Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West is a history of the development of the American West through the lens of water management technology. Building on substantial archival research, Worster argues that
The West, more than any other American region,
was built by state power, state expertise, state technology, and state
bureaucracy. That is another way of
saying that it has been, and is, the most thoroughly modern of American
regions, and therefore that its experience, particularly in the matter of
water, has been most instructive for deciphering the confused messages of that
modernity.
By positioning water as technology rather than nature and the West as a federally-funded, man-made landscape, Worster both deconstructs the West's self-image as independent and free of government control AND reconstructs the region not as a colony of the East but as the seat of a global American empire.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
141: Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization
Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1934) is a massive history of technological development in the Western world in three phases: the Eotechnic, from AD 1000 to the 18th century, which was characterized by diverse, unsystematized inventions and ideas; the Paleotechnic, from the late 18th century to the late 19th, which was "reckless to the point of barbarism" in its war, death, brute strength, and industrialization; and the Neotechnic, which began in the early 20th century and is hopeful that new alloys, electricity, communication technologies will lead to better, more organic social and technological projects. Throughout, Mumford argues that "No matter how completely technics relies upon
the objective procedures of the sciences, it does not form an independent
system, like the universe: it exists as an element in human culture and it
promises well or ill as the social groups that exploit it promise well or ill." He advocates a more egalitarian technopolitics via an increased understanding and assimilation of the machine.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
137: Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Rhodes is a novelist, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb is, as most reviewers have noted, a readable, and at times engrossing, epic (or as Hacker calls it, an
“Atomiad.”) It traces the development of
the atomic bomb from the early 1900s, when physicists were just beginning to
suspect the existence of an atom (though he locates belief in the “atom” as “an
invisible layer of eternal, elemental substance” in ancient Greeks Leucippus
and Democritus) through Los Alamos and WWII, and on to the development and
testing of the “Super” or hydrogen bomb in the 1950s. Various reviewers put their own political
slants on Rhodes’ thesis, but Broad, I think, captures it most fairly: since
1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, science has for the first time become powerful enough to challenge
the state. Critically, unlike
technological determinists, Rhodes sees that though atomic technology has
changed the way politics is enacted, the relationship between politics and
technology is a two-way street – which means, following Bohr, that a peaceful,
unified, global system is just as possible in the Nuclear Age as the current
system of warring states.
136: Richard Schein's Landscape and Race
With the edited collection Landscape and Race in the United States, Richard Schein aims to get the reader thinking about the relationship between race and the cultural landscape of everyday places; following Toni Morrison, he argues that "all American landscapes can be seen through a lens of race, all American landscapes are racialized. For Schein and his contributors, cultural landscape is material, visual, and epistemological, and landscape itself is a process: we shape it to reflect our cultural values, and then the cultural "framings" it contains come back to shape culture, so that whether material or symbolic, "cultural landscapes are constitutive of the processes that created them in the first place." Further, following Cornel West, Schein argues that race is an anti-essential, social, and political construct that "matters" as if it were ontological. Examining race in the landscape allows us to understand, in Omi & Winant's worlds, "the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed." In other words, studying racialized landscapes can help us understand the process of racialization.
Labels:
Cultural Geography,
culture,
history,
landscape,
process,
race,
vernacular
134: Carl Sauer's Morphology of Landscape
Carl Sauer's "The Morphology of Landscape" argues unambiguously that geography is the morphological study of cultural landscapes; it is the systematic study of both the ways in which humans have manipulated the physical landscape, and the ways in which physical landscape shapes the cultural landscape. This article is one of the foundational articles for the Berkeley School, human geography, and cultural geography; Sauer wrote it partly to get the environmental determinists off his back, and partly to stake out some territory for geography. Here are a few highlights:
- the "morphological method" involves describing the hell out of physical and cultural landscapes, and then looking for formal patterns across landscapes to determine the connections between culture and the landscape. The goal is to create composite types, so that you can measure future landscapes against them.
