Many individuals helped me with this textbook. First and foremost, I would like thank my son, Augustus, and my daughter, Beatrice. Because they are my greatest teachers, I dedicate this work to them.

I am able to do this work because of the American military. While pursuing an education in 1988, I joined the Army National Guard and received G.I. Bill benefits. I was recognized as an honor graduate of my Army basic training unit at Fort Sill and later earned honors at the Primary Leadership Development Course for noncommissioned officers. I was a member of the historic 45th Division from Oklahoma, and my service in the field artillery included time as the gun chief on a M110 howitzer. Proud to call myself a “Thunderbird,” my intellectual devotion to the history of the armed forces is personal as well as professional. In a sense, the men and women in uniform remain a part of my extended family.

I also appreciate the immeasurable support of colleagues and friends. Roger Bromert, Gerald Thompson, Charles Glaab, and Robert Freeman Smith passed away before the completion of this work, but I am indebted to each for mentoring me during my career as well as for their service in the military. Many individuals helped to locate documents, including Michael E. Gonzalez, curator for the 45th Infantry Division Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Carl S. Richardson sent me a copy of a Marine pilot’s diary, which had been entrusted to his care. At Columbia College of Missouri, Michael Polley shared his research on World War II. Terry Smith critiqued an early draft of the introduction. Academic Affairs funded various stages of my research. I am indebted to individuals at Stafford Library, namely Janet Caruthers, Cynthia Cole, Mary Batterson, Lucia D’Agostino, Peter Neely, Nason Throgmorton, and Vandy Evermon. I was assisted by work‐study students, Sara Hurst and Craig Rush. Finally, the undergraduates enrolled in HIST 370 helped to hone my thinking about the primary sources. If I have failed to list a name deserving acknowledgment, then please accept my apology and my gratitude.

I am very grateful for the support of the professionals at Wiley‐Blackwell. I benefited enormously from the expertise and advice of anonymous reviewers. Linda Auld and Caroline Richards copy‐edited the manuscript. Furthermore, Galen Smith guided me throughout the publication process. In my opinion, there is no better editor in the publishing business than Peter Coveney. He understood from the beginning what the textbook offered to instructors and students alike. I am privileged to work with such a great team of professionals.

In preparing the second edition, I have profited from the assistance of many others. Andrew Davidson at Wiley‐Blackwell recommended updating the textbook. Haze Humbert, Maddie Koufogazos, Jennifer Manias, and Kelley Baylis kept everything on track. Janani Govindankutty managed the production and the permissions. Katherine Carr provided copy editing. Aneetta Antony handled production editing. Beth Bailey at the University of Kansas and Kara Dixon Vuic at Texas Christian University shared new materials with me. Major Andrew J. Forney at the United States Military Academy aided me as well.

I will conclude by giving thanks to Deidra, my amazing wife. She gave me her criticisms and suggestions. She gave me her empathy, too. Simply stated, I owe her everything.

In spite of all the advice and guidance I have received while working on the textbook, I alone am responsible for any errors.

“To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might,” declared Oliver Wendell Holmes, a wounded veteran of the American Civil War and later an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. His words before a Memorial Day audience in 1884 expressed something elemental about American military history. The former Lieutenant Colonel spoke of those who were near and dear to him, “not because their lives have become historic,” but because “their lives are the type of what every soldier has known and seen” in war. He called them “the army of the dead,” who swept before the nation wearing “wounds like stars.” He remembered his comrades with great reverence: “I speak of those whom I have seen.” With a gesture to the audience, he mused: “But you all have known such; you, too, remember!”¹

No one should forget the millions of Americans, who have fought in wars large and small. They embody what endures at the heart of military affairs, that is, the will to fight for something greater than the self. For centuries, they provided for the common defense. The history of the American military offers a framework through which the people and the nation can be analyzed. At the dawn of a new millennium, acts of war still permit individuals to dedicate themselves to a cause in life as well as in death. Because so many have fought with all their might, I ask the readers of this textbook to consider the historical question: What did American warriors believe and want?

What they said has survived in scores of documents, which I sample in the following pages as broadly as possible. A number consider the role and the use of the armed forces in relation to the social, cultural, economic, political, and territorial development of the United States. Some feature commentary on strategic initiatives, combat operations, force structure, public policy, and home fronts. Others offer the firsthand testimony of extraordinary men and women in uniform. Most reveal the connections between combatants and the societies that spawned them. Thanks to an abundance of documentary materials, I present excerpts from diaries, memoirs, letters, speeches, songs, posters, memoranda, reports, manuals, laws, debates, petitions, reviews, and articles.

