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Tactical Inclusion
Difference and Vulnerability in U.S. Military Advertising
Jeremiah Favara
University of Illinois Press, 2024
The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony. Favara draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence.

Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising’s role in building the all-volunteer military.

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Tail of the Storm
Flying Missions in the First Gulf War
Alan Cockrell
University of Alabama Press, 1995

Cockrell writes lyrically about flying and about the emotional and intellectual satisfaction enjoyed by those who fly

Within days of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the far reaching arm of American airpower sprang into action. The skyscapes of the North Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean became laced with the contrails of great jets flowing day and night toward the Persian Gulf. From the skies, manpower and material poured onto the bleak sands under the ominous clouds of the gathering storm, and in only a few weeks the size of the effort eclipsed that of the Berlin Airlift.

The thousands of crewmembers flying the jets, as well as those servicing and managing them, became the backbone of history’s largest air logistical operation. Many of these men and women were Air Force reservists, and the author participated as a pilot of a C-141B Starlifter with the Mississippi Air National Guard.

Cockrell writes lyrically about flying and about the emotional and intellectual satisfaction enjoyed by those who fly. His focus is on the people recalled to active duty, who flew thousands of hours, coping with fatigue, cracked wings, missile attacks, and, in some cases, deteriorating businesses and families at home. Tail of the Storm gives expression to their love of flight, as well as their dedication to the endangered values of duty, honor, country. This story is good reading—not only for those who share the author’s enthusiasm for flying but also for those who read for pleasure and have a curiosity about a pilot’s world.
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The Taktika of Leo VI
Leo VI
Harvard University Press, 2010
Although he probably never set foot on a battlefield, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI (886–912) had a lively interest in military matters. Successor to Caesar Augustus, Constantine, and Justinian, he was expected to be victorious in war and to subject barbarian peoples to Rome, so he set out to acquire a solid knowledge of military equipment and practice. The Byzantines had inherited a voluminous series of military treatises from antiquity on nearly every aspect of warfare, from archery to battle formations and the art of besieging or defending. Leo intended to review all this, summarize it, and present an elementary handbook for his officers on how to prepare soldiers for war and how to move them on campaign and on the battlefield. He included a chapter on naval warfare and he explained Saracen (Arab) methods of war and how to defeat them. The Tactical Constitutions, or Taktika, were the result. Painstakingly prepared from a tenth century manuscript now in Florence, this is the first modern critical edition of the complete text of the Taktika and includes a facing English translation, explanatory notes, and extensive indexes.
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The Taktika of Leo VI
Revised Edition
Leo VI
Harvard University Press, 2014
Although he probably never set foot on a battlefield, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI (886-912) had a lively interest in military matters. Successor to Caesar Augustus, Constantine, and Justinian, he was expected to be victorious in war and to subject barbarian peoples to Rome, so he set out to acquire a solid knowledge of military equipment and practice. The Tactical Constitutions, or Taktika, were the result. First published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2010 as part of the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae series, and now available in this updated, revised paper edition, this is the first modern critical edition of the complete text of the Taktika, including a facing English translation, explanatory notes, and extensive indexes.
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Technology in Russian Strategic Culture
From the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day
Anzhelika Solovyeva
Karolinum Press, 2024

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Tecumseh's War
The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America
Donald R. Hickey
Westholme Publishing, 2023
A Comprehensive History of the Most Important Native American Resistance Movement
 The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh’s younger brother Lalawethika (soon to be known as “the Prophet”) had a vision for an Indian revitalization movement that would restore Native culture and resist American expansion. Tecumseh organized the growing support for this movement, which came from Indigenous peoples across the Old Northwest and parts of the Great Plains, into a loose but powerful military alliance. 
            In late 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting mission in the South, General William Henry Harrison led an army to the center of Native resistance at Prophetstown in present-day Indiana. In the early morning hours of November 7, in what came to be known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison’s men fought off an Indian attack, which marked the beginning of Tecumseh’s War. Seven months later, when the United States declared war on Britain, thus initiating the War of 1812, the British and Tecumseh forged an alliance against the United States. Initially, the Anglo-Indian alliance enjoyed considerable success at Detroit, Chicago, Mackinac, and elsewhere, exposing much of the Old Northwest to border warfare, but the tide turned in 1813 when Harrison invaded Canada. On October 5 the American army defeated a much smaller Anglo-Indian force in the climactic Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed in this battle, and although his confederacy disintegrated, British support ensured that the Indian war would continue for another two years with the Sauk chief Black Hawk now providing the inspiration and leadership. Tecumseh’s War ended only in late 1815 after the British made peace with the United States and abandoned their native allies. 
            Tecumseh’s War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America is the first complete story of this major conflict. Distinguished historian Donald R. Hickey detaches it from the War of 1812, moving Tecumseh’s confederation to center stage to tell the sweeping and engrossing story of this last great Indian War—the last time that Indigenous Peoples had a powerful European ally to oppose United States expansion and thus the lastchance they had of shaping the future of the continent.
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Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood
Partners in Command
John S. D. Eisenhower
University of Missouri Press, 2013

Theodore Roosevelt was a man of wide interests, strong opinions, and intense ambition for both himself and his country. When he met Leonard Wood in 1897, he recognized a kindred spirit. Moreover, the two men shared a zeal for making the United States an imperial power that would challenge Great Britain as world leader. For the remainder of their lives, their careers would intertwine in ways that shaped the American nation.

When the Spanish American War came, both men seized the opportunity to promote the goals of American empire. Roosevelt resigned as assistant secretary of the navy in William McKinley’s administration to serve as a lieutenant colonel of the Rough Riders, a newly organized volunteer cavalry. Wood, then a captain in the medical corps and physician to McKinley, was promoted to colonel and given charge of the unit.

Roosevelt later took over command of the Rough Riders. In the Battle of San Juan Hill, he led it in a charge up Kettle Hill that would end in victory for the American troops and make their daring commander a household name, a war hero, and, eventually, president of the United States.

At the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The next year, Wood became military governor of Cuba. He remained in the post until 1902. By that time Roosevelt was president. One of the major accomplishments of his administration was reorganization of the War Department, which the war with Spain had proved disastrously outdated. In 1909, when William Howard Taft needed a strong army chief of staff to enforce the new rules, he appointed Leonard Wood.

Both Wood and Roosevelt were strong proponents of preparedness, and when war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Wood, retired as chief of staff and backed by Roosevelt, established the “Plattsburg camps,” a system of basic training camps. When America entered the Great War, the two men’s foresight was justified, but their earlier push for mobilization had angered Woodrow Wilson, and both were denied the command positions they sought in Europe.

Roosevelt died in 1919 while preparing for another presidential campaign. Wood made a run in his place but was never taken seriously as a candidate. He retired from the army and spent the last seven years of his life as civilian governor of the Philippines.

