Full color, high quality reprint of 1980 study.

Although conscientious objection is a long-standing phenomenon, it has only recently become a major factor affecting armed forces and society. The only comprehensive, comparative scholarly study of conscientious objection to military service, this book examines the history of the practice in the Western world and state policies that have grown up in response to it. It shows how the contemporary refusal to bear arms is likely to be secular and widespread rather than religious and marginal, now including service people (as seen in the 1991 War in the Persian Gulf) as well as conscription resisters. No account of civil-military relations or peace movements in advanced industrial countries is complete without reference to conscientious objection, and this book will be the standard text on the subject.

The immediacy and apparent truth of the visual image, plus film and television's ostensible ability to propel viewers back into the past, confers a sense of veracity on the most powerful historical films. Examining the effect of film and television on perceptions of World War II and history is the guiding purpose of this collection of original essays.

Between 1890 and 1920, the forces accompanying industrialization sent the familiar nineteenth-century world plummeting toward extinction. The traditional countryside with its villages and family farms was eclipsed by giant corporations and sprawling cities. In lively, accessible prose, John Chambers incorporates into his book the latest scholarship about the social, cultural, political, and economic changes that produced modern America. He illuminates the experiences of blacks, Asians, Latinos, as well as other working men and women in the cities and countryside as they struggled to improve their lives in a transformed economy. Striding these pages are many of the prominent individuals who shaped the attitudes and institutions of modern America: J. P. Morgan and corporate reorganization; Jane Addams and the origin of modern social work; Mary Pickford and the new star-oriented motion picture industry; and the radical labor challenge of "Big Bill" Haywood and the "Wobblies." While recognizing a "progressive ethos"-a mixture of idealistic vision and pragmatic reforms that characterized the period-Chambers elaborates the role of civic volunteerism as well as the state in achieving directed social change. He also emphasizes the importance of radical and conservative forces in shaping the so-called "Progressive Era." The revised edition of this classic work has an updated bibliography and a new preface, both of which incorporate particularly the new social and cultural research of the past decade. John Whiteclay Chambers II is professor of history at Rutgers University. He recently co-edited The New Conscientious Objection and is the author of To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America.

Full color, high quality reprint of 1980 study.