The common idea that southerners were for the Great War, can be contested because of how rural southerners were suppressed. Jeanette Keith, the author of Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class and Power in the Rural South during the First World War, focused on World War I, specifically on the Home Front. She introduces three larger themes; War Mobilization, State’s Rights, and Race and Class issue that can be found amongst the seven chapters in Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight. Keith fights the master narrative about southern whites. “White southerners, the nation’s most militaristic people, stand always ready to fight their country’s wars.” In several examples, she shows the southerners appeal against war from a peaceful outburst …show more content…
of free speech to full outright resistance and protest to the Great War, the Draft, and conscription. The main contributions of this book are how she discusses the actions of the locals, slackers, and deserters, protest and surveillance of Union members, and how race was handled throughout the South. John Smith, a deserter from the Army, is how Keith began to talk about the Souths resistance to the Great War.
Smith was an average man who left for War but went AWOL after taking leave. Later in the book Keith discusses Smith and similar deserters more in-depth. The troops that dragged him away from his family were sent to the region to acquire all the deserters and slackers around “the DeKalb, Warren, Van Buren, White and Cumberland counties that were harboring them.” Harboring was a major issue in parts of the South and in some cases was charged as a crime. Keith goes into detail about several incidents of slackers and deserters being housed and harbored by family members for example the Cleburne County slackers and draft evader. The intimidation tactics used on the family eventually made the deserters surrender to surrounding counties. These people were charged because of the defenses taken up against local sheriffs. Keith connects the high number of deserters in the South to the slackers’ ability of getting away with it weather it be hiding in the mountains or in nearby …show more content…
woods. In the event of Tom Watson, who protested class was an anti-war advocate.
Watson believed people were being deprived of their civil liberties. Watson wrote about his socialist beliefs in his national newspaper the Jeffersonian. The readers of his newspaper did not obtain a copy of his latest version because of the Wilson administration denying Watson’s mailing privileges. After Wilson and the postmaster silenced the rural radical press it allowed propaganda to flourish and dominate the field. Addition to Watson’s views other Socialist unions were under attack. These unions were private about their meetings, but the members of the unions were under harsh surveillance. After an intense investigation the unions eventually disbanded or were arrested for conspiracy. Moreover, Keith examines how race and class influenced rural locals all over the South. In Texas, blacks were put under surveillance because locals believed they would take up arms and take their women. Also, after the Espionage Act many blacks in Texas were being scared into silence. Keith talks about the Bureau records and how an agent overlooked “white violence against blacks” for merely speaking extremely about events related to the
War. Another key point about the race and class issue was its implication to the slackers and deserters of the South. In different states black and white deserters were treated differently. In Mississippi, white deserters were perceived as dangerous while blacks were considered innocent. This mindset was because of Mississippians locals not issuing African Americans their notice. The locals would escort the deserters to the camps and then collect the reward for doing so. This operation was frowned upon by the national government and they believed it needed to be fixed immediately. All things considered, Jeanette Keith succeeded in contesting the master narrative. She depicts the South as being the most problematic. The locals were against the draft and tried their hardest not to register and or show up for camp. After realizing that the Draft was not going to be stopped in time rural southerners had only three options: “accept the situation and work within it, protest passively through evasion, or fight.” Evidence from town newspapers, and letters to representatives prove how white and black southerners were distressed about conscription, treason, and deferments. Keith provides several quotes from southerners requesting exemption from farmers to religious members. Consequently, once locals were not approved their deferments they began to desert and contest for their right not to fight in the Great War. Ideally, history is subjective when looking through certain lenses, Keith lenses focused on the locals of the South and there opinion from local letters found in the files of the many investigations by the Justice Bureau.
C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most Southern historian and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, for Mary Chestnut's Civil War. He’s also a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. In honor of his long and adventurous career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. The book actually helped shape that historical curve of black liberation; it’s not slowed movement; it’s more like a rollercoaster.
