One survivor tells of the fire bombing of Dresden. Another recounts the pervasive fear of marauding Russian and Czech bandits raping and killing. Children recall fathers who were only photographs and mothers who were saviors and heroes. These are typical in the stories collected in The War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II. For this book Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, a childhood refugee himself after the fall of Nazi Germany, interviewed twenty-seven men and women who as children--by chance and sheer resilience--survived Allied bombs, invading armies, hunger, and chaos. "Our eyes carried no hate, only recognition of what was," Samuel writes of his childhood. "Peace was an abstraction. The world we Kinder knew nearly always had the word war appended to it." Samuel's heartfelt narratives from these innocent survivors are invariably riveting and often terrifying. Each engrossing story has perilous and tragic moments--school children in Leuna who are sent home during an air raid but are strafed as moving targets; fathers who exist only as distant figures, returning to their families long after the war--or not at all; mothers who are raped and tortured; families who are forced into a seemingly endless relocation that replicates the terrors of war itself. In capturing such experiences from nearly every region of Germany and involving people of every socio-economic class, this is a collection of unique memories, but each account contributes to a cumulative understanding of the war that is more personal than strategic surveys and histories. For Samuel and the survivors he interviewed, agony and fright were part of everyday life, just as were play, wondrous experience, and above all perseverance. "My focus," Samuel writes, "is on the astounding ability of a generation of German children to emerge from debilitating circumstances as sane and productive human beings." Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, a retired colonel in the U. S. Air Force, is the author of German Boy: A Refugee's Story and I Always Wanted to Fly: America's Cold War Airmen, both published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Fairfax, Va.

The Swahili coast of Africa is often described as a paragon of transnational culture and racial fluidity. Yet, during a brief period in the 1960s, Zanzibar became deeply divided along racial lines as intellectuals and activists, engaged in bitter debates about their nation's future, ignited a deadly conflict that spread across the island. War of Words, War of Stones explores how violently enforced racial boundaries arose from Zanzibar's entangled history. Jonathon Glassman challenges explanations that assume racial thinking in the colonial world reflected only Western ideas. He shows how Africans crafted competing ways of categorizing race from local tradition and engagement with the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

War on Error brings together the stories of twelve young people, all vastly different but all American, and all Muslim. Their approaches to religion couldn’t be more diverse: from a rapper of Korean and Egyptian descent to a bisexual Sudanese American to a converted white woman from Colorado living in Cairo and wearing the hijab.

DeStefano details the events leading up to the creation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the federal law that first addressed the phenomenon of trafficking in persons. The book also describes the tensions created as the Bush Administration tried to use the trafficking laws to attack prostitution and shows how the American response to these criminal activities was impacted by the events of September 11th and the War in Iraq.

War on the Gulf Coast is one of the first books about the Spanish period in West Florida (1797-1805) written from the Spanish point of view. Using Spanish archival sources, Gilbert Din is able to shed new light on the machinations of William Augustus Bowles, an adventurer who sought to introduce goods, subvert the Creek Indians, and deprive the Spaniards of territory.

By revealing the inner workings of the Spanish military establishment, Din makes a convincing case that West Florida--which then stretched all the way to the Mississippi River--was a vital zone of international intrigue, not an unimportant backwater. He also offers a much-needed corrective to previous depictions of Bowles, questioning his actual influence among the Creek Nation. Din highlights the naval efforts to curtail smuggling and capture Bowles and counters prevailing wisdom about why the Spanish were forced to surrender at Fort San Marcos.

Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution—and not necessarily by the Right.

The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves.

During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.

For more than forty years, Western policymakers defined communism as the central threat to international peace and stability. They responded by confronting it with a counterbalancing threat of force, and pursuing a strategy of containment. With the collapse of communism, the challenge to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic community has changed. Soviet expansionism has been supplanted by powerful, internal forces arising out of the clash of competing ethnic nationalisms. This challenge, argues Steven L. Burg, cannot be met by force alone, or neutralized through a strategy of containment. It requires Western states to act decisively to influence the internal political development of the post- communist states themselves.

Burg surveys the challenges that the ethnic diversity in Eastern Europe present to domestic stability, international peace, and American interests, and suggests policies and practices by which the United States and its allies might contribute to the consolidation of peace in the region. He provides a concise explanation and analysis of the issues, evaluates the usefulness of scholarly approaches to the resolution of ethnic conflicts, and offers a strategy of what he calls preventive engagement by which policymakers may prevent conflicts such as the one that destroyed the former Yugoslavia.

War or Peace? offers clear and direct recommendations to guide both interested citizens and national policymakers as they attempt to grapple with the complexities of ethnic and nationalist politics in Europe.

Gathering together essays by some of the most influential modern political philosophers and theorists, War, Peace, and International Political Realism reveals the twentieth-century roots of the realist tradition and demonstrates the enduring relevance of realist insights for current international relations scholarship and foreign affairs. These essays, all of which were published in The Review of Politics, the majority during the 1940s and 1950s, reflect four major tenets of the classical realist tradition: an obligation to confront large and difficult questions about international politics, a recognition of the fundamentally tragic nature of relations among humans and states, a rejection of historical optimism, and a belief in practical morality. Keir A. Lieber provides an excellent introduction emphasizing the importance of political realism as defined by the contributors. Students and scholars of political theory, international relations, and history will welcome having these important essays in one useful volume; they are just as applicable to contemporary foreign policy challenges as they were to the crises of post-World War II international politics.

Historians of religion and public schooling often focus on conflict and Bible Wars, pitting Catholics and Protestants against one another in palpitating narratives of the embattled development of American public schooling. The War That Wasn’t tells a different story, arguing that in nineteenth-century New York State a civil system of democratic, local control led to adjustments and compromises far more than discord and bitter conflict. In the decades after the Civil War, New Yorkers from rural, one-room schools to big city districts hammered out a variety of ways to reconcile public education and religious diversity. This book recounts their stories in delightful and compelling detail. The common school system of New York State managed to keep the peace during a time of religious and ethnic pluralism, before sweeping educational reforms ended many of these compromises by the turn of the twentieth century.