Black Troops Quotes

Beasts bounding through time. Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly

Night-time train travel is wonderful again! No standing in the corridors for hours, no being shunted off for a troop train to pass, and above all, no black-out curtains. All the windows we passed were lighted, and I could snoop once more. I missed it so terribly during the war. I felt as if we had all turned into moles scuttling along in our separate tunnels. I don't consider myself a real peeper-they go in for bedrooms, but it's families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me. I can imagine their entire lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or lit candles, or bright sofa cushions.

the Black Hats, Simon Cutler’s Iron Brigade, best troops in the Union Army. An

Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.

WHEREVER WE HAD BEEN in Russia, in Moscow, in the Ukraine, in Stalingrad, the magical name of Georgia came up constantly. People who had never been there, and who possibly never could go there, spoke of Georgia with a kind of longing and a great admiration. They spoke of Georgians as supermen, as great drinkers, great dancers, great musicians, great workers and lovers. And they spoke of the country in the Caucasus and around the Black Sea as a kind of second heaven. Indeed, we began to believe that most Russians hope that if they live very good and virtuous lives, they will go not to heaven, but to Georgia, when they die. It is a country favored in climate, very rich in soil, and it has its own little ocean. Great service to the state is rewarded by a trip to Georgia. It is a place of recuperation for people who have been long ill. And even during the war it was a favored place, for the Germans never got there, neither with planes nor with troops. It is one of the places that was not hurt at all.

Without commanding a single troop or passing a single bill, a conservative Supreme Court is not a check on the other branches of government, but a check on progress itself. We can move only as far and as fast as the nine unelected and unaccountable justices on the Court allow us to.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot.

And yet these Americans, with their helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying to take down a clan, the most ancient and efficient social organization known to man. Didn’t the Americans realize that for every leader they arrested there were dozens of brothers, cousins, sons, and nephews to take his place? Setbacks just strengthened the clan’s resolve. Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn’t that just elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?

The pirates trooped in like a sentence full of adjectives, adverbs, and exclamation marks, punctuated finally by the tiny black full stop of Verisimilitude Jones, who was generally called, or more precisely, screamed, "Millie the Monster".

Key wrote it during the War of 1812, when the British troops offered freedom to enslaved black Americans if they’d fight on their side, which is just what they did. A group of former slaves fought on the British side, whooped Key’s ass, and he wanted to kill them. In the third verse, he says:

It was the lot of the Fifity-fourth to bear the brunt of the struggle against the bitter injustice of inferior pay to which black troops were subjected, and the further struggle to secure for the enlisted men who earned it by intelligence and bravery, the right to rise from the ranks and serve as officers.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental as an error only less grave than to make it fundamental. There were Jacobin workmen in Paris who would have fought for the blacks against Bonaparte's troops. But the international movement was not then what is it to-day, and there were none in San Domingo. The black labourers saw only the old slave-owning whites.

Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the East.

But just below the grim tranquility he had learned to display, he cursed with boiling intensity the ambitious men who used him and his troops to further their careers. He cursed the air wing for not trying to get any choppers in through the clouds. He cursed the diplomats arguing about round and square tables. He cursed the South Vietnamese making money off the black market. He cursed the people back home gorging themselves in front of their televisions. Then he cursed God. Then there was no one else to blame and he cursed himself for thinking God would give a shit.

It is I, indeed; and if ever true knight gave proof I am that man,’ replied the leader of the second troop; ‘for who would not rather face giants, sorcerers, or pagans, than this pinching cold?

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the Partition Plan. On May 14, 1948, as the last British troops departed, Jewish leaders declared the creation of the State of Israel on the land apportioned to them by the UN plan.

But even when the names of Black fighters did not survive, stories of their exploits did. Half a century later, José Antonio Aponte, a free Black carpenter and the grandson of one of the Black militiamen who defended Havana against the British, painted pictures precisely of scenes like this, of Black troops taking British men prisoner, of military encampments guarded by Black soldiers. Indeed, Aponte would use those pictures to recruit Black men to a major conspiracy against slavery.

Roman Centurion's Song" LEGATE, I had the news last night - my cohort ordered home By ships to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome. I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below: Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go! I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall, I have none other home than this, nor any life at all. Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here. Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done; Here where my dearest dead are laid - my wife - my wife and son; Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love, Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove? For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice. What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies, Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze - The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days? You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean To Arelate's triple gate; but let me linger on, Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon! You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines. You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but -will you e'er forget The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet? Let me work here for Britain's sake - at any task you will - A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill. Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep, Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep. Legate, I come to you in tears - My cohort ordered home! I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome? Here is my heart, my soul, my mind - the only life I know. I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

Typical was (later governor and U.S. senator) Pitchfork Ben Tillman’s cold-blooded massacre in South Carolina of “a troop of black militiamen for no other reason than that they had dared to conduct a celebratory Fourth of July parade through their mostly black town,” Thomas writes.

Every time I returned home I would drive on streets named for those who thought of me as chattel. “Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee.” “Take a left on Jefferson Davis.” “Make the first right on Claiborne.” Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.

I asked, Did she know Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll? And Ms. Wright’s black sunglasses turned to look at me. During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan blood-lines pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution. True fact.

Most seemed to have been prepping for the Obama apocalypse, the one with FEMA storm trooping in, black helicopters dispatched by the first black president, come to seize their guns, hustling them off to camps where they’d be forced to read the Koran, eat kale, who knew what, while they waited to be dragged before death panels.

