In 235 years, only about two dozen women have experienced the role of “mourner in chief” as current or former first ladies grieving a presidential husband. This chapter examines the performances of six of these women in different historical contexts and under very different circumstances: Martha Washington, Mary Lincoln, Lucretia Garfield, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan. This analysis considers first ladies’ performances of mourning during presidents’ illness or assassination; funerals and memorial services; and the expanse of time for which they survived their husbands. Through these case studies, the authors consider how a first lady’s mourning can shape her husband’s legacy, and what it can teach us about how Americans grieve.

Paul’s letters reflect levels of stories and are embedded in God’s grand narrative of creation and new creation

The journey through the wilderness ends with the people of Israel in the land of promise, but it is fraught with snares and temptations in the turbulent books of Joshua and Judges.

Public memory denotes how groups recall the past and how those ideas take shape, evolve, and prompt differences or agreement about history’s events and actors. Examining first ladies through their tenures in office, memoirs, interviews, historic sites, and memorials often reveal how they wanted to be remembered. Biographies, dramatic films, documentaries, and historical fiction about them can determine how presidential wives’ legacies are preserved or morph in the public psyche over time. Siena College Research Institute’s scholar polls and Ranker online surveys rate first ladies among historians and the general public. This chapter applies such evidence to first ladies Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Mary Lincoln, Edith Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush. Each exemplifies a variety of legacies—both positive and negative—and reflects how memorializations and public memories evolve.

US first ladies have exercised a complicated kind of activism when it comes to women’s rights. Some have acted as vocal advocates to insist that women’s equality should be a national priority. Others have used their platform more quietly to intervene on behalf of women’s rights. Still others have held and promoted views that have contradicted, undermined, or altogether avoided efforts to advance women’s rights. This chapter traces how US first ladies have addressed and influenced the prevailing women’s rights issues of their day, with a focus on two national campaigns: a federal amendment for women’s suffrage and a federal amendment for equal rights. By engaging or avoiding the debates surrounding women’s suffrage and the ERA, these women stretched the political and rhetorical boundaries of their platform and shaped public understanding about the ongoing struggle for women’s equality in the United States.

The Jewish–Arab conflict and the fighting it engenders began before the establishment of the state of Israel and has been a constant of Middle-Eastern politics for over a hundred years. The intensity of the fighting has fluctuated but the variations have been like a jazz tune that plays around a common constant central theme. Because of the continuity and longevity of the conflict, as well as various short-term issues affecting it, each strategic event is analysed by the rival decision makers according to three separate time factors: the immediate – how to achieve the best result and terminate the specific event as quickly as possible; the medium term – how the current event results from the trend of the past few years and will affect that trend favourably over the next few years; and lastly the long term – how the results of the specific current event and the current trend it belongs to fits into the overall conflict and will favourably affect its future direction. Of course, the ‘best strategic result’ and ‘favourable strategic effect’ are different for each participant. The purpose of this chapter is to explore and describe the characteristics of the conflict as a whole and the major theme of the Israeli strategic responses to them, while touching on various shifts in trends or specific events that required fundamental changes in the melodies or temporary improvisations.

All too often, the terms terrorism and insurgency are used interchangeably, just like tactics and strategy. But terrorism is indeed a tactic while insurgency is a strategy, and the two concepts are far from synonymous. This chapter details the differences between terrorism and insurgency, and hence, terrorists and insurgents, by tracing the evolution of each of these terms and placing them in the proper context, while providing numerous examples of terrorist chieftains and insurgent leaders, and how these individuals thought about strategy over time. The chapter will also investigate the considerable overlap between terrorism and insurgency. After all, militants pursuing an insurgent strategy may seek to use terrorism as a tactic toward achieving their objectives. Size can be a useful distinguishing characteristic, because terrorist groups often consist of a small number of individuals. By contrast, insurgent organisations, such as Lebanese Hizballah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), number in the thousands. Indeed, many of the most important ‘terrorist’ groups in the world – including Lebanese Hizballah, LTTE, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – are better described as insurgencies that use terrorism than as typical terrorist movements.

This chapter offers an overview of the strategic environment and grand strategies employed by the Ming and Qing dynasties. It discusses how they built upon pre-existing strategic traditions while also incorporating new technologies and tactics to expand the empire, creating a sophisticated state capable of responding to a dazzling array of challenges. The chapter not only delineates the nature of the strategic threats faced by the last Chinese empires, but also covers the extensive primary source materials demonstrating how imperial leadership and personal networks operated alongside institutions to create an effective grand-strategy paradigm allowing the Ming and Qing to retain their superiority in east Asia for some five centuries. Finally, this overview of late imperial grand strategy offers clues into how China still perceives the world and its strategic goals in Asia.

In the nineteenth century, it is difficult to discern anything in an age-old form of warfare that was not almost instinctive reaction on the part of those opposing conquest, occupation or the legitimacy of authority. Nineteenth-century guerrilla warfare was highly diverse but always the resort of the weak in face of the strong. There could be little expectation that a guerrilla strategy of itself could result in victory in such circumstances unless guerrillas could transform themselves to meet regular forces conventionally or co-operate with regular forces in a partisan role. There are few examples where setting objectives, priorities and allocating resources can be readily identified among those who led guerrillas in the nineteenth century. Four case studies are chosen to illustrate contrasting circumstances pertaining to how far strategic analysis can be applied to nineteenth-century guerrilla warfare. These are the attempt to control Spanish resistance to Napoleon after 1808, the decision of the Southern Confederacy not to pursue a guerrilla strategy at the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Burmese resistance to British annexation between 1885 and 1895, and the decision of the Boer leadership to undertake guerrilla warfare in 1900 during the South African War.