White Soldiers Research Articles

Abstracting the Battlefield: Designers on Evolving Mechanisms, Historical Accuracy, and Representation in Modern Wargames

How wargame and wargame-adjacent designers use mechanisms to represent combat, historical events, equipment, and issues like race and gender are more important than ever considering the massive explosion of wargames and wargame adjacent titles in the last twenty years or so. Increasingly, simple dice combat for unit elimination found in games like Axis & Allies and Risk has given way to more innovative systems like deck building (Undaunted Normandy, Osprey Games), corps morale systems (Chancellorsville 1863, Freeman’s Farm 1777, Worthington Games), area control (Twilight Struggle, Fort Sumter, Flashpoint: South China Sea, GMT Games), and more. Increasingly, designers not only have to wrestle with the age-old question of balancing gameplay mechanisms with historical accuracy, but also how to create that balance in light of new, innovative systems. This paper would be based on data (interviews) from several wargame and wargame-adjacent designers, and it would consider how they incorporate new and innovative mechanisms, and how at the same time they reflect historical accuracy. To what extent do designers “fudge” history in order to make a compelling and balanced tabletop wargame. This also would consider how representing traditionally underrepresented groups can be a product of an intentional historical inaccuracy, (i.e. black soldiers fighting alongside white soldiers in the American Army during WWII in Undaunted Normandy), or how members of these groups who were actual historical actors are portrayed.

Fatal Longings: Nostalgia, Slavery, and Medicine

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the politics of nostalgia’s history as a fatal disease between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as it was applied to slaves in late eighteenth-century Cuba. I trace nostalgia’s medical history beginning with its inauguration in Swiss medicine in 1688, and then describe the contours of its transformation into a military disease primarily affecting white soldiers in France and the United States. Finally, I translate and analyze key elements of Francisco Barrera y Domingo’s work on nostalgia as experienced by slaves in sugar mills in Havana. I show that Barrera uses his analysis of nostalgia and its treatment to describe the slaves’ harrowing conditions and homesickness. Nevertheless, in denying slaves the ability to return home and in failing to propose the abolition of the slave system in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, I argue, Barrera in fact deploys the diagnosis of nostalgia in order to medicalize and pathologize the slaves’ reactions and resistance to their captivity. Thus, despite his sympathy to the slaves, I conclude that for Barrera, nostalgia functions as a tool to better manage the slaves as laborers and as property.

Black America and Hollywood’s Korean War: The Steel Helmet (1951) and Pork Chop Hill (1959)

Representing neither the glory of World War II, nor the anguish of the Vietnam War, the Korean War continues to occupy an obscure place in American history and culture. Similarly, those who fought in this conflict – including African Americans – have been overshadowed by the combatants who served before and after. Yet the Korean War was enormously significant, not least because it was the first conflict fought by a racially integrated American fighting force. For the first time, black and white soldiers ate, slept, and fought side by side. Films about the Korean War made during the 1950s explored this new racial dynamic. Focusing on the representation of African Americans in The Steel Helmet (1951) and Pork Chop Hill (1959), this article examines the ways in which screen representations both reflected and challenged popular attitudes regarding African American military service during the Korean War.

“Servants not Soldiers”: The Origins of Slavery in the United States Army, 1797–1816

Abstract: This article illuminates a lesser-explored aspect of the United States as a “slaveholding republic.” Between 1816–1861, the U.S. Army relied on thousands of enslaved persons who served as officers' servants. In 1816, Congress authorized allowances, rations, and bonuses for officers' private servants while putting an end to the practice of soldiers serving as servants. This legislative move effectively subsidized and incentivized military slaveholding. The paper delves into the political circumstances and legislative maneuvers that led Congress to institutionalize military slavery, establishing mechanisms to sustain, fund, and expand the number of enslaved servants. Military slavery developed gradually with the foundation, bureaucratization, and professionalization of an American military peace establishment. It evolved from 1797 to 1816 through competing policy objectives, resulting in a long-lasting bureaucratic workaround euphemistically termed "servants not soldiers." Facing public criticism over officers’ abuse of soldiers’ labor, the army “outsourced” officers’ servants through a dual process of privatization and racialization, differentiating between “public” and “private” service, between free, white soldiers and enslaved, black servants. Though serving slaveholders’ interests, the adopted solution was a product of bureaucratic contingencies and ad-hoc decision-making and not a policy orchestrated by a cabal of enslavers. Interestingly, a basic question of reimbursement led somewhere unanticipated, ending in government-sponsored enslaved servitude. Acknowledging this contingency does not excuse the actions but underscores how slavery was often "solved" through institutional accommodation rather than political or moral opposition. Thus, slavery directly impacted the U.S. Army, a central national institution, altering the military system at its pivotal, formative moments.

