Hidden Histories of War

The Hidden Histories of War series examines conflict through the lives of those who carried its weight long after the fighting stopped—the caretakers, medics, builders, chaplains, laborers, and forgotten witnesses of war. Rather than glorifying combat, these books explore:

Who buried the dead

Who healed the wounded

Who rebuilt what was destroyed

Who carried trauma home

Who history chose not to remember

Drawing from military history, anthropology, archaeology, and personal narrative, this series re-centers war as a deeply human experience—one shaped by grief, endurance, duty, and moral complexity. Titles in this series explore:

Graves registration and burial practices

Battlefield medicine and caregiving

War labor and engineering

Animals in war

Spiritual care and moral injury

Memory, trauma, and remembrance

These books ask not how wars were won, but who paid the price—and how they were remembered.

ChatGPT Image Jan 10, 2026, 04_10_22 PM.png

Our Volumes

Known Unto Us: The Hidden History of War's Caretakers

From ancient battlefields to modern war zones. In every conflict, after the last shot, someone stayed behind.

They are the gravediggers and stretcher bearers, the mortuary clerks and field chaplains, the nurses who closed the eyes and the mothers who never stopped searching. They carried not rifles but body bags. Not ammunition but silence. Not glory but grief.

We honor those who die in war with monuments and parades. But the ones who return bearing the weight of broken bodies and unfinished names are rarely seen, rarely spoken of, rarely remembered.

Known Unto Us traces the hidden history of war's caretakers — from the fossores who carved burial chambers beneath Rome to the young soldiers who disinterred their comrades in the frozen fields of Bastogne. From the freedmen who sang spirituals over segregated graves to the mortuary specialists working the night shift at Dover Air Force Base. From the Gold Star mothers who crossed an ocean on segregated ships to the forensic anthropologists still searching for the 81,500 Americans never brought home.

This is not a book about war. It is a book about what war leaves behind — and the people who refused to let the dead be forgotten.

Those Who Bound the Wounds and Fed the Hungry

From ancient firelight to modern front lines. In every war, before the first shot and long after the last, someone kept the living alive.

They are the medics and the mess sergeants, the battlefield surgeons and the camp cooks, the nurses who held a soldier's hand through amputation, and the women who stirred broth by lantern light so the wounded had something warm to swallow. They carried not weapons but bandages, not orders but bread. Their labor was constant, invisible, and essential.

The Healers' Burden recovers the twin histories that military tradition has left behind: the hands that bound the wounds and the fires that fed the hungry. From the priest-physicians of ancient Mesopotamia to the combat medics of Afghanistan. From the Indigenous herbalists whose knowledge was taken without credit to the enslaved laborers who cooked for armies that would never free them. From Florence Nightingale's wards to the humanitarian kitchens of World Central Kitchen.

The herbs that heal are often the same plants that nourish. The women who followed armies often did both—nursing by day and feeding by night. To separate these histories is to accept an erasure this book refuses.

What begins as a history of care becomes a question for now: whose labor do we see, and whose do we choose to forget?

The Wounded Earth Book Cover Front.v4.png

The Wounded Earth: Environmental Devasation, Ruin, and Renwal

From ancient groves to irradiated atolls. For every bullet fired, a bird is silenced. For every bomb dropped, a tree is scorched into shadow. We have built cathedrals of remembrance for fallen soldiers. The landscapes that fell beside them remain largely unmourned.

When the Romans salted Carthage, they did not just destroy a city—they destroyed a future. When the trenches were carved through Flanders, the skylarks stopped singing and never returned. When Agent Orange rained over Vietnam, forests sacred to the Montagnard became skeletal wastelands where spirits could no longer dwell. When the oil fields of Kuwait burned, the desert bled smoke visible from space.

The Wounded Earth traces what war histories leave out: the poisoned rivers, the irradiated soil, the dead zones where nothing grows—not because the seeds are wrong, but because the ground remembers. From the deforested siege lines of Alexander the Great to the depleted uranium of modern drone strikes, from Hiroshima's shadow forests to the Zone Rouge of Verdun, still closed to human life a century after the shelling stopped.

The Earth does not file reports or hold press conferences. She speaks through trees that will not grow, birds that do not return, and rivers that will not run clean.

This book listens.