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In fighting the Philippine-American War, the United States counted
heavily on twenty-five new regiments raised in the summer of 1899:
the United States Volunteers (USVs). The USVs outnumbered regular
regiments in eleven of eighteen military pacification districts,
particularly through the southern archipelago, where they bore the
brunt of field service, combat, and disease casualties until
relieved in spring 1901 by a reconstituted Regular Army. The US
Volunteers in the Southern Philippines offers the first full
account of this historically unique 35,000-man force - and in the
process describes how the USVs decisively contributed to the United
States' single most successful counterinsurgency campaign waged
outside the Western Hemisphere. A close examination of the military
achievements, garrison life, and institutional characteristics of
the US Volunteers reveals how the force effectively combined the
best elements of the American regular and militia traditions during
its brief existence - abetted by an Army medical system vastly
improved since debilitating losses in Cuba and the United States
during 1898. Countering recent readings of the pacification of the
Philippines as a near-genocidal event, John Scott Reed uses
court-martial records to argue for a high disciplinary and
behavioral standard among the USVs - in garrison, in the field,
and, most critically, in their interactions with Filipino
villagers. This standard, his evidence suggests, was supported by a
late-Victorian, reflexively patriotic sense of masculinity that
motivated the Volunteers, along with a profound belief in the
self-evident superiority of American institutions. He also draws on
recent Filipino scholarship to clarify the role of landed and
commercial elites in initially supporting the Philippine Revolution
and later collaborating with the US occupation. Bridging military
history and post-colonial studies, Reed's work provides a new and
clearer understanding of the short-lived but highly effective US
Volunteer force, and a new perspective on a critical moment in
America's military and colonial past.
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