Barton C. Hacker

Margaret Vining

Scholars in recent decades have begun to pay a great deal of attention to the mobilization of women in the Great War, but why so many women, civilian and military alike, wore uniforms is a question that has scarcely been asked, much less answered. The contributors to Cutting a New Pattern bring this question to the fore and show why it matters. Of the many ways the Great War divided the past from the future, few were more significant than the reordered place of women in society. Although women’s new status clearly had prewar roots, it just as clearly derived from their wartime participation in uniform. Not only did tens of thousands of women for the first time become members of the uniformed forces, many tens of thousands more wore uniforms as members of an enormous variety of paramilitary or quasi-military services, civilian relief and welfare organizations, and as workers. Uniformed female workers and volunteers for wartime service in such large numbers was unprecedented. This ground-breaking project moves women’s uniforms to center stage.

Cutting a New Pattern: Uniformed Women in the Great War

Barton Hacker

This volume addresses the changing relationships between women and armed forces from antiquity to the present: eight chapters review the existing literature, an extended picture essay visually documents women’s military work, and eight chapters illustrate more restricted topics.

A Companion to Women's Military History

Jennifer Tucker

This collection of essays explores the way history itself has become a contested element within the national legal debate about firearms. The debate over the Second Amendment has unveiled new and useful information about the history of guns and their possession and meaning in the United States of America. History itself has become contested ground in the debate about firearms and in the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Specifically this collection of essays gives special attention to the important and often overlooked dimension of the applications of history in the law. These essays illustrate the complexity of the firearms debate, the relation between law and behavior, and the role that historical knowledge plays in contemporary debates over law and policy. Wide-ranging and stimulating The Right to Bear Arms is bound to captivate both historians and casual readers alike.

Margaret Vining

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