Forget bringing the troops home from Iraq. We need to get the troops home from World War II. Can anybody tell me why, in 2009, we still have more than sixty thousand troops in Germany and thirty thousand in Japan? At some point, these people are going to have to learn to rape themselves. Our soldiers have been in Germany so long they now wear shorts with black socks. You know that crazy soldier hiding in the cave on Iwo Jima who doesn’t know the war is over? That’s us. Bush and Cheney used to love to keep Americans all sphinctered-up on the notion that terrorists might follow us home. But actually, we’re the people who go to your home and then never leave. Here’s the facts: The Republic of America has more than five hundred thousand military personnel deployed on more than seven hundred bases, with troops in one hundred fifty countries—we’re like McDonald’s with tanks—including thirty-seven European countries—because you never know when Portugal might invade Euro Disney. And this doesn’t even count our secret torture prisons, which are all over the place, but you never really see them until someone brings you there—kinda like IHOP. Of course, Americans would never stand for this in reverse—we can barely stand letting Mexicans in to do the landscaping. Can you imagine if there were twenty thousand armed Guatemalans on a base in San Ber-nardino right now? Lou Dobbs would become a suicide bomber. And why? How did this country get stuck with an empire? I’m not saying we’re Rome. Rome had good infrastructure. But we are an empire, and the reason is because once America lands in a country, there is no exit strategy. We’re like cellulite, herpes, and Irish relatives: We are not going anywhere. We love you long time!

By far the most important psychological and political part of the Hayes compromise package, of course, was the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South. It was far better, said the new President, for the white man and the black man of the South to make their peace together than to live in constant tension under the surveillance of a federal garrison.

The main reason I don’t like it is that the commodification of Memorial Day and events like NFL’s Salute to Service month . . . capitalizes on a new strain of ‘patriotism,’” Doolittle said. “In America today, we display patriotism through the lens of militarism and war and pass it off as support for the troops. It can smell a lot like nationalism. We’ll buy a hat with a camo logo of our favorite team and wear it proudly, a way to show support for our team and our armed forces. There’s more to patriotism than standing for the anthem and wearing red, white, and blue or camo-themed garb, but this new kind of American patriotism gets exploited in the name of capitalism, and days like Memorial Day lose some of their meaning.

For three or four days the men fought the fire, saving the property and effects of the people, yet these white men and women could not tolerate our black Union soldiers, for many of them had formerly been their slaves; and although these brave men risked life and limb to assist them in their distress, men and even women would sneer and molest them whenever they met them.

The French and British Armies had begged the United States to send supporting reinforcements, but General Pershing had refused to relinquish command of any U.S. troops. They were his responsibility to lead and, as much as possible, to safeguard. He didn't want Americans used as expendable cannon fodder by non-American generals. But he could spare a black regiment, to be used as needed.

Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered.

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste, For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger, At whose approach, ghosts wand’ring here and there Troop home to churchyards. Damnèd spirits all, That in crossways and floods have burial, Already to their wormy beds are gone. For fear lest day should look their shames upon, They willfully themselves exile from light And must for aye consort with black-browed night.

Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.

Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. “It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their drums marked Staunton, Va.,” one said. “They wore the grey, with a black and brass helmet. There were several companies of Virginia and Southern troops.”148 Contingents of black veterans were liberally represented among the sixty thousand soldiers, supplemented by eighteen thousand veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Consequential to the election outcome were the many private contacts in the capital between southern Democrats and Hayes’s northern Republican supporters. At Wormley’s Hotel on February 26, five Hayes people pledged that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South; new “redeemer” governments would be tolerated and “home rule” restored; the four southern Democrats promised, in return, fair treatment of the black community. The influence of the so-called Wormley Conference has been greatly overstated, for it merely culminated months of bargaining and confirmed what was already clear: that Hayes would bring an end to Reconstruction.

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

The Revolution and the Founders’ Constitution chose unity over justice, but the Civil War and Reconstruction put justice ahead of unity. The heroes and villains are different. The Founding reveres paramilitary organizations like the Sons of Liberty. The army of the national government is viewed suspiciously—the Founders did not want a standing army. In Reconstruction, US Army troops, including many Black soldiers, are the heroes, and paramilitary organizations like the Klan and the White League are the villains. The presence of a standing army within a civilian population, dreaded by the Revolutionaries, is what protects the freedpeople

In theory, at least, the Union’s victory in the Civil War had reaffirmed the supremacy of the national government over the states. But of course the states of the former Confederacy had not come back willingly. They rejoined the union at gunpoint, and only after being forced to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and rewrite their state constitutions to ensure equal rights for newly freed blacks. Even then, it took the constant presence of federal troops, who fanned out across the South, to fight off attempts by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists to intimidate, terrorize, or murder black citizens who dared try to cast a ballot.

Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed. Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.

Reconstruction prompted a vicious white backlash, which gained traction following the disputed election of 1876, when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South in return for the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Segregationist whites, known as Redeemers, regained power and quickly targeted black voters, first through violence and fraud and then via devices like literacy and good character tests, poll taxes, and stringent residency requirements. Mississippi became the first state to change its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890. Every other southern state quickly followed. Black voters disappeared seemingly overnight.

George Washington had turned down the requests of blacks, seeking freedom, to fight in the Revolutionary army. So when the British military commander in Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to Virginia slaves who joined his forces, this created consternation. A report from one Maryland county worried about poor whites encouraging slave runaways: The insolence of the Negroes in this county is come to such a height, that we are under a necessity of disarming them which we affected on Saturday last. We took about eighty guns, some bayonets, swords, etc. The malicious and imprudent speeches of some among the lower classes of whites have induced them to believe that their freedom depended on the success of the King’s troops. We cannot therefore be too vigilant nor too rigourous with those who promote and encourage this disposition in our slaves.

Hispanics are half as likely to enlist in the military as either whites or blacks. The recruit-to-population ratio for whites is 1.06. For blacks it is 1.08. For Hispanics, it’s only 0.65. The media not only neglect to highlight this particular underrepresentation, they lie about it. An article published by the Population Reference Bureau—subsidized by taxpayers—is titled: “Latinos Claim Larger Share of U.S. Military Personnel.” To the untrained eye, this would seem to be saying that Latinos claim a larger share of U.S. military personnel. In fact, however, by “larger share,” the headline means “larger” compared with the past—not compared with other groups. The actual article admits that Hispanics constitute less than 12 percent of all enlistees, compared with 16 percent of the civilian workforce. Moreover, despite their machismo culture, a majority of Hispanic troops are women.15

The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action. Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.... Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Fair Employment Practices Commission he had set up.

