Conscription in the United States

Courage, Cowardice, and Masculinity at War Usually when people associate war to cowardness, courage, or masculinity, they think that going to war is courageous and manly and not going to war is being a coward. Tim O’Brien explains his own thoughts on this in his collection of short stories, The Things They Carried. His thoughts on what is cowardly and what is courageous are new and worth looking into. He proposes that someone could be both courageous and cowardly depending on how you think of…

I am disorganized by nature. I have come to learn that the only way I can work efficiently is with rigid structure, but that rigid structure does not translate into the work itself. Crafting a well-organized text tends to be difficult for me and is one of the things I have struggled with most in English classes. Because I possessed this self-knowledge, I knew it was something to focus on, especially in final drafts. In the past, I was often told that my writing was convoluted, and while I…

The idea of a partial person is not a new thing, nor is it a literary device that belongs solely to a singular author or genre. A person that suffers from physical, mental or spiritual un-wholeness usually serves an important role in the plot. An un-wholeness creates interest as it has a story; blank canvas often says more than a damaged one. Literature uses the idea of partiality just as any other art form does. Dickens’ pulls on heart strings in A Christmas Carol with the crippled Tiny Tim,…

The Celtics are poised for their best season since the post “Big Three” era and according to Vegas odds they are expected to be the second best team in the East with fifty-one wins. A lot of commentators of the NBA would have you believe that they are in an enviable position with their stockpile of draft picks and young players. The signing of Al Horford seems to be a turning point in the rebuilding of the Celtics by acquiring the four time NBA all-star they finally added some legitimacy to…

treatment of the enlisted men and officers varied depending on their appearance for the lack of better word. There was barely any organized opposition to oppose the war. The only group that opposed was the Socialist Workers Party. In 1940, before the United States was involved in the war movement, the Smith Act was passed by Congress. The Smith Act applied the Espionage Act in which people were prohibited to oppose service in armed forced…

When the word “war” is brought up amongst a group, people in society tend to interpret t it differently from one another. As defined by Merriam-Webster, war is “a state or period of fighting between countries or groups”. Though this may be the dictionary definition, the word war may resonate and mean something different depending on the individual. For some, the word could be thought of as a way to gain or keep peace, for others it may be the place they lost their father or son, and for others,…

In 1863 New York had a huge riot over The Draft and the riot was among the most violent riots incidents of civil unrest in United States history. Although you might think all of New York must have been a part of it to be that bad it was mainly white working people that were involved in the draft. You may be asking why it was just white working people in riot and it was mainly because…

Many individuals believe that the storylines in movies and books such as Divergent or The Purge where things are very twisted in the world could never actually happen, but thinking more deeply about The Hunger Games, the idea does not seem so far-fetched. Although the morphed idea of society in this movie seems beyond unrealistic, some things tend to be more related to our world than people may think. Every day, people talk about the struggles of our country and the way we function as a whole.…

With new laws being enacted in the military and the ever present possibility of conflict, a relatively dormant topic has emerged, the Selective Service and the military draft. As with any emerging topic, differing opinions towards the issue have risen, Economists tend to argue that the agency “captures people who would prefer to be doing something else and forces them to bear the cost of national defense disproportionately by working for a submarket wage”(Applebaum), military officials lean…

to read about Fugui’s conscription into the Nationalist army. Many of the other aspects of his army experience were familiar, like the dangers of deserting and the moans of wounded soldiers. The idea of being found on the street and thrown into an army, on the other hand, was completely foreign to me. Fugui had no say in his life from that moment until his release two years later. A 2000 article from Los Angeles Time provides another glimpse of this strange event. Conscription really was just…