astype() will cast each series to the dtype object (string) and then call the str() method on the converted series to get the string literally and call the function upper() on it. Note that after this, the dtype of all columns changes to object.
In [17]: df
Out[17]:
regiment company deaths battles size
0 Nighthawks 1st kkk 5 l
1 Nighthawks 1st 52 42 ll
2 Nighthawks 2nd 25 2 l
3 Nighthawks 2nd 616 2 m
In [18]: df.apply(lambda x: x.astype(str).str.upper())
Out[18]:
regiment company deaths battles size
0 NIGHTHAWKS 1ST KKK 5 L
1 NIGHTHAWKS 1ST 52 42 LL
2 NIGHTHAWKS 2ND 25 2 L
3 NIGHTHAWKS 2ND 616 2 M
You can later convert the ‘battles’ column to numeric again, using to_numeric():
In [42]: df2 = df.apply(lambda x: x.astype(str).str.upper())
In [43]: df2['battles'] = pd.to_numeric(df2['battles'])
In [44]: df2
Out[44]:
regiment company deaths battles size
0 NIGHTHAWKS 1ST KKK 5 L
1 NIGHTHAWKS 1ST 52 42 LL
2 NIGHTHAWKS 2ND 25 2 L
3 NIGHTHAWKS 2ND 616 2 M
In [45]: df2.dtypes
Out[45]:
regiment object
company object
deaths object
battles int64
size object
dtype: object