It was a quiet end for two men who had been giants of their time. While their modernization of the army is widely admired, they were not without their critics. Roosevelt and Wood saw themselves as bold leaders but were regarded by some as ruthless strivers. And while their shared ambitions for the United States were tempered by a strong sense of duty, they could, in their certainty and determination, trample those who stood in their path. Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood: Partners in Command is a revealing and long overdue look at the dynamic partnership of this fascinating pair and will be welcomed by scholars and military history enthusiasts alike.

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Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815
Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans
Tom Kanon
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815 by Tom Kanon tells the often forgotten story of the central role citizens and soldiers from Tennessee played in the Creek War in Alabama and War of 1812.

Although frequently discussed as separate military conflicts, the War of 1812 against Great Britain and the Creek War against Native Americans in the territory that would become Alabama were part of the same forceful projection of growing American power. Success in both wars won for America security against attack from abroad and vast tracks of new land in “the Old Southwest.” In Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, Tom Kanon explains the role Tennesseans played in these changes and how they remade the south.

Because it was a landlocked frontier state, Tennessee’s economy and security depended heavily upon the river systems that traversed the region; some, like the Tennessee River, flowed south out of the state and into Native American lands. Tennesseans of the period perceived that gaining mastery of these waterways formed an urgent part of their economic survival and stability.

The culmination of fifteen years’ research, Kanon’s work draws on state archives, primary sources, and eyewitness accounts, bringing the information in these materials together for first time. Not only does he narrate the military campaigns at the heart of the young nation’s expansion, but he also deftly recalls the economic and social pressures and opportunities that encouraged large numbers of Tennesseans to leave home and fight. He expertly weaves these themes into a cohesive narrative that culminates in the vivid military victories of the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the legendary Battle of New Orleans—the victory that catapulted Tennessee’s citizen-soldier Andrew Jackson to the presidency.

Expounding on the social roles and conditions of women, slaves, minorities, and Native Americans in Tennessee, Kanon also brings into focus the key idea of the “home front” in the minds of Tennesseans doing battle in Alabama and beyond. Kanon shows how the goal of creating, strengthening, and maintaining an ordered society permeated the choices and actions of the American elites on the frontiers of the young nation.

Much more than a history of Tennesseans or the battles they fought in Alabama, Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, is the gripping story of a pivotal turning point in the history of the young American republic.
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The Tennessee Campaign of 1864
Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Few American Civil War operations matched the controversy, intensity, and bloodshed of Confederate general John Bell Hood’s ill-fated 1864 campaign against Union forces in Tennessee. In the first-ever anthology on the subject, The Tennessee Campaign of 1864, edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, fourteen prominent historians and emerging scholars examine the three-month operation, covering the battles of Allatoona, Spring Hill, and Franklin, as well as the decimation of Hood’s army at Nashville.

Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville.

Canvassing both military and social history, this well-researched volume offers new, illuminating perspectives while furthering long-running debates on more familiar topics. These in-depth essays provide an expert appraisal of one of the most brutal and notorious campaigns in Civil War history.
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Texian Iliad
A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836
By Stephen L. Hardin
University of Texas Press, 1996

Winner, T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission
Summerfield G. Roberts Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas
Honorable Mention, Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History

Hardly were the last shots fired at the Alamo before the Texas Revolution entered the realm of myth and controversy. French visitor Frederic Gaillardet called it a "Texian Iliad" in 1839, while American Theodore Sedgwick pronounced the war and its resulting legends "almost burlesque."

In this highly readable history, Stephen L. Hardin discovers more than a little truth in both of those views. Drawing on many original Texan and Mexican sources and on-site inspections of almost every battlefield, he offers the first complete military history of the Revolution. From the war's opening in the "Come and Take It" incident at Gonzales to the capture of General Santa Anna at San Jacinto, Hardin clearly describes the strategy and tactics of each side. His research yields new knowledge of the actions of famous Texan and Mexican leaders, as well as fascinating descriptions of battle and camp life from the ordinary soldier's point of view.

This award-winning book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone interested in Texas or military history.

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Theaters of the American Revolution
Northern, Middle, Southern, Western, Naval
James Kirby Martin
Westholme Publishing, 2023
Understanding the Course of the War for American independence through Geographical Regions
Identifying discrete geographical areas in order to better understand a conflict that moves across hundreds of thou­sands of square miles of land and water, such as the American Civil War and World War II, has been a valuable historical method. During this time of greater study of the war that made America, the authors of Theaters of the American Revolution take this approach for the first time. The result is a stimulating volume that will allow readers to see how the war flowed from region to region from 1775 to 1781, beginning in the Northern colonies and Canada, through the dark months in the Middle colonies, to a shift to the South and culmination at Yorktown. Simultaneously, the war raged up and down the western frontier, with the Patriots working to keep the British and their Indian allies from disrupting the main battle armies to the east. Equally important was the war at sea, where American privateers and a fledgling navy attempted to harass the British; but with the entrance of France to the conflict, the control of the sea took a much more balanced—and important— aspect. With specially commissioned maps and colorful descriptions of eighteenth century American terrain, settle­ments, and cities, as well as key battles, Theaters of the American Revolution provides an ideal introduction to understanding one of the most important wars in world history in its totality.

Contents
Introduction • James Kirby Martin and David L. Preston
The Northern Theater • James Kirby Martin
The Middle Theater • Edward G. Lengel and Mark Edward Lender
The Southern Theater • Jim Piecuch
The Western Theater • Mark Edward Lender
The Naval Theater • Charles Neimeyer 
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They Fought at Anzio
John S. D. Eisenhower
University of Missouri Press, 2007

Italy, from the toe to the Alps, was the scene of the longest, bloodiest, most frustrating, and least understood series of battles fought by the Western Allies during World War II.        Now, John S. D. Eisenhower offers a new look at the Italian campaign, emphasizing the Anzio offensive—an operation pushed by Winston Churchill that fell largely to American troops to carry out. It was visualized as an amphibious landing of two Allied divisions behind German lines that would force the Wehrmacht to evacuate all of Italy. But the Germans held on and, with the arrival of reinforcements, nearly wiped out the Allied troops pinned down at Anzio Beach.

            By portraying that struggle from the perspectives of both commanders and foot soldiers, this prominent military historian focuses on the experiences of the individuals who fought in the Italian campaign to reveal what the battle at Anzio was all about. But more than the account of one operation, They Fought at Anzio covers the entire Italian campaign, from the landings at Salerno to the capture of Rome.

Eisenhower brings a trained eye to reconstructing the difficult terrain of battle, approaching the Anzio campaign as a contest between opposing commands striving to anticipate and counter the opponent’s moves—not as a field exercise but as a deadly struggle for survival. He analyzes the command decisions that brought about the Anzio stalemate, interspersing his account with personal experiences of the men in the trenches, the nurses of the 56th Evacuation Hospital, and the young officers witnessing the horrors of war for the first time.

