Recruiting, Drafting, and Enlisting

These five volumes concern one of the most important institutions in human history, the military, and the interactions of that institution with the greater society. Military systems serve nations; they may also reflect them. Soldiers are enlisted; they may also be said to self-select. Military units have missions; they also have interests. In an older, more traditional military history, while the second reflects a newer approach. Although each statement in the pairs may be said to be true, the former speak from the framework of the military sciences; the latter, from the framework of the social and behavioral sciences. The military systems of our past differ from one another over time, in political origins, size, missions, and technological and tactical fashions, but to a great extent their historical experiences have been more noticeably similar than they were different. When we ask questions about the recruiting, training, or motivating of military systems, or of those systems' interactions with civilian governments and with the greater society, as do the essays in these five volumes of reading on The Military and Society we are struck by the almost timeless patterns of continuity and similarity of experience. In each of these volumes approximately half of the essays selected deal with the experience in the United States; the other half, with the experiences of other states and times, enabling the reader to engage in comparative analysis.

Peter Karsten

1: The Institution of Conscription; 2: Hessian Peasant Women, their Families, and the Draft: a Social-Historical Interpretation of Four Tales from the Grimm Collection; 3: Purchase and Promotion in the British Army in the Eighteenth Century; 4: The Afro-Argentine Officers of Buenosaires Province, 1800-1860; 5: 'Martial Races': Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India 1858-1939; 6: Chums In Arms: Comradeship Among Canada's South African War Soldiers 1; 7: The Creation of the Imperial Military Reserve Association in Japan; 8: The Untouchable Soldier: Caste, Politics, and the Indian Army; 9: Ethnic Conflict in the Military of Developing Nations: A Comparative Analysis of India and Nigeria; 10: The Blue Water Soviet Naval Officer; 11: Consent and the American Soldier; 12: General Smallwood's Recruits: The Peacetime Career of the Revolutionary War Private; 13: Commutation; 14: Guerrilla War in Western Missouri, 1862-1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis; 15: Draft Evasion in the North during the Civil War, 1863-1865; 16: Making the Military American: Advertising, Reform, and the Demise of an Antistanding Military Tradition, 1945-1955 1; 17: Was Vietnam a Class War?; 18: The Army's Be All You Can Be Campaign