Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them. In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice? Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.

The upcoming film "All Quiet on the Western Front" is set to be a new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel published in 1929. Directed by Edward Berger, the film will be produced by DreamWorks Pictures and will star Daniel Brühl, newcomer Felix Kammerer and Devid Striesow. Filming began in late 2021 and the release date is yet to be announced. The story follows a group of young German soldiers who enlist in World War I, filled with idealism and patriotism. However, as they face the brutal reality of trench warfare, they are forced to confront the devastating effects of the war on their physical and mental well-being, as well as their disillusionment with the patriotic propaganda that inspired them to enlist. The novel is considered a masterpiece of anti-war literature, and the film is expected to be a powerful portrayal of the human cost of conflict.

Between 1880 and 1930, close to 200 women were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South. Many more were tarred and feathered, burned, whipped, or raped. In this brutal world of white supremacist politics and patriarchy, a world violently divided by race, gender, and class, black and white women defended themselves and challenged the male power brokers. Crystal Feimster breaks new ground in her story of the racial politics of the postbellum South by focusing on the volatile issue of sexual violence. Pairing the lives of two Southern women—Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly branded lynching a white tool of political terror against southern blacks, and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who urged white men to prove their manhood by lynching black men accused of raping white women—Feimster makes visible the ways in which black and white women sought protection and political power in the New South. While Wells was black and Felton was white, both were journalists, temperance women, suffragists, and anti-rape activists. By placing their concerns at the center of southern politics, Feimster illuminates a critical and novel aspect of southern racial and sexual dynamics. Despite being on opposite sides of the lynching question, both Wells and Felton sought protection from sexual violence and political empowerment for women. Southern Horrors provides a startling view into the Jim Crow South where the precarious and subordinate position of women linked black and white anti-rape activists together in fragile political alliances. It is a story that reveals how the complex drama of political power, race, and sex played out in the lives of Southern women.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”—Jesus of Nazareth The sight of all Europe engaged in the most terrific conflict in the history of mankind is a heartrending spectacle. On the east, on the south and on the west the blood-lust leaders have flung their deluded millions upon unbending lines of steel, martyrs to the glorification of Mars. We see millions of men taken from their homes, their shops and their factories; we see them equipped and organized and mobilized for the express purpose of devastating the homes of other men; we see them making wreckage of property; we see them wasting, with fire and sword, the accumulated efforts of generations in the field of things material; we see the commerce of the world brought to a standstill, all its transportation systems interrupted, and, still worse, the amenities of life so placed in jeopardy for long generations to come that the progress of the world is halted, its material and physical progress turned to retrogression. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!” But this is not the worst. We see myriads of men banded together to practice open violation of the very fundamental tenets of humanity; we see the worst passions of mankind, murder, theft, lust, arson, pillage—all the baser possibilities of human nature—coming to the surface. Outside of the natural killing of war, hundreds of men have been murdered, often with incidents of the most revolting brutality; children have been slaughtered; women have been outraged, killed and shamefully mutilated. And this we see among peoples who have no possible cause for personal quarrel. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!” To all human beings of normal mentality it must have seemed that the destruction of the Lusitania marked the apex of horror. There is, indeed, nothing in modern history—nothing, at least, since the Black Hole of Calcutta and some of the indescribable atrocities of Kurdish fanatics—to supply the mind with a vantage ground from which to measure the causeless and profitless savagery of this black deed of murder. To talk of “warning” having been given on the day the Lusitania sailed is puerile. So does the Black Hand send its warnings. So does Jack the Ripper write his defiant letters to the police. Nothing of this prevents us from regarding such miscreants as wild beasts, against whom society has to defend itself at all hazards. There are many reasons but not a single excuse for the war. When a man, or a nation, wants what a rival holds and makes a violent effort to enter into possession thereof, right and conscience and duty before God and to one’s neighbor are forgotten in the struggle. Man reverts to the brute. Loose rein is given to passion, and the worst appears. The fair edifice of sobriety and amity and just dealing between man and man, upreared by civilization in centuries of travail, is rent asunder, stone from stone. The inner shrine of the inalienable sense of human brotherhood is profaned. One cannot reconcile with any program for the lasting accomplishment of good and the victory of the truth, this fever of murder on a grand scale, this insensate madness of pillage and slaughter that goes from alarum and counter-alarum to overt acts of fiendish and sickening brutality, palliated because they are done by anonymous thousands instead of by one man who can be named. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!” It is civilization that is being shot down by machine guns in Europe. That great German host is not made up of mercenaries, nor of the type of men that at one time composed armies. There are Ehrlichs serving as privates in the ranks and in the French corps are Rostands. A bullet does not kill a man; it destroys a generation of learning...

Before award-winning director Dan Curtis became known for directing epic war movies, he darkened the small screen with the horror genre's most famous soap opera, Dark Shadows, and numerous subsequent made-for-TV horror movies. This second edition serves as a complete filmography, featuring each of Curtis's four-dozen productions and 100 photographs. With the addition of new chapters on Dark Shadows, the author further explores the groundbreaking daytime television serial. Fans and scholars alike will find an exhaustive account of Curtis's work, as well as a new foreword from My Music producer Jim Pierson and an afterword from Dr. Mabuse director Ansel Faraj.

