'How To Make The Contrabands Useful'

The Civil War was one of America’s most brutal battles in history. Majority of which being white, male soldiers. Over the years, many historians have argued the actual involvement of blacks during the civil war era. Many claiming that they were doing nothing more than assisting the actual, white soldiers

James M. McPherson sets out to discover what motivated the Confederate and Union soldiers to continue fighting in the Civil War in his book What They Fought For. McPherson analyses nearly a thousand letters, journals, and diary of Union and Confederate soldiers to determine what urged them to fight

“Berlin, Ira. The Making of African America The Four Great Migrations. By Ira Berlin. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. Pp 289” Ira Berlin (author of many thousands gone) starts this book off (in the prologue) by recalling a dispute some

Franchise or Pardon During the Reconstruction period, beginning in 1865, the United States entered a period in which they mended relationships between the North and the South. It was also a period of hostility between both sides. The war had ended and the Southerners’ had suffered plenty of damage to their land. The Reconstruction period was a time which the South was rebuilt with the integration of all the newly freed blacks into society. This particular collection I chose by Thomas Nast called “Franchise. But not this man?” and “Pardon” are depicted during the Reconstruction. This collection was printed in the Harper’s Weekly, a very popular Union newspaper during the Civil War. An analysis of the images depict the common beliefs shared by

Part one of this book “Dignity Denied: Youth in the Early War Years”, discusses the political and economic context of the United States in the early 1940’s, when the zoot suit style grew popular (Alvarez, p. 10). During world war two, many African and Mexican Americans contributed to the war effort, because they thought it was what they needed to do in order to improve their standard of living. African Americans and Mexican Americans even fought in the war. However they were still excluded from feelings of patriotism and national belonging because of their race. Even though they were essential in the war effort, they were still being discriminated against. They were expected to join the military and protect a country that failed to acknowledge their civil rights at home (Alvarez, p. 239).

In his conclusion, McPherson answer what may lead one to ask if the American Civil War was indeed an extraordinary revolution, one whose likes the world had ever seen. The answer lies in the exact opposite of revolution. Counterrevolution occurred at first chance which in so many ways blanketed the revolutionary characteristics to the best of its applicability. From 1865 to 1866, immediately after the war, black codes began to surface. The purpose of these codes were to keep black labor in a state of dependence and subjection as close to slavery as possible. These codes appeared in the forms of vagrancy laws, contract labor laws the subjected freedmen to peonage and sharecropping, and violence. This code also makes for the final piece of evidence toward support of McPherson’s goal in categorizing the American Civil War as a revolution. Southern redeemers, after the withdrawal of northern Republican interest, went through great lengths to counter evolve them. Why would that be? In order to

The South vs. The South by William Freehling is a narrative that focuses on the civil war that affected a vast number of Southerners who opposed the Confederacy regardless of whether they were white or black. These “anti-Confederates,” as termed by Freehling comprised Slaves and Boarder state whites who together

W.E.B. DuBois’ “Returning Soldiers,” an editorial piece written in May of 1919 for the NAACP’s publication The Crisis lays out for not just returning soldiers, but for African-Americans as a whole that the war is not over. While the Great War of 1914-1918 may have ended, there is still a greater war to continue to fight on the American homefront. “Returning Soldiers” calls out the United States government on the charges against its people as seen by DuBois and reiterates and rejuvenates the reader for the fight it still needs to take on. The black man soldier may have escaped the battlefields of France and now be able to shed the uniform that symbolizes the systematic injustices he faced, but upon returning, in his “civil garb” he is still a soldier, only in a different military.

The Civil War, a period of four years in the United States filled with bloody combat, thousands of casualties, and the destruction of much of Southern infrastructure. Although the Civil War had various causes (economy, politics, etc.), it mainly originated from the pressing issue of slavery at the time, mainly

After four years of bloody battles and 620,000 deaths, the North finally won the war slavery, and African Americans were free; but the freedom that they envisioned was nonexistent. Their freedom was tied down by numerous of factors, including South’s effort to re-establish slavery conditions, wavering support from the North,

In the modern day, we, Americans, face racism and inequality on a daily basis, whether it is by appreceiving or by being hectored with it. In Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, Horwitz peppers in the harsh reality of unequal conditions and the struggle of an everyday American that

Neiel Edmonds Professor Jackson 1 Dec 2014 African American History Glory Essay The film Glory by Edward Zwick is one of the most well-known films of all time. The film itself is solely based upon the first formal unit of the Union Army during the American Civil War which consist of all African American men. They were essentially the very first unit of United States Colored Troops. They were formally known for their courageous attempts to and actions at Fort Wagner in 1863. The film is set in many different locations such as New York, Maryland, South Carolina and Massachusetts. In each of these different locations events took place that shaped our history. For example on November twenty seventh of 1862 Robert Shaw started to train soldiers. July eighteenth 1863 the Colonel Shaw and his troops attempted to take Fort Wagner, which didn’t succeed.

[Your name here] [Your university here] Abstract On 1 May 1866 in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, an altercation between black Union soldiers and Memphis police officers started a chain reaction that eventually brought about what has come to be known as the Memphis Riots of 1866. The group of amicably intoxicated soldiers reacted negatively when told by a small group of officers to break up their party, and although no one was seriously injured, the situation quickly escalated to the point where shots were fired on both sides (Carden 2). This incident, however, was not the cause of the Memphis Riots. Instead, I will argue that the altercation merely served as the spark to set a fire to a whole mess of kindling made of economic, political, and social twigs and branches, which was already in place long before the actual events of the Memphis Riots.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois defines the problem of the Twentieth Century to be the color-line. The color line is a metaphor for the segregation within the African-American and Caucasian community The Veil refers to the community of African-American’s in the past (during slavery),

Throughout history, war has invariably been the solution to conflicts that arise between two opposing sides of mankind. As Bertrand Russell puts it, “War does not determine who is right but who is left”. The illustration, Cold Harbor by John Reekie, captures the aftermath of the Civil War as African