An original history of music and its consequences in the ranks of the US military.
 
Since the Civil War, the United States military has used music for everything from recruitment and training to signaling and mourning. “Reveille” has roused soldiers in the morning and “Taps” has marked the end of a long day. Soldiers have sung while marching, listened to phonographs and armed forces radio, and filled the seats at large-scale USO shows. Whether the sounds came from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where there was war, there was music too.
 
Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with the emotional and psychological traumas of war. Although musical practices have been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has rarely been recognized. Suisman also reveals a darker history of music, specifically how musical practices have enabled the waging of war. Instrument of War challenges assumptions that music is inherently a beneficent force in the world, demonstrating how deeply music has been entangled in large-scale state violence.
 
Whether it involves chanting “Sound off!” in basic training, turning on a radio, or listening to a playlist while out on patrol, the sound of music has long resonated in soldiers’ wartime experiences. Now we can finally hear it.
 

The appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the United States in 1953 marked the opening of a new era in the nation’s constitutional development. As Archibald Cox points out in his Preface, during the next fifteen years the Supreme Court rewrote, with profound social consequences, major constitutional doctrines governing race relations, the administration of criminal justice, and the operation of the political process. The extent and the rapidity of these changes raise grave questions concerning the nature and function of constitutional adjudication and the proper role of the Supreme Court in the national life.In these lectures, originally given in somewhat shorter form in Honolulu in the summer of 1967 under the joint auspices of Harvard Law School and the University of Hawaii, Mr. Cox describes the main lines of constitutional development under the Warren Court. He analyzes the underlying pressures involved and the long-range institutional consequences in terms of the distribution of governmental power. The central theme of Mr. Cox’s book is embodied in his examination of the American paradox that invests the judicial branch with the responsibility of deciding “according to law” our most pressing and divisive social, economic, and political questions.Although not uncritical of the grounds on which several of the court’s crucial decisions have been reached, Mr. Cox comes to the conclusion that the trend of the rulings has been “in keeping with the mainstream of American history—a bit progressive but also moderate, a bit humane but not sentimental, a bit idealistic but seldom doctrinaire, and in the long run essentially pragmatic—in short, in keeping with the true genius of our institutions.”