Lew Wallace (1827-1905) won fame for his novel, Ben-Hur, and for his negotiations with William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, during the Lincoln County Wars of 1878-81. He was a successful lawyer, a notable Indiana politician, and a capable military administrator. And yet, as history and his own memoir tell us, Wallace would have traded all these accolades for a moment of military glory in the Civil War to save the Union. Where previous accounts have sought to discredit or defend Wallace's performance as a general in the war, author Christopher R. Mortenson takes a more nuanced approach. Combining military biography, historical analysis, and political insight, Politician in Uniform provides an expanded and balanced view of Wallace's military career - and offers the reader a new understanding of the experience of a voluntary general like Lew Wallace. A rising politician from Indiana, Wallace became a Civil War general through his political connections. While he had much success as a regimental commander, he ran into trouble at the brigade and division levels. A natural rivalry and tension between West Pointers and political generals might have accounted for some of these difficulties, but many, as Mortenson shows us, were of Wallace's own making. A temperamental officer with a ""rough"" conception of manhood, Wallace often found his mentors wanting, disrespected his superiors, and vigorously sought opportunities for glorious action in the field, only to perform poorly when given the chance. Despite his flaws, Mortenson notes, Wallace contributed both politically and militarily to the war effort - in the fight for Fort Donelson and at the Battle of Shiloh, in the defense of Cincinnati and southern Indiana, and in the administration of Baltimore and the Middle Department. Detailing these and other instances of Wallace's success along with his weaknesses and failures, Mortenson provides an unusually thorough and instructive picture of this complicated character in his military service. His book clearly demonstrates the unique complexities of evaluating the performance of a politician in uniform.

In this biography Rodney Atwood details the life of General Lord Rawlinson of Trent (1864-1925), a distinguished British soldier whose career culminated in decisive victories on the Western Front in 1918 and command of the Indian Army in the early 1920s. He served his soldier's apprenticeship in the Victorian colonial wars in Burma, the Sudan and South Africa. His career provides a lens through which to examine the British Army in the late-19th and early-20th century. In the South African War (1899-1902) Rawlinson's ideas aided the defence of Ladysmith, and he distinguished himself leading a mobile column in the guerrilla war. In the First World War he held an important command in most of the British Expeditionary Force's battles on the Western Front. He bears a heavy part-responsibility for the disastrous first day of the Somme, but later in the battle his successful tactics inflicted heavy losses on the enemy. His Western Front career culminated in a series of victories beginning at Amiens. He commanded the Indian Army between 1920 and 1925 at a time of military and political tension following the 3rd Afghan War and the Amritsar Massacre. He introduced necessary reforms, cut expenditure at a time of postwar retrenchment and began commissioning Indians to replace British officers. He would have taken up the post of CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff), thus being the only British soldier to hold these two top posts. He died, however, four days after his sixty-first birthday. Drawing extensively on archival material including Rawlinson's own engagingly-written letters and diaries, this thorough examination of his life will be of great interest to those studying British military history, imperial history and the First World War.

Dillon J. Carroll's Invisible Wounds examines the effects of military service, particularly combat, on the psyches and emotional well-being of Civil War soldiers-Black and white, North and South. Soldiers faced harsh military discipline, arduous marches, poor rations, debilitating diseases, and the terror of battle, all of which took a severe psychological toll. While mental collapses sometimes occurred during the war, the emotional damage soldiers incurred more often became apparent in the postwar years, when it manifested itself in disturbing and self-destructive behavior. Carroll explores the dynamic between the families of mentally ill veterans and the superintendents of insane asylums, as well as between those superintendents and doctors in the nascent field of neurology, who increasingly believed the central nervous system or cultural and social factors caused mental illness. Invisible Wounds is a sweeping reevaluation of the mental damage inflicted by the nation's most tragic conflict.