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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
A newly minted second lieutenant fresh from West Point, Hugh Lenox
Scott arrived on the northern Great Plains in the wake of the
Little Bighorn debacle. The Seventh Cavalry was seeking to subdue
the Plains tribes and confine them to reservations, and Scott
adopted the role of negotiator and advocate for the Indian
"adversaries." He thus embarked on a career unique in the history
of the U.S. military and the western frontier. Hugh Lenox Scott,
1853-1934: Reluctant Warrior is the first book to tell the full
story of this unlikely, self-avowed "soldier of peace," whose
career, stretching from Little Bighorn until after World War I,
reflected profound historical changes. The taste for adventure that
drew Scott to the military also piqued his interest in the tenacity
of Native cultures in an environment rife with danger and
uncertainty. Armand S. La Potin describes how Scott embraced the
lifeways of the Northern Plains peoples, making a study of their
cultures, their symbols, and most notably, their use of an
intertribal sign language to facilitate trade. Negotiating with
dissident bands of Indians whose lands were threatened by Anglo
settlers and commercial interests, he increasingly found himself
advocating federal responsibility for tribal welfare and assuming
the role of "Indian reformer." La Potin makes clear that "reform"
was understood within the context of Scott's own culture, which
scaled "civilization" to the so-called Anglo race. Accordingly,
Scott promoted the "civilization" of Native Americans through
assimilation into Anglo-American society-an approach he continued
in his later interactions with the Moro Muslims of the southern
Philippines, where he served as a military governor. Although he
eventually rose to the rank of army chief of staff, over time Scott
the peacemaker and Indian reformer saw his career stall as Native
tribes ceased to be seen as a military threat and military merit
was increasingly defined by battlefield experience. From these
pages the picture emerges of an uncommon figure in American
military history, at once at odds with and defined by his times.
In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues
that the political ideology and racial views of American
Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism
or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the
millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of
antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved
deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative
of the North versus the South. Moving beyond the traditional
optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants
of the Civil War era into ""premillenarian"" and
""postmillenarian"" camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian
Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the
arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing.
This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances.
Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to
actively perfect the world via moral reform-of self and society-and
free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or
racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally
comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding
human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans' utopian plans to
reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views
like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least
acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve
white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American
Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change
requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the
reconstruction of southern society. Millenarian Dreams and Racial
Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil
War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial
ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the
postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states
during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union
victory in 1865.
This epic story opens at the hour the Greatest Generation went
to war on December 7, 1941, and follows four U.S. Navy ships and
their crews in the Pacific until their day of reckoning three years
later with a far different enemy: a deadly typhoon. In December
1944, while supporting General MacArthur's invasion of the
Philippines, Admiral William "Bull" Halsey neglected the Law of
Storms, placing the mighty U.S. Third Fleet in harm's way. Drawing
on extensive interviews with nearly every living survivor and
rescuer, as well as many families of lost sailors, transcripts and
other records from naval courts of inquiry, ships' logs, personal
letters, and diaries, Bruce Henderson finds some of the story's
truest heroes exhibiting selflessness, courage, and even
defiance.
Many aspects of Britain's involvement in World War Two only slowly
emerged from beneath the barrage of official secrets and popular
misconception. One of the most controversial issues, the internment
of 'enemy aliens' (and also British subjects) on the Isle of Man,
received its first thorough examination in this remarkable account
by Connery Chappell of life in the Manx camps between 1940 and
1945. At the outbreak of war there were approximately 75,000 people
of Germanic origin living in Britain, and Whitehall decided to set
up Enemy Alien Tribunals to screen these 'potential security
risks'. The entry of Italy into the war almost doubled the
workload. The first tribunal in February 1940 considered only 569
cases as high enough risks to warrant internment. The Isle of Man
was chosen as the one place sufficiently removed from areas of
military importance, but by the end of the year the number of enemy
aliens on the island had reached 14,000. With the use of diaries,
broadsheets, newspapers and personal testimonies, the author shows
how a traditional holiday isle was transformed into an internment
camp. of earning extra income. Eventually the internees took part
in local farm work, ran their own camp newspapers and even set up
internal businesses. With inmates of the calibre of Sir Nikolaus
Pevsner, Lord Weidenfeld, Sir Charles Forte, Professor Geoffrey
Elton and R.W. 'Tiny' Rowland, the life of the camp quickly took on
a busy and constructive air; but the picture was not always such a
happy one, as angry disputes flared between Fascist inmates and
their Jewish neighbours, and a dangerous riot forced the
intervention of the Home Office. Even now, there remains the
persistent question never settled satisfactorily. Were the
internments ever justified or even consistent?
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