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A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.

This first volume of Male Fantasies centers on the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. These men were officers in the Freikorps--private, volunteer armies that roamed Germany, serving the cause of domestic repression in the aftermath of World War I. Klaus Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, as well as cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters. He explores these sources, not to discover what their creators thought about fighting or the fatherland, but to seek out and reconstruct their images of women. He shows that the Freikorps male identity was shaped by the dread and revulsion that characterized their relations with women (real or imagined) and that this dread was, in turn, linked to the aggressive racism and anticommunism at the heart of most fascist movements.

Theweleit’s second volume, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, carries Male Fantasies from the female image to the self-image of manhood and its ritualized forms of mass behavior, culminating in warfare. It also is available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Theweleit’s project in Male Fantasies is to discover the emotional core of fascism as it was revealed in the novels and memoirs of the Freikorps, mercenary bands that fought Germany’s border disputes and put down worker revolts in the aftermath of World War I. His excavation of Freikorps literary remains (and the writings of some of their protofascist contemporaries) enabled Theweleit to reconstruct the mythical content of the fascist imagination. An integral part of Male Fantasies is Theweleit’s choice of illustrations--cartoons, advertisements, engravings, posters--that serve as an ironic commentary on the text and extend its meaning in time and space.

In this second volume of the two-volume work Theweleit discovers how the repudiation of one’s own body--and of femininity--became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid--the “Red Flood,” lava, mud--and the “feminine” emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into a “man of steel.” As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.

The first volume of Male Fantasies, also available from the University of Minnesota Press, deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior that threatens to engulf the male ego.

When war came to the nation in 1861, Michiganians rallied around the Stars and Stripes and readily agreed with a veteran politician who declared, “He who is not for his country is against her.” Even as the conflict grew bloody and costly, they remained committed to suppressing the rebellion. By war’s end, an astonishing 50 percent of its military-age males had enlisted in the army. This Michigan Civil War chronicle is more than a story about soldiers’ heroism on distant battlefields. It also includes the often-overlooked role of women—some of whom refused to stay home and went to war. Also buried in the historical record are accounts of white soldiers whose views on slavery and African Americans, especially those in uniform, were transformed. There is also a much-needed exploration of Michigan’s response to the shocking assassination of a beloved president. Many a Hand captures these stories in a single volume. 

A concise and comprehensive biography of Mao Zedong, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

A half-century after his death in September 1976, Mao Zedong remains one of history’s most polarizing figures: a peasant boy who became a revolutionary leader, a general in World War II, and finally the Great Helmsman, the founding father of the People's Republic of China. His legacy is a mix of national liberation and human tragedy. Today, Mao is no static icon on a banknote but the architect of a superpower whose ideas, methods, and personal life are continually reexamined through a modern lens.

This comprehensive biography bridges the gap between the revolutionary and the man without overlooking the events that led to the end of China’s Century of Humiliation, the brutal cost of the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, reevaluating his “mass line” ideology.

Based on new archival information and startling revelations from his inner circle—including his personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, and former nurses—Clements offers a clear and accessible portrait of a leader whose persistent influence reminds us why Mao’s story remains essential to understanding the global power dynamics of today.

The Independence Trilogy
The American Revolutionary War began when Massachusetts militiamen and British troops clashed at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Two months later, a much larger engagement occurred at Bunker Hill in Boston. The conflict then expanded into a continent-wide war for independence from Great Britain. Or so we are taught. A closer look at events in the South in the eighteen months following Lexington and Concord tells different story. The practice of teaching the Revolutionary War as one generalized conflict between the American colonies and Great Britain assumes the South’s support for the Revolutionary War was a foregone conclusion. However, once shots were fired, it was not certain that the southern colonies would support the independence movement. What is clear is that both the fledgling American republic and the British knew that the southern colonies were critical to any successful prosecution of the war by either side.
In March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775–1776, historian Michael Cecere, consulting primary source documents, examines how Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ended up supporting the colonies to the north, while East Florida remained within the British sphere. South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida all retained their royal governors through the summer of 1775, and no military engagements occurred in any of the southern colonies in the six months following the battles in Massachusetts. The situation changed significantly in the fall, however, with armed clashes in Virginia and South Carolina; by early 1776 the war had spread to all of the southern colonies except East Florida. Although their march to independence did not follow the exact route as the colonies to the north, events in the South pulled the southern colonists in the same direction, culminating with a united Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This book explores the crucial events in the southern colonies that led all but East Florida to support the American cause.
 

A historically significant memoir offering a firsthand perspective on life, identity, and cultural transformation in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Memoir of My Youth in Cuba: A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895–1898 is a translation of the memoir Memorias de mi juventud en Cuba: Un soldado del ejército español en la guerra separatista (1895–1898) by Josep Conangla. The English edition is based on the Spanish version edited by Joaquín Roy, who found the memoir and was given access to the Conangla family archives. Conangla’s memoir, now available in English, is an important addition to the accounts of Spanish and Cuban soldiers who served in Cuba’s second War of Independence.

