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  Exploring the West: The History...

  Editors Charles River

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  The Louisiana Purchase encompassed all or part of 15 current U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, including Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Minnesota that were west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota, nearly all of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, Northern Texas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans (parts of this area were still claimed by Spain at the time of the Purchase.) In addition, the Louisiana Purchase contained small portions of land that would eventually become part of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The purchase, which doubled the size of the young nation, comprises around 23% of current American territory.  
  	In the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition was a much-heralded blow for American rights in the face of international competition, but that was only one of four expeditions authorized by Jefferson. Four years before Lewis and Clark set off, an army officer from New Jersey led two long-distance treks, one northward to the headwaters of the Mississippi River and the other to the Southwest. These were the only expeditions authorized by Jefferson while they were already en route, planned and launched by subordinates within the military. 
  	Of all the legends and folk heroes who lived in the 19th century, men such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, few actually accomplished as much as Kit Carson. A frontier boy who hopped onto the Santa Fe Trail as a teen, Carson became the quintessential mountain man during the 1830s and was literally a trailblazer for John C. Fremont’s historic expeditions through the West in the 1840s. Along the way, Carson learned so many Native American dialects that he was considered nearly as proficient talking with them as he was fighting them.

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  The Kaiser's Escapees - Allied...

  Philip D. Chinnery

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  Following on from the his first well-received book 'The Kaisers First POWs' Philip Chinnery now turns his attention to the attempts by allied prisoners of war to escape the Kaiser's clutches and return to their homeland. As the war progressed, the treatment of allied prisoners worsened as the blockade of Germany reduced the amount of food and material coming into the country. The majority of the prisoners were too weak or ill-equipped to attempt to escape, but there were others who were determined to pit their wits against their jailers. These included the officers at Holzminden prison, who dug a tunnel allowing twenty-eight of their number to escape; men like Canadian Private Simmons, who escaped and was recaptured twice before his third attempt saw him gain his freedom; men who jumped from moving trains or marched brazenly out of the camp gates disguised as German officers.Although Holland and Switzerland were neutral countries during the First World War, escaping from their camps, crossing miles of enemy territory and outwitting the sentries guarding the frontiers taxed even the strongest individuals. But many men did make the attempt and more than a few of them were successful. This is their story.

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  On to Stalingrad - Operation...

  Horst Scheibert

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  In late November 1942, Soviet forces surrounded Paulus' Sixth Army in a pocket outside the Russian city of Stalingrad. In response the Germans planned a relief operation, Operation Winter Storm, intended to break through the Soviet forces and open the pocket, releasing the encircled units. The 6th Panzer Division was the spearhead of the German relief force. 
   
   
   
  The attack started on December 12th, 1942 and was aborted on December 23rd after heavy Soviet counterattacks. This failure sealed the fate of the German 6th Army in Stalingrad. 
   
   
   
  This account of the operation was first published in German in 1961, written by the well-respected military historian and retired German officer, Schiebert Horst. It covers the entire operation from the situation in mid-November through the two German offensives, the Soviet counteroffensive and ongoing fighting until early January.

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  Small Medium Large - How...

  Colleen A. Dunlavy

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  We live in a world of seemingly limitless consumer choice. Yet, as every shopper knows without thinking about it, many everyday goods—from beds to batteries to printer paper—are available in a finite number of "standard sizes." What makes these sizes "standard" is an agreement among competing firms to make or sell products with the same limited dimensions. But how did firms—often hotly competing firms—reach such collective agreements? 
   
   
   
  In exploring this question, Colleen Dunlavy puts the history of mass production and distribution in an entirely new light. She reveals that, despite the widely publicized model offered by Henry Ford, mass production techniques did not naturally diffuse throughout the US economy. On the contrary, formidable market forces blocked their diffusion. It was only under the cover of collectively agreed-upon, industry-wide standard sizes—orchestrated by the federal government—that competing firms were able to break free of market forces and transition to mass production and distribution. Without government promotion of standard sizes, the twentieth-century American variety of capitalism would have looked markedly less "Fordist." 
   
   
   
  Small, Medium, Large will make all of us think differently about the everyday consumer choices we take for granted.

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  Unguessed Kinships - Naturalism...

  Steven Frye

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  It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with All the Pretty Horses, followed by major prizes, more bestsellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy's commitment to an older form of literary expression: naturalism. McCarthy's work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well. 
   
   
   
  In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of McCarthy's work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy's concerns are deeply religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most expansive sense.

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  The Missing Anthology: Stories...

  nor, Vanessa Ho, Raksha Mahtani

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  Sex workers in Singapore — and most places around the world — tend to be dehumanised, glamourised or sensationalised by the public and media alike. Rarely do mainstream narratives centre sex workers’ voices and agency. The Missing Anthology presents fifteen bold new voices from sex workers, whose writings resist society’s simplistic assumptions about sex work. In these works, authors recount their lived experiences, share their struggles and triumphs, and imagine different futures for the sex industry. 
   
  Born from an open call and writing workshops organised by Project X — the only non-profit organisation in Singapore that provides social, emotional, and health services to people in the sex industry — these pieces daringly experiment with form, genre, and perspective. In these pages, you’ll find two “chickens” discussing their dreams while blowing up a condom; pieces on the dynamics of domme-ing and servicing second-hand hearts; essays on the importance of activism and its obstacles; short fiction exploring fantasies of violent liberation; tender letters to loved ones and younger selves that reflect on their journeys and how far they’ve come. 
   
  The Missing Anthology re-centres sex workers’ voices from the margins, bringing them into the conversation about an industry often treated as illicit and taboo. By doing so, it aims to address issues of inequality, social and economic mobility, stigmatization, and safety that are fuelled by misconceptions about sex workers and their profession.

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