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Full-Text Articles in History

"The Fate Which Takes Us:" Benjamin F. Beall And Jefferson County, (West) Virginia In The Civil War Era, Matthew Coletti Mar 2016

"The Fate Which Takes Us:" Benjamin F. Beall And Jefferson County, (West) Virginia In The Civil War Era, Matthew Coletti

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to …


Engineering Victory: The Ingenuity, Proficiency, And Versatility Of Union Citizen Soldiers In Determining The Outcome Of The Civil War, Thomas F. Army Jr Aug 2014

Engineering Victory: The Ingenuity, Proficiency, And Versatility Of Union Citizen Soldiers In Determining The Outcome Of The Civil War, Thomas F. Army Jr

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores the critical advantage the Union held over the Confederacy in military engineering. The skills Union soldiers displayed during the war at bridge building, railroad repair, and road making demonstrated mechanical ability and often revealed ingenuity and imagination. These skills were developed during the antebellum period when northerners invested in educational systems that served an industrializing economy. Before the war, northern states’ attempt at implementing basic educational reforms, the spread of informal educational practices directed at mechanics and artisans, and the exponential growth in manufacturing all generated a different work related ethos than that of the South. Plantation …


American Jacobins: Revolutionary Radicalism In The Civil War Era, Jordan Lewis Reed Feb 2009

American Jacobins: Revolutionary Radicalism In The Civil War Era, Jordan Lewis Reed

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation is an attempt to portray the revolutionary character of the American Civil War through a comparative methodology utilizing the French Revolution as both point of influence and as a parallel example. Within this novel context, subtle trends in the ideological development of the Republican Party's Radical wing undertake new meaning and an alternative revolutionary heritage takes shape around an idealization of the universalism of the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s. The work argues that through a diffusion of ideas and knowledge of events from the streets of Paris into the fields of Haiti and onto the …