...Malcolm DuBose Dr. Paul A. Cimbala Seminar:Civil War Soldiers Essay 3 The extent of political ideology as a motivational factor for soldiers in the American Civil War was so great that it changed the historical narrative of the war for veterans and future southerners. In his semi-biographical book, The Making of a Confederate, Williams L. Barney uses the life of an elite Western North Carolina planter named Walter Lenoir, and his descent into the Lost Cause ideology. Barney presents Lenoir as a comparatively liberal man of the time. Educated at his home states university, prior to the attack on Fort Sumner he planned to move to Minnesota, a fairly young state that was actively recruiting Americans from other states and Europeans to solidify population dominance over the inhabitant native tribes. Barney characterizes the Lost Cause phenomenon as an attachment to the faded glory of a romanticized Confederate past. Using Williams L. Barney as a model of the Confederate soldier, his choice of subject varies from the popular trend of studying the poor southern confederate soldiers and his motivations. Lenoir, an elite southern planter was the quintessential model of who would most benefit from a victorious south. Though southern identity contains it fare share of myriad ambiguities, Barney presents a semi-biographical analysis that precisely dissects the often-proclaimed complexity of the Lost Cause narrative. With intention, Barney shows that the preservation of slavery...
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...result in crossing lines and getting in trouble, but can also be one the most effective way to get noticed. If an opinion is not being noticed, citizens can make it a priority to be heard because without a voice there can be no guidelines. In government, boundaries are needed to lead its citizens towards a righteous path; however, if a citizen leans toward another path of righteousness a voice is needed to be heard. Citizens should not be lurking in the shadows and keeping an opinion bottled up to never be heard. If an idea or belief gets shot down, a citizen can try again to make their idea noticed. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses civil disobedience in “ Letter from Birmingham Jail,” as “ Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (173). Although civil disobedience can alter life drastically, it does not mean to continue on the path of insanity, but to stand up for what you believe is just. While standing up for justice is admirable, however, it is not always easy. In Iran, the government can take disciplinary action towards its citizens striking fear and panic into their souls. In the book The Complete Persepolis written by Marjane Satrapi, in which she discusses a hectic life in Iran. In chapter fourteen “The Wine,” Satrapi discusses how the government takes disciplinary action towards the citizens who chose to rebel by having a party. The citizens found at the party...
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...was a powerful pioneer in civil rights and a powerful leader who faced many struggles of prejudices because she was a colored woman. Because she had lived a difficult life in the capital of the US, she decided it was time the world knew of her the many trajectories she continued to face along with many other African Americans. On October 10, 1906, Terrell gave a speech titled, “ What it Mean to be Colored in the Capitol of the U.S.,” to the members of the United Woman’s club in Washington, D.C. This speech was very influential and significant speech that served as a voice for other African Americans who had no voice. This speech also was a time for Terrell to explain the unnecessary hassles she and other blacks had to take on when trying to live as a citizen in the capital. Through this speech we can see an abundance of prejudice that taint the lives of African Americans in the U.S.. In the following paragraphs, I will establish the notability of this speech, analyze the historical context that sparked the discourse into existence and explore other rhetorical features that will establish my analysis’s significance. Mary Church Terrell embodies feminine style rhetoric in her argument to address the social, economic and political struggles placed against African Americans with the undertone of constitutive rhetoric, topical structure, pathos and logos to validate her point. History: Mary Church Terrell was born during the civil war on September 23,1863 to...
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...weeks of intense but fun time learning about American Literature. There were some awesome topics, essays and readings that were my favorites. However, there were also some few topics that even though were interesting to read were my least favorite. The body of this essay is going to be talking about my three favorite as well as my three least topic, essays, forums and reading throughout the course. My first is Anti-Slavery and Slave Narratives in week seven forum, some of the challenges Linda Brent faced while she lived under Flint. While reading, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” it actually made me feel very sad for this...
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...The Rebirth of the South: Wolfe, Faulkner, Warren The South is more distinctively a region than any other section of the United States is, because of the experiences and traditions that have taught it attitudes sharply at variance with some of the standard American beliefs: ● The sense of failure, which comes from being the only group of Americans who have known military defeat, military occupation, and seemingly unconquerable poverty; ● The sense of guilt, which comes from having been a part of America’s classic symbol of injustice, the enslavement and then the segregation of the Negro; and ● The sense of frustration, which comes from the consistent inadequacy of the means at hand to wrestle with the problems to be faced, whether they be poverty, racial intolerance, or the preservation of an historical past rich in tradition. In the years after the Civil War, the Southerner attempted to deny these things by the simple, but ultimately ineffectual, process of ignoring them. The Southern local colour writers concentrated on the quaint, the eccentric, and the remote; and the creators of the “plantation tradition” idealised the past. Against this sentimental view the first two voices that were strongly raised were those of Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell, Virginians who in their differing ways defined the patterns which 20th-century Southern fiction was to take when it became serious and fell into the hands of that group of writers of talent who have practised...
