Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale Historical Publications. Miscellany ; 129. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Title: Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870

Author: Karen Halttunnen

Year of Publication: 1982

Thesis:

The middle-class of the nineteenth century expressed their anxieties about their competitive, tenuous, and liminal state through the caricature of the "confidence" (con) man and "painted women," whom they identified as a menacing presence. Relying heavily on etiquette literature, Halttunnen notes a shift from a culture of sentimentalism, in which sincerity was meant to reflect one's inner state, was later overcome by a self-consciousness in etiquette writing, leading to an embrace of more performative culture.  

Time: 1830-1870

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

List of Illustrations

Preface

1. The Era of the Confidence Man

2. Hypocrisy and Sincerity in the World of Strangers

3. Sentimental Culture and the Problem of Fashion

4. Sentimental Culture and the Problem of Etiquette

5. Mourning the Dead: A Study in Sentimental Ritual

6. Disguises, Masks, and Parlor Theatricals: The Decline of Sentimental Culrure in the 1850s

Conclusion

- Tocqueville's critiques of Americans

- "American democrat" and "middle-class American" appear synonymous

Epilogue: The Confidence Man in Corporate America

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Guides on etiquette

Historiography:

Keywords:

Etiquette - performance

Themes:

Critiques:

Perhaps a greater variety of sources to support the thesis.

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

Look inside - https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Men-Painted-Women-Middle-class/dp/0300037880

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Title: The Market Revolutionon: Jacksonian America - 1815-1846

Author: Charles Sellers

Year of Publication: 1991

Thesis:

Describes a major shift in the U.S. economy as transportation (roads, canals, railroads, steam power), communications (telegraph), and banking became much more available. For many families working in subsistence agriculture, this impeded on the structure of the home and brought a shift from working at home to working in factories; time governed by the clock and production vs. the growing season.  Growing anxieties over these capitalistic developments led to Jackson's election as people saw him as a defender of common folk--land acquisition by genocide of Native Americans, an increase in yoemanry, and vetoing the National Bank's charter formed part of his legacy. However, he believes leaders have cashed in on a myth of democracy while "bourgeois hegemony" has never since sustained a serious challenge.

Time: 1815-1846

Geography: U.S. (https://www.loc.gov/maps/?fa=subject%3Aunited+states&dates=1815)

Organization:

1. Land and Market

- Jackson - defeats Packenham in New Orleans, leads to Treaty of Ghent.

- Describes the revoulution - settlers see land as opportunity to achieve wealth & respect. (4)

- Though, cheap land, high labor costs. (4)

- Subsistence farming to producing for market takes place in early 1800s. Transport is key to making this happen. (6)

- Does not fall short on describing genocide as genocide (7)

- Demonstrates how settlers adapt Native American ways of working with the land & the changes as well (plough animals, for example). Creates dependency on European products (9)

- Need for more labor because of these ways of subsistence led to need for more children, then more land (9)

- Patriarchy w/father as landholder

- Interesting discussion on childhood 10-11 see quote

- Land passes on through primogeniture (12)

- "When men gathered, they com- peted in displaying the elements of male honor—strength, courage, storytelling boast and wit, and such manly skills as riding and shooting—accompanied by con- siderable cursing, whiskey-drinking, and righting. Women, on the other hand, formed tight networks of neighbor and kin wives for friendship and mutual sup- port. These networks gave women their only escape from the male-dominated world of the household and their only opportunity to value themselves by other than male standards." (14)

- Market appears ancillary from a householder's perspective (15)

- Europe relying on exports to feed itself from 1755-1820 (15)

- Concerned with length of transport as a large factor in determining marketable surplus for subsistence families. (16)

- Migration strategy - selling land to buy cheaper land father west (17) <-- here is where you can see land speculation beginning to boom.