The autumn hit-and-run raids and the colonists’ attempts to retaliate ended with the early onset of especially heavy snowfalls that year. Over the next few months, the Massachusetts government dispatched to Maine companies of “country soldiers” to augment the inadequate regional militia forces. The troops, however, proved a mixed blessing to local residents and stimulated great controversy, especially in Black Point. There taxpayers later complained bitterly that they had not asked for the soldiers and had derived little benefit from their presence, yet they had nevertheless been required to pay the soldiers’ expenses. Even more galling, they explained, was the fact that the local commander, Joshua Scottow, who had moved to Maine from Boston a few years earlier, had used the men for his own personal gain, employing them to pave his yard, move his barn, and build a palisade for his property.

Lenin was buttressed throughout his life by a moral justification which he outlined in Krasnyi Mech (The Red Sword), a weekly periodical of the Political Department of the Special Corps of Ukranian Cheka Troops. 'For us there do not, and cannot, exist the old systems of morality and "humanity" invented by the bourgeoisie for the old purpose of oppressing and exploiting the "lower classes" [he wrote]. Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute, for it rests on the bright ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion. To us, all is permitted, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but ibn the name of freeing all from bondage....Blood? Let there be blood, if it alone can turn the grey-white-and-black banner of the old piratical world to a scarlet hue, for only the complete and final death of that world will save us from the return of the old jackals.

Four piles of dead were heaped together like broken meat on a butcher’s stall — not a whit more tenderly — and cleared out of the way like carrion; the ground was broken up into great pools of blood, black and noisome; troops of flies were swarming like mimic vultures on bodies still warm, on men still conscious, crowding over the festering wounds (for these men had lain there since Saturday at noon!), buzzing their death-rattle in ears already maddened with torture. That was what we saw in the Malakoff, what we saw a little later in the Great Redan, where among cookhouses, brimful of human blood, English and Russian lay clasped together in a fell embrace, petrified by death; where the British lay in heaps, mangled beyond recognition by their dearest friends, or scorched and blackened by the recent explosions; and where — how strange they looked there! — there stood outside the entrance of one of the houses, a vase of flowers, and a little canary!

With extraordinary bravery, civil rights leaders, activists, and progressive clergy launched boycotts, marches, and sit-ins protesting the Jim Crow system. They endured fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and beatings by white mobs, as well as by the police. Once again, federal troops were sent to the South to provide protection for blacks attempting to exercise their civil rights, and the violent reaction of white racists was met with horror in the North. The dramatic high point of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in 1963. The Southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating peacefully at one lunch counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century. Between autumn 1961 and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men, women, and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone, another fifteen thousand were imprisoned, and one thousand desegregation protests occurred across the region, in more than one hundred cities.32

Oh, it's a good story, as a story,' returned that gentleman; 'as good a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a partner in a house in some large way—spirits, or buttons, or wine, or blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron, or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops, or seamen, or somebody—and the house burst, and we being among the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a scientific manner, and all the rest Of it. When the fairy had appeared and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing, that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,' said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, 'You never saw such a lot of forms in your life. "Why," the attorney said to me one day, "if I wanted this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it, I couldn't have more trouble about it." "You are right, old fellow," I told him, "and in future you'll know that we have something to do here."' The pleasant young Barnacle finished by once more laughing heartily. He was a very easy, pleasant fellow indeed, and his manners were exceedingly winning. Mr Tite Barnacle's view of the business was of a less airy character. He took it ill that Mr Dorrit had troubled the Department by wanting to pay the money, and considered it a grossly informal thing to do after so many years. But Mr Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up men are believed in. Whether or no the reserved and never-exercised power of unbuttoning, fascinates mankind;

The twentieth century’s first major discovery about vision came about, once again, because of war. Russia had long coveted a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean, so in 1904 the czar sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Manchuria and Korea to bully one away from the Japanese. These soldiers were armed with high-speed rifles whose tiny, quarter-inch bullets rocketed from the muzzle at fourteen hundred miles per hour. Fast enough to penetrate the skull but small enough to avoid messy shattering, these bullets made clean, precise wounds like worm tracks through an apple. Japanese soldiers who were shot through the back of the brain—through the vision centers, in the occipital lobe—often woke up to find themselves with tiny blind spots, as if they were wearing glasses spattered with black paint. Tatsuji Inouye, a Japanese ophthalmologist, had the uncomfortable job of calculating how much of a pension these speckled-blind soldiers should receive, based on the percentage of vision lost. Inouye could have gotten away

British ecologist Josephine Andrews, now affiliated with the anthropology department at Washington University, reports a case of primate infanticide by a female black lemur in Madagascar. She found that, after an attack by dogs and the subsequent death of the leading female, a fight ensued between two adult females neither of whom was “dominant.” As they fought, one female suddenly picked up the other female’s infant and “ran back up the mango tree with the screaming infant, shaking it violently from side to side in her mouth, smashing the rib cage, and then held the body while eating some of the entrails.” The mother of the dead infant became silent and, although she sat watching the body, she did not ascend the tree to investigate. For the next few days, the female who had lost her infant sat apart from the rest of the group. She did not eat with the others, but waited until they had moved away before feeding. From then on, the killer of the baby lemur and her infant led the troop. The mother of the dead baby trailed some distance behind them.

The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won.

The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place — a spirit like the night, sad, lonely, silent, mystical, immense. And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves. In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.

When we say that the Negro wants absolute and immediate freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today, the answer is disturbingly terse to people who are not certain they wish to believe it. Yet this is the fact. Negroes no longer are tolerant of or interested in compromise. American history is replete with compromise. As splendid as are the words of the Declaration of Independence, there are disquieting implications in the fact that the original phrasing was altered to delete a condemnation of the British monarch for his espousal of slavery. American history chronicles the Missouri Compromise, which permitted the spread of slavery to new states; the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which withdrew the federal troops from the South and signaled the end of Reconstruction; the Supreme Court' compromise in Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the infamous "separate but equal" philosophy. These measures compromised not only the liberty of the Negro but the integrity of America. In the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro in 1963, the word "compromise" is profane and pernicious.

