On both sides of the turn of the twentieth century, there emerged a style of writing that was a distant kin to the modern historical novel. It was known as Les Guerres Imaginaires, which can basically be translated into “The Imaginary War.” It was a literary device used to tell how future wars might occur and be fought. This type of novel was written by military authors who sought to mold and enhance their foresight with intricate historical and political analyses. Examples of this genre include “The Battle of Dorking,” a 1871 short story in Blackwood’s Magazine by Sir George Tomkyns Chesney; The Great Naval War of 1887, written in 1886 by Sir William Laird Clowes and Commander Charles N. Robinson; The Great War of 189-, A Forecast, by Rear Admiral Philip Colomb, written in 1893; The War Inevitable (1908), by Alan H. Burgoyne; The Valor of Ignorance (1909), by Homer Lea; and two great novels of the 1920s, Sea Power in the Pacific (1920) and The Great Pacific War (1925), by Hector Bywater. John Eric Vining resurrects a mirror image of this genre to look back into history and explore what might have happened if Mexico had taken Germany’s 1917 Zimmermann Telegram seriously and attempted to recapture the American Southwest at the height of World War I. While this is fantastically unbelievable at first glance, a further analysis is warranted. What you might find is that not only was a Mexican invasion of the American Southwest quite possible in 1917, the real surprise is that it did not happen in the actual history of World War I! Take the plunge and see for yourself if it might have been possible for the United States and Mexico to have fought the Great Southwestern War of 1917.

An epic achievement over one hundred years in the making... In December 1941, Japan had perhaps the greatest combination of land, sea, and air forces the world had ever seen, and she used these to conquer a huge empire in the Western Pacific and East Asia. Yet by August 1945, Japan had been beaten to her knees by the combined power of China, Great Britain, and the United States. Was this destruction inevitable? Did Japan have no chance to defeat America and her allies? Why would she think she could successfully battle the two greatest industrial powers the world had ever known—Great Britain and the United States—at the same time? Violet Lightning: A Blueprint for Japanese Victory in the Pacific, 1941–1942 is a sweeping narrative over a century in the making. From the first confrontation in 1895 between the United States and Japan over Hawaii; to the massive Japanese defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942; to author John Eric Vining’s first interest in the Japanese-American conflict in the fall of 1967 by reading Carrier War in the Pacific; to the fall of 1995 when Vining first put pen to paper on this project; and finally, to 2020’s finished product by Page Publishing, Vining reviews a history of the acrimony between Japan and the United States in the first half of the Twentieth Century. He then builds what one reviewer calls a “chillingly believable” scenario for a Japanese victory in the greatest of all wars. Violet Lightning poses and answers the question: “Could Japan really have pulled it off?” You just might find yourself coming around to a point of view you didn’t believe was possible.

Mark Gamble is one of the greatest sharpshooters in the Civil War’s Confederate Army of Tennessee. He is well-known on both sides of the battle line: revered by his compatriots and feared by his enemies. Mark’s own fear is that his soul is lost forever as his lust for killing increasingly takes over his entire being. After he is severely wounded at the Battle of Lookout Mountain on November 24, 1863, Mark is captured by Union soldiers and placed in a federal military hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There he is nursed back to health by the lovely Ruth Taylor, a Quaker nurse/volunteer at the hospital. Falling in love with the gentle and caring Ruth, he eventually wins her hand in marriage. The war ends. Mark converts to the Society of Friends, and Mark and Ruth settle into what would seem to be a “happily ever after” life of farming in the lush valleys of the Appalachian Mountains near Allentown, Pennsylvania. But Ruth feels a call in her life to serve as a missionary to the Brule Lakota (Sioux) in Western Nebraska—a tribe that is slowly being decimated by white encroachment. With deep misgivings, Mark agrees to accompany her, and the couple moves to the West to answer Ruth’s calling. Can Ruth survive the tough, brutal life of a Great Plains wife and missionary? Can Mark serve as both a companion to his wife and a mentor to the distrusting Native American tribe while withstanding the pressures inherent to an Indian agent? Most importantly, can Mark, with the grace of God and a spirit of self-forgiveness, find redemption for his many transgressions as a missionary to a dying race on the bleak, windswept barrens of the western Great Plains?

Includes names from the States of Alabama, Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.