Investigates the groundbreaking role American women played in commemorating those who served and sacrificed in World War I In Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War, 1917–1945 Allison S. Finkelstein argues that American women activists considered their own community service and veteran advocacy to be forms of commemoration just as significant and effective as other, more traditional forms of commemoration such as memorials. Finkelstein employs the term “veteranism” to describe these women’s overarching philosophy that supporting, aiding, and caring for those who served needed to be a chief concern of American citizens, civic groups, and the government in the war’s aftermath. However, these women did not express their views solely through their support for veterans of a military service narrowly defined as a group predominantly composed of men and just a few women. Rather, they defined anyone who served or sacrificed during the war, including women like themselves, as veterans. These women veteranists believed that memorialization projects that centered on the people who served and sacrificed was the most appropriate type of postwar commemoration. They passionately advocated for memorials that could help living veterans and the families of deceased service members at a time when postwar monument construction surged at home and abroad. Finkelstein argues that by rejecting or adapting traditional monuments or by embracing aspects of the living memorial building movement, female veteranists placed the plight of all veterans at the center of their commemoration efforts. Their projects included diverse acts of service and advocacy on behalf of people they considered veterans and their families as they pushed to infuse American memorial traditions with their philosophy. In doing so, these women pioneered a relatively new form of commemoration that impacted American practices of remembrance, encouraging Americans to rethink their approach and provided new definitions of what constitutes a memorial. In the process, they shifted the course of American practices, even though their memorialization methods did not achieve the widespread acceptance they had hoped it would. Meticulously researched, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials utilizes little-studied sources and reinterprets more familiar ones. In addition to the words and records of the women themselves, Finkelstein analyzes cultural landscapes and ephemeral projects to reconstruct the evidence of their influence. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how American women supported the military from outside its ranks before they could fully serve from within, principally through action-based methods of commemoration that remain all the more relevant today.

A fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose singular passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery. George Washington spent more of his working life farming than he did at war or in political office. For over forty years, he devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture, which he saw as the means by which the American people would attain the Òrespectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.Ó Washington at the Plow depicts the Òfirst farmer of AmericaÓ as a leading practitioner of the New Husbandry, a transatlantic movement that spearheaded advancements in crop rotation. A tireless experimentalist, Washington pulled up his tobacco and switched to wheat production, leading the way for the rest of the country. He filled his library with the latest agricultural treatises and pioneered land-management techniques that he hoped would guide small farmers, strengthen agrarian society, and ensure the prosperity of the nation. Slavery was a key part of WashingtonÕs pursuits. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. To this end, he devised an original and exacting system of slave supervision. But Washington eventually found that forced labor could not achieve the productivity he desired. His inability to reconcile ideals of scientific farming and rural order with race-based slavery led him to reconsider the traditional foundations of the Virginia plantation. As Bruce Ragsdale shows, it was the inefficacy of chattel slavery, as much as moral revulsion at the practice, that informed WashingtonÕs famous decision to free his slaves after his death.

For the city’s first two hundred years, the story told at Washington DC’s symbolic center, the National Mall, was about triumphant American leaders. Since 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, the narrative has shifted to emphasize the memory of American wars. In the last thirty years, five significant war memorials have been built on, or very nearly on, the Mall. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, The National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During WWII, and the National World War II Memorial have not only transformed the physical space of the Mall but have also dramatically rewritten ideas about U.S. nationalism expressed there. In Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall, Kristin Ann Hass examines this war memorial boom, the debates about war and race and gender and patriotism that shaped the memorials, and the new narratives about the nature of American citizenship that they spawned. Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall explores the meanings we have made in exchange for the lives of our soldiers and asks if we have made good on our enormous responsibility to them.

This inspiring anthology it the first to convey the noteworthy experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words-from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East. Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Inga Fredriksen Ferris's describes how it felt to be a woman marine during World War II. Heidi Squier Kraft recounts her experiences as a lieutenant commander in the navy, deployed to Iraq as a psychologist to provide mental health care in a combat zone. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, military depositions and testimonies, as well as from published and unpublished memoirs-generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms and at great personal peril.

Renowned artist and architect Maya Lin's visual and verbal sketchbook—a unique view into her artwork and philosophy. Walking through this parklike area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

State war histories: an atom of interest in an ocean of apathy -- War memoirs: they pour from the presses daily -- War stories: fiction cannot ignore the greatest adventure in a man's life -- War films: shootin' and kissin'

Women Vietnam Veterans: Our Untold Stories, by Donna Lowery, a Vietnam veteran, chronicles the participation of American military women during the Vietnam War. This little-known group of an estimated 1,000 women from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force left its mark in Vietnam from 1962 to 1973. They served in a myriad of duties from intelligence analysts, flight controllers, clerk-typists, translators, physical therapists, dietitians and communications specialists among many others. Our Untold Stories allows the women to speak for themselves about their experiences, and, for the first time ever, brings names, facts and figures together in one literary work. The purpose of the book is to be historically significant to future researchers. The history of the military women in Vietnam began in 1962 with Army Major Anne Marie Doering. She was born in what became North Vietnam. Her father was a French officer, her mother a German citizen. When her father died, her mother married an American businessman. Her service in Vietnam as a Combat Intelligence Officer is a compelling story of the US military women in a war zone. It was not until 1965 that the US Women’s Army Corps (WAC) sent two women as advisors to assist the newly formed Vietnam Women’s Armed Forces Corps. The following year, the Army authorized the establishment of a WAC Detachment in Vietnam. Soon, thereafter, the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy also sent women to serve in various capacities. In March 1973, under the Paris Peace Accords, the last women left Vietnam along with the remaining men. The impact they had in Vietnam set the stage for the expansion and integration of women into additional roles in the military. Today, women serve in areas of active combat, demonstrating their abilities and dedication to the mission.