美国独立战争的影响用英文写的!!拜托了 求求了!!
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发布时间：2022-05-05 23:15
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时间：2022-06-28 07:01
The veterans from both sides were the first and probably the most partisan revisionists. On some points they found near unanimity: Northern veterans believed they had saved the Union and given a new birth to freedom; Confederate veterans believed they had fought nobly for independence and might well have prevailed had their resources not given out. But both argued endlessly over the specifics.
The legions of popular and academic authors who have studied the war have discerned no clearer pattern of grand truths from the clutter of documented facts. Moreover, today, thousands of ordinary citizens not only retrace the soldiers' steps literally across preserved battlefields but claim expertise about the war as they do for no other event in U.S. history. Partly because of and partly in spite of such interest, attempting to understand the long‐term impact of the Civil War has proced as much conflict as consensus.
From a strictly military standpoint, the war appears to many historians as the first modern war. A technological explosion around midcentury accounted for such innovations as rifled small arms and ordnance, armor‐plated steam vessels, and primitive machine guns and submarines. Corresponding changes in transportation and communications helped make the Civil War more like World War I than Napoleonic warfare. Yet old‐fashioned tactics retained grisly currency, and both armies depended upon animal power—mules for supply and horses for tactical mobility—to the very end. Clearly, this was a transitional time wherein elements of the old and the new were mixed.
In its unprecedented requirements for men and goods, the Civil War called forth novel administrative skills and structures. The Confederate central government took a commanding role in these affairs, largely e to the comparatively underdeveloped instrial and transportation infrastructure in the plantation states before the war. Although the U.S. government in Washington increased dramatically in size, and expenditures ring Abraham Lincoln's presidency surpassed those of all his predecessors combined, Northern officials relied upon conventional market mechanisms and the lure of profits rather than coercion to meet their need for supplies. Whereas early in the war, bureaucrats with extensive administrative experience—such as Edwin M. Stanton, whom Lincoln appointed secretary of war—were in short supply, the crucible of war quickly changed that.
From the standpoint of manpower, both sides departed sharply from precedent in resorting to conscription to replenish their ranks. Precisely because conscription was so European a practice, Americans had abhorred it from the time of the Revolutionary War. Citizens of the Confederate states, who enred the draft a year before their Yankee counterparts did, also suffered levies upon food, wagons, work animals, and other militarily useful supplies. Although Northerners escaped such material tolls and their demoralizing consequences, they found much to criticize in the draft of men. The New York City anti‐draft riots of July 1863 epitomized the opposition. Even apart from the disturbances that it proced, the Union's draft worked poorly. As a result, the military‐run, undemocratic conscription served largely as a negative example for the future.
The North's other major overture toward filling the ranks, the recruitment of African Americans in the military, left a much more significant legacy. This policy reflected the North's commitment to destroying slavery, as best expressed in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863. Besides its grant of freedom to slaves in the Confederate states, the proclamation also provided for the wholesale incorporation of black men into the Union army.
Like most other innovations of the Civil War years, the legacy of this mobilization was mixed. On the negative side of the ledger, African American soldiers enred separate and unequal treatment to the end. When the demographics of demobilization dictated that they would play a major role in occupying the defeated South, Washington forestalled that opportunity by assigning black regulars to positions along the Atlantic coast and the border with Mexico, far removed from possible contact with former slaves. And for their part, black sailors soon found themselves again subjected to the prewar quota system (5% of total enlistments) and consigned systematically to the ratings of cook and steward.
On the positive side of the ledger, African Americans won a permanent—though neither undisputed nor uncheckered—place in the armed forces of the reunited nation. The all‐black 24th and 25th Infantry and 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments (the fabled “Buffalo” Soldiers) created a legacy of loyalty and sacrifice that persisted well into the twentieth century. Even more important, the service of nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors—the overwhelming majority of whom were former slaves—established a claim for citizenship rights that the nation attempted to satisfy in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Participation by former slaves in the political life of the ex‐Confederate states followed. Affiliation with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, persisted among black voters until the 1930s. Union army veterans played an important part in this allegiance.
The war conferred a similarly mixed legacy upon the officer corps of the army and the navy. Although most volunteer officers returned to civilian life after the war, men who opted for continued service encountered considerable frustration. Reced from their inflated if temporary (brevet) rank to the more prosaic regular rank in the shrunken regular army, officers faced an abundance of boredom and danger but little glory on the western frontier. Naval officers likewise languished in the smaller postwar navy, often spending years at the same grade with little hope of promotion in a fleet a mere shadow of its wartime counterpart. In part because of their isolation from civilian life, officers in both branches cultivated a strong sense of professionalism. Postwar military school systems helped the officer corps regain the collective confidence it had enjoyed at the end of the Civil War.
