Revelation: The move towards social aspect

As I have been reading Taverns and Drinking in Early America, I have come to the realization that people in the colonial era were drunk most of their lives. It is a complete wonder how these people accomplished anything. This book is filled with accounts of drinking being a distraction to their everyday life, and yet not much was done about this. Laws were passed to prevent such drunkenness and yet, these laws were as disregarding as most speeding limits. The times were the laws were most upheld was when drunkenness interfered with the Sabbath and moral boundaries. When I say moral boundaries, I do not mean personal moral boundaries, but rather the moral boundaries set by religion. These moral boundaries also varied with each colony depending on whether or not they were sectarian or non-sectarian colonies.
Sectarian colonies, or colonies that were ruled by a religious affiliation, were the stricter colonies regarding moral boundaries. While they allowed drinking to continue, they paid more attention to people who broke moral codes. For example, lawmakers in Plymouth Colony were concerned about the drinking age, whereas other non-sectarian colonies were not so worried. Plymouth Colony lawmakers stated, in regards those who were not allowed to drink, that those, "especially young persons and such as stand not in need thereof." This law made it illegal for young person to consume alcohol, "except in case of necessitie for the releife of those that are sicke or faint or the like for theire refreshing." Alcohol, or 'strong water', was considered the safest form of liquid, as opposed to water, so in times of necessity it was acceptable for those who were barred from drinking, were allowed to consume 'strong water.'
Non-sectarian colonies were more concerned about the social order. New York, a non-sectarian colony, was extremely disturbed by tavern keepers who entertained blacks. The tavern keepers who served free and 'unfree' blacks were the most heavily prosecuted. Making blacks equal to whites were an idea that touch a raw nerve for New York lawmakers because it disrupted the social order they were so keen on keeping. Even more interesting were the tavern keepers; they were women. Women in this time period depending on their husbands to keep them financially sound, so when their husband died (or they were single women), they needed to find an income source. These women opened taverns, not to just free white men, but everyone. Judith Peters, Susannah Hutchins and Ann Butler were all prosecuted for keeping 'disorderly house.' These women entertained blacks to supplement their small income, and because of this they were prosecuted. Each women was fined, and in the case of Ann Butler, she was banished from New York. The elites of this society took social order very seriously.
The correlation between sectarian colonies and non-sectarian colonies is their moral bases are founded upon two different ideals: religion and social order/money. Both of these types of colonies deeply frowned down upon specific types of 'drunks' and tavern keepers. Sectarian colonies frowned upon the drunk and tavern keeper who was in business on the Sabbath. Non-sectarian colonies frowned upon the tavern keepers, and drunks, who supplied to free and 'unfree' blacks.

Ashley Blog #3: Motivations and Case Studies

This week, I was trying to work my way through some of my journal articles. One interesting source that I located was a short paper submitted to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Symposium, in 2004. Michael MacQueen, in this paper, examines the work of historian Alfonsas Eidintas, using case studies of participants in the Holocaust to help prove Eidintas’ ideas about motivation. The citation and analysis follow below.

MacQueen, Michael. “Lithuanian Collaboration in the ‘Final Solution’: Motivations and Case Studies.” Paper presented at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Symposium Presentation, Washington, D.C., 2004.

According to MacQueen, there has been a hesitation among some Lithuanians to acknowledge their country’s participation in the Holocaust. MacQueen states that many seek to “label the Lithuanian participants in the genocide ‘elements from the social margins’” who, upon receiving “license by the Germans,” simply vented their “preexisting appetites for mass murder” (1). Propaganda spread by the Germans and anti-Soviet resistance groups attributed to the tension within Lithuania, until this sparked violence.

However, MacQueen does not support this idea, instead stating that there is a wide range of motivations for participation in the Holocaust. He builds upon the research of Eidintas, listing the motivations as follows: revenge, opportunism, expiation, anti-Semitism, self-enrichment, and a section he adds, “mass murders by chance, the ‘accidental genocidaires’” (1). In order to help prove these motivations, he examines the motivations of actual participants.

