Bøger udgivet af University Press of Kansas

The book describes the creation and conduct of American airpower strategy in World War II, and explains how the legacies of that experience have affected warfare ever since.

The definitive biography of George Henry Thomas, who is often counted among the Union's top five generals. Provides a new and more complete look at a man known to history as "the Rock of Chickamauga" and to General William T. Ssherman as a soldier who was "as true as steel."

In the wake of national crises and sharp shifts in the electorate, new members of Congress march off to Washington full of intense idealism and the desire for instant changebut often lacking in any sense of proportion or patience. This drive for instant political gratification concerned one of the key Founders, James Madison, who accepted the inevitability of majority rule but worried that an inflamed majority might not rule reasonably.Greg Weiner challenges longstanding suppositions that Madison harbored misgivings about majority rule, arguing instead that he viewed constitutional institutions as delaying mechanisms to postpone decisions until after public passions had cooled and reason took hold. In effect, Madison believed that one of the Constitutions primary functions is to act as a metronome, regulating the tempo of American politics.Weiner calls this implicit doctrine temporal republicanism to emphasize both its compatibility with and its contrast to other interpretations of the Founders thought. Like civic republicanism, the temporal variety embodies a set of valuespublic-spiritedness, respect for the rights of othersbroader than the technical device of majority rule. Exploring this fundamental idea of time-seasoned majority rule across the entire range of Madisons long career, Weiner shows that it did not substantially change over the course of his life. He presents Madisons understanding of internal constitutional checks and his famous extended republic argument as different and complementary mechanisms for improving majority rule by slowing it down, not blocking it. And he reveals that the changes we see in Madisons views of majority rule arise largely from his evolving beliefs about who, exactly, was behaving impulsivelywhether abusive majorities in the 1780s, the Adams regime in the 1790s, the nullifiers in the 1820s. Yet there is no evidence that Madisons underlying beliefs about either majority rule or the distorting and transient nature of passions ever swayed.If patience was a fact of life in Madisons daya time when communication and travel were slowit surely is much harder to cultivate in the age of the Internet, 24-hour news, and politics based on instant gratification. While many of todays politicians seem to wed supreme impatience with an avowed devotion to original constitutional principles, Madisons Metronome suggests that one of our nations great luminaries would likely view that marriage with caution.

A profusely illustrated comprehensive key for identifying species of amphibians and reptiles from the continental United States and Canada.

This single volume work serves as an introduction and overview of the authors Stalingrad trilogy that transformed our understanding of the Nazi Soviet War and its impact on world history.

Republicans today often ask, What would Reagan do? The short answer: probably not what they think. Hero of modern-day conservatives, Ronald Reagan was not even conservative enough for some of his most ardent supporters in his own timeand today his practical, often bipartisan approach to politics and policy would likely be deemed apostasy. To try to get a clearer picture of what the real Reagan legacy is, in this book Marcus M. Witcher details conservatives frequently tense relationship with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and explores how they created the latter-day Reagan myth.Witcher reminds us that during Reagans time in office, conservative critics complained that he had failed to bring about the promised Reagan Revolutionand in 1988 many Republican hopefuls ran well to the right of his policies. Notable among the dissonant acts of his administration: Reagan raised taxes when necessary, passed comprehensive immigration reform, signed a bill that saved Social Security, and worked with adversaries at home and abroad to govern effectively. Even his signature accomplishmentinvoked by Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!was highly unpopular with the Conservative Caucus, as evidenced in their newspaper ads comparing the president to Neville Chamberlain: Appeasement is as Unwise in 1988 as in 1938.Reagans presidential library and museum positioned him above partisan politics, emphasizing his administrations role in bringing about economic recovery and negotiating an end to the Cold War. How this legacy, as Reagan himself envisioned it, became the more grandiose version fashioned by Republicans after the 1980s tells us much about the late twentieth-century transformation of the GOPand, as Witchers work so deftly shows, the conservative movement as we know it now.