In his book, Blood Done Sign My Name, the author Timothy Tyson tells the story of the highly combustible racial atmosphere in the American South before, during, and after the Jim Crow era. Unlike Margaret Mitchell’s account of the glory and grandeur of the Antebellum South, Tyson exposes the reader to the horrific and brutal reality that the black race experienced on a daily basis. Tyson highlights the double standard that existed during this period in history, arguing that the hypocrisy of the “white” southern judicial system allowed the murder of a young black African-American male at the hands of white racists to go unpunished (Tyson 2004, 244).
Currently in the United States of America, there is a wave a patriotism sweeping across this great land: a feeling of pride in being an American and in being able to call this nation home. The United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave; however, for the African-American citizens of the United States, from the inception of this country to midway through the twentieth century, there was no such thing as freedom, especially in the Deep South. Nowhere is that more evident than in Stories of Scottsboro, an account of the Scottsboro trials of 1931-1937, where nine African-American teenage boys were falsely accused of raping two white girls in Scottsboro, Alabama and no matter how much proof was brought forth proving there innocence, they were always guilty. This was a period of racism and bigotry in our country that is deeply and vividly portrayed though different points of view through author James E. Goodman.
Christopher Paul Curtis wrote The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 throughout the course of 1995. The novel follows the Watsons, a black family living in Flint, Michigan during the Civil Rights Era. In a historical context, 1963 and the early 1990s have far more in common than one would expect. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 following the church bombing in Birmingham, and yet race-based discrimination remains a problem even in our modern society via passive racism. This paper will analyze the ways in which Curtis’ The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 draws parallels between the time in which his is writing during and the time in which he is writing about. This analysis will also shed light on what can be called the “white standard,” wherein all things white are “good” or “better” and anything not-white is “bad.”
The book ‘For Cause and Comrades’ is a journey to comprehend why the soldiers in the Civil War fought, why they fought so passionately, and why they fought for the long period of time. Men were pulling guns against other men who they had known their whole lives. McPherson’s main source of evidence was the many letters from the soldiers writing to home. One of the many significant influences was how the men fought to prove their masculinity and courage. To fight would prove they were a man to their community and country. Fighting also had to do with a duty to their family. Ideology was also a major motivating factor; each side thought they were fighting for their liberty. The soldier’s reputations were created and demolished on the battlefield, where men who showed the most courage were the most honored. Religion also played an important role because the second Great Awakening had just occurred. Their religion caused the men who thought of themselves as saved to be fearless of death, “Religion was the only thing that kept this soldier going; even in the trenches…” (McPherson, p. 76) R...
The Confederate jobs, wealth, and property (including slaves) were at stake. “Confederates fought for independence, for their property and way of life, for their very survival as a nation” (McPherson, 27). For this reason, dedication for the cause was strong for Confederates. A collection of letters from Civil War soldiers online, alongside with McPherson’s evidence, shows the patriotism and dedication to their nation and slaves. Confederates stood behind each other and were dedicated to having their own nation; one soldier stated, “that if he was killed, it would be while ‘fighting gloriously for the undying principles of Constitutional liberty and self government’” (McPherson, 11). Private Street, while on his death bed, wrote to his wife: "we must never dispair, for death is preferable to a life spent under the gaulling yoke of abolition rule" (Street, 1862). The reasons that fueled Confederate soldiers were the very practices that they strived on in everyday life; these soldiers naturally had dedication, but patriotism towards their nation and brotherhood is universal between the letters presented, and helped unify the Confederacy.
