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.
The author implies that the title of Glatthaar’ s book refers specifically to which of the following?

选项 A、The sense of pride and accomplishment that Black soldiers increasingly felt as a result of their Civil War experiences.
B、The civil equality that African Americans achieved after the Civil War, partly as a result of their use of organizational skills honed by combat.
C、The changes in discriminatory army policies that were made as a direct result of the performance of Black combat units during the Civil War.
D、The improved interracial relations that were formed by the races’ facing of common dangers and their waging of a common fight during the Civil War.
E、The standards of racial egalitarianism that came to be adopted as a result of White Civil War veterans’ repudiation of the previous racism.

答案D

解析 Glatthaar的书名是什么意思?这点文中有明确回答,见L9—13。∴D正确。改善的种族间关系是由不同种族面对共同危险以及在内战中并肩作战形成的。A、B、C、E都不合原文的解释。
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