On February 1, 1861, delegates at the Texas Secession Convention elected to leave the Union. The people of Texas supported the actions of the convention in a statewide referendum, paving the way for the state to secede and to officially become the seventh state in the Confederacy. Soon the Texans found themselves engaged in a bloody and prolonged civil war against their northern brethren. During the course of this war, the lives of thousands of Texans, both young and old, were changed forever. This new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, incorporates the latest scholarly research on how Texans experienced the war. Eighteen contributors take us from the battlefront to the home front, ranging from inside the walls of a Confederate prison to inside the homes of women and children left to fend for themselves while their husbands and fathers were away on distant battlefields, and from the halls of the governor’s mansion to the halls of the county commissioner’s court in Colorado County. Also explored are well-known battles that took place in or near Texas, such as the Battle of Galveston, the Battle of Nueces, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the Red River Campaign. Finally, the social and …

In Spartan Band (coined from a chaplain’s eulogistic poem) author Thomas Reid traces the Civil War history of the 13th Texas Cavalry, a unit drawn from eleven counties in East Texas. The cavalry regiment organized in the spring of 1862 but was ordered to dismount once in Arkansas. The regiment gradually evolved into a tough, well-trained unit during action at Lake Providence, Fort De Russy, Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins' Ferry, as part of Maj. Gen. John G. Walker's Texas division in the Trans-Mississippi Department. Reid researched letters, documents, and diaries gleaned from more than one hundred descendants of the soldiers, answering many questions relating to their experiences and final resting places. He also includes detailed information on battle casualty figures, equipment issued to each company, slave ownership, wealth of officers, deaths due to disease, and the effects of conscription on the regiment’s composition. “The hard-marching, hard-fighting soldiers of the 13th Texas Cavalry helped make Walker’s Greyhound Division famous, and their story comes to life through Thomas Reid’s exhaustive research and entertaining writing style. This book should serve as a model for Civil War regimental histories.”—Terry L. Jones, author of Lee’s Tigers

Accounts of Charles Curtis, who served in the 5th United States Infantry on the New Mexico and Arizona frontier. This is edited version version of serial installments (originally published in newspapers from 1877-1880) with the addition of biographical information and some historical context, as well as some reorganization to read chronologically and some normalization of language and spelling. Index starts on page 561.

Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the U.S. Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields. In War in the Villages, Ted Easterling examines how well the CAPs performed as a counterinsurgency method, how the Marines adjusted to life in the Vietnamese villages, and how they worked to accomplish their mission. The CAPs generally performed their counterinsurgency role well, but they were hampered by factors beyond their control. Most important was the conflict between the Army and the Marine Corps over an appropriate strategy for the Vietnam War, along with weakness of the government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the strategic and the tactical ability of the North Vietnamese Army. War in the Villages helps to explain how and why this potential was realized and squandered. Marines who served in the CAPs served honorably in difficult circumstances. Most of these …

An elite team of reporters brought the Great War home each week to ten million readers of The Saturday Evening Post. As America’s largest circulation magazine, the Post hired the nation’s best-known and best-paid writers to cover World War I. The Weekly War provides a history of the unique record Post storytellers created of World War I, the distinct imprint the Post made on the field of war reporting, and the ways in which Americans witnessed their first world war. The Weekly War includes representative articles from across the span of the conflict, and Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy complement these works with essays about the history and significance of the magazine, the war, and the writers. By the start of the Great War, The Saturday Evening Post had become the most successful and influential magazine in the United States, a source of entertainment, instruction, and news, as well as a shared experience. World War I served as a four-year experiment in how to report a modern war. The news-gathering strategies and news-controlling practices developed in this war were largely duplicated in World War II and later wars. Over the course of some thousand articles by some of the most …

James L. Freaner was one of America’s first war correspondents covering General Winfield Scott’s campaign during the Mexican War. His letters appeared in newspapers under the byline “Mustang,” and his reports from the front included publication of complete casualty lists (long before official reports became public), detailed battle descriptions, and observations on postwar Mexico. Freaner’s greatest contribution was persuading Nicholas P. Trist, negotiator with Mexico, to ignore his recall and conclude a peace treaty that added California, Nevada, Utah, and other territory to a growing country. From the Halls of the Montezumas is a complete compilation of Freaner’s Mexican War reporting. Editors Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff annotated the text with footnotes identifying people, places, and events, also adding pictures of key figures and maps.

