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Recovering the rarely heard voices of immigrant soldiers, Indigenous women, and Mexican women alongside officers' narratives, this book richly portrays the US Army at war in Florida and Mexico. Its unique focus on interactions between the army and local women uncovers army culture's gendered foundations. Countering an almost exclusively officer-focused historiography, it amasses enlisted men's accounts to describe what life was like for ordinary soldiers, show how enlisted men participated in and shaped army culture, and demonstrate how officers wrote their reports to achieve specific ends. By piecing together scattered mentions of women from personal writings, military and civilian newspapers, court-martial proceedings, and official records, it also shows the wide spectrum of Indigenous and Mexican women's wartime activities. Army authors erased or reframed evidence of women's combatancy to bolster their status as women's protectors, but undoing this process reveals that even in the most understudied conflicts, evidence exists to tell women's stories.
List of contents
Introduction: army paternalists, enemy women, and US Army culture in wartime Florida and Mexico, 1835-1848; Part I. War in Florida: 1. The dilemma of army cohesion: West Point officers, immigrant soldiers, and the beginnings of an army culture, 1802-1842; 2. Developing a logic of protection: army debates on the treatment of Seminole women in Florida, 1835-1842; 3. 'Find where their women are': the US Army's pursuit of Seminole women, 1835-1842; Part II. War in Mexico: 4. Rescuing the enemy: Mexican women and the US Army's transformation in Northern Mexico, 1846-1847; 5. A Perfect sacrifice: the unexplored rape case that radically expanded military justice, 1847; 6. Buying benevolence: contested legitimacy during the US occupation of Mexico, 1847; 7. 'They were our best friends': army misunderstandings of Mexican women's wartime activities, 1847-1848; Conclusion: beyond men's military history.
About the author
Justine Meberg received her PhD from Columbia University, where she won the Bancroft Dissertation Award.
