Joseph Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle is not the first excellent study of Black soldiers and their White officers in the Civil War

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问题     Joseph Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle is not the first excellent study of Black soldiers and their White officers in the Civil War, but it uses more soldiers’ letters and diaries—including rare material from Black soldiers—and concentrates more intensely on Black-White relations in Black regiments than do any of its predecessors. Glatthaar’s title ex- presses his thesis: loyalty, friendship, and respect among White officers and Black soldiers were fostered by the mutual dangers they faced in combat.
    Glatthaar accurately describes the government’s discriminatory treatment of Black soldiers in pay, promotion, medical care, and job assignments, appropriately emphasizing the campaign by Black soldiers and their officers to get the opportunity to fight. That chance remained limited throughout the war by army policies that kept most Black units serving in rear-echelon assignments and working in labor battalions. Thus, while their combat death rate was only one-third that of White units, their mortality rate from disease, a major killer in this war, was twice as great. Despite these obstacles, the courage and effectiveness of several Black units in combat won increasing respect from initially skeptical or hostile White soldiers. As one White officer put it, "they have fought their way into the respect of all the army. "
    In trying to demonstrate the magnitude of this attitudinal change, however, Glatthaar seems to exaggerate the prewar racism of the White men who became officers in Black regiments. "Prior to the war," he writes of these men, "virtually all of them held powerful racial prejudices." While perhaps true of those officers who joined Black units for promotion or other self-serving motives, this statement misrepresents the attitudes of the many abolitionists who became officers in Black regiments. Having spent years fighting against the race prejudice endemic in American society, they participated eagerly in this military experiment, which they hoped would help African Americans achieve freedom and postwar civil equality. By current standards of racial egalitarian-ism , these men’ s paternalism toward African Americans was racist. But to call their feelings "powerful racial prejudices" is to indulge in generational chau- vinism—to judge past eras by present standards.
According to the author, which of the following is true of Glatthaar’ s Forged in Battle compared with previous studies on the same topic?

选项 A、It is more reliable and presents a more complete picture of the historical events on which it concentrates than do previous studies.
B、It uses more of a particular kind of source material and focuses more closely on a particular aspect of the topic than do previous studies.
C、It contains some unsupported generalizations, but it rightly emphasizes a theme ignored by most previous studies.
D、It surpasses previous studies on the same topic in that it accurately describes conditions often neglected by those studies.
E、It makes skillful use of supporting evidence to illustrate a subtle trend that previous studies have failed to detect.

答案B

解析 哪一点关于Glatthaar的书和以前同题材的书的比较正确?A.更可靠、更完整图画。无。B.正确。Glatthaar的书使用了更多的某一来源材料,而且对于这一题材的某一方面给予更多的关注。见原文L4—9。更多地使用了黑人书信、日记,更关注黑白人关系。C.包括未加证实的观点,并强调被大多数以前研究所忽视的论题。从原文推不出。D.原文未说新研究讨论以前研究忽视的条件。E.文中未说以前研究“failed to detect a trend”。
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