This paper examines the US-Cuban relationship during the first military occupation of Cuba from 1898 to 1902, to show the role of high modernist state building in the occupation and the scope of Cuban participation in this endeavor. This is evidenced by heavily examining the annual reports of the US Military Governor General of Cuba and the US appointed civil secretaries of the Cuban government. This research differs from previous studies in the field by introducing James C. Scott’s concepts of legibility and high modernist state building, as well as suggesting that the Cuban civil secretaries participated within a limited scope to help form an independent republic.

During the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, fighting books—Fechtbücher—were produced in northern Italy, among the German states, in Burgundy, and on the Iberian peninsula. Long dismissed by fencing historians as “rough and untutored,” and largely unknown to military historians, these enigmatic treatises offer important insights into the cultural realities for all three orders in medieval society: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who labored. The intent of this dissertation is to demonstrate, contrary to the view of fencing historians, that the medieval works were systematic and logical approaches to personal defense rooted in optimizing available technology and regulating the appropriate use of the skills and technology through the lens of chivalric conduct. I argue further that these approaches were principle-based, that they built on Aristotelian conceptions of arte, and that by both contemporary and modern usage, they were martial arts. Finally, I argue that the existence of these martial arts lends important insights into the world-view across the spectrum of Medieval and early Renaissance society, but particularly with the tactical understanding held by professional combatants, the knights and men-at-arms. Three treatises are analyzed in detail. These include the anonymous RA I.33 Latin manuscript in the Royal Armouries at Leeds; the early German treatise attributed to Hanko Döbringer that glosses the great Johannes Liechtenauer; and the collection of surviving treatises by the Friulian master, Fiore dei Liberi. Each is compared in order to highlight common elements of usage that form the principles of the combat arts.

The story of the rural soldiers and militiamen of Virginia that served in the American Revolution remains open to historical research and exploration. Recent scholarship of Virginia’s military contribution to the Revolution focuses heavily on relationships of power among social groups that operated within the colony’s hierarchy, concluding that a lack of white, lower-class political and economic representation disabled mobilization among the Old Dominion’s more settled regions. My study emphasizes the revolutionary backcountry’s story by using Fauquier County, Virginia as a case study. A study of Rural Virginia during the Revolution presents scholars with significant challenges. Literacy rates among the general population were meager, meaning that Virginians in the backcountry left few letters and diaries for historians to interpret. Further complicating the reconstruction of Virginia’s rural revolutionary past were the destructive events of the nineteenth century. The tumults of the Civil War destroyed many Revolutionary War records of several Virginia counties, erasing much of what the Old Dominion’s revolutionary generation documented. For these reasons, Fauquier County represents an ideal subject of study. Court minutes, tax records, property records, and even a few letters and diary entries survived history’s fires to provide enough data from which to synthesize a social history to explore rural Virginia’s revolutionary story and mobilization patterns. The revolutionaries in Fauquier County were not always in concert with those throughout the rest of the colony. In contrast to most of Virginia, the county rallied enthusiastically to pre-Declaration calls for companies of minutemen. Hundreds of rural farmers from Fauquier across the socioeconomic spectrum served in the most successful of Virginia’s fleeting minute battalions known as the Culpeper Minutemen. These men defined themselves as backcountry Virginians against their more cosmopolitan peers from the longer-established eastern settlements. As the war matured and exacted its toll, however, fault lines between the local gentry and local yeomen widened, and the county settled into a recruiting pattern like most other Revolutionary Virginian counties. Understanding the issue of representation and its effect on how communities respond to a crisis remains a highly relevant topic that continues to challenge the public and its elected representatives to this day.

From 1869 to 1878 approximately fifty American military officers were invited to Egypt by Khedive Ismail for the purpose of modernizing the Egyptian army. During that time the American officers led by General Charles P. Stone designed a staff system for the Egyptian army and they established a series of technical schools not only for the staff officers but for the rank and file as well. In addition to the reorganization, the American officers led exploratory expeditions into central Africa, they refortified the Egyptian coastline and they built roads and lighthouses. In conjunction with their expeditions, the officers produced numerous territorial maps, hydrological maps, and assay reports.

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This dissertation explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly-raised regiments that fought through the Civil War’s final year. Period observers and historians have typically regarded such later arrivals as substandard to the “Boys of ‘61” who enlisted at the war’s start. Tapping the methods of social and traditional military history, this work is among the first to assess the record of these soldiers under fire. It does so by tracing the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments, starting with their formation and continuing with their service throughout the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns (May 1864 – April 1865). Both outfits fought in the Army of the Potomac, the Union’s largest field army, in which only half of whose veterans reenlisted on the expiration of their original three-year terms. The 17th and 31st maintained moderate to high levels of unit cohesion, showed determination to accomplish battlefield objectives, and sustained heavy casualties in the process. This project justifies a reappraisal of the later arrivals, a population of approximately 820,000 white men who donned the uniform between 1863 and 1865. These forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy. / History

This dissertation articulates the Federal Republic of Germany’s critical role in establishing and sustaining the modern multinational European aviation sector. It demonstrates how Bonn employed its 1959 acquisition of the Lockheed F-104G Starfighter combat aircraft to take advantage of the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to reduce the US military presence in Europe and achieve strategic goals of military, political, and economic primacy within NATO through multinational cooperation and consortium building. In fostering the European Starfighter consortiums and their successors, West Germany embraced a leadership role that saw it build one of NATO’s largest air forces and become a primary political and economic driver of the continent’s multinational military-aviation projects. This dissertation is predicated on intensive archival research conducted in Germany, Belgium, and the United States. This work employs economic, political, and military historical lenses of analysis to argue that the Starfighter’s legacy represents a long-term success that allowed the Federal Republic to leverage a role of normalized leadership within a decade of joining NATO, boost its moribund aviation sector, and take a leading role in contemporary multinational aviation concerns such as the Panavia Tornado, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Airbus Space and Defense. / History

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