Labels:
area,
Cultural Geography,
culture,
empiricism,
history,
landscape,
morphology,
nature,
objectivity,
Sauer,
subjectivity,
superorganic,
typology
133: Edward Relph's Modern Urban Landscape
Edward Relph's The Modern Urban Landscape examines the landscapes of large cities since 1880 for clues as to the relationship between modernization and urban form. In particular, he studies the visual landscapes of the "modern parts of towns and cities" in North America, Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; building on this firsthand experience, he concludes that "the modern urban landscape is both rationalised and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human, an expression of human will and deeply imbued with meaning." He thus shifts the focus of human geography from the rural to the urban, while retaining the discipline's focus on empirical observations of coherent visual landscapes.
To collect data on the changes in urban architecture, planning, technology and social conditions since 1880, Relph takes the "geographical" approach of "watching:" he starts with "the totality of what I see," then follows "several directions more or less at once," looking for unusual details, new developments, and ironic juxtapositions within the larger context of the urban fabric. Landscapes, to Relph, are the "visual contexts of daily existence," and he insists on retaining the wholeness of the urban landscape because so much of landscape is about context, about the relationships between buildings and the streets and spaces and other structures around them, that you cannot study any one element in isolation. Only by preserving landscape's "fragile wholeness" can we hope to learn anything about how it functions.
To collect data on the changes in urban architecture, planning, technology and social conditions since 1880, Relph takes the "geographical" approach of "watching:" he starts with "the totality of what I see," then follows "several directions more or less at once," looking for unusual details, new developments, and ironic juxtapositions within the larger context of the urban fabric. Landscapes, to Relph, are the "visual contexts of daily existence," and he insists on retaining the wholeness of the urban landscape because so much of landscape is about context, about the relationships between buildings and the streets and spaces and other structures around them, that you cannot study any one element in isolation. Only by preserving landscape's "fragile wholeness" can we hope to learn anything about how it functions.
131: DW Meinig's Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes
The Interpretation of Everyday Landscapes: Geographical Essays is a collection of landscape studies edited by DW Meinig. It represents a conscious effort to complicate the cultural landscape and reclaim it from the abstractions of science, in a way that both respects the visual nature of landscape and takes advantage of its discursive possibilities.
In his Intro, Meinig defines an ordinary landscape as a continuous surface created by and through the "routine lives of ordinary people." But it's also not that simple: landscape is a coherent unity of physical, biological, and cultural features; it has both functional and aesthetic components; it is more visual and panoramic than an environment, but less subjective and experiential than a place; and it is both a geographical formation and a representation, a history and a text, a symbol and an accretion of meanings. Landscape is both space and meaning; it doesn't exist without interpretation.
The essays in this collection generally support Meinig's rather complex definition of landscape as a field of study. A few highlights:
In his Intro, Meinig defines an ordinary landscape as a continuous surface created by and through the "routine lives of ordinary people." But it's also not that simple: landscape is a coherent unity of physical, biological, and cultural features; it has both functional and aesthetic components; it is more visual and panoramic than an environment, but less subjective and experiential than a place; and it is both a geographical formation and a representation, a history and a text, a symbol and an accretion of meanings. Landscape is both space and meaning; it doesn't exist without interpretation.
The essays in this collection generally support Meinig's rather complex definition of landscape as a field of study. A few highlights:
Labels:
Cultural Geography,
discourse,
history,
landscape,
meaning,
memory,
objectivity,
preservation,
space,
subjectivity,
symbolic,
text,
visual space
129: Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place
Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History is a reflection on 8 years of work at her Boston nonprofit The Power of Place, which she started in 1984 to "to situate women’s history and ethnic history in
downtown, in public places, through experimental, collaborative projects by
historians, designers, and artists." Written for academics, fellow practitioners, and the general public, The Power of Place shows how collaboratively-produced public art can bring together urban space and urban history in new, generative ways, while also identifying and preserving significant public places from changes in the configurations of capital. With the increasing interconnectedness of cities and the rise of placelessness, Hayden argues, an urban landscape history that accesses and generates "place memory" is the surest route to recovering both a sense of place and the historical agency/ capacity for social change that comes with it.
