Duty beyond the Battlefield

In a survey of African American military service between the Civil War and World War I, Le'Trice D. Donaldson aims to correct several gaps in the historiography of Black soldiers in the U.S. armed forces and the “long civil rights movement” (p. 3). These gaps are said to include failure to recognize the importance of Black soldiers as leaders in the fight for racial justice, a lack of attention to the significance of military service as an exercise of citizenship with its assumed entitlements, and a general absence of attention to the importance of “manhood” for Black soldiers (p. 202). As the book title indicates, Donaldson addresses the experiences of Black soldiers “beyond the battlefield,” although she does not completely neglect the battlefield. Three chronological chapters cover the era of the buffalo soldiers on the western frontier (roughly 1870–1898), what Donaldson refers to as the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War, and the World War I era and its aftermath. Two additional chapters each focus on a single African American soldier

African american · Ancient history · Battlefield · Citizenship · Criminology · Duty · Ethnology · Frontier · Military history · Military service · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American History and Culture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law