- "The American economy's takeoff was fueled by the unusually feverish enter- prise of its market sector. Colonial Americans pursued wealth more freely than Europeans because they were not overshadowed and hemmed in by aristocrats and postfeudal institutions. And they pursued wealth more avidly because it made them the American equivalents of aristocrats." (21)

- Market revolution makes life more precarious for African American men & women & (white) women as well (23)

- Nature of work also changes (pace increases, leisurely attitude no longer a part of it) (27)

- Whole families brought to work in factories (live & work there, deductions for rent, etc.) (28) <--this represents a huge shift in family dynamics & the nature of work women did (many are pushed out of the home) (29)

- Religion plays a large role in this, too - (see + Great Awakening pp. 29-31)

- Mr./Mrs./Miss becoming titles for working folk, too (32)

- "By threatening this yeoman republic, market elites stirred up a powerful democratic counterforce seeking a tighter control over government by ordinary voters. Thus the clashing perspectives of land and market focused early American pol- itics on three tightly linked questions: 

1. How democratic—how responsive to popular majorities—would govern- ment be? 

2. Would government power be extensive and concentrated at the federal level or limited and diffused among the states? 

3. To what extent and in what ways would government promote economic growth?" (33)

"But Republicanism was compromised by contradictions between opportunity and equality, while rural egalitarianism itself was compromised by farmers' commitment to private property and the patriarchy it sustained. The potential dangers of unlimited property rights under market conditions were obscured by Americans' premarket experience with private property under a per- son/land ratio sustaining family security and equality. On these contradictions would turn the postwar generation's climactic struggle over American destiny." (33)

2. Ambiguous Republicanism

3. "Let us Conquer Space"

- Discussion of creation of national banks

- Transport system 

4. The Crisis of 1819

- Jackson attacks Spanish Florida

- Salary Act of 1816 - yearly salary for Congress

- Monroe elected in 1816

- Essentially, economic crisis makes the case for yeoman enterprise vs. capitalistic

- Makes the case that slavery was an impediment to capitalist development (125-6)

"Slavery was becoming a profound contradiction for capitalism. Never have so many been enslaved as when the European market dragooned Africans into subduing the New World to commodity production. With abundant American acre- age offering independence and security to the landless, only the lash could compel enough disciplined exertion to meet capital's demands. Human enslavement ener- gized the market's global conquest." (126)

"Abolitionism did more for benevolent entrepreneurs than endow them with virtue. It was "a highly selective response to labor exploitation," as historian David Brion Davis argues. By making chattel slavery the uniquely immoral form of human exploitation, abolitionism undercut the mounting working-class com- plaints about wage slavery and beatifed the capitalist order. These abolitionists hated slavery not just for its inhumanity but also for impeding their vision of a capitalist society of free individuals whose labor could be freely exploited." (128) <-- Again, that capitalism is considered efficient and an enemy of slavery.

5. Hard Times, Hard Feelings, Hard Money

6. "A General Mass of Disaffection"

7. God and Mammon

8. Ethos vs. Eros

"The so-called middle class was constituted not by mode and relations of pro- duction but by ideology. Where nobilities and priesthoods left folk cultures little disturbed, capital feeding on human effort claimed hegemony over all classes. A numerous and dispersed bourgeoisie of small-scale enterprisers pushed both them- selves and their workers to staggering effort by mythologizing class as a moral cat- egory. Scorning both the handful of idle rich and the multitude of dissolute poor, they apotheosized a virtuous middle class of the effortful. The "business man"— originally a man conspicuously busy—became the archetype of a culture of busy- ness." (237)

- Middle class as an ideology - actually very very small (237,9)

"Within these marital bounds, libido expressed itself without conscious con- straint, an elemental force as compelling as hunger and as fructifying as the boun- tiful earth. Women were thought as lustful and as fulfilled by sexuality as men— or more so, in male fears and fantasies—and folk belief sustained against all expe- rience a conviction that conception could not occur without female orgasm. Unsegregated nudity, casually exposed genitalia, and the sounds and smells of coition were commonplace in crowded cabins." (241)

- Children not named until they had made it passed gauntlet of mortality (241)

- Attempts to reform women prostitutes into middle-class image & idea of sexual purity (244)

- Work became the cure for whatever was considered too much libido. (253)

- Section on development of mental institutions with a special focus on masturbation. (254-55)

- Male doctors begin to supplant women in childbirth with new tech & pushing midwives out of new tech methods (255) <--- really if you think about J. Marion Sims, this tech develops from slavery and subjugation of African American women. (256)

- Seems to be a good argument that sexuality is constrained by capitalism (259)

"Yet libidinal repression went far beyond demographic necessity and contracep- tive contrivance. Capital conscripting human labor to productive manipulation of inert matter declared war on the vitality of both human and external nature. To a bourgeoisie leveling the wilderness, fighting off alcohol, fleeing dirt, and draping its carnivorous animality in ceremonial table manners, sexuality epitomized the uncontrolled nature they had to subdue. Between the hammer of demographic necessity and the anvil of capitalist discipline, human libidowas wrought into anx- ious constraint. A middle-class society still fleeing its species-nature has yet to count the costs of this primitive accumulation of human energy." (259)

- Drinking becomes an issue (260)

- Much on addiction & mental illness (261-)

9. Politicians "Reapply Principles"

- Denmark Vesey - 1822 Rebellion sparks a culture of further repression in the slaveholding South.

