I’m a scholar of ancient history who was a locomotive engineer, a subway motorman, and union shop steward in New York City. I tried to be a good union man. It was my Monday through Saturday religion. The New York railroads—passenger, freight, yard service, docks—are a big paramilitary enterprise, a subterranean empire where on-the-job deaths are routine. When I became a scholar, Alexander the Great proved to be an appealing subject since he was a killer who kept his own casualties low. Many of the men I worked with were Black and talked about slavery time, so the Civil War turned out to be another appealing subject.
I wrote
Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great’s project of uniting and reconciling religions and nations points to a theme in American history—the reconciliation of races and fellow Christians during the American Civil War. In a Black bookstore in Philadelphia, I found a book about this theme, Blake or the Huts of America, by Martin R. Delaney, the first Black to be made an Army officer.
It appeared in 1858, three years before the war.
Delaney realized there would soon be a Civil War and explained how we could survive it. His strange recommendation: let a Black army put an end to slavery. That would cost much less than a national Federal army doing the same job. Men of God, not just generals, must lead these Black forces.
Delaney wanted a Black Alexander—but would have accepted a white one—a unifier as well as a conqueror. It’s the best of all American historical novels because Delaney wrote it before the fact. That amazed me—made me envious but also optimistic. A book about the past can be a book about the future, too. It epitomized everything I wanted to accomplish.
Blake; Or, The Huts of America (1859-1862) is a novel by Martin Delany. Serialized in The Anglo-African Magazine, the novel has had a complicated publishing history due to the loss of the physical issues in which the final chapters appeared in May 1862. Despite this, Blake; Or, The Huts of America is considered a brilliantly unique work of fiction from an author known more for his activism and political investment in Black nationalism. Through the eyes of his hero Henry Blake, Delany envisions a future of revolutionary possibility and radical resistance to slavery and oppression. Though it was largely ignored…
What about writers more like me? In this book, an Ohio small-town banker turned Union volunteer describes race relations not as Delaney thought they should be but as they were in Union armies commanded by officers who were often anti-Black as well as anti-slavery. It made me feel I was there.
Beatty was a sort of good Union man—no politics at the start of the war, but Radical (Republican) politics at the end of it.
When Southerners fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, John Beatty left his bank job in Ohio to answer President Lincoln's call for soldiers. Within a short while he was commanding the Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, as green to combat as his men. The diary he kept from June 1861 to January 1864 shows how well they did their fearful job without losing their humanity.
In October 1862 the Ohio regiment lost nearly forty percent of its five hundred men on the field at Perryville. After heavy fighting at Stone's River the following year, Beatty was promoted to brigadier…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
For conditions after the War, this book describes parts of the South that had been the wealthiest (and most exploitative). Easton was a Quaker and, thus, a pacifist. I felt I was there and being forgiven for what I had done or failed to do. Again and again, Easton is in the room with Klansmen, Army officers, and Black and White and poor and rich public officials.
American civil violence is his salient theme. To give three later examples of this theme: Don’t argue with Trump—shoot him. Don’t argue with JFK—shoot him. And most of all, don’t argue with Lincoln, a bigger leader—shoot him and make a theatrical event of it.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
The English General Fuller may be said to have taken Alexander’s program and imagined applying it to World War II. Had Hitler cooperated with Stalin’s unhappy subjects, he might have won the war in Russia. The same reasoning applied to Hitler’s opponent, England.
Had England given freedom to India before the war started, the Japanese would have found Asia far harder to conquer. Churchill and Chamberlain agreed that India must remain part of the Empire. Alexander knew better. He made the top Indian kings his allies, not his subjects.
In a brief and meteoric life (356-323 BC) the greatest of all conquerors redirected the course of world history. Alexander the Great accomplished this feat with a small army-no more than 40,000 men-and a constellation of bold, revolutionary ideas about the conduct of war and the nature of government. In a style both clear and witty, Fuller imparts the many sides to Alexander's genius and the full extent of his empire, stretching from India to Egypt.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Mary Renault’s partly fictional biography of Alexander reminds us that the King had more trouble with his courtiers than with his subjects or enemies.
She tells the story of how they poisoned him. That tendency of ours—to shoot the religious messenger bringing strange news—to think that that the strange news is freakish or threatening—is one to remember.
The acclaimed biography of Alexander the Great by Mary Renault, the author of Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy, two best-selling novels about Alexander.
Whatever we may think of Alexander—whether Great or only lucky, a civilizer or a sociopath—most people do not regard him as a religious leader. And yet religion permeated all aspects of his career. When he used religion astutely, he and his army prospered. In Egypt, he performed the ceremonies needed to be pharaoh and thus became a god as well as a priest.
His aim was to unify mankind in an idiosyncratic way—Greece and the Near East all worshipping the same gods with themselves as the chief son of the chief god, be they god Egyptian, Greek, or Babylonian. Trouble arose with two groups that would not cooperate—the Hindus and the Jews.
