Objectors to war have descendants, too

Cindy Freed at the group blog In-Depth Genealogist calls attention to a Civil War database of Pennsylvanians whose religious convictions prevented them from accepting a draft to serve in the Union army. Her title ("Bet You've Never Researched This") may grate on those with lots of Quaker ancestors, or those from the German Brethren churches who took a similar stand. But her title does reflect an ambivalence in genealogy between honoring individual service and sacrifice in war, on one hand, and support of war in general, on the other. (An earlier post along these lines is here.)

Additional sources for more recent conscientious objectors can be found in National Archives Record Group 163, "Selective Service System (World War I), 1917-1939," and Record Group 147, "Records of the Selective Service System 1940-," and in various federal court records.





Cindy Freed, "Bet You've Never Researched This," The In-Depth Genealogist, posted 6 May 2012 (http://www.theindepthgenealogist.com/?p=6448 : accessed 6 May 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Objectors to war have descendants, too," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Chicago 2401 months ago, and other books

Two hundred years and one month ago, at the start of the War of 1812, the Potawatomi obliterated Chicago. Last month the University of Chicago Press announced a new book on the subject by historian Ann Durkin Keating: Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago. With blurbs from Donald Miller (City of the Century) and Lee Sandlin (Wicked River) it looks to be a good read. (Sandlin's take is not wholly favorable, however.)


Other recently reviewed books of potential microhistorical interest:

Adrea Lawrence, Lessons from an Indian Day School: Negotiating Colonization in Northern New Mexico, 1902-1907, reviewed here.

Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after World War Two, reviewed here.



Harold Henderson, "Chicago 2401 months ago, and other books," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Memories of War

"There is no one American memory of either world war," writes Jay Winter in his interesting review."We need to acknowledge the messiness of remembrance, the absence of uniformity, and the heterodox tendency of people who survive war to speak their minds and express their feelings in their own ways." (Of course, one way of remembering -- not so useful to the genealogist or historian -- is simple silence, which seems to be what my great-grandfather practiced.) Winter commends four books:

Steven Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

John Bodnar, The "Good War" in American Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Harvard's publicity describes it as "a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight . . . . resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial."

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). This one I can recommend personally, having already read it. What sticks with me is her description of what was then conventionally viewed as "A Good Death," and how surviving soldiers did their best to describe their fallen comrades' deaths accordingly.


Jay Winter [featured review], The American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 3 (June 2011):755-58.


Harold Henderson, "Memories of War," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]