The military career of General James Monroe Williams spanned both the Civil War and the Indian Wars in the West, yet no biography has been published to date on his important accomplishments, until now. From his birth on the northern frontier, westward movement in the Great Migration, rush into the violence of antebellum Kansas Territory, Civil War commands in the Trans-Mississippi, and as a cavalry officer in the Indian Wars, Williams was involved in key moments of American history. Like many who make a difference, Williams was a leader of strong convictions, sometimes impatient with heavy-handed and sluggish authority. Building upon his political opinions and experience as a Jayhawker, Williams raised and commanded the ground-breaking 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment in 1862. His new regiment of black soldiers was the first such organization to engage Confederate troops, and the first to win. He enjoyed victories in Missouri, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), and Arkansas, but also fought in the abortive Red River Campaign and endured defeat and the massacre of his captured black troops at Poison Spring. In 1865, as a brigadier general, Williams led his troops in consolidating control of northern Arkansas. Williams played a key role in taking Indian …

In the opening decades of the 20th century, war reporting remained one of the most well-guarded, thoroughly male bastions of journalism. However, when war erupted in Europe in August 1914, a Boston woman, Mary Boyle O’Reilly, became one of the first journalists to bring the war to American newspapers. A Saturday Evening Post journalist, Mary Roberts Rinehart, became the first journalist, of any country, of any gender, to visit the trenches. These women were only the first wave of female journalists who covered the conflict. American Women Report World War I collects more than 35 of the best of their articles and those that highlight the richness of their contribution to the history of the Great War. Editor Chris Dubbs provides section introductions for background and context to stories such as “Woman Writer Sees Horrors of Battle,” “Star Woman Runs Blockade,” and “America Meets France.” The work of female journalists focuses more squarely on individuals caught in the conflict—including themselves. It offers a valuable counterpoint to the male, horror-of-the-trenches experience and demonstrates how World War I served as a catalyst that enabled women to expand the public forum for their opinions on social and moral issues.

Few works of military history are able to move between the battlefield and academia. But Warriors and Scholars takes the best from both worlds by presenting the viewpoints of senior, eminent military historians on topics of their specialty, alongside veteran accounts for the modern war being discussed. Editors Peter Lane and Ronald Marcello have added helpful contextual and commentary footnotes for student readers. The papers, originally from the University of North Texas's annual Military History Seminar, are organized chronologically from World War II to the present day, making this a modern war reader of great use for the professional and the student. Scholars and topics include David Glantz on the Soviet Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945; Robert Divine on the decision to use the atomic bomb; George Herring on Lyndon Baines Johnson as Commander-in-Chief; and Brian Linn comparing the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq with the 1899-1902 war in the Philippines. Veterans and their topics include flying with the Bloody 100th by John Luckadoo; an enlisted man in the Pacific theater of World War II, by Roy Appleton; a POW in Vietnam, by David Winn; and Cold War duty in Moscow, by Charles Hamm.