Spaniard Josep Conangla was conscripted at the age of twenty and sent to Cuba. In the course of his time there, he reaffirmed his pacifism and support of Cuban independence. The young man was a believer who unfailingly connected his view of events to the Christian humanitarianism on which he prided himself. Conangla’s advanced education and the influence of well-placed friends facilitated his assignment to safe bureaucratic positions during the war, ensuring that he would not see combat. From his privileged position, he was a keen observer of his surroundings. He described some of the decisions he made—which at times put him at odds with the military bureaucracy he served—along with what he saw as the consequences of General Valeriano Weyler’s decree mandating the reconcentración, an early version of concentration camps. What Conangla saw fueled his revulsion at the collusion of the Spanish state and its state-sponsored religion in that policy. “Red Mass,” published six years after the War of Independence and included in his memoir, is a vivid expression in verse of his abhorrence.

Conangla’s recollections of the contacts between Spaniards and Cubans in the areas to which he was assigned reveal his ability to forge friendships even with Creole opponents of the insurrection. As an aspiring poet and writer, Conangla included material on fellow writers, Cuban and Spanish, who managed to meet and exchange ideas despite their circumstances. His accounts of the Spanish defeat, the scene in Havana around the end of the war, along with his return to Spain, are stirring.

A richly researched account of the social, racial, and political history of a major Deep South infantry division at home and in the Pacific

Chris Rein’s study of the Thirty-First Infantry Division, known officially as the “Dixie Division,” illuminates the complexities in mobilizing American reserve units to meet the global emergency during World War II. Citizen soldiers from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi formed the core of one of the ninety infantry divisions the Army successfully activated, trained, equipped, and deployed to defeat fascism in Europe and race-based imperialism in the Pacific. But the Army mobilized ideas along with manpower, and soldiers from across the Jim Crow South brought their racial ideas and views with them into the ranks and then exported these across the South Pacific. If the American victory in World War II represents a “double victory” over racism abroad and at home, the division’s service is a cogent reminder that the same powerful force could pull in opposite directions.

While focused on the division’s operational service during the war years, Mobilizing the South: The Thirty-First Infantry Division, Race, and World War II spans the division’s entire service from 1917 to 1967, from an interwar period highlighted by responses to natural disasters and facing down lynch mobs through a postwar service that included protecting activists in the most important struggles of the civil rights era. But the division’s extended service as a training establishment highlights lingering resentments and tensions within the American military system between the active and reserve components. Despite this, the division performed well in General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign across the South Pacific. Using official records as well as details drawn from correspondence and oral histories, Rein captures how individual soldiers framed their exposure to a larger world, and how service alongside African American, New Guinean, and Filipino units both reinforced and modified views on race and postwar American society.
 

As American troops became bogged down first in Iraq and then Afghanistan, a key component of U.S. strategy was to build up local police and security forces in an attempt to establish law and order. This approach, Jeremy Kuzmarov shows, is consistent with practices honed over more than a century in developing nations within the expanding orbit of the American empire. From the conquest of the Philippines and Haiti at the turn of the twentieth century through Cold War interventions and the War on Terror, police training has been valued as a cost-effective means of suppressing radical and nationalist movements, precluding the need for direct U.S. military intervention and thereby avoiding the public opposition it often arouses.

Unlike the spectacular but ephemeral pyrotechnics of the battlefield, police training programs have had lasting consequences for countries under the American imperial umbrella, fostering new elites, creating powerful tools of social control, and stifling political reform. These programs have also backfired, breeding widespread resistance, violence, and instability—telltale signs of “blowback” that has done more to undermine than advance U.S. strategic interests abroad.

The Strategic Victory that Established the Continental Army as a True Fighting Force
The battle of Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, is among the most important battles in the history of the American Army. Well known in American mythology as the battle where Molly Pitcher fought alongside her fallen husband, Monmouth Court House is regarded by historians as the moment when the image of the American army in both Europe and the colonies was transformed from that of a rag-tag band of ill-trained civilians to that of a disciplined, well-guided, professional military unit. In June 1778, British General Henry Clinton’s army evacuated Philadelphia and struck out across “the Jerseys” on its way back to New York City. George Washington’s Continental Army, retrained and confident after enduring a winter at Valley Forge and supplemented by a large number of fresh New Jersey militia, marched in pursuit. About 50 miles south of New York City, the armies clashed at Monmouth Court House on June 28, in the last major Revolutionary War battle in the north. Essentially a draw, the battle marked the first time in the war that the Continental Army was able to hold a battlefield, fighting the full force of the British army to a standstill. Monmouth Court House: The Battle that Made the American Army by Joseph G. Bilby and Katherine Bilby Jenkins is the story of this battle, how it came to be, and its influence on the course of the war and American history.

