Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was one of the chief architects of the stunning Confederate victory at the battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, on May 2, 1863. Along with overall Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, Jackson devised a daring plan that divided the numerically inferior southern army and then marched Jackson’s men far around the Union army to strike unsuspecting northern troops on their extreme right flank. Northern soldiers were caught almost completely unawares and quickly succumbed to panic and rout, resulting in one of the most striking tactical victories of the war. Jackson, eager to follow up the initial success by mounting an extremely rare nighttime attack, reconnoitered the Union lines by the light of a full moon the evening of the battle. It was his last act as commander.

Though the men of his corps were undoubtedly exhausted after the day’s fighting, there was reason to believe that they would summon the will for a follow-up attack. Jackson’s men had already proved themselves capable of feats of endurance far beyond what most Civil War-era units could accomplish. During their famed 1862 campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Jackson’s men marched over 400 miles during a four-week stretch (including one 57-mile march in 51 hours) and fought six battles that month, repeatedly confounding Union generals’ attempts to defeat them. That the troops in Jackson’s command managed these feats under extremely difficult conditions—many had poor equipment, insufficient rations, and suffered from dysentery and other chronic conditions—renders their achievements even more remarkable, and helps explain why Jackson’s infantry became known as his “foot cavalry.” Their record as some of the most battle-hardened troops in the Army of Northern Virginia may have led their commander to believe they could renew the attack even after a grueling day of battle. (Jackson also may have anticipated a relative advantage over his Union opponents, whose troops were not only exhausted from the day’s hard fighting but also suffering from low morale due to the chaos of their defeat earlier in the day.)

Night attacks like the one Jackson contemplated at Chancellorsville were extremely rare during the Civil War not because of fatigue but because of the difficulty of fighting in the dark. Even under the best of conditions, Civil War battles were chaotic and confusing affairs: absent modern communications technologies, regiments depended on brightly-colored flags and uniforms to distinguish friend from foe. Even in daylight, troops sometimes mistook friendly regiments for enemy units: the thick, heavy smoke produced by Civil War firearms hung close to the ground, obscuring lines, and in the first years of the war many units on both sides employed nonstandard uniforms. Nighttime amplified these problems, making it nearly impossible to determine the position of friendly and enemy units. The increased threat of so-called “friendly fire” casualties represented a powerful disincentive to mount nighttime operations.

Jackson himself became the best-known Civil War victim of friendly fire. While scouting the Union lines at Chancellorsville by moonlight on horseback with his aides, Confederate pickets mistook his party for northern troops and fired several volleys into the group. Jackson himself was struck by musket balls and mortally wounded: surgeons amputated his left arm in an attempt to save his life, but pneumonia set in and the famous general died eight days after the battle.

Contemporary Americans often picture the War for Independence as a straightforward struggle between American patriots and the British crown over the political independence of the colonies. The reality is far more complex: the colonists did not represent a homogeneous bloc, and in some senses the conflict resembled a civil war over political sovereignty in the colonies. Like all civil wars, it extracted a toll on the civilian population, many of whom who found themselves displaced and their lives disrupted by the military and political struggle being played out in North America.

Not every inhabitant of the colonies in 1776 supported the Declaration of Independence and the political break from the English crown. It is impossible to know precisely how many supporters the Patriot forces enjoyed (especially when announcing one’s allegiance was a potentially risky move), but modern historians estimate that, at most, the Patriots enjoyed a bare majority of popular support—that is, no more than half the residents of the colonies supported the cause of independence. Between one-sixth and one-fifth of the residents of the colonies remained loyal to the British crown; the remainder of the population did their best to avoid an open declaration of their sympathies, since “fence-sitting” was often the safest political and practical course.

Fully fifteen to twenty percent of the residents of the North American colonies retained their allegiance to the crown during the conflict. These loyalists presented some serious challenges to the Patriot forces mounting the War for Independence, already strained by the demands of fighting the world’s most powerful military with scarce resources and an embryonic government. Loyalists threatened to provide information or material support to British forces, and the stakes involved in the struggle—in the eyes of the Crown, after all, the Patriots advocating treason in their push for independence—led the Patriots to deal with Loyalist elements harshly at points in the struggle. Desperate to deter loyalists from overtly supporting British forces, Patriots imposed loyalty oaths on colonists suspected of British sympathies. Other Loyalists had their land confiscated; by war’s end, the hostilities had forced some 60,000 Loyalists to leave their homes in the thirteen colonies and relocate to England or to other parts of the empire.

The 1994 PBS film Mary Silliman’s War does an excellent job of demonstrating many of the tensions the War for Independence created in local communities, and the ways in which civilians caught between two warring armies attempted to continue their lives against a backdrop of conflict and civil war. The film is based on the true story of Mary Silliman, whose husband Selleck actively prosecuted Loyalists for treason as the state’s attorney for Connecticut. After winning a death sentence for two Fairfield men, their relatives kidnap Selleck and threaten to hang him if the convicted Loyalists ascend to the gallows. In charting Mary’s efforts to secure her husband’s release, the film vividly portrays the often insoluble dilemmas faced by civilians during what remained (until the 1970s) America’s longest war.

This question gets at a central truth about service in the Civil War armies: desertion was common on both sides. It became more frequent later in the war (when more of the soldiers were draftees rather than volunteers, and when the brutal realities of Civil War combat had become more clear), and was more common among Confederate soldiers, especially as they received desperate letters from wives and families urging them to return home as Union armies penetrated further south.

While it is impossible to know with certainty how many soldiers deserted over the course of the conflict, Northern generals reckoned during the war that at least one soldier in five was absent from his regiment; at war’s end, the Union Provost Marshal General estimated that nearly a quarter of a million men had been absent from their units sometime during the war. Estimates for Confederate armies range even higher—perhaps as many as one soldier in three deserted during the course of the war. The Army of Northern Virginia alone lost eight percent of its total strength in a single month during the savage campaign of the summer of 1864.

