"When Martha Summerhayes (1844-1926) came as a bride to Fort Russell in Wyoming Territory in 1874, she "saw not much in those first few days besides bright buttons, blue uniforms, and shining swords," but soon enough the hard facts of army life began to intrude. Remonstrating with her husband, Jack Wyder Summerhayes, that she had only three rooms and a kitchen instead of "a whole house," she was informed that "women are not reckoned in at all in the...

Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.

An army marches on its stomach - so the classic saying goes. This book brings together excerpts from contemporary manuals to show how the U.S. Army fed and provisioned its troops in the 19th and early 20th century, lifting the lid on what daily life must have been like both for those preparing and consuming the rations. The first part of the book covers the development of rations, messing, and army cooking until the Civil War. During the Civil War...