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10 books match the query 'Sociology, Military'
Army of Hope, Army of Alienation
Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War GermanyJohn P. Hawkins
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Army life has always been known as a life of sacrifice, challenge, and frustration, yet one filled also with deep satisfactions. This is so for the soldiers’ families as much as for the soldiers themselves. Over the years, military and civilian leaders of the US Army have tried to reduce the hardships of military life by creating an array of community services designed to provide social support for soldiers and families and help them live satisfying lives in military communities.
Unfortunately, this effort has not been particularly successful, and frustration, dissatisfaction, and alienation persist among soldiers and family member in the US Army communities in Germany. Discontent continues because the underlying sources of alienation in the Army and among its families are highly complex, poorly understood, and therefore hardly addressed by the Army’s quality-of-life programs that are intended to make soldier and family life more bearable.
In Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany, the author seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in the American military communities that lay scattered along the frontier between East and West Germany during the final years of the Cold War. In coming to understand the life and thought of these American soldiers and families, ordinary American citizens can learn much about their military forces and about their own society and culture. In addition, a greater understanding about how people work and live around an institution that is at once so important and yet tasked with a mission so different from that of ordinary pursuits can stimulate social scientists and concerned citizens to think differently about culture, society, and behavior in general.
MANHOOD, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE NATIONAL GUARD
ILLINOIS, 1870–1917ELEANOR L HANNAH
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations
The Military in the Political Development of New NationsMorris Janowitz
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Napoleonic Friendship
Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century FranceBrian Joseph Martin
University of New Hampshire Press, 2011
Winner of the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies
One of the first books on “Gays in the Military” published following the historic repeal of “Don't Ask Don't Tell” in 2011, Napoleonic Friendship examines the history of male intimacy in the French military, from Napoleon to the First World War. Echoing the historical record of gay soldiers in the United States, Napoleonic Friendship is the first book-length study on the origin of queer soldiers in modern France. Based on extensive archival research in France, the book traces the development of affectionate friendships in the French Army from 1789 to 1916.
Following the French Revolution, radical military reforms created conditions for new physical and emotional intimacy between soldiers, establishing a model of fraternal affection during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that would persist amid the ravages of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. Through readings of Napoleonic military memoirs (and other non-fiction archival material) and French military fiction (from Hugo and Balzac to Zola and Proust), Martin examines a broad range of emotional and erotic relationships, from combat buddies to soldier lovers. He argues that the French Revolution's emphasis on military fraternity evolved into an unprecedented sense of camaraderie in the armies of Napoleon. For many soldiers, the hardships of combat led to intimate friendships. For some, the homosociality of military life inspired mutual affection, lifelong commitment, and homoerotic desire.
Oh, Say, Can You See
The Semiotics of the Military in Hawai’iKathy E. Ferguson
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
Considers what the military presence in Hawai’i tells us about colonialism, gender, race, and class.
Everywhere you look in Hawai’i, you might see the military. And yet, in daily life few residents see the military at all-it is hidden in plain sight. This paradox of invisibility and visibility, of the available and the hidden, is the subject of Oh, Say, Can You See?, which maps the power relations involving gender, race, and class that define Hawai’i in relation to the national security state.
Western intruders into Hawai’i-from the early explorers, missionaries, and sugar planters to the military, tourists, and foreign investors-have seen the island nation as a feminine place, waiting to embrace those who come to penetrate, protect, mold, and develop, yet conveniently lacking whatever the newcomers claim to possess. Thus feminized, this book contends, the islands and the people have been reinscribed with meanings according to the needs, fears, and desires of outsiders. Authors Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull locate and “excavate” sites of memory, such as cemeteries, memorials, monuments, and museums, to show how the military constructs its gendered narrative upon prior colonial discourses. Among the sites considered are Fort DeRussy, Pearl Harbor, and Punchbowl Cemetery, as well as the practices of citizenship that are produced or foreclosed by the narratives of order and security written upon Hawai’i by the military.This semiotic investigation of ways the military marks Hawai’i necessarily explores the intersection of immigration, colonialism, military expansion, and tourism on the islands. Attending to the ways in which the military represents itself and others represent the military, the authors locate the particular representational elements that both conceal and reveal the military’s presence and power; in doing so, they seek to expand discursive space so that other voices can be heard. ISBN 0-8166-2978-1 Cloth $49.95xxISBN 0-81662979-X Paper $19.95x240 pages 5 7/8 x 9 DecemberBorderlines Series, Volume 10Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
Security Disarmed
Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and MilitarizationMorgen, Sandra
Rutgers University Press, 2008
In Security Disarmed, scholars, policy planners, and activists come together to think critically about the human cost of violence and viable alternatives to armed conflict. Arranged in four parts--alternative paradigms of security, cross-national militarization, militarism in the United States, and pedagogical and cultural concerns--the book critically challenges militarization and voices an alternative encompassing vision of human security by analyzing the relationships among gender, race, and militarization. This collection of essays evaluates and resists the worldwide crisis of militarizationùincluding but going beyond American military engagements in the twenty-first century.
The End of Victory Culture
Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a GenerationThomas M. Engelhardt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, “Wanted, Dead or Alive”); how his administration brought “victory culture” roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Husseins's Iraq; and how, from its “Mission Accomplished” moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.
The New Praetorians
American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever WarMichael D. Gambone
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
In an engrossing narrative that considers the military, economic, political, and social developments affecting military service after Vietnam, Michael D. Gambone investigates how successive generations have intentionally shaped their identity as veterans. The New Praetorians also highlights the impact of their homecoming, the range of educational opportunities open to veterans, the health care challenges they face, and the unique experiences of minority and women veterans. This groundbreaking study illustrates an important and often neglected group that is key to our understanding of American social history and civil-military affairs.
The Tribute of Blood
Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945Peter M. Beattie
Duke University Press, 2001
Beattie looks through sociological, anthropological, and historical lenses to analyze archival sources such as court-martial cases, parliamentary debates, published reports, and the memoirs and correspondence of soldiers and officers. Combining these materials with a colorful array of less traditional sources—such as song lyrics, slang, grammatical evidence, and tattoo analysis—he reveals how the need to reform military recruitment with a conscription lottery became increasingly apparent in the wake of the Paraguayan War of 1865–1870 and again during World War I. Because this crucial reform required more than changing the army’s institutional roles and the conditions of service, The Tribute of Blood is ultimately the story of how entrenched conceptions of manhood, honor, race, citizenship, and nation were transformed throughout Brazil.
Those interested in social, military, and South American history, state building and national identity, and the sociology of the poor will be enriched by this pathbreaking study.
Why They Die
Civilian Devastation in Violent ConflictDaniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable.
Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.