Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Bloody Outrages Of A Most Barbarous Enemy:” The Cultural Implications Of The Massacre At Fort William Henry, Colin Walfield

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The August 10, 1757 massacre at Fort William Henry contradicted eighteenth-century European standards for warfare. Although British colonial opinion blamed it on Native American depravity, France‘s Native American allies acted within their own cultural parameters. Whereas the French and their British enemies believed in the supremacy of the state as the model for conduct, Native Americans defined their political and military relations on a personal level that emphasized mutual obligations. With the fort‘s surrender, however, the French and British attempted and failed to bring European cultural norms into the American wilderness. While the French triumphed in Fort William Henry‘s capitulation, …

“There Was Nothing In Sight But Nature, Nothing...”: Nineteenth-Century Gendered Perceptions Of The Overland Trail, Andrea J. Savadelis

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

One hundred and seventeen years ago, between 1841 and 1867, the Overland Trail saw approximately 350,000 Oregon and California bound North Americans traverse its landscape. This westward migration painted the American frontier with a white sea of wagon covers, spotted the grassy plains with brown patches of oxen herds, and lighted the night sky with open cooking fires. Men and women Overlanders experienced this life-changing event in different ways, which are crucial to understanding the dynamics and interaction between these people and their frontier context. Gender-specific roles and social standards of masculinity and femininity carried from emigrants’ previous lives influenced …

Front Matter

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editor, Evan C. Rothera

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Credibility And Incredulity: A Critique Of Bartolomé De Las Casas‘S A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, Alexander Allen

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

A fierce advocate for the indigenous people of the New World, Bartolomé de Las Casas sought to promote awareness and enact legal change. Born in 1484, Las Casas grew up as exploration of the New World began. After embarking on several voyages to the New World, he saw firsthand the injustices committed against the natives. Years later, following a religious conversion, he began elucidating the actions of the Christians in an effort to draw awareness to the Indians plagued by the Spanish presence and to compel the Spanish Crown to take action in order to maintain its religious legitimacy in …

The Ottoman Gunpowder Empire And The Composite Bow, Nathan Lanan

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The Ottoman Empire is known today as a major Gunpowder Empire, famous for its prevalent use of this staple of modern warfare as early as the sixteenth century. However, when Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq visited Constantinople from 1554 to 1562, gunpowder was not used by the Sipahi cavalry who stubbornly, it seems, insisted on continuing to use the composite bow that the Turks had been using for centuries. This continued, despite their fear of European cavalry who used “small muskets” against them on raids. Was this a good idea? Was the composite bow a match or contemporary handheld firearms? Were …

The Struggle To Create Soviet Opera, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s.

Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the …

Gettysburg Historical Journal 2010

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Sweet Tooth For Empire: Sugar And The British Atlantic World, Colin Walfield

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

With increasing productivity and rising standards of living, a new spirit of consumerism reached Britain. After its entry into the Atlantic World economy, though Scotland never fully benefited until the 1707 Act of Union, all classes eventually gained access to a wide variety and exotic assortment of consumer products. Among them, sugar, valued for its sweetness since the Middle Ages, maintained a special position, dominating all exports from British America. Embraced by the British populace, sugar provided an impetus for colonization and required imported African labor. Sugar and a newfound consumerism at home drove the British Atlantic World.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, The National Security Council, And Dien Bien Phu, David Putnam Hadley

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s remarks at a conference on National Defense in 1957 reflected the philosophy behind his national security system: his dedication to preparation and proper planning. One of Eisenhower’s most regularly used, structured tools for proper planning was the National Security Council (NSC). The Council was an organization comprised of high-ranking members of government, chaired by the president, which was designed to provide the president with the information and coordination needed to shape intelligent policy. The Council itself was not created by Eisenhower, but was part of the National Security Act of …

Letter From The Editor, Brian Matthew Jordan

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

'Since This Is A Horrible Thing To Think About': European Perceptions Of Native American Cannibalism, Evan C. Rothera

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Contemporary Italian playwright Dario Fo wrote a satirical play entitled Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas which purported to be the account of one Johan Padan, a contemporary of Columbus, who journeyed to the New World, was shipwrecked, and rescued by some friendly Indians. At one point, Padan and a group of his fellows discussed the hospitality of the Indians, who were quite generous. One of them expressed the fear that the Indians simply care for them so that they will make a splendid feast. Another man remarked, quite scathingly, “This is the third voyage I’ve made to …

Front Matter

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Life On The South Side Of Chambersburg Street, 1910, Rachel A. Santose, Sierra Green

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The people of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania heralded in the year of 1911 and reflected on their accomplishments throughout the past year. With "pealing bells, tooting whistles and noisy revolvers...in a more vigorous way than has been witnessed here for many years," this New Year’s Eve celebration recognized the past year as it welcomed the new year to come. The entire town took part and its faculties were utilized in the festivities of the night, including "the Court House bell and those of the St. James and College Lutheran churches...engines added their quota of noise and all over town men brought into …

Gettysburg Historical Journal 2009

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Female Captivity Narratives In Colonial America, Kathryn O'Hara

