Collisions of Conflict: Studies in American History and Culture, 1820-1920 (Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies)
Language: English
Pages: 149
ISBN: 3631648480
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book explores and analyzes the problems and challenges that have resulted from the Civil War, Reconstruction, slavery, and segregation in North America. These painful chapters in American history have continued along racial and regional lines and are of particular interest today when the USA are for the first time governed by an African American president. The postscriptum extends the main narrative by focusing on selected writers’ activities and fiction during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
rejected secession, probably waiting for Virginia’s move, but after the Civil War broke out, all of them, including Virginia, seceded, and Richmond became the new capital of the Confederate States of America. Chapter 2 Fighting Slavery: Various Shades of Abolitionism The Missouri Compromise, the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the Lincoln–Douglas debates, and ultimately the Civil War reveal the immense significance of slavery in the social and political life of the Republic and, at the same time, the
Chapter 3 reinforced the conviction of many Unionists that the war was progressing towards its definite end, a conviction that proved to be premature. In September of the same year, the Confederates won their last significant victory in the war. Though they were the victors of the battle of Chickamauga, they lost a great opportunity to score a much greater victory over Major General Rosenkrans’ Army of the Cumberland. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, General Braxton Bragg, who was in command
entirely in white hands” (160). Only education could make African Americans fully participant in the fruits of citizenship; only education could help them gain access to labor and land. As Rodney P. Carlisle makes clear, 70 Chapter 4 “[t]he African Americans, despite their new freedom, were at a disadvantage politically and economically. They were free, but they still had to eat” (78). One must realize that no one prepared former slaves to be and act on their own. The new life of a freedman
“walking through a chamber of horrors” (Clark 228), The Crisis, never lost its prime objective, fighting for a law against lynching and racial prejudice. Analyzing the significant increase of lynchings in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, one should consider the causes of the rise in this time period. Undoubtedly a certain social climate approving of such acts existed. Its roots can be traced back to the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction
Williams and William D. Pederson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. 140 – 150. Synnestvedt, Sig. The White Response to Black Emancipation: SecondClass Citizenship in the United States Since Reconstruction. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1972. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Twain, Mark. “Only a Nigger.” http://thunderbird.k12.ar.us/The%20 Classics%20Library/American%20Literature. June 2, 2012. Thompson, Tracy. The New