The Most Famous Thing Robert E. Lee Never Said: Duty, Forgery, and Cultural Amnesia

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN HEUSTON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
English Language ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Scholarly Journals ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cultural Amnesia

This essay explains the surprising set of circumstances surrounding perhaps the best-known quotation commonly attributed to Robert E. Lee (“Duty is the sublimest word in the English language”) and explains several significant things about the famous quotation and its broader significance: (1) Lee never said any such thing. (2) The famous line appears in a forged letter. (3) It is quite likely that a Union soldier forged the letter when the US Army occupied Lee's Arlington, Virginia estate during the American Civil War. (4) The phony quotation also shows up in an amazing range of sources, from academic books and scholarly journals, to Forbes magazine, to legal briefs and judicial decisions, to speeches by major political figures. (5) Although at one point early in the twentieth century it was fairly widely known that the letter was a forgery, the bogus quotation persists in widespread usage as something like a southern (and, perhaps surprisingly, a national) equivalent of George Washington's apocryphal “I cannot tell a lie.” (6) The long, strange career of this bogus quotation has larger implications for professional and general conversations about Lee, the Civil War, and American cultural memory.

Models of Leadership

2019 ◽  
pp. 130-185
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Authority ◽  
Democratic Leadership ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Important Site

This chapter situates monuments to Union and Confederate leaders within longstanding traditions in art history. Early tributes to Civil War commanders extended antebellum efforts to develop democratic variations on the equestrian statue, a form associated with imperial sovereigns. Monuments to orators illustrated the fading of the lyceum oratory that had shaped public culture during the Civil War era and the increasing emphasis on military commanders as exemplars of leadership. The equestrian statues that proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offered allegories of public authority, gradually shifting from popular election of leaders to rank-and-file submission to review by captains of industry. Some monuments explored the possibilities of charismatic democratic leadership, but the prevailing models illustrated the growing influence of professionalization in art as well as in government. The US Army was an important site of professionalization, and the equestrian statue most informed by current military thinking celebrated the establishment of the army general staff as a landmark in American bureaucracy.

Surgical Pathology in the Era of the Civil War: The Remarkable Life and Accomplishments of Joseph Janvier Woodward, MD

2005 ◽  
Vol 129 (10) ◽  
pp. 1313-1316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy V. Rapkiewicz ◽  
Alan Hawk ◽  
Adrienne Noe ◽  
David M. Berman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Surgical Pathology ◽  
Biographical Sketch ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Us Army ◽  
The Us ◽  
Aniline Dyes

Abstract Joseph Janvier Woodward was an assistant surgeon in the US Army during the Civil War, coauthored the definitive works on the mortality and morbidity of that war, attended at the autopsy of President Lincoln, and attended President Garfield after he was shot. He revolutionized the field of photomicroscopy and was one of the first pathologists to use aniline dyes as tissue stains. Yet despite the occasional biographical sketch every few decades, he is largely unknown today. Herein, we review his contributions to surgical pathology and medicine and present modern-day photomicrographs of 140-year-old slides from Woodward's original collection.

A White Man’s War?

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Founding Principle ◽  
Proper Response

This chapter looks at the first two years of the Civil War, when black men were barred from serving in the US Army. It follows the debate that black Northerners conducted about the proper response to the call to serve in the US military, which they were sure would come at some point. Immediate enlistment advocates sparred with those who counseled withholding enlistment until African Americans’ demands had been met. Black Northerners began to articulate the terms under which they would serve the Union, among which citizenship emerged as central, as well as the changes necessary to bring lived reality in the United States in line with the founding principle of equality.

scholarly journals US CIVIL WAR MENURUT FORREST CARTER

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Suryo Sudiro ◽  
Sayit Abdul Karim ◽  
Juhansar Juhansar
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The Us ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
History Books ◽  
Us Civil War

A novel may reflect the political interests and actions of the author. The author can make a story that is purposed to alter common consciousness. This article uses historicism as an interpretation theory. Historicism is used to avoid careless interpretation. With historicism, the story written in the novel is matched with historical events written in some history books. Forrest Carter writes a lot about US Civil War. He, in purpose, does not write about slavery that is commonly read as the cause of the US Civil War. He writes a lot about the murder of women and children by the northern US army soldiers in southern districts. He also writes a lot about the cooperation of his white character with a Cherokee. Above all written by Forrest Carter, the influence of his life and his political interests are seen. 

