Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and ...includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.
How does violence during civil war shape citizens’ willingness to trust and rely on state security providers in the post-conflict period? Can post-conflict security sector reform restore perceptions ...of state security forces among victims of wartime state predation? Using a survey and field experiment in Liberia, we show that rebel-perpetrated violence is strongly positively correlated with trust and reliance on the police after conflict is over, while state-perpetrated violence is not. Victims of wartime state predation are, however, more likely to update their priors about the police in response to positive interactions with newly reformed police officers. We also show that abuses committed by police officers in the post-conflict period are negatively correlated with citizens’ perceptions of the police, potentially counteracting the positive effects of security sector reform. We corroborate our quantitative findings with detailed qualitative observations of interactions between civilians and police officers in the field.
Escaping the Fire Guzaro, Toms; McComb, Terri Jacob; Stoll, David
2010, 2010-03-01
eBook
During the height of the Guatemalan civil war, Toms Guzaro, a Mayan evangelical pastor, led more than two hundred fellow Mayas out of guerrilla-controlled Ixil territory and into the relative safety ...of the government armys hands. This exodus was one of the factors that caused the guerrillas to lose their grip on the Ixil, thus hastening the return of peace to the area. In Escaping the Fire, Guzaro relates the hardships common to most Mayas and the resulting unrest that opened the door to civil war. He details the Guatemalan armys atrocities while also describing the Guerrilla Army of the Poors rise to power in Ixil country, which resulted in limited religious freedom, murdered church leaders, and threatened congregations. His story climaxes with the harrowing vision that induced him to guide his people out of their war-torn homeland. Guzaro also provides an intimate look at his spiritual pilgrimage through all three of Guatemalas main religions. The son of a Mayan priest, formerly a leader in the Catholic Church, and finally a convert to Protestantism, Guzaro, in detailing his religious life, offers insight into the widespread shift toward Protestantism in Latin America over the past four decades. Riveting and highly personal, Escaping the Fire ultimately provides a counterpoint to the usual interpretation of indigenous agency during the Guatemalan civil war by documenting the little-studied experiences of Protestants living in guerrilla-held territory.
This book examines the differing ways that Atlantans have
remembered the Civil War since its end in 1865. During the Civil
War, Atlanta became the second-most important city in the
Confederacy after ...Richmond, Virginia. Since 1865, Atlanta's civic
and business leaders promoted the city's image as a "phoenix city"
rising from the ashes of General William T. Sherman's wartime
destruction. According to this carefully constructed view, Atlanta
honored its Confederate past while moving forward with financial
growth and civic progress in the New South. But African Americans
challenged this narrative with an alternate one focused on the
legacy of slavery, the meaning of freedom, and the pervasive racism
of the postwar city. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
Atlanta's white and black Civil War narratives collided. Wendy
Hamand Venet examines the memorialization of the Civil War in
Atlanta and who benefits from the specific narratives that have
been constructed around it. She explores veterans' reunions,
memoirs and novels, and the complex and ever-changing
interpretation of commemorative monuments. Despite its economic
success since 1865, Atlanta is a city where the meaning of the
Civil War and its iconography continue to be debated and
contested.
Referring to the war that was raging across parts of the American landscape, Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1862, "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth." Lincoln ...recognized what was at stake in the American Civil War: not only freedom for 3.5 million slaves but also survival of self-government in the last place on earth where it could have the opportunity of developing freely. Noted historian Steven E. Woodworth tells the story of what many regard as the defining event in United States history. While covering all theaters of war, he emphasizes the importance of action in the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River in determining its outcome. Woodworth argues that the Civil War had a distinct purpose that was understood by most of its participants: it was primarily a conflict over the issue of slavery. The soldiers who filled the ranks of the armies on both sides knew what they were fighting for. The outcome of the war—after its beginnings at Fort Sumter to the Confederate surrender four years later—was the result of the actions and decisions made by those soldiers and millions of other Americans. Written in clear and compelling fashion, This Great Struggle is their story—and ours.
The escalation of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) into interstate wars has been studied extensively with opportunity and willingness frameworks. In this article, we conceptualize and ...operationalize proto-insurgencies as a civil war equivalent to MIDs. Just as most MIDs do not escalate into interstate war, most proto-insurgencies never make the key tactical transitions needed to produce the onset of civil war. We separately examine proto-insurgency formation and proto-insurgency escalation to onset. We find that proto-insurgency formation is associated with political persecution, such as denial of access to justice, regime corruption, and mid-range levels of repression. Our theoretical focus is on how state repressive violence creates diffusion effects that push proto-insurgencies toward the tactical transitions that enable the escalation to civil war. Proto-insurgency escalation to civil war onset is driven by high levels of state repressive violence directed against proto-insurgency and its area of origin. This leads to the dispersal of proto-insurgents and the displacement of surrounding populations, inducing the spread of state repression to a larger number of administrative units. This creates the foundation for guerrilla warfare and establishes the conditions for rebels to offer sanctuary to displaced persons in return for active support, marking the onset of civil war.
Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into ...existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, "Dixie"; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection-before apples turned to ashes in their mouths-many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.
The absence of state capacities to raise revenue and to support markets is a key factor in explaining the persistence of weak states. This paper reports on an ongoing project to investigate the ...incentive to invest in such capacities. The paper sets out a simple analytical structure in which state capacities are modeled as forward looking investments by government. The approach highlights some determinants of state building including the risk of external or internal conflict, the degree of political instability, and dependence on natural resources. Throughout, we link these state capacity investments to patterns of development and growth.
This article investigates the relationship between civil war onset and state capacity through a focus on the role of primary commodities. This is accomplished by moving the focus of the civil war ...literature away from an almost exclusive concern with the incentives of rebels to a consideration of both rebels and rulers as revenue seeking predators. This predatory theory approach expects that higher levels of state capacity should deter civil war onset, while civil war onset should reduce state capacity. Further, natural resource rents are expected to enhance state capacity, rather than increase the likelihood of civil war onset. In order to deal with the endogeneity posed by including fiscal measures of state capacity in single equation models of civil war onset, this study employs a simultaneous equations framework. This framework allows us to capture the effects of civil war onset on state capacity and vice versa, as well as the effects of primary commodities on both endogenous covariates. The main findings from the statistical analyses include: state capacity does not affect civil war onset, but civil war onset reduces state capacity; and primary products directly affect only state capacity — they do not directly affect civil war onset, as found in previous contributions to the literature.
This book provides a comparative history of the domestic and international nature of Spain's First Carlist War (1833-40) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), as well as the impact of both conflicts.
...The book demonstrates how and why Spain's struggle for liberty was won in the 1830s only for it to be lost one hundred years later. It shows how both civil wars were world wars in miniature, fought in part by foreign volunteers under the gaze and in the political consciousness of the outside world.
Prefaced by a short introduction, The Spanish Civil Wars is arranged into two domestic and international sections, each with three thematic chapters comparing each civil war in detail. The main analytical perspectives are political, social and new military history in nature, but they also explore aspects of gender, culture, nationalism and separatism, economy, religion and, especially, the war in its international context. The book integrates international archival research with the latest scholarship on both subjects and also includes a glossary, a bibliography and several images.
It is a key resource tailored to the needs of students and scholars of modern Spain which offers an intriguing and original new perspective on the Spanish Civil War.
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