Volume 90, Number 3 · July 2026

This essay challenges traditional naval histories of the American Revolution by examining the military mobilization of maritime labor in 1775. It argues that American sea power was not a reluctant, halfhearted effort but an improvised strategy predicated on a pool of highly motivated and experienced New England fishermen. The British Restraining Act of 1775 shut down the American fisheries and transformed thousands of unemployed mariners into a ready-made military asset. The mass mobilization of maritime laborers enabled successful seaborne interdiction. The resulting capture of British supply ships provided essential military stores and provisions. This essay demonstrates that victories on land were inextricably linked to sea power and that understanding American victory requires integrating labor and military history.

This article reconstructs the march of the Franco-American armies from Head of Elk to Williamsburg in September 1781—one of the most ambitious and understudied troop movements of the American Revolution. Drawing on diaries, orderly books, correspondence, and French and American eyewitness accounts, it recovers the march as the operational center of the Yorktown campaign—a fragile experiment in coalition warfare, logistical improvisation, and coordination across cultural, linguistic, and infrastructural divides. Rather than treating Yorktown as the seamless culmination of strategic brilliance, this study reveals the campaign’s success as contingent on the uncertain, everyday labor of movement.

This paper assesses the Royal Yugoslav Navy (RYN) during its period of exile and cooperation with the British Royal Navy during World War II. It argues that the RYN was hampered by matériel, personnel, and political problems of such magnitude that it was of little use to the Allied cause. Sections treat the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and the transition to exile, the period of turmoil and slow growth during 1942 and 1943, the dramatic changes between the surrender of Italy and the exile government’s dissolution, and the gradual abolishment of the RYN in the postwar period.

This article utilizes previously unexploited sources to provide a more detailed account and analysis of the casualties sustained by 154 Brigade during the North West Europe campaign during the Second World War. New data contained in previously unpublished sources enables a full analysis of the officer casualties sustained by 51st Highland Division and day-by-day details of casualties suffered by the brigade. The article is thus able to present a much more detailed picture of the experience of the campaign in one brigade of the British Liberation Army. This tells us much about the nature of the campaign, the fighting experienced, and the methods of the British Liberation Army.

This article explores how memories of World War I, both personal and culturally transmitted, shaped conscientious objection as both a legal construct and a personal, gendered experience during World War II. Debates around the formation of Civilian Public Service (CPS), the alternative service arrangement established in 1940 for conscientious objectors (COs) to the war, revolved around contested memories of manhood in the earlier war. Following CPS’s formation, the Great War remained a powerful framework for understanding one’s position as a pacifist man in wartime. Indeed, COs and their enemies used the products of pacifist memory, including Hollywood productions of All Quiet on the Western Front and Sergeant York, to stake diverging claims over what it meant to be a pacifist in the United States in the 1940s. At all points, gendered assumptions underscored both the memories of individual COs and the more capacious discourses of memory in which they participated.

This article examines the integration of women into the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1976, focusing on the intersection of femininity, institutional tradition, and military service. It argues that West Point’s leaders navigated a complex set of pressures to reconcile traditions with the female cadets’ presence. Central to this negotiation was the development and regulation of the women’s uniform, which both preserved institutional continuity and embodied army-imposed norms of femininity. The resulting policies institutionalized contradictory expectations and created social tensions that hindered women’s integration into the corps of cadets. Drawing on archival sources and interviews with early female cadets, this study highlights how West Point officials attempted to control both the physical and psychological expressions of femininity.

In summer 2026, VMI’s John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History & Strategic Analysis is launching a new research tool on its public website (www.vmi.edu/adamscenter) aimed at making the National Archives and Records Administration’s vast, largely untapped holdings of Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) archival records more navigable, accessible, and usable. Powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and utilizing semantic search and retrieval augmented generation, the tool moves far beyond the limited capabilities of traditional keyword search. It features a conversational research assistant that will connect researchers with OSD archival collections directly relevant to their particular interests, even though OSD records remain mostly unprocessed at NARA.