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...African American History Introduction In the essay “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro- American History” the eminent historian John Hope Franklin declared “Every generation has the opportunity to write its own history, and indeed it is obliged to do so.”1 The social and political revolutions of 1960s have made fulfilling such a responsibility less daunting than ever. Invaluable references, including Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Evelyn Brooks Higgingbotham, ed., Harvard Guide to African American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert E. Weems, Jr., eds., The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); and Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro- American Slavery (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), provide informative narratives along with expansive bibliographies. General texts covering major historical events with attention to chronology include John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), considered a classic; along with Joe William Trotter, Jr., The African American 1  Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and, Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The African American Odyssey...
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...African American literature is surprising, captivating, and spirited. Once you start reading a story it is easy to get caught up in the tale being told. The descriptive nature of the works makes it easy to relate to them. Throughout my readings thus far in the class I have noticed some common themes that reoccur in many of the stories and poems. Of course slavery was a very common topic but there were others such as inequality between the races and sexes, injustice and resentment, the black identity, and a strong faith and religion. Even though the words can be separated in the end they all come back together. There were many narratives written by fugitive slaves before the Civil War and by former slaves in the postbellum era. These narratives document slave life from the perspective of first-hand experience. The stories they tell are dark and ugly. The authors like Douglas and Jacobs reveal the struggles, sorrows, aspirations, and triumphs of slaves in absorbingly personal story-telling. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. In it she describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. She also recounts her life in slavery in the context of family relationships with her escape and her struggle to free her children. Fredrick Douglas who wrote Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas, an American Slave, Written by Himself...
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...students and historians on the topic of the Vietnam War. Each chapter brings a new area, which needs to be addressed about how to remember the war from the viewpoint of the women. She states, “had to face up to met own ignorance of Vietnam’s postwar circumstance, to figure out why women warriors, so essential to Vietnam’s long history… have remained invisible to most Americans,” (page 6). Overall, this book is a great read to open the eyes of the reader to an untold story of hardships and struggles. While, Turner is respectful to the culture of Vietnams people, it is hard to fully understand the importance of this topic. Yes, it is important to understand a forget history of gender during warfare. But, the way she sets out to write her book is hard to follow at some points in the book. Through out her book, it felt as if she was trying to do too much in a short amount of pages. Turner has great oral stories for the reader to learn about, but it felt as if it was rushed. The...
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...Stonewall. No, I’m not talking about the Confederate general during the American Civil War. I’m talking about the Stonewall Uprising — the dawn of the modern day gay rights movement. During the 1960’s, homosexuals unwillingly complied with police forces and yielded to the homophobic American laws. This was true until the 1969 police raid of Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar located in New York’s Greenwich Village. In the early morning hours of June 28, members of the New York Police Department’s Public Morals Squad stormed the bar, but to their surprise, the bar patrons fought back, thus symbolizing a significant change in the mindset of homosexuals across the country. This police raid ignited a fire within these targeted homosexuals, and...
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...autobiography was “a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt at embellishment,” readers for nearly a century have found it richly rewarding. Today, Up From Slavery appeals to a wide audience from early adolescence through adulthood. More important, however, is the inspiration his story of hard work and positive goals gives to all readers. His life is an example providing hope to all. The complexity and contradictions of his life make his autobiography intellectually intriguing for advanced readers. To some he was known as the Sage of Tuskegee or the Black Moses. One of his prominent biographers, Louis R. Harlan, called him the “Wizard of the Tuskegee Machine.” Others acknowledged him to be a complicated person and public figure. Students of American social and political history have come to see that Washington lived a double life. Publicly he appeased the white establishment by remaining cautious in his charges and demands. Privately he worked tirelessly to undo the effects of institutional and cultural racism. Although he seemed to have made a grand compromise, first with the white south and then with white America, he worked in deepest secret to undermine the compromise and advance the social and economic position of blacks. No doubt exists as to his greatness....
