Documents the life of the inventor of the Gatling gun--the first machine gun--and the impact of his invention on the expansion of the United States as a superpower and the international boom of the arms industry.

The long relationship between America’s colonizing wars and virulent anticommunism The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.” Original and boldly argued, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean offers an enlightening new history with relevance for our own time.

This book presents both nationally significant objects and ordinary items from everyday life to provide insight into 19th century American society, showing readers how the production, design, function, and use of these objects can inform our understanding of the period. Artifacts from 19th Century America examines a broad array of objects representing various aspects of 19th century American society. The objects have been chosen to illuminate daily life in a number of categories including cooking, entertainment, grooming, clothing and accessories, health, household items, religious life, work, and education. The book's 53 entries include a brief introduction to the background of the object, when and why it was made, and who used it, followed by a detailed description of the object itself. Finally, each entry provides a deep dive into the object's significance and how the object reveals clues about the social, political, economic, and intellectual life of the society in which it was produced and utilized. Students and general readers alike will not only learn about the time period but also learn to use the skills of material culture theory and method, including how to draw meaningful conclusions from each object about their historical context and significance.

A unique chapter in the history of firearms, the multibarrel, hand-cranked Gatling gun was one of the first practical rapid-fire weapons ever to be used in battle. It changed warfare by introducing the capability to project deadly, high-intensity fire on the battlefield, and portended the devastation that automatic weapons would wreak in World War I. During its 50-year career, it saw widespread service with US, British, and other forces on a host of battlefields through conflicts in Zululand and the American West, to the Spanish-American War. Although it saw widespread use in the hands of industrialized nations against various groups of indigenous native warriors, it was famously left behind by Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn, where some argue it could have made all the difference. Featuring full-colour artwork plus contemporary and close-up photographs, this engaging study investigates the origins, development, combat use, and lasting influence of the formidable Gatling gun.

The author, a New York Times reporter, traces the invention and mass distribution of the AK-47 assault rifle, and its effects on war. He traces the invention of the assault rifle, following the miniaturization of rapid-fire arms from the American Civil War, through World War I and Vietnam, to present-day Afghanistan, where Kalashnikovs and their knockoffs number as many as 100 million, one for every seventy persons on earth. It is the weapon of state repression, as well as revolution, civil war, genocide, drug wars, and religious wars; and it is the arms of terrorists, guerrillas, boy soldiers, and thugs. From its inception to its use by more than fifty national armies around the world, to its role in modern-day Afghanistan, he discusses how the deadly weapon has helped alter world history.

In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.

Connects British and American literature to a changing media landscape in an era of innovation.

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War represents pathbreaking research on the rise of U.S. Army intelligence operations in the Midwest during the American Civil War and counters long-standing assumptions about Northern politics and society. At the beginning of the rebellion, state governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois cooperated with federal law enforcement officials in various attempts—all failed—to investigate reports of secret groups and individuals who opposed the Union war effort. Starting in 1862, army commanders took it upon themselves to initiate investigations of antiwar sentiment in those states. By 1863, several of them had established intelligence operations staffed by hired civilian detectives and by soldiers detailed from their units to chase down deserters and draft dodgers, to maintain surveillance on suspected persons and groups, and to investigate organized resistance to the draft. By 1864, these spies had infiltrated secret organizations that, sometimes in collaboration with Confederate rebels, aimed to subvert the war effort. Stephen E. Towne is the first to thoroughly explore the role and impact of Union spies against Confederate plots in the North. This new analysis invites historians to delve more deeply into the fabric of the Northern wartime experience and reinterpret the period based on broader archival evidence.

Brian G. Shellum tells the story of Company L, which served in Skagway, Alaska, and was one of the two companies added to the all-Black Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment after war was declared on Spain in April 1898.

The third book in Professor Christian Potholm’s war trilogy (which includes Winning at War and War Wisdom), Understanding War provides a most workable bibliography dealing with the vast literature on war and warfare. As such, it provides insights into over 3000 works on this overwhelmingly extensive material. Understanding War is thus the most comprehensive annotated bibliography available today. Moreover, by dividing war material into eighteen overarching themes of analysis and fifty seminal topics, and focusing on these, Understanding War enables the reader to access and understand the broadest possible array of materials across both time and space, beginning with the earliest forms of warfare and concluding with the contemporary situation. Stimulating and thought-provoking, this volume is essential for an understanding of the breadth and depth of the vast scholarship dealing with war and warfare through human history and across cultures.