As a study in command, Eisenhower’s narrative gives new credit to generals Lucian Truscott and Fred Walker and assesses both the strengths and weaknesses of General Mark Clark, allowing us to grasp the situation as it appeared to those in command. He also offers compelling portraits of German commanders Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and General Frido von Senger und Etterlin.

            It has been said that Anzio was a soldier’s battle, remembered more for blood shed than for military objectives achieved. By focusing on the experiences of the soldiers who fought there and the decisions of commanders in perilous circumstances, They Fought at Anzio offers a new appreciation of the contributions of both and a new understanding of this unheralded theater of the war.

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Third Alabama!
The Civil War Memoir of Brigadier General Cullen Andrews Battle, CSA
Cullen Andrews Battle
University of Alabama Press, 2002
This memoir is a dramatic, intelligent first-person account of an Alabama regiment central to the Confederate campaign, written by its commander.

From Seven Pines to Sharpsburg and Chancellorsville to Spotsylvania, the Third Alabama Regiment played a key role in the Civil War. One of the first infantry units from the Deep South to make the journey to Virginia in 1861, the Third Alabama was the first to cross the Potomac into Maryland and to enter the streets of Gettysburg in 1863.

As the regiment’s leader and one of General Robert E. Lee’s brigade commanders, General Cullen Andrews Battle witnessed the extent of the many triumphs and sufferings of the Army of Northern Virginia. Trained as a journalist and lawyer, he records these events honestly and with compassion. Battle captures the courage of citizen soldiers fighting without prior military training, always paying tribute to the heroism of those under his command, while providing vivid accounts of some of the war’s bloodiest fights. He assesses Confederate mistakes, particularly at Seven Pines—and sheds light on the third Battle of Winchester, the only decisive defeat in which the regiment was involved.

Brandon Beck’s introductory notes provide a thorough review of Battle’s life and valuable biographical information on soldiers under his command as well as on other officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. A worthwhile addition to all Civil War libraries, public or private, Third Alabama! offers an informative, dramatic reading of the wartime activities of one of the Confederacy’s bravest fighting units.

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The Thirty Years War
Europe’s Tragedy
Peter H. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 2011

A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals—the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict.

By war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster.

An understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict.

For a map of Central Europe in 1618, referenced on page XVI, please visit this book’s page on the Harvard University Press website.

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This Destructive War
The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782
John S. Pancake
University of Alabama Press, 1985

An exciting and accurate portrayal of the military action in the southern colonies that led to a new American nation.

A companion to Pancake’s study of the northern campaign, 1777: The Year of the Hangman, this volume deals with the American Revolution in the Carolinas. Together, the two books constitute a complete history of the Revolutionary War.

Pancake tells a gripping story of the southern campaign, the scene of a grim and deadly guerilla war. In the savage internecine struggle, Americans fought Americans with a fierceness that appalled even a veteran like General Nathanael Greene.

"Utilizing extensive manuscript collections, John Pancake explains not why the colonists won the War of Independence, but rather why the British lost. Yorktown, he argues, was not the result of a momentary oversight by the British navy, but the final consequence of the longstanding failure of British military and political leadership." So said the Journal of Southern History when This Destructive War was first published in 1985. The Florida Historical Quarterly further opined, "Pancake has given us a well-researched and beautifully—and tightly—written book."

General readers as well as scholars and students of the American Revolution will welcome anew this classic, definitive study of the campaign in the Carolinas.

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This War So Horrible
The Civil War Diary of Hiram Smith Williams, 40th Alabama Confederate Pioneer
Hiram Smith Williams
University of Alabama Press, 1993
A different sort of Civil War diary.

"[M]ost intriguing . . . for it is the diary of a Confederate who spent most of his military service as a noncombatant . . . a soldier who was also an outspoken opponent of military life and war in general and of the Civil War in particular. Hiram Smith Williams was a native Northerner who moved to the South shortly before the war but enlisted as a private in the 40th Alabama Infantry. . . . This truly unique diary, which is enlivened by Williams’s keen eye for detail, a certain literary flair, and his frank assessment of the Confederate army and cause, also includes extensive notes and a perceptive introduction."
Civil War History
  
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Thomas Ewing Jr.
Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General
Ronald D. Smith
University of Missouri Press, 2008
An Ohio family with roots in the South, the Ewings influenced the course of the Midwest for more than fifty years. Patriarch Thomas Ewing, a former Whig senator and cabinet member who made his fortune as a real estate lawyer, raised four major players in the nation’s history—including William Tecumseh “Cump” Sherman, taken into the family as a nine-year-old, who went on to marry his foster sister Ellen. Ronald D. Smith now tells of this extraordinary clan that played a role on the national stage through the illustrious career of one of its sons.
In Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General, Smith introduces us to the Ewing family, little known except among scholars of Sherman, to show that Tom Jr. had a remarkable career of his own: first as a real estate lawyer, judge, soldier, and speculator in Kansas, then as a key figure in national politics. Smith takes readers back to Bleeding Kansas, with its border ruffians and land speculators, reconstructing the rough-and-tumble of its courtrooms to demonstrate that its turmoil was as much about claim-jumping as about slavery. He describes the seat-of-the-pants law practice in which Ewing worked with his brothers Hugh and Charlie and foster brother Cump. He then tells how Tom came to national prominence in the fight over the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, was instrumental in starting up the Union Pacific Railroad, and became the first chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.
Ewing obtained a commission in the Union Army—as did his brothers—and raised a regiment that saw significant action in Arkansas and Missouri. After William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, he issued the dramatic General Order No. 11 that expelled residents from sections of western Missouri. Then this confidant of Abraham Lincoln’s went on to courageously defend three of the assassination conspirators—including the disingenuous Samuel Mudd—and lobbied the key vote to block the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Smith examines Ewing’s life in meticulous detail, mining family correspondence for informative quotes and digging deep into legal records to portray lawmaking on the frontier. And while Sherman has been the focus of most previous work on the Ewings, this book fills the gaps in an interlocking family of remarkable people—one that helped shape a nation’s development in its courtrooms and business suites. Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General retells a chapter of Kansas history and opens up a panoramic view of antebellum America, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age.
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Threat
Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel
Edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar
Pluto Press, 2011

Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty.

By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyse the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalise and de-politicise them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release.

This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.

