Books published by University Press of Kansas

Midway through 1942, Japanese and Allied forces found themselves fighting on two fronts - in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. These concurrent campaigns proved a critical turning point in the war being waged in the Pacific. Key to this shift was the Allies seizing of the strategic initiative - a concept that Sean Judge examines in this book, particularly in the context of the Pacific War.

The first study in half a century to focus on the election of 1796. Colorfully portrays the young nation's politics, focusing especially on images of Adams and Jefferson created by supporters and detractors through the press, capturing the way that ordinary citizens in 1796 would have experienced candidates they never heard speak.

From Kanorado to Pawnee villages, Kansas is a land rich in archaeological sites - nearly 12,000 known - that testify to its prehistoric heritage. This volume presents the first comprehensive overview of Kansas archaeology in nearly fifty years, containing the most current descriptions and interpretations of the state's archaeological record.

Nancy Beck Young presents a documented study of Lou Henry Hoover's White House years, 1929-1933, showing that, far from a passive prelude to Eleanor Roosevelt, she was a true innovator.

Revealing the interplay between foreign policy, domestic politics, and public opinion, the author of this book argues that 1950 was a pivotal year for the USA. The convergence of Korea, McCarthy, and the Bomb, he states, wounded the nation in ways from which it never fully recovered.

What was for the United States a struggle against creeping Communism in Southeast Asia was for the people of North Vietnam a "great patriotic war" that saw its eventual victory against a military Goliath. Victory in Vietnam is the People's Army of Vietnam's own account of two decades of struggle, now available for the first time in English.

Using memoirs and histories, letters and diaries, early photos and old maps, Susan Schrepfer compares male and female mountaineering narratives to show the ways in which gender affected what men and women found to value in rocky heights, and how their different perceptions together defined the wilderness preservation movement for the nation..

Shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, Congress established the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War. The COCOW generated controversy throughout the war, and its legacy sparks debate even. In the wake of both critical and sympathetic appraisals, Bruce Tap now offers the first history of COCOW's activities, focusing on the nature of its power and its influence on military policy.

In most studies of nationalism, the United States is curiously ignored or is examined only during its colonial and republican periods. But it was the Civil War, argues Susan-Mary Grant, that truly formed the American nation by unifying the states once and for all, abolishing slavery, and setting the country on the path to modernity.

While war is most effectively waged as a united effort, the United States has consistently waged military conflict without firm central direction. Throughout our history, observes Michael Pearlman, the waging of war has been subject to continuous bargaining and compromise among competing governmental and military factions. What passes for strategy emerged from this process.

In 1940 the US Army Signal Intelligence Service broke the Japanese diplomatic code. Resurrecting Oshima Hiroshi's decoded communications, Carl Boyd provides a unique look at the Nazis from the perspective of a close foreign observer and ally. He uses Oshima's own words to reveal the thought and strategies of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis, with whom Oshima associated.

Over the course of two centuries, Americans have tried to tame the Missouri River. Writing in a new tradition of environmental history, Robert Kelley Schneiders takes a long historical view to reconstruct the Missouri Valley environment before Euro-American settlement and then trace the environmental transformations resulting from the development projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In recent years, controversies over abortion, school prayer, and religious cults have raised new questions about the delicate balance between church and state, between true believers and civic authority. John West shows that America's Founders had already anticipated and answered such questions by carefully defining religion's proper role in politics.

Underscoring an emerging revisionist view of the American Expeditionary Forces, David Trask argues that the performances of the AEF and General John J. Pershing were much more flawed than conventional accounts have suggested. This can best be seen, he shows, by analysing coalition warfare at the level of grand tactics.

Historians, while recognizing the emergence of a pre-Civil War professional army, have generally placed the solid foundation of military professionalism in the post-Civil War era. William Skelton maintains, however, that the early national and antebellum eras were crucial to the rise of the American profession of arms.