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A cutting-edge analysis of the interwar period as one fundamentally international in scope and deeply violent in nature.World War I destroyed the world that had come before. It shattered three empires and fueled new nationalisms and ideologies that threatened to destroy those that remained. It left millions in its wake with military training and access to weaponry, creating networks of violence that would spread across much of the globe. This violence in the interwar period resulted in more deaths than during the Great War, most of them outside of Europe. While studies of the First and Second World Wars have become more international and interconnected, our understanding of the interwar period remains dominated by national narratives. A Violent Peace offers a new perspective, stretching across four continents and drawing together a multitude of conflicts, large and small: from the Spanish Civil War to the Wewel Incident in Ethiopia; from the small RAF force involved in Somaliland to the hundreds of thousands in the Chinese Nationalist Encirclement Campaigns; from the conflicts surrounding newly formed states in the Polish-Soviet War to a settling of much older accounts in South America. The themes and patterns from this global era are drawn together in a cohesive analysis, including key studies on the utilization of technology, the growing importance of ideology, and how the Great War shaped the nature of these conflicts. A Violent Peace provides a fresh angle on a tumultuous era and challenges readers to reconsider their preconceived ideas about the interwar period.

The environmental consequences of the US military presence from World War II through the end of the US war in Vietnam.Oceans and deserts, jungles and plains, mountains and rivers, monsoons and blizzards, fertile grounds and diseased lands; all have shaped how strategy and technology has been deployed and developed, and all have supported unexpected victories and decimated even the best-laid plans. Conversely, warfare and militarization have shaped the environment, scarring landscapes, accelerating the global spread of disease, unbalancing ecosystems, and contributing to climate change. Reflecting on the inextricable, reciprocal, and often surprising relationship between the natural world and human warfare, these essays offer a new perspective on power, knowledge, and the environment in US military history. The history of US military engagement in the Pacific powerfully demonstrates the profound and diverse impacts that regions' extraordinarily diverse environments have wrought on warfare. US military action has also had profound impacts in the Pacific, from the nuclear weapons testing programs of the Cold War to the use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam. The contributors to this volume consider how the physical environments of the Pacific shaped the process and outcome of battles and wars, and discuss the effect warfare and other military actions had on these physical environments.

The previously overlooked story of how the labor of Black GIs helped win the war and advanced racial integration in the US armed forces.More than 80 percent of Black GIs in World War II served behind the front lines. At the beginning of the war, segregation policies maintained physical separation of Black and white GIs and only allowed Black soldiers to do simple, menial work, maintaining a false sense of racial inferiority. But the mechanization of armed forces during World War II demanded more skilled laborers behind the front lines. The Army Service Forces, created in March 1942, turned to Black GIs to solve the serious manpower shortage and trained them for jobs previously done only by white GIs. In Building Bridges, author Douglas Bristol tells the story of how military necessity led to unprecedented changes in the employment of Black troops. These changes had unanticipated consequences. American military leaders adopted a new racial discourse that emphasized the rights and potential of Black GIs. The new opportunities also exposed racial discrimination, giving Black GIs and their allies more leverage to demand better treatment. Black GIs built bridges, roads, and runways. They repaired engines and radios. They transported bombs, bullets, food, gasoline, and water to hard-pressed soldiers on the front lines. Their numbers, skills, and necessity only grew as the war continued. By the end of the World War II, Black GIs had cracked the glass ceiling in the racialized military hierarchy behind the front lines and became indispensable to keeping the American war machine running around the globe.

The first historical look at what happened during the Somalia intervention; what went wrong and what lessons we should learn from it.The story of Black Hawk Down is a familiar one. On 3 October 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was just one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation; the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. The United States sought to show the world that the UN could rebuild a country, but in a dire foreshadowing of the failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later, the intervention in Somalia was plagued with political infighting, policy mismatch, confusion, and fatal assumptions. In 1992 Somalia saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa, and 1993 brought the first UN-led peace enforcement mission and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. In Beyond Black Hawk Down, Jonathan Carroll provides the first scholarly military history of the entire intervention, from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase in 1992 through to the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Carroll dispels the myths and misunderstandings surrounding one of the most infamous episodes of the 1990s to present a new interpretation of events, most notably by including the Somali perspective, to argue what went so wrong in Somalia, and more importantly, why. Understanding the intervention in Somalia, its successes and the roots of its failures, is invaluable to contemporary debates on concepts of nation-building and counterinsurgency. Moreover, the increasing regularity of inter-state and intra-state conflicts across the world means the international community will continue to be called upon to intervene in other failed or failing states in the future. Beyond Black Hawk Down is an important new history that will inform the shape and nature of future military interventions.

