During wartime, the Constitution requires the president to lead the nation as commander-in-chief. But what about first ladies? As wives, mothers, and co-equal partners, these “first ladies-in-chief” have found themselves serving as field companion to the commander-in-chief, mother-in-chief to sons on combat duty, steward of national resources, and caretakers to the nation’s wounded. This chapter considers six prominent first ladies during major American conflicts: Martha Washington and the Revolutionary War, Dolley Madison and the War of 1812, Mary Todd Lincoln and the Civil War, Edith Wilson and World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II, Lady Bird Johnson and Vietnam, and Barbara and Laura Bush during the first and second Gulf Wars. Taken together, they paint the first lady as a vital contributor to the nation’s military efforts who deserve our recognition and respect.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This chapter applies localized peace enforcement theory to a subnational analysis of patterns of dispute escalation in Mali. In order to investigate whether the previous chapters’ experimental findings generalize to real-world operations, the chapter presents the results of two analyses of UN peacekeeping efforts to prevent the onset of communal violence in the central Malian region of Mopti. The first study leverages a geographic regression discontinuity design to compare dispute escalation on either side of the Burkina Faso–Mali border. The border splits similar areas into those “treated” with UN peacekeeping patrols (on the Mali side) and “control” areas without peacekeeping (on the Burkina Faso side). The findings indicate that peacekeeping reduces the likelihood of communal violence. The second study delves deeper into the data with an analysis of UN peacekeepers from different countries deployed to the same regions of Mali and uncovers further evidence in line with the predictions of the theory. Rather than comparing UN peacekeeping in countries with against those without a peacekeeping operation, the study compares UN peacekeepers from different contributing countries – Togo and Senegal – deployed to the same area.

This chapter examines local-level peacekeeping operations in a cross-national context. The analysis draws on a dataset of nearly 400,000 georeferenced troop deployments in sub-Saharan Africa from 1999 to 2019. Consistent with the theory’s predictions, it demonstrates that increases in the number of peacekeeping troops deployed to local communities are strongly positively associated with decreases in the onset of communal violence. Since cross-national data of this sort cannot directly measure local perceptions of peacekeepers cross-nationally, the study tallies the number of peacekeepers from former colonial powers and neighboring countries deployed to each area as a proxy for perceptions of bias. The patterns further vary in ways that support the logic of localized peace enforcement theory. Specifically, the evidence shows that there is no relationship between the deployment of these two types of peacekeepers and levels of communal violence. The analyses presented in the chapter also detect a strong negative association between all other types of peacekeepers, likely to be perceived as impartial, and the onset of communal violence.

This chapter describes the importance of studying wartime displacement, outlines several key questions that motivate the book, and summarizes the main arguments. It also briefly defines strategic wartime displacement and specifies the scope of the study, explaining why it confines the analysis to civil wars and why it focuses on displacement perpetuated by state combatants. It then describes what we know about displacement in war. This includes outlining existing explanations and discussing their limitations. It concludes by describing the methods and sources used in the book, summarizing its main findings, and outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

This chapter provides additional evidence for the sorting theory in a broader set of contexts. In order to demonstrate that the findings from Chapter 5 generalize beyond Uganda – and can account for the empirical associations found in Chapter 4 – it conducts “shadow” case studies of three civil wars from the Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict dataset that experienced forced relocation. The three case studies are Burundian Civil War (1991–2005), the Aceh conflict in Indonesia (1999–2005), and the Vietnam War (1960–1975). These cases were selected for both methodological and practical reasons. Using process-tracing of secondary sources, the chapter finds that in all three cases, perpetrators used forced relocation to overcome identification problems posed by guerrilla insurgencies, specifically by drawing inferences about the identities and allegiances of the local population based on civilian flight patterns and physical locations. State authorities also used relocation to extract economic and military resources, notably recruits, from the displaced, which in some instances helped fill critical resource gaps. The evidence suggests that the theory and its underlying mechanisms are generalizable beyond Uganda and travel to other diverse contexts.

After the US Civil War, technology, expertise, and surplus materiel flowed out into the Pacific World where it was adopted by “self-strengthening” movements in Peru, Chile, China, and Japan. As leaders in the Pacific faced the threat of North Atlantic maritime power, they sought to leverage technological and tactical advances pioneered in the US Civil War. In doing so, these four states transformed in a matter of years from “navies to construct” into “newly made navies”: industrial fleets, built from little or no naval infrastructure, leveraging recent technological innovations. This chapter also explores how newly made Pacific navies performed in the War against Spain (1864–1866), the Boshin War (1868–1869), and the Japanese Expedition to Taiwan (1874). Contemporaneously, US postwar demobilization created moments of parity between the US “Old Steam Navy” and Pacific states. Most histories frame the post-Civil War period as one of US naval retrenchment and stagnation, but when framed in a transwar context, the Pacific becomes a laboratory of US-inspired innovation.

This chapter reconstructs the development of constitutional law in the Ottoman region from the earlier nineteenth century to the middle part of the twentieth century. It shows how constitution making in this setting gave extreme expression to general militaristic tendencies in constitutional law, as the imposition of norms of citizenship in the Ottoman Empire both induced deep lateral conflicts and stimulated external violence. This is exemplified through analysis of the imperial constitution at the end of the Tanzimat era and of sub-imperial constitutions in Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. The chapter reconstructs post-Ottoman lineages in constitutional law against this background, showing how internal and external conflicts persistently converged and military units assumed dominant nation-building roles.

Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.

This introduction explains how constitutions first developed in the context of inter-imperial rivalry in the eighteenth century. In this setting, constitutions formed effective military contracts between rulers and subjects, allowing the extraction of military force in return for certain constitutional rights. It discusses how this process shaped national and imperial societies, and how it instilled propensities for violence in constitutional ordered polities.

This chapter charts the nature of political power from the earliest Merovingian kings to the unification of the kingdoms under Chlothar II in 613. The period witnessed conquest and civil war, as competition for power between kings, queens, and their families transformed late Roman political structures into more fluid and responsive modes of government. It covers the key reigns of Childeric I and Clovis for establishing the power of the Merovingian dynasty through a mixture of war, legend-building, and performance. It also examines how competition between kings in subsequent generations affected how the family was defined, especially under the influence of queens Brunhild and Fredegund.

The Vietnamese communist leadership displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and resourcefulness in its quest to drive out the Americans, finish off the regime in Saigon, and win the conflict by achieving national reunification under its exclusive aegis. At times, it proved callous to the extreme, making choices it understood might result in massive death and suffering for its people. Increasingly reliant over time upon military and other aid from socialist allies, most notably China and the Soviet Union, it still jealously guarded its autonomy, refusing even to consult those allies about major strategic matters. The audacity and temerity of the Hanoi Politburo were matched only by its impenetrability and staunchness. In the end, it prevailed over its enemies owing less to their shortcomings than to the merits of its masterfully crafted and carefully calibrated strategy of “struggle” on three separate yet closely intertwined fronts.

This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.