Scholars have assessed the impact of the war on the national government variously over the years. Early studies stressed the transformation of the prewar state of limited constitutional authority into a powerful centralized government, which the metamorphosis of “the United States” from a plural to a singular construction neatly captures. During the past generation, social scientists from various disciplines have examined the Civil War from the standpoint of state formation. Often they employ a comparative method that likens the process of national consolidation in the United States with that in late nineteenth‐century Germany, Italy, Japan, and Brazil. Whereas some scholars take the approach that centralized bureaucratic states are the functional byprocts of instrial society, most insist that historically specific considerations determine the evolution of the state in relation to society. From the latter perspective, the Civil War presents a treasure trove of insights.
With nearly monopolistic control over the wartime government in Washington, the Republican Party enacted pivotal measures regarding homesteads, banking and the currency, ecation, railroads, and the freed slaves. But even in such circumstances, policymakers found it easier to prosecute military victory than to secure the peace. Amid increasingly rancorous debate, congressional Republicans seized the Reconstruction process from President Andrew Johnson, guaranteed the freedom and citizenship of the former slaves, and imposed temporary military rule on the South. Obstinate opposition from white southerners coupled with growing disenchantment among white northerners soon fragmented the Republican coalition. Party moderates backed away from guaranteeing citizenship rights, from supporting the elected Republican governments in the former Confederate states, and from radically transforming the southern economy. Content in the knowledge that the South (like the West) was subject to the economic dominion of the Northeast, Washington acquiesced in southern “home rule.” Former Confederate soldiers led the way in forcibly removing freedmen from public life.
If students of the late nineteenth‐century South tend to view the consequences of the war as devastating to the regional economy, students of the national economy show far less unanimity over the effects of the Civil War. Some seventy years ago, historians Charles R. and Mary A. Beard (1927) declared that the war constituted “The Second American Revolution,” which removed southern agrarians from national power and thereby made possible the instrial transformation of the nation after 1865. Historians who have examined this thesis using assorted interpretive frameworks and techniques have reached no firm consensus. Whereas some would confirm the Beards' assertion that the war ushered in the instrial transformation, others perceive it as a retardant force. Given the accelerating pace of instrialization before the war, the critics argue, the war in fact slowed development, largely e to the diversion of human and material resources. Yet statistics of economic performance do not tell the whole tale.
The true measure of the war's economic impact lies in its consolidation of federal dominion over the North Amer ican landmass the United States had accumulated ring the first half of the nineteenth century. Just as reconstructing the South was key to this objective—even if remaking the southern economy along demonstrably northern lines was of secondary importance—controlling the Indians of the Great Plains figured prominently in the larger scheme. Although the wartime and postwar conflicts between Anglo‐Americans and Native Americans grew out of grievances present in such encounters from the seventeenth century onward, there were many new factors in the equation.
Aside from the growing desire of white homesteaders and prospectors for access to Indian lands, railroad interests laden with federal land grants increased the demand. Missionaries and officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs made strong overtures on behalf of “civilizing the savages,” all of which strengthened the federal commitment to confining each tribe to a specific reservation (and by 1887 proced the Dawes Severalty Act and the fixation with indivial land allotments). Civil War politics further complicated the mix, the most famous instances being the “disloyalty” of the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory and the violent rebellions undertaken by the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanches in the southwest desert. When in the late 1860s, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. Philip H. Sheridan set out to sube the Indians' resistance to federal authority, they took full advantage of the new weaponry and means of transportation that the Civil War had proven. Their use of the new tactics of unconditional surrender—winter campaigns, making war on women and children, and destroying villages and crops in the Plains Indians Wars forced the Native Americans to succumb.
In sum, the Civil War has left a mixed, even contentious, legacy in the different sections of the nation and among the different sectors of the population. Moreover, as each generation born since the war has found—alternately to its delight and its dismay—that legacy is not fixed and immutable. Instead, it is subject to reinterpretation. Perhaps the recurrent controversy that surrounds the public display of the Confederate battle flag best illustrates a key interpretive insight: though struggles over the legacy of the war may degenerate into mere skirmishes or escalate into full‐scale wars, their guns, unlike those of 1861–65, will never fall completely silent.
[See also Economy and War; Instry and War; Society and War; State, The.]
Bibliography
Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols., 1927.
Jay Luvaas, The Military Legacy of the Civil War, 1959.
Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, 1971.
Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1973.
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 1982.
Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare, 1988.
Philip Shaw Paludan, “A People's Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865, 1988.
Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in American, 1859–1877, 1990.
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992
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时间：2022-06-28 07:02
或者the American War of Independence impaction
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时间：2022-06-28 07:02
