Andrew Carroll spent three years traveling throughout the United States and around the world to seek out the most powerful and unforgettable letters ever written during American wars.

Behind the Lines is the result of that extraordinary trip and represents the first book of its kind: a dramatic, intimate, and revealing look at warfare as seen through the personal correspondence of US and foreign troops and civilians who have experienced major conflicts firsthand. From handwritten missives penned during the American Revolution to e-mails from Afghanistan and Iraq, Behind the Lines captures the full spectrum of emotions — exhilaration, fear, devotion, despair, courage, heartache, patriotism, rage, and even humor — expressed in times of war.

The centerpiece of a major national campaign to indentify and preserve forgotten history, Here Is Where is acclaimed historian Andrew Carroll’s fascinating journey of discovery in which he travels to each of America’s fifty states and explores locations where remarkable individuals once lived or where the incredible or momentous occurred.
 
Sparking the idea for this audiobook was Carroll’s visit to the spot where Abraham Lincoln’s son was once saved by the brother of Lincoln’s assassin.  Carroll wondered, How many other unmarked places are there where intriguing events unfolded — or where extraordinary men and women made their mark?  And then it came to him: the idea of spotlighting great hidden history by traveling the length and breadth of the United States, searching for buried historical treasure.
 
In Here Is Where, Carroll drives, flies, boats, hikes, kayaks and trains into the past, and in so doing, uncovers stories that inspire thoughtful contemplation, occasional hilarity and often, awe. Among the things we learn:
 
*Where the oldest sample of DNA in North America was discovered
 
*Which obscure American scientist saved 400 million lives
 
*Which famous FBI agent was the brother of a notorious gangster
 
*Which cemetery contains one million graves – but only one marked
 
*How a 14 year old boy invented television
 
Featured prominently in Here Is Where are an abundance of firsts (including the first elevator, the first modern anesthesia, the first cremation, and the first murder conviction based on forensic evidence), outrages (from massacres, to forced sterilizations, to kidnappings) and breakthroughs (from the invention of the M-1 carbine to the recovery of the last existing sample of Spanish Flu to the building of the rocket that made possible space travel).
 
A profound reminder that the ground we walk is often the top sedimentary layer of amazing past events, Here Is Where represents just the first step in an ongoing project that will recruit citizen historians to preserve what should be remembered.

From the New York Times bestselling author of War Letters and Behind the Lines, Andrew Carroll’s My Fellow Soldiers draws on a rich trove of both little-known and newly uncovered letters and diaries to create a marvelously vivid and moving account of the American experience in World War I, with General John Pershing featured prominently in the foreground.
 
Andrew Carroll’s intimate portrait of General Pershing, who led all of the American troops in Europe during World War I, is a revelation. Given a military force that on the eve of its entry into the war was downright primitive compared to the European combatants, the general surmounted enormous obstacles to build an army and ultimately command millions of U.S. soldiers. But Pershing himself—often perceived as a harsh, humorless, and wooden leader—concealed inner agony from those around him: almost two years before the United States entered the war, Pershing suffered a personal tragedy so catastrophic that he almost went insane with grief and remained haunted by the loss for the rest of his life, as private and previously unpublished letters he wrote to family members now reveal. Before leaving for Europe, Pershing also had a passionate romance with George Patton’s sister, Anne. But once he was in France, Pershing fell madly in love with a young painter named Micheline Resco, whom he later married in secret.
 
Woven throughout Pershing’s story are the experiences of a remarkable group of American men and women, both the famous and unheralded, including Harry Truman, Douglas Macarthur, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Teddy Roosevelt, and his youngest son Quentin. The chorus of these voices, which begins with the first Americans who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion 1914 as well as those who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, make the high stakes of this epic American saga piercingly real and demonstrates the war’s profound impact on the individuals who served—during and in the years after the conflict—with extraordinary humanity and emotional force.

In the summer of 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts organized a series of writing workshops led by prominent authors to encourage US troops and their families to record their experiences and reflections on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The result is this extraordinary volume of first-hand letters, poems, journals, memoirs, and e-mails from the men and women directly involved in battle and their families back home.

This uniquely personal addition to the long tradition of war literature covers the entire arc of a soldier’s journey, from those first experiences of combat, encounters with Iraqis and Afghans, and the humor and boredom of the daily grind, to the physical and emotional toll of battle, the struggle of loved ones back home to carry on, and finally the return and integration back into American life.

In 1998, Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy Project, with the goal of remembering Americans who have served their nation and preserving their letters for posterity. Since then, over 50,000 letters have poured in from around the country. Nearly two hundred of them comprise this amazing collection—including never-before-published letters that appear in the new afterword.

Here are letters from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf war, Somalia, and Bosnia—dramatic eyewitness accounts from the front lines, poignant expressions of love for family and country, insightful reflections on the nature of warfare. Amid the voices of common soldiers, marines, airmen, sailors, nurses, journalists, spies, and chaplains are letters by such legendary figures as Gen. William T. Sherman, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernie Pyle, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Julia Child, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. Collected in War Letters, they are an astonishing historical record, a powerful tribute to those who fought, and a celebration of the enduring power of letters.