War In American History Research Articles

Charleston, City of Mourners: Anticipations of Civil War in the Cradle of Secession

Charleston, City of MournersAnticipations of Civil War in the Cradle of Secession Michael E. Woods (bio) On Saturday morning, January 19, 1861, a Northern journalist steamed into Charleston Harbor aboard the Columbia. Skirting the “massive, commanding, and formidable” hulk of Fort Sumter, the ship docked at the nascent republic of South Carolina. The unnamed correspondent stayed ten days, taking the pulse of a citizenry energized, and yet divided, by the prospect of war. Everywhere, Charlestonians discussed “those two eternal subjects, Secession and Fort Sumter.” Secession was electrifying; Sumter was vexing. Perched on an island three miles from downtown, the fortress defied armchair strategists, whose schemes for seizing it ranged from frontal attacks to stink bombs that would drive the garrison back to Yankeedom. “Young and thoughtless” hotspurs craved war, but many of their elders gagged at the idea of risking their genteel lives against the “gang of Irishmen, Germans, British deserters, and New York roughs” manning the fort. Excruciating anxiety united white Charlestonians: how long would they teeter on the verge of combat? Locals postponed clothing purchases, lest Sumter’s guns rake the city and compel them to wear mourning black. They flinched when doors slammed and quivered when cannons fired, even to celebrate Louisiana’s secession on the twenty-sixth. And always, their conversations circled back to the awaited assault. One impatient soldier loudly berated a civilian friend: “‘Why, good Heaven, Jim! do you want that place to go peaceably into the hands of Lincoln?’” Jim emphatically denied the charge, but added a warning. “‘I tell you, Fred, when the fort is attacked, it will be the bloodiest day,—the bloodiest day!—the bloodiest—!!’” Suddenly speechless, [End Page 7] Jim “flung his arms wildly about, ground his tobacco with excitement, spit on all sides, and walked away, shaking his head . . . in real grief of spirit.”1 Three themes pervade the journalist’s account: Fort Sumter’s strength, dread of a costly assault, and anticipations of an even bloodier civil war. Since late December 1860, secessionists had coveted the fort, the last Federal stronghold in the Palmetto State. But white Charlestonians differed over the expediency of an assault. Many envisioned appalling short- and long-term consequences. Would Charleston Harbor run red with the blood of Carolina’s finest? Would the resulting war claim even more lives? Despite Charleston’s reputation for fire-eating politics and military ardor, these questions plagued the city’s diverse white population during the secession winter of 1860–61. Charlestonians did not rush blindly into a catastrophe, in part because Fort Sumter constantly reminded them of war’s grim costs. Yet, their candid forecasts of a bloody and protracted conflict did not foster an organized peace movement, largely because the meanings of “bloody war” talk varied widely. As Elizabeth R. Varon has shown, antebellum Americans used “disunion” discourse to predict the future, threaten rivals, and tar opponents as traitors.2 After South Carolina seceded, anticipations of war played similarly diverse roles in Charlestonians’ public and private discussions of the future. Ardent secessionists, reluctant disunionists, and unionists appealed to the prospect of bloodshed for their own purposes. Forebodings of violence at Fort Sumter and beyond did not uniformly point toward moderation or compromise. This emphasis on powerful but diverse anticipations of bloodshed cuts against the grain of Civil War historiography. Often, the bombardment of Fort Sumter serves as an ironic interlude between secessionist vitriol and Civil War carnage or as a milestone on Americans’ impulsive rush to war. That Sumter’s defenders capitulated after an artillery duel that killed no one is, in retrospect, ironic, given the slaughter soon to come. According to one oft-repeated phrase, the bombardment was “a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American history.”3 That Sumter was undermanned and unfinished after three decades of [End Page 8] fitful construction enhances its symbolic significance. Like the incomplete US Capitol dome or the half-built Washington Monument, Sumter’s unmounted guns and empty embrasures readily represent the nation’s political and military immaturity. Dismissed by one historian as “unfit for service,” Fort Sumter provides an ideal setting for tales of naïfs plunging into the abyss.4 Embedded in these narratives...

NEGOTIATING WITH THE TALIBAN: HOW WILL IT AFFECT THE FUTURE OF AFGHANISTAN?

