Heather P. Venable, "How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918" (US Naval Institute Press, 2019)

New Books in American Studies · Oct 18, 2021 · 47m

For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at large. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions. Heather P. Venable, How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918 (US Naval Institute Press, 2019) argues that the Marine Corps could not and would not settle on a mission, and therefore it turned to an image to…