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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations > Civil war
The history of the Moroccan troops in the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939) is the story of an encounter between two culturally and
ethnically different people, and the attempts by both sides,
Moroccan and Spanish, to take control of this contact. This book
shows to what extent colonials could participate in negotiating
limits and taboos rather than being only on the receiving end of
them. The examination of this encounter, in its military,
religious, as well as sexual aspects, sheds new light on colonial
relations, and on how unique or typical the Spanish colonial case
is in comparison to other European ones.
The Diary of a Civil War Marine: Private Josiah Gregg is a rare
firsthand account of a United States Marine during the Civil War,
written within hours of the events described. Gregg enlisted as a
private at the beginning of the war, and served as a shipboard
Marine on the Vanderbilt as it hunted Confederate raiders in the
Caribbean and Atlantic. He also served aboard the Brooklyn at the
battles of Mobile Bay and Fort Fischer. Part war story and part
travel log, Gregg tells a good story with the confident prose of a
man who worked as a school teacher and a clerk before the war. Seen
by only Gregg's descendants for the last 140 years, the diary
entries have been edited to include notes that explain what might
be unclear to a modern audience. Also included are brief histories
of the ships and the events described in the journal, and eight
black and white photographs that were found inside the journal.
A talented field commander, Union General Philip Kearny began his
career as a lieutenant with the 1st U.S. Dragoons. He studied
cavalry tactics in France and fought with the Chasseurs d'Afrique
in Algeria, where his fearlessness earned him the nickname "Kearny
le Magnifique." Returning to America, he wrote a cavalry manual for
the U.S. Army and later raised a troop of dragoons--using his own
money to buy 120 matching dapple-gray mounts for his men--and led
them during the Mexican War, where he lost an arm. One of the most
experienced officers at the outbreak of the Civil War, he commanded
a division in the Army of the Potomac, famously leading a charge at
the Battle of Williamsburg, saber in hand and reins in his teeth.
He disliked and sometimes disobeyed General George McClellan, once
protesting an order to retreat as "prompted by cowardice or
treason." Kearny was on the verge of higher command when he was
killed in action in the Battle of Chantilly in 1862.
In the historical literature of the American Civil War, the
president, the generals, and the cabinet secretaries have won the
war of words. Of the hundreds of men who served in the House of
Representative during this great struggle, only a handful appear
typically in general discussions of the period. Yet without a
deeper understanding of the contributions of the members of
Congress to the successful prosecution of the war we cannot fully
appreciate the desperate nature of that conflict and its
significance in the building of the nation. This book explores
important aspects of the Civil War from the perspective of Capital
Hill. It is an effort to reconnoiter some of the possibilities for
understanding the congressmen, their relations with one another,
and their interaction with President Lincoln. Designed as an
exploration rather than as a full-scale history of the Civil War
Congress, this book reveals a legislature in which the average
length of service was very short, although a relatively small core
of national public figures provide continuity. The era was one of
strong ideology and fateful policy decisions, but the congressmen
continued to think also as politicians.
This book focuses on an important but neglected aspect of the
Spanish Civil War, the evolution of medical and surgical care of
the wounded during the conflict. Importantly, the focus is from a
mainly Spanish perspective - as the Spanish are given a voice in
their own story, which has not always been the case. Central to the
book is General Franco's treatment of Muslim combatants, the
anarchist contribution to health, and the medicalisation of
propaganda - themes that come together in a medico-cultural study
of the Spanish Civil War. Suffusing the narrative and the analysis
is the traumatic legacy of conflict, an untreated wound that a new
generation of Spaniards are struggling to heal.
Civil War Torpedoes examines the history of landmine development
and use in the Civil War and beyond. The author organizes his
scholarship around three thematic elements: tactics, technology,
and morality. Hess uses multiple archival sources to tell a
compelling narrative, one that stresses not only the tactical and
technological challenges faced by torpedo pioneers but one that
also considers the moral stigma most contemporaries attached to
this new weapon of war.