In response to the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York, US military launched an operation on October 7, 2001. Despite the totally removal of the Taliban in 2001, now Afghanistan is more insecure than ever. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Taliban controlling the 43 per cent of Afghanistan’s districts and threaten 70% of Afghanistan. After President Donald Trump's will to end the longest war in American history, special representative Zalmay Khalilzad began to shuttle between the countries that might have an impact on the Afghan issue. Since September 2018, Khalilzad has held five rounds of talks with the Taliban. The most important issues of these negotiations are: The United States wants to ensure that Afghanistan will not be a shelter for terrorist organizations, cutting off ties with organizations such as al-Qaeda, Taliban talks with the Afghan government and a ceasefire. On the other side, the only condition of the Taliban is that the clear timetable of foreign forces complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. Also, Afghan president Gani stressed that they would void the outcome of the negotiations that excluded the elected government. The American side gives the message that the process continues with Gani's knowledge and support. After U.S. withdraw, the predictions that the Taliban can return to Kabul are pushing Washington to pursue peace talks and to accept the Taliban as a political reality is the defeat in any case for the United States. On the other side, Afghans are concerned that negotiation with the Taliban could destroy the 18-year gains in democratic and human rights fields. Within this pessimistic atmosphere, is it posible to negotiate with fragmented, factionalised and undisciplined groups of Taliban to be successful?, Is the US-Taliban agreement sufficient for peace?, how will it affect the future of Afghanistan? and is it beginning of dark times for women and minorities in the Afghanistan?. This article tries to answer the above questions.

The US Peace Diplomacy in Afghanistan

In 2001, following the Taliban’s ousting from Afghanistan, the United States signed the Bonn Agreement directly with an Afghan delegation. Nineteen years later, in a bid to end the longest war in American history, the Trump administration signed the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” with the Taliban, this time circumventing any direct involvement from the Afghan government. Is the US-Taliban deal a major diplomatic solution to a protracted conflict that signifies the importance of diplomatic solutions to military action? Or is it a war-failed and diplomacy-bound-to-fail scenario? This paper analyzes the issues and challenges facing the peace process in Afghanistan, with a focus on the diplomatic efforts by the United States.

Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat

Jonathan M. Steplyk's book constitutes the latest link in a substantial chain of histories dating back to the mid-1940s that probe the inner mind of the common soldier in the U.S. Civil War. That genre has attracted the participation of some of the most respected and prolific names in Civil War studies, such as Bell Irvin Wiley, James M. McPherson, Joseph T. Glatthaar, Drew Gilpin Faust, Peter S. Carmichael, Susannah J. Ural, and Earl J. Hess, along with such rising scholars as Lorien L. Foote. These works have attempted to explain why American males decided to enlist in the Union and Confederate armies; what made them endure the discipline, hardship, tedium, disease, and danger endemic to soldier life; their reaction to the mounting carnage in what became the bloodiest war in American history; and how military service illuminated gender issues and interactions with friendly and hostile civilians. At first glance, Steplyk's Fighting Means Killing overlaps with much of this literature, particularly Gerald F. Linderman's Embattled Courage (1987) and Hess's The Union Soldier in Battle (1997). While Steplyk acknowledges his intellectual debt to these and other historians, his work stands apart because it focuses exclusively on what soldiers in blue and gray thought about taking human life and what performing that most traumatizing military duty did to them. Steplyk characterizes his monograph as an exercise in “killology” (p. 8). That approach derives from Dave Grossman, the West Point psychology professor who wrote On Killing (2009).

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History

The U.S.-Apache wars in the Southwest borderlands may have constituted the longest war in U.S. history, and they certainly have captured the attention of generations of novelists, filmmakers, and historians. The eminent military historian and professor of history at the University of New Mexico, Paul Andrew Hutton, has penned not so much a revisionist account but an intense, fast-paced, and vivid retelling of a familiar story to those versed in the history of the Apache conflict. After introducing the violent history of the Spanish, Mexicans, and Apaches in the borderlands, Hutton starts his discussion from 1861. He brings us Cochise and the Bascom Affair and the betrayal and murder of Mangas Coloradas during the Civil War years. The Camp Grant massacre (1871), General George Crook's Western Apache and Yavapai campaigns, President Ulysses S. Grant's “peace policy,” and the establishing of reservations constitute the essentials in the following chapters. He also covers the concentration of Apaches at San Carlos, Victorio's wars, and the religious revivalism that exploded into violence at Cibecue. The final third of the book follows the dwindling resistance of the free Chiricahuas in the 1880s, the U.S. Army's penetration of the Sierra Madre, and the hunt for Geronimo and glory by Generals Crook and Nelson Miles. Unlike most historians, Hutton does not stop there. He instead narrates the exploits of the “outlaw” Apache Kid, thus stretching out the wars for a few years.