Upon the 2018 death of George H. W. Bush, pundits and politicians mourned the passing of an exemplar of the statesmanship and bipartisan ethos of an earlier day. The judgment, though sound, would have shocked observers of the 1988 election that put Bush in the White House. From a scholar who played a small role in that long-ago election, After Reagan provides an eye-opening look at a presidential campaign that few suspected marked the end of an eraor the rise of forces roiling our political landscape today.Willie Horton. Read my lips: No new taxes. Michael Dukakis in a helmet, in a tank. Though these are remembered as pivotal moments in a presidential campaign recalled as whisker-close, in his book John J. Pitney Jr. reminds us how large Bushs victory actually was, and how much it depended on social conditions and political dynamics that would change dramatically in the coming years. A turning point toward the post-Cold War, hyper-partisan, culturally divided politics of our time, the election of 1988 took place in a very different world. After Reagan captures a moment when campaigns were funded from the federal Treasury; when Republicans had a lock on the presidency and Democrats controlled Congress; when the electorate was considerably whiter and less educated than todays; and when the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Unionand the subsequent rise of globalizationwere virtually unimaginable.Many books tell us that elections have consequences. Pitneys explains how campaigns are consequentialthe 1988 campaign more than most. From the perspective of the last thirty years, After Reagan shows us the 1988 election in a truly new lightone that, in turn, reveals the links between the campaign of 1988 and the politics of the twenty-first century.

Offers a measured, deeply informed look at how the American constitutional system has broken down, how it impacts decision-making today, and how we might find our way out of this unhealthy power division.

Tells the story of the forgotten airmen, the RAF special service officers who, embedded among local populations and indigenous tribes, collected vital intelligence, developed targets, directed air strikes when necessary, and, perhaps most important, provided personal assessments of airpower's qualitative effects against primarily guerrilla forces.

Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs proclaiming “Heritage Not Hate.” Theirs, they said, was an “open and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage.” How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did “not hate” square with a “heritage” grounded in slavery? How do so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is bound up in the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth whose components, proponents, and meaning this timely and provocative book explores.The narrative of Confederate exceptionalism, in this analysis, updates two uniquely American mythologies—the Lost Cause and American exceptionalism—blending their elements with discourses of racial neoliberalism to create a seeming separation between the Confederacy and racist systems. Incorporating several methods and drawing from a range of sources—including ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents—Maurantonio examines the various people, objects, and rituals that contribute to this cultural balancing act. Her investigation takes in “official” modes of remembering the Confederacy, such as the monuments and building names that drive the discussion today, but it also pays attention to the more mundane and often subtle ways in which the Confederacy is recalled. Linking the different modes of commemoration, her work bridges the distance that believers in Confederate exceptionalism maintain; while situated in history from the Civil War through the civil rights era, the book brings much-needed clarity to the constitution, persistence, and significance of this divisive myth in the context of our time.

Wars ravage Iraq and Afghanistan. An earthquake devastates Haiti. The economy is in crisis and America is in the death grip of partisan politics. But what really, really gets you down? Your college basketball team loses a key game. It kind of makes a person wonderfirst, of course, about his priorities, but then, inevitably, about the nature of such an obsession, one clearly shared with millions of sports fans spanning the United States. In a book that begins with one fans passion for a game, Andrew Malan Milward takes a deep dive into sports culture, team loyalty, and a shared sense of belongingand what these have to do with character, home, and history.At the University of Kansaswhere the inventor of the sport coached its first teambasketball is a religion, and Milward is a devoted follower with a faith that has grown despite time and distance. Jayhawker, his first venture into nonfiction, bears the marks of the accomplished storyteller. Sharply observed, deftly written, and often as dramatic as its subject, the book pairs personal memoir with cultural history to conduct us from the world of the athlete to the literary life, from competition to camaraderie, from the history of the game to the game as a reflection of American history at its darkest hour and in its shining moments. A journey through one mans obsession with basketball, Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball tells a quintessential American story.

In December 1917, nine months after the disintegration of the Russian monarchy, the army officer corps, one of the dynasty’s prime pillars, finally fell—a collapse that, in light of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, historians often treat as inevitable. The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856–1917 contests this assumption. By expanding our view of the Imperial Russian Army to include the experience of the enlisted ranks, Roger R. Reese reveals that the soldier’s revolt in 1917 was more social revolution than anti-war movement—and a revolution based on social distinctions within the officer corps as well as between the ranks.Reese’s account begins in the aftermath of the Crimean War, when the emancipation of the serfs and consequent introduction of universal military service altered the composition of the officer corps as well as the relationship between officers and soldiers. More catalyst than cause, World War I exacerbated a pervasive discontent among soldiers at their ill treatment by officers, a condition that reached all the way back to the founding of the Russian army by Peter I. It was the officers’ refusal to change their behavior toward the soldiers and each other over a fifty-year period, Reese argues, capped by their attack on the Provisional Government in 1917, that fatally weakened the officer corps in advance of the Bolshevik seizure of power.As he details the evolution of Russian Imperial Army over that period, Reese explains its concrete workings—from the conscription and discipline of soldiers to the recruitment and education of officers to the operation of unit economies, honor courts, and wartime reserves. Marshaling newly available materials, his book corrects distortions in both Soviet and Western views of the events of 1917 and adds welcome nuance and depth to our understanding of a critical turning point in Russian history.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing ""others"" under its sway - among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire considers how teachers took up this task.