In the Jolan district, on the edge of the Euphrates River, in the northwestern corner of the city, Marines found something far more troubling. Inside a metal-sided warehouse, past the insurgent caches of rocket-propelled grenades and artillery rounds, the Marines discovered a crawl space barricaded with a safe. Pushing it aside, the troops saw an Iraqi man chained hand and foot, lying in his own waste. The virtual skeleton proved to be a still-living taxi driver who’d been abducted four months earlier along with a pair of French journalists—thankfully, he would survive. Down the hall, Marines crashed through another door and found themselves in what appeared to be a ramshackle movie studio. On the table was a glass with ice in it; whoever had left had just done so in a hurry. Nearby, Marines found two video cameras, klieg lights, and instructions on how to get footage to the Baghdad offices of some of the regional news networks. On the back wall of the room hung the black-and-green flag of Ansar al-Islam. The floor was caked in dried blood. The moment I read that last detail in the intelligence report I received, I knew it was the room where Nick Berg had been murdered.

mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands

The White Liners didn’t bother with any such pretense of civility or restraint. On October 7, John Milton Brown, the sheriff of Coahoma County, reported a “perfect state of terror” had seized his jurisdiction. “I have been driven from my county by an armed force. I am utterly powerless to enforce law or to restore order.” Disheartened by Grant’s refusal to rush troops to Mississippi, Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. He concluded that Reconstruction was a dead letter, white supremacists in his state having engineered a coup d’état. “Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery,” he lamented to his wife. Sarcastically referring to Grant’s and Pierrepont’s words, he wrote, “The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation . . . from such ‘political outbreaks.’ You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.” To head off threatened impeachment, he decided to resign after the election. His darkly prophetic letter previewed the nearly century-long Jim Crow system that would cast blacks back into a state of involuntary servitude to southern whites.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

The Hayes-Tilden deadlock and the fate of Radical Republican administrations in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana eventually were resolved in Washington with Senator John B. Gordon playing a large role. Gordon apparently helped forge a “bargain” under which the South agreed to certification of the election of Hayes on an understanding that the new President would evacuate the last Federal occupation troops from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This would remove Federal protection from those states’ Reconstruction administrations, giving Gordon’s friend Hampton the disputed South Carolina governorship and another Democrat, F. T. Nicholls, the governorship of Louisiana. This compromise completed the so-called “shotgun” political enterprise for which the Ku Klux Klan had been organized a decade before. The extended campaign of terror, led first by the Klan and then by myriad imitations or offshoots, swept the last troops of Federal occupation from the South, leaving the Southern Democratic power structure free to impose upon the region the white-supremacist program it desired. The New York Times had been proved essentially correct; even though Tilden had not been declared victorious over Hayes, the white South had nevertheless won its long struggle to begin the return of blacks to a status tantamount to their antebellum chains. In an economic sense, their new “freedom” would become worse than slavery, for with all Federal interference removed they soon would be allowed to vote only Democratic if at all—and this time there was no master charged with responsibility for providing them at least rudimentary shelter, food, and clothing.

Theseus Within the Labyrinth pt.1 The lives of Greeks in the old days were deep, mysterious and often lead to questions like just what was wrong with Ariadne anyway, that’s what I’d like to know? She would have done anything for that rascally Theseus, and what did he do but sneak out in the night and row back to his ship with black sails. Let’s get the heck out of here, he muttered to his crew and they leaned on their oars as he went whack- whack on the whacking board—a human metronome of adventure and ill-fortune. She was King Minos’s daughter and had helped Theseus kill the king’s pet monster, her half-brother, so possibly he didn’t like feeling beholden—people might think he wasn’t tough. But certainly he’d spent his life knocking chips off shoulders and flattening any fellow reckless enough to step across a line drawn in the dust. If you wanted a punch thrown, Theseus was just the cowboy to throw it. I’m only happy when hitting and scratching, he’d told Ariadne that first night. So he’d been the logical choice to sail down from Athens to Crete to stop this nonsense of a tribute of virgins for some monster to eat. Those Cretans called it eating but Theseus thought himself no fool and liked a virgin as well as the next man. Not that he could have got into the Labyrinth without Ariadne’s help or out either for that matter. As for the Minotaur, lounging on his couch, nibbling grapes and sipping wine, while a troop of ex-virgins fluttered to his beck and call, Theseus must have scared the horns right off him, slamming back the door and standing there in his lion skin suit and waving that ugly club. The poor beast might have had a stroke had there been time before Theseus pummelled him into the earth. Then, with Ariadne’s help, Theseus escaped, and soon after he ditched her on an island and sailed off in his ship with black sails, which returns us to the question: Just what was wrong with Ariadne anyway?

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote, “Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class. The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.

When the commander of one of the brigades Gilbert had sent to reinforce McCook approached an imposing-looking officer to ask for instructions as to the posting of his troops—“I have come to your assistance with my brigade!” the Federal shouted above the uproar—the gentleman calmly sitting his horse in the midst of carnage turned out to be Polk, who was wearing a dark-gray uniform. Polk asked the designation of the newly arrived command, and upon being told raised his eyebrows in surprise. For all his churchly faith in miracles, he could scarcely believe his ears. “There must be some mistake about this,” he said. “You are my prisoner.” Fighting without its commander, the brigade gave an excellent account of itself. Joined presently by the other brigade sent over from the center, it did much to stiffen the resistance being offered by the remnants of McCook’s two divisions. Sundown came before the rebels could complete the rout begun four hours ago, and now in the dusk it was Polk’s turn to play a befuddled role in another comic incident of confused identity. He saw in the fading light a body of men whom he took to be Confederates firing obliquely into the flank of one of his engaged brigades. “Dear me,” he said to himself. “This is very sad and must be stopped.” None of his staff being with him at the time, he rode over to attend to the matter in person. When he came up to the erring commander and demanded in angry tones what he meant by shooting his own friends, the colonel replied with surprise: “I don’t think there can be any mistake about it. I am sure they are the enemy.” “Enemy!” Polk exclaimed, taken aback by this apparent insubordination. “Why, I have only just left them myself. Cease firing, sir! What is your name, sir?” “Colonel Shryock, of the 87th Indiana,” the Federal said. “And pray, sir, who are you?” The bishop-general, learning thus for the first time that the man was a Yankee and that he was in rear of a whole regiment of Yankees, determined to brazen out the situation by taking further advantage of the fact that his dark-gray blouse looked blue-black in the twilight. He rode closer and shook his fist in the colonel’s face, shouting angrily: “I’ll soon show you who I am, sir! Cease firing, sir, at once!” Then he turned his horse and, calling in an authoritative manner for the bluecoats to cease firing, slowly rode back toward his own lines. He was afraid to ride fast, he later explained, because haste might give his identity away; yet “at the same time I experienced a disagreeable sensation, like screwing up my back, and calculated how many bullets would be between my shoulders every moment.