The essential biography of Charles Evans Hughes, whose indelible career in politics and law shaped American modernization in the twentieth century.In the first full-life biographical study of Charles Evans Hughes in over seventy years, Joanne Reitano provides a fresh assessment of Hughes's distinguished, multifaceted public service during the first half of the twentieth century. His exceptional career included the roles of governor of New York (1906-1910), associate justice and presidential candidate (1910-1916), secretary of state (1921-1925), and chief justice of the Supreme Court (1930-1941). A household name in his own time, Hughes challenged bossism in New York politics, championed post-World War I internationalism, and brokered the world's first arms limitation agreement. On the Supreme Court, he was instrumental in modernizing legal doctrines concerning the interstate commerce clause, substantive due process, and civil liberties. Reitano unpacks the seemingly paradoxical nature of Hughes's political and legal careers, arguing that he was neither radical nor reactionary, but a structural reformer and a practical idealist who significantly impacted the nation's transition into the twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Reitano's work will be the definitive account of Charles Evans Hughes for years to come.

Over the last two decades, the political narrative of the "liberal coasts" and the "conservative heartland" has become something of a truism, leading many Democrats to write off much of the Midwest as a Republican stronghold. Today's polarized divide between rural and urban voters makes it easy to forget that things have not always been this way. The Liberal Heartland is a powerful reminder that the American Midwest has a progressive legacy that rivals the coasts.Across twenty chapters, The Liberal Heartland traces the political history of this region from the post-New Deal period to the rise of the New Right and Donald Trump's right-wing populism. The contributors explore the way liberals and progressives across the Midwest fought for expanding environmental protection, engaged in community activism, developed a queer-labor coalition before Stonewall, struggled for women's rights and representation in the Plains states, opposed the death penalty, and mobilized for Indigenous self-determination, among other topics. In addition to well-known leaders like Harry Truman and George McGovern, the book highlights lesser-known figures, such as Lydia Cady Langer, Mary Jean Collins, Richard Hatcher, Jim Jontz, and Paul Wellstone.A companion to the 2020 volume, The Conservative Heartland, The Liberal Heartland explores the history of the Midwest from a less-acknowledged perspective, recounting often forgotten stories that demonstrate the importance of the Midwest for New Deal liberalism and various forms of left-wing politics. This is a long-overdue book that represents a fresh look at the American heartland.

"In 2013, while helping her mother, Ingrid, comb through family possessions, Karin Wagner came across a large folio handwritten in German in the back of a dresser drawer. When Karin asked her mother what the document was, Ingrid replied, "Oh, that is your grandfather's Great War memoir. "Schiller was a seventeen-year-old student in Bromberg, Prussia, when World War I broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in the German army and was assigned to an artillery unit on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1917, Schiller saw action in what is now Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and Russia's withdrawal from the war, Schiller was transferred to the Western Front. He arrived in time for Germany's last great offensive in the west, where the attempt to break the Allied lines included what is believed to be the single greatest artillery bombardment in human history up to that point. After the German retreat and Armistice, Schiller reentered military service in the Freikorps, German mercenary groups fighting in former German territory in Eastern Europe, where the conflict dragged on even after the Treaty of Versailles. Schiller left military service in May 1920. Hans Schiller's Kriegserinnerungen (literally, "memories of war") was written in 1928 and based on diaries, since lost, that Schiller kept during the war. A Tale of Two Fronts, an edition of the memoir with historical context and explanatory notes, provides a vivid first-person account of German army life during World War I. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the experiences of common soldiers in World War I"--