- Jackson wins the election by appealing to farmers and along ethnic lines. (300)

10. Millennial Democracy

- Jackson wants to "drain the swamp" so to speak of patronage

- "Yet it is hard to imagine a President who could have mobilized greater political strength against nullification than Old Hickory. Understanding that a democratic Union was at stake, he linked democracy indissolubly with American nationalism. His democratic unionism held a fracturing republic together for another thirty years before drowning slavery in fratricidal blood." (331)

"Asserting premarket values against all respectable opinion, Jackson mustered democracy to defend patriarchal independence, equality, and therefore honor, against an activist capitalist state." (331)

11. Ambiguous Democracy

"Politicians of all parties have joined ever since in a politics of interests, repress- ing the Jacksonian spectre of class politics by trading instead on sectional, racial, ethnic, and religious conflict. Never again challenging bourgeois hegemony, the two-party democracy that emerged from the Bank War would endow American capitalism with unparalleled dynamism and legitimacy. Within little more than a generation, as Civil War snapped restraints on national developmentalism, the capitalist state would resume its interrupted leadership toward the bourgeois Mil- lennium." (363)

12. The Bourgeois Republic

- Rise of public schools to help train for new economic circumstances countered by religious schools and such (367)

13. The Great Contradiction [slavery]

"Slavery is the pivot of our industrialism today as much as machinery, credit, etc.," Karl Marx observed in the 18405. "Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry." But because industry also required free labor and juridical equality, he understood, "liberty and slavery constitute an antagonism." (396)

- Discusses how families of enslaved people are affected by this economy - this reads like a synthesis of texts on slavery pre-1990s.

-1836 - all discussions of slavery tabled immediately in Congress ("gag rule")

- "Abolitionism, although resisted by much of the bourgeoisie, muted class con- flict over wage slavery to become the vanguard of capitalist liberalism. Rising from the middle-class soil of Moderate Light, temperance, and Antimasonic Whiggery, it satisfied antinomian doubts as romanticism could not. Suffusing free-labor enter- prise with antislavery altruism, it would eventuallyendow the bourgeois state with hegemonic sanctity. Yet an antislavery altruism blinded to capitalist commodifi- cation of free labor and human relationships would be further compromised through politics by the racism capitalism fed." (405)

- Women abolitionists appeal for the franchise (406)

- Westward expansion & the issue of slave or free states

Bibliographical Essay

Notes

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Slesinger - The Age of Jackson (1945) - depicts this age as farmers against elite capitalists. 

Keywords:

use-value communalism (early NE property concepts) (10)

proletarianization

Hamiltonian developmentalism (33)

True woman/True man (240s) - women as sexually pure; men having to compete in market for jobs, and they end up taking out their failures in rigid forms of control at home. (246) Men are then defined by the purity of women.

Self-making

Arminian - anti-Calvinist

Antinomian - faith alone is good enough for salvation

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

On gender & childhood:

"Daughters worked with mothers and boys with fathers at age-graded tasks. Probably it is going too far to say that childhood did not exist in the subsistence culture, that youngsters were in fact treated as the little adults portrayed by the self-trained folk limners who pro- duced the earliest American family portraits. But certainly children were expected to labor as much as strength, skill, and attention span admitted. Shaming and phys- ical punishment broke rebellious wills while enforcing prescribed behavior and labor." (11)

Notes:

Khan Academy on Jacksonian Era - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/age-of-jackson/v/jacksonian-democracy-part-4

-> "Man of the people"

->  spoils system (removes competent folks & replaces with loyal folks)

-> Expands exec branch through veto (vetoes bank charter, then Panic of 1837) This increases presidential power & cuts down on Federal branches

-> White settling and removing Native Americans from their land.

John Green - Market Revolution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNftCCwAol0

Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Norton, 1996.

