Since English settlers first touched the shore of the new country in 1607, the Chesapeake Bay has been a multifaceted engine of American history and commerce. The body of inland tidal water between the largest bay cities, Norfolk and Baltimore, was large enough to be the setting of adventure and close enough to allow smaller towns and cities to grow up on its shores. The common community came to life with the technologies of steamboats that could cover the long distances between North and South relatively quickly. Steamers filled in the nooks and crannies of the bay's geography, and by the...

Normandy, Flanders Field and other cemeteries for American war dead buried outside the United States are well known. However, lesser-known burial sites exist all over the world-in Australia and across the Pacific Rim, in Canada and Mexico, Libya and Spain, even as far north as the Russian Arctic. This is the history of American soldiers buried abroad since the American Revolution. It traces the evolution of American attitudes toward its war dead and provides the location of individual burial sites and the names of those interred.

The role of Americans in the two world wars is well known - with a glaring exception. By the time of the American entrance into World War I in April 1917 and World War II in December 1941, tens of thousands of Americans had already fought and died in those conflicts in the uniforms of other nations. Most had travelled to Canada to join the ground, air and naval forces of the Commonwealth nations, others to France, Poland, China and the other nations and armed forces that played a role in the continuing world conflict of the first half of the century. In preceding their own nation to war, they...