Man's War Research Articles

"The Skin of an American Slave": African American Manhood and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Literature

When Civil War began in April 1861, African American men attempted in vain to volunteer for military service. As Jim Cullen writes, efforts of abolitionists to contrary, secession, not slavery, was pretext for outbreak of hostilities, and Lincoln administration assiduously courted slaveholding states still in Union by avoiding any appearance of restructuring existing race relations. (1) For all of their differences, most Northern and Southern white men agreed that this was, indeed, a white man's war, and objected to idea that black men, slave or free, should occupy a role formerly reserved only for white male citizens. Yet military necessity would accomplish what abolitionist politics could not. The Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1, 1863, freed all slaves in states still in rebellion against Federal government; it also provided for lawful enlistment of African American men in Union army. (2) Eventually, 179,000 black men would serve in army, majority of whom came from Confederate and border slave states. (3) Black soldiers would play major roles in a number of battles, including those at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Abolitionists, black and white, and most African Americans were well aware that enlistment of black men into Union army would challenge fundamental notions of race, masculinity, and citizenship, and would have a significant impact on treatment of African Americans during and after Civil War. On July 4, 1863, seven months after Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Harper's Weekly responded to this controversial development with a drawing illustrating transformation of one black man from slave to contraband and finally to Union soldier (Figure 1). (4) Gordon, typical negro featured in drawing, is portrayed in three poses, from left to right. The first panel, labeled GORDON AS HE ENTERED OUR LINES, shows subject sitting in a chair with his legs crossed. His feet are bare and his clothes are tattered. In second panel, GORDON UNDER MEDICAL INSPECTION, Gordon wears only his pants and sits with his scarred back to audience, his face turned just enough to reveal his profile. He stands upright in third panel, wearing a uniform and holding a rifle in front of him; panel is labeled GORDON IN HIS UNIFORM AS A U.S. SOLDIER. The purpose of illustration appears to be to demonstrate Gordon's ability to transform himself--or to be transformed--into a man and a soldier. However, curiously enough, final panel is not most conspicuous in series. Rather, second panel, depicting Gordon's scars, is largest and presumably first to attract observer's eye. Despite label, which asserts that this image is drawn from Gordon's medical examination while in Union camp, illustration and scars that it highlights were more likely to remind readers that Gordon had been a slave, and a harshly treated slave at that. (5) The accompanying text also emphasizes the degree of brutality which slavery has developed among ... whites, rather than significance of Gordon's military service. (6) While his skin color suggests that Gordon was a slave, scars are presented in drawing as proof of that fact. Gordon is ultimately labelled a slave because of his scars and smaller representations of him as contraband and Union soldier do little to dispel that label. FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This depiction of Gordon accents conflicts inherent in visual and literary use of scar in representations of African American men, both before and during Civil War. (7) Although GORDON IN HIS UNIFORM AS A U.S. SOLDIER marks a new opportunity for African American men, spectacle of Gordon's scarred back is representative of a long tradition in abolitionist literature. …

Re-thinking Sol Plaatje's Mafeking Diary

(2001). Re-thinking Sol Plaatje's Mafeking Diary. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 855-863.

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley

David Williams. <italic>Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley</italic>. Athens: University of Georgia Press, in association with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission. 1998. Pp. xiv, 288. $34.95

Journal Article David Williams. Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, in association with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission. 1998. Pp. xiv, 288. $34.95 Get access Williams David. Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, in association with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission. 1998. Pp. xiv, 288. $34.95. Steven Eliott Tripp Steven Eliott Tripp Grand Valley State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 105, Issue 3, June 2000, Pages 930–931, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.3.930 Published: 01 June 2000

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley.

Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley.

The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography.