Officially, desertion constituted a capital offense and was punishable by death. But because of the numbers of soldiers involved, it proved practically as well as politically impossible to execute every deserter who was captured. The armies could not afford the numerical loss of such large numbers of troops; more importantly, as Abraham Lincoln himself noted, people would not stand to see Americans shot by the dozens and twenties. Both armies employed other punishments (branding captured soldiers with a “D” on the hip, was common, for example) rather than execute every deserter they recovered. Both armies did execute some captured deserters—often in highly public ceremonies before the entire regiments, intended to deter other would-be fugitives—but such punishments were unusual.

Only 147 Union deserters were executed during the course of the war. Rather than rely entirely on punitive measures, Union authorities attempted to woo deserters back with offers of amnesty for soldiers who returned to their commands before a specific deadline, frequently pairing that reprieve with threats of increased punishment for those who failed to return before the designated date. Lincoln offered general amnesty to some 125,000 Union soldiers then absent from their regiments in March 1863, provided those soldiers returned to their units.

The prevalence of desertion from the ranks of both armies speaks to an interesting reality about those soldiers’ conception of military obligation. Long mistrustful of professional armies and fiercely protective of individual liberties, many Americans of the mid-nineteenth century (North and South) adhered to a conception of military service as a contractual—one that involved obligations from the state as well as from the citizen-soldier.

For some Civil War volunteers, their service in the army was predicated on specific treatment from their officers and the government. When they believed that the government had not held up its end of the bargain (by failing to provide essential supplies, for example, or by furnishing incompetent leaders) they assumed that the contract had been voided—and their absence, by extension, did not constitute desertion.

Maybe, but in a roundabout way.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that this question is apparently not something that has elicited a lot of serious historical research up to now ("Where do I find historical evidence for a simple game played by children that requires no equipment?" and "Will I hurt my chances for tenure if I spend much time researching such a seemingly trivial subject?"), so I will have to go out on a limb here with my own theory, which is based only on circumstantial evidence. Because this is just my theory, I am going to have to explain how I arrived at it.

First, a confession: Although I began playing rock-paper-scissors when I was a child, I had never heard it called "Rochambeau" until you sent in your question. Asking around, however, I discovered that some of my colleagues, raised in various places around the country, had vaguely heard of "Rochambeau," but with some of them I was not able to figure out if they had definitely called the game of rock-paper-scissors "Rochambeau" when they were younger, or whether they had merely watched a certain South Park episode in which Eric Cartman challenged another child to play "Rochambeau," but which he explained as consisting in a kind of duel carried out by kicking each other (Google "Rochambeau" and "South Park" to find a link to the clip, but I hereby give you a "language warning" for this).

Nevertheless, more Googling makes it clear that "Rochambeau," used for rock-paper-scissors, has an older and wider provenance. Mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, for example, who have recently become interested in "multivariant" selection systems over the past 20 years or so, have written about rock-paper-scissors and have typically cited the game as "rock-paper-scissors" and then added "Rochambeau" or "Roshambo" in parentheses after it. So that carries the word back at least a couple of decades.

As an illustration of the severe limits on using Wikipedia for research, the English-language Wikipedia entry on rock-paper-scissors (or rock-scissors-paper, etc.) says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in French. But the French-language Wikipedia entry on the game lists the Francophone countries' names for it as: pierre-feuille-ciseaux, papier-caillou-ciseaux, roche-papier-ciseaux, pierre-papier-ciseaux, and feuille-caillou-ciseaux. It then says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in the United States. I wondered whether "Rochambeau" might be an English-language corruption of a French triplet beginning with "roche" (rock), but I have nothing else to offer in this speculative vein, so this is not part of my theory.

Next up was to consider the alleged connection with the Comte de Rochambeau, the French general who was a hero of the American Revolution.

Over the past decade, rock-paper-scissors has become a quasi-formally organized sport with international tournaments. Two American brothers, Douglas and Graham Walker, organized the World RPS Society, with tournaments, a website, t-shirts, and posters, and they have also published a light-hearted guide to playing "professional" rock-paper-scissors, which includes a brief and half-serious history of the game. Their Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide (2004) offers one theory about how the game became "synonymous with" the Comte de Rochambeau:

"It is widely believed that an ill-advised throw of Scissors (or Ciseaux) resulted in his being uprooted from his ancestral home to become the marshal of the French forces during the American Revolution. His arrival is widely credited with the introduction of RPS to the United States."

But this is all unlikely. Rochambeau (and Lafayette and other French military officers) were quite eager to come to America to fight with the Americans, and had to resist others' efforts to keep them in France so that their military experience would not be missed there.

Another mention of the supposed historical connection with Rochambeau is in physicist Len Fisher's Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life (2008):

"George Washington is reputed to have played it with Cornwallis and the Comte de Rochambeau to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis's tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. (The story goes that Rochambeau won, which is why the game is still called Ro-Sham-Bo in some quarters.)"

But Washington, Rochambeau, and Cornwallis did not negotiate surrender terms together in a tent; nor did they even meet together on that occasion. Cornwallis sent Washington a message under a flag of truce, proposing a cessation of hostilities so that officers appointed by each side could meet and "settle terms of the posts at York and Gloucester." After speaking with his own staff and with Rochambeau and his officers, Washington responded in writing that he wished to see Cornwallis' proposed terms of surrender before he could agree to the talks. Cornwallis sent back another written message to Washington, listing his terms. Washington then decided that he could not accept the terms as written, but that they were enough to begin negotiations, so he agreed to the ceasefire and to send representatives to the Moore house on the York River behind the Americans' lines, where Cornwallis had proposed the meeting take place.