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Three Byzantine Military Treatises
George T. Dennis
Harvard University Press, 1985
Threatened on all sides by relentless enemies for a thousand years, the Byzantines needed ready armies and secure borders. To this end, experienced commanders compiled practical handbooks of military strategy. Three such manuals are presented here. The Anonymous Byzantine Treatise on Strategy was written by a retired combat engineer around the middle of the sixth century, while Skirmishing and Campaign Organization and Tactics date from the late tenth century and concern warfare in the mountains along the Syrian frontier and campaigns in the rugged terrain of the Balkans. These treatises provide information not only on tactics and weaponry but also on the motivations of the men who risked their lives to defend the empire.
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Three Napoleonic Battles
Harold T. Parker
Duke University Press, 1983
This narrative account of three Napoleonic battles adheres rather closely to the Aristotelian configuration of evolving tragedy. The historian succeeds in presenting herein events and character not only in historical reality but also in unities employed by the artist or tragedian. For a beginning of this lively, military story, Harold T. Parker chooses a portrayal of Napoleon at the height of his power, the battle of Friedland. The middle episode is concerned with Napoleon in his first serious personal check, the battle of Aspern-Essling. To complete the unity and to conclude the tragic progression, the author resurveys the episode of Napoleon's final defeat at the battle of Waterloo.
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Through the Crosshairs
War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze
Stahl, Roger
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Now that it has become so commonplace, we rarely blink an eye at camera footage framed by the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun or from the perspective of a descending smart bomb. But how did this weaponized gaze become the norm for depicting war, and how has it influenced public perceptions?
 
Through the Crosshairs traces the genealogy of this weapon’s-eye view across a wide range of genres, including news reports, military public relations images, action movies, video games, and social media posts. As he tracks how gun-camera footage has spilled from the battlefield onto the screens of everyday civilian life, Roger Stahl exposes how this raw video is carefully curated and edited to promote identification with military weaponry, rather than with the targeted victims. He reveals how the weaponized gaze is not only a powerful propagandistic frame, but also a prime site of struggle over the representation of state violence.  
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Thunder Below!
The USS *Barb* Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II
Admiral Eugene B. Fluckey
University of Illinois Press, 1992
The thunderous roar of exploding depth charges was a familiar and comforting sound to the crew members of the USS Barb, who frequently found themselves somewhere between enemy fire and Davy Jones's locker.
 
Under the leadership of her fearless skipper, Captain Gene Fluckey, the Barb sank the greatest tonnage of any American sub in World War II. At the same time, the Barb did far more than merely sink ships-she changed forever the way submarines stalk and kill their prey.
 
This is a gripping adventure chock-full of "you-are-there" moments. Fluckey has drawn on logs, reports, letters, interviews, and a recently discovered illegal diary kept by one of his torpedomen. And in a fascinating twist, he uses archival documents from the Japanese Navy to give its version of events.
 
The unique story of the Barb begins with its men, who had the confidence to become unbeatable. Each team helped develop innovative ideas, new tactics, and new strategies. All strove for personal excellence, and success became contagious. Instead of lying in wait under the waves, the USS Barb pursued enemy ships on the surface, attacking in the swift and precise style of torpedo boats. She was the first sub to use rocket missiles and to creep up on enemy convoys at night, joining the flank escort line from astern, darting in and out as she sank ships up the column.
Surface-cruising, diving only to escape, "Luckey Fluckey" relentlessly patrolled the Pacific, driving his boat and crew to their limits. There can be no greater contrast to modern warfare's long-distance, videogame style of battle than the exploits of the captain and crew of the USS Barb, where they sub, out of ammunition, actually rammed an enemy ship until it sank.
 
Thunder Below! is a first-rate, true-life, inspirational story of the courage and heroism of ordinary men under fire.
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Thundersticks
Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America
David J. Silverman
Harvard University Press, 2016

The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America’s indigenous peoples—a cultural earthquake so profound, says David Silverman, that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. Thundersticks reframes our understanding of Indians’ historical relationship with guns, arguing against the notion that they prized these weapons more for the pyrotechnic terror guns inspired than for their efficiency as tools of war. Native peoples fully recognized the potential of firearms to assist them in their struggles against colonial forces, and mostly against one another.

The smoothbore, flintlock musket was Indians’ stock firearm, and its destructive potential transformed their lives. For the deer hunters east of the Mississippi, the gun evolved into an essential hunting tool. Most importantly, well-armed tribes were able to capture and enslave their neighbors, plunder wealth, and conquer territory. Arms races erupted across North America, intensifying intertribal rivalries and solidifying the importance of firearms in Indian politics and culture.

Though American tribes grew dependent on guns manufactured in Europe and the United States, their dependence never prevented them from rising up against Euro-American power. The Seminoles, Blackfeet, Lakotas, and others remained formidably armed right up to the time of their subjugation. Far from being a Trojan horse for colonialism, firearms empowered American Indians to pursue their interests and defend their political and economic autonomy over two centuries.

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Till the Extinction of This Rebellion
George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779
Eric Sterner
Westholme Publishing, 2024
TIn late 1778, leading a small force of one hundred and fifty men, George Rogers Clark entered the Illinois Country where they would capture Great Britain’s major posts along the Mississippi and take British lieutenant governor Henry Hamilton prisoner to achieve one of the most singular victories during the American Revolution. Having suffered at the hands of British-supported Native American raids in Kentucky, Clark and his men embraced a confrontational approach, lumping all Native American nations together as inveterate blood enemies. For years, Clark’s daring achievement was lionized as the embodiment of American initiative. Now, in light of Clark’s treatment and participation in the subjugation of Native peoples, his legacy has reversed, with his statue at the University of Virginia recently being removed. His lack of nuance led him to misinterpret Indian responses to his military campaign and conclude that his approach produced results. In fact, many Native American nations simply used the American presence on the Mississippi to extort greater support from the British. In Till the Extinction of This Rebellion: George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779 Eric Sterner views the campaign from the American, British, and Indigenous perspectives and illustrates the wide geographic impact of the American Revolution west of the Appalachians, particularly on the French and Native American communities in the area.
            Clark’s expedition was sanctioned by Virginia in order to protect its western border, and the author provides an overview of this rationale along with the strategies, tactics, and logistics Clark employed, particularly his ability to operate over great distances in remote areas. In particular, the author pays close attention to the psychological battlefield and how Clark combined mobility, surprise, and a calculated reputation for violence—a tactic respected by the Native peoples—to achieve dominance over his adversaries, often enabling the Americans to achieve their goals without harming anyone. The book culminates with the capture of Fort Sackville/Vincennes, in which Clark and his men fought the only pitched battle of the Illinois Campaign. The resounding success of Clark’s expedition laid the foundation for credible American postwar claims to lands as far west as the Mississippi, opening even more territory to new settlements at the expense of the Native peoples. Till the Extinction of This Rebellion is an important contribution to understanding the impact of the American Revolution on both Native peoples and westward expansion. 
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A Time Far Past
A Novel of Viet Nam
Le Luu
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
This epic novel presents a sweeping portrait of war and peace in northern Vietnam from the defeat of the French to the mid-1980s. The story follows the odyssey of Giang Minh Sai, the son of a Confucian scholar in the rural Red River delta, from his early childhood through his decorated service during the American War and his later efforts to adapt to the postwar world of urban Ha Noi. Through two failed marriages, Giang Minh Sai struggles to come to terms with his responsibilities, his past, and his future. The novel's ending leaves its hero and Vietnamese socialism at a problematic and painful crossroads.

