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This chapter examines the lives of the “victory girls” of World War II—young women who exhibited patriotism by offering sex to servicemen. This relationship defied not only social norms but also the authorities that attempted to classify, manage, and restrain young people's sexual acts and attitudes. World War II left a legacy of young female sexual self-assertion that would generate both conservative and liberal responses in the postwar years, inspiring calls for female sexual autonomy during the “sexual revolution” to come. The stories examined in the chapter illustrate how the nation's military mobilization expanded young women's access to casual encounters. It also discusses the issues that emerged such as infidelity, rape, and the rise of sexually transmitted diseases.

This chapter provides a background on the consequences of choices about military mobilization in China's southeast coast under the Ming dynasty from 1368 to 1644. It does not focus on military or logistical or fiscal consequences but on social consequences of how military institutions shaped the lives of ordinary people. This chapter tells the stories of ordinary Ming families' interaction with state institutions and how this interaction affected other kinds of social relations. It explains how ordinary people in the Ming were able to deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army and what were the broader consequences of their behaviour. The chapter also shows how people seized opportunities offered by living with the Ming state. Their strategies, practices, and discourses constitute a pattern of political interaction that was not unique to soldiers but was distributed more broadly across Ming society, and was not unique to the Ming but can be identified in other times in Chinese history, and perhaps beyond.

Xu discusses how conscription laws, army textbooks, and the New Life Movement propaganda helped the Chinese Nationalist state construct the soldier figure in the 1930s. These supplementary materials aided in configuring the citizenship ideal the Nationalist Party envisioned of their soldiers at Whampoa. In addition, literacy education was pivotal to morality and virtue, and thus was implemented into programs for the soldiers in order to educate the young individuals who previously had not been or were poorly taught. Despite these attempts, much of society did not respect and attempt to emulate these soldiers because of their social status and the fact that they still had few rights.

This chapter outlines the Western Front’s environmental history to show how the First World War was fought in, through, and against nature. If sterility implies the absence of life and infertility, it seemed that the war had sterilized vast swathes of northern and eastern France. The mobilization of terrain and topography had begun before the establishment of trench warfare during the initial war of movement. The military mobilization of animals during the war was, at times, symbolic. As well as featuring on propaganda posters, animal imagery appeared on actual war machines. Bases and training grounds served a variety of purposes during the war. Among them were training troops in trench warfare, testing weapons, and providing places of repose for soldiers recovering from life in the trenches. The mobilization of nature for military training and weapons testing militarized sites beyond northern and eastern France.

This chapter puts the events in Missouri into national perspective. It discusses how the American Civil War was the first time in history a nation mobilized all its material and human resources for a war effort, and was in this sense the first modern war. The chapter discusses how the Civil War began with the largest grassroots military mobilization in the nation's history, but was the last time the United States raised an army in this way. The Civil War produced many administrative innovations, most of which ended when the war did. Centralized military procurement, however, remained in place. The chapter discusses Skowronek, who argues that the critical period was 1877 to 1920, when rapid industrialization spurred such government innovations as business regulation and civil service reform. The change in military procurement was another important and permanent accretion of power to the U.S. government.

This chapter discusses the Largo Caballero Government and the dissatisfaction felt by Soviet policy makers toward it. Despite this dissatisfaction, the Largo Caballero Government was still accepted as a reasonable start toward a viable Popular Front government. The development and comparatively rapid growth of the People's Army were gratifying; September and October were times of frenzied activity, both in military mobilization and in Communist expansion. The new prime minister tried to follow the official line, declaring that his government was merely fighting for the “democratic Republic” and sought to uphold the “Republican constitution.” Within less than a month he even called the first rump session of the Cortes since the fighting began. As Burnett Bolloten has observed, it was a strange parliament because so many of the opposition deputies had either fled or had been executed.

Prior to the Civil War, the United States stood out as one of the few remaining world powers striving to uphold the ancient but waning institution of slavery. Now it had dramatically and decisively joined the cause of abolition. This chapter looks at the impact of the Civil War on the American economy, and the way the outcome of the war and Reconstruction established the strength of the federal government. It begins with a brief survey of how the relation between the U.S. economy and government was evolving in the antebellum years. It then examines slavery both as labor system and as cause of sectional strife. It also discusses the war's impact on government in four overlapping realms: military mobilization, public finance, civil liberties, and economic mobilization. It shows that the Union and the Confederacy, the two central states involved in the Civil War, were in most respects mirror images, with a few intriguing variations on a theme. Finally, the chapter takes up the war's legacy as it played out in the South under Reconstruction and in the nation overall.

This chapter narrates the resulting standoff in the battle of Irupata—discussed in Chapter 3—that nearly descended into civil war. The incoming administration of Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969) vetoed a full-scale attack, despite President Víctor Paz's desire to use the hostages as a cause célèbre to take the mines by military force. The miners eventually capitulated in the face of vague threats by Washington—a massive Bolivian military mobilization, and rumors that thousands of armed, pro-Paz Indian peasants were set to march on the mining camp. The chapter also highlights that the release of American hostages a few days before Christmas did not resolve the battle of attrition that had emerged between Paz's development-oriented government and the rebellious miners.

This chapter presents an overview of the financial conspiracy that occurred in Missouri at the beginning of the Civil War. In 1861, a small group of pro-secession politicians, bankers, and wealthy men conspired to divert money from Missouri's banks to arm and equip rebel military units then forming throughout the state. The scheme backfired and caused widespread indebtedness among Missouri's planters and their extended families, ending their decades-long domination of the state's economic and political life. The chain of events set off by the failed conspiracy was unique to Missouri, but the records of it give a detailed picture of military mobilization in both sections of the country during the earliest phase of the Civil War. This episode also contributes new data to several larger questions of Civil War history, including the nature of wartime guerrilla violence in the Border States and postwar leadership persistence in the New South.