Manhood Citizenship And The National Guard

"During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, thousands upon thousands of American men devoted their time and money to the creation of an unsought - and in some quarters unwelcome - revived state militia. In this book, Eleanor L. Hannah studies the social history of the National Guard, focusing on issues of manhood and citizenship as they relate to the rise of the state militias." "The implications of this book are far-reaching, for it offers historians a fresh look at a long-ignored group of men and unites social and cultural history to explore changing notions of manhood and citizenship during years of frenetic change in the American landscape."--BOOK JACKET.

During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, thousands upon thousands of American men devoted their time and money to the creation of an unsought--and in some quarters unwelcome--revived state militia. In this book, Eleanor L. Hannah studies the social history of the National Guard, focusing on issues of manhood and citizenship as they relate to the rise of the state militias. In brief, the National Guard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is best interpreted as one of a host of associations and organizations that American men of those eras devised to help them negotiate their location and purpose in the strange new world of industrial capitalism. The National Guards brought men from a wide array of regions, ethnicities, races, and economic backgrounds together in a single organization. These men were united by a shared understanding of ideal manhood and civic responsibility that could be expressed through membership in a state militia. Once committed to the power of the word and the image evoked by the term "soldier" to bring diverse men together in one common bond, the men who volunteered their time and money had to give soldiering their serious attention. By 1900 a commitment to soldiering that was founded on shared social needs took on a life of its own and refocused National Guard members on an individualized, technical, professional military training--on a new kind of manhood for a new age. The implications of this book are far-reaching, for it offers historians a fresh look at a long-ignored group of men and unites social and cultural history to explore changing notions of manhood and citizenship during years of frenetic change in the American landscape.

The creation of Finland’s national conscription army in the wake of its independence from Russia in 1917 aroused intense but conflicting emotions. This book examines the struggles of a new army to find popular acceptance and support, and explores the ways that images of manhood were used in the controversies. Ahlbäck places the situation of interwar Finland within a broad European context to reveal the conflicts surrounding compulsory military service and the impact of the Great War on masculinities and constructions of gender.

Rough Draft draws the curtain on the race and class inequities of the Selective Service during the Vietnam War. Amy J. Rutenberg argues that policy makers' idealized conceptions of Cold War middle-class masculinity directly affected whom they targeted for conscription and also for deferment. Federal officials believed that college educated men could protect the nation from the threat of communism more effectively as civilians than as soldiers. The availability of deferments for this group mushroomed between 1945 and 1965, making it less and less likely that middle-class white men would serve in the Cold War army. Meanwhile, officials used the War on Poverty to target poorer and racialized men for conscription in the hopes that military service would offer them skills they could use in civilian life. As Rutenberg shows, manpower policies between World War II and the Vietnam War had unintended consequences. While some men resisted military service in Vietnam for reasons of political conscience, most did so because manpower polices made it possible. By shielding middle-class breadwinners in the name of national security, policymakers militarized certain civilian roles—a move that, ironically, separated military service from the obligations of masculine citizenship and, ultimately, helped kill the draft in the United States.

Scholars have characterized the early decades of the Cold War as an era of rising militarism in the United States but most Americans continued to identify themselves as fundamentally anti-militaristic. To them, "militaristic" defined the authoritarian regimes of Germany and Japan that the nation had defeated in World War II--aggressive, power-hungry countries in which the military possessed power outside civilian authority. Much of the popular culture in the decades following World War II reflected and reinforced a more pacifist perception of America. This study explores military images in television, film, and comic books from 1945 to 1970 to understand how popular culture made it possible for a public to embrace more militaristic national security policies yet continue to perceive themselves as deeply anti-militaristic.

This encyclopedia details the participation of individual ethnic and racial minority groups throughout U.S. military history. Ethnic and Racial Minorities in the U.S. Military: An Encyclopedia is unique in its coverage of nearly all major ethnic and racial minority groups, as opposed to reference works that have focused only on individual ethnic or racial minority groups. It acknowledges the military contributions of African Americans, Asian Americans, French Americans, German Americans, Hispanic Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and Native Americans. This timely work highlights the individuals and events that have shaped the experience of minorities in U.S. conflicts. The work provides a comprehensive encyclopedia covering the role of all major ethnic and racial minorities in the United States during wartime. Additionally, it considers how the integration of servicemen in the U.S. military set the precedent for the eventual desegregation of America's civilian population.

In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respect, and a more stable place in society. As citizen-soldiers, black men were empowered to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and publicly commemorate black freedom with celebrations such as Emancipation Day. White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom--to ensure the postwar white right to rule. This book is a forty-year history of black militia service in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, connecting this chapter of the post-emancipation South to the larger history of militia participation by African-descendant people through the Western hemisphere and Latin America.