Buffalo Soldier Collection: 2 books by Dr. John P. Langellier.

Fighting for Uncle Sam, Buffalo Soldiers in the Frontier Army

Scouting with the Buffalo Soldiers: Lieutenant Powhatan Clarke, Frederic Remington, and the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in the Southwest.

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in the Frontier Army (Schiffer, 2016) breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as “buffalo soldiers” played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past. Now 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army, the reader literally can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the “Stars and Stripes” to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John “Black Jack” Pershing.

Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, historian and author John P. Langellier spent four decades working in public history after earning a Ph.D. in military history from Kansas State University. He spent a dozen years with the U.S. Army, helped found California’s Autry Museum of the American West, and served as director for Wyoming State Museum, deputy director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, executive director of Arizona’s Sharlot Hall Museum, and director of Arizona Historical Society’s Central Division.

He has written dozens of published books, served as a Hollywood film consultant, a Smithsonian Institution fellow, and produced history documentaries for television networks A&E, History, and PBS.

Langellier officially “retired” to Tucson in 2015, but still continues his work as one of the preeminent military historians in the United States.