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.
"In Spetsnaz, Tor Bukkvoll presents the first in-depth history of the Soviet, and, later, Russian special operations forces from their establishment in the early 1950s until today. He focuses on three broad topics: (1) Soviet and later Russian thinking on the use of special operations forces; (2) the actual process of constructing these forces and how this was facilitated or hampered by other agencies of the Soviet and Russian states; and (3) the use of these forces in combat"--
"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.
"Through a close analysis of New Right architect Paul Weyrich, who is often seen as secular but was a committed Catholic who worked closely with evangelical Protestants, this book explores the way this Catholic-Protestant political alliance was forged by using a shared identity of victimhood to stitch together disparate religious groups, and then how this new political coalition constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as the ideal goal. Chelsea Ebin calls this "prefigurative traditionalism" -- a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this strategy, the new Religious Right obscures the radicality of its politics by framing the movement's aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive. An interdisciplinary work informed by the fields of history, religious studies, public law, and American politics, Prefiguring the Past is an insightful exploration of the origins of the New Christian Right, whose political victories are now radically reshaping the landscape of American society"--
"On February 27, 1973, a group of roughly 300 armed Indigenous men, women, and children seized the tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, at gunpoint, took hostages, barricaded themselves in the hilltop church, and visibly displayed an upside-down American flag. Taking place at the site of the infamous massacre in 1890, the highly symbolic confrontation spearheaded by the American Indian Movement (AIM) ultimately evolved into a prolonged, 71-day armed standoff between law enforcement officers and modern-day Indigenous warriors-some of whom were Vietnam War veterans who were using Vietnam-era equipment and weaponry. By organizing in defense of the newly proclaimed Independent Oglala Nation, the AIM activists at Wounded Knee linked the nationalist quest for sovereignty and self-determination with a warrior masculinity that was constructed from a mix of Indigenous cultures and contemporary cultural elements, including the Black civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the antiwar movement. In Reinventing the Warrior, Matthias Andrâe Voigt examines the way gender construction was integral to the Red Power movement. Indigenous activists sought to become "more manly" in order to challenge hegemonic masculinities-and, by implication, colonialism. Indigenous remasculinization challenged the emasculating nature of white supremacy. Voigt traces the story of the reinvention of Indigenous warriorhood from 1968 to the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973 and beyond"--
The Vietnam War ended nearly fifty years ago but the central paradox of the struggle endures: how did the world's strongest nation fail to secure freedom for the Republic of Vietnam? Michael F. Morris addresses this vexing question by focusing on the senior Marine headquarters in the conflict's most dangerous region. Known as I Corps, the northern five provinces of South Vietnam witnessed the bloodiest fighting of the entire war. I Corps also contained the Viet Cong's strongest infrastructure, key portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the important political and economic prizes of Hue and Da Nang. For Americans, it was the site of the first major military operation (Operation STARLITE); the Battles of Hue City and Khe Sanh during the 1968 Tet Offensive; and a military innovation known as the Combined Action Platoon (CAP), a counterinsurgency technique designed to secure the region's villages. The Marine zone served as Saigon's "canary in the coal mine"--if the war was to be won, allied action must succeed in its most contested region. With such deep significance, I Corps holds many answers to the lasting questions of the Vietnam War.Following the Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF)--the primary US tactical command in I Corps from 1965 to 1970--Corps Competency? provides the first composite analysis of the critical role of the senior Marine headquarters and offers a coherence missing in piecemeal accounts. Despite the critical importance of I Corps, relatively little is known about its overall impact on the war due to disconnected and patchy historical study of the region.In this comprehensive and newly insightful study of the Vietnam War, Michael Morris tells a story that illustrates what can happen when a corps headquarters is not ready for the conflict it encounters and then fights the war it wants to rather than the one it must.
In this book, Bruce I. Oppenheimer and the late Robert L. Peabody analyze the 1976 House majority leader race and present the result of their unrivaled insider access to this turning point in congressional history. This fierce contest among the Democratic leadership marked the transition of the House of Representatives into the party-dominated institution that is so familiar today. The 1976 election, in which the Democrats consolidated the gains made in 1974, led to two important changes in House Democratic leadership. After Carl Albert's retirement, Majority Leader Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., of Massachusetts advanced unopposed to the Speakership. This led to a contest between four formidable candidates for the position of majority leader: Rules Committee Spokesman Richard Bolling of Missouri, Caucus Chairman Phillip Burton of California, Majority Whip John McFall of California, and Representative James C. Wright, Jr., of Texas. It was arguably the most competitive contest for a major leadership position in congressional history. Ultimately, it took extensive campaigning and three ballots before Wright emerged victorious. During the race, Oppenheimer and Peabody conducted lengthy interviews with the candidates and their principal supporters, resulting in their eye-opening analysis of this contest as a key stepping stone between committee government and conditional party government in the House of Representatives that continues to the present day. The authors first presented their original research on the 1976 House majority leader contest at the 1977 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. With that original groundbreaking paper at its core, this book adds new chapters by Oppenheimer that evaluate the accuracy of the study and provide richer historical context, showing how congressional politics changed in the years after the 1976 contest. Their original study was the result of the greatest access that political scientists have ever had to a congressional leadership race, and it has enduring value for understanding our current political crisis.
The beautiful picture of brothers in arms vanquishing a tyrant. The power of a well-orchestrated army and navy winning historic battles. Overwhelming military might and ability through teamwork. This is how the US military services portray themselves to the public and to their own service members through official doctrine. However, under the veneer of jointness, deeply fraught processes are at play. Frequently, the services think more about protecting organizational turf than about national security and maintaining an advantage against the United States' external adversaries. Uniting US military services is a difficult endeavor that becomes even more so the farther from a battlefield and the higher up the command structure the unifying needs to happen.In The Collaborative Fight, Paul R. Birch and Lina M. Svedin examine cases of institutional jointness among US military services from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. They draw actionable conclusions for practitioners in the defense establishment while giving examples of successful joint cooperation that overcame the difficulties inherent in pursuing it. Even the successful cases that Birch and Svedin discuss show that the US military services face bureaucratic incentives and organizational leadership issues that make battlefield cooperation less than ideal.Birch and Svedin adeptly translate theory and history into approaches useful to practitioners in the field while examining the theoretical framework outlining the drivers in joint military cooperation.
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