Peter H. Wood’s Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) remains underrated for its time. Published contemporaneously alongside Fogel and Engerman’s controversial Time on the Cross and within a few years of groundbreaking works by historians Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, Phillip Curtin, and Herbert Gutman, it breaks the mold that had, for decades, confined historians to cotton belt plantation studies in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Wood appears to have anticipated noted slavery scholar Ira Berlin’s celebrated article, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America” (1980) by several years. Berlin, surveying the body of scholarship on slavery, called for a shift from thinking of slavery as a singular, static phenomenon. Instead, he cited the importance of considering when and where as essential components of any slavery study. The explosion of slavery studies following Berlin’s prescriptions remains undeniable. However, Berlin appears to have alighted on an already developing trend. Wood’s prescient work not only connected to a nascent school of Atlantic history but also dominated its niche topic of rice production in the Carolinas for decades. He remains complemented and strengthened, but unsurpassed by Daniel Littlefield and Judith Carney, two historians who researched rice in South Carolina and West Africa.[1]

Relying heavily on demographics, studies of contemporary Gullah speech, newspapers, wills, letters, and other plantation records found across a number of archives, Wood argues convincingly that an often-skilled, independent, malaria-resistant, enslaved Black majority in South Carolina brought with them the technical knowhow for rice production. Mortality and morbidity still high due to the brutal conditions of slavery on rice plantations, enslavers shipped increasing numbers of West Africans to work. Large numbers of skilled Black people stoked fears among whites, provoking a mix of repression and “calculated benevolence.” (loc 7416) Wood’s steady accension to the ultimately unsuccessful Stono Rebellion and other false starts along the way buoy his exploration of white repression and Black resistance.

Wood’s work is prophetic. For example, as he explores Gullah speech as an example of cultural retention, he notes, “It was an outgrowth of [enslaved people’s] ingenuity, not of their ignorance, and it served its function well.” (loc 4265) Language scholars widely accept the premise that all languages perform the basic function of communicating meaning. Furthermore, maintaining multiple linguistic registers, such as code switching between African American Vernacular and so-called “Standard” English requires more, not less mental acuity. Wood’s examination of enslaved people’s rice production thus affirms Black people’s ingenuity long after colonial slavery and enters a modern linguistic debate long before its time.           

The Black majority in South Carolina felled trees for masts, planted and produced rice, and lent their martial talents against the Yamasee Confederacy, without which, according to Wood, South Carolina may never have existed. (loc 2884) While Black people contributed to the success of South Carolina and, by extension, to the subsequent development of the U.S., this is not a contributionist history.[2] Enslaved people labored under duress, and Wood demonstrates the circumstances leading to a unique Black majority culture of survival and resistance.

[1] Littlefield’s argument that slave-owning rice planters were not only aware of, but actively pursued enslaved people of particular ethnic identities (based on their own conceptions of ethnicity, however poorly informed) and Judith Carney’s exploration of “agrarian genealogy” and gender do not substantially challenge Wood’s assertions. See: Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slave: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991 and Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. For excellent work on comparative historical linguistics and rice cultivation, see Fields-Black, Edda L. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. She argues, in addition to Wood’s thesis, that Luso-African traders provide researchers a window into previously unexplored stateless societies.

 [2] Historian Robert Harris defines contributionist history as dealing mostly with individuals and less so with group action. In African American historiography, this led to an unfortunate focus on a few token individuals. See: Harris, Robert L. “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography.” The Journal of Negro HIstory 67 (1982): 115.

Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Themes: Economics, Class, Race, Gender, Labor, Early Republic Capitalism
Geographical Scope: Baltimore
Chronological Scope: Late 18th/Early 19th Century
Thesis Summary: This is a labor history of the working poor in late 18th and early 19th century Baltimore. With its heterogeneous labor system that included a range of unfree and semi-free labor, Rockman argues that free market Capitalism came late for this population; instead Early Republic Capitalism exploited workers and limited their choices. Baltimore provides an excellent antidote to the dominant narrative arc of freedom and prosperity. Capitalism, according to Rockman, dictates “who worked where, on what terms, and to whose benefit.” (5) Very little leeway proved available to the working poor, and the assumption that skilled artisans and laborers enjoyed solidarity together to develop tools of resistance is dispelled.

