The Gilded Age Speaker Who Made the Rules for American Politics
Defining a "statesman" as "a successful politician who is dead," Thomas Brackett Reed gave himself some latitude in pursuing his goals as a congressional leader. His leadership style is encapsulated in the Reed Rules, which serve as the institutional foundation of the modern House of Representatives and as a metaphor for the practice of power ......
Citizen-Soldiers and the American Way of War, 1919-1939
Winner: Army Historical Foundation Award for Excellence in U.S. Army History WritingThe modern US Army as we know it was largely created in the years between the two world wars. Prior to World War I, officers in leadership positions were increasingly convinced that building a new army could not take place as a series of random developments but was ......
Newt Gingrich is one of the most polarizing and consequential figures in US politics. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, he rose from a minority party backbencher to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years. Though much has been written about Gingrich, accounts of his time in Congress are incomplete and ......
In this work of creative nonfiction, author Kate Benz provides an intimate look at the present-day residents of Courtland, Kansas (population 285), a town whose economy depends almost entirely on agriculture.Through charming, first-person accounts, Nothing but the Dirt: Stories from an American Farm Town tells the whole story of life in Courtland, ......
The Federal Government and the Desegregation of Alabama Schools
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a roadmap for how to achieve this lofty goal-it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path toward the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of ......
The True Story of the Firebase Pace Incidents and the Vietnam Drawdown
By the autumn of 1971 a war-weary American public had endured a steady stream of bad news about the conduct of its soldiers in Vietnam. It included reports of fraggings, massacres, and cover-ups, mutinies, increased racial tensions, and soaring drug abuse. Then six soldiers at Fire Support Base Pace, a besieged U.S. artillery outpost near the ......
According to the US Constitution, if a bill is not returned to Congress by the president within ten days of receiving it and Congress has adjourned, the bill is effectively vetoed. The so-called pocket veto dates at least as far back as the presidency of James Madison (1808-1816), but the constitutionality of its use had not been considered by the ......
Innovative Military Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh
An army, Lewis Mumford once observed, "is a body of pure consumers"-and it is logistics that feeds this body's insatiable appetite for men and materiel. Successful logistics-the transportation of supplies and combatants to battle-cannot guarantee victory, but poor logistics portends defeat. In Feeding Victory, Jobie Turner asks how technical ......
The Mississippi Central Campaign and Chickasaw Bayou, October 25-December 31, 1862
In Early Struggles for Vicksburg, Tim Smith covers the first phase of the Vicksburg campaign (October 1862-July 1863), involving perhaps the most wide-ranging and complex series of efforts seen in the entire campaign. The operations that took place from late October to the end of December 1862 covered six states, consisted of four intertwined ......
