Volume 89, Number 4 · October 2025

In the modern era, it was common for military contingents defending a territory to be quartered among the local population, until authorities recognized the importance of keeping the military physically separated from civilians. In early seventeenth-century Palermo, the quartering of troops shared both similarities and differences with other Italian cities. The viceregal authorities’ aim to separate soldiers from the population unfolded within a complex historical, political, and economic context. Accustomed—and at times compelled—to live in private homes through a rental system that left both soldiers and civilians dissatisfied, the troops frequently clashed with the city’s inhabitants, leading to brawls and various forms of violence. The viceregal government, which spearheaded the quartering process in response to the impossibility of peaceful coexistence, faced institutional and social obstacles that curtailed its plans. These challenges were further compounded by the plague of 1624, which halted all efforts to establish proper garrisons. This article examines the entire process of garrisoning in Palermo, from the initial recognition of its necessity to the construction, reform, and formal establishment of barracks by 1650.

When Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed that the American “frontier has gone” in 1893, he did more than impose an ethnocentric history on land that had never been “open” in the first place. He also forgot to look up. In the century following Robert P. Porter’s 1890 Census Bulletin and Turner’s seminal musings, middle- and upper-class Euro-Americans increasingly turned to vertical landscapes in response to the socioeconomic and cultural shifts of modernity, thereby claiming new frontier space for their discovery. This paper situates the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division at the center of that story, arguing that the narrative of America’s “ski troopers” captures the enduring potency of the frontier for modern Americans. By writing their pioneering narrative into the peaks they trained and fought in, the Tenth helped establish the mountains as purportedly open space into which Americans could expand and in which they could reimagine their freedom.

There are dark histories in every nation’s past, stories that for one reason or another are best left out of official narratives. World War II is full of such “uncomfortable” histories. The political context in Southeast Asia, however, was more complicated than in Europe, the only other major world region almost entirely under the control of an occupying power during the war. Here collaboration involved “defecting” from one colonial power to another. In the Philippines, there has been limited scholarship on the many individuals accused of “treason” during Japan’s occupation of that country between 1942 and 1945. Only the activities of the national and regional elites have received serious consideration, and scant attention has been given to what life was like in rural areas, to the people living in the thousands of villages or barrios across the archipelago. Their lost stories, however, can still be recovered from the previously inaccessible records of the Historical Data Papers, the village histories mandated by President Quirino in 1951. The more than forty thousand pages of this unique source offer a grassroots account of the Japanese occupation told from the viewpoint of the barrio residents that challenges the previous wartime historiography of the islands.

Previous scholarship has focused on why kamikaze pilots accepted their one-way missions, typically drawing on notions of an essentialized Japanese culture or modern state-nationalism. This article brings the invention of kamikaze tactics into the 1940s by excavating examples of dissent and resistance in the Japanese military. It argues that since many people articulated opposition by citing their own understandings of Japanese culture, kamikaze tactics cannot be explained as pre-determined by traditional culture or modern ideological indoctrination. This article emphasizes the viewpoints of working-class soldiers who comprised the majority of kamikaze squadrons, as well mid-ranking career officers representing an earlier Japanese military tradition.

POW/MIA campaigns have motivated the U.S. military to repatriate servicemembers’ remains from overseas battlefields for decades. Although scholars tend to regard them as a product of the Vietnam War, this study argues their birth should be traced to the Korean War. The limitation of its military power during the Cold War prompted the United States to open a new front against the communist bloc. During and after the Korean War, China and North Korea accused the U.S. of preventing their prisoners from returning home under the pretext of voluntary repatriation; the U.S. countered that those states detained missing U.S. personnel in secret camps. U.S. officials used this to further an anti-communist agenda and mobilize a population upset by military setbacks and allegations of domestic subversion. The politicization of the missing prisoners after the Korean War was a harbinger of the post-Vietnam campaigns.

Early in the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) used strategic bombing tactics from World War II, despite growing evidence that high-altitude formation bombing was vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. From 1960 through 1963, SAC took part in large-scale air defense exercises with the North American Airspace Defense Command (NORAD) called Operation Sky Shield. These exercises revealed weaknesses in SAC tactics, prompting SAC to make significant changes, such as adopting low-altitude single-sortie flights, passive radar jamming, structural modifications to existing bombers, and canceling planned high altitude bomber designs. These changes increased SAC bomber survivability.

The presence of American GIs in Cold War Taiwan was a double-edged sword for Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government. He needed American military aid to sustain his regime, so he granted American GIs diplomatic immunity. This posed a challenge, however, as it evoked memories of extraterritoriality that contradicted the official historical narrative and thus undermined the regime’s attempt to transform Taiwan’s population into Chinese citizens. This embarrassing situation forced Chiang to initiate negotiations with the U.S. This paper demonstrates that the negotiations resulted in a win-win outcome. The U.S. maintained partial jurisdiction, while the KMT struck a balance between its relationship with the U.S. and its governance over Taiwan.