A Kansas historian details how the U.S. Army confronted its ‘race problem’ during Vietnam War

As troops took to the battle fields of Vietnam, internal fighting among American service members threatened to weaken the Army's ability to wage war. "An Army Afire" explores how commanders confronted the crisis.
Historian Beth Bailey is interested in the mechanics of social change, an interest that has yielded wide-ranging research.

“My first book about dating was really about the conventions that govern courtship,” says Bailey, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the University of Kansas’ history department, “and what rules people followed or broke as they were sort of trying to deal with heterosexual courtship.”

After tackling the world of dating in 2002’s “Sex in the Heartland,” Bailey’s newest release, “An Army Afire,” looks into the ranks of the U.S. Army as it attempted to confront its racial crisis in the Vietnam era, and shows how a massive, bureaucratized organization saw a problem, tried to identify its causes and worked to fix it.

“This book is about social change in a different way,” she says.