Customer Reviews

Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839-1915

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Read one way, this is a straightforward history of military colleges and secondary schools in the American south in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Crisply organized chapters deal with the views that undergirded the military schools movement, the founding of state colleges like Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, the many effects of the Civil War, how the South responded to the Morrill Act that established the land grant colleges, and the tensions between "militarism" and "republicanism" that the military colleges had to resolve.

There's a fine essay on the system of discipline for cadets and how it came to incorporate legal protections recognized in American society. Another chapter traces the history of the separate military schools for African-Americans (Hampton was the most famous).

Read another way, this book addresses historical narratives of the ante-bellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Andrew challenges historians who have argued that the popularity of military schooling in the South derived from slavery and racism, and he succeeds in adding more depth and texture to discussion of the issue. Southern educators and parents were affected both by regional and national culture; law; concepts of duty, honor, virtue, and citizenship; reflections on adolescence; the economic development of the south; and the evolution of thinking on education and its purposes.

This is history, but as always history sparks thinking on the present. The legacy of the cultural values that supported the military schools, a century or more later, can be seen in the number of young men and women from the South who serve in the armed forces.

-30-