The officers who met for negotiations the following day included Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens, a native South Carolinian, who had previously been Washington's aide-de-camp, and (for Rochambeau) Colonels Louis Marie Antoine vicomte de Noailles (Lafayette's brother-in-law), and Guillaume Jacques Constant Liberge de Granchain. They met with British Lieutenant-Colonel Duridas and Major Ross, one of whom was Cornwallis' aide-de-camp. Negotiations lasted eight hours that day. They were extremely detailed about terms, including even the requirement for the British troops to march out with their colors masked and with their fifers not playing any British or German tunes. A final agreement was reached only during the second session, the following day, on October 19, when the same negotiators returned, having consulted with their superiors. They then brought back the Articles of Capitulation for their commanders to study and to sign "in the trenches." Cornwallis signed for the British side. Generals Washington and Rochambeau, and Admiral de Grasse, gathered elsewhere, signed for the opposing side.

That afternoon, the British forces marched out from where they had been besieged. Cornwallis was not among them. He pleaded illness, and left the formal surrender to Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, who rode up to the allied officers and asked which one was Rochambeau. He was immediately told to surrender to Washington, but when he stopped in front of Washington and offered him Cornwallis' sword, Washington refused, for reasons of military protocol, to receive a sword from the opposing side's subordinate commander. Washington directed him to surrender the sword to his second in command, General Benjamin Lincoln, which he did, and turned and rode away.

None of the details of the surrender or the ceremony itself seem like they would have been left to a game of chance.

I conclude, therefore, that the stories that try to link the game with Rochambeau himself, are likely recent and apocryphal, made up in an ad hoc fashion to give flesh to why the game was called "Rochambeau."

Now we get to the nub of this matter: I did a rather tedious search in online databases of books, periodicals, and newspapers published in America from the 17th- through 19th-century and found absolutely no mention of "Rochambeau" used as the name of a game, or, for that matter, of any mention of Rochambeau playing rock-paper-scissors, or even any mention of the game of rock-paper-scissors itself being played in America at all until well into the 20th century. I certainly do not believe that my search has been exhaustive (many old newspapers are not online, for example), and there was plenty that was written that was never published, but if the game was being played by children of European descent "from time immemorial," it seems odd (but not conclusive) that I have been able to find no one mentioning it in anything published in America for the first several centuries of European presence here, even though the game, by its very nature, is not something on which writers would necessarily have thought to expend much ink, if they deigned to notice it at all.

The absence of any mention of the game does not mean, by the way, that American children did not have hand games for deciding winners or selecting alternatives—"Odds and evens," for example, has a long history in Anglo-American culture (James Boswell mentions it in his Life of Samuel Johnson).

In addition, there is evidence (by way of a conspicuous absence of another order) of American ignorance of the game as late as the turn of the 20th century: Stewart Culin, Director of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, published Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan in 1895. In it, he described various East Asian hand games, among which was the Japanese game of Janken (or Jankenpon). This was precisely what became our game of rock-paper-scissors, and is most likely its ultimate source, either via Europe or across the Pacific (perhaps through Japanese immigrants to the West Coast). Culin, however, grinds right through his description of it, placing it among his descriptions of the other East Asian hand games to which it is closely related, without ever talking about any game in his own culture, that is, without mentioning anything like, "this is identical to our game of rock-paper-scissors." This too suggests that in fact the game had not yet become a part of American culture by that time.

The first homegrown mention of the game rock-paper-scissors I found is in a compilation of children’s games, Handbook for Recreation Leaders, put together by Ella Gardner, the Government's "play expert" and "recreation specialist" with the Children's Bureau in Washington and first published by the Government Printing Office in 1935. In the 1930s, the Children's Bureau helped organize or participated in many national and international gatherings of child care specialists. Gardner herself was a kind of traveling outreach specialist on the subject of recreation activities.

In the Handbook, the game of rock-paper-scissors is called, precisely, "Rochambeau." Gardner appears to have been fond of team games, so to adapt rock-paper-scissors, her Handbook has the players of each of two teams decide among themselves whether their team will present rock, paper, or scissors. Then, with the two teams facing each other, the captains of each team raise their fisted arms and bring them down in partial steps, each at the same time, saying "Ro," then "cham," and then, on "beau," revealing their sign. The Handbook presents the game along with another, called "Fox, Hunter, Gun," in which foxes defeat hunters, hunters defeat guns, and guns defeat foxes. The signals of that game included simultaneous cries and arm gestures that impersonate the characters.

Soon after the government made the book available to educators, recreation planners, community groups, clubs, and parents around the country, more descriptions of the game began to appear in books, magazines, and newspapers. Bernard Sterling Mason's Social Games for Recreation, for example, published the following year, describes "rock scissors paper." And letters to the children's sections of domestic newspapers began explaining and recommending the game in the late 1930s.

There was an upsurge in the number of mentions of the game after World War II. It was initiated with articles in the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, written by army reporters stationed in Japan during the U.S. occupation of the country. The reporters appear to have been unfamiliar with the game from their own childhoods, calling it a kind of "odds and evens." From about that time, the game began being mentioned regularly in books, magazines, and newspapers. Clearly, by then it had become embedded in American culture. Judging by the "documentary" evidence, then, it looks like the game found its way to popularity in America through the combined efforts of Ella Gardner of the Children's Bureau and, later, G.I.s returning from Japan.

The author of the Children's Bureau handbook, Ella Gardner, was a Washington, D.C. native. The Children's Bureau had been in the Department of Labor, but with the Bureau's large expansion under the New Deal, and especially the Social Security Act of 1935, would soon end up with the Social Security Administration (and later with HEW and its successor, HHS).

At the time the book was published, the Children's Bureau was in the Widner building in Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. But the government was in the midst of a huge expansion, and was buying and leasing buildings all over downtown, and moving agencies from one place to another. The new Social Security Administration would quickly be moved into an apartment building that had been commandeered by the Government about a block away from the Children's Bureau. This building was the Rochambeau Apartments, at the corner of 17th and K Streets. The building had that name because it faced Lafayette Square, which has a large bronze statue of the Comte de Rochambeau.

