Read more
Divisions draws together the history of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; and of African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, arguing that racist divisions were a defining feature of America's World War II military.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I: Enlistment
- Chapter 1: The Jim Crow Boomerang
- Chapter 2: Enlisting and Excluding an "Enemy Race"
- Part II: Assignment
- Chapter 3: The Backbone of Segregation
- Chapter 4: Separate Segregations
- Part III: Classification
- Chapter 5: The Boundaries of Blackness
- Part IV: Training
- Chapter 6: Jim Crow in Uniform
- Chapter 7: Bonds and Barriers
- Part V: Fighting
- Chapter 8: Deploying Jim Crow
- Chapter 9: Brothers in Arms?
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Thomas A. Guglielmo is Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University. He is the author of
White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1940 (OUP, 2003), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians.
Summary
Divisions draws together the history of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; and of African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, arguing that racist divisions were a defining feature of America's World War II military.
Additional text
Guglielmo's great skill as a historian is his ability to lay out the complexity and nuance involved in the military's recreation of myriad color lines and acts of resistance against them. Important, timely, and masterful, Divisions gives much food for thought not only about the historical antecedents for today's intensifying racial tensions but also about the immense challenges African Americans and other people of color will continue to face in any broad-based campaign for racial justice and equitable citizenship.