The first participant he examines is Jonas Barkauskas, a Pole who worked at the headquarters of Ypatingas Burys, masquerading as a Lithuanian. He worked very closely at the base at Paneriai, where he was a sentry at the killing pits. He was eventually asked to rotate to shooting the Jews, and did not resist this change, taking the opportunity to begin looting all that he could get his hands on. When asked by Polish authorities about his motivations, Barkauskas stated that he “had no reason to mourn the Jews” and that they were all “parasites” (3). This is an example of self-enrichment, anti-Semitism, and the accidental genocidaires, as it was chance that led him to the job at Ypatingas Burys.

The second participant examined by MacQueen is Antanas Gečas-Gecevicius, who eagerly signed up for service with the Battalion for the Defense of National Labor when the Germans invaded Lithuania. He eventually became commander of the 2^nd Battalion and from this position traveled to Belorussia to help in “Operation Free-of-Jews” (4). It was his job to ensure that the Jews in his area of Belorussia “disappear with a remnant” (4). MacQueen states that the 2^nd Battalion alone murdered at least 19,000 people in about a month. They also participated in a massacre in Slutsk, where Gečas personally murdered Jews that did not die with the first shots from his soldiers. He was awarded an Iron Cross from Germany, and later, from a POW camp, was able to convince the Polish Army that he “always felt Polish, and… wish[ed] to serve the Polish Army” (5). He was able, through his service, to win both Polish and British military decorations.

MacQueen’s third case study is Aleksandras Lileikis, whose memoir illuminates his involvement as chief of the Lithuanian Security Police. He reorganized the security police to work like the Gestapo, and had control over “cases of Jews in hiding, Jews suspected of communist links, and… cases of Jews who had escaped from ghettos” (6). He also signed off on all executions that took place at Paneriai at the hands of the Ypatingas Burys, which MacQueen states fits “the definition of the bureaucrat who kills with a pen rather than a gun” (6).

In his final case study, MacQueen addresses several men involved in the killings in smaller cities. He is able to name the specifics of each situation, due to the testimonies of survivors. For example, in the town Darbenai, he notes that the chief of police locked 400 Jewish citizens in a synagogue for over a month before shooting them. These case studies, he states, show that the killers not only knew their victims, but also operated with extreme brutality and that “the motivation of personal enrichment at the expense of Jewish victims seems to have played a stronger role in the rural setting” (9).

Despite his paper having very little analysis and no real conclusion, it nevertheless offers interesting details about those people who were involved in the Paneriai, Ypatingas Burys, and 2^nd Battalion, their interconnectedness, and their possible motivations. It will be a good source to use for framing my own examination of motivation, along with the publication by Eidintas.

Blog week three

After finally narrowing down the topic, and the specific area within in the topic, I have began to look at my journal articles, looking at the origins of minstrelsy and the viewpoints that would have been expressed during the time and nowadays. My article The Seeming Counterfeit”: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy” covered one of these areas. My belief is that I feel I must understand the origins and all views from the audience to see what they would see, and how this could be interpreted back then in order to keep my bias from getting in the way.

Several quotes within the article stuck out when reading. It seems there were many views on Blackface performers, and many people seemed to be split between the two. One famous writer, Fredrick Douglas, called Blackface imitators “the Filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens”. However, it is also stated that while many people agreed with this, society embraced the actors and the shows, and considered Blackface performing to be “an American invention”, and that the minstrelsy “originated on the plantation and constituted the “”only completely original contribution””.

I found this interesting, since if these shows were continuing today, there would be outcries and the courts and laws would be all over the place on racial issues. However, in this time, even though there were issues with the shows and actors, people were allowing it to happen simply because it was an “American classic” and it was one of the only type of performing that originated in America through the adaptation of European theatre mixed with Black dialect, music and dancing.  

The Troubles: Reactions to Bloody Sunday

As I slowly come into forming an argument, I am finding that the historiography on Bloody Sunday is mysteriously absent. There does not seem to be a highly debatable: most historians and journalists now all agree that what occurred on January 30th, 1972 was a travesty and that the British paramilitary troops were wrong to fire on unarmed people. What I am looking into finding are the motivations behind the British troops who fired on civilians, and also the actions taken by the Unionists and the Republicans in response to the tragic event.

