Fordham Impressions » WWII

International Women’s Day

FUPress — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:34:49 +0000

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Senate Honors Tuskegee Airman, Alexander Jefferson

FUPress — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:52:06 +0000

3 Tuskegee Airmen lauded on Senate floor

Two Hawaii residents are among those recognized for their service in World War II

By Associated Press

March 2, 2013

The state Senate honored Friday three members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the celebrated group of African-American combat pilots who fought in World War II.

Romaine Goldsborough, Philip Baham and Alexander Jefferson (author of Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW, Fordham University Press), each received a Certificate of Recognition during the Senate’s floor session.

Goldsborough and Baham are both Hawaii residents, while Jefferson is from Michigan.

Sen. Will Espero said the certificates are intended to show appreciation for the veterans’ service.

“It was such an honor to meet these veterans who faced so much adversity yet still had the strength to fight in the war. It was important to acknowledge and share their story and the contributions they made to our American history,” Espero (D, Ewa Beach-Iroquois Point), chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Safety, Intergovernmental and Military Affairs, said in a news release.

The Tuskegee Airmen are members of the 332nd Fighter Group and 477th Bombardment Group who helped pave the way for desegregation in the U.S. military. The group has received eight Purple Hearts, three Distinguished Unit Citations and 14 Bronze Stars.

To read full article. . .

Why University Presses Matter

FUPress — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 07:27:50 +0000

We are excited to have Fordham University Press Director, Fredric Nachbaur, blogging for us as part of the University Press Week blog tour! The tour continues today at Texas A&M University Press. A complete blog tour schedule is also available here.

Witnessing all the damage caused by Sandy has me feeling a melancholy. I was born and raised in New Jersey and spent many summers “down the shore.” In recent summers I have taken my daughter to some of the same beaches I enjoyed as a kid. I’ve been a New Yorker since 1991 and am a regular visitor to Coney Island, and lived for a short time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is quite devastating to see all the massive destruction done to our great city and state and to our neighbors in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. As I was preparing to write my post for University Press Week, I reflected on how university presses have bonded together in the past during times of tragedy to help us all understand what is happening at the moment and how we can move forward. “Books for Understanding” was developed by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) soon after 9/11 to bring the latest and most valuable scholarship to readers in an easy to find and easy to use place. The AAUP instantly became a resource for people who wanted to know more and to find it from reliable sources—University Presses—the pillars of knowledge. The day after hurricane Sandy hit, a reporter from the Huffington Post contacted me about a Fordham University Press (FUP) author who wrote a history of the NYC subways. She wanted to interview him about the flooding of the tunnels and the mass transit shutdown. It is a prime example of how the media turns to university presses for expertise during times of crisis.

We emphasize scholarship by being witnesses to global events, detectives for finding the best authors, and sharers of critical information that has been researched and vetted. Combining efforts to make all of our books on a specific topic of current concern to citizens of the world is invaluable. There are several lists related to Hurricane Sandy, including one on Katrina. Knowing this, I’m not feeling as sad. Thank you AAUP! In preparation for University Press Week to celebrate the AAUP turning 75, Will Underwood, Director of Kent State University Press, asked fellow directors to gather some endorsements from key stakeholders. Happily, I got a great response from faculty and administrators on the Fordham campus as well as some FUP authors and friends. Here is what the Provost of Fordham University wrote:

“As the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) celebrates its 75th anniversary, Fordham University joins in honoring a rich history of committed leadership and collaborative service to the academy and to society. Fordham University Press has partnered with AAUP since 1938 to advance academic excellence in the full pursuit of truth and to enrich public discourse through the dissemination of scholarly research of the highest quality across the disciplines. We look forward to our work with the AAUP to engage evolving challenges and opportunities for university presses in the decades ahead. —Stephen Freedman, Provost, Fordham University

FUP celebrated its 100^th anniversary in 2007. Established in 1907 to help Fordham faculty publish monographs based on their research, we now publish up to 70 books per year from faculty at institutions all over the globe. Not unlike the AAUP, FUP is a small organization with big ambitions. We have established ourselves as a leading academic press concentrating in history, literary theory, philosophy and religion. We also publish well established series in continental philosophy, American philosophy, medieval studies, World War II, and the Civil War among others and have created new series spanning a diversity of topics from Orthodox Christianity to Italian American studies. We have a long history publishing regional books focusing on New York City and the Hudson Valley. In 2010, we established the Empire State Editions imprint to better brand and market these titles.

To kick off the festivities of UP week, we hosted an open house for faculty showcasing their work as authors and series editors. Despite the previous evening’s nor’easter, we got a nice turnout and received positive feedback. Here are a few shots.