Labels:
collaboration,
community,
Cultural Geography,
culture,
history,
landscape,
memory,
place,
placemaking,
preservation,
struggle,
vernacular
Monday, April 8, 2013
127: Dolores Hayden's Building Suburbia
Dolores Hayden's Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-1900, is an extended essay on the 180 years of metropolitan development in the US from the perspective of the "urban periphery." Taking a network approach to the history of suburban development, Hayden studies maps, town plans, housing designs, pictures of households, aerial photography and other sources for clues as to the particular configuration of real estate entrepreneurs; natural and built environments; the lives of women, children, and men; and class, race, and political orientations that went into the development of the suburbs, and she divines 7 distinct types, each with its own characteristic development practices, building techniques, marketing strategies, architectural preferences, and environmental attitudes. The resulting book is both a history of suburban development and a critique of suburbia; throughout, Hayden argues that the suburbs have historically reproduced the conflict between people who seek the "triple dream of home, nature, and community" and entrepreneurs who "search for profits through the development of greenfield sites." She thus brings the suburbs to the forefront of landscape studies and reconfigures them as a site of struggle over the realization of the American Dream.
Labels:
capitalism,
Cultural Geography,
democracy,
development,
history,
landscape,
network,
struggle,
suburbs
Sunday, April 7, 2013
106: Neil Smith's American Empire
Neil Smith's American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization uses the life and career of Isaiah Bowman, geographer under FDR, to trace the interconnected histories of geography, the American Century, and globalization. Explicitly critiquing the claim that American Empire, and the global capitalism it is attached to, are placeless or beyond the "end of geography," Smith argues that as the "territoriality of power," geography has been profoundly important to the construction of American Empire. However, unlike European imperialisms, American Empire proceeds by global economic expansion rather than in "geopolitical, territorial terms." Thus, American Empire and geography are evolving together, as global economic expansion makes place ever more important.
American Empire proceeds both temporally and geographically. Temporally, Smith identifies three nodes or "formative moments" in the US rise to globalism:
American Empire proceeds both temporally and geographically. Temporally, Smith identifies three nodes or "formative moments" in the US rise to globalism:
- WWI and Wilson's League of Nations; the US gets more ambitious than it had been in 1898, and dreams of continuing its imperial acquisitions; this dream is deferred
- WWII; by the end of the war, Henry Luce's 1941 claim that this was the "American Century" seemed to ring true; from 1945-1970s US capital and culture flourished and spread
- Smashing the Berlin Wall/ sacking Baghdad in 1989/1991; after economic setbacks in the 1970s and 1980s from strengthening global competition, deregulation, the "withering" of the Japanese challenge in the 1990s, reconstruction of the US economy and the end of official communism all seemed to signify a "new world order," strengthened by a renewed interest in geography in the 1970s and 1980s.
99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place
In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender. In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life. Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues. Their book is divided into six parts:
Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women. Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia. They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.
Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women. Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia. They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.
Labels:
bodies,
consumption,
Cultural Geography,
domesticity,
empire,
environment,
gender,
general and theoretical,
globalization,
history,
home,
labor,
mobility,
nationalism,
place,
space,
women
Saturday, April 6, 2013
93: Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open
Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America is a conscious attempt to excavate and describe the legacy of the women's movement - primarily second wave feminism - for generations of women (and men) who didn't live through it, so that a kind of living, breathing social history can keep the struggle for gender equality alive. In particular, Rosen charts the change in women's consciousness from the 1950s to the 1990s through a vast compendium of the many issues, events,
people, ideas, books, successes, and failures of the women’s movement in the
United States, with some connections to women’s movements outside the US.
This book is written for a popular audience in response to her discovery that her undergraduate students in the 1980s had no idea what the women's movement had redefined. Accordingly, it hits all the highlights: Betty Freidan, SNCC and other civil rights groups, the coming together of the Old and New Left in what she calls the “female generation gap,” Kennedy’s commission on women and the tension between liberal and radical feminism, NOW, Gloria Steinem, the Vietnam War, abortion, the naming of hidden injuries, sexuality, the body, intersections between feminism and race and class, protests and happenings, consciousness-raising groups, sex, pornography, ideological factionalism, trashing, paranoia, the FBI, commodification, the superwoman, and Ronald Reagan and the spread of global feminism. Throughout, she attempts to characterize the depth and breadth of the women’s movement as much as she can while also showing just how interconnected this historical period was. She also tries to account for the successes and failures of the women's movement and the legacy of the movement as a whole.
