Browse

This book highlights a seminal but largely overlooked period in the development of American counterinsurgency strategy. It examines how Progressive counterinsurgency ideas and methods evolved between 1899 and 1913 as Americans fought Philippine Moros in their first sustained military encounter with Islamic militants. It then compares those ideas and methods with current theory on COIN (counterinsurgency) as set forth in The U.S. Army * Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The author also explores how Moros contested American military intervention in their lives. He asks: How did they bend the narrative? How did Progressive counterinsurgency in Mindanao and Sulu come to have a Moro face? Finally, this work focuses on how John J. Pershing, during his seven years of service among Moros, contributed to Progressive counterinsurgency strategy. How did his approach compare with Gen. Leonard Wood’s radically different ideas on pacification? In the most creative years of Pershing’s life, how did he pull together lessons learned from his Philippine experience to craft a relatively balanced and full-spectrum approach to fighting small wars? What can we take from his experience and apply to America’s fraught relationship with Islamic militancy today?

Changing the Game is the memoir of Jim Host, a pioneer in college sports marketing. After attending the University of Kentucky, Host spent a few years in business before accepting a position as commissioner of public information in Governor Louie Nunn’s cabinet in 1967. After an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 1971, Host founded what would eventually become Host Communications Incorporated (HCI). HCI engaged in association management before entering the far more high-profile field of college sports marketing when it gained the radio rights to University of Kentucky athletics. Host then developed the NCAA Radio Network, broadcasting games for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. Before long, HCI had developed radio networks and marketing strategies for the Southwest Conference (SWC) and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Host began to bid on college media rights, ultimately partnering with more than thirty universities. He created the concept of “bundled rights” at the university level, whereby corporations became “official” sponsors of college athletic programs across a spectrum of media formats. In the early 1980s Host convinced NCAA executive director Walter Byers to sell corporate sponsorships for the NCAA basketball tournament. This innovation dramatically increased revenue for the NCAA and increased the popularity of the tournament. In Kentucky, Host was involved with the construction of Rupp Arena, the Kentucky Horse Park, and the KFC Yum! Center. He played a key role in bringing the Alltech World Equestrian Games to Kentucky in 2010.

Richmond, Virginia, became the capital of the Confederate States of America in May 1861. From that point on, it would be the target of multiple Union “On to Richmond” campaigns. Richmond was symbolic: its capitol building bore the imprimatur of the Revolutionary War generation and had been designed by Thomas Jefferson; on its grounds was a famous equestrian statue of George Washington. Nearby was St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry had demanded liberty—or death. But Richmond was an anomaly in the antebellum South. It supported a diverse population of whites, slaves, free people of color, and immigrants. It had modernized during the 1850s. By 1860, it ranked thirteenth nationally in manufacturing and boasted a robust commercial economy. When civil war erupted in 1861, it was only logical to shift the Confederate capital to the city on the James. Richmond became the keystone of the rebellion. Its people would sacrifice until there was literally nothing left. Rather than allow the Union army to take the city in 1865, the Confederacy’s military leaders fired the tobacco housed there, which created a firestorm that nearly destroyed the city. When the Federals entered Richmond on April 3, they could see the detritus that was a testament to the city’s and its citizens’ contributions to the Confederacy.

Literacy in the Mountains examines five Appalachian newspapers published between 1885 and 1920 for evidence of literacy practices in mountain communities. The newspapers illustrate that there existed a vibrant community of readers and writers in an area often imagined as illiterate and textless. Documenting a variety of literacy exchanges and a passionate commitment to local education institutions, the newspapers serve as a historical archive to recover otherwise invisible practices from the turn of the century. These findings demonstrate that the “idea of Appalachia” as a poor and illiterate region at the turn of the century is inaccurate, thus belying current narratives that the region is doomed to repeat cycles of poverty that reach into the distant past. Instead, Appalachia has a rich history of literacy and civic participation on which to draw.

