Thomas Childers – författare

A revelatory social history examining the lives of American military veterans after their return home following World War II.“Thomas Childers’s heartbreaking book makes palpable the human cost of a conflict too often sanitized as ‘the good war.’” —Chicago TribuneOne of our most enduring national myths surrounds the men and women who fought in the so-called “Good War.” The Greatest Generation, we’re told by Tom Brokaw and others, fought heroically, then returned to America happy, healthy and well-adjusted. They quickly and cheerfully went on with the business of rebuilding their lives.In this shocking and hauntingly beautiful book, historian Thomas Childers shatters that myth. He interweaves the intimate story of three families—including his own—with a decades’ worth of research to paint an entirely new picture of the war’s aftermath. Drawing on government documents, interviews, oral histories and diaries, he reveals that 10,000 veterans a month were being diagnosed with psycho-neurotic disorder (now known as PTSD). Alcoholism, homelessness, and unemployment were rampant, leading to a skyrocketing divorce rate. Many veterans bounced back, but their struggle has been lost in a wave of nostalgia that threatens to undermine a new generation of returning soldiers.Novelistic in its telling and impeccably researched, Childers’s book is a stark reminder that the price of war is unimaginably high. The consequences are human, not just political, and the toll can stretch across generations.“Childers’s absorbing study offers an important corrective to sanitized tributes to the Good War’s legacy.” —Publishers Weekly“A powerful work of social history that readers will stay with to the last page.” —Booklist

The first study based on a large national sample of both urban and rural districts examines the Nazi constituency -- how it was formed, from which social groups, under what conditions, and with what promises. Using advanced statistical techniques to analyze each national election of the Weimar era, Childres offers a new and challenging interpretation of who voted for Hitler's NSDAP and why. He also provides a systematic examination of Nazi campaign strategy. |A biography of James Longstreet, from his leading role as commander of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia through his controversial postwar career. Although the authors absolve Longstreet of guilt for Gettysburg, they call attention to the consequences of hi

The first study based on a large national sample of both urban and rural districts examines the Nazi constituency — how it was formed, from which social groups, under what conditions, and with what promises. Using advanced statistical techniques to analyze each national election of the Weimar era, Childres offers a new and challenging interpretation of who voted for Hitler’s NSDAP and why. He also provides a systematic examination of Nazi campaign strategy.

This book is the culmination of three years of study of information and referral activity in U.S. public libraries. Information and referal (I&R) is defined broadly as facilitating the link between a people and the resource or resources outside the library that can meet their needs. The book helps to define what I&R is, how some libraries have approached it, and what major problems have been associated with its adoption. It serves as a guide on the role of public libraries in I&R, managing I&R in a library environment, appropriate skills and training, the performance of libraries where I&R has been tried, the impact of library-based I&R on the client group, and how library-based I&R compares with non-library I&R.

In the years preceding publication of this book in 1986 much progress was made in identifying the social sources of support for Hitler’s NSDAP and in determining the tactics employed by the party to mobilise its constituency at grass roots level. It has emerged that the Nazi’s roots were far more diverse than previously assumed, extending beyond the lower middle class to encompass both the affluent bourgeoisie and the working class. This book collects together original studies which represent a distillation of some of the contemporaneous research.

In the years preceding publication of this book in 1986 much progress was made in identifying the social sources of support for Hitler’s NSDAP and in determining the tactics employed by the party to mobilise its constituency at grass roots level. It has emerged that the Nazi’s roots were far more diverse than previously assumed, extending beyond the lower middle class to encompass both the affluent bourgeoisie and the working class. This book collects together original studies which represent a distillation of some of the contemporaneous research.

“Riveting…An elegantly composed study, important and even timely” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) history of the Third Reich—how Adolf Hitler and a core group of Nazis rose from obscurity to power and plunged the world into World War II.In “the new definitive volume on the subject” (Houston Press), Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, he found his voice and drew a loyal following. As his views developed, Hitler attracted like-minded colleagues who formed the nucleus of the nascent Nazi party. Between 1924 and 1929, Hitler and his party languished in obscurity on the radical fringes of German politics, but the onset of the Great Depression gave them the opportunity to move into the mainstream. Hitler blamed Germany’s misery on the victorious allies, the Marxists, the Jews, and big business—and the political parties that represented them. By 1932 the Nazis had become the largest political party in Germany, and within six months they transformed a dysfunctional democracy into a totalitarian state and began the inexorable march to World War II and the Holocaust. It is these fraught times that Childers brings to life: the Nazis’ unlikely rise and how they consolidated their power once they achieved it. Based in part on German documents seldom used by previous historians, The Third Reich is a “powerful…reminder of what happens when power goes unchecked” (San Francisco Book Review). This is the most comprehensive and readable one-volume history of Nazi Germany since the classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.