Rosen's faith in the power of narrative to continue the perpetual gender revolution is clear, and I think her point that we will lose the gains we have made if we are not vigilant is a good one - just look at the attacks on affirmative action. However, I would very much like to read a history of this iteration of the women's movement written by someone who was not there, to get a sense of the larger social and political context and a more thoroughgoing critique (instead of a celebration) of the movement itself.
This book is written for a popular audience in response to her discovery that her undergraduate students in the 1980s had no idea what the women's movement had redefined. Accordingly, it hits all the highlights: Betty Freidan, SNCC and other civil rights groups, the coming together of the Old and New Left in what she calls the “female generation gap,” Kennedy’s commission on women and the tension between liberal and radical feminism, NOW, Gloria Steinem, the Vietnam War, abortion, the naming of hidden injuries, sexuality, the body, intersections between feminism and race and class, protests and happenings, consciousness-raising groups, sex, pornography, ideological factionalism, trashing, paranoia, the FBI, commodification, the superwoman, and Ronald Reagan and the spread of global feminism. Throughout, she attempts to characterize the depth and breadth of the women’s movement as much as she can while also showing just how interconnected this historical period was. She also tries to account for the successes and failures of the women's movement and the legacy of the movement as a whole.
Rosen's faith in the power of narrative to continue the perpetual gender revolution is clear, and I think her point that we will lose the gains we have made if we are not vigilant is a good one - just look at the attacks on affirmative action. However, I would very much like to read a history of this iteration of the women's movement written by someone who was not there, to get a sense of the larger social and political context and a more thoroughgoing critique (instead of a celebration) of the movement itself.
Labels:
1960s,
American Studies,
feminism,
gender,
history,
liberalism,
narrative,
New Left,
Old Left,
radical,
revolution,
social movements,
women,
WWI to the present
Thursday, April 4, 2013
63: George Rogers Taylor's The Transportation Revolution
In The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860, George Rogers Taylor argues that transportation played a key role in the shift from a "colonially oriented economy" to a "national economy" by 1860 by facilitating the shift from an "extractive-commercial" economy to an industrial one. Because the US is so vast, revolutions in transportation and communication were the only way to connect the country enough to facilitate the massive growth in the later decades of the 19th century.
This book was published in 1951, and it provides a clear, readable survey of the development of the various transportation networks in the US. Taylor builds his history out of histories of the various transportation modes, economic data from government sources, photos from Culver and other readily accessible archives, and detailed tables that piece together the costs associated with building roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads, with an eye toward the rather substantial federal subsidies that went into transportation in the 19th century. He also integrates economic history, labor history, and discussions of industrialization and urbanization, so that transportation development occurs within its larger social, geographic, and economic contexts.
This book was published in 1951, and it provides a clear, readable survey of the development of the various transportation networks in the US. Taylor builds his history out of histories of the various transportation modes, economic data from government sources, photos from Culver and other readily accessible archives, and detailed tables that piece together the costs associated with building roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads, with an eye toward the rather substantial federal subsidies that went into transportation in the 19th century. He also integrates economic history, labor history, and discussions of industrialization and urbanization, so that transportation development occurs within its larger social, geographic, and economic contexts.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
55: Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul
In Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson details the large slave market in antebellum New Orleans from 1830-1860 in an exploration of the cultural implications of turning human beings into property. In doing so, he illustrates how slave markets, and particularly the point of sale, spatialized and embodied dynamics of race, economics, and power. He argues that these markets were central to the construction of Southern culture because they highlight the central contradiction of antebellum slavery.
To reconstruct the internal dynamics of the slave market, Johnson studies a wide range of sources, including slaveholders' letters, acts of sale, records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, letters, diaries, business records, and narratives of escaped slaves, all in pursuit of the "experience" of slavery, the market, and the sale. The result is a book structured around the point of sale and the asymmetrical relationships among the three parties involved: the slave, the slave holder, and the trader. All three approached this point using various forms of resistance, manipulation, and negotiation, and all are situated in the pens, offices, and selling blocks of the market.
The crucial thing here is that Johnson clearly portrays the agency and potential for resistance of all three parties, including the slaves, and he reconstructs the worlds of all three, including the spaces - pens, boardinghouses, and plantations - in which they live and encounter one another. Like the new social historians of slavery and labor, Johnson is very much interested in the world as it was lived and perceived by each group; building on their work, he also explores the shifting power relationships and negotiations among them. He concludes that transforming people into property had broad cultural implications for all three groups: planters' perceived superiority lies in their ability to judge and get a good price on the bodies of slaves; slaves balanced the knowledge that they could be sold at any moment with a desire to build community, even in the pens; traders come to see the slaves as the commodities that hold their community together, rather than as people.
