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Today we have a guest post from Sean P. Cunningham, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Texas Tech University. Here, he tells a story about how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted his teaching, and how Penn Press...

To The Last Round
The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea 1951
by Andrew Salmon

On the eve of Remembrance Day 2010, a book on Britain's bloodiest - but almost completely unknown - post-1945 battle won the inaugural Hampshire Libraries (Special Collections) Award for the Best Military Book of 2009 from a field of 60 key military titles.

“In a list of very strong military books, this is an excellent book," said renowned broadcaster and bestselling historian Professor Richard Holmes, the patron of the award. "It well-deserves the winning award."

"A neglected battle that in fact deserves to join the first rank of British military actions, To the Last Round is a book that does its subject proud," added Librarian Andrew Dalziel. "This is easily one of the best books I have read on a military subject in recent years: truly inspiring."

The inaugural award is designed to highlight the three "armed services" collections - aviation, naval and military - in Hampshire Libraries. The military collection alone boasts 18, 000 titles.

Salmon, a Seoul-based reporter, sent an acceptance speech filmed on the Imjn battleground, where the 1951 British positions remain fortified to this day against the North Korean threat.

"I'd like to thank the award panel for recognizing an unknown author writing about a forgotten war," Salmon said. "Though Korea remains the biggest, bloodiest and most brutal conflict fought by British soldiers since World War II, it is almost completely unknown in the UK; I hope this award will bring veterans some long-overdue recognition."

Salmon and film makers Dan Gordon and Howard Reid are hoping to create a documentary on the book. The author is currently finalizing a prequel, Scorched Earth, Black Snow which tells the story of the Australian and British soldiers in North Korea in winter 1950, the most dramatic, but most terrible months of the war, in the words of the men who came home. It will be published by Aurum in early 2011.


Richard Holmes handing the award to Sam Mercer (representing the author), a veteran of the Gloster battalion annihilated on the Imjin, and a survivor of the grim North Korean POW camps. A chance meeting with Mercer, who lost a leg and an eye in the fighting, provided Salmon with the inspiration for his book. Richard Sullivan of Osprey Publishing (the award sponsors) stands between them.


Graham Eames was there on behalf of Aurum Press and Andrew Salmon

Hayden Library - RC537.C748 2019

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Dewey Library - RC280.B8 P49 2019

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Hayden Library - RC280.B8 N537 2019

Strong social networks got India through the calamity of demonetisation. By not giving migrant workers enough time to get home, the govt has likely deprived them of this

No Filter has a deceptively simple goal: 'To bring you the definitive inside story of Instagram'

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Barker Library - TK1362.U38 H54 2019

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Divest your resources so that these Universities can be run independently and professionally

Lucky for us, Luna Luis Ortiz has a passion for history. A native New Yorker, he’s been a fixture on the house and ballroom scene since the late 1980s as a performer, photographer, and activist. So, when New-York Historical Society curator Rebecca Klassen was looking for advisers to help develop our exhibition Letting Loose and...

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Growing up in the North Jersey suburbs in the 1960s, I never thought of my family as makers of American history. But looking back on our weekend trips to Bear Mountain and the banks of the Hudson River, I realize that we participated in an important chapter of the 20th century: the flowering of the...

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If you were an adventurous visitor to New York City in the 1950s or 1960s, you might have found your way to the 82 Club. A basement nightclub at 82 East Fourth Street, it wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Located in what was then a remote edge of the Lower East Side,...

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One of the signature elements of New-York Historical’s exhibition Hudson Rising is the imposing, elegant slabs of white pine and red oak that greet visitors. The live-edged trunks evoke the forests of New York State’s Adirondacks and help make the presence of nature palpable. Hudson Rising—closing on Sunday, August 4—presents the Museum’s stellar collection of Hudson River School landscape...

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Tycoons love to survey their empires. And in the 1870s, that empire was San Francisco. The city was in a period of ravenous growth fueled by mining discoveries like the 1848 Gold Rush and the Comstock Lode, and the first transcontinental rail line, a feat that made the men behind the Central Pacific Railroad—Mark Hopkins,...

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Henry Pelham created an image for the ages. On the snowy night of March 5, 1770, a group of British soldiers were confronted by an unruly crowd of colonists near the Custom House in Boston. The melee that followed ended with the panicked troops firing into the crowd, killing several colonists, including Crispus Attucks, a...

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The New-York Historical Society Museum wants a wedding cake topper. Not just any cake topper: a same-sex version with two men or two women that speaks to the titanic shift in American culture that happened when gay marriage was legalized at the federal level in 2015. So if we’re so eager, why not just buy...

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To help support the city’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 and to protect the health of our visitors and staff, New-York Historical is temporarily closing to the public as of Friday, March 13, at 6 pm through the end of the month. While you can’t drop by to see our Meet the Presidents exhibition in...

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The situation in the valley, which has been witnessing lockdown since the third week of March due to COVID-19 pandemic, was generally calm barring a few local protests in some villages of Pulwama in south Kashmir.