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window. Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said. Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.” But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person. Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a 'rifle club' of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina's government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that 'the leading white men of Edgefield' had decided to 'seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.' Although a coroner's jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statute honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state's public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman's honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta Verse 1 Damn it feels good to be a gangsta A real gangsta-ass nigga plays his cards right A real gangsta-ass nigga never runs his f**kin mouth Cuz real gangsta-ass niggas don't start fights And niggas always gotta high cap Showin' all his boys how he shot em But real gangsta-ass niggas don't flex nuts Cuz real gangsta-ass niggas know they got em And everythings cool in the mind of a gangsta Cuz gangsta-ass niggas think deep Up three-sixty-five a year 24/7 Cuz real gangsta ass niggas don't sleep And all I gotta say to you Wannabe, gonnabe, cocksuckin', pussy-eatin' prankstas 'Cause when the fire dies down what the f**k you gonna do Damn it feels good to be a gangsta Verse 2 Damn it feels good to be a gangsta Feedin' the poor and helpin out with their bills Although I was born in Jamaica Now I'm in the US makin' deals Damn it feels good to be a gangsta I mean one that you don't really know Ridin' around town in a drop-top Benz Hittin' switches in my black six-fo' Now gangsta-ass niggas come in all shapes and colors Some got killed in the past But this gangtsa here is a smart one Started living for the lord and I last Now all I gotta say to you Wannabe, gonnabe, pussy-eatin' cocksuckin' prankstas When the sh*t jumps off what the f**k you gonna do Damn it feels good to be a gangsta Verse 3 Damn it feels good to be a gangsta A real gangta-ass nigga knows the play Real gangsta-ass niggas get the flyest of the b**ches Ask that gangsta-ass nigga Little Jake Now b**ches look at gangsta-ass niggas like a stop sign And play the role of Little Miss Sweet But catch the b**ch all alone get the digit take her out and then dump-hittin' the ass with the meat Cuz gangsta-ass niggas be the gang playas And everythings quiet in the clique A gangsta-ass nigga pulls the trigger And his partners in the posse ain't tellin' off sh*t Real gangsta-ass niggas don't talk much All ya hear is the black from the gun blast And real gangsta-ass niggas don't run for sh*t Cuz real gangsta-ass niggas can't run fast Now when you in the free world talkin' sh*t do the sh*t Hit the pen and let the mothaf**kas shank ya But niggas like myself kick back and peep game Cuz damn it feels good to be a gangsta Verse 4 And now, a word from the President! Damn it feels good to be a gangsta Gettin voted into the White House Everything lookin good to the people of the world But the Mafia family is my boss So every now and then I owe a favor gettin' down like lettin' a big drug shipment through And send 'em to the poor community So we can bust you know who So voters of the world keep supportin' me And I promise to take you very far Other leaders better not upset me Or I'll send a million troops to die at war To all you Republicans, that helped me win I sincerely like to thank you Cuz now I got the world swingin' from my nuts And damn it feels good to be a gangsta

The Holy Land became a police state. The British brought in more troops, until there were one hundred thousand soldiers. Some of the Black and Tan policemen, who had once suppressed the Irish, were sent to Palestine to keep order.

That night I had the first episode of a nightmare that would recur for many years: Our platoon was walking on patrol, deep in Angola. We walked through a dark, petrified forest-like area that seemed to have been burned and then we found ourselves walking into the middle of a small town with rows of small brightly painted houses like those in Ongiva. The dirt streets had big potholes and rubbish lay strewn everywhere. The little town was alive with activity; the black Angolans stood calmly on their stoeps chatting with each other and jeered at us, unafraid. Kids ran around us, laughing as we walked through in formation. Something was obviously wrong; we should not have been there but we kept formation and walked through the uneven, littered streets. Then a local came up to us, grinning, and casually told us in some language we could more or less understand that we had better watch out because someone had gone to call the government troops and they would be here any minute to kill us. But we kept on with our patrol.

For an army so constituted, every moment was beset with medical hazards. One was the water they drank. Often, marshes and streams were already saturated with microbes when the troops arrived. But then half a million men and a hundred thousand horses randomly fouled that water as they passed.

Meanwhile, weeks of occupation undermined French military preparedness. The most obvious factor was the impact of epidemic disease, which was favored by warm weather and the unsanitary conditions of the crowded French encampments and burned-out houses that the troops commandeered. But a new factor—plunder itself—played a prominent part.

As with all gastrointestinal diseases, the force of dysentery wanes with cold weather, which renders transmission difficult. Typhus, however, is different. A marching army in winter provides perfect circumstances for any louse-borne affliction. A hundred thousand shivering troops huddled together in filthy bivouacs facilitate its transmission. Indeed, the affinity of the disease for military environments is suggested by its popular nineteenth-century names: “war pest,” “camp fever,” “war plague.

But venereal diseases, hepatitis, and diarrhea continued to ravage the French. In addition, recent evidence demonstrates that trench fever, a debilitating but rarely fatal disease borne by the same body lice that transmit typhus, also afflicted Napoleon’s troops. Thus multiple comorbidities compounded the misery of the retreating troops and compromised their resistance. Furthermore, typhus is well known to be especially lethal when it runs its course in populations that are undernourished. The nineteenth-century epidemiologist Rudolf Virchow reminds us that the disease fully earned yet another of its many nicknames—“famine fever.” The classic case is Ireland, where famine and typhus accompanied one another in successive crises between the end of the eighteenth century and the potato famine of 1846–1848.