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
The battalion’s arrival to Texas was met with great hostility from the white residents. “So opposed were whites to the very sight of black men in uniform that it was not unusual for trains carrying black troops to be fired on as they passed through Southern towns.” (Dorau, 1988) Houston patrolmen harassed and arrested soldiers for minor infractions and perceived slights that further increased racial tensions in the
People attending schools before 1960’s were learning about certain “unscrupulous carpetbaggers”, “traitorous scalawags”, and the “Radical Republicans”(223). According to the historians before the event of 1960’s revision, these people are the reason that the “white community of South banded together to overthrow these “black” governments and restore home rule”(223). While this might have been true if it was not for the fact that the “carpetbaggers were former Union soldiers”, “Scalawags… emerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionists”(227). Eric Foner wrote the lines in his thesis “The New View of Reconstruction” to show us how completely of target the historians before the 1960’s revision were in their beliefs.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett is an investigative journalist who wrote in honesty and bluntness about the tragedies and continued struggles of the Negro man. She was still very much involved with the issue even after being granted freedom and the right to vote. Statistics have shown that death and disparity continued to befall the Negro people in the South where the white man was “educated so long in that school of practice” (Pg. 677 Par. 2). Yet in all the countless murders of Negroes by the white man only three had been convicted. The white man of the South, although opposed to the freedom of Negroes would eventually have to face the fact of the changing times. However, they took every opportunity and excuse to justify their continued horrors. There were three main excuses that the white man of the South came up w...
More confederates than unions were illiterate due to the fact that most held professional or white-collard jobs (36). To make the Union soldiers sample fair sense most blacks couldn’t read or write, 2 who could were included in the sample (36). The levels of patriotism differed from the upper and lower south given to the fact that the upper south were mainly cotton states. The confederates felt as if it was a “rich mans woar but the poor man has to do the fifting” (16). The confederates were mainly fighting for “independence, property and way of life” (27). Some characteristics the soldiers had in common were McPherson’s calculations for the Union. He came to seeing that out of 562 Union soldier’s letters read only 67 percent voice strong patriotic motives. This is the same as the two-thirds of Confederates. As a result from reading McPherson’s book, research showed that the Union and Confederate soldiers expressed about the same degree of patriotic and ideological convictions. Even though they both had different reasons for fighting the levels of sincerity and dedication in their notes were
The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War II, Macmillan Publishing, New York, New York, 1999. Duis, Perry. The War in American Culture, The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Schultz, Stanley K. American History 102 Civil War to the Present. Copyright 1999 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin a href="http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture21.html">http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture21.html/a>.
Those studying the experience of African Americans in World War II consistently ask one central question: “Was World War II a turning point for African Americans?” In elaboration, does World War II symbolize a prolongation of policies of segregation and discrimination both on the home front and the war front, or does it represent the start of the Civil Rights Movement that brought racial equality? The data points to the war experience being a transition leading to the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s. World War II presented several new opportunities for African Americans to participate in the war effort and thereby begin to earn an equal place in American society and politics. From the beginning of the war, the black media urged fighting
Robert F. Williams was one of the most influential active radical minds of a generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever affected American and African American history. During his time as the president of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950’s, Williams and his most dedicated followers (women and men) used machine guns, Molotov cocktails, and explosives to defend against Klan terrorists. These are the true terrorists to American society. Williams promoted and enforced this idea of "armed self-reliance" by blacks, and he challenged not just white supremacists and leftists, but also Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, and the civil rights establishment itself. During the 1960s, Williams was exiled to Cuba, and there he had a radical radio station titled "Radio Free Dixie." This broadcast of his informed of black politics and music The Civil Rights movement is usually described as an nonviolent / peaceful call on America 's guilty conscience, and the retaliation of Black Power as a violent response of these injustices against African Americans. Radio Free Dixie shows how both of these racial and equality movements spawned from the same seed and were essentially the same in the fight for African American equality and an end to racism. Robert F. Williams 's story demonstrates how independent political action, strong cultural pride and identity, and armed self-reliance performed in the South in a semi-partnership with legal efforts and nonviolent protest nationwide.
The book Girl at War, written by Sarah Nović takes place from the point of view of a naїve, young girl growing up in Croatia during times of civil war. Young Ana is curious and wants to know more about the war. There is something very intriguing about reading a book from the point of view of a youthful child who is so innocent and the reader knows more about the situation than the narrator. Sarah Nović does an exceptional job of keeping the reader aware of the conflicts through the use many literary devices while the reader still can capture the beauty and keep the purity of the ingenuous child, Ana.