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.

The advent of Islam in Arabia created a new regional actor: the Rashidun Caliphate. Later caliphates inherited the vast territories of expansion accrued under the Rashidun. The ordeal of civil war was the crucible from which the Umayyad Caliphate arose. Civil crisis had a lasting influence on both the strategic setting and then environment within which successive Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs had to contend. Unity and unification of the caliphate was a necessary political objective for the duration of all caliphates. The Umayyads fused their right to political legitimacy with their military prowess and notions of divine providence. The ideological dependency of the Umayyad Caliphate to an aggressive policy of security-maximising expansionism was predicated upon a politically legitimating doctrine of perpetual war which constantly directed strategic decision making. The dependency upon war serving as the only strategic instrument subordinated to the political ends of security, the Umayyad leadership was distracted from managing growing internal dissent and covert factions brewing rebellion and eventual revolution. The Abbasid Revolution of AD 750 not only ended the Umayyad House, but effectively sheathed the doctrine of perpetual war that the Umayyad Caliphate had wielded for nearly a century. The Abbasids squandered the vast territorial and strategic inheritance within decades of wrestling power. The early course of the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, was consistently one of political and territorial expansion followed by structural fragmentation, civil strife and subsequent collapse.

The warfare of the Greek city states was limited by their means, lacking military academies, professional officers and standing forces. Small communities fought local wars with levies of citizens, often highly motivated, but precious to the polity, which could not be kept in the field for long. Fruits of victory were modest, and defeat could put the survival of the whole state at risk. Fortification as a passive defensive policy was essential. In offensive warfare, states and coalitions mostly pursued a strategy of opportunism, in which the desirable was subordinated to the attainable. Commanders typically tried to avoid decisive engagements due to the risks involved; they focused their attacks on exposed targets like farmland, small towns, isolated garrisons and unprepared enemy troops. They relied heavily on local dissenters and deserters to guide and facilitate operations. When wealthier states like Corinth, Athens and Syracuse found themselves able to invest in warfare, we clearly see their dissatisfaction with this strategic straitjacket. The rapid development of fleets, extensive fortification networks, standing corps of specialist troops and siege technology allowed these states to dominate their less fortunate neighbours. This gives the lie to old notions that the Greeks preferred their wars to be limited in scope. A state that had much more than the others could disrupt the entire system, as Macedon would eventually show.

The development of Russian strategy over a near forty-year period from 1877 to 1914 was characterised by gradual movement towards the formation of modern military forces based on a massive army and developed industry. The foundation for this path was laid out by radical military reforms in the 1860–1870s.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 were fundamentally different from each other in many respects. The first was fought in a thoroughly studied theatre and against a well-known adversary, with whom Russia had fought regularly for approximately 200 years. The second was conducted in a remote and underexplored location against an enemy whose strength was severely underestimated. The land and naval forces involved in the two wars significantly differed as well.

Preparations for a large-scale European war have always remained the basis of strategic planning. An important milestone was the formation of the Russian-French alliance. A possible coalition war against Germany required the adoption of an offensive strategy from the onset of the possible conflict. The First World War was the final test that measured the effectiveness of the efforts undertaken by the Russian government since the period of military reforms.