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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 …

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 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 …

"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 …

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 …