“This book will be of great use to historians of the western theatre of the Civil War, to the reader of nineteenth-century history, and to students of the undergraduate and graduate levels. -Gary D. Joiner, author of Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West

Earthen Walls, Iron Men tells the story of Fort DeRussy, Louisiana, a major Confederate fortification that defended the lower Red River in 1863-64 during the last stages of the Civil War. Long regarded as little more than a footnote by historians, the fort in fact played a critical role in the defense of the Red River region. The Red River Campaign was one of the Confederacy's last great triumphs of the war, and only the end of the conflict saved the reputations of Union leaders who had recently been so successful at Vicksburg. Fort DeRussy was the linchpin of the Confederates' tactical and strategic victory.

Steven M. Mayeux does more than just tell the story of the fort from the military perspective; it goes deeper to closely examine the lives of the people that served in-and lived around-Fort DeRussy. Through a thorough examination of local documents, Mayeux has uncovered the fascinating stories that reveal for the first time what wartime life was like for those living in central Louisiana.

In this book, the reader will meet soldiers and slaves, plantation owners and Jayhawkers, elderly women and newborn babies, all of whom played important roles in making the history of Fort DeRussy. Mayeux presents an unvarnished portrait of the life at the fort, devoid of any romanticized notions, but more accurately capturing the utter humanity of those who built it, defended it, attacked it, and lived around it.

Earthen Walls, Iron Men intertwines the stories of naval battles and military actions with those human elements such as greed, theft, murder, and courage to create a vibrant, relevant history that will appeal to all who seek to know what real life was like during the Civil War.

Steve Mayeux is a graduate of LSU and a former Marine officer. His work as an agricultural consultant in the central Louisiana area for the past thirty years has given him a great appreciation for the history and geography of the lower Red River.

The Ethiopian popular revolution of 1974 ended a monarchy that claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and brought to power a military government that created one of the largest and best-equipped armies in Africa. In his panoramic study of the Ethiopian army, Fantahun Ayele draws upon his unprecedented access to Ethiopian Ministry of Defense archives to study the institution that was able to repel the Somali invasion of 1977 and suppress internal uprisings, but collapsed in 1991 under the combined onslaught of armed insurgencies in Eritrea and Tigray. Besides military operations, The Ethiopian Army discusses tactical areas such as training, equipment, intelligence, and logistics, as well as grand strategic choices such as ending the 1953 Ethio-American Mutual Defense Agreement and signing a treaty of military assistance with the Soviet Union. The result sheds considerable light on the military developments that have shaped Ethiopia and the Horn in the twentieth century.

Published in 1976, Sir John Keegan's The Face of Battle was a groundbreaking work in military history studies, providing narrative techniques that served as a model for countless subsequent scholarly and popular military histories. Keegan's approach to understanding battles stressed the importance of small unit actions and personal heroism, an approach widely employed in the narratives produced by reporters embedded with American combat troops in Iraq.

Challenging Keegan's seminal work, The Eye of Command offers a new approach to studying and narrating battles, based upon an analysis of the works of the Roman military authors Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus. Kimberly Kagan argues that historians cannot explain a battle's outcome solely on the basis of soldiers' accounts of small-unit actions. A commander's view, exemplified in Caesar's narratives, helps explain the significance of a battle's major events, how they relate to one another and how they lead to a battle's outcome. The "eye of command" approach also answers fundamental questions about the way commanders perceive battles as they fight them-questions modern military historians have largely ignored.

"The Eye of Command is a remarkable book-smart, thoughtful, clear, vigorous, factual but creative, and grounded in the practical. It is at once scholarly and readable, combining classical scholarship and military theory. Rarely have I come across a book that makes two-thousand-year-old events seem so alive."
-Barry Strauss, Professor of History, Cornell University

"In a work well written, concisely presented, and convincingly argued, Kagan uses examples from Caesar's Gallic Wars to challenge John Keegan's focus on lower-echelon experiences of battle in favor of 'The eye of command': a narrative technique emphasizing decisions and events that shape a battle's outcome."
-Dennis Showalter, Professor of History, Colorado College

"To know whether a battle is won or lost is not enough. Kagan's deep analysis of theory and practice points to a new way of understanding complex army-commander and small-unit perspectives that can properly claim the status of history."
-Gordon Williams, Thacher Professor of Latin Emeritus, Yale University

Kimberly Kagan was an Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy between 2000 and 2005. Since then, she has served as a lecturer in International Affairs, History, and the Humanities at Yale University and as an adjunct professor at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at American University's Department of History. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History from Yale University.