Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune

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Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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Robert Gould Shaw was, from any purely military standpoint, a minor figure in the Civil War. Nevertheless, his position as white leader of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the premier regiment of Union African American troops, one of the first to fight in the war, brought him and many of his men a hero’s death and earned them a magnificent monument created by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the grounds of Boston Common. Relegated to footnotes during most of the twentieth century, Shaw was brought back to public attention as the subject of the Academy Award-winning film Glory in...

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