Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans—women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, “bad paper” discharges, or criminal records—have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits.

Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service. Together, the chapters in this collection recast veterans beyond the archetype, inspiring an innovative model for veterans studies that encourages an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis of veterans history. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Barbara Gannon, Robert Jefferson, Evan P. Sullivan, Steven Rosales, Heather Marie Stur, Juan Coronado, Kara Dixon Vuic, John Worsencroft, and David Kieran.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen members of the Islamist extremist organization al-Qaeda launched four coordinated attacks on the United States, killing 2,977 people. These events and the government’s subsequent “War on Terror” refueled long-standing negative stereotypes about Muslims and Islam among many Americans. And yet thousands of practicing Muslims continued to serve or chose to enlist in the U.S. military during these years.

In Service in a Time of Suspicion, fifteen such service members talk about what it means to be Muslim, American, and a uniformed member of the armed services in the twenty-first century. These honest accounts remind us of our shared humanity. 

Called upon for the first time to render military service outside the States, Negro soldiers (called Smoked Yankees by the Spaniards) were eager to improve their status at home by fighting for the white man in the Spanish-American War. Their story is told through countless letters sent to black U.S. newspapers that lacked resources to field their own reporters. The collection constitutes a remarkably complete and otherwise undisclosed amount of the black man’s role in—and attitude toward—America’s struggle for empire.

In first-hand reports of battles in the Philippine Islands and Cuba, Negro soldiers wrote from the perspective of dispossessed citizens struggling to obtain a larger share of the rights and privileges of Americans.

These letters provide a fuller understanding of the exploits of black troops through their reports of military activities and accounts of foreign peoples and its cultures.