And no one liked the space of the market itself (save maybe the traders, who apparently merrily ate their lunches together there) - to the planters, it smacked of grubby commercialism, and to the slaves, it smelled of fear and filth. Although focusing on New Orleans does force Johnson to exclude other markets, it does allow him to drill down into a particular time and place. And the guilt, distaste, fear and brute indifference of that place are harrowing. It's no wonder that it was destroyed soon after the Civil War - but I do think it's important to resurrect it here.
To reconstruct the internal dynamics of the slave market, Johnson studies a wide range of sources, including slaveholders' letters, acts of sale, records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, letters, diaries, business records, and narratives of escaped slaves, all in pursuit of the "experience" of slavery, the market, and the sale. The result is a book structured around the point of sale and the asymmetrical relationships among the three parties involved: the slave, the slave holder, and the trader. All three approached this point using various forms of resistance, manipulation, and negotiation, and all are situated in the pens, offices, and selling blocks of the market.
The crucial thing here is that Johnson clearly portrays the agency and potential for resistance of all three parties, including the slaves, and he reconstructs the worlds of all three, including the spaces - pens, boardinghouses, and plantations - in which they live and encounter one another. Like the new social historians of slavery and labor, Johnson is very much interested in the world as it was lived and perceived by each group; building on their work, he also explores the shifting power relationships and negotiations among them. He concludes that transforming people into property had broad cultural implications for all three groups: planters' perceived superiority lies in their ability to judge and get a good price on the bodies of slaves; slaves balanced the knowledge that they could be sold at any moment with a desire to build community, even in the pens; traders come to see the slaves as the commodities that hold their community together, rather than as people.
And no one liked the space of the market itself (save maybe the traders, who apparently merrily ate their lunches together there) - to the planters, it smacked of grubby commercialism, and to the slaves, it smelled of fear and filth. Although focusing on New Orleans does force Johnson to exclude other markets, it does allow him to drill down into a particular time and place. And the guilt, distaste, fear and brute indifference of that place are harrowing. It's no wonder that it was destroyed soon after the Civil War - but I do think it's important to resurrect it here.
Labels:
American Studies,
antebellum,
bodies,
community,
culture,
economics,
history,
new social history,
slaveholders,
slavery,
space
54: Paul Johnson's Sam Patch
Paul Johnson's Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper uses a microhistory of a gentleman named Sam Patch to trace larger processes of proletarianization, growing income disparities, and evangelical reform movements in the Jacksonian era. Although the book does not have an expository thesis per se, it shows how industrialization in the early 1900s turned once-proud independent farmers and artisans into deskilled, unlanded factory workers tied to an urbanizing market economy.
Sam Patch, the man, was a mule spinner who lived in Paterson, NJ, the descendant of an English family that arrived in Salem in 1636; the family became poorer with each successive generation, in large part because the trades they worked were made obsolete by the new mills. Patch was moody and a drinker; he was one of many working-class men in Paterson who jumped from nearby Passaic Falls as a kind of bodily escape from the regimentation of their jobs and a protest against the harnessing of nature. He was daring, and after his first professional jump in September 1827 (to protest privatization of the working-class space of the falls), he progressed to more and more dangerous leaps - to the delight of the local, then national press. He died in a November 1829 leap from Genesee Falls, drunk, morose, and sloppy.
Patch left no diary, will, property, marriage certificates or even next of kin, so Johnson reconstructs his life from a motley collection of vital statistics, tax lists, church rolls, wills, deeds, court records, and newspaper clippings and handbills that chronicle his brief stint as an early celebrity. But in doing so, he also reconstructs an emerging working-class culture that resisted alienation even as it was constructed by it. Although the fine-grained detail required by the microhistory approach sometimes leads Johnson to speculate (about Patch's death wish, for instance) and often leads to privileging personal details over other historical elements (like tensions between Irish and native workers in New England), it makes history so readable that I could easily see assigning this book to undergrads, and then spinning off of it into labor history, urbanization, the environment, and the process of proletarianization.
