Kevin Adams - Class and Race in the Frontier Army 1870-1890

Kevin Adams is a historian at Kent State, his first book is Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890 (amzn.to/31D4Lta)

Kevin Adams's new study of the late nineteenth-century frontier U.S. Army explores the lives of the enlisted men and officers through the prisms of race, class, and ethnicity. It is a fascinating study that considers whether the physically isolated frontier army was really that separated from the rest of American society.

Beginning with a comprehensive review of the literature about the late nineteenth-century U.S. frontier army, Adams states that most scholars have either ignored the social aspects of military life or failed to examine military life from the perspectives of class or ethnicity. After describing the variety of tasks that were assigned to the frontier army, Adams notes that these activities occupied relatively little of the officers' time. He then examines the demographics of the army. It did not resemble American society as a whole, he finds; for example, the South was underrepresented and foreign-born men were overrepresented.