Will Gorenfeld

While the authors seemed to have good intentions in telling a story of the Old Army at its best, while including the realities of Indian removal and antebellum constabulary work, this book just felt a bit lacking to me in terms of narrative backbone. You can open this book up anywhere and find an interesting story, but all those stories and anecdotes didn't seem to aggregate up into a more substantive understanding of much of anything, though the transition from Jacksonian volunteerism to something more professional seems to have been the intention; sometimes you really do need a theory of history.… (més)