НЕОКОНЧЕННАЯ ВОЙНА Б. ОБАМЫ

This article explores the role of the United States military in Afghanistan since the official end of the coalition’s combat mission. It explains why President Obama had to make a painful choice between pressing ahead with withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and abandoning his goal of ending the longest war in American history. Specifically, it focuses on major adjustments to the original drawdown plan outlined in May 2014, which the President made under growing pressure from the Pentagon, Republican lawmakers and much of the national security establishment in Washington. By doing so the President came under criticism for going back on his promise to bring home almost all American troops by the end of his second term. He was also criticized for handing off responsibility for the Afghan conflict to the next president, who will decide the size and scope of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan beyond 2017. Meanwhile, based on the current situation on the ground it seems that the Obama administration’s attempt to “sublet the war” to Afghan national forces has failed. As Afghan army and police forces can hardly contain terrorist and insurgent groups, the American military has to step in, thus blurring the line between assistance and direct action. Even so, the rapid spread of insurgency in 2015 exposed the limits of the U.S. and allied troop presence, mostly in an advisory and training capacity. Given the new developments in the country, especially the Islamic State’s growing presence and the Taliban’s dramatic gains including the seizure of Kunduz, it appears that President Obama will leave his successor a far worse situation in Afghanistan than the one he inherited eight years ago. Overall, without a clear strategy and bipartisan consensus on the way forward in the Afghan war, it is highly unlikely that a new administration will prevent the country from spiraling into chaos now plaguing Iraq.&nbsp

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History by Paul Andrew Hutton

Reviewed by: The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History by Paul Andrew Hutton Thomas A. Britten The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History. By Paul Andrew Hutton. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016. Pp. 544. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The Apache Wars (1861–86) have been a popular topic in American history for some time, and scholars have churned out a broad body of scholarship predominantly focusing on the roles of specific tribes and bands or biographies of participants, both Apache and U.S. Army. In The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton provides a comprehensive treatment of “the longest war in American history” with a special focus on Geronimo and the exploits of two less well known but no less important participants: the Apache Kid and Mickey Free. Intended for a broad audience, the book provides a thorough, balanced, and fairly traditional treatment of [End Page 518] the Apaches’ long struggle to retain their independence amidst a rapidly changing southwestern frontier. In the brief prologue, Hutton introduces readers to twelve-year-old Felix Ward. In January 1861, a raiding party of Aravapai Apaches took Felix captive, precipitating rescue efforts that sparked the onset of the twenty-five yearlong Apache wars. In subsequent chapters, the author details additional causes: the infamous “cut the tent” episode involving Cochise, the whipping of Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves) by miners at Pinos Altos, and the hanging of six Apache prisoners at Apache Pass. Apache retaliation followed, and by the end of 1861, the U.S. army found itself embroiled in warfare both to preserve the Union and to extend its control over widely scattered bands of Apaches in Arizona and New Mexico. Hutton does a masterful job introducing the multitude of Apache leaders, military officials, Indian agents, scouts, and territorial officials that played a part in ameliorating—or exacerbating—the bloodshed. A short biography follows the first mention of each participant to provide context and offer hints at possible motivations. In December 1872, Felix Ward, who had lived for over a decade with the Apaches, enlisted as a scout and received the name Mickey Free (a popular character in Charles Lever’s 1901 novel Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon). His motivations for enlisting remain a mystery but a steady paycheck, meals, and the opportunity to fight against traditional tribal enemies may explain the choice. Appearing neither white nor Apache, Free was, according to fellow scout Al Seiber, “half-Mexican, half-Irish and whole son-of-a-bitch” (201). The Aravapai Apache known as the Apache Kid (also known as Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl and Ski-be-nan-ted) was approximately ten years younger than Mickey Free, and Hutton reserves most of his discussion of him until late in the book. Like Free, the Apache Kid enlisted as an Apache scout and was well respected by his peers. In the summer of 1887, he went AWOL from his unit to avenge the death of his father by killing an Apache named Rip. He was subsequently court-martialed and sent to Alcatraz prison but was released and returned home after serving only seven months. Arrested and tried again in an Arizona territorial court, the Kid received a seven-year sentence to Yuma Territorial Prison. He escaped in transport and for the next several years managed to elude authorities. Mickey Free reportedly tracked and discovered the Apache Kid’s remains in Aravapai Canyon at some point in the 1890s. By this time, Free was a middle-aged man. He died in obscurity in 1914. Hutton’s writing style, research, and organization are exemplary, and he is certainly successful at telling the story of Mickey Free and the story of his contemporaries— “both friend and foe alike, red and white—whose lives were shaped by the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest and northern Mexico” (2). For those interested [End Page 519] in a one-volume study of the Apache Wars and the peoples who fought it, this is essential—and enjoyable—reading. Thomas...

Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America. by Kristen Layne Anderson

Reviewed by: Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America. by Kristen Layne Anderson Aaron Astor (bio) Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America. By Kristen Layne Anderson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. 278. Cloth, $48.00.) No state exhibited more contradictory impulses during the Civil War era than did Missouri. A Union slave state with one of the fastest-growing populations in the American West, a gateway to Bleeding Kansas, and home of the Dred Scott decision and some of the worst guerrilla war in American history, Missouri proved to be a vortex of conflict and chaos. A defining element in Missouri's Civil War was the sizable and growing German immigrant population, most of whom were antislavery by 1861. In recent years historians have come to appreciate and explore the complexity of Civil War Missouri and its centrality in the national debate over slavery. As scholars have come to view the American Civil War in more transnational perspective, the role of German immigrants has rightfully earned greater interest, including deeper exploration of German ethnic identity on both sides of the Atlantic. Emphasis on the diversity of class, regional origin, and religion among German migrants to America has helped to complicate some older myths of a monolithic German American migration and assimilation narrative. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America engages with some of the central questions arising from this new scholarship. To what extent did Germans in slaveholding Missouri oppose slavery, how influential were they in pushing Missouri toward emancipation, and how did German American attitudes toward black citizenship and suffrage change after the war? Though German immigrants wrestled with these questions throughout the state, Anderson focuses almost entirely on the city of Saint Louis. She [End Page 336] mined the German-language newspapers thoroughly and paints a convincing portrait of the range of political thought within the German community. The most famous voices were those of the 1848 revolutionaries who established newspapers such as the Westliche Post and pushed for a more radical emancipationist and egalitarian vision throughout the era. Anderson contrasts the voices of radicals with the less well known conservative German voices, including those from the Catholic and the Missouri Synod Lutheran communities. Editors like Karl Dänzer of the Anzeiger des Westens joined forces with the English-language conservative Unionists in the Missouri Republican to offer a counterpoint to radical claims to speak for the entire German population. The most valuable contribution Anderson provides is her assessment of the change in sentiment within the German American community on a range of sensitive issues surrounding the war. Germans generally said little against slavery before 1854 and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After that point they often embraced the view of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Congressman Frank Blair, who took a free-soil position regarding Kansas and the West. Though very few Germans were outright abolitionists before the Civil War, the community could be counted on to anchor the antiextension Republican Party in the 1860 election in Missouri and the Union cause within the state shortly thereafter. Saint Louis Germans were immediately pitted against secessionists during the deadly Camp Jackson affair of May 1861, where German American soldiers fired into a crowd of rioters. From then on most Germans came to embrace the Union cause in Missouri with vigor. As guerrilla violence escalated in the state, many German Unionists demanded a more thorough prosecution of the war, including the destruction of the slave system that had made Missouri subject to Confederate ambitions in the first place. Anderson is careful to note that radical Germans held the upper hand in this push for immediate emancipation but that conservative Germans were quick to counter with delaying mechanisms whenever possible. Emancipation arrived in January 1865 with a constitutional amendment and then passage of an entirely new constitution itself. Arguments over the radical Drake Constitution of 1865 divided the German community along religious, class, and ideological lines, especially regarding public schools, black suffrage, Sunday closing laws, and racial segregation. A common call for expanded citizenship rights for African and German...

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History. By Paul Andrew Hutton.

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History . By Paul Andrew Hutton. (New York: Crown, 2016. xiv + 514 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00, CAN$40.00; $30.00, e-book.) Nineteenth-century Apacheria encompassed an enormous expanse of the desert and rugged mountain terrain of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, a landscape well suited to the guerrilla warfare strategies employed by independent and widely scattered Apache bands. The resulting wars consumed four bloody decades of raids and reprisals, more often resembling small skirmishes rather than decisive battles. Over time, however, relentless military pursuits and the burning of Indian encampments deprived the Apaches of their most remote sanctuaries and forced the last groups to surrender in 1886. Paul Andrew Hutton, professor of history at the University of New … mtate{at}mail.unomaha.edu

America's founding and the struggle over economic inequality

If, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers' arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued. Fatovic reveals a deep concern among the Founders--including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Noah Webster--about the impact of economic inequality on political freedom. America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality traces this concern through many important political debates in Congress and the broader polity that shaped the early Republic--debates over tax policies, public works, public welfare, and the debt from the Revolution. We see how Alexander Hamilton, so often characterized as a cold-hearted apologist for plutocrats, actually favored a more progressive system of taxation, along with various policies aimed at easing the economic hardship of specific groups. In Thomas Paine, frequently portrayed as an advocate of laissez-faire government, we find a champion of a comprehensive welfare state that would provide old-age pensions, public housing, and a host of other benefits as a matter of right, not charity. Contrary to the picture drawn by so many of today's pundits and politicians, this book shows us how, for the first American statesmen, preventing or minimizing economic disparities was essential to the preservation of the new nation's freedom and practice of self-government.

WHO WAS BADSHAH KHAN?