In its intricate sketching of complicated alliances, personal debts, and human interactions, A Time Far Past explores the complex layering of family and village history and Party and feudal authority. It also paints a vivid picture of the vast dislocations in Vietnamese culture caused by the political and military turmoil of the Indochina wars.

A Time Far Past was enormously popular in Vietnam, where it was first published in 1986, selling more than 120,000 copies and winning that country's national prize for fiction.
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Time in the Barrel
A Marine's Account of the Battle for Con Thien
James P. Coan
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A Marine’s highly personal memoir reliving the hellish days of a pivotal conflict of the Vietnam War

Con Thien, located only two miles from the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Vietnam, was a United States Marine Corps firebase that was the scene of fierce combat for months on end during 1967. Staving off attacks and ambushes while suffering from ineffectual leadership from Washington as well as media onslaughts, courageous American Marines protected this crucial piece of land at all costs. They would hold Con Thien, but many paid the ultimate price. By the end of the war, more than 1,400 Marines had died and more than 9,000 sustained injuries defending the “Hill of Angels.”
 
For eight months, James P. Coan’s five-tank platoon was assigned to Con Thien while attached to various Marine infantry battalions. A novice second lieutenant at the time, the author kept a diary recording the thoughts, fears, and frustrations that accompanied his life on “The Hill.” Time in the Barrel: A Marine’s Account of the Battle for Con Thien offers an authentic firsthand account of the daily nightmare that was Con Thien. An enticing and fascinating read featuring authentic depictions of combat, it allows readers to fully grasp the enormity of the fierce struggle for Con Thien.
 
The defenders of Con Thien were bombarded with hundreds of rounds of incoming rockets, mortars, and artillery that pounded the beleaguered outpost daily. Monsoon downpours turned the red laterite clay soil into a morass of oozing mud, flooded bunkers and trenches, and made Con Thien a living hell. .Being at Con Thien came to be ruefully referred to by the Marines stationed there as "time in the barrel” because they were targets as easy as fish in a barrel.
 
More than a retelling of military movements, Coan’s engrossing narratives focus on the sheer sacrifice and misery of one Marine’s experience in Vietnam. Through his eyes, we experience the abysmal conditions the Marines endured, from monsoon rainstorms to the constant threat of impending attack. Climatic moments in history are captured through the rare, personal perspective of one particularly astute and observant participant.
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Titan II
A History of a Cold War Missile Program
David K. Stumpf
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
The Titan II ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) program was developed by the United States military to bolster the size, strength, and speed of the nation’s strategic weapons arsenal in the 1950s and 1960s. Each missile carried a single warhead—the largest in U.S. inventory—used liquid fuel propellants, and was stored and launched from hardened underground silos. The missiles were deployed at basing facilities in Arkansas, Arizona, and Kansas and remained in active service for over twenty years. Since military deactivation in the early 1980s, the Titan II has served as a reliable satellite launch vehicle.
 
This is the richly detailed story of the Titan II missile and the men and women who developed and operated the system. David K. Stumpf uses a wide range of sources, drawing upon interviews with and memoirs by engineers and airmen as well as recently declassified government documents and other public materials. Over 170 drawings and photographs, most of which have never been published, enhance the narrative. The three major accidents of the program are described in detail for the first time using authoritative sources.
 
Titan II will be welcomed by librarians for its prodigious reference detail, by technology history professionals and laymen, and by the many civilian and Air Force personnel who were involved in the program—a deterrent weapons system that proved to be successful in defending America from nuclear attack.
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To Command the Sky
The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942-1944
Stephen L. McFarland and Wesley Phillips Newton
University of Alabama Press, 2006

To Command the Sky is a scholarly record of the fight for domination of the skies over western Europe during World War II. It also explains the technical details of the tactics used to defeat the Luftwaffe. This book is important for serious students of World War II or military aviation.

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To My Dearest Wife, Lide
Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. during Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan, 1853–1855
Edited by M. Patrick Sauer and David A. Ranzan
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A personal account of Commodore Perry’s landmark expedition to Japan and life in the antebellum navy
 
George B. Gideon Jr. served as second assistant engineer aboard the  USS Powhatan from 1852 to 1856. From his position on the steam  frigate, Gideon traveled to Singapore, Labuan, Borneo, Hong Kong, and many other Asian lands. During his time at sea, Gideon penned dozens of letters to his wife, Lide, back home in Philadelphia. Recently  discovered in the attic of his great-great-grandniece, were fifty-one letters penned by Gideon providing thorough and insightful commentary  throughout the voyage.

Through these correspondences, Gideon laboriously documents the details of his daily life on board, from the food they ate to the technical aspects of his work, as well as observations concerning the historical events unfolding around him, such as Chinese piracy, the Taiping Rebellion, the Crimean War, and the devastation of Shimoda.  To My Dearest Wife, Lide: Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. during  Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan, 1853–1855 is a rare first-person account of the landmark American naval expedition to Japan to establish commercial relations between the two countries. Gideon’s letters have been meticulously transcribed and annotated by the editors and are an invaluable primary historical source.

Gideon’s letters are candid and revealing, delving into the rampant dysfunction in the navy of the 1850s—sickness and disease, alcohol abuse, and poor leadership, among other challenges. Gideon also unabashedly shares his own cynical views of the navy’s role in supporting American economic interests in Japan. This firsthand account of the political mission of the Perry expedition is a unique contribution to naval and military history and gives readers a better view of life aboard a navy ship.
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To the Arctic!
The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times
Jeannette Mirsky
University of Chicago Press, 1970
"Who Reached the North Pole First?" A recent article in the New York Times (February 17, 1997) presented new evidence from the journals of Admiral Robert E. Peary and Dr. Frederick A. Cook that sheds light on this long-argued debate. Questioning whether the journal entries are truthful, new theories indicate that neither explorer was first, despite their individual claims. To the Arctic contributes valuable information to this debate in its lively narrative of Arctic exploration from the time of the ancient Greeks to the mid-1940s. Revealing stories of the many men who attempted to map the lands or search for means to live there, Mirsky describes the weather and resources they encountered, the temptations and odds of success, and the role of nationalism and individual character in the many conflicting accounts of Arctic exploration.