"This book provides a well-researched, exhaustive, and fascinating examination of the life of Benjamin Bickerstaff, a desperado who preyed on blacks, Unionists, and others in northeastern Texas during the Reconstruction era until armed citizens killed him in the town of Alvarado in 1869. The work adds to our knowledge of Reconstruction violence and graphically supports the idea that the Civil War in Texas did not really end in 1865 but continued long afterward.”—Carl Moneyhon, author of Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction

In Beyond the Quagmire, thirteen scholars from across disciplines provide a series of provocative, important, and timely essays on the politics, combatants, and memory of the Vietnam War. The essays pose new questions, offer new answers, and establish important lines of debate regarding social, political, military, and memory studies. Part 1 contains four chapters by scholars who explore the politics of war in the Vietnam era. In Part 2, five contributors offer chapters on Vietnam combatants with analyses of race, gender, environment, and Chinese intervention. Part 3 provides four innovative and timely essays on Vietnam in history and memory.

Soon after the close of military operations in the American Civil War, another war began over how it would be remembered by future generations. The prisoner-of-war issue has figured prominently in Northern and Southern writing about the conflict. Northerners used tales of Andersonville to demonize the Confederacy, while Southerners vilified Northern prison policies to show the depths to which Yankees had sunk to attain victory. Over the years the postwar Northern portrayal of Andersonville as fiendishly designed to kill prisoners in mass quantities has largely been dismissed. The Lost Cause characterization of Union prison policies as criminally negligent and inhumane, however, has shown remarkable durability. Northern officials have been portrayed as turning their military prisons into concentration camps where Southern prisoners were poorly fed, clothed, and sheltered, resulting in inexcusably high numbers of deaths. Andersonvilles of the North, by James M. Gillispie, represents the first broad study to argue that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. This study is not an attempt to “whitewash” Union prison policies or make light of Confederate prisoner mortality. But once the careful reader disregards unreliable postwar polemics, and focuses exclusively on the more reliable …

From 1840 through 1844 East Texas was wracked by murderous violence between Regulator and Moderator factions. More than thirty men were killed in assassinations, lynchings, ambushes, street fights, and pitched battles. The sheriff of Harrison County was murdered, and so was the founder of Marshall, as well as a former district judge. Senator Robert Potter, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, was slain by Regulators near his Caddo Lake home. Courts ceased to operate and anarchy reigned in Shelby County, Panola District, and Harrison County. Only the personal intervention of President Sam Houston and an invasion of the militia of the Republic of Texas halted the bloodletting. The Regulator-Moderator War was the first and largest of the many blood feuds of Texas. Bill O'Neal includes rosters of names of the Regulator and Moderator factions arranged by the counties in which the individuals were associated, along with a roster of the victims of the war.

Louisiana’s Neutral Strip, an area of pine forests, squats between the Calcasieu and Sabine Rivers on the border of East Texas. Originally a lawless buffer zone between Spain and the United States, its hardy residents formed tight-knit communities for protection and developed a reliance on self, kin, and neighbor. In the early 1900s, the timber boom sliced through the forests and disrupted these dense communities. Mill towns sprang up, and the promise of money lured land speculators, timber workers, unionists, and a host of other characters, such as the outlaw Leather Britches Smith. That moment continues to shape the place’s cultural consciousness, and people today fashion a lore connected to this time. In a fascinating exploration of the region, Keagan LeJeune unveils the legend of Leather Britches, paralleling the stages of the outlaw’s life to the Neutral Strip’s formation. LeJeune retells each stage of Smith’s life: his notorious past, his audacious deeds of robbery and even generosity, his rumored connection to a local union strike—the Grabow War—significant in the annals of labor history, and his eventual death. As the outlaw’s life vividly unfolds, Always for the Underdog also reveals the area’s history and cultural landscape. Often using the particulars of …

