War Comes Home: The Legacy

A collection of letters, poems, and petitions from the front, written mostly by infantrymen to their families and friends, evokes the emotions of an intense longing for home, fear, hope, grief, and anger aroused by the Vietnam War.

An authentic account of the Vietnam War from the actual letters of the men and women who served there. The harsh realities of life and death, friendships made and lost - these letters home tell it all, with newsreel and home-movie footage shot by the servicemen themselves. These are the authentic voices of war, some who survived, many who never made it home.
Performer(s):Includes the voices of Tom Berenger, Ellen Burstyn, Willem Dafoe, Robert DeNiro, Brian Dennehy, Kevin Dillon, Matt Dillon, Robert Downey, Jr., Michael J. Fox, Mark Harmon, John Heard, Harvey Keitel, Elizabeth McGovern, Judd nelson, Sean Penn, Randy Quaid, Martin Sheen, Kathleen Turner, Robin Williams.

Gooding belonged to the 54th Massachusetts, the black Union regiment celebrated in the film Glory ; here his wartime letters to the New Bedford (Mass.) Mercury are augmented with a foreword, annotations and appendixes.

From among 25,000 of an estimated six billion letters sent overseas during World War II, history professors Litoff (Bryant College, Rhode Island) and Smith (University of Maine) have culled and skillfully edited a sampling by 400 American women. These letters, starting with one to a seaman wounded at Pearl Harbor, are compelling documents of home-front life in varied ethnic, cultural and financial milieus. Tragic, touching and funny, the correspondence is full of prosaic news and gossip about jobs and neighbors, along with accounts of births and intimate allusions to love-making. (Publisher's Weekly)

Rare among Civil War correspondence, the collection of Union Sergeant George F. Cram's letters reveals an educated young man's experiences as part of Sherman's army. Advancing through the Confederacy with the 105th Illinois Infantry Regiment, Cram engaged in a number of key conflicts, such as Resaca, Peachtree Creek, Kennesaw, and Sherman's "march to the sea."

These writings by ordinary Oregonians reveal a personal side of Oregon history, filled with the concrete details of everyday life.

Twenty-three letters originally published serially in The Pioneer, or, California monthly magazine, Jan. 1854-Dec. 1855.

"Dear Master" is a rare firsthand look at the values, self-perception, and private life of the black American slave. The fullest known record left by an American slave family, this collection of more than two hundred letters--including seven discovered since the book's original appearance--reveals the relationship of two generations of the Skipwith family with the Virginia planter John Hartwell Cocke.

Hernan Cortes's Cartas de Relacion, written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525.