On August 26, 1861, one hundred volunteers met at Camp Wood and
formed Company A. These men, for the most part, were well educated
and left to us a series of letters to families and friends,
diaries, letters to their local newspapers, official reports, and
talks they gave after the war at reunions. Their correspondence
differs from most others in that they do not simply record the
temperature and what they had to eat. The story the correspondence
of Company A tells allows the reader to know what it was really
like to be a volunteer soldier. The men describe what they saw from
their vantage points on the parts of the battlefield they could
see. Their letters cover their discussions and arguments concerning
slavery, the national draft, the right of "citizen soldiers" to
confiscate property, and the use of blacks in combat. On a very
personal level they describe what it was like to be captured and
spend time in Confederate prisons awaiting exchange, what they felt
when they had to leave wounded or dead comrades on the field when
they had to retreat, whether to reenlist, the punishments they had
to endure, the witnessing of military executions, and whether to
mutiny. There are marvellous descriptions of the unauthorized
truces the men arranged with the Confederates to trade tobacco for
coffee or to bathe in a stream separating them.
A panoramic collection of essays written by both established and
emerging scholars, American Discord examines critical aspects of
the Civil War era, including rhetoric and nationalism, politics and
violence, gender, race, and religion. Beginning with an overview of
the political culture of the 1860s, the collection reveals that
most Americans entered the decade opposed to political compromise.
Essays from Megan L. Bever, Glenn David Brasher, Lawrence A.
Kreiser Jr., and Christian McWhirter discuss the rancorous
political climate of the day and the sense of racial superiority
woven into the political fabric of the era. Shifting focus to the
actual war, Rachel K. Deale, Lindsay Rae Privette, Adam H. Petty,
and A. Wilson Greene contribute essays on internal conflict, lack
of compromise, and commitment to white supremacy. Here,
contributors adopt a broad understanding of ""battle,"" considering
environmental effects and the impact of the war after the battles
were over. Essays by Laura Mammina and Charity Rakestraw and
Kristopher A. Teters reveal that while the war blurred the
boundaries, it ultimately prompted Americans to grasp for the
familiar established hierarchies of gender and race. Examinations
of chaos and internal division suggest that the political culture
of Reconstruction was every bit as contentious as the war itself.
Former Confederates decried the barbarity of their Yankee
conquerors, while Republicans portrayed Democrats as backward rubes
in need of civilizing. Essays by Kevin L. Hughes, Daniel J. Burge,
T. Robert Hart, John F. Marszalek, and T. Michael Parrish highlight
Americans' continued reliance on hyperbolic rhetoric. American
Discord embraces a multifaceted view of the Civil War and its
aftermath, attempting to capture the complicated human experiences
of the men and women caught in the conflict. These essays
acknowledge that ordinary people and their experiences matter, and
the dynamics among family members, friends, and enemies have
far-reaching consequences.
This biographical dictionary catalogs the Union army colonels who
commanded regiments from Missouri and the Western States and
Territories during the Civil War. The seventh volume in a Series
documenting Union army colonels, this book details the lives of
officers who did not advance beyond that rank. Included for each
colonel are brief biographical excerpts and any available
photographs, many of them published for the first time.
This volume of original essays, featuring an all-star lineup of
Civil War and Lincoln scholars, is aimed at general readers and
students eager to learn more about the most current interpretations
of the period and the man at the center of its history. The
contributors examine how Lincoln actively and consciously managed
the war - diplomatically, militarily, and in the realm of what we
might now call public relations - and in doing so, reshaped and
redefined the fundamental role of the president.
Jesse Olsavsky's The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic
story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground
Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These
groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black
neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of
the Underground Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand
refugees, building an elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers
across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and class. Olsavsky
reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated
by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, including
famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and
Henry David Thoreau, who shared critical information with one
another. Formerly enslaved runaways-who grasped the economy of
slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and
communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists-serve as the
book's central focus. The dialogues between fugitives and
abolitionists further radicalized the latter's tactics and inspired
novel forms of feminism, prison reform, and utopian constructs.
These notions transformed abolitionism into a revolutionary
movement, one at the heart of the crises that culminated in the
Civil War.
The study of Confederate troops, generals, and politicians during
the Civil War often overshadows the history of noncombatants- slave
and free, male and female, rich and poor- threatening obscurity for
important voices of the period. Although civilians comprised the
vast majority of those affected by the conflict, even the number of
civilian casualties over the course of the Civil War remains
unknown. Wallace Hettle's The Confederate Homefront provides a
sample of the enormous documentary record on the domestic
population of the Confederate states, offering a glimpse of what it
was like to live through a brutal war fought almost entirely on
southern soil. The Confederate Homefront collects excerpts from
slave narratives, poems, diaries and journals, along with brief
introductions that examine the circumstances and biases of each
source. Bearing witness to the lives of marginalized groups,
narratives by women navigating complex webs of loyalties and former
slaves resisting and escaping the Confederacy feature prominently.
