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Full-Text Articles in History

“Bloody Outrages Of A Most Barbarous Enemy:” The Cultural Implications Of The Massacre At Fort William Henry, Colin Walfield Jan 2010

“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 Jan 2010

“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 …


The Ottoman Gunpowder Empire And The Composite Bow, Nathan Lanan Jan 2010

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 …


Front Matter Jan 2010

Front Matter

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.


Letter From The Editor, Evan C. Rothera Jan 2010

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 Jan 2010

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 Struggle To Create Soviet Opera, Miriam Grinberg Jan 2010

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 Jan 2010

Gettysburg Historical Journal 2010

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.