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Podcast: New Books in the American South
Episode: Robert Wooster, "The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775-1903" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
Description: The story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield is the focus of Robert Wooster’s The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 (University Press of Kansas, 2021). As Wooster shows, Americans repeatedly used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies, but to shape their nation and their vision of who they were, often in ways not directly associated with shooting wars or combat. That the regular ar...