This work focuses on the highly controversial Project 100,000 which was initiated in the midst of the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty during the Johnson administration. With the project as a model, the authors easily show exactly how the military examined, selected, classified, trained, and utilized the one third of our nation generally considered untrainable and unemployable. In addition to providing detailed statistics on the performance of lower aptitude youth in the military for the last half-century, this work analyzes experiments conducted by the armed forces to develop effective and efficient ways to train these youths.

The introduction of absolutism in France has conventionally been seen as a process of centralization imposed from the top down. The Crown, the chancellor, the principal ministers, and the secretaries of state are all supposed to have worked in concert to break the power of the nobles and governors, abolish local Estates, and even intervene in the selection of municipal councillors. The fiscal and institutional development of the province of Dauphine, however, suggests a very different absolutist dynamic. While it is clear that the Crown wanted to standardize and, when possible, centralize the institutions of the province, it is equally clear that, from the 1540s on, certain groups anxious for provincial tax reform actively encouraged royal intervention. Daniel Hickey analyses the individuals and groups that directed each stage of the struggle for tax reform: rural villagers, the elite of the ten major cities, lawyers and legal groups, and new and old nobles. Each group expressed itself through the means available to it: peasant revolt, courtroom hearings, local village meetings, or lobbying at court. The social alliances made during the struggle were temporary in nature and often united groups that would normally have been opposed to each other. But they were effective. Hickey identifies two major results of this social movement: the Crown was able to take major steps towards integrating Dauphine into the kingdom, and the province's fiscal structure underwent a major reform.