On Veteran’s Day, FUP hosted a Veteran’s Day public program entitled Five Historians Reflect on World War II: What We Know, What We Still Need to Learn and What We May Never Know. It turned out to be a successful event with a lively engaged audience. Here are some pics.

Dr. Scott H. Bennett, author of Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank and Albert Dietrich

Dr. G. Kurt Piehler, Dr. Scott H. Bennett, Dr. Sidney Pash, Dr. Ann Pfau, Dr. John Chambers, Dr. J. Garry Clifford

FUP is lean, resourceful, hardworking, and determined. I’d say that about captures the definition of a university press and the AAUP. I’m proud to be a member of this superb, caring, humane community. Happy birthday AAUP. Here’s to another 75 years.

I’ll end with a quote from a friend and a fan of university presses:

“What words to describe the university press? Patient, ambitious, demanding, sustaining, generous, utterly essential. Serious thinking is unimaginable without it.”
—William Germano, Dean of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union

Fredric Nachbaur (Twitter: @FNachbaur) is the Director of Fordham University Press.

Next stop: Texas A&M University Press.

Veteran’s Day Public Program

FUPress — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:45:17 +0000

VETERAN’S DAY PUBLIC PROGRAM

Five Historians Reflect on World War II
“What We Know, What We Still Need to Learn and What We May Never Know”

Monday, November 12, 2012
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus
113 West 60th Street
Lowenstein 12th Floor Lounge
New York, NY 10023

Participants:

Dr. Scott H. Bennett is an authority on the American peace movement and the Second World War and, among other works, is editor of Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank and Albert Dietrich (Fordham University Press, 2005).

Dr. J. Garry Clifford is one of the country’s leading diplomatic historians and has written on how America raised an Army in World War II.

Dr. Sidney Pash is author of Defending the Open Door: American-Japanese Relations, 1899-1941 (forthcoming University Press of Kentucky) which offers a re-examination of the coming of war in the Pacific.

Dr. Ann Pfau is author of Miss Your lovin: GIs, Gender, and Domesticity during World War II (Columbia University Press), which examines how GIs thought about war and dreamed about the homefront.

Dr. G. Kurt Piehler is author of Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian) and over the course of his career has interviewed over 300 World War II veterans. He is book series editor of FUP’s World War II: The Global, Human and Ethical Dimension.

Books in World War II: The Global, Human and Ethical Dimension series:

The United States and the Second World War: New Perspectives on Diplomacy, War, and the Home Front
edited by G. KURT PIEHLER and SIDNEY PASH
356 pages, 978-0-8232-5203-9, paper, $26.00

Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich
by FRANK DIETRICH and ALBERT DIETRICH,
edited by SCOTT H. BENNETT
408 pages, 978-0-8232-2378-7, cloth, $38.00

Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron
by DEBORAH S. CORNELIUS
400 pages, 16 b/w illustrations, 978-0-8232-3344-1, paper, $28.00

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW
by ALEXANDER JEFFERSON,
with LEWIS H. CARLSON
160 pages, 71 b/w illustrations, 978-0-8232-2366-4, cloth, $29.95

For more books in the World War II series, CLICK HERE.

Red Tails Takes to the Screen January 20th

FUPress — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:10:25 +0000

We’re excited to see Red Tails featuring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terrence Howard. Produced by George Lucas, the movie launches Friday, January 20, 2012 and promises to be a gripping story about the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American pilots in the military, and were named for the town in Alabama where they were trained.

We like to think the movie was inspired by one of FUP’s bestselling authors—Alexander Jefferson. While Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free is one of the few memoirs of combat in World War II by a distinguished African-American pilot, it is also perhaps the only account of the African-American experience behind barbed wire in a German prison camp.

Alex Jefferson was one of 32 Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group to be shot down defending a country that considered them to be second-class citizens. A Detroit native, Jefferson enlisted in 1942, trained at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, became a second lieutenant in 1943, and joined one of the most decorated fighting units in the War, flying P51s with their legendary—and feared —“red tails.”

Alex Jefferson writes what it was like not only to be an African-American pilot flying during WWII, but also what it was like being a prisoner of war in Germany. Jefferson was shot down in 1944, right in German territory. He was immediately taken captive by German soldiers and held in a POW camp for nine months. His memoir, co-written by Lewis Carlson, spares no details of his experiences fighting for a country where he did not have equal rights.

Alex’s story is vivid and personal. An unvarnished look at life as a fighter pilot and POW, it is also a look at race and democracy in American through the eyes of a patriot who fought to protect the promise of freedom—not only on the front lines, but also as he moved through the camps, air bases, and segregated streets of hometown America.