"Excellent. . . . This is a book which anyone interested in almost any facet of the north will find of value."—William Cody, Canadian Field Naturalist

"A book filled with adventure."—Daily News Journal
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To the End of the World
Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan
Andrew Waters
Westholme Publishing, 2023
A Stranded American Army, a Relentless Enemy, and a Thrilling Pursuit and Escape that Changed the Outcome of the American Revolution
“In the most barren inhospitable unhealthy part of North America, opposed by the most savage, inveterate perfidious cruel Enemy, with zeal and with Bayonets only, it was resolv’d to follow Green’s Army, to the end of the World.” So wrote British general Charles O’Hara about the epic confrontation between Nathanael Greene and Charles Cornwallis during the winter of 1780-81. Only Greene’s starving, threadbare Continentals stood between Cornwallis and control of the South—and a possible end to the American rebellion. Burning their baggage train so that they could travel more quickly, the British doggedly pursued Greene’s bedraggled soldiers, yet the rebels remained elusive. Daniel Morgan’s stunning victory at Cowpens over a superior British force set in motion the “Race to the Dan,” Greene’s month-long strategic retreat across the Carolinas. In constant rain and occasional snow, Greene’s soldiers—tracking the ground with their bloody feet—bound toward a secret stash of boats on the Dan River. Just before Cornwallis could close his trap, the Continentals crossed into Virginia and safety. Greene’s path featured three near-miss river escapes, the little-known Battle of Cowan’s Ford, and a final chase so close that the fate of the American South—and the American effort—rested on one wrong British move. 
    With a background section on the Southern theater in 1780, and a summary outlining the lives and careers of its important officers, To the End of the World: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan is a carefully documented and beautifully written account of this extraordinary chapter of American history. The book not only showcases the incredible dramatics of the American Revolution’s “Great Escape,” but also provides a compelling look at the psychological and intellectual distinctions between its two great generals, Greene and Cornwallis.
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To the Maginot Line
The Politics of French Military Preparation in the 1920’s
Judith M. Hughes
Harvard University Press, 1971

“[A] stimulating and excellently documented book…Individual personalities are particularly well handled. Foch and Pétain, Poincaré and Blum—all emerge with veritable life in them. The trends of French interwar history are deftly carried through onto these pages with an unobtrusive lucidity and persuasiveness.”—Michael Hurst, American Historical Review

“Admirable…Instead of working backward from 1940, seeking causes and culprits of collapse in the 1930s, Ms. Hughes has wisely chosen to begin in 1918 and to focus upon the 1920s. This chronology has given her a fresher perspective and a wider scope for sympathy than other commentators of the period. It is the great merit of this book that it passes judgments with compassion and restraint. Indeed, Professor Hughes insists upon viewing French military policy in the broadest possible context of international developments, domestic politics, economic problems, and intellectual moods; from these elements, she weaves a dilemma of tragic dimensions in which the confusions and mistakes of individuals are reviewed with kindness and realism.”—Charles C. Bright, Political Science Quarterly

The decision to fortify northeastern France has usually been considered a tragic mistake, an example of bad planning and missed opportunities. Not so, says Judith M. Hughes, who provides a convincing view of how France’s military and political leaders tried to safeguard their nation—and why they failed.

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To Zenzi
Robert L. Shuster
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2021
To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig’s odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy’s cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city.

Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer’s bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair—all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans.

With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.
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The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II
Yuma Totani
Harvard University Press, 2008

This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)—commonly called the Tokyo trial—established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Through extensive research in Japanese, American, Australian, and Indian archives, Yuma Totani taps into a large body of previously underexamined sources to explore some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions that have persisted to the present day. Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totani disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in “victors’ justice” in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg.

This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law.

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Too Far on a Whim
The Limits of High-Steam Propulsion in the US Navy
Tyler A. Pitrof
University of Alabama Press, 2024
In Too Far on a Whim, Tyler A. Pitrof presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Pitrof’s research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them.

War with an aggressive Japan and a resurgent Germany loomed in the dark days of the late 1930s. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, advanced a radical vision: a new fleet based on high-steam propulsion, a novel technology that promised high speeds with smaller engines and better fuel efficiency. High-steam engines had drawbacks—smaller operational ranges and maintenance issues. Nevertheless, trusting its engineers to resolve these issues, the US Navy put high-steam propulsion at the heart of its warship design from 1938 to 1945.

The official record of high-steam technology’s subsequent performance has relied heavily on Bowen’s own memoir, in which he painted high-steam innovation in heroic colors. Pitrof’s empirical review of primary sources such as ship’s maintenance records, however, illuminates the opposite—that the heroism lay in the ability of American seamen to improvise solutions to keep these difficult engines running.

Pitrof artfully explains engineering concepts in layman’s terms and provides an account that extends far beyond technology and into matters of naval hierarchies and bureaucracy, strategic theory, and ego. He offers a cautionary tale—as relevant to any endeavor as it is to military undertakings—about how failures arise when technical experts lack managers who understand their work. Admiral Bowen wielded excessive power because no one else in the US Navy knew enough to countermand him.

Compulsively readable, To Far on a Whim is a landmark for those interested in naval history and technology but also for readers interested in the interplay between innovation, decision-making, and engineering.
 
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Toppling the Taliban
Air-Ground Operations in Afghanistan, October 2001–June 2002
Walter L. Perry
RAND Corporation, 2016
On September 11, 2001, the United States was without a plan for military operations in Afghanistan. One was quickly created by the Defense Department and operations began October 7. The Taliban was toppled in less than two months. This report describes preparations at CENTCOM and elsewhere, Army operations and support activities, building a coalition, and civil-military operations in Afghanistan from October 2001 through June 2002.
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Torpedo
Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain
Katherine C. Epstein
Harvard University Press, 2014

When President Eisenhower referred to the “military–industrial complex” in his 1961 Farewell Address, he summed up in a phrase the merger of government and industry that dominated the Cold War United States. In this bold reappraisal, Katherine Epstein uncovers the origins of the military–industrial complex in the decades preceding World War I, as the United States and Great Britain struggled to perfect a crucial new weapon: the self-propelled torpedo.

Torpedoes epitomized the intersection of geopolitics, globalization, and industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century. They threatened to revolutionize naval warfare by upending the delicate balance among the world’s naval powers. They were bought and sold in a global marketplace, and they were cutting-edge industrial technologies. Building them, however, required substantial capital investments and close collaboration among scientists, engineers, businessmen, and naval officers. To address these formidable challenges, the U.S. and British navies created a new procurement paradigm: instead of buying finished armaments from the private sector or developing them from scratch at public expense, they began to invest in private-sector research and development. The inventions emerging from torpedo R&D sparked legal battles over intellectual property rights that reshaped national security law.

Blending military, legal, and business history with the history of science and technology, Torpedo recasts the role of naval power in the run-up to World War I and exposes how national security can clash with property rights in the modern era.

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Torture and Impunity
The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation
Alfred W. McCoy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.
    During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later, the U.S. had failed to punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture, disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral authority as a world leader.
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Toxic Exposures
Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States
Smith, Susan L.
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Mustard gas is typically associated with the horrors of World War I battlefields and trenches, where chemical weapons were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Few realize, however, that mustard gas had a resurgence during the Second World War, when its uses and effects were widespread and insidious. 
 
Toxic Exposures tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to poison gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. In addition, it reveals the racialized dimension of these mustard gas experiments, as scientists tested whether the effects of toxic exposure might vary between Asian, Hispanic, black, and white Americans. Drawing from once-classified American and Canadian government records, military reports, scientists’ papers, and veterans’ testimony, historian Susan L. Smith explores not only the human cost of this research, but also the environmental degradation caused by ocean dumping of unwanted mustard gas.
 
As she assesses the poisonous legacy of these chemical warfare experiments, Smith also considers their surprising impact on the origins of chemotherapy as cancer treatment and the development of veterans’ rights movements. Toxic Exposures thus traces the scars left when the interests of national security and scientific curiosity battled with medical ethics and human rights. 
 
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Trading with the Enemy
The Covert Economy During the American Civil War
Philip Leigh
Westholme Publishing, 2022
The Impact of Illicit Trade Between the North and South During the Civil War
While Confederate blockade runners famously carried the seaborne trade for the South during the American Civil War, the amount of Southern cotton exported to Europe was only half of that shipped illicitly to the North. Most went to New England textile mills where business “was better than ever,” according to textile mogul Amos Lawrence. Rhode Island senator William Sprague, a mill owner and son-in-law to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, was a member of a partnership supplying weapons to the Confederacy in exchange for cotton. The trade in contraband was not confined to New England. Union General William T. Sherman claimed Confederates were supplied with weapons from Cincinnati, while General Ulysses S. Grant captured Rebel cavalry armed with carbines purchased in Union-occupied Memphis. During the last months of the war, supplies entering the Union-controlled port of Norfolk, Virginia, were one of the principal factors enabling Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army to avoid starvation. Indeed, many of the supplies that passed through the Union blockade into the Confederacy originated in Northern states, instead of Europe as is commonly supposed. Merchants were not the only ones who profited; Union officers General Benjamin Butler and Admiral David Dixon Porter benefited from this black market. President Lincoln admitted that numerous military leaders and public officials were involved, but refused to stop the trade.
            In Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy During the American Civil War, New York Times Disunion contributor Philip Leigh recounts the little-known story of clandestine commerce between the North and South. Cotton was so important to the Northern economy that Yankees began growing it on the captured Sea Islands of South Carolina. Soon the neutral port of Matamoras, Mexico, became a major trading center, where nearly all the munitions shipped to the port—much of it from Northern armories—went to the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, a frenzy of contraband-for-cotton swept across the vast trans-Mississippi Confederacy, with Northerners sometimes buying the cotton directly from the Confederate government. A fascinating study, Trading with the Enemy adds another layer to our understanding of the Civil War.
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Trailing Clouds of Glory
Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders
Felice Flanery Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 2010
This work is a narrative of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican War campaign, from the formation of his army in 1844 to his last battle at Buena Vista in 1847, with emphasis on the 163 men in his “Army of Occupation” who became Confederate or Union generals in the Civil War. It clarifies what being a Mexican War veteran meant in their cases, how they interacted with one another, how they performed their various duties, and how they reacted under fire. Referring to developments in Washington, D.C., and other theaters of the war, this book provides a comprehensive picture of the early years of the conflict based on army records and the letters and diaries of the participants.

Trailing Clouds of Glory is the first examination of the roles played in the Mexican War by the large number of men who served with Taylor and who would be prominent in the next war, both as volunteer and regular army officers, and it provides fresh information, even on such subjects as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Particularly interesting for the student of the Civil War are largely unknown aspects of the Mexican War service of Daniel Harvey Hill, Braxton Bragg, and Thomas W. Sherman.

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Travesty
The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice
John Laughland
Pluto Press, 2007
In 2006, Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in the Hague during a four-year marathon trial for war crimes. John Laughland was one of the last Western journalists to meet with him. Laughland had followed the trial from its beginning and wrote extensively on it in the Guardian and the Spectator, challenging the legitimacy of the Yugoslav Tribunal and the hypocrisy of "international justice."



In this short book, Laughland gives a full account of the trial---the longest trial in history---from the moment the indictment was issued at the height of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia to the day of Milosevic's mysterious death in custody. "International justice" is supposed to hold war criminals to account, but---as the trials of both Milosevic and Saddam Hussein show---the indictments are politically motivated and the judicial procedures are irredeemably corrupt. Laughland argues that international justice is an impossible dream and that such show trials are little more than propaganda exercises designed to distract attention from the war crimes committed by Western states.



"Study this story. . . . The truth is hard to find, but in John Laughland we are fortunate to have a man blessed with the desire to find the truth."
---Ramsey Clark, from the Foreword

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Trends in Russia's Armed Forces
An Overview of Budgets and Capabilities
Keith Crane
RAND Corporation, 2019
The authors assess how Russian military forces are postured and resourced and how they are likely to operate. They also discuss the goals and effects of Russian military reform efforts, including initiatives that span all of the Russian armed forces’ services and independent branches. Touching on most of Russia’s armed forces’ major capabilities, the authors conclude with a look at how those capabilities are being integrated in practice.
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The Trial of the Germans
An Account of the Twenty-two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
Eugene Davidson
University of Missouri Press, 1997

The "definitive one-volume study of Nuremberg," The Trial of the Germans is now available in paperback. An astute observer of the Nuremberg trial, Eugene Davidson has struggled with the issues it raised: Was it a necessary response to the heinous crimes of the Third Reich? How were Germany and the Germans capable of such extraordinary evil? Was the trial just, given the claims that the defendants were simply serving their country, doing as they had been told to do? And if not just, was it nonetheless necessary as a warning to prevent future crimes against humanity? Davidson's approach to these and other large questions of justice is made through examination of each of the defendants in the trial. His reluctant, but firm, conclusion is: "In a world of mixed human affairs where a rough justice is done that is better than lynching or being shot out of hand, Nuremberg may be defended as a political event if not as a court." Some sentences may have seemed too severe, but none was harsher than the punishments meted out to innocent people by the regime these men served. "In a certain sense," says Davidson, "the trial succeeded in doing what judicial proceedings are supposed to do: it convinced even the guilty that the verdict against them was just."

Faulty as the trial was from the legal point of view, a catharsis of the pent-up emotions of millions of people had to be provided and a record of what had taken place duly preserved for whatever use later generations would make of it.

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Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie
Thomas J. Cypert, edited and with an introduction by Margaret M. Storey
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie highlights in emotional detail the local tensions between Unionists and Confederates in the Civil War South and offers a rare first-person account of the guerrilla war that devastated Western Tennessee.