From reading The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966-1996 by Tim Pat Coogan, the reactions to Bloody Sunday were severe on both sides. According to Coogan, many Unionists (those in favor of keeping Northern Ireland a part of Britain) outright supported and sometimes even relished over what the troops had done (135). Coogan's chapter title "'They Shot Well, Didn't They!'" encompasses the feelings of some of the protestant Loyalists in 1972. Even officials were in favor with the shooting; they justified it. General Ford reported on BBC that "Paratroopers did not go in there shooting. In fact they did not fire until they were fired upon and my information at the moment...is that the 3rd Battalion fired three rounds altogether, after they'd had something between ten and twenty fired at them" (qtd. Coogan 135). Responses became even more extreme through propaganda, with one statement reporting that the troops "came under nail-bomb attack and a fusillade of fifty to eighty rounds" (qtd. Coogan 135).

This, of course, enraged the Republicans into acting out in their own way. As stated by Coogan, "Bernadette Devlin took her protest... to the House of Commons by saying: 'The Minister has stood up and lied to the House. Nobody shot at the Paratroopers but somebody will shortly'" (136). And Devlin was correct on both accounts: no civilians were armed that day with either guns or nail-bombs; and the IRA, not a month later, bombed a British troops' headquarters, killing seven people, five of them women. The IRA officials claimed it was a response to Bloody Sunday (Coogan 137).

Thus, after reading Coogan's chapter over Bloody Sunday, my argument or thesis is progressively developing. I either want to analyze the eyewitness accounts of the civilians and the troops and compare and contrast them; look at their motivations and biases for the things they declared. Or, something that may be more difficult to achieve, I would like to see exactly how much and how long the IRA used the Bloody Sunday massacre to justify future atrocities committed by them. Just from looking at Coogan, it is obvious both are significant factors.

Titanic Research Week 3 Blog

Titanic Research Week 3

            My research has went pretty well this week, I have ordered five more books, only one of which has arrived so I will be focusing on it for the purpose of this blog and looking forward to the historiography assignment. The title of this secondary source is Unsinkable: The Full Story of RMS Titanic, by Daniel Allen Butler. Butler gives a full history of the Titanic in this book, starting from right before it set sail and ending with the judicial inquiries about its sinking. Butler is a quirky writer contrasting this book with other Titanic books which are often dry and serious, or overly-dramatic. For example in the introduction he stated that Titanic is the third most recognizable word in the world after God and Coca-Cola.

            This book is going to be helpful to my research regarding social class aboard the Titanic. Butler includes a lot of detail about the differences among the social classes. Part of his argument relates to my topic, he wrote “It must be remembered that the Titanic was lost at a time when prejudices were an accepted fact of life, class distinctions were sharply drawn and sharply enforced… Whether the beliefs, attitudes, and ideas of this era were ultimately right or wrong is immaterial: what is essential is to remember that at the time they were accepted as valid, and people’s actions were determined by that validity” (Butler 3). This is important to remember because it is so easy to compare modern standards of equality and ideas about social class to this era, but that would not be fair. (As Dr. Wolbrink has always reminded us “be past-minded”) Butler’s statement refutes the idea that the people who lived during the Titanic era were naive. He argues that modern historians should not judge the people in 1912 against any standard except those standards already existing in Edwardian society. For example, for forty years before the sinking of the Titanic, only four people had lost their lives aboard passenger ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps this is why so many people felt safe boarding the Titanic and claiming it “unsinkable”, not because they were being naïve or arrogant.

            Lastly, in this brief blog I want to discuss the importance of Butler’s argument in the context of other Titanic historians. Last week I wrote about Steven Biel who has argued that the event of the Titanic’s sinking was significant but it was not a turning point in American society, the end of an innocent age, something that orthodox historians have maintained. After reading excerpts of Butler’s book, I have concluded that he is in alignment with the orthodox view. Although he analyzes and debates some new questions, I have categorized him this way because in his last chapter, he basically came to the same conclusion as previous orthodox historians. He stated “The same energies that powered the Edwardian age would, like a flywheel spinning too fast, soon tear it apart. When the waters of the North Atlantic closed over the Titanic’s stern that cold April night, something changed in the western world, though no one knew it at the moment. Attitudes, beliefs, and values that had endured for hundreds of years were shaken, overnight as it were, and would remain unsettled a century later” (Butler 235).

