As a first lieutenant in Bravo Company of the Third Battalion, 187th Infantry, Frank Boccia led a platoon in two intense battles in the Vietnamese mountains in April and May 1969: Dong Ngai and the grinding, 11-day battle of Dong Ap Bia--the Mountain of the Crouching Beast, in Vietnamese, or Hamburger Hill as it is popularly known.
Exploring the pedagogical power of the monstrous, this collection of new essays describes innovative teaching strategies that use our cultural fascination with monsters to enhance learning in high school and college courses.
Among the many German immigrants to the United States over the years, one group is unusual: former prisoners of war who had spent between one and three years on American soil and who returned voluntarily as immigrants after the war.
Vampire characters are ubiquitous in popular culture, serving as metaphors for society's most sensitive subjects--sexuality, gender roles, race, ethnicity, class--and often channeling widespread fears of immigration, crime, terrorism and addiction.
Zombies, vampires and ghosts feature prominently in nearly all forms of entertainment in the 21st century, including popular fiction, film, comics, television and computer games.
Vietnam's Year of the Rat explores the lunar New Year 1960 and the dynamic relationship between two competing groups vying for control in the Republic of Vietnam.
In the five months after Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy won a string of victories in a campaign to consolidate control of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.
When Kenneth Johnson's science fiction miniseries V premiered in 1983, it netted more than 40 percent of the television viewing audience and went on to spawn a sequel, a weekly series, novelizations, comic books and a remake.
During World War I, the American Expeditionary Force Second Division saw more action and captured more ground and enemy combatants than any other, including the vaunted First Division.
The samurai films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are set in the past, but they tell us much about the present, as do his crime stories, romances, military films, medical dramas and art films.
In 1968, Theodore Hammett entered a war he believed was wrong, pressured by his father's threat to disown him if he withdrew from a Marine Corps officer candidate program.
In the many historical accounts of D-Day, the Navy, Coast Guard and merchant marine, who transported troops to the invasion beaches and supported the attack, are often given scant attention.
Before unmanned combat drones, there was the Grumman OV-1C Mohawk, a twin-engine turboprop fixed-wing reconnaissance aircraft loaded with state-of-the-art target detection systems.
Following on author Peter Rollins' motto "e;If it isn't popular, it isn't culture,"e; this collection of new essays considers Vince Gilligan's award-winning television series Breaking Bad as a landmark of Western culture--comparable to the works of Shakespeare and Dickens in their time--that merits scholarly attention from those who would understand early the 21st century zeitgeist.
The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their employment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch.
One of the most popular comic strips of the 1950s and the first to reference politics of the day, Walt Kelly's Pogo took on Joe McCarthy before the controversial senator was a blip on Edward R.
It was not Robert Oppenheimer who built the bomb--it was engineers, chemists and young physicists in their twenties, many not yet having earned a degree.
