A disgraced officer and an enlisted man forge an unlikely friendship through the desperate river battles waged along the Mississippi between Union forces and outnumbered Confederate defenders. Following their surrender, the two friends along with the other defeated Rebels are incarcerated in Northern prisoner of war camps where new challenges await them. Only one will survive. Based upon ten years of historical research, Long Road Home explores the trials and travails of George Spears and his friend, Eli Forrest. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1004/thumbnail.jpg

Excerpt: Despite the great success of the Civil War epic Glory, the story of the black troops during and after the War is not well known. This lack of exposure to popular familiarity is especially true of the Buffalo Soldiers who served on the frontier in the late 19th century, chiefly but not exclusively in the Indian Wars.

This thesis considers the experiences that motivated the creation of an 1863 painting by American artist Eastman Johnson entitled The Lord is My Shepherd. An examination of the painting—which depicts a black man reading a Bible—reveals multiple artistic, social, political, and spiritual influences. Created in the midst of the American Civil War, the painting's inspiration derived from Johnson's New England childhood, training in Europe, encounters with the Transcendentalist movement, and his abolitionist views. As a result, The Lord is My Shepherd is a culminating work in Johnson's oeuvre that was prompted by years of experience and observations in an age of rampant racism and civil war. It is also argued that The Lord is My Shepherd has diaristic qualities in that Johnson explored significant social and political issues of the day such as slavery through his work. Before now, this painting has been considered a relatively minor work within Johnson's oeuvre. This thesis seeks to change that perception and raise awareness of the contextual significance of The Lord is My Shepherd.

Review of Myra Inman: A Diary of the Civil War in East Tennessee. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2000.

As a border state, Kentucky occupied a unique position in the early days of the Civil War. Her neutral stance was observed by the belligerents for the first five months of the conflict, but in September 1861, troops entered the state. Confederate armies under the leadership of Brigadier Generals Humphrey Marshall and Feliz Zollicoffer sought to drive the Federal forces from eastern Kentucky. Through a series of skirmishes, however, the Southern armies were repelled and placed on the defensive. Later defeats at Logan’s Cross Roads and Middle Creek in early January 1862 cleared eastern Kentucky of Confederate forces. For the next several months, the Confederates regrouped out of the state and planned a major offensive to deliver Kentucky to the Confederacy. Under the guidance of Generals Braxto Bragg and E. Kirby Smith, the fateful invasion took shape in August 1862. But by then, possibly the best chance for a Confederate Kentucky had already passed.

This paper focuses on Native American military service in Euro-American Wars. It analyzes their reasons for fighting and compares those reasons to the reasons of other racial and ethnic groups. This paper explores how certain racial and ethnic groups are marginalized and “otherized” and how they occasionally attempt to assimilate into mainstream society through military service. Irish Americans and African Americans viewed the Civil War in this way, while Native Americans hoped they would be able to improve their individual situations. Native Americans fought for purposes of assimilation and citizenship in World War I, and while they were technically granted citizenship their conditions did not improve. Neither military service or various government policies have allowed Native Americans to fully integrate into mainstream society. Today they still suffer because they are seen as “others” and stereotypes.

During the Guatemalan civil war (1962-1996), different forms of anonymity enabled members of the organizations of the social movement, revolutionary militants, and guerrilla combatants to address the popular classes and rural majorities, against the backdrop of generalized militarization and state repression. Pseudonyms and anonymous collective action, likewise, acquired political centrality for revolutionary politics against a state that sustained and was symbolically co-constituted by forms of proper naming that signify class and racial position, patriarchy, and ethnic difference. Between 1979 and 1981, at the highest peak of mass mobilizations and insurgent military actions, the symbolic constitution of the Guatemalan state was radically challenged and contested. From the perspective of the state’s elites and military high command, that situation was perceived as one of crisis; and between 1981 and 1983, it led to a relatively brief period of massacres against indigenous communities of the central and western highlands, where the guerrillas had been operating since 1973. Despite its long duration, by 1983 the fate of the civil war was sealed with massive violence. Although others have recognized, albeit marginally, the relevance of the politics of naming during Guatemala’s civil war, few have paid attention to the relationship between the state’s symbolic structure of signification and desire, its historical formation, and the dynamics of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity during the war. Even less attention has received the affective and psychic dynamics between proper naming, state violence, and the symbolic formation of the Guatemalan state. This dissertation addresses that relationship and dynamic. Following a historical-anthropological perspective, I argue that, from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s decade, prior to the beginning of the civil war, the Guatemalan state took the form of a finca-state. The Guatemalan finca-state functioned by inscribing, in the form of proper names, lineages and inheritance of colonial and post-colonial origin that came to signify wealth, whiteness, renown, and surplus of pleasure or jouissance, in the form of White-European patronymics, by virtue of which, indigenous proper names were forced to occupy the position of loss. This form of inscription, I argue, produced the foreclosure of the indigenous other. For the indigenous pueblos, nonetheless, state enforced inscription established forms of interpellation that desubjectivized the conditions of their own institutions of proper naming by turning them into mere objects of identification. The politics of pseudonymity and anonymity that proliferated between 1979 and 1981, especially among indigenous people of the Guatemalan highlands, was a refusal of a form of state that excluded the possibility of their recognition beyond identification. In a deep sense, anonymity and pseudonymity enabled revolutionary militants to become truly others, a condition that disorganized previous forms of state identification. In their inability to respond to a sense of crisis under conditions of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity, the Guatemalan army responded with massive violence as an attempt at eliminating their sense of threat. I pay particular attention to the Ixil region, where the UN sponsored Guatemalan truth commission concluded that the Guatemalan army perpetrated acts of genocide against indigenous communities of Ixil descent. This dissertation is based on extensive archival research conducted between the months of October 2014 and May 2015, extensive collective and individual interviews carried out between 2004 and 2007, and ethnographic observation in the Ixil region between May and October of 2015. Its methodology follows the routes of collaborative research, archival reading, and ethnographic participant observation.

