Before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he made a last-minute change - a paragraph authorizing the army to recruit black soldiers. Over the next two years, approximately 180,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors joined the cause. Several thousand came from Canada, the terminus of the Underground Railroad.

What compelled these young men to leave the comfort and safety of home to face death on the battlefield, loss of income for their families, and legal sanctions for participating in a foreign war? Drawing on newspapers, autobiographies, and military and census...

Commanding Canadians is the first comprehensive personal account ? British or Canadian ? that covers the entire inshore anti-U-boat campaign in European waters during the Second World War. Rescued from the archives, the diary of Commander Arthur Layard affords the reader insights into the experiences of command at sea against German naval forces. Far from a daily chronicle, this remarkably full and honest diary outlines Layard's thoughts on his daily life and his naval career, including the strain and responsibility associated with command at sea in wartime.

As well as...

Soldiers found guilty of desertion or cowardice during the Great War faced death by firing squad. Novels, histories, movies, and television series often depict courts martial as brutal and inflexible, and social memories of this system of frontline justice have inspired modern movements to seek pardons for soldiers executed on the battlefield. In this powerful and moving book, Teresa Iacobelli looks beyond stories of callous generals and quick executions to consider the trials of nearly two hundred soldiers who were sentenced to death but spared by a disciplinary system capable of...

This landmark book dispels the idea that the period between the Second World War and the unification of the armed services in 1968 constituted the Canadian Army's ?golden age.? Drawing on recently declassified documents, Peter Kasurak depicts an era clouded by the military leadership's failure to loosen the grasp of British army culture, produce its own doctrine, and advise political leaders effectively. The discrepancy between the army's goals and the Canadian state's aspirations as a peacemaker in the postwar world resulted in a series of civilian-military crises that ended only when the...