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Oral narratives of Vietnam War veterans, collected at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, were paralleled to the written narratives of the Indian War soldiers abstracted from existing diaries, journals and autobiographies. A statistical analysis was applied to the Vietnam War texts to discern the attitudes of the informants as a group. Informants' attitudes towards the enemy and the enemy's guerrilla fighting style were shown to be similar to the attitudes of the Indian War soldiers in both areas. Both sets of similar attitudes resulted in high levels of frustration which produced occasional atrocities. By the application of folklore and folklore fieldwork, in the form of instruction on the enemies' rites, customs and beliefs, and a statistical analysis of the oral lore of the American soldiers, an atrocity-producing situation may be detected beforehand, and corrected.

Early in the Civil War, the Union Army drove pro-southern Missouri leaders and their followers into Arkansas, and the state fell under Federal occupation. However, many people of southern sympathies remained in Missouri, and between 1862 and 1864 Confederate forces launched four large scale cavalry raids into the state from their Arkansas bases. Major General Sterling Price, C. S. A., led the fourth and largest of these raids, September through November, 1864. An ex-Governor of Missouri, Sterling Price was the truly representative figurehead of the state's Confederate element. Throughout the war, he constantly believed that an oppressed, hidden majority of Missourians restlessly awaited the day when they could free themselves from Federal domination. Fearing that the Confederate cause was nearly lost, Price and his followers hoped to revive the hearts of southern sympathizers by a raid into Missouri. Political and military circumstances motivated General E. K. Smith, commander of the South's Trans-Mississippi Department, to authorize the expedition, and in September 1864 Price entered Missouri at the head of a 12,000 man cavalry force. Price's expedition was a total fiasco. The expected uprising did not occur, and most of the 5,000 men who joined Price subsequently deserted. After suffering a crushing defeat at Pilot Knob, Missouri, Price's army moved across the central part of the state, and the invasion that was meant to redeem Missouri for the Confederacy turned into a chaotic, large-scale looting expedition. After being routed at Westport, Missouri, on October 23, Price's army fled south and subsequently disintegrated. The expedition was basically an expression of the South's desperate desire in the fall of 1864 for a smashing victory that would change the tide of the war. However, the expedition's total failure weakened the South's Trans- Mississippi forces to such a degree that no major campaigns occurred in that department for the last six months of the war.

Using mainly primary sources, the activities of the Kentucky National Guard in World War I are chronicled. The major contribution of these Kentuckians was the 149th Infantry, which served on the front line in France. After extensive research, it is concluded that the Kentucky Guard did not play a major role in the war effort.

This study focuses on an analysis of militarism in German culture from the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 to the Fall of the Third Reich in 1945. Its focuses on the effects of the military, its presence, needs, personnel, values and activities on the four main groups of relevance to this topic within the German populace; The rulers of Germany and its various states prior to unification, the aristocracy, the common solidres and the common people who comprise the remainder of the populace. The differences in the specificity between the first three categories and the last one is that the rulers, nobility and soldiery each have unique and intense connections with the military and its structures as they are either directly a part of its traditions and hierarchies or are deeply intertwined with its functioning. The rest of the German populace, the common man, experience the structures of the military second hand, they are affected by it but not directly connected to it. This study focuses on an analysis of militarism in German culture from the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 to the Fall of the Third Reich in 1945. Its focuses on the effects of the military, its presence, needs, personnel, values and activities on the four main groups of relevance to this topic within the German populace; The rulers of Germany and its various states prior to unification, the aristocracy, the common soldiers and the common people who comprise the remainder of the populace. The differences in the specificity between the first three categories and the last one is that the rulers, nobility and soldiery each have unique and intense connections with the military and its structures as they are either directly a part of its traditions and hierarchies or are deeply intertwined with its functioning. The rest of the German populace, the common man, experience the structures of the military second hand, they are affected by it but not directly connected to it. This study will also focus primarily on the history and military tradition a German state, Brandenburg-Prussia later the Kingdom of Prussia. This is for two reasons; first, that Russia's hegemony over the other German states and its eventual role in unifying them into the German Empire in 1871 give its traditions and structures a primacy amongst its neighbors; second, that the history of Prussia is so deeply entwined with their army, which made them famous at the time and is still the main contributor to their notoriety in history today, that its military culture has the strength and recognition amongst the other German states.

