Southern by the Grace of God but Prussian by Common Sense: James Longstreet and the Exercise of Command in the U.S. Civil War

Restoring the Union and securing emancipation after the Civil War depended on the U.S. Army. But the symbolism of standing military forces operating at the domestic vanguard of social and political change hampered the army’s ability to conduct a widespread occupation. The success of Reconstruction (1865–1877) depended on the army integrating itself in unprecedented ways in political affairs, social conditions, and economic markets to forge a new South stable enough never again to threaten the Union’s survival, but not too centralized to appear coercive. Ultimately, the very institution that reintegrated the formerly rebellious states into their proper federal orbit was also regarded by White Northerners and Southerners as an unstable threat to democratic self-determination. Hampered by a consistent and rapid demobilization, the army could not wield the tools necessary to prevent former Confederates from regaining political power and “redeeming” the South into an eerie image of its prewar self.

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Rupturing the Silences: Intergenerational Construction of Salvadoran Immigrant War Necronarratives

Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies ◽

10.18085/1549-9502.11.1.75 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 75-92

Author(s):

Ester N. Trujillo

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Second Generation ◽

The State ◽

Central American ◽

Immigrant Parents ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

War Memories ◽

Salvadoran Civil War ◽

War Stories ◽

The U.S

Abstract As the children of wartime immigrants from El Salvador become adults, they must grapple with the role violence played—and continues to play—in Salvadoran society. Second-generation Salvadorans interpret their relatives’ stories of war, death, and violence through a lens that prioritizes lessons gained over traumatization. Thus, immigrant parents’ casual discussions about their experiences during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) become what this article calls necronarratives: stories pieced together from memories based on foiling death and violence generated through state necropolitics. Youth interpret inherited memories through a lens of survival, resilience, and healing. Necropolitics refers to the ability of the state to legislate and draw policies that determine who lives and who dies. Although scholars have noted that high levels of war-related trauma among Salvadoran immigrants cause them to remain silent about those experiences, my research reveals that children of these immigrants collect and construct narratives using the memory fragments shared during casual conversations with their relatives. Drawing from 20 semi-structured interviews with U.S. Salvadorans, this paper shows that U.S. Salvadorans construct narratives out of their family’s war memories in order to locate affirming qualities of the Salvadoran experience such as surviving a war, achieving migration, and building a life in a new country. Contrary to past indications that Central American migrants live in silence about their national origins in order to avoid discrimination in the U.S. and to avoid traumatizing their children, this study on second-generation Salvadoran adults describes the ethnic roots information families do share through war stories. The Salvadoran case shows youth actively engage with necronarratives as they come of age to adulthood to yield lessons about how their national origins and ethnic heritages shape their senses of belonging and exclusion within U.S. society.

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The American Colonization Society’s Not-So-Private Colonization Project

New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813054247.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

David F. Ericson

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Financial Support ◽

Public Private Partnership ◽

Private Partnership ◽

American Colonization Society ◽

Federal Support ◽

Federal Level ◽

The Public ◽

The U.S

Ericson traces the efforts of the American Colonization Society to gain the financial support of the U.S. government and the public-private partnership that ensued. He maintains that this partnership was not only one of the first of its kind on the federal level, but that it was also the most enduring prior to the Civil War. He concludes that without federal support, the society probably would never have founded Liberia and that the support was crucial to the colony’s survival.

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