Books by "Charles P. Roland"
10 books found
Greatly expanded and updated from the 1977 original, this new edition explores the evolution of the modern horror film, particularly as it reflects anxieties associated with the atomic bomb, the Cold War, 1960s violence, sexual liberation, the Reagan revolution, 9/11 and the Iraq War. It divides modern horror into three varieties (psychological, demonic and apocalyptic) and demonstrates how horror cinema represents the popular expression of everyday fears while revealing the forces that influence American ideological and political values. Directors given a close reading include Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg, Guillermo Del Toro, Michael Haneke, Robert Aldrich, Mel Gibson and George A. Romero. Additional material discusses postmodern remakes, horror franchises and Asian millennial horror. This book also contains more than 950 frame grabs and a very extensive filmography.
Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War and its biggest battles, particularly Gettysburg, Antietam, and Shiloh, all of which involved Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant. But one of the 6 biggest battles of the war, and the one that took the heaviest toll by % on both armies was fought at the end of 1862 in Tennessee, and it involved neither of those generals. In late December 1862, William Rosecrans’s Union Army of the Cumberland was contesting Middle Tennessee against Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, and for three days the two armies savaged each other as Bragg threw his army at Rosecrans in a series of desperate assaults. Bragg’s army was unable to dislodge the Union army, and he eventually withdrew his army after learning that Rosecrans was on the verge of receiving reinforcements. Though the battle was stalemated, the fact that the Union army was left in possession of the field allowed Rosecrans to declare victory and embarrassed Bragg. Of all the Civil War battles fought, and of all the victories achieved by Robert E. Lee at the command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, the Battle of Chancellorsville is considered the most tactically complex and ultimately the most brilliant Confederate victory of the war. In early May 1863, the Army of the Potomac was at the height of its power as it bore down on Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia near Fredericksburg, where the Confederates had defeated them the previous December. The Union behemoth had spent most of the winter season being reorganized and drilled by “Fighting Joe” Hooker, an aggressive commander who had fought hard at places like Antietam. With an army nearing 130,000 men, Hooker’s Army of the Potomac was twice the size of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s heavily outnumbered army won the most stunning victory of the war at Chancellorsville, but it cost them Stonewall Jackson. Moreover, the reorganization of the armies and the battle itself played an influential role in the way the Pennsylvania Campaign and the Battle of Gettysburg unfolded later that summer. Without question, the most famous battle of the American Civil War took place outside of the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which happened to be a transportation hub, serving as the center of a wheel with several roads leading out to other Pennsylvanian towns. From July 1-3, Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia tried everything in its power to decisively defeat George Meade’s Union Army of the Potomac, unleashing ferocious assaults that inflicted nearly 50,000 casualties in all. Day 1 of the battle would have been one of the 25 biggest battles of the Civil War itself, and it ended with a tactical Confederate victory. But over the next two days, Lee would try and fail to dislodge the Union army with attacks on both of its flanks during the second day and Pickett’s Charge on the third and final day. Meade’s stout defense held, barely, repulsing each attempted assault, handing the Union a desperately needed victory that ended up being one of the Civil War’s turning points. After the South had lost the war, the importance of Gettysburg as one of the “high tide” marks of the Confederacy became apparent to everyone, making the battle all the more important in the years after it had been fought. While former Confederate generals cast about for scapegoats, with various officers pointing fingers at Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and James Stuart, historians and avid Civil War fans became obsessed with studying and analyzing all the command decisions and army movements during the entire campaign. Despite the saturation of coverage, Americans refuse to grow tired of visiting the battlefield and reliving the biggest battle fought in North America.
In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources—including thousands of letters and unpublished journals—he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants’ own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the war began, it was not just Texas that many of these soldiers enlisted to protect, but also their native states, where they had family ties.
"We were as brothers," Sherman said, describing his relationship to Grant, a friendship forged on the battlefield. They were prewar failures--Grant, forced to resign from the Army because of his drinking, and Sherman, who held four different jobs during the four years before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. But heeding the call to save the Union, each struggled to join the war effort. And taking each other's measure at the Battle of Shiloh, ten months into the war, they began their unique collaboration. They shared the demands of family life and the heartache of loss, including the death of Sherman's favorite son. They supported each other in the face of criticism by press and politicians. Their growing mutual admiration and trust, which President Lincoln increasingly relied upon, would set the stage for the crucial final year of the war.--From publisher description.
During the four years of the American Civil War, over 400,000 soldiers -- one in every seven who served in the Union and Confederate armies -- became prisoners of war. In northern and southern prisons alike, inmates suffered horrific treatment. Even healthy young soldiers often sickened and died within weeks of entering the stockades. In all, nearly 56,000 prisoners succumbed to overcrowding, exposure, poor sanitation, inadequate medical care, and starvation. Historians have generally blamed prison conditions and mortality rates on factors beyond the control of Union and Confederate command, but Charles W. Sanders, Jr., boldly challenges the conventional view and demonstrates that leaders on both sides deliberately and systematically ordered the mistreatment of captives.Sanders shows how policies developed during the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War shaped the management of Civil War prisons. He examines the establishment of the major camps as well as the political motivations and rationale behind the operation of the prisons, focusing especially on Camp Douglas, Elmira, Camp Chase, and Rock Island in the North and Andersonville, Cahaba, Florence, and Danville in the South. Beyond a doubt, he proves that the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis purposely formulated and carried out retaliatory practices designed to harm prisoners of war, with each assuming harsher attitudes as the conflict wore on.Sanders cites official and personal correspondence from high-level civilian and military leaders who knew about the intolerable conditions but often refused to respond or even issued orders that made matters far worse. From such documents emerges a chilling chronicle of how prisoners came to be regarded not as men but as pawns to be used and then callously discarded in pursuit of national objectives. Yet even before the guns fell silent, Sanders reveals, both North and South were hard at work constructing elaborate justifications for their actions.While in the Hands of the Enemy offers a groundbreaking revisionist interpretation of the Civil War military prison system, challenging historians to rethink their understanding of nineteenth-century warfare.