After some twenty years of research into original frontline letters, the US military’s Individual Deceased Personnel files, and accounts of the chaotic Korean War, author Sherri Steward has recovered a story that was lost for more than seventy years. Bringing Davy Home: In the Shadow of War, a Soldier’s Daughter Remembers chronicles the brutal combat experiences of two small-town Texas boys. One, an underage soldier, was killed in action only three weeks after arriving in Korea. Months later, the older brother he admired—a decorated World War II veteran—was compelled to join the same war that had already fractured his family. Bringing Davy Home examines the grievous burden heaped upon our warriors and their families, themselves forgotten casualties in the web of war. Through personal communications and interviews with hundreds of veterans and their families, Steward provides a haunting examination of the minds and hearts of young men who were thrust onto savage battlefields in service to their nation. Many did not survive. Many others came home alive but still carrying the shattering emotional burdens imposed by the horrors they witnessed. In 2023, there were more than 16 million veterans, thousands of whom remained tormented by indelible memories of war. Bringing Davy Home will shed new light on the pervasive problem of PTSD among our warriors, solemnly accounting the psychological costs paid by service members and their families.

This important volume documents events and routines defined as public relations practice, and serves as a companion work to the author's The Unseen Power: Public Relations which tells the history of public relations as revealed in the work and personalities of the pioneer agencies. This history opens with the 17th Century efforts of land promoters and colonists to lure settlers from Europe -- mainly England -- to this primitive land along the Atlantic Coast. They used publicity, tracts, sermons, and letters to disseminate rosy, glowing accounts of life and opportunity in the new land. The volume closes with a description of the public relations efforts of colleges and other non-profit agencies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thus providing a bridge across the century line. This study of the origins of public relations provides helpful insight into its functions, its strengths and weaknesses, and its profound though often unseen impact on our society. Public relations or its equivalents -- propaganda, publicity, public information -- began when mankind started to live together in tribal camps where one's survival depended upon others of the tribe. To function, civilization requires communication, conciliation, consensus, and cooperation -- the bedrock fundamentals of the public relations function. This volume is filled with robust public struggles -- the struggles of which history is made and a nation built: * the work of the Revolutionaries, led by the indomitable Sam Adams, to bring on the War of Independence that gave birth to a New Nation; * the propaganda of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in the Federalist papers to win ratification of the U.S. Constitution -- prevailing against the propaganda of the AntiFederalists led by Richard Henry Lee; * the battle between the forces of President Andrew Jackson, led by Amos Kendall, and those of Nicholas Biddle and his Bank of the United States which presaged corporate versus government campaigns common today: * the classic presidential campaign of 1896 which pitted pro-Big Business candidate William McKinley against the Populist orator of the Platte, William Jennings Bryan. This book details the antecedents of today's flourishing, influential vocation of public relations whose practitioners -- some 150,000 professionals -- make their case for their clients or their employers in the highly competitive public opinion marketplace.

Lily Wilk always knew she was destined to be an artist -- ever since she pulled a drawing kit from a grab bag on her tenth birthday. Now Lily's work is always in demand around her small Massachusetts town, where she makes her living painting fire hydrants, lettering diplomas, and applying "Gulls" and "Buoys" to restaurant bathroom doors. But when supermarket heiress Mary Ziemba commissions her to paint a family portrait, Lily senses her lifelong dream of creating a memorable masterpiece is finally within her grasp. What she discovers, however, is that dreams often take their own unexpected twists...and with each small and gentle brush stroke she applies to Mary Ziemba's painting, Lily learns more than she ever imagined about the meaning of friendship, family, and love. With a gift for creating fiction that is "rich with an unusual sweetness" (USA Today) and filled with wry humor, bestselling author Suzanne Strempek Shea delivers a poignant and unforgettable work of art in Lily of the Valley.