Böcker utgivna av University Press of Kansas

Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award If the Battle of the Bulge was Germany's last gasp, it was also America's proving ground-the largest single action fought by the U.S. Army in World War II. Taking a new approach to an old story, Harold Winton widens our field of vision by showing how victory in this legendary campaign was built upon the remarkable resurrection of our truncated interwar army, an overhaul that produced the effective commanders crucial to GI success in beating back the Ardennes counteroffensive launched by Hitler's forces.Winton's is the first study of the Bulge to examine leadership at the largely neglected level of corps command. Focusing on the decisions and actions of six Army corps commandersLeonard Gerow, Troy Middleton, Matthew Ridgway, John Millikin, Manton Eddy, and J. Lawton Collinshe recreates their role in this epic struggle through a mosaic of narratives that take the commanders from the pre-war training grounds of America to the crucible of war in the icy-cold killing fields of Belgium and Luxembourg. Winton introduces the story of each phase of the Bulge with a theater-level overview of the major decisions and events that shaped the corps battles and, for the first time, fully integrates the crucial role of airpower into our understanding of how events unfolded on the ground. Unlike most accounts of the Ardennes that chronicle only the periods of German and American initiative, Winton's study describes an intervening middle phase in which the initiative was fiercely contested by both sides and the outcome uncertain. His inclusion of the principal American and German commanders adds yet another valuable layer to this rich tapestry of narrative and analysis.Ultimately, Winton argues that the flexibility of the corps structure and the competence of the men who commanded the six American corps that fought in the Bulge contributed significantly to the ultimate victory. Chronicling the human drama of commanding large numbers of soldiers in battle, he has produced an artful blend of combat narrative, collective biography, and institutional history that contributes significantly to the broader understanding of World War II as a whole. With the recent modularization of the U.S. Army division, which makes this command echelon a re-creation of the corps of World War II, Corps Commanders of the Bulge also has distinct relevance to current issues of Army transformation.

Nancy Beck Young presents a documented study of Lou Henry Hoover's White House years, 1929-1933, showing that, far from a passive prelude to Eleanor Roosevelt, she was a true innovator.

Revealing the interplay between foreign policy, domestic politics, and public opinion, the author of this book argues that 1950 was a pivotal year for the USA. The convergence of Korea, McCarthy, and the Bomb, he states, wounded the nation in ways from which it never fully recovered.

What was for the United States a struggle against creeping Communism in Southeast Asia was for the people of North Vietnam a "great patriotic war" that saw its eventual victory against a military Goliath. Victory in Vietnam is the People's Army of Vietnam's own account of two decades of struggle, now available for the first time in English.

Using memoirs and histories, letters and diaries, early photos and old maps, Susan Schrepfer compares male and female mountaineering narratives to show the ways in which gender affected what men and women found to value in rocky heights, and how their different perceptions together defined the wilderness preservation movement for the nation..

Gaspar Perez de Villagra AwardThe Dine have been a pastoral people for as long as they can remember; but when livestock reductions in the New Deal era forced many into the labor market, some scholars felt that Navajo culture would inevitably decline. Although they lost a great deal with the waning of their sheep-centered economy, Colleen O'Neill argues that Navajo culture persisted. O'Neill's book challenges the conventional notion that the introduction of market capitalism necessarily leads to the destruction of native cultural values. She shows instead that contact with new markets provided the Navajos with ways to diversify their household-based survival strategies. Through adapting to new kinds of work, Navajos actually participated in the "e;reworking of modernity"e; in their region, weaving an alternate, culturally specific history of capitalist development. O'Neill chronicles a history of Navajo labor that illuminates how cultural practices and values influenced what it meant to work for wages or to produce commodities for the marketplace. Through accounts of Navajo coal miners, weavers, and those who left the reservation in search of wage work, she explores the tension between making a living the Navajo way and "e;working elsewhere."e; Focusing on the period between the 1930s and the early 1970sa time when Navajos saw a dramatic transformation of their economyO'Neill shows that Navajo cultural values were flexible enough to accommodate economic change. She also examines the development of a Navajo working class after 1950, when corporate development of Navajo mineral resources created new sources of wage work and allowed former migrant workers to remain on the reservation. Focusing on the household rather than the workplace, O'Neill shows how the Navajo home serves as a site of cultural negotiation and a source for affirming identity. Her depiction of weaving particularly demonstrates the role of women as cultural arbitrators, providing mothers with cultural power that kept them at the center of what constituted "e;Navajo-ness."e; Ultimately, Working the Navajo Way offers a new way to think about Navajo history, shows the essential resilience of Navajo lifeways, and argues for a more dynamic understanding of Native American culture overall.

Shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, Congress established the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War. The COCOW generated controversy throughout the war, and its legacy sparks debate even. In the wake of both critical and sympathetic appraisals, Bruce Tap now offers the first history of COCOW's activities, focusing on the nature of its power and its influence on military policy.

