Based on a wide range of sources, including materials only recently made available to researchers, this first complete, carefully documented biography of Miles skillfully delineates the brilliant, abrasive, and controversial tactician whose career in many respects epitomized the story of the Old Army.
For the U.S. Army, Western experiences illustrated its role in ensuring national security and in fostering national development. Its soldiers performed feats of great heroism and rank cruelty. Debates regarding the military's role in projecting Indian policy, the division of power between state and federal authorities, and the size of a professional military establishment reveal the inconsistency in the nation's views of its army.
A model of analytical history. In . . . spare, cogent prose, Wooster delineates military strategy against the western tribes, places the political influence of the Gilded Age military establishment in solid perspective, gives an able survey of the institutional structure of the postwar army, briefly describes key Indian campaigns, and presents pithy characterizations of leading western military personalities. . . . Wooster's book places events in a national, and in military terms international, context. In so doing he has made a major contribution to frontier and military scholarship".-Paul Andrew Hutton, American Historical Review. "A superior and important book. . . . [Wooster] succinctly identifies and illumines significant truths about the military establishment and its role in the final stages of confrontation and conflict along the western Indian frontier".-Robert M. Utley, Journal of American History. "A provocative example of the new historiography. . . . Students of the Indian wars have frequently suffered from a form of myopia. . . until now, no one has undertaken so comprehensive or critical a look at the army's role in formulating and implementing Indian policy".-Bruce Dinges, New Mexico Historical Review. Robert Wooster, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, is the author of Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Nebraska 1993).
The idea of the West conjures exciting images of tenacious men and women, huge expanses of unclaimed territory, and feelings of both adventure and lonesome isolation. Located astride communication lines linking San Antonio, El Paso, Presidio, and Chihuahua City, the United States Army?s post at Fort Davis commanded a strategic position at a military, cultural, and economic crossroads of nineteenth-century Texas. Using extensive research and careful scrutiny of long forgotten records, Robert Wooster brings his readers into the world of Fort Davis, a place of encounter, conquest, and community. The fort here spawned a thriving civilian settlement and served as the economic nexus for regional development Frontier Crossroads schools its readers in the daily lives of soldiers, their dependents, and civilians at the fort and in the surrounding area. The resulting history of the intriguing blend of Hispanic, African American, Anglo, and European immigrants who came to Fort Davis is a benchmark volume that will serve as the standard to which other post histories will be compared. The military garrisons of Fort Davis represented a rich mosaic of nineteenth-century American life. Each of the army?s four black regiments served there following the Civil War, and its garrisons engaged in many of the army?s grueling campaigns against Apache and Comanche Indians. Characters such as artist and officer Arthur T. Lee, William "Pecos Bill" Shafter, and Benjamin Grierson and his family come alive under Wooster?s pen. Frontier Crossroads will enrich its readers with its careful analysis of life on the frontier. This book will appeal to military and social historians, Texas history buffs, and those seeking a record of adventure.
- The Civil War continues to capture the public's imagination, as evidenced by the popularity of the Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War and recent bestsellers like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.
The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 is the story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield. Repeatedly, Americans used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies, but to shape their nation and their vision of who they were, often in ways not directly associated with shooting wars or combat. That the regular army served as nation-builders is ironic, given the officer corps’ obsession with a warrior ethic and the deep-seated disdain for a standing army that includes Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and debates regarding congressional appropriations. Whether the issue concerned Indian policy, the appropriate division of power between state and federal authorities, technology, transportation, communications, or business innovations, the public demanded that the military remain small even as it expected those forces to promote civilian development. Robert Wooster’s exhaustive research in manuscript collections, government documents, and newspapers builds upon previous scholarship to provide a coherent and comprehensive history of the U.S. Army from its inception during the American Revolution to the Philippine-American War. Wooster integrates its institutional history with larger trends in American history during that period, with a special focus on state-building and civil-military relations. The United States Army and the Making of America will be the definitive book on the army’s relationship with the nation from its founding to the dawn of the twentieth century and will be a valuable resource for a generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and virtually any scholar with an interest in the U.S. Army, American frontiers and borderlands, the American West, or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation-building.
This engaging, illustrated history of Fort Davis, one of the U.S. Army's most important western posts, relates the exciting history of Trans-Pecos Texas—the far western reaches off the state. Wooster traces the history of this Davis Mountains region from the days when Indians and later Spaniards and Mexicans inhabited the area, through its days as the site of Texan and American interests. The establishment and construction of Fort Davis in the mid-1850s tells the story of one of the army's largest western posts. We learn about the famous army camels which Secretary of War Jefferson Davis brought to the area, with Fort Davis serving as a base of operations, and about the difficult conditions imposed on the army by weather, climate, and Indians, Evacuated by the U.S. Army at the beginning of the Civil War, Fort Davis later was occupied by Texas state troops, then briefly reoccupied by the Federals. After the war, the War Department began shifting regular army units back to the western frontiers. Among these units were each of the famous black regiments, many of them composed of former slaves who proved to be excellent soldiers. The details of daily life—food, clothing, social activities, weapons, medical care—are thoroughly discussed, as are the often ineffective campaigns against Indians. Robert Wooster skillfully uses the forty-year history of Fort Davis to provide a clear window into the frontier military experience and into nineteenth-century American society. Because of its black soldiers, and its large Mexican-American civilian community, Fort Davis is a prime resource for studying and understanding the stratified racial relations which accompanied the army's and the nation's westward expansion.
He had an extraordinary Broadway career, wrote 90 novels and story collections, and among his immortal characters are Jeeves and the Empress of Blandings. McCrum's magisterial biography chronicles the achievements and shadows of a gilded life.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.