|
|
Article: Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- December 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
To risk a gross generalization, social historians are concerned with demarcating the slow, developmental changes of a social order; when confronted with sweeping social change, there is a tendency to investigate its contexts, rather than the change itself. As a discipline, social history has shied away from the study of war because of the desire to examine how individuals have shaped the context of their lives; war removes individuals from their own backgrounds and places their actions in the services of a larger social agency, the state. While the social or "new" history of war has emerged as subdiscipline of social history, most literature in the field,has thus far used ...