William Harding Carter And the American Army: A Soldier's Story (Campaigns and Commanders)

In this first full-length biography of William Harding Carter, Ronald G. Machoian explores Carter's pivotal role in bringing the American military into a new era and transforming a legion of citizen-soldiers into the modern professional force we know today.

Machoian follows Carter's career from his boyhood in Civil War Nashville, where he volunteered to carry Union dispatches, through his involvement in bitter campaigns against Apaches in the Southwest, to his participation in the Indian Wars' tragic final chapter at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Since his death in 1925, Carter's important contributions toward modernizing the U.S. Army have been overlooked. Machoian redresses this oversight by highlighting Carter's contributions to the U.S. military's growth as a professional institution and the nation's transition to the twentieth century.