Buffalo soldiers essays

Buffalo soldiers essays In the years immediately following the Civil War, thousands of former slaves moved westward, hoping to find new opportunities for employment. Among the opportunities open to young black men was serving with the United States Army. In 1866, the United States Congress authorized the creation of six regular Army regiments to be staffed entirely by black soldiers. By 1869, these regiments were decreased by two. Black men were given the choice of enlisting with the Ninth or Tenth Cavalry or the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth Infantry. It is these regiments that would eventually be dubbed the Buffalo Soldiers (Katz 1996). The term Buffalo Soldiers was bestowed by the Plains Indians, who were the soldiers' enemies. Despite their enmity, however, the name reveals the respect many Native Americans accorded to the black soldiers. The Indians had high regard for the courage and valor shown by the black men in combat. This paper argues that the Buffalo Soldiers played a crucial, though often overlooked role in the history of westward expansion. By protecting settlers, the Buffalo Soldiers paved the way for the settlement of the west and the creation of the United States. By showing courage on the battlefield, the Buffalo Soldiers also challenged prevailing misconceptions about black people. In doing so, they contributed to the establishment of multicultural societies in the West and by extension, in the rest of the The Buffalo Soldiers initially came into being because during the late 19th century, the United States Military supported segregation. Black freemen thus could not serve along with the white soldiers. Thus, the Buffalo Soldiers were tasked with building forts which were often reserved only for white soldiers. In Forth Concho, the Buffalo Soldiers were housed in separate rooms. However, historians like Stanford L. Davis (1999) argue that the realitie...

The Quest for the Source of the Nile

The Quest for the Source of the Nile In the mid-nineteenth century, European explorers and geographers were obsessed with the question: where does the Nile River begin? Many considered it to be the greatest geographic mystery of their day, and those who sought it became household names. Their actions and the debates that surrounded them intensified public interest in Africa and contributed to the colonization of the continent. The Nile River The Nile River itself is easy to trace. It runs northward from the city of Khartoum in Sudan through Egypt and drains into the Mediterranean. It is created, though, from the confluence of two other rivers, The White Nile and the Blue Nile. By the early nineteenth century, European explorers had shown that the Blue Nile, which supplies much of the water for the Nile, was a shorter river, arising only in neighboring Ethiopia. From then forward, they fixed their attention on the mysterious White Nile, which arose much further south on the Continent. A Nineteenth-Century Obsession By the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans had become obsessed with finding the source of the Nile. In 1857, Richard Burton and John Hannington Speke, who already disliked each other, set out from the east coast to find the much-rumored source of the White Nile. After several months of acrimonious travel, they discovered Lake Tanganyika, though reportedly it was their headman, a former slave known as Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who first spotted the lake (Bombay was essential to the success of the trip in many ways and went on to manage several European expeditions, becoming one of the many career headmen on whom explorers heavily relied.) As Burton was ill, and the two explorers were constantly locking horns, Speke proceeded north on his own, and there found Lake Victoria. Speke returned triumphantly, convinced he had found the source of the Nile, but Burton dismissed his claims, beginning one of the most divisive and public disputes of the age. The public at first strongly favored Speke, and he was sent on a second expedition, with another explorer, James Grant, and nearly 200 African porters, guards, and headmen. They found the White Nile but were unable to follow it up to Khartoum. In fact, it was not until 2004 that a team finally managed to follow the river from Uganda all the way to the Mediterranean. So, once again Speke returned unable to offer conclusive proof. A public debate was arranged between him and Burton, but when he shot and killed himself on the day of the debate, in what many believed was an act of suicide rather than the shooting accident it was officially proclaimed to be, support swung full circle to Burton and his theories.   The quest for conclusive proof continued for the next 13 years. Dr. David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley searched Lake Tanganyika together, disproving Burton’s theory, but it was not until the mid-1870s that Stanly finally circumnavigated Lake Victoria and explored the surrounding lakes, confirming Speke’s theory and solving the mystery, for a few generations at least. The Continuing Mystery As Stanley showed, the White Nile flows out of Lake Victoria, but the lake itself has several feeder rivers, and present-day geographers and amateur explorers still debate which of these is the true source of the Nile. In 2013, the question came to the fore again when the popular BBC car show, Top Gear, filmed an episode featuring the three presenters trying to find the source of the Nile while driving inexpensive station wagons, known in Britain as estate cars. Currently, most people agree the source is one of two small rivers, one of which arises in Rwanda, the other in neighboring Burundi, but it is a mystery that continues.