William A. Dobak – författare

Fort Riley and Its Neighbors is a story of soldiers trying to save money and civilians trying to make it.Fort Riley stands today overlooking the Kansas River because army quartermasters in the 1850s thought that small steamboats could deliver supplies cheaply there. Civilians came to help build the fort and stayed to bid on the quartermaster's contracts for feed and fuel.Army posts were often a magnet for settlers. Contracts for supplies and transportation brought hard-to-find cash to small western towns, replacing systems of barter and credit and integrating them into the national economy.Townspeople kept a covetous eye on Fort Riley's land and its resources, and they voted bond issues to build short-line railroads in order to get competitive freight rates from trans-continental carriers. These short lines put Fort Riley at the center of the nation's transportation system, assuring the fort's survival for the next century.The history of Fort Riley and its neighbors typifies the relations that evolved between the American people and their government throughout the American West. The settlers' approach to federal authority, at once supplicating and conniving, has persisted and thrived and become the national attitude.This book won first place in the Dr. Edward Tihen Historical Research and Publication competition, November 5, 1999. This award is presented by the Kansas State Historical Society for Kansas books written by first-time authors.

Black soldiers first entered the regular army of the United States in the summer of 1866. While their segregated regiments served in the American West for the following three decades, the promise of Reconstruction gave way to the repressiveness of Jim Crow. But black men found a degree of equality in the service: the army treated them no worse than it did their white counterparts.The Black Regulars uses army correspondence, court-martial transcripts, and pension applications to tell who these men were, often in their own words: how they were recruited and how their officers were selected; how the black regiments survived hostile congressional hearings and stringent budget cuts; how enlisted men spent their time, both on and off duty; and how regimental chaplains tried to promote literacy through the army's schools. The authors shed new light on the military justice system, relations between black troops and their mostly white civilian neighbors, their professional reputations, and what veterans faced when they left the army for civilian life.

The Civil War changed the United States in many ways—economic, political, and social. Of these changes, none was more important than Emancipation. Besides freeing nearly four million slaves, it brought agricultural wage labor to a reluctant South and gave a vote to black adult males in the former slave states. It also offered former slaves new opportunities in education, property ownership—and military service. From late 1862 to the spring of 1865, as the Civil War raged on, the federal government accepted more than 180,000 black men as soldiers, something it had never done before on such a scale.Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains, and still others took part in major operations like the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments took up posts in the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy. Freedom by the Sword tells the story of these soldiers'' recruitment, organization, and service. Thanks to its broad focus on every theater of the war and its concentration on what black soldiers actually contributed to Union victory, this volume stands alone among histories of the U.S. Colored Troops.