Sam Patch, the man, was a mule spinner who lived in Paterson, NJ, the descendant of an English family that arrived in Salem in 1636; the family became poorer with each successive generation, in large part because the trades they worked were made obsolete by the new mills. Patch was moody and a drinker; he was one of many working-class men in Paterson who jumped from nearby Passaic Falls as a kind of bodily escape from the regimentation of their jobs and a protest against the harnessing of nature. He was daring, and after his first professional jump in September 1827 (to protest privatization of the working-class space of the falls), he progressed to more and more dangerous leaps - to the delight of the local, then national press. He died in a November 1829 leap from Genesee Falls, drunk, morose, and sloppy.
Patch left no diary, will, property, marriage certificates or even next of kin, so Johnson reconstructs his life from a motley collection of vital statistics, tax lists, church rolls, wills, deeds, court records, and newspaper clippings and handbills that chronicle his brief stint as an early celebrity. But in doing so, he also reconstructs an emerging working-class culture that resisted alienation even as it was constructed by it. Although the fine-grained detail required by the microhistory approach sometimes leads Johnson to speculate (about Patch's death wish, for instance) and often leads to privileging personal details over other historical elements (like tensions between Irish and native workers in New England), it makes history so readable that I could easily see assigning this book to undergrads, and then spinning off of it into labor history, urbanization, the environment, and the process of proletarianization.
52: Herbert Gutman's The Black Family
In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Herbert Gutman builds on John Blassingame's strategy of studying slave communities from the inside out to argue that between 1750 and 1925, black families were able to adapt to slavery while retaining cultural traditions, continuous kinship connections, and the "double-headed kin-related household;" they thus created a new African American culture that and strong communities that helped them navigate their lives after freedom. He thus dispels two common (in the 1970s) scholarly assumptions about black family life: that slavery had destroyed any stable family structures, so that black home life in America was characterized by instability and promiscuity, and that this "pathological" condition of black family life had been growing worse over time.
Like many other scholars around this time, Gutman was very interested in E.P. Thompson's new social history, which shifted the focus of historical inquiry from relations between groups to relations within them. To access this information, he uses a wide variety of sources, including plantation records, county census schedules, Freedman's Bureau Records, family letters, court testimony, literature, anthropological studies, and oral histories. He also structures the book to follow his own research process, so that the reader follows him back in time from the 20th century to the 1740s, when the plantation system first developed.
In addition to establishing the resiliency of black families, he also established the agentive force within black communities that developed in a space separate from black-white relations. While the possibility that any community can develop autonomously outside the reach of unequal power relations was questioned even as Gutman was writing, as was the separation of politics and culture, Gutman's book still goes a long way toward recovering slave families and bringing them into the historical record.
Like many other scholars around this time, Gutman was very interested in E.P. Thompson's new social history, which shifted the focus of historical inquiry from relations between groups to relations within them. To access this information, he uses a wide variety of sources, including plantation records, county census schedules, Freedman's Bureau Records, family letters, court testimony, literature, anthropological studies, and oral histories. He also structures the book to follow his own research process, so that the reader follows him back in time from the 20th century to the 1740s, when the plantation system first developed.
In addition to establishing the resiliency of black families, he also established the agentive force within black communities that developed in a space separate from black-white relations. While the possibility that any community can develop autonomously outside the reach of unequal power relations was questioned even as Gutman was writing, as was the separation of politics and culture, Gutman's book still goes a long way toward recovering slave families and bringing them into the historical record.
50: John Blassingame's The Slave Community
Published in 1972, John Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South uses autobiographies of fugitive slaves and survivors of slavery to show that the experience of slavery varied widely with time and place. More importantly, he argues that slave communities, which operated both in response to their particular conditions of oppression and along their own internal dynamics, were crucial in shaping slaves' experience of slavery and the institution of slavery itself. Blassingame thus refutes the position of many white scholars of slavery, particularly Stanley Elkin, that the oppression of slavery flattened all slave personalities into "smiling Sambos." Slavery was certainly oppressive, but it was not universally so, and many slaves had freedom within slave quarters, religion, and the family to create a culture that influenced both black and white society.