‘An inferior technician’? African American signallers in the First World War

Abstract In the literature on the struggles of African Americans during the First World War, there has been a failure to examine the experiences of the 325th Field Signal Battalion, the first Black signal unit in the U.S. Army. Drawing upon a range of archival sources, unpublished letters, official documents and newspapers, this article assesses the experiences of the battalion’s Black officers and men before, during and after the war, arguing that they defied not only traditional notions of specialism within the army, threatening to destabilize unambiguous racial boundaries by challenging what had long been viewed as an intrinsically white soldiers’ sphere of influence, but also some of the fundamental principles underpinning Jim Crow ideology. In so doing, they made an important, albeit subtle, contribution to the ‘long civil rights movement’.

Why Did Black Soldiers Historically Have More Pneumonia Than White Soldiers in the U.S. Army?

Black U.S. Army soldiers had four times as much bacterial pneumonia as White U.S. Army soldiers during both the U.S. Civil War and World War I (WWI). Pneumonia case fatality rates were a third greater in Black soldiers during the U.S. Civil War, but were the same between the racial groups by WWI. During WWII, the use of antibiotics decreased bacterial pneumonia mortality rates 100-fold and apparently erased racial differences. Similar differences in bacterial pneumonia rates by racial group were observed in African colonial soldiers of the French and British Armies during WWI. Pneumonia rates in Indian, Filipino, and Puerto Rican soldiers suggested that genetic polymorphisms were not a decisive factor determining Black pneumonia mortality. Postmeasles pneumonias did not suggest an immune deficit in Black soldiers. Geographic focus of pneumonia in Black soldiers from the southern U.S. states and other tropical regions raises the possibility that increased bacterial pneumonia rates were related indirectly to malaria infections. Malaria remains a difficult-to-measure but potentially important mortality risk factor in pneumonia.

Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote

Reviewed by: Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote Lesley J. Gordon (bio) Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War. Lorien Foote. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6527-6. 312 pp., paper, $22.95. For the last twenty-five years, there has been an ongoing debate among Civil War historians about the level of violence the conflict unleashed. Was it controlled by political policy makers and military commanders? Or was it unrestrained and chaotic, wreaking destruction in unprecedented ways, not just on soldiers’ bodies and minds but on civilians, enslaved people, and communities? Lorien Foote enters this historiographical discussion with her latest book, Rituals of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War, based on her 2019 Steven and Janice Brose Lectures at Penn State. Foote asserts [End Page 115] that for both Confederates and Federals, the Civil War was a “crisis of civilization” and one that determined which side was truly civilized and which was barbaric (16). She focuses on the federal Department of the South, tracking the raising of black troops, their active campaigning in South Carolina and Florida, and their treatment as POWs. The Department of the South was not central to the conflict’s major engagements, but Foote contends that events there offer a close look at how prominent political and military leaders on both sides were acutely aware that the world was watching and judging them on how they waged war. A good deal of Foote’s focus is on the enlistment of African American men in the Union army and their subsequent treatment as POWs. Their status as legitimate combatants, controversial and hugely significant, Foote maintains, reveals assumptions about civilized warfare at play and how these ideals at times broke down entirely. As Foote notes, most white Americans viewed African Americans as uncivilized—inherently unrestrained and animalistic. Black soldiers were used sparingly as combat units largely due to these racist assumptions, but when they did fight in battle, these troops often suffered higher casualties than white soldiers, due to a variety of factors. Historians have pointed to the Confederacy’s refusal to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war, instead defining those captured as fugitives and returning them to their owners, or worse, taking no quarter and killing them outright. Foote argues that notions of civilized war explain how and why Confederates justified such wanton murders: Black soldiers were not deemed a legitimate and civilized enemy. Throughout, Foote claims to make several scholarly interventions, including “for the first time,” she attests, demonstrating that in fact Confederates changed their policy toward captured “freeborn Black troops in combat,” when formal POW exchanges resumed near the war’s end (4). Foote insists repeatedly that her interpretations are original and that other historians have either failed to recognize the importance of these rituals or underplayed their significance without much elaboration of just who these scholars are. Yet others have discussed these rituals and the concept of “civilized war.” But perhaps the most damning accusation she makes is in her allegation that scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction era have neglected recognizing “civilization” as part of nineteenth-century Americans’ world view. She broadly takes scholars to task for focusing exclusively on concepts like race and gender, which she concedes are part of the definition of civilization but should be seen as expressions of it, not vice versa; a confusing and convoluted claim that sounds like an accusation of presentism without calling it as such. Understanding the term civilization in its proper context is important, but as Foote herself admits in these pages, it is limiting. And, in some ways, her definitions are rather narrow in a military sense. For Civil War armies in the field, [End Page 116] such rhetoric had a very pragmatic purpose: to create effective fighting troops. Military discipline helped ensure that soldiers stayed healthy and in the ranks whether marching, in camp, or in the heat of battle. But of course, as Foote documents here, even the best trained troops sometimes failed and faltered and broke “the rules of war.” Lesley...