           

Blog Post #3 - Secondary Sources (Maybe)

     This week for my blog post, I planned to analyze two of my secondary sources. The first of which being The Suffragettes: Towards Emancipation edited by Dr. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta. Upon opening this source, I realized that it was not in fact a secondary source, but a primary source that had been edited and republished. This source is actually a memoir by Emmeline Pankhurst, with the name of My Own Story. I decided that since I had already chosen it for this week I would continue my analysis anyway even though it is a primary source. The memoir itself it broken up into three separate “books”, the first two of which I decided against analyzing. The reason being that the first book concerned Emmeline’s childhood and the second focused on the peaceful work of the Women’s Social and Political Union, neither of these are the focus of my topic. The third book “The Women’s Revolution” centers on my topic so my analysis will begin there.

      For Emmeline this movement centered on more than just fighting for rights, it began with the belief that women should be equal politically in England with men. She not only concerned herself with the rights of the elite women of the time, but also included working class women in her organization. In this, the third section of her memoir, Emmeline also focuses on her daughter Christabel’s work in sustaining the organization and moving toward more militaristic tendencies. The reason Christabel and Emmeline shifted toward militancy centered on the lack of progress they made with their more peaceful protests and demonstrations (Roberts 266). These women realized they needed the attention of the press and the public. The one way to guarantee their message was heard was through more radical ideas and actions (Roberts 263). The rest of the source offers more information on the movement, although it does have a bias, being written by Emmeline Pankhurst.

     The other source I chose to analyze this week is The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860 – 1930 written by Laura E. Nym Mayhall. This upon looking inside is actually a secondary source of compiled information. The beginning of this book does not offer anything of use to my topic because it is too early. Instead, I started my analysis on the third chapter of the book, which begins in 1906. This is still a little early for my topic because I am focused on the militancy, which did not gain traction until about 1909 with the peak of militancy occurring between 1912 – 1914 (Mayhall 81). The first chapters offer lots of background information on the movement, especially with the various suffrage groups working within England at the time. This is useful because it offers comparison to the WSPU. Although in the beginning, membership fluidly moved between all the organizations, causing many women to be members of multiple suffrage organizations (Mayhall 40). This source will offer lots of insight into the background of the suffrage movement.

Sources:

Mayhall, Laura E. Nym. The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860 – 1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Roberts, Marie M., and Tamae Mizuta, eds. The Suffragettes: Towards Emancipation. London: Routledge & Thoemmes Press, 1993.

THE BLACK FLAG

"THE BLACK FLAG..."is an article published in the New York Times April 16th, 1864, it was written April 14th, 1864. The actual battle occurred April 12, 1864, so the article can be used as a primary source of how Northern media portrayed the massacre. It is easy to pick up the bias of the story as the author refers to the Northern Army as "our troops". The author also does not shy away from incendiary language as he calls the Rebel troops "bloodthirsty as devils incarnate". Also, the article describes the slaughter as not being limited to soldiers. The author claims that negro women and children were murdered in the massacre. There are also claims that men who were wounded were shot and then rolled onto a heap of bodies, which were then burned. Most concerning of all allegations in the article was the allegation that two black soldiers were buried alive and then unburied themselves and made their way to the hospital. 

The second part of the article is a report given by a man aboard the Platte Valley, a steamer that was allowed during seize fire to come and recover wounded men from the fort as well as burry dead. This report was done 3 days after the battle and was wired from St. Louis. According to the soldier on the boat, the hospital at the battle site was invaded and wounded who lay in the hospital were shot, or forced to exit the hospital before the hospital was burned. Also mentioned in the article was that General Chambers, one of the leaders of the Rebel forces, stated that they have tried to prevent the carnage that happened at Fort Pillow despite the Confederacy having the policy of not sparing negro soldiers. 

Obviously the accounts told in this story are gruesome and implicate war crimes enacted by Confederate forces. However, due to the information being one sided I know I would get an entirely different report if I were to look at a Southern newspaper. I think that it would be fun to take my project in the direction of looking at the reactions in the media towards the Battle since it was a very contentious topic at the time in the media. 

http://www.nytimes.com/1864/04/16/news/black-flag-horrible-massacre-rebels-fort-pillow-captured-after-desperate-fight.html