Attentive to diversity in the American military, I present not one point of view but many. The sampling of extracts makes for an eclectic mix, but not infinitely so. The result may be described as a reconnaissance of a historical field. The point is not to go left or right to engage the past. Rather, it is to dig deeper and to reach wider in the effort to grasp what happened and why. Whether part of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, National Guard, or Coast Guard, Americans from all walks of life served with honor and dignity. Even while facing the prospect of death, they remained focused on accomplishing their missions in theaters around the world. In the process, their experiences became entangled with thematic issues common to each historical era. To help readers recognize the most prevalent themes of the documents, my aims in this textbook are threefold.

My first aim is to trace America’s ways of war. Beginning in 1607, the approaches to combat in North America appeared as varied and as ambiguous as each individual. In a sense, each was fighting his or her own battles. Over time, the use of the armed forces by the United States revealed patterns of design and purpose. Although war often created a momentum of its own, Americans mastered strategies for attrition as well as tactics for defense, concentration, maneuver, and assault. Combat included not only strategic and tactical aspects but also social and intellectual thrusts. In other words, operations involved fighting as well as thinking. What distinguished American warriors was not just the logistics of their military campaigns. It was also their passion for the literature, music, and art of war. The face of battle elicited extreme emotional responses, which resonated with the lingering effects of stress and trauma. At the same time, the nation expressed a great deal of pride about the profession of arms. The ways of war involved a private and public sense of civic virtue, collective anxieties, and shared memories.

Of course, there never was a single or simple way of war. Warfare involved extraordinary actions, which combatants often remembered differently. Whether charging or retreating, no one observed everything on the battlefield. Lies, falsehoods, distortions, and exaggerations appear at times in the spoken and the written accounts of individuals. Thus, language itself may seem inadequate for the task of recovering the whole story from partial and fragmentary narratives. Even so, the recollections and the commemorations of war illustrate the martial spirit at home and abroad. Veterans told stories about adventures that astonished and perplexed. They recalled experiences marked by horror and misery. The most vivid and compelling tales give a sense of combat, thereby providing the next best—or worst—thing to having been there. Once recorded, the reports of eyewitnesses convey far more than words alone can possibly say. Their voices deserve amplification, because they have come to terms with the incontrovertible fact that death remains the end of all war. Engaging with the primary sources permits readers to study the ways of war in a raw and unfiltered form.

My second aim is to study leadership in military affairs. Time and again, commissioned and noncommissioned officers led others through the fog of war. They made tough choices in order to achieve military objectives, whether or not they fully recognized all the obstacles before them. In spite of the risks to life and limb, they persuaded their comrades in arms to follow them up hills or into caves. While setting courageous examples, they drove the rank and file across dark skies and stormy waters. They endeavored to seize the initiative in a struggle, which on many occasions placed them in the crossfire. Their sway turned motley crews into cohesive units. Their foresight made teamwork successful. To be sure, combat operations were punctuated with accidents and surprises. Even the best laid plans for action faltered in the absence of adequate resources, proper training, high morale, or public support. From boot camps to battle stations, however, leaders often adapted and overcame. Many of the challenges they met in the past continue to pose challenges to men and women in uniform today. With respect to decision‐making, the following pages will expose readers to models of military leadership at all levels of service.

Without a doubt, a number of martial figures in the United States possessed a genius for leadership. More than simply trumpeting their military accomplishments, many leaders wrote reflectively about how they worked major problems. The best and the brightest studied innovative concepts to improve the readiness of the armed forces. Searching for determining factors in war, they obsessed over losses as well as victories. They carefully analyzed elements of battle—from both the ground up and the inside out. They assessed outcomes to better understand their own strengths and weaknesses rather than merely to second‐guess the choices made by others. They benefited from the privileges of hindsight, which enabled them to identify historical parallels instructive to future generations. Lively and open‐ended discussions about the lessons learned tended to educate their senses. Insights born out of wisdom provoked and enlightened not simply by pleasing guardians of a set of ideological assumptions or by refighting each battle from the last campaign. Rather, great military leaders developed a pragmatic style that privileged performance and results over orthodoxies and doctrines.

Thirdly, my aim is to reveal the vitality of civil–military relations in the United States. Since the Age of Enlightenment, standing armies and navies represented nothing if not state‐organized instruments of violence. The founders of the American republic established the military based—at least in theory—on the notion that service constituted an obligation of all citizens. The U.S. Constitution permitted Congress to draw largely from the preexisting militia system while building a new nation. Moreover, each Commander in Chief tried to strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, the military establishment seemed at odds with the most liberal impulses of community life. On the other hand, global empires on the march made the world unsafe for democracy. Consequently, a professional military with trained regulars prepared for peace as well as for war. Civilian authorities used them in constabulary roles across the continent and deployed them in contingency operations overseas. During the draft era, the federal government forged a massive war machine to stop the aggression of totalitarian regimes. With the introduction of nuclear arms and guided missiles, the American military became a mighty tool for national security.

