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“Don't Ask, Don't Tell” was the directive of President Bill Clinton's 1993 military policy regarding gay and lesbian soldiers. This official silence continued a collective amnesia about the patriotic service and courageous sacrifices of homosexual troops. This book recovers these lost voices, offering a rich chronicle of the history of gay and lesbian service in the U.S. military from World War II to the Iraq War. Drawing on more than 50 interviews with gay and lesbian veterans, it charts the evolution of policy toward homosexuals in the military over the past 65 years, uncovering the ways in which silence about sexuality and military service has affected the identities of gay veterans. These veteran voices—harrowing, heroic, and on the record—reveal the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans, men and women who simply did their duty and served their country in the face of homophobia, prejudice, and enemy fire. The book demonstrates that, far from undermining national security, unit cohesion, or troop morale, these veterans strengthened the U.S. military in times of war and peace. It also examines challenges to the ban on homosexual service, placing them in the context of the wider movement for gay rights and gay liberation.

Historians have long understood that books were important to the British army in defining the duties of its officers, regulating tactics, developing the art of war, and recording the history of campaigns and commanders. This book identifies which, among over nine hundred books on war, British officers considered most important, and how those books might have affected the army from one era to another. By examining the preferences of some forty-two officers who served between the War of the Spanish Succession and the French Revolution, it shows that by the middle of the eighteenth century British officers were discriminating in their choices of books on war and, further, that their emerging preference for Continental books affected their understanding of warfare and their conduct of operations in the American Revolution. In their increasing enthusiasm for books on war, the book concludes, British officers were laying the foundation for the nineteenth-century professionalization of their nation's officer corps.

How was it possible that almost all of the nearly 300,000 British and American troops who fell into German hands during World War II survived captivity in German camps and returned home almost as soon as the war ended? This book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the living conditions in Nazi camps and traces the actions the British and American governments took—and didn't take—to ensure the safety of their captured soldiers. Concern in London and Washington about the safety of these prisoners of war (POWs) was mitigated by the recognition that the Nazi leadership tended to adhere to the Geneva Convention when it came to British and U.S. prisoners. Following the invasion of Normandy, however, Allied apprehension over the safety of POWs turned into anxiety for their very lives. Yet Britain and the United States took the calculated risk of counting on a swift conclusion to the war as the Soviets approached Germany from the east. Ultimately, the book argues, it was more likely that the lives of British and American POWs were spared because of their race rather than any actions their governments took on their behalf.

The U.S. policy of “Dollar Diplomacy” was designed to replace “dollars for bullets,” to guarantee economic and political stability in the Caribbean without intrusive and increasingly controversial military interventions. Using military and government records from Dominican and US archives, this work investigates the extent to which early twentieth-century U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic fundamentally changed the course of Dominican history and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In the Dominican Republic, successive interventions contributed to a drastic shifting of the social order, as well as centralized state power through the military, which Rafael Trujillo leveraged in his rise to dictatorship in the 1920s. Ultimately, this study demonstrates, the overthrow of the social order resulted not from military planning, but from the unplanned and uncoordinated interactions and negotiations between U.S. Marine Corps military occupation initiatives and Dominican society. This work provides insight into Dominican history and early U.S. attempts to use military force to reform other nations, but also offers a unique view of the power and goals of U.S. Navy officers and administrators during a period of expansive naval growth and concern about Caribbean security.

The United States established an academy for educating future army officers at West Point in 1802. Why, then, did it take this maritime nation forty-three more years to create a similar school for the navy? This book examines the origins of the United States Naval Academy and the national debate that led to its founding. Americans early on looked with suspicion upon professional military officers, fearing that a standing military establishment would become too powerful, entrenched, or dangerous to republican ideals. Tracing debates about the nature of the nation, class identity, and partisan politics, the book explains how the country's reluctance to establish a national naval academy gradually evolved into support for the idea. The United States Naval Academy was finally established in 1845, when most Americans felt it would provide the best educational environment for producing officers and gentlemen who could defend the United States at sea, serve American interests abroad, and contribute to the nation's mission of economic, scientific, and moral progress.

Since 1845, the United States Naval Academy has prepared professional military leaders at its Annapolis, Maryland, campus. Although it remains steeped in a culture of tradition and discipline, the Academy is not impervious to change. Dispelling the myth that the Academy is a bastion of tradition unmarked by progress, the author of this book examines challenges to the Naval Academy's culture from both inside and outside the Academy's walls between 1949 and 2000, an era of dramatic social change in American history. Drawing on more than two hundred oral histories, extensive archival research, and his own participatory observation at the Academy, he demonstrates that events at Annapolis reflect the transformation of American culture and society at large in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In eight chapters, the author discusses recruiting and minority midshipmen, the end of mandatory attendance at religious services, women's experiences as they sought and achieved admission and later served as midshipmen, and the responses of multiple generations of midshipmen to societal changes, particularly during the Vietnam War era. This cultural history not only sheds light on events at the Naval Academy but also offers a novel perspective on democratic ideals in the United States.