Michael A. Bellesiles – författare

This text is both a biography of Ethan Allen and a social history of the conflict between agrarian commoners and their wealthy adversaries.

By any standard, the United States is the most violent nation in the industrialized world. To find comparable levels of interpersonal violence, one must look to nations in the midst of civil war.Most observers of modern American violence do not consider the historical roots of current levels of violence, preferring to criticize American liberalism, permissive child-rearing practices, and excessive greed and individualism as the sources of the problem.This collection of original essays examines the role of violence in America's past, exploring its history and development, from slave patrols in the Colonial South to gun ownership in the twentieth century.Contributors examine both individual acts, such as domestic violence, murder, dueling, frontier vigilantism, and rape, and group and state-led acts such as lynchings, slave uprisings, rifle clubs, legal sanctions of heterosexual aggression, and invasive medical experiments on women's bodies.Contributors include Jeff Adler, Bruce Baird, Robert Dykstra, Lee Chambers-Schiller, Philip J. Cook, Laura Edwards, Uche Egemonye, Nicole Etcheson, Evan Haefeli, Sally Hadden, Paula Hinton, Arthur L. Kellermann, Laura McCall, Kate Nickerson, Mary Odem, Craig Pascoe, John C. Pettegrew, Junius P. Rodriguez, and Andrea Tone, Christopher Waldrep.

In A People''s History of the U.S. Military, historian Michael A. Bellesiles draws from three centuries of soldiers'' personal encounters with combat—through fascinating excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, as well as audio recordings, film, and blogs—to capture the essence of the American military experience firsthand, from the American Revolution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Military service can shatter and give meaning to lives; it is rarely a neutral encounter, and has contributed to a rich outpouring of personal testimony from the men and women who have literally placed their lives on the line. The often dramatic and always richly textured first-person accounts collected in this book cover a wide range of perspectives, from ardent patriots to disillusioned cynics; barely literate farm boys to urbane college graduates; scions of founding families to recent immigrants, enthusiasts, and dissenters; women disguising themselves as men in order to serve their country to African Americans fighting for their freedom through military service.A work of great relevance and immediacy—as the nation grapples with the return of thousands of men and women from active military duty—A People''s History of the U.S. Military will become a major new touchstone for our understanding of American military service.