Kentucky distillers have produced bourbon and rye whiskeys for more than two centuries. Part I of this book examines the complexities associated with nineteenth-century distilling’s evolution from an artisanal craft practiced by farmers and millers to a large-scale mechanized industry that adopted increasingly refined production techniques. The change from waterpower to steam engines permitted the relocation of distilleries away from traditional sites along creeks or at large springs. Commercial-scale distilling was accompanied by increasing government taxes and oversight controls. Mechanized distilleries readily expanded production and increased their demand for labor, grains, cooperage, copper stills, and other metal fixtures. Improved transportation—turnpikes, steamboats, trains, and dams and locks—allowed distillers to extend their reach for grains and equipment while distributing their product to national and international markets. Industrial production produced large amounts of spent grains, or slop, which had to be disposed of by feeding it to livestock or dumping it in sinkholes and creeks. Industrialization also increased the risk of fire, explosions, personal injury, and livestock diseases. Overproduction during the last third of the nineteenth century, among other problems, forced many distilleries to stop production or close. The temperance movement eventually led to Prohibition, which was in effect nationwide from 1920 to 1933. A small number of distillers survived that period by making medicinal whiskey. Part II consists of two case studies that provide detailed information on the general process of mechanization and industrialization: the Henry McKenna Distillery in Nelson County, and James Stone’s Elkhorn Distillery in Scott County. Part III examines the process of claiming product identity through naming, copyright law, and the acknowledgment that tradition and heritage can be employed by contemporary distillers to market their whiskey. Distillers venerate the “old,” and reconstructing the past as a marketing strategy has demonstrated that the industry’s heritage resides on the landscape—much of it established in the nineteenth century in the form of historic buildings, traditional routes, distillery towns, and other features that can be conserved through historic preservation and utilized by contemporary whiskey makers.

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the mid-nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. There, the clashing ideologies of this era—slavery and freedom, urban and rural, industrial and agrarian—met, merged, and melded. As they did, they formed something new—a fluid, flexible identity that somehow grew from these tensions while rising above them. This border identity would play a critical role in these states’ experiences during the secession crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, this story—one of political division, internal warfare, and economic struggles—is only one part of the border South’s larger saga. Focusing on the heart of this complicated region, Marriage on the Border reveals how this border environment shaped the lives and loves of Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Appalachian Virginians. Inundated with conflicting messages about marriage, divorce, and gender, these border southerners set their own path. In an era when advice manuals urged all Americans to adopt new ideals of companionate marriage and loving mutuality, border southerners proved especially receptive to these notions. Additionally, when these marriages crumbled, border southerners found ways to divorce more easily than other southerners of this era. Marriage on the Border follows border southerners through their courtships and into their homes, through blissful marriages and turbulent divorce dramas, through secession, war, and reconstruction. Along the way, Marriage on the Border captures the turmoil and confusion of this era, not in its legislative halls or on the battlefield, but in the households of those who lived at the heart of the country.

In these provocative essays, military historian Phillip Meilinger explores timeless issues. Beginning with an iconoclastic look at the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz, Meilinger sees an unfortunate influence due to an emphasis on bloody battle, combined with a Euro-centric worldview. Moreover, Clausewitz’s dictum that war is an extension of policy actually says very little to guide modern world leaders. Other essays examine the nature of war in the twenty-first century, principles of war, the meaning of decisive victory, the importance of second front operations, the influence of time in battle, and a look at the first major amphibious and joint campaign of World War II in Norway. He also notes the crucial role played by service culture, and his controversial look at the American military tradition reveals that the US military has played a major role in politics throughout our history. An essay on unity of command in the Pacific during World War II reveals interservice rivalry and conflicting strategic views. Strategic bombing in World War II depended on new analytical tools, such as intelligence gathering. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey examined the results of those bombing campaigns in depth. The United States now engages in wars of choice and requires an international mandate to intervene to restore peace or destroy a terrorist group. We must therefore limit risk and cost, especially to the civilian populace. This leads to a new paradigm emphasizing the use of airpower, special operations forces, intelligence gathering and dissemination systems, and indigenous ground forces.