Disparities in the Medal of Honor Why African American Soldiers Awards were Delayed, and Japanese American Awards were Immediate

The 442nd Infantry Regiment Combat Team, composed mostly of Japanese American soldiers, is the most decorated division in U.S. military history. As a minority combat team motivated by accusations of disloyalty following Pearl Harbor, they sought to demonstrate their patriotism through excellence in battle. President Harry Truman formally recognized the valuable contribution of the 442nd Infantry Team to the Allied victory and assigned a medal of honor to one of the Japanese American soldiers, Private First-Class Sadao S. Munemori, immediately after the war. African American soldiers similarly demonstrated great loyalty and skill in the 332nd Fighter Group, called the Tuskegee Airmen, and the 761st Tank Battalion, also known as the Black Panthers. However, although both units fought with distinction, the granting of medals of honor for African American World War II service was delayed until 1997. Based on memoirs, interviews, and an Army Report Investigation conducted by the Department of Defense, this paper analyzes the reasons for the decades-long discrepancy in the timeline for the acquisition of medals of honor between Japanese American and African American soldiers. The differing experiences and interpretations of discrimination and segregation, both during and after the war, account for the immense positive attention paid to Japanese American efforts compared to the total lack of national honor assigned to African American soldiers. Through their service, Japanese Americans resoundingly exposed the errors of the federal governments decision to intern families of Japanese descent and helped promote a narrative of wrongdoing that the federal government has since acknowledged. In contrast, African American victories, no less impressive than those of Japanese American and white soldiers, were overshadowed by the racial discourse of Jim Crow-era politics. Specifically, African American soldiers continued to face systemic discrimination at home and in the armed forces despite their military accomplishments. It delayed the formal acknowledgement of the significance of African American service.

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Clayton J. Butler

Reviewed by: True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Clayton J. Butler Jonathan A. Noyalas (bio) True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Clayton J. Butler. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0-8071-7662-7. 248 pp., cloth, $45.00. On August 29, 1866, a newspaper correspondent in Madison, Wisconsin, reflected on the critical role Southern unionists played and the sacrifices they endured to ensure [End Page 110] the Union’s restoration. “What men merit more the esteem . . . of the country than these tried Unionists of the South,” the journalist pondered in the Wisconsin State Journal. While the experiences of Southern unionists largely fell into obscurity for more than a century after the Civil War’s guns fell silent, historians since the turn of the twenty-first century have made significant strides in chronicling the experiences and contributions of those who resided in the Confederacy, but ardently supported the Union. Clayton Butler’s recent volume, prodigiously researched and eloquently crafted, adds significantly to that historiography. Butler’s study explores the lives of unconditional white unionists in the Deep South, primarily through the service and experiences of three US regiments organized in the Confederacy—the First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. The author freely admits that while this methodology excludes certain groups, namely white Southern unionist women, a close examination of the troops who served in these regiments reveals much about what fueled unconditional unionists’ allegiance, how they asserted themselves, how they were perceived in the Confederacy, and how Northerners regarded them. While the author addresses the complex factors that prompted individuals to unconditional unionism—class resentment, disagreement with secession’s legitimacy, economic factors, political considerations, and the belief that loyalty to the Union presented the best opportunity to safeguard slavery—much of this study’s core focuses on the challenges those unconditional unionists confronted. Butler cogently chronicles how some white unconditional unionists, such as those in New Orleans, maintained a low profile while Confederates occupied the city—out of a fear of reprisals. Others, particularly after Confederate conscription went into effect in the spring of 1862, believed the only way they could protect themselves and their families was to report for duty, thus creating the illusion of Confederate loyalty. The author rightly contends that this proved not only a useful mode of survival but offered unionists who resided in more remote parts of the Deep South an opportunity to get closer to Union lines, desert, and then offer their services to the United States. Other unionists, such as a contingent that resided in Texas and enlisted in the First Louisiana Cavalry, took a circuitous route through Mexico to reach New Orleans to join the regiment. Butler’s analysis of how unionists prior to enlistment balanced survival with allegiance is quite powerful. Hindrances, as the author clearly asserts, did not diminish once in the United States’ service. Union soldiers, such as those in the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, were massacred because of their unconditional unionism, along with US Colored Troops, at Fort Pillow in the spring of 1864. While Butler vividly recounts the many ways Confederates violently lashed out against Southern unionist soldiers, he states that although much admired by Northerners, at times Southern [End Page 111] unionists became the target of scorn from white Northern soldiers. For instance, when veterans of the Second Rhode Island Cavalry were ordered to merge with the First Louisiana Cavalry in the summer of 1863, some Rhode Islanders protested: they despised the idea of belonging to a regiment from a state that contributed so much to the Confederacy. Numerous trials, as the author notes in the book’s final two chapters, faced unconditional white unionists in the Civil War’s immediate aftermath. Some confronted attacks and destruction of property from former Confederates. On various occasions these reprehensible activities compelled some to move west and begin life anew. Butler also explores the divisions that formed among white unconditional unionists as to the merits of disenfranchising former Confederates and the necessity of suffrage for African Americans. Additionally, the author investigates how unionists in the period...