Barbary pirates in Africa targeted sailors for centuries, often taking slaves and demanding ransom in exchange. First published in 1808, Horrors of Slavery is the tale of one such sailor, captured during the United States's first military encounter with the Islamic world, the Tripolitan War. William Ray, along with three hundred crewmates, spent nineteen months in captivity after his ship, the Philadelphia, ran aground in the harbor of Tripoli. Imprisoned, Ray witnessed-and chronicled-many of the key moments of the military engagement. In addition to offering a compelling history of a little-known war, this book presents the valuable perspective of an ordinary seaman who was as concerned with the injustices of the U.S. Navy as he was with Barbary pirates. Hester Blum's introduction situates Horrors of Slavery in its literary, historical, and political contexts, bringing to light a crucial episode in the early history of our country's relations with Islamic states. A volume in the Subterranean Lives series, edited by Bradford Verter

Rather than focus on the attraction exerted by the Mediterranean South on Northerners in search of health, pleasure, leisure and culture, the contributors to this book choose to bring out its less enticing aspects and the repugnance these induced in northern Europeans over four centuries, through a series of sixteen essays covering a geographical area stretching from Portugal to Turkey and Lebanon, from the Balkans to Egypt, and embracing several cultures, two religious faiths and very diverse populations. Most of them were read at an international conference held in Nice in April 2012, and were substantially revised for publication in this volume. All contributions centre around the manner in which British, German (and American) travellers, tourists, writers, thinkers, all members of Protestant modernizing nations rapidly rising in political and economic power reacted to their physical, or merely intellectual, encounter with a Mediterranean world whose pure light, warm sunshine and marvellous scenery could not make them overlook the fact that the glories of the classical past were now “set in the midst of a sordid present” (George Eliot in Middlemarch) and that the successors, possibly the descendants, of the Romans in the countries of the South were sunk in poverty, religious superstition and racial degeneracy. What emerges from these studies that draw on a variety of primary sources is nothing but cruelty, decrepitude, ignorance and obscurantism. With its dark side exposed, the Mediterranean bears little resemblance to the “exquisite lake,” the fons et origo of form and harmony, to which E. M. Forster compared it in A Passage to India. Beyond the portrayal of horrors, however, all essays attempt to unravel the historical conditions and the nexus of mentalités that determined or inspired the perception, imagination or representation of a dark Mediterranean and Near-Eastern world. Not only do they make a useful contribution to the elaboration of the Mediterranean as an intellectual construct, but their original angle of vision offers a valuable addition to the intellectual and cultural history of the North, telling more, perhaps, about the values, prejudices and certainties of northern Europeans than about the true nature of the Mediterranean South.

This volume explores the multifaceted depiction and staging of historical and social traumata as the result of extreme violence within national contexts. It focuses on Israeli-Palestinian, German and (US) American film, and reaches out to cinematic traditions from other countries like France, Great Britain and the former USSR. International and interdisciplinary scholars analyze both mainstream and avant-garde movies and documentaries premiering from the 1960s to the present. From transnational and cross-genre perspectives, they query the modes of representation – regarding narration, dramaturgy, aesthetics, mise-en-scène, iconology, lighting, cinematography, editing and sound – held by film as a medium to visualize shattering experiences of violence and their traumatic encoding in individuals, collectives, bodies and psyches. This anthology uniquely traces horror aesthetics and trajectories as a way to reenact, echo and question the perpetual loops of trauma in film cultures. The contributors examine the discursive transfer between historical traumata necessarily transmitted in a medialized and conceptualized form, the changing landscape of (clinical) trauma theory, the filmic depiction and language of trauma, and the official memory politics and hegemonic national-identity constructions.

Based on Leonora Sansay’s eyewitness accounts of the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue (Haiti), Secret History is a vivid account of race warfare and domestic violence. Sansay’s writing provocatively draws comparisons between Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution and the postrevolutionary United States, while fluidly combining qualities of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, colonial travel writing, and political analysis. Laura, Sansay’s second novel, features as its protagonist a beautiful impoverished orphan who throws herself headlong into a secret marriage with a young medical student. When her husband dies in a duel in an effort to protect his wife’s reputation, Laura finds herself once more alone in the world. The republication of these works will contribute to a significant revision of thinking about early American literary history. This Broadview edition offers a rich selection of contextual materials, including selections from periodical literature about Haiti, engravings, letters written by Sansay to her friend Aaron Burr, historical material related to the Burr trial for treason, and excerpts from literature referenced in the novels.

History is replete with pronouncements on war. Some reflect on man’s warlike nature (“We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth”—Homer); others deal with the practical strategies of the combatants (“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”—Winston Churchill); and still others offer advice for avoiding conflict (“The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war”—Desiderius Erasmus). More than 2,700 quotations on war and conflict are presented in this reference work. The quotations are arranged by more than 100 broad categories, from action to winning. For each, the quotation is first given, followed by its author, the work in which it appeared (when appropriate), and the date. The book includes numerous cross-references, and keyword-in-context and author indexes are provided for further utility.