The Rochambeau statue had been erected in 1902 and, in 1931, had been the focus of a large celebration of the sesquicentennial of the victory at Yorktown. If the Children's Bureau staff were looking for a ready place to try out games with a group of children, Lafayette Square would have been ideal. And if they were looking for a three-syllable word to hang on the game of rock-paper-scissors, "Rochambeau" would certainly have been near at hand.

But why bother with making up a new name for the game? Well, it was a Japanese game and English-speaking children might have been leery of a name as unfamiliar as "Jankenpon." Diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States were growing quite cool by the mid-1930s, so perhaps the Children's Bureau reduced the "foreign" feeling of the name "Jankenpon" by attaching a foreign name to it that was nevertheless indubitably a "patriotic" one: "Rochambeau."

The upshot is that the name "Rochambeau" does appear to link the game to the French General, but it is likely his statue, not the gentleman himself, that is responsible for the link.

So that is my theory, and I am sticking to it. At least for now. It seems more reasonable than supposing Washington, Cornwallis, and Rochambeau were playing hand games together during the British surrender. However, my theory is based almost entirely on a long chain of guesses and circumstantial evidence. If or when someone runs across some early mention of "Rochambeau" applied to the game, the entire limb I have climbed out on will be sawed off. But for now, that is the best I can come up with.

The goals of U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt during the 1950s were to protect American and western European access to oil in the Middle East, to end British colonial rule throughout the area in line with the ideal of self-determination expressed in the Atlantic Charter, to contain the expansion of communism and particularly the influence of the Soviet Union in the region, and to support the independence of Israel without alienating the Arab states.

In all this, the U.S. State Department regarded Egypt as the natural leader among the Arab states and sought to make it an ally and to encourage pro-Western elements in Egyptian society.

One essential problem was that the various goals of U.S. policy toward Egypt were often at odds with one another. As one example, the U.S. was sympathetic to Egypt's desire to free itself from British colonial rule--just as the U.S. had done--and emphasized its support for full Egyptian self-rule to the country's political and military leaders. But the U.S. was also allied with Britain to oppose the Soviet Union's expansion into Europe.

Almost all of Europe's oil at the time came through the Suez Canal. Britain was divesting itself of its empire, but in Egypt it had strong concerns about leaving the Suez Canal undefended. Britain's lingering military presence in the Mideast helped protect oil shipping lanes, the canal, and the oil fields from the threat posed by the Soviet Red Army. For its part, Egypt simply wanted Britain out and was disappointed when the U.S. did not always take its side.

Another example of internally conflicting goals--the U.S. supported "peoples' right to self-determination." This was, in fact, one way of framing why the U.S. opposed communism and the Soviet Union in particular: because it was totalitarian and crushed individuals' liberties. However, the U.S. had in mind a model of self-governance that assumed its own historical situation and that of other western European states who were the heirs of the Enlightenment and its ideals of individual autonomy. Other places were not necessarily burgeoning libertarian strongholds that only wanted a chance to grow to fruition as western-style capitalist democracies.

Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, approached this dilemma by applying a "Marshall Plan" strategy of massive aid to places such as the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while also implicitly dealing with the fact that in these places (unlike in the European countries with strong democratic traditions that had been devastated by World War II), the "people" were not necessarily committed to turning their countries into capitalist, pro-western democracies.

Dulles's State Department believed that countries such as Egypt, for example, would naturally undergo a two-step process. First, relatively corrupt old regimes would be cast aside (least destructively, by military coups) and the governments would then be controlled by relatively authoritarian regimes that would pull together and organize the country's various factions. Second, with development aid and the establishment of trade ties with the rest of the world, the countries would emerge (through a peaceful evolutionary process, it was hoped) as full-fledged democracies.

Even if this were a true description of the "natural" evolution of Third World countries, however, none of this could happen in isolation. Larger political forces, outside the individual countries, affected their internal politics.

For the U.S., Dulles's goal of opposing and, as he framed it, "containing" the expansion of the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and China provided a dilemma. When colonial powers disengaged from their former colonies in the Third World, the power vacuum that resulted meant that the U.S. found itself in various places giving its support to indigenous, but authoritarian and even dictatorial, regimes. This, it was thought, would cordon off these countries' borders, as it were, against communist intrusion and provide an opportunity for the U.S. to engage there in what the State Department came to call "nation building," which generally meant the infusion of massive economic and military aid. The eventual goal was the peaceful evolution of these countries into functioning, pro-western democracies.

This was the template for U.S. policy toward Egypt in the 1950s. Unfortunately for its prospects of success, it was only partly congruent with Egypt's own perceived interests. In particular, Egypt's leaders were generally never sympathetic to communism, but they did not fear anything like a takeover by the Soviet Union. In fact, following a long established practice in Mideast diplomatic circles, they looked for ways to play off one great power against another to their advantage.

Egypt had centuries of experience in warding off the domination of great powers by playing them against one another. When the U.S. stalled in advancing Egypt's positions against Britain, Egypt sought to engage with the Soviet Union, partly because that was where it could find military and economic support and partly because it was a way to exact more concessions from the U.S. in return.

In addition, the political power that Egyptian leaders wielded, like that in other countries in the region, was weak. In a way that American diplomats did not understand, Mideast leaders had to adjust their countries' alliances constantly with one another and could not make permanent, unilateral alliances. It was an Egyptian goal to enhance its own power in the region, not as the leader of a pro-American alliance.

Beginning with President Roosevelt's meeting with King Farouk at the end of World War II, American diplomats (including Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson) assured Egyptian leaders that the U.S. supported the country's efforts at self-determination. The Egyptians unfailingly heard these assurances to mean that the U.S. would help them rid Egypt of Britain. Sometimes, however, U.S. diplomats used this sort of language to mean that the U.S. would protect Egypt from communist subversion, internally or externally, from the Soviet Union. This miscommunication caused confusion.

