The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the military responses that follow, stand as the defining events shaping war and society in twenty-first century U.S. culture. This chapter traces this history, beginning by placing the attacks and the events that followed in a broader historical context stretching back to the late 1970s before examining the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the evolution of military strategy, the impact of new technologies like drone warfare, the evolution of the all-volunteer force during prolonged conflict, and the physical and psychological consequences of war for servicemembers and their families. The chapter also addresses domestic responses to these conflicts, including the surveillance and detention of Arab and Muslim Americans, protest and resistance to the conflicts, and larger political shifts. This multidisciplinary approach to the past quarter century of domestic and foreign policy illuminates how the contours of American engagement with foreign policy, warfare, and the military have evolved and how the War on Terror remains the defining paradigm through which contemporary Americans contemplate the intersection of war and society.

American society is deeply intertwined with the materials, norms and metaphors of war, a process war and society scholars call militarization. Surprisingly, such militarization occurred most rapidly not during mass mobilizations like WWI and WWII but instead in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1973, Congress ended military conscription and shifted to a voluntary military peopled by recruits, thereby expanding the military’s influence over the nation. The choices military leaders and elected officials made about how the All-Volunteer Force would function increased the military’s impact on American popular culture, the state, the economy, and the globe and even further militarized the job of soldiering itself. Despite fewer people serving in the armed forces during a time without large mobilizations and no formal declarations of war, the military nevertheless ascended as the primary metaphor for the American polity and citizenship, as massive components of state activity, as the crucible for a new political economy, as a leading edge of American influence around the globe, and as an ultra-militarized space for those who served.

This chapter outlines the history of conscription in the United States and argues that the draft can be used as a tool to decipher public understandings of religion, race, gender, obligation, and the role of government in each historical moment and over time. The answers to the questions of who was included, who was left out, and most importantly, why, reflect larger trends in American society and politics and constitute a clear field of inquiry for the war and society approach to history. The study of conscription is critical to understanding how war radiated out to all levels of American society and how the complex stew of American liberal individualism, republican notions of obligation, gendered and racial hierarchies, and personal psychology impacted American warfighting. In other words, the draft provides a roadmap to Americans’ relationship with and to war.

This article reflects on the state of war and society scholarship in the context of current global conflicts. It argues for bridging the gap between traditional military history and the war and society school to gain a deeper understanding of war's complexities. It uses examples from contemporary conflicts and historical analyses to explore themes such as comradeship, gender, memory, and culture, demonstrating their relevance in interpreting modern warfare. In emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in examining war's multifaceted impact on societies and individuals, it calls for war and society scholars to engage more directly with contemporary issues, applying their insights to foster a more nuanced comprehension of the roots and implications of war.

This essay explores the intersection of race and the field of war and society in U.S. history. Centering race as a critical fault line, it examines how racial identities, hierarchies, and constructions have shaped—and been shaped by—U.S. experiences of war, both during and beyond moments of active conflict. While race is the central focus, the essay also considers how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect with it. These interconnected forces help define not only who is recognized within "society" but also how war is waged, experienced, and remembered. By analyzing key historiographic debates, the essay considers how scholarship on race has contributed to a deeper, more complex understanding of the war and society field. It also argues that race-based inquiry challenges conventional definitions of war and society, expanding them beyond state-sanctioned actors and discrete wartime events to include long-term, systemic forms of violence and resistance. In doing so, the essay highlights the co-productive relationship between war and society and how race reshapes our understanding of both.

This essay argues that understanding religion and the history of religion in the United States can help scholars, students, and the American public be more aware of the dynamics around war and wiser in the conclusions they reach about experiences of war and their relationship to American society. Put differently, when those who study war and society in America keep religion out of their stories, they remove from consideration not only some of the nation’s most influential institutions and voices, but also many of the ideas, stories, and symbols that help women and men find meaning and purpose in the uncertainty, the suffering, and the loss that go along with war.

This chapter explores the rise of US imperial militarism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the settler colonial American West and overseas colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Beyond sketching a general account of this period, the chapter argues that US military colonization was both a set of distinct encounters and a larger project connected by shared repertoires of violence; transfers of expert knowledge; and ideologies of racialized dominance. It also understands US imperial militarism in infrastructural terms. Military actors and organizations served not only as the sharp edge of colonization, but also initial – and sometimes primary – agents of colonial state-building. Longer term, American imperialism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created the conditions of possibility, both ideologically and materially, for global elaborations of US empire that persist today.

