"It does not take long to tell the difference in the sound of the explosion of a gas, shrapnel, or high explosive shell," Carl Andrew Brannen said of his introduction to trench warfare. As that nineteen-year-old marine from Texas had quickly learned, the first big war of the twentieth century promised new horrors on the battlefield. In this intense journey through the beginnings of modern war, C. A. Brannen's memoirs and battlefield snapshots are complemented with a unique set of contemporary and retrospective photographs. Seventy-five years after World War I, the author's son retraced his...

Historian Virginia Bernhard has deftly woven together the memoirs and letters of three American soldiers--Henry Beston Sheahan, Mike Hogg, and George Wythe--to capture a vivid, poignant portrayal of what it was like to be "over there." These firsthand recollections focus the lens of history onto one small corner of the war, into one small battlefield, and in doing so they reveal new perspectives on the horrors of trench warfare, life in training camps, transportation and the impact of technology, and the post-armistice American army of occupation.

Henry Sheahan's memoir, A Volunteer...

Tells the little known story of the contribution of Texas A&M University to early aviation in World War I. Through painstaking research - using unit records, after-action reviews, alumni newsletters, and countless other university documents - John Adams Jr. paints a portrait of the Aggie aviator in the Great War.