Internal Egyptian politics made Egyptian King Farouk align himself increasingly with factions that demanded an immediate abrogation of an earlier treaty that allowed Britain to continue control over the Suez Canal and that Britain pull all its troops out of Egypt. The U.S. found the King to be unsympathetic to America's reluctance to go along with the demand for Britain to abandon Egypt and the canal immediately. To the U.S., it seemed that political power in Egypt was rapidly being corrupted and that it was flowing "down the drain," out to the more radical political factions.

The U.S. State Department concluded that it would find a more sympathetic hearing from another ruler. Historians have reached different conclusions about the extent of the involvement of U.S. diplomats and CIA operatives at this juncture, but it seems fairly clear that they met with dissatisfied Egyptian military officers and at least promised them that if there was a military coup, that the U.S. would not oppose it, and that the U.S. would prevent possible British opposition to it, as long as foreign nationals and property were protected.

The coup occurred in July 1952. Two military officers, General Mohammed Naguid and Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser, emerged as the new Egyptian leaders. The military government immediately asked for U.S. military and economic aid. A State Department official agreed, but the Secretary of State and the President balked at the deal, which caused internal political problems for the Egyptian leaders.

President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson were succeeded by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles in 1953. Dulles' brother Allen was made director of the CIA.

The Dulles brothers provided military advisors and equipment to the Egyptian army. Through clandestine contacts, both the State Department and the CIA gave Egyptian leaders, especially Nasser, important intelligence training and assistance in moderating potential internal political rivals and in conducting propaganda campaigns.

In 1954, Nasser edged out Naguid and ascended to sole leadership of the military government. During the tumult surrounding this, Nasser was able to disband the main faction of his opposition, the Moslem Brotherhood, after an assassination attempt during one of his speeches, in which the would-be assassin fired seven shots at him, but missed. Public sympathy for Nasser surged, allowing him to quash his opposition. Nasser's chief of security much later admitted that the CIA had given Nasser a bulletproof vest, which he was wearing during his speech, raising the issue of whether the assassination attempt was a setup, designed to benefit Nasser.

Egypt looked for military equipment and aid. During this period, both State and the CIA provided it, sometimes clandestinely, hoping for a formal military alliance with Egypt, and for Egypt to take the lead in reaching a peace settlement with Israel. Egypt, however, extracted as much military and economic assistance from the U.S. as it could, but refused a military alliance with the West. It was Nasser's intention to adopt a policy of "neutralism" between West and East (that is, between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) in order to maintain its own independence, and, in fact, to heighten competition between the two in the region in order to fend off domination and to gain as much aid as possible from each.

The U.S. recognized that by the mid-1950s the U.S.S.R. had developed a Third World strategy of pouring vast amounts of money and material into countries in Asia, Africa, and the Mideast that had recently been colonies of Western countries. The Soviets hoped to counter Western influence in these countries by promoting anti-colonial sentiment and supporting socialist reform there. The strategy was quite successful, at least for a time. The result was that in much of the Third World, the Soviet Union was viewed more favorably than the United States.

The U.S. and Britain attempted to form a cordon of defensive alliances around the world in order to prevent Soviet expansion. This included NATA in Europe and SEATO in Southeast Asia. The initial plan also included a Mideast alliance to bridge the gap between the two, but when the U.S. and Britain began formalizing agreements with Turkey and Iraq (rivals of Egypt in regional influence), Nasser felt that they had discarded Egypt. Nasser's idea was to form a regional military alliance within the Arab League, with him as leader. The souring of relations between Nasser and the West resulted in a turning point in 1955 in which Nasser asked for, and received, large-scale military equipment sales from the Soviet Union, and distanced his country and himself from the United States. Indeed, he adopted socialist reforms and heavily promoted "pan-Arab nationalism," as well as "neutralism" and "noncooperation with the West."

Despite that, the U.S. continued to court Nasser with economic aid, which indeed he was happy to receive. The U.S. accepted that a "neutralist" Egypt was better than a communist one, and recognized that the Soviets, from this time, intended to block Western efforts to cordon them and, to do that, were encouraging vast sales of its military equipment all over the region, as well as supporting the idea of Arab nationalism, especially in opposition to Israel. The U.S. pressured Israel and Egypt to make concessions toward a settlement, with the intention of avoiding war and reducing Soviet influence in the region.

When the U.S. found that Nasser and Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion were ultimately unable or unwilling to conclude a peace agreement, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles opted to call Nasser's bluff by countering him in several covert ways, especially in promoting relations with his regional Arab rivals in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The U.S. calculated that Nasser, confronted by the possibility that the other Arab states were aligning with the West, would find himself in a situation that he would find unacceptable--namely, with only one powerful "friend," the Soviet Union.

In order to avoid such an outcome, the U.S. believed, Nasser would become more tractable to a peace settlement with Israel, so that he would not be left behind, relative to the other Arab states. In response, Nasser stepped up anti-American rhetoric in the region and, in return from the Soviets for help in setting up covert intelligence operations in the region designed to undermine the Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Libya, and Iraq, Nasser agreed to accept Soviet military assistance.

The denouement occurred over the plans to construct the Aswan High Dam, which the U.S. had been willing to fund, but which the Soviet Union had told Nasser that it would also be willing to do. Secretary of State Dulles, with Eisenhower's agreement, finally decided to extract the U.S. from situations in the Third World in which the countries were deliberately playing them off against the Soviet Union. In 1956, Dulles let it be known to Nasser that the U.S. would not fund the dam, believing that Nasser's only other option to finance it was to accept the Soviet Union's offer. This, Dulles believed correctly, Nasser would be highly reluctant to do. Nasser responded by opening diplomatic relations with China.

Nasser also had another option that the U.S. did not anticipate: He suddenly took an enormously dangerous risk and nationalized the Suez Canal, anticipating that Egypt could use the canal revenues to finance the construction of the Aswan High Dam without U.S. or Soviet funding.