From the first, America has considered itself a shining city on a hilluniquely lighting the right way for the world. But it is hard to reconcile this picture, the very image of American exceptionalism, with what Americas Use of Terror shows us: that the United States has frequently resorted to acts of terror to solve its most challenging problems. Any war on terror, Stephen Huggins suggests, will fail unless we take a long, hard look at ourselvesand it is this discerning, informed perspective that his book provides.Terrorism, as Huggins defines it, is an act of violence against noncombatants intended to change their political will or support. The United States government adds a qualifier to this definition: only if the instigator is a subnational group. On the contrary, Huggins tells us, terrorism is indeed used by the statea politically organized body of people occupying a definite territoryin this case, the government of the United States, as well as by such predecessors as the Continental Congress and early European colonists in America. In this light, Americas Use of Terror re-examines key historical moments and processes, many of them events praised in American history but actually acts of terror directed at noncombatants. The targeting of women and children in Native American villages, for instance, was a use of terror, as were the means used to sustain slavery and then to further subjugate freed slaves under Jim Crow laws and practices. The placing of Philippine peasants in concentration camps during the Philippine-American War; the firebombing of families in Dresden and Tokyo; the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasakiall are last resort measures to conclude wars, and these too are among the instances of American terrorism that Huggins explores.Terrorism, in short, is not only terrorism when they do it to us, as many Americans like to think. And only when we recognize this, and thus the dissonance between the ideal and the real America, will we be able to truly understand and confront modern terrorism.

Sets out to show how Richard Nixon's passion for sports, more than policy positions or partisan politics, engaged the American people - and how Nixon used this passion to his political advantage. Fan in Chief takes place in the realm of political theatre, a theatre in which the president's role was perfectly genuine.

The American presidency is not what it once was. Nor, Stephen Knott contends, what it was meant to be. Taking on an issue as timely as Donald Trump's latest tweet and old as the American republic, Knott documents the devolution of the American presidency from the neutral, unifying office into the demagogic, partisan entity of our day.

The politics of division and distraction, conservatives' claims of liberalism's dangers, the wisdom of amoral foreign policy: however of the moment these matters might seem, they are clearly presaged in events chronicled by Joshua Kastenberg in this in-depth account of a campaign to impeach Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas.

If you have heard of Charles A. Dana, it was probably from his classic Recollections of the Civil War (1898), which was ghostwritten by muckraker Ida Tarbell and riddled with errors. Lincoln's Informer at long last sets the record straight, giving Charles A. Dana his due in a story that rivals the best historical fiction.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the United States emerged as a global leader in conservation policynegotiating the first international conservation treaties, pioneering the idea of the national park, and leading the world in creating a modern environmental regulatory regime. And yet, this is a country famously committed to the ideals of limited government, decentralization, and strong protection of property rights. How these contradictory values have been reconciled, not always successfully, is what Kimberly K. Smith sets out to explain in The Conservation Constitutiona book that brings to light the roots of contemporary constitutional conflict over environmental policy.In the mid-nineteenth century, most Progressive Era conservation policies would have been considered unconstitutional. Smith traces how, between 1870 and 1930, the conservation movement reshaped constitutional doctrine to its purposehow, specifically, courts and lawyers worked to expand government authority to manage wildlife, forest and water resources, and pollution. Her work, which highlights a number of important Supreme Court decisions often overlooked in accounts of this period, brings the history of environmental management more fully into the story of the US Constitution. At the same time, illuminating the doctrinal innovation in the Progressives efforts, her book reveals the significance of constitutional history to an understanding of the governments role in environmental management.

On 1 January 1943, with German Sixth Army about to be destroyed in the Stalingrad pocket, the Stavka (Soviet High Command) launched Operation Don, a strategic offensive aimed at demolishing German defenses in the southern Soviet Union. This book is the first detailed study of this crucial but virtually overlooked Soviet military operation.

Long before the coming of Euro-Americans, native inhabitants of what is now Kansas left their mark on the land: carvings in the soft orange and red sandstone of the state's Smoky Hills. In a series of photographs, Petroglyphs of the Kansas Smoky Hills offers viewers a chance to read the story that these carvings tell of the region's first people.

