Segregation: Remembering The Children’s Crusade

he subject of the crusades is still a very controversial topic that spans across various time periods and has religious, social, and political implications. The first crusade started off as a widespread pilgrimage that ended as a military expedition resulting in the recapture of Jerusalem in 1099. The crusades initiated from a call from help from Alexius for the protection of Constantinople and the recovery of Anatolia. For centuries textbooks have repeated with routine regularity, that the immediate…

The Thought-experiments in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death In 1945 Kurt Vonnegut witnessed a horrific series of bombings that led to the destruction of the German city of Dresden, where he was taken as a prisoner of war. The controversial fire-storm raid, carried out by bombers of the Royal Air Force and US Air Force, took casualties of up to a quarter million people (Klinkowitz x-xi). As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was forced to participate…

the facts for what they are. After much discussion and exploration, we figure that the third crusade actually did follow the principles of Christianity to some extent. Portions of the third crusade were definitely morally wrong and conflicted against the teachings of Christianity, but not all of it fell out of order in which the foundation upon which Christianity was built. At the beginning, the Third Crusade was called under the belief that by reclaiming the Holy Land of Jerusalem, the Christians…

The Crusades “The Crusades: series of wars by Western European Christians to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims.” (Encarta “Crusades”) The Crusades first began in 1096 and ended in the late 13th century. The term Crusade originally meant that the European’s would use all their efforts to regain the power from the Muslims. They wanted to retake the city of Jerusalem, which was holy to Christians because that’s where the crucifixion of Jesus Christ occurred. Europeans later used it to allocate…

enterprise, legitimized by his personal mandate” (1). This essay examines the background of the crusades to offer a better understanding as to why they occurred. It also examines the effects that the crusades had on the world. It is easy to look at the crusades as a violent meaningless act, but one must understand the type of setting this movement occurred during. This was a time when if you took part in the crusades, you were seen as a warrior of god, recruited by the pope. Any man who fought in the name…

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries lynching and racial segregation were terrible problems. Mob violence killed black men, women and children indiscriminately, often for crimes they had no part in or that were not even committed. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born a slave, to James and Elizabeth Wells during the Civil War. She attended Rust College, which was partly founded by her father in Mississippi. After Wells’ parents died to yellow fever she attained a teaching position at a local school…

The Life of Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade Marked by two world wars and the anxiety that accompanies humanity's knowledge of the ability to destroy itself, the Twentieth Century has produced literature that attempts to depict the plight of the modern man living in a modern waste land. If this sounds dismal and bleak, it is. And that is precisely why the dark humor of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. shines through our post-modern age. The devastating…

They were babies for the most part with most coming fresh out of high school while some had not even finished. They were leaving the comforts of home to fight in a war they did not know much about. After Mary’s rant, Vonnegut named his book The Children's Crusade after being called children fighting in war(Kunze 45). The name was also brought up again when referring to Billy and the other American soldiers while at a German detainment camp. After being cleaned and shaven, did the Englishmen finally noticed…

As the historian John Riley Smith points out “The First Crusade was a violent and brutal episode during which the crusaders cut out a swathe of suffering through Europe and Western Asia.” In this description of the First Crusade (1095/6- 1099) Smith makes it difficult for us to see and, or uncover any elements of pilgrimage in the crusaders actions. However, there are many different ways in which the crusades have been described, the historian Christopher Tyerman on the other hand, steers towards…

The Crusades The Crusades were Christian military expeditions undertaken between the 11th and the 14th century to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. “The word crusade, which is derived from the Latin crux ("cross"), is a reference to the biblical restriction that Christians carry their cross.”1 Crusaders wore a red cloth, cross sewn on their tunics to indicate that they had assumed the cross and were soldiers of Christ. What were the real causes of the crusades and how did all of it finally…