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Authors are not responsible for the cover designs of their books, and for every cover proudly posted on campus office doors or Facebook pages, some smaller number have been greeted with a vague sense of disappointment.Within the historical profession, of course, dust jackets matter little; we all understand that complexities of historical argument are not easily translated into visual design, and in any case we know better than to judge a book by its cover.Nonetheless, the best place to start making sense of these two identically titled books may be with their covers.The dust jackets of both Kathleen Frydl's and Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin's versions of The GI Bill picture soldiers returning from war.Altschuler and Blumin's veterans are the AP photo version, jubilant men crowded onto the deck of a transport ship, grinning and waving as they pull into dock.The Signal Corps photograph on Frydl's book portrays a different homecoming, the men somber, no more than silhouettes, dark shapes in helmets and heavy packs, rifles evident, heads bowed, trudging single file down the gangplank to shore.The black-and-white photograph on Altschuler and Blumin's book is embedded in patriotism, the book's title rendered in red, white, and blue, a strip of full-color U.S. flag running along the cover's top edge.The blackand-white photograph that fills Frydl's cover is washed, top to bottom, in dark, murky green.In one way, the covers' different promises are fulfilled: the first book is forthright and generally celebratory, a straightforward work with little irony and no hidden layers.The second is full of ambivalence and ambiguity.But in a more fundamental way, these images are misleading.For in The GI Bills of Frydl, Altschuler, and Blumin, war offers only the most distant of contexts.
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