If the sheer diversity of recent hits from Twelve Years a Slave to Get Out, to Black Panther tells us anything, it might be that there's no such thing as ""black film"" per se. This book is timely, then, in expanding our idea of what black films are and, going back to the 1960s, showing us new ways to understand them.

Who should decide what is constitutional? The Supreme Court, of course, both liberal and conservative voices say - but in a bracing critique of the ""judicial engagement"" that is ascendant on the legal right, Greg Weiner makes a cogent case to the contrary.

Inspired by the mystique of a uniquely American tree, the pecan, John Gifford set out to explore the US pecan industry. What he discovered during his two-year immersion was a nut that's poised to become the next superfood and an industry that today finds itself in the most important juncture in its history.

In 1990, NASA began developing Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE), an initiative aimed at using satellites to study the planet's environment from space. MTPE's main goal was to better understand fundamental processes such as climate change. This book tells the remarkable story of this unprecedented convergence of science, technology, and policy.

In 1966 Richard Nixon hired Patrick J. Buchanan, a young editorial writer at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, to help lay the groundwork for his presidential campaign. Fiercely conservative and a whiz at messaging and media strategy, Buchanan continued with Nixon through his tenure in office, becoming one of the presidents most important and trusted advisors, particularly on public matters. The copious memos he produced over this period, counseling the president on press relations, policy positions, and political strategy, provide a remarkable behind-the-scenes look into the workings of the Nixon White Houseand a uniquely informed perspective on the development and deployment of ideas and practices that would forever change presidential conduct and US politics.Of the thousand housed at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, presidential scholar Lori Cox Han has judiciously selected 135 of Buchanans memos that best exemplify the significant nature and reach of his influence in the Nixon administration. Here, in his now-familiar take-no-prisoners style, Buchanan can be seen advancing his deeply conservative agenda, counterpunching against advisors he considered too moderate, and effectively guiding the president and his administration through a changing, often hostile political environment. On every point of policy and political issueforeign and domesticthrough two successful campaigns, Nixons first term, and the fraught months surrounding the Watergate debacle, Buchanan presses his advantage, all the while honing the message that would push conservatism ever rightward in the following years. Expertly edited and annotated by Han, Advising Nixon: The White House Memos of Patrick J. Buchanan offers rare insight into the decision-making and maneuvering of some of the most powerful figures in governmentwith lasting consequences for American public life.

Shifting our attention from official days of commemoration and publicly orchestrated events to spontaneous visits by citizens, Matthew Costello's book clearly demonstrates in compelling detail how the memory of George Washington slowly but surely became The Property of the Nation.

The mythmakers of US expansion have expressed ""manifest destiny"" in many different ways - and so have its many discontents. A multidisciplinary study that delves into these contrasts and contradictions, Inventing Destiny offers a broad yet penetrating cultural history of nineteenth-century US territorial acquisition.

The mythmakers of US expansion have expressed ""manifest destiny"" in many different ways - and so have its many discontents. A multidisciplinary study that delves into these contrasts and contradictions, Inventing Destiny offers a broad yet penetrating cultural history of nineteenth-century US territorial acquisition.

In July 1941, the Soviet Union was in mortal danger. Imperiled by the Nazi invasion and facing catastrophic losses, Stalin called on the Soviet people to subordinate everything to the needs of the front. Kazakhstan answered that call. Stalin had long sought to restructure Kazakh life to modernize the local populationbut total mobilization during the war required new tactics and produced unique results. Kazakhstan in World War II analyzes these processes and their impact on the Kazakhs and the Soviet Union as a whole. The first English-language study of a non-Russian Soviet republic during World War II, the book explores how the war altered official policies toward the regions ethnic groupsand accelerated Central Asias integration into Soviet institutions.World War II is widely recognized as a watershed for Russia and the Soviet Unionnot only did the conflict legitimize prewar institutions and ideologies, it also provided a medium for integrating some groups and excluding others. Kazakhstan in World War II explains how these processes played out in the ethnically diverse and socially backward Kazakh republic. Roberto J. Carmack marshals a wealth of archival materials, official media sources, and personal memoirs to produce an in-depth examination of wartime ethnic policies in the Red Army, Soviet propaganda for non-Russian groups, economic strategies in the Central Asian periphery, and administrative practices toward deported groups. Bringing Kazakhstans previously neglected role in World War II to the fore, Carmacks work fills an important gap in the regions history and sheds new light on our understanding of Soviet identities.