What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the home front register wars and wartime in their everyday lives, particularly when military conflict remains removed from immediate perception, available only through media forms. Looking back over two centuries, Mary Favret locates the origins of modern wartime in the Napoleonic era and describes how global military operations affected the British populace, as the nation's army and navy waged battles far from home for decades. She reveals that the literature and art produced in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries obsessively cultivated means for feeling as much as understanding such wars, and established forms still relevant today. Favret examines wartime literature and art as varied as meditations on the Iliad, the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, and popular poetry in newspapers and periodicals; she locates the embedded sense of war and dislocation in works ranging from Austen, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to Woolf, Stevens, and Sebald; and she contemplates how literature provides the public with methods for responding to violent calamities happening elsewhere. Bringing to light Romanticism's legacy in reflections on modern warfare, this book shows that war's absent presence affects home in deep and irrevocable ways.

Iraq at a Distance describes the plight of the Iraqi people, caught since 2003 in the carnage between U.S. troops and Iraqi insurgents. This provocative book is a bold attempt by five distinguished anthropologists to study an inaccessible war zone through ground-breaking comparisons with armed conflicts around the world.

Porter challenges the powerful ideology of "Globalism" that is widely subscribed to by the US national security community. Globalism entails visions of a perilous shrunken world in which security interests are interconnected almost without limit, exposing even powerful states to instant war. Globalism does not just describe the world, but prescribes expansive strategies to deal with it, portraying a fragile globe that the superpower must continually tame into order. Porter argues that this vision of the world has resulted in the US undertaking too many unnecessary military adventures and dangerous strategic overstretch. Distance and geography should be some of the factors that help the US separate the important from the unimportant in international relations. The US should also recognize that, despite the latest technologies, projecting power over great distances still incurs frictions and costs that set real limits on American power. Reviving an appreciation of distance and geography would lead to a more sensible and sustainable grand strategy.

Noted documentary photographer Robert Nickelsberg's photographs help bring into focus the day-to-day consequences of war, poverty, oppression, and political turmoil in Afghanistan. Since the attack on the World Trade Center, Afghanistan has evolved from a country few people thought twice about to a place that evokes our deepest emotions. TIME magazine photographer Robert Nickelsberg has been publishing his images of this distant yet all too familiar country since 1998, when he accompanied a group of Mujahideen across the border from Pakistan. This remarkable volume of photographs is accompanied by insightful texts from experts on Afghanistan and the Taliban. The images themselves are captioned with places, dates, and Nickelsberg's own extensive commentary. Timely and important, the book serves as a reminder that Afghanistan and the rest of the world remain inextricably linked, no matter how much we long to distance ourselves from its painful realities.

A study of young war correspondents and the early Vietnam battles.

Maps poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography trace a profound shift in our understanding and experience of space. The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and express fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses as reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at a Distance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new and even inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation, political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since 1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has captured global bird's-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, both physical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define this shift.

The #1 bestselling chapter book series of all time celebrates 25 years with new covers and a new, easy-to-use numbering system! Cannon fire! That's what Jack and Annie hear when the Magic Tree House whisks them back to the time of the American Civil War. There they meet a famous nurse named Clara Barton and do their best to help wounded soldiers. It is their hardest journey in time yet—and the one that will make the most difference to their own lives! Did you know that there’s a Magic Tree House book for every kid? Magic Tree House: Adventures with Jack and Annie, perfect for readers who are just beginning chapter books Merlin Missions: More challenging adventures for the experienced reader Super Edition: A longer and more dangerous adventure Fact Trackers: Nonfiction companions to your favorite Magic Tree House adventures