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Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890. By Kevin Adams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. xvi + 276 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.
Class and Race in the Frontier Army is social histoty first, military second. Adams has two theses: that an "enormous class division" ttumped ethnicity, but not race, and that militaty historians have sought comfot t in depicting the army as socially isolated, a unique institution. A book so critical deserves critique; Class and Race is both a laudable effort to connect military to social history, and a product of late twentieth-century graduate school, producing focused insights and reminding us of the big picture, but leaving the mid-level blurry. Adams's historiographical undertone is that whiteness scholars have exaggerated the tacialization of European immigrants, that the army shows that ethnicity meant little compared to class or, for African Americans,...