Response

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-122
Author(s):  
Catherine Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
World War ◽  
Novel Studies ◽  
Stellar Group ◽  
The Military

I felt both tremendously honored and slightly alarmed when I learned that this roundtable was being organized. I was delighted that such a stellar group of novel critics was willing to read Telling It Like It Wasn't but worried about their reactions to what Deidre Lynch has called the book's “deeply weird materials.” Much of the historical substance, especially the military and economic historiography, are far from our usual interests, and many of the literary texts are obscure and ephemeral. Furthermore, I passed over the opportunity to write about the best-known novels (like Philip Roth's Plot Against America) by limiting my twentieth-century case studies to American Civil War and British World War II counterfactuals. So I worried that a panel on this eccentric book might seem merely an irrelevant interruption, especially in the context of a meeting of the Society for Novel Studies.

Warriors Wanted: The Performance of Immigrants in the US Army

2020 ◽  
pp. 019791832094981
Author(s):  
Eiko Strader ◽  
Jennifer Lundquist ◽  
Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Immigrant Incorporation ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Job Outcomes ◽  
Cultural Training ◽  
Us Army ◽  
The Us ◽  
Active Duty Personnel

The US Army offers English-language instruction and socio-cultural training to foreign-born personnel, and current US law allows some immigrants to apply for expedited citizenship through military service. The US Army, thus, offers a compelling context in which to explore how such institutional factors might facilitate immigrant incorporation, yet we know little about the experience of foreign-born soldiers because most surveys exclude active-duty personnel. Using novel data obtained from the US Department of Defense that are not available to the public, this research note describes the integrative nature of the US Army, and contrasts foreign-born and native-born soldiers in relation to what we know about selectivity and immigrant job outcomes elsewhere. We examine rank, promotion likelihood, and retention of newly enlisted citizen and noncitizen immigrant soldiers compared to their native-born counterparts who joined the US Army between 2002 and 2009. We show that immigrants perform equally well or better than native-born soldiers.

“After the Eruption”: Melville and the Cultural Memory of the American Civil War

Leviathan ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-146
Author(s):  
Coleman Hutchison ◽  
Colin Dewey
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
American Civil War

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Billy Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Power ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
American People ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diverse Population ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Effect ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Partisan Conflict

This introduction overviews the book’s argument about how early Americans discovered the political power of music. Music had always been ground of contestation for early Americans but following the ratification of the US Constitution conservative elites in particular looked to music to persuade Americans to rise above political and partisan conflict to instead create a more unified, ordered, and deferential society. This conservative tradition of eliciting political effect from music’s improving, elevating, and refining effects as opposed to its more radical, or disruptive, qualities was intended to unite a diverse population in support of its leaders. However, it also placed music at the center of fraught debates over the proper relationship between the American people and their leaders. Despite resistance from various groups, conservative ideals of musical power successfully shaped perceptions of its political use at least through to the end of the American Civil War.

scholarly journals United States Reconstruction across the Americas

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Free Society ◽  
National History ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Market Capitalism

United States Reconstruction across the Americas explores how emancipation, nationhood and nationalism, and the spread of market capitalism—all central to United States Reconstruction—were interwoven with patterns of post–Civil War global, political, social, and economic developments. The chapters answer these questions: How can an internationalization of US Reconstruction—through a consideration of national history as part of a process involving several state actors—enhance our understanding of this period? How did the American Civil War reshape the US’s relationship to the world, both regionally and internationally? And in what respects did international developments affect the US South’s transition from a slave to a free society?

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