This book is an examination of American army legal proceedings that resulted from a series of moments when soldiers in a war zone crossed a line between performing their legitimate functions and committing crimes against civilians, or atrocities.

Using individual judicial proceedings held within war-time Southeast Asia, Louise Barnett analyses how the American military legal system handled crimes against civilians and determines what these cases reveal about the way that war produces atrocity against civilians. Presenting these atrocities and subsequent trials in a way that considers both the personal and the institutional the author considers how and why atrocity happens, the terrain of justification, and the degree to which the army and American society have been willing to take military crimes against civilians seriously.

Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia will be of interest to students, scholars and professionals interested in Military Justice, Military history and Southeast Asian History more generally.

This book is an examination of American army legal proceedings that resulted from a series of moments when soldiers in a war zone crossed a line between performing their legitimate functions and committing crimes against civilians, or atrocities.

Using individual judicial proceedings held within war-time Southeast Asia, Louise Barnett analyses how the American military legal system handled crimes against civilians and determines what these cases reveal about the way that war produces atrocity against civilians. Presenting these atrocities and subsequent trials in a way that considers both the personal and the institutional the author considers how and why atrocity happens, the terrain of justification, and the degree to which the army and American society have been willing to take military crimes against civilians seriously.

Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia will be of interest to students, scholars and professionals interested in Military Justice, Military history and Southeast Asian History more generally.

For more than a century, Americans have been captivated by the legend of General George Armstrong Custer. But the various truths of Custer's life and last stand prove elusive. Why are we so taken with the myth and the so-called mystery behind the man?

In a field teeming with highly partisan and wildly speculative treatments of Custer, Louise Barnett enters with a volume widely acclaimed by both military and cultural historians as the most balanced account of his life and legend. Custer's life spans two great eras of American history, and Barnett's commanding work pushes beyond the existing literature to a comprehensive view of this controversial figure.

When Martha Summerhayes (1844–1926) came as a bride to Fort Russell in Wyoming Territory in 1874, she “saw not much in those first few days besides bright buttons, blue uniforms, and shining swords,� but soon enough the hard facts of army life began to intrude. Remonstrating with her husband, Jack Wyder Summerhayes, that she had only three rooms and a kitchen instead of “a whole house,� she was informed that “women are not reckoned in at all in the War Department.�   Although Martha Summerhayes’s recollections span a quarter of a century and recount life at a dozen army posts, the heart of this book concerns her experiences during the 1870s in Arizona, where the harsh climate, rattlesnakes, cactus thorns, white desperadoes, and other inconveniences all made for a less-than-desirable posting for the Summerhayeses.  First printed in 1908, Vanished Arizona is Summerhayes’s memoir of her years as a military wife as her husband’s Eighth Regiment conducted Gen. George Crook’s expedition against the Apaches. It was so well received that she became an instant celebrity and the book a timeless classic. The book retains its place securely among the essential primary records of the frontier-military West because of the narrative skill of the author and her delight in life.   

The honeymoon of Elizabeth Bacon and George Armstrong Custer was interrupted in 1864 by his call to duty with the Army of the Potomac. Her entreaties to be allowed to travel along set the pattern of her future life. From that time onward, she did indeed accompany General Custer on all his major assignments except the summer Indian campaigns, "the only woman," she said, "who always rode with the regiment." This is the story of Elizabeth B. Custer (1842-1933), told in her own words. She was not only a housewife on the Plains; she was whatever the occasion demanded: nurse to a group of frostbitten soldiers; any-hour-of-the-day hostess to the regiment, since her husband was not fond of entertaining; the garrison's favorite confidante (and many an interesting story she has to tell); and would-be Indian fighter whenever the women of the regiment had to be left alone. Boots and Saddles also offers a gentle, loving portrait of George Armstrong Custer, husband and man, by the person who knew him best. Elizabeth Custer's absolute devotion to him is revealed in every line of her story, which ends, appropriately enough, with the day on which she received the news of the disaster at Little Big Horn.

Heart's Bouquet is an insightful collection of thirteen lessons designed to help Christian women mature into all that Christ has planned for them to be. The spiritual beauty of a woman must be cultivated like a garden. Beautiful women, like beautiful flowers, require hard work, preparation, patience, pruning, and the love of a skilled gardener. Christian women must be rooted in God's Word to achieve their ultimate spiritual beauty. Some are planted in more difficult environments than others, but, with God's help and nourishment, all can blossom into their full beauty. These lessons are classic, timeless studies prepared by one who has already gone home to be with the Lord. She touched many lives for good during her years on earth, and she continues to teach by her godly example and the written works she has left behind. Allow her to help cultivate your heart's garden into the beautiful legacy that you were designed by God to produce.

In April 1879, on a remote Texas military base, a decorated army officer of dubious moral reputation faced court-martial. The trial involved shocking issues, and top U.S. Army officials got involved; General Sherman himself made it his mission to see that Captain Andrew Geddes was punished for his alleged crime. What had Geddes done? He had accused a fellow officer, Louis Orleman, of incest with his teenaged daughter, Lillie. The army charged not Orleman but Geddes with "conduct unbecoming a gentleman"—for daring to speak of such a taboo subject.

Barnett offers readers a compelling narrative of this important trial and a nuanced examination of post-Civil War attitudes toward sexuality, parental discipline, the army, and the appropriate division between public and private life.

Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own time concerning his relations with women and his representations of them in his writings. For over twenty years he regarded Esther Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed never to have seen her alone. From his time to our own there has been speculation that the two were secretly married--since their relationship seemed so inexplicable then and now. For thirteen of the years that Swift seemed committed to Stella as the acknowledged woman in his life, he maintained a clandestine--but apparently also nonsexual--relationship with another woman, Esther Van Homrigh, or "Vanessa." Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women looks again at these much-examined relationships and at others that reveal Swift as a man who enjoyed the company of a number of women as pupils and as ministrants to his various needs.
Swift, a man with a complex private life, was also a writer whose satiric portraits of women could be unsparing. While Swift often criticized women for frivolous pastimes and idle chatter, his most notorious texts on women image their bodies as loathsome: as he once wrote in a serious political tract, a woman is a "nauseous, unwholesome carcass." Such representations cross a line by showing a repugnance for women as a sex, the biological other. They have led, not surprisingly, to repeated charges of misogyny, an issue that Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women addresses at some length. This first book-length treatment of Swift and women comprehensively examines Swift's attitude toward women in all their manifestations in his work and life: as intimates, acquaintances, proteges, wives, mothers, nurses, disobedient daughters, young women who marry older men, and--finally--as poets and critics.