Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring those who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. The following books and films seek to share the experiences of American soldiers throughout our country's history.
While we are focusing on ebooks, audiobooks and information accessible from home, we have also highlighted when the items have physical copies you can request. There are many more books on these subjects in our catalog, through our digital book services, and in our online databases.
If you are interested in discovering military history in your family, please visit our Genealogy resources.
- Books for Kids & Early Readers
- Books for Adults & More Advanced Readers
- Discovering Historical Archives
Books for Kids & Early Readers
One Dead Spy (Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, Book 1)
Nathan Hale, the author's historical namesake, was America's first spy, a Revolutionary War hero who famously said “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country" before being hanged by the British. In the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series, author Nathan Hale channels his namesake to present history's roughest, toughest, and craziest stories in the graphic novel format.
One Dead Spy tackles the story of Hale himself, who was an officer and spy for the American rebels during the Revolutionary War. Author Hale highlights the unusual, gruesome, and just plain unbelievable truth of historical Nathan Hale—from his early unlucky days at Yale to his later unlucky days as an officer—and America during the Revolutionary War.
Big Bad Ironclad! (Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, Book 2)
Each of the books in Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales has elements of the strange but true and is presented in an engaging, funny format, highlighting the larger-than-life characters that pop up in real history. Big Bad Ironclad! covers the history of the amazing ironclad steam warships used in the Civil War.
From the ship's inventor, who had a history of blowing things up and only 100 days to complete his project, to the mischievous William Cushing, who pranked his way through the whole war, this book is filled with surprisingly true facts and funny, brave characters that modern readers will easily relate to.
Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood: A World War I Tale (Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, Book 4)
World War I set the tone for the 20th century and introduced a new type of warfare: global, mechanical, and brutal. Nathan Hale has gathered some of the most fascinating true-life tales from the war and given them his inimitable Hazardous Tales twist. Easy to understand, funny, informative, and lively, this series is the best way to be introduced to some of the most well-known battles (and little-known secrets) of the infamous war.
Raid of No Return: A World War II Tale of the Doolittle Raid (Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, Book 7)
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, officially bringing the United States into World War II. A new generation of pilots were recruited to fly bombing missions for the United States, and from that group, volunteers were requested for a dangerous secret assignment. For the first time in American history, Army bombers would be launched from an aircraft carrier. Once at sea, they were told their mission was a retaliation strike against targets in Tokyo. But on the day of the raid, a Japanese patrol boat spotted them and they had to launch early, with barely enough fuel to get them past their target.
After the bombing, some pilots crashed, some were captured, and many ended up in mainland China and were carried to safety by Chinese villagers, being hunted by Japanese forces all the while. With tales of high-flying action and bravery, Raid of No Return is a story of heartbreak and survival during wartime.
Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles
World War II is raging, and thousands of American soldiers are fighting overseas against the injustices brought on by Hitler. Back on the home front, the injustice of discrimination against African Americans plays out as much on Main Street as in the military. Enlisted black men are segregated from white soldiers and regularly relegated to service duties. At Fort Benning, Georgia, First Sergeant Walter Morris's men serve as guards at The Parachute School, while the white soldiers prepare to be paratroopers. Morris knows that for his men to be treated like soldiers, they have to train and act like them, but would the military elite and politicians recognize the potential of these men as well as their passion for serving their country?
Tanya Lee Stone examines the role of African Americans in the military through the history of the Triple Nickles, America's first black paratroopers, who fought in a little-known attack on the American West by the Japanese. The 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, in the words of Morris, "proved that the color of a man had nothing to do with his ability."
Books for Adults & More Advanced Readers
Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery — Where War Comes Home
Gifted writer and reporter Robert Poole opens Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery with preparations for Memorial Day when thousands of families come to visit those buried in the 624-acre cemetery, legions of Rolling Thunder motorcyclists patrol the streets with fluttering POW flags, and service members place miniature flags before each of Arlington's graves. Section 60, where many of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been laid to rest alongside service members from earlier wars, is a fourteen-acre plot that looms far larger in the minds and hearts of Americans.