The congregants thanked God that they werent like all those hopeless people outside the church, bound for hell. So the Westboro Baptist Churchs Sunday service began, and Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a curious observer, wondered why anyone would seek spiritual sustenance through other peoples damnation. It is a question that piques many a witness to Westboros more visible activitythe GOD HATES FAGS picketing of funerals. In God Hates, sociologist Barrett-Fox takes us behind the scenes of Topekas Westboro Baptist Church. The first full ethnography of this infamous presence on Americas Religious Right, her book situates the churchs story in the context of American religious historyand reveals as much about the uneasy state of Christian practice in our day as it does about the workings of the Westboro Church and Fred Phelps, its founder.God Hates traces WBCs theological beliefs to a brand of hyper-Calvinist thought reaching back to the Puritansan extreme Calvinism, emphasizing predestination, that has proven as off-putting as Westboros actions, even for other Baptists. And yet, in examining Westboros role in conservative politics and its contentious relationship with other fundamentalist activist groups, Barrett-Fox reveals how the churchs message of national doom in fact reflects beliefs at the core of much of the Religious Rights rhetoric. Westboros aggressively offensive public activities actually serve to soften the anti-gay theology of more mainstream conservative religious activism. With an eye to the churchs protest at military funerals, she also considers why the public has responded so differently to these than to Westboro's anti-LGBT picketing.With its history of Westboro Baptist Church and its founder, and its profiles of defectors, this book offers a complex, close-up view of a phenomenon on the fringes of American Christianityand a broader, disturbing view of the mainstream theology it at once masks and reflects.

In August 1889, the five states that were once part of the Dakota 1861 Territory--North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho--drafted their state constitutions in preparation for inclusion in the United States. These constitutions were models of progressive and pragmatic values for their time. Wyoming, for instance, was the first state to grant women's suffrage. In addition to suffrage, delegates from these states banned child labor, curbed the power of railroads and grain monopolies, mandated state ownership of running water, opened voting eligibility, and created state-owned banks. These states, the "89ers," as Samuel Western calls them, exhibited a spirit of commonweal inclusivity that set them apart.Much has changed since--and not for the better. Today, legislators in these five states have spurned these inclusive values. Instead, they promote the narrative of exclusion and lean toward authoritarianism. Legislators restrict voting, disenfranchise Native Americans, limit protests, squash public education, and discourage immigration initiatives, such as sanctuary cities. In their current condition, these states are in direct contradiction of the pragmatically inclusive and progressive values of their 1889 constitutions. The 89ers today are driven by ideological objections to political autonomy (stripping power from cities), fueling partisanship, and a rigid commitment to traditional commodity-based industries. Western sees hope for the future, but only if these states replace their fidelity to a particular idea of rural America with a more pragmatic openness to diversity and change--which will paradoxically bring them closer to the original spirit of their constitutions.Western calls for a radical rethinking of what rural America is and could be. As a long-time resident in Wyoming, he speaks not from the outside but as someone who personally cares about this region and its future prosperity. The Spirit of 1889 aims to shed light on how these states have drifted so far from where they began and what might be done to reclaim those original values.

In Policing Show Business, Francis MacDonnell explores the starring role played by J. Edgar Hoover in the development of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s. As director of the FBI, Hoover poured resources into scrutinizing show business, a policy choice unjustified by any corresponding threat to public security. He detailed agents to write regular reports on actors, screenwriters, lyricists, singers, and studio executives. His frequent handwritten comments on papers inside the files of film industry personalities demonstrate a level of interest bordering on obsession.Policing Show Business is not just another book about the Hollywood blacklist. MacDonnell approaches the Red Scare through biography using FBI records on such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Hedda Hopper, Adolphe Menjou, Lena Horne, Fredric March, Cecil B. DeMille, and Burl Ives to present in unexpected, surprising, and sometimes poignant ways the rich human dramas experienced by both targets of the bureau and its collaborators.MacDonnell's meticulously researched account, drawing on many newly available FBI files, evokes the passions and resentments; the courageous acts and calculated evasions; and the petty tyrannies and self-interested campaigns of an ignominious episode in the annals of American freedom.

