"Military history often focuses on heroes - soldiers of high and low ranks who took decisive action, won wars, and decided battles. Prisoners of war, however, do not always fit this heroic narrative. They did not win on the battlefield and, especially in the eyes of a nationalistic audience in the nineteenth and twentieth century, they had not given everything, even their lives, to their cause or country. As a result, captive soldiers have often been treated as a separate topic in military history - disconnected from the larger and seemingly more important story of planning and conducting warfare and the societies that waged it"-- Provided by publisher.

Part 1. Cultural contexts of warfare -- Border captives : prisoners of war on the Creek-Georgia border, 1770-1800 / Joshua S. Haynes -- Down, but not out : manhood and the American prisoner-of-war experience in the First World War / Brian K. Feltman -- Part 2. Military policies in warfare -- "Citizen for citizen" : the problem of political prisoners during the American Revolutionary War / T. Cole Jones -- Forgotten prisoners : communist POWs during Vietnam's American War / Marcel Berni -- Abandoning traditional concepts of POWs : military captives in the twenty-first century / Paul J. Springer -- Part 3. State-building and warfare. Blue or Gray? Taking advantage of the Civil War prisoner system / Earl J. Hess -- Sowing the seeds of democracy : a comparative examination of American efforts to re-educate German and Japanese prisoners of war in the United States during World War II / Adam S. Rock Part 4. Economic and environmental dimensions of warfare -- Carceral footprints left in the Civil War north : trappings of the Camp Douglas and Elmira Prison environs / Michael P. Gray -- Part 5. Political symbols in warfare -- "The nation cannot now be entrusted to hands reeking with the blood of loyal victims" : prison propaganda, hard war, and the politics of criminalizaton / Daniel Farrell -- "As happy a man as ever wore 'Confederate grey' : Confederate ex-prisoners of war and their narratives of imprisonment, 1877-1890 / Angela M. Riotto -- Part 6. Public conversations and narratives about warfare : the National Park Service interprets the prisoner-of-war experience / Adam H. Domby and Christopher W. Barr.