For more information on Red Tails visit or www.Redtailsfilm.com

Remembering Pearl Harbor 70 Years Later . . .

FUPress — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:58:06 +0000

Dec. 7, 2011 — Today marks the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor when Japan bombed the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored in Hawaii.

This “Day of Infamy” was unprovoked and ultimately drew this nation into World War II.

At exactly 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese torpedoes started ripping open battleships anchored alongside Ford Island. Within two hours, some 20 ships were sunk or damaged and 164 planes destroyed.

Of the 2,400 who died, nearly half were killed in a matter of seconds aboard the giant USS Arizona battleship, when a bomb detonated the ship’s munitions depot, igniting a conflagration that burned for three days.

It was the most devastating foreign attack on U.S. soil until September 11, 2001.

Here are some titles from our World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimensions series:

Civil Rights in New York City

FUPress — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:00:53 +0000

The New York Times spotlights Clarence Taylor’s new book, Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era.

While the nation’s attention was riveted on the South, much of the civil rights revolution in the second half of the 20th century was being waged in the North. Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era (Fordham University Press, $35) attempts to provide some balance through 10 academic essays that cast light on struggles between blacks and organized labor, civil rights and the cold war, discrimination that extended even to garbage collection, and the competing visions of Mayors David N. Dinkins and Rudolph W. Giuliani. READ MORE

Remembering Martin Luther King

FUPress — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:33:20 +0000

Today marks the anniversary of Civil Rights Leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s untimely death in 1968.

In 1967, King led the largest antiwar demonstration to date in New York City. More than 1,100 people marched with King from Central Park to U.N. headquarters to protest the Vietnam War.

He is remembered today in New York with a street named in his honor. Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard is an alternative name for Manhattan’s 125th Street. There is also a Martin Luther King, Jr. High School on Amsterdam Avenue and a Martin Luther King Triangle, a park space in Manhattan’s Mott Haven neighborhood (Austin Place and East 149th Street).

Since the 1960s, most U.S. history has been written as if the civil rights movement were primarily or entirely a Southern history. Civil Rights in New York City edited by Clarence Taylor joins a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the importance of the Northern history of the movement. The contributors make clear that civil rights in New York City were contested in many ways, beginning long before the 1960s, and across many groups with a surprisingly wide range of political perspectives. Civil Rights in New York City provides a sample of the rich historical record of the fight for racial justice in the city that was home to the nation’s largest population of African-Americans in mid-twentieth century America.

Other titles of interest…

Remembering Pearl Harbor

FUPress — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:10:14 +0000

On the morning of December 7, 1941, the American naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. This spurred America’s involvement in World War II. Millions of Americans went on to serve in the war, fighting abroad in Europe and in the Pacific against what was then known as the “Axis of Evil.”

Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941, a classic study of the run up to World War II, examines the ways domestic politics shaped America’s response to Japanese moves in the Pacific. The book covers fundamental questions, such as: How did Japan and the United States end up at war on December 7, 1941? What American decisions might have provoked the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor?

Fordham’s Letters to Lee gives us a deeply personal look into the life of a soldier, Lt. General James V. Edmundson, through his letters home to his beloved wife, Lee, and also through his meticulous vignettes describing the conditions in Hawaii (where he was stationed from 1940-1942) and in the Pacific, written following Lee’s death in 2000.

To read more about Letters to Lee, visit www.letterstolee.com.

The Real Pacific

FUPress — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:58:40 +0000

The Pacific is a hit series from HBO that centers on the fighting in the Pacific during World War II. The 10-part miniseries is produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman, and chronicles the true stories of 3 Marines as they fight in the Pacific theater. The finale of this stirring series airs this Sunday, May 16th at 9 pm on HBO, but you can learn more about the true stories in several Fordham titles:

Going to War with Japan 1937-1941 examines just how Japan came to attack the US in the fateful Pearl Harbor bombing of December 7, 1941, taking an in-depth look at the pivotal years leading up to the explosion.

The Diary of Prisoner 17326: A Boy’s Life in a Japanese Labor Camp is the memoir of a young man’s time spent in a Japanese labor camp during the invasion of the Dutch East Indies. John Stutterheim was taken prisoner in Java when he was only 15 years old. During his time at the camp, he hid a diary in his mattress, where he recorded the shocking details of his day-to-day life as a child prisoner.

America’s Japan: The First Year–1945-1946 tells the story of Grant Goodman, one of the few non-Japanese Americans trained to read, write, and speak Japanese, serving in Japan as an intelligence officer under General Douglas MacArthur. In his capacity, he was able to understand Tokyo and its people better than almost any other American there during that time. His book provides valuable insight into a people and a history.This title is part of the White Sale. Get it now for $6.25!