Marketing The Dead of Antietam: Photographs of Death as a Cultural Commodity

Marketing The Dead of AntietamPhotographs of Death as a Cultural Commodity A. Maggie Hazard (bio) In October 1862 photographer and entrepreneur Mathew Brady launched an exhibition of photographs taken by Alexander Gardner at the Battle of Antietam. The exhibition, held at Brady’s New York City gallery and titled The Dead at Antietam, was the first of its kind in America.1 Among the photographs was Gardner’s Dead of Stonewall Jackson’s Brigade by the Rail Fence on the Hagerstown Pike (Fig. 1). The powerful image presents a startling glimpse of the battle. The contorted bodies of three Confederate soldiers lie next to a rail fence. Two of the three soldiers’ faces are not visible. Their legs flail in various directions, as if barely connected to their torsos. The soldier on the left is so twisted that he appears to be headless, his legs jutting out toward the viewer as his upper body pushes against the fence. His left arm reaches up, frozen in time as if he is reaching for a weapon or raising a hand to beg for assistance. On the right side of the photograph, another soldier is even more knotted. One leg bends as if the man was interrupted while trying to rise, his arm fixed forever in a cradled position against the fence. His head is almost indistinguishable from the foliage into which he has fallen, and his lower leg blends into the figure beside him. He still wears his hat. In the center of the group lies the only soldier whose face we might recognize. The agony of death demonstrated in the soldier’s twisted expression means that any small relief the viewer might [End Page 9] experience in seeing a complete body is short lived, and that agony will remain with the viewer well after they leave the exhibition. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Alexander Gardner, Dead of Stonewall Jackson’s Brigade by the Rail Fence on the Hagers town Pike, Battle of Antietam, 1862. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs [LC-B811-559]) Gardner’s photograph was typical for the exhibition but was previously unknown to society. Even more, Brady’s exhibition of these photographs and the sale of them afterward is significant to the way the war was seen and known and to how it is understood even today. The Battle of Antietam resulted in the first sustained photographic rendering and display of the casualties of war, and the exhibition was the public’s first encounter with grisly photographic images of actual battlefield death. Promoted in newspapers like the New York Times, the exhibition, along with the conversion of several photographs into woodcut prints that were published in illustrated journals and photographic images that were advertised for sale to those at home, created a new kind of commodity—a marketing of the dead.2 This new way of visualizing, which captured the bodies of fallen soldiers contorted, maimed, and anything but heroic, was crucial to redefining the way people back home (in the North at least) understood [End Page 10] combat and the death that inevitably accompanied it. Although a few photographs of combat death had been created prior to this moment, they were restricted to far off wars that those in the US did not experience, such as the Second Opium War in China in the 1850s. Photographs of other conflicts, like the Crimean War and the Mexican-American War, did not include images of the dead. This meant that when the photographs from the Battle of Antietam went on view in New York City, citizens were seeing these graphic depictions of the dead for the first time. Not only that, photographs of those earlier conflicts were much more scattered in their scope and, more significantly, were not subject to an aggressive marketing campaign to distribute the photographs to the public in their place of origin (largely Europe).3 It is important to note that all the photographs of fallen combatants from the Civil War that are known to exist are of white soldiers. There are a few reasons for this. The clearest and most obvious of these with regard...