At length the final step in the Grande Armée’s degradation occurred when troops resorted to eating each other.

Three developments were critical: British colonialism, as it set troops and trade in movement; religious pilgrimages and fairs, including the Haj, which took Indian Muslims to Mecca; and the transport revolution involving railroads, steamships, and the Suez Canal.

This differential immunity between those of European and African descent powerfully affected the history of Saint-Domingue. It dictated the ongoing need to import plantation laborers from Africa rather than relying on impoverished Europeans or Native Americans; it inflamed the social tensions that led to revolt; and it drove the violent yellow fever epidemics that periodically swept the European populations of the Caribbean. As we will see, the arrival of an armada of European troops also played an outsized role in unleashing the most deadly epidemic of yellow fever in the history of the Americas in 1802. This epidemic produced a suite of momentous consequences, including the defeat of Napoleon’s aspirations in the Americas.

In his book Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914, John R. McNeill estimates that Napoleon dispatched sixty-five thousand troops in successive waves to suppress the revolt in Saint-Domingue. Of these, fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand died, with thirty-five thousand to forty-five thousand of those deaths caused by yellow fever. Thus in the late summer of 1802 Leclerc reported that he had under his command only ten thousand men, of whom eight thousand were convalescing in hospital, leaving only two thousand fit for active duty. Two-thirds of the staff officers had also succumbed.

Leading communists like Khieu Samphan had served as ministers in his government during the 1960s, and he thought he knew them well. In early 1973 the prince and his wife Monique toured the CPK’s “liberated zone,” posing with pasted-on smiles in the black pajamas worn by the communist troops. He later wrote to several Democrats in the US, reassuring them (and maybe also himself) that the Khmer Rouge would not set up a communist system after coming to power, “but a Swedish type of kingdom.”15 In private he was more pessimistic, predicting that the Khmer Rouge would spit him out “like a cherry pit” once they gained power.16

Hamilton elite, most of whom deplored incendiary speech. They’d seen the damage it could do not only in the Atlanta riot (where the judge’s son-in-law commandeered state militia troops) but in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, where distant Williams cousin Colonel Alfred Waddell had riled crowds of white men to a frenzy, resulting in wide-scale death and destruction aimed at ridding the city of black leaders and officeholders. Even though the ends in that case were to their liking, they preferred more legalistic means.

Gujarat's temple of Somnath [...] had been fortified in 1216 to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. Recorded instances of Indian kings attacking the temples of their political rivals date from at least the eighth century, when Bengali troops destroyed what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, Kahsmir's state deity under King Lalitaditya (r. 724-60). In the early ninth century Govinda III, a king of the Deccan's Rashtrakuta dynasty (753-982), invaded and occupied Kanchipuram in the Tamil country. Intimidated by this action, the king of nearby Sri Lanka sent Govinda several (probably Buddhist) images that the Rashtrakuta king then installed in Śiva temple in his capital. At about the same time the Pandya King Śrimara Śrivallabha (r. 815-62) also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital at Madurai, in India's extreme south, a golden Buddha image -- a symbol of the integrity of the Sinhalese state -- that had been installed in the island kingdom's Jewel Palace. In the early tenth century, King Herambapala of north India's Pratihara dynasty (c.750-1036) seized a solid-gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha when he defeated the king of Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills. By mid-century the same image had been seized from the Pratiharas by the Chandela King Yasovarman (r. 925-45), who installed it in the Lakshmana Temple of Khajuraho, the Chandelas' capital in north-central India. In the mid eleventh century the Chola King Rajadhiraja (r. 1044-52), Rajendra's son, defeated the Chalukyas and raided their capital, Kalyana, in the central Deccan plateau, taking a large black stone door guardian to his capital in Tanjavur, where it was displayed as a trophy of war. In the late eleventh century, the Kashmiri King Harsha (r. 1089-1111) raised the plundering of enemy temples to an institutionalized activity. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, kings of the Paramara dynasty (800-1327) attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat. Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies' temples. In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III (r. 914-29) not only demolished the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpi near the Jammu river), patronized by the Rashtrakutas' deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but took special delight in recording the fact.

The State Lay in wait Attica Attack Troops wearing masks carrying gas cannisters and proud to be white proud to be doing what everyone can for The Man

As Yanukovych went underground, Putin led the closing ceremonies in Sochi and ordered Russian special-operations forces and troops based at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet to seize Crimea’s airfields and its regional parliament. Thousands of Russian soldiers, their uniforms bearing no insignia, took control of the peninsula. Putin insisted that they were local militias. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu denied that Russian troops were in Crimea even as Ukrainian soldiers surrendered to them. The Ukrainians started calling the invaders “little green men,” evidently from outer space.

The use of local militia troops to guard black prisoners was highly controversial, given that most came from the “finest families” and had signed on for social, political, and career reasons, expecting their most arduous duties to come during summer camp training and performances at annual Confederate Memorial services.

The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity. It developed its own language: prime hands, bucks, breeding wenches, and fancy girls. Its routes, running counter to the freedom trails that fugitive slaves followed north, were similarly dotted by safe houses - pens, jails, and yards that provided resting places for slave traders as well as temporary warehouses for slaves. In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of southern society. Few southerners, white or black, were untouched. In the half century following the War of 1812, planters and traders expanded and rationalized the transcontinental transfer of slaves. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, traders and owners sent an estimated 120,000 slaves from the seaboard to the west, with the states and territories of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana being the largest recipients. That number increased substantially during the following decade and yet again during the 1830s, when slave traders and migrating planters uprooted almost 300,000 black men, women, and children. By this time, though most of the slaves still derived from the Upper South - particularly Maryland and Virginia - their destination had moved further west. Alabama and Mississippi had become the largest recipients, with each receiving nearly 100,000 slaves during the 1830s. The Panic of 1837 and the subsequent decline in cotton and sugar production deflated the price of slaves and the trade slackened for a few years. But prices soon revived and with them the demand for slaves. Nearly one quarter of a million slaves left the seaboard for the interior during the 1850s, with more than half being taken west of the Mississippi River. The 'mania for buying negroes' easily overwhelmed periodic bans against slave importation and did not cease until the arrival of Union troops.