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988), also called Badshah (“the king”) Khan, is a nearly unknown champion of nonviolence in South Asia and a forgotten Muslim ally of Mohandas Gandhi. The story of Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) movement in what was to become Pakistan is not only inspirational but also instructive, exploding as it does several widespread myths about nonviolence. Today, the United States (with some allies) is embroiled in that region in the longest war in American history and among the Pashtun people from whom Khan arose. Thus his story, according to this article, has a revolutionary potential. When young Malala Yousafzai cited Badshah Khan in a speech at the United Nations in 2013, therefore, she may have done more good than she realized.

The Amendment Diversion: How Clinton, the Democrats, and Even Sanders Distract Attention from Effective Strategies for Too Much Money in Politics by Promoting Futile Remedies -- Book I: Hillary Clinton and the Dark Money Disclosure 'Pillar'

2016 election campaign's defining issue is the recovery of democracy from the death grip of plutocracy. reform proposals that are supported at the outset of the primary season by Democrats and their leading presidential candidates are all inadequate for the task. This study provides a critical analysis of the current set of the widely promoted proposals on this issue of money in politics. It features those of the Democratic candidates and the congressional party. analysis of these proposals functions as a strategy primer on the subject of money in politics for purposes of wisely assessing the widely promoted but misleading and terminally ineffective strategies. This helps open space for identifying and formulating effective strategies. Democrats and their professional activist allies, including celebrity activists and non-profit organizations have not been credible sources of strategic advice on the issue of money in politics. Their priority is the marketability of soundbite strategies, not effective political strategy. current proposals are necessarily deficient because they all start from the erroneous assumption that the Constitution was written to establish a corrupt plutocracy and that it must therefore now be amended to enable democracy.This premise asks us to believe, without evidence, that the framers' professed intention to establish a democracy legitimized solely by the consent of the governed must now be considered to have been an elaborate fraud because five undistinguished Supreme Court justices tell us, two centuries later, that their Constitution mandates a plutocracy where money buys legitimacy. It is safe to say that the framers, who never said any such thing in the many volumes they wrote about the Constitution, are more reliable sources on this question than two Reagan and three Bush family appointees elevated from deserved obscurity to serve political ends.The active form of the Amendment is advocacy of a constitutional amendment as the only solution to plutocracy. This advocacy is most often phrased as having the purpose of overturning Citizens United, which would only leave in place the noxious root of the problem, which is Buckley v Valeo (1976). Such advocacy often takes the form of the mere concept of an amendment, little more than the quoted phrase, thereby avoiding the devilish detail of producing actual text. Amendment proposals that are reduced to text, upon analysis, are found to have perverse unintended consequences.Alternative diversionary proposals instruct us that the only available remedies short of such an amendment are a set of ineffective shopworn piecemeal reforms that comply with the Supreme Court's judicial supremacist interpretations. These interpretations reflect the Court's own plutocratic Constitution, nowhere to be found in the text of the original document. Servile compliance with the Supreme Courts' illegitimate plutocratic amendment of the Constitution is the passive form of the Amendment Diversion.This series on The Amendment Diversion is contained in three Books to be published in 2016. Book I describes Hillary Clinton's reform proposal which is so minimally piecemeal as to be probably counterproductive. Her proposals explore just how thinly a piecemeal reform of money in politics can be sliced so as not to offend her donors, while appearing to offer substance. In this effort she embraces President Obama's example of how Democrats avoid offending their plutocratic backers while throwing spare soundbites to their uninformed and effectively disenfranchised voters.Hillary Clinton is campaigning on her experience and pragmatism. But pragmatism in the form of piecemeal, gradualist, incremental reform of systemic corruption tends to only make it worse. Clinton's proposals on money in politics so vastly underestimate what it takes to reform a systemically corrupt government that it draws into question her fundamental understanding of the subject. Nor is Clinton's experience with this issue during her service as Secretary of State a recommendation for her candidacy. Instead of attesting to her knowledge, Clinton's experience confirms that she lacks either understanding of or concern about the centrality of the issue of systemic corruption. Her direct intervention to derail anti-corruption programs in Afghanistan contributed to the current precarious status of the Kabul government, and to rendering futile the longest war in American History. Even if Clinton's proposals are not necessarily different in significant ways from her opponent Bernie Sanders' current proposals, her relevant experience, pragmatic approach and lack of determined resolve is the opposite of what is needed to remedy the defining problem of the era.

Military Serving at What Cost? The Effects of Parental Service on the Well-Being Our Youngest Military Members.

