Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

“$300 Or Your Life”: Recruitment And The Draft In The Civil War, Melissa Traub Dec 2015

“$300 Or Your Life”: Recruitment And The Draft In The Civil War, Melissa Traub

Honors Scholar Theses

One of the most challenging tasks of a nation at war is turning its average citizens into soldiers. While volunteers flooded to the war front in thousands in the beginning of the Civil War, recruitment slowly dwindled as the war dragged on. Eventually, the North was forced to pass the Enrollment Act of 1863, the first national draft in United States history. Every able bodied man between the ages of twenty and forty-five was subject to the draft. For an already unstable nation, the national draft did little to help the divides that split the country. The policies of substitution …


The Saint Patrick’S Battalion: Loyalty, Nativism, And Identity In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Kevin P. Lavery Dec 2015

The Saint Patrick’S Battalion: Loyalty, Nativism, And Identity In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Kevin P. Lavery

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

Two decades before the Irish Brigade covered itself with glory, an earlier unit of Irish immigrants had won renown for its service during the Mexican American War. Calling themselves the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, these men marched under a flag of brilliant emerald decorated with Irish motifs: a harp, a shamrock, and the image of Saint Patrick [excerpt].


The "Unfinished Work:" The Civil War Centennial And The Civil Rights Movement, Megan A. Sutter Oct 2015

The "Unfinished Work:" The Civil War Centennial And The Civil Rights Movement, Megan A. Sutter

Student Publications

The Civil War Centennial celebrations fell short of a great opportunity in which Americans could reflect on the legacy of the Civil War through the racial crisis erupting in their nation. Different groups exploited the Centennial for their own purposes, but only the African Americans and civil rights activists tried to emphasize the importance of emancipation and slavery to the memory of the war. Southerners asserted states’ rights in resistance to what they saw as a black rebellion in their area. Northerners reflected back on the theme of reconciliation, prevalent in the seventy-fifth anniversary of the war. Unfortunately, those who …


July 4, 1865: A Nation In Search Of Itself, Sorn A. Jessen Jan 2015

July 4, 1865: A Nation In Search Of Itself, Sorn A. Jessen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The eighty-ninth anniversary of the declaration of American independence from Britain, on July 4, 1865, caught the nation at a critical time in its history. The great national crisis of civil war was over, but the nation had not yet re-united. The thesis argues that in the aftermath of the Civil War, American nationalism could not be reconstituted on neither an ethnic nor a civic model. Rather, on the eighty-ninth anniversary of Independence, the course of American Nationalism fell out along lines decreed by historical memory. The narrative construction of the past in the present constituted the only common thread …