It represents a living, breathing community of fellow members of the military, family members, friends, and loved ones of those who have fallen to the new weapons of war: improvised explosive devices, suicide bombs, and enemies who blend in with local populations. Several of the newest recruits for Section 60 have been brought there by suicide or post-traumatic stress disorder, a war injury newly described but dating to ancient times. Using this section as a window into the latest wars, Poole recounts stories of courage and sacrifice by fallen heroes, and explores the ways in which soldiers' comrades, friends, and families honor and remember those lost to war — carrying on with life in the aftermath of tragedy. Section 60 is a moving tribute to those who have fought and died for our country, and to those who love them.
On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery
On Hallowed Ground opens with the long-delayed funeral of four servicemen, brought home for final honors at Arlington National Cemetery almost forty years after they disappeared in Vietnam. To understand how this tradition of extraordinary care for our war dead began, Robert Poole traces the founding of Arlington Cemetery on what had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee. After resigning his commission in the U.S. Army, Lee left Arlington to command the Army of Northern Virginia. Arlington, strategic to the defense of Washington, D.C., became a U.S. Army headquarters and a cemetery for indigent Civil War soldiers before Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton made it the new national cemetery.
Initially, there was no honor attached to being buried at Arlington; this began to change after the war, as the Union gathered thousands of hastily-buried casualties from nearby battlefields and reinterred them at Arlington, where they received the honors of a grateful nation. But the rites, rituals, and reverence associated with Arlington evolved over the next hundred years, paid through the blood of those who fought in the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraq and Afghanistan. Robert Poole paints an intimate, behind-the-scenes picture of the history and day-to-day operations of Arlington National Cemetery.
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.
When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II
When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. These Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. When Books Went to War is the inspiring story of the Armed Services Editions, and a treasure for history buffs and book lovers alike.
The Vietnam War: An Intimate History
More than forty years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war: US and Vietnamese soldiers and their families, high-level officials in America and Vietnam, antiwar protestors, POWs, and many more. The book plunges us into the chaos and intensity of combat, even as it explains the rationale that got us into Vietnam and kept us there for so many years. Rather than taking sides, the book seeks to understand why the war happened the way it did, and to clarify its complicated legacy. Beautifully written and richly illustrated, this is a tour de force that is certain to launch a new national conversation.
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Discovering Historical Archives
Oration at the National Cemetery: Gettysburg, May 29, 1886
An excerpt from William H. Lambert’s introduction of Major-General Winfield Scott Hancock: “The original purpose of Memorial Day was to commemorate the defenders of our country who died during the War of the Rebellion. But custom has widened the scope of our ceremonies, and we now commemorate our dead comrades whether they died during the war or since its close. […] Not that in making him my theme I forget those other great soldiers who since our last Memorial Day have gone from our midst; whose names are imperishably written in our history — respectively the first and the last of the generals who in the war commanded all the armies ; each in his day the most trusted of our leaders ; each the centre of the Nation's hope ; each unselfishly giving his best to the cause ; each having part in the final triumph, for though in the fortunes of the war the first held no command at its close, the great army that gave the last blow to the rebellion was the army he had formed and led, and that through all its vicissitudes bore the impress of his genius, and never forgot how devotedly it had followed him. […] Well might we here eulogize him under whose command the army that had here fought, conjoined with the other armies of the Union, crushed the Confederacy.“
What Women Did for the War, and What the War Did for Women
This pamphlet contains an 1894 Memorial Day speech given to the Soldier's Club in Wellesley, Massachusetts highlighting the accomplishments of women during the American Civil War. It highlights that Memorial Day, also known as Decoration Day, was begun by the Grand Army of the Republic whose first post was organized on April 6, 1866, in Decatur, Illinois.
Eleanor Roosevelt's Address to the Nation After the Attack on Pearl Harbor
This audio clip features first lady Eleanor Roosevelt addressing the nation after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Her speech comes one day before the United States would enter World War II.