Chapter Outlines:
1. Coming to Work in the City
- Described as an entrepôt built by a variety of common laborers from Irish to German to laborers from free to enslaved and including women and children. The flour industry boomed during this period.
2. A Job for a Working Man
- Knowing how and where to get work was a skilled job in and of itself, and the Early Republic Capitalists dictated this process. This chapter features representative vignettes of individual laborers and their struggles.
3. Dredging and Drudgery
- Manual labor paid relatively well, but day laborers struggled to get consecutive days of labor, which would equate to a decent wage
- The mudmachine for dredging the harbor was foul-smelling labor and often laborers did not last more than a month working it before they found something else, but Rockman highlights several people who managed to stay for a goodly portion of their working years
4. A Job For a Working Woman

5. The Living Wage
6. The Hard Work of Being Poor
- Families needed at least two incomes just to “scrape by”
- More Black men were heads of household than previously assumed, despite the higher ratio of women to men due to gender discrimination in manumissions
- Develops different experiences for Black and White folks (ex: white parents could send their children for apprenticeships to prepare them to eventually earn mediocre wages without concern they would be kidnapped and sold into slavery)
- Basic items were very expensive, especially clothing and food
7. The Consequence of Failure
8. The Market’s Grasp

Sources:
Newspapers, penitentiary records, almshouse records, petitions (for clemency), receipts, payroll contracts

Historiography:
Early Republic Labor History
Gerda Lerner - “Rethinking the American Paradigm”

Keywords: 
Mud Machine
Early Republic Capitalism
Mixed labor

Mann, Bruce H. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Themes: Economics, Class
Geographical Scope: NY, PA
Chronological Scope: Mid-18th to early 19th century
Thesis Summary: This cultural history charts several shifts in the colonial economy with respect to how colonists saw debt. Mann distinguishes between two important terms: insolvency, which is the inability to pay a debt, and bankruptcy, which is the release of obligation from that debt. Partially because of the way the barely passing Bankruptcy Act of 1800 was structured to favor large debtors, people in lower socio-economic strata objected. Mann argues that the passage of this Act (and subsequent acts in decades to come) signals a shift in the way people viewed debt from a moral, communal issue to one of impersonal debt management. Also instrumental were the financial difficulties provoked by the Seven Years War. Finally, the religious basis for assessing the moral implications of borrowing also receded during this time. People, at least the white class of men who could afford bankruptcy, saw themselves as entrepreneurs who engaged in acceptable risks. The society Mann describes is one of insufficient specie and one in which all citizens were debtors, all mostly happy to collect interest on debts given the difficulty of collecting the whole sum. Indeed the only time they began to request the whole sum was when they suspected a decrease in their debtors’ ability to pay the entire amount. In a sardonic twist, he demonstrates how “honor” had two definitions: the first backed by capital and the second backed by integrity. The wealthy tended to invoke the latter definition only when they became insolvent.

Chapter Outlines:
1. Debtors and Creditors
- Extending credit a sign of honor / mark of respect or patronage
- Debts are transferrable
- Mortgage = promise to pay on a debt
- Collecting on interest easier than collecting the whole (cash was in short supply)
2. The Law of Failure
- Attitudes begin to shift in creditors’ minds; they begin to accept small payments versus receiving their entire investments
- Seven Years War was pivotal in changing attitudes from moral failure to one of general economic uncertainty
3. Imprisoned Debtors in the Early Republic
- Imprisonment was a common (and imported) phenomenon
- Once in a debtor was in jail, his stay was compounded by suits from additional debtors
- Newspapers begin to reconsider the efficacy of debtors’ prison
4. The Imagery of Insolvency
- Opens with vignette of Joseph Pintard, arrested for debt but celebrates the 4th of July with wine and merriment. Describes his complicated entrepreneurial ventures using debt to support himself.
- Insolvency, while it offered Pintard time to read, threatened men’s sense of their masculinity (created a forced dependence).
5. A Shadow Republic
- Debtors develop their own constitution; remarkably based on principles of Republican freedoms and a conscious social contract.
6. The Politics of Insolvency
- Covers debates on federalizing bankruptcy.
7. The Faces Bankruptcy
- Creditors initiated the action
- It was involuntary (though with voluntary, cooperative elements between creditors and debtors)
- One could not initiate the action as a debtor
- Designed to stop debtors from hiding assets
- Required a full accounting of debtors’ assets
- Debtor able to keep essential items for living
- Declaring bankruptcy was considered an admission of failure

Sources:
Letters and memoirs from and to debtors. Pamphlets, as well.