Hettle also focuses on lesser-known aspects of the war, such as
conscription, draft evasion, and the development of Union military
policies that helped bring about the demise of slavery. Reflecting
recent work by Civil War historians, Hettle includes numerous
documents that focus on the role of Christianity in justifying the
Confederacy's increasingly destructive moral and ideological
position in the war. He also examines the guerrilla war on the
southern homefront and the plight of black and white refugees,
adding new insights into the destructive impact of warfare on the
lives of civilians. The first documentary history to foreground the
experiences of Confederate civilians, The Confederate Homefront
illuminates the overlooked lives of noncombatants in the Civil War
and bears witness to the traumatic final years of the institution
of American slavery.
In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered as the nation was in the
throes of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that both sides
"read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His
aid against the other." He wasn't speaking metaphorically: the
Bible was frequently wielded as a weapon in support of both North
and South. As James P. Byrd reveals in this insightful narrative,
no book was more important to the Civil War than the Bible. From
Massachusetts to Mississippi and beyond, the Bible was the nation's
most read and respected book. It presented a drama of salvation and
damnation, of providence and judgment, of sacred history and
sacrifice. When Americans argued over the issues that divided them
- slavery, secession, patriotism, authority, white supremacy, and
violence - the Bible was the book they most often invoked. Soldiers
fought the Civil War with Bibles in hand, and both sides called the
war just and sacred. In scripture, both Union and Confederate
soldiers found inspiration for dying-and for killing-on a scale
never before seen in the nation's history. With approximately
750,000 fatalities, the Civil War was the deadliest of the nation's
wars, leading many to turn to the Bible not just to fight but to
deal with its inevitable trauma. A fascinating overview of
religious and military conflict, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood
draws on an astonishing array of sources to demonstrate the many
ways that Americans enlisted the Bible in the nation's bloodiest,
and arguably most biblically-saturated conflict.
From the perspective of the North, the Civil War began as a war to
restore the Union and ended as a war to make a more perfect Union.
The Civil War not only changed the moral meaning of the Union, it
changed what the Union stood for in political, economic, and
transnational terms. This volume examines the transformations the
Civil War brought to the American Union as a
politico-constitutional, social, and economic system. It explores
how the war changed the meaning of the Union with regard to the
supremacy of the federal government over the states, the right of
secession, the rights of citizenship, and the political balance
between the union's various sections. It further considers the
effect of the war on international and transnational perceptions of
the United States. Finally, it considers how historical memory has
shaped the legacy of the Civil War in the last 150 years.
Providing a fresh look at a crucial aspect of the American Civil
War, this new study explores the day-to-day life of people in the
Confederate States of America as they struggled to cope with a
crisis that spared no one, military or civilian. Mobley touches on
the experiences of everyone on the home front-white and black, male
and female, rich and poor, young and old, native and foreign born.
He looks at health, agriculture, industry, transportation, refugees
city life, religion, education, culture families, personal
relationships, and public welfare. In so doing, he offers his
perspective on how much the will of the people contributed to the
final defeat of the Southern cause. Although no single experience
was common to all Southerners, a great many suffered poverty,
dislocation, and heartbreak. For African Americans, however, the
war brought liberation from slavery and the promise of a new life.
White women, too, saw their lives transformed as wartime challenges
gave them new responsibilities and experiences. Mobley explains how
the Confederate military draft, heavy taxes, and restrictions on
personal freedoms led to widespread dissatisfaction and cries for
peace among Southern folk. He describes the Confederacy as a region
of divided loyalties, where pro-Union and pro-Confederate neighbors
sometimes clashed violently. This readable, one-volume account of
life behind the lines will prove particularly useful for students
of the conflict.
Charles I provides a detailed overview of Charles Stuart, placing
his reign firmly within the wider context of this turbulent period
and examining the nature of one of the most complex monarchs in
British history. The book is organised chronologically, beginning
in 1600 and covering Charles' early life, his first difficulties
with his parliaments, the Personal Rule, the outbreak of Civil War,
and his trial and eventual execution in 1649. Interwoven with
historiography, the book emphasises the impact of Charles'
challenging inheritance on his early years as king and explores the
transition from his original championing of international
Protestantism to his later vision of a strong and centralised
monarchy influenced by continental models, which eventually
provoked rebellion and civil war across his three kingdoms. This
study brings to light the mass of contradictions within Charles'
nature and his unusual approach to monarchy, resulting in his
unrivaled status as the only English king to have been tried and
executed by his own subjects. Offering a fresh approach to this
significant reign and the fascinating character that held it,
Charles I is the perfect book for students of early modern Britain
and the English Civil War.
