Professor Xander is the author of The Army Under Fire, the Politics of Anti-Militarism in the Civil War era.

In the book, Professor Xander examines how leading political figures interacted with the professional army

and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of the nation's regular soldiers while waging a civil

war and attempting to reunify the nation in its aftermath. And a note to our listeners,

with the academic year now wrapped, lectures and history will pause new episodes until September.

Over the summer, we'll revisit some of our most engaging past lectures and other history-focused

content. This episode was recorded in February 24. More in a

moment. Today we're on to Army Explorers in the sort of interior west. So as I told you all last time,

we've been proceeding pretty chronologically up to this point. This lecture is going to kind of

spin us out onto a thematic

topic. So we're going to start right around Thomas Jefferson, who we left off talking about

on Monday, but we're going to jump all the way through forward to the U.S.-Mexico War and the Civil

War. And so a lot of the topics we're talking about today, they're also going to come up

in our future lectures. So just know that if you

feel slightly unmoored when it comes to what time we're in, I'm going to do my best

to signposts, but just flag me down if you're like, we've suddenly jumped 20 years. That's

going to happen today because it's a more of the thematic topic. But what I really want

us to get out of this is a deeper insight into this question we've

been talking about throughout the class, which is once you have an empire, how do you exert

control over it? And how is the new U.S. federal government, which we started to talk about

on Monday, going to control the interior west, which is going to be

its kind of biggest problem. So we'll start here with Adam Smith, pretty famous, famous dude,

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