153: Walter Licht's Industrializing America

In Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, Walter Licht complicates the process of industrialization in the United States during the 19th century by re-examining both the context of American industrial development and the composition of American industry.  In the first move, he situates manufacturing within a rapidly expanding market, which was fueled by a growing population, immigration, westward settlement, expanding cities, and developments in transportation and communication infrastructure; industrialization was a result of these changes as well as an active shaper of market relationships.  In the second move, he expands the focus of industrial manufacturing from large-scale industrialization to the broader business landscape of small factories, specialty shops, and regional diversity, which allows him to separate 19th century industrialization from late 19th century corporate consolidation.  Licht therefore deconstructs the old narrative of 19th century production-driven Progress, arguing instead for a declension from ordered mercantilism to a chaotic market economy that was only beginning to organize toward the end of the century.

Licht synthesizes business history, economics, labor history, and the history of technology to situate American industrialization in its economic, social, political, and regional contexts.  He begins in the early 1800s with regional diversity and the Jefferson/ Hamilton debates; examines the diversity of antebellum development in its mill villages, single-industry cities, diversified urban centers, and Southern "industrial" slavery; discusses artisan protests in Jacksonian American along with with evangelical reform;  charts the relationship between the Civil War and government-sponsored industrialization and transportation; and analyzes regional industrial diversity, the rise of Carnegie, Rockefeller and anti-monopoly politics, and the labor disputes, single-issue reform movements, and utopian critiques of late-19th century urban disorder.

Licht's relentless contextualization, breakdown of industry into regions, and insistence that the voices of workers, women, and immigrants be heard are a welcome relief to the usual histories of 19th century technology.

70: Eric Foner's Reconstruction

Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is a synthetic history of American Reconstruction that combines social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into three overarching themes:

• the centrality of black experience
• the larger context of an emergent national state
• the impact of social, political, economic, and moral developments in the North affected the course of Reconstruction in the South

A synthesis of "revisionist" scholarship on black experiences after slavery, Foner's book clearly and consistently emphasizes the experiences, worldviews, interpretations, and actions of black Southerners across class lines.  He thus builds on the work of new social historians and continues WEB DuBois' project in Black Reconstruction, which rewrote the history of the Reconstruction period by reframing black "debauchery" as white racism and a deliberate attempt to retain the power of white elites by discrediting freed blacks.  He also integrates "post-Revisionist" studies into his argument by showing how Reconstruction policies themselves were woefully inadequate, and thus the North, as well as the South, was complicit in the failure of the Reconstruction project.  Even though freed blacks were eager to take control of their working lives and many had millenial expectations of a post-racial society, white Southerners were so afraid of losing their disciplined workforce that they blocked land purchases, denied credit access, built exploitation into a new sharecropping system, and used violence to prevent freed people from exercising their newfound freedom.

60: David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness

In Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that whiteness is an ideology that was constructed in the 19th-century, when working-class whites responded to the increased wage dependence, standardization, and discipline attached to the Industrial Revolution by separating themselves from blacks, demonizing them, and accepting the "public and psychological" value of whiteness as part of their wage.  The compensation of these "wages of whiteness" led to a kind of self oppression, which both made them willing to accept a lot more misery than they would otherwise have taken and kept them from organizing with black workers against their mutual exploitation.

This deceptively simple argument has several constituent parts, as Roediger pulls from an updated classical Marxism, new labor history, new social history, and theories of racism to delineate the development of whiteness and connect it to the formation of the working class in the early 19th century.  Critical to his argument is the expansion of Marxist theory to include race: he argues that race cannot be reduced to class, and that the two social categories work in dialectic with one another.  From the new labor/ new social history, he pulls the insistence that working class people are historical agents, not dupes controlled by capital, and that they are thus complicit in the construction of their own racism.  And he builds on existing theories of race, racism and slavery (most notably George Rawick) to show that racism developed as a response to early 19th-century capitalist development, of which slavery was a constituent part: nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, combined with frustration at their own proletarianization, resulted in white working-class racism and hatred toward black slaves as emblems of both preindustrial peasants and industrial capitalist workers.  From there, the step to racism as a constituent element of white working class identity was a small one.

The rest of the book includes two case studies that Roediger largely pulls from secondary sources: blackface minstrelsy as a way to provide an outlet for white racial tensions and frustrations; and the story of how the black Irish adopted racism against blacks to assume a white American identity.  In both cases, Roediger shows how racism both constructs and masks the blackness that is at the heart of whiteness.  While I was surprised to find that such an innovative and hugely influential thesis is built on secondary evidence and conjecture more than empirical research, I think the case studies illustrate Roediger's argument well, and I really like his innovative use of developments in studies of race, slavery, and the working class that came out of the new social history.

59: George Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup

In From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community,  George Rawick stresses the agency and relative autonomy of American slaves "from sundown to sunup" - those few hours when they weren't expected to work the fields - to create the behaviors and institutions that helped them survive the oppression of slavery.

Rawick has two main theses.  First, he argues that black slaves developed an autonomous community outside of the white environment; this community was shaped by both their experiences in the US and their African heritage.  The backbone of this community was communication among slaves, which relied on travels of free blacks, reading of white newspapers, and the "interplantation" movement of the slaves themselves; it encouraged different levels of resistance, fostered a separate series of religious practices, and supported the continuity of the black family.  It also kept the slaves from having to become "Sambos."