Organized in the fall of 1862, the 125th Ohio Volunteer Infantry
was commanded by the aggressive and ambitious Colonel Emerson
Opdycke, a citizen-soldier with no military experience who rose
from lieutenant to brevet major general. Part of the Army of the
Cumberland, the 125th first saw combat at Chickamauga. Charging
into Dyer's cornfield to blunt a rebel breakthrough, the
outnumbered Buckeyes pressed forward and, despite heavy casualties,
drove the enemy back, buying time for the fractured Union army to
rally. Impressed by the heroic charge by an untested regiment,
Union General Thomas Wood labeled them "Opdycke's Tigers." After
losing a third of their number at Chickamauga, the 125th fought
engagements across Tennessee and Georgia during 1864, and took part
in the decisive battles at Franklin and Nashville. Drawing on both
primary sources and recent scholarship, this is the first
full-length history of the regiment in more than 120 years.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History The unforgettable saga of
one enslaved woman's fight for justice-and reparations Born into
slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed
in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward
colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into
bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving
birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her
in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a
second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for
damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation,
Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The
decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount, though
the largest ever awarded by an American court in restitution for
slavery, was the fact that any money was awarded at all. By the
time the case was decided, Ward had become a wealthy businessman
and a pioneer of convict leasing in the South. Wood's son later
became a prominent Chicago lawyer, and she went on to live until
1912. McDaniel's book is an epic tale of a black woman who survived
slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory
over one of her oppressors. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a
portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing
reminder of the lessons of her story, which establish beyond
question the connections between slavery and the prison system that
rose in its place.
As they trudged over the Pyrenees, the Spanish republicans became
one of the most iconoclastic groups of refugees to have sought
refuge in twentieth-century France. This book explores the array of
opportunities, constraints, choices and motivations that
characterised their lives. Using a wide range of empirical
material, it presents a compelling case for rethinking exile in
relation to refugees' lived experiences and memory activities. The
major historical events of the period are covered: the development
of refugees' rights and the 'concentration' camps of the Third
Republic, the para-military labour formations of the Second World
War, the dynamics shaping resistance activities, and the role of
memory in the campaign to return to Spain. This study additionally
analyses how these experiences have shaped homes and France's
memorial landscape, thereby offering an unparalleled exploration of
the long-term effects of exile from the mass exodus of 1939 through
to the seventieth-anniversary commemorations in 2009. -- .
Pushing back against the idea that the Slave Power conspiracy was
merely an ideological construction, Alice Elizabeth Malavasic
argues that some southern politicians in the 1850s did indeed hold
an inordinate amount of power in the antebellum Congress and used
it to foster the interests of slavery. Malavasic focuses her
argument on Senators David Rice Atchison of Missouri, Andrew
Pickens Butler of South Carolina, and Robert M. T. Hunter and James
Murray Mason of Virginia, known by their contemporaries as the ""F
Street Mess"" for the location of the house they shared. Unlike the
earlier and better-known triumvirate of John C. Calhoun, Henry
Clay, and Daniel Webster, the F Street Mess was a functioning
oligarchy within the U.S. Senate whose power was based on shared
ideology, institutional seniority, and personal friendship. By
centering on their most significant achievement - forcing a rewrite
of the Nebraska bill that repealed the restriction against slavery
above the 36 degrees 30' parallel - Malavasic demonstrates how the
F Street Mess's mastery of the legislative process led to one of
most destructive pieces of legislation in United States history and
helped pave the way to secession.
There is an extraordinary range of material in this anthology, from
Lincoln's Gettysburg address to a contemporary account of a visit
from the Ku Klux Klan. The primary sources reproduced are both
visual and written, and the secondary materials present a
remarkable breadth and quality of relevant scholarship.
Contains an extensive selection of writings and illustrations on
the American Civil War
Reflects society and culture as well as the politics and key
battles of the Civil War
Reproduces and links primary and secondary sources to encourage
exploration of the material
Includes editorial introductions and study questions to aid
understanding
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