The Civil War fought between Charles I and his Parliament is one of the most momentous conflicts in English history. This book provides a wholly new perspective by revealing the extent to which the struggle possessed an "ethnic" dimension, and the impact of that on the forging of English national identity. Stoyle reveals the acute fear of foreign invasion that gripped England after 1640, when the insular English were placed on the brink of what they perceived as a national emergency. Stoyle sets the creation of the New Model Army within that context, arguing that its appearance represented the culmination of a campaign by Oliver Cromwell and others to forge a purely "English" military instrument, one purged of the foreign solders who had been so prominent in earlier Parliamentarian armies. This self-consciously "English" army eventually succeeded in wresting back control of the kingdom by defeating the king's forces, re-conquering Cornwall and Wales, and expelling all foreign agents.

What did it feel like to be an openly Jewish soldier fighting alongside German troops in WWII? Could a Jewish nurse work safely in a field hospital operating theater under the supervision of German army doctors? Several hundred members of Finland’s tiny Jewish community found themselves in absurd situations like this, yet not a single one was harmed by the Germans or deported to concentration or extermination camps. In fact, Finland was the only European country fighting on either side in WWII that lost not a single Jewish citizen to the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” Strangers in a Stranger Land explores the unique dilemma of Finland’s Jews in the form of a meticulously researched novel. Where did these immigrant Jews—the last in Europe to achieve citizenship status—come from? What was life like from their arrival in Finland in the early nineteenth century to the time when their grandchildren perversely found themselves on “the wrong side” of WWII? And how could young lovers plan for the future when not only their enemies but also their country’s allies threatened their very existence? Seven years researching Finland’s National Archives plus numerous in-depth interviews with surviving Finnish Jewish war veterans provide the background for a narrative exploration of love, friendship, and commitment but also uncertainty and terror under circumstances that were unique in the annals of “The Good War.” The novel’s protagonists—Benjamin, David and Rachel—adopt varying survival strategies as they struggle with involvement in a brutal conflict and questions posed by their dual loyalty as Finnish citizens and Zionists committed to the creation of a Jewish homeland. Tensions mount as the three young adults painfully work through a relationship love triangle and try to fulfill their commitments as both Jews and Finns while their country desperately seeks to extricate itself from an unwinnable war.

A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941-44 is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead. Bearing witness to--and participating in--the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching, and illuminating perspective on life on the eastern front. He documented the carnage perpetrated by both sides, the destruction which was exacerbated by the young soldiers' hunger, frostbite, exhaustion, and their daily struggle to survive. And he wrestled with his own sins, with the realization that what he and his fellow soldiers had done to civilians and enemies alike was unforgivable, with his growing awareness of the Nazi policies toward Jews, and with his deep disillusionment with himself and his fellow men. An international sensation, A Stranger to Myself is an unforgettable account of men at war.

These letters chronicle the wartime courtship of a Confederate soldier and the woman he loved—a sister-in-law of Abraham Lincoln. It is a relative rarity for the correspondence of both writers in Civil War letter collections to survive, as they have here. Rarer still is how frequently and faithfully the two wrote, given how little they truly knew each other at the start of their exchange. As a romantic pair, Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd had no earlier history; they had barely met when separated by the war. Letters were their sole lifeline to each other and their sole means of sharing their hopes and fears for a relationship (and a Confederacy) they had rashly embraced in the heady, early days of secession. The letters date from April 1861, when Nathaniel left for war as a captain in the Fourth Alabama Infantry, through April 1862, when the couple married. During their courtship through correspondence, Nathaniel narrowly escaped death in battle, faced suspicions of cowardice, and eventually grew war weary. Elodie had two brothers die while in Confederate service and felt the full emotional weight of belonging to the war’s most famous divided family. Her sister Mary not only sided with the Union (as did five other Todd siblings) but was also married to its commander in chief. Here is an engrossing story of the Civil War, of Abraham Lincoln’s shattered family, of two people falling in love, of soldiers and brothers dying nobly on the wrong side of history. The full Dawson–Todd correspondence comprises more than three hundred letters. It has been edited for this volume to focus tightly on their courtship. The complete, annotated text of all of the letters, with additional supporting material, will be made available online.

“A remarkable book . . . a detailed panorama of the many ways in which the Israeli state limited the rights of its Palestinian subjects.” —Orit Bashkin, H-Net Reviews Following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinian Arabs comprised just fifteen percent of the population but held a much larger portion of its territory. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a draconian military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands. Citizen Strangers traces how Jewish leaders struggled to advance their historic settler project while forced by new international human rights norms to share political power with the very people they sought to uproot. For the next two decades Palestinians held a paradoxical status in Israel, as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime. Neither the state campaign to reduce the size of the Palestinian population nor the formulation of citizenship as a tool of collective exclusion could resolve the government’s fundamental dilemma: how to bind indigenous Arab voters to the state while denying them access to its resources. More confounding was the tension between the opposing aspirations of Palestinian political activists. Was it the end of Jewish privilege they were after, or national independence along with the rest of their compatriots in exile? As Shira Robinson shows, these tensions in the state’s foundation—between privilege and equality, separatism and inclusion—continue to haunt Israeli society today. “An extremely important, highly scholarly work on the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians.” —G. E. Perry, Choice