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Author: Jeremy Agnew
Publisher:
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the Indian Wars period of the 1840s through the 1890s, Life of a Soldier on the Western Frontier captures the daily challenges faced by the typical enlisted man and explores the role soldiers played in the conquering of the American frontier.
Author: Kevin Adams
Publisher:
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHistorians 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.
Author: Durwood Ball
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780806133126
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUnlike previous histories, this book argues that the politics of slavery profoundly influenced the western mission of the regular army - affecting the hearts and minds of officers and enlisted men both as the nation plummented toward civil war."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Anne Bruner Eales
Publisher: Big Earth Publishing
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9781555661663
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"No one interested in the history of the American West or in women's history should miss this well-written, carefully researched, comprehensive treatment of a subject that previous scholars have largely ignored. Based on the writings of more than fifty women who accompanied their husbands to remote duty posts in the far west.
Author: Douglas C. McChristian
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2017-05-04
Total Pages: 783
ISBN-13: 0806159030
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“The drums they roll, upon my soul, for that’s the way we go,” runs the chorus in a Harrigan and Hart song from 1874. “Forty miles a day on beans and hay in the Regular Army O!” The last three words of that lyric aptly title Douglas C. McChristian’s remarkable work capturing the lot of soldiers posted to the West after the Civil War. At once panoramic and intimate, Regular Army O! uses the testimony of enlisted soldiers—drawn from more than 350 diaries, letters, and memoirs—to create a vivid picture of life in an evolving army on the western frontier. After the volunteer troops that had garrisoned western forts and camps during the Civil War were withdrawn in 1865, the regular army replaced them. In actions involving American Indians between 1866 and 1891, 875 of these soldiers were killed, mainly in minor skirmishes, while many more died of disease, accident, or effects of the natural environment. What induced these men to enlist for five years and to embrace the grim prospect of combat is one of the enduring questions this book explores. Going well beyond Don Rickey Jr.’s classic work Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay (1963), McChristian plumbs the regulars’ accounts for frank descriptions of their training to be soldiers; their daily routines, including what they ate, how they kept clean, and what they did for amusement; the reasons a disproportionate number occasionally deserted, while black soldiers did so only rarely; how the men prepared for field service; and how the majority who survived mustered out. In this richly drawn, uniquely authentic view, men black and white, veteran and tenderfoot, fill in the details of the frontier soldier’s experience, giving voice to history in the making.
Author: Michael Norman McConnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2004-01-01
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0803232330
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe end of the Seven Years? War found Britain?s professional army in America facing new and unfamiliar responsibilities. In addition to occupying the recently conquered French settlements in Canada, redcoats were ordered into the trans-Appalachian west, into the little-known and much disputed territories that lay between British, French, and Spanish America. There the soldiers found themselves serving as occupiers, police, and diplomats in a vast territory marked by extreme climatic variation?a world decidedly different from Britain or the settled American colonies. Going beyond the war experience, Army and Empire examines the lives and experiences of British soldiers in the complex, evolving cultural frontiers of the West in British America. From the first appearance of the redcoats in the West until the outbreak of the American Revolution, Michael N. McConnell explores all aspects of peacetime service, including the soldiers? diet and health, mental well-being, social life, transportation, clothing, and the built environments within which they lived and worked. McConnell looks at the army on the frontier for what it was: a collection of small communities of men, women, and children faced with the challenges of surviving on the far western edge of empire.
Author: Robert Wooster
Publisher: UNM Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 0826338445
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor the U.S. Army, Western experiences illustrated its role in ensuring national security and in fostering national development. Its soldiers performed feats of great heroism and rank cruelty. Debates regarding the military's role in projecting Indian policy, the division of power between state and federal authorities, and the size of a professional military establishment reveal the inconsistency in the nation's views of its army.
Author: Chris Enss
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-05-01
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1493023403
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the earliest days of the western frontier, women heeded the call to go west along with their husbands, sweethearts, and parents. Many of these women were attached to the army camps and outposts that dotted the prairies. Some were active participants in the skirmishes and battles that took place in the western territories. Each of these women-wives, mothers, daughters, laundresses, soldiers, and shamans-risked their lives in unsettled lands, facing such challenges as bearing children in primitive conditions and defying military orders in an effort to save innocent people. Soldier, Sister, Spy, Scout tells the story of twelve such brave women-Buffalo Soldiers, scouts, interpreters, nurses, and others-who served their country in the early frontier. These heroic women displayed a depth of courage and physical bravery not found in many men of the time. Their remarkable commitment and willingness to throw off the constraints of nineteenth-century conventions helped build the west for generations to come.
Author: John Gibbon
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAbove all, Gibbon recounts in detail the realities of army life and Indian warfare. He saw no gallant cavalry charges in the Sioux Campaign of 1876, only footsore infantrymen marching in search of Indian warriors who always managed to outdistance their pursuers. An avid sportsman and explorer, Gibbon also recounts hunting and fishing trips in the wilderness and a visit to the newly created Yellowstone Park.
Author: Don Rickey
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 1963
Total Pages: 420
ISBN-13: 9780806111131
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe enlisted men in the United States Army during the Indian Wars (1866-91) need no longer be mere shadows behind their historically well-documented commanding officers. As member of the regular army, these men formed an important segment of our usually slighted national military continuum and, through their labors, combats, and endurance, created the framework of law and order within which settlement and development become possible. We should know more about the common soldier in our military past, and here he is. The rank and file regular, then as now, was psychologically as well as physically isolated from most of his fellow Americans. The people were tired of the military and its connotations after four years of civil war. They arrayed their army between themselves and the Indians, paid its soldiers their pittance, and went about the business of mushrooming the nation’s economy. Because few enlisted men were literarily inclined, many barely able to scribble their names, most previous writings about them have been what officers and others had to say. To find out what the average soldier of the post-Civil War frontier thought, Don Rickey, Jr., asked over three hundred living veterans to supply information about their army experiences by answering questionnaires and writing personal accounts. Many of them who had survived to the mid-1950’s contributed much more through additional correspondence and personal interviews. Whether the soldier is speaking for himself or through the author in his role as commentator-historian, this is the first documented account of the mass personality of the rank and file during the Indian Wars, and is only incidentally a history of those campaigns.
