Artillery

Author(s):  
Boyd L. Dastrup

During the early years of the 21st century, field artillery achieved unparalleled accuracy with the introduction of precision-guided munitions. Such munitions allowed a gun crew to hit a target with one round or to engage a target without adjusting fire as long as the target was precisely located. In Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st century, the US Army fired Excalibur precision munition from its 155-millimeter (mm) howitzers and the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System precision munition from its Multiple Launch Rocket System to destroy insurgent safe houses and other pinpoint targets. This precision capability revolutionized field artillery because massing fire to compensate for the lack of accuracy dominated field artillery tactics since the late 18th century with the introduction of relatively light, mobile field guns to complement siege artillery, coast artillery, garrison artillery, and pack artillery. Precision artillery munitions gave armies, especially the US Army, the capability of destroying a target with minimal collateral damage, meaning the destruction of civilian property or deaths of noncombatants who were near the target but not part of the target. This precision came centuries after gunpowder siege artillery in the form of bombards and heavy cast-bronze cannons had replaced mechanical siege engines, such as trebuchets and onagers, as a means of battering down fortification walls and after European armies started employing lighter cannons on the battlefield.

Author(s):  
Bartosz Kruszyński

The tradition of the US Army dates back to the era of patrimony of the Continental army, which was established on June 14, 1775. Topics related to land troops of the US Army are very complex and involve many substantial threads from the 18th to the 21st century. Publications on this subject can be divided into articles published in scientific journals, popular-science articles, and books. The books on the army can be further divided into synthesis (general overviews), anthologies, encyclopedias and dictionaries, autobiographies and biographies (personal and collective), journalistic reports, and monographs. In terms of thematic monographs, there are monographs of individual battles, campaigns, wars, intervention units, doctrines, and weapons. Autobiographies and biographies relate specifically to leaders of the US Army, and in doing so highlight related topics of the US Army’s evolution and history. Encyclopedias and dictionaries of armed conflicts focus on concepts or people. Journalistic reports apply to individual campaigns. These publications represent the achievements of military institutions connected with the US Army, analytical centers, think-tanks, and independent researchers. The most valuable publications, in terms of the merit, are those issued by the US universities and research institutions associated with the US Army, including the official US Army Center of Military History.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 476-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam R. Seipp

AbstractThis article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.


Author(s):  
Deidre Lynch

The notion that theoretical inquiry and the love of literature are at odds is a tenacious one, likewise the related account of the theorist as heartless killjoy. This article, however, challenges the notion that theory is necessarily down on love. It surveys the several strains of theory that since the turn of the 21st century have made it possible for practitioners of theory to acknowledge more readily that concept-driven intellectual work inevitably has an affective undertow. But it also looks further back, to the late 18th-century origins of the literary studies discipline, so as to understand why the love question cannot be confined to the sphere of amateurism but instead hovers persistently around what literature professors do in their classrooms: what does that persistence say about the place of ethical and affective norms in the discipline’s intellectual enterprise? And just why and how does aesthetic receptivity get defined as “love” in the first place?