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll David Silkenat Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. By Dillon J. Carroll. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 324. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6966-7.) In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to Civil War soldiers’ mental health. Diane Miller Sommerville, Brian Matthew Jordan, Jeffrey W. McClurken, James Marten, Sarah Handley-Cousins, and others have demonstrated that wartime trauma had lasting effects on veterans, many of whom struggled for decades. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers impressively builds on and adds to this scholarship. Carroll chronicles how wartime experiences undermined Union and Confederate soldiers’ mental health, as the horrors of combat combined with poor food, disease, exhaustion, and homesickness. Drawing on the work of Kathryn Shively, Carroll argues that Civil War soldiers practiced self-care individually and in community with fellow soldiers to cope with the trauma of war. Some soldiers ended up hospitalized for mental illness: over 1,500 Union [End Page 154] soldiers were sent to the Government Hospital for the Insane (later rebranded as St. Elizabeth’s Hospital) in Washington, D.C., while an unknown number of Confederate soldiers were sent to state institutions. In the decades that followed, veterans carried their trauma with them. Overcrowded asylums struggled to cope with increasing numbers of former soldiers, while many traumatized veterans received care from family. Carroll persuasively argues that many Civil War veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. While he is not the first historian to make this claim—see Eric T. Dean Jr.’s Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)—Carroll skillfully draws on modern psychology and medicine to demonstrate how traumatic wartime experiences prompted postwar symptoms, including nightmares, headaches, and suicidal behavior. Although Carroll is careful not to posthumously diagnose individuals, he argues that the patterns of behaviors that veterans demonstrated, and that doctors and families witnessed, point in that direction. Carroll also argues that other war-related phenomena, including alcoholism, opium addiction, and syphilis, contributed to the postwar veteran mental health crisis. Invisible Wounds has much to recommend it. It artfully uses asylum records, soldiers’ letters, and diaries to examine mental illness from the perspectives of both doctors and patients. It also is unafraid to engage with modern medicine and put it in conversation with Civil War–era understandings of mental illness. The book’s descriptions of the brutality and trauma of Civil War soldiering are graphic and evocative. Carroll also does an excellent job depicting a handful of veterans and doctors, including Thomas Hyde, Prince Rivers, Pliny Earle, and Silas Weir Mitchell, giving faces to the book’s broader themes. Some readers may not be swayed by a few of the claims made in Invisible Wounds. Carroll observes that relatively few Black veterans ended up in hospitals like St. Elizabeth’s. He argues that African Americans did not experience the negative effects of wartime service because they were “imbued with a sense of purpose and a desire to strike back at the trauma of slavery” and were therefore “less susceptible to combat trauma than white soldiers” (p. 2). This is a provocative claim, and the evidence that Carroll provides to support it is intriguing but ultimately not entirely persuasive. Deeply researched, Invisible Wounds paints a gruesome picture of how the Civil War left a lasting mark on the minds of the men who fought in it. Its brisk, accessible writing style would make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classrooms, where it is bound to prompt discussion and debate. David Silkenat University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War, an Oral History by David P. Cline

