Armed Forces History

Prussian Royal Army Exercise for Infantry, 1812.  After the reorganization of the army of Prussia following the defeat of 1806, a new set of "regulations for the exercise of the troops" was published in 1812.  This was in use by the Army just in time for the beginning of the BefreiungsKrieg, the War of Liberation from Napoleon, which began in the early spring of 1813. 

Original text in German.

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Hundreds of thousands of women donned uniforms in World War I. Some actually became part of the armed forces as members of women's auxiliaries and nurse corps, while others were hired under contract. But many more wore military-style uniforms as volunteers in civilian war relief and support organizations, both secular and religious. And still more donned uniforms of other kinds on the home front as factory workers, trolley conductors, police, and a host of others. Uniforms gave women a symbolic claim to full citizenship and their war service provided them a moral claim to suffrage widely recognized after the war.

Military revolutions are a normal consequence of the central role of military institutions in complex societies. They have everywhere occurred regularly, if infrequently; they are scarcely limited to Western Europe, or even to the modern world. This essay discusses recent writings on two military revolutions in the ancient world, both centered on the military horse: first, its domestication and its role in pulling war chariots; second, the transition from horse driving to horse riding in battle. The chariot revolution of the second millennium BC profoundly reshaped warfare and transformed polities all across Eurasia. The cavalry revolution of the first millennium BC proved equally transformative and far longer lasting. Despite the controversy that has come to surround the concept of military revolution, it may still be fruitfully applied to important aspects of the large-scale historical interactions between societies and their armed forces.

Livermore National Laboratory has long since outgrown its origins, if not the controversy that surrounded them. However vital the issues, however great the impact of institutions like Livermore on Cold War America, they have only recently begun to attract serious historical attention. Until lately we have had to rely on participants and journalists, often unsatisfactory and sometimes misleading. The traditional account, like most such tales, is not so much wrong as partisan, highly colored, and incomplete. Confining the action to little more thali a year, from early spring 1951 to late spring 1952, it pits Edward Teller and his Air Force allies as champions of the H-bomb and a new laboratory against Robert Oppenheimer and a complacent Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) more concerned with improving fission weapons than chasing Hbombs and anxious above all to protect its existing laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The slave trade out of Africa resembled in many respects a prolonged series of small-scale military actions. Most slaves were war captives and a significant portion of them, particularly those traded to the Muslim world, became slave soldiers. Slave soldiers, in turn, regularly engaged in raiding for slaves. Military technology featured prominently in this process. Cavalry horses long remained a mainstay of the Trans-Saharan trading for slaves, while gunpowder and firearms tended to fill the same role in the Trans-Atlantic trade. Horsed raiders dominated the slave trade on the sub-Saharan savanna, while musket-bearing footmen reaped their harvest of slaves from the forests to the south. This paper sketches the military history of the African slave trade, emphasizing its military technological aspects.

Primary impetus for aU. S. program of peaceful nuclear explosions came from the nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore, then a branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory. 3 In late 1956 Livermore sought AEC support for a classified conference to discuss peaceful nuclear explosives, secret because peaceful differed from warlike chiefly in purpose, not technology. The conference took place in February 1957 4 3 Five months later Livermore had AEC approval for a full-fledged program. Officially, Project Plowshare began in July 1957$ Early planning centered on two projects, Gnome and Chariot. Gnome fell outside Plowshare's major lines of development. Instead, it addressed two unique questions. First, could molten salt store the enormous heat of a nuclear explosion to produce electricity via steam-driven generators, a possibility suggested by results from an earlier, non-Plowshare test? And second, could potentially valuable explosion-created radionuclides be recovered for use? The answer to the latter question proved a qualified yes; repeated in several other tests, such recovery also identified new transuranic elements . Planners found an underground salt bed near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and scheduled Gnome for late 1959 6 The second project, Chariot, had closer links to a major Plowshare goal, using the atom more cheaply than conventional explosives for massive earth-moving. Tentatively scheduled for fall 1960, it called for blasting a harbor on Alaska's Arctic coast with nuclear explosives. 7 When the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing began at the end of October 1958, however, Plowshare schedules went out the window.

David Ayalon's classic and highly influential 1956 study of Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom left some surprising questions unexamined. He attributed Ottoman victory primarily to Ottoman firearms, while Mamluks stubbornly clung to the arms of the mounted archer. But despite the technological underpinnings of his thesis, Ayalon discussed the technology of neither the traditional warfare of mounted archery nor the newfangled warfare of gunpowder weapons. Was Mamluk mounted archery actually inferior to Ottoman firearms? This essay addresses the technical basis both for the mounted archery central to Mamluk military prowess and the characteristics of late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century firearms adopted by the Ottomans, both in the context of the social technology of Muslim military slavery. By opening the black box of Mamluk and Ottoman military technology, this essay seeks to show more precisely in what ways military technology did and did not shape the outcome of the struggle. Keywords Mamluk-Ottoman conflict – mounted archery – gunpowder weapons – military slavery David Ayalon's classic and highly influential 1956 study of Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom left some surprising questions unexamined. He attributed Ottoman victory primarily to Mamluk rejection and Ottoman acceptance of gunpowder weapons. But despite the technological underpinnings of his thesis, Ayalon discussed the technology of neither the traditional warfare of