Since the onset of war in Iraq and Afghanistan in April 2002, much attention has been given to the effect of war on servicemen and servicewomen who have now been serving in combat for over thirteen years, the longest sustained war in American history. Many service members have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffered from the visible and invisible wounds of war. Much work has been done in the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense, and the civilian sector after observing the effects of multiple deployments and overall military service on the service member. A survey of the literature revealed that the ethics of conducting research on programs to assist these brave men and women is fraught with ethical concerns based on a military culture that often precludes autonomy and privacy. While strides have been made in developing strategies to assist service members deal with their military service issues, a serious lack of information exists on the impact of a parent's service on the health and well-being of military children. A discussion of current research on services for children is presented with an analysis of the ethical problems that have precluded adequate study of those who need society's help the most.

The War against Slavery, Reconsidered and Reframed

The War against Slavery, Reconsidered and Reframed Suzanne Cooper Guasco (bio) Andrew Delbanco et al. The Abolitionist Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. vii + 205 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. W. Caleb McDaniel. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 344 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $48.00. Scholars have long been interested in abolitionists and the history of the movement to end slavery. Historians have been particularly enamored with the radical immediatism of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers. Most discussions of these topics begin with the 1969 publication of Aileen S. Kraditor’s Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850. In this important work, Kraditor explored the efficacy of the strategies employed by Garrison as well as the nature of the internal divisions over tactics that plagued the movement. She represented Garrison and his fellow abolitionists as polemical but rejected the notion that they were radical fanatics who pursued an unattainable moral and societal perfectionism. Subsequent scholars—James Brewer Stewart, Ronald G. Walters, Henry Meyer, and Robert H. Azbug, to name a few—have expanded upon her conclusions by exploring the origins of the abolitionist mentality and the role abolitionism played in the eventual triumph of emancipation. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the roles black radicalism and the issues of race played in the movement to end slavery. Historians as varied as Benjamin Quarles, Merton Dillon, James Huston, Paul Goodman, John Stauffer, and Richard S. Newman have demonstrated convincingly that Northern free black activism and slave resistance radicalized white opponents of slavery, which led abolitionists to collaborate with black leaders as they abandoned the gradualist position predominant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and embraced an immediatist approach to ending slavery after 1830. Despite the scope and quality of this scholarship, however, historians continue to debate a wide variety of questions about abolitionism. What role did abolitionists play in the coming of the American Civil War? Was the [End Page 60] Garrisonian movement a fanatical product of a distinctly American reform impulse? How influential (and effective) was this embattled minority? Who among the warriors against slavery can be legitimately called an abolitionist and who deserves the more conservative label of antislavery activist? How inclusive was the movement to end slavery and what was the nature of the abolitionist commitment to racial equality? Andrew Delbanco and W. Caleb McDaniel offer the latest contributions to this scholarly conversation and engage several, though not all, of these questions. In his latest book, The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), Andrew Delbanco seeks to illuminate the abolitionist temperament and, in doing so, asks scholars to reconsider their celebration of a small group of radical idealists whose efforts to eradicate slavery resulted in the most violent and deadly war in American history. He argues that “the sacred rage of abolitionism—its moral urgency and uncompromising fervor, its vision of the world purified and perfected—has been at work in many holy wars since the war against slavery” (pp. 47–48). For him, the abolitionist temperament is “an ahistorical category of human will and sentiment” and nineteenth-century abolitionists were merely the first group among many to identify “a heinous evil” and demand “to eradicate it—not tomorrow, not next year, but now” (p. 23). By understanding abolitionism in this way, argues Delbanco, scholars might reassess their celebration of nineteenth-century radical abolitionists and expand their investigations to include antislavery moderates who questioned the cost of abolition, fearing that the price of enacting it would be too great (p. 54). Today’s scholars, cautions Delbanco, might soberly acknowledge the sacrifice that brought freedom, eagerly celebrate abolitionists for provoking that change, and, in hindsight, say that it was worth the price paid; but they do so at the risk of neglecting the broader story of the war against slavery and the lessons nineteenth-century abolitionism has to offer to all subsequent radical reform efforts. As Delbanco recounts, abolitionists, though small in number, were divided over strategy and often inconsistent and inconstant in their actions. They attracted...

Advances and controversies in military posttraumatic stress disorder screening.

As the longest war in American history draws to a close, an unprecedented number of service members and veterans are seeking care for health challenges related to transitioning home and to civilian life. Congressionally mandated screening for mental health concerns in the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as screening efforts Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities, has been established with the goal of decreasing stigma and ensuring service members and veterans with depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) receive needed treatment. Both the DoD and VA have also developed integrated behavioral health in primary-care based initiatives, which emphasize PTSD screening, treatment, and care coordination. This article discusses the rationale for population-level deployment-related mental health screening, recent changes to screening frequency, commonly used screening instruments such as the primary care PTSD screen (PC-PTSD), PTSD checklist (PCL), and Davidson Trauma Scale (DTS); as well as the strengths/limitations of each, and recommended cut-off scores based on expected PTSD prevalence.