Americans have struggled to reconcile capitalism and war. Over three centuries of history, they have grappled with fundamental tensions between capitalism and security. The combination of war and capitalism often created disruptions and deep inequities that ordinary Americans and their leaders decided must be moderated for the sake of a more successful and politically sustainable war effort. For much of the nation’s history, capitalism was understood to be an insufficient provider of security; the U.S. military economy was semi-socialized, in both peacetime and wartime. But as the record of recent decades has highlighted, Americans have not experienced an ever-higher ratcheting of regulation and socialism, with each new war, over the long run. Rather, the historical record suggests that many postwar demobilizations served to reinforce capitalism. For the nation’s entire history, struggles over the economics of war and national security have been important parts of U.S. political development. This will continue to be the case in the current century, as Americans battle over economic policy and fight new wars, domestically and abroad.

Over successive centuries, Americans have routinely narrated war stories as love stories: melodramas in which men's dedication to soldiering is rewarded by women's devotion to soldiers. In reality, though, love and war rarely march in lockstep. This essay explores the multivalent languages of love that wartime Americans have spoken: patriotic love of country; homosocial love of comrades; sentimental love of home; and romantic love of absent partners. Although often invoked simultaneously, these attachments do not coexist easily. While love is conjured as the redeeming grace that makes suffering bearable, the experience of being at war—departure from home, separation from loved ones, and the specter of injury or death—is just as likely to corrode affective bonds as to strengthen them. Using a thematic approach, this essay proposes that the complexities of emotional life in wartime—from heteronormative expectations to homosocial bonds, and the fragility of wartime intimacy—can only be understood through a war and society approach. In short, we must be as attentive to service personnel and the armed forces as we are to civilians and the social structures within which they're embedded.

No North American society before the twenty-first century has sanctioned female warriors as normative, creating a cultural context that privileges the male warrior. A war and society approach to the topic of masculinity connects cultural constructions of manhood to the organization, discipline, and fighting of military forces. This chapter first examines the connection between manhood and spiritual power for Native American warriors. It then considers the universality of honor across cultures and the role it played in military hierarchy, motivation, and group cohesion during battle. In the 19th and 20th centuries, conflicts over restrained and martial manhood, especially when connected to social class, impacted the bonding of military units, the relationship between officers and enlisted men, the implementation of military discipline, the combat effectiveness of armies, and how societies worked through the aftermath of war. Mass armies in the modern nation state forced military authorities to incorporate those whose manhood was denigrated, whether because of race or a perceived crisis of masculinity in the 20th century, impacting how units were structured, trained, and deployed.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.

The European invasions of the Americas generated an extended period of world-historic significance. Through individual and societal interactions and accompanying exchanges—friendly, exploitative, and warlike—imperial collisions wrought profound societal, cultural, economic, and political changes. War influenced tactics, strategies, weaponry, gender norms and relations, racial interactions, and settlement patterns. It affected the development of colonial, Indigenous, and enslaved peoples. The more that war demanded of societies, the more they in turn demanded of war and politics. Recentering the focus from traditional military history to the broader and more complex panorama of war and society places at center stage the observation that armies and navies fight battles, but societies fight wars. War’s imprint on European and Indigenous societies presaged future patterns of contact, conflict, warfare, and societal development. The broad patterns established during this moment of imperial collisions portended that which followed, from the era of the American Revolution through the United States’ most recent conflicts, and forward into the country’s unknowable future.

This essay argues that the war and society motif has deeply influenced modern political and cultural understandings of the American Civil War, revising the academic and public narratives from martial (emphasizing battles and leaders and themes of heroism, sacrifice, and reconciliation) to social (emphasizing slavery and emancipation, civilians and common soldiers, social disruptions, and irreconciliation). Previously, a sentimentalized “brothers’ war” narrative of the war tacitly accepted the Lost Cause narrative by deemphasizing slavery as a war cause, criticizing Reconstruction, and emphasizing reconciliation. New generations of “post-revisionist” academic historians have emphasized the Civil War’s violence, trauma, dislocation, and chaos through new subfields including emancipation, nationalism, homefront, borderlands, guerrillas, and death studies. National conversations over race, memory, and the unfinished legacy of the Civil War have resulted from this war and society paradigm. Renewed debate about enduring Confederate symbols is being actively waged for the first time in a half-century, manifesting itself publicly in recent unrest over Confederate monuments and iconography.