Reviewed by: Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War, an Oral History by David P. Cline Steve Estes Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War, an Oral History. By David P. Cline. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 387. $32.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6453-8.) “I got out of the military and came back to Mississippi to restore the power and the glory to my bloodline,” one Korean War–era Black veteran told an interviewer in 2006; “I came to Mississippi to conduct a war against white [End Page 180] supremacy” (pp. 333–34). That veteran was James Meredith, the activist who desegregated the University of Mississippi in 1962 and launched his one-man March Against Fear in 1966. In Meredith’s telling, he would not have had the confidence and courage to face white supremacy if not for his time in the military. David P. Cline includes Meredith’s interview in the new book Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War, an Oral History. While many scholars acknowledge the impact of World War II and the Korean War on the civil rights movement, none have offered as comprehensive an account of Black service during the Korean conflict and Black veterans’ perspectives on civil rights as Cline has here. The introduction to Twice Forgotten provides context for the oral history interviews with a detailed chronology of Black military service before Korea and the process that led President Harry S. Truman to order the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. Historians know that desegregation of the military was an uneven process, but this book lets the veterans themselves tell that story. Interviews with political luminaries like Congressmen Charles B. Rangel and John Conyers Jr. stand alongside the stories of many more everyday folks. Black veterans from every branch of the military and every region of the country explain the impact that leaving a segregated society to fight in an increasingly desegregated military had on their political views and the rest of their lives. “When we first traveled from Houston to Los Angeles by train and we had to eat together [with white soldiers], it was kind of frightful,” a former corporal in the U.S. Army told Cline. “One of the cooks there, he used to say, ‘Go on man, go on and sit down, you’re in the army now, don’t act like you’re different’” (p. 47). In contrast to this soldier’s experience, veterans who had grown up outside the South described the comparable shock of experiencing legal segregation for the first time while traveling to southern bases or serving in segregated units that persisted in some divisions until nearly the end of the Korean conflict. The most gripping sections of Twice Forgotten relay the harrowing details of battles waged by Black combat veterans and years of incarceration endured by Black prisoners of war. Cline steps aside and allows veterans’ voices to rise to the fore in these chapters. He intervenes more directly in chapter 7, “From the Service to the Streets: Korean War Veterans and Social Change,” which uses activists’ memoirs and other sources to draw connections between military service and civil rights that were not covered in as many of the interviews included in the book. Cline’s sources from Black newspapers, the Truman Presidential Library, and other archives provide necessary context for the oral histories. Cline conducted many of the interviews for American RadioWorks in support of a documentary on the Korean War, and others were conducted by a range of oral historians under the auspices of the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. This book could have benefited from more thorough explanations of how these interviews were conducted, how they were chosen, and how the historical context of their collection (many were recorded in the early 2000s) might have affected their content. Still, this comprehensive account of Black service in Korea makes an invaluable contribution to American military historiography and scholarship on the civil rights movement. [End Page 181] Steve Estes Sonoma State University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies: Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies:Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) In 1953, following the Korean Armistice Agreement that ostensibly ended direct U.S. intervention in Korea (but, in reality, merely led to a recalibration of the unending Korean War), African American soldier Clarence Adams was one of twenty-one prisoners of war who refused repatriation back to the United States and instead migrated to the People's Republic of China. His decision was influenced by the antiblackness that structured the segregated U.S. South, curtailing his chances of upward mobility, as well as his compassion for the Korean civilians devastated by U.S. military intervention, prompting recognition of the shared oppression of Third World peoples.1 Twelve years later, during the Vietnam War, he broadcast a message to Black soldiers via Radio Hanoi, urging them to return to the United States: "You are fighting the wrong war. Brothers, go home. The Negro people need you back there."2 According to Daniel Y. Kim, "Adams mobilize[d] a historiography of a race war to cast both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as ones waged by a white empire against a colored population," exemplifying what Bill Mullens terms "Afro-Orientalism": a phenomenon in which Black activists turned to idealized Asian subjects for anti-imperialist and antiracist inspiration.3 I begin with Adams' story for three reasons. First, it highlights continuities between Black narratives of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Whereas historians have elucidated the experiences of Black soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, few studies have grappled with these two Cold War fronts in relation, noting patterns and [End Page 97] particularities in Black subject formation across the two U.S. imperial conflicts.4 With the signing of Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, exemplifying the United States' project of racial liberalism and bolstering the expansion of the liberal empire, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, even as Jim Crow laws continued to delimit the mobility of African Americans on the home front. Whereas the Korean War was the first U.S. experiment in militarized integration, it wasn't until the Vietnam War that the question of Black–white tensions in the military, transposed from the continental United States to the battlefront in Asia, gained widespread visibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967: "[We watch] Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."5 Segregation at home was only interrupted by "brutal solidarity" abroad: the uniting of Black and white soldiers in a common project of racialized wartime destruction.6 But continuities between the Korean and Vietnam Wars also led to political mobilization: many civil rights and Black Power leaders active during the Vietnam War era, such as Bobby Seale, James Forman, Ivory Perry, and Robert F. Williams, were radicalized during their experiences as Black soldiers in Cold War Korea.7 Second, Adams' story stitches together three southern spaces that are rarely discussed in relation: the U.S. South, South Korea, and South Vietnam. To focus on the southern-ness of these three sites is to trace the convergence of white supremacy, antiblackness, imperialism, and anticommunism that cohere at the intersection of the U.S. Civil War and Cold War politics.8 Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, amid the structural antiblackness of the segregated U.S. South, Adams joined the U.S. Army to escape incarceration at the hands of white policemen. This military service brought him to South Korea: a decolonizing nation that the United States had taken upon itself to protect in the Cold War struggle against North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Union. These south-south relationalities—the transposition of a Black subject of the U.S. South to the southern warfront of a new...

Relationships between Moroccan soldiers and white women in WW II: ambiguous perspectives

The study focuses on Moroccan veterans’ stories about the French military command’s comprehensive interference in romantic relationships between Moroccans and European women in France during the Second World War. It is based on interviews with some Moroccan veterans about European women’s elopement with their alien suitors to Morocco. The Muslim soldiers’ attachment to their Islamic norms in a Western society was quite embarrassing to the French colonial mind. There was an element of ambiguity in the French officers’ objection to the French women and Moroccan men’s marriages, with the aim of establishing stringent demarcations between white females and colonial soldiers. While some French soldiers directly castigated Western women for befriending or marrying Moroccans, other French men were indifferent to the issue of hybrid relationships.

