Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
98
result(s) for
"African American soldiers History 20th century."
Sort by:
Black veterans, politics, and civil rights in twentieth-century America : closing ranks
\"This collection examines the lives of African American soldiers and the sociopolitical world they constructed upon returning to the United States. The experiences analyzed in this volume provide a useful backdrop for understanding the complex relationship between race, war, and politics in the United States throughout the twentieth century.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Black Yanks in the Pacific
By the end of World War II, many black citizens viewed service in the segregated American armed forces with distaste if not disgust. Meanwhile, domestic racism and Jim Crow, ongoing Asian struggles against European colonialism, and prewar calls for Afro-Asian solidarity had generated considerable black ambivalence toward American military expansion in the Pacific, in particular the impending occupation of Japan. However, over the following decade black military service enabled tens of thousands of African Americans to interact daily with Asian peoples-encounters on a scale impossible prior to 1945. It also encouraged African Americans to share many of the same racialized attitudes toward Asian peoples held by their white counterparts and to identify with their government's foreign policy objectives in Asia.
InBlack Yanks in the Pacific, Michael Cullen Green tells the story of African American engagement with military service in occupied Japan, war-torn South Korea, and an emerging empire of bases anchored in those two nations. After World War II, African Americans largely embraced the socioeconomic opportunities afforded by service overseas-despite the maintenance of military segregation into the early 1950s-while strained Afro-Asian social relations in Japan and South Korea encouraged a sense of insurmountable difference from Asian peoples. By the time the Supreme Court declared de jure segregation unconstitutional in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, African American investment in overseas military expansion was largely secured. Although they were still subject to discrimination at home, many African Americans had come to distrust East Asian peoples and to accept the legitimacy of an expanding military empire abroad.
eBook
Let Us Fight as Free Men
Today, the military is one the most racially diverse institutions in the United States. But for many decades African American soldiers battled racial discrimination and segregation within its ranks. In the years after World War II, the integration of the armed forces was a touchstone in the homefront struggle for equality-though its importance is often overlooked in contemporary histories of the civil rights movement. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from press reports and newspapers to organizational and presidential archives, historian Christine Knauer recounts the conflicts surrounding black military service and the fight for integration.Let Us Fight as Free Menshows that, even after their service to the nation in World War II, it took the persistent efforts of black soldiers, as well as civilian activists and government policy changes, to integrate the military. In response to unjust treatment during and immediately after the war, African Americans pushed for integration on the strength of their service despite the oppressive limitations they faced on the front and at home. Pressured by civil rights activists such as A. Philip Randolph, President Harry S. Truman passed an executive order that called for equal treatment in the military. Even so, integration took place haltingly and was realized only after the political and strategic realities of the Korean War forced the Army to allow black soldiers to fight alongside their white comrades. While the war pushed the civil rights struggle beyond national boundaries, it also revealed the persistence of racial discrimination and exposed the limits of interracial solidarity.Let Us Fight as Free Menreveals the heated debates about the meaning of military service, manhood, and civil rights strategies within the African American community and the United States as a whole.
eBook
Freedom struggles : African Americans and World War I
For many of the 200,000 African American soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in WWI, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. This work explores how WWI mobilized a generation.
Book
War! What Is It Good For?
African Americans' long campaign for \"the right to fight\" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. InWar! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labor, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.
eBook
Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers : perspectives on the African American militia and volunteers, 1865-1917
Annotation During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American men were seldom permitted to join the United States armed forces. There had been times in early U.S. history when black and white men fought alongside one another; it was not uncommon for integrated units to take to battle in the Revolutionary War, but by the War of 1812, the United States had come to maintain what one writer called a whitewashed army. Yet despite that opposition, during the early 1800s, militia units made up of free black soldiers came together to aid the official military troops in combat. Many black Americans continued to serve in times of military need. Nearly 180,000 African Americans served in units of the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War, and others, from states such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Missouri, and Kansas, participated in state militias organized to protect local populations from threats of Confederate invasion. As such, the Civil War was a turning point in the acceptance of black soldiers for national defense. By 1900, twenty-two states and the District of Columbia had accepted black men into some form of military service, usually as state militiamen brothers to the buffalo soldiers of the regular army regiments, but American military men regardless. Little has been published about them, but Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865-1917, offers insights into the varied experiences of black militia units in the post-Civil War period. The book includes eleven articles that focus either on Black Participation in the Militia or Black Volunteer Units in the War with Spain. The articles, collected and introduced by author and scholar Bruce A. Glasrud, provide an overview of the history of early black citizen-soldiers and offer criticism from prominent academics interested in that experience. Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers discusses a previously little-known aspect of the black military experience in U.S. history, while deliberating on the discrimination these men faced both within and outside the military. Chosen on the bases of scholarship, balance, and readability, these articles provide a rare composite picture of the black military man's life during this period. Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers offers both a valuable introductory text for students of military studies and a solid source of material for African American historians.
Book
Torchbearers of Democracy
On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson thrust the United States into World War I by declaring, \"The world must be made safe for democracy.\" For the 380,000 African American soldiers who fought and labored in the global conflict, these words carried life or death meaning. Relating stories bridging the war and postwar years, spanning the streets of Chicago and the streets of Harlem, from the battlefields of the American South to the battlefields of the Western Front, Chad L. Williams reveals the central role of African American soldiers in World War I and how they, along with race activists and ordinary citizens alike, committed to fighting for democracy at home and beyond.Using a diverse range of sources, Williams connects the history of African American soldiers and veterans to issues such as the obligations of citizenship, combat and labor, diaspora and internationalism, homecoming and racial violence, \"New Negro\" militancy, and African American historical memories of the war. Democracy may have been distant from the everyday lives of African Americans at the dawn of the war, but it nevertheless remained a powerful ideal that sparked the hopes of black people throughout the country for societal change.Torchbearers of Democracyreclaims the legacy of black soldiers and establishes the World War I era as a defining moment in the history of African Americans and peoples of African descent more broadly.
eBook
Brotherhood in combat : how African Americans found equality in Korea and Vietnam
\"Explores integration in the military and society during the wars in Korea and Vietnam by incorporating military, diplomatic, social, race and ethnic topics, specifically addressing how racial tension during this period was present in rear units, and for the most part, nonexistent in front line units.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
A Nation Forged in War
World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and
this new book—the first in the Legacies of War
series—explores one of the most significant changes it
fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious
tolerance.
A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study
of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War
helped to dissolve longstanding differences among White
soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds. Never before or since
have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time:
more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to
1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers' shared
experiences—enduring basic training, living far from
home, engaging in combat—transformed their views of other
ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how
specific military policies and practices worked to counteract
old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing
together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and
classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also
forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home
after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder
what it meant to be white in America. Using the presidential
campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as
bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias.
Smith's defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with
anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy's victory some three decades
later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an
insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes
that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had
limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own
struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar
decades. Extensively documented,
A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the
social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars
and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history
will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.
eBook