Women in Civil War Texas is the first book dedicated to the unique experiences of Texas women during this time. It connects Texas women’s lives to southern women’s history and shares the diversity of experiences of women in Texas during the Civil War. Contributors explore Texas women and their vocal support for secession, coping with their husbands’ wartime absences, the importance of letter-writing, and how pro-Union sentiment caused serious difficulties for women. They also analyze the effects of ethnicity, focusing on African American, German, and Tejana women’s experiences. Finally, two essays examine the problem of refugee women in east Texas and the dangers facing western frontier women. The contents include: "Everyone has the war fever" / Vicki Betts -- Caroline Sedberry, politician's wife / Dorothy Ewing -- He said, she said / Beverly Rowe -- Finding joy through hard times / Brittany Bounds -- Black Texas women and the freedom war / Bruce A. Glasrud -- Black women and Supreme Court decisions during the Civil War era / Linda S. Hudson -- Mexican-Texan women in the Civil War / Jerry Thompson and Elizabeth Mata -- Courage on a Texas frontier / Judith Dykes-Hoffman -- "In favor of our fathers' country …

“There are some poets we admire for a mastery that allows them to tell a story, express an epiphany, form a conclusion, all gracefully and even memorably— yet language in some way remains external to them. But there are other poets in whom language seems to arise spontaneously, fulfilling a design in which the poet’s intention feels secondary. Books by these poets we read with a gathering sense of excitement and recognition at the linguistic web being drawn deliberately tighter around a nucleus of human experience that is both familiar and completely new, until at last it seems no phrase is misplaced and no word lacks its resonance with what has come before. Such a book is Austin Segrest’s Door to Remain.”— Karl Kirchwey, author of Poems of Rome and judge

The AEF in Print is an anthology that tells the story of U.S. involvement in World War I through newspaper and magazine articles—precisely how the American public experienced the Great War. From April 1917 to November 1918, Americans followed the war in their local newspapers and popular magazines. The book’s chapters are organized chronologically: Mobilization, Arrival in Europe, Learning to Fight, American Firsts, Battles, and the Armistice. Also included are topical chapters, such as At Sea, In the Air, In the Trenches, Wounded Warriors, and Heroes. “Some of these stories are real gems. Irving Cobb’s account of the sinking of the SS Tuscania, for example, is absolutely riveting, and the same can be said of William Shepherd’s description of life aboard US Navy destroyers in the Atlantic, Floyd Gibbons’s narration of his wounding at Belleau Wood, and George Pattullo’s roll-out of the Sergeant York legend.” —Steven Trout, author of On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance. “The well-written and evocative articles bring the war to life.” —Jennifer Keene, author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America.

Following the Civil War, the United States was fully engaged in a bloody conflict with ex-Confederates, conservative Democrats, and members of organized terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, for control of the southern states. Texas became one of the earliest battleground states in the War of Reconstruction. Throughout this era, white Texans claimed that Radical Republicans in Congress were attempting to dominate their state through “Negro-Carpetbag-Scalawag rule.” In response to these perceived threats, whites initiated a violent guerilla war that was designed to limit support for the Republican Party. They targeted loyal Unionists throughout the South, especially African Americans who represented the largest block of Republican voters in the region. Was the Reconstruction era in the Lone Star State simply a continuation of the Civil War? Evidence presented by sixteen contributors in this new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, argues that this indeed was the case. Topics include the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the occupying army, focusing on both sides of the violence. Several contributors analyze the origins of the Ku Klux Klan and its operations in Texas, how the Texas State Police attempted to quell the violence, and Tejano adjustment to Reconstruction. Other chapters …

Civil War Heavy Explosive Ordnance is the definitive reference book on Union and Confederate large caliber artillery projectiles, torpedoes, and mines. Some of these projectiles are from the most famous battles of the Civil War, such as those at Fort Sumter, Charleston, Vicksburg, and Richmond. Others were fired from famous cannon, such as the “Swamp Angel” of Charleston and “Whistling Dick” of Vicksburg. And some were involved in torpedo attacks against major warships. Jack Bell covers more than 360 projectiles from public and private collections in smoothbore calibers of 32-pounder and up, rifled projectiles of 4-inch caliber and larger, and twenty-one Union and Confederate torpedoes and mines. Each data sheet shows multiple views of the projectile or torpedo (using more than 1,000 photos) with data including diameter, weight, gun used to fire it, rarity index, and provenance. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to Civil War historians, museum curators, field archaeologists, private collectors, dealers, and consultants on unexploded ordnance. “This will become a required reference guide at every Civil War site and related museum.”--Wayne E. Stark, Civil War artillery historian

Book documenting the history of the 1st Infantry Divisions cavalry unit fighting in Operation Desert Storm based on personal accounts and recollections of personnel, squadron documents, and contextual information about the conflict.

