American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913 provides a play-by-play account of a crucial but often overlooked period in the development of American counterinsurgency strategy. Tracing Pershing's military campaigns in the Philippines, Ronald K. Edgerton examines how Progressive counterinsurgency doctrine evolved in direct response to the first sustained military encounter between the United States and Muslim militants. Pershing de-emphasized so-called civilizing efforts and stressed the practicality of building relationships with local Moro leaders and immersing himself in Moro cultural practices. In turn, Moros elected him as a fellow datu, or chief, and Pershing came to realize a fundamental principle of counterinsurgency warfare: one size does not fit all, and tactics must be molded to fit the specific environment. In light of Pershing's military success, this study calls for a reevaluation of the more invasive counterinsurgency methods used by US officers against Muslim militants today, and it addresses the important role the Philippine–American War played in developing modern US military strategy.

Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I. In World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence, Mark Stout establishes that, in fact, World War I led to the realization that intelligence was indispensable in both wartime and peacetime. After a lengthy gestation that started in the late nineteenth century, modern American intelligence emerged during World War I, laying the foundations for the establishment of a self-conscious profession of intelligence. Virtually everything that followed was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention. World War I ushered in a period of rapid changes. Never again would the War Department be without an intelligence component. Never again would a senior American commander lead a force to war without intelligence personnel on their staff. Never again would the United States government be without a signals intelligence agency or aerial reconnaissance capability. Stout examines the breadth of American intelligence in the war, not just in France, not just at home, but around the world and across the army, navy, and State Department, and demonstrates how these far-flung efforts endured after the Armistice in 1918. For the first time, there came to be a group of intelligence practitioners who viewed themselves as different from other soldiers, sailors, and diplomats. Upon entering World War II, the United States had a solid foundation from which to expand to meet the needs of another global hot war and the Cold War that followed.

A fascinating encyclopedic survey of the Spanish-Cuban/American War, the Philippine War, and the small wars between 1899 and the end of the occupation of Haiti in 1934. The name changes themselves are instructive. The usage of "Spanish-American War" ignores the fact that the war in Cuba had been largely won by the Cuban revolutionaries before US intervention, hence the new title, Spanish-Cuban/American War. The use of "Philippine Insurrection" is replaced by Philippine War, since the Philippine forces had taken much of the islands from Spain before US ground forces arrived. And guerillas or revolutionaries have replaced "bandits," the term used by the US to discredit oppositional forces. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Success in dealing with unknown ciphers is measured by these four things in the order named: perseverance, careful methods of analysis, intuition, luck." So begins the first chapter of Colonel Parker Hitt's 1916 Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers, a foundational text in the history of cryptology. An irrepressible innovator, Hitt possessed those qualities in abundance. His manual, cipher devices, and proactive mentorship of Army cryptology during World War I laid the groundwork for the modern American cryptologic system. Though he considered himself an infantryman, Hitt is best known as the "father of American military cryptology." In Parker Hitt: The Father of American Military Cryptology, Betsy Rohaly Smoot brings Hitt's legacy to life, chronicling his upbringing, multiple careers, ingenious mind, and independent spirit. In the 1910s, after a decade as an infantry officer, Hitt set his sights on aviation. Instead, he was drawn to the applied sciences, designing signal and machine-gun equipment while applying math to combat problems. Atypical for the time, Hitt championed women in the workplace. During World War I he suggested the Army employ American female telephone operators, while his wife, Genevieve Young Hitt, became the first woman to break ciphers for the United States government. His daughter, Mary Lue Hitt, carried on the family legacy as a "code girl" during World War II. Readers of Elizabeth Cobb's The Hello Girls, Liza Mundy's Code Girls, and David Kahn's The Codebreakers will find in Parker Hitt's story an insightful profile of an American cryptologic hero and the early twentieth-century military. Drawing from a never-before-seen cache of Hitt's letters, photographs, and diaries, Smoot introduces readers to Hitt's life on the front lines, in classrooms and workshops, and at home.

Frederick Palmer was an American journalist and writer. Born in Pleasantville, Pennsylvania, Palmer attended Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. 'Bliss Peacemaker' is Palmer's biography of General Tasker Howard Bliss, detailing his life with the inclusion of original letters and pictures. The pictures in this volume are all originals and thus some may be blurry or pixelated.

