IN THIS GROUNDBREAKING WORK, covering thousands of years of history and spanning the globe, Linda Grant De Pauw explores the varied roles women have played in war. De Pauw depicts women as victims and as warriors; as nurses, spies, sex workers, and wives and mothers of soldiers; as warrior queens leading armies into battle, and as baggage carriers marching in the rear. Her historical survey provides context for current public policy debates over women in the military.

Set against a volatile political landscape, Irish republican culture has struggled to maintain continuity with the past, affirm legitimacy in the present, and generate a sense of community for the future. Lullabies and Battle Cries explores the relationship between music, emotion, memory, and identity in republican parading bands, with a focus on how this music continues to be utilized in a post-conflict climate. As author Jaime Rollins shows, rebel parade music provides a foundational idiom of national and republican expression, acting as a critical medium for shaping new political identities within continually shifting dynamics of republican culture.

In Nursing Civil Rights, Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army. As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. Threat tells how progressive elements in the campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, she follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.

The relationship between women and guns and the ways in which the figure of an armed woman has served as a lightning rod for cultural issues are examined in a study that draws on advertising, journalism, fiction, political writings, and autobiographies, among other sources.

The Battle of Gettysburg is told from a fresh perspective--the women, immigrants, and African Americans who participated in this epic battle, through memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts culled from the documentary history of the period. 30,000 first printing.

This book is unique in its critical inquiry into the new woman warrior's appropriation of violence and the Western war narrative. Informed by feminist theoretical debates regarding women's new roles, the authors delve into the meaning of that appropriation for alternative storytelling. To date, television's "ferocious few" have received little scholarly attention. By inviting a variety of perspectives, editors Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy provide a cutting-edge forum to recognize women's increasing role in popular culture as they are cast as action heroes. As a timely and accessible work, this book will appeal to scholars, feminists, cultural critics, and the general reader.