In response, three months later, Britain, France (the two foreign shareholders in the canal), and Israel attacked Egypt, resulting in a quick and decisive military defeat for Egypt. The Israelis occupied a large portion of the Sinai Peninsula, and the Anglo-French forces occupied Port Said and Port Fouad at the Mediterranean terminus of the Suez Canal. All of this they did without consulting the U.S.

Eisenhower and Dulles were appalled at the attack. They believed with some good evidence that it would result in a military response from the Soviet Union, risking a much larger war, and, in any event, would throw the weight of public opinion throughout the Arab Middle East entirely against the West and into the Soviet camp. The U.S., therefore, strongly and publicly opposed the invasion and worked in the U.N., especially with Canada, to pass a cease-fire resolution and a call for the withdrawal of military forces.

In addition, the U.S. pressured Britain by threatening to sell the British bonds it held, which would have forced a devaluation of the British currency and threatened Britain's ability to import food and oil. The British relented, a cease-fire was called, and the occupying forces were evacuated.

In the Suez Crisis, the Third World in general and the Arab states in particular saw the U.S. as having acted as its friend. Despite Egypt's military loss, Nasser remained in power with the Suez Canal under Egypt's control, and the British, French, and Israelis evacuated the region they had invaded.

For the next few years, U.S. policy toward Egypt was guided by what became known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine," a declaration that the U.S. was prepared to offer assistance to any Middle Eastern country (if it asked for assistance) in order to oppose the military threat of "any nation controlled by international communism." In reality, the doctrine was fairly impractical for a number of reasons.

It invited pro-Western countries in the region to gin up internal or external "communist threats" as a simple way to procure U.S. aid without the necessity to negotiate agreements or treaties. Also, the policy was actually aimed at thwarting Nasser's ambitions to undermine his Middle Eastern rivals in the region, many of whom were pro-Western. The policy was given public shape, however, in a resolution that the Eisenhower Administration had pushed through Congress by the expediency of using the phrase "international communism." This left the Administration's actual policy in the dark and often at odds with its publicly expressed policy.

The practical result of this was State Department and CIA involvement, by covert means, in the complicated internal politics of the region, as the political winds within each country shifted. This created unintended and unwanted consequences for the United States, for which the CIA coined the term "blowback." Much of this activity, including coups and counter-coups, was inspired, influenced, or even orchestrated by the CIA. In Egypt, CIA operator Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (Teddy's grandson), developed an exceedingly complicated and intimate relationship with (and sometimes against) the Nasser regime, as did CIA operative Miles Copeland. The U.S., however, acted for the rest of the decade under the conviction that Nasser himself was too powerful to be deposed and came to reconcile itself to containing his attempts to consolidate his influence with the other Arab states.

Political, social, economic, and cultural forces were at work at the time, but Roosevelt's actions, undertaken consciously and intentionally, had important consequences as well.

The conventional wisdom that America was generally "isolationist" until the end of the 19th century has some severe limits. It is only true if it means that the United States was reluctant to become involved in European politics (as opposed to European business, manufacturing, and trade relationships, which the U.S. was not so reluctant to engage in, despite the imposition of protectionist tariffs).

The reluctance derived from the fact that European immigrants to America, from the very beginning, had often fled to escape Europe. For them, America was a place apart, free of the "entangling alliances" (Jefferson's phrase) of entrenched interests, monarchies, and religious restrictions. The idea was fortified by geography, with oceans separating the Old World and the New.

The problem with the idea of "American isolationism," however, comes when it is taken to imply that the policy of the U.S. during this time was "peace with each other and all the world" (as President Polk said during his inaugural address) or that it was guided exclusively by the simple desire not to interfere with other peoples' lives. If the U.S. relationship with North American indigenous peoples is not evidence enough to the contrary, its relationship with Mexico throughout the 19th century—well before the Spanish-American War—should demonstrate that the U.S. did not refrain from interfering with other peoples' lives or other country's policies or from exercising military power over them.

The Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War and the consequent abolition of slavery, appeared to justify the use of state power to impose solutions to social problems, to demonstrate that social progress could be engineered by the state. This was the essence of "Progressivism," and, as a political or social philosophy, it was a departure from the deep-rooted American suspicion of, and aversion to, a strong central state power. Progressives sought first to uplift and re-order America, but then turned their view outward, especially with the emergence of a popular view that the valued American pioneer "spirit" would diminish as the westward settling of the continent reached the Pacific Ocean.

The Progressives contemplated doing unto other lands what they were already doing to their own; or, as Mark Twain sarcastically put it, "extending the blessings of civilization to our brother who sits in darkness."

Nevertheless, if we limit ourselves to considering American actions overseas, then a sea change of sorts did occur toward the end of the 19th century. America deliberately fashioned itself into a formidable naval power. U.S. Naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan encapsulated the rationale for this in his highly influential book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, published in 1890.

Not surprisingly, America's overseas reach was made possible by a large effort to expand and modernize the U.S. Navy, which began under President Chester A. Arthur in 1882, 16 years before the Spanish-American War. President Arthur also negotiated with the Kingdom of Hawaii the right to use Pearl Harbor as a coaling station for U.S. Navy ships.

It was also in 1882 that young Theodore Roosevelt published his first historical book, The Naval War of 1812. He was friends with Mahan and shared his view of the need for the U.S. to develop its navy. President William McKinley appointed Roosevelt to the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. He resigned the following year to fight in the Spanish-American War.

Counting the value of foreign commerce in the leading commercial nations from 1870 to 1890, the U.S. ranked 4th behind the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

From 1850 to 1890, the dollar value of U.S. total imports and exports rose from $318 million to $1.3 billion, an increase of 400 percent. As America's own industries grew in the 2nd half of the 19th century, the percentage of manufactured goods (as opposed to raw materials) exported also grew.

Just as important, America's direct investment overseas increased, placing more American businesses in situations in which they operated within local conditions around the world. These businesses dealt directly with local foreign markets, governments, labor pools, and raw material suppliers.