Blassingame traces the development of slave culture in American from the slave trade in Africa and the Middle Passage; he argues that slaves retained their culture even as they adapted to new work habits, and he discusses the relationship between slave families, runaways, and resistance to slavery. He also deconstructs the three main stereotypes of slave personality (Sambo, the affectionate, loving servant; Jack, the shifty, lazy good-for-nothing, and Nat, the calculating rapist and murderer) by examining life on different plantations (cotton, sugar, tobacco.)
This book is controversial both because of its sources and its claims. Blassingame relied heavily on slave narratives (supported by plantation records) in order to construct slave communities from the inside, and critics were concerned that many narratives were shaped either by abolitionists with an agenda or by the age of the ex-slaves. I also question his rather dubious claim that slave personalities could still be fitted into universal types.
However, despite these issues, the book was well-received by scholars who were interested in reclaiming the voices of oppressed peoples because it allows the slaves to speak for themselves. It also suggests that slaves were far less passive than previous accounts had assumed, that they had agency and enough autonomy to create their own cultures, and that as a result the relationship between masters and slaves was often closer to a kind of negotiation than an exploitative imbalance of power. Slave culture was thus integral to the culture of antebellum Southern America.
Blassingame traces the development of slave culture in American from the slave trade in Africa and the Middle Passage; he argues that slaves retained their culture even as they adapted to new work habits, and he discusses the relationship between slave families, runaways, and resistance to slavery. He also deconstructs the three main stereotypes of slave personality (Sambo, the affectionate, loving servant; Jack, the shifty, lazy good-for-nothing, and Nat, the calculating rapist and murderer) by examining life on different plantations (cotton, sugar, tobacco.)
This book is controversial both because of its sources and its claims. Blassingame relied heavily on slave narratives (supported by plantation records) in order to construct slave communities from the inside, and critics were concerned that many narratives were shaped either by abolitionists with an agenda or by the age of the ex-slaves. I also question his rather dubious claim that slave personalities could still be fitted into universal types.
However, despite these issues, the book was well-received by scholars who were interested in reclaiming the voices of oppressed peoples because it allows the slaves to speak for themselves. It also suggests that slaves were far less passive than previous accounts had assumed, that they had agency and enough autonomy to create their own cultures, and that as a result the relationship between masters and slaves was often closer to a kind of negotiation than an exploitative imbalance of power. Slave culture was thus integral to the culture of antebellum Southern America.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
44: Jill Lepore's King Philip's War
Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity argues that all wars are contests for meaning, and that the peculiar characteristics of King Philip's War, especially that it was a frontier war between literate and non-literate peoples, make it a critical moment in the formation of a uniquely American identity.
King Philip's War was a frontier conflict between Native Americans and colonists in what is now New England between 1675 and 1678. Also called Metacom's Rebellion, King Philip's War was the deadliest per capita battle on American soil. Lepore reconstructs this battle by reading accounts of it from the perspectives of both colonists and Indians, and as a result the book is a much larger study of a war between two cultures, literate colonists who fight with words, and Indians, both literate and illiterate, who write in "blud not ink." The book is also an analysis of the ways in which these binaries break down in war, so that sometimes colonists take pleasure in torturing Indians instead of trying to translate pain into language, and sometimes Indians make their frustrations legible by destroying property or stripping and scalping colonists in a kind of symbolic, rather than pleasurable, "denuding," or erasure of the social meaning the colonists had given the land and themselves. Further, in theatrical representations of this war in the 1800s, the roles switch, so that Americans are playing Indian and representing Philip as a noble savage, and Native American tribes go through American legal channels to preserve their identity. American identity is thus intimately connected to language, to the frontier warfare early colonists fought, and to the Native Americans themselves.
Throughout The Name of War, Lepore is careful to anchor her analysis of "text" in the material world of bodies and landscape, actions and objects; the book is thus both a part of the discursive turn and a reaction to it. It is also thoroughly interdisciplinary in both source and method, as much a work of literary analysis as a work of history. I don't feel like this kind of sustained, thorough engagement with both texts and the material bodies and spaces and actions that produced them happens nearly as often as it should.
