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[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

Why Were Chemical Weapons Not Used In World War Ii?, Jeffrey W. Legro

Political Science Faculty Publications

Chemical warfare had played an important enough role in World War I that there was widespread expectation of its use in World War II. Certainly, Germany's army and its chemists had no qualms about adding poison gas to the Third Reich's arsenal. When war began, however, many of the latest chemical warfare agents were not available in deliverable form. The early successes of conventional-war making, combined with an increasing shortage of raw material, led Germany to deemphasize gas warfare even apart from the fear of Allied retaliation that significantly influenced at least the armed forces.