Color of Truth is definitive biography of McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, two of the best and brightest who advised presidents about peace and during most dangerous years of Cold War. The Bundy brothers embodied all idealism and hubris that animated American foreign policy in decades after World War II. They will be remembered forever as anti-communist liberals who, despite their grave doubts about sending Americans to fight in Southeast Asia, became key architects of America's in Vietnam. Kai Bird, author of Chairman, acclaimed biography of John J. McCloy, brilliantly recreates world of Boston Brahmin privilege in which Bundy brothers were reared to govern. Educated at Groton, Yale and Harvard, Mac and Bill Bundy were proteges of Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson and Justice Felix Frankfurter, and their friends and admirers included Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Bill played a major role in supersecret Ultra code-breaking project that proved invaluable to Allies' victory over Nazi Germany. Mac, a key military aide, was present at D-day and later wrote Stimson's influential but misleading essay explaining Truman's decision to use atomic bomb. In 1950s, both brothers became ensnared in Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunts against suspected communists in government and academia. As dean of Harvard College, Mac fought to protect his tenured faculty while sacrificing junior scholars who refused to name names to FBI. Bill, a high-ranking CIA official, saw his career nearly destroyed when McCarthy learned he had contributed money to Alger Hiss's defense fund. Bill's refusal to testify before senator's committee was a turning point in battle against McCarthyism. The brothers reached apex of national security establishment under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Kennedy appointed Mac Bundy to be his national security adviser, and Bill Bundy moved into senior positions at Pentagon and State Department. Both were intimately involved in many of triumphs and deceits of Kennedy years, including Bay of Pigs fiasco, plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and Cuban Missile Crisis. But it was their role in guiding nation to in Vietnam that engulfed them in controversy and indelibly marked them as failed figures in American history. At every stage of war-- from assassination of South Vietnamese president Diem in 1963 to Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, from bombing campaign of Operation Rolling Thunder to President Johnson's July 1965 decision to send hundreds of thousands of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam-- Bundy brothers were present, urging a policy of gradual escalation. Long after Johnson had dismissed their warning that Vietnam could become a white man's war on Asian mainland, Bundys remained loyal to their liberal president, who was determined not to allow right-wing critics to accuse him of losing another Asian country. Based on nearly a hundred interviews with Bundy brothers, their families and colleagues, and on thousands of pages of archival documents-- including some White House memos that remain classified-- Bird's account contains dramatic new information that alters history of Vietnam War. Like bestselling Wise Men, this dual biography is both an inside account of making of U.S. foreign policy in an era of nuclear weapons and a stunning group portrait of heirs of Wise Men-- including Robert McNamara, George Ball and Robert Kennedy-- and presidents they served.

The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861-1900

What do women know about war? asked Fleta in the popular Northern story paper the Flag of Our Union in January 1865. What do they not know, she answered: What drop in all the bitter cup have they not tasted?-what ball strikes home on the battle-field that strikes not hearts at the hearthstone as well? Women knew about war, she argued, steadily crush back the blinding tears, and whisper through white, brave lips, 'Go,' or wait in vain for the letter that never comes-who search, with sinking hearts, and eyes dark with anguish, the fearful battlelists. Chastising those who would ask such a question, she concluded, let the desolate homes, the bro­ ken hearts, and the low wail of agony that God hears on his throne, make answer!! For the anonymous author Fleta, the Civil War occurred not just on the battle­ front but also on the Northern home front, where a woman's war of sacrifice and suffering complemented a man's war of fighting. Her impassioned claim to women's knowledge of the war was part of a wide-ranging popular wartime literature that explored white women's domestic war experiences, imagining them as a source of self-knowledge, an education in patriotism, an initiation into the values of work, the occasion for romance, and, increasingly, the cause of unbearable anguish. The femi­ nized Civil War of this article's title refers both to literature featuring women hero­ ines on the Northern home front and to the domestic wartime concerns that such literature highlighted. Written by both men and women, and part of a wartime liter­ ature that marked the gender of both men and women, feminized literature often appeared side by side with masculinized literature exploring men's experiences of the

Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 (review)

