Volume 73, Number 1 · January 2009

The American Revolution was as much a civil war between Americans as a war between the Continental and British armies, yet our understanding of the civil warfare’s extent is limited. This article compiles comprehensive information on the Revolution in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and measures the scope (how many participated on each side) and severity (how many lives were adversely affected) of civil warfare in this county. It demonstrates that those opposing the Revolution were nearly as numerous as its supporters (approximately 1,600 versus 1,900) and that over 20 percent of the adult males in the county suffered tangibly during the war.

Military cartography is studied in order to approach the role of information in war. This serves as an opportunity to reconsider the Military Revolution and in particular changes in the eighteenth century. Mapping is approached not only in tactical, operational and strategic terms, but also with reference to the mapping of war for public interest. Shifts in the latter reflect changes in the geography of European conflict.

In the age of sail, every maritime power offered prize money as an incentive for the officers and crews of their naval vessels and their privateers to capture, and to bring home, enemy ships with their cargoes. During the War of 1812, the U.S. frigate Chesapeake captured a valuable English merchant vessel in January 1813, and the resulting litigation, a prize case called Decatur v. Chew, laid bare the tensions between ranking officers over their contrasting views of their appropriate shares.

This essay stresses the crucial importance of logistics during the French occupation of Catalonia during the Peninsular War. The supplies found in the occupied territory were insufficient for French needs, leading to the failure of Napoleon’s “war feeds war” policy in that region. It became necessary to find alternative sources and modes of supply in the midst of a permanent guerrilla war and the British blockade of Catalan ports. Logistical operations largely dominated the French campaigns, while the requirement to supply a besieged Barcelona made it nearly impossible to conquer the province and led to the collapse of French plans to incorporate Catalonia into the French Empire.

During the American Civil War, German- and Irish-Americans fought for both the Union and the Confederacy, serving their respective causes for a variety of reasons and comprising a large percentage of the Union armies, in particular. Anglo-Americans developed myths and misconceptions about these foreign-born soldiers, however, some of which persist today and unfortunately obscure the historical truth about ethnic participation in the war. This essay examines some of the most enduring stereotypes and exposes the realities that lay shrouded behind them.

Brian Holden Reid, "‘Young Turks, or Not So Young?’: The Frustrated Quest of Major General J. F. C. Fuller and Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, The Journal of Military History 73 #1 (January 2009): 147-175

This article has as its prime focus not the theories of J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart, but their zeal to reform the British Army, 1918-39. It explores the strengths and weaknesses they brought to the task, and seeks to relate their aims to broader intellectual currents, especially the notion of a “conflict of generations” that the experience on the Western Front of the First World War heightened. The latter reached a peak of popularity in 1928-33. The article thus seeks to assess Fuller and Liddell Hart’s motives and aspirations in the light of a shared passionate desire not to sacrifice their intellectual freedom as critics.

Since the early 1930s, the United States has become significantly militarized in government, economy, society, and culture. While never quite slipping over the edge into militarism either in behaviors, policies, or norms and values, the American people’s identification with and use of war images and thinking, and a belief in the primacy of standing military forces for American safety, have become normalized. The danger of an endless “war” on terrorism is that the militarization common to America society in wartime will become permanent, infecting the country with militarism, and transforming the United States incrementally, over time, into a nation its founders would recognize, but abhor.