Bøger udgivet af University Press of Kansas

Few provisions of the American Constitution have had such a tumultuous history as the contract clause. How the contract clause has fared, as chronicled in this book by James W. Ely, Jr., tells us a great deal about the shifting concerns and assumptions of Americans. Its history provides a window on matters central to American constitutional history.

Reuben Smith's diaries provide the unusual perspective of a young Englishman who arrived in the United States during a time when the country was dividing into North and south and heading toward civil war. For fifty years, Smith participated in key events that shaped the history of Kansas and he captured those moments with candor and eloquence in his diaries.

From 1942-1945 the Allies' war in the Southwest Pacific was effectively a bilateral coalition between the United States and Australia under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. By charting the evolution of the military effectiveness of the US-Australian alliance, MacArthur's Coalition puts the relationship between the US and Australia at the centre of the war against Japan.

An in-depth, finely detailed portrait of the German Army from its greatest victory in 1871 to its final collapse in 1918, this volume offers the most comprehensive account ever given of one of the critical pillars of the German Empire - and a chief architect of the military and political realities of late nineteenth-century Europe.

Midway through 1942, Japanese and Allied forces found themselves fighting on two fronts - in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. These concurrent campaigns proved a critical turning point in the war being waged in the Pacific. Key to this shift was the Allies seizing of the strategic initiative - a concept that Sean Judge examines in this book, particularly in the context of the Pacific War.

The aim of the American Presidency Series is to present historians and the general reading public with interesting, scholarly assessments of the various presidential administrations.

The spirit of nullification is seeing a resurgence in an ever-more politically fragmented and decentralized America. What this means is the question explored in this volume. The book offers a variety of informed perspectives "neo-nullification", a category that extends from formal declarations on the invalidity of federal law to what might be called "uncooperative federalism".

Unique among president's wives, Lady Bird Johnson was not only a leading environmentalist, but she redefined the institution of First Lady. Using Lady Bird's White House papers and interviews with her and her associates, Lewis L. Gould captures her spirit and achievements in her First Lady role.

In 1979, with El Salvador growing ever more unstable and ripe for revolution, the United States undertook a counterinsurgency intervention that over the following decade would become Washington's largest nation-building effort since Vietnam. In 2003, policymakers looked to this successful undertaking as a model for US intervention in Iraq. In fact, Brian DHaeseleer argues in The Salvadoran Crucible, the US counterinsurgency in El Salvador produced no more than a stalemate, and in the process inflicted tremendous suffering on Salvadorans for a limited amount of foreign policy gains. DHaeseleers book is a deeply informed, dispassionate account of how the Salvadoran venture took shape, what it actually accomplished, and what lessons it holds.A historical analysis of the origins of US counterinsurgency policy provides context for understanding how precedents informed US intervention in El Salvador. What follows is a detailed, in-depth view of how the counterinsurgency unfoldedthe nature, logic, and effectiveness of the policies, initiatives, and operations promoted by American strategists. DHaeseleers account disputes the success narrative by showing that El Salvadors achievements, mainly the spread of democracy, occurred as a result not of the American intervention but of the insurgents war against the state. Most significantly, The Salvadoran Crucible contends that the reforms enacted during the war failed to address the underlying causes of the conflict, which today continue to reverberate in El Salvador. The book thus suggests a reassessment of the history of American counterinsurgency, and a course-correction for the future.

From Kanorado to Pawnee villages, Kansas is a land rich in archaeological sites - nearly 12,000 known - that testify to its prehistoric heritage. This volume presents the first comprehensive overview of Kansas archaeology in nearly fifty years, containing the most current descriptions and interpretations of the state's archaeological record.

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.

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.

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.