American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.

No other region in America is so fraught with projected meaning as Appalachia. Many people who have never set foot in Appalachia have very definite ideas about what the region is like. Whether these assumptions originate with movies like Deliverance (1972) and Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), from Robert F. Kennedy's widely publicized Appalachian Tour, or from tales of hiking the Appalachian Trail, chances are these suppositions serve a purpose to the person who holds them. A person's concept of Appalachia may function to reassure them that there remains an "authentic" America untouched by consumerism, to feel a sense of superiority about their lives and regions, or to confirm the notion that cultural differences must be both appreciated and managed. In Selling Appalachia: Popular Fictions, Imagined Geographies, and Imperial Projects, 1878-2003, Emily Satterwhite explores the complex relationships readers have with texts that portray Appalachia and how these varying receptions have created diverse visions of Appalachia in the national imagination. She argues that words themselves not inherently responsible for creating or destroying Appalachian stereotypes, but rather that readers and their interpretations assign those functions to them. Her study traces the changing visions of Appalachia across the decades from the Gilded Age (1865-1895) to the present and includes texts such as John Fox Jr.'s Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Harriet Arnow's Hunter's Horn (1949), and Silas House's Clay's Quilt (2001), charting both the portrayals of Appalachia in fiction and readers' responses to them. Satterwhite's unique approach doesn't just explain how people view Appalachia, it explains why they think that way. This innovative book will be a noteworthy contribution to Appalachian studies, cultural and literary studies, and reception theory.

The Big Sandy River and its two main tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks, drain nearly two million mountainous acres in the easternmost part of Kentucky. For generations, the only practical means of transportation and contact with the outside world was the river, and, as The Big Sandy demonstrates, steamboats did much to shape the culture of the region. Carol Crowe-Carraco offers an intriguing and readable account of this region's history from the days of the venturesome Long Hunters of the eighteenth century, through the bitter struggles of the Civil War and its aftermath, up to the 1970s, with their uncertain promise of a new prosperity. The Big Sandy pictures these changes vividly while showing how the turbulent past of the valley lives on in the region's present.