What has been called the early modern military revolution may be described most simply as the replacement of small cavalry forces by huge gunpowder infantry armies. The revolution was a diffusionary process with a relatively well-understood chronology and geography. The innovations at its core began in northern Italy in the later fifteenth century and spread throughout central, northern, and eastern Europe in the three centuries that followed. Seen in this way, it was a unique and unitary phenomenon. Thus we speak of the military revolution, an episode in world history, instead of several different revolutions in the constituent parts of Europe. Nonetheless, the course and impact of the revolution were different in the regions it eventually affected.

The histories of Germany and the United States became deeply entangled in the century of total war. After (re)unification on the battlefield in the midnineteenth century, both countries underwent rapid transformations through national programs of industrialization based on new products and technologies and emerged as great powers with global pretensions at the beginning of the twentieth century. An initial, and somewhat hesitant, confrontation in World War I was followed by a period of oscillation and confusion during the 1920s and 1930s, as leading elements in the two economies sought grounds for collaboration even as the political development of the two nations diverged, one moving toward fascism, the other toward a liberal democratic renewal. This produced the deeply ideological collision of the Second World War, which resulted in an equally dramatic turnabout, as the Germans endured what Americans then most feared, a grim (albeit partial) communist takeover, and the United States became the staunch ally of the German west in its faceoff with the east. Recently this close partnership has turned into a more perplexed and occasionally suspicious friendship, as the familiar terrain of the cold war is ploughed up. This is a history of extreme reversals is tied inextricably to war and preparations for war.

The modern world is composed of unstable landscapes in which boundaries, horizons, and attendant possibilities of living in the world change with dizzying rapidity. Likewise, the experience of modernity is often described in terms of peoples' attenuated attachments to the places they inhabit (Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989). Such tenuous, at times chimeric, connections between persons and places, to up the ante between subjectivity(ies) and the place-bound artifice of habit and custom, pose some pressing analytical challenges to those who are interested in cultural description.

If women's biology is their economic destiny, nowhere is this destiny more inexorable than in anthropological representations of the sexual division of foraging labor. Physically weak, immobilized by nursing children, engrossed in the provisioning of reliable plant foods, redolent with odors that drive away the game, and subject finally to the axiom that specialization everywhere increases productivity, the foraging woman who gathers but does not hunt seems multiply inevitable, the product at once of logistical necessity and evolutionary selection.

“The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains,” cried the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea. “The blood spills out into great indignation and a resolute urge to fight,” it “liberates us from slavery.” The image in the anthem was not simply symbolic. Upon taking power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and towns of Cambodia, initiating a three-year regime of terror that leveled the country economically, culturally, and physically. In this typhoon of tragedy, nearly two million people died, swept aside in a whirlwind of social upheaval.