American Archives

Black GIs arrive in Britain

by History Guild | Nov 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 13 minutes
In this blog post I’m going to draw on the Cabinet Papers to explore the British Government’s response to the arrival of Black GIs in Britain during the Second World War. I refer to government records and other primary sources of the time which use terminology which we now consider offensive, for example, ‘coloured troops’ and ‘negroes’.

Several years ago I recall hearing a story about villagers in the West Country during the Second World War refusing to go along with a local US Army segregation order that Black GIs were excluded from the local pub and that only white American troops could use it – the villagers protested and effectively overturned this order. I’m pretty certain that it was the singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg that related this story to me, when I had the pleasure to meet him some years back. The story made a big impression on me and I thought, one day, I must follow this thread up. Now I have, and here are the fruits of my research so far.

FIVE GREAT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE FILMS: PART FIVE

by History Guild | Nov 14, 2023 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Most history enthusiasts will eye the release of a new film on a historical topic somewhat skeptically, thinking ‘will they get it right?’ Here are some that did!

African-American GIs of WWII: Fighting for democracy abroad and at home

by History Guild | Nov 9, 2023 | Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Until the 21st century, the contributions of African-American soldiers in World War II barely registered in America’s collective memory of that war. The “tan soldiers,” as the Black press affectionately called them, were also for the most part left out of the triumphant narrative of America’s “Greatest Generation.” In order to tell their story of helping defeat Nazi Germany in my 2010 book, “Breath of Freedom,” I had to conduct research in more than 40 different archives in the U.S. and Germany.

Putin’s failure to learn from history has led to Russian quagmire in Ukraine

by History Guild | Nov 6, 2023 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes

As the Russo-Ukraine conflict continues with no resolution in sight, we are painfully reminded of not only the horror of war, but also how often major powers’ interventionism, for whatever objective, hasn’t paid off. These powers have repeatedly failed to learn from the futility of their past adventures to avoid future ones. Counterproductivity has often become the hallmark of their efforts.

‘Wicked and seditious writings’ – Thomas Paine, Rights of Man and treason

by History Guild | Oct 26, 2023 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
In December 1792, detachments of the 2nd Dragoon Guards across the Southwest of England staged spectacles of hate. A dummy was paraded through the towns on an ‘ass’ led by a hangman, the crowd of soldiers and residents encouraged to subject it to ‘every possible mark of indignity’. At the customary place of execution, it was burned amidst repeated exclamations of ‘“God Save the King”, and constant cheering and huzzahring’. The dummy was an effigy, of the radical writer Thomas Paine.

Black soldiers and the Red Ball Express during World War II

by History Guild | Oct 23, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had a problem. In June 1944, Allied forces had landed on Normandy Beach in France and were moving east toward Nazi Germany at a clip of sometimes 75 miles (121 kilometers) per day.
With most of the French rail system in ruins, the Allies had to find a way to transport supplies to the advancing soldiers. “Our spearheads … were moving swiftly,” Eisenhower later recalled. “The supply service had to catch these with loaded trucks. Every mile doubled the difficulty because the supply truck had always to make a two-way run to the beaches and back, in order to deliver another load to the marching troops.”

The solution to this logistics problem was the creation of the Red Ball Express, a massive fleet of nearly 6,000 2½-ton General Motors cargo trucks. The term Red Ball came from a railway tradition whereby railmen marked priority cars with a red dot.

Treason against the state: America declares independence

by History Guild | Oct 12, 2023 | Military History, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
This is the second part of a two-blog series exploring treason against the state, as used during the civil wars of the 1640s and again in the American Revolutionary War of the 1770s and 80s. Previously, treason laws had always protected the life and authority of the monarch. Now, they were used by those that levied war against the monarch to reject royal authority and accuse their kings of levying war – of committing treason – against the state.

The “Madman Theory” Was Quintessential Nixon

by History Guild | Oct 5, 2023 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
When H. R. “Bob” Haldeman first described Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” in his 1978 memoir, The Ends of Power, few scholars paid serious attention. For those who did notice, the one-paragraph description of Nixon’s risk-laden strategy sounded like Haldeman was taking a cheap shot, calling his old boss crazy. After all, Nixon had seen his chief of staff resign and serve time for the Watergate cover-up. The “madman theory,” Haldeman wrote, was a “phrase…which I’m sure will bring smiles of delight to Nixon-haters everywhere.” Nearly half a century later, scholars have established that the rash ruse was central to Nixon’s strategy to fight the Cold War. The madman theory can also tell us a good deal about the famously elusive ex-president himself: how Nixon saw his career as he saw the superpower struggle, how life, for Nixon, proved to be laden with exhilarating risk, peril and a series of tests of will against determined foes.

Ukraine war: how Gorbachev’s 1987 INF missile treaty has limited the arsenal available to Putin

by History Guild | Sep 27, 2023 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Thanks to the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, a disarmament treaty has denied Vladimir Putin thousands more missiles which he could have ordered to be used against Ukraine. Russian forces attacking Ukraine have not been able to use land-based missiles with ranges of between 500km and 5,500km because this entire category of weapons was scrapped under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the former Soviet leader was instrumental in establishing.

The End of History: Francis Fukuyama’s controversial idea explained

by History Guild | Sep 20, 2023 | Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
In 1989, a policy wonk in the US State Department wrote a paper for the right-leaning international relations magazine The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”. His name was Francis Fukuyama, and the paper stirred such interest – and caused such controversy – that he was soon contracted to expand his 18-page article into a book. He did so in 1992: The End of History and the Last Man. The rest, they say, is (the end of) history.

Pickett’s Charge: What modern mathematics teaches us about Civil War battle

by History Guild | Aug 31, 2023 | Military History, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
The Battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the American Civil War, and Gen. George Pickett’s infantry charge on July 3, 1863, was the battle’s climax. Had the Confederate Army won, it could have continued its invasion of Union territory. Instead, the charge was repelled with heavy losses. This forced the Confederates to retreat south and end their summer campaign.

Black troops were welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow wasn’t: the race riot of one night in June 1943

by History Guild | Aug 28, 2023 | Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
More a mutiny than a battle, it led to the death of Private William Crossland in nearby Mounsey Road, and four other injuries to black American soldiers in a five-hour confrontation which spread from the thatched Olde Hob Inn at one end of the town to the Adams Hall army camp, where from early 1943 the US Eighth Army Quartermaster Truck Company, a black company apart from a few white officers, had been based. The event was officially downplayed, in order not to undermine morale on the home front, but the events of that night led to the conviction of 27 black American soldiers.

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