From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation's defense. This book breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as "buffalo soldiers" played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past. Now, 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army the reader literally can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the "Stars and Stripes" to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John "Black Jack" Pershing.

John Langellier and C. Paul Loane have collaborated to produce a resource that not only builds upon the information provided by their predecessors, but also contributes fresh material to the body of existing knowledge. These two highly respected and long-time students of American military history have spent decades locating and analyzing specimens in both public and private collections in the United States and Europe. They have woven their individual research into a concise narrative, accompanied by an extensive selection of illustrations and informative captions. Their overview takes the reader on a journey through more than a half century of change, illustrating the variety of factors that contributed to the evolution of U.S. military headgear during this dynamic period.

In this new, extensively researched volume, U.S. Army uniforms - including enlisted soldiers, officers, insignia, and headgear - from the years 1848-1873 are examined in exacting detail. For the first time, original accounts from official reports, diaries, and other primary sources will be combined with color photographs of extraordinary surviving specimens, hundreds of important black and white images, as well as artwork from the period to tell the story of what the American soldier wore during these years. Army Blue represents more than twenty years of research in major institutions and private collections throughout the United States, and offers a concise overview of a topic which promises to be must reading for collectors, modelers, and curators alike.

In this new book, the development of an altogether new uniform for troops of the United States Army, a few years after the Civil War, has never been told so well or so comprehensively. In this volume, the sequel to the author's highly praised Army Blue: The Uniform of Uncle Sam's Regulars, 1848-1873, John Langellier continues the story of the evolution of American army uniforms during a critical period that saw experimentation and innovation finally surmount conservatism to produce some of the more practically functional and aesthetically appealing martial clothing in American history. The breadth of Langellier's research, coupled with his years of accumulated expertise in the study of historical army uniforms, is evident throughout, and together make this book the most thorough and precise accounting the topic has ever received.