Marching in Step

Engagedly written and fast paced, this is a first-class book worthy of being read by a wide audience.

In this highly engaging and perceptive study, Alexander Macaulay challenges the characterization of The Citadel as a hidebound southern anachronism. Macaulay's post-Word War II Citadel is more a reflection of the larger society than a reaction against it, an institution forced to reconsider its gendered and racialized notions of citizenship as the ground shifted beneath its feet.

Macaulay presents this astute account of South Carolina's military college, The Citadel, within the framework of masculinity and shows how concerns over manliness fueled both the school's leaders' and its students' ideologies and actions and reflected American, southern, and South Carolinian anxieties about the tumultuous social and cultural transformations that followed World War II. This is an authoritative institutional history based on Macaulay's perceptive understanding of his alma mater.

This is a story that is bigger than one small school in a southern town. It is, as it should be, the story of America coming to terms with its past. From the Cold War to civil rights, from Vietnam to the feminist movement, The Citadel found itself on the front lines of America's culture wars. Thankfully, in Macaulay, we have found a historian of consummate skill to analyze those conflicts and their effects on the modern South.

In spite of being a recent Citadel graduate, Macaulay presents a remarkably objective look at this uniquely isolationist collegiate culture and its often-visceral reaction to the progressiveness of the outside world. A must read for any student of the modern South or civil-military relations.

Much more than an institutional history, this book's most significant contribution is to show how such a deeply gendered and racialized place responded to and helped shape American arguments about gender and citizenship.

Writing as both a historian and a Citadel graduate, Macaulay capably describes the experiences of cadets and school officials who struggled with social, political, and cultural changes in postwar America. His discussion of the shifting attitudes toward masculinity in the 1960s is especially convincing and clearly shows how The Citadel reflected national debates on a local level.