The last U.S. Army mules were formally mustered out of the service in December 1956, ending 125 years of military reliance on the virtues of this singular animal. Much less glamorous than the cavalryman?s horse, the Army pack mule was a good deal more important: from the Mexican War through World War II, mules were an indispensable adjunct to army movement. ø The author has exhaustively researched the ubiquitous yet nearly invisible army mule. Through his work we learn a great deal about military procurement, transport, and supply, the bedrock on which military mobility rests.
The vast, and vastly influential, American military machine has been aided and abetted by cinema since the earliest days of the medium. The US military realized very quickly that film could be used in myriad ways: training, testing, surveying and mapping, surveillance, medical and psychological management of soldiers, and of course, propaganda. Bringing together a collection of new essays, based on archival research, Wasson and Grieveson seek to cover the complex history of how the military deployed cinema for varied purposes across the the long twentieth century, from the incipient wars of US imperialism in the late nineteenth century to the ongoing War on Terror. This engagement includes cinema created and used by and for the military itself (such as training films), the codevelopment of technologies (chemical, mechanical, and digital), and the use of film (and related mass media) as a key aspect of American "soft power," at home and around the world. A rich and timely set of essays, this volume will become a go-to for scholars interested in all aspects of how the military creates and uses moving-image media.
This user-friendly encyclopedia comprises a wide array of accessible yet detailed entries that address the military, social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of the Mexican-American War. The Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War: A Political, Social, and Military History provides an in-depth examination of not only the military conflict itself, but also the impact of the war on both nations; and how this conflict was the first waged by Americans on foreign soil and served to establish critical U.S. military, political, and foreign policy precedents. The entries analyze the Mexican-American War from both the American and Mexican perspectives, in equal measure. In addition to discussing the various campaigns, battles, weapons systems, and other aspects of military history, the three-volume work also contextualizes the conflict within its social, cultural, political, and economic milieu, and places the Mexican-American War into its proper historical and historiographical contexts by covering the eras both before and after the war. This information is particularly critical for students of American history because the conflict fomented sectional conflict in the United States, which resulted in the U.S. Civil War.
South Texas and northern Mexico formed a seedbed of revolt in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, two decades after he had launched his own successful revolution from South Texas, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz faced a cross-border insurgency intent on toppling his government. The Garza War, so named for the revolutionary firebrand and editor Catarino Erasmo Garza, actually comprised three concerted Texas-based attempts to overthrow Díaz: a June 1890 raid led by Francisco Ruiz Sandoval, the Garza Raid of September 1891, and the San Ignacio Raid of December 1892. In the first detailed military history of the Garza War, Thomas Ty Smith reveals how an armed insurrection against a foreign government, conducted on American soil, drew the US Army into a uniquely complex conflict whose repercussions would be felt on both sides of the US-Mexico border for generations to come. Though not intended as a direct threat to the United States, the insurgency, in using Texas as a staging area, threatened US neutrality laws, forcing the United States to honor its treaty obligations to the Porfirio Díaz government in Mexico City—a proposition further complicated by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevented soldiers from acting as law enforcement. Smith describes how what began as a measured and somewhat limited effort by the United States to enforce the Neutrality Act in Texas eventually escalated into an all-out shooting war between the army and the Garzistas, elevating the counterinsurgency campaign into the highest military, diplomatic, and political echelons of both America and Mexico. The Garza War in South Texas profiles central characters in the conflict—such as Captain John Gregory Bourke, famed for his service with Major General George Crook in the Indian Wars; the biracial, bilingual Shely brothers, former Texas Rangers who ran the army’s secret spy network; and Francisco Benavides, aka El Tuerto (One-Eye), leader of the 1892 raid that resulted in the brutal slaughter and burning of a Mexican federal cavalry outpost across the river from San Ygnacio, Texas. These revolutionaries provided a cornerstone ideology, and a historic legacy, for the Mexican Revolution two decades later.
History has portrayed Christopher "Kit" Carson in black and white. Best known as a nineteenth-century frontier hero, he has been represented more recently as an Indian killer responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Navajos. Biographer David Remley counters these polarized views, finding Carson to be less than a mythical hero, but more than a simpleminded rascal with a rifle. Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man strikes a balance between prevailing notions about this quintessential western figure. Whereas the dime novelists exploited Carson's popular reputation, Remley reveals that the real man was dependable, ethical, and—for his day—relatively open-minded. Sifting through the extensive scholarship about Kit, the author illuminates the key dimensions of Carson's life, including his often neglected Scots-Irish heritage. His people's dire poverty and restlessness, their clannish rural life and sternly Protestant character, committed Carson, like his Scots-Irish ancestors, to loyalty and duty and to following his leader into battle without question. Remley also places Carson in the context of his times by exploring his controversial relations with American Indians. Although despised for the merciless warfare he led on General James H. Carleton's behalf against the Navajos, Carson lived amicably among many Indian people, including the Utes, whom he served as U.S. government agent. Happily married to Waa-Nibe, an Arapaho woman, until her death, he formed a lasting friendship with their daughter, Adaline. Remley sees Carson as a complicated man struggling to master life on America's borders, those highly unstable areas where people of different races, cultures, and languages met, mixed, and fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes together, for the possession of home, hunting rights, and honor.
This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion. This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers. Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor. Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.
Ulysses Grant, the highest-ranking general of the American Civil War and 18th president of the United States, was a surprisingly reluctant soldier and an even more reluctant president. But he was always an enthusiastic horseman. Rich with anecdote, humour and humanity, From Cincinnati to the Colorado Ranger tells of the extraordinary collection of horses that inhabited Grant's world. From the placid plough horses of his youth to the brave war chargers that "carried the destiny of the nation on their backs." From the pampered trotters of the Gilded Age to the exotic stallions whose blood enriched a new breed of American horse. The story of these horses more than illuminates the life and culture of a great American.
The School of Abbasid Studies, originally founded as a co-operative venture by scholars at the Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow in Scotland during the 1980s, is a joint enterprise involving the Universities of St Andrews, Cambridge and Leuven. It aims to promote, foster and cultivate the academic study of the Abbasid dynasty. This book is a volume of sixteen papers delivered by a distinguished array of leading scholars at a meeting of the School of Abbasid Studies at the University of Cambridge in July 2002. It provides a fully contemporary insight into the cutting edge of Abbasid Studies, and includes works ranging from Arabic philosophy and jurisprudence to religious, intellectual and institutional history, literature and grammar. The contents of the volume are divided into three principal foci of interest (Institutions and Concepts, Figures, and Archaeology of a Discipline), and the work is accomplished by a substantial introduction by the editor.
Texas Hill Country is a rugged and hilly area of central Texas known for its food, architecture and unique melting pot of Spanish and European settlers. The area's rich history is filled with quirky and fascinating tales about this landscape and the animals and people who have called it home. Clay Coppedge has been gathering Texas stories for over thirty years. This collection of his favorite columns includes his best Texas-sized stories on Hill Country history. From the legend of Llano's Enchanted Rock and the true story of Jim Bowie's famous knife to one rancher's attempt at bringing reindeer to the hottest area of the country and an oilman's search for Bigfoot, Hill Country Chronicles has them all and more.