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The female captivity narrative provides a complex view of colonial American history by recounting the experiences of women captured from their colonial homes by Native Americans. Male editors, often family friends or town ministers, generally compiled the experiences of female captives, and separating the voice of the female captive from influence of the male editor presents a challenge. Puritan captivity narratives in particular demonstrate conflict between attempts by Puritan ministers to impose a unified religious message in the sagas and the captives’ individual experiences, which often contradicted Puritan doctrine. During the early colonial era, ministers’ attempts to promote the Puritan …

Pushkin And Gannibal: Ethnic Identity In Imperial Russia, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Since his untimely death in 1837, the nineteenth-century romantic writer Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin has been renowned the world over not only for his literary achievements, but also for being a paradigm of "Russianness." However, Pushkin himself was by no means a "pure" Russian. Like many of the inhabitants of the Russian empire during his time, he was borne of a veritable hodgepodge of ethnicities. The most surprising of these is his African ancestry; his great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African slave brought to Russia in the early eighteenth century. Remarkably, this same slave became the godson and close confidante …

Letter From The Editor, Kevin Bowman

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Gettysburg Historical Journal 2007

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Currents Of Liberty, Seas Of Change: Black Sailors As Subversive Agents Of Freedom In The Early Republic, Skye Montgomery

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Years after being kidnapped from his native Ibo village as a young boy, Olaudah Equiano vividly recalled his wonder at seeing a European ship for the first time. Although he failed to realize it at the time, that same ship, and the Atlantic currents it navigated, would shortly transport him and millions of his countrymen to lives of slavery on the far shores of a distant continent. In addition to providing a convenient avenue for the initial transport of slaves, water enabled the development of a trade network linking scattered plantations in the Caribbean to centers of trade in North …

"The Regiment Bore A Conspicuous Part": A Brief History Of The Eight Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Gibraltar Brigade, Army Of The Potomac, Brian Matthew Jordan

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

On April 10, 1850, a sixteen year-old from Xenia, Ohio named Samuel Sexton copied a stanza of Epes Sargent’s poem, “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” into his notebook:

A life on the ocean wave! A home on the rolling deep!

Where the scattered waters rave, and the winds their revels keep!

Like an eagle caged I pine, on this dull unchanging shore.

Oh give me the flashing brine! The spray and the tempest roar!

Before his death in New York City, July 11, 1896, Sexton would serve as the Assistant Surgeon of the Eighth Ohio Volunteers, his entire service …

Pope John Paul Ii, The Assassination Attempt, And The Soviet Union, Daniel C. Scotto

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

“The attempt to murder the pope remains one of the century’s great mysteries,” wrote Carl Bernstein and Marco Politti in their 1996 biography of Pope John Paul II. Indeed, the mystery has remained unsolved since the pope was shot and wounded on May 13, 1981. A recent investigation concluded that the Soviet government was the perpetrator, but the situation should be examined in a broader historical context. What actually happened on May 13, 1981? Was it the sole decision and action of Mehmet Ali Agca, who was expressing his opposition to “Western imperialist policies,” as he had written in a …

Revealing Zion's Daughters: Women In Puritan Jurisprudence, Brett Jackson

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The legal status of American women has consistently been portrayed as a linear progression flowing from a colonial jurisprudential repression and exclusion to a modern-day legal equity and a female influence within every aspect of justice. In this narrative of sequentially gained status, seventeenth-century Puritan law has stood as the exemplar of America’s most repressive jurisprudential treatment of women. However, when its characteristics are triangulated and its subordination of women is juxtaposed with its inclusion of a female voice, a new conception of America’s first legal system is seen. The notion of a linear progression is thus replaced with an …

"The Desired Effect": Pontiac's Rebellion And The Native American Struggle To Survive In Britain's North American Conquest, Joseph D. Gasparro

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Ravaged by war and in debt after its victory in the French and Indian War, Britain was not only recuperating, but rejoicing over the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. This treaty officially ended the fighting and gave Britain all of the land east of the Mississippi River, formerly owned by the French. The ink on the treaty was barely dry when a new insurgence arose in British occupied North America. Native Americans, dissatisfied after the war with their position as conquered people and not as allies, rebelled collectively against British colonists and forts along the frontier. Before …

Front Matter

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

"Our Blood Would Rise Up & Drive Them Away:" Slaveholding Women Of South Carolina In The Civil War, Nicole M. Lenart

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Southern slaveholding women during the Civil War are usually portrayed as either Eve or the Virgin Mary. They are either depicted as staunch patriotic wives and mothers who out of love suffered and sacrificed most of their worldly goods for the Cause, or as weak-willed creatures who gave up on the war, asked their men to come home, and concerned themselves with getting pretty dresses from the blockade runners and dancing at elaborate balls and bazaars. This latter view, which seems cut so superficially from Gone With the Wind, is nevertheless one that is common in Civil War scholarship …

What Is An Anzac? An American Response To Australian Warriors, Brandon P. Roos

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Rarely, in the annals of historical memory does one find a story as compelling and depressing as the narrative of the ANZACs. Never have men fought so bravely and ultimately so futilely to protect a land they only knew from history and geography books. With a deep sense of responsibility and youthful nationalism, these Australians and New Zealanders volunteered for service to the British Crown. Few knew their actions and the actions of their comrades and enemies would result in the war to end all wars, World War I. Few Australians knew their engagements would be covered in many of …

Letter From The Editor, Stephanie M. Bender

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Gettysburg Historical Journal 2006

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.