In a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le’Trice D. Donaldson locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood. Through extensive research, Donaldson not only illuminates this evolution but also interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, Donaldson investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States. Continuing to probe the idea of what it meant to be a military race man—a man concerned with the uplift of the black race who followed the philosophy of progress—Donaldson contrasts the histories of officers Henry Flipper and Charles Young, two soldiers who saw their roles and responsibilities as black military officers very differently. Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement.

World Wars I and II changed the globe on a scale never seen before or since, and from these terrible conflicts came an abundance of photographs, drawings, and other artworks attempting to make sense of the turbulent era. In this generously illustrated book, Catherine Speck provides a fascinating account of women artists during wartime in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and their visual responses to war, both at the front lines and on the home front. In addition to following high-profile artists such as American photographer Lee Miller, Speck recounts the experiences of nurses, voluntary aides, and ambulance drivers who found the time to create astonishing artworks in the midst of war zones. She also describes the feelings of disempowerment revealed in the work done by women distant from the conflict. As Speck shows, women artists created highly charged emotional responses to the threats, sufferings, and horrors of war—the constant fear of attack, the sorrow of innocent lives destroyed, the mass murders of people in concentration camps, and the unimaginable aftermath of the atomic bombs. The first book to explore female creativity during these periods, Beyond the Battlefield delivers an insightful and meditative examination of this art that will appeal to readers of art history, war history, and cultural studies.

Beyond the Battlefield: The New Military Professionalism presents the nature and character of military professionalism. This book describes the increasing tendency for the military to view professionalism mainly in terms of military skills. Organized into five parts encompassing 13 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the various concepts and definitions of military professionalism. This text then reexamines military professionalism in the post-Vietnam era with regard to perspectives on value convergence and empathy between military and society. Other chapters consider the changes in the international security environment and the complexity of national security policy. This book discusses as well the demands on the profession as a result of the changed security environment. The final chapter deals with the essential factors that establish the military mindset and world view, as well as determine the quality of civil–military relations. This book is a valuable resource for military professionals and sociologists.

The Army goes to great lengths to capture lessons learned and preserve these lessons for current practitioners and future generations. Though the Army is one of the most self-critical organizations found in American society, a well-deserved reputation has also been earned for failing to inculcate those lessons by transforming the institutional Army. Change is achieved through a continuous cycle of adaptive innovation, experimentation, and experience. In Iraq, out of necessity while in contact with a dynamic enemy, the Army transformed on the battlefield with radical changes in doctrine, organization, training, and material, which significantly enabled battlefield success. As a result of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, this paper analyzes the success of the military's counterinsurgency strategy and nation-building efforts, examines the future of combat which the Army may face in order to recommend a suitable force posture, and makes recommendations for future competencies and capabilities utilizing the problem-solving construct of DOTMLPF in order to ensure future victories in this relevant component of the full spectrum of conflict.

This volume draws together an international team of scholars to explore the experience and significance of early modern European continental warfare from an interdisciplinary perspective. Individual essays add to the lively fields of War and Society and the New Military History by combining the history of war with political and diplomatic history, the history of religion, social history, economic history, the history of ideas, the history of emotions, environmental history, art history, musicology, and the history of science and medicine. The contributors address how warfare was entwined with European learning, culture, and the arts, but also examine the ties between warfare and ideas or ideologies, and offer new ways of thinking about the costs and consequences of war. In addition to its interdisciplinarity, the volume is distinctive in including chapters focused not only on Western and Central Europe but also the often-ignored European peripheries, such as the Baltics and the Russian frontier, Scandinavia, and the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands of Southeastern Europe. As a whole, the volume offers readers interesting alternatives and threads for reconsidering the place and meaning of warfare within the larger history of early modern continental Europe. This book will be valuable for general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars interested in military, early modern, and European history.

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

Diving deep into the heart of Vietnam's turmoil, 'Beyond the Battlefield: Vietnam's Tragic Odyssey' thrusts readers into the relentless chaos of war. Alex J. Mason, a member of the elite Special Forces unit, SOG, shares his raw and unfiltered journey through the dense jungles and treacherous landscapes of Southeast Asia. From daring missions behind enemy lines to the bond forged in the crucible of combat, Mason's account spares no detail, offering a gripping portrayal of the Vietnam War's relentless brutality. But the battle doesn't end on the battlefield—Mason's narrative delves into the profound struggles of returning home, navigating the scars of war in a world forever changed. With evocative imagery, personal artifacts, and a poignant reflection on the aftermath, 'Beyond the Battlefield' is an unforgettable exploration of courage, sacrifice, and the enduring human spirit.

In a fascinating contribution to Civil War history, this book goes to the camps--where, perhaps ingloriously, soldiers spent most of their time--to reveal what they ate, what they wore, and what they did to combat boredom. 75 photos throughout.

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. In the late nineteenth century, at a time when Americans were becoming more removed from nature than ever before, U.S. soldiers were uniquely positioned to understand and construct nature's ongoing significance for their work and for the nation as a whole. American ideas and debates about nature evolved alongside discussions about the meaning of frontiers, about what kind of empire the United States should have, and about what it meant to be modern or to make "progress." Soldiers stationed in the field were at the center of these debates, and military action in the expanding empire brought new environments into play. In Taking the Field Amy Kohout draws on the experiences of U.S. soldiers in both the Indian Wars and the Philippine-American War to explore the interconnected ideas about nature and empire circulating at the time. By tracking the variety of ways American soldiers interacted with the natural world, Kohout argues that soldiers, through their words and their work, shaped Progressive Era ideas about both American and Philippine environments. Studying soldiers on multiple frontiers allows Kohout to inject a transnational perspective into the environmental history of the Progressive Era, and an environmental perspective into the period's transnational history. Kohout shows us how soldiers--through their writing, their labor, and all that they collected--played a critical role in shaping American ideas about both nature and empire, ideas that persist to the present.

The first in-depth study of racial integration at West Point after the Civil War Race, Politics, and Reconstruction tells the story of racial integration at the United States Military Academy after the Civil War and spotlights the social environment and cultural currents that led to its failure. The first attempt to racially integrate West Point proved not simply a lost opportunity but an opportunity sabotaged with shocking degrees of forethought and deliberation. By investigating West Point’s experience with race from varied and nuanced perspectives, including those of the first Black cadets, the US Army officer corps, white cadets, the Academy’s faculty and staff, and the Black and white American publics, the contributors to this volume cast both the promise and the failure of integration at West Point as an illuminating microcosm of Reconstruction itself. Contributors: Jonathan D. Bratten, Army National Guard * Makonen A. Campbell, United States Military Academy * Adam H. Domby, Auburn University * Le’Trice Donaldson, Auburn University * Louisa Koebrich, US Army North * Ronald G. Machoian, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Cameron McCoy, US Naval War College * Rory McGovern, United States Military Academy * Amanda M. Nagel, US Army Command and General Staff College