book reviews223 "soft fighting and heavy victories," as Lee put it. This was to be achieved through the grand turning movement, threatening the enemy's communications and forcing him out of his chosen positions to fight unprepared and at a disadvantage. Harsh says that strategically Lee did this in the Peninsula and Second Manassas campaigns but that faulty tactical execution led to unaffordable Rebel losses. Harsh's provocative argument challenges recent criticism of Lee's aggressiveness . The book will inevitably raise questions. If a defense of Lee's actions rests on showing that his was the way to break Northern morale, why does the book spend almost no time on the psychological balance of the opponents? Indeed, Harsh suggests that the union answer to defeat on the Peninsula was to increase their armies by 50 percent, surely not the response Lee wanted. Works assessing the psychological aspect of the war, however, are not in the bibliography . Again, in supporting Lee and Davis in their belief that the war must be fought on the Northern border to shield Richmond, rather than making a defensive stand in the heart of the South, Harsh says that a large percentage of Rebel manufacturing was concentrated in the Rebel capital and had to be saved. But couldn't the machinery have been transported South, as the Russians shipped away their industrial plant in face of Hitler's 1941 invasion? Finally, in saying that the South came closest to winning in the summer of 1862, is Harsh forgetting the war in the West, which saw the Rebels turned back from Cincinnati and driven from Kentucky at Perryville? Wasn't this of equal import to Second Manassas as a morale factor in the war? These are the kinds of questions this stimulating book will generate. Michael C. C. Adams Northern Kentucky University Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865. By Noah Andre Trudeau. (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1998. Pp. 576. $29.95.) Noel Andre Trudeau's Like Men of War is a chronicle of combat. The book treats every major engagement in which black troops took part as well as many of the smaller actions. Trudeau sets the scene for each engagement by describing its geographical location and topography, its place within larger strategic frameworks, the major actors (the field commanders and the units under their command), and the outcome. Sixty detailed maps complement the discussion. Like his earlier works, this one also relies heavily upon participants' observations .To the standard after-action reports, he adds insightful commentaries from black men in the ranks, from their company officers, and, not infrequently, from their Confederate foes. Diaries, letters, newspaper reports, and material in federal pension case files provide this first-person vantage point. Trudeau makes clear that black soldiers were willing, even eager, to engage the enemy in pursuit of freedom for the slaves and full citizenship rights for all black people in America. He also provides ample evidence ofthe men's passion 224CIVIL WAR HISTORY to demonstrate what Frederick Douglass (among countless others) termed "the Negro's manhood" (7). Yet, even as the record of heroic action grew longer, each unit carried a "cross" into its first engagement: "the need to prove themselves in combat before the eyes of the white man" (331). The question "Would they fight?" dogged black soldiers from the beginning to the end of the contest. Most eyewitnesses proved capable of changing their views after observing black men in action. Following the battle of Nashville in December 1864, Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas hoped to slay the dragon once and for all by proclaiming , "The question is settled; negro soldiers will fight" (349). But William T. Sherman remained unconvinced. Although Trudeau finds it "difficult to identify a major engagement in which black soldiers played a crucial role" (467), their solid performance overall clearly contributed to the Union's victory. What is more, that record helped tip the balance in favor of extending citizenship to African Americans during the postwar period. By focusing so closely on combat, Trudeau's account highlights the deadly consequences that often awaited captured black soldiers and their officers. In the aftermath of the battle...

A Lecture—The Blood of Experience: The Conflict in the Southern Sudan: A Search for Common Ground

A Lecture— The Blood ofExperience The Conflict in the Southern Sudan: ? Search for Common Ground Robert O. Collins University of California, Santa Barbara The blood of experience meanders on In the vast expanse of the valley of time The new is come and the old is gone And time abides a changing clime. AH A. Mazrui Any review of the Southern Sudan today is a remorseless and melancholy task whose reward is more in the expectation of better things to come than a lament for a tragic past. All of us gathered here this evening need not dwell upon the years of drought and death, fierce fighting with its civilian and military fatalities, opportunities lost through personal ambition, humanitarian assistance compromised by greed, international intervention frustrated by national interests. To many Sudanese and non-Sudanese who have followed the course of events in the Sudan and particularly die South, they despair at any solution to the current imbroglio and sadly surrender to an historical inevitability that the Southern Sudan is ungovernable, a Hobbesian state where every man's Presented at the Conference on "The Conflict in the Southern Sudan: A Search for Common Ground" sponsored by the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Conrad Grebel College, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and the African Studies Association in Canada, Project Ploughshares, and the United Church of Canada.»Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 4, No. 1 (New Series) 1997, pp. 21-37 21 22 Robert O. Collins hand is raised against every other. There are those who subscribe to such a doleful portrait, like Dorian Gray, stripped of the facade ofyouth, hope, and vitality to expose a decay before years, pessimism without contemplation , lethargy in despondency. They conclude that history has dealt the cards to the southern Sudanese from a stacked deck and extract from the pages of the past the words of alien rulers to prove it-Baker, Gordon, Karamallah Kurkusawi, Symes, Robertson, Ibrahim Abboud-whose opinions are succinctly summed up by the infamous remark of Sir Harold MacMichael during his first official visit to the Southern Sudan in 1927 when he dismissed the region as a "Serbonian Bog into which had drifted or had been pushed all the lowest racial elements surviving north of the equator and a great deal of equally decaying vegetation." Nothing, however, is inevitable in history. Few have ever waxed philosophically about the Sudan, let alone the future of the South, but it is not foreordained by the Azande henge cult nor The Washington Times that "a whole culture, a whole civilization is disappearing." Despite the millions who have died, the destruction ofmaterial and social structures, the continuation of conflict, one cannot deny that man is powerless to confront the catastrophe of the Southern Sudan, that he is no longer the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. Despite the soothsayers of doom and gloom we cannot yet admit that the obstacles to the current calamity are insurmountable, that the hope of resurrection, so fundamental to the human spirit, is to be denied in an age on the threshold of a new century when everywhere man's fate appears more sanguine, paradoxically, after the most ferociously destructive century in this millennium. If we abandon faith in our endeavors to ameliorate, if not resolve, the tragedy of the Southern Sudan, we have diminished none but ourselves. Moreover, the degree of human and material destruction in the Southern Sudan has never been constant. The years from 1985 to 1989 witnessed death in unprecedented numbers, principally among the Nilotic peoples. This was not all man's doing, for severe drought and epidemic disease produced famine and death made all the more terrible, however, by man's war more often than not conducted by the rabble, the murahilin, who possessed none ofthe restraint of the professional soldier and all of his vices. And the vultures of violence-the jallaba, officials, adventurers-gathered in droves to feed on the unfortunate and the helpless . Ten years later the fighting continues even though abated by the The Blood ofExperience 23 internal divisions, sagging morale, and the exhaustion of the warriors. Nature in the past several years has returned to its...