Across the Color Line: Using Text Networks to Examine Black and White US Soldiers’ Views on Race and Segregation during World War II

"Across the Color Line" is part of a larger digital project, The American Soldier in World War II. The project has made accessible sixty-five thousand pages of uncensored handwritten commentaries composed by US service members, along with quantitative datasets produced by a novel interdisciplinary US Army research branch. This small organization of leading psychologists and social scientists was tasked with analyzing and reporting on soldier morale, including the rank-and-file effects of segregation and relations between the races. This article showcases initial findings derived from a cross-sectional survey of Black and White soldiers administered in February and March of 1943, only months before race rebellions erupted in Detroit, Los Angeles, Harlem, and elsewhere over the country's maintenance of Jim Crow while the US and its allies were at war to save democracy. Text correlation networks reveal in striking visual detail the effects of segregation on the experiences, habits, and opinions of both White and Black US citizen-soldiers, individually and collectively. Network-based visualizations are particularly effective at revealing the inverted epistemology of American racial thought and of W.E.B. Du Bois's popular characterization of Black America's "double consciousness," or "twoness."

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Coloured Diamonds: Integrated Baseball in the Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1918

For the duration of the First World War, the Canadian Expeditionary Force was officially integratedin principle, but stubbornly segregated in practice. Black soldiers, having fought to fight, discoveredthat relationships forged in the trenches often shook ingrained prejudices. If there was no such thingas an atheist in a foxhole, then the same could be said of bigots and baseball diamonds. Integrated baseball inthe CEF was more common than extant histories suggest. Black and white soldiers played against each other,and shared benches alike, when such desegregated diamonds were still exceedingly rare on the home front.

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll Jane E. Schultz (bio) Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. By Dillon J. Carroll. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 368. $45.00 cloth; $30.16 ebook) Dillon Carroll's book on soldiers' mental health mines the relationship between war injury and postwar debility, enriching the literature on Civil War medicine. Invisible Wounds traces the history of the physical and psychological conditions resulting from battle trauma that led physicians to better understand the etiology of psychiatric and psychosomatic diseases. These advances were slow to come because wartime surgeons and "alienists" (psychiatrists) often attributed patients' mental decline to moral lapses instead of traumatic injuries sustained in combat. Physicians "were convinced that disease, hereditary factors, intemperance, masturbation, and moral impurity could, and did, result in insanity" (p. 196). Through close examination of patient records at St. Elizabeth's Hospital outside Washington D.C., and asylums in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, Carroll builds a case for how medicine mostly failed traumatized veterans by warehousing them, sometimes for decades. Carroll applies and contextualizes the symptomology of posttraumatic stress disorder to these war-scarred men, illustrating physicians' increasing awareness of the psychic damage wrought by physical trauma, an insight, he suggests, southern practitioners embraced more readily than northern peers. Even so, the effects of trauma sat differently upon different individuals: "The repeated traumas of war psychologically broke down some men and planted seeds of later trauma in others," whereas some utilized therapeutic strategies (letter writing, dissociation) to escape the chronic setbacks that bedeviled the more vulnerable (p. 27). Carroll observes crucial [End Page 434] differences between Black and white soldiers' responses to traumatic events, concluding that after experiencing slavery, Black men were so gratified to fight and thereby redeem their manhood, they skirted the traumas that compromised white soldiers. Though Carroll cites ample evidence of Black men's cathartic martial enthusiasm, the lack of data surrounding Black mental healthcare and limited Black access to medical institutions, matters to which the text alludes, might alter the impression of Black imperviousness.1 Soldiers' family members are central participants in Invisible Wounds both in their responses to diagnoses and medical decision making, though only one of the book's eleven chapters is devoted to the familial contexts of mental healthcare. When St. Elizabeth's released putatively violent, insane men to their homes without adequate travel support, family members found themselves ill-equipped to care for them. Wives like Charlotte Gilkison of Ohio and Elizabeth Harris of Washington fought to keep their husbands institutionalized lest they endanger their families. Still, others created elaborate ruses to keep their soldiers' mental illnesses under wraps. Readers must wait until chapter ten to get to the meat of the book, an extended institutional account of St. Elizabeth's, where we learn about staffing problems, overcrowding, the treatment of what would later be called traumatic brain injuries, and how practitioners and patients worked to "decode" the menace of long-term impairment (p. 206). Early chapters rehearse camp and battlefield conditions for white men and then Black, describe weaponry and ballistics, and even define "contraband" without explaining the relevance of these issues to the book's mental health focus. Thus, the argument about mental illness causation is delayed, discussion of the surgeons Carroll follows is fleeting (notwithstanding that of neurologist Weir Mitchell in chapter twelve), and the segmented structure of chapters leads to extraneous analysis. [End Page 435] The multiple mechanics problems—from infelicitous syntax and historical errors (e.g., referring to Sir Isaac Newton as "Thomas") to redundancies, repetitions, and simple typos—interrupted the flow of ideas and thus diminished the important insights Carroll presents in the last several chapters of the book. Historians will no doubt profit from the source base introduced here, but Invisible Wounds offers only a partial step toward understanding the devastating effects of Civil War wounds as physicians, patients, and family members interpreted them. Jane E. Schultz JANE E. SCHULTZ is professor of English, history, and medical humanities at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis. Her project on the relationship between language and the Civil War surgical corps' professional ambitions is...

