Historians have long assumed that ethnic and racial divisions in post–Civil War America were reflected in the U.S. Army, of whose enlistees 40 percent were foreign-born. Now Kevin Adams shows that the frontier army was characterized by a “Victorian class divide” that overshadowed ethnic prejudices. Class and Race in the Frontier Army marks the first application of recent research on class, race, and ethnicity to the social and cultural history of military life on the western frontier. Adams draws on a wealth of military records and soldiers’ diaries and letters to reconstruct everyday army life—from work and leisure to consumption, intellectual pursuits, and political activity—and shows that an inflexible class barrier stood between officers and enlisted men. As Adams relates, officers lived in relative opulence while enlistees suffered poverty, neglect, and abuse. Although racism was ingrained in official policy and informal behavior, no similar prejudice colored the experience of soldiers who were immigrants. Officers and enlisted men paid much less attention to ethnic differences than to social class—officers flaunting and protecting their status, enlisted men seething with class resentment. Treating the army as a laboratory to better understand American society in the Gilded Age, Adams suggests that military attitudes mirrored civilian life in that era—with enlisted men, especially, illustrating the emerging class-consciousness among the working poor. Class and Race in the Frontier Army offers fresh insight into the interplay of class, race, and ethnicity in late-nineteenth-century America.

Historians have long assumed that ethnic and racial divisions in post-Civil War America were reflected in the U.S. Army, of whose enlistees 40 percent were foreign-born. Now Kevin Adams shows that the frontier army was characterized by a "Victorian class divide" that overshadowed ethnic prejudices. Class and Race in the Frontier Army marks the first application of recent research on class, race, and ethnicity to the social and cultural history of military life on the western frontier. Adams draws on a wealth of military records and soldiers' diaries and letters to reconstruct everyday army life--from work and leisure to consumption, intellectual pursuits, and political activity--and shows that an inflexible class barrier stood between officers and enlisted men. As Adams relates, officers lived in relative opulence while enlistees suffered poverty, neglect, and abuse. Although racism was ingrained in official policy and informal behavior, no similar prejudice colored the experience of soldiers who were immigrants. Officers and enlisted men paid much less attention to ethnic differences than to social class--officers flaunting and protecting their status, enlisted men seething with class resentment. Treating the army as a laboratory to better understand American society in the Gilded Age, Adams suggests that military attitudes mirrored civilian life in that era--with enlisted men, especially, illustrating the emerging class-consciousness among the working poor. Class and Race in the Frontier Army offers fresh insight into the interplay of class, race, and ethnicity in late-nineteenth-century America.

In a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le’Trice D. Donaldson locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood. Through extensive research, Donaldson not only illuminates this evolution but also interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, Donaldson investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States. Continuing to probe the idea of what it meant to be a military race man—a man concerned with the uplift of the black race who followed the philosophy of progress—Donaldson contrasts the histories of officers Henry Flipper and Charles Young, two soldiers who saw their roles and responsibilities as black military officers very differently. Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement.

References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation “Geronimo” used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States’ formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the “savage wars” of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.

The Civil War era marked the dawn of American wars of military occupation, inaugurating a tradition that persisted through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that continues to the present. In the Wake of War traces how volunteer and even professional soldiers found themselves tasked with the unprecedented project of wartime and peacetime military occupation, initiating a national debate about the changing nature of American military practice that continued into Reconstruction. In the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, citizen-soldiers confronted the complicated challenges of invading, occupying, and subduing hostile peoples and nations. Drawing on firsthand accounts from soldiers in United States occupation forces, Andrew F. Lang shows that many white volunteers equated their martial responsibilities with those of standing armies, which were viewed as corrupting institutions hostile to the republican military ethos. With the advent of emancipation came the enlistment of African American troops into Union armies, facilitating an extraordinary change in how provisional soldiers interpreted military occupation. Black soldiers, many of whom had been formerly enslaved, garrisoned regions defeated by Union armies and embraced occupation as a tool for destabilizing the South’s long-standing racial hierarchy. Ultimately, Lang argues, traditional fears about the army’s role in peacetime society, grounded in suspicions of standing military forces and heated by a growing ambivalence about racial equality, governed the trials of Reconstruction. Focusing on how U.S. soldiers—white and black, volunteer and regular—enacted and critiqued their unprecedented duties behind the lines during the Civil War era, In the Wake of War reveals the dynamic, often problematic conditions of military occupation.

Taking the Field draws on the experiences of U.S. soldiers to examine interconnected ideas about nature and empire during the Progressive Era.

In a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le’Trice D. Donaldson locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood. Through extensive research, Donaldson not only illuminates this evolution but also interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, Donaldson investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States. Continuing to probe the idea of what it meant to be a military race man—a man concerned with the uplift of the black race who followed the philosophy of progress—Donaldson contrasts the histories of officers Henry Flipper and Charles Young, two soldiers who saw their roles and responsibilities as black military officers very differently. Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement.