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This chapter reinterprets Robert F. Williams as a new kind of black male publisher, who challenged the civil rights establishment and the mainstream black press. Northern black papers had often challenged southern black papers to be as militant as they were, but Williams, a publisher based in the South, accepted this challenge, prompted by escalating racial violence in the South following the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Lacking the commercial resources of the mainstream black press, Williams used a mimeograph machine to publish The Crusader to address these issues and promote a vision of black manhood rooted in black self-defense against the non-violent strategy promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. Williams came to believe in “print and practice,” and issued a challenge to mainstream black newspapers to do the same, which helped expose the black press for not being as militant as it had long claimed to be. Many black newspapers now sided with nonviolent activists, elevating Martin Luther King especially, a move that helped usher in the decline of mainstream black newspapers and the rise of radical ones.

Chapter two examines the tension between the Friends' ideal of peace and the militant metaphors employed by Quaker ministers. Male and female Society members declared themselves holy warriors, called by their divine commander to take to the battlefield in Christ's army. In this way, Friends declared a holy war against nationalism and fought with every spiritual weapon in their arsenal. This unique assertion of a church militant was a response to the growing association between citizenship and military service. This correlation had two significant effects: the definition of citizenship as an exclusively male privilege and, consequently, an increasingly inextricable link between manhood and violence. Quakers simultaneously rejected the increasingly gendered nature of national citizenship and fought against the ways in which manhood was becoming intimately tied to violence and domination. In so doing, they also promulgated a new definition of femininity—one that introduced a model of active, engaged female citizenship based on the equal participation of women in the imagined community of the nation.

In this chapter army demobilization and the civilian response to returning soldiers are examined. Veterans wanted to believe they would easily reintegrate into peacetime life. Civilians were anxious that returning soldiers would become a destabilizing force. These themes appear in popular images and fiction from the early postwar period. Winslow Homer’s engraving “Our Watering Places—The Empty Sleeve at Newport” serves as an example of the wounded warrior image preferred by the civilian populace. Veterans responded to this image in a variety of ways. Union veteran John William De Forest in his novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion hoped to reaffirm the prewar citizen-soldier ideal. Confederate veteran Sidney Lanier sought in his novel Tiger Lilies for a pure emotion that would unite soldiers and civilians without reference to duty or pity. Both resisted the idea that war had disabled them for life during peacetime.

This chapter explores how liberal filmmakers, historians, and politicians sought to reclaim the ideal of the citizen soldier and celebrate his exploits in the years after the Vietnam War, one dominated by conservatives. It looks at how vital military service remains to the popular conception of what it means to be an American patriot. It examines the role of “war and nationalism” liberals such as James McPherson, Stephen Ambrose, Ken Burns, Stephen Spielberg, Ted Turner, and Tom Brokaw in reinvigorating liberal nationalism. By producing films that tackle the Civil War and World War II and celebrate the citizen soldier, these “war and nationalism” liberals launched a patriotic critique of the country's professionalized military and the adventurist foreign policy that it has helped make possible.

This chapter provides an overview of the fundamental elements of the French combat method. Since the French Revolution had unleashed new ideas that fundamentally altered French culture, and at the same time realized Enlightenment military reforms deemed anathema by the armies of the ancien régime, the result was a way of warfare that matched the unique capabilities of the citizen-soldier with a new system of tactics. This new system disregarded the limitations of eighteenth-century warfare and proved superior to the system of Frederick the Great. This intellectual framework, called the French combat method, informed military affairs far beyond the borders of France, eventually becoming a transnational cultural influence.

This essay explores how racist thought became tied to the history of early US political violence through the analysis of two narratives of the War of 1812, one written by a supporter of slavery and the other by an advocate of African American equality. It argues that divisions among the soldiers in the War of 1812 provided a symbol of the perpetual instability faced by a nation founded in revolutionary violence. In response, a discourse of white supremacy and racial purity would be remembered in the antebellum era as the source of affiliation between men that could balance this volatility. As they illustrate a cultural effort to define legitimate expressions of political violence as the exclusive right of a sovereign community of white men, these narratives reveal how racial divisions obscured the similar forms of exploitation experienced by both white soldiers and enslaved blacks in the service of an expanding nation state.

This introduction provides a critical framework for re-evaluating a tacit assumption in the field of American literary scholarship, namely that its objects of study are civilian. While scholars have examined how texts negotiate the relationship between subjects and citizens, such considerations have overwhelmingly overlooked the importance of the military for shaping both. The Civil War draft transformed the content of citizenship for Americans, and embedded the military in the structures of representative democracy. Because the draft drew on yet unsettled norms of representation established as far back as the Constitutional Convention, a vast outpouring of texts not only thematized the draft but made textual representation itself a crucial domain for thinking through the draft’s promises of metaphoric equality and pitfalls of synecdochical rendering. Identifying substitutes as a particularly important subset of the draft, this book traces a cultural history of the connections between the symbolic nation and its body politics.

This chapter examines how the changing role of the reserve component in the post–Cold War era has affected US civil-military relations. It argues that as the reserve component has transitioned from strategic to operational reserve, the part-time service members of the reserve component have become less distinct from their active-duty counterparts. The blurring of the distinction between citizen-soldier and professional soldier has important implications for key issues in civil-military relations. Policymakers previously assumed the societal disruption caused by mobilizing the reserve component would impose significant political costs on presidents who conduct overseas military operations, but this does not appear to be the case today. In addition, political activity—including serving in Congress—by members of the reserve component who simultaneously publicize their ongoing military service may exacerbate concerns about the politicization of the military.

This chapter addresses two questions: Why are the armed forces of some states more inclined than others to shoot when the masses converge upon a public square? Why are some soldiers more likely to put down their arms and join the crowds rather than turn against them? The citizen-soldier model emerges as a common thread among militaries that have toppled dictatorships. In these militaries, the leadership is often made up of career professionals, but the rank-and-file members are conscripts, also called “citizen-soldiers.” They serve a mandatory term in the military, usually one to three years, before returning to civilian life. These conscripts are civilians first and soldiers second. The rotation of civilians in and out of the military creates a feedback loop between the military and the civilian population that keeps the military in touch with civilian values.

Any general account of democracy in the period 1789–1860 must consider ideologies and practices relating to armed force. Early decades were overshadowed by massive and prolonged warfare, raising questions about the relationship between armies and soldiers, on the one hand, nation and citizenry, on the other. In the subsequent era of peace (or smaller wars), small professional armies were relatively more important—but they nonetheless sometimes incubated reformist political ideologies. They often identified themselves with the interests of the nation, while providing scope for the talented to rise to positions of leadership that they might not otherwise have attained. Napoleon Bonaparte continued to offer a role model—but with political implications that were at best ambiguous. While military coups before 1860 were often staged in defence of liberal or popular governments, a pattern was set by which they might crush these and pave the way for autocracy.