War For Freedom Research Articles

AGGRESSION AGAINST GEORGIA AND UKRAINE: CONTEXT AND PARALLELS

AGGRESSION AGAINST GEORGIA AND UKRAINE: CONTEXT AND PARALLELS

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

Social Consciousness and Women's Liberation in Bharathi's Works

Living in harmony with nature, human society has seen various types of advancements using nature. Since man began to live as an individual, he has upheld society due to his hard work. Also, when an individual comes into a society, he has certain values. Such values are changeable according to each society and period. In this way, Mahakavi Bharatiyar is notable among the poets who made the glory of the Tamil language known to the world. He is a social thinker. His record as a social thinker, freedom fighter, spiritual erudite, woman revolutionary, reformer, and so on is compelling. However, his approach and vision were far broader. Although he is understood in various dimensions like politics, spirituality, literature, and reformation, he also shines as a human being and a saint. Bharathiyar sang many songs for India's independence. He used the doctrine of “Religious Unity” for the freedom of India to unite the people in the freedom war. He removed the evils seen in old age and drew people to innovation. In this way, the aim here is to explore various platforms such as Bharathi's sense of national freedom, unity, and women's liberation through Bharathi's works.

Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell

Reviewed by: Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell Adrienne Caughfield Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi. Edited by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell. ( Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 297. $29.95, ISBN 978–1-57441–651-0.) Texas differs from much of the Confederacy in regard to the Civil War's impact on the state. Separated by distance and, eventually, Union-held territory, Texans did not experience the same amount of difficulty or loss of property as those in Confederate states that were strafed by Federal troops. Similarly, women in Texas wrangled with the effects of war in different ways. Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell's edited volume on the lives of women in Texas during the Civil War examines the variety of experiences faced by a diverse population. Each essay in Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi emphasizes a distinct perspective by discussing women who were white and black, German and Tejana, and Unionists or enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy. The authors culled much of their information not only from diaries and letters where women disclosed their opinions in a more private venue but also from newspapers of the time wherein editors discussed women's actions and lauded their feminine efforts to contribute to the war by boosting morale. Despite an inability to vote or serve in battle, women placed themselves in the thick of the war. The volume begins with Vicki Betts's discussion of early enthusiasm for the war, which demonstrates women's fervent support for what many assumed would be a limited engagement. As the war continued, however, women pressed on with the drudgery of managing everyday life. In chapter 2, Dorothy Ewing describes the life of Caroline Sedberry, a politician's wife who found herself in wartime taking on unfamiliar tasks. In the same way, Beverly Rowe compares men's and women's wartime experiences through their letters, and both she and Ewing explore the [End Page 164] nature of battle, the meaning of the "glorious cause," and the frustrations of scarcity and other difficulties (p. 60). As Brittany Bounds suggests, while Texans struggled, women redoubled their efforts to encourage themselves and others by creating and joining aid societies, participating in social events and holidays, and relying on their faith to carry them through. Women in Civil War Texas also explores the experiences of non-Anglo Texans. Two essays, one by Bruce A. Glasrud and the other by Linda S. Hudson, describe how black women, both enslaved and free, dealt with what Glasrud describes as a "Freedom War" (p. 100). Hudson uses records from civil and criminal court cases to illustrate how the Texas Supreme Court viewed black women as well as how black women responded to these cases. In their essay, Jerry Thompson and Elizabeth Mata focus on Tejana women and recognize that not all Tejanos were in favor of the Confederacy. The realities of anti-Tejano racism and keen poverty exacerbated the problems that Tejanas faced. In her essay, Judith Dykes-Hoffman demonstrates that German women who lived in Unionist households dealt with similar persecution and, in some cases, the murders of their Unionist husbands. Discussions of both race and ethnicity provide new dimensions to understanding the war. Like German Texans, other women, including many in North Texas, came from Unionist families as well. Rebecca Sharpless tells the stories of Unionist women who tried to maintain their homes after their husbands had fled or were hanged. Their political opinions set them apart from the main population, leaving them isolated in many ways. One did not, however, have to be a Unionist to feel isolated. Candice N. Shockley describes how white southern women from other states became refugees in Texas, where distance protected them from the ravages of war. Some refugees, whose land had been destroyed, were welcomed; others, often members of the southern elite, were scorned as cowards fleeing their martial duties as good Confederates. Finally, Deborah M. Liles notes in her essay that Texas was not just a southern state...

Cuba and Angola: The War for Freedom by Harry Villegas

Villegas, Harry. Cuba and Angola: The War for Freedom . Atlanta, GA: Pathfinder Press, 2017.