Time in the Wilderness describes John J. Pershing’s early years and experiences, fleshing out the years of remote postings in places such as New Mexico, the Dakotas, and Montana, accompanied by sporadic Indian fighting, often overlooked in other biographies.

Contributions by Sandra Bartlett Atwood, Nathan E. Bender, London Brickley, Eric A. Eliason, Noah D. Eliason, Tim Frandy, Robert Glenn Howard, Jay Mechling, Annamarie O'Brien Morel, Raymond Summerville, Tok Thompson, and Megan L. Zahay Guns are a ubiquitous part of life in the United States. Arguably more pervasive than physical guns is “gunlore,” which refers to the many folklore genres related to firearms. Gunlore: Firearms, Folkways, and Communities is the first book to engage with the many narratives, rituals, folk-speech, customs, art, and handicraft encompassed by gunlore. Like most expressive cultures, gunlore emerges from specific communities. Groups with a shared interest around firearms may form for many reasons—self-protection, hunting, crime, work, political or social identity signaling, the desire to creatively modify guns, and even the resolve to oppose gun use and ownership. This collection explores a range of gunlore genres and the “gunfolk” groups that give rise to them. Contributors examine topics that include the fetishization of firearms, “Moms Who Carry,” online discussion boards, alternative history cosplay, survivalist communities, gunsmiths and gun craft, and more. Gun owners and gun enthusiasts, in all their varieties, are one of the largest avocational groups in America. The essays in Gunlore seek to expand our understanding of these communities by looking at the various roles firearms play, have played, and can play in our world. Gunlore, for better or worse, is a powerful and pervasive method of self-expression. In examining the folklore around these controversial and politically charged tools, weapons, and symbols, we can begin to understand aspects of American culture that will remain prominent for the foreseeable future.

Governor of the Cordillera tells the story of an American colonial official in the Philippines who took the unpopular position of defending the rights of the Igorots, was fired in disgrace, and made a triumphal return. During the first fifteen years of colonial rule (1898–1913), a small group of Americans controlled the headhunting tribes who were wards of the nascent colonial government. These officials ignored laws, carved out fiefdoms, and brutalized (or killed) those who challenged their rule. John Early was cut from a different cloth. Battling colleagues and supervisors over their treatment of the mountain people, Early also had run-ins with lowland Filipino leaders like Manuel Quezon. Early's return as governor of the entire Cordillera was celebrated by all the tribes. In Governor of the Cordillera Shelton Woods combines biography with colonial history. He includes a discussion on the exhibition of the Igorots at the various fairs in the US and Europe, which Early tried to stop. The life of John Early is a testament to navigating political and racial divides with integrity.

In this “forensic, unflinching, devastating work of historical recovery” (Sathnam Sanghera), Bud Dajo—an American atrocity bigger than Wounded Knee or My Lai, yet today largely forgotten—is revealed, thanks to the rediscovery of a single photograph. In March 1906, American soldiers on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines surrounded and killed 1000 local men, women, and children, known as Moros, on top of an extinct volcano. The so-called ‘Battle of Bud Dajo’ was hailed as a triumph over an implacable band of dangerous savages, a “brilliant feat of arms” according to President Theodore Roosevelt. Some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain, saw the massacre for what it was, but they were the exception and the U.S. military authorities successfully managed to bury the story. Despite the fact that the slaughter of Moros had been captured on camera, the memory of the massacre soon disappeared from the historical record. In Massacre in the Clouds, Kim A. Wagner meticulously recovers the history of a forgotten atrocity and the remarkable photograph that exposed its grim logic. His vivid, unsparing account of the massacre—which claimed hundreds more lives than Wounded Knee and My Lai combined—reveals the extent to which practices of colonial warfare and violence, derived from European imperialism, were fully embraced by Americans with catastrophic results.

How the US crusade against prostitution became a tool of empire Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world. Eva Payne describes how American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored US laws, calling for states to criminalize prostitution and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. She argues that Americans’ ambitions to reshape global sexual morality and law advanced an ideology of racial hierarchy that viewed women of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities as dangerous vectors of disease. Payne tells the stories of the sex workers themselves, revealing how these women’s experiences defy the dichotomies that have shaped American cultural and legal conceptions of prostitution and trafficking, such as choice and coercion, free and unfree labor, and white sexual innocence and the assumed depravity of nonwhites. Drawing on archives in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Empire of Purity ties the war on sexual vice to American imperial ambitions and a politicization of sexuality that continues to govern both domestic and international policy today.