Search Results

This chapter deals with the government power to conscript. It provides that the Government of the United States can conscript citizens to serve in the military forces of the country. It notes however, that the power to conscript is not expressly provided for in the Constitution, but it has long been considered available to a government authorized to “raise and support Armies.” It further notes that systems of military conscription have been employed during the American Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. It opines that however exalted the status may be of personal liberty in the United States, it does not extend so far as to require that an American army always be made up entirely of volunteers. It notes that the armed forces have, in recent decades, been thus constituted is the result of political, not constitutional, determinations.

The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, but Salvationists were neither fully of the communities they evangelized nor outsiders. Some trade unionists and labor leaders admired the Salvation Army's ability to organize its adherents into well-disciplined corps, while others deplored its theological approach to poverty. Some deemed it irrelevant, while others found its services blasphemous. In other instances, young men organized themselves into “Skeleton Armies,” which initiated serious, well-organized street frays. The opposition mounted by pamphlet writers and the legal opposition of magistrates and local governments coincided with attacks by street gangs. The Army stimulated a kind of informal alliance of these unlikely allies, who were united in their desire to clear Salvationists from their neighborhoods. Their opposition allowed the Salvationists to present themselves as the champions of the working class, resisting an unjust church and state—a position that echoed a long tradition of Nonconformist, egalitarian radicalism.

This essay reviews the book The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, by Norman Mailer. First published in 1968, The Armies of the Night is a journalistic mock epic of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. The book presents Mailer as a reluctant participant in a mass protest against the Vietnam War that took place in October 1967. During that time, the so-called New Journalism was in full bloom. The Armies of the Night stood out in some important ways. In particular, Mailer got as close as he could to the gears of power, and then used his own sensibilities as a set of coordinates by which to measure the dimensions of people and events on the national stage: presidents and astronauts, championship fights and political conventions. Mailer's most significant discovery in Armies was the technique of writing about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in a novel.

This chapter examines how Ray Bradbury's disillusionment with modernity led him to take on Modernist themes such as isolation, alienation, the loss of values, and the decline of traditional sources of wisdom. Bradbury's early work on the Illinois novel coincided with the development of two novel concepts that would not reach print in any form for sixty years: Masks and Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night. Behind the scenes of his award-winning success with major market magazines, Bradbury's own search for a writing identity in long fiction moved for a time beyond the psychological novel he was writing about his Illinois youth. This chapter considers Bradbury's development of Masks as a second psychological novel project beginning in April 1946 and the ways it differed from the psychological underpinnings of the Illinois novel. It also discusses how Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night led to Fahrenheit 451 and how one set of its page fragments evolved into a published story as “The Smile” (1952).

This book has argued that armies played a key political role in the Chilean revolution—hence its three main analytical categories: armies, politics and revolution. It has endorsed Mario Góngora’s hypothesis that warfare was central to the process of state building in Chile, and that the revolution was a prolonged experience that had a permanent effect on Chilean society.

This chapter examines the course and failure of the major attacks on the Soviet state that were launched by the White Armies during 1919–20, paying particular attention to those emanating from South Russia (under the aegis of General A.I. Denikin, especially the Armed Forces of South Russia) and Siberia (under the aegis of Admiral A.V. Kolchak, especially the Russian Army), but dwelling also upon White operations (and Red Army counter-attacks) in North Russia and North-West Russia. Regarding the latter, the debilitating impact upon anti-Bolshevik efforts in the Baltic region of the conflict between pro-German and Latvian and Estonian forces during 1919 (the Landeswehr War) is highlighted, as is the hugely positive influence upon Red efforts of the Soviet Commissar for Military Affairs, L.D. Trotsky.