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Heroes and Cowards
When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war. Drawing information from government documents, soldiers' journals, and one of the most extensive research projects about Union Army soldiers ever undertaken, Heroes and Cowards demonstrates the role that social capital plays in people's decisions. The makeup of various companies--whether soldiers were of the same ethnicity, age, and occupation--influenced whether soldiers remained loyal or whether they deserted. Costa and Kahn discuss how the soldiers benefited from friendships, what social factors allowed some to survive the POW camps while others died, and how punishments meted out for breaking codes of conduct affected men after the war. The book also examines the experience of African-American soldiers and makes important observations about how their comrades shaped their lives. Heroes and Cowards highlights the inherent tensions between the costs and benefits of community diversity, shedding light on how groups and societies behave and providing valuable lessons for the present day.
eBook
I Try Not to Think of Afghanistan
I Try Not to Think of Afghanistan
includes photographs and commentaries from Lithuanian
veterans of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979-89), addressing the
lasting realities of war and its effects on those conscripted to
fight. Unflinching first-person accounts give details of
training, combat, and the often difficult return to society for
military conscripts within the Soviet system. Anna Reich gives
insight into the experiences of not only the Lithuanian veterans
from the Soviet War in Afghanistan but also veterans from all
countries who face similar struggles and challenges.
For three months, Reich interacted with twenty-two veterans in
their homes and meeting halls and throughout their daily routines
to produce portraits that provide intimate and unvarnished
portrayals of their lives and the lasting effects of forced
military service in the Soviet army. Often ostracized socially
because of their involvement with the Soviet army, the veterans
frequently feel invisible: there are no social programs to assist
them in their attempts to address post-traumatic stress disorder
and assimilate into society, their cause is largely unknown, and
the government responsible for their conscriptions no longer
exists.
I Try Not to Think of Afghanistan is the culmination of
eight years of investigation into the psychological toll of war and
trauma. In providing a rarely seen perspective of life after
combat, the book intersects with contemporary discourse,
specifically the way the US experience in Afghanistan closely
mirrors that of the Soviets and the Russian Federation's forced
conscription of young men to fight in Ukraine.
eBook
The Boxing Boys in Blue: Gloved Sparring and Bare-Knuckle Prizefighting in the Union Army, 1861–65
In 1860, American heavyweight champion John C. Heenan traveled to England to face Tom Sayers in a bare-knuckle prizefight for the championship of the world, sparking unprecedented interest in boxing throughout the United States. In the wake of the Heenan–Sayers contest, gloved sparring and bare-knuckle prizefighting attracted a bevy of new practitioners, eager to emulate their fistic heroes. On April 12, 1861, however, Confederate forces in Charleston, South Carolina, fired on Fort Sumter, commencing the American Civil War. Thousands of northern men promptly enlisted in the Union Army to extinguish the southern rebellion, carrying their sporting preferences into their military service. Within the context of the Union Army, this study approaches boxing as not merely a passing form of distraction but rather a complicated social and cultural practice, used for a multiplicity of purposes by soldiers, including the development of masculine identities, preservation and improvement of health, fraternal entertainment, and camp-based dispute resolution.
Journal Article
The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000
Since Peter Stuyvesant greeted with enmity the first group of Jews to arrive on the docks of New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews have entwined their fate and fortunes with that of the United States—a project marked by great struggle and great promise. What this interconnected destiny has meant for American Jews and how it has defined their experience among the world's Jews is fully chronicled in this work, a comprehensive and finely nuanced history of Jews in the United States from 1654 through the end of the past century. Hasia R. Diner traces Jewish participation in American history—from the communities that sent formal letters of greeting to George Washington; to the three thousand Jewish men who fought for the Confederacy and the ten thousand who fought in the Union army; to the Jewish activists who devoted themselves to the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Diner portrays this history as a constant process of negotiation, undertaken by ordinary Jews who wanted at one and the same time to be Jews and full Americans. Accordingly, Diner draws on both American and Jewish sources to explain the chronology of American Jewish history, the structure of its communal institutions, and the inner dynamism that propelled it. Her work documents the major developments of American Judaism—he economic, social, cultural, and political activities of the Jews who immigrated to and settled in America, as well as their descendants—and shows how these grew out of both a Jewish and an American context. She also demonstrates how the equally compelling urges to maintain Jewishness and to assimilate gave American Jewry the particular character that it retains to this day in all its subtlety and complexity.
eBook
Dangerous Liaisons: Working Women and Sexual Justice in the American Civil War
The American Civil War drew thousands of white and black women into paid and unpaid work for the Union and Confederate armies. While the armies provided some women with a reliable income, their very proximity also represented a dangerous liaison that drew them into closer contact with Union troops that rendered them vulnerable to sexual assault. By 1865, more than four hundred Union soldiers had been court-martialed for sexual crimes against white and black women and girls. At the war’s onset, the Union’s judge advocate corps, which tried soldiers for violations of the articles of war, was ill-prepared to adjudicate sexual crimes. By the war’s end, however, an ethic of sexual justice emerged from Union military courts to provide women with a means of redressing their wartime sexual violation.
Journal Article
Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union
The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. In his other acclaimed books about the American presidency, Fred Greenstein assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. Here, he evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents.
Using his trademark no-nonsense approach, Greenstein looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, he provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Greenstein sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day.
Presidents and the Dissolution of the Unionreveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times--and what caused others to fail.
eBook
Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War
Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War chronicles the lives and concerns of the Anderson, Brockman, and Moore families of piedmont South Carolina during the late-antebellum and Civil War eras through 124 letters dated 1853 to 1865. The letters provide valuable firsthand accounts of evolving attitudes toward the war as conveyed between battlefronts and the home front, and they also express rich details about daily life in both environments. As the men of service age from each family join the Confederate ranks and write from military camps in Virginia and the Carolinas, they describe combat in some of the war's more significant battles. Though the surviving combatants remain staunch patriots to the Southern cause until the bitter end, readers witness in their letters the waning of initial enthusiasm in the face of the realities of warfare. The corresponding letters from the home front offer a more pragmatic assessment of the period and its hardships. Emblematic of the fates of many Southern families, the experiences of these representative South Carolinians are dramatically illustrated in their letters from the eve of the Civil War through its conclusion.
eBook