Richard Fulton's Warrior Generation 1865-1885 fundamentally rethinks the efficacy of an institutional drive among influential middle-class opinion leaders to militarize lower-class boys in Victorian Britain. He contends that instead of engendering the desired cultural militarism, as has been commonly argued, their push had merely contributed to a fast-developing culture of adventure and masculinity. Challenging this popular assumption, Fulton carefully reexamines many of the oft cited touchstones of militaristic influence on lower-class boys, deeply assessing their actual effects on the behaviours and cultural practices of this generation. He explores a range of themes from, among others, the propagation of the military's message in school curricula (and its glorification in students' textbooks), to the military's heroic depiction and ubiquitous presence in lower-class boys' entertainment and popular media.

"Richard Fulton's Warrior Generation 1865-1885 fundamentally rethinks the efficacy of an institutional drive among influential middle-class opinion leaders to militarize lower-class boys in Victorian Britain. He contends that instead of engendering the desired cultural militarism, as has been commonly argued, their push had merely contributed to a fast-developing culture of adventure and masculinity. Challenging this popular assumption, Fulton carefully reexamines many of the oft cited touchstones of militaristic influence on lower-class boys, deeply assessing their actual effects on the behaviours and cultural practices of this generation. He explores a range of themes from, among others, the propagation of the military's message in school curricula (and its glorification in students' textbooks), to the military's heroic depiction and ubiquitous presence in lower-class boys' entertainment and popular media"--...

When looking for historical examples of women who have fought as soldiers, one can refer--with disappointment--to the words of John Keegan, one of the world's most well-known military historians: "Women look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when they fail as defenders...Women do not fight."In this book, anthropologist and historian Robert Edgerton disagrees, taking as his centerpiece the women warriors of Dahomey, a West African kingdom that reached its heyday during the height of the African slave trade. In this land (now the Republic of Benin), women eventually became the elite force of the kingdom's standing army, the prime fighting force faced by the French when they defeated and colonized the region in the 1890s. This book is both a narrative history of these women and their role in Dahomian society as well as a more far-ranging refutation of the argument that warfare has always been a club "for men only."