Thomas Jefferson Cypert (1827-1918) was a staunch Union man of Wayne County, Tennessee. In 1863, he helped organize the Second Tennessee Mounted Infantry, a regiment of loyalist Southerners enlisted to combat Confederate cavalry in West Tennessee and Northern Alabama. Tried Men and True is Cypert’s memoir of his time as Captain of Company A, including his capture by Confederate cavalry and subsequent daring escape, in which he was aided by local Union sympathizers and slaves.
 
After the Civil War, Cypert served two terms in the Tennessee State Senate, one of them during the heated first years of Reconstruction, when Tennessee disenfranchised former rebels and attempted to establish Unionist Republican rule in the state. Cypert clearly wrote his memoir to defend Unionism, condemn secession and rebellion, and support loyalists’ claims for post-war power through an account of their wartime sacrifices. Never before published, the manuscript has been preserved in nearly perfect condition by Cypert’s descendants over the generations. This book is a remarkable and engagingly written account of resistance to the Confederacy by a group of southwestern Tennessee loyalists.

 


 
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Tripartite minehunter Haarlem
Bob Roetering
Amsterdam University Press

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Truman and Korea
The Political Culture of the Early Cold War
Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr.
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Detailing for the first time the story of America's homefront during the Korean War, Truman and Korea fills an important gap in the historical scholarship of the postwar era. Paul Pierpaoli analyzes the political, economic, social, and international ramifications of America's first war of Soviet containment, never losing sight of the larger context of the cold war. He focuses on how and why the Truman administration undertook a bloody, inconclusive war on the Korean peninsula while permanently placing the nation on a war footing.

Truman and Korea illuminates the importance of the Korean conflict as a critical turning point in the cold war by examining both the immediate and the long-term domestic and foreign policy effects of the conflict. Pierpaoli addresses such important topics as presidential war powers and debates concerning the Defense Production Act; the inner workings of the many war mobilization agencies; the operations and politics of nationwide price and wage controls; questions concerning cold war tax policies and fiscal and monetary policies; and the evolution of national security policy.

Pierpaoli shows that President Truman's decision to intervene in the Korean War quickly became subsumed by larger cold war concerns. By the autumn of 1950 the Korean mobilization program had become the nation's de facto cold war preparedness program, which would come to span nearly forty years and eight presidential administrations. After 1950 the cold war not only continued to significantly shape political and ideological discourse in the United States but also began to reshape aggregate economic policy. By doing so, it altered the nation's industrial and economic contours, giving birth to the concept of an institutionalized "national security state," which in turn spawned the cold war military-industrial-scientific complex.

Based upon extensive research in the papers and official presidential files of Harry S. Truman, as well as many manuscript collections and records of wartime and government agencies, Truman and Korea offers a new perspective on the Korean War era and its inextricable ties to broader cold war decision making.

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Truman, Franco's Spain, and the Cold War
Wayne H Bowen
University of Missouri Press, 2017
Well-deployed primary sources and brisk writing by Wayne H. Bowen make this an excellent framework for understanding the evolution of U.S. policy toward Spain, and thus how a nation facing a global threat develops strategic relationships over time.

President Harry S. Truman harbored an abiding disdain for Spain and its government. During his presidency (1945–1953), the State Department and the Department of Defense lobbied Truman to form an alliance with Spain to leverage that nation’s geostrategic position, despite Francisco Franco’s authoritarian dictatorship. The eventual alliance between the two countries came only after years of argument for such a shift by nearly the entire U.S. diplomatic and military establishment. This delay increased the financial cost of the 1953 defense agreements with Spain, undermined U.S. planning for the defense of Europe, and caused dysfunction over foreign policy at the height of the Cold War.
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Turning Points of the American Civil War
Edited by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White, with a foreword by Thomas A. Desjardin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Contributors to this collection, public historians with experience at Civil War battle sites, examine key shifts in the Civil War and the context surrounding them to show that many chains of events caused the course of the war to change: the Federal defeats at First Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, the wounding of Joseph Johnston at Seven Pines and the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Federal victory at Vicksburg, Grant’s decision to move on to Richmond rather than retreat from the Wilderness, the naming of John B. Hood as commander of the Army of Tennessee, and the 1864 presidential election. In their conclusion, the editors suggest that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln might have been the war’s final turning point. 
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Turtle
David Bushnell's Revolutionary Vessel
Roy R. Manstan
Westholme Publishing, 2010

The Remarkable History and Reconstruction of the First Operational Submarine
At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel designed specifically “for the destruction of vessels of war.” On a quiet September night in 1776, sergeant Ezra Lee maneuvered Bushnell’s strange little craft out from Manhattan and into the midst of the greatest naval fleet ever assembled in the Americas. Lee’s goal was to sink the British flagship HMS Eagle by attaching a powerful explosive to its hull. Although the mission was unsuccessful, Bushnell’s concept of submarine warfare was considered by George Washington to have been “an effort of genius.”

David Bushnell was raised in the town of Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. More than two centuries later, another Turtle would be launched into the same river within sight of Bushnell’s first forays with his vessel during the summer of 1775. Under the direction of technical arts teacher Frederic J. Frese, students at Old Saybrook High School created a working replica of Bushnell’s submarine, facilitated through an education partnership with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, where Roy R. Manstan was a mechanical engineer and Navy trained diver. With twenty-first century submariners at the helm, the Turtle replica was subjected to a series of operational tests at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.

In Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel, the authors provide new insight into Bushnell’s “engine of devastation,” tracing the history of undersea warfare before Bushnell and the origin of the many innovations Bushnell understood would be necessary for conducting a covert submarine attack. The knowledge gained from testing the Turtle replica enabled the authors to speculate as to what America’s first submariner Ezra Lee experienced that September night and what may have caused the attack to fail.

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Twenty-Three Minutes to Eternity
The Final Voyage of the Escort Carrier USS Liscome Bay
James L. Noles
University of Alabama Press, 2004
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Type 42 destroyer Southampton
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The primary role of the Type 42 destroyers was providing air defense for the fleet. With their long-range sensors, the ships could also act as radar pickets, sailing ahead of a task group. HMS Southampton was the eighth ship originally destined to be a 16-ship class – two of these ships have been exported to Argentina. The type 42 comprised eight Batch 1 vessels, four Batch 2 and four Batch 3 Stretched Type 42.
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Type 47B Destroyer Drenthe
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
After World War II, the Royal Netherlands Navy ordered new ships to counter the growing threat coming from the Soviet submarines. These ships were classified as ASW destroyers (onderzeebootjagers), but close to contemporary destroyers in terms of specifications. The national industry designed and constructed two classes of these ships. Drenthe was of the more capable Type 47B series.
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