During this period, American business entrepreneurs in the Pacific and in Central and South America began to venture deeply into local political and even military affairs. Actions sometimes reached far beyond mere business activities, including the organization of "free lance" military expeditions called "filibusters" against governments in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

American companies, such as the United Fruit Company, came to own vast plantations in these countries and operated them as agricultural colonies. They often pressured the U.S., especially throughout the 1st half of the 20th century, to intervene militarily in countries such as Nicaragua, Honduras, and Haiti when their interests were threatened by local wars and revolutions.

The pattern of American commercial interests supported by American military power had already been set by the beginning of the 20th century. Hawaii was first annexed to the U.S. in February 1893, after immigrant businessmen and politicians from the U.S., including Sanford Dole (his cousin James would become the "Pineapple King") ousted the Hawaiian royalty, with the backing of U.S. diplomats and soldiers. The annexation was withdrawn, but was re-instituted under President McKinley in 1898, with an eye toward using Hawaii as a naval base in the Pacific to fight Spain in Guam and the Philippines.

In the Spanish-American War of 1898, naval power was decisive to the U.S. victory. Quasi-colonial competition between the U.S. and Spain was one factor in the war, as well as an ambivalent notion in the U.S. that it was expelling Old World domination (Catholic and monarchical) from the New World. This in theory helped to free the hemisphere for democratic revolution and republicanism, while at the same time advancing U.S. economic and political power over the same region.

The end of the war saw the U.S. emerge as a fully-fledged, although ideologically conflicted, colonial power. That ideological conflict regarding the destiny and direction of American foreign policy would continue through the 20th century. This new era of foreign involvement was underway before Theodore Roosevelt held any national elected office.

Practically speaking, of course, the U.S. had no way to become militarily entangled in Europe—even if it had wished to—until it had a navy and commercial fleet capable of protecting its own shores, but more importantly, capable of transporting troops and supplies across the Atlantic.

As the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 1900 campaigning for McKinley's second term, Roosevelt publicly argued in favor of the annexation of the Philippines, contending that both the Philippines and the U.S. would benefit.

After McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and Roosevelt became President, he built the "Great White Fleet," four battleship squadrons of new naval ships. He then dispatched them around the world from 1907-1909 on a mission of friendship and goodwill, but with a subtext of demonstrating that the U.S. had come of age as an international naval power.

Roosevelt also strengthened and extended the Monroe Doctrine in his 1904 address to Congress. He claimed that the U.S. had the right to intervene—to exercise "international police power"—in the economic affairs of Central American and Caribbean nations in order to stabilize them. This claim became known as the "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine.

Roosevelt had wide support in the U.S. for his foreign policy bullishness, although strong and significant opposition existed against actions that appeared to be at odds with the country's own republican ideals.

He quickly recognized the legitimacy of Panamanian rebels to separate from Columbia, and he committed the U.S. to protect their independence. But this (and the U.S.'s negotiated lease for the Canal Zone) suggested an action quite at odds with the country's refusal to allow states to secede from the Union during the Civil War.

Roosevelt, however, was convinced that a canal would be built across the Isthmus of Panama and that the U.S. must control it. During the war, American ships fought in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Transferring the fleets from one ocean to the other meant sending ships around Cape Horn, a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming operation. When the canal was finished, thought Roosevelt, only if American controlled it, could the U.S. ensure its ability to defend both of its own coasts.

All of Roosevelt's actions fortified the outward-looking expansive trend in U.S. foreign policy. Roosevelt's decisions, such as undertaking the Panama Canal project and strengthening the Navy, had long term consequences for the U.S.

When Americans started to move westward after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, many found the Mexican government happy to have them in Texas (they were called "Texians" there), alongside the Tejanos (Texans of Mexican or Latin-American descent). Because settlements were few and far between, the Mexican government needed settlers to protect the area from the Apaches and the Comanches, and the central government, centered far to the south in Mexico City, therefore encouraged the formation of regional militias.

Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, and the Mexican Constitution of 1824 established the newly independent country as a Federal Republic. In 1833, after years of political volatility and coups, however, Mexico emerged as a centralized dictatorship under the control of General and President Antonio López de Santa Anna. As a result, several Mexican states rebelled against the reversal of federalism, including Coahuila y Tejas (the area that would become Texas), and formed their own regional governments. At a convention called in 1833 by dissidents to the central government, Stephen F. Austin was chosen as the representative of the self-declared "new" state of "Texas."

By this time, Anglo settlers in Texas outnumbered Tejanos by more than 5 to 1. Mexico was convinced that the United States coveted Texas. In 1827, President John Quincy Adams had offered to buy the region for a million dollars, and in 1829, President Andrew Jackson had increased the offer to $5 million. Mexico had rejected both offers.

By this time, the central government was dissatisfied that the Anglos refused to assimilate into Mexican culture. They resisted the legal requirement to support the Catholic Church, refused to learn Spanish, and refused to emancipate their slaves (Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829). In 1830, the central government prohibited further immigration from the U.S. into Texas.

At the same time, the Tejanos felt betrayed by Santa Anna's consolidation of political power. They had long felt alienated by the government in Mexico City and by the circles of power further south.

By mid-1835, "Texas Committees" in the U.S. sent money to Texas and recruited volunteers to help Texians resist the central government. Not long afterwards, Stephen Austin called for Texan independence.

Mexican soldiers assaulted the Texian garrison at Gonzales with the goal of forcing the settlers there to return a cannon they were given for self-defense. The Texians raised a flag picturing the outline of a cannon and the words "Come and Get It." The Mexicans were forced to retreat.

In November, at San Felipe de Austin, Texans formed a provisional government, the "Consultation," that expressed allegiance to the annulled Mexican Constitution of 1824. The Consultation authorized the creation of a new Texas regular army force (apart from the volunteers who were by then headed by Stephen Austin) commanded by Sam Houston.

In December 1835, Jim Bowie and his volunteer troops defeated the forces of Santa Anna's brother-in-law, General Martin Perfect de Cos, after a siege of the Alamo Mission at Béxar (modern San Antonio, Texas). The Texians released De Cos and his 1,000 men and paroled them. Afterwards, the Texians encamped at the Alamo and fortified it, although a confused chain of command among the various Texan military commanders shortly stripped the Alamo of most of its provisions and all but 100 or so defenders.

General Santa Anna left Mexico City at the end of November 1835, with a force of 6,000 soldiers to put down the revolt in Texas. Shortly thereafter, the Mexican Congress, encouraged by Santa Anna, declared that all "foreigners" captured fighting against the government should be regarded as "pirates" and summarily executed. By February 23, Santa Anna reached San Antonio and occupied the town, beginning a siege of the Alamo, then under the joint command of Jim Bowie and William B. Travis. Davy Crockett was among the Anglo defenders.

Meanwhile, Texans met 175 miles to the east, at Washington-on-the-Brazos, and on March 2 signed a Declaration of Independence from Mexico, declaring a new Republic of Texas. On March 4, Sam Houston was appointed commander of Texas forces, and he set out to raise and train an army in east Texas, in advance of Santa Anna's route.

The Alamo's defenders, still no more than about 200 men (but including a band of 25 Tejanos led by Juan Seguín) were determined to block Santa Anna from proceeding to east Texas to confront Houston and his men while they were building in strength. They pledged to defend the Alamo to the death.

Santa Anna occupied San Antonio and, with 1,500 soldiers, laid siege to the Alamo, trading intermittent cannon fire for about a week. The defenders refused to surrender. Santa Anna's forces overran them on March 6, 1836, in an early morning attack, under orders not to take prisoners. The defenders gradually fell back and collected around the chapel, where non-combatants (women, children, and slaves) were gathered.

The Mexicans reached the chapel and captured it. They released the non-combatants, but all defenders (including 8 Tejanos) died, either in the battle or, according to some accounts, by execution after surrender.

On March 19, 1836, 90 miles to the southeast, at the Battle of Coleto, forces under General José de Urrea defeated the Texian garrison stationed nearby at the Presidio La Bahia at Goliad. Eight days later, the Mexicans massacred the Texan garrison of more than 350 they had taken as prisoner, including its commander, James Fannin.

Santa Anna was branded throughout Texas as bloodthirsty, and as a result, Houston's forces grew with outraged volunteers. Sam Houston and his newly formed army proceeded into east Texas, closely pursued by Santa Anna, whose divided forces clashed several times with Texans.

At San Jacinto, 250 miles east of the Alamo, the Texan forces turned on Santa Anna's overconfident army in a surprise attack during siesta time. The Mexican army was defeated in 20 minutes. Seven Texans were wounded and up to 300 Mexicans died.

In the confusion, Santa Anna attempted to escape by donning the uniform of a corporal and hiding in a marsh, but the Texans noticed that the "corporal" was wearing silk underwear and figured out his identity. Under a tree nearby, Houston and Santa Anna negotiated a treaty giving Texas its independence and Santa Anna was released.

Trench warfare was not an innovation of World War I, but it was never so prevalent in any other war before or since.

One reason that World War I became a massive trench war on the Western Front was that western Europe was densely populated. The opposing armies in the west were so vast that they could be deployed across the entire European continent, forming a continuous front. Early in the war, the opposing armies engaged in mobile tactics in an effort to outflank each other, but were countered as opposing troops were brought in to extend their lines.

Throughout late 1914, after the first battle of the Marne, units of the opposing sides were deployed north and south of the already-entrenched armies and attempted to outrace each other and, in so doing, to turn their enemies' flank before the extending lines reached the sea. These attempts resulted in a series of battles, but neither side achieved a decisive breakthrough. From that point, the war on the Western Front devolved into filling in gaps in the lines, fortifying them, and experimenting with new tactics and weapons in order to break through.

The trench lines had the effect of turning Western Europe into two fortresses whose armies laid siege to each other along a single border.

In the east, the geography worked against entrenchment. The battle lines were much longer and the ground was harder. Trenches were more difficult to dig, and they could not be easily defended because forces could not be deployed along vast distances without making defensive lines easy to break. In the west, railroad lines were well established and could be used to shuttle forces back and forth rapidly in order to meet challenges along the front, but the transportation infrastructure in the east was much less developed.

The other reason that trench warfare dominated the conflict in World War I had to do with technological developments in weaponry, communications, and transportation, whose net effect was to strengthen the ability to conduct defensive operations and to make successful offensive operations much more difficult.

In previous wars, massed infantry and cavalry forces advanced or defended against each other across open ground. The small arms and other field weapons that had been available could certainly inflict losses on an advancing force as it came into range, but with enough men and horses, an advancing commander could hope to reach the defending army's lines and overwhelm them.

By World War I, however, small arms were much more lethal. They could fire accurately at far greater distances and they could be fired much more rapidly. Soldiers were now equipped with bolt-action rifles, hand grenades, and machine guns, and their field artillery was equipped with high explosive shells. The advancing army could also be slowed through quickly deployed lines of barbed wire, or through the use of flamethrowers or poison gas.

The advancing army's movements could also be tracked more efficiently. Airplanes did this job, and details of opposing troop movements were relayed to line commanders by rapidly strung phone lines.

The result was that an attacking force could no longer have much hope of surviving an advance over open ground against a defending force, especially an entrenched one. The opposing armies therefore fell into defending their territories along roughly parallel lines separated by a lethal "no man's land" between them.

The technology and tactics that could break this stalemate were not fully developed until the very end of the war and so were not effectively employed until the outbreak of World War II. They resulted in the use of highly mobile offensive forces that integrated infantry troops with newly improved tanks and close air support. This allowed an attacking force either to penetrate a defender's lines or to bypass entrenched fortifications altogether.