Bleeding Kansas, bleeding Missouri: the long Civil War on the border

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on Border. Edited by Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 346. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-7006 1929-0; cloth, $37.50, ISBN 978-0-7006-1928-3.) The border wars in Kansas and Missouri continue to complicate our understanding of Civil War. Building on work of scholars like late Michael Fellman, contributor to this volume, who interpreted border conflict as a war of against all and scene of the worst guerrilla war in American history, Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on Border confirms and extends recent scholarship on topic (p. 4). The collection breaks new ground by looking at border wars across geographical lines, and, by offering variety of approaches, essays help readers navigate complicated political and ideological world of people who lived through conflict. The book also considers how later generations have remembered war on border. Following useful introduction by editors, Fellman argues that violent guerrilla war on border resulted from long tradition of Christian crusading that motivated men to kill others in name of God. Victimizing their own, dehumanizing enemy, and fighting for cause that required blood sacrifice, warriors in border region descended into endless cycle of revenge (p. 13). Later historians sanitized cultural memory by making border one of exceptions to rule of civility in Civil War (p. 23). The editors divide remaining chapters into three parts, first of which looks at how issue of slavery changed border region. Kristen K. Epps argues that while slaveholding in region was relatively small-scale, it played an essential role in economic life of those who lived there before 1850s. Westward movement was seen as progress, and slavery was vital to that progress given scarcity of labor on sparsely settled frontier. Nicole Etcheson argues that concepts of law and order explain why proslavery citizens perceived influx of antislavery immigrants as threat. The proslavery side thought that its adherents followed rules and saw themselves as defenders of law and order, while they sincerely believed that those who opposed slavery were dangerous fanatics who brought anarchy to border region. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel delves into intersection of race and gender in language used by participants who tried to demean manhood of other side. Pearl T. Ponce's political analysis of Lecompton constitution insightfully explores efforts and failures of leaders like James Buchanan. The essays in second part show how border wars escalated as national conflict began. Tony R. Mullis demonstrates that U.S. Army tried to respond to free-soil guerrillas in 1860, arguing that although army was largely ineffective, their efforts taught them important lessons that they later put to use against proslavery irregulars during Civil War. …

John Fabian Witt. Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History

John Fabian Witt. Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History

The Horrors of Slavery and Crisis of Humanity in Amistad and 12 Years a Slave

Solomon Northup’s testimonial 12 Years a Slave (1853) tells the heart-wrenching story of how a free black man living in New York was captured by slave traders and forced to live as a slave on southern plantations in the 1840s under inhuman and oppressive conditions. Writing up and publishing his experiences, Northup presents a searing portrayal of the evils of slavery that influenced abolitionist arguments and movements in the pre-Civil War period as debates over slavery intensified, leading to the bloodiest war in American history. The horrors of slavery created a crisis of humanity in the United States in which a class of Americans participated in slave-holding, a practice that was seen in some parts of the country as causing a crisis of humanity in which millions were subjected to inhuman living working and living conditions. While the U.S. constitution and American revolution had produced “liberty and justice for all,” and proclaimed equal rights before the law obviously the system of slavery created a crisis for U.S. constitutional democracy that led to a Civil War that almost tore the country apart. Hollywood cinema has traditionally been reluctant to portray the horrors of slavery, providing idealizations of slavery in films like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and tending to ignore it during the highly charged post-World War II period that featured an intensifying powerful Civil Rights movement. Steve McQueen’s 2013 film provides a powerful cinematic rendition of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave and has been affirmed as one of the one most powerful films on slavery ever produced, a film being nominated for and winning multiple awards as I write in winter 2014. In this article, I will contrast Gordon Parks’ relatively unknown PBS “American Experience” film of 1984 Solomon Northup’s Odyssey with McQueen’s film, although I open with a look back at Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), which presents a 1839 slave revolt on a ship bound to the Americas and the subsequent trial of the rebels. The Amistad rebellion and trial, like Northup’s book, influenced the abolitionist movement and is a significant, although often forgotten moment in U.S. history. Hence, the current discussions of McQueen’s highly acclaimed film provide the opportunity for a look backwards at a painful moment in U.S. history and for discussion of different modes of cinematic representation of slavery and how a crisis of humanity in the U.S. has received different modes of cinematic representation. Accordingly, I will contrast Spielberg’s film with Parks’ and McQueen’s presentations of slavery in their versions of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. Although Spielberg’s Amistad contains many features of dominant American ideology and an individualist Hollywood narrative which informs Spielberg’s liberal cinema, it is perhaps the most modernist and one of the most compelling of Spielberg’s films that deserves a second look and comparison with Park and McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. I will, however, first examine Amistad which provides a broader panorama of the system and complex effects of slavery in U.S. life and history than Parks’ powerful narrative of Northup’s book and McQueen’s more concentrated and intense focus on the horrors of slavery in 12 Years a Slave. I contrast Parks’ use of classical realist modes of representation with McQueen’s aestheticized and modernist version. Juxtaposing different cinematic representations of slavery and cinematic renditions of Northup’s slave testimony, I show how McQueen’s film provides a modernist version of Northup’s text that forces the audience to experience the horrors of slavery and crisis of humanity, while Parks uses a conventional realist narrative to tell Northup’s story and depict the institutions of slavery. These films, I believe, are among the best English-language cinematic efforts to engage the “peculiar” and arguably monstrous American institution of slavery that continues to shape our history today into the Obama era.Palabras clave: Esclavitud; Crisis de la humanidad; Narrativas de la crisis; Hollywood; Steven Spielberg; Steve McQueen Keywords: Slavery; Crisis of Humanity; Narratives of Crisis; Hollywood; Steven Spielberg; Steve McQueen