King Philip's War was a frontier conflict between Native Americans and colonists in what is now New England between 1675 and 1678. Also called Metacom's Rebellion, King Philip's War was the deadliest per capita battle on American soil. Lepore reconstructs this battle by reading accounts of it from the perspectives of both colonists and Indians, and as a result the book is a much larger study of a war between two cultures, literate colonists who fight with words, and Indians, both literate and illiterate, who write in "blud not ink." The book is also an analysis of the ways in which these binaries break down in war, so that sometimes colonists take pleasure in torturing Indians instead of trying to translate pain into language, and sometimes Indians make their frustrations legible by destroying property or stripping and scalping colonists in a kind of symbolic, rather than pleasurable, "denuding," or erasure of the social meaning the colonists had given the land and themselves. Further, in theatrical representations of this war in the 1800s, the roles switch, so that Americans are playing Indian and representing Philip as a noble savage, and Native American tribes go through American legal channels to preserve their identity. American identity is thus intimately connected to language, to the frontier warfare early colonists fought, and to the Native Americans themselves.
Throughout The Name of War, Lepore is careful to anchor her analysis of "text" in the material world of bodies and landscape, actions and objects; the book is thus both a part of the discursive turn and a reaction to it. It is also thoroughly interdisciplinary in both source and method, as much a work of literary analysis as a work of history. I don't feel like this kind of sustained, thorough engagement with both texts and the material bodies and spaces and actions that produced them happens nearly as often as it should.
Monday, April 1, 2013
41: Jack Greene's Pursuits of Happiness
In Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, Jack Green situates the American colonies within the larger British colonial empire and determines that they all followed a normative pattern of cultural and social development.
The usual interpretation of American cultural development is the "declension" model. This model argues that all of American culture followed the pattern seen in New England, where a highly organized, religious, communal culture declined into individualism, liberalism, and entrepreneurial priorities. While Greene agrees that the declension model makes sense for New England, he argues that the rest of the English colonies in America, the Caribbean, and Ireland followed a "developmental" model, which had three phases:
- social simplification: most colonies started out as pure business ventures in a difficult, undeveloped world; this raw environment and more permissive, materialistic, and secular culture took only the basics of English culture (probably because people were more interested in surviving)
- social elaboration: slowly, economies improved, living conditions and thus life expectancies improved, and the early egalitarianism settled into a relaxed but hierarchical form in most of the non-New England colonies by the mid 18th century
- social replication: economies and populations expanded, people built towns and trading centers, occupational and social structures became more differentiated, culture became more secular, and colonists started to look to England for models of colonial behavior
And why the development of a relatively uniform worldview in the colonies, which in turn derived from a increasingly uniform (and increasingly British) infrastructure and culture, matter? Greene argues that the convergence of colonial cultures - each with their own twists on British culture, but still - was critical for the formation of an American cultural order, which in turn was necessary if America was going to revolt against England.
Maybe (probably) I'm missing something here, but Pursuits of Happiness kind of feels like Jack Greene is shooting a dead horse: yes, New England was different from the rest of the country; yes, Puritans were an anomaly in their home country as well as in the New World; yes, the colonists on the eastern seaboard came from England, so American culture had close ties to English culture; no, American culture didn't all start in New England. More importantly, the theory of a unitary American culture was debunked in the 1960s, and the notion that New England was the genesis of American culture came under attack around the same time. Also, do cultures really progress in a linear fashion? This is likely a strong synthesis of work on the American Revolutionary period, but it feels more akin to Bernard Bailyn than to, say, Amy Kaplan or Bill Cronon.
Labels:
American Studies,
colonial America,
grand narratives,
history,
ideology,
Progress
40: Bill Cronon - Changes in the Land
Bill
Cronon’s Changes in the Land is an
ecological history arguing that “the shift from Indian to European dominance 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.” (xv) By
extension, history and ecology cannot be separated; further, biological and
ecological changes were just as active in shaping history as were the
intentional actions of human beings toward each other. Cronon builds his argument for
interdisciplinarity/ interconnection/ ecological history using a variety of
sources, including geography (of course), historical descriptions of landscape
and environment, anthropology, and, when sources from these disciplines proved
too general or inconsistent, “modern ecological literature.” The result sometimes feels like a smaller Nature’s Metropolis or a more academic Guns, Germs, and Steel: English attempts
to make New England more like Europe economically and politically were
intimately connected to ecological changes.
(Indians were not passive in this transformation, either.)
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