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

Being a spy during the american revolution was arole that a black person was well suited for. as the "invisible race" it was easy for blacks to gain access to information that would help either the Patriots or the Loyalists, because many on both sides did not believe that a black person had the cunning or intellect to be a spy. Black housekeepers, servants, cooks, and maids were often present when valuable information about troop positions, troop movements, and artillery and supply routes were discussed.

The previous evening, Adamishin had told Risquet that Crocker had warned him that “[South Africa] will not withdraw from Angola until the Cuban troops have left the country” and that the South African military “feel every day more comfortable in Angola, where they are able to try out new weapons and inflict severe blows on the Angolan army.” Crocker’s message was clear: if Havana and Luanda wanted Pretoria to withdraw from Angola, they would have to make significant concessions.28 Castro was not impressed. “Ask the Americans,” he told Adamishin: “If the South Africans are so powerful, . . . why haven’t they been able to take Cuito? They’ve been banging on the doors of Cuito Cuanavale for four months. Why has the army of the superior race been unable to take Cuito, which is defended by blacks and mulattoes from Angola and the Caribbean? The powerful South Africans . . . have smashed their teeth against Cuito Cuanavale . . . and they are demoralized.”29

You’re kidding me. Someone can get killed in their division and they are at home asleep and hear about it the next day?” I was appalled. This businesslike attitude signified that nobody cared about the lives that were lost, often Black and brown lives. The community was being denigrated. But when someone gets shot in the middle of the night and the captain jumps out of bed to get there, the troops hear it loud and clear: “This matters. This life matters. These people who are being killed matter.” The level of accountability rises, and officers are made to understand that there are expectations, not simply, “Yeah, somebody got shot in South LA. Just another dead body.” It reverberates through the organization.

Black soldiers comprised 60 percent of the fifteen thousand Americans who suffered through blistering heat, monsoons, and disease to build the Ledo Road, the 271-mile supply route through the mountains of northeastern India and Burma. The role played by black troops was acknowledged for the first time by the Department of Defense in 2004.

Detroit was ready to explode. On a Sunday afternoon marked by rising temperatures and short tempers, scuffles broke out between whites and blacks at a park called Belle Isle. A false rumor ricocheted among the African Americans that whites had thrown a black woman and child to their deaths off a bridge leading to the park. For the next thirty hours, until several thousand federal troops and tanks intervened, mobs raged through the city. “Race War in Detroit: Americans Maul and Murder Each Other as Hitler Wins a Battle in the Nation’s Most Explosive City,” bellowed Life magazine. Eight pages of disturbing pictures showed bloodied black men being chased, surrounded, and beaten by whites armed with lead pipes and bottles. In the end, twenty-five blacks and nine whites lay dead and six hundred injured. Seventeen of the black victims were killed by policemen. Of the fourteen hundred people arrested, twelve hundred were black, even though most of them reportedly had been attacked first. Despite the many problems in Detroit, bigotry did not reign in all quarters of the city. The United Automobile Workers union refused to tolerate whites who would not work with blacks on its assembly lines, and there were few problems. It was a lesson in what could happen when discipline was imposed. It is an example that another organization renowned for discipline

around her child which means someone else had to open it. Now start it slowly and see which part of her body comes out first.” They watched as the young woman’s upper body came out of the doorway followed by her legs. Sgt. Daniel said, “She was pushed. If she had come through on her own, her leg would have come out first.” “I guess that explains it.” AG said, “Explains what?” Lt. Bates brought the view in closer to the young woman’s face just before she was shot and said, “That is the Black Witches Daughter and Grand-child. They did this to make her what she’s become.” Daniels shook his head, “Those are really evil devils. Colonel Van Bao led that attack. I guess now we know why someone of his rank was designated to do it.” AG said, “Who is the Black Witch?” Lt. Bates sighed, “She’s used to draw our troops into ambushes. When Charlie captures any of our troops, they’ll turn them over to the Black Witch to do her magic. She holds them outside our bases and announces all day that she is going to kill them slowly that night. She then starts torturing them by cutting pieces off and burning their extremities. They always die slowly and screaming at the top of their voices. Their suffering is what pulls our troops out to try and save them. Waiting for them is a specially trained battalion setup to ambush anyone that attempts a rescue. We’ve learned that to go after our captured soldiers is suicide. Even if we managed to get close, she would just shoot the captives in the head before she escapes. She is one sadistic bitch.” AG slowly shook her head, “She blames us for what happened.” Bates nodded, “She certainly does and she names the toes she cuts off after her daughter and grand-child.” Daniels

York City, as bloodthirsty mobs of enraged working-class Whites roamed Midtown Manhattan “armed with clubs, pitchforks, iron bars, swords, and many with guns and pistols,” looking for any African Americans they could find.1 Marching through the streets, those with weapons fired toward anyone in their way, even at New York City policemen. On the corner of Twenty-Ninth Street, “a crowd who had been engaged all day in hunting down and stoning to death every negro they could spy” lingered in plain view of the Twenty-First Precinct police station. It was undermanned because thousands of New York State Militia troops who would have served as backup had been sent to the Battle of Gettysburg.2 Nothing was spared. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, home to more than two hundred disadvantaged Black children, had been burned to the ground. Horses pulling streetcars had been shot to death and the cars smashed to pieces. The homes of prominent abolitionists were being looted and destroyed. Railroad tracks had been torn up and telegraph wires cut. Dozens of public buildings, including churches, were ransacked and torched. Even the house of the New York City mayor, George Opdyke, was raided and set on fire. It was mayhem. Ever since President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the city’s poorest Whites feared that freed slaves would migrate to Manhattan and steal their jobs. Then in March, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which made all able-bodied adult males immediately eligible to be drafted into the Union Army. This reality sank in when the names of New York City draftees were published leading up to “Draft Week.” Making matters worse was that under the Enrollment Act, any wealthy man could escape the draft by paying a $300 fee (the equivalent of more than $6,500 today).3 He would be replaced by some poor fellow who simply couldn’t afford to pay that.