This dissertation examines African American students’ perspectives of African American agency during the Civil War. It also seeks to understand where their knowledge of African Americans during the Civil War comes from. The topic fits within the Critical Race Theory framework and utilized a mixed methods approach to understand the study findings. The methodology included an online survey completed by forty-two participants at a Historically Black university and 3 semi-structured interviews using the interview protocol. Descriptive statistical demographic data, open-ended responses and interview transcripts were analyzed using the agency rubric developed by the researcher. The themes that emerged from the study included the limited agency of African Americans during the Civil War, silenced voices of African American women, students’ limited knowledge of ancestors’ emancipation and emancipation narratives, and little specific knowledge of African Americans involvement in the Civil War

Public sector corruption is a major problem in Monrovia. Successive national governments have instituted anticorruption measures in the 1970s and 2000s, and anticorruption agencies were established to eradicate corruption. However, there appears to be a significant lack of resources and political willpower to prosecute corrupt government officials. A failure to curb political corruption indicates that current policies are not working. Government works when there is a perception that it delivers results and that the needs and safety of the citizenry are protected. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenology study was to gain a deeper understanding of public sector corruption at high levels of government in Monrovia. The conceptual framework for this study was based on the sociological theory of collaboration, within which governance is seen as a component of interpersonal relationships and a way to build trust and social interactions. Data were collected from open-ended semistructured interviews with former and present government officials (N = 8). The results were coded using descriptive coding to take an inventory of the contents, and to classify the coding into themes and subthemes. Results indicated that distrust among stakeholders and various governing institutions has hindered cooperation. Civic engagement and participation, patriotism, decentralization of the central government, job creation, safety and security, law and order, education and healthcare, and diluting the powers of the presidency, etc., were some of the issues raised by the participants. This dissertation may support positive social change in a meaningful way by providing policymakers with the information to make the country safe and governable, increase the standard of living and bring needed relief to the citizenry.

In placing Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey in conversation with each other, my dissertation analyzes - alongside their poetry and prose - monuments, paintings, television, film, photographs, and performance as connected to understanding the impact of historical legacies on lived experiences within the empire of U.S. America. Toni Morrison's concept of recovering the "unwritten interior life" of the slave experience - a life hidden within slave narratives - assists in understanding the historical poetics of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey as artists engaged in similar projects of reclamation. For Harjo this entails shedding a light on the weight of Native American histories for the descendants of survivors while contesting the myths that abound within popular culture regarding Native peoples. Trethewey's work intervenes within the public memory of the nation by centering on the inner-lives of African Americans as well as other people of color, stressing their various gendered and racialized experiences. The gaps within the records that each poet illuminates do not constitute a failure of history, per se, but rather emphasize limitations concerning traditional methodologies of history-writing. In order to further expand on this argument, throughout my work I rely upon certain ideas from 20th century ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas regarding our obligations to the past of the Other as well as the potential violence inherent within Western philosophical rhetoric regarding the Other. "Tending to the Past" argues that due to the gaps within the archival records we need multiple ways of approaching our history. The absence within the archives of the "emotional truths" or "interior lives" of historical subjects proves to emphasize the necessity for the poetic interventions of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey.