Comps Field 2

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and theMaking of American Capitalism. By Edward E.Baptist. (New York: Basic, 2014. xxviii, 498pp. $35.00.)

Year: 2014 Field: Summary: n The Half Has Never Been Told the historianEdward E. Baptist vividly describes the waysenslaved people shaped the development ofmodern capitalism. He asserts that their ex-ploitation in the cotton fields, through violentforce, enabled the United States to prosper,expand, and become a world leader in cot-ton production. Baptist anchors his study inthe eighty-year period between the end of theAmerican Revolution and the beginning ofthe Civil War, tracing the experience of en-slaved people through trade, travel, separa-tion, labor, and violence. Thesis: Hetells the story of capital development in theUnited States, arguing that the country pros-pered because of enslaved labor in the cottonindustry. Relying heavily on the testimony ofenslaved people, the book follows the physical structure of a giant. He begins with the "heart"and introduces readers to the thoughts andfeelings of the enslaved, shared through theirtestimonies from narratives and interviews.They complete the story of American slavery,because their half had never been told. Fromthe heart, he moves to "feet" and describes theways "black feet went tramping west and southin chains," through the domestic slave trade (p.11). Next he describes the "heads" that weredecapitated in the Haitian Revolution to showhow enslaved people resisted and fought back.Violence is again at the center of his analy -sis. Baptist continues by exploring the "righthand," "left hand," "tongues," "breath," "seed,""blood," "backs," and "arms." Each chaptercovers a particular moment in time, as well asthe metaphorical body of an enslaved personforced to labor against his or her will. cholars writing on this topic have some -times danced around the idea of violence, and,if covered, it was not made central. Baptist ar-gues that "enslaved African Americans builtthe modern United States, and indeed the en-tire modern world" (p. xxiii). Until now, he ar-gues, only part of this history has been told andrarely from the vantage point of the enslaved.Utilizing narratives or combinations of narra-tives, at times Baptist employs a methodologysimilar to that of Marcus Rediker in the intro-duction to The Slave Ship: A Human History(2007). Explaining this method, Baptist writesthat he wishes "to provide a richer depictionof the landscape, work practices, and culturalpractices of the time" by using the testimoniesof "formerly enslaved people" who lived andsurvived enslavement (p. 428). To my liking,Baptist uses narratives indiscriminately andcites from the many published narratives of thenineteenth century as well as the Works Prog-ress Administration (wpa) interviews collected in the 1930s. Of the latter he says, "the wpanarratives contain rich personal observationremembered by the interviewees themselves"and if "read carefully," can reflect the worldview of the enslaved (p. 427). I appreciate thisperspective and have always been troubled bycomplete dismissal of these sources. . Baptistsharply challenges what he claims are historians' majorassumptions about slavery's role. These conceptionsview slavery as a premodern economic institution, largelyseparate from American industrialization and concludethat slavery was flatly inconsistent with the politicaleconomy principles of the new American republic, so itwould inevitably end and free labor and northern inter-ests would prevail (xvi-xviii). Baptist argues to thecontrary that slavery was capitalist and economi-cally modern; that the wealth slaves created financedAmerican industrialization; and that slavery's expansionwas principally the result of a long-term, mutually prof-itable economic and political bargain between north-ern and southern whites. Historians have also assumedthat "the worst thing about slavery" was that it deniedAfrican Americans modern citizenship's benefits(xviii). In response, Baptist contends that slavery also"killed people, in large numbers," made "them live interror and hunger," and "stole everything" from survi-vors (xix).!!! The book supports its arguments principally by ana-lyzing the expansion of the interstate slave trade andcotton slavery. It does so by examining three primarydimensions along which slavery changed over time:its lived experience for blacks; its economic characterand effects; and its influence on politics. Baptist createswhat appears to be a powerful portrait of everyday expe-riences for blacks. Some historians may find this mate-rial familiar in certain respects; however, it raises variousmethodological concerns, which are discussed through-out this review. On the book's analysis of economics andpolitics, he raises essential questions to which he offersanswers that are likely to prove controversial to varyingdegrees but that should prompt desirable investigationand debate. Notwithstanding these significant qualifica-tions, many historians will appreciate this work's relent-less insistence on the full integration of the harshrealities of slavery and the African American experienceinto national history.!!! Other: Perhaps we are in the middle of figuringthis out, and Baptist's book, like controversialstudies before it, has stepped out and offeredone perspective—one that has not been sharedso clearly before. As a scholar of the enslaved,I found the use of narratives a welcome contri-bution to a difficult history. I also would loveto see his data and a discussion of technolog-ical change in the cotton plants, production,and processing described by so many econo -mists. Even more of the story needs to be told.As Charles Ball reminds us, "it is a mistake tosuppose that the southern planters could everretain their property, or live amongst theirslaves, if those slaves were not kept in terror ofthe punishment that would follow acts of vio-lence and disorder" (Ball, Slavery in the UnitedStates, 1937, p. 379). book provides an extended argument for a closerelationship between slavery and the growth of Americancapitalism. Baptist claims that enslavers (his term forslaveholders) and slave traders were entrepreneurs inmuch the same way northern capitalists were, and thatslavery was economically successful enough to have sur-vived and prospered after 1865, if the country had notgone to war (347-354, 411-414). He supports these con-tentions in several ways. First, he traces the evolution ofantebellum banking and finance's connection to slaveryexpansion. In chapters 3 and 4, Baptist begins analysis ofwhat becomes a recurring theme by showing that as theglobal cotton market developed in the wake of British in-dustrialization, adaptive changes occurred in the slavetrade and in financing the cotton trade and slavery ex-pansion. Slaveholders and traders entrepreneuriallymolded their businesses to obtain banking and global fi-nance capital through techniques such as trade standardi-zation, collateralization, and securitization of slaveproperty. They participated in the creation of state banksthat sometimes benefited from state credit guarantees asthey financed slavery. Investors in the American Northand abroad directly or indirectly helped to finance andprofited from slavery's expansion. These modernizingchanges intensified the commodification of slaves The third element of Baptist's economic argument ischapter 9's claim that slavery's profits essentially fundedthe Industrial Revolution in the United States. He con-tends that northern growth and the fortunes of middle-and upper-class northern whites in particular were builton cotton slavery (311). As of 1836, he maintains, "al-most half of the economic activity in the United States .. . derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced bythe million-odd slaves - 6 percent of the total US popu-lation" (322). However, in 1832 cotton mills employed20,000 workers; about 10 percent of the total factoryand workshop workforce (320), and a much smaller frac-tion of the total labor force. As of 1836, the cottoncrop's value was $77 million, or 5 percent of GrossDomestic Product; he claims that with related costs thiswould increase to more than $100 million (321) (i.e.,perhaps 7 percent). He contends that "second-order ef-fects" of goods and services needed to produce cottonwould add $100 million (321). "Third-order effects"such as money spent by millworkers would, Baptist as-serts, amount to a further $400 million. No sources are One sentence: As Baptistmakes clear, his book is about "how slavery constantly grew, changed,and reshaped the modern world" (xxii); it reveals the violence, theft, andmodernity of American slavery and what it meant for those who survivedthe rapid expansion of racial slavery during the first half of the nineteenthcentury. Baptist tells "the other half of [slavery's] story," a half that has been"left out of history" by southern whites who "convinced a majority of whiteAmericans, including most historians, that slavery had been benign andthat 'states' rights' had been the cause of the Civil War" (xxii, 409). Baptistargues otherwise; slavery propelled the American economy forward whileon "new slave labor camp[s]" (115) in the Mississippi valley, entrepreneur-ial slave masters upped productivity by deploying "systematized torture"as a "central technology" (141-42). Violent exploitation reduced humansinto "hands," interchangeable commodities "rendered effectively identicalfor white entrepreneurs' direct manipulation" (101). Theft, speculation,piracy, and risky behavior defined life in the sprawling Cotton South, asaggressive, expansionist, and consumeristic planters generated untoldriches for manufacturing and trade businesses throughout the Atlanticworld. As Baptist declares, "The northern economy's industrial sector wasbuilt on the backs of enslaved people," while Britain's economic ascendancebegan with cotton textiles (322). Slavery's profits emboldened its politi -cians to press the continued geographic expansion of slaveholding terrain,to amplify slavery's leverage in Congress, and ultimately to wage war for anindependent proslavery state. Slavery—Baptist concludes—lay at the axisof American capitalism; it was the definitive driver of economic growthand a source of unparalleled political power. In a "world greedy for . . . thewhipping-machine's super-profits," American slaveholders built an empire!!!!!! nd a world economic power on the backs of cotton and slavery (413). Thatstory—an account of a capitalist "world in motion . . . [of ] the sweat andblood of [a] growing system"—Baptist claims, is "the half [that] has neverbeen told" (xxiv, xxi).Perhaps every good historian of American slavery courts controversy.Stanley Elkins, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genoveseall triggered intense debate among generations of scholars. Baptist too hasdrawn fire. In an intemperate—and subsequently withdrawn—review, theEconomist pronounced Baptist's latest work to be "advocacy." In anotherbruising encounter, one reviewer declared it "a poor book . . . overblown."2It is neither—historians should be writing exactly the kind of capacious,challenging history that Baptist intends to tell. The Half Has Never BeenTold, furthermore, forces its readers to confront the moral basis of history."We tell slavery's story by heaping praise on those who escaped . . . leavingthe listener to wonder if those who didn't flee or die somehow 'accepted'slavery" (xix). They didn't, of course, but the rights-centered discourseof American history has isolated enslaved African Americans from thenational story with enduring consequences for modern society. Whether readers agree with every depiction (the terms "slave laborcamp" and "enslaver" replace "plantation" and "master," for instance),Baptist's gripping book plainly reveals that slavery was central to the riseof modern American capitalism. It explicitly details the enormous humancost of slavery and the violence that attend the nation's economic andpolitical history. The shattered families, lacerated backs, stolen years, andcatatonic eyes vividly demonstrate that enslaved peoples were, above all,victims. That is not "advocacy"; it was the grim reality of slavery and is astory that must be told

Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire.Edited by BERNARD BAILYN and PHILIP D. MORGAN. (Chapel Hill,N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, published for theInstitute of Early American History and Culture, i99i. Pp. xii, 456.$39.95 hardcover; $14.95 paper.)

Year: 1991 Field: Summary: An introduction surveys British imperial historiography and provides a context for the volume as a whole. The essays focus on specific ethnic groups -- Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch and Germans -- and their relations with the British, as well as on the effects of British expansion in particular regions -- Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies. A conclusion assesses the impact of the North American colonies on British society and politics. Taken together, these essays represent a new kind of imperial history -- one that portrays imperial expansion as a dynamic process in which the oulying areas, not only the English center, played an important role in the development and character of the Empire. The collection interpets imperial history broadly, examining it from the perspective of common folk as well as elites and discussing the clash of cultures in addition to political disputes. Finally, by examining shifting and multiple frontiers and by drawing parallels between outlying provinces, these essays move us closer to a truly integrated story that links the diverse ethnic experiences of the first British Empire. Thesis: Bernard Bailyn and Philip Morgan introduce all of this material with anengaging and perceptive essay that salutes "a new form of imperial history"(p. 9). No longer the dense, metropolitan-centered, institutional andpolitical narrative made famous by Charles McLean Andrews, imperialhistory must now "focus upon the area of interaction among the compo-nent parts of imperial systems. Instead of a single, coherent outward thrustby the English, the process should be seen as vastly more complicated,much more double-ended, with the colonies playing as dynamic a role asthe metropolis" (ibid.). Bailyn and Morgan offer a superb summary ofrecent trends in English and Scottish (or British, after 1707), Iris North American history. Because most of the confrontations and inter-actions described in this volume took place outside the core realm ofGreat Britain, this reviewer, in the tiniest of quibbles, wishes the editorshad called the book Strangers under One Crown, or Strangers to the Realm,not Strangers withi Put at its simplest, this ongoing redefinition of the character andmodus operandi of the first British Empire hinges on the rejectionof the Anglocentric approach and high politics beloved of traditionalimperial historians. In essence, the contributors to this volume, andseveral others whose work is not included, are insistent that thoseregions and ethnic groups formerly depicted as being essentially pas-sive receptors of what might be crudely termed the high political,economic and cultural imperatives of the metropolis be placed at thecenter of the stage as active players in the shaping of the first BritishEmpire. Timothy Breen put it better than most when he wrote of thenew imperial history that it should "focus on the movement of peoplesand the clash of cultures, on common folk rather than on colonialadministrators, on processes rather than institutions, on aspects ofdaily life that one would not regard as narrowly political. It will bean integrated story ... an investigation of the many links that connect ng on both sides of the Atlantic." This is the mainthrust of, and the connecting link between, essays which are concernednot with the first British Empire in its entirety but with the NorthAtlantic and Caribbe space. In effect, these authors argue, there was a very real sense,as well as many different senses, in which the continuing encountersof English and non-English peoples prompted the assessment andreassessment, the definition and redefinition, of cultural identitiesand priorities. This, the volume suggests, was as true of the Englishas it was of those they encountered. Other: As Bailyn and Morgan point out, this volume is intended as apossible "stepping-stone" on the way toward the articulation of a newimperial history. All the essays in the collection, including their own,greatly enhance our understanding of the first British Empire andsuggest areas and themes still in great need of exploration or furtherelaboration. Neither the editors nor the contributors would claim thattheirs is the last word on the subject, and ofthat they can One sentence:This volume represents a stepping-stone in the opposite direction. It istransnational in spirit, pluralist and multicultural in approach. It attempts toembrace some, at least, of the diverse ethnic experiences of the first BritishEmpire. It links England's Celtic borderlands to colonies oversea British imperial development as a vastly complicated process: the recruit-ment of a wide variety of peoples, their interaction, their conflicts, theirpartial absorption, and their creation of new cultures. It offers ways tointegrate these experiences, by suggesting different levels on which they canbe studied and by exploring the impact of a major group of colonies on thecenter. It does none of this to celebrate empire or to indulge in Anglophilia.Ratlier, the volume simply seeks further understanding of Seeley's "mightyphenomenon"-that huge, outwardly expanding peripheral arc sweepingnorth and west from London and the Home Counties into Scotland, acrossIreland, southwest through Newfoundland, and then down the NorthAmerican coast into the Caribbean. And this was only the beginning, for thisentire interactive Atlantic culture system, this vast band of variant march-lands, was in itself only a segment of a global system that ultimately reachedSoutheast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the Pacific worldas well. But that is another story.!!!!!!!!!!! This dialectical process, which has shaped much of the modern world,isstudied here with respect to the early, preindustrial history of England (andthen Britain) as a modern imperial power. The essays concentrate on how thecentral, or hearth, culture of southeastern England interacted with othercultures, other peoples, on a succession of marchlands-Scotland, Ireland,North America, and the Caribbean. No singular "British" system emergedfrom this global process. There were many systems, linked to each otherindirectly, through a common center of power and an extraordinarily perva-sive language I culture, centered in southeastern England, which radiatedout into the distant corners of the globe.Aspects of this process have been explored by others. One task, then, istosituate our study within a broader historiographical context.Itis emphati-cally not our intention to be comprehensive, but rather to identify, in selec-tive fashion, certain key developments; and, in this, we hope to break newground. But these findings are necessarily incomplete and tentative, and theylead us to explore aspirations and to identify promising lines of furtherresearch as well.!!

JOHN FREDERICK MARTIN. Profits in the Wilderness:Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New EnglandTowns in the Seventeenth Century.

Year: 1991 Field: Colonial America Summary: New Puritan villages were financed, legitmaized, defended, land aquired, setllers recruited, and disputes settled by a hieracrhyu of abotu 100 people. The Purtitan expansion was finianced and it was not an eqalitarian soceityy Thesis: Towns," Martin argues, "apportioned rights andresponsibilities according to business principles" (p.3). Entrepreneurs invested in communal land corpo-rations, acquiring "rights" or "shares" that could besold, developed, leased, or held for capital gains. Theland corporations became powerful communal insti-tutions. Resident shareholders, known as "inhabit-ants," constituted a landholding elite. For most of theseventeenth century the corporations shared localauthority with church and town.The most original part of Martin's story is hisexplanation of how the "ambiguous" relationshipbetween town and corporation was resolved. Lack ofclarity about which group was responsible for financ-ing community affairs and who should share in landdistributions caused a series of conflicts throughoutNew England. Hardly a town remained unaffected.Then, during the Dominion, Governor Edmund An-dros announced that towns had no legal existenceaccording to English law. The land corporations did,but not the towns. After the Dominion collapsed,colony after colony passed laws clarifying the rela-tionship between the two. The laws all distinguishedclearly between a corporation of town proprietorswho controlled land and a corporation of town resi-dents who controlled governance. Thus, the unwill-ing architect of policies that shaped most subsequenttown founding in New England was none other thanthe region's most threatening seventeenth-centuryofficial, the infamous Andros. Other: Martin sets himself three key tasks: to demonstrate the importance of "com-mercial enterprise" in the founding of seventeenth-century New England towns;to clarify the domination of town government by an entrepreneurial class; andto establish the primacy of individualism over communalism ). On the other hand, the purpose of Part I is not to arrive at any specific calculation. It is instead descriptive: to describe the requirements of founding a town in the wilderness, the organizations town promoters invented, the different profit schemes they devised, the general court policy, and the prevailing ideas (both secular and religious) about the frontier— all to give concreteness to the basic assertion that entrepreneurship was a practical necessity, socially and culturally acceptable, at the heart of the effort to settle the wilderness in the seventeenth century. Part II is concerned with towns after they were founded; it takes issue with the second standard proposition, namely, that town residents shared land and power. This section is based on evidence from sixty-three towns, roughly half the number founded in the seventeenth century, including towns from every New England colony. It argues that, having been launched by organizations possessing a strong business character, towns apportioned rights and responsibilities according to business principles.!!!! One sentence: The New England town and town expansion project was not equalitarian or purely idealistic manifest destiny; it was a business-type individualist expansion financed by a group of wealthy oligarchs.

The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in NativeAmerican Communities.

Year: 1995 Field: Am Rev Summary: Then -there isthe sheer magnitude of the task: "Indian country" was actually "the Indiancountries," a land inhabited by many groups, each with its own story. Tomake matters more difficult, the evidence available to reconstruct those sto-ries is scattered and otherwise intractab //New and intresting method of looking at many indivudal experuences in native history Thesis: Rather, Indians found themselves in a bloody struggle for liberty and sovereignty that too often put them in direct conflict with American patriots. Those who turned to the British as allies felt betrayed by the Peace of Paris in 1783, when Britain ceded Indian lands to the newly recognized United States. In the end, as Colin G. Calloway demon- strates in this important book, "whether they sided with rebels, redcoats, neither, or both" (p. xiii), the American Revolution was a disaster for most Indian peoples Other: . But the main, substantive chapters of the book are choked with detail and intricate narratives, meticulously glued to the documented sources and the innumerable writings on the subject. One has to struggle through dense and tangled episodes—of tribal factionalism, divided allegiances, microscopic shifting alliances, skirmishes, raids, captivities, devastations, and atrocities. Some of the complex accounts of borderland warfare during the Revolution throw clear light on major historical developments, but some prove to be dead ends—efforts that got nowhere and made little difference to the overall story of the Revolution's impact on the native American population, or vice versa. Calloway arguesthat colonization had created "new worldsfor all" (p. 1) by the mid-eighteenth century,characterized by extensive cross-culturalcontact and influence. Indian communitiesgrappled with rapid change and sought tocurb the press of colonists onto Indianlands. The war brought new pressures, butthey produced no common Indian response:at Stockbridge the locals supported the patri-ots; the Cherokees at Chota opposed the pa-triots to protect their lands; the MaquachakeShawnees struggled to remain neutral.Calloway presents a kaleidoscope of commu-nity dynamics under the pressure of war.Niagara and Cuscowilla, both refugee com-munities, followed different trajectories.At Niagara the war caused privation andincreased factionalism; afterward its popula-tion disintegrated and dispersed. InCuscowilla the war helped create a new,Seminole polity where none had previouslyexisted. Other communities illustrate otherthemes: Stockbridge and Oquaga, the dangerof identifying too closely with Europeans;Maquachake, the difficulty of maintainingneutrality in wartime; Tchoukafala, theChickasaw struggle for independence!! Overall, Indians sought to protect their owninterests first, staying neutral if possible but fighting or fleeing as nec-essary.\\ The far reaching revolution and move it from a white mans war - Historiogrpahy: Indians fougth against the americans and lost , they are negiligible - You must include them for a full story; they too had to resond to reovultinary conditions - There was a wide range of experiences - We have ignired how the revolution affected indians in their commuhnites and therefore their lives - The menaing for them was different, but the world is all too real - Americans excluded them - The revolution elevated the acquisition of Indian land to a national policy!! - The reovltion created a new soiety and justified indian exclsion from it - Series of case studies and what the am rev meant for these people Prologue: In 75, most of america was indian land, they were more integrated with american cities and land, the revolution was the first massive step towards severing our connections and destroying their culture and land 1. Am rev created civil war in indian coutnry - It was also a total war - They had war torn lives now, 2. Odenacks were politcally in turmoil but intact asa nation 3. Briiths aligned indians lost their land. Those who sided got no benefit 4. Am rev divied many goruos internally and effectivly sew dissent in the leagues of indian alliances 5. Niagara represnted the way indians could band together and depend on eachother during this time. \ 6. Nuetaility wasn't an opition; they werent allowed to be 7. Cherokkess were lobbied against for their role in the qwar 8. Am forced trade and debt on chickasaw and chocataw and then took their land\\ 9. Seimole gained independence and forged a tribe identiy in the fact of american aggression 10. Indians were revbuilfing resilently after the war but were now deemed extermination worthy for the us Epi: Indins had amny deinfitons of freedom and choice but the US boiled it all down to the myth of defiance that must be curshed; they used them in every sense Particpaition in the rev guarenteed their exclusion and their refusal to assimilate guarenteed their extinction!!! One sentence: The Revolution, Calloway concludes—with its "burned villages and crops, murdered chiefs, divided councils and civil wars, migrations, towns and forts choked with refugees, economic disruption, breaking of ancient traditions, losses in battle and to disease and hunger, betrayal to their enemies"—was "one of the darkest periods in American Indian history."

The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. By HERBERT G. GUTMAN. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Pp. i 664. $15.95.)

Year: 1976 Field: Summary: Herbert Gutman has put together a pro- vocative and sweeping reinterpretation of the black family experience. Few other historians of this generation have approached such a significant topic with so much discernment, imagination, and energy. The author outdoes most family historians and quantifiers at their own game and draws upon an extraordinary diversity of sources family letters, court testimony, literary works, anthropological studies, oral histories to argue his case. The new primary data, both written and statistical (not to mention the remarkable photograph that Gutman calls his single most telling piece of evidence), are the book's greatest strength. The Black Family will remain a significant scholarly landmark long after the smoke has cleared Thesis: . Challenging traditional theories of black family disorganization and "pathology," Gutman contends that even cen- turies of slavery and injustice failed to weaken the remarkable "adaptive capacities" of Afro-Ameri- cans. At least until the 192os, he argues, blacks managed to preserve cultural traditions, family continuities, and the "double-headed kin related household. " The first eight of Gutman's ten long chapters deal with the black family in slavery, and his cen- tral evidence consists of plantation records, a few surviving county census schedules, and Freed- men's Bureau records, especially of validated mar- riages. Whatever the faults of Gutman's study, this information is invaluable-in the place of a few observers' impressions, one is now confronted with some information about the lives of tens of thou- sands of largely illiterate and unskilled Americans, the ancestors of living Americans. This evidence, often interpreted with skill and imagination, dra- matically reinforces the key theme of the best re- cent works on American Negro slavery: that the worst barbarities of human bondage could coexist with a kind of accommodation between black and white cultures. The controversial point is whether the relative autonomy and perseverance of black family life was a wholly independent force, as Gut- man maintains, immune from white-determined rules of the game, rules pragmatically chosen to ensure the stability of the slave regime. Gutman is not always sensitive to the limitations and ambiguity of his evidence. To give only two examples, he almost wholly ignores the wide- spread practice of "hiring" slaves out for a year or more in the most lucrative labor market, a practice detrimental to family stability but seldom re- corded except in probate proceedings where pos- sible claims could arise involving the transmission of title. Second, in arguing for the relative stability and durability of slave marriages, Gutman places great weight on the demography of four Virginia counties in 1865 and i866. Yet in three of the counties over half the adult black males were over the age of forty (in York County, 57 percent). In i86o the national figure for black males of the same age group was 34 percent. Gutman makes no al- lowance for this disproportionate age and sex structure. Nor does he emphasize that the fourth county, Montgomery, is west of Roanoke, in the mountains, or that it had a low proportion of blacks and a relatively high proportion of black single-parent households. It is significant that what Gutman terms "the most important single piece of historical evidence in the book"-the dust jacket photograph of "Five generations on Smith's plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina"-does not portray a single young adult male. Much of the smoke surrounding the book's appearance can, of course, be traced to Gutman himself. His topical point of departure, his broadly inclusive scope, and his assertive generalizations seem calculated, however unconsciously, to stimulate public controversy. Some readers will applaud, and most will tolerate, his open commitment to relevancy, though a few quote back at him his observation that "historical evidence has a cruel way of playing tricks on those who record it for nonhistorical purposes" (p. 360). Less tolerable, at least for me, in a study with so much intrinsic power and importance, is Gutman's tendency to digress from his compelling discussion to allude, cryptically or at length, to the work of other contemporary white scholars engaged in the cottage industry of writing black history. (See pp. I03, I3I, 258ff, 303ff.) Such historiographical infighting belongs in the footnotes or in the impressive essay on concepts of race contained in Appen- dix C. In addition, Gutman's arrangement of topics, presentation of tables, and general style can be confusing; the lengthy volume seems sprawling, repetitive, and disjointed at times. Much of this, however, is due to the fact that the author allows the reader to look over his shoulder as he works and reworks. Gutman's argument is carefully documented step by step, and the book reveals something of the form, as well as the substance, of his arduous research. The substance itself is straightforward and only appears startling in contrast to prior misconceptions. For example, building upon an analysis of a half-dozen plantation records from various regions, each stretching over more than one generation, Gutman demonstrates that the large majority of black children in the mid-nineteenth century were raised in two-parent households, and that these families were remarkably stable, considering the disruptive nature of the slavery system. In showing the existence of such units to have been widespread, he takes pains to contradict the notion that double- headed households existed mostly among "elite" slaves house servants, skilled workers, or the property (and perhaps offspring) of the most well-to- do masters. Among younger slaves premarital intercourse and pregnancy were apparently common, in part because masters encouraged every means to increase their work force and slaves sought every way to limit the possibility of sale. But as with whites in early New England, such relationships generally led to marriage and the raising of children with a single spouse. For black Southerners, unlike white Southerners, that spouse was almost never close kin, and this careful exogamy was reinforced through naming patterns which, as Gutman shows for the first time, regularly linked extended family groups across generations. Significantly for colonial historians, the deepest thrust of the book is not toward the twentieth century, though policy-planners have begun to argue its implications, or toward the nineteenth century, from which most of the data are drawn and for which Gutman holds out the promise of "a subsequent volume" dealing specifically with "the Afro-American slave and ex-slave between i86i and i868" (p. xx). Instead, the book's drift is toward the eighteenth century, "the date when a developing slave community first took shape" (p. I44). By the eighth chapter Gutman has been led back inevitably, through the logic of his own questions, to the era between I740 and I780. His instincts are sound, for in the midst of recent intensive writing about the origins of slavery and the workings of the antebellum plantation system, this intervening era remains, by comparison, curiously unxplored Other: Intro Resonding to moniyhan report which presuppsed the inability of aas to adapt to a changing culture This builds off elkins and sambos. They are ifnants "By destorying the balck family, whites broke the will and ability of blacks" //Gutman like lol no Blacks had families and did not engage in unsavory practices an more than whites // this book suffers from time and space issues //culture is everything Chapter 1: slaves and exslaves after the civil war. Most slaves lived in a double headed housgold 2:Familial belief and behavior were based in slave not memetic white practices 3 and 4: Reconstuct sslave famiilal domesti arrangments and kin networks in very different settings from that exsisted amoung slaves, Insistnts on a common slave culture across south //wrong; it shows some commonaliteis not a culture //inbleivable research in this book 5 Slave kin obligaton s turned into social obligations //focuses on slave namings practives 6: slave surname shows their deisre and ability to sepetrate from their owneers over time //They choose their names activley =, not because they oculdnt recognize another way 7; response to geno,. Elkins, and stammp //Bleifs were passed down ///Family was everyth9ign to slaves 8 slave culture was contained within the parameters of a masters domination of power, but separate from their instiutions 9 and 10: no breakdown in the slave fmailal network //FOCUSED ON INDIVUDAAL EXPERIN ES IN HIS METHOD //SLAVE CULTURE IS DYNMAIC AND ADAPTIVE, NOT STATIC //Slave narrowed what slaves were alloiwed to do, not what they were capable of doing//social structe!!!!!!!!!!!!! One sentence: Herbert Gutman's work, The Black Family in Slavery anid Freedom, shows that between 1750 and 1925, blacks in America were able to establish and maintain stable patterns of family life

Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660 Cynthia Van Zandt

Year: Field: Summary: Brothers among Nations is a very ambitious book. Cynthia Van Zandt has taken on the difficult task of investigating broad, intercultural alliances that extended far beyond the boundaries of individual colonies or ethnic or racial groups. In doing so, she reminds us of the intricate connections that bound the peoples of North America and the Atlantic world together in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Van Zandt focuses on a broad geographic region, the eastern seaboard from the New England colonies to the Chesapeake Bay, incorporating English, Dutch, and Swedish settlers as well as multiple Indian groups and African slaves. She draws on a broad range of sources from these colonies as well as the metropole, including a number of Dutch sources. At the center of Van Zandt's book isthis tension between the desperate need of both nativesand newcomers to learn about one another and the dan-gers inherent in either trying to extract information orgetting the facts wrong. This chapter [prolougesets the stage for the book by contrasting two colonial conflicts involving the Susquehannock Indians. In 1655, Susquehannocks helped lead a raid on Manhattan, singling out an influential colonist named Isaac Allerton. Twenty years later in 1675, Allerton's son, Major Isaac Allerton, with Colonel John Washington led Virginia and Maryland militia in an attack on the Susquehannocks' major fortified town. The chapter argues that the events of 1675 illustrate the ways in which the colonial world had changed dramatically over the course of Isaac Allerton Sr.'s lifetime. The book, then, explores why the world before those changes was so important. Thesis: The book is, in many ways, "a cultural history of the first international coalitions in North America" (p. 11). Van Zandt emphasizes cooperation and partnerships in a world in which interdependence was often unavoidable, but she also acknowledges that interactions could spark misunderstandings and conflicts as well. Van Zandt argues that for a period during the seventeenth century, from about 1620 to 1670, the fact that no single group along the Atlantic seaboard had decisive power meant that every group created and used a network of alliances in order to achieve their aims. This is not interpreted as a period of intercultural harmony; rather, it is argued that each side mistrusted the other and were forced into such relationships by their political circumstances, showing themselves happy to achieve their goals through warfare instead when possible. ties. Though the line of interpretation in this book ebbs andflows, by the end an important thesis emerges: local affairs in colonialAmerica between 1600 and 1650 were often influenced by, and in turninfluenced, events up and down and even across the Atlantic because ofthe wide-reaching work of intercultural brokers. Additionally, Indian pri-orities and premises disproportionately shape They did so in part by mapping one another, marking the boundaries of cultures, spaces, and worldviews. This book explores early modern peoples' pursuit of intercultural partnerships by focusing on the ways in which they used maps to bridge cultures and in which early moderns mapped peoples, as well as lands and waterways.!! Other: Van Zandt argues that Indians and Europeans in thefirst half of the seventeenth century on North America'seastern seaboard deeply desired alliances and spent agreat deal of effort "mapping" one another: that is, fig-uring out not only the land's physical features but alsoother people's social and political arrangements. Out-numbered, Europeans depended on Indians to tradewith them and to refrain from destroying the fledglingcolonies. For their part, Indians desired trade and mil-itary connections with the newcomers. Neither Euro-peans nor Indians were united groups. Generally, therewere more reasons for conflict between, say, New Neth-erland and New England or the Senecas and the Sus-quehannocks than across what we might anachronisti-cally imagine as a racial divide. While enslaved and freeAfricans in the colonies held an infinitely smalleramount of power than did most Indians and Europeansin the Americas, Van Zandt fits them into her argumenttoo. Indeed, perhaps their lack of power made mappingtheir physical and social surroundings and forging al-liances all the more important. This chapter presents an overview of the importance of intercultural alliances along the Atlantic seaboard in the period from 1580 to 1660. One of the ways in which Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans created intercultural alliances was by mapping one another. Mapping in the early modern era included significant ethnographic dimensions; such ethnographic mapping was an integral part of the pursuit of intercultural alliances in the early colonial period. Although conflict was a frequent outcome in this period, widespread intercultural accommodation was as important as conflict in shaping the early colonial experience. One sentence:It argues that Europeans, Native Americans, and diaspora Africans all continuously mapped one another as they pursued the intercultural alliances that, to a large extent, shaped the early colonial world. Finally, Brothers among Nations uses the term intercultural rather than cross‐cultural in order to emphasize not only the cooperative nature of such interactions but also the limits that were always present.

matthias

Year: Field: Summary: Campbel-lites; other anti-evangelical dissenters, such as the Mormons, launched separatereligious movements altogether. Still farther out in the anti-evangelical strato-sphere lay the weird, cranky realm of Father Matthias. In this world, Wilentz andJohnson have hung a marvelous tale that not only knits together some of themajor interstices ofthe national scandal it became?salvation, sex, murder?butalso reveals much about the sexual and economic underpinnings of nineteenth-century Amer Smith, to the conclusion, where one of thecentral characters assumes the name by which histo-rians know her, Johnson and Wilentz successfullyanchor their narrative in the religious and economichistory of the early nineteenth cent THE MEETING OF the Prophets Matthias and Joseph Smith was one of hundreds of strange religious events that occurred all across the United States from the 18205 through the 18405. These were the peak years of the market revolution that took the country from the fringe of the world economy to the brink of commercial greatness. They were also (not coincidentally) years of intense religious excitement and sectarian invention, the culmination of what historians have called the Second Great Awakening. While revivals reshaped the landscape of mainstream American Protestantism, smaller groups went beyond evangelical orthodoxy into direct and often heretical experience of the supernatural. Young women conversed with the dead; male and female perfectionists wielded the spiritual powers of the Apostles; farmers and factory hands spoke directly to God; and the heavens opened up to reveal new cosmologies to poor and uneducated Americans like Matthias and Joseph Smith. Building on more than two centuries of occultism and Anglo-American millenarian speculation, the seers of the new republic set the pattern for later prophetic movements down to our own time and gave birth to enduring religious institutions, including Smith's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.\ Very quickly, this logic led radical reformers to attack two of the nation's central institutions. Southern slavery, they argued, interposed a despotic power between slaves and a loving God. Traditional marriage and the patriarchal family committed the same soul-destroying crime against women. But Americans also sensed that the Matthias cult spoke with strange eloquence to the social and emotional upheavals in which they lived their own lives— particularly their struggles to redefine what it meant to be a woman or a man in the new world of the nineteenth century. For Matthias was not content, as some other prophets were, to convert a few members of his own social class and then hide out with them. He was angrier and more ambitious than that: he launched a mad (and for a time successful) mission among some prominent New York City Finneyite reformers, converting, humiliating, and ruining evangelical businessmen who had tried to assume social and religious dominance over better men. The result was a sustained and singularly well-documented encounter between welt-do Finneyites and a mysterious prophet who hated them and all they stood for. //cults relect the society they are within and the depravity of it that needs to be filled The story of Matthias and his Kingdom fascinated contemporaries. In the newspaper accounts, each of the Kingdom's major characters appeared to be emblematic of a more general social type; and almost every twist in the plot seemed indicative of some larger cultural trend. The story was shocking (and the newspapers made sure to play up its shock value) but it was also significant—"a bitter satire upon the age and country," one writer observed, an eccentric but dead-serious commentary on the contests over family life, sexuality, and social class that accompanied the rise of market society, with continuing resonance for Americans today. 6 This book tells that story. Thesis: Other: One sentencJohnson and Wilentz's microhis-torical focus opens a window into the socialfabric of the United States during this era ofsocial reform and democratization. The King-dom of Matthias will disappoint those whoprefer their social history laden with theoret-ical concepts and explanatory categories.While examples of "status discontent," "hege-monic masculinity," and other constructs arerichly explored, they are not theorized inexplicit terms. Traditional historians, skepti-cal of innovations made by Natalie ZemonDavis, John Demos, and others may find thisto be another speculative postmodern prod-uct of the "linguistic turn" in history. TheKingdom of Matthias epitomizes narrativehistory's emphasis on storytelling as opposedto the rigid cataloging of facts and events. Thismasterful work of cultural history deserves awide audiencee: // By standards that Elijah Pierson would later adopt, the immutable inequality of this tight-knit patriarchy was a perfect model of injustice. That women, slaves, and propertyless men should stand subordinate to the likes of Benjamin Pierson— or any other mortal— would one day look to Elijah like the negation of Christ's Word. But for those raised within it, Morristown's regime held out the example of mutual care and obligation: under the rule of fathers, widows stayed warm in winter, deaf people took the best seats in church, and men like Usual Crane kept their dignity. For generations of Piersons it had been a workable formula for decency and order in this world. Almost certainly, Elijah carried that formula in his head when, while still a young man, he left Morristown and set off to take a job as an apprentice clerk in New York City. Cults like this seem to capture a dangerous undercurrent in American society, fueled by disenfranchised men who are bitter about the loss of patriarchal authority, both in religion, and in their society. As for what happens to the members of this particular cult, Matthias continues preaching and wandering after he's released from prison. Sylvester Mills ends up in an insane asylum, while Benjamin and Ann Folger resume their lives in the evangelical community. Meanwhile, Isabella Van Wagenen collaborates with antiracist newspaper editor Gilbert Vale to reveal the truth about the cult, including the cult's sexual promiscuity, and Benjamin and Ann's roles as leading cult members. Isabella Van Wagenen wins her lawsuit against Benjamin Folger, and she uses the compensation to begin a new life as antiracist activist Sojourner Truth. Yet, the story of Matthias's cult also tells an interesting social story about American society. It exposes one way in which poor 19th-century Americans attempted to resist the social and religious dominance of emerging, affluent middle classes //Racil prejudice and patricarchy are reflected in their stiryl

Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution. ByJACK N. RAKOVE. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, i996. Pp. xvi, 439.

Year: Field: Summary: What a good historian can bring to the debates about original intentionsand initial understandings is a sound command of sources, a professionalassessment of the evidence at hand, and a dispassionate attempt toreconstruct the interplay of politics and theory that produced theConstitution. As Rakove says, what is remarkable about our understandingof the making of the Constitution is not how little but how much we know. If allof this evidence cannot permit us to discover an original understanding, oreven to identify the framers' meaning or intent, it can at least illuminate "therange of meanings that the American political nation first attached to theproposed Constitution" and provide some grounds for judging whether "oneaccount of the original meaning of the Constitution appears more persuasiveor better founded than another" (pp. 7, I Thesis: Other: One sentence:b What do we mean my original intent and is it useful? 1 talks about problems, 2-5 Were the intents and and uderstansdinsg of a constitution coherent? 5 and 6 are about the debate around ratifyication and what it meant and how do we reconstuct their ideas. That is in 7-10 where he discusses federalism, representation, sepration of power, and rights. //This book is an itnerpration of the origins of the constituitios and the sources of greatest tension. He takes no side; rather he just wants to show the context theconstituion was forged in Thos seeking will thus be mor einformed on the entire adorption process. A lot of attention on madison. //Dialtectic between politcal action and thought 1.Madison wanted people to find the unbiased history and I think bilder shows he fraility here. Meaningm, intention and understanding are historical in anture By learning the context we can give meaning to debates about the document's origins 2. The articles sucked created a desperate need for the constitution Madison was the most prepared and intentional Madison had grand intentions but ultimatly bended and played aloong the loines of poltics in philly 3. Divisions and compromises drove the maing of the const The morality of slavery was sacked for compromsies sake 4. The convention could not invent laws without states consent which spurred debate and politcs 5. Debate the constit Debate on origiknal intent exsisted from the begiing, 7 FEDERALISM Big debates that ultimatly show the impact the people had on decisions not just the framers 8. Getting it ratified was always the goal while amking a strong ujnion . There was so much tension then, it makes sense that there is now 9. Not concerned as much with the executive excpet it beign a king, it was unsure if hamilitoon was trying to use the executive as a sugel or if it was supposed to eb attrative 10 rights: Intnetio can be fulfilled on long afgter the framer had dided 11 Framers wanted 1. To insert essential principles only to avoid over perscripotion and givt control 2. To use simple and [percise language Madison chnaged his mind on ideas he had at the framing Madiosn used originalism politcally later Recast the doucmnet and irignalisma s objective then you can use it for poltical reasons!!!! We still do this to today!

1992, Rodgers, JAH

Year: 1992 Field: Summary: The concept of republicanism was one of the success stories of the 1980s. A gen-eration ago the term-while not unknown-carried no more freight than scoresof others in the historical vocabulary. First given formal analytic and conceptualidentity in a historiographical essay by Robert Shalhope in 1972, it vaulted withina decade into the eye of scholarly debate over revolutionary and early nationalpolitics-and soon thereafter into nineteenth-century historiography as well. By1985 it had become, in the words of one of its principal critics, "the most protean"concept in antebellum cultural history. By 1990 it was everywhere and organizingeverything, though perceptibly thinning out, like a nova entering its red giantphase.'The process by which republicanism burst onto the scene was not simply one ofintellectual fashion. Nor was it, at heart, a discovery, driven by newly unearthed evi-dence. It was a conceptual transformation, a reconfiguration of the largely known,a paradigm shift of Kuhnian scale and Kuhnian dynamics-fittingly so, sinceThomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was so closely bound upin it. Sorting the enduring from the merely provocative in Kuhn's notion of para-digm shifts has constituted a sizable intellectual industry since the book's publica-tion in 1962. That modern science has moved through intermittent conceptual revo-lutions, from one highly elaborated structure of assumptions to another, with aprecipitousness that often more closely resembled conversion than the accretiveprocesses of normal science was not a novel announcement g quandaries. Kuhnian science did ntive; it leaped from paradigm to paradigm, fromto ano Thesis: Was it an ideology, with the power to construct theimaginable possibilities of behavior? A language precluding rival languages? A par-adigm of Kuhnian power? In the late 1980s, as republicanism was catching up theimagination of more and more historians, explaining so much, it was quietly comingapart at its core.!! Other: The gift of republicanism, as an explanatory concept, lay in its ability to do so muchdisparate interpretive work. At its best, the republicanism paradigm enriched andcomplicated historians' understanding of revolutionary and early national America.It brought into consciousness lost worlds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryideas and culture. It offered social and intellectual historians a momentary pieceof common ground. At its worst, employed for too many ends and distended toofar, it ran the danger of explaining everything, even that most Hartzian of catego-ries, to which it stuck with a tenacity inexplicable except in terms of rivalry for thesame explanatory space: the American "mind." Formulated as an alternative to aflat, timeless liberalism, it threatened to end up, by its very parallelisms, reifyingand reconfirming the liberalism it had been designed to escape. Like all successfulparadigms, it answered a breathtakingly wide array of questions. In this regard, itssuccess and its weakness were one and the sam111111 One sentence:

Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in JamaicaBy Sasha Turner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Year: 2017 Field: Summary: Sasha Turner's superb book Contested Bodies skillfully examines how enslaved women's reproductive potential became central to debates and reforms prompted by the late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century abolitionist movement, pulling in a variety of actors. Abolitionists argued that improving maternal and infant health on plantations and getting involved in child socialization would pave the way for the end of the transatlantic slave trade and emancipation by creating a self-reproducing, disciplined Christian labor force. Planters were receptive to some of these arguments but continued to prioritize productivity and profitability over women's lives. Doctors used new interventions and hospitals to expand their influence over reproductive health care but occasionally departed with abolitionist and planter perspectives on the best route forward. Enslaved women and men [End Page 702] seized on some of the opportunities created by new reforms and ameliorative measures but also struggled to maintain spheres of reproductive autonomy. Local courts and government officials attempted to mediate between these actors, often failing to enforce new laws and leaving much to the discretion of individual planters who implemented reforms inconsistently in practice. Thesis: This book examines struggles over pregnancy and childrearing among the enslaved population of Jamaica during the era of abolitionism, the late 1780s to 1834. Turner writes that she has placed the enslaved female body at the centre of her analysis, as the "main investigative frame, thus taking "a body-centered approach" (5). The bodies of women and children became the sites, or zones, of struggles between and among planters, estate managers and overseers, doctors, abolitionists, and enslaved women and men. Her overall theme is that these struggles "reveal the centrality of women's reproductive labor to the moral and economic ambitions of abolitionists and slaveholders, and reproductive concerns as essential to enslaved people's resistance" (70). Other: Enslaved women and their children were essential to abolitionist goals of transforming the colonies from slave to free societies. Having received improved treatment, women were expected to birth a greater number of children, who would then be trained from their infancy to become moral and industrious free people. Children were far more crucial to the project of creating free societies than adults. Although the foundations of creating a free society rested on women's ability to reproduce, the difficulties of reconditioning the minds of adults made them somewhat of a lost generation to the ultimate project of freedom. The ideological entanglements between abolitionists and planters stretched beyond the articulation of abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of enslaved women. As the next two chapters show, the contested nature of pronatalism centered on the fact that colonial capitalists were driven not by moral but rather by economic imperatives. The working out of reforms in the colonies was subordinated to planter interests, who prioritized maintaining sugar production and increasing profits. Because concerns for day-to-day productivity and profitability of sugar estates dictated reproductive interventions, abolitionist moral ambitions were subordinated to the economic ambitions of plantation agents and owners. Stimulating population growth was therefore not just about ending slavery; when viewed in the context of British colonialism it was also about cultivating moral and industrious subjects. In following this strategy, abolitionists linked abolition and colonial reform to the reproductive lives of enslaved women.!!!! . They disagreed on what these bodies represented and how they should be treated, used, and cared for. Studying these conflicts uncovers how the links abolitionists made between biological reproduction, abolition, and reform transformed the experiences of enslavement, and fostered new forms of resistance, social relations, and cultural life among the enslaved.!!!!! One sentence: encapsulates Turner's argument—abolitionists wanted to mitigate pun ishments and labor, but planters disagreed and registered their disapproval bybeating enslaved bodies that resisted or failed to live up to their expectations.\\ The period between the 1780s and 1834 transformed the lives of the enslaved and the culture of slavery. Planters reformed punishment, work, and health practices to facilitate bearing and raising children. Yet Jamaican planters and the government did not simply abandon their old methods of coercing labor and neglecting enslaved women and children to adopt pronatal reforms. Planters purchased more females and young captives, adjusted how they deployed mother-workers and children to the fields, punished them, and provided them with medical care, food, and clothes according to estate labor needs, production cycles, and solvency. The pronatal policies and practices of abolitionists, planters, and the imperial and local governments had mixed results for the enslaved. Enslaved people became subjected to British middle-class gendered expectations and experienced limitations on their freedoms to form sexual partnerships and to determine childbearing and child-rearing practices. Pronatal reforms, however, brought much-needed relief from demanding, degrading, and dangerous work; while mitigated punishment for mother-workers boosted the survival chances of enslaved infants and children, and conferred legal rights upon the enslaved. Enslaved people took advantage of these reforms and their associated debates to protect themselves and their children from exploitation and abuse. Pronatalism simultaneously enhanced and undermined the authority and autonomy enslaved women had over their bodies, sexuality, families, and communities. These struggles for the control of biological reproduction reveal the significance of childbearing to the economic and political entanglements of slavery and abolition, and enslaved people's resistance and social life.!!!!!!!!

American Negro Slave Revolts Aptheker

Year: 36 Field: slavery Summary: In the book, Aptheker (attempts to dismiss the belief that the American Negro's rebellion was characterized by inactiveness and compliance. Moreover, Apthekerdisapproves of the notion that the Negro slaves were treated well by the white masters. The aim of the current research is to review the book American Negro slave revolts and assess Aptheker's main arguments. In addition, the essay will assess the researcher's opinion on the impact of slavery in modern American society. Thesis: Back in 1937, in studying and beginning to publish on slave revolts in the United States, I was reaching the conclusion that the then domi- nant historiography depicting Afro-American slaves as docile, imita- tive, passive, childlike (to use some of the words employed by U. B. Phillips, then the authority) was untrue. By the time the slave-revolt book appeared, I concluded therein (p. 374): "The evidence . . . points to the conclusion that discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American Negro slaves." The present note helps sustain that view. San Jose, California HE Other: He again stressed both the increase in the number of blacks relative to whites and economic depression as factors that induced rebelliousness. He pointed out that the growth of indus- try and urbanization also made more difficult the control of slaves. Economic depression was particularly relevant because it shattered the idyllic image of a magnolia-scented South and re- vealed the real world of the market with its economic cycles That cruelty, as he presented it, was not some strange anomaly, but resulted from the inherent conflict beween master and slave. The slave was property, but a property with a reasoning faculty that "leads men, unlike automobiles, to compare, plan, hope, yearn, desire, hate, fear, which leads them to seek pleasure and shun pain, to spin dreams and build philosophies and gladly die for them." At the core of Aptheker's view of slavery was his in- sistence upon the human qualities of slaves Revolts are understudied because of a belief if negro ifneriority The harsh methods of control eneded to maiantin slavery spurred discontnet Revotls spurred by; increase in lakc pop over white; modernization in industry and urban made controlling slaves less effective; ecomoic depression increaed rebelliousness (forced liquidation of esates) Above all it was the inhumainty and unfairness that spurred rebellion //not great on space and time //turner inspired others //methodliocigal issues, but great eprsepctive One sentence: African American had agency; were not docile; responded to mistreatment; revolted frequently and there was cvulture of revolts

The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins ofthe American Revolution. By GARY B. NASH. (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, I979. Pp. XX, 548. $I8.50.

Year: 1979 Field: am rev Summary: the past decade Gary B. Nash has enriched our understandingof colonial and Revolutionary history with an important series of articleson urban life. Nash, along with Jesse Lemisch, Alfred F. Young, and oth-ers, is one of a circle of "new left" historians who have plumbed the activi-ties and outlook of the "lower orders." His long-awaited book, reflectingand expanding his seminal research, examines town dwellers in Boston,New York, and Philadelphia, between i690 and I776. Always its empha-sis is on the " 'laboring classes' . . . , people who worked with their hands"(p. xii), rather than on the elite. The book moves chronologically, with onechapter discussing the social structure and economy of an epoch and thenext examining the era's politics and ideology. It is an ambitious, provoca-tive, and invariably thoughtful work, but ultimately one that must bejudged a mixed success. Thesis: The Revolution, Nash contends, "isbest understood if ideological principles and economic interests are seen asintimately conjoined. " While dramatic events such as the Stamp Act riots, theBoston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and armed conflict at Lexington andConcord have captured the attention of historians, Nash argues that un-derlying social and economic processes were silently at work creating a worldin which revolution was possible!!!!!!!!!!!! The argu-ment running through these chapters is that between i690 and I776 citydwellers, particularly the poorer ones, "came to perceive antagonistic divi-sions based on economic and social position ... and that through thesestruggles they developed a consciousness of class" (p. x). This burgeoningpolitical awareness, Nash argues, was a sustained process, as characteristicof the I720s as of the I76os. The emergence of a self-conscious laboring class shaped the comingof the Revolution. But, as Nash demonstrates, the Revolution alsoshaped the nascent class consciousness. Although politically active work-ers (mostly artisans) gained power during the revolutionary crisis, theRevolution also undermined the growing sense of class unity by creatingelite-led popular coalitions. Although Nash, somewhat disappointingly,stops short of drawing all of the connections between the Revolutionand almost a century of urban change, he does bring scholars closer toa full understanding of the material origins of the American Republic.That is a considerable accomplishme!!!!!!!! urban, class consiouness, dialectic between politcs, intelelctual, and economic //not monocasual Other: Placing the concept of class at the center of his "urban crucible,"Nash outlines the changing structure of life in each of these three citieswith a close eye on the demography and social morphology of the"laboring classes." These cities shared many common characteristics: amercantile orientation, a preindustrial mode of production, a similardivision of wealth, and a similar pattern of social relations. In addition,each port had a socially and politically dominant merchant elite; a nu-merically dominant artisan class; and a large, mobile, and often unrulyunderclass of slaves, indentured servants, and free wage workers. Butbeyond these commonalities-which European cities also shared-nu-merous and important structural differences existed. For example, NewYork depended heavily on slave labor, Philadelphia on indentured ser-vants, and Boston on free wage workers. The laboring classes of eachcity were composed of a distinctive ethnic and religious mix. Differencesalso existed in the size and composition of urban elites, although Nashsees the lower orders as the dynamic element in seaport society andconcentrates his attention on them. One sentence: Capitliast soceity develpoed in the city first and spread Wants to see how class relations shifted, how people worked and lvied, changes around themm, how political consiosness grew, emphasis on urban laborers Located in seaports People were all aware of heirarchy They began to see their class as a point of contention and acted politcally on its anatagonism Nash wants to see how class conscisousnness developed and what people did about it in cities before the rev!! Wants to see the social changes that game from this class consciousness and fgormation, which will help us better understand the am rev It is economic conditions and ideology that lead to these drastic shifts in class!!! They exsist ina dialectic. Admits there isnt a lot of women and draws his evidence and argument from the repeated actions and evidecne presented by lower class people Part 1: The pop growth and econmoic explision in boston created the greatest inequity yet seen in the states Laboring People may not have written about this inequity but acted politcally afgaisnt it. Diiferent reasons across the three cities for their unrest with authority; royality, ethnic tension, and local rule. New england was losing its propsoerity because of the disconenct betweenagriculture and the city. Shows relgious revivial as wel Boston had intense economic declien and relgious increas which are hallmarks of unreast Argues that laborers in boston recognized that profit was being derived from their exploitation and they acted out agaisnt it Local issues needed to intersect with imperial issues for that energy to be tossed at Britian Stamp act\ Base your analysis of social upheavel in the local because that will give you the basis for politcal consiosness. Am rev could not have unfoled when or how it did without the poltical consiousness of the working class They power was dwindling and it had to be reordered; this required an ideoligical component to resturcte the rev. they needed to mentally rework the social and rearrange it.

LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of MarthaBallard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.

Year: 1990 Field: colonial Summary: Yet itis in these very details of the "exhaustive, repetitious dailiness" (p. 9) ofordinary women's lives that Ulrich finds the ultimate value of the diary, oneof the few extant chronicles by an eighteenth-century woman. Unwillingto dismiss women's work as trivial, Ulrich uses an impressive array ofsupporting documents to construct her interpretation of diary entries, whichare typically terse, nonjudgmental, and circumspect. Ulrich teases out-often from the barest of clues -a vivid picture of everyday life in Hallowell(some of which is present-day Augusta), Maine. Ulrich thus fills in themissing details about women's domestic concerns, placing them against thebackground of eighteenth-century social and cultural history by relatingthe diary to larger themes such as premarital pregnancy, parental authority,aging in pre-industrial New England, family economy, and obstetricalhistory. In the process, Ulrich's very methodology transforms the natureof historical evidence.**** Thesis: Considering midwifery in the broadest of contexts, chapters are framedby diary exerpts concerning women's general preoccupations during thetime. Ulrich's governing metaphor is the web, an elaborately extendedimage used to describe the social nature of Ballard's domestic economy,which included the gender-linked production of textiles. From evidencein the diary, Ulrich finds that Martha Ballard and other women in herneighborhood were "gadders," who were frequently away from the home:"In fact, too great a concentration on one's own household was probablysomewhat suspect.... [E]xtensive rather than intensive relations were thenorm" (pp. 92-93). Ballard then had to face the trials ofdomestic life (including routine domestic chores, like washing, which cameto symbolize her oppression) alone or with irregular and uncertain help.Gender dictated Ballard's experience: women's work knew no boundari The diary provides evidence that while premarital sex was rampant,and New England children were able to choose their own partners, romancewas ultimately subordinate to economic concerns. Particularly interesting is the original way Ulrich uses Ballard's accountof daily realities to address the larger question of the professionalizationof medicine. Ballard's presence at autopsies, for example, is discussed inthe context of the eighteenth-century system of social medicine, whichrelied on cooperation between midwives and physicians. (In the nine-teenth-century women would be excluded from attending dissections,which came to be performed in hospitals instead of homes, as medicaleducation was institutionalized and midwives were subordinated.) Ulrichdistinguishes female healers, who identified with the community to suchan extent that they are difficult to locate, from male professionals, whojoined medical organizations and distanced themselves from the commu-nity, evidenced by their use of the title "Doctor." In general, historians have attributed the eventual male domi-nation of obstetrics in both England and America to fashion and to thewillingness of males to practice "emergency" medicine, which called forthe use of more dramatic therapies (bloodletting), medicines (digitalis andopium), and instruments (forceps). Here Ulrich underestimates the impor-tance of forceps (which were rejected by midwives) in an era when Caesar-ean sections -performed without anesthesia - were rare and almost alwaysfatal. Nonetheless, Ulrich's fascinating study is a welcome contribution towomen's history at a time when too much of it is devoted to theoreticalabstractions. Exemplifying a growing trend in feminist research, Ulrich'semphasis on the details of women's daily lives forces us to consider thegendered nature of historical evidence hat women's centraiity in fem-ily labor systems has so rarely been visible canbe at least partially explained by the scarcityof records (such as Martha Ballard's) of theirat times elaborate trade in labor and goods Other: Nonetheless, Ulrich's fascinating study is a welcome contribution towomen's history at a time when too much of it is devoted to theoreticalabstractions. Exemplifying a growing trend in feminist research, Ulrich'semphasis on the details of women's daily lives forces us to consider thegendered nature of historical evidence One sentence:

Madison's Hand Revising the Constitutional Convention

Year: 2015 Field: contitution/new pepublic Summary: . Yet theycontinue to place him at the center of the thoughts and ac-tion in the summer of 1787. One reason is that Madisonhas long been viewed as the most prepared and creativedelegate at the Constitutional Convention. Another is thathis Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention pro-vide the most accessible information about how, when,and why the Constitution reads as it does. Thesis: . The two rea-sons, Mary Sarah Bilder argues in Madison's Hand, herfascinating analysis of how Madison wrote his Notes, areintertwined. Madison appears as the central figure of theConvention, she argues, because he made himself the pro-tagonist of his Notes and kept revising them long after thedelegates returned home. Through painstaking textualanalysis, leavened with judicious but at times speculativeinterpretation, Bilder demonstrates that the Notes were thepartial, cryptic, expunged, and sometimes misleading texts(plural) of a political actor, not an objective account of themaking of the Constitution. Bilder's Madison was not quite so well prepared inMay 1787. The theory of the extended republic thatRakove argues Madison brought with him to the Conven-tion was, Bilder suggests, developed during or even afterit was over, and with the unacknowledged assistance ofother delegates. The Vices memorandum in her renderingmight have begun as a draft for an opening speech Madi-son never delivered and can be read as continuous withthe Notes. How Madison created those Notes is her mainstory. Bilder concludes that Madison took "rough notes,"presumably in shorthand, during the debates, then tran-scribed them twice per week, at least until late August,when he became too involved in drafting to keep up. Hereconstructed that last month of the Notes afterward, pos-sibly two or more years later. And he never stopped revis-ing them. From the outset, she argues, Madison focusedon recording what mattered to him, not least his own rolein shaping the project, and his coverage was uneven, mini-mizing the contributions of others, and sometimes inaccu-rate, especially with regard to his own speeches. He begantaking the Notes as a legislative diary, an early moderngenre written as an aide-mémoire and for selected readers,at a time when most legislative sessions were closed to thepublic and press. Madison had kept legislative diaries inthe Virginia Assembly and in Congress; doing so in Phila-delphia was reflexive. Only gradually, Bilder argues, didhe begin to reshape the Notes to make them appear morecomplete and official, possibly for printing, though heresisted publication until the end of his life. It was DolleyMadison and her brother who, after Madison died, madethe final edits in preparation for publication in 1840. She concludes that the Notes as we have them emerged from aprocess of intellectual and political change and accommodation process, she argues, entwined with Madison's political thought andactions from his time as a delegate to the Confederation Congressin the 1780s through the 1790s and into Madison's retirement, from1817 to his death in 1836. Using Madison's Notes as a source requires facing two problems.First, as they are Madison's creation, we must see them through thelens of our understanding of Madison. Second, as they are the doc-umentary road map for understanding the Convention and its workcreating the Constitution, we must see them through the lens createdby generations of uses of Madison's Notes to guide our interpretationof what the Convention's members thought, said, and did. To Bilder'scredit, she seeks to understand Madison and his role as constitution-maker anew. Bilder does not share the traditional vision of Madisonas "father of the Constitution." For this skepticism, she has the bestpossible supporting witness, Madison himself—whether because hewas frustrated that in the Convention's second half he lost every battlein which he engaged, or because he recognized that the Constitutionwas (in his words) "the product of many heads and many hands," orboth.There is room for disagreement on various matters in her book.For example, Bilder argues that Madison created the Notes primarilyfor Thomas Jefferson Other: Here is a sampler of Bilder's findings:"Madison was an unreliable narrator about himself" (p. 67); "The Notes were not anobjective record of discussions but reflected Madison's inevitable distortions" (p. 70);"Just as Madison recast his speeches, he also minimized criticism of himself" (p. 75);"Madison repeatedly skipped over votes that lay outside his political commitments"(p. 81); "For Madison, the process of writing the Notes also became a process of revising his ideas. The version of his speeches in the Notes diverged from their oral delivery" (p. 89); "The Notes were above all about Madison" (p. 118); "Throughout themanuscript, Madison repeatedly deleted or altered characterizations" (p. 193); "Inthe Notes, five sheets were replaced, each containing a Madison speech or vote capable of being read as aligned with Hamilton" (p. 202); "Authenticity for Madisonremained surprisingly flexible" (p. 214); and "He added sentences to speeches or eveninserted an entire speech" (p. 228) One sentence: I suggest that Madison took his Notes first for himself, but also withthe belief that the Notes would be read by Thomas Jefferson. To focuson Madison and Jefferson as readers does not mean that Madison wasunaware of the possibility of a future, public audience. But the Notes werenot taken for the public. The purpose of the book, however, is not to advance these interpreta-tions as independent theses, but to show the importance of reading a pri-mary document such as the Notes with consideration of context,genre,audience, and subsequent provenance. Madison's original Notes andrevisions reopen many debates in constitutional history. The Notes de-serve their place as a foundational text once we appreciate that they areboth text and artifact. tell the story of Madison's Notes in five parts. Part One begins be-fore the Constitutional Convention with two examples of Madison'snotetaking practice: his prior experience with a legislative diary; andhis use of working notes, here notes for a possible opening address tointroduce the Virginians' constitutional plan. Part Two follows Madisonas he learns to keep a diary of the Convention, exploring his record of theopening days and his struggle to record the early speeches. Part Three ex-amines the sustained section of Notes from mid- June to mid-August inwhich Madison delineated his political strategies, confronted failure inmid-July, and then gradually found a new role arising out of his notetaking.Part Four describes Madison's abandonment of the Notes in late Augustas illness, committee service, and the complexity of drafting the Consti-tution overwhelmed him, and his stance on the Notes as a result of thechanging relevance of the Convention between 1787 and 1789. PartFive describes Madison's effort to complete the Notes for Jefferson's re-turn from France, the levels and types of revisions, Jefferson's relation-ship to the Notes, and Madison's eventual rejection of Jefferson's requestto publish. The Conclusion traces Madison's effort to transform the Notesfrom a diary into debates in the decades before his death and reconsidersthe meaning of Madison's famous account of writing the Notes. Nonetheless, over the half century that Madison fiddled with the text,he left a word unchanged. He never altered "revising." That word, partof the original congressional charge to the Convention, remained as ac-curate to the eighty-five-year-old author as it had been when he had firstwritten it in the summer of 1787. The significance of the Convention andof Madison's Notes—perhaps of every word in the Constitution—lay inthe inherent ambiguity of revising.!!!!!!

Traveling Black by Mia Bay

Year: Field: Summary: Thesis: Other: One sentence:About how travleing segregation is pervadive throughout all of american history She wants to show how these systems devleoped and how it transformed and adapted as transportation did (train, bus, airplane)** Segregation evolves with technology and each time blacks welcome new transportation as oppurnity and resist the inscription of racial hierarchy; cars ad airplanes become part of jim crow The accommodation was always inferior All major black leaders addressed this It is about controlling blacks Closely linked with class If you stop where they can go and disincentivze them from doing so then you can stop them from moving up the social ladder Jim Crow car was manifestly inferior and dangerous Cars allow for different roads to take Travel segregation was national Uses individual accounts to show this story Racism is a system of wealth extaction; 1st class tickets still result in you on a jim crow cart Black travleres experienced racism on the road Long distance travel focus Incosistnet across the states All black classes wwere effected and spoke on yhis Studies how segregated transportation worked and how and why its eradication became so central to aaa freedom struggle, black mobility is an enduring focal point of struggles over equality and difference.

Gould Entangled Histories

Year: Field: Summary: This, at any rate, is one of the lessons to be learned by acknowledging tangled history that bound the English-speaking Atlantic to its Spanish coun Even in moments of apparent self-sufficiency and triumph, the British and American Atlantic world(s) remained deeply intertwined with Spain's Atlanti pire. Only in the most general sense, however, can these transatlantic comm be said to have been comparable or distinct. Despite some apparent similaritie new England and the new Spain" were ultimately "not equivalents," as F Valdes-Ugalde has written, and at no point were their national boundaries an tories unproblematically separate.93 Together, such concerns ought to st warning both against claiming too much for comparative history and of the be open to other approaches, especially when the history involves such dissim entangled communities. We cannot hope to understand the cosmohabited by people such as Francisco Me that matter, the significance of a totem realize that each belonged not to one com munities together constituted - indeed nected yet porou Thesis: Other: One sentence:

"Cuffy," "Fancy Maids," and "One-Eyed Men": Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States ahr 2001 Ed Baptist

Year: 01 Field: slavery Summary: They -also assert, especially through their frequent discussions of the rape of light-skinned enslaved women, or "fancy maids," their own relentlessly sexualized vision of the trade. Finally, the traders insist in accidental testimony that sexual fetishes and commodity fetishism intertwined with such intimacy that coerced sex was the secret meaning of the commerce in human beings, while commodification swelled its actors with the power of rape. Such complexities lead one to wonder if historians might do well to reinterpret the antebellum South-a society in which the slave trade was a motor of rapid geographical and economic expansion-as a complex of inseparable fetishisms.4 Black resistance, of course, does not need to change whites' minds-or even register an impact on white culture-for it to matter, and matter beyond easy measure. Resistance is not the subject of this essay. Instead, here I focus on explaining why and how some white men identified rapes and slave sales as conjoined and essential parts of their very selves.!!! // Last senctence Thesis: Economic commodification and secual commodificatio or people commodification go hand in had The only distinction between commodity and sexual fetishization in this history of the slave trade comes from our own habit of intellectually separating economic desires from those of sexuality, our own kind of remembering and forgetting. The two sets of desires were remarkably compatible, and, indeed, the commodity and the sexual fetish were ultimately the same for such men Karl Marx's definition of the commodity fetish and Sigmund Freud's argument that forms of sexual fetishism are central to male desires-offer terms that can begin an exploration of the passion for slaves shared by both traders and buyers. Other: Commodification is a process that takes place in the eye of the commodifier, not the commodified. The singular term "Cuffy" standardized the human produce shipped from the Chesapeake, using a partitive term to imply that selling slaves was no different from selling "soup" or "lumber." The product was uniform: the main difference between one and thirty was one of the quantity of packages.40 One-eyed men, of course, are kings in the land of the blind. But there are other one-eyed men in the metaphorical world. slang as a synonym for the penis //iognoarnt and led by their dicks Like ideas about honor and manhood, independence, and whiteness, the collective sexual aggressiveness enabled and valorized by the slave trade helped form a group identity for slaveowning white men. Market participants were all greedy for male and female labor in the fields, and for reproductive labor in the slave quarters, but also for fancy maids. So greedy were they, in fact, that such men spoke of themselves as if they were animated, erect penises, one-eyed men watching for mulatto women to rape.5 //Fancy signified status making commodities in a capitalist society One sentence: The fetishization of the commodity plays out in the fetishization of the slave women. it is a mix of Frued and marx. SLavery was a economic path to excellence as was sexual fetishization //this is all abotu commodification of people; their bodies and their labor

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. By JENNIFER L. MORGAN. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 279 pages. $55.oo (cloth), $19.95 (paper)

Year: 04 Field: SLAVERY Summary: Morgan defines labor in terms of these women's reproductive capacity as well as the types of physical labor in which they were forced to engage. While developing her discussion, she examines issues?the creation of negative stereotypes, labor demands, resistance?to illustrate the importance of enslaved women not just as a subject to include in the study of slavery, but as a paradigm for understanding the formation of early American slave societies. Laboring Women is informative and provides interesting commentary on the value of slave women as laborers; however, a few of Morgan's arguments need more development to strengthen certain of aspects of he Thesis: In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, Kathleen M. Brown argued that racial differences were, at heart, based on English ideas about the proper gendered order of things.1 Contributing to this ongoing discussion about race, gender, and sex, Jennifer L. Morgan cen- ters not only on women's bodies but also on their actual labor, produc- tive and reproductive, in her history of slavery in South Carolina and Barbados. Morgan argues that enslaved African and African American women's labor was physically and symbolically vital to the evolution of slavery in Britain's American colonies: their backbreaking labor in the fields underwrote the colonies' economic development and their repro- ductive labor defined, legally and culturally, the system of slavery. By focusing on the experiences of enslaved women, in addition to represen- tations of them, Morgan forces scholars to move beyond the confines of cultural history that have limited many histories of racial formation Other: Laboring Women begins by tracing the emergence of a racialized and sexualized ideology about African women, their bodies, and their repro- ductive capacities that served to justify the exploitation of their labor by English slave owners, an exploitation that required the construction of differences. Morgan convincingly demonstrates how English authors manipulated representations of African women to focus on nudity, shamelessness, sexual availability, childbirth, and breast-feeding. At center of these misrepresentations, Morgan argues, was motherhood, particularly the myth of painless childbirth and a supposed ability to "suckle [their children] over their shoulder" (41). Though elongated breasts marked African women as "monstrous" (49), the lack of pain they experienced giving birth placed them outside "a Christian commu- nity" (40); both made them suitable for enslavement. Yet such represen- tations were not without contradictions. Morgan notes that immunity to pain was also implicitly valued-it depicted African women as hardier than European women and therefore more suitable for field- work-and simultaneously acted as "a veiled critique of European female weakness" (17). Since, as Morgan notes, the English were "late starters in the scram- ble for New World possessions" (I), these manipulated representations of African women were particularly powerful in shaping English ideas about race. Future colonists first encountered Africans in the comfort of their own "parlors and readings rooms on English soil" (49), long before they encountered actual African individuals; thus, their expectations of Africans were entrenched and perhaps less subject to change despite contrary and contradictory experiences. Texts depicting Africans have been scrutinized by previous scholars; Morgan's contribution is in con- tending that the disjuncture between English gender practices (from clothing to sexual mores to mothering) and African ones, rather than skin color or religion, was the central factor underwriting emerging racial distinctions.2 These representations were not static but changed over time. As English involvement with the African slave trade expanded, their images of African women became primarily reduced to emphasizing their suitability for productive and reproductive labor. Morgan's analysis is limited to texts that were published in English; many, however, were originally written for French, Spanish, Dutch, and other European audiences. This publication of translations can shed light on the circulation of racial thought throughout Europe and let readers see how different European nations adapted ideas to their own particular colonial situation wealth and the reproduction o0f property for their own progeny. Just as Walter Johnson demonstrated so elegantly for the slave market, Morgan here reveals how slave owners constructed themselves through the bodies of enslaved women and their existing and potential chiltrn One sentence:By situating this study of slavery and reproduction in both the Caribbean and the American South, I intend to suggest that women's reproductive identity— and by that I mean both the experience of childbirth and, perhaps more important, the web of expectations about childbirth held both by black women and men and those who enslaved them— itself provides the comparative frame rather than the crop being cultivated or the size of the household in which one labored. I do not mean to suggest that such things as work or slaveholdings are inconsequential. However, I do argue that the underlying realities of reproductive lives shape the encounter with work, community, and culture. //important w/ counterpoint //presupposes the crop This book argues that as slaveowners contemplated women's reproductive potential with greed and opportunism, they utilized both outrageous images and callously indifferent strategies to ultimately inscribe enslaved women as racially and culturally different while creating an economic and moral environment in which the appropriation of a woman's children as well as her childbearing potential became rational and, indeed, natural. In largely private acts of writing— the composition of wills and inventories— slaveowning settlers both crafted and evidenced their reliance upon the idea of reproduction even in the face of sky-high mortality and dismal fertility rates among the women and men whose bodies held such a promise of legacy. My intention in this chapter is to suggest the many ways in which childbirth itself is situational and demands historicity. Historical evidence, for example, of the ways in which adults in areas affected by high rates of infant mortality delay connection with children until they reach an age at which survival is more probable should provide a corrective to the impulse to assign transparent tragedy to childbirth under slavery. 15 Childbirth under slavery must be couched in both the historical parameters of the slave trade, the physical and emotional violence of racial slavery, and an interrogation of the multiple meanings of women's reproductive lives. . I do not intend to argue that the experience of enslaved women should be approached only through their biological capacity to reproduce. However, the expectations and experience of reproduction significantly influenced both the violence done to enslaved African women in the Americas and their ability to survive it. In my effort to depict the broad sweep of reproduction over time and space I mean to evoke the contradictory consequences of childbirth under slavery, the ways in which slaveowners both relied upon and ignored the physiological realities of women's bodies, the slaveowners' desire to obfuscate and exploit African women's sexual identity and the humanity they so obviously shared, and the simultaneity of violation and creativity manifested in creolization for enslaved women and men. In the process, I argue that the entire framework of slavery as an institution rested upon these contradictory assumptions and that centering the lives of enslaved women in the colonial period is not simply an exercise of inclusion but is rather a foundational methodology in writing the history of early America.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I say ''potential'' because I am not interested in any account of behavior that rests on the flimsy grounds of the ''natural.'' In such an account, a rejection Constrained by the vagaries of evidence and power, one must turn elsewhere— to travel accounts and probate records, to court cases and cargo lists— to evoke the range of possible experiences for women and men enslaved in the colonial period. An expansive methodology in and of itself is the obvious solution; it is not particularly innovative. But I am in search of an expansive methodology deployed in the service of, and open to the possibility of, contingency and the unknowability of the past. Ultimately, I would like this study to have evoked a sense of the possible. Not just to refute any lingering suggestion that Africans in the Americas are a people without access to the furthest reaches of our historical experiences, but also to make clear that this, as are all projects engaged in the past, is a venture of profound, and profoundly creative, uncertainty.

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON. Creatures of Empire: HowDomestic Animals Transformed Early America. NewYork: Oxford University Press. 2004

Year: 04 Field: enviro Summary: The story of European imperialism in the Americashas been analyzed politically, economically, and reli-giously, but ecologically only in recent decades. Itturns out that the invaders were successful not so muchbecause they were monarchists or capitalists or Cath-olics or Protestants but because they were transmit-ters, sometimes unconsciously, of certain kinds oforganisms. Virginia DeJohn Anderson's book is abushel basket of examples, along with informed anal-yses of the example Thesis: As "co-invaders," domesticated animals provided the muscle to fur-ther English land claims as well as an ideological rationale to supporttheir colonizing project. Livestock facilitated invocation of the Romanlaw concept of res nullius: empty lands became property through im-provement, and nothing in English eyes signaled improvement asmuch as domesticated animals. In addition, settlers hoped that hus-bandry would aid in civilizing and Christianizing the Natives by pro-moting sedentary h argues that the animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behavior of the peoples who dealt with them. And sooner or later, everyone—Indians and colonists—had to deal with livestock. Despite their status as domesticated creatures, the animals were never wholly under human control. Sometimes they acted in ways that their owners neither predicted nor desired, provoking responses that ran the gamut from apology to aggression. To a remarkable extent, the reactions of Indians and colonists to problems created by livestock became a reliable indicator of the tenor of their relations with one another. Other: argues that sometimes mundane decisions about how to feed pigs or whether or not to build a fence also could affect the course of history. Three groups comprise the cast of characters. Indians did not define living animals as property, but they nevertheless believed that animals could supply human needs. This chapter argues that labor shortages and the availability of land encouraged Chesapeake colonists to abandon English practices and adopt free-range livestock husbandry. Many animals, especially swine, strayed from plantations and feral populations resulted. These developments loosened the colonists' hold on their livestock, complicated claims to animal property, and compromised domestic animals' usefulness as symbols of English civility.!! - Even the scrawniest cow wandering aimlessly through the woods advanced the cause of civilizing the wilderness. One sentence: Livestock were co-invaders and a vector oif imperialism. As an analytical tool it shows the different in culutral -practicezs and goals through animal behacviuor and treatment. Therein lies the tragedy of this story. Indians found room in their world for livestock, but the colonists and their descendants could find no room in theirs for Indians.!!

Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. by Jon Butler

Year: 1991 Field: Relgion Summary: Thesis: 'The story of religion in America after i7oo is oneof ascension rather than declension - Christianization rather than dechristianiza-tion ... neither the substance nor the dynamic of America's religious developmentwas inevitable or "given".' The efflorescence of organized Christianity was some-times planned, often not; it resulted from the choices made by a multitude ofpeople from among the multitude of alternative forms, practices and theologiesavailable and accessible i Other: -Church lsot favor in Enghland Only in the eigh- teenth century did formally organized Christianity really take root; in that plan- tation the experience of the South and of the middle colonies is as telling as that of New England. While he acknowledges realignments in the late eighteenth century, Butler sees a unity in the whole period from c. I700 to i865. Transatlantic links remained strong, various and fruitful. But Europe and America diverged: Europe could not match the 'undisciplined energy of spiritual creativity' which marked America. As Christianity's hold weakened in Europe, so it tightened in America and so organized Christianity was embraced by ever more Americans. Puritianism ios overemphaized 1. American religion was mor ecomplex than believed. Move outside New England; pluraism 2. Authorites and coercion shaped religions 3. Religion can not be uderstood apart from slavery; condned slavery and devasted black spirtualism 4. Magic and superstituion were vital and widespread inAnmerican religion 5. Relgion grew over the centuries, it did not decline*** Doesnt agree with the Great Awakening A fresh, provocative chapter on slavery and religion is alone worth theprice of the book. Butler describes how English Anglicans shaped aslaveholding ethic, emphasizing black obedience and white paternalism,transmission of which to the colonies was seminal in rationalizing slaveryin America. Butler further argues that slaves suffered a "spiritual holo-caust" (chap. 5) that annihilated African religious systems, if not allvestiges of tribal practice. This loss left them vulnerable not only toChristian indoctrination as their societies stabilized but also to a more fullyEuropean form of religion at the end of the eighteenth century than wouldever exist again, as "black Christianity became increasingly Afro-Americanafter rather than before i8oo" (his emphasis, p. I 53). Butler suggests thatthe more segregated black churches of the nineteenth century reinvigo-rated certain African survivals, such as healing and death rituals. Theargument is both complex and challenging; we shall see how it fares inblack studies programs. One sentence: American Christianity was wide, grew over time, was shaped by authority, magic and superstition were vital to Christianity. Slavery and Christianity are intertwined; Black spiritual holocausts and the Christianity as a justification for white paternalism.

Stephanie E. Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2007. Pp. 273. $29.95

Year: 2007 Field: trade Summary: Ever since the rise of the campaign two centuries ago against the trafficking of Africans across the Atlantic, the experience of the enslaved in the middle passage from Africa to the Americas has been a central element in investigations of the slave trade. It figured in the extensive parliamentary enquiries and dictated the nature of British interventions in the slave trade before the latter was outlawed to British subjects in 1807. The middle passage has since become a metaphor for the sheer brutality and inhumanity of the slave trade. It is this theme that preoccupies Stephanie E. Smallwood's study, the title of which is intended to distinguish the experiences of enslaved Africans forced to cross the ocean from those born as slaves in the Americas. Smallwood contends that they still give anaccurate characterization of the circumstances that dictated the lives of Africancaptives. She presents the startlingly graphic and often tragic story of merchants,sailors, and slaves caught up in the transatlantic slave trade and the MiddlePassage merican-born slaves were favored by slave owners, and even among theenslaved there were clear advantages to having been born in the Americas. Thesetwo groups often looked down on recently arrived African captives whom theyreferred to as "newcomers" or "saltwater Negroes." The history of slavery in theAmericas began in Africa, included the rhythm of the slave ships in the saltwaterof the Atlantic, and ended with the arrival of these human cargoes in theAmericas. Thesis: This quantitativeapproach to death fails to attend to the ways African captives experi-enced and understood mortality. Lest we mistake these incommensu-rable approaches to death as cultural, Smallwood makes plain that theissue is one of power - the power to make live and let die. The scientificenterprise of managing life was essential to the process of transforminghumans into commodities. Merchants, Smallwood writes, "reduced peo-ple to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to anarithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator"(43). Neatly arranged double columns of figures translated the captive'sutter alienation from the norms of everyday life into debits and credits.!!! f figures that obscured destroyed worlds, and the seemingly passionlessaccount table - "rationalized" (139) the conomy of death. More surpris-ing perhaps is the fact that the abolition of the slave trade did not resultin the demise of this way of thinking. To our peril and at the expense ofthe dead, this mercantile logic or mathematical reasoning has enjoyed along afterlife and continues to determine the character and concerns ofhistorical scholarship. In this regard Saltwater Slavery marks an impor-tant shift in the study of the slave trade because of its imaginative ren-dering of the experience of captivity and its healthy suspicion of theterms of historical intelligability!!!!1 ves, "The individual stories of saltwater slavery form theantithesis of historical narrative, for they feature not an evolving plot ofchange over time but rather a tale of endless repetition that allows notemporal progression" Other: The overall impression is one of relentless dehumanization, whereby Africans were stripped of kinship ties, dignity, and a sense of self-worth, and the survivors of the middle passage were left to try to create "kinship and community out of the disaggregated units remaining after the market's dispersal of its human wares" (p. 183). Saltwater Slavery is organized along a linear trajectory where captives fromAfrica became commodities in the Americas. The chapters in Saltwater Slaverydescribe the Atlantic market in human beings on the Gold Coast, the conversionof African captives into Atlantic commodities, the political economy of the slaveship, the anomalous intimacies and the "living dead" aboard the slave ship at sea,and the transformation of Atlantic commodities into American slaves. mallwood spends four chapters describing the experiences of Africancaptives in the slave dungeons of the "castles" and "forts" on the African coastand in the Middle Passage. Captives of war who previously were assimilated intothe African societies were now sent into the waterside markets, separated fromthe life and people who defined them as individuals and delivered into "theperpetual purgatory of kinlessness." Smallwood details the process oftransforming "independent beings into human commodities" and concludes that"the methods by which traders turned people into property that could moveeasily, smoothly through the channels of saltwater slavery took the form of bothphysical and social violence." On the slave ships, despite the diversity in thesocial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, they all experienced the singular eventof psychic terror. It was on these ships that the commodification of Africancaptives reached its nadir!! One sentence: bjectivity and agency.1 Smallwood's effort to trace"African life within the commodity circuits of the Atlantic economy"(5-6) produces an account of the Atlantic slave trade that subtly recon-structs the captive's psyche, worldview, and networks of affiliation basedon the shards of narrative, loosely wrought sentences, and tales of end-less repetition. The detective, the storyteller, and the metahistorian areall summoned in the effort to unearth the trail of the captive's own testi-mony. Informed speculation, provisional assessments, and diasporicyearning engender an insightful and counterintuitive reading of thecommercial archive. How does one find the stories of the captives giventhe "total annihilation of the human subject" (61) achieved by the processof commodification? Or rectify the "counterfeit representation [s]" (63)of capitalism? In reckoning with these questions, Smallwood straddlesthe divide between the reconstructive work of the historian determinedto fill in the silences of the past and eager to hear the testimony of thedead and her own sober account of the Middle Passage and saltwaterslavery as the space slavery is a liminal place in soceity Smallwood is not timid about venturing answers to such questions.The Atlantic slave trade, she contends, "marked a watershed in whatwould become an enduring project in the modern Western world: prob-ing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body withoutextinguishing the life within" (35-36). If the guise of empiricism facili-tated the "manage [d] . . . depletion of life" (36) and acts of destructionwere licensed as trade, then shattering the veneer of neutrality andobjectivity is essential to reconstructing the history of "the lower rungs"(30). While one of the significant contributions oí Saltwater Slavery is itscritique of the mathematical reasoning that produced the official accountof the slave trade and consequently its willingness to cast in doubt thegoverning norms of the historical guild, the book endeavors to do morethan that. No less important is the effort to disaggregate cargo intohuman subjects and social actors and to depict the lives and cultures cre-ated in the aftermath of social death!!!!!

Thavolia Glymph , Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household

Year: 2008 Field: antebellum Summary: Thesis: author's primary argument is that during the nineteenth century, the definition ofwhat constituted a plantation "household"changed. By investigating the relationshipsof power between southern white and blackwomen from the Civil War into emancipation,Glymph argues that the static terms "public" and "private" are not accurate descriptorsfor southern gendered ideology. Rather, themanagement of labor (be it enslaved or free)emerged as the driving discourse in households. Glymph contends that the imagined"cult of domesticity" produced violent interactions between mistresses and enslaved women.The first two chapters in particular suggest thatviolence inscribed life in the household andbeyond its walls. As evenhanded as Glymphis in her treatment of violence experienced byenslaved women and the roles of subordination assumed by white plantation women inrelation to patriarchal male figures, mistresseswere, nonetheless, the "female face" of the slaveowners' often-violent power (p. 4). Emergingfrom that line of inquiry is Glymph's suggestion to reexamine the politics of domination aswell as previously held convictions about thenature of slave resistance (p. 67). Chapter 1 provides a detailed overview of gendered violence and engages a broadrange of scholarly literatures. Chapters 6 and 7shift focus from southern women to a discussion of the white and black population in theSouth. That transition supports the author'sargument for change within the context of liberation movements. This shift is effortless, detracting not at all from the tightly woven narrative of the first five chapters.Glymph suggests that Out of the House ofBondage is part of a larger research trajectoryon class and regional variations during the eraof emancipation. Whether this book is the firstof an ongoing study or the author's definitive word on the topic, Glymph has provideda new canvas for classic questions of enslavement, emancipation, and domestic spaces. In this important book, Thavolia Glymph reconceptualizes the history of women and slavery and debunks the [End Page 263] notion that former slaves sought to emulate the domestic ideals of white America. In place of this explanation, Glymph argues that freedwomen sought a separate selfhood that kept them apart from white women and the Victorian gender conventions that served white supremacy. Glymph argues that such interpretations, which posit a solidarity between black and white women based on the gendered structure of power, "rest ultimately on uncritical acceptance of a huge assumption: that a gentle and noble white womanhood had once existed in fact, together with a cult of domesticity to which enslaved and free women mutually ascribed." (135)!!!! Other: One sentence: Shows the domination of white women over black women in the domestic sphere and does not spare them from slaveholding. Labor is the axiom of analysis,. Black women joined these acts of self-definition to their job struggles for higher pay, shorter workdays, and fewer tasks. Just as their fight for dignity under slavery necessitated that black women undermine white women's identity as civilized ladies, their postwar fight for free homes also "required the dismantling of antebellum notions of southern white womanhood." (191) Although Glymph takes issue with several influential studies, her work fits with other trends in the field. Out of the House of Bondage draws on the scholarship of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who denied the existence of an inter-racial sisterhood and argued for the importance of work to relationships within the plantation household. It also resonates with Steven Hahn's account of black politics in the rural South, which defined politics broadly and finds continuities in pre- and post-Civil War battles over white racial supremacy. Glymph's emphasis on the interconnections between the seemingly separate categories of public and private and work and leisure fits with Stephanie Camp's recent study of enslaved women. Glymph achieves something unique, however, in her attention to the prewar and postwar eras and her juxtaposition of enslaved women's politics of dignity against the claims of white women's domesticity. She in vindicating the role fothe aa doemstic worker. Tranquility and violence coexist Ideas about what constitutes public and private, and differentiates them, are central to all of these matters. The notion of private/public assumes that the household is a family and thus private. This has made it difficult to see the household as a workplace and, beyond gender relations, as a field of power relations and political practices. Historians have long been interested in how questions of power and hegemony informed relations between slaves and slaveholders and between women and men. We have paid less attention to power relations between women. 5 My task is to reconstruct, as best I can, the day-to-day practices of domination and its responding discontents within the antebellum, wartime, and postbellum plantation households.' Historians have noticed and taken account of violence against slaves in the cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco fields. Here it is easier to "see" because it took place in a "public" arena where cash crops were produced and came principally from the hands of men - masters, overseers, and slave drivers. Violence and power in the great house, the female side of domination, have not received nearly the commensurate attention. Chapter 3 explores the interplay of notions of domesticity and ideologies of race and slavery within the plantation household. Chapters 5 and 6 unravel the particular initiatives on the part of freedwomen that fueled these changes and the adjustments in domestic work that transformed black and white homes and set them on a path to becoming free homes. : The plantation household's fac ¸ ade of privacy was stripped away, fully exposing its public realm. Freedom gave black women the right to quit as it gave white women the right to fire them. It gave them the right to move about to seek other employment and to openly discuss the characters of their employers, to gossip about them. This is a study about the power of mistresses and its meaning for how black and white women thought about unfreedom, freedom, work, gender, citizenship, and race. It departs from most studies of nineteenth-century southern women in its focus on the power white women exercised over black women during slavery. It accords a signal place and active role to planter women in the maintenance of the plantation household, and to black women in its destruction. It connects white women's exercise of power in the domestic realm to black women's understanding of the kind of freedom they wanted to have and build. In building freedom, former mistresses and former slave women looked to their own material and cultural history. This book adopts the perspective of a wide geographical canvas. My argument also relies on the broad chronological sweep deployed here as well. Slavery was not a fixed social or cultural entity; social relations within the plantation household changed over time. 25 And the postwar transformation of the household was heavily influenced by memories, real as well as invented, of what slavery had entailed. Any regional study such as that attempted here must of necessity rely on the scholarship of others. To tell this story, I am building on two generations of scholarship in southern, U.S., and comparative women's history. I am particularly indebted to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's conceptualization of the "household" as an analytical construct.!!!!!! BETTER 1 SENTENCE: This most of it --> I have tried in this book to insist on the importance of attending to relations of power between women, and contests over that power. Once "home" is understood as a political space, those contests, once silent and unseen in the historiography become visible and public. Black women were determined to take control of their whole lives. They challenged the authority of former masters and mistresses to order them about any longer, speak for them, or to cheat them of their earnings. They made a public matter of what one planter called "my domestic affairs exclusively." 22 Many paid a dear price for doing so, but the memory of the struggles that had gone before continued to inform black women's resistance to racism and discrimination. Meanwhile, despite the calls to Christian charity and reform, physical violence and mental abuse remained entrenched in domestic work.

Annette Gordon-Reed. The Hemingses of Monticello:An American Family. New York: W.W. Norton andCompany. 2008. Pp. 798.

Year: 2008 Field: president Summary: ordon-Reed has convinced me here to takeJefferson seriously and even sympathetically, as a complex human being,rather than to let his mastery of Monticello and Poplar Forest over-whelm his stirring language of human equality and liberty. To avoidJefferson without blotting him out seems akin to the task of imaging anextrasolar planet; the glare of the neighboring star is overwhelming. Yetin the same manner of recent astronomers, Gordon-Reed shifts attentionand perspective away from him. This book is more centrally about BettyHemings and her children, particularly Robert, James, Thenia, Critta,and Sally, and their kin, including not only Jefferson but also his wife,Martha Wayles Jefferson, and their daughters Martha and Maria. Thebook is about the malign absurdities of slavery, about one most unusualplantation complex, and about sex, naivete, opportunity, choices, andlimits in the founding era of the United Stat Gordon-Reed realizes that to understand this American family wemust understand American slavery. But she also realizes (and arguespowerfully) that we do the Hemingses a huge injustice if we reducethem to mere exemplars of some supposedly general pattern. Thesis: ars today, and Gordon-Reed makes a sensitive case for its rationality. More diffi cult to determine, and a source of enduring scholarly consternation, has been the question of emotional connection. Where did desire and affection figure in Sally's decision? Common sense tells us we have to confront this question, yet the ethical position many historians ascribe to themselves has made it almost impossible to ask: Can the subaltern love? the working class. To argue that two people who lived together for thirty-eightyears and produced seven children left no historical evidence about theirrelationship because they failed to put their feelings in writing is to shutdown debate about the nature of that relationship It is only through piercing the veil of southern society's laws, includingits fictions about family," she argues, "that we can take the first step towardgetting at the reality of black and white lives under slavery" (85) e exact nature ofthe relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, if she cannot Other: But shedemonstrates two important points. First, history in any meaningful senserequires not "facts" but context. Second, the rules and assumptions that thehistorian uses to establish context need to be clear, much like the rules of evi-dence in law. Like Jefferson, Gordon-Reed is a lawyer, and she establishes afar larger pattern of meaningful context surrounding the Hemingses thanJefferson himself did when he submitted "facts" to a "candid world" inorder to "prove" his case against King George III in 1776. More important, the narrative imposes a subtle but nonetheless powerful moral arc tothe story of life at Monticello: the resolve and nobilityof the Hemingses. It would be harder to quarrel withthis framing if we did not know how, in her earlier work,Gordon-Reed struggled to challenge an analogous,deeply entrenched narrative built around the dignityand morality of the Sage of Monticello. Still, as a closingtestimony to the book's beauty, I was most disappointedby its ending so soon, in the early nineteenth century.Hopefully when the awards season ends Gordon-Reedwill hurry back to the archives and tell us what the future held for this fascinating American One sentence: Slaves and blacks words are not seen as evidence because of their race. The first person experience is discounted as subjective. Black people lives in a biograohical sense are written from the broad aa hsitroy and not from their subjective experience*** INTRO:This is a book about the experience of an afircan american family during salvery Looking at the first handexperience - Cant not talk about monticello without the heminses - The idea of family in slavery - The idea of being mixed and passing 1. Origins - We must consider the world they were reared in, whichwas very different. Warns of presentism. - My idea that she shows: the intimacy of space that gives the heminses a different perspective of jeffereson that we then get. 2. The vaunted scene of europe - We should not fetishize record keeping - I THINK ABIUT THIS a lot, history and white supremacy and sources. - Not the most social constuction hsitry, somewhere inbetween - Sally could not be his legal wife - Reed believes you can read the story of the bigger world into the circumstance to make educated guesses but can not know - 3. - - Heminges was not allowed to leave until jefferson died - Memory and love are why we remember the hemingses

Vincent Brown. The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 3

Year: 2008 Field: slavery Summary: . Vincent Brown is the first to take Jamaica's "extravagant death rate" as the starting point for an investigation of a whole society. His vision of the death rate as "the landscape of culture itself ... the principal arena of social life" (p. 59) un dergirds this extraordinarily powerful rewriting of many familiar narratives in the history of Caribbean and At lantic slavery Thesis: other parallels, Brown dem onstrates the potential of interpretations that place en slaved people and free people, Europeans and Afri cans, within a single analytic framework and a single Atlantic world. Rather than examining white-organized inquests as part of a modern world of law while con sidering coffin divination in relation to questions about cultural survival, he analyzes both for what they tell us about the ways in which people dealt with questions of responsibility in a world where death was ubiquitous. He makes concrete the claim that modernity was not a straightforward secularizing process, that "the modern world was still an enchanted one" (p. 25 In The Reapers Garden, Vincent Brownmakes use of that simple fact to examine whathe describes as the "political meaning of death"in the colony (p. 5). He shows that in wills, infunerary rites, in religious beliefs, and evenin the disposition of bodies Jamaicans?slaveand free?managed death in ways that bothstrengthened and challenged the structures ofslave society. The result is a sophisticated and!! , Brown paints a vivid portrait of Jamaica and its society. As he says, Jamaica was probably Britain's most successful colonial ventureby the mid-eighteenth century, a place that offered European settlers enormous wealth andopportunities. At the same time, those possibilities depended heavily on the brutal Africanslave trade and a vicious colonial slave system.Jamaica was also, however, a place wherepeople went to die?Europeans from the ravages of disease, Africans, from not only disease but also from the punishing demands ofslavery. Mortality rates were high throughoutJamaica's colonial period, and its populationgrowth was based on immigration and importation rather than natural increase for muchof that era. That people had to confront deathas a part of life in Jamaica forms the crux ofBrown's story.Brown draws on anthropological theory Brown also examines how slaves and slaveowners evoked the terrors of death and thedead for political ends. Jamaica's elite was never reluctant to use grisly public executions andto display the corpses of slaves to try to inspiresubmission in the slave population. Slaves invoked the power of the dead for strength tochallenge white authority and as a source ofunity among themselves.Particularly enlightening is Brown's exploration of the significance of death for theemergence of the abolitionist movement inBritain in the late eighteenth century, pointing toward its success in achieving British colonial emancipation in the 1830s. As Brownshows, through a persuasive linking of slavery,greed, and death?emphasizing, especially, thewillingness of slave traders and slave ownersto sacrifice slaves' lives for profit?black andwhite abolitionists made the system seem increasingly repugnant to the British public. InJamaica, death symbolism further helped define the meaning of emancipation when it finally arrived.The Reapers Garden is an engaging book;its insights should encourage and provide anoutstanding model for comparative studies ofother New World slave societies.!!!!! The Reaper's Garden early Jamaica as the basis for a fascinatiwhites and blacks, the enslaved and the contend over the meaning of death (andthat was early!! Instthe predominant fact of life in colonialfoundly it shaped the culture of the island.numbered weddings or births as occasionsthe first half of the eighteenth century, Jburials for every baptism.) Both blacks and sarily "created new worlds of meaning indeath'" (58). All colonial cultures are connomic, spiritual, and political materials awhich any society would be rooted was fiand Europeans "tilled the same haunted gthey planted different seeds and reaped diffrrent harvests!!! Other: One sentence: Prolouge: a focus on death as a majort sociasl pivot pouint Death shaped lkife sthrough social practocew and meaning, itr reflkects ourselves and our desires Moturary politcs hspaed the poltitics of briton and abolition Jamica represnerted the most bare aspectx of british capitlaism, slaverry, and explotiation, reflected in the horrifgic death rates. 1. Jmaica to blacks weas the coiniutjatiuon b fo the death march of the middle passage; deatjh, walth, and power were inextricably connected. - The weatolth of sugar in the west indies turned to political power in the west indies - Death teaches us aboiut the libves of the enslaved - Death and its path created a shared experience - The atlantic and white world represented death to africans - New borns not expected to survive - The accelerasted life cycle - The living reached to use the power of adeath for present polkitiucs and used funearls a nd death as communal rallying ops 2. Desth was a social cry to reorganize scoeiuty from catyastophe - Interwined is an ehtos for hi; everythinb g is - Dewath was an impetus for regeneration - Death was seghregated but a shared expereience of backs and whites 3: expectations fo the dead - Dead people could pass on meager prperty - Inheritence supported kinship netweroks and gave communal itnegrity - Generated some wealth - When slave hodlers died, their slaves were thrown into chaos; connective - Inlfuenced by patterson 127* may be iomportant - Dead lives influenced their future and poltics over dad whites and blacvks were deeply politcal; it could deal with inheritence or location or family closeness - 4,: Icons, Shamans, and Martyrs : Martyrdom of slaves and the public hanghing a and siplay to stop rebelelion were used as forms of power in the colonial jamica \h The derths of heroic rebels responated mor ethan that of the lowest black which created scoail upheavel !!! 5: The sould of the brit empire - Aobliton rises ain brtian and calls on sddeath politcally. - Reframe with god in mind dejyu==ustofied slaveru - Thos reform was moral and waas ynot yet politcasl 6. looking to redeem the soul\s oof the british - poweer of relkigion rwevobled around death - souls > slaveryt = blck > white -chritians are talking to whites for abolition not blacks 7. remeberance and physicsl markers - dead show continty and suggest change!! FO those who know tomorrow is not promised, yesterday is not past

Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. By Seth Rockman. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 368. $25.00, paper.

Year: 2009 Field: Summary: That laboring men could earn $1 a day seemed "incredible" to some foreign observers who were hard pressed to understand how this might lead to anything but universal prosperity. Yet it was not uncommon for other observers to take note of dirty children in tattered clothing collecting bits of wood and rags or poor families waiting in line for free bread. These two very different portraits of American's urban working classes were interpreted similarly. Prosperity followed ambition and morality; poverty followed laziness and degeneracy. In the land of the prosperous, only those of moral failing would not?could not?succeed. Poverty was the consequence of "idleness, intemperance, and improvidence" (p. 159) As all economic historians know, a dollar-a-day wages did not translate into $365 in annual earnings; it did not even translate into $300. It was difficult for most working folk to string together a month of uninterrupted employment. A year of continuou mployment was as unimaginable to urban working class men and women as a dollar a day was to some foreign observers Thesis: The reality of urban working life, Seth Rockman reminds us, was privation, worry, and trouble. Food alone demanded half a laboring man's weekly wage, assuming he could keep himself employed the entire week. Bread cost \2V2 cents a loaf and fruit and vegetables were expensive even in season, so that most of the remaining food budget was spend on meat and stimulants (coffee, tea, and tobacco). Diets heavy in bread and meat were spartan and so deficient in dietary fiber that constipation was a common complaint among the working poor (p. 178). For many of those who could not find six day's work a week, "scavenging, bartering, and a host of other informal exchanges" filled the void (p. 185). Still others stole, begged, or prostituted themselves. A dollar a day wasn't enough Seth Rockman has written a powerful book that works in a sustained and convincing way on three levels simultaneously. At the most basic level, Scraping By is a rich history of poor people, a deeply researched account of the multiethnic men, women, and children who performed the unskilled, often dangerous, and utterly necessary labors of Baltimore, a dynamic Atlantic port city, from 1790 to 1840. At a second level, the book exemplifies a new kind of labor history that treats race, class, gender, and capitalism in sophisticated, multidimensional ways. As such it offers a critique of previous artisan-based labor histories of early America. At a third level, the book is a moral and political commentary on the conservative free-market ideology of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century America and on the related mythology that profoundly affects the way many see the nation and its history. The book begins with shit. More precisely, it begins with the labor of scraping excrement off the streets of Baltimore and four men who in 1829 believed that they deserved to make more money for performing this important work. Worried that they might end up in the almshouse, toiling on the farm to which they now delivered the dung to serve as fertilizer, they petitioned authorities for an increase in wages. Thus begins a history from below with a profound materialist perspective. Other: working conditions facing men, and women, wages paid, the nonmarket labors involved in "scraping by," and the consequences of failure, which were the almshouse and private benevolence. The most interesting chapter is the third, titled "Dredging and Drudgery," in which Rockman documents the conditions of the men who worked the city's "mud machine." So much silt flowed into Baltimore's harbor each year that ships regularly ran aground and only constant dredging kept the channel clear and the dredger was familiarly called the "mud machine" by the men who worked it. Most of the early republic's laboring men left no documentary record of their labors. Fortunately, for Rockman and for his readers, the city kept and circumstances preserved detailed payroll records of the mud machine's operators. The work was grueling and filthy and "unsuited to the habits of republican artisans" (p. 76). Thus, the work fell to the working poor?immigrants, blacks, and unskilled native-born whites. Men with likely Irish surnames represented more than 30 percent of those recorded in the payrolls (p. 89). Despite the compensating differential for the dangerous and disgusting work and the constancy of employment, few men lasted more than month on the machine. This chapter would be a terrific assignment for an undergraduate economic history course. The wide-ranging nature of the chapter opens several avenues for fruitful discussions about the condition . Chapter 1, "Coming to Work in the City," inaugurates an extended exploration of the Baltimore labor market and the economic insecurities it fostered. Chapter 2 focuses on the experience of working men: how to get a job is the question. It illuminates the varieties of work and the differential experiences of "term slaves," hired-out slaves, indentured servants, and "free" proletarians. Rockman finds that mixed-race work sites were common in Baltimore; the heterogeneity of workers expanded opportunities for exploitation by "enterprizing Capitalists" (231). Chapter 3 analyzes life and work on the "mudmachine," the contraption that kept Baltimore's busy harbor usable by sailing ships. For its workers, wage labor was not a stage of life but a harsh, filthy, lifelong fate. Chapters 4-5 center on women's work and "the hidden labor of capitalist economies" (101). Rockman explores the social and material lives first of laundresses and domestic workers, then of seamstresses and the important role they played in the strike of 1833 and a surrounding national debate about women's wages, which in Baltimore were six and one-quarter cents per day. The argument of chapter 6 is conveyed by its title: "The Hard Work of Being Poor" surveys the survival strategies of Baltimore's proletarians, from scavenging to pawning, working at various menial jobs, and using poor relief. Chapter 7 maps the overlapping social functions of the Baltimore almshouse as a place used by workers for their own ends, by elites to establish their own benevolent selfimage, and by capitalists to create social discipline. The relevant motto was not "work or starve" as poor relief agencies insisted; it was "work and starve" (230). Rockman shows in chapter 8, "The Market's Grasp," that the combination of enslaved and so-called free labor intensified the treatment of labor as a commodity and expanded the power of the market, which did not undermine slavery but rather entrenched it. An enslaved young man named Equillo, seventeen or eighteen years old, worked at the backbreaking pumps at Jones Falls to enrich his master by a dollar a day. Michael Gorman, a runaway Irish indentured servant turned mudmachine worker, and his wife, Bridget, landed after some unknown calamity in the almshouse. Bridget died after three months in "a state of mental derangement" (92). Michael never regained independence, perishing in the institution nine years later. Rockman treats each of these lives with a compassion for basic human needs: food, shelter, health, family, and community. And he explains why these were, for many, consistently denied within a capitalist political economy. The likes of Stallings, Equillo, and the Gormans are among the most difficult historical subjects to study. Poor, mobile, and often illiterate, they left few records of their own, and at the same time they usually slipped beneath the gaze of tax collectors (because they had nothing to tax) and other local officials. Rockman has drawn comprehensively on municipal and state records, often institutions such as the almshouse or the prison, and he has made tremendously creative use of commercial newspapers. Many will be surprised that a book of this depth and range on Baltimore's motley proletariat has proven possible. Scraping By is a novel treatment of laborers black and white, enslaved and free, male and female, old and young, waged and unwaged—all in the same story, within a great Atlantic moment of capitalist transformation. The combination of subjects is most unusual, especially in contrast to the artisan-based labor narratives that have long dominated early American history. Rockman joins Peter Way and others in striking a blow against narrow labor histories that concentrate on artisans to the neglect of the proletarians below them in urban class systems.1 The most original part of Scraping By is Rockman's analysis and critique of the market. Many accounts of the market represent it as abstract, remote, neutral, and benign. Rockman presents a different image. In the lives of the workers of Baltimore, the market was radically and concretely present, fiercely aggressive, actively malign, and perhaps above all else violent in the extreme. This is made clear through close attention to the workings of casual and seasonal labor markets according to skill, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and legal status. Rockman shows that the transformation of labor into a commodity and its ruthless subjection to laws of supply and demand made the market something other than "a force of human liberation" (258). The "invisible hand" was actually a fist that beat people bloody—and even killed them One sentence: Intro: The lives of unskilled labroers They buiit the city in the postcolonial period and lvied hand to mouth Little control voer labor The aspirations of the revolution stood beyond the promises of the revolution as they were deemed morally insufficent This is about the workers who were unfree and unewual who built the most egalitarian and prosperous soceity in the world Baltimore //Human labor is a commodity deployed in the name of private wealth and national economic development Rockman's captialism is oone of politcal economy and market exchange not just market exchange Slavery and cpaialism are ver compatiabnle to rockman ]] This books claims that early erepiblic capitlaism thrived on the expllotiation of those who could not live the market dream //its foundatonal to early repubicm capitlaism We always focus on artisian, which almost always excludes definitionally subalterns Balitmorian laborers did not have class consiouness as they aegfued and quibbled too often Intersectional book 1 Owning and controlleing lbaor is more improtant than utilizing it in early baltimore and cpailaism generally Emploers controlled who worked and who didny Eokring woman were taksed with "social reporduction" and gained little for their efforts. They produced and supproted the next era of wage laboerers Women's wage work drasitcally increaed. However, they never made a living, that would be too freeeing\ The proximity to absilute poverty of laborers kept them in the cycle jUst gettting a job, going to it and keeping it were labor in itself

Alan Taylor. The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens,British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf. 2010. Pp. vii, 620

Year: 2010 Field: 1812 Summary: Taylor's treatment of the causes and conclusion of the war, as well as the military and naval campaigns, is perfunctory. He focuses instead on the people, soldiers and civilians alike, who were on the frontier between Detroit and Montreal. In keeping with modern conventions, he discounts the importance of the international boundary and treats the region as a contested borderland where individuals interacted and cultures clashed. Because most people living there shared a common language and a similar culture, the border was porous and loyalties flexible. Those who were unhappy with their options on one side of the border could simply relocate to the other side and seek a new life. Thesis: aylor argues that few people on either side thought that empire and republic could long coexist on the continent. "Like the revolution," he tells us, "the War of 1812 was a civil war between competing visions of [End Page 743] America: one still loyal to the empire and the other defined by its republican revolution against that empire" (12). The British expected the republic to collapse, while Americans were sure that Canada would become part of the United States. But if some Americans actively sought the annexation of Canada, few British were interested in recolonizing America. John Graves Simcoe, an early governor of Upper Canada, had visions of leading an army into the American heartland, but it is hard to find any other British subject who shared his fantasy. Taylor suggests that the dispatch of a British spy to New England in 1808 constituted a revival of Simcoe's dream, but this is a stretch (130). By contrast, Taylor is certainly right to suggest that the burning, looting, and atrocities served to drive people apart, so that by the time the war ended, both sides had a better sense of who they were and the frontier was now much more of a true boundary Other: he peace confirmed the former Anglo-American boundary: apparently, noth-ing had changed. But the recognition of astable border in fact changed everything.Yet again, and now definitively, Britainbetrayed its Indian allies, clearing the wayfor the rapid expansion of American settle-ments. More importantly, the ideologicalthrust of revolutionary republicanism dissi-pated, securing Canada's southern border-lands against further serious challenge. Inshort, a war that combatants originally ylor draws on the conceptual frameworks createdin the burgeoning field of borderlands history to construct his study. He uses this approach to situate thecharacter of the war along the American-Canadian border, which he sees as central to the entire conflict. Insome ways influenced by Peter Sahlins's Boundaries:The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (1989),Taylor argues that the fluid movement of population inthe Atlantic world and along the ambiguous CanadianAmerican borders in the Old Northwest and GreatLakes region complicated geopolitical realities,clouded political identities in both societies, and created near political anarchy. Irish immigrants and soldiers fighting in both armies, American-born Canadiansettlers, Native American nations that straddled theborder and negotiated with both sides, Federalist politicians (primarily in the New England states) trying tomanipulate the struggle and even threatening to breakthe United States apart: this was the reality of the period and the region. In other words, the War of 1812 sawcivil wars within civil wars that confounded politiciansin both polities. The war, and the societies that it engulfed, were more socially and culturally complex thanscholars have imagin 1!!! One sentence: Intro: - Heightened tension between subjects and citizens - Federalists still be flitrin with the british and were defeated ; they could not coexxist in NA - Loyalists in canada and revoltuaines in America created an idelogical tension - Loyalists battled with ameicans for upper canada - US parties about to break into civil war - The irish are reelling as subjects of the british across their empire - Native people were divided - This was a civil war on amny front and a direct consewuence of the rev - Borderlands history!!!!!!! - Compare the reublic and empire after the rev on the broderlands 1. Tesnion goes back to after war period where there are negotatiaons over land and values 2. Canada is not the Us and loylaists flood there while the british breathe easy on it 3. French rev insipires irish 4. British still treated americans as subjects outside of tis sovernigty and so US declared war and asserted itself Americans could not win over the canadians and thus the war was on; biritish like this Many wanted the war to over and so they supported the british A canadian invasion cant work, not enough people or morale Prisoners were used to make and distinguish citizens and subjects The war established a firm border and reaffirmed in the american memory a sense of automony and pride Many goups were divided and firmyl defined on the bordeland of canada and the us, war was the sperator. Really intresting view on conflict

Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from i67o through the Stono Rebellion. By PETER H. WOOD. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. PP. xxiv, 346, xii. $ Stono Rebellion - Wikipedia

Year: 74 Field: Summary: This, a revised version of a prize-winning dissertation at Harvard, is an important book. The literature about slavery in the British North American colonies is sparse, and nowhere has the dearth been more unfortunate than in regard to South Carolina, where blacks early con- stituted a majority of the population. Both the impact of blacks on local life in South Carolina and their ability to maintain and develop their own culture were unusually large for the mainland. Consequently, if we are going to try to understand the black experience in North America, there is no better place to start than with this colony, and Peter Wood has made a superb beginning Relatively few of the historians and social scientists who have in the past several years expanded both quantitatively and qualitatively Afro- American history of the slave era have focused upon the roles played and the contributions made by blacks in colonial American life, and none has done so with more resourcefulness and perception than Peter Wood. Moreover, he has pursued his research in a particularly signifi- cant setting, for it was South Carolina that received over 40 percent of the slaves who reached the British mainland colonies between 1700 and 1775 and it was South Carolina that had, uniquely among its mainland neighbors, a black majorit Thesis: By employing modern concepts of epidemiology he is able to substantiate the early belief that Africans were more re- sistant than whites to the fevers endemic in the lowland swamps. In addition, Wood believes that blacks, many of whom had long been familiar with the rice plant, probably contributed much of the know- how as well as the labor necessary to its successful cultivation. Skilled in raising livestock, fishing, and woodcraft, many Africans also proved to be adept as artisans. Initially, therefore, they engaged in a wide range of occupations that often permitted a considerable degree of independence and intimate contact with whites. But their increasing numbers led to greater anxieties in the white community, which then tightened re- strictions. The slaves in turn ran away and plotted insurrection with greater frequency. Ultimately, these and other forms of resistance culmi- nated in the Stono Rebellion, when perhaps as many as one hundred slaves set out for St. Augustine and freedom. But the revolt failed, and, according to Wood, the resulting repression systematized in the Negro Act of 1740 was successful in preventing further serious rebellions during the remainder of the colonial period. Other: One sentence: Intro: //Proportion of blavcks to white //superior knowledge of rice cultivation //more attention for sc //specifically what doiid it mean to have a nbalck majority //balck skill and ingenity were critivcal to sc life //vlackl culture was perserved and promp-igated in america Part 1 //sc weas the conloy of a crraibbean colony//derivative //rice growth and domiantion grew togetrher in sc be cuase of balck klnowleftge //better than enlgihs in the rice wqorld //Aas more robuyst health wise than whites //epidemiology history Parts 2: Blacks are first to tame the land; first pioneers //As balcks tames this land, had majority, and sefl-suifficenciy, white worried about rebellion //Balcks were ingenious nnot ignorant; destroy the sambo PSART 3 //BLACKS HAD ALMOST A SPERATE AND CERTAINLY JUST AS RICH COMMUNITY //Whitoes fear balck dissent and the clear ability of bklack life //They feared a economically better baLCK POP AND USED VIOLENCE TO OPRESS THEM //SLAVE RUNAWAYS ASSETRTED THEIR DISPLEASURE //REUNAWAYS SLAVES COTINUIYUED THE ANECITY AND WORSENDED IT AND AN EPOIDEMIC WAS HAPPENIGN THAT COIULD UNDO SLEAVERY Party 4 Wehite responded with oublic and psycholicgal violenc which gave real consequences and rfear At large Policing increased Laws passed Insitution erupted Balck resistance //extrenme vioklence //arson //poisioning //full on rebllionm //too late for freedom by stono but the culimation of a histiory /Stono brought sc to the edge mor ehtan people relaized but the broader sytsem of slavery was alreeady in palce3w and stono would not change that in america

American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of ColonialVirginia. By Edmund S. Morgan

Year: 75 Field: SLAVERY Summary: . Edmund Morganhas addressed himself to an uncomfortable paradox: that Virginians, whoseculture was clearly based on enslavement of human beings, provided leadershipthat firmly established the American Republic and wrote many of the docu-ments which have guided its development across two hundred years. He haslooked for an explanation in the sources of and attitudes towards labor inVirginia. The quest has led him to the study of basic social and econevelopments of the Chesapeake in the 17th century: the organization of itseconomy around the production and marketing of a labor-intensive staple; thepopulating of the country by men - and some women - who came as servantsto raise the crop; the imbalanced sex ratios and extraordinary mortality thathelped keep Virginia dependent on immigration to people it far longer than inthe colonies to the north; and the eventual shift from short-term indenturedEnglish servants to black slaves as a solution to labor shortages. He provides aremarkable synthesis of Virginia colonial history organized around these themes,and in explaining his paradox he shows how that history affected and still affectslater Americans!! Thesis: Slavery and freedom were locked into a symbiotic relationship in which slavery made possible the freedome of jefferson contemporaries espused. Racism was not inherent but devloped for structal and power reaosns. To create this new soceity and establish freedom they used the labor and extracted the power of slaves/ Other: Morgan is the first historian to recognize the social importance of freedservants in the society of the 17th-century Chesapeake. However, I think that tosome degree he misinterprets their experience. For one thing, labor was treatedas a commodity . Morgan argues that they felt secure in doing so most of the poor men who could have become a Morgan sees slavery as the solution not only to Chesapebut to the problems both of caring for and suppressing ththat over the 17th century contempt for the poor becamebaggage of Englishmen that in Virginia combined withance of slave labor impossible. The book ends with a sotempt for the poor accompanied the development of17th-century England. Slavery accompanied the growth oginia, ideals that Virginia slaveowners wrote into the Conespouse freedom only by first securing the inferiority of not encour!! One sentence: Slavery and Freedom are two sides of the same coin. SLavery onyl increaded and became commodified becuase of the virigian desire for freedom. Can freedom exsist with the exploitaionm of others? whereas Eugene Genovese, the renowned Marxist, makes Chris-tianity and race the determinative ingredients of his Roll, Jordan, Roll,Edmund Morgan, who is not known as a Marxist, emphasizes class consid-erations far more than racism in explaining how "The rise of liberty andequality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery" (p. 4).Whilst the Marxist materialist has become obsessed with aspects of non-Marxist ideology, one of our most distinguished historians of early Ameri-can thought and culture seems to be more impressed with profit motiva-tions, the preservation of status distinctions, and the perpetuation of classdominance. The world turned upside down, historiographically speaking,at least No slavery--> slavery-> racism-> populism-> republicanism-> rev

Bolster Mortal Sea

Year: Early 2000s Field: Envirmoment Summary: His subtitle notwithstanding, Bolster's book is not quite about fishing the Atlantic Ocean in the age of sail. Geographically, it concerns the North Atlantic and analyzes in depth only a corner of the northwest Atlantic between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. Chronologically, it treats not only the age of sail but also steam trawling, and in the epilogue it addresses developments through the 1990s. A more accurate subtitle would be: "obliterating stocks of one marketable fish after another in the Gulf of Maine, 1500-1920." Thesis: Bolster argues that there was widespread concern in the nineteenth century regarding the depletion of multiple varieties of fish in the Atlantic Ocean. Fishermen's petitions for restricted fishing that would reduce competition along with fishery commission reports pertaining to reduced catches help Bolster to establish that widespread public concern over depleted fish stocks did exist. The Mortal Sea is a chronicle of shifting occupational andenvironmental baselines and thresholds, a scrupulous unraveling ofthe optimism, ambition, contradiction, and destructiveness thatriddled them. Bolster's case is clear—the centuries-long trajectory ofNorth American marine environmental history is heavily rooted inthe waters between Newfoundland and Cape Cod, and it rippled farand wide from them. He argues that commercial fishing has depleted the complex ecosystems of the Atlantic Ocean and its attached rivers, estuaries, and coastal waters over the past 500 years. Other: Most such environmental histories blame capitalism, heedless businessmen, excessive consumption, and so forth. Bolster refrains for the most part from fingering anyone in particular, although New York fish wholesalers and nineteenth-century fisheries scientists are occasionally cast as villains. Bolster knows his fish, fishing vessels, fishing tackle, and his marine biology, but wears this learning lightly. The author contends that English settlers in Massachusetts attempted to establish laws and regulations to manage the fisheries in a weak effort to prevent history from repeating itself. Massachusetts legislators passed laws against using cod or bass to fertilize farm fields, for example. Yet, the bounty of New World seas beckoned fishermen, and "by 1800 the northwest Atlantic was beginning to resemble European seas" Instead of resolving these paradoxes, Bolster moves on to the depletion of lobster, menhaden, mackerel, and halibut off the New England coast between 1879 and 1897. He argues that over this period commercial fishing resulted in "a stunning series of population crashes" (p. 170) the likes of which had never been seen before. Americans began importing greater quantities of fish from Europe. Increased reliance on foreign producers and depleted seas generated a fierce debate over the future of commercial fishing in America. Fishermen were the staunchest advocates for placing limits on commercial fishing, while other groups pushed for no restraints. The public debate culminated in the passage of the first federal fishing regulation in U.S. history in 1887. He argues that the rise of mechanized commercial fishing greatly accelerated the depletion of the ocean. The U.S. government attempted to propagate fish in the Atlantic Ocean at the turn of the twentieth century, but these efforts could not undo the damage. The government also called on the Bureau of Fisheries to look into the environmental impact of trawling. The Bureau's 1915 report indicated the potential for danger but did not recommend restricting or stopping trawling in U.S. waters. One sentence: Overfishing is not new; it was used to support all economies; it has destroyed the ecosystem. People knew they were overfishing the whole time.

JAMES SIDBURY. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pp. ix, 291. $29.99

Year: 07 Field: racr Summary: James Sidbury's Becoming African in America explores the earliest efforts by anglophone diasporic Africans to define themselves and the nature of their rela tionship to Africa and Africans. Closely reading and contextualizing several key documents enables Sidbury to uncover a discursive black nationalistic tradition that began in the mid-18th century, but declined precipitously in the 1820s. At its most basic, this tradition embodied a creative tension between what Sidbury calls "filiative kinship," referring to the mythic "blood" relationship, and "affiliative kinship," referring to a common African identity forged in a shared history of oppression Thesis: he argues that in North America and England the "African" identity that developed through the discussion of greater political autonomy, abolition, and socioeconomic improvement was based upon a troubled interplay with the memory of indigenous cul- ture in Africa and uneven possibilities for black self- determination in America. The author argues that, at the outset of this creative process of identity formation, black authors took their collective meaning of "African" from the diaspora ex- perience rather than from any inherently continental characteristic. Originally the preoccupations of black activists were forged through the diasporic lens and fo- cused upon notions of racial uplift, firmly grounded in ideas of Christian missionary projects. An intriguing contribution of Sidbury's work is the seamless melding of religious, political, and social motivations as he dem- onstrates the complicated interweaving of these ele- ments in the historical trajectory of African identity. The important role played by African churches in the United States is highlighted in the networking they fos- tered among free blacks and the dynamic interplay of ideas that shaped these project Sidbury's sources and focus alternate between the manuscript and published texts produced by some of the leaders he has identified and the practical experi- ences and responses of various groups of blacks as they either accepted or rejected the ideas expressed by these figures. His intent is to move from "intellectual history to sociocultural history" by privileging individual sources and local institutions (p. 7). He outlines the work of "African" authors and follows black propo- nents of emigration schemes like Paul Cuffee to gauge how their projects fared, as well as how they were per- ceived, both in America and in Africa. Beyond this, the author incorporates detailed information from Other: Such a methodology leads us to understand that "be- coming African" was not as natural a process as might be imagined. The notion of being "African" would be rejected by many blacks in America on the grounds that this idea condemned enslaved blacks in the South to a hopeless perpetuation of their bondage and played di- rectly into the aspirations of southern slaveholders. The climax of this study is the discussion of the American Colonization Society and its important role in the "de- mise of the discourse on African identity through the 1820s" (p. 13). This is a welcome contribution to the puzzle of the complex relationships developing in the Atlantic world at this time. The author grapples with the nature of re- lations among people in Africa, America, and Europe as these sought to find their place in this world. The contextual framework of the argument might have been expanded with reference to the important recent work on similar themes in the South Atlantic, especially through analysis of the Brazilian returnees and their impact on West Africa. However, these comparisons will surely be made in the future now that the ground- work for such analysis has been laid so effectively. Sid- bury's book is full of insights that will be useful to ex- perts and students alike. It is a compellingly argued contextualization of the politics of race in the United States during this early period. . Sidbury argu that, by the late eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sanch Olaudah Equiano, and others created an "alternative understanding o 'Africanness' that could provide a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade" (6). Based on "emerging European perceptions that residents of Africa shared a 'racial' essence (7), this alternative identity presented Africans as integral to th "Enlightenment's grand narrative of human history" (7). Black intellec tuals, writers, and activists accomplished this complicated task by simul- taneously expressing their African identity and adopting key Europea cultural values such as Christ One sentence:Diaspora determined african ideity not ethcoaty or african anationality\ Black intellectuals shaped a narrative of african identiy Yhis was racial consciosnnes being purposfuslly develpoed for socail transformation They adapted christianity for negotiating purposes and sold non-commidites on the seas It was never about returning to africa or recaputing an african past, it was about social strucutre They even went back to africa and started to create a verison of america, not africa , that thye wanted to realize Paul cuffe's cross sea netweor was an aim to connect and African nation with an African diasporic people; was trying to get them to emigrate Churches were the resting place of revoltuinary activity African rested on a shared history of oppression Sidbury is looking at black identity discourse int this book Chp 7 looks at the demise of this dientiy discupurse in the 1820s Colored places started to replace African ones The focus shifted to fixing America This turn helped get rid of slavery and was a good argument for legal equality but it undermined the black cause of socioeconomic progress; which being African was better for Epiloge looks at the rememergence of these discussion in the 1850s This was a continuation and reextalobhmenty of balck nationalism and emigration by delany A in a argues that first discussions of being African in England and NA rose in rension with and in partial opposition to memories and experiences of indigenous cultures in Africa, rather tthan directly out of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seeks to collapse the historigrpahical distinction between sociocuclutral and intellectual history by ecoveing yhr sophisticated ways that self styled africans understood Good, America, Africa, and their fellow diasporians This is the foundational conversation in early black political and social discourse; started in England African identity was critical to fighting for equal rights economically especially 1 The writings of people like whatley creared the first whispers of a cultural black identiy They started the conversation and proposed ideeas for this identity Their idea of identiy was closer to mdoern ethniciaty: It was unchanging and suggested a shared culture 2. African americans turn towards africa and startwriting autobiographies; defining africa their own way; Their shared past is now looking towards a ashared prospeoroius future Africans were like jews in some idscoure; shared oppression of chosen people who will reach the promised land. African insitutions pop up and fututre invigrate the identiy conversation. What is meant to be african engaged the minds of many blakca 4 Freetown and nova scotia infdeperndet balck colonies are forming but can not espcae the weight of the american project 5. With this idea of a black idenoty we now get Cuffe activing on it; trying to wrest the atlanic for the support of blacks

Exchanging Our Country Marks : The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South Michael A. Gomez

Year: 1998 Field: Antebellum race Summary: Most histories of African-American life in the mainland American Southtake as their starting point the confluence of African and European cultures,sometimes on the coast of Africa, sometimes in the larger Atlantic world,and sometimes (adding Native American cultures) on the mainland itself.The genius of Michael A. Gomez's thoughtful and challenging ExchangingOur Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonialand Antebellum South is to shift the focus from that traditional intersectionto the juncture of various African peoples. Indeed, for Gomez, professor ofhistory at the University of Georgia, the creation of an African-Americanidentity in the American South can be found in the forging of African "eth-nicities" into race (p. ii) Thesis: In thisview, identity formation was a project of enslaved Africans and their descen-dants to create a "new collective self-perception in an African-based commu-nity" (p. 219). In an analysis that sparkles with originality, Gomez suggestsexactly how they converted ethnicity into race by creating a narrative-andsituating responsibility-for their own enslavement, establishing common rituals like the ring shout and water baptism, and inventing funerary prac-tices to honor those who passed on to another world. Others, distinguished by theirwork assignments, light skin color, urban residence, or free status, also cre-ated a new identity informed by what Gomez calls "classism" (p. 4). Theircultural psychology was characterized by "What W.E.B. Du Bois called'double consciousness"' (p. 223) and their cultural politics by an aspirationfor incorporation into the larger American society, thus distancing themfrom the enthusiasm and commitments symbolized by the ring shout. In interpreting the transformation of ethnicity to race, Gomez thusfavors the plantation experience and promotes the plantation laborers whoshed their country marks to the front ranks of those who made the race. Nodoubt others will challenge that assessment and give equal, if not greater,credence to the efforts of those whom Gomez sees ensnared in the web of"classism." If so, however, they will find a formidable adversary in this richand forceful interpretation of the processes by which the many ethnicities ofAfrica became a race in the American South. A. Gomez presents a persuasive argumentthat African ethnicities had both a profound effect andan enduring presence within the slave communities ofthe southern United States. His work thus not onlysupports but also advances significantly a dominanttrend in recent slavery historiography emphasizing theagency of enslaved African Americans in shaping theirwor Race, a convenient construction imposed by whitesto categorize African Americans but "without -signifi-cant meaning in much of Africa" (p. 11) before theAtlantic slave trade, did not quickly overwhelm ethnic-ity as the key determinant of slave identity, as gener-ations of commentators and scholars have posited.Slaves' African antecedents retained potency and vi-tality at least through 1830, when Gomez concludes hisstudy, by which time American-born slaves predomi-nated and a composite African-American identity hadbecome more readily discernible He argues that theindividuals caught up in this forced migra-tion retained powerful memories of their homecultures, that different parts of Anglo-Americareceived different mixtures of African ethnicgroups, and that, under the shared pressure ofcommon enslavement by white Englishmen,Africans and their descendants came to definethemselvesmore and more in terms of "race"-of being black rather than white. For the yearswhen American-born slaves became numeri-cally dominant, especially after the AmericanRevolution, he points to the development ofnew fissures in this young community basedlargely on what he calls "classism." The fis-sures, he says, arose in connection with workskills that were often based on different Africancultural practices, miscegenation, urbanization,and the creative Mricanization of Christianity.He stops with 1830, when race relations andthe issue of slaverytook a different turn Other: Gomez deemphasizes the confrontation of Europeans andAfricans in the process of African Americanization, he hardly ignores it, asthe transition of peoples of African descent from an ethnic to a racial iden-tity rested upon enslavement. It was enslavement in the Americas, after all,that forced "Africans of varying ethnicities, who had never considered theirblackness a source of reflection," to seize it as "a principle of unity" (p. i65).Indeed, Gomez's discussion of the Middle Passage is perhaps the best sum-mation of what is known about that horrific experience. He also payshomage to the character of slavery-its changing demography, economies,and geography-as integral to the creation of an African culture in America.Nonetheless, for Gomez, the African origins of southern slaves is the criticalelement in the development of African-American culture. Slavery and theother circumstances of life in the American South can explain just so much.Southern slaves cannot be understood, Gomez emphasizes in distinguishinghis work from recent studies of African-American culture, "by differencesbetween tobacco and rice cultivation" (p. ii) By adding this"African-based" portion of the population to the "African-born," Gomezpostpones the emergence of an "American-based" majority among theenslaved until the end of the eighteenth century. He bolsters his argu-ment for a persistence of African identity with evidence drawn from run-away advertisements and church records, which suggest that, at least, ifmeasured by two crucial indicators of acculturation, the acquisition ofthe English language and the conversion to Christianity, the great major-ity of the enslaved were not "American" in cultural practice as late as thesecond quarter of the nineteenth cen!! African-American elites,buoyed by Christianity's inclusionist philosophy, wouldhenceforth pursue full integration, a goal consideredchimerical by the black American majority who recog-nized American racism's "fundamental and unequivo-cal rejection of Africa as equal" and hence determinedto stay "as close to the bosom of Africa as they couldget" (p. 292).!! Classism was an important and inevitable development in the history of the black community. Just as important was the conversion to Christianity, which ultimately facilitated the transition to race. This was primarily through those properties that allowed for differences among and between the African and the country-born to be bridged in an effective manner. At the same time, race influenced religious beliefs within the black community and the African antecedent continued to inform, so that whether individuals converted or Christianity was Africanized. Although powerful media of simultaneous transformation . In contrast to the elite, the majority of the African-based community, beginning as early as 1830, defined the problem very differently. They saw slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, and related discrimination as symptoms of a much deeper and intractable generative source. The problem, as they saw it and experienced it and knew it intuitively, was the fundamental and unequivocal rejection of Africa as equal, otherwise known as racism. The majority certainly fought for civil rights and equal opportunities, but they always understood the primary issue to be more insidious. The black elite manage to stay afloat with great difficulty. In any event, their condition is not so critical as those relegated to the category of underclass, the least of these, who continue to represent Africa to America. . This chapter argues that there were specific mechanisms in each phase of the African's experience— the initial capture and barracoon, transatlantic trek, and seasoning— through which he was increasingly nudged toward reassessment of his identity. The question of the nature of enslavement and its attendant impact upon the slave is a complex one, to which Patterson has made one of the more signal contributions to date. 1 Clearly, the very process of enslavement directly informed the restructuring of the slave's identity. The slaveocracy attempted to define the African's condition for its own purposes, manipulating cultural symbols with such efficacy that in some cases the slave ultimately adopted and embraced the perspective of the slaveholder as her or his own. On the other hand, many slaves understood the objective of the enslaver and often opted to resist. In addition to insurrection and other forms of rebellion, continuity of culture was a principal weapon, forged and reforged with varying degrees of success. Within the context of a political struggle, which is exacdy what slavery was, it ceased to matter whedier specific cultural forms could be maintained over increasing spans of time and space.\ One sentence: , the creation of an African-Americanidentity in the American South can be found in the forging of African "eth-nicities" into race (p. ii)

The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Pp. 501, notes, acknowledgements, index.)

Year: 2001 Field: Summary: Taking Bushnell's speech as her point of departure, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich sets out to understand the attraction that the mythos of an age of homespun held for nineteenth-century Americans and how that notion inspired and informed their efforts to record and preserve New England history. With an interest in both cloth making and history making at the heart of her inquiry, the author organizes each of the book's eleven chapters around one or two textiles or textile-related objects. In doing so, she links social history to cultural history by scrupulously detailing the origins of an imagined moment in the American past that was created, embraced, and preserved by nineteenth-century New Englanders who yearned for a pastoral heritage unspoiled by technology, of which the mill cities encroaching on their landscape were the emblems. What happens when the power brokers, the armies, the signers ofthe Declaration of Independence, and the inventor of the cotton ginfind themselves positioned as "background," as small singular trumpetnotes heard against the steady thump of a thousand looms and the whirrof ten thousand spinning wheels? Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age ofHomespun is a history of textiles in New England from the 1670s to the1840s, but it is also the history of everything else: gender relations, eco-nomic relations, Indian wars, Indian survival, sheep herding, countyfairs, rural literacy, sovereignty, inheritance, concepts of virtue, value,and memory. This is a Braudelian narrative: a patchwork of many lives,a "thick description" of disparate unsuspecting objects, and a unifiedhistory that draws its reader with a sense of breadth, completion, andtruth, a history recounted with the readability of Tolstoy. Thesis: Drawing on object-centered anthropological models for thinking about the meaning of things, as well as text-based methods honed by historians (including the texts of folktales documented by folklorists), Ulrich artfully teases out the multiple stories that converge in the objects she has chosen to illuminate—stories that the age of homespun mythos (as one of many competing cultural narratives) alternately embodied, misrepresented, and repressed. Attending closely to physical evidence of how items such as an Indian basket, an embroidered rose blanket, and a linen tablecloth were made and used, as well as to a broad array of textual materials—everything from probate inventories to diaries to the idiosyncratic, handwritten note that accompanied the gift of an object to a historical society—this book wonderfully complicates our understanding of the cultural contexts that shaped the production and consumption of textiles and of history in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century New England. Ulrich concludes that home production of textiles was indeed central to the early nineteenth-century New England economy. But its importance to the rhetoric of the age of homespun had as much or more to do with the fact that "images of industrious, self-sacrificing and patriotic women domesticated and softened the often harsh realities of political conflict, economic uncertainty, and war" (p. 413). Images of republican women spinning and weaving repressed the facts that the cotton they spun was grown by slaves and that the cultivation of linen and of sheep for textile production was significantly implicated in the eradication of indigenous peoples' way of life and ability to sustain themselves economically. Homespun will become gospel for how to take seriously the textiles and the women and men who made and preserved them. These readers will cheer when Ulrich writes that "the history of textiles is fundamentally a story about international commerce in goods and ideas. It is therefore a story about exploitation as well as exchange, social disruption as well as entrepreneurship, violence as well as aesthetics" (p. 414). Other: Ulrich's book, indeed her whole career, is atribute to "the silent work of ordinary people."Bushnell compared this sort of unsung laborto electricity, which "becomes historic only ina storm, 'though it does nothing more in itsthunder, than simply to notify us, by so great anoise, of the breach of its connexions, and thedisturbance of its silent work."' "The obvioustask for historians," Ulrich notes, "is to con-nect electricity and thunder." In her work, it isusually men who thunder, whether by makingwars or by creating ideologies. Only in pasto-ral are men "tamed by love." Politics is merethunder, a breach of connections, a distur-bance of meaningful work. Deeply suspiciousof abstraction and rhetoric, exemplified bypastoral but also implicit in the ideology of theRevolution, Ulrich puts her faith in the mun-dane and the tangible. The Age of Homespun isat once radical and conservative, simple andexceedingly complex. It ends, not with resolu-tion, but with two New England weavers em-igrating to Utah, almost like Huck Finn light-ing out for the territories, and with Ulrichsuggesting that new stories are yet to be spunand woven and loose ends to be left hanging One sentence: nUlrich's argument is far from simplistic. She takes a seemingly elementary concept, "the age of homespun," and shows how it was constructed to fill the romantic needs of a feminized Victorian culture, dominated by the ideal of separate spheres, for a useable colonial heritage that celebrated the contributions of women alongside those of men. New Englanders such as the Reverend Horace Bushnell, who helped to popularize the phrase in the 1850s, were compelled by the rising democracy of the era to integrate their grandmothers and great-grandmothers into colonial history. Ultimately, they did so in ways that sidestepped the participation of those women in market culture.!!!!!!!!! Ulrich's premise is "that ordinary people make history thrsmallest acts of everyday life" (p. 414), but finding those ordinarand giving voice to that history is not an easy task, nor is givingthat history a matter of straightforward interpretation. Ulrich ecomplexity, paradox, nuance, and the overlapping soundsvoices. Her sources include diaries, letters, probate inventorrecords, broadsides, tax lists, census records, political tracts, gravers, genealogies, local antiquarian histories, surviving buildinpaintings, portraits, ancient labels tied onto even more ancienconversations with curators and conservators, as well as the sof others who have pieced together fragments of the tales sheaugments, and completes. Her thread of argument refutes thepattern of a linear progression from subsistence to market erural New England, and her queries erase all tidy binaries. Sheinstance, "How does the seemingly private life of householdthe public worlds of commerce and politics?" (p. 143). The pand answer(s) to this query animate the book, as Ulrich makesthe "centrality of cloth-making in the culture and economyRevolutionary New England" (p. I92) among all classes andfor both genders. Her search is for those resonant points where ting of an unfinished knit stocking, a twined pocketbook, orpointed shepherdess display "the intersections of agriculcommerce, religion and politics, literature and life" (p. 229), cmythology and forgotten violence re read card

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes ofthe Civil War.

Year: 2001 Field: Civ War Summary: Ever since the guns went silent in 1865, veterans, politicians, and eventu-ally, historians have discussed and debated why eleven southern states se-ceded to form the Confederacy. Depending upon when and where one liveddetermined what was inculcated and accepted. Charles B. Dew reopens thedialogue in Apostles of Disunion. For him, the key to understanding secessionlies in a close reading of the secession commissioners' writings, which Dewargues show unequivocally that the protection of slavery was paramount in thebreakup of the Union Charles Dewseeks to allow contemporary southerners themselves, by their own words, toplace the peculiar institution at the center of the secession crisis. For the authorthis corrective is made necessary by the "deep division and profound ambiva-lence in contemporary American culture over the origins of the Civil War" (p.4). As evidence, he points to such recent developments as the furor over flyingthe Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State Capitol. Dew admits thatas a southerner he has found it hard to reconcile his boyhood vision of the waras a gallant cause with the rhetoric he analyzes in the b Thesis: commisoner and officer writing show unequivocally that the civiy was fought over slcveyrth Other: ook's main contention is a familiarbut latterly unfashionable one: the DeepSouth abandoned its membership in theUnion in the weeks after Abraham Lincoln'selection in order to defend its racial systemand ideology. Observing that the secessionistsof 1860-1861 "talked much more openlyabout slavery than present-day neo-Confeder-ates are willing to do," Dew profiles the mensent out to spread the disunionist gospel be-yond the radical heartland. The secessioncommissioners were chosen for their ortho-doxy and invariably had close connectionswith the states to which they were dispatched.Although they were second-rank figures forthe most part, they played a crucial role inconvincing uncommitted communities to jointhe secession bandwagon in the aftermath ofthe 1860 election amply justifies the attentionthe author affords them. In the commission- One sentence:Commision letter between officers and states prove that the c.w. was a bout slavery\ //Commsioner notes from 60-61 as they rally the troops and form the confederacy //The sole perpose of the commisioners or apostles was to advance the cause of seccesion by any means

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom, Gross, Ariela.

Year: 2001 Field: antebellum Summary: Throughan analysis of slave cases from courts in the DeepSouth, Gross adds depth and complexity to our under-standing of slavery's social and cultural framework,and of the tensions and contradictions slavery createdin its American setting . The leading work on the history of Southern slavery and law is divided into sections on "slaves as property" and "slaves as persons" as well, roughly corresponding to a split between civil and criminal law.2 By implication, slaves under Southern law had the char- acter of persons in criminal cases and that of property all the rest of the time.3 But there are other ways to understand the "doubleness" of slaves' character than in terms of a fissure in Southern law. By looking at the moment when slaves were most property-like to white Southerners—at the moment of sale or hire—this study will explore the paradoxes that arose from slaves' double identity as human subjects and the objects of property relations at one and the same time. Thesis: . As Grossdemonstrates, both civil and criminal proceedings re-garding slavery required white southerners, almost inspite of themselves, to consider slaves not only asproperty but also as human beings. And she delineatesthe contradictions this created both for southern racialideology and for social ideals. The other is the familiartheme of honor. Gross shows how dramas of honor and dishonordominated discussions of slavery in southern courts. Indoing so she considerably enriches our understandingof the concept of honor itself, and of its role insouthern social and cultural life Sheargues that slaves' character was often at issuein damage or breach of warranty claims con-cerning slaves. (Professor Gross has generouslyposted three of her databases on her Web site.)Gross's analysis of these cases is necessarilysubtle and extensive because proslavery whitesouthern litigants and courts developed some-times tortuous intellectual constructs to denythat dishonored, subordinated people could bytheir intentions or behavior exercise any inñu-ence over their owners and hirers and overcourt cases. above all, they required partiesto confront the meaning of race in the complex worldslavery created. "Double character" suggestsdeceit, trickery, the presentation of a false face. Deceit was one of the fewtools available to slaves in the effort to manipulate their worlds and theirfates, and many of these legal disputes were shaped by whites' fear ofslaves' trickery. Second, these disputes, by forcing "the law" to considerslaves' character, also challenged slaveholders' self-conception as honor-able masters. Thus "double character" took on another dimension in tri-als involving slaves: the double characterofmasters and slaves. Thesecases mattered to white Southerners because their self-understandings aswhite masters depended on their relationshipsto black slaves; puttingblack character on trial called white character into question as well!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Southern culture also had a "double character." On the one hand, the plantation South was a world governed by conceptions of honor. White men of the Deep South understood their own place in society and that of others according to their ability to participate in an honor culture. They prized their reputation as honorable men, and they vowed to defend their honor against all slights. Yet, simultaneously, increasing numbers of men, and some women, participated ina vigorous commercial market, whose values seem at first glance contradictory to those of the honor culture. Despite their apparent incompatibility, both commercial and honorific practices and values were sustained and knitted together by slavery, the central institution of the Deep South. Indeed, slaves themselves saw com- merce and the honor culture as inextricably linked, with the marketplace providing the arena formany of the rituals ofwhite honor and black dishonor that most deeply defined slavery. Going to the core of what slav- ery meant to them, upon freedom, many sang!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other: One sentence: Slaves are property and people, causing legal issues. As Gross demonstrates, issues of race were centralto the law of slavery. A major purpose of the southernlegal system, she explains, was to reinforce the honorof southern whites through the dishonoring of slaves,complementing similar efforts maintained through thequotidian humiliations of plantation life and the stillmore demeaning humiliations of the auction block.The exclusion of slave testimony, a "medicalization" ofrecalcitrant behavior, and an assumption of slavedeceitfulness all served to affix a badge of dishonor tothe slave. All combined to confirm, for whites, theirown racialized capacity for honor. Gix>ss argues only for anindirea influence. Somedmes slave resistancemeant that white men had no choice but toevaluate slaves' choices in civil court. Enslavedpeople's independent behavior often resultedin white men's efforts to defend their honoragainst any implication that they had failed tocontrol their slaves or had been successfullytricked by them. Most important in court was,of course, whose perception prerailed

DYLAN C. PENNINOROTH. The Claims ofKinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth- Century South. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. x, 310. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Year: 2003 Field: Summary: Yet as Dylan C. Penningroth ar- gues, such analyses not only presume a false unity among African Americans (and Africans, for that matter) but work from the assumption that black lives are best understood in terms of their relations to white people and white power rather than on their own terms. By probing how African Americans gave mean- ing to and understood connections between kinship and property, Penningroth instead manages to make the heroic narrative and the paradigmatic debates seem flat and simplistic without ever denying either the brutalities of white supremacy or the import and the power of black family and community life for individ- ual and collective dignity, strength, and pride both in slavery and beyond. Penningroth applies an intellectual frame-work laden with insights gleaned from African Studiesand anthropology, making this book an ambitiousexercise in interdisciplinary scholarship and compara-tive history This book is about family, community, and property among African Americans: what they meant, how they were made, and how they changed between the last decades of slavery and the early years of freedom. It tries to explain how people who were legally considered to be property were able to earn and own property; it analyzes the social networks in which black people were involved and the compromises they struck over the years with masters, neighboring whites, government agents, and especially with other black people. Thesis: It is a pungent joke with a serious point: there is much more to being black than the struggle against white oppression. The book's most significant contri- bution, however, may be how Penningroth reveals the centrality of materialism to the very construction of slave family and community life. Property accumula- tion by the enslaved nearly always depended on coop- erative labor. Such a reality in turn meant that families "made" property together and held overlapping (and frequently contested) interests and ownership claims. Moreover, the collective accretion of material goods itself helped make flexible slave "families" that might include members who were not related by blood or even by marriage. Viewing social relations as (among other things) a field of struggle over resources helps explain why so many slave societies throughout human history permitted their most exploited members — slaves — to own property. 19 Between masters and slaves in the United States, race provided the language and the justification for subordinating people of African descent. Most white southerners either supported the informal economy of slavery or did not care about it one way or the other. They did not have to deprive slaves of all property, because slavery and freedom were written on people's skin and hair for anyone to see. 20 But among black southerners and in many parts of Africa, it was kin who defined access to resources, and it was through a language of kinship, not race, that people rationalized and understood their claims on one another. Kinship mattered, both because it helped "make" property and helped people claim it, and because property— more precisely, people's interests in property and labor — helped "make" kinship. For African Americans, the meanings of property, race, and kinship were interrelated, and none of them stood still for long. That constant experience of claiming and belonging was an important part of life in the 1800 s — and maybe beyond. Ex-slaves argued with one another in the 1860 s and 1870 s not in spite of property's links to kinship but because of them. The ending of slavery in the South ushered in a new world of negotiation among black people over the claims of kinfolk, a world that comes to life if, rather than asking "whose daughter was this?" we ask instead, "what did it mean to be someone's daughter?" . Yet, as the author points out, slaves were often able to participate in a significant informal economy and to gradually accumulate Under slavery, ties of kinship and community had given African Americans not only emotional support but also the muscles they needed to accumulate property and the social networks to claim it. In the years after emancipation, ex-slaves rebuilt their families, often widening them to embrace new members. From their old masters they wrested away more control over their labor and property than ever in their lives. Ex-slaves took their swelling amounts of property and their brand-new control over labor and applied older, kin-based understandings of controlling labor and property. Just at the moment when black people began seizing new opportunities to accumulate, they drastically changed the social networks that still anchored their claims of ownership. Hence, blackon-black negotiations transformed their lives as much as anything whites did. The reestablishment and expansion of family networks after the Civil War and the growth of property controlled by families meant that family became more important to African Americans than ever. The evidence in the military court records of conflict among former slaves did not mean that the black family was weak or broken. On the contrary, as the Fante case suggests, such conflict reflects how expansive kinship became after emancipation, how strong its claims on people, and how important it remained for people's access to property and labor. For African Americans and Fantes alike, emancipation both opened new opportunities to strengthen their families and sparked fiery struggles over the meaning of kinship. Perhaps as much as official ordinances and emancipation proclamations, it was this remarkable surge in the claims of kinfolk that made the 1860 s and 1870 s a turning point in so many people's lives. property. Slaves worked on their own time to raise crops, traded goods in town markets, and operated ferry services. Some slaves were even able to hire out their own time and achieve a kind of autonomy. Many whites, including masters, ben- efited from these informal practices and were reluctant to halt them* hus, in actuality slaves were able to painstakingly acquire some property. Slaves acquired food, clothing, animals, wagons, money, and in a few instances obtained rights to land and patents. Hence, Penningroth has uncovered a striking dichotomy between law and social practice Penningroth was particularly keen to emphasize the agency of the enslaved, and points out repeatedly that social relationships informed black property ownership under slavery. Although complex and often combining the interests of several slaves, owners, and others, these relations were essentially African American and "largely apart from those they had with whites and formal institutions of the South." While most slaveholders tolerated, and even encouraged, slave property owrung (because it suited them to do so), within the resulting semi-autonomous space, the enslaved drew on their family and community to produce, accumulate, and assign meaning to property and so to family and kinship. Therefore, slavery, because it stripped away a person's kin ties and fastened them onto his or her new master's lineage, could be defined in West African societies as "the absence of kin." In the absence of legal protection of their families, the enslaved were always obliged to reestablish kin, incorporate new people, and reconfigure their understanding of family. As such, through the prism of African Studies we can locate an essential aspect of U.S. slavery, not in formal law, but in the varying abilities of enslaved people to control what was most dear to them—family and property. As in Ghana, the material possessions of southern U.S. slaves were valuable not only because they were useful or saleable, but also for the social relationships embedded therein, ready to be called into action. Disputes over property, Penningroth contends, were just as likely to call forth the kin ties that created and gave meaning to property as to elicit talk of dollars and cents* The chapters that follow mine these sources for testimony by slaves and former slaves. Chapter 1 is a case study of southern Gold Coast, West Africa (today's Ghana), from the 1860 s to the 1920 s. Underlying my approach to African American history are perspectives from African history and anthropology, and this chapter makes them explicit. Chapters 2 and 3 explore kinship and property during slavery in the United States, reconstructing the networks of black-black social relationships that enabled slaves to accumulate property, moving outward to explore the meaning of ownership, and analyzing how those relationships made it possible for slaves toassert property claims that even their masters respected. Chapters 4 , 5 , and 6 explore what it meant for African Americans when, in the years following emancipation, the law finally recognized their families and their right to own property. Other: One sentence: second issue raised by this volume is the relationship between respect for private property and individual liberty. The Anglo-American constitutional tradition has long stressed individual property rights as a bulwark of freedom from arbitrary government. Some have even argued that property is the cornerstone of all per- sonal freedoms. Penningroth, however, is skeptical that the libertarian dimensions of property ownership had much validity as applied to slaves. He maintains that "property ownership was generic among slaves, and, what conundrums it posed within the law, it was perfectly compatible with the institution of slavery" (77). Penningroth added that nothing slaves "did with their property weakened the slave system at all" (191). Thus, the author calls into question common assumptions about the link between a market economy and freedom!!!!!!!!!!!

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformationof America, 1815-1848. By Daniel Walker Howe.

Year: 2007 Field: Early 19th Summary: . Of greater significance, however, are the connections he establishes between evangelical religion, social reform, sectional politics, and economic development as key elements in America's transformation. , Howe refuses to approach theera as the "age of Jackson." Instead, he sortspeople, ideas, and events into two broad categories?modernizers and democratizers?thatsteadily gained congruence with the Whig andDemocratic parties during the middle period.Before they constituted a party, modernizerscomprised all who hungered for design anddirection at the head of the American experiment. Included in that fellowship were economic nationalists, institution builders, Protestant perfectionists, and a generous helpingof enlightened intellectuals; Howe selects astheir symbolic spokesman John Quincy Adams. The democratizers (my term: Howe doesnot label them) drew on romantic assumptionsand the libertarian strain of revolutionary republicanism to assemble a defensive alliance of all who believed that liberation itself constituted purpose and that leadership consistedof preventing the erection of barriers to privateambitions. Andrew Jackson and his colleaguesrallied what they called "the people" behinda partisan commitment to little government,minimal institutions, and expanding freedomfor adult white American men Thesis: The Age of Jackson"; Jackson's poli-cies were too controversial and divided thenation, he argues. Nor did he use "MarketRevolution." There was no such thing, he believes, rather an evolution from a nascent market system already in place in the eigh-teenth century. There were two revolutions in the period 1815-1845, however, one in com-munication and one in transportation. The development of the telegraph in 1844 meant instant communication across most of thenation, including news of the DemocraticConvention that nominated Polk. And toHowe, it is significant beyond symbolismthat Jackson went to Washington in 1828 byhorse and carriage, and left it eight years laterby railroad. Such developments, products ofthe market capitalist system, would surelyhave been impossible without it, along withpolitical and social changes such as the rise ofantislavery sentiment and the beginnings ofthe women's movement that technology andthe markets only aided What Hath God Wrought ,market capitalism is a positive force, whichexpedited the notion of progress on everylevel in the United States Other: "Old Hickory" as a self-absorbed white supremacist with "profoundly authoritarian instincts" -definitely "not a man to be crossed" (p. 328). Particularly noteworthy areHowe's observations on Indian removal, a brutal process that he describes asa form of ethnic cleansing (pp. 423, 810). "The fundamental impulse be-hind Jacksonian Democracy," he emphasizes, "was about the extension ofwhite supremacy across the North American continent," adding that "Indianpolicy, not banking or the tariff, was the number one issue . . . during theearly years of Jackson's presidency" (pp. 356-57). Jacksonian America wasmany things, but it was not essentially democratic. To be sure, the franchiseexpanded during the period, but only for white men. Indians, free blacks,undesirable immigrants, and women were systematically excluded from cit-izenship, to say nothing of the terrible plight of slaves. An unswerving com-mitment to America's "Manifest Destiny" and the protection of slavery ac-cordingly became central tenets of Jacksonian Democracy (p. 524). America's communications revolution comprisedthree major technological innovations introduced after the War of 1812:the advent of steam-powered rotary presses capable of mass producing allsorts of printed materials; the reorganization of the U.S. postal system toone capable of distributing these printed materials over vast distances; and,most awesome of all, the introduction of Samuel Morse's "lightning" elec-tric telegraph in 1844. One sentence: Howe insists that "some of the most important de-bates of the period did not take place within the arenaof politics" at all (p. 851). In other words, and perhapsinevitably, a partisan age has generated its own partisanhistoriography. tech and comm rev. my notes: Intro: Jacksonian america, its wasn't true and not democra tic; he was controversial No market rev. the market already exsisted before it just drasitcally expanded; really it wasa communication revolution Communciation spead up everythign including abolition, undercutting the traditoanl channels\ 1.America was changing and it was the choice between the fututre and past, should we be agrigcultural or market and how do we deal with the morality of democarcy etc 3. Competing nationalism of the whigs and jacsonian democrats emergeed 4.Cotton helps the market and makes slavery more contentious 6. Comm and transport revolution helped economic and intellecutal horizons as well as changing popular democracy in mass politcal parties and policatl information 7. Whigs are the improvers, nationally mijnded 8. Slavers could not afford this nationalizing equal tenor 11. Indian Removal shows Jackson's commitment to oimperliasm and land domjnation and white suprmacy 12. Religion and the great awake provided stability for a nation undergoing massive change., 14. We love a railroad and how changed the econmy 15. Whigs were the party of americas future advocating for a national econokmy and a cosopolitan furute. 20. Amerca wetaherd its crises and came out the other side; religion was conservative and progresssive and slavery was a tense as ever' Finale: Whigs championed womens rights

Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, by Nicholas Guyatt

Year: 2016 Field: Race creation Summary: On 4 July 1776, the American Revolutionaries linked enslaved and native peoples as problems that threatened the future of the new, independent republic. As Nicholas Guyatt shows, these two groups never stopped being problems that nagged even those who wanted to promote the Declaration's universalist language of all being 'created equal' and endowed with 'inalienable rights'. How did enslaved African Americans and Native Americans fit in? They did not, or, rather, could not. According to Guyatt, by the 1830s American political leaders and opinion makers (whom he refers to as 'liberals' or 'enlightened Americans') learned that the only way they would be able to abolish slavery and treat Native Americans fairly was to banish them from the United States. They might have been created equal, but they would never be able to enjoy the blessings of American self-government Thesis: Guyatt is searching for the origins of segregation in the United States. He argues the notion of 'separate but equal', enshrined by the Supreme Court in the 1890s, had its roots in a century-long debate about whether free African Americans and Natives could live in the same communities and enjoy the same citizenship rights as white folk. Guyatt believes this refusal to create an inclusive society 'lies at the heart of American history' (p. 10). His intriguing book does something quite fresh: it makes an argument about the rise of segregation by integrating two discourses of historical inquiry that had previously been cordoned off from each other, those of the roots of the colonisation movement and Native American removal. The book looks at these two phenomena as one piece, listening for consonances. America's growing cities, progressives, Guyatt suggests, embraced racial separation as the answer, from Thomas Jefferson's advocacy of removal in his Notes on the State of Virginia to Abraham Lincoln's longtime support for African American colonization in Liberia. and the appeal of these programs to "liberal" and "benevolent" whites who "em- phatically denied that blacks or Indians were permanently inferior" (8-9). The "essential principle" of these plans, that "African Americans and Native Americans should leave the United States" (10), would today be called "ethnic cleansing" (13). Guyatt makes that point clear, but he urges his readers not to dismiss these efforts as merely racist. "In the soaring rhetoric of its (mostly) white proponents," Guyatt argues in this engaging and impor- tant book, "colonization would allow the races to become 'separate but equal'" (10). Other: deportation, indian dispalacement To say that racial separation was a racist idea is to misunderstand its allure: in the soaring rhetoric of its (mostly) white proponents, colonization would allow the races to become "separate but equal. One sentence: Nicholas Guyatt's argument in Bind Us Apart is at once simple and far-reaching: the princi- ple of racial separation was originally devised not by enemies of equality after Reconstruc- tion, but rather by friends of equality decades earlier as a means of limiting the practical 180e Journal of American History June 2017 consequences of egalitarianism. In elegant prose Guyatt traces the justifications for separation in abolitionist literature as well as in texts associated with the nation's manage- ment of Indian affairs. In both cases, he shows that early interest in complete integration of nonwhite populations into the political com- munity ultimately gave way to strategies of exclusion. Guyatt's narrative toggles between accounts of slaves and those of native peoples, sometimes to successfully draw incisive paral- lels (for example, he notes that William Lloyd Garrison saw similarities in the plight of both populations and opposed removal for both), but occasionally in ways that are disruptive to the explication of central arguments\ colnonization was linekd to this project

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. By Marisa J. Fuentes

Year: 2016 Field: SLAVERY Summary: A micro-study of urban slavery, each chapter looks at the life of a differentslave woman and the various layers of abuse and violence she experienced. Fuentes takes her leadfrom the well-trodden literature on the multiple ways in which slaves resisted or asserted varying levels of autonomy over their enslavement and Orlando Patterson's use of the term 'social death' -the concept that one of the defining features of a slave's identity is that, by virtue of being a slave,he or she is stripped of a social identity outside of their enslavement. It is from within this under-standing that Fuentes asserts that 'resistance' to slavery, and to the violence to which enslavedwomen and their bodies were exposed, is indeed survival. As Fuentes writes, it is the 'will to sur-vive, the sound of somebody wanting to be heard, wanting to live or wanting to die [...] the struggleagainst dehumanization is the wanting' (p.143). Fuentes finds such 'wanting', as she reads againstthe grain of the archival sources, her central point of enquiry power in the production of history" (5) as pioneered byAntoinette Burton, Ann Laura Stoler, Michel-RolphTrouillot, and others. Fuentes refutes the idea that slavery was less violent inurban areas than on rural plantations, and argues that hercase studies of selected women reveal the exploitation, vi-olence, and commoditization that constituted their life ex-periences. She addresses several key questions: How didurban slaves negotiate physical and sexual violence, colo-nial power, and the demands of their owners? How wasfreedom defined? How did punishments and confinementcontrol enslaved women in an urban context? What dothe archives reveal, and refuse to reveal, about slave wom-en's experiences? (3). Violence, she argues, is the "histori-cal material" that animates her study, as enslaved womenappear in the archive "disfigured and violated" (7). Thetheme of gendered violence and white obsession withslave women's bodies is picked up again in the final chap-ter on abolition discourse, which builds on studies by his-torians such as Diana Paton who have emphasized aboli he key theme of Fuentes's book—the relationship be-tween race, gender, and sexuality as it defined the lives ofslave, free black and mulatto, and white women—is ex-plored through contrasting case studies. She begins in chap-ter 1 with a fugitive slave, Jane, and a more general discus-sion of slave runaway advertisements as they exposed "wom-en's private and scarred bodies" (15), marked by the ethnicscars of their African origins, punishment stripes, and own-ers' brands Thesis: Yet, as her subtitle makes plain, Fuentes'sbook is not simply a history of enslaved blackwomen in the urban Caribbean, nor does itseek to bring to light never-before-seen evi-dence newly unearthed in a British Caribbe -an archive. Rather, Dispossessed Lives aims toreconstruct the experiences of enslaved wom-en based on a patchwork of surviving archivaldocuments while simultaneously interrogatingboth the traditional archive and the disciplineof history. This is a book, Fuentes argues, con-cerned with "violence in its many configura -tions: physical, archival, and epistemic" (p.6). She focuses on the "'mutilated historicity'of enslaved women (the violent condition inwhich enslaved women appear in the archivedisfigured and violated)" and addresses newepistemologies available to historians "to re-cover what might never be recoverable and toallow for uncertainty, unresolvable narratives,and contradictions" (pp. 7, 12). Other: This work seeks to understand the production of "personhood" in the context of Bridgetown and this British Caribbean archive, while troubling the political project of agency. 6 It articulates the forces of power that bore down on enslaved women, who sometimes survived in ways not typically heroic, and who sometimes succumbed to the violence inflicted on them. Each chapter examines one woman in the context of eighteenth-​ century Bridgetown as she came into archival view. The chapters are titled after the women who are named in the fragments I explore when possible, in order to contest their fragmentation and to challenge the impetus of colonial authorities to objectify enslaved people in the records by generic namings such as "Negro" or "slave." One sentence: By changing the perspective of a document's author to that of an enslaved subject, questioning the archives' veracity and filling out miniscule fragmentary mentions or the absence of evidence with spatial and historical context our historical interpretation shifts to the enslaved viewpoint in important ways. As previous scholarship has generated substantial knowledge about how enslaved women made meaning in their lives despite commodification and domination, my book does not simply seek to recover enslaved female subjects from historical obscurity. Instead, it makes plain the manner in which the violent systems and structures of white supremacy produced devastating images of enslaved female personhood, and how these pervade the archive and govern what can be known about them. Rather than leaving enslaved women "vulnerable to the readings and misreadings of whoever chooses to make assumptions about them," 8 my book probes the construction of enslaved women in the archival records, using methods that at once subvert and illuminate biases in these accounts in order to map a range of life conditions that profoundly challenge assumptions about the "slave experience" in Caribbean systems of domination. . Therefore, this book dwells on violence in its many configurations: physical, archival, and epistemic. The most obvious instances are physical—​ the ways violence inflicted on enslaved bodies turned them into objects in slave societies. Chapter 5 features and reproduces the inordinate accounts of enslaved women's beatings in the records of the slave trade abolition debates. brings to the fore how the excessive nature of such images works to silence these violent experiences beneath the titillated gazes of white men, abolitionist sensationalism, and historiographical skepticism, as well as our unavoidable complicity in replicating these accounts in order to historicize them. Dispossessed Lives demonstrates what other knowledge can be produced from archival sources if we apply the theoretical concerns of both cultural studies and critical historiography to documents and sources. It is an argument that history can still be made, and we can gain an understanding of the past even as we consciously resist efforts to reproduce the lived inequities of our subjects and the discourses that served to distort them. Within the scope of this book I make two interventions into the extant literature on slavery in the Atlantic world. First, I argue that close attention to the specificities of urban slavery challenges scholarly representations of plantation slavery as more violent and spatially confining than slavery in other locales. 17 To do this, I map how urban slave owners constructed and used architectures of terror and control on this seemingly mobile enslaved population through imprisonment, public punishment, and legal restrictions. Second, much of the previous historical scholarship on slavery influenced by the crucial Civil Rights and Black Power activism of the 1960s and 1970s focuses on enslaved resistance, a vital (and decades long) effort to gain insight into the "agency" of enslaved people and to refute earlier depictions of the enslaved as passive and submissive. 18 The agency of enslaved and free(d) people of color, however, was more complex than the "liberal humanist" framework allows. 19 We need to examine the excruciating conditions faced by enslaved women in order to understand the significance of their behaviors within the confounding and violent world of the colonial Caribbean. Finally, the centrality of gender in this study illuminates how African and Afro-​ Caribbean women experienced constructions of sexuality and gender in relation to white women and, as important, how enslaved women's subaltern positions in slave society shaped the ways they entered the archive and, consequently, history. Moreover, the surplus enslaved and female population of this town allowed slaveowners to turn enslaved women into sexual objects for incoming soldiers and sailors, a lucrative informal economy for their owners. Examining the degree to which colonial authorities utilized public punishments and structures of confinement complicates discussions of the possibilities of freedom and mobility in urban enslavement. Re read intro This study argues that there was something particular about being enslaved and female in slave societies even as it resists more traditional concepts of gender; it dwells purposely on feminist epistemological questions concerning how (historical) knowledge is produced about enslaved female subjects through the archive. A careful interrogation of the brothel as a site of urban confinement reveals the complex intra-​ gendered relationships of enslaved women and their female owners and provides new insight into the troubling domestic spaces enslaved women occupied. It also exposes how narratives of economic success tragically and historiographically obscures the violence of sexualized labor in slavery and in freedom. . This is a different form of agency—​one that does not expect resolution or revolution in outcome. What can be heard from "the most dreadful cries?"—​ that "terrible beauty"? 92 Perhaps resistance to the violence of slavery is survival, the will to survive, the sound of someone wanting to be heard, wanting to live or wanting to die. But the struggle against dehumanization is in the wanting . And sometimes, we can hear it.!!!!!!!!!! Dispossessed Lives insists that historical studies of the black Atlantic inform the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality continue to shape the lives of African-​ descended people worldwide. It is a history of how people of African descent became disposable, when black lives were objectified and thus vulnerable to the caprice, lusts, and economic desires of colonial authorities. It documents the strategies and structures that made black Atlantic lives subject to violence of thought and action. It offers material to reflect on the stakes of resistance in such systems and the reproduction of raced and gendered configurations of vulnerability. It begins to mark the way that the archive and history have erased black bodies and how the legacies of slavery—​ the racialized sexism and the legal, socioeconomic, and physical violence against people of African descent—​ manifest in the violence we continue to confront. It is a gesture toward a reckoning of our own time. It is a history of our present.!!

Richard Archer. Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in AntebellumNew England. New York: Oxford UP, 2017. 312 pp. $29.95.

Year: 2017 Field: antebell north Summary: Largely because of the NovoAnglophilia of twentieth-century American studies of slavery, until recently there were few sustained critical examinations of pre-Civil War bigotry and racism in the North where antislavery forces were not treated sympathetically. Thesis: Rather than argue that one region utilized racist and oppressive tactics to subjugate their African American communities more than the other, Archer explains how racism impacted and altered the areas in different yet fundamentally important ways Archer also charts some fairly new territory of his own. In a chapter titled "Riding the Rails with Jim Crow," he tells us that the idea of a Jim Crow car on railroads was originated in New England. According to his analysis, segregated Jim Crow cars were first introduced by Eastern Railroad out of Boston in its second year of service in 1839; other railroads adopted the practice immediately thereafter. Free blacks could not buy tickets in either "first class" seating or in "paddy cars," which were other special cars to segregate Irish passengers (94-95). Over the next four years, repeated petitions, boycotts, and appeals to the railroads succeeded in encouraging them to eradicate such practices before laws could be enacted to outlaw Jim Crow cars. Concurrent efforts to secure the right to vote and to abolish segregated schools in the middle 1840s also led to considerable changes. By 1845, black males could vote in all New England states except Connecticut; four states (excluding Maine and Rhode Island) had adopted personal liberty laws, but segregated schools still operated in Boston and in the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Another of Archer's most important original contributions relates of the relaxing of laws on interracial marriages. In a chapter titled "Repealing the Law," he outlines a successful movement in Massachusetts in 1843 to repeal a law forbidding mixed marriages that had been on the books since 1705 and had been reaffirmed in 1786. This chronicle precedes a detailed analysis of 410 mixed marriages Archer has documented in 209 different cities, towns, and villages throughout New England from the antebellum period. The fewest mixed marriages were again in Connecticut and Rhode Island, causing him to declare that in every measure these two "were the most racist states in the region" Other: Richard Archer's 2017 monograph, Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Antebellum New England, provides a new and exciting perspective on nineteenth-century race relations and conflicts in antebellum New England. Widely considered the birthplace of abolitionism, Archer places the region at the center of Jim Crow segregation, widespread racial strife, and civil rights activism. Jim Crow North explains how racism during the antebellum period served as a precursor to the Jim Crow South decades later while challenging the notion that New England was more progressive or accepting of African Americans. Ultimately, by shifting the focus from white abolitionists and deconstructing preconceived notions of antebellum New England, Jim Crow North is able to weave a thrilling and often overlooked narrative through the lives of African Americans in the North!!!! One sentence:He argues that many citizens within New England expressed a self-righteous attitude toward the elimination of slavery; however, they still participated in brutal violent and aggressive actions towards communities of color The first section of the monograph concludes by highlighting the two most pressing problems for African Americans in the North, a rigid class hierarchy and an aggressive white population that wanted to maintain clear distinctions between themselves and minority populations. While progress had been made throughout the antebellum era, the ability to fundamentally challenge the economic hierarchy in New England proved too difficult for African Americans to experience equality. ** . Overall, one of the most apparent themes in the text is the battle for economic citizenship. While readers will easily identify barriers to education and public segregation as "Jim Crow" tactics intended to disenfranchise African American communities, the author's clear and digestible text highlights how a strict racial and economic hierarchy restricted mobility and reinforced racist norms within the region

Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. By Deirdre Cooper Owens. (Athens: University of Geor- gia Press, 2017. xvi, 165 pp. $48.95.)

Year: 2017 Field: Summary: n the course of 5 succinctly tailored chapters, Dr. Cooper Owens demonstrates the compli- cated ways in which ambitious men relied for their advancement on disenfranchized, vulnerable women's bodies and labor. In the North, these men included politicians, immigration and health officials, and elite employers; the population they exploited were primarily working class Irish women. In the South, the men comprised plantation owners, physicians, and surgeons who counted on, for example, African American slave women (who were also nurses in George Sims' plantation hospital) to take medical knowledge back to their owners on plantations, to heal other slave women without the plantation owners incurring extra treatment costs. Cooper Owen's history shows that in the nineteenth-century development of gynecology,whether in the South or the North, both surgical intervention and the creation of hospitals existto exploit the bodies of poor and vulnerable women, not to serve them. In the twentieth century,perhaps no case of mistreatment exemplifies this exploitation more starkly and grimly than themistreatment of Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins hospital in the 1950s (Skloot, 2010). CooperOwens offers us the back-story that escorted Mrs. Lacks to the experimental ward that treated"negroes" at Johns Hopkins, while elite white women were still receiving bedside care from physi-cians and midwives committed to their comfort and protection. In this cleverly titled book, Deirdre Cooper Owens uses the intersectionof class, gender, medicine, and authority to study enslaved black and Irishwomen's bodies in the evolution of gynecology as a medical specialty dur-ing the early to mid-nineteenth century. Whites knew that "black womenliterally carried the race and extended the existence of slavery in theirwombs" (8), but studying reproductive health on slave plantations, andamong Irish immigrant women, is difficult. Owens faced many problems,but detailed census records opened the way to explore the issue of babiesborn during medical experimentation, which in turn opened the door tothe world of enslaved gynecological subjects. Owens applies a sophisticatedanalytical framework to a wide variety of archival sources—diaries, news-papers, publications, case histories, former slave women's narratives, andcourt records—as well as secondary scholarship in order to demonstrate 144 jou rnal of t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 9 , i s s u e 1 the ways in which both southern and northern doctors used racial ste- reotypes to advance medical knowledge. The result is an absorbing and important contribution to the history of women, slavery, and experimental medicine in the nineteenth-century United States She focuses on the re-lationship of slavery in the Old South and theorigins of male-dominated gynecology in theUnited States. Although the concentration ison the experience of black females, chapter 4innovatively adds Irish immigrant women tothe analysis. Linking the two populations isJames Marion Sims, the "Father of AmericanGynecology," who, after pioneering gyneco-logical surgery on the enslaved in Alabama,relocated to New York City where famineIrish refugees were his subjects. "This book,"the author writes, "recognizes the unherald-ed work of those enslaved women recruitedagainst their will for surgeries and made towork while hospitalized, and the labor ofthose poor immigrant women who willinglyentered crowded hospitals in an effort to behealthy reproductively" (p. 3). Indeed, asshe significantly argues, the preeminence ofAmerican gynecology during the nineteenthcentury in cesarean sections, obstetrical fistu-lae repair, and ovariotomies was "guided bythe belief that elite white lives should be heldin higher esteem than poor, foreign ones evenwhile he [Sims] relied on immigrant and blackwomen's disorders to discover cures for the ill-nesses of all women" (p. 5). In addition, themedical maintenance of the social reproduc-tion of enslaved women served to perpetuatethe horrendous practice of slavery and its grimlegacy to the present.!!! Thesis: cholars in recent years have begun exploring the ways in which medi-cine and slavery affected each other. Owens takes this a step further byexamining reproduction (voluntary and involuntary) in shaping the systemof slavery and demonstrates the central importance of enslaved women'sbodies to the development of American gynecology. The increased accessto enslaved bodies with gynecological problems made enslaved women"objects of study and fascination" and a leading source of knowledge forthe new specialty (9). Fundamental to Owens's account is the concept ofa "medical superbody," not a nineteenth-century term but one she uses todescribe how physicians denied enslaved women full humanity while valu-ing them as ideal research subjects for medical experimentation. Whitephysicians looked at enslaved black women in racist terms, highlighting"their fecundity, their alleged hypersexuality, and their physical strength"(109). Owens argues that the analytic category of the "black medicalsuperbody" provides the best means of exploring the various meanings ofsexual, gynecological, and reproductive conditions that women suffered(117). While recognizing that black and white bodies were anatomicallythe same, the so-called best science of the day—really "scientific racism"—legitimated racial differences and allowed doctors to conduct gyneco-logical experiments on a vulnerable population, laying the foundation forgynecological medicine.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other: hat this book, which devotes an entire chapter to the parallels between the pathologized Irish women's bodies in the North and black slave women's bodies in the South, should be published now, when too many apologists for anti-black racism in the US deploy a narrative to the effect that "Irish were treated as slaves too" makes it timely in an unusual way. It serves as a strong corrective both to this new racist narrative, and as a reminder to those who would over-steer toward suggesting that there never was a grossly abusive racism directed at Irish immigrants to the 19th Century US. Some readers may be surprised to see Cooper Owens use the term "wage slave" to refer to the circumstances of poor Irish women in the northern states, but Cooper Owens is making a point about Irish women's bodies as a parallel phenomenon in which they too were owned (by their employers) who paid for their medical care only in order to return them to domestic labor so poorly paid that the women had neither agency nor the capacity to protect themselves. Cooper Owens details the ways in which Irish women's bodies were vilified in Northern hospitals for suffering the effects of their sexual victimization at the hands of employers who routinely raped, impregnated, and infected them, and argues that although Irish women eventually acquired the ability to leave their employers because of community building within the Irish Catholic population they were, "like their enslaved sisters in the South, [ ... ] at the mercy of sometimes unscrupulous employers who took advantage of them sexually" (p. 103). It is through her account of this history that Cooper Owens reveals how and why Catholic hospitals arose to offer more compassionate and specific care for Irish women than was possible in the South where women relied on informal networks of slave women to provide "traditional and naturalistic health care" (p. 102). One sentence:Medical Bondage also builds on two significant arguments about the relation-ship between slavery and medicine. First, reproductive medicine was essentialto the maintenance and success of southern slavery, especially during the ante-bellum era, when the largest migration and sale of black women occurred inthe nation's young history. Doctors formed a cohort of elite white men whosework, especially their gynecological examinations of black women, affected thecountry's slave markets. Each slave sold was examined medically so that shecould be priced. Second, southern doctors knew enslaved women's reproduc-tive labor, which ranged from the treatment of gynecological illnesses to preg-nancies, helped them to revolutionize professional women's medicine. Slaveowners used these men's medical assessments to ascertain whether a womanwould be an economically sound investment. Was she a fecund woman or in-fertile? Did she have a venereal disease that could infect others slaves on a farmor plantation? These questions mattered, and doctors provided the answers forbuyers. Most pioneering surgeries such as ovariotomies (the removal of dis-eased ovaries) and cesarean section surgeries that occurred in American gyne-cological history happened during interactions between white southern doctorsand their black slave patients.!!! istorian Stephanie Camp has argued that "geographies of containment" were spaces where slaveholders put the idea of restraint into praxis. The slave hospital in this study is an exemplar of this kind of corporeal geographic containment.!!!!!!! Although the very earliest histories of slavery and medical history make no mention of enslaved women, they played a crucial role in the evolution of American medicine and must be acknowledged as scholars engage in the important work of tracing the origins of the intersections of race, gender, and medicine in early America. This study also serves as a counternarrative to socio-medical histories that do not question the veracity of hagiographic top-down histories about "great white medical men."!!! The Birth of American Gynecology," contextualizes earlyAmerican medicine with a particular focus on gynecology. Gynecology was notfully established as a formal branch of medicine until the 1870s. During its na-scent period, however, slavery and enslaved patients were vital to the work thatphysicians performed to cure female ailments. A major theme that is examinedis the confluence of racial ideologies about black people and antebellum-eramedicine. As professional women's medicine grew in the 1800s, its ascendancyand legitimacy allow historians to also push past notions of continuity betweenhow doctors treated all women in American society from its colonial begin-nings to the antebellum era.Chapter 2, "Black Women's Experiences in Slavery and Medicine," providesa historical examination of enslaved women's reproductive medical needs. Thelarge number of enslaved women who needed reproductive care was one ofthe most significant boons to the outgrowth of gynecology. The institutionof slavery allowed southern doctors to flourish professionally in what wouldlater be called gynecological surgery. Due to the grueling work performed, thedisproportionate number of sexual assaults enslaved women experienced, theunsanitary conditions of lying-in spaces, and inadequate diets lacking in vitalnutrients and minerals, bondwomen were vulnerable to a host of diseases andconditions related to reproduction. This chapter explores how black womennavigated their places in a rapidly growing medical field where white meneventually came to dominate a formerly all-female space for healing.!!!! They knew the black female body could serve as the medical exemplarfor all women's bodies because there was no real physical difference in howblack and white female bodies functioned. Yet they adhered to a racial etiquettethat dovetailed with medical and scientific ideologies that espoused black bio-logical difference. Further, these early gynecologists experienced genderedanxiety about their professional status and value as successful businessmen inan era when medical doctors were shedding their reputation as quacks and pillpushers.Chapter 4, "Irish Immigrant Women and American Gynecology," describesthe realities of poor Irish immigrant women's medical lives and demonstratesthat their physical and medical experiences in sites of healing were similar tothose of enslaved women. Through an examination of period newspapers,medical journal articles, physicians' notes, and hospital case records, I showhow similarly these patients were written about, treated, and even experi -mented on by doctors who racialized their foreign-born patients. In this sec-tion I evidence what philosopher Frantz Fanon stated about the burden of raceplaced on the victims of racism (I substitute Irish for black): "Not only mustthe Irish woman be Irish; she must also be Irish in relation to the white man andwoman."23 Poor Irish immigrant women patients were also affected by racistthinking about their bodies just as enslaved women were. These women weremarked because of their recent immigrant status and the racial tropes that de-fined them as aggressive, masculine, ugly, and physically strong women.The last chapter, "Historical Black Superbodies and the Medical Gaze,"delves into the ways that medical doctors conceived of blackness through abinary framework of sameness and difference. This chapter explains how theuse of various categories of analyses such as race, gender, medicine, and classwere fluid. Thus I employ a meaning-centered critical analysis rooted in thesocial, cultural, and political significance of the body. By doing so, I bring intosharper focus the lives of the enslaved and poor immigrant women. Further,the appropriated bodies of "black" women can also be understood through thedaily spaces where antebellum-era conceptions of race took shape, in hospitals,homes, and slave cabins.!!!!!! ." I argue thatstudies of American slavery must grapple with all facets of slave life, includ-ing medicine, because every person born under the institution lived through amedical experience. The study of medical experiences provides a foundationalframework for understanding the lives of the enslaved and, by extension, theoppressed. The white medical gaze on black women's lives and bodies, the shiftingscales on the continuum of racial sameness and difference, and white men'scontinued use of black women in gynecology were all grounded in ideas aboutblack subjugation and white control. The black women bore the brunt of theseideas and practices all while coping with doctors' expectations that they wouldcontinue as laboring medical superbodies, performing the duties fit for a ser -vant. The renewed interest in these women's medical lives provides greaterinsight into the history of slavery and medicine 's development, the value ofblack and immigrant women to gynecology, and the importance of reassessingthe place and value of historical actors in stories of origin!!!

Lincoln and the Decision for War : The Northern Response to Secession Russell McClintock

Year: 2018 Field: civil war Summary: This book, then, tells the story of America's last, irrevocable step into civil war. It is intended to be my own small contribution to a generationslong discussion of how the war happened. If along the way it also implies something about the American character, then so be it. What was the impact of antebellum political culture on Northerners' response to secession? First, as I have pointed out, it dictated that their response would be political— that is, that they would delegate to a few elected officials the ultimate decision of what course they would take, and that talk of resisting this decision, even among those who vehemently disagreed with it, was minimal. Thesis: . It grew narrower in that while the number of people involved in the decision appeared to be quite large through January and even into February, as congressmen, state legislators, editors, and untold thousands of others sought to influence events, power was gradually revealed to rest with just an elite few, and finally in the hands only of the president. Thus in the early chapters of this study, Lincoln is one of many individuals whom we follow through the labyrinth of Northern politics; at times, he even seems to drop out of the picture as he deliberately maintained a low profile far from the center of action in Washington. By the final chapters, though, his presence is dominating; by March, the story of the Northern decision for war was very much the story of Abraham Lincoln. Ultimately, compromise efforts failed because Northern Republicans were unwilling to countenance permanent protection of slavery in the Union. This suggests that certain limits exist in viewing the crisis only from the Democratic and conservative Republican perspectives. The rejection of compromise efforts is thus only truly comprehensible if we understand how mainstream Republicans viewed the crisis from the perspective of their larger political culture. RE Other: One sentence: I also found a more important problem with abandoning the traditional, ''elitist'' approach to politics than just difficulty telling a story: the much-maligned ''great white men'' in power really did lie at the center of events. Recent historians are right to point out that the rank and file had considerable influence over party leaders, that continuous negotiation between elites and masses impelled politics more than the top-down dictation that earlier generations of historians often assumed. Shared ideology, loyalty, traditions, and ethnic and religious background provided the foundation for unity and action within parties, giving ordinary voters reason to follow party leaders while restricting how much leaders could deviate from their constituents' expectations. The Northern response to secession cannot be understood without taking into account these considerations. Yet the older political history— the high-politics, narrative approach— remains necessary. Not just useful, but necessary." "There are two reasons historians must pay close attention to high politics. The first is that the electorate paid close attention to it, and acted in response to it. Party organizers gave structure to the negotiations and the shared values on which modern political historians have focused, and the words and actions of trusted party leaders swayed popular opinion profoundly. The second is that American democracy is not direct but representative; the influence of the people is often critical, but it is leaders, acting in their dual capacity as elected officials and party managers, who make final decisions. Thus, to comprehend the process by which Northerners decided to oppose disunion through force of arms— the decision most immediately responsible for the Civil War— one must examine the views and motives of political actors in their respective roles as principals, activists, and plebeians, and the relationship among actors at these various levels. To do that requires the integration of newer findings with traditional narrative; neither is complete without the other" lmfao

Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America.

Year: 2019 Field:ante Summary: But in her splendid new book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, Kabria Baumgartner reminds us that African American educational activism began long before the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the towns and cities of the Northeast, Baumgartner demonstrates that African American girls and women engaged in a multifaceted campaign for educational justice in the decades before the Civil War. Whether they were integrating female seminaries in Clinton, New York, founding schools for Black children in Brooklyn and New York City, or mobilizing entire communities in their quest for equitable education in Boston, Massachusetts, African American women and girls approached the fight for educational access with a deep sense of purpose. For this generation of African American women, Baumgartner argues, education and civil rights activism remained inextricably linked and crucial to their sense of themselves as Christian women dedicated to the Black freedom struggle. Thesis: Rather, Baumgartner reveals a network of African American parents, students, and teacher-activists who viewed education as an emancipatory act, one that was bound up with—rather than distinct from or a substitute for—other antislavery endeavors. Moreover, by moving Black women from the margins to the center of the story, Baumgartner has also provided an illuminating perspective on antebellum free Black community-building efforts, abolitionist activism, and larger national educational reform movements in the early nineteenth century. Small scale activism roted in acts of rebellion or portoest became comples dyn amic and organmized as history endured. Other: Christian beliefs but also laid the groundwork for a social role that would become "an important mode for African American women's public self-expression and civic engagement" (31) in subsequent decades. Despite these efforts, the court's ruling upheld Boston's school segregation practices and "set the precedent for the 'separate but equal' doctrine" (143). Activists persisted, and in 1855, Boston public schools were integrated, an important victory representing years of community activism. Three major tenets characterized African American women's edu-cational activism: eradicating prejudice and promoting Christian love,training African American women and men to be educator-activistswho would fight for civil rights, and cultivating moral and intellec-tual character in children and youth. Instilling moral and intellectualcharacter in children and youth meant abiding by a biblical version ofmorality that stressed care, kindness, and God's love Alongside their abolitionist allies, these women resisted their dehumanization and devaluation through the pursuit, acquisition, and use of knowledge, insisting all the while that they themselves were valuable members of the community" (43). One sentence: By the 1830s, as Part II of In Pursuit of Knowledge emphasizes, African American activists increasingly pursued equal school rights at public schools as a key means of advocating for civil rights.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Errand into the Wilderness, By PERRY MILLER.

Year: 1956 Field: clonail Summary: Those in Errand into the Wilderness,however, do have a central theme; it is the broadening out of the narrow,intense, intellectual Puritanism to what we may call religion and theologyin the English colonies from the seventeenth century through JonathanEdwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century. "The Marrow of PuritanDivinity" discusses, with the enthusiasm of first discovery, the covenant or"foederal" theology of the Puritans in a clearer fashion and in briefer com-pass than does The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. It willprove most useful to students first taking up this difficult subject. "FromEdwards to Emerson" sketches the course of Puritan thought for a centuryafter the Great Awakening until it converges with other streams of thoughtinto Transcendentalism, though the author leaves the reader wondering justhow it all will come out, given Mr. Miller's position. Other essays treatreligion in early Virginia, the question of whether there were democraticelements in the views of Thomas Hooker, "The Rhetoric of Sensation,""Nature and the National Ego," and "The End of the World" of thePuritans. Explores the mind of the New Englander Thesis: The prutian ideology was preloaded before they came here. They wanted to realize their ideas of fulling their duty to God and makijg a land of perfect practice. The mission itself was the goal.They were fulfiling the covenant Purtians started Americanization. Puritan ideas are fundamnetal aspects of the Smericam Mind Deep concern with New England morality in NE Puritan ideology was comples and influenced by things outside of theorlogy and was more flexible than thought; slow, not immobile Edwards first authntic calvinist in NE While we think in terms of capitalism for example they thought in terms of god Deeply concerned with presentism Great wasinevitable a logical perhaps not distinctly american It rreally was the taking away of the english religious mind over the am people Ideas were not concepts but emotions to edwards Other: Miller argues that the Bay Colony sought to execute "a flank attack" on the unfinished reformation in the Mother Country. The immediate mission was, of course, to establish a Wilderness Zion in accord with the Biblical model, but the ultimate design was to utilize this achievement as an in- strument for purging the English Church of its corruptions. Hence, the leaders of the Bay operated on the "unspoken assumption" that Jehovah "would bring back these temporary colonials to govern England." But alas, this secret dream was blasted by tol- erationist Independents under Cromwell. "Amid this shambles, the errand of New England collapsed." Thenceforth the Bay saints "were left alone with America." Being thus marooned and forgotten, the leaders of the second and third generations indulged in doleful lamentations, revealing therein much confusion as to what the errand into the wilderness was really all about. This mood of anxiety and uncertainty reached a grand climax in Cotton Mather's Magna e. Their real errand, as I read the record, was to establish a true Biblical pattern of church and state in the new world. And in this respect, the Bay Colony does not seem un- like the other New England communities. Plymouth, Hartford, and New Haven were all the outcome of a concern to establish true covenant communities according to t One sentence: His main purpose wasto demonstrate how, in grafting the covenant concept upon Cal-vinism, the Puritans had consciously or unconsciously modifiedclassical Calvinism. By means of the covenant they had discovereda way to rationalize God's relation to the world, to encourage manto take the initiative in his salvation, and to render predestinationmore palatable to the new age. In strongly stressing these tend-encies, Miller unintentionally opened the door to a rash of wish-ful thinking, and some of his enthusiastic admirers joyfully trum-peted the fantastic notion "that the Puritans were not and neverhad been Calvinists." Far from being Calvinists, the foundingfathers had been more nearly precursors of rationalistic Protes-tantism

North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860.ByLeon F. Litwack. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1961. 318 pp. Bibliographical essay and index. s6

Year: 1961 Field: AHNTEBELLUM Summary: This is a pioneer study of the American Negro in the ante-bellum North. The author discusses various evidences of North-ern discrimination-the refusal of the state governments to admitthe Negro to full citizenship, the separate but unequal educa-tional accommodations in the public schools, the segregation of theNegroes into "ghettos" in the cities, the economic persecution ofcolored laborers particularly by the Irish, and the segregated prac-tices of the churches in dealing with their Negro brethren. Theusually frustrated endeavors of Negro religious leaders and whiteabolitionists to better the condition of the Northern freedmen arealso discussed at length by the a Thesis: line, as Mr. Litwack states, has often beenused "to contrast southern racial inhumanity with northern benev-olence and liberality." That such a clear-cut contrast does notexist is proved by Professor Litwack's extensive research, for heshows by many examples that before the Civil War "discrimina-tion against the Negro and a firmly held belief in the superiorityof the white race were not restricted to one section but shared by an overwhelming majority of white Americans in both the Northand the South. North of Slavery makes it abundantly clear that the federal government, be-fore i86o, threw its weight against the NTegro's aspirations; that the judicial dis-aster of the Dred Scott decision, as one colored crusader declared, merely con-firmed "the already well known fact that under the Constitution and Governmentof the United States, the colored people are nothing and can be nothing but analien, disfranchised and degraded class." Northern state and local legal andextralegal discriminations, powerfully reinforced by public opinion and presump-tions of natural white superiority, were even more catastrophic, and consigned thefree people of color to a condition scarcely more enviable, and sometimes verymuch the contrary, than that of their fettered kinsmen in the slave sta For most Americans their racialproblem, which was synonymous with 'the Negro problem, was a localor Southern problem whidh would solve itself in time. Subsequentevents in the United States as well as in the world at large have causedthem to be more conscious of the N'egro problem as a national prob-lem with international implications an'd as la result they have modifiedtheir racial practices and have inaugurated a new policy in regardto 'the Negro. Nevertheless, they have not faced squarely the uncom-fortablee fact that the doctrine of white supremacy has been deeplyrooted in the American way of life and that before the Civil Warthis wafs ;as true of the North 'as of the South. Other: In the North, public conveyances and facilities either assigned Negroes to segregated sections or denied them their services alto- gether. Negroes were excluded from the franchise in the vast majority of northern states and were denied the right to sue in courts of justice or to act as jurors. Churches refused Negroes full communicant privileges and relegated them to separate par- ishes or to seats in the rear or balcony of the church buildings. Most northern politicians reflected the voices of their constituents when they steadfastly opposed all measures aimed at extending to freedmen the rights of citizenship. The prewar stand of Abraham Lincoln on these measures brings him closer in thought and word to the twentieth century Mississippian than to the twentieth cen- tury northern liberal. Lincoln opposed the Dred Scott decision because he believed that the important question of citizenship should be decided by the several states rather than by the Su- preme Court of the United States, not because the decision de- clared the Negro u!!]] Free northern Negroes were forbidden to migrate from state to state. Theywere excluded from the franchise in those states in which more than go per centof them lived. They were denied the right to sue or to serve as jurors, judges, orwitnesses in the courts. Common carriers, public facilities, and (with astonishinginflexibility) the church either excluded them or relegated them to Jim Crowsections. Schools closed their doors to them, and virtually every employment savethat of the menial was reserved to the white man. Even the common Negro daylaborer faced the fierce hostility of white workers fearful of competition.Belief in the Negro's inherent inferiority was all but universally embraced inthe pre-Civil War North, even among those most disposed to assist him in hisaspirations to social redemption. Everywhere the stereotype and the external sym-bols of his degradation were insisted upon. In the very potter's field of Cincinnati,Harriet Beecher Stowe's home town, whites were buried east and west andNegroes north and south.We have long needed a comprehensive, scholarly, and candid survey of theante bellum northern Negro. It is here at last, well written, overwhelmingly docu-mented, a splendid monograph. Footnotes are at the bottom of the page, wherethey belong, and there is a thorough bibliographical ess //The historian must look beyond porfits and losses, climate, and geography as adequate reasons for the liquidation of slavery in the north //freddom does not equal full citizenship //northern states limtied the civil rights of blackds //overpoliced balck pop the arrest of Negroes for minor offenses, the difficulty of their ob-taining counsel and witnesses on their behalf, and other disabilities.Statistics of racial crime, Litwack concludes, fail to tell a true story.For example, in states where a Negro could not testify againsta white man or appear as a witness, a felony (perhaps even a mur-der) committed by a white person might go unpunished and there-fore not become a statistic. What Litwack says about the Negro and the church has especialrelevance for social theories and general readers today. The inde-pendent Negro church, the author reminds us, was born out of thedissatisfaction of Negroes with the practices of discrimination andsegregation in white parishes. Furthermore, Professor Litwack sug-gests that the church "proved to be the most dynamic social institu-tion in the Negro community, affording its members an all too rareopportunity to assemble freely, vote for officers, and express them-selves spiritually, socially, and politically." (p. 1?! //function of white ] One sentence:WHITE SURPEMACY WAS FOUNDATIONALO IN THE NORTH AS WELL. Antebellum North was more explicit then recently with its racism 1. Why not use slaves in the north? It could have been very profitable //White supremacy still exsisted in white supremacy //2. Fed and the Negro. Fed choose to disenfran chise and curb aa CITIZENSHIP//neither as citizens or aliens or enforce laws 3. North hated integration and favored de facto //Even integrated schools were segregated 5. Shunned from job sof economic stature //there was a negro bouegoiuse but race superceded it \ //6. Separate churches see upper chaps 7. Improving thr condition of northern balcks became crucial to abolition because it stcuk at the roots of slavery 8. Northern balcks were not on the front of the minds of anyone as the civil war approached in the 1950s People picked up more on their plight but avoided social itnegration at all costs //whites excluded balcks and then gaslit them as stuoid and incapable 279 is all time!!!

PAUL BOYER and STEPHEN NISSENBAUM. Salem Pos-sessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1974.Pp. XXi, 231. $10.00

Year: 1974 Field: religion Summary: The purpose of the study scarcely could be simpler - to seek, in the wordsof the title, the social origins of witchcraft. The technique too is simple. Hereagain we have historians peering deeply into the life of a tiny, out-of-the-waycommunity. But here the problem of sample, so vexing elsewhere, seldomintrudes. Salem was, after all, the event as well as the place, and the questionthat disturbs other Massachusetts studies - is the particular town representa-tive of the colony? - is not immediately important Thesis: of them. Citing analogous "afflictiothey argue the whole business could havevival instead of a witchcraft epidemic unin the number and respectability of its victdiscover the causes, both proximate and cevents in 1692 by a detailed examination Salem village, producing in the process fiincongruously alternate with rather straian archetypal significance in the developming world. he authors, however, believe that their account of local factional strifeis "ultimately insufficient" as an explanation of the events of 1692 (p. 186).Rather, Salem village witchcraft really exposes the "social realities of late-seventeenth century western culture-a culture in which a subsistence,peasant-based economy was being subverted by mercantile capitalism" (p.178). The western inhabitants of the village ("back-country farmers")were at once frightened, frustrated, and also intimidated and tempted by"commercial capitalism and the social style that accompanied it" (p. 180),at least as represented by Salem town, and so they fought back on a politi-cal and psychic level while simultaneously purging their own guilt feelingsby labeling as witches some of the villagers affiliated with the town anda few genuine merchants in the town proper as well. Boyer and Nissenbaum dig deep into Salem's past. It is there that theyfind the roots of the witchcraft episode. They argue simply and clearly thatthe affair rested in Salem's own special history, that it emerged from a "con-vergence of a specific and unlikely combination of historical circumstances[in a] particular time and place" (p. 107). Part of these circumstances con-cerned Salem's identity, or better, its lack of one. Salem Village, where thewitchcraft episode occurred, was not politically independent but part ofSalem Town. The latter was wealthier and concerned with shipping and mer-chant activity, while Salem Village was quietly agricultural. Village residentsfared poorly in Town politics and before 1692 tried to win independent townstatus from the General Court, but to no avail. Their only success in findingsome measure of autonomy came with the erection of a separate church in1689, an event engineered only with considerable Worse, Salem Village was itself disfigured by internal disputes. The effortto create the separate church made bitter enemies of some Village residents.Moreover, this dispute was heightened by tense relations between two of theVillage's leading families, the Putnams and the Porters. Already antagonisticin the 1670s - the Putnams' economic standing declined while they wereincreasingly frozen out of Town politics, a sharp contrast to the gain inwealth and prestige generally experienced by the Porters - their inf \ e future as they were bitter about the past.These tensions fused in the witchcraft affair. Many alleged witches andtheir supporters were clearly linked with Salem Town through both econo-mics and residence, some of the most prominent living near the Ipswich Road,which ran toward the Town, while their accusers and supporters of the trialslived farther away to the north and west, "inside" the Village. Likewise,accused witches generally had opposed the separate Salem church and thesettlement there of Samuel Parris, while Parris's daughter and niece were thewitches' first victims and their first accusers. And finally, Boyer and Nissen-baum are able to connect many witches with the Porters, and accusers withthe Putnam Other: modernization accelerated withcraft claims One sentence: Notes Preface and intro: Normal people swept up in their social circumstance Thye didn't understand theor cocrmstance and lashed out agaisnt it by calling ti witchcraft 1, Relgious revival coincided with witch craft; religion was the light and witch craft was the dark but they were the same impulese 2. Village and town are separate the villagw church was a place to meet and resolve coflcit 4. This is a factional dispute that centered on cpailaism The village was farming while the city was mercantile Village had little power and automy but tasted independence; shut out from boston The eniemies from slaem town or those who disapproved of vilalge life were evil not just poltical enemies!!! Withcraft fervor allwoed for piolitcal oppurtunity that was more than relgious Publiv and private concerns were intertwined 8. Withccraft married factionalism People were blamed for the impurity of their communityes and labled as withced Slaem village lost the war against mercantile cappy Learn this: 'The social order was being profoundwhich had lured all too many into active complicity with it. We havechosen to construe this force as emergent capitalism ... Salem Villagecalled it witchcraft'!!

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power inColonial Virginia. By KATHLEEN M. BROWN.

Year: 1996 Field: colnial Summary: Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia. Thesis: he argument of the book is not easy to summarize. Presented in threesections-each of which contains three or four chapters-the work proposesthe centrality of gender in the following areas: the shaping of English identityand colonial enterprise through the early seventeenth century; the demarcationof racial boundaries, the establishment of slavery, and the forging of a politi-cal culture in mid- to late-seventeenth-century Virginia; and the creation ofmale and female gentry cultures in the mature Virginia society of theeighteenth century (to 1750). A useful introduction and a tantalizing afterwordidentify the main assumptions, findings, and implications of the book. Edmund Morgan portrayed the implicit bargain by which slavery and its attendant ideology became the ground for a relative peace between the various classes of white males contending for power in colonial Virginia. Kathleen Brown now adds gender to the grounds of white male, and above all of planter power in eighteenth-century Virginia. Her aim is two-fold and penetrating: she aims to show that gender was the door through which a species of racism entered colonial Virginia, and to develop fully the sense in which gender was in its own right a continuing ground of white male power in general, and of patriarchal gentry power in particular, in this peculiar corner of the British Empire. The central premise of this study is that the various, and occasionally competing, discourses on gender generated in several different arenas - medical science, law, literature, and community - were more pervasive, systematically articulated, and politically useful than those of race on the eve of English voyages to Ireland, Africa, and the Americas. Despite contradictions and ambiguity in medical and religious theories, gender remained a powerful way to refer to nature and thus to rescue certain questions from debate by placing them in the realm of forces beyond the control of human beings. Gender discourses could, therefore, be mobilized to suggest that relationships between different groups of people - African and English, for example - were simply following a hierarchical pattern established by divine plan. Naturalized concepts of gender and race disguised both the fact and the sites of the cultural production of slavery, thereby protecting the interests represented by those productions Taken further, Brown's argument is powerful in explaining the possible origins of the enduring link between gender and race in the southern mind, a link seen so clearly, for example, in the recent work of Stephanie McCurry on antebellum South Carolina. Taken further still, Brown leads me to wonder whether by 1750 southern males thought of themselves as the last real men on the model of a past patriarchal age, desperately asserting their colonial manhood as the last real manhood amid a rising tide of feminized European sensibility and inchoate, colonized races. Once the Revolution removed the restraints of such English fashions as sensibility and humanitarianism, this violently assertive, defensive, atavistic colonial masculinity came to the fore in Virginia, and even more so in antebellum South Carolina, determined never again to fall victim to the slavery of modern sensibilities. Gender, race, and history had combined to make southern manhood a bizarre but enduring artifact. Other: One sentence:This study investigates how gender and race became intertwined components of the social order in colonial Virginia. It focuses on two related issues: the role of gender in the creation of racial slavery and the intensification of patriarchal forms in gentry families, colonial culture, and the legal apparatus of the state. It not only examines the uses of gender for constructing racial categories and legitimating political authority but takes stock of the transformation in gender relations that accompanied the rise of slavery and political stability in Virginia. Discourses of gender, the division of labor by sex, and the regulation of white women's sexuality were integral to the process of defining race and contributed significantly to the establishment of slavery in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Racial slavery, in turn, breathed new life into patriarchal social relations. By the mid-eighteenth century, the social categories of gender and race had become mutually implicated in supporting the claims of a wealthy slaveholding planter class to social and political authority. Sixteenthand seventeenth-century contrasts between good women, exemplified by the English ideal of the "good wife," and unsupervised wantons, known to promoters of the Virginia colony as "nasty wenches," had gradually given way to a racial opposition in which women of English descent embodied the privileges and virtues of womanhood while women of African descent shouldered the burden of its inherent evil, sexual lust. Originally used to differentiate between married women of England's middling order and poor English women suspected of sexual misdemeanors, "good wives" and "nasty wenches" assumed new meanings during the course of the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, many Anglo-Virginian women, especially those of the planter class, aspired to the prerogative of plantation mistresses rather than the responsibilities of good wives. Referring almost exclusively to enslaved women of African descent, "wenches," meanwhile, had been irrevocably racialized, reflecting the appropriation and transformation of English gender discourses in the creation of Virginia's slave society. The differences between men and women— as reflected by their work, clothing, and manners— occasionally blurred dangerously, moreover, threatening to confuse not only the divinely inspired natural order but the entire human construction of society and government that rested upon it. Such fundamentally ambiguous categories required diligent reinforcement and provoked monarchs, advice book authors, and ordinary people to insist that female domesticity and male propertyownership were the natural basis for an orderly and civilized society.<ß-! Better one sentence: Gender distinctions and the need to differentiant laid the gorundwork for doing it racially in ncolonial america

STEPHANIE E. JONES -ROGERS . They Were Her Property: WhiteWomen as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xx, 296. Cloth $30.0

Year: 2019 Field: Summary: Thesis: tephanie E. Jones-Rogers's They Were Her Prop-erty: White Women as Slave Owners in the AmericanSouth emerges from this important recent historiogra-phy. As Jones-Rogers explains, she intends to look atwhite women's "fundamental relationship to slavery asa relation of property . . . economic at its foundation" inorder to "uncover hitherto hidden relationships amonggender, slavery, and capitalism." Indeed, she argues,participation in the slave system by these "mistresses ofthe market" made them essential to "the nation's eco-nomic growth and to American capitalism" (xii-xiv). scholars, Jones-Rogers argues, have too easilyaccepted that limits of coverture—the legal principlethat marriage subsumed a woman's legal identitywithin that of her husband—removed married womenfrom direct ownership and management of slaves.Slave ownership was not just the province of widowsand spinsters, she insists; wives also owned slaves intheir own right. Female slave owners were thus at thecenter, not just the margins, of the peculiar institution.Jones-Rogers offers numerous examples of marriedwomen who through separate estates, use of equitycourts, or raw self-assertion exerted powerful controlover human property they claimed as their own. Other: mistresses' engagement with thecommerce of slavery. White women, she demonstrates,were not shielded from the sordid details of the pur-chase and sale of slaves, aspects of the slave institutionoften "considered ill-suited to white ladies" (xii). As"astute, sophisticated, and calculating slave-market con-sumers," they surveyed slave pens for likely acquisi-tions, participated in public slave auctions, and evenwelcomed slave traders to do business in their ownhomes (134). "White women were ubiquitous in slave-market dealings" (149). Making creative use of news-paper advertisements, Jones-Rogers demonstrates howmistresses were also active agents in establishing mar-kets for wet nurses, commodifying both bodies and thebreast milk that was their product and foregoing anyhuman sympathy for enslaved women who were sepa-rated from their children through this trade. One sentence:ones-Rogers is far from the first scholar of southernwomen's history to note the limits of coverture, but itremains difficult to ascertain the representativeness ofher compelling examples or their place within a broaderpattern of southern white women's evolving legal statusover the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-ries. Many men, for example, vigorously and success-fully opposed marriage settlements that would removetheir wives' slave property from their absolute control.In her emphasis on the frequency of women's indepen-dent control of slave property—and thus by implicationon their moral as well as economic responsibility forslavery—Jones-Rogers has also created a portrait of fe-male autonomy and empowerment that departs dramati-cally from what we have long taken to be the nature ofwhite gender roles in this hierarchical and patriarchal so-ciety. "By definition and in fact," she writes, "the mis-tress was the master's equivalent" (xv); there is reason,she believes, to "challenge current assumptions aboutthe patriarchal order of nineteenth-century households"(204). In her effort to underscore white women's com-plicity and culpability in slavery and to enhance theiragency in the administration of the system of humanbondage, has she perhaps liberated them too much? When parents gave their daughters enslaved people, those daughters assumeda new identity: they became slave owners. Over the course of their lives, theylearned valuable lessons about the importance of property and how to be effectiveslave owners. They also learned how to determine when, if, and in what ways toallow other people to interfere with any aspect of their wealth in slaves. 1. As this incident suggests, white women, especially mothers, were instrumen-tal in these kinds of market transactions. They routinely sought out and procuredenslaved wet nurses to suckle their children, creating a demand for the intimate , abor that such nurses performed in southern homes. They were crucial to thefurther commodification of enslaved women's reproductive bodies, through theappropriation of their breast milk and the nutritive and maternal care they pro-vided to white children 1. Butwhite women's invisibility within southern slave markets has little to do withtheir avoidance of or aversion to the commerce that took place there. In fact,white women were ubiquitous in slave-market dealings. Regardless of how theymight have felt about the system, their slave-market activities brought themwealth that they would not have accumulated otherwise. Most did not verbalizetheir innermost feelings about the morality and justness of slavery in the recordsthey left behind. Yet every time a white woman chose to buy and sell slaves,provide a slave trader with goods or services, or prostitute the bodies of theenslaved females she owned, she contradicted the sentimental or maternal view f white women's relationships with slaves and the institution as a whole. Theirdecisions to buy and sell enslaved people helped sustain the institution of slav-ery and the domestic slave trade, severed relationships between enslaved familymembers, and broke emotional bonds that would never be mended. The slave-owning women who engaged in slave-market activities were far more thanbegrudgingly complicit bystanders on the margins of the peculiar institution.They had an immense economic stake in the continued enslavement of AfricanAmericans, and they struggled to find ways to preserve the system when theCivil War threatened to destroy the institution of slavery and their wealth along

Vincent Brown, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. viii + 320 pp. (Cloth US$35.0

Year: 2020 Field: slavery Summary: In April 1760, enslaved people in St. Mary's parish, Jamaica rose up in insurrectionunder the leadership of Tacky, a man from the Gold Coast captured and forced into the world ofAtlantic slavery years earlier. Within weeks, Jamaica's White government suppressed therebellion and exacted brutal punishments on its leaders. By the end of May, a rebellion began inanother parish, signifying a period of prolonged insurrection that would forever change thepolitical landscape of slavery on the island and beyond This volume, in which Vincent Brown both compellingly narrates a Jamaican slave revolt and offers scholars a bracing new analytical frame for all slave revolts, is a major achievement. Brown makes a strong case that Tacky's Revolt, which began in April 1760 and lasted eighteen months, was "only one conflict within a larger war" against the Jamaican regime (p. 163). Moreover, Brown invites historians to analyze this and other slave insurrections as military history. Tacky's Revolt, he argues, was a product of the West African wars that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, and of the daily warfare of slavery that made Jamaica "a militarized society from top to bottom" (p. 44). Furthermore, the revolt took place so thoroughly in the context of the Seven Years' War that he classifies it as "one of the hardest-fought battles of that titanic global conflict" (p. 7). Thesis: Biggeest ideas is to see revolts as wars!! Jamaica's internal and external wars took their shape not only from the economic and military imperatives of the British Empire but also from West Africa's diasporic warfare. Brown effectively argues the revolt of 1760 was part of a much larger war that encompassed political and military conflict in western African nations, an ongoing race war between enslaved Black peoples and white slaveholders, internal divisions among the enslaved populations of the Caribbean, and imperial struggles between European nations. Placing the revolt in this trans-Atlantic setting underscores the complexities of slave revolt and emphasizes the interconnections between war, empire, and slavery. It also illuminates the political intentions and goals of those who rebelled. At the center of Brown's narrative are several insurrection leaders identified asCoromantee, an identity formed by people who shared the common experiences of resistingenslavement on the Gold Coast, fighting in slave wars, and carrying out regimented labor. On theone hand, Jamaican slaveholders sought Coromantees because of their purported attributes ofstrength, endurance, intelligence, and tenacity. At the same, plantation owners feared that these same characteristics made Coromantees formidable figures prone to rebellion. By the mid-1700s,Jamaica's enslaved population included a large percentage of Coromantees. Brown argues thatunderstanding the Coromantee identity of many of the rebels helps us interpret the leadership ofthe revolt, which Brown calls the Coromantee War, as well as the political goals of the enslaved.Rebel leaders such as Tacky, Apongo (also known as Wager), and Simon all drew from theirlikely experiences fighting on the Gold Coast of Africa and appear to have focused ongeographic targets and political goals that were informed by their experiences resisting andsurviving their prior conditions while enslaved. Brown concludes that the Coromantee rebelssought to achieve lasting freedom and the creation of autonomous political entities. While Whiteplanters and officials understood localized revolts as disparate uprisings contingent uponimmediate impulses and demands of the enslaved, the Coromantees saw themselves as engagedin a longer slave war that began on the Gold Coast and would continue until they had achievedtheir goals Other: y framing slave rebellion as a "war story", Brownbrings Africa, Europe, and the Americas into a wider narrative aboutspace, race, and class warfare. When viewed properly as "war", slaverevolts altered the economic, political, and social trajectories ofEuropean empires. African people and Europeans were moulded bytheir previous experiences in battle. Both groups came into conflict asthey tried to carve out a space in the social, political, and geographicallandscapes of the Americas. White people's fears of slave rebellionhelped solidify racial battle lines for generations, as people of Africandescent attempted to carve out spaces of meaning and the wealthy classused their influence and privilege to maintain their powerful positionsat the top. Furthermore, slave revolt was not simply black peopleopposing slavery. This was an intense, life or death fight for a true lifeof dignity and belonging. Indeed, because of the heritage of slavery andracism, this grand struggle for belonging by people of colour continuesto this day!!! One sentence:, Vincent Brown asserts that slave revolts were "viewedas war" (5). Furthermore, he argues that Tacky's revolt in Jamaica wassimultaneously part of four conflicts. These included "an extension ofAfrican wars" that continued in the colonies after the forced migrationof enslaved people; "a race war" as white and black people came intoconflict on plantations; an internal conflict among black Jamaicans; and"one of the hardest-fought battles" of the Seven Years' War (7).Generally, Brown's purpose is to bring Africa into focus as an integralpart in the development of European Atlantic empires, and to show theway wars for enslavement stretched throughout the Atlantic region tomorph into race war on plantations and wars for imperial dominance.This Atlantic history of war brings the interconnectedness of Africa, thecolonial Americas, and Europe into sharper focus. More specifically,Brown points to Tacky's rebellion, and the larger Coromantee War, inJamaica as a major military event of the Seven Years' War. In sixchapters, Brown convincingly accomplishes his goals.!!!

Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 235. Cloth $19.95

Year: 2006 Field: am rev Summary: Hard on its heels comes this book, an extended riff on one element of the earlier opus: the neglected role of African Amer- icans in the nation's founding. Originally presented as three lectures at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the text is around 30,000 words, published in a compact format that sits snugly in the palm of one's hand. The book may be small, but it packs plenty of pun Thesis: Gary Nash argues that prominent white public figures lacked the political courage needed to challenge contemporary views on race. Instead, the founding fathers chose to utilize intellectual and pseudo-scientific justifications to negate the widely touted belief that "all men are created equal Nash is not content to inject a few black characters into the patriotic theater of the revolution by shining the spotlight on actors like Peter Salem and Lemuel Haynes. He insists we understand just how extraordi- nary was the African American response. White revo- lutionaries might speak of their "leap into the dark," Nash writes, but for African Americans that leap was much bolder, "so outlandish in its presumption that the distant shore of freedom could be reached we can only marvel... that men and women of dark skin even tried" (p. 7). Spurning the defensiveness of most accounts of the black presence in the revolution, Nash reiterates that African Americans overwhelmingly identified the British forces as the conduit to freedom, and were right to do so, given the failure of the founders to create a nation free of the abomination of sla hy. Nash is determined to show that it was moral culpability, cowardice, and impoverished leadership that allowed slavery to be entrenched in the new republic, a failure of nerve at the top that meant that the brave new nation would never be true to its founding ideology. The dismayed Marquis de Lafayette understood this when he wrote to George Washington in 1786: "I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived thereby I was founding a land of slavery" (p. 103). Nash rejects the argument that it would have been impossible to abolish slavery at that time as one that "reeks of the dangerous, indeed odious, concept of historical inevi- tability" (p. 70) invariably advanced by those eager to excuse mistakes. Nash is having none of it. The aboli- tion of slavery was achievable, he argues, since the re- ality was that only South Carolina and Georgia were intractable on that matter. Moreover such a move could have been integrativerather than divisive. Eliminating a rankling sore in the body politic was a way for an un- easy amalgam of factional regions to be forged into a genuinely national society. A nation where people's be- havior accords with their ideology is surely stronger than one where these two are acutely at odds, he rea- sons In this compact and supremely engaging collection of three essays, Gary Nash explores the experience of African Americans during the Revolutionary era and the debate surrounding their status in the new nation. The book's subtitie refers to the "historical amnesia" which blighted scholarship for almost two centuries: de spite constituting a fifth of the population during the War of Independence, early historians of the period ignored the involvement of African Americans to such an extent "it would appear that the British and the Americans fought for seven years as if half a million African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent" (4). The Forgotten Fifth is a corrective to this tradition; through these essays, Nash aims to recenter aa i9n revilutinj narrative !! Other: Nash first recalls how people of African descent embraced the "spirit of 1776." He notes how enslaved Africans and African Americans obtained their freedom through direct participation in the revolution because the American colonists' struggle for liberty resonated with most African-descended people. If enslaved workers fought for "freedom," the free blacks fought to protect what they now believed to be their homeland. Nash does an outstanding job of recounting the patriotism of Barzillai Lew, Peter Salem, and Paul Cuffe; however, his detailed analysis of the legacy of black Philadelphian James Forten is especially revealing. F . While some supported the patriot cause by serving in the Continental Army, others seized the opportunities presented by the conflict to escape their bondage One sentence: . In describing the "greatest slave rebellion in North American history," Nash reveals the bravery and staggering commitment of African Americans to the cause of freedom and independence (23). In the second essay, Nash addresses the question of slavery's preservation in the new nation and contends that abolition would have been possible had America's leaders been willing to expend the necessary political capital. Nash convincingly argues that abolition would not have weakened the union, and that the states in the Lower South were in no position to survive independently if the institution had been outlawed. In an argument pre viously oudined in Race and Revolution, Nash lays much of the blame for slavery's preservation at the feet of northerners who were unwilling to see the issue as anational, rather than a sectional, problem. The . The final essay examines the changing status of free African Americans in the early republic and the emergence of a racially based conception of citizenship that excluded people of colour from the national polity. The Forgotten Fifth is an informative, elegant and accessible study of African Americans in the late eighteenth century, and their centraa;oioo to the politcal and ideolofgical development of the nation . Nash's argument that black Americans' quest for freedom during the Revolution "marked the first mass slave rebellion in American history" is striking, as is his judgment that black people "had to fight for the right to fight" (pp. 1, 10). Nash also focuses on how the war's end led to diverse outcomes, including re enslavement, for the formerly enslaved. But other African Americans seized the opportunity to lead their new communities. In Part 2, Nash asks, "Could Slavery Have Been Abolished?" The sad story is that white leaders' abolition efforts failed because of their ambivalence about black Americans and because racism grew more virulent as Revolutionary egalitarianism diminished. Nash correctly describes the "immediate post-revolutionary period" as "an opportune time for abolishing slavery" (p. 71). "Cultural environmentalism" was another basis for egalitarianism, Nash argues (p. 71). Many post-Revolutionary Americans blamed the low status of black people on lack of nurture rather than on innate weakness. Intriguing yet not completely convincing is Nash's expectation that sales of western lands could [would] have financed compensated emancipation "of every adult slave in the country" (p. 74). Tellingly, what Nash terms "the ocean of white prejudice against black navigate (p. 90). There are errors in Nash's argu Carolina "insisted that slavery b United States in 1790 (p. 72). In thereby enabling Congress to pa that Virginians freed "ten thou end of the century," and he igno that "one out of every eight blac is that only one of every eighte Professor Nash's third chapter most convincing. States cou government could. But it did progress increased dramaticall contrasts black Philadelphian Ja Coxe, a white Philadelphian w Still, three thousand black men cast their lot with America, not Nash's closing statement in this African American future: "[Afr a nation within a nation,!!!!

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. By Orlando Patterson (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, I982) 5II pp. $

Year: 1982 Field: slavery Summary: Orlando Patterson certainly throws down the gauntlet. "All human relation- ships are structured and defined by the relative power of the interacting per- sons," he asserts in the very first sentence of his introduction. "Slavery is one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerless- ness from the viewpoint of the slave. . . . slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. " The rest of the book is a marvelously detailed and cogently argued elaboration of that theme, moving through a consideration of the internal relations of slavery and of slavery as an institutional process to a conclusion that, with equal original- ity, adds the concept that slavery is analogous to what biologists term "symbi- otic parasitism. " Thesis: The core of the books concerns the basic social facts of slavery: how people have beocme slaves. Their condition (natally alientaed, culturally dead, without honor), and treatment while they were slaves; and how people ceased to be slabvesd through various forms of manumission (symboliv rebirht) slaveyr is interprtated as a relation of domination rathe rthan as a category of legal thought. A chapter oin the unench as thye ultimate slave is insightful. Other: Power played an essential role in the relationship between a slave and master, and violence was often deemed a necessary component of slavery. A slave was seen to have no worth. They had no name of their own and no honor. Instead, their worth and honor was transferred to the master and gave him an elevated social status among his peers.[15] Violence within the relationship was considered essential because of the low motivation of the enslaved people, and it was also a factor in creating social death and exercising power over the slaves. Whipping was not only a method of punishment but also a consciously chosen symbolic device to remind slaves of their status.[16] This physical violence had other psychological effects as well, gradually creating an attitude of self-blame and an acknowledgement of the complete control that a master had. Interviews with former American slaves included statements such as "slaves get the masters they deserve" and "I was so bad I needed the whipping", demonstrating the justification that slaves had no right to expect kindness or compassion because of their status in society and the devastating mental effects from social death.[17] One sentence: Intro: Three types of power relations all functionaing potenatilly as domiantion 1. Viloence, 2. Physoclical 3. Cultural Intro: The Consitutent Elements of Slavery Slavey is not a subsitutie for death but often a alertnative to a voilent one. It functions on the idea of social alientation or the master turning their slave top a social non-person Alientated from their brith rightrs; kin and social rights; natal aleintation The slave is someone profundlyt and havbitually dishonored Honor and power are loinked Slavery is the permanent, violent domination of nattaly alientaed and generally dishonored persons Part 1: The internla relations of sdlavery Doesn't believe proerty is nesseacry for slavery - Social authoirity is the goal of the master - Honor of the master is enhanced by the degradation of the slave - Slave holding culture is by dejfntion honorific - Slavery required an oppurnity for freedom for the slave to coninte living II Slavery as a instiutional process - shows how slavery has worked gloablly in buying and selling and how is prior observations are baked into scoeity III the dialectics of slavery - Keep slaves away from the levers o0f power by oisolating them and degrading that which is powerful - Human patrisitm is the way slavery works;./; master a parasiote on a host - Freedom can not be understood without slavery; as it is the escape from the enslaved psotion that prodcues the free.

Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. By Emily Conroy Krutz.

Year: 2015 Field: Religion Summary: Conroy-Krutz's Christian Imperialism: Converting the world in the early American republic is one of them, focusing on the first three decades of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). American Christian Foreign Policy and Relations through missionaioiues and the gov. It isan account of American engagement in the world in the years before theU.S.-Mexican War. By the 1840s, American foreign missionaries had beenlaboring around the world for nearly three decades. In that time, they hadworked hard to bring the whole world, and what they viewed as the needsof all of its people, to the attention of American Christians. Thesis: American evan- gelicals had a dual identity: they were both evangelical Christians who saw themselves as transnational figures taking part in a global struggle for God's kingdom and Americans whose national pride called them to partner with Great Britain in the conversion of the world The centerpiece of Conroy-Krutz's argument is that American Christian missionaries acted as imperialists because they intended that their global evangelizing would also further the United States' political expansion. It is not necessary for the validity of her argument, she states, to demonstrate that the United States was at that time an empire or that the missionaries in fact acted as political agents because Christian imperialism was "a vision" for the missionaries, not "a reality" (p. 10). She infers an imperialistic mindset from the evangelicals' belief in "their own cultural superiority and their right to alter foreign cultures" to align with the Anglo-American civilization model (p. 13). Further proof of an imperialist bent comes from the fact that American evangelicals sought Anglo-American governance protection to work within territories controlled by British imperial power (p. 8). Conroy-Krutz informs the reader that she uses the term "imperial" vis-à-vis the United States as an analytical tool to evaluate unequal power dynamics between proselytizing Americans and proselytized heathens (p. 10). It is essential to Conroy-Krutz's argument that she demonstrate a widespread American imperialistic mindset. She concludes from her research that the U. S. government, ABCFM missionaries, and the American public at large held a commonality of belief about the role of the young republic (p. 8). She keeps her focus squarely on the ways Americans viewed the rest of the world as she examines different mission models and their relationships to British and American imperialism (p. 16). Other: . Conroy-Krutz contends that the ABCFM envisioned a Christian empire based on cooperation with western colonial governments. For the ABCFM, God's providence meant that the expanding British Empire was to be used as a means of bringing Christianity and civilization to a world they considered heathen. Conroy-Krutz supplements Demos by examining the other side—what the American missionaries did abroad. It argues that although believing in human equality, American missionaries reinforced the existing inequality by harboring "hierarchies of heathens" (19) and prioritizing those nations that ranked at the top. They were therefore imperialists in essence. However, their Christian imperialism was different from what we may call physical imperialism, with which they failed to exist in harmony. The crisis of Indian removal resulted in a sharp missionary critique of this style of American imperialism hey often phrased their definition of these categories in negative terms:civilization was the opposite of what savage and barbarous communitieswere like.Whereas savages hunted to provide themselves with food and sus-tenance, civilized men farmed and lived in settled communities; whereassavages wandered about in near nakedness, civilized people wore properclothing. Sexual modesty was similarly an important definition of civiliza- One sentence: The link between the governement and relgion and how a sense of imperalist culrtral superiortiy propelled the US to evangelize across the world. White Paternalist imeporioalism.

HARRY L. WATSON. Liberty and Power: The Politics ofJacksonian America. (American Century Series.) Paper-back edition. New York: Noonday. 1990. Pp. xii, 275.$9.95

Year: 1990 Field: NEW NATION JACKSON AMERI Summary: history. For while the theory of reto which Andrew Jackson was aligned places liberty and powwith one another, in practice they became wed in the politiThe author begins with the premise that the political party slished in 1828 and lasting until 1856 was primarily characteactions of, and reactions to, Jackson's presidency. Rather thoffering a chronological review, Watson adopts a subject-orieto analyzing events and personalities. The book covers the tosonian democracy in a wholistic manner, avoiding the narrostraight biograohy Thesis: atson argues instead that a significant and"profound transformation in politics" swept across the American landscapeafterthe Warof 1812 (pp. 4-5). This transformation involved an intensificationof public involvement in politics and the emergence of enduring politicalparties, which "carried on a serious policy debate about the future of theRepublic and the nature of its society and economy" (p. 5). Watson considersJackson himself to be a "a central figure" in this democratization of politics (p.9) Watson labels it "the Market Revolution," in which "millions of economicactors ... began to live their lives according to the shifting signals of prices,hoping always to maximize profit in an economy based on buying and selling"(p. 28). But Watson perceptively notes that the ascendancy of the marketrevolution was incomplete. Significant numbers of Americans remainedoutside or resistant to market forces; even those enmeshed in the throes ofchange found the market revolution a mixed blessing, as it made life increasinglycomplicated and unsettled existing material and status relationships. Inevitably,the market revolution generated real issues that pushed their way into the newpolitical system.In explaining the substance of Jacksonian politics, Watson draws heavilyupon the theme of republicanism. The Jacksonian ideal was a society ofindependent producers and small farmers, a vision, Watson reminds us, thatstill approximated reality in much of the country. Democrats, therefore,registered their unequivocal hostility to government policies that assisted themarket revolution at the expense of the independence, virtue, and equality ofthe people. Jackson won his "greatest support" in areas where the "small-producers economy remained strongest" (p. 148). Whigs, however, viewedthemselves as the party of prosperity, and of evangelical and familial valuesassociated with economic progress, such as temperance. Whig ideology wasalso rooted in social reality, and "Whigs had a greater advantage amongmarket-directed or urban-oriented voters" (p. 236 he convincinglydemonstrates that Jacksonian politics involved dramatic clashes over genuineand substantial issues According to Watson, "liberty and powerwere indeed at issue" in the crucial presidentialelection of 1828 and "PresidentJackson took office asthe friend to liberty and the foe of unwarrantedpower" (pp. 93, 95). There is a certain novelty andsubtlety, too, in this reading of an election that manycontemporaries and later historians alike regarded asone of the dirtiest, most issueless, and least principledin American history. Subtlety may enter into Watson'schoice of the modifier "unwarranted" as his perhapsindirect way of suggesting that a man so dedicated toincreasing his own power as was Jackson felt that alike accrual of power by his many critics was unjusti-fied. Other: ). If Dem-ocrats rejected people of color because theychampioned the rights of whites, Whigs it seems were"more willing than Democrats to accord partial rightsto blacks and Indians" because of Whig "acceptanceof human inequality" (pp. 215, 246). There may be aconsistency of sorts in such appraisals but it is of thekind that induces wonder about hobgoblins Titile is a a token rather of his belief that theconflict between liberty and power discerned by JohnTrenchard and Thomas Gordon in eighteenth-cen-tury England was also at the center of Americanpolitics during the second quarter of the nineteenthcentury. According to Watson, "liberty and powerwere indeed at issue" in the crucial presidentialelection of 1828 and "PresidentJackson took office asthe friend to liberty and the foe of unwarrantedpower" (pp. 93, 95). There is a certain novelty andsubtlety, too, in this reading of an election that manycontemporaries and later historians alike regarded asone of the dirtiest, most issueless, and least principledin American history. Subtlety may enter into Watson'schoice of the modifier "unwarranted" as his perhapsindirect way of suggesting that a man so dedicated toincreasing his own power as was Jackson felt that alike accrual of power by his many critics was unjusti-fied. Although he clearly has much greater admira-tion and sympathy forJackson and his party than fortheir adversaries, Watson does not blink from report-ing the Jacksonians' deficiencies, demonstrating anexemplary fairmindedness and integrity. The prob-lem is that his readings of much of the evidence areunpersuasive, he often seems oblivious to outragesperpetrated by the politicians he favors, and he treatsone individual's comments as representative of thethinking of a group. In rightly rejecting the view that the public rhetoric of realistic major party politiciansis invariably claptrap, Watson often takes the mouth-ings of office-seekers at close to face value, notwith-standing the absence in their careers of any sugges-tion that they lived up to or acted on the loftyprinciples they proclaimed to the electorate.Portraying materialistic, proslavery Democraticleaders active in land and financial speculation as aspecies of libertarian democratic socialists dedicatedto an egalitarian commonwealth, as Watson does, isimaginative but not persuasively so. Appraising partyleaders cheerfully tolerant of, where they did notpractice, corruption as fervent devotees of the "vir-tue" that an ingenious modern school of historicalthought assures us was believed necessary for a re-public, is puzzling, as is the suggestion that theJacksonians' hostility toward blacks and Native Amer-icans was a "logical" byproduct of their public "insis-tence on white male equality" (pp. 242-43). If Dem-ocrats rejected people of color because theychampioned the rights of whites, Whigs it seems were"more willing than Democrats to accord partial rightsto blacks and Indians" because of Whig "acceptanceof human inequality" (pp. 215, 246). There may be aconsistency of sorts in such appraisals but it is of thekind that induces wonder about hobgoblins imilarly, he devotes considerable attention to the eaof the Market Revolution and satsifactorily demonstratfrequently in tension with the traditional claims of Economic growth and development, first evident in thetion revolution," were seen by some as a threat to liberendorsement of power, both individual and governmenIn the author's view, concerns over corruption flowetransformations that were occurring on the American chapters 3 and 4 he elevates the corruption theme to ondeadly sins of political theology. Andrew Jackson railedor imagined corruption and persons fearful of the eroslicanism listened and responded Perhaps it is an unintended irony, but the author devoattention to religion. Nowhere is this more apparent th6, "National Parties and Local Politics," where he offers a concisediscussion of the impact of evangelical religion upon political develop-ments. Watson seems to work both sides of the ethnocultural street,however, for at other points in the chapter he minimizes religions nfluence. In any event, one wishes that in the discussion of pdevelopment the author had broadened his geographical horizafter all, Rochester and New York City do not a nation make.In his analysis of the various presidential contests, Watson together several skeins. In the 1824 election, for example, all of contenders embraced republican principles, but Henry Clay sought to encourage the Market Revolution. By the time of the nnational campaign, the questions of liberty and power, as well asruption, loomed large as the voters chose the friend of liberty, AnJackson. 2 this somewhat autocratic president who had already com-menced his struggles against the national bank, high tariffs, and inter-nal improvements capitalized upon the theme of republicanism andpower. Four years later Martin Van Buren, the quintessential partyorganizer, emphasized the centrality of political parties as he advocatedthe protection of republicanism. The incipient Whigs were not im-pressed but neither were they victorious. Yet by the 1840 campaignthe Whigs relentlessly portrayed themselves as the successors of theRevolutionary generation. Professor Watson perceives more ideolog-ical conflict in that rollicking canvass than many scholars have beenable to discern. na thoughtful concluding chapter, the author summarizes muchof his interpretation. He offers a cogent reminder when he observesthat both Whigs and Democrats drew upon the republican traditionsand worried about the balance between liberty and power. "But theydiverged profoundly," he notes, "over the specific powers they fearedand the liberties they sought to protect" (p. 237). Elsewhere in thischapter Watson approvingly notes the Democratic party's commitmentto the expansion of the voting franchise and the number of electiveoffices, as well as other "reforms." But he then asks the reader toaccept the Democrats' racism and support of slavery as the "logicalaspects" of their party ideology. This cannot easily be done, however,if one considers that Whigs and Democrats alike shared an exclusivefocus upon free whites. When the author asserts that Whigs weremore willing than Democrats to extend partial rights to blacks andeven that southern Whigs occasionally supported voting rights forfree blacks, he claims too much. After all, this is the same party, asWatson rightly observes, that had a remarkable lack of enthusiasmfor widening the franchise.Despite some lingering questions, I have no hesitation in recom-mending Watson's book as a stimulating and provocative yet reason-able and, for the most part, convincing synthesis. I intend to add itto my list of required books for the antebellum period. One sentence: Intro: Alexis was wrong in dissmissing Jacksonian Americas political parties. Though the dispute between "Aristocratic and ddemocratic passions" was real enough, jacksonian polticians also carried on a aserious policy enough, jack politicians also carried on a serious policy debate abou the future of thr repubplic and the natur od its scoeity and econokmy Intesified public involveemnt in poltics and the formation of enduring poltical parties were the important consequences of the jax era **it is clear that the social and economic change of the new age put strains on the older political framework that it could nto accommodate Jackson bridged the gap between the republican ideals of the foudners and an egaliatrian ideology (for white fellas Turst the majority to prevent moral decay à jax Jax believed that equality deomcracy and party discipline were all bound together Never truly democratic; the new political institution led to party elitism Jacsonian democarcy and the politcal party system it insipired grew up in this atmoshpere of social and econmic confrontation 1. The mrkt rev intensified capitlism it did not create it - Increased productivity and proftis for fewer - The panic of 1819 was a painful blow but it seemed to reinforce the lesson that the problems of a free soceity were ultimatly polical and 2. Liberty was th goal of government in america, and the repubs wanted virtuious citizens who put aside private intrests for the greater good - Poltics are good or evil 3. Repubs think liberty and power are separate, but adams thought that liberty is power, I think Jackson does too - Jacson was the friend of liberyty an foe of power; he leverages this 4. Saw himself as preserving am vlaues tradish but was innovative and used new means for old goals - Jackson attack bank of us and soldifyes his opposition because that's attack national economics 5. Jax is lightning rod for those upset at the rapidly industializing and changing econmy 6. Local and national parties are intertwied, whigs win but it is unorganzied 7. Am policits had stablized under the whigs and dems 8. Both drew on repub traditons - Both compromised and negotiated - Liberty and power as a stuggle reverberates throughout all am history. Did not restore the old but built the new as liberty and jacsonian politcs of maajoity rule is in both parties

changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. By WILLIAMCRONON.

Year: 1983 Field: Colnoial/ Envirmoenntal Summary: . He is concerned mainly withthe dynamic interplay between people and environment and hence in the ecologi-cal condition of New England in the colonial period. In fact, he spends a great dealof time untangling relations between native Americans and Europeans beforeelucidating the interaction between people and natural setting. Although little ofthe intercultural history is new, it is nicely done, clearly written, and judicious. Formost historians the ecological sections will be Thesis: : the shift from Indian to European domiance in New England entailed important changes in the ways these peoples organized their lives, BUT IT ALSO INVOLVED FUNDAMENTAL REORGANIZATIONS IN THE REGION'S PLANT AND ANIMAL COMMUNITIES. TO THE CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WUROPEAN INVASION -WHAT HISTORIANS SOMETIMES CALL "THE FRONTIER PROCESS" WE MUST ADD THE ECOLOGICAL ONES AS WELL. All were connected by complex relationships which requitre the tools of an ecologist as well as those of a historian to be properly udnerstood." enouncing such ready-made evaluations,Cronon proposes a more neutral "ecological history." He declares, in con-tradiction to the myth enunciated by Thoreau (and still powerful in our day),that "the choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without ahuman influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways ofbelonging to an ecosystem" (p. 12).!! " Historical treatment of environmentscannot therefore be separated from consideration of the ways particularhuman groups understand them Other: the envrioment is dynamic English fixity and surplus vs. Indian diversity mobiltiy ;; boundary issues It was not that indians didn't have property and the english did. Rather one loved it more than the other; defined themselves by it They enaged in ecological change otgether but commodification really deforested etc. Cronon proposes that"the great strength of ecological analysis in writing history is its ability touncover processes and long-term changes which might otherwise remaininvisible" (p. vii). They all engaged in a system that swet up captialisma nd the desturction of the land :Ecological abundance and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of plenty were a peoplre of waste" One sentence: People and the environment are in a dialectic. Indians and colonists are in a dialectic. Ecological history shows aspects of the colonies we could not see before.

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

His main theme is a familiar one: how Lincoln'scapacity for growth enabled him to transcend his earlier limitations and achievegreatness during the trying years of his wartime presidency. But if the theme isfamiliar, the execution is not. Eric Foner's prodigious research and his deepknowledge of the era allow him to provide perhaps the best account of this subjectavailable today. Even seasoned scholars will find facts in this volume that are newto them and fresh insights that they will want to consider. **Lincoln's story is one of growth, he was not born to agree with the radical republicans and abolishnists, but as the moment grew so did he. Foner wants to show wevery aspect of the growth and ttack the development of lincolns ideas. Foner argues that Lincoln was sometimes conflicted on race but that antislavery sentiments shaped his policies as much as wartime demands for party unity, border-state loyalty, and public support affected his move toward emancipation and arming blacks. To Foner Lincoln both operated within and transcended the politics of slavery in his day. His capacity for growth was the lodestar of his greatness as an instrument for freedom. Lincoln's constant search for the lowest common denomi-nator of antislavery sentiment, his desire never to outrun public opinion, and hiswish to act always within the limits of the possible suggest that the real heroes willbe those who change public opinion and make new positions possible for apolitician like Lincoln. Abolitionists and Radicals are of prime importance toFoner because "their agitation helped to establish the context within whichpoliticians like Lincoln operated As the book goes on, however, Foner gives Lincoln more credit for thechanges he experienced. Lincoln's contact with African Americans, abolitionists,and Radical Republicans increased substantially when he became president, andhis views began to evolve. In an almost shocking statement,Foner chides historians for their attempts to uncover Lincoln's racial outlook,asserting that "race is our obsession, not Lincoln's" (120). In the end, thoughFoner reminds us that Lincoln was influenced by more radical antislaveryfigures than himself and was carried along by changes in public opinion, Foner'sLincoln is admirable for being more compassionate, more principled, and morevisionary than when he entered the White House. This is definitely a "glass halffull" view of Lincoln and slavery.

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 404 pp. $34.95

Year: 09 Field: Summary: Pascoe rightfully reminds us that marriage as a social institution defined by the state and expres- sive of evolving racial ideologies enjoys an "extraordinary power to naturalize some social relationships and to stigmatize others as un- natural" (p. 2). Exclusions made through marriage have proved as fundamental, perhaps more so, to the maintenance of white, het- erosexual, male power as discriminations embedded in the more public spaces of employment, residence, electoral politics, educa- tion, and military service. ns. The long reach of Pascoe's analysis demonstrates beyond a doubt that the sexualizing of race law was a founding element of the U.S. legal system. Thesis: Her primary purpose is to survey antimiscegnation laws throughout the history of the United StateThe theme is not new, and its details have been discussed elsewhere. But it is Pascoe's ability to synthesizthe history of laws prohibiting miscegenation and thstories of the couples who fought them that makes thisbook so compelling. Throughout the work, she demonstrates the connection between the prejudice that itermarriage is an unnatural union and similar forms o"white supremacy," such as the segregation of schooland railroads, racial restrictions on suffrage, and othelegal impairments to citizenship. One of her importaninsights is that the delegitimization of interracial coples equated their relationships with illicit sexuality. Atthe end, she compares the historical effort to dismantleantimiscegenation laws to the current efforts to revokelaws against gay marriage Other: The most striking element of Pascoe's book is the apparent legal plasticity of both "marriage" and "race." She ef fectively utilizes court records and legislative debates to show how malleable marriage could become in service to the institu- tionalization of racial difference. Sometimes civil, sometimes religious, marriage took many and contradictory guises to serve as a bulwark against "dangerous relations," that is, couples seeking to marry across the socially determined lines of race. The "color line" was no less arbitrary. Wildly divergent definitions of racial identity were promulgated and policed, almost all of them based on fictions of difference based on blood, or on the dubious science of "racial types." Pascoe painstakingly documents how these arbitrary designations operated to serve the aspirations of white supremacists. One sentence: Race geneder and sexualitly as they intertwine in misgenation law How the law hshapes life 1 is about the historical links of these things, how laws stopped intermarriage, how the collapse of slavery cayse d the creation of miscegenation 2 -4 is about how the courts upheld these laws as abutressing element of white suprmeacy; "proves" that its unnatural 5 show how the claim that interracial marriage was untrautal was then turned into beaurcratic process withich made interacialls staistically invisisble Marrriage liscence clerks become gatekeeps of white supremacy Race science 6-8 The steps people took to overturn miscegnation laws; NAACP fights miscegnation ofr its white supmeciast character but doesn't support interacial for reasons of power and sexism; femlae protexction 9 loving v virgina which made it legal supreme court, was a harbindger of color blindness Color blindness is a rcial ideoloify of its own Nisceg is the foundation of american white purity and supremacy Law shapes life and society National and multiracil project, that is foundatonal to white supremacy and purtiy in beaurcratic practic and court and state legistalures.It also wants to expose what it means to be natural. 1. It starts with slvaery and patricatchy and in Reocnsturction as they are freed misceganation is a way to moralize and control blacks and whites 2. Judges invoded sciecne and god and democry to consturct these laws on unatural gorunds; this reached concensus, and became the basis for stuff like plessy v ferg 3. Asians were racialized; In order to sustain these laws, racial categors had to be defined 4. Race was created through legal, scienfitfc means, and by the testimony of whites. Race was supposed to be only biological Race classifcation was the trucutre of miscegnation laws 5. Enfroement and state law constructed race 6. NAACP Chapter; see itnro 7. They turn it on the head and say marriage of any two is a natural right 8. Interracial marrigage then moved to be a civil right 9. Loving is the foundation of colorblindess doctirne; now miscegnation was a ghost, not an ancestor Equality and nature are categories we should be suspicios of

Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 406. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4841-8

Year: 16 Field: Summary: More than a century and a half later, many historians basically agree with him. African slavery gave capitalism its critical early infusion of capital: black bodies hauled it out of silver mines, squeezed it out of sugarcane, pulled it from the boll, and birthed it from their loins. Commodified, collateralized, leveraged, and compelled to labor, black bodies rewrote the history of the world, propelling the West, and then the globe, into a historical escape velocity from the event horizon known as the Malthusian trap. In Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman seek to provide "the most multidimensional account to date of slavery as a constitutive element of American capitalism," and in this they succeed admirably (p. 5). At their best, [End Page 993] edited volumes help capture the diversity of a new field while creating a multiplying sense of the field's importance. Slavery's Capitalism is strongest on African slavery's impact on modernity itself—on finance, accounting, management, charity, technology, law, and higher education. Thesis: n their introduction Beckert and Rockman note, "While the essays in this volume do not provide an explicit theorization of the relationship between capitalism and slavery, they show how slavery became central to and perhaps even constitutive of a particular moment in the history of capitalism" (p. 10). This statement seems accurate, open, and honest. Arguably, slavery's capitalism has done its most important work poking holes in our existing theorizations: Marxism, modernization theory, and world-systems theory, specifically. Where Marx seemed to place slaving in the primitive accumulation of capital stage—the stage of land grabs, enclosure movements, and precious metal extraction—slavery's capitalism presents slavery as innovative, adaptable, and modern, even in its brutality. Where modernization theorists tend to see expanding markets and liberalization proceeding hand in hand—progress toward utopia—slavery's capitalism sees markets and exploitation proceeding hand in hand—"progress" as dystopia. Where world-systems theorists see the cotton kingdom as the typically brutal and extractive frontier that makes the civilized metropoles possible, slavery's capitalism sees the cotton kingdom as civilization's core—the place where its values and interests are most consistently exposed. While it is too early to know, slavery's capitalism may never generate an explicit theorization, partly because it is nonteleological: in its conception, capitalism does not lead to revolution, or freedom, or progress; capitalism leads to more capitalism. Without regulation we presumably head toward a global Gilded Age. With regulation, presumably, consumption and exploitation become more digital and subtle and broadly distributed until the Earth is used up and we are all thinly enslaved. Regardless, this volume presents a historical theorization for the new millennium, one in which things do not get better and do not come to a head, in which historical time is neither linear nor circular but vaguely unmoored. All of these reasons make Slavery's Capitalism not just historiographically but also historically important, and it deserves to be widely read. Other: One sentence: see card; there is tyoo much

The Radicalism of the American Revolution.By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Knopf, 1992.x + 447 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-679-40493-7.)

Year: 92 Field: Summary: 1991, Gordon S. Wood attempted to reconcile his previous arguments in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, with myriad analytical categories, especially emotions, in this book. Wood's contentions remained the same from his revised dissertation sans the extensive foray into state constitutionalism during the Confederation period. That is, Wood maintained the premises of his contentions on the purposes of representation (including the idea of a "natural aristocracy"), "liberty" of assembly and association (sans antebellum conceptions of voluntaryism), as well as "tensions" within and without an idea of "liberty," often perceived as the indistinguishable "unity[?]" of "positive and negative." These principles, frequently classified as "libertarian," were inexorably collapsed into a sociopolitical "liberalism" and "interests"-based representation in an ostensibly "national government," more commonly associated with solely "negative liberty." Wood still depicted early federalism as a response to anti-federalist questions regarding the very notion of an expansive "[the] United States" and the solecism imperium-in-imperio, sovereignty-within-sovereignty. James Madison and his federalists offered a last rebuttal: the locus of "power," sovereignty, would be vested in "the people," not in a central government or in state governments, and certainly not in governmental apparatus or branches as such. This rebuttal encompassed not only direct apportionment for the House of Representatives, but also elected state assemblies and legislator appointment of Senators as an indirect form of representative election, in addition to the apportionment of Presidential electors and even state ratification conventions for the Constitution itself.[2] A "mutuality of interests" generated a crucible for "the alliance of power and liberty."[3] Thesis: Wood sharply disputes the view that theRevolution was a conservative affair and "hardly a revolution at all" (4).To the contrary, it was both "one of the greatest revolutions the worldhas known" and "the most radical and far-reaching event in Americanhistory" (5, 8). Its essence lay in the swift transition between the socio-political orders denoted by the book's three sections-"Monarchy," "Re-publicanism," and "Democracy." This change reached further than theorigins and character of political power: it encompassed a transformationin human relationships, moving from a world of hierarchy, kinship, andpatronage to one of egalitarianism, interest, and cash on the barrelhead,from ancien regime to something recognizably close to modern But these achievements also carry costs. Wood skillfully presses thematerials of social history into the service of a political framework-within every social relationship lies the stuff of politics-but at theexpense of extending his American Revolution over more than a cen-tury's span, and by homogenizing some differences and excluding oth-ers. This work is emphatically in the tradition of describing how a greattransformation took place, and each of the book's three sections-all,apparently, expanded lectures-operates under the compulsion of show-ing the dominance of a single societal stage. This requirement involvessome sleight of hand-as when a single and, admittedly, bizarre opinionis cited as sufficient to show that South Carolina shared a pervasivenational egalitarianism. Wood's argument for a pervasive eighteenth-century Anglo-colonial allegiance to monarchical forms arguably down-plays the greater importance of aristocratic oligarchy. Several otherpotentially significant themes, such as the parts played by prerevolu-tionary religious heterodoxy and Southern society after I8oo, get shortshrift. Overall, the force of the book's driving thesis results in payinglittle more than lip service to a variety of"bystanders" in Wood's greattransition-to loyalists (here alias courtiers), and to women and ethnicminorities whose revolutionary legacy was ambivalent at best. At severalpoints, Wood cites but dismisses the conclusions of scholars who havedocumented continuing inequalities in American society. Contempor-aries and visitors, he argues, are not on record as seeing things that way.But how adequately do the exhortations of a number of individuals whomanaged to place their views in print encapsulate what we may acceptas reality?Finally, Wood's redefinition of the Revolution as a transformationof sociopolitical consciousness leaves readers wondering to what degreethis can be tied so closely to the winning of independence and thecreation of a republic. Other countries-England, say, or Canada-alsoexperienced much of this transformation without passing through rev-olutionary upheaval, and even achieved some changes, such as an endto slavery, votes for women, and welfare measures, as fast or faster.Thus, can the transition be celebrated as so directly a legacy of struggleor such a uniquely American contribution to world history as Woodportrays? His book is an event, opening fresh vistas. It builds newbridges between rhetoric and reality. But a genuine admiration must betempered by noting what is left by the wayside. his is a beautifully crafted book. Gordon S. Woodhas divided his study into three sections: monarchy,republicanism, and democracy. As the rubrics sug-gest, he interprets the revolutionary years accordingto their dominant political form, republicanismbringing an end to monarchy only to be quicklyovertaken by democracy. To capture the culturalessence of his sequential social forms he createsdiscursive collages of anecdotes, quotations, and illus-trative details, adroitly arranging them to show ushow sensibilities, values, and understandings of real-ity changed under the pressure of events with which Other: One sentence: Intro and preface:Bailyn is all ideas all the way down, wood is social conditions and people, the ideas faltered and republican democracy gave way It was a social revolution primarily where the way people related to each other were deeply changed and effected =! Class //Don't focus on what the rev didn't do he says, lmao. Antislavery happened eventually //wrecked the aristocracy?? //it changed how americans saw liberty and power //success in monarchl soceity was based on character and emulation of the king //Who do you know in relation to that and how to you fulfill your role //wood makes so many value judgements 2/ Republicanism destroyed monartchal soceity //Republicanism was radical because it undermined the moarchy //Its kinship and hiereracy and vlaues were upheaveled by //Republicaism and moarchicism exsisted outside a political binary //Wood defines Repiblicanism as having better values then monarchy //He sees colonial csoceity intension between republican and morarchal ideas that had to be resolved as repubicianism was in moarchal soceity //repubs win //Republciiansm buckled under the weight of its own contradctions on hierarchye tc. //Republicanism isnt equal //The ideas of liberty and everyones worth creates radical change in society and social relations //has to go to jackson to show his argument //His ideas that this creates our economy arent bad //The am rev created democracy //shafts balck concerns

Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3rd edn. rev. (Chicago, Illinois, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976, ^9-40 [cloth], ^3-00 [paper]). Pp. viii, 320.

Year: 1959 orig arg Field: Summary: in the American South, to move it from the "old debate" as to its justices and injustices to "new viewpoints" of slavery as "a problem in American institutional and intellectual life." The new viewpoint is informed by such ques- tions as: What was the pattern of slavery in the United States? Why did it assume the pattern that it did? How did it differ from other systems of slavery? What was the effect of slavery upon the personality of the Negro slave? What were the intellectual and in- stitutional resources available in society for solving the problem of slavery? These are taken up in three main comparative chapters dealing with institutions and the law of slavery in the United States and Latin America; slavery and concentration camp practices and the ef- fects upon personality; abolitionism and the approach to a solution of the problem. Patterns of slavery have usually been stated as contrasting types such as, for example, David Potter's paternalistic manorial and exploita- tive commercial. Mr. Elkins' statement of the pattern takes its lead from Slave and Citizen, an increasingly influential book by Frank Tannenbaum, in which a comparison of slavery in Latin America and the United States reveals some striking differences. Thesis: In particular, the " Elkins thesis " concerning the alleged mass infantilization of American slaves within a " closed system " that was, for limited purposes, said to be analogous to the Nazi concentration camps aroused a storm of protest. A spate of articles and monographs appeared which (implicitly or explicitly) rejected (or severely modified) the depiction of the absolute power of the master confronting the absolute dependency of the slave within a " total institution." Again, Elkins's use of comparison - building on the work of Frank Tannenbaum - to evaluate and characterize the nature of American Negro slavery suggested fundamental institutional and cultural differences between Latin American slave systems and the slave society of the Old South, where " the dynamics of unopposed capitalism " produced a regime of unique severity When this view of man's relation to society was applied to the Negro slave, since he could not be considered as of transcendent value, he was treated as merely a commodity, an abstract, nonhuman entity. From this fact-so runs Mr. Elkins' thesis-arose the peculiar difficulties of our peculiar institution. There is no space to do more than state the subject of his three main chapters: "Institutions and the Law of Slavery" (contrasting the legal status of slaves in the institutionalized society of Latin America); "Slavery and Personality" (comparison of slavery with German concentration camp practices which transformed the individual into a completely dependent, immature personality-a Sambo); "Slavery and the Intellec- tuals" (analysis of the way our "peculiar quality of abstraction" pre- vented us from finding institutional channels for solving the problem). This is a fresh, exciting book, interesting not only for what it says about slavery, but for its insights into American antebellum society in general. Other: In it, Elkins made two major, and controversial, statements, the first being American abolitionists reduced their effectiveness by insisting on ideological consistency and purity, and refusing to compromise with the slave system. He argued British abolitionists were more pragmatic and thus effective, allowing them to abolish slavery without war. He went on to contrast slavery in North America with that in Spanish America, suggesting it was more important to focus on the structures governing the institution, rather than its conditions. In North America, slaves were deprived of any legal rights, including the ability to marry or have a family, be protected from violence, own property or make a will. With the exception of Maryland and Kentucky, slave states even passed legislation making it illegal for anyone to teach slaves to read and write, or allow them to own books. The removal of personal rights and utter dependence on their owners resulted in what Elkins called "chattel slavery", which he contrasted with the system prevailing in Spanish America. Although conditions could be just as harsh, slaves generally had a variety of legal rights, including the ability to use the court system, purchase their freedom or contract their labour out to others.[5] In addition, slavery in North America was almost exclusively a black experience, while in Spanish America it began as a "misfortune" that could happen to anyone who fell into debt. As a result, "chattel slavery" had a lasting impact on how black Americans viewed themselves and how they were perceived by wider society. Then-recent research by Bruno Bettelheim and others on inmates of Nazi concentration camps during World War II showed their totalitarian environment systematically destroyed the ability of inmates to resist, plan or form positive relationships with one another. Elkins suggested pre-Civil War slavery was a similar environment, views that were influential in the late 1960s when politicians like Daniel Patrick Moynihan supported affirmative action programs as a way to counteract the longterm impact of slavery on black culture.[6] His arguments have since been heavily criticised, particularly for his use of the racial slur "Sambo" to describe the allegedly "infantilised" state which black Americans were reduced to by slavery. In addition, critics point out Elkins provided no data or methodology for his comparison between WWII concentration camp victims, largely white Europeans, and black Americans. Initially heralded by the black community as an important and positive contribution, this comparison was considered offensive by descendants of both groups. Finally, it is suggested his criticism of American abolitionists ignores the reality of the society within which they operated, since every attempt made to achieve partial reform was blocked.[7] The controversy is discussed in more detail in a collection of essays by Ann Lane, [8] and also by historian John Wesley Blassingame.[9] he work of such scholars as David Brion Davis and Eugene Genovese, however, pointed up the essential similarities between all New World slave societies, while that of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in particular, stressed the material well-being of American slaves. Professor Elkins has made some concessions to his critics, notably on the issue of the " open-ness " of the American slave plantation at certain points. But, as the two new chapters (both of which have already appeared in other publications) in this third edition of his book reveal, he retains some basic convictions about his earlier depiction of American and Latin American slavery. Moreover, his analysis of recent slavery historiography in the present edition (" The Two Arguments on Slavery ") shows him to be a trenchant critic of his scholarly detractors. Two points stand out. The first is a concern that comparative studies of slavery and race relations in the Western hemisphere have tended to " homogenize " the experiences of essentially dissimilar societies, for example, Brazil and the United States. Professor Elkins urges that such com parisons should not be extended " beyond fairly restricted purposes." The second (and more telling) reservation about recent works on American slavery is that they (individually and collectively) treat slave " culture " and " resistance " with a corresponding (but unjustifiable) minimization of the " damage " inflicted by slavery on both blacks and whites. American slavery, Elkins contends and cautions, " was a very harsh system, and we would do well not to forget it." One sentence:Elkins argued that the slave system of South America and North America were strikingly dissimilar because of institutional differences be- tween the English and the Iberians. The Hispano-Portuguese tradition adminis- tered slavery through mitigating layers of law and custom; the Catholic Church and a "manorial economy" appeared to Elkins as countervailing institutions con- serving the humanity of African slaves. British North America, on the other hand, appeared comparatively bereft of institutions that might check the abso- lutism of slavery. Only one more Ameri- can institution- capitalism- loomed larger than slavery, but this "unopposed" insti- tution, proclaimed Elkins, proved to be the very force that gave American slavery its unparalled rigor. "Unmitigated cap- italism" became "unmitigated slavery." The "closed" slave system of the United States meant that "virtually all avenues of recourse for the slave, all lines of communication to society at large, origi- nated and ended with the master. The system was unique, sui generis (Elkins. 1959: 49, 63). Satisfied that North and South Ameri- can slavery were qualitatively different, Elkins then asked, what difference did the difference make? His provocative an- swer, an analysis of "Personality and Slavery," is remembered by many as the whole of his book. Ranging across the disciplines as easily as he ranged across the Americas, Elkins turned to Freud, Harry Stack Sullivan and Bruno Bettel- heim to suggest that the "closed system" produced a plantation personality, a "Sambo" type, who shared the patho- logical features of retrogression and in- fantilism allegedly suffered by the victims of Nazi concentration camps. As the only "significant other" and absolute enforcer of "role clarity," the Southern planter might ultimately emerge as a father fig- ure in a "grotesque patriarchy" that saw the slaves' superego give way to an iden- tification with the oppressor. To be sure Elkins had interrupted the rhythm of the old debate. with far more acceptance than rejection. Seeing Negroes as victims was a doctrine of liberalism, and the televised sight of Southern storm troop- ers wielding cattle prods and police dogs only reinforced the image. Elkins, along with liberalism, would pass out of vogue, but in the meantime his work profoundly influenced virtually every piece of writ- ing that touched on race. The most widely read book in America on con- temporary race relations g. They argued that the "closed system" crushed the life out of African culture at the same time they argued that Africanisms remained ubiquitous in Afro- American culture. Ancestral slaves served as a composite myth: broken victims of America and unbreakable iron men of Africa. Elkins contributed to the mythology at the same time he provoked its undoing. Without Elkins it would have been inestimably more difficult for Blassin- game ( 1972 ) and Rawick ( 1972 ) to have conceptualized a "slave communi- ty," to have begun to see slavery as Ra- wick suggested, as "a human institution, albeit an exceedingly inhumane one." From this point of view slaves existed not as passive victims, but lived as active human beings in a complex social insti- tution. With Sambo as a shield, the post- Elkins historiography of slavery could advance the argument that the slaves themselves, unbroken and resilient, de- termined no small part of their o

The Creation of the American Republic, r776-I787. By GORDON S. WOOD.(Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, pub-lished for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, i969Pp. XiV, 653. $15.0

Year: 1969 Field: Summary: Wood traces the development of American "Whig" political thought from its pre-Revolutionary origins, when it served to justify colonial re- sistance, through its application to the first state constitutions and its ulti- mate embodiment, much altered, in the Federal Constitution. The process involved an ideological "transformation" which created a "new conception of politics" and ended with a "truly original formulation of political as- sumptions." (p. ix) he founding fathers fully believed they were living under mob desp tism, or at least the imminent threat of it. The constant theme, reite ated so often as to be a cliche-a casual observation to which agree- ment was assumed-was that the country had fallen into the anarchy predictable of unchecked democracy and that the licentiousness of the people had to be curbed in order to preserve a republican form of gov- ernment. If there was a consensus among the nation's leaders, it was this. What was the elite afraid of? During the Revolution the complaints were about the arrogance of committees and the stupid and arbitrary acts of "popular" legislatures, after the Revolution about paper money and debtor relief legislation. But in wartime somebody had to get out supplies for the army and try to enforce price controls; after the war there was an economic depression, and paper money was the traditional way of coping with it. It would seem that the actual record of events hardly adds up to popular oppression or expropriation. Shays Rebel- lion, it is true, was an escalation of popular action to higher levels, but it was easily suppressed and got little approval outside western Massa- chusetts Thesis: The am revoluition was met with a radical republicanism of the intelligensia and ideas. Usign the rheoitirc of democracy they acoomplished their aims of aristocratic domination by enlarging the arena of republican govt from a local to a national basis so that only the socially prominent or widely know coulsd win elections and based the systemon basic human selfishness. 87, he convincingly demonstrates that theConstitution was "the climax of a great revolution" as a result ofwhich "the rulers had become the ruled and the ruled the rulers."Without at first realizing what they had wrought-and some, suchas John Adams, never understood-the revolutionaries by 1787 hadabandoned the concept of mixed government and had created "adistinctly American system of politics" in which sovereignty residedwholly with the people. The only social contract now recognizedwas the Lockean compact to which free individuals subscribedprior to the establishment of government. Thus in America all gov-ernments exercised only those powers delegated to them by the"sovereign people." Here, wrote Tom Paine, was the "revolutionin the principles and practise of Government" that made the effortto separate from England worth Other: The Whigs, he declares, came to regard the Senate not merelyas an aristocratic body but as one equally responsible to the people, a theorywhich led to "an entirely new and revolutionary conception of politics."(p. 235) One sentence: By attempting to formulate a theory of politics that would represent reality as it was, the Americans of 1787 shattered the classical Whig world of 1776." (pg 606)The above quotes from the final chapter of this book summarize the point Wood is trying to make. The creation and development of the American system of government was by no means inevitable or anticipated. How the thinking of the American founders changed and developed is marvelously shown in this book. Previous assumptions about society and forms of government had to shift, sometimes greatly, and with considerable effects.Not only is this an important work for understanding the development of the American constitution, it is also a great work of historical thinking and writing. Highly recommended. (less)

Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in RevolutionaryAmerica. By Linda K. Kerber. (Chapel Hill: Published for the Insti-tute of Early American History and Culture by the University ofNorth Carolina Press, c. 1980. Pp. xiv, 304. Paper, $9.00; cloth,$19.50.)

Year: 1980 Field: WOMEN+REV+NEW NATION Summary: Linda K. Kerber makes a fresh and importantcontribution to the debate over the ideological origins and consequences of theAmerican Revolution that has been unfolding in the work of Bernard Bailyn,Gordon Wood, J. R. Pole, and others. After a brief introduction and a review o"the inheritance of the Enlightenment," Kerber explores women's experienceof and contribution to the war. In three chapters, she depicts the variety ofwomen's engagement in the war effort (boycotts, enforcement of economicnorms, production of clothing and blankets, nursing, cooking and washing fortroops, the keeping of boarding houses and informal prisons); she investigatesthe special meaning of female patriotism; and she sets forth the complexnotions of the appropriate revolutionary loyalties of married women. In thisinstance, she focuses on the eventual property rights of the nondefecting wivesof loyalist husbands, thus indicating the space created for the independentexistence of married women by conflict between their subservience to theirhusbands and to the state. Kerber then turns to the consequences of theRevolution in matters of special female concern: coverture, divorce,education, and women's reading. In these four chapters, as in her concludingchapter, "The Republican Mother," she evaluates the continuities and changein the living and the representation of womanhood in the early republic. In herjudgment, the American Revolution effected enduring, if not always dramatic,institutional, change in women's lives. Thesis: Her thesis is complex-and significant. Pointing out thatwomen were peripheral rather than central participants in the Revolution,Kerber argues that the period "witnessed the development of an ambiva-lent ideology concerning the political role of women," summarized in thephrase "Republican Motherhood" (p. 11). While women were not to be-come central participants in the civic culture of the new nation, they wouldnow be charged with raising sons trained in the ideal of virtuous behavior,ready to sacrifice their interests for the good of the state. The author alsocontends that this step toward a broader definition of an appropriate rolefor women represented "a very important, even revolutionary, inven-tion" (p. 284) because it moved them beyond the constraints of the do-mestic circle. The new role pointed directly toward liberation, since itmeant that women would need more formal education, more training ineconomic matters (especially pertaining to the home), and, ultimately,more opportunity to work as purifying reformers on the perimeter of themale-dominated political arena.!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other: Intro: Republican mothers defined themselves as citizens and set up what it meant to be an ordinary women Nation within a antion Women took took the repbulican ideology and carved out their citzenry rights from it Theyer neither fully policial or preolicial but on the margins This is about the origins of female political behavior Enlighment ideology was limited and anti-women, so they had to create and adapt their own ideoly Wmen were in mutal supprot groups and discussesd the best ways to interact with the revolutinary perisod. 3. Orgina of femal epatiorism \ Submissivea and supportive was the given role of the female patriot Women redeifned and considered their pstion in their social support groupd They neeed the church and domestic groups to form their politcal base Women proved they could display poltical behavior Men wanted ewomrn to be a wive even mor ehtan they eanted revolution 5. !!The arguments for married women;s property legislation eventualy opened the way to the assertation of a feminist demand for republican rights.!! 6. Revoltiatry ideas of speration for the power was reflected in the ability for divorce; poorly enfored but present and symbolic 7. women became vectors of the new government in the home as wives and mothers, giving them a foothold in citizenry and educatiion Education grew with omesticity 9. Eepublican motherood justifed the civic and polticial and educated woman!!!! The paradox of reublican motherhood led to the next stage of eomen;s rights One sentence:

Time and Space; berlin

Year: 1980 THE DIVERSE DEVELOPMENT OF AFRO-AMERICAN CULTURE during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals the importance of time and place in the study of American slavery. Black people in colonial America shared many things: a common African lineage, a common racial oppressor, a common desire to create the richest life possible for themselves and their posterity in the most difficult of circumstances. But these commonalities took different shape and meaning within the diverse circumstances of the North American mainland. The nature of the slave trade, the various demographic configurations of whites and blacks, and the demands of particular staples-to name some of the factors influencing the development of slave society-created at least three distinctive patterns of Afro-American life. Perhaps a finer analysis will reveal still others. This diversity did not end with the American Revolution. While African- creole differences slowly disappeared as the centerpole of black society with the closing of the slave trade and the steady growth of an Afro-American popu- lation, other sources of cohesion and division came to the fore.63 Differences be- tween freemen and bondsmen, urban and rural folk, skilled and unskilled work- ers, and browns and blacks united and divided black people, and made black society every bit as variable and diverse during the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth. Indeed the diversity of black life increased substantially during the antebellum years as political changes abolished slavery in some places and strengthened it in others, as demographic changes set in motion by the Great Migration across the Lower South took effect, as the introduction of new crops enlarged the South's repertoire of staples, and as the kaleidoscopic movement of the world market sent the American economy in all directions.

Ar*n 't la Woman? Female Slaves in the Planta-tion South. By Deborah Gray Whiite. (NewYork: Nonon, 1985. 216 pp. $18.95.

Year: 1985 Field: Summary: Black in a wliite society, slave in a free society,woman in a society ruled i>y men, female slavesiiad the ieast formal power and were perhapsthe most vulnerabie group of antebellumAmericans." In an exceiient, ofren controver-sial, and certainiy inteüectuaily provocadvemonograph of summary and synthesis, De-lK)rah Gray White is not the first to demolishthe myth of the matriarchial slave household;nor was tliat her purpose. Yet she does not ne-gate the existence ofthe matrifocal plantadonstave household. Based largely on printedsources and carefully footnored, Wiiite's finestudy provides the first critical, schoiarly,book-length study of slave women on theplantadons of the American Soudi. Thesis: Men and woman had fundamtnally different bondages because of the emapghaidss on childrearing care. No part of the life cylce of the female slave was free of abuse and was always aware of their childrearing responbilities Female slave entwrok exsitsted and allowed for self-defintion and community Bulwark for the integrity of a slave amrriage and did not dominate their husband and were not dominated Other: Black men and women were not interchangeableworkers. Field work and home work had gender distinctions, and blackwomen most often worked with other black women. This work helped toforge a network of female relationships. hite explores the issue of sex and race, explain-ing the perception of many southern whites thatmiscegenation occurred because, though sometimesfeigning resistance, black women invited sexualovertures from white men. In addition, she de-scribes the opposition of white women to miscege-nation, although they could do little about it. Jezebels, whites praised black women's efficient careof white charges and their role as the mammy of thehousehold. Both images were misleading, althoughevidence for the stereotypes could be found in theroles black women were required to pla ccording to White, the preponderance of maleover female slaves made it easy for females to findmates, even when forced separations made manywomen household heads. Childbearing and work inthe fields were the major tasks for most blackwomen. The author finds no convincing evidence ofbirth control and abortion. Infanticide was atypical.Despite heavy labor and less nutritious diets, blackwomen's fertility rate was higher than that of south-ern white women, and pregnancy was one way ofavoiding work for a time. She concludes that themost important distinction between male and fe-male bondage was that the slave women's childbear-ing and child care responsibilities reduced theirinvolvement in resistance activities and decreasedtheir numbers in the ranks of fugitive slaves. Femaleslaves were more likely to become truants for a fewdays. On occasion, women did violently resist sexualexploitation and used poisoning as well as feigningillness as modes of resistan' White describes the generalpattern of the female slave's life cycle. In childhoodshe was a nurse for younger children, a task sharedwith boys. By age twelve she began field work. Atfirst, girls worked in gangs consisting only of preg-nant and nursing women and the very young andvery old. In these gangs, girls received their firstacculturation into women's sex roles. Usually femaleslaves had their first child at nineteen, two yearsbefore southern white women. Masters encouragedmating and "marriage" and rewarded prolific childbearers. Infertile women were quickly sold off, ifpossible. But slaves took marriage seriously andtried to protect family life as much as possible, usingit as a means of transmitting their cult . "Had they been whiteand free, they would have learned the contempo-rary wisdom of nineteenth-century America" thatwomen were delicate. But, "because they were blackand slaves, they learned that black women had to bethe maid servants of whites but not necessarily ofmen" (p. 18).In a chapter on the female slave network, Whitedescribes how adult female cooperation and inter-dependence was a fact of female slave life. Menplowed and women hoed; women also did domesticwork such as sewing and weaving, and they workedlong after they returned from the fields and longafter the men had retired. Females cooperated inthe delivery of newborns and in convalescent andchild care. Women who were midwives, folk doc-tors, cooks, and seamstresses had superior status, asdid work-gang leaders. Those who were especiallygood at any particular task gained the respect of theothers. White's book is a much-needed description of thelives of female slaves and should stimulate addi-.tional, more narrowly focused studies. More work inless obvious sources such as court records shouldprovide additional information concerning the day-to-day life of female slaves in particular localities inthe American South One sentence:One measure of the scholarly neglect is that White emphasizes victimiza-tion and studies the image of black women, themes explored over a decadeago by historians of white women, but relatively unexplored for slavewomen. She argues that the double burden of being female and blackensured a different experience of life from that either of other women or ofother blacks.(Double idenity) The difference began as early as the middle passage when theminority of women aboard ship might be kept above decks to serve the crew.It continued until death, which came later for slave women than for theirmale contemporaries. Throughout all of their lives (and all of White's chap-ters) female sexual vulnerability shaped these differences Jezbel and mammy; sexual temptress and a maternal foundation; both funtions of white about black woman, I wish I knew more about how they saw themselves

Battle cry of freedom: the Civil War era · James McPherson

Year: 1988 Field: civvy war Summary: Long synthesis that tries to understand the Civil War from every aspect instead of just the military or political etc. Everything is connected; from the Homefront to the battlefield. Thesis: What unifies the Civil War era as defined in Battle Cry of Freedom is not war,but the politics of slavery. Although the book ends before the ThirteenthAmendment delivers slavery's coup de grace, the central plot-packed withdangerous reverses and close calls -is the political and military defeat of thedefenders of slavery. In Battle Cry of Freedom, the real war took place not onthe hospital cots visited by Whitman, but in the capitals, the congresses, thetents of field commanders, and the firing lines. The outcome was not theprofound amnesia that troubled Whitman. Instead, it was victory, sweet andgood, though costly McPherson constructs an argument attentive to the "mul-tiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and re-formed into new patterns in the crucible of war" (p. viii). But the abrupt endof the book in April 1865 prevents even a brief overview of how freedom faredin the rest of the Civil War era, the postwar crucible of Reconstruction. Thetelescoped conclusion permits a general reader to make a disquieting mis-reading: to the problems of antebellum politics, war was the solution; in fouryears the generals got the country out of the mess politicians had wallowedin for forty years; war ended slavery and delivered freedom By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolon-gation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly eve-rything the Confederacy was fighting for" (p. 490). Lee's victories began theSouth's demise because they stirred the North to a policy of total war thateroded reservations about emancipation while casualties mounted and con-scription reached deeper into northern communities Other: Great man white man history. It pays attention to women etc. but they are not on equal footing One sentence: Battle Cry of Freedom tends to conflate the end of slavery with freedom, thereby introducing a powerful teleology for the war and American history as a whole. Curiously, the conflation makes it possible to read Battle Cry of Freedom as a neo-Hartzian account of freedom's prolonged birth agony.

Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. By Michael Tadman. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Pp. xviii, 317. Illustrations, figures, tables, appendix, bibliography, index. $27

Year: 1990 Field: Summary: Few students of slavery would deny that the commercial traffic in human beings, whether of foreign or domestic origin, was intrinsically the worst aspect of the peculiar institution. The horrors of the "mid- dle passage" from Africa to the New World are well known, and more than fifty years ago Frederic Bancroft illuminated the similar brutalities of the internal trade in his seminal work Slave Trading in the Old South. Now Michael Tadman of the University of Liverpool, has scrutinized the interregional trade between Upper and Lower South from 1820 to 1860, drawing heavily upon the hitherto un- tapped records and correspondence of slave traders and employing the modern techniques of quantification. The result is what might be termed a neo-Bancroft or, more generally, a neo-abolitionist interpre- tation of the slave South. Thesis: It is Tadman's contention that the preponderance of slaves trans- ferred to the virgin lands of the Southwest were transported by pro- fessional traders rather than migrating planters. Basing his estimate on data from the New Orleans trade in the 1840s, application of the "survival rate" technique to age structure in the censuses of 1850 and 1860, and on the records of South Carolina traders in the 1850s, Tadman concludes that at least 60 percent and possibly 70 percent of the interregional movement of slaves after 1820 was attributable to the slave trade. These figures are dramatically higher than the 16 percent cited by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their pioneer- ing, albeit highly controversial, book Time on the Cross. The probllem, explains Tadman, was that Fogel and Engerman relied almost exclu- sively on data from the atypical New Orleans slave market. According to Tadman, Fogel and Engerman also seriously under- estimated the impact of the domestic trade upon the integrity of slave families. In marked contrast to their finding that only 2 percent of slave marriages were terminated by the interregional transfer of slaves, Tadman concludes that one in five of first marriages in the Upper South were shattered by the trade alone and that if other factors are considered the proportion increases to one in three. Moreover, just over half of the slaves involved in the interregional trade suffered some kind of family separation. Such insensitivity to family relationships was endemic to the racist South, charges Tad- man, and adversely affected general relations between masters and slaves. Other: One sentence: Manifesting righteous indignation with progressive vehemence, Tadman depicts white southerners in a manner that would have brought a smile to the lips of the most rabid abolitionist. Infected by virulent racism, slaveowners were motivated overwhelmingly by the profit motive - not by necessity - in selling slaves to traders. Families were broken up without the slightest compunction. "Market forces, rather than sentiment for family," he claims, "were apparently always likely to predominate with slaveowners" (p. 139). Nor was the typical slave trader a detestable pariah, shunned by members of polite soci- ety; that was merely a southern myth. Depreciating the "accommoda- tion" and paternalistic theories of master-slave relationships, Tadman concludes that "genuine paternalistic sacrifice seems to have been a rarity" among the slaveholders (p. 218Q!! His main argument is that trading was so common and pervasive that one cannot take the "myth of the reluctant planter" at face value. This is true enough, but only a part of the even more wide- spread drive toward wealth accumulation through slave property. Nor is Tadman partic- ularly strong in analyzing slave trading as part of an interactive economic system. His analysis of slave trade profits, for example, will not be considered impressive by economists. But these limitations do not detract from the major re- search achievement of this book. Tadman's quantitative methods are straightforward and not flashy, driven by common sense and in- formed judgment rather than love of technique (a virtue all too rare). Now and then one might raise the "fully-only" question, whether to em- phasize the number of slaves who were sold and families separated or the many families in many years who were not sold. But the cumulative weight of the evidence presented is powerful, and the book is generally persuasive. It deserves a wide readership Tadman's claims concerning the hollowness of planter paternalism when it came to the slave trade are convincing and will likely be seen as a criticism of the interpretation of slaveholding society associated primarily with Eugene Genovese. Actually, while Tadman's point is certainly worth making, advocates of the paternalist thesis have never argued that slaveholders let their view of themselves as benevolent fathers interfere with making money. In short, Speculators and Slaves addresses an important question in a stimulating way. It should be read and argued with by all students of slavery and the Old South.!! Intro; Paternalistic accomodation is untrue as it obscures the economic contrating motivations of slaves and masters Part 1 How does the slave trade effect the minds of slaves and masters; moreover, how does speculation show the fear of slave speration from family and the greedy protift seeking of masters. Also, it was not infdivula planters who expanded slavery, it was large scale speculators Jim crow was fundamnetal in the antebellum period Paart2 There is a myth of the loving relctant master which always gave way to protif motives Paternalism is a one-sided affair where the white is able to take pride in civilkizing the savage he created Paternalism self-defined allowed for specualtion and the ego of the master themselves Paternlaism and specutlation relied on the respectablilty of the trader Speculation and thhis expansion of slavery created a rift between slaves and slavers, it was segregation predating Jim Crow. Proximity but not intimacy.

Soul murder and slavery; Nell Irving Painter

Year: 1995 Field: slkavery Summary: Soul murder is a psycholigocal term used to describe the effects of child abuse in psycholigy Those who are soul murdered find it difficult to register how they feel and are angry towards themselves and others We must loook at slaves psychology as to not diminish their personhood Physical abuse of children created generational trauma and was used to make slaves submissive' Slaves were sexualy abused early and abusted my the wives of slave holders and eachother Thesis: Slaves had support of each other to resist being damaged permantly and slavers did as much damage to themselves and their own families through this behavior Hierarchy does not preclude attahcment The blame fro these abuses was alowys but on the slave or woma Many parallels between white women and slvaes Our mental health as a ascoeity rquires us to see the interconencted ness of class anrace in the past for the present. Other: One sentence:

CHRISTINE LEIGH HEYRMAN. Soulthern Cross: The Begin-nings of the Bible Belt.

Year: 1997 Field: relgion Summary: Her substantive introduction outlines her argument. Evan- gelicals began prosyletizing in the South in the 1740s, but it took a century for most southerners to embrace the religious outlook that would, in the 1840s, be institutionalized in regionally separate Baptist and Methodist churches (and later, in the Civil War, in a southern Presbyterian church) and dominate the South thereafter. Even in 1810, only twenty percent of white Southerners had joined evangelical churches and fewer than ten percent of African Americans were members. In four detailed, well-crafted chapters, the book out- lines the specific ways that evangelicals changed the minds of other southerners about their religion and, in the process, were themselves changed Thesis: //Evangelicals were outsiders at frist who slowly changed and negotiated with the major power structures of the south to receive recognition. Other: Finally, Heyrman discusses how evangelicalsadapted their views on the role of women. A longtradition had recognized the active spirituality of godlywomen who were seers and prophesizers exercisingtheir gifts in public. In the early nineteenth century,evangelical leadership offered a new model of accept-able religious behavior for women, one "less assertiveand more private than those exhibited by southernwomen before 1800" (p. 197). Women were now toachieve spiritual bliss through devotion to their fami-lies, neatly reinforcing the authority of southern patri-archs. Evangelical men were themselves to be moreassertive, in ways that could fit comfortably with theSouth's code of personal honor. The result was "tomeld the South's regional mores of masculinity andmartial honor with the evangelical ethos" (p. 20 n all these areas theconvictions of evangelicals assaulted the hierarchical, male-dominated structure of traditional southern culture and reenforced the sectarian status ofevangelicalism.!!!1 Her conclusion is that evangelicals altered theirown beliefs and practices to win the acceptance of the establishment. To wit,they toned down their more radical notions like an incarnate devil; dismantledtheir clerical "cult of youth" in favor of a mature and settled ministry; permitted congregations less disciplinary control over their members; and greatlycircumscribed the spiritual authority given to women and slaves. On all thesefronts, evangelicals made their beliefs and practices more palatable to thewhite males who exercised mastery over southern life. After these strategicadjustments, evangelicalism was, by the 1820s, well on its way to becoming thenew religious establishment in the antebellum South. One sentence: //Evangelicals were outsiders at frist who slowly changed and negotiated with the major power structures of the south to receive recognition. Evancelicals liberlaized for acce4ptance. Porlouge: Evangelicalism came late to the south and was marginalized for a logn time Revoljution Helped More progressive and eglaitarian in the start just to be pusehed right by the South Not inevitable, hard faught Gained member si in the 20s and 30s because of the unchurched It was a dynaimc and popular movment that conformed to the csouth as much as the south confiormed to it 1. Overcoming predjudices//a culture steeped in supernaturalism // used blacks for memebership in the begging and discarded them later for wider appeal //they were too progressive but very pro white 2. They realize that their anti-hierarchical message in the family and else where was too radical 3. Evangelists did not pay enough attention to fiamily vlaues on the here and now//As they creaed a system of family vlaues they made sure to make it patricrachal where the father protected goldy women 4. Evans defined wemen as good for aquiesing// evans needed to access the home tiself// it offered men a way to make their wives more submissive 5. Evqans ensured that being an evan would not be any less amssculine//you must vindicate masculinity oin the public spehere and prop up an honor ccode Epi: They were a popular movement and conformed to the will fo the people;

HILIP D. MORGAN. Slave Colunteipoint: Black Cuilturi-ein the Eighteenthl-Centutiy Chesapeake and Lowcolutily.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthe Omohundro Institute of Early American Historyand Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1998. Pp. xxiv, 703.Cloth $49.95, paper $2

Year: 1998 Field: Summary: n 1776, nearly three-quarters of all blackpeople in North America lived in the Ches-apeake region of Virginia, Maryland, andDelaware and the Low Country region ofcoastal South Carolina and Georgia. Usinga vast array of primary and secondarysources, and drawing on literature from avariety of disciplines and fields, SlaveCounterpoint sketches the development ofa vibrant culture among people of Africandescent enslaved in British North Americabetween approximately 1670 and 1800 he book is organized around a compar-ison between these two centers of black lifein North America, the Chesapeake and theLow Country. This comparison, whichforms the "counterpoint" of the title, al-lows Philip D. Morgan to draw out newinsights while giving clarity to his detailedand complicated analysis. Within this com-parative framework, the book is dividedinto three pa Thesis: the first of the book's three parts, Morganoutlines the "contours" of black life in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and lowcountry: environment;crop regime; rate of slave reproduction; pattern ofslave importation; density of white settlement. Com-bining a nested set of scales of analysis-environmen-tal, economic, everyday-this part of the book repre-sents Morgan's work at its substantial best. In thetemperate Chesapeake, tobacco thrived. Because to-bacco presented few barriers to entry and offered feweconomies of scale, most Chesapeake slaves lived onrelatively small farms in close proximity to their own-ers and other whites. And because tobacco required agreat deal of care, those slaves were minutely super-vised and worked in gangs, usually from sunup tosundown. By 1720, they were reproducing themselvesand by the time of the Revolution, Virginia slavehold-ers had virtually stopped importing African slaves. Cutoff from Africa, closely monitored, and surrounded bywhites, Chesapeake slaves were, by the end of theeighteenth century, "thoroughly assimilated," depen-dent on their owners for their material culture, theirdress, their language, and their custom Things in South Carolina were different. The trop-ical climate and long growing season of the lowcountrywere ideal for rice cultivation. The tremendous invest-ment it took to clear, drain, and ditch South Carolina'sswamplands favored those who could make a largeinitial investment, and rice cultivation offered substan-tial economies of scale. Consequently, lowcountryslaves generally lived on plantations larger than thosein the Chesapeake and they saw a good deal less ofwhite people; the majority of the inhabitants of SouthCarolina were black as early as 1700, and by 1790 manyareas were eighty percent black. Rice was a hardy cropthat did not require close supervision, and SouthCarolina slaveholders generally "tasked" their slaves,assigning them a set amount of work for a week andallowing them the rest of their time to themselves.Slaves often used this time to cultivate food which theyused to support themselves and sometime sold, thusaccumulating a small "peculium" of their own prop-erty. Slaves in the lowcountry lived harder than thosein the Chesapeake: they were often ill, undernour-ished, and brutally punished. Although the birthrateamong lowcountry slaves was comparable to that in theChesapeake, lowcountry slaves died at a much higherrate, and South Carolina slaveholders remained enthu-siastic importers of African slaves up to (and in somecases after) the closing of the African slave trade in1808. In contrast to their Chesapeake counterparts,lowcountry slaves were relatively autonomous and"African": they wore few European clothes, slept inAfrican-styled houses, provided their own food, shareda culture full of African elements, and spoke a dialect(Gullah) that was unintelligible to many whites. Thedifferences between slavery in the Chesapeake and thelowcountry, Morgan concludes, illustrate the tparadox of New World slavery: "an inverse relation-ship between material conditions and communal au-tonomy" (p. 665).!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other: n this part of the book, Morgan takes up theextraordinarily important question of the psychologi-cal dimension of the experience of enslavement. Mor-gan frames his argument about slave psychology as arealist critique, part of a broader effort to "deroman-ticize" black history by considering the vulnerabilitiesand frailties of enslaved people alongside their com-munal autonomy, human agency, and consistent resis-tance. As it appears here, the argument consists ofthree loosely linked propositions: enslaved peoplederived "self-esteem" by working alongside whites andbeing considered valuable in the market; slaves "iden-tified closely with their master" and often felt a good Surely, slaveholders' own ac-counts of the enthusiasm with which their slavesgreeted them upon their return from long trips or thefealty their slaves demonstrated by sticking aroundduring the Revolution, fraught as they are with pro-jection, self-deception, and the dissimulating purposesof the slaveholders who scripted them out in letters totheir while friends, are not the best sources to usewhen trying to decide which expressions of affectionwere tactical and which "too effusive to be explainedaway" (p. 382). In his effort to explore the psycholog-ical dimensions of slavery (or rather, of enslavement),Morgan raises questions of extraordinary importance,questions that press at the outer limits of historians'imaginations and their sources. Unfortunately, in thesepassages, those questions go begging for answers. In the final part of the book, Morgan turns from thematerial determinants and social parameters treated inthe first two parts to the social relations, family life,and cultural forms that defined "the black world."Morgan begins with the sometimes contentious rela-tions among African groups in the Americas and theequally vexed relations of Africans as a group withtheir Creole neighbors. The emergence of a Creolemajority, first in the Chesapeake and later in thelowcountry, Morgan argues, "facilitated cohesivenessamong slaves" (p, 463). Morgan notes, however, thatrelations between slaves were shot through with con-flict along the axes of age and sex and, especiallyamong those with plans of resistance, were character-ized by a good deal of suspicion. From the outset,Morgan's account of "the slave family" emphasizesvulnerability. Noting that slave families were oftenseparated by their owners and that slaves had no"legally sanctioned sexual monopoly" of their partners,Morgan suggests that "coresidential consensual union"(p. 499) might be a better word to describe slaveunions than "marriage." Nevertheless, slaves activelystruggled to keep up family ties in spite of marriageand family-separating estate settlements and sales."For the most part," Morgan opines, slaves tookmarriage and parenting "very seriously" (p. 540). Inthe book's final chapter, Morgan turns to the culturalforms that helped enslaved people resist "dehuman-ization." Working his way through a remarkable vari-ety of cultural practices-talking, drumming, singing,dancing, playing, joking, conjuring, poisoning, walking,smiling, glancing, dying-Morgan argues that therewas a significant African element to eighteenth-cen-tury slave culture, but that various African practiceswere inevitably mixed with one another and withEuropean cultures so that "creativity and innovationfar more than ... any attachment to an indeliblecultural tradition" (p. 594) characterized the lives ofChesapeake and lowcountry slaves.With a few curious exceptions-the work of Marga-ret Creel Washington and Daniel C. Littlefield onslavery and slave culture in South Carolina and oylvia Frey on slavery and the American Revolutioncome to mind-Morgan has seemingly attempted totake up every question that has shaped scholarship onslavery since the time of Ulrich B. Philips. The pages ofthis book are peopled by vital characters and punctu-ated by incidents by turns fascinating, disturbing,perplexing, and deeply moving. The sheer diversity ofthe stories that Morgan tells highlights both thestrength and the weakness of what is surely the mostcomprehensive social history of slavery yet written.And yet, the stories in these pages often seem totranscend the historiographical arguments that knitthem together. At this point in the historiography ofslavery, it may be less important to establish that slavesin the Americas had a culture (African or otherwise)or felt for their families or "preserved their humanity"than it is to explore the complexities of what thosethings meant in their everyday lives: how culturalforms were actively used, fought over, and redefined inspecific struggles; how patriarchy and family life werepractically negotiated over hostile terrain; and howslaves' own thoughts about their place in the naturaland supernatural order shaped their daily response toslavery. It is, then, as much for the extraordinarystories he tells as for the scholarly arguments he makesthat Morgan is to be commended.A!!! One sentence: Intro: Rice and tobacco: "the shaping power of each staple," Morgan argues, "was . . . formidable" (p. 147). Rice proved most profitable when grown on large plantations by coerced workers forced to labor in the deadly disease environment of the Lowcountry. From these simple economic facts followed enormous human consequences. To expand production, planters bought as many African slaves, preferably young males, as they could. The Lowcountry slave population thus remained predominantly African until the 1780s, and many slave men remained single. The creation of large-scale plantations (800-900 acres, with more than 20 slaves, was the norm) pushed free white smallholders out of the Lowcountry and created, as Peter Wood has so aptly noted of the Carolinas, a black majority. Because rice did not significantly exhaust the soil, and its cultivation required the water resources available only in the Lowcountry, planters and their slaves seldom moved. Slaves could thus build communities extending across generations, and as blacks so outnumbered whites and worked in rice fields where whites seldom ventured, they lived much of the time apart from their masters and free of direct white supervision. Slave culture thus remained both more African and more distinctively black than in the Chesapeake. On most plantations, slaves worked to complete specific tasks, directed by other blacks; the tasks completed, they had time to hunt, fish, or grow food crops (including rice) for themselves—an arrangement profitable for the planters which gave slaves greater autonomy but probably a less ample diet than in the Chesapeake. This books lays bear the black national substructure Slaves were activee aprtcpants in their history and vicims of bruatlairy Part 1: Very attentive tine and space!!! Very light Ecological and economic determinism Part 2: Big paternalism hisotoripgrhay Part 1 argues that differentecologies, geographies, and staple crops inthe two regions molded two different expe-riences of slavery and helped shape the riseof two regional cultures among enslavedblack people ). In other words, Morganargues, the "material conditions" of slaves'lives and their chance for "communal au-tonomy" were, in broad terms, inverselyrelated (pp. 101, 665 Part 2 focuses on interactions betweenblacks and whites. Building on Eugene D.Genovese's thesis about paternalism, Mor-gan argues that slavery locked whites andblacks together in ways that touched nearlyevery corner of their lives. (See Eugene D.Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World theSlaves Made [New York, 1974].) But Mor-gan deepens our understanding of white-black interactions by exploring change overtime, by emphasizing the immense com-plexity of those interactions, by devotingconsiderable attention to interactions be-tween slaves and the many "plain" whitefolk who did not own slaves, and by explor-ing the informal economy of trading be-tween slaves and whites, a subject thatMorgan, in his previous work, was the firstto analyze in depth. Though blacks' viewsare less clear, Morgan persuasively arguesthat white masters' views shifted during theeighteenth century from patriarchalism topaternalism and that their changing atti-tudes deeply affected relations betweenblacks and whites of all classes. Scholars ofnineteenth- and twentieth-century Ameri-can history will find fascinating new per-spectives in this history of eighteenth-century chang vidence, Morgan assesses slaves'family structure, language, play, and reli-gion and concludes that slaves developed avibrant culture of their own, one that wasinfluenced by, yet distinct from, Europeanand African cultures. Although he findsmuch evidence of African culture in NorthAmerica, Morgan ultimately concludesthat the significance of slaves' culturestems less from its connections with Africathan from the enormous obstacles arrayedagainst it. Morgan counts among thoseobstacles frequent divisions among Afri-cans, black cre?les, slaves, and NativeAmericans as well as whites' oppression.For Morgan, the very existence of a coher-ent culture among slaves was the slaves'"major triumph" (p. xxii) ike recent works by Michael A. Gomez,Ira Berlin, and others, Morgan insists thatthe development of African-American cul-ture cannot be explained simply in terms ofreplacement, destruction, or adoption, butrather reflected complex processes ofchange that differed from region to regionand were influenced by slaves' interactionswith many different groups. (See MichaelA. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks:The Transformation of African Identities inthe Colonial and Antebellum South [ChapelHill, 1998]; and Ira Berlin, Many Thou-sands Gone: The First Two Centur?es ofSlavery in North America [Cambridge,Mass., and London, 1998].) The compara-tive framework allows Morgan to acknowl-edge those complexities while exploring avast range of subjects, from the rise of taskand gang labor systems to the cultural rootsof poisoning. Brimming with insights andclearly written, this book will be essentialreading for scholars interested in African-American history, the history of slavery,and the history of British North America

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.

Year: 1998 Field: Slavery Summary: this work is a two-century synthesis of American slavery across three eras and four areas. Berlin shows the contrasting and similar aspects of these times and places. In it we see that slavery or blackness was not monolithic and was not understood the same in any given area and time. Thesis: -Time and space -slave societies and societies with slaves and the fluidity between the two -slavery goes in different directions and developments negatively and positively - race and slavery construct one another as much as they are constructed -race is a hsitorical and social construct -three genrations: charter, plantation, and revolutionary Other: The charter generation was looser than the planationation generation -the plantation generation was tighter and defined violent aspects of slavery -the revoltuianry gen allowed for aoltion but did not feel the same in the north and south but led to the civil war. -comprehensive -explores slavery across multiple regions and time -explores the differences and compares them across those times -offers historical paradigms to work from -nuanced -a little old and white in story telling -a emotional -"agency"

The Marketplace ofRevolution: How ConsumerPolitics Shaped American Independence. By T.H. Breen. (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004. xx, 380 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-506395-

Year: 2004 Field: Summary: Thesis: Other: One sentence: Into: Daily life matieral culutrw and consumpiton. Explians popular mobilization as a consumper and trust activity //ALL about that consumer marketplce //It argues that the colonists shareped experience as consumers provided them with the culutral resources needed to develop a bold new form of politcal protest. One's willingness to sacrifice the pleasure of the market proved commitment //america invented a new politcal culture Chpter 1 shows how consumer culutre created poloitvcal consiousness Chpater 2-5 mateoral ciltire created a social and ecomoic framework 6-8 polical world of the personal cjoice of where to consumema nd how arised poltical consiousness 1. The private world of consumer desire help the potential to redefine popular politics Later on: Consumer culture creates a discourse of rights about choice. An empire of goods impeded personal happiness The people became accountable in market for the common good This brings all the classes together Consumer culture != cause the am rev, it was a precipiating factor that inspired a break frok palimtnet. We need to pay more attention to cumspumpiton and what it relfect ins society and how it can miliblize power.

STEPHANIE M. H. CAMP. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 206. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95

Year: 2004 Field: slavery Summary: oining a growing number of scholars of enslaved women in the Americas, Stephanie M. H. Camp studies bondwomen's resistance through "places, boundaries, and movement." Using planter papers, oral histories, and other familiar sources, she documents planters' efforts to confine slaves and regiment their motion (the "geography of containment"), enslaved women's movement despite these restraints (the "rival geography"), and the "perpetual conflicts" that arose as a result (pp. 13, 6). The "rival geography" provided not autonomy but chances for creativity, play, rest, and, ultimately, resistance to planters' domination. Camp's conceptually ambitious project works well with her carefully delimited parameters. Chronologically, she explores the antebellum decades and the Civil War, although she is deeply versed in colonial and comparative scholarship. She makes deft use of colonial architecture, nineteenthcentury paternalism, law, the black Atlantic, and print culture to anchor individual bondwomen in a broader present and a long past. She examines the entire South but only its plantation slaves. She also excludes religion, theft, and fugitives from her scope. The book's brevity and admirable cohesion reward this approach Thesis: Avoiding the word "slave," meanwhile, is one of the book's arguments: "slave" implies a static "state of being," while "bondperson" draws attention to legal status and "enslaved person" suggests an "active historical process" (p. 143). Anyone skeptical that terminology matters should consider substituting "enslavers" for "slaveholders" and "masters," two terms which efface violence and privilege owners' point of view n Closer to Freedom, Stephanie Camp provides readers with a creative interpretation of gender and day-to-day resistance among nineteenth-century Southern slaves. Her approach to this topic is imaginative. Part of her thesis considers the "geography of containment," a concept she employs to describe slaveholders' use of restraint in exercising control over their bound laborers. The second part of her thesis suggests that bondpeople etched out "mobility in the face of constraint" that operated against their owners' efforts. Borrowing from the work of Edward Said, the author concludes that "bondpeople created a 'rival geography' . . . characterized by motion: the movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around plantation space" (7). Closer to Freedom explores the rival geography between the enslaved and their owners, noting that it operated in clandestine ways during the antebellum era and in visible, overt, and sometimes offensive ways during and immediately following the Civil War.\ Closer to Freedom is premised on the idea that masters and slaves used space differently, that there were black spaces and white spaces that represented "rival geographies." Camp adapts this term, used by Said and geographers to describe resistance to colonial occupation, for the plantation South where the enslaved perpetually challenged their enslavers' control of time, space, and movement.1 Playing with the double entendre of the concept of place, Camp explains that whites' "social place" was predicated on the control of black movement and the containment of blacks to particular spaces. In Closer to Freedom, slave resistance is understood as "mobility in the face of constraint" (7). [End Page 298] Building on existing research of absenteeism, Camp's discussion of women as truants and truancy facilitators deepens our understanding of resistance as both an individual and collective endeavor. She argues forcefully that although men comprised the majority of runaways and truants, the role that women played in providing food and information made these two forms of resistance individual and collective at the same time, and gave bonded men and women more control of the southern landscape than whites ever wanted them to have. riguing and interesting is Camp's treatment of the body as space. According to Camp, imagining the enslaved body in space allows us to see how the enslaved "claimed, animated, politicized, personalized and enjoyed their bodies" (62). Blacks took their bodies to religious ceremonies and other surreptitious gatherings, and women, in particular, adorned and used their bodies in ways that allowed them to become instruments of self-expressive style. Although this part of Camp's argument might have benefited from a fuller explication of the interaction of mind, body, and soul, Camp argues insightfully that the enslaved had at least three bodies: one that the enslaver dominated, one that processed and endured that domination, and another that the enslaved claimed and enjoyed—the contested site between the enslaver and the enslaved. he concept of rival geographies works well when applied to the Civil War and Jim Crow era. According to Camp, the Civil War disrupted the spatial arrangements of slavery; blacks and whites, men and women were all both figuratively and literally "out of place," enabling and increasing black resistance to white domination. By the time Closer to Freedom arrives at the Jim Crow era, Camp has laid the foundation for her description of segregation as "a modern, state-sponsored response to an old problem" (140). Built on established habits, Camp concludes that "segregation seems as much tradition in a new form as a modern break from it" (140). Closer to Freedom queries some old questions in new ways and gives deeper analysis to what is already on record. Regrettably, the domestic slave trade, with all of its movement through the southern countryside, is nowhere to be found in this study of movement, place, and space. Other: The five chapters explore two themes: the limitations of "classic social scientific dichotomies," such as resistance/accommodation, public/private, collective/indi vidual, and political/apolitical, and "the spatial history of American slavery" (pp. 3, 4). Chapter 1 investigates why such minute control was meaningful to planters at the time, and why it is an important part of the history of American slavery now. The next three chapters focus on patterns of barely discernible activity that were carefully hidden on plantations across the South. Chapter 2 looks at the practice of truancy, an intentionally temporary escape. In addition to engaging in absenteeism a good deal more than they ran away, women were also key to enabling the shortterm flight of others. Women, then, were users and makers of slaves' rival geography and were instrumental in facilitating an endemic labor problem in the Old South. Chapter 3 explores bondpeople's secular hidden institution: the illegal party. This chapter argues that women created ''third bodies'' that were sites of pleasure and resistance. Chapter 4 is a close reading of two incidents involving bondwomen who acquired abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their homes. In these instances, slave cabins were linked to a national readership of abolitionist print culture and an illustration of the advancement of abolitionism into the South. They were the meeting ground of everyday plantation resistance and high national politics. Investigating everyday forms of resistance does more than draw us into secret worlds; it alerts us to the hidden origins of the most dramatic historical events. Revolutionary moments may make spectacular breaks with the past, but they also are formed by them, spilling over from the old constraints and making the most of new opportunities to do visibly what formerly had been cloaked.≤∑ Chapter 5 analyzes the moment when the hidden was made visible, when covert resistance moved out of the underground and into the light of day. In this chapter, I look at enslaved women's and men's motion from a perspective somewhat di√erent from that of earlier chapters. During the war, thousands of enslaved people escaped slavery by running to Union army camps. This migration from bondage to freedom was shaped by antebellum gender patterns that deepened during the war, and it was made possible by the knowledge antebellum slaves (especially men) had acquired about plantation and extra-plantation space and the value that all had placed on its use. The relative openness of flight during the Civil War made slaveholders—and the records they left behind—more informative about slaves' illicit movement than they had been before. At the same time, the activities of women remained more di≈cult to locate than those of men (in whom the Union army was very interested and about whom they wrote a good deal; war, it is clear, was men's business). The e√ort to find and write about black women during the Civil War continued to require resourceful reading of the material One sentence:Chapter 3 is a fascinating look at slaves' illicit socializing and the signifi cance of enslaved women claiming control of their own bodies for pleasure and enjoyment. Camp recreates enslaved women's participation in secret nighttime slave frolics; the importance of women's clothing and appearance at such social events; and the degree to which slaves' physical socializing was implicitly a challenge to slavery's control of their bodies, space, and time. Chapter 4 examines enslaved women's possession and display of aboli tionist propaganda to explore the political and social significance of bond women who nurtured overt opposition to slavery in their homes. Chapter 5 focuses on bondwomen's migrations away from slavery during the Civil War. In this final chapter, Camp deftly shows how this overt rejection of slavery was a clear outgrowth of the spaces for independent action that bondwomen and bondmen had created under slavery. Without doubt, Camp moves historical analysis beyond agency and resis tance to create an in-depth picture of the process of slavery and the way that slaves carved out lives filled with political and personal meaning. Closer to Freedom is an excellent study of bondwomen and a penetrating look at the rival geographies created by enslaved people more generally. It is not a comprehensive study of slave resistance; rather it suggests how we might reconceptualize selected facets of the daily lives of bondpeople. Other schol ars would do well to build on Camp's beginnings and continue to investigate the cultures of opposition she has uncovered. !!!!!!! n short, bondpeople created a ''rival geography''—alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space that conflicted with planters' ideals and demands. The term ''rival geography'' was coined by Edward Said and has been used by geographers to describe resistance to colonial occupation.∞∫ I have adapted the term for the slave South, where the challenge for enslaved people was not one of repossession of land in the face of dispossession but of mobility in the face of constraint. Thus the rival geography was not a settled spatial formation, for it included quarters, outbuildings, woods, swamps, and neighboring farms as chance granted them. Where planters' mapping of their farms was defined by fixed places for plantation residents, the rival geography was characterized by motion: the movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around plantation space.∞Ω The rival geography did not threaten to overthrow American slavery, nor did it provide slaves with autonomous space. Much of the rival geography, such as woods and swamps, was space to which planters and patrols had access, and other parts, including quarters and outbuildings were places over which they also had a large measure of control. Nor was there anything safe about bondpeople's illicit movements or the temporary spaces they created; to the contrary, these activities and areas were truly dangerous. The rival geography did, however, provide space for private and public creative expression, rest and recreation, alternative communication, and importantly, resistance to planters' domination of slaves' every move During their enslavement, women and men—in fear, rage, indignation, and desperation—fled some of the worst moments of their bondage. These escapes were not palliatives but were of value to enslaved people and o√ensive to planters. They were also part of a long-term freedom struggle that ended with emancipation and the Confederate surrender in April 1865, only to begin once again at those same moments. The unmaking of the slavery regime was in process throughout (at least) the antebellum period, in the hands and feet of those who would live to exploit national crisis to bring about their own liberation

Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. By Eliga H. Gould. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 3

Year: 2012 Field: Atlantic rev stuff Summary: Among the Powers of the Earth examines this double-sided engagement with the law of nations by tracing the question of America's legal and political standing through a series of historical moments and issues. Among the many topics that Gould addresses are the entanglement of the British, French, and Spanish Empires in the eighteenth century; the ambiguous legal status of the American rebels (did they deserve to be treated as true soldiers or were they what contemporary administrations would call "unlawful combatants"); the struggle to strengthen the national government in the 1780s; conflicts over shipping and neutral rights during the wars of the French Revolution; territorial expansion; removal of Native Americans; and conflicts over the slave trade. In its reach, clarity, and consistent focus, Gould's book is a tour de force of the new international history of the revolutionary Atlantic world. A field that once stressed nationalism to the point of insularity now sports a cottage industry in contextualizing the origins of the United States within its international setting. Eliga H. Gould advances this salutary development one step further, by explaining not only how the new American nation responded to extra-national developments, but how the nation itself emerged and took shape from the struggle to establish order within a scene of international rivalry. Thesis: The Declaration of Independence's "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" was more than a rhetorical flourish, Gould shows; instead, that "decent respect" demanded an ongoing project to bring American statehood into line with the rules and expectations of European public law. But, he insists, the American search for concord with the law of nations was not simply a constraint on American power; the rules of the law of nations enabled the powerful within the United States territory to exercise their power with limited oversight from other nations. International constraint enabled domestic hierarchy.! At the core of Gould's interpretation is the United States' search to become a "treaty-worthy" nation.! Gould argues that the imperatives of international conflict "played a role in the making of the American republic at least as important as the liberal and republican ideologies that have framed scholarship on the American Revolution since the Second World War" (p. 11). This powerful claim should provoke serious consideration from readers, who must judge whether the character of the early United States owes more to external practicalities than to immanent beliefs. Gould labels his account an "entangled history" (p. 11), a felicitous phrase that also served as the title to a 2007 article, published in the American Historical Review, in which Gould laid out several of the ideas now brought to fruition in this rich monograph. His scope extends beyond the customary approach of matching the United States with a comparative Atlantic counterpart. Among the Powers of the Earth brings the United States into conversation with neighbours to the north, south, east and west, including locations from St. Eustatius, to Miccosukee, to Sierra Leone. A set of excellent maps at the front serve as a helpful guide to readers. As settlers took control of the effort to integrate North America into the zone of law, they sought to protect the place of slavery within the new political order. Initially, when North America stood outside the zone of law, slavery had "flourished" without challenge (p. 50). However, slavery seemed to undermine American claims to recognition as a legitimate power after the Revolution, especially in light of the antislavery sentiment spreading throughout the British Empire. Gould insists on the "success with which American slaveholders managed the change" (p. 146). By supporting the movement to ban the slave-trade, American planters managed to have their cake and eat it too: gaining a place among the powers of the world without giving up their right to own slaves. Other: Gould argues that the annexation of Florida in 1819 was a critical turning point, when the US, after decades of diplomatic and military struggle, succeeded in acquiring internationally recognized boundaries. The regime that was established in 1819 did not, however, comprehensively extend the protection of the law of nations to all the people living inside the US. On the contrary, Native Americans and African Americans were left in a dangerous legal limbo. The legal plight they had suffered in the colonial era only became worse, as the dispossession of the Indians and the perpetuation of slavery were in effect authorized by internationally recognized treaties. One sentence: entanglked hsoitry and america become streatry worthy purposefully during their founding.

Jennifer L. Anderson. Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 432 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-04871-3, $34.00 (cloth).

Year: 2012 Field: eASRLY AMERICA Summary: Mahogany is a historical study that is as fine-grained and intricate as the finished furniture that Anderson describes so beautifully in this [End Page 988] fascinating exploration of a new world extractive industry. Focused on the rise and fall of the mahogany trade over the course of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, Anderson's book reveals the damaging human and ecological costs of this sought-after timber commodity. Using a series of biographical portraits and local studies, Anderson demonstrates how the market for this wood was created, adapted, and sustained by a wide range of individuals whose stories are shaped by everything from their ingenuity and imprudence to their resilience and sheer insistence on survival. It is their stories that allow Anderson to offer a nuanced exploration of capitalism, depicting it not only as a system shaped and sustained by vast structures and discourses, such as slavery, Enlightenment thinking, and imperial competition, but also by a system that was defined by unpredictable human responses. Her work thus fits into the broader conversation scholars have been having over slavery and capitalism, as well as providing a timely reminder of the costs of consumerism in both the eighteenth century and our own Thesis: Central to Lepore's thesis is the notion that war cultivates language The Name of War asks whether it is possible to discover alternative ways in which King Philip's War was (and is) remembered since most of what has been written about it comes from the pens of the "winners." Lepore's analysis indeed proves that it is. She detects native voices between the lines of text but also hears faint echoes of them emanating ftom other sources. The m^sage is to listen careftilly, especially today, as native peoples' voicfô resonate across New England in contestation over a war that for some has never really ended. The Name of War has much to recommend it. Read careftilly, the book is wonderftilly insightfiil. Page x: wounds and words, the injuries and their interpretations cant be seperated ; narratives are generatred; all is for a common purpose: to define the geogra-phical, popliotical, cultuiral, racial, and national bouinhdaries between -people/ War is a contest for meaning Other: As Lepore argues, their detailed, often gruesome, accounts of the damage caused by the war, including descriptions of mutilated bodies, maimed animals, and ravaged property, sharpened their identity as Anglo-American colonists and laid the foundation on which they would build American nationalism . Individuals are named; their actions, motivations, and emotions are assessed. The war is no longer impersonal, but something that affected the lives of real people Public commemorations, as Lepore argues, helped to keep it alive well beyond the late seventeenth century not enough antive perspective or materlaist analyisis!! One sentence:

Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. xvii + 337, $30, paperback. ISBN 978-1-107-64086-3.

Year: 2013 Field: Summary: The Panic of 1837 was a signal event in the financial history of the United States, Great Britain, and a number of other countries. According to Jessica Lepler, 1837 also marked a change in economic conceptualization, as contemporaries sought to understand what precisely had occurred. In Lepler's view, there were two broad ways of viewing events. In the United States, the genesis of 1837 was interpreted politically, either as the outcome of party factionalism (Whigs and Democrats), or, at bottom, as the result of a moral failure that had some connection to the institution of chattel slavery. Either way, economics per se offered no proximate causes. M. Lepler combines financial, busi- ness, and economic history with social, cul- tural, and political history in a transnational context in The Many Panics of 1837 to dem- onstrate that human agency remains at the heart of seemingly large impersoal forces. Thesis: " (6). Lepler offers a more nuanced, contingent account, one that centers on countless decisions by commercial elites, bankers, politicians, and newspaper editors between 1836 and May 10, 1837. She characterizes this period as one of genuine uncertainty, during which individuals on both sides of the Atlantic scrambled to gather accurate information about and produce [End Page 420] explanations for financial failures. Within this account, the banks' suspension of specie payments on May 10 appears not as the start of the panic but as its conclusion. Lepler argues persuasively in this well-writtentale of three cities that the transition from thebest of times to the worst of times explainsthe psychology of what was so panicky aboutthe panic of 1837. Localized panics created bybusinessmen's and governmental leaders' de-cisions between March 4 and May 10, 1837,resulted in high anxiety over what might hap-pen next. The economic depression that fol-lowed suspension of specie payment by NewYork banks on May 10, 1837 - usually de-scribed as the start date of a singular nationalpanic - was instead the denouement of thepreceding localized panics Other: The panic is a cultural construction The panics were plural!!!!! It was a coalesacne of events in the econmi political and culural spehres that predated the panic which was later calcifed in the panic \ There were many panics with different origins'; her history is entagled; how does information work with the conomy; the local nature of transnational events; how do econimc and ideas dflorush The book demostares how the parallel crises and many panics of 1837 led to the invention of a single, national event that would become know as the panic of 1937. Then we fell in love with the panic and forgot. \ 1. Pays attention to race and stuff; she sees things almost anti-structually. Infinite personal choices make the panic.. Speculation in the american economy dimished from the brisitsh and the america economy was becoming very bull and bubblish 2. Investors afriad of american specualtion crrated the panic they saw to avoid because of their lack if confidence Internartlional by nature; Intreparations and the memeing of it throughout culture facilitaed a fear in american economics. The british did not belive in us because of the bank wat 3. All people foucsed on self-made men as the reaosn for success and trouble, I wonder if lepler does too The riot was because oif the believe in perrsonal reponsibilty By the end of 1837 people blamed larger structure\\\ 4. Commuication matters a lot in economic hsitory: This communicationa nd desire to create a natrative out of their shared panic asked them to create a structre of the panic of 1837 to fix the issue 6. \ The two months of panics allowed for testing and prcaial readjustments of the realtionship of the govt to the finncial syatem The naartive of the panic of 1837 is wrong ; it was plutal and obscured by NY 7. \ It suspended specie payment and personal agency to end the panic This is a storying off goruping to avoid the implications of being infdivudals (panics and ppeople) People forgot about it to forget the pain and re build the economy Epi \Thinks therre is a obscured hsitoical reality Says all other interpets have been purposeful but not hers? She does care regihtly about the way that people actualy experienced it Experience shapes economic understanding and thus shapres human agency?? Rediscoery of the panic istsefl One sentence:The panic is a cultural construction The panics were plural!!!!! It was a coalesacne of events in the econmi political and culural spehres that predated the panic which was later calcifed in the panic There were many panics with different origins'; her history is entagled; how does information work with the conomy; the local nature of transnational events; how do econimc and ideas dflorush The book demostares how the parallel crises and many panics of 1837 led to the invention of a single, national event that would become know as the panic of 1937. Then we fell in love with the panic and forgot. \

Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. By Janet Polasky. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. 391 pages. Cloth, paper.

Year: 2015 Field: Summary: Pamphlets, not muskets, ignited the revolutions that swept through America and Europe at the end of the eighteenth century" (17). So Janet Polasky opens Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. This epigram-worthy sentence encapsulates much of this capacious book. Following traveling revolutionaries around the Atlantic world from 1776 to 1804, Polasky traces how the sparks that were revolutionary ideas about liberty spread and caught fire, igniting revolutions. But Polasky's is not a Whiggish history focused only on democratic dreams of liberty burning bright. It is also a history of failed revolutions in places such as Geneva, Guadeloupe, and Sierra Leone, where, more often than not, revolutionaries "dreamed of worlds never realized" (354). Polasky traces how ideology connected entangled revolutions of all sorts, exhibiting a shared idiom, a "call to liberty" that "resonated with different accents across the Atlantic world" (5). Thesis: In this, it both hearkens back to a much older historiography from the 1950s and 1960s and forms part of a present trend toward the global. Polasky's work also makes a strong case for the larger field of Atlantic world history itself. Given some scholars' questioning of the field's raison d'être in the twenty-first century, Polasky's lucid exposition in its favor will stand as one of her book's significant contributions Although Polasky's work is focused on conceptions of liberty rather than democracy, both its transatlantic approach and the revolutionary movements it examines and connects will inevitably remind readers of R. R. Palmer's classic The Age of the Democratic Revolution.1 Her book brings that transatlantic history up to date by expanding it in new directions to reflect the seismic shifts that have occurred in the field since the 1960s. Most notably, Polasky folds gender and race into the narrative by including women and people of color among her cosmopolitan revolutionaries, and she expands the entangled geography of late eighteenth-century revolutions to Africa and the Caribbean. [End Page 761] Other: Polasky states her case for the ubiquity of ideology as a revolutionary force in nine chapters. Each revolves around a different set of sources, "most generated in the alternative political sphere beyond the official institutions of government" (14). This common origin reflects Polasky's interpretive focus: hers is an age of revolutions driven by peripatetic networks of ideas, paper, and people rather than one defined by economic concerns, political structures, or governing institutions. What is welcome about this approach is that [End Page 762] it more naturally lends itself to expanding discussions of ideology beyond the mostly elite white men and leaders of successful revolutions who peopled earlier seminal works on revolutionary ideology by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood.3 Polasky's work should earn her a place within their interpretive canon, where she will bring fresh attention to different genders, classes, and races and to the failures among late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century revolutions!!! One sentence: Between and , the possibility of revolution loomed large over four continents. Revolutions were erupting everywhere. "Over half of the globe, all men utter but one cry, they share but one desire," a pamphle-teer proclaimed from Brussels. He witnessed "humanity, united in action" all around him, people "rising up to reclaim a majestic and powerful lib-erty." Th e call to liberty, he reported, could be heard wherever tyrants oppressed their subjects. It was not just in America and France that revolu-tions were overturning governments. Revolutions cascaded through all of the continents bordering the Atlantic. From the Americas to Geneva, the Netherlands, Ireland, the Belgian provinces, France, Saint- Domingue, Guadeloupe, Poland, Martinique, Sierra Leone, Italy, Hungary, and Haiti, revolutionaries challenged the privileges of aristocrats, clerics, and mon-archs to claim their sovereignty. - Th e founding fathers of the small set of revolutions we commemorate did not conceive of freedom in isolation. - ifty years before red fl ags above the barricades announced the revolutions of and almost a cen-tury before the Socialists of the Second International assembled in Paris to debate a common strategy, revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic world staked their claim to the rights of man. Two centuries before the Arab Spring, without social media or even an international postal system, revolutionaries shared ideals of liberty and equality across entire continents. Th eirs, too, was an international movement connected by ideas that traveled. - Th e real "revolution was in the minds of the people," not on the battlefi elds of America and Europe. At the end of all of these debates and introductiondiscussions, some conducted within the confi nes of the nation- state, but others across borders, people on both sides of the Atlantic understood the world and their place in it totally diff erently - Revolutions without Borders not only recovers the idealism of these eighteenth- century revolutionaries, but also probes the uncertainty and disappointments they experienced in the search for liberty. Th eir short-comings, contradictions, and inconsistencies not only were constituent of the transnational revolutions that upended the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, they endure as testimony to the daring of its vision. Th is is a history of the variety of visions from an era when anything seemed possible. Ignored by historians focusing on the big two or three national revolutionaries, America, France, and Haiti, ideals and schemes spun at the crossroads or on the periphery of the Atlantic Revolution also changed our world, even if they did not establish a nation- state that has endured to the present.History doesn't repeat itself, but historians do. Having privileged suc-cessful revolutions, we look for our founding fathers' plans for democra-cies everywhere in every subsequent upheaval, from Romania to Egypt. We are then inevitably frustrated. Without an understanding of the rich variety of revolutionary possibility in the past, we are condemned to judge the present through the blinders of a limited set of national narratives. Searching for new exceptional national revolutions, we neglect the men, women, and children of the Arab Spring who struggled, but who will not be cast as the heroes of a new democracy. Revolutions without Bordersreminds us that revolutions travel easily across national borders and that many roads have led in diff erent directions, not straight to the present ideas crossed boreders and the rev was decided by a rev ideology in the midns of people rathe rthanm battlefields.

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp

Year: 2016 Field: Summary: Thesis: Karp turns to American foreign policy, where slaveholders also ruled. He argues that a cosmopolitan planter elite, operating from a mindset that was active and expansive rather than withdrawn and defensive, spurned ideas of states' rights and limited government for the frank embrace of national power on a global stage. They were, in their eyes, American patriots, but patriots of the United States as the world's greatest slaveholding power, not as Thomas Jefferson's (or Abraham Lincoln's) empire of liberty. Their aim at the helm was to make the future safe for slavery. Other: They might have been on the defensive at home, but they saw a brightfuture for themselves in the emerging global political-economic order. Southern independence was not an act of desperation to save anarchaic institution. It was a bold, offensive move Slavers loved centralized power when it benefitted them Secession was a foreign policy decision as much as anything else cp 10 Take the slave holders seriously, they were devilish and sophisticated One sentence:Overview of Foreign Policy and slvaery and how slaveholding deeply intertwined with American foregin policy. It was therefore not in the fevered exposition of crabbed states'-rights doctrine, nor even in overhyped private filibustering, but in "master class foreign policy" that the planter elite most clearly showed its hand (7). To foil it they championed first a strong navy and, later in the 1850s under Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, even an expanded peacetime army. Their ascendance reached its height in the early 1840s in the Tyler and Polk administrations. Karp recasts Texas annexation in 1845 as a means not so much to buttress slavery's position within the United States as to secure its hemispheric bastions without—whether by diplomacy, as in Cuba and Brazil, or, as in Texas, by direct takeover if necessary. , Karp argues, their global outlook waxed yet more expansive and optimistic. Buoyed by the failure (in their eyes) of free labor in the Caribbean sugar islands, and by growing European exploitation of nonwhite labor elsewhere, southerners saw the commercial world turning toward reliance on racial slavery, or something like it, as the natural and necessary state of things, an essential element of progress. In the emerging modern order, cotton—along with sugar, rice, tobacco, and coffee—would rule, and free labor, not slavery, would be the anomaly. The ability of pro-slavery forces in the Tyler and Polk administrations to thwart this effort and instead annex Texas itself stands, in Karp's words, as "perhaps the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery" (100). Despite profound moral, economic, and political shifts in the West, slaveholders nonetheless saw a bright future, one in which slavery played a critical role in the modern world. Matthew Karp's insightful and persuasive book helps cement this case. Karp's contribution here is essential — he shows how southern elites also directed the nation's foreign policy. In doing so, he also changes our understanding of antebellum political economy, not just for slaveholders but for the nation For the better part of forty years, antebellum southernhistoriography has been dominated by an emphasis on differences anddiversity within the South; the personalities of hotheads, eccentrics, andhothead eccentrics; and the supposed romanticism of archaic slaveholders.Embedded in these historiographical emphases is an assumption that the South was backward and agrarian, out-of-step with economic and politicaldevelopments in the larger Atlantic world, including natural-rights ide-ologies, political democracy, and industrial capitalism

Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. By Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor.

Year: 2016 Field: Summary: When Frederick Douglass and other nineteenth-century black residents of the United States voyaged between cities, they referred to themselves as "colored travelers." This term, which Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor uses as the title of her book, addresses the racialized experience of black mobility and transportation technologies in the nineteenth century. The first three chapters detail the complexities of northern racism and how black people resisted segregation on public transportation, where free blacks were likely to confront white hostility. Thesis: Making use of print sources including slave narratives, interviews, letters, slave songs, sketches, abolitionist lectures, journals, and newspaper articles, Pryor contends that "colored travelers"—that is, free and financially capable people of color who resided in the antebellum North—believed that uninhibited travel constituted "a crucial component of U.S. citizenship" and that "by protesting against segregation, colored travelers identified the cars, compartments, and cabins of public conveyances as critical sites for equal rights protest" a century before Rosa Parks and the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 (p. 2). Stordeur Pryor compellingly argues that blacks connected equal access to public transportation space with the rights of citizenship. Travel, especially because of technological changes that occurred between 1790 and 1860, "was a vital mechanism for citizenship" (p. 45). The development of segregation in the early 1800s led to equal rights conflicts over access to transportation technologies and citizenship. This fight over mobility and citizenship that occurred before the Civil War had implications for subsequent civil rights conflicts. Stordeur Pryor explains that nineteenth-century black activism and struggles for access to transportation technologies, in the face of Jim Crow segregation, "birthed, shaped, and cultivated the equal rights movement in the United States" (p. 1). Black travelers insisted on their rights as free people to wander the coun - try and the world; the obstacles they faced illuminate how the practice of race-based slavery in the United States plagued all black people regardless of their status. Other: One sentence:

ERIC WILLIAMS. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Pp. ix, 245. $29.95

Year: 44 Field: Summary: Thesis: In general, Williams supports economic materialism, aligning himself against those who situate moral causality, ideological humanitarianism, and poetic sentimentalism at the center of the abolition movement. In a chapter entitled "The 'Saints' and Slavery," Williams goes so far as to call English abolitionists hypocrites and the "unconscious mouthpieces" of the "new industrial interest." Other: One sentence: Intro: Strictly Economic Shows imperal relationships in histroy and the centrlaity of the african trade to Brishish imperialism 1:origins of slavery; racism was born as a consequence of slavery The reason for slavery was economic not racial Ackowneldges that white servitude exsisted along with black and the english eventually phased that out Slavery did not assume the inferiority of the negro bcuase white where there too, it was a labor issue. I don't agree but underatbd 4 monopoly was met and challenged by free trade private merchants challenge the biritsh hegemony in the indies 6 am rev 'Breaks up the britsh monoploy in the west 8. The britsh lwan toward aboltions ebcuase it was resonding the growing free labor. The reasons were economic all the way down. 10. England wants everyone to adopt free labor to cripple other competing instrests and trase with them 11 Blacks given back freedom by the leites who enslaved them in the west indies

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. Lepore, Jill

Year: 90s Field: indigenous Summary: Unlike other war stories, Jill Lepore's book is not about battles and heroes. Rather, it is about war and remembrance. The war is King Philips, a conflict between Indians and colonists fought in New England from 1675 to 1676. Named after a Wampanoag sachem known to native peoples as Metacom, this littleknown American war has raged for more than three centuries. On its battlefield, English, Native Americans, and European Americans have stri^led over identity. In the continuing contest, language, as Lepore reasons, has played an active role with historical memory in transforming the events and cruelties of what may have been one of the bloodiest American wars. Lepore structures the book around four aspects of the conflict: language, war, bondage, and memory. Deeply semiotic text Thesis: Other: One sentence:

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. By BEbridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, Pp. xxiii+335.

Year: I967. Field: am rev Summary: The central theme of Professor Bailyn's interpretation remainsthe idea which he twice quotes from John Adams, that: "TheRevolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected,from 1760 to 1775 ... This radical change in the principles, opin-ions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real Ameri-can Revolution." Bailyn continues to focus on "the years of crisisfrom 1763 to 1776," when he says a "view of the world and Amer-ica's place in it only partially seen before" was clarified and con-solidated, "fused into a comprehensive view, unique in its moraland intellectual appeal." This conceptual framework, describingthe Revolution as a transformation, producing the fusion of a comprehensive ideology in the dozenis identical in both versions of the essay. Thesis: Bailyn's view that the "American Revolutionwas above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and notprimarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changesin the organization of the society or the economy." For ifthe distinguishing "ideology" of the "Revolutionary" period was"completely formed" in the 1730's, then one may wonder whetherthere was a revolutionary transformation of ideology in the 1760'sand 177o's Yet in fact Bailyn's long, virtually unchanged concluding chap-ters demonstrate conclusively that there were substantial changesin American ideas if not ideology in the period 1760 to 1776. Ex-amining the concepts of representation and consent, of constitu-tion, and sovereignty for example, Bailyn brilliantly traces theirdevelopment during these years towards a peculiar American con-figuration. Indeed if Bailyn is correct in describing the "Revolu-tionary" ideology as fully formed in the 1730's, then the impres-sion he conveys is that the experience of the Revolutionary periodserved to extend this system of ideas, not transform it. The revolu-tionary change was not the fusion of partially recognized ideas intoan ideology; that was already complete. Rather, it was the exten-sion of this ideology to greater numbers of people who stretched itto its logical conclusions in applying it to immediate politicalquestions. Other: Had revoltuinary principles à won à New government àRevise principlesàapply to new govt 1. They made pamplhelts well before the rev, this is where the ideas rested with the desire to persuade. - They were aiming at liberty free of parliament 2. It was the culture of ideas that existed and were poked at and realized in 1763 which inspired the nation to take arms - Law was inspuiration but not indicative of whatt would come next - Not a coherent set of ideas, still had to be codified into a revolutinaory framework. - Ideas stated in england civill war and law and was apporatied and adapted by the colonists 3. Power attacked liberty and the colonist took umbridge - Liberty meant natural rights - Remember: My intepreatiation of these ideas probably come from this book. It is the standard! - "When tyranny is abroad, submission is a crime" 4. The logic of rebellion - Conspiracy against liberty by the british justified revolutin - It was delibrate by british - Age of ideology 5. Transformation: -They came together under the banner of these ideas and gave moral santion to themselves and rebellion under the britsh system of logic -England's system can not gaurnette and lionize liberty -Colonist cared about the sovernighty of power; where does I lie - should it be singualr 6. The contagion of liberty - Catches on, it's a mofdular and democratic idea Postscirpt: 3 phases of ideology 1. Pre revoltuon: Fear of centrliazed power etc. 2. Rev: Implimaentation through state constitutions and evoltions 3. Constitution The culmiantion -They reworked their ideas; ot dispensde with them \ One sentence: By looking at pamhplets, Bailyn decideds that rev ideology exsisted in 1730, far before 1760, and that ideology was trhe driving force of the revioltuion.

Martha S. Jones. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

Year: very new Field: ante Summary: Ordinary persons of color in antebellum Baltimore led extraordinary lives. Although told by many high state courts and the Supreme Court of the United States that they had no rights a white person was obligated to respect, free blacks in Baltimore before the Civil War organized churches, went to sea, started businesses, sued and were sued, and more generally regarded themselves as rights-bearing citizens in a rights-bearing republic. Judicial elites debated whether free persons of color were federal and state citizens, almost always concluding they were not. Yet once out of the sight of these high court priests and, too often, their contemporary scholarly devotees, free black Baltimoreans sought to demonstrate that they were as American as those white persons with whom they shared civic space. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America tells the fascinating story of African American citizenship from the perspective of black Baltimoreans Thesis: Martha S. Jones's pathbreaking study details how this form of lived citizenship differed from the legal and constitutional citizenship being discussed in antebellum legal opinions and contemporary scholarship. "Despite persistent assertions to the contrary," she points out, "Baltimore's free black residents had long lived as rights-bearing people who cobbled together a strain of belonging that looked like citizenship" (146) The nineteenth- century Americans for whom Yates wrote were fascinated by a juridical puzzle: Not slaves nor aliens nor the equals of free white men, who were former slaves and their descendants before the law? Other: Jones presents persons of color as actors rather than as victims Nevertheless, Birthright Citizens is far more concerned with how African Americans attempted to work within and work around racial discriminations than with how racial discrimination subordinated African Americans and African American communities. The chapter in Birthright Citizens that discusses gun rights illustrates this emphasis on acting rather than victimhood. Jones points out that Maryland was one of many states that placed substantial restrictions on the capacity of persons of color to own and carry weapons. Although these regulations were largely unenforced, black Baltimoreans routinely ran through the numerous legal hoops necessary to obtain a legal permit necessary to carry a gun. One reason for this was almost certainly the adage "better safe than sorry." Jones points to a second reason. In antebellum America, gun ownership was a sign of manhood and citizenship. By obtaining a permit to own a gun, men of color demonstrated that they were, if not official citizens, rights-bearing individuals entitled to at least some legal respect. Birthright Citizens reminds us that historical memory played an important part in the process of retaining and recovering citizenship. Free black people struggled against the new restrictions of the nineteenth century and were aware of the ground they were losing in the new era of greater racial hostility. They prized the promise of republicanism and equality implicit in the nation's eighteenth-century founding, seeking to retain and reclaim as much as possible in an atmosphere considerably more hostile to freedom. This chapter examines the confrontations that Maryland's black laws provoked for free people of color in Baltimore. While their terms were wide ranging, a closer look at the city's criminal docket shows how infrequently such laws were enforced. Laws requiring travel permits and gun licenses are two of the more striking examples. Both mobility and the possession of fi rearms had material signifi cance -they enabled self- suffi ciency and self- protection. They were also linked to emerging discussions about what rights the Constitution might protect: abolitionists argued that the Second Amendment extended to free people of color a right to bear arms, and the Supreme Court was beginning to provide for a right to interstate travel. In Baltimore, free people of color were regarded as an exception in the sense that they required court permission to inhabit such rights. But they did gain the rights to travel across state lines and carry fi rearms. Along the way, they made lawyers and judges into accomplices whose own reputations turned on the ability of free black people to comport themselves like rights- bearing people. As they traveled with a permit or carried a licensed gun, they were that much closer to citizenship. Still, as black Baltimoreans initiated their own claims, they found a court that was quietly accommodating. One sentence: How african americans fought through law and life to cobble together a version of untrational citenship