For the sake of national security, the United States continues to marshal its military power to meet the challenges of globalization. Blood is still shed on land, at sea, and in air, but battles also rage in cyberspace. Wars have been won and lost in Washington, DC, where the Commander in Chief works closely with the military brass inside the Pentagon. With Congressional appropriations for procurement, pay, and benefits, civilian control over the military establishment endures. However, American society no longer considers military service an obligation of citizenship. Instead, the Department of Defense now depends upon an all‐volunteer force structure. Thanks to public policies that have revolutionized military affairs, the armed forces destroy enemies on battlefields with as little risk to civilians as possible. Ironically, defense experts want the best military on the planet in order to give peace a chance. Hence, a number of the documents will invite readers to engage in an ongoing national dialogue about the common defense. Each reader undoubtedly will recognize something vital to the American republic in the relationship between civilians and the military.

In sum, my aims complicate the dominant narrative without necessarily changing it. Critics have dismissed the phrase “freedom fighters,” but the American military effectively liberated people under tyranny. Whatever their races, classes, and genders, men and women in uniform fought oppression around the world. Experiencing no easy days or nights, they considered war not only in theory but also in practice. Of course, they often disagreed about the meanings of their encounters with each other and with their enemies. They suffered and sacrificed, but they were not silenced. However socially or culturally constructed, ideas mattered to them as much as bullets or bombs. Whether they carried a flintlock musket or piloted an A‐4 Skyhawk, they battled for a vast country. They remained as much a part of the fabric of the United States as any other thread. The implications of war differed for individuals, yet all service members knew something personal about American military history. The documentary evidence conveys what no one should forget about their stories. Everywhere they went they fulfilled the nation’s fondest hopes of what America was, is, and should be.

To be sure, there are things absent from this kind of a textbook. Obviously, the documents give only fleeting glimpses of the contingencies in war. By focusing upon the contest between the English colonists and the indigenous populations, the early chapters offer no comparative viewpoints from Spanish, Dutch, or French outposts on the continent. Likewise, the later chapters ignore the clandestine operations, nuclear umbrellas, and defense contractors of the Cold War. Although campaigns appear in every chapter, they lack the “drum‐and‐bugles” of battle histories that some historians may prefer. Historians seeking details regarding logistics, manpower, and arsenals may be uninterested in the linguistic turns of the documents. Missing are excerpts that illustrate the full extent to which staff rides, war games, military fiction, or social media shaped expectations about combat. More might be said about the evolving definitions of wounds, disabilities, and bodies. The key to any textbook on American military history, nonetheless, is to not be so far off the mark or too narrow in focus that it becomes irrelevant once the future is revealed.

To the greatest extent possible, I have tried to preserve the richness of the primary sources in this textbook through careful editing. With only minimal refinements to the language, the quaint spellings, curious acronyms, and archaic renderings appear unaltered. By retaining most of their original forms, the passages convey a sense of the past. Nevertheless, words that pass through the hands of several scribes occasionally require polishing to ensure readability in the present. From time to time, edits to typography, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar have clarified awkward prose. Ellipses indicate redactions; brackets contain additions. The margins are not cluttered with annotations, because excessive editorial commentary tends to distract from what was actually said. Given the completeness of the citations, readers will be able to consult the primary sources to find the full texts of the edited excerpts.

I have arranged the edited excerpts chronologically into 16 chapters. From English colonization to current globalization, they align with major periods of American military history. As a frame of reference, a timeline of key events opens each chapter. Each closes with a list of suggested sources for further reading. Introduced with information on people, places, and actions, a head‐note places the excerpt within a historical context. To provide a scaffold for working with the blocks of text, three questions appear after each excerpt. They range from a basic query for inviting literal responses to an advanced one for making appropriate inferences. In regard to the history of the American military, the scope of coverage reveals the “big picture” from various angles of vision.

In the final analysis, American military history teaches us about the human element in war. In the words of one wounded veteran, American warriors believed something and wanted something with all their might. Because their “hearts were touched with fire,” he said, they had learned that “life is a profound and passionate thing.”² They forever will remain the subjects of historical epics, because their jobs by definition involved matters of life and death. Though battle itself is never glorious, their devotion to the greater good is full of glory. Their bravery through the ages resonates with the narrative of the United States as a whole. It is an incredible saga, which began long ago on the North American seaboard and continues even now near another shore.