The Army Disease: Drug Addiction and the Civil War

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and doctors have claimed that the ‘army disease’ of both the Union and the Confederate armies was morphine addiction. But since drug addiction was not yet fully understood in medical texts of the mid-1860s, addiction as the army disease could have been perceived only in hindsight. Whether addiction was prevalent among veteran troops or not, one thing can be firmly ascertained: after the Civil War, every other war in American history has brought with it a drug problem, whether real or imagined.

“Civil War Memory in the Civil Rights Movement and Contemporary Culture.”

Memory in Civil Rights Movement and Contemporary Culture.AMERICAN ORACLE: The Civil in Civil Rights Era. By David Blight. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2011.REMIXING THE CIVIL WAR: Meditations on Sesquicentennial. Edited Thomas J. Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011.The bloodiest war in American history, Civil ensured survival of union, ended chattel slavery, and accelerated technological development, territorial expansion, and economic concentration. Yet its promise of a new birth of freedom was soon betrayed violence and disenfranchisement. Now, as nation marks Civil Sesquicentennial, two important books consider war's legacy and memory.In. American Oracle, Blight revisits Civil Centennial commemoration, which both consistently reflected and studiously ignored upheavals of Civil Rights Movement. In early 1960s, nation restaged battles of a century earlier. A February 1961 ceremony to mark founding of Confederacy paraded directly past Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, whose young pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. had come to prominence five years earlier during Montgomery bus boycott. In April of that year, northern state commissions threatened to commemoration of first shot fired at Fort Sumter because Charleston's segregated Francis Marion Hotel would not accoimnodate New Jersey delegation's one black member, Madeline A. Williams. The dispute was resolved after reluctant intervention of President John F. Kennedy resulted in alternate lodging arrangements across bay at Charleston Navy Yard. A year later, Blight relates, Southerners and their coimnission members threatened not to boycott a ceremony at Lincoln Memorial commemorating Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, but also to secede from national Centennial altogether (18).1 No Civil enthusiast in period costume could more faithfully reenact battles of one hundred years prior than did almost compulsive repetition of debates about federal authority, states'-rights, secession, and-above all, even if seldom acknowledged outright-race. rights intruded over and again on Civil War (13), Blight concludes, yet the official Civil Centennial could never find adequate, meaningful ways to balance Civil remembrance with civil rights rebellion (11).No scholar knows subtleties and sophistries of Civil memory better than Blight, whose magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil in American Memory (2001) remains authoritative treatment of Civil memory in American culture.2 In that work, Blight documents how narratives of reconciliation-of mutual valor and shared sacrifice-often worked hand-in-hand with white supremacist narratives to erase a narrative of black emancipation. Asimilar whitewashing colored Civil Centennial, which became largely a series of public rituals and events mired in conservative, sometimes pro-Confederate, racially divisive, and Cold (11). Such impulses issued in a commemoration characterized crass commercialism, by a consensual evasion of story of Emancipation, and a commitment to only ends of reconciliation and patriotism (11). It was, in other words, an astonishing acquiescence to racism and blatant avoidance of present (19).With official observance marked unintentional irony, umeflective nostalgia, and selective memory, it fell in large part to writers, those unofficial historians, to offer more complex, ambivalent acts of remembering Civil and more critical, searching analyses of its role in national memory. Blight examines works of four writers-Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin-who reflected fifty years ago on what Wilson referred to as this absurd centennial.3 To various degrees, Blight states, each of these writers wrote with an awareness of public dimensions of Centennial commemoration, though all of them pursued their art for its own sake (10). …