The word “liberation” has dominated recent American history of the Second World War in Europe. The celebratory “liberation narrative,” in which American GIs brought freedom to France, Italy and Germany, does not accurately portray the war’s end, at least from the perspective of Europeans themselves. To them, the allied victory and occupation brought freedom, but also a bitter taste of defeat, as well as exploitation and repression. U.S. officers often viewed the French, Italians, and Germans with condescension, even contempt. They looked the other way when their subordinates committed acts of theft and sexual assault. Throughout Europe the American word “liberation” became a neologism for looting. Defeat meant different things to different peoples, depending on their geographical location, their status as an occupied, victorious, or defeated nation. Still, female sexuality and heterosexual relations played major symbolic roles in how Europeans understood the war’s end. The prostitution and rape of female civilians became powerful signifiers of defeat and emasculation. Likewise women who sexually engaged with American GIs symbolized national betrayal and decline.

On a June evening in 2015, a white supremacist who supported the Lost Cause—Confederate Civil War memory—shot and killed African American worshippers at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. The twenty-first-century Lost Cause remains rooted in the battle for Black equality that shaped generations of Emmanuel’s congregants’ lives. Initially, Confederate supporters articulated the Lost Cause when they buried their dead, but it came to support racial control in a post-emancipation society. Ultimately Jim Crow, segregation, and disfranchisement rested on twin pillars of extralegal violence and Lost Cause ideology. In the twentieth century, many Americans accepted the Lost Cause because it supported racism at home and in an overseas empire. As decades passed, the Democratic Party and its Black allies supported civil rights, echoing the discourse of the Union Cause that emphasized emancipation. In contrast, the Republican Party (Lincoln’s party) embraced the Lost Cause to woo voters in the South and around the country. Today, Civil War memory has become a battlefield for efforts to fulfill or deny the promise of emancipation—the war’s principal legacy.

The expression of military power—whether through armed combat or through peacetime development and training—is inherently environmental, just as it is inherently social, and yet scholars tend to separate the natural from the cultural when it comes to studying martial activity. This chapter explores a variety of ways war, society, and environment intersect in the U.S. context and makes a case for better integrating the methods of environmental history into the study of war and society. It takes a thematic rather than chronological approach, not only to highlight the ubiquity of nature across all military activities, but to draw attention to both continuities and ruptures in the ways Americans and their armed forces have interacted with nature over time. This includes how global environmental change has influenced the mission of the American armed forces and their outlook on the future. Nature has influenced and guided American military actions, just as it has shaped American social and political developments, and we must take nature seriously in our discussions of war and society if we are to achieve a full understanding of the dynamics of human conflict.

The expression of military power—whether through armed combat or through peacetime development and training—is inherently environmental, just as it is inherently social, and yet scholars tend to separate the natural from the cultural when it comes to studying martial activity. This chapter explores a variety of ways war, society, and environment intersect in the U.S. context and makes a case for better integrating the methods of environmental history into the study of war and society. It takes a thematic rather than chronological approach, not only to highlight the ubiquity of nature across all military activities, but to draw attention to both continuities and ruptures in the ways Americans and their armed forces have interacted with nature over time. This includes how global environmental change has influenced the mission of the American armed forces and their outlook on the future. Nature has influenced and guided American military actions, just as it has shaped American social and political developments, and we must take nature seriously in our discussions of war and society if we are to achieve a full understanding of the dynamics of human conflict.

Whereas it had taken colonizers more than two centuries to dislodge Indigenous powers from the East, major campaigns against Native nations in the West were over in a few decades. What explains the United States’ rapid conquest of some of the mightiest powers on the continent? And how did the U.S. Army manage this feat with a dwindling and scattered force? The answers lay beyond conventional military theaters. The campaign against the Native West was a war on Indigenous society itself. Farmers transformed Indigenous land, hunters obliterated Indigenous resources, teachers curtailed Indigenous languages, federal agents withheld Indigenous annuities, politicians denied Indigenous rights, and soldiers deported Indigenous people. Yet many tools used to conquer Native people – reservations, railroads, the English language, the federal Indian school system – became, in time, instruments of resistance and revival. Native people rode trains to build intertribal connections. They spoke English to bridge divides between ethno-linguistic groups. And they drew on common educational experiences to craft a shared history – a history of oppression and dispossession but also remarkable resilience.