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...Was the legislation that gave African Americans equal rights to ‘whites’ the result of famous, glorified leaders such as Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson or was it those who worked behind the scenes, the local groups and individuals, who set the stage for these legal amendments to be possible? The Civil Rights Movement was one of the most significant events in the modern history of the United States that has formed the basis of many of its core values and laws today. The Civil Rights Movement unofficially ended with the passing of the long awaited “1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act” which legally saw an end to the racial discrimination faced by African Americans. However the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement has “undergone some serious revision” since 1965 as it ‘gained popular appeal.’ Initially the Civil Rights Movement was “romanticized” and considered to be a “heroic narrative of moral purpose and personal courage by which great men and women inspired ordinary people to rise up and struggle for their rights” such as the famed Martin Luther King, who was painted as the ‘driving force behind the movement’ ,President Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy and organisations such as ‘The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’ (NAACP) This idea of the federal government, prominent leaders and organisations playing the defining role in the passing of these bills soon became less plausible in the 1970’s and 1980’s as the “second...
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...One’s view of poetry is extremely personal. With over fifty-five different formal styles of poetry to choose from (Kennedy & Gioia 681-717) no two individual’s tastes will coincide, the same can be said for poets. No one will argue that Walt Whitman and Herman Melville have vastly different techniques for chronicling the events they experienced. This is especially true for the author’s interpretations of events leading up to, throughout, and after the American Civil War. Although they approached their subject from the same vantage point, that of the Union or Northern Army, both author’s writing styles could not be more different. Melville and Whitman’s family history, personal experiences, professional interactions and literary notoriety all factor into their chosen poetic style and content. The following is a critical analysis of these similarities and differences using select works from Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The list of recommended poems is not sufficient to adequately fulfill this requirement. For thoroughness, additional poems...
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...Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Documenting the Civil War through Pictures The American Civil War of 1861 is one of the most revolutionary events that the United States has experienced in its young history. The eleven states of the south declared their secession from the United States in response to Abraham Lincoln’s campaign against the expansion of slavery into the northern states where the importation of slaves was considered illegal. Confederate forces instigated war against the north by attacking a United States military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina in retaliation to the law against the importation of slaves. Considered the deadliest war in American history, 620,000 soldiers were left dead among a plethora of undocumented civilian casualties. There to document the casualties of war was Mathew Brady, a name basically synonymous with Civil War photography, and his well-known accomplices Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, and Egbert Guy Fox (Wert). Altogether, these photographers can be accredited with documenting the entire war from beginning to end. Their collection of photographs comprises the majority of the overall for contributing to the majority of our collection of photographs from the Civil War, as well as the majority of the known photographs of the war (Trachtenberg). Some of the earliest forms of photography appeared in the 1830s, just a handful of decades before the American Civil War. Due to the fact that the transfer of real life...
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...Much of America was overtaken by slavery for nearly two hundred and fifty years, dating back to the 1600’s in Jamestown, Virginia. In the 1850’s, slavery was widespread across the Southern states viewing blacks as inferior, which made the action morally acceptable in their eyes. Within the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was established, allowing slave catchers to travel into free states to capture runaway slaves and stating that private citizens must assist in capturing the slaves or else they’d be fined or jailed. Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author and abolitionist, found the idea of taking part in such a wrongful system as the one that was put into effect by the compromise, to be completely immoral and wanted nothing to...
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...King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and the Civil Rights Movement in America are alternative beats of the same heart. In his overall fight against racism, the important landmarks were the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington; anti-Vietnam War Activism and Assassination in the year 1968, Dr. King emerged as a sterling crusader. He was the living legend and glorious in death. He was intensely loved and fiercely hated. In his book, “Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop,” Harvard Sitkoff writes, “I have to craft a brief yet stirring narrative for a twenty-first-century readership that illustrates the historical forces that shaped King, and how he, in turn, changed American society.”(xiv) Black freedom movement was a tough socio-political responsibility for Dr. King, and his adversaries belonged to the powerful ruling class, reluctant to give any concessions to the blacks. He led the movement at great personal sacrifice and suffering. Sitkoff writes, “ However overwrought or sometimes paralyzed by fear he became, King’s biblical faith enabled him to keep his eyes on the prize, to put righteousness before expediency, despite the beatings, jailing, inner turmoil, and constant threats if assassination.”(xiv) Unprecedented changes began to happen in United States and King’s mission paved way for a broader crusade against imperialism and of economic inequality by the time of his death and subsequently thereon. The forces that were bitterly...
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