Walt had arrived. He ripped through the enemy line with his bare hands—throwing one rebel magician down the hallway with inhuman strength, touching another and instantly encasing the man in mummy linen. He grabbed the staff of a third rebel, and it crumbled to dust. Finally he swept his hand toward the remaining enemies, and they shrank to the size of dolls. Canopic jars—the sort used to bury a mummy’s internal organs—sprang up around each of the tiny magicians, sealing them in with lids shaped like animal heads. The poor magicians yelled desperately, banging on the clay containers and wobbling about like a line of very unhappy bowling pins. Walt turned to our friends. “Is everyone all right?” He looked like normal old Walt—tall and muscular with a confident face, soft brown eyes, and strong hands. But his clothes had changed. He wore jeans, a dark Dead Weather T-shirt, and a black leather jacket—Anubis’s outfit, sized up to fit Walt’s physique. All I had to do was lower my vision into the Duat, just a bit, and I saw Anubis standing there in all his usual annoying gorgeousness. Both of them—occupying the same space. “Get ready,” Walt told our troops. “They’ve sealed the doors, but I can—” Then he noticed me, and his voice faltered. “Sadie,” he said. “I—” “Something about opening the doors?” I demanded. He nodded mutely. “Amos is in there?” I asked. “Fighting Kwai and Jacobi and who knows what else?” He nodded again. “Then stop staring at me and open the doors, you annoying boy!” I was talking to both of them. It felt quite natural. And it felt good to let my anger out. I’d deal with those two—that one—whatever he was—later. Right now, my uncle needed me. Walt/Anubis had the nerve to smile. He put his hand on the doors. Gray ash spread across the surface. The bronze crumbled to dust.

Our people have been tested while you have become soft and flabby. Even if this coronavirus takes root here in America, let’s be realistic. Sacrifice never comes to American shores. In a global pandemic, you will continue to enjoy life in restaurants and taverns and crowd the beaches while swapping breaths filled with bat fluids. Could you have taken high casualties as we did during World War II, our cities surrounded by enemy troops during a cold winter at Leningrad, where we stood fast for over eight hundred days? No, for you Americans, nothing should interfere with your right to party. To observe one of your sacred Capitalist holidays like Black Friday, a perfect image for your society, where, if you are not fast or greedy enough, you get trampled. You Americans don’t know hardship. You’ve become bloated. The airlines have had to create bigger seats to accommodate your fat asses, yet you’re always telling pollsters the country is moving in the wrong direction. Slothful. Pampered. Life has never been a spring break for us Russians. Life was not a social for Marina, yet she produced four-to-six liners that were like little jewels. Her Palm Sunday poem, “1920” for example.’ Reciting the poem, he closed his eyes like Andrei Voznesensky when reciting a poem. He had Voznesensky’s tight, intense face.

In the upside-down world of the Holocaust, dignified professionals were Hitler’s advance troops.

In March 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became the nineteen president of the United States. The hell that followed was the seeds of Jim Crow beginning to sprout with Democrats and Republicans enabling more white terror. As agreed on in the Compromise of 1877, federal troops abandoned the South. Democrats tightened their hold on the former Confederacy. Reconstruction, a time designed to repair the nation after war, was a closed chapter. It wasn’t only slavery that led to Black America starting from behind the rest of the nation; it was the Democratic and Republican failure of Reconstruction.

The Egyptian Expeditionary Force had initially protected the Suez Canal from the Turks. Its first assault on Gaza in March 1917 marked the start of an Allied invasion of enemy territory. In April the entire civilian populations of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were ordered to leave ‘for their own safety’. Beersheba and then Gaza were captured after heavy fighting in late October and early November. Jaffa fell on 16 November. Australian troops who entered Tel Aviv shouted ‘Europe, Europe’. Those victories paved the way for the advance on Jerusalem.

Custer, dressed in an almost comical black velvet uniform of his own design that featured gaudy coils of gold lace, galloped to the head of the First Michigan and assumed command. Well ahead of his troops, with his sword raised, he turned toward his men and shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!” With Custer in the lead, the Michiganders started out at a trot but were soon galloping, “every man yelling like a demon.” When Custer’s and Stuart’s forces collided on what is now called East Cavalry Field, the sound reminded one of the participants of the thunderous crash of a giant falling tree. “Many of

Plantation owners redefined their former slaves as sharecroppers to maintain harsh and exploitative conditions. Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red Shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a “rifle club” of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina’s government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that “the leading white men of Edgefield” had decided “to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.” Although a coroner’s jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never again came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statue honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state’s public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman’s honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.*

One day during a pep rally to the troops, Watson scrawled the word THINK on a piece of paper. Patterson saw the note and ordered THINK signs distributed throughout the company.

I’m very reluctant to accept that, Penn. I’ve never heard of any Bastard Sons of the Confederacy. And nothing like this has happened anywhere else in this country. You know? Why here? Why now?” “Mission Hill, obviously.” Doc curses under his breath. “That’s what people will say. But to me this feels more like the kind of thing those boogaloos were doing during the George Floyd marches, to discredit Black Lives Matter and gin up riots. Like the Nazis dressing up as Polish troops and destroying their own radio stations at the outset of World War II. Black folks are angry, sure, but they don’t want a war. Not a real one. We’re not fools.” “But if this is a false-flag attack, why pick a name like ‘The Bastard Sons of the Confederacy’? Why not just sign the note ‘Black Lives Matter’?

Aelin, Rowan, Lorcan, and Fenrys lingered on the plain outside the city gates until they were certain the fallen army was not going to rise. Until the khagan’s troops went between the enemy soldiers, nudging and prodding. And received no answer. But they did not behead. Did not sever and finish the job. Not for those with the black rings, or black collars. Those whom the healers might yet save.