Author(s):  
Alfred Acres

Jan van Eyck (b. c. 1390–d. 1441), whose fame was international during his own lifetime and has never faded in the centuries since, was one of the most inventive and influential painters of all time. Born probably in the 1390s in or near Maaseik, his early years and training remain obscure. His career first comes into partial focus in the early 1420s, when he is recorded working in The Hague for John of Bavaria, Count of Holland. In 1425 he was employed by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (r. 1419–1467), one of the most powerful princes in Europe. Based mainly in Bruges, he served Philip and other prestigious patrons for rest of his life. The great esteem in which he was held by the duke and others, along with Jan’s unprecedented assertion of himself among inscriptions and images, made him an early model of the prized court artist, a role that would soon become more familiar in the Renaissance and after. Of the approximately two dozen paintings most confidently attributed to him, the earliest dated work is also the largest and most complex: the Ghent Altarpiece, completed 1432. Its inscription indicates that the project was begun by his brother Hubert (d. 1426), from whom no other surviving works have been confidently identified. The remaining paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck are altarpieces, smaller devotional pieces, and portraits. Lost works mentioned in early sources or echoed in variant paintings and drawings included more of the same, along with at least one genre-like image, of a woman at her bath. It has long been speculated that Jan’s early work may have included manuscript illumination, with the paintings of the Turin-Milan Hours at the center of this scholarship. In his 1550 Lives of the Artists, Vasari credited Jan van Eyck with the invention of oil painting, a claim widely repeated until it was disproven in the late 18th century. But fascination with the brilliant effects of van Eyck’s technique—and especially the novel depths of his realism—has never waned. Much of the 20th-century literature has probed symbolic and related dimensions of meaning in his realism. This interpretive scholarship on van Eyck and his Flemish contemporaries (chiefly Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden), associated especially with Panofsky’s conceptions of iconography, iconology, and “disguised symbolism,” became widely influential in 20th-century art history.


Author(s):  
Lee A. Craig

Since the late 18th century the long-run trend in economic growth—conventionally measured by real gross domestic product, income, and wages—has been positive in the United States and throughout Europe. However, in the 19th century, many Western countries, including the United States, experienced stagnation and even cyclical downturns in the biological standard of living—as measured by, for example, the expectation of life and adult stature—thus creating the “antebellum puzzle,” so named because the downturn began in the decades before the US Civil War. This puzzle suggests that industrialization and modern economic growth were accompanied by an increase in inequality and a decrease in the consumption of net nutrients.


Author(s):  
Kirk Hawkins

Donald Trump’s victory in the US 2016 presidential election awakened many US scholars to the existence of populism. However, the study of populism is old news for political scientists in Latin America and other regions. Since at least the 1960s, scholars in these regions have dealt with key conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues in the study of populism, covering instances of populism that have appeared since the inception of liberal, representative democracy in the late 18th century. This wealth of scholarship is an aid to mainstream scholars in the United States and other wealthy democracies as they grapple with the impact of populist forces, providing them with tools for measuring populism and for studying its causes and consequences. However, there are also lessons for scholars in regions that have studied populism much longer. This is especially true for Latin America. Senior Latin Americanists who engage with populism have a tendency to rely on older approaches and methods that have not withstood empirical tests in other regions. Some researchers are unaware that comparative, cross-regional scholarship has arrived at a rough consensus about the nature of populist ideas, and that the cross-regional study of populist discourse has moved beyond the anti-positivist bent of some early work. Thus, this bibliography walks a fine line between highlighting the foundational work of earlier scholars, particularly those studying Latin America, while introducing current Latin Americanists to the work being done outside the region. A concluding section highlights the unique scholarly contributions to the study of populism in the United States, contributions that provide an important touchstone to Latin Americanists, not to mention mainstream scholars in the United States.


Author(s):  
M. McNEIL

Erasmus Darwin was the focus and embodiment of provincial England in his day. Renowned as a physician, he spent much of his life at Lichfield. He instigated the founding of the Lichfield Botanic Society, which provided the first English translation of the works of Linnaeus, and established a botanic garden; the Lunar Society of Birmingham; the Derby Philosophical Society; and two provincial libraries. A list of Darwin's correspondents and associates reads like a "who's who" of eighteenth century science, industry, medicine and philosophy. His poetry was also well received by his contemporaries and he expounded the evolutionary principles of life. Darwin can be seen as an English equivalent of Lamarck, being a philosopher of nature and human society. His ideas have been linked to a multitude of movements, including the nosological movement in Western medicine, nineteenth century utilitarianism, Romanticism in both Britain and Germany, and associationist psychology. The relationships between various aspects of Darwin's interests and the organizational principles of his writings were examined. His poetical form and medical theory were not peripheral to his study of nature but intrinsically linked in providing his contemporaries with a panorama of nature. A richer, more integrated comprehension of Erasmus Darwin as one of the most significant and representative personalities of his era was presented.


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