Become a mission-focused, people-centric leader On Mission serves as a resource for personal leadership development, crafted by Sean Georges and John Buford, two former marine officers with a combined 80 years of leadership experience in military, business, nonprofit, and education. This book is for those who aspire to lead authentically across the spectrum of their lives by taking responsibility for and committing to their unique learning journey. Using a simple but powerful servant leadership model with a focus on mission, the authors share practical, fundamental, and timeless leadership concepts designed to help readers understand what it means to lead in an authentic way. The book is intended to be transformational and personal in nature, written to change the way aspiring leaders understand and approach leading across the spectrum of their own lives and help them answer the key question, “What is my best and highest role, in support of my teammates, in alignment with our mission?” The authors provide readers with the tools and perspective needed to navigate and shape their own unique developmental journey.
Who said DeSoto found the Fountain of Youth in Arkansas in the 1540's. Feet of clay? Who has feet of clay? The Banty Rooster employee surprise. Junius Sneed and the Summer of Love. What is a morion? Who decapitated the criminals? What happened to Detective Sneed?
The fighting on the first day at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, was unexpected, heavy, confusing, and in many ways, decisive. Much of it consisted of short and often separate simultaneous engagements or “firefights,” a term soldiers often use to describe close, vicious, and bloody combat. Several books have studied this important inaugural day of Gettysburg, but none have done so from the perspective of the rank and file of both armies. John Michael Priest’s “Strong Men of the Regiment Sobbed Like Children”: John Reynolds’ I Corps at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 rectifies this oversight in splendid style. When dawn broke on July 1, no one on either side could have conceived what was about to take place. Anticipating a fight and with a keen appreciation for terrain, Brig. Gen. John Buford deployed his Union cavalry in a giant arc north and west of Gettysburg to slow down any Confederate advance until Maj. Gen. John Reynolds could bring up his infantry. By the time the foot soldiers of the I Corps arrived, A. P. Hill’s heavy Confederate formations had pushed back the troopers from the west. Richard Ewell’s troops would soon arrive from the north, threatening the town and its key road network. Reynolds, who would die early in the fighting, poured his troops in as they arrived. The road system and undulating ground broke up command control, and the various ridges, tall ground cover, and powder smoke made target recognition difficult. Brigades and regiments often engaged on their own initiatives without the direction of a division or corps commander. The men of both armies fought with determination born of desperation, valor, and fear. By the time the fighting ended, the I Corps was in shambles and in pell-mell retreat for Cemetery Hill. Its bold stand, together with the XI Corps north of town, bought precious hours for the rest of the Army of the Potomac to arrive and occupy good defensive ground. Priest, who Edwin Bearss hailed as “the Ernie Pyle of the Civil War,” spent a decade researching this study and walking the ground to immerse readers into the uncertain world of the rank-and-file experience. He consulted more than 300 primary sources, including letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper accounts, recollections, casualty lists, and drill manuals to present the battle from the ground up. Nineteen detailed regimental-level maps illustrate the ebb and flow of the battle. The result is a fast-paced narrative sure to please the most demanding students of the Civil War. The footnotes alone are worth the price of admission. Readers will close the book with a full understanding of why a veteran New Yorker spoke for the survivors of both armies when he wrote, “Strong men of the regiment sobbed like children.”
In Slaves for Hire, John J. Zaborney overturns long-standing beliefs about slave labor in the antebellum South. Previously, scholars viewed slave hiring as an aberration -- a modified form of slavery, involving primarily urban male slaves, that worked to the laborer's advantage and weakened slavery's institutional integrity. In the first in-depth examination of slave hiring in Virginia, Zaborney suggests that this endemic practice bolstered the institution of slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War, all but assuring Virginia's secession from the Union to protect slavery. Moving beyond previous analyses, Zaborney examines slave hiring in rural and agricultural settings, along with the renting of women, children, and elderly slaves. His research reveals that, like non-hired-out slaves, these other workers' experiences varied in accordance with sex, location, occupation, economic climate, and crop prices, as well as owners' and renters' convictions and financial circumstances. Hired slaves in Virginia faced a full range of oppression from nearly full autonomy to harsh exploitation. Whites of all economic, occupational, gender, ethnic, and age groups, including slave owners and non-slave-owners, rented slaves regularly. Additionally, male owners and hirers often transported slaves to those who worked them, and acted as agents for white women who wished to hire out their slaves. Ultimately, widespread white mastery of hired slaves allowed owners with superfluous slaves to offer them for rent locally rather than selling them to the Lower South, establishing the practice as an integral feature of Virginia slavery.
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