Spanish authorities used two agencies to occupy and control California as a royal province from 1769 to 1821: the church and the army. While the story of the missions and the missionaries has been thoroughly chronicled, little attention has been focused on the men who comprised Spain's military forces. This thesis examines the experience of the royal soldier in California to determine his significance in the Golden State's Spanish colonial era. The journals, diaries, and correspondence of the soldiers, missionaries, explorers, traders, and foreign rivals who visited or occupied the province comprise a major part' of the source material. The variety of viewpoints represented by these · documents facilitated examination from several perspectives. Another valuable primary source was the Spanish frontier regulations, which provided the royal perspective on the military enterprise. Published materials based on documents in the major archival repositories such as those in Mexico, Spain, and the Bancroft Library in California were accessible through works in the Portland State University Library and the Oregon Historical Society which supplied sources pertinent to this investigation. Secondary works by historians provided both a historical background and data on specific aspects of a soldier's life. Cited periodical articles concentrated more specifically on the military experience both in California and the Spanish northern frontier.

With the Second World War, the U.S. defense establishment attained a scale and permanence it never had before. The new strategic blueprint of the Cold War dictated constant readiness for military confrontation, but it was also clear that the country could not keep up wartime levels of total economic mobilization. Faced with the problem of managing this military behemoth, leaders in the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for expertise to help them run the emerging national security state. The result was a remaking of defense administration in the image of the post-war corporation. This dissertation explains how and why reformers placed their faith in models of business enterprise, an approach that was neither self-evident nor readily accepted across the military leadership. In the decades after World War II, the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy around values of efficiency and productivity shaped U.S. military operations and affected millions of people around the world. In concrete terms, this dissertation tracks how managerial science changed the ways the military kept accounts, disciplined labor, trained officers, and handled government assets. Interest in improving military management exploded after 1950. In the realm of budgeting and finance, reformers set up transactions between units to imitate buyer-seller relationships, requiring officers to express their needs for supplies and labor in dollar terms. Drawing analogies between military and private industry, defense establishment reformers embraced methods like Taylorist work measurement, which they used to control work ranging from filing to the production of massive weapons systems. Borrowing directly from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, defense leaders established schools to train high-ranking military officers in the latest trends of business management. While these business-inspired reforms gained traction in many parts of the military bureaucracy, they were not accepted without controversy. After the Vietnam War, many military leaders questioned the dominance of “managerialism” and denounced it in favor of traditional concepts of command and leadership. By the 1970s, however, the language and values of management had become thoroughly embedded in the institutional structure of the military. I argue that the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy in the image of the profit-seeking firm changed the experience of work in the military, redefined what it meant to be an officer, and facilitated the privatization of many of the defense establishment’s functions. Further, I aim to show that understanding how the military governed and produced can reframe key historiographic debates about 20th century American political economy.

This dissertation explores the meaning of the Civil War in the South by examining the experience of Tennessee’s black Union army soldiers and veterans from the 1860s through the early twentieth century. Today historians almost reflexively agree that the black military experience took on an “ever larger meaning” in American society, but few scholars have given sustained attention to black soldiers’ lives in the postwar South. My dissertation finds that the black military experience profoundly disrupted Southern hierarchies and presented black men with unprecedented opportunities to elevate their political, economic, and social status; however, these aspirations rarely went uncontested. Nearly 40 percent of Tennessee’s black male population of military age enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War, and as these men pursued individual agendas and attempted to build families and communities they played a critical part in the postwar remaking of the urban and rural South. The redefinition of Southern society produced inter- and intra-racial tension and occasionally brutal violence, but it also involved striking accommodations and reconciliations. This study also explores conflicting commemoration of the war by contrasting black prominence in the state’s racially integrated Grand Army of the Republic veterans’ organization with efforts to recognize Confederate “colored soldiers.” The dissertation’s most important sources are federal military pension records at the National Archives in Washington, which allow the study to focus on otherwise largely undocumented and unexplored lives. These invaluable records provide information about antebellum, wartime, and postwar family life, health conditions, employment history, economic mobility, geographical mobility, race relations, and relationships with white ex-soldiers.