Class and Race in the Frontier Army

Kevin Adams is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

“This well-written and skillfully researched study is a fascinating account of the social history of a significant American institution….[Adams] clearly proves that the frontier army might have been physically isolated from American society, but culturally it was part of the same milieu.” - American Historical Review“Kevin Adams’s fine study of the frontier army in the West ranks among the best books on the subject in decades…..Adams uses the army as a laboratory for a better understanding of American society during the Gilded Age…. [Class and Race in the Frontier Army] is readable, coherent, well organized, meaningful, and enjoyable….Adams should be congratulated for this significant contribution to our understanding of the frontier army in the crucial period from 1870 to 1890.” - Montana: The Magazine of Western History“Based on an impressive array of primary sources and statistical information, this well-argued and well-written book should be read by all students of the frontier army, Gilded Age society, and American labor and immigration history.” - Pacific Historical Review“In this ambitious and provocative blend of social, cultural, and military history, Kevin Adams uses the experiences of the western army to emphasize the importance of class, and to deemphasize the significance of ethnicity, in Gilded Age America. As Adams shows, the egalitarian, often communal worldview of enlisted men contrasted sharply with the elitist attitudes of officers, whose celebration of leisure and habits of conspicuous consumption suggest a distinctly unprofessional attitude toward soldiering.” - Robert Wooster, author of Frontier Crossroads: Fort Davis and the West“Here is a history of the nineteenth-century frontier army for the twenty-first century. With graceful prose, Adams presents the military as part of American life, not distinct and isolated from it. This study is smart - and long overdue.” - Sherry L. Smith, author of The View from Officers' Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians