The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2020 35 From Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution Andrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest and S.C.M. Paine, eds., Georgetown University Press, 2019, $36.95/paperback, e-book available, 320 pages. While today’s presidential tweets are light-years away from the scratch of pens on parchment during the era of the American Revolution, the importance of political communi- cation is eternal. From Quills to Tweets: How America Communi- cates about War and Revolution explores the roles that political narratives, media coverage and evolving technologies have played in precipitating, shaping and concluding (or prolonging) wars and revolutions over the course of U.S. history. Each chapter takes a different conflict and offers a unique assessment of a particular aspect of the communications battle. Collectively, the book provides an overview of the history of American strategic communications that will interest scholars, students and communications strategists alike. Judith Baroody, who retired from the Senior Foreign Service in 2017 with the rank of Minister Counselor, contributed the chapter “AmericanWartime Communication Strategies during the Gulf War.” State Department librarianMartin J. Manning wrote the chapter “The Communications Revolution during the U.S. Civil War.” All three of the book’s editors are on staff at the U.S. Naval War College. Andrea J. Dew is the Maritime Irregular Warfare Forces Chair and Co-Director of the Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups; Marc A. Genest is the Forrest Sherman Professor of Public Diplomacy in the Strategy and Policy Department; and S.C.M. Paine is the William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy. A “Polio” Finds His Way: My Father’s Remarkable Journey Susan Clough Wyatt, independently published, 2020, $18.95/paperback, e-book available, 350 pages. As we struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is worth recalling that this is not the first time in history that disease has challenged life as we know it. In addition to the 1918 influenza outbreak, polio ravaged the globe in the first half of the 20th century. In this book, Susan Clough Wyatt recounts her father’s experience with this brutal malady. Forrest Clough contracted polio at the age of four months in 1909 in Fort Worth, Texas, and the disease left him a paraplegic. In the decades before the passage of the first disability rights legislation in 1966, the United States “was immune to the needs of the disabled,” Wyatt writes, calling her father’s survival against the disease a “miracle.” Clough was supported by a determined mother, a devoted wife and many others along the way. He became the lead trumpet player in the 1930s with the Southern Methodist University band and went on to enjoy a 30-year career in radio in Texas. Wyatt draws from her father’s college autobiography and seven scrapbooks to interweave his story with the history of polio, FDR’s attempts to develop vaccines, her own bout with polio during the 1952 epidemic and efforts to eradicate the disease today. While Wyatt didn’t suffer from paralysis, she does share her experiences with post-polio syndrome. Susan Clough Wyatt was a Foreign Service spouse for 16 years and worked with the State Department for seven of those years. She is also the author of two memoirs, Arabian Nights and Daze (2010) and Thirty Acres More or Less (2003). She lives in Eugene, Oregon. Marketing the Frontier in the Northwest Territory: Land Sales, Soils and the Settling of the Great Lakes Region in the 19th Century Robert E. Mitchell, McFarland, 2020, $55/hardcover, e-book available, 252 pages. Robert Mitchell combines narrative history with in-depth, data-rich social and economic research to examine the fate of frontier farms in the Old Northwest Territory of the United States. In the antebellum period these farms and their related legislatively created markets resulted in significant investment losses for both individual farmers and the country’s economy. Part narrative and part study, Mitchell describes the ambitions and decision-making of farmers intent on making a living in frontier lands. By examining physical geography alongside the human geography of the westward expansion of the United States in the 18th century, Mitchell overlays individual investment decisions with the growth of frontier communities, and how farmers fared in imperfect markets.