For Victor Hugo, the nineteenth century could be remembered by only its first two years, which established peace in Europe and France's supremacy on the continent. For General Lam Quang Thi, the twentieth century had only twenty-five years: from 1950 to 1975, during which the Republic of Vietnam and its Army grew up and collapsed with the fall of Saigon. This is the story of those twenty-five years. General Thi fought in the Indochina War as a battery commander on the side of the French. When Viet Minh aggression began after the Geneva Accords, he served in the nascent Vietnamese National Army, and his career covers this army's entire lifespan. He was deputy commander of the 7th Infantry Division, and in 1965 he assumed command of the 9th Infantry Division. In 1966, at the age of thirty-three, he became one of the youngest generals in the Vietnamese Army. He participated in the Tet Offensive before being removed from the front lines for political reasons. When North Vietnam launched the 1972 Great Offensive, he was brought back to the field and eventually promoted to commander of an Army Corps Task Force along the Demilitarized Zone. With the fall of Saigon, he …

During World War II, tens of thousands of African Americans served in segregated combat units in U.S. armed forces. The majority of these units were found in the U.S. Army, and African Americans served in every one of the combat arms. They found opportunities for leadership unparalleled in the rest of American society at the time. Several reached the field grade officer ranks, and one officer reached the rank of brigadier general. Beyond the Army, the Marine Corps refused to enlist African Americans until ordered to do so by the president in June 1942, and two African American combat units were formed and did see service during the war. While the U.S. Navy initially resisted extending the role of African American sailors beyond kitchens, eventually the crew of two ships was composed exclusively of African Americans. The Coast Guard became the first service to integrate—initially with two shipboard experiments and then with the integration of most of their fleet. Finally, the famous Tuskegee airmen are covered in the chapter on air warfare. Proud Warriors makes the case that the wartime experiences of combat units such as the Tank Battalions and the Tuskegee Airmen ultimately convinced President Truman to desegregate the …

Historical description of military operations organized into eight chapters covering frontier Texas: [1] Tribal Warfare of Colonial Tejas, 1822-1835, [2] The War for Texian Independence, 1835-1836, [3] Conflicts of the Early Texas Republic, 1836-1838, [4] Conflicts of the Middle Texas Republic, 1838-1840, [5] Conflicts of the Late Texas Republic, 1841-1845, [6] The Mexican-American War, 1846-1848, [7] Conflicts of Antebellum Texas, 1846-1861, and [8] The War for Confederate Independence, 1861-1865. Index starts on page 393.

Stilwell and Mountbatten in Burma explores the relationship between American General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) and the South East Asia Command (SEAC) between October 1943 and October 1944, within the wider context of Anglo-American relations during World War II. Using original material from both British and American archives, Jonathan Templin Ritter discusses the military, political, and diplomatic aspects of Anglo-American cooperation, the personalities involved, and where British and American policies both converged and diverged over Southeast Asia. Although much has been written about CBI, Stilwell and China, and Mountbatten, no published comparison study has focused on the relationship between the two men during the twelve-month period in which their careers overlapped. This book bridges the gap in the literature between Mountbatten’s earlier naval career and his later role as the last Viceroy of British India. It also presents original archival material that explains why Stilwell was so anti-British, including his 1935 memorandum titled “The British,” and his original margin notes to Mountbatten’s farewell letter to him in 1944. Finally, it presents other original archival material that refutes previous books that have accused Stilwell of needlessly sacrificing the lives of …