Second, he argues that there was a connection between the parallel emergence of slavery and capitalism.  I'm not sure I buy this argument, but Rawick claims that racism has European roots; black Africans were seen as rural peasants who represented a longed-for but unreachable past, and therefore slavery and racism were punishment meted out to blacks.  And then racism played an important role in the growth and continuity of slavery and in the development of American culture more generally.

From Sundown to Sunup was one of the earliest books on slavery that treated slaves as subjects and actors instead of as victims and objects; working from an assumption of subjectivity allowed him to create whole worlds based on slave narratives and psychological and psychological theories.  This focus on slaves as conscious, subjective actors also allowed Rawick to overturn two oversimplifying accounts of slave culture: Kenneth Stampp's argument that slaves lived in a state of cultural chaos, unable to practice their African cultures and unable to understand American culture; and Stanley Elkins' argument that slave personalities were almost entirely determined by their subordination to authoritarian masters.  Thus, while it suffers from the same lack of verifiable data as do other attempts to reconstruct slave culture (and in Rawick, this lack is particularly exacerbated because he uses slave narratives from the Civil War era to reconstruct slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries), the book still puts forward a theory of racism and a respect for slave subjectivity that continues to impact later works.

58: James Oakes' The Ruling Race

In the early 1980s, while new social historians were focusing on the internal dynamics of slave communities, James Oakes was using quantitative methods to understand the diverse conditions and experiences that made up slaveholding culture.  In The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, Oakes strongly critiques Eugene Genovese's conception of a relatively homogeneous paternalistic "master class;" he argues that slaveholding culture varied over time and was different in different places.  He also argues that slavery was a capitalist enterprise, not precapitalist, and thus that its implications need to be considered within the broader context of American capitalist development.

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.

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.

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.

47: Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom

In American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, Edmund Morgan studies the social and political history of Virginia from the 1580s to about 1720, and he argues that the supposed political harmony and freedom in Virginia after 1730 was symbiotically related to the enslavement of black people - freedom and slavery didn't just co-exist; they mutually constructed one another.

Apparently the trajectory of Virginia's growth closely followed the pattern set out by Jack Greene in In Pursuit of Happiness: small and disorganized in Jamestown; then a tobacco boom starting in 1615, which creates huge disparities of wealth between planters and workers, as well as high mortality and increased individualism; then social stabilization from 1630 to 1680, when the mortality rate dropped and, despite Bacon's Rebellion in 1670, elites centralized control; and then the increased substitution of slavery after 1680, which solved the problem of freed indentured servants wanting land and, through racism, created a bond between lower and upper-class whites.  And racism, combined with 18th century ideology of the common man and a dwindling number of non-landowning whites, froze social relations and neutralized dissent in a way that allowed elites to support freedom and slavery to be the thing that held freedom up.

This thesis - that freedom and exploitation are intertwined - seems like a pretty classic Marxist argument to me.  What Morgan adds to the equation is the development of racism as a consciously applied tool of capitalist exploitation.  I'm a little confused about how, exactly, racism comes about - do the elites invent it?  Do the roving bands of unemployed former indentured servants invent it?  Is is already in the air because of experience with Native Americans?  But regardless of origins, this idea of racism as a tool of economic oppression is now pervasive in whiteness studies, so maybe he's on to something.

38: Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone

Ira Berlin's argument in Many Thousands Gone is a simple one: the slave experience in America varied over time and from place to place, and as the institution of slavery matured from 1619 to 1861, racism and slavery fed on one another to increasingly exploit and degrade African Americans.  Although this book was published in 1998, it is the first major synthetic work to argue that slavery was not a monolithic, unchanging enterprise from such a long view.

Berlin divides the history of American slavery into four regions (the North, the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry, and the lower Mississippi Valley) and compares them across three chronological eras.  The first or 'charter generation' of slaves were cosmopolitan Atlantic creoles, many of whom came from West Africa or the West Indies, had interacted with the Spanish or Portuguese, and had worked as translators or interpreters.  Slavery was relatively fluid in all four regions, and some slaves bought their freedom, baptized children, had children with whites, and owned property.  Beginning in the late 17th century, three revolutions then transformed slavery.  The Plantation Revolution, which began in Barbados and spread to the Chesapeake and the Carolinas in the late 17th/ early 18th centuries, consolidated planter power and shifted from wage to slave labor.  The Democratic Revolution produced the first sustained intellectual opposition to slavery in the New World, but had contradictory effects on slavery: it became more entrenched in the South, began to disappear in the North and Old Northwest, and was accompanied in all regions by virulent racism.  The Cotton Revolution undercut the illusion that slavery was a dying institution by expanding slavery, despite decreasing production, soil exhaustion, and shift to grain.

While this is largely a synthetic work, Berlin does employ a number of innovations.  First, he focuses on two unique overarching developments: the shift from "societies with slaves" to "slave societies," and the historical development of race as a generational phenomenon.  His focus on the generational development of race is particularly important because the generations up with the three chronological periods under study.  But even more important is his insistent preservation of dual points of view - both the history of slavery and the diverse histories of the people who were enslaved.  He thus combines two very different ways of doing history: as a narrative of domination, and as an exploration of the cultures and agency of the oppressed.

If you would like more info, there is a much more in-depth summary here.