The authors set Monmouth Court House within the context of the American Revolution and the civil war between Tories and Whigs that erupted in New Jersey during that time. The entire campaign and battle are described, including an analysis of the commanders, personnel, organization, training, and weapons of both armies. The book also assesses the historiography and folklore of the battle, including the story of the real “Molly Pitcher,” the use of the battleground as Civil War muster-in camp, its eventual status as Monmouth Battleground State Park, and current efforts at interpretation and battlefield archaeology and how they have changed our understanding of the battle.

How discipline and conscience displaced anger and reputation in the early US Navy’s crucible of leadership

More Real Courage: Transforming Honor at the Early Naval Academy is a work of narrative history that traces a hard-fought moral transformation within the United States Navy’s officer corps. Samuel J. Limneos reveals an institutional struggle between competing ideals of courage, as traditional notions of offense, reputation, and aggression collided with emerging values of restraint, loyalty, and duty. Through intensely human stories of conflict, discipline, and conscience, the book shows how honor was contested, defended, and ultimately reshaped into a standard grounded in moral courage and professional responsibility.

Set across three pivotal decades at the Naval Academy, the study examines how midshipmen learned to navigate a culture inherited from European martial traditions while serving a rapidly changing republic. Limneos illuminates the professionalization of naval officers during the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating how commitment, longsuffering, and performance of duty gradually displaced volatile codes of personal honor. Bridging social, cultural, and institutional history, More Real Courage fills a significant gap in naval historiography and speaks directly to enduring debates over character, leadership, and education in the armed forces. The book offers enduring moral lessons for naval historians, military professionals, and readers seeking to understand how national character is forged amid conflict, reform, and cultural change.
 

A compelling biography of General William C. Gorgas, the US Army doctor's campaign against mosquito-borne disease reshaped public health, military medicine, and U. S. power on the world stage. 

Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854–1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States, including the end of the Civil War and the industrialization of the US military and economy, the emergence of germ theory and the modernization of the public health system, and the rise of the United States as a world power.

A scion of Confederate elites, Gorgas came of age amidst war and disease and the politics of racial segregation. He followed his father into military service as an army medical officer, treating troops on America’s western frontier posts. During the US occupation of Cuba, Gorgas applied Walter Reed’s research on the theory of mosquito-borne disease transmission, ending centuries of yellow fever in Havana through the eradication of the deadly Aedes aegypti mosquito. Applying similar strategies on the isthmus of Panama against yellow fever and malaria, Gorgas enabled the completion of the Panama Canal, then the largest engineering project in the world. Hailed a hero, he pursued his fight against mosquito-borne disease throughout the tropics, expanding American interests as he went. Appointed as US Army surgeon general on the eve of World War I, Gorgas resumed work modernizing the army health care system, strengthening US medical and military authority on the world stage.

Celebrated in life, Gorgas’s reputation fell victim to competing political interests and jealousies after his death, a cautionary tale about historical memory and the politics of science and personality. Carol R. Byerly’s balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of US global ascendency.
 

This landmark bilingual collection presents a comprehensive selection of Vietnamese poetry spanning nearly fifty years of warfare and its aftermath, from the Indochinese War (1946-1954) through the Vietnam War (1961-1975) and into the post-war period. Edited and translated by renowned Vietnam War scholars and poets Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl, in collaboration with Vietnamese poet and editor Nguyen Ba Chung, this volume captures the voices of Vietnamese writers who experienced, witnessed, or processed the transformative conflicts that shaped modern Vietnam.

Encompassing poetry from multiple generations, these poems reflect on the diverse responses to conflict: some express patriotic commitment, others grapple with loss and trauma, while many explore the intimate human experiences of war. Mountain River demonstrates how Vietnamese poets drew upon a rich literary tradition while creating new forms of expression to address the unprecedented scale of modern warfare. The result is a collaborative effort that represents a significant achievement in postwar Vietnamese-American literary relations and cross-cultural translation.

A compelling story of a unit of Buffalo Soldiers and their white commander fighting on the Italian front during World War II.

The 92nd Division of the Fifth Army was the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe during 1944 and 1945, suffering more than 3,200 casualties. Members of this unit, known as Buffalo Soldiers, endured racial violence on the home front and experienced racism abroad. Engaged in combat for nine months, they were under the command of southern white infantry officers like their captain, Eugene E. Johnston. 

Carolyn Ross Johnston draws on her father’s account of the war and her extensive interviews with other veterans of the 92nd Division to describe the experiences of a naïve southern white officer and his segregated unit on an intimate level. During the war, the protocol that required the assignment of southern white officers to command black units, both in Europe and in the Pacific theater, was often problematic, but Johnston seemed more successful than most, earning the trust and respect of his men at the same time that he learned to trust and respect them. Gene Johnston and the African American soldiers were transformed by the war and upon their return helped transform the nation.