WORLD WAR 1 JOURNAL ACTUALLY WRITTEN WHILE IN THE FIELD BY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER FIND OUT WHAT WAS IT REALLY LIKE TO FIGHT AS AN AMERICAN DOUGHBOY Lost and forgotten for over 90 years, this book is the result of one street-wise and peace-loving but fiercely patriotic American soldier who went well beyond the typical censored letters, pocket diaries, and post-war memoirs to help answer that question for future generations. Through a unique combination of skill, circumstance and strong personal motivation, Private William J. Graham (Company B, 103rd Military Police Battalion, 28th Division/First Army) delivers one of the most compelling, detailed, and true real-time eyewitness accounts of an American soldier's W.W. 1 experience ever recorded. Over four thousand miles from his home, family and work as a Philadelphia mounted policeman, thirty-nine year old William J. Graham found himself fighting as a detached field M.P. in war-devastated northern France as one of over two million men and women who made up the American Expeditionary Forces in the bloody latter half of 1918. Through his keen eyes and artful powers of description, it is not difficult to imagine yourself slogging through the muddy blood-spattered fields of the Western Front as the earth trembles and German shells scream overhead...where hunger, "cooties," and death are constant companions. Private Graham's uncensored journal of over 650 hand-written pages was penned by him not from memory while resting comfortably by a warm fire in a stuffed chair...but incredibly in France while the events he describes actually unfolded around him under raw filthy field conditions. This is the 2015 revision of the book originally published in 2012. This revision contains extra journal entries recently found by Graham's grand-daughter Deborah Share of Philadelphia and over a hundred new photos from the Jarvis Collection. With America's centennial starting in 2017, this book is a great look at America's involvement in the Great War as seen firsthand by a Doughboy. The Journal itself was so well written by this soldier, that it practically reads like a novel. The photographs enhance the story he is telling and combined, they place the reader right there with him. This is not a history book. Rather it is a work that gives readers an authentic and powerfully moving description of the horrific sights and emotions of Americans at war with the German "Hun" in the world's first-ever global conflict. It serves as an accurate and superbly detailed description of what many U.S. fighting men experienced "doing their bit" while struggling to survive yet another day..."Somewhere in France"!
Since the earliest days of the silent era, American filmmakers have been drawn to the visual spectacle of sports and their compelling narratives of conflict, triumph, and individual achievement. In Contesting Identities Aaron Baker examines how these cinematic representations of sports and athletes have evolved over time--from The Pinch Hitter and Buster Keaton's College to White Men Can't Jump, Jerry Maguire, and Girlfight. He focuses on how identities have been constructed and transcended in American society since the early twentieth century. Whether depicting team or individual sports, these films return to that most American of themes, the master narrative of self-reliance. Baker shows that even as sports films tackle socially constructed identities like class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, they ultimately underscore transcendence of these identities through self-reliance. Looking at films from almost every sporting genre--with a particular focus on movies about boxing, baseball, basketball, and football--Contesting Identities maps the complex cultural landscape depicted in American sports films and the ways in which stories about "subaltern" groups winning acceptance by the mainstream majority can serve to reinforce the values of that majority. In addition to discussing the genre's recurring dramatic tropes, from the populist prizefighter to the hot-headed rebel to the "manly" female athlete, Baker also looks at the social and cinematic impacts of real-life sports figures from Jackie Robinson and Babe Didrikson Zaharias to Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.
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