Unwriting the Freedom Narrative: A Review Essay

In the fifty years spanning the centennial and sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Civil War, much has changed in the way historians think about that cataclysmic event. Indeed, many no longer think of the Civil War as a single event but rather as a series of wars fought on a number of fronts. Not only does the western theater now compete with the eastern theater for historians' attention, but scholars of the war in the West also assert that the nature of warfare in the lower Mississippi Valley, not to mention in Texas and New Mexico, differed considerably from warfare in Virginia, so much so as to perhaps qualify as a different war altogether. Historians today recognize the importance of the home front--both Union and Confederate--where, some argue, what happened in kitchens and bedrooms was just as important as what transpired on battlefields. As a result, the definition of combatants has expanded to include not only partisans and guerrillas but also women, children, and slaves. Perhaps most important, professional historians today generally agree that the political divide over slavery caused the war, even as segments of the larger public still cling to a myth that the institution was a tangential issue at most. Despite these sweeping changes in historians' understanding of why the war was fought, where it was fought, and who fought it, the master narrative of the Civil War in the last fifty years has been remarkably static. The standard syntheses of the period repeat more or less the same refrain: by late 1862, what initially began as a war to preserve the Union with slavery intact became a war for freedom. Although historians continue to disagree about the extent to which emancipation reflected a calculated military necessity or a principled commitment to liberal ideals, if not to flesh-and-blood people who were enslaved, freedom has become the sine qua non of Civil War history. Whether it came gradually and begrudgingly or, as James Oakes has recently argued, perpetually and willfully, freedom was both the Civil War's battle cry and its unfinished revolution. (1) Recent events, however, suggest that the freedom narrative may be ready for a twenty-first-century reboot. In the wake of the June 2015 murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, debates about the Confederate flag converged with the larger #blacklivesmatter movement to push national conversations about race in new directions. By exposing how the legacy of chattel slavery continues to infuse the American political economy and culture, activists marked the end of the Civil War sesquicentennial not by celebrating the emergence of a nebulous condition that succeeded legal bondage but by indicting the very notion that such a succession was either clear or complete. Their focus was not on the incremental accrual of civil or political rights but rather on the accrual of dead bodies. The continuum of violence against black people, stretching from the antebellum plantation to twenty-first-century cities and suburbs, and carried out by law enforcement and private citizens alike, raises troubling questions about how historians narrate the Civil War and its aftermath. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance--no matter how improved--as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. (2) This recent grassroots revision of the nation's historical consciousness coincides with a scholarly movement to reframe our understanding of the Civil War and emancipation. For nearly two decades, historians have been grappling with the inadequacies of the freedom narrative for analyzing American history, but their efforts so far have not produced a new, synthetic alternative to the Whiggish march toward greater and more perfect freedom. Nevertheless, significant revisions to the way we interpret the multifaceted changes wrought by the destruction of chattel bondage and the institution of new regimes of labor and political organization suggest that we will not wait much longer for a more comprehensive unwriting of the freedom narrative. …

Evangelizing for Union, 1863: The Army of the Potomac, Its Enemies at Home, and a New Solidarity

Evangelizing for Union, 1863The Army of the Potomac, Its Enemies at Home, and a New Solidarity John J. Hennessy (bio) In late January 1863, Joseph Hooker took command of an Army of the Potomac still muttering at army commander’s George McClellan’s November 1862 removal, still stung by the disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg in December, deeply conflicted by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and still cleaning its boots after the drudgery of Burnside’s infamous Mud March. Hooker deserved and received much credit for the rehabilitation of the army that followed his appointment; the transformation in mood, food, health, and routine started almost immediately. But, like McClellan after Second Bull Run (when Lee electrified a demoralized Union army by crossing the Potomac into Maryland), Hooker benefitted immensely from an outside force over which he had no control—not Lee this time, but rather a threat from the home front: the Copperheads. The burgeoning clamor for war’s end among northern Peace Democrats that winter and spring not only challenged the will of the Army of the Potomac’s soldiers to continue the war but also the value of all the army had sacrificed and accomplished to this point. As it had against Lee in September, the army rose to this emergency in noisy response. The springtime battle of words and sentiment between the army and Copperheads at home would be an unexpected turning point. The army had long been a pot boiling with internal dispute over the nature and purpose of the Union war effort—officers and men alike had dispensed scattershot opinions in public and private on everything from slavery to southern civilians to Washington politicians. In early 1863, the convergence of the Emancipation Proclamation and the rise of the Copperheads brought focus to everyman’s opinion, permitting easy classification on a suddenly oversimplified political landscape: for the war or against it? Opinions thoughtlessly dispensed in 1862 carried important labels in early 1863, forcing officers and soldiers to choose their words and express their sentiments carefully. At a tumultuous time when one might expect challenges from the outside to provoke greater unrest within an [End Page 533] army beaten, discouraged, and internally conflicted, the opposite, in fact, happened: the army largely coalesced around a collective determination to dispute the Copperheads and see the war through to victory. The public involvement by officers in the debate over war aims and the wisdom of the administration waned. The army recognized in itself a political voice and political power precisely at the moment when the question of soldiers voting was bubbling up as an issue of consequence in Union states. In many ways, the overwhelming support among soldiers for Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was forged in the spring of 1863, during its rhetorical war with the Copperheads. Prior to Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s appointment on January 26, 1863, few armies in American history had had a more contentious relationship with the government it served than did the Army of the Potomac. The army of 1862 was emphatically McClellan’s army, an emerging organization dominated by Democratic-leaning officers in a still-young republic, where the boundaries of civil-military discourse still stood fuzzy. By proxy and direct action, the army’s leaders—notably McClellan and Fitz John Porter—leapt into the debate over the nature and purpose of the war, relentlessly arguing for a war largely confined to the clash of armies, sparing southern civilians and, except incidentally, southern slavery. All the while, the government edged toward harsher war. Congress authorized the confiscation of slaves and other property integral to sustaining the Confederate war effort. Maj. Gen. John Pope arrived in Virginia flashing novel (for Virginia) general orders that would bring war’s hardships to southern civilians (though by late-war standards, in a decidedly gentle way). Most importantly and most provocatively, in late July President Lincoln set upon a policy of formal, legal emancipation of slaves in the southern states still in rebellion. The war for the Union would also be a war for freedom. In 1862, the North— including many officers and soldiers—saw the transformation in a less dreamy light.1 Philosophical...

