Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we're told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional,...

During World War II, the city of Evansville manufactured vast amounts of armaments that were vital to the Allied victory. The Evansville Ordnance Plant made 96 percent of all .45-caliber ammunition used in the war, while the Republic Aviation Plant produced more than 6,500 P-47 Thunderbolts, almost half of all P-47s built during the war. At its peak, the local shipyard employed upward of eighteen thousand men and women who forged 167 of the iconic...

FREEDOM of thought and speech in the pre-war South is, as Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger observed during an address at Durham, North Carolina, on April 5, 1939, both a timely and a timeless subject. No event in the modern world is more ominous than the destruction of government by discussion and the repression of independent thought in large areas of Europe by dictatorships. Such ruthless disregard of the rights of minorities of both Fascist and...

To many observers in the West, events in Iran leading up to the revolution in 1979 took a mystifying and seemingly irrational course. In this National Security Essay, Jack Miklos, a foreign service officer who served in several key assignments in Iran, discusses the Iranian Revolution. He looks at theories of social modernization as applied to the history and culture of Iran, and then focuses in depth on the effects of land reform and the pervasive...

Explores the difficulties faced by service men and women after they leave the military and return to civilian life and discusses the services available to them.

An unflinching account, in words and pictures, of America's longest war by our most outspoken graphic journalist Ted Rall traveled deep into Afghanistan-without embedding himself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating himself with flak jackets and armored SUVs, where no one else would go (except, of course, Afghans). He made two long trips: the first in the wake of 9/11, and the next ten-years later to see what a decade of U.S. occupation had wrought....

"Third Place for the 2013 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology and American Anthropological Association" "Honorable Mention for the 2015 Delmos Jones and Jagna Scharff Memorial Book Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America" Kenneth T. MacLeish is assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University. An intimate look at war through the lives of soldiers and their families...

"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation,...

"There is perhaps no starker example of the domestic costs and blindspots of America's modern military exploits than the continued practice of deporting men and women who have served in our armed forces. In this book, J. Malcolm Garcia reports from across the country and abroad, profiling veterans who have been deported, as well as the families and friends they have left behind. Without a Country analyzes the political and cultural climate that has...

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses happily forgot the war for a little while as they danced together in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability in a time of social, moral, and geographic upheaval. Meghan Winchell demonstrates that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the "greatest generation." Combining archival...