The Truth(s) About Women and Peace

Much has been made in Western culture of the dichotomy between “women's peace” and “men's war.” We can see the importance of this dichotomy in politics, media, education and socialization, where women are expected to be inherently creative, nurturing and peaceful, while men are bold, courageous warriors. For more than a hundred years, these differences have been the foundation for banal arguments that peace is a “women's issue.”

Refusing to Travel La Via Chilena : Working-Class Women in Allende's Chile

Refusing to Travel La Via Chilena·. Working-Class Women in Allende's Chile Camilla Townsend "Take me with you," I said. "I can't, Eva." "Aren't there women in the mountains?" "No this is a man's war, but better times wiU come, and then we can love each other under different circumstances." ... In his eyes, I would never be independent. Huberto had thought that way since he could think at all; it was not likely that the Revolution was going to change him. I realized that our problems were not related in any way to the fortunes of the gueriUas; even if he achieved his dream, there would be no equality for me. . . . His revolution would not change my fate in any fundamental way; under any circumstances, as long as I Uved I would still have to make my own way. Perhaps it was at that moment I realized that mine is a war with no end in view.... Yes, Elvira had been right: you have to be tough, life is a dogfight. From Eva Luna by Isabel AUende, niece of Salvador AUende On Wednesday, December 1, 1971, approximately five thousand women gathered in the late afternoon at the Plaza Baquedano in Santiago, Chile. They proceeded to march through the downtown streets, shouting anti-government slogans and banging empty pots and pans. While many of the women were middle class and even upper class, many others were in fact from working-class neighborhoods. Poor women along with the elite marched to protest the government of the Unidad Popular (UP), led by Salvador Allende, which had among its goals the gradual redistribution of wealth in accordance with socialist justice. In explaining this phenomenon to themselves, the Right claimed that these were women of superior feminine virtue who had seen through the Ues of those who wanted to impose a Marxist dictatorship, and thus wished to defend their beloved country. The Left, on the other hand, pitied such ignorant, tradition -bound women who could be so luUed by deceitful enemies as to ignore their own true class interests. In reaUty, however, neither side was presenting an accurate picture of what had happened on December 1. Nobody had asked the working women why they were there. © 1993 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 4 No. 3 (Winter) 44 Journal of Women's History Winter The presence of these women was indicative of a larger problem the AUende government had in attempting to gain the support of unorganized working-class women. Members of the government insisted that they had poor women's interests in mind. In addition to striving toward their primary goal of gradual socialization of the economy, officials made some more immediate changes, such as opening neighborhood centers to provide free milk and health care. They also talked about women's potential in new ways, introducing what one historian has called a "creative ambiguity" in dialogues which traditionally had foUowed certain scripts.1 Despite their efforts, however, the UP faüed to attract a majority of the working women they claimed to defend. As has happened in other times and places, the women were often simply dismissed as "tradition bound" or assumed to be controUed by the church, whose priests frequently disapproved of the changes advocated by the left-wing coaUtion of parties. If poor women did choose to agree with the priests, however, few of the spurned leftists made significant attempts to understand why. A possible explanation may be found in viewing the question from the perspective of the working women themselves. Until recently, due to the poUtical situation in Chile, any project involving the testimony of working-class women's experiences under the UP has been untenable. Now, as Chilean women begin to speak more openly, it is possible to sort out the evidence gathered thus far. This article attempts to organize what we presently know about the decisions working-class women made in the years of the Popular Unity government, and suggest some interpretations. The problem can best be understood only after coming to terms with the historical background of both labor activism and left-wing parties in Chile, and exploring the roles played by women in...

