Jared Frederick – författare

Experience the Pennsylvania saga, told not by those who researched it, but by those who lived it.For centuries, Pennsylvania has stood as a pillar of American life. From early Native American history through modern technological revolutions, the Commonwealth has witnessed heroism, heartache, and the pursuit of happiness. This rich, multigenerational tapestry is woven together through lived experiences and compelling memories, ranging from the 1688 Germantown petition against slavery to the 2002 Quecreek Mine rescue. However, these stories have largely been forgotten in archives, tattered newspapers, and obscure memoirs. Pennsylvania: An Eyewitness History changes that. With keen interpretation, sharp insight, and mindful curation, author Jared Frederick presents a revealing “snapshot history” of the Keystone State spanning more than four centuries. Within these pages, readers will discover one hundred primary sources that showcase Pennsylvania’s—and often the nation’s—transformative past. Drawn from vintage periodicals, personal reminiscences, aged texts, defunct newspapers, and digital libraries, these documents speak across time and space. The people, places, and products that define Pennsylvania come alive in the vivid details of this concise and highly accessible book. Covering every range of the human experience, the selected works span indigenous and colonial lifestyles, civic participation and political struggle, industrial labor and environmental change, civil rights, warfare, sports, and popular culture. Ideal for classrooms, scholars, and history enthusiasts, this volume resurrects voices of bygone eras to reveal the timelessness of shared human experience. With years of teaching state history as his guide, Jared Frederick reminds us of the important elements that bind past, present, and future.

Fans of Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers will be drawn to this complex portrait of the controversial Ronald Speirs, an iconic commander of Easy Company during World War II, whose ferocious courage in three foreign conflicts was matched by his devotion to duty and the bittersweet passions of wartime romance.Fight Like You Mean to WinHis comrades called him “Killer.” Of the elite paratroopers who served in the venerated “Band of Brothers” during the Second World War, none were more enigmatic than Ronald Speirs. Rumoured to have gunned down enemy prisoners and even one of his own disobedient sergeants, Speirs became a foxhole legend among his troops. But who was the real Lieutenant Speirs? In Fierce Valor, historians Jared Frederick and Erik Dorr unveil the fuller story of Easy Company’s longest-serving commander. Tested by trials of extreme training, military rivalry, and lost love, Speirs’s international odyssey begins as an immigrant child in Prohibition-era Boston and continues through the bloody campaigns of France, Holland, and Germany. But 1945 did not mark an end to Speirs’s military adventures. Uncovered by sharp scholarship, his lesser-known exploits in Korea, the Cold War, and embattled Laos also come to light for the first time.Packed with groundbreaking research, Fierce Valor unveils a compelling portrait of an officer defined by boldness on the battlefield and the inherent costs of war. His story serves as a telling reminder that few soldiers escape the power of their own pasts.

One of the last great memoirs of World War II, Into the Cold Blue is a riveting account of the air war over Europe, when hell was four miles above the earth.A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the Pearl Harbor attack. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 Liberator over Nazi Germany, raining death and destruction on the enemy. This first-person account of his harrowing missions—chronicling deadly flights through skies of red-hot flak bursts and airmen bailing out with parachutes aflame—will leave readers staggered by the determination and grit of World War II aviators.Fighting a fierce enemy in the air seemed the perfect way for Homan to channel his restless, energetic spirit in wartime, but he could never have imagined the horrors that awaited him. During a vast operation over Nazi-occupied Holland in September 1944, his plane was punched full of holes, its left tail shot away, and a tire blown to bits. Homan wondered how he could possibly survive. The young lieutenant and his exhausted crewmates braced for a nearly hopeless emergency landing. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, waited the sweetheart he thought he’d never see again.With wit, warmth, and astonishing clarity, John Homan conveys the skill and heroism of the “Mighty Eighth” Air Force in the most perilous theater of history’s greatest air war.