Letters From The Field

Beginning in 1925, when at twenty-three she embarked on her first field work in Samoa, Mead sent family and friends these letters from the field “to make a little more real for them” the exotic worlds that absorbed her. In this complement to her bestselling memoir Blackberry Winter, Mead has assembled selected letters she wrote from Samoa in 1925-26; from Peré Village, Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, in 1928-29; from the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli, New Guinea, in 1932-33; from Bali and the Iatmul, New Guinea, in 1936-39; from Manus again in 1953; and during brief visits in the sixties and seventies to Manus, several new Guinea sites, and Montserrat in the West Indies. Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, these intelligent, vivid, frequently funny and sometimes poetic letters help us share with Mead “the unique, but also cumulative, experience of immersing oneself in the on-going life of another people, . . .attempting to understand mentally and physically this other version of reality.”

Field of Letters is a historical narrative timeline of womankind in ancient times, with thirty stories and twenty adult coloring illustrations. Beginning with the earliest woman known by name, this book tells the tales of women whose lives made an impact on early human civilization.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1865.

Field-Marshal Gomm’s letters and journals provide a first-rate account of the numerous actions, battles and events that he was involved in during the Napoleonic wars. A seasoned officer from a military family, he was an acute observer of all that went on around him, and the notes and letters he wrote, edited by his son, provide a capital trove of information. This collection of his diary entries and letters focuses on the Napoleonic Wars, although he would rise to the highest rank in the British Army and C-in-C of India. Engaged in the early campaigns of the British Army against the French forces from 1799, he was one of the few officers that fought in the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign that actually had some staff training, having passed through Staff College. Many of his contemporaries were somewhat amateur in their outlook to soldiering, but Gomm was a thoughtful and assiduously thorough officer. After the campaign in Portugal and Spain, first under Wellington and then under Sir John Moore, he managed to survive the Walcheren expedition and was then posted back to Spain, where he would serve out the Peninsular war. Present at the battles of Busaco, Fuentes d’Oñoro, Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, the Nive, the Nivelle and St Pierre, as well as the sieges of Cuidad Rodrigo and Badajoz, he was a lieutenant-colonel by the time he left for England. This was a fairly rapid ascent for the time, a signal confirmation of his abilities as a staff and regimental officer, and some influence at home, no doubt. Appointed to the post of Quartermaster General of Picton’s fifth division, he was to see the furious combat of Quatre Bras and the “hard pounding” of Waterloo two days later. His position as an unattached staff officer gave him a view of the fields of battle from a position on horseback, and with freedom of movement around the field that few could match. His contemporaneous notes and letters of Waterloo are annotated with his more considered thoughts and views, particularly regarding the “crisis” of Waterloo, the repulse of the last columns of the Garde Impèriale. Author – Field-Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, G.C.B (1784-1875) Editor – Francis Culling Carr-Gomm (1834-1919) Introduction - Francis Culling Carr-Gomm (1834-1919)

The poignant story of a teenaged boy's journey to manhood from Berlin, Connecticut through the battlefield of Antietam, Burnside's Mud March, the Siege of Plymouth, North Carolina and the horrors of Andersonville, as told through the letters he sent back home.

These fond letters between Junius and Katherine Harris represent the beginnings of a long and loving relationship. Their separation during WWII set the stage for their almost daily letter writing chronicles of their activities. Junius was forced to deal with Army bureaucracy while Katherine struggled to grow their small Insurance Agency and report to Junius all the family news. Junius moved from training maneuvers in Tennessee, across the Atlantic to England, then the battlefront in France, Belgium, and Germany. Junius was assigned to the nimble 965th Field Artillery Unit that was often called to support Infantry movement near the front lines. As a clerk for his outfit, he recorded company personnel actions while dealing with cramped, if any, quarters. He was nonetheless expected to stand guard duty and maintain all his own equipment. His service extended through the famous Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1945.

For readers of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, Diane Smith’s warmhearted and award-winning epistolary novel about a spunky young woman who joins a makeshift field study in Yellowstone National Park at the end of the nineteenth century “I loved this book in a way that I haven’t loved a book in some time.” —James Welch, author of Fools Crow In the spring of 1898, A. E. (Alexandria) Bartram—a spirited young woman with a love for botany—is invited to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park. The study’s leader, a mild-mannered professor from Montana, assumes she is a man, and is less than pleased to discover the truth. Once the scientists overcome the shock of having a woman on their team, they forge ahead on a summer of adventure, forming an enlightening web of relationships as they move from Mammoth Hot Springs to a camp high in the backcountry. But as they make their way collecting amid Yellowstone’s beauty, the group is splintered by differing views on science, nature, and economics. Brimming with humor, excitement, and the romance of the Yellowstone landscape, Letters from Yellowstone is a love letter to the joys of scientific discovery and America’s majestic natural beauty, as well as a thoughtful reflection on environmentalism, Native American displacement, and feminism at the dawn of a new century.

Grenville Goodwin was one of the leading field anthropologists during a crucial period in American Indian research--the 1930s. His letters from the field provide original source material on Western Apache beliefs and customs. They also reveal the attitudes and methods which made him so effective in his work. A dedicated and thorough ethnographer, Goodwin became familiar with every aspect of Western Apache culture. During this same period, Morris Opler was studying the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache in New Mexico. In order to exchange information about their studies, Goodwin and Opler began corresponding. Both men were convinced that a long-overdue, systematic comparison of Apachean cultures would yield significant results.