Civil War

Hist 136

Tuesday 1:30

4/5/2005

Paper #2

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest wars of all time, and it was fought by people of the same country. It is amazing to think that such a thing could have happened to this country. About 260,000 rebel soldiers and 373,000 Union soldiers were killed (Text, pg. 378). The reason for such a high number of deaths is mainly because most battles of the war involved about 200,000 soldiers. With this many people fighting at once, there are bound to be a huge number of deaths. Another factor to the high death count is the fact that newer and better weapons were being developed. The new technology allowed guns to be more accurate and even more deadly. This, combined with the lack of medical attention, made it more likely that you would die in battle, than survive. Many soldiers could not make it to medics in time, and even when they got there, many of the medics were not sufficiently trained. This is sad to see, but they needed all the "doctors" they could get.

According to Alger, Cahan, and Gold, success usually was trading rags for respectability, not for great wealth (Text, pg. 472). Most of Alger's stories tended to be glorified. Not many people really did make it the way that Alger's characters did. Cahan gives a more realistic tale of this rag to riches theory by showing the spiritual loss that comes along with the material gain. Gold tells even grimmer stories of people how just flat out don't "make it". These are all different views on the theory, but all have truth behind them. Historians generally measured success by categorizing occupations. They then do random questioning and see what nationalities have become more successful according to job ranking. This is extremely inaccurate. First of all, there is no way that each nationality is fairly represented in these polls. Some countries, or even people, looking at the micro level, may judge success in different ways. Some may feel that money is the key to success, whereas some may see having a "respectable" job as success. In my opinion, the illustration for "No One Cares for Me" seems more accurate. The other one seems to be glorifying the whole concept. In "No One Cares for Me", the person looks very sad and lonely,