"On December 15, 1972, as rumors swirled of a pending peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam, Governor Jimmy Carter issued an executive order creating the Georgia Advisory Committee on Vietnam Veterans (GACVV). His reasoning was simple: "the citizens of the State of Georgia and of the United States of America owe a debt of gratitude to these veterans who have served the Nation in an unpopular war." Carter's efforts followed trends occurring across the country as a host of states contemplated their responsibilities to Vietnam veterans by considering such benefits as cash bonuses, educational stipends, and free hunting licenses. Through his words and actions, Carter joined this broader debate regarding society's obligation to Vietnam veterans. In A Debt of Gratitude, Glenn Robins examines Carter's role in the creation of Vietnam veterans' issues as a national agenda item. Covering virtually the entire decade of the 1970s, from Carter's single terms as governor and president of the United States, Robins demonstrates that, throughout this period, Carter distinguished himself as one of the country's most important decision-makers concerning Vietnam veterans' policy. By addressing Vietnam veterans' issues and by communicating his positions and views, Carter made a substantial political investment in moving these items from the level of public debate to the level of policy prescriptions, thereby raising awareness, generating concern, and promising government attention to honor and thank Vietnam veterans"--

The Santa Fe Trail has a special allure in southwestern history-it was a road of lucrative commerce, military expansion, and great adventure. Because these themes are connected with the Santa Fe Trail in the American imagination, however, the trail is not often associated with stories of women. Crossings tells the personal stories of several women who made the journey, showing how they were involved with and affected by Santa Fe Trail trade. The Santa Fe Trail was a nexus of nations and cultures, connecting the northern frontier of newly formed Mexico with the quickly expanding western United States, as well as with the many Indigenous nations whose traditional lands it crossed. With her attention on women, Frances Levine enriches our understanding of the Santa Fe Trail and shows how interregional trade affected society, politics, and culture.Through diaries, letters, and firsthand accounts, Levine seeks to understand the experiences of women who journeyed from St. Louis to Santa Fe, as well as some who made an eastward crossing. Crossings focuses on women who traveled during the most crucial period of Santa Fe Trail trade from the early 1820s to the later 1870s, ending as railroads made cross-continental movement a safer and more leisurely experience for travelers. Several of the women made multiple crossings, adding to the depth of their observations of the changing country and dispelling the myth of women in this period as averse to the risks of trail life.Crossings introduces readers to the stories of women such as the Comanche captive María Rosa Villalpando; Carmel Benavides Robidoux and Kit Carson's half-Arapaho daughter Adaline, both of whose lives were dramatically impacted by American expansion; suffragist Julia Anna Archibald Holmes; Kate Messervy Kingsbury, who sought health on the trail west; diarist Susan Shelby Magoffin and her enslaved servant Jane; army wife Anna Maria De Camp Morris; Jewish pioneers Betty and Flora Spiegelberg; and many others. As an expert guide to the people of the Santa Fe Trail, Frances Levine has curated a view of the American West that gives voice to many of the women who made this journey.

"The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an agency of the US government whose funding is kept secret. How is it possible for a government agency to be exempt from providing "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures"? In Hidden Cost of Freedom, Brad Fisher chronicles the origins and administrative inner workings of the CIA's clandestine financial system"--

What happened to the Democratic Party after the 1960s? In many political histories, the McGovern defeat of 1972 announced the partys declineand the conservative movements ascent. What the conventional narrative neglects, Patrick Andelic submits, is the role of Congress in the partys, and the nations, political fortunes. In Donkey Work, Andelic looks at Congress from 1974 to 1994 as the Democratic Partys stronghold and explores how this twenty-year tenure boosted and undermined the partys response to the conservative challenge.If post-1960s America belongs to the conservative movement, Andelic asks, how do we account for the failure of so much of the conservative agendaespecially the shrinking of the federal government? Examining the Democratic Partys unusual durability in Congress after 1974, Donkey Work disrupts the narrative of inexorable liberal decline since the 1970s and reveals the ways in which liberalism and conservatism actually developed in tandem. The book traces the evolution of ideologies within the Democratic Party, particularly the emergence of neoliberalism, suggesting that this political philosophy was as much an anticipation of Americas right turn as a reaction to it; as factions vied for control of the party, Congress itself both strengthened and weakened liberal resistance to the conservative movement.By putting the focus on Congress and legislative politics, in contrast to the presidential synthesis that dominates US political history, Andelics book offers a new, deeply informed perspective on two turbulent decades of American politicsa perspective that alters and expands our understanding of how we arrived at our present political moment.