Military

In the Southern Appalachian Mountains, no character was more loved or despised than George W. Kirk.

This inured Union officer led a group of deserters on numerous raids between Tennessee and North Carolina in 1863, terrorizing Confederate soldiers and civilians alike. At Camp Vance in Morganton, Kirk's mounted raiders showcased guerrilla warfare penetrating deep within Confederate territory. As Home Guards struggled to keep Western North Carolina communities safe, Kirk's men brought fear and violence throughout the region for their ability to strike and create havoc without warning. Civil War historian Michael C. Hardy examines the infamous history of George W. Kirk and the Civil War along the Blue Ridge.

Author Gretchen Knapp brings to life the challenges and contributions of daily life in World War II Buffalo.

When President Roosevelt visited Buffalo in November 1940, he found a hardworking city with a large immigrant population manufacturing aircraft for the Allies. Nearby Fort Niagara inducted over 100,000 young men, resulting in an acute labor shortage. American Brass, Bell Aircraft, Chevrolet, Curtiss-Wright, Houde Engineering and Republic Steel reluctantly, then gladly, hired women. More than 300,000 defense workers toiled in hot factories for high wages despite transportation, housing and food shortages. The aircraft plants alone employed 85,000 on forty-eight-hour workweeks. Buffalonians watched the flag raising at Iwo Jima, participated in the Manhattan Project and observed the formal surrender of Japan in Tokyo Bay. Author Gretchen Knapp brings to life the challenges and contributions of daily life during wartime.

Fort Holabird was a US Army facility near Baltimore, Maryland and began as a training center for a relatively new military technology, the motor vehicle, it would later bear witness to intrigue as a center of US Army intelligence and counterintelligence.

Fort Holabird was a US Army facility near Baltimore, Maryland. Opened as Camp Holabird in preparation for World War I, Holabird trained vehicle drivers and mechanics. After World War II, Holabird became home to the US Army Intelligence School. It was around this time the facility was renamed Fort Holabird. The intelligence school relocated to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1971, and Fort Holabird closed in 1973. Holabird has an amazing history. It began as a training center for a relatively new military technology, the motor vehicle. Holabird would later bear witness to intrigue as a center of US Army intelligence and counterintelligence. Holabird is also remembered by many Vietnam-era draftees as an induction center.

Author David B. Lari is an attorney, historian, US Army veteran, lifelong resident of Maryland, and a graduate of the University of Baltimore. The sources of these photographs include the US National Archives, the US Army Heritage and Education Center, the National World War I Museum and Memorial, the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society and Museum, and the Kansas Historical Society.

In World War II Hawaii, experience the untold stories of Hawaii at war where children worked the pineapple fields and women served in armed volunteer units. Makeshift bomb shelters were constructed, trenches dug around public buildings, and barbed wire strung on beaches. This tropical paradise transitioned into an active war front where over one million servicemen and tens of thousands of civilian defense workers came through and changed Hawaii forever. 

Within hours of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, martial law was declared in Hawaii. Schools were taken over by the military, and neighborhoods were evacuated. All communication was censored, and every citizen was fingerprinted and registered. The US government burned over $2 million and replaced it with newly minted currency that had “Hawaii” stamped on it in case of invasion by the Empire of Japan.

Dorothea N. Buckingham is a librarian, author, and World War II historian. John C. Buckingham is a retired US Marine Corps officer, author, and active docent with Pearl Harbor museums. Through this collection of rarely seen images, taken mainly from the Hawaii War Records Depository, they present daily life in Hawaii during World War II as it has never been seen before.

From January to July 1942, more than seventy-five ships sank to North Carolina's "Graveyard of the Atlantic" off the coast of the Outer Banks. A Standard oil tanker sank just sixty miles from Cape Hatteras.

German U-boats sank ships in some of the most harrowing sea fighting close to America's shore. Germany's Operation Drumbeat, led by Admiral Karl Donitz, brought fear to the local communities. The U-85 was the first U-boat sunk by American surface forces, and local divers later discovered a rare Enigma machine aboard. Author Jim Bunch traces the destructive history of world war on the shores of the Outer Banks.

The entrance of the United States into World War II in 1941 completely transformed the nation. During this time, the small Nebraska towns of Mead and Wahoo in Saunders County were chosen to be the site of the Nebraska Ordnance Plant, one of three such plants in the state. The plant operated for 20 years—from 1942 to 1962. It served as an ordnance plant during World War II and the Korean War, then as an Atlas missile site from 1960 to 1962. Since then, the land has been sold to various interests, including the University of Nebraska and the Nebraska National Guard. The Nebraska Ordnance Plant uses over 150 photographs and their accompanying captions to tell the story of the profound effect the plant had on the social, economic, and environmental life of the county. 

Jennifer Garza is the assistant at the Saunders County Historical Society and a lecturer in the history department at the University of Nebraska. Erin Hauser is the curator at the Saunders County Historical Society.

John Hairr is an award-winning author and maritime historian who explores the past of unique and often forgotten places. He returns to the Cape Fear country for his latest photographic look into the region’s past. 

Kure Beach, North Carolina The sandy dunes stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Cape Fear River may not have looked impressive, but Fort Fisher, North Carolina, was a key part of the coastal defenses protecting the most important link in the lifeline of the Confederacy. Blockade runners and naval raiders alike sheltered for cover under the protection provided by powerful artillery batteries, which warships of the Union Navy dared not challenge. Modeled by the fort’s commander, Col. William Lamb, after Russian-engineered designs, the sandy ramparts defending the New Inlet entrance to the Cape Fear River eventually became the largest fortifications in the South, gaining the nickname “Confederate Gibraltar.” During the waning days of the war, Union commanders went to great lengths to destroy the fort, thus closing the vital port of Wilmington to Confederate blockade runners. The woefully undermanned defenders fought bravely, turning back the first Union assault in December 1864 and would no doubt have repulsed the second had promised reinforcements arrived. After fierce hand-to-hand combat, the garrison was overwhelmed by superior numbers, and Fort Fisher fell on January 15, 1865.

Join Matthew Borders and Joseph Stahl as they share their expertise and grant glimpses into the lives of those who fought to preserve the Union.

The Battle of Antietam, fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland, was the bloodiest day in American history, with more than twenty-three thousand dead, wounded and missing. This book invites the reader to walk the routes of some of the units on the field through the stories of thirty-six individual soldiers who fought on that day. The images of the soldiers in this work, many of which have never been published before, give faces to the fighting men at Antietam, as well as insight into their lives

This compelling look at Charleston's twentieth-century history chronicles the changes and challenges faced by Charleston as its population exploded in response to expansion of the Charleston Navy Yard. As World War II called for the United States to flex her industrial might, the shipyard rose to meet the challenge and 55,000 new residents flooded into the city.

Charleston was unprepared for such dramatic expansion: the need for labor at the yard meant the sudden appearance of good jobs, but also resulted in severe housing shortages, food rationing and dilemmas over race and gender. Ongoing workforce shortages forced the navy to look to sources of labor previously regarded as unsuitable--African Americans and women--causing dramatic changes to the status quo.

Author and historian Fritz Hamer makes use of written documents and oral histories to argue that the war's effects pulled a reluctant "Holy City" into the twentieth century, setting the stage for further modernization and growth. Warm personal accounts from a range of individuals who witnessed the city's dramatic change provide a human element in Hamer's solid research.

Well written and imaginatively conceived, Charleston Reborn will interest the general reader as well as a wide range of historians--from students of World War II and chroniclers of gender and racial history, to urban historians and scholars of the modern American South.