Historiography:

Keywords: 
Moral economy
Insolvency
Bankruptcy
Sin
Risk
Speculation

Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Themes: Gender, Sexuality, Race, Power
Geographical Scope: Philadelphia
Chronological Scope: 1730-1830 (periodization is unique)
Thesis Summary: Philadelphia in the mid-to-late 18th century was unique in the way it dealt with sexuality; in fact, it had a thriving sexual pleasure culture that included sexual freedom for women and men. Serial monogamy and sexual liaisons that resulted in children out of wedlock were socially acceptable, and for a time, prostitution was tolerated. Women who gave birth to children regularly sued for child support, and their partners seldom denied their responsibility. The social structure in place, run by a group of artisans called the Overseers of the Poor was eventually wrenched away from power by Quakers concerned with the behavior and also cost of Philadelphians. The moral authority of the Quakers accelerated as slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania in 1780. By the early 1800s, the image of white women as a chaste model of perfection and the association of poor whites and people of color with sexual deviance formed the foundation for gendered and racial oppression in the absence of slavery.

Chapter Outlines:
1. Wives challenged the patriarchy through self-divorce.
2. The pleasure culture, out-of-wedlock children, child support, and prostitution.
3. Eroticized print.
4. Class and racial dynamics.
5. Gender politics and men/women’s roles.
6. Non-marital sexuality in print (changes to it)
7. Attempts at sexual reform (gentle coercion)
8. Attempts at sexual reform (repression)

Methods:
Blend of social & cultural history.

Sources:
Popular Print
Court Records
Church Records
Social Agency Records
Newspapers

Historiography:
Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America
Butler, Gender Trouble
Cott, Passionlessness
Cohn, The Murder of Helen Jewett
Dayton, Women Before the Bar
Fischer, Suspect Relations
Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England
Grossberg, Governing the Hearth
Hodes, White Women, Black Men
Lystra, Searching the Heart
Stansell, City of Women
Thompson, Sex in Middlesex
Ulrich, Good Wives
William & Mary Quarterly, January 2003

Keywords: 
Acts of the Pennsylvania Assembly
African-Americans
Adultery
Bastardy
Citizenship
Cross-racial sex
Enlightenment
Divorce
Gender
Indentured servants
Laws/Legal prosecution
Lower classes
Marriage
Overseers of the Poor
Patriarchy
Popular and Print Culture
Prostitution
Race
Republicanism
Benjamin Rush
Self-divorce
Sexuality

Saunt, Claudio. West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.

Themes: Interdependence, Vast Early America

Geographical Scope: Cherokee lands (in current Kentucky & Tennessee), Aleutian Islands, Utah, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Hudson's Bay, Black Hills, Havana, Hawaii

Chronological Scope: 1760s-1770s

Thesis: Saunt leaves his thesis open to interpretation, but by implication he firmly pushes against both the tendency to view Early America as a focus on the thirteen colonies or even a strictly Atlantic lens. Instead, he imbues multiple narratives with what Karin Wulf dubs "Vast Early America," using the American Revolution as a case study. In fact, the American Revolution as we know it is reduced to a sidebar to anchor us in time, but otherwise is almost wholly ignored, instead showing how the geographical areas above were changing in key way during the revolutionary period. Saunt also offers a subtle pushback against dependency theory in the second part of his book, showing how Algonquins effectively whittled the resources of Hudson Bay Company traders, 

Major/Sub-Arguments: 

- By looking at the way colonizers wrote and mapped, it is clear many had little sense of what lay West.
- Russian expansion into Alaska as they used Aleutian forced labor to procure otter pelts concerned Spanish missionaries, who somewhat exaggerated the case for the creation of San Diego in part due to inaccurate mapping.
- More ignorance about the terrain contributed to problems in supplying missions, especially in San Francisco.
- However, many of these failures would end up shaping the maps of the future, such as the colossal failure the Spanish to link its concerns in Utah with those of the West Coast; their round-a-bout journey back to Utah, however, mapped a great deal of terrain.
- Beavers are important ecological players, judging by their presence or absence in an ecosystem.
- When Native groups, for example the Osage or the Creek Nations, developed economic systems around access to European goods, they leveraged their positions. For example, Creek Indians continued to shuttle back and forth between Havana and the mainland in order to pressure Spanish officials into trade and military alliances. This was effective because the sugar industry had made the Spanish dependent on imported provisions, many of which Creeks could supply, and Creek taste for the illegal aguardiente made smuggling an option. (204) 

Method and Sources: Continental viewpoint (vs. Atlantic). Examines changes around 1776 in different places in what is now the U.S. Very interesting ecological sources on the beaver; otherwise letters, journals, manuscripts, proclamations, diaries, biographies, autobiographies. 