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis

Reviewed by: The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis Christopher Hager (bio) The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. Deborah Willis. New York: New York University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1479809004, 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. In the visual culture of the Civil War era, images of Black men most often evoke slavery. The figure of a kneeling, half-naked slave persisted from Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist icon of the 1780s—Am I Not a Man and a Brother?— to the 1876 Emancipation Memorial in Washington DC, in which Abraham Lincoln extends his hand over Archer Alexander’s barely lifted head. At the height of the Civil War, in 1863, a fugitive named Gordon was photographed in multiple poses, but only the shot of the whipping scars on his back became a widely circulated carte de visite. The image of him in a new private’s army uniform appeared, smaller, to one side of the picture of his bared back, near the end of an issue of Harper’s Weekly. (See Bruce Laurie’s “Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image, reviewed by Anne Strachan Cross, pages 323–325 of this issue, for an investigation of this image.) On a Black man’s body, a soldier’s uniform not only signified freedom rather than enslavement. It also suggested equality—it was, after all, the same [End Page 327] one white soldiers wore (even if Black soldiers alone got their pay docked for it)—and citizenship. The eagerness with which newly enlisted men had their photographs taken in uniform suggests they understood very well what Frederick Douglass expressed: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., . . . and there is no power on the earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” The Black Civil War Soldier presents an unmatched array of such photographs—enough to ensure their place in any canon of wartime imagery and to make Black citizens, more than Black slaves, an essential part of the visual record of the Civil War. The quality of the physical book is no small part of this project. Generous in size, on glossy paper, it features scores of high-resolution images, mostly in color, to capture what a visitor to an archive would see: sepia tones, hand-coloring, gilt bindings on carte-de-visite albums, metal clasps on ornately decorated tintype frames. With production values that rival the kinds of commemorative and coffee-table books from which, for many years, young people in a certain class of American homes formed their initial impressions of the conflict (remember the companion volume to Ken Burns’s The Civil War?), Deborah Willis’s new book claims a place as a definitive reference—one that puts African Americans’ roles at the center of the story. The book’s text, organized into five chronological chapters, consists primarily of excerpts from primary sources. Civil War historians will be familiar with many of these, drawn from notable figures such as Charlotte Forten, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Robert Gould Shaw. Some of the richest material—letters by Black soldiers and their families—will likewise be familiar to scholars of “The Black Military Experience,” to borrow the title of a key volume of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s Freedom series, which is among several published anthologies Willis draws from. Connections between these sources and the images that accompany them can sometimes be gnomic or elusive. A photograph of Sojourner Truth appears without comment below a Massachusetts soldier’s letter about pay inequity; the images of the enslaved man Gordon are reproduced without discussion in the text; and Martha Glover’s letter to her husband dangles unremarked at the end of a chapter, despite being a widely cited source in scholarship on family structure (Amy Murrell Taylor), congressional abolition (Amy Dru Stanley), and Black women’s abuse by enslavers (Sharon Romeo). Readers of this journal may be frustrated by the book’s lack of historiography or its reticence about some complicated textual material, but its aim is not...

World War II and Black Economic Progress

During the 1940s, a substantial share of southern Black men moved from low-skilled to much better paying semiskilled jobs. Using newly digitized military data, I show that counties with higher World War II casualty rates among semiskilled White soldiers saw an increase in the share of semiskilled Black workers. These deaths opened new employment opportunities for Black southerners and, together with learning effects by employers, can explain 35% of the occupational upgrading at mid-century. I provide evidence that the casualty-induced labor shortages reduced racial barriers to entry, leading to a positive selection of Black workers into semiskilled employment.