The Role of the Maroons in the 1865 Morant Bay Freedom War

AbstractThis article considers the role of the Maroons in Jamaican history. Mindful that, today, Jamaica still experiences tension between the descendants of the Maroons and of Paul Bogle, this article examines the historical roots of this tension and suggests that there is scope for healing across both parties. Regardless of the present-day implications of these historical debates, however, the article is essentially an historical investigation that seeks to uncover what actually happened and what were the dominant motivations of the key players.

Robert H. Patton. Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Pp. 291. $26.00 (cloth).

Robert H. Patton. Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Pp. 291. $26.00 (cloth).

Book Review: Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution

Book Review: Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution

The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, by David Andress

<i>The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France</i>, by David Andress

The long war for freedom: the Arab struggle for democracy in the Middle East

Introduction. 1. Heartbreak and Hope. 2. Better Saddam's Hell Than America's Paradise. 3. The Courage of Their Convictions. 4. What's Wrong with Arab Society? 5. Whose Islam? 6. America: Satan or Savior? 7. Israel: The Great Excuse. 8. The Challenge of Terrorism. 9. The Iraq War: Aggression or Liberation? 10. Women's Rights: A Test Case for Reform 11. A Thousand and One Difficulties. Notes. Index.

Editorial: the American Century in Europe

In 1999, the Whitney Museum of American Art had a very successful exhibition called The American Century. Indeed, there were two exhibitions, The American Century, Part I about the first half of the 20th century and Part II dealing with the following 50 years. The presentation was divided up into decades, each of them having its own motto. The one for the 1950s was: ‘America takes command’. This may sound rather martial but the motto is indeed very appropriate, as one could argue that as from then on American leadership also included cultural leadership.The name of the exhibition, ‘The American Century’, was of course derived from the title of the famous article that Henry Luce, the editor/publisher of journals such as Life and Time, published in Life on 17 February 1941. Luce wanted the Americans to play a major role in the war for freedom and democracy that was in progress at that time and the building of the better world that would have to come after that. In his article Luce insisted that ‘our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals’. The idea of America as a world power and, indeed, as the world power of the future, is, of course, much older than the concept of the 20th century as the American century. Already in 1902, the British liberal journalist and advocate of world peace through arbitration, W.T. Stead published a book with the title The Americanization of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century. According to Stead, the heyday of the British Empire was over and the US was the Empire of the future. The enormous success of America was due to three things: education, production and democracy. Britain's choice was between subjugation or cooperation. Stead even proposed the merger of the two countries. In the following decade, this idea that America was Britain's successor and that the two countries should – and could – form a union because of their intimate familiarity, became popular among British writers.

Freedom's War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union

Freedom's War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union

The Cold War: How the Winner Won

Books reviewed in this article: Scott Lucas,.Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Libelrty

A struggle to contextualize photographic images: American print media and the “Burning Monk”

On June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc sat in a lotus position in the middle of a busy Saigon intersection and set fire to himself. His self‐immolation was caught in an award‐winning series of photographs by Malcolm Browne. The “Burning Monk”; photographs — now recognized as some of the most powerful visual images to have come out of this period of history — became a frame through which many Americans perceived the events unfolding in South Vietnam during the Summer and Fall of 1963. This essay suggests that although these visual images engaged the American audience, their meaning — and thus the frame they provided — was the subject of a dispute within the American print media. How this frame was constructed depended largely upon whether the images were situated against a backdrop of religious oppression, or a war for freedom against the communists.

The Dilemmas of Freedom

During the Civil War, which was a war for freedom in a truer sense than most of the wars which have been so called, Abraham Lincoln laid bare the essentials of the dilemma which has baffled the philosophic understanding of freedom and which has made it appear that there was always something left to be desired in its political realization. On April 18, 1864, Lincoln gave a brief and unpretentious address to the crowd assembled at the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore.“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” he said,and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable names—liberty and tyranny.