In most studies of nationalism, the United States is curiously ignored or is examined only during its colonial and republican periods. But it was the Civil War, argues Susan-Mary Grant, that truly formed the American nation by unifying the states once and for all, abolishing slavery, and setting the country on the path to modernity.

While war is most effectively waged as a united effort, the United States has consistently waged military conflict without firm central direction. Throughout our history, observes Michael Pearlman, the waging of war has been subject to continuous bargaining and compromise among competing governmental and military factions. What passes for strategy emerged from this process.

In 1940 the US Army Signal Intelligence Service broke the Japanese diplomatic code. Resurrecting Oshima Hiroshi's decoded communications, Carl Boyd provides a unique look at the Nazis from the perspective of a close foreign observer and ally. He uses Oshima's own words to reveal the thought and strategies of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis, with whom Oshima associated.

Over the course of two centuries, Americans have tried to tame the Missouri River. Writing in a new tradition of environmental history, Robert Kelley Schneiders takes a long historical view to reconstruct the Missouri Valley environment before Euro-American settlement and then trace the environmental transformations resulting from the development projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In recent years, controversies over abortion, school prayer, and religious cults have raised new questions about the delicate balance between church and state, between true believers and civic authority. John West shows that America's Founders had already anticipated and answered such questions by carefully defining religion's proper role in politics.

Underscoring an emerging revisionist view of the American Expeditionary Forces, David Trask argues that the performances of the AEF and General John J. Pershing were much more flawed than conventional accounts have suggested. This can best be seen, he shows, by analysing coalition warfare at the level of grand tactics.

Historians, while recognizing the emergence of a pre-Civil War professional army, have generally placed the solid foundation of military professionalism in the post-Civil War era. William Skelton maintains, however, that the early national and antebellum eras were crucial to the rise of the American profession of arms.

Features the best and most influential essays by Donald Pisani, one the US's leading environmental and western historians. Collectively, the essays highlight the central role played by land, water, and timber allocation in the American West and show how efforts to achieve justice and efficiency were compromised by the region's obsession with achieving rapid economic growth.

This book reconstructs the discourse of American federalism, a discourse grounded in the intense debate over the role of government in the regulation of the economy.

An account of the link between Locke's thought and the American Founding. The author argues that previous writers have misread Locke's influence on the Founders: he portrays the philosopher as a moderate 17th-century moralist advocating an individualism that fits well with classic republicanism.

Flynn chronicles the draft's military and strategic successes and failures in America's mid-century wars. He shows how major institutions and lobbies representing science, education, and various professions and religions influenced it and how the selective character of the draft eventually made the system inequitable and helped cause its downfall.

Long before the current calls for national service, civic responsibility, and the restoration of community values, the Progressives initiated a remarkably similar challenge. Eldon Eisenach traces the evolution of this powerful national movement from its theoretical origins through its dramatic rise and sudden demise, and shows why their philosophy still speaks to us with such eloquence.

The Pacific Northwest has always invoked images of lush forested landscapes and travelog vistas. More recently, such images have been marred by much-publicized controversies pitting spotted owls and salmon against logging interests and power companies. But, as Robert Bunting shows, such conflicts are only the most recent emblems of the competition for dominion in the region.

Most people think Star Wars was Reagan's idea, but its roots reach decades farther back. Military historian Don Baucom traces them to the dawn of the atomic age in 1944. In this first scholarly account of the origins of SDI, Baucom brings together the political, technological, and strategic forces that have shaped the history of ballistic missile defenses from World War II to the present.

Before the federal constitution was written, the Confederate Congress established a policy providing land grants for local and state governments to support public schools. Compiling information from the twenty-two states that still own such trust lands, the authors provide a rare look at public land management from a state rather than federal government perspective.

This text tells the story of how John Kriss made large-scale farming work. It shows how he kept records of crops and rainfall to manage the land carefully, farming thousands of acres in an environmentally sensitive way and retaining a viable operation even during the Dust Bowl years.

Presenting a significant new interpretation of Napoleonic warfare, Robert M. Epstein argues persuasively that the true origins of modern war can be found in the Franco-Austrian War of 1809. Epstein contends that the 1809 war had more in common with the American Civil War and subsequent conflicts than with the decisive Napoleonic campaigns that preceded it.

Over a century ago, tallgrass prairie stretched over most of what is now Iowa, Illinois, southern Minnesota, northern Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. Today only a few scattered patches remain. The author traces the history of the prairie and examines grassland ecology.

An outstanding contribution to the growing literature in world-systems theory, Kathleen Schwartzman's study of the first Portuguese republic demonstrates the significant ways in which a nation's social and political structures are shaped by its position in the global economy.