A German Voice over Paris: Ernst Junger and Edgardo Cozarinsky's Film One Man's War

Ernst Jiinger emerged from World War I as one of the most highly decorated young officers of the German infantry. Although wounded several times, in his first book, In Stahlgewittern Storm of Steel (1920)], he described his participation in battle as the peak of human experience, as an ecstasy of dangers withstood amid the sublime spectacle of unrestrained destruction. His literary aesthetics and erotics of militarism placed him on the extreme right in the ideological battle waged during the Weimar Republic over the meaning of the war. By the beginning of 1933, however, after a period of activity as a publicist sympathetic to conspiratorial reactionary movements, he had clearly withdrawn from any political involvement. One might have expected him to decide quite difterently at this point, and indeed his reputation as a representative of fascist thinking gave him some protection during the Nazi period. After a series of accounts developing the idea of an elemental being reached by the true soldier through the enraptured adventure of warfare in the trenches, Jiinger turned to speculations on how this essential life of violence could be transferred to new forms of state organization which might replace the flaccid relations of bourgeois modernity. His book Der Arbeiter Worker], published in 1932, and the essay Die totale Mobilmachung [The Total Mobilization], which appeared two years earlier, proclaim an emerging age of heroic collective commitment to a new technological order. Although his response in 1933 to

Mafeking Diary: A Black Man's View of a White Man's War

Mafeking Diary: A Black Man's View of a White Man's War

The Temptation of Fascism and the Question of Literature: Justice, Sorrow, and Political Error (An Open Letter to Jacques Derrida)

1. Jacques Derrida, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 14, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 12764-republished in a slightly expanded form in Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). All references, unless otherwise indicated, will be to the Critical Inquiry edition and will be cited parenthetically.

"Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology

"Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology

Resetting the Agenda

Previous articleNext article No AccessOn Jacques Derrida's "Paul de Man's War"Resetting the AgendaJohn Brenkman, and Jules David LawJohn Brenkman Search for more articles by this author , and Jules David Law Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 15, Number 4Summer, 1989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448521 Views: 11Total views on this site Copyright 1989 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Jacques Derrida's Apologia

Previous articleNext article No AccessOn Jacques Derrida's "Paul de Man's War"Jacques Derrida's ApologiaW. Wolfgang HoldheimW. Wolfgang Holdheim Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 15, Number 4Summer, 1989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448519 Views: 15Total views on this site Copyright 1989 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

THE WAR OF ABRAHAM ESAU 1899–1901: MARTYRDOM, MYTH AND FOLK MEMORY IN CALVINIA, SOUTH AFRICA

IN STUDIES of the South African War of 1899-1902 one important area has until recently been relatively little explored: the impact of the war upon black communities and individuals and the ways in which they responded to, and acted upon, events. It is only in the last decade that we have begun to develop a proper historical awareness of the part played by tens of thousands of African and Coloured people. Despite the gaps in our knowledge, we are now beginning to appreciate the full and complex dimensions of black involvement in 'the white man's war'. 1 The story of Abraham Esau thus constitutes part of a wider historical consciousness of the South African War, one in which the experiences and traditions of subordinated black people drawn into the struggle are fully acknowledged. For locked up in the drama of Esau's experience of resistance, incarceration and execution are realities of extreme crisis and conflict that are central to an understanding of the ways in which a war between British imperialism and Boer republicanism turned with abrupt and

Towards the twenty‐first century

It is suggested that the change in thought and technology in France, North America and England in the late 18th century is paralleled in the change in contemporary modes of behaviour and ways of looking at the self. The philosophy articulated at that time was by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and poets of Romanticism. Contemporary psychologies are concerned with the structure of the individual psyche and with social organization. In this nuclear age we are threatened by nuclear war, over‐population and ecological imbalance, with irreversible destruction of living and technological resources. The contemporary philosophical and technological changes are on a global basis, as is the current conflict reflecting a war of man against himself. This can lead to either complete annihilation of humanity or to a re‐appraisal through a holistic approach to ourselves and our planet, based on internationalism.