Major Questions: What major changes are taking place during the American Revolution besides on the easter seaboard?

Connections/Historiography: This could be tied to Daniel Richter’s Facing East, in that it takes a more native-centric approach by putting native communities in the foreground and at times juxtaposing their points of view with settlers. Alan Taylor’s American Colonies is also similar in its continental approach. Bill Cronon’s Changes in the Land and subsequent ecological work have their echo here.

How I might use this: This is a fascinating resource that disorients the reader accustomed to thinking about the American Revolution as an all-encompassing event. I would probably use this in concert with Saunt's work on mapping Early America, which would be useful for students to know how just how many people on the continent might have heard only the faintest echo, or nothing at all of the fight in the East. It goes beyond simply upsetting a geographical myth--it suggests we should review our chronological lens as well--what do we mean by Early America.

Adorno, Rolena. “The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios.” Representations Special I, no. 33 (1991): 163–99.

Rolena Adorno, who co-translated the still-reigning Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, writes this still-prescient article that upends accepted narratives on Cabeza de Vaca. She quotes him alongside Oviedo to effectively argue that contrary to popular and persistent retellings of his story, Cabeza de Vaca was not entirely the deus ex machina we have been led to believe. She charts his journey after his shipwreck, subsequent enslavement, and as a reluctant shaman as groups suffering from the devastation of Spanish-born illnesses made a conscious decision to solicit his help. Later, as a trader, he finds himself an outsider able to negotiate the price of goods on well-trodden paths in times of war and peace. The most significant part of his journey, as Adorno tells it, is when he uses the skills he has learned as both shaman and trader to negotiate his travels. She identifies three types of fear: his initial fear of torture, his ability to inspire fear in native groups, and his ability to convince native groups they have nothing to fear from the Europeans as he ends his journey.

Cabeza de Vaca was never just a small party traveling, but he brought a large contingent with him, and they hardly traveled “aimlessly.”

Essentially, with a group of natives, some of whom would travel ahead, they would send word that a man who had the power to heal (and kill) was coming to pay a visit. Groups were instructed to lay out gifts of food and drink and other valuables, and they were set upon by the visitors. Adorno offers a damning quote from Cabeza de Vaca’s own writing: "They receive us weeping and with great sadness because they knew that wherever we went, the people were sacked and robbed by those who accompanied us, and when they saw us alone, they lost their fear, and gave us some prickly pears and not another single thing." (178) That is to say, without his group to accompany him, he was fairly ineffectual at inspiring his hosts to give him such great “gifts.”

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Cronon argues that we should not attribute the shift from Native to European dominance in early New England solely to complex changes taking place in a social, political, and economic sphere. To these factors, we must add the region's ecology. Cronon employs the well-known framework of Native American and European contact in New England while carefully weaving in intricate relations between humans as they interacted with their environments. Ultimately, the ability to put a price on nature produced catastrophic effects on N/A populations. In building his argument, Cronon sets out to examine the ways in which Native Americans and New Englanders viewed and used their habitats, and how they changed their views and use of the land, pre- and post-European contact.

Sub-arguments/Themes:

• Fires (edge habitats) - Native Americans used fire to clear areas, eliminate bugs, create areas where animals they hunted would thrive, at times as part of a military strategy. As use of fire increases, so too does the climate change (hotter or colder, snow melts faster, ground doesn’t hold water and runs off quickly).

• Mobility - Moving from place to place seasonally allowed for plant and animal life to rebuild itself

• Population Control - New England Native Americans kept their populations to a manageable amount, not over-procreating in order to keep their populations mobile.

• Surplus - Something that didn't particularly enter into Native American life until products had been commoditized--after which time many people imported goods (including food staples) in exchange for hunting

• War - Among Native peoples often due to conflicts over territory to produce commodities to exchange for European goods.

• Property - Different conceptions of property were in place; Native people granted specific permissions for using the land, while British colonizers assumed they had ownership.

• Commoditization - Well-known cases are beaver pelts, but others are interesting, too. The case of pot ash - required lots of burning, so as soon as pot ash had a price on it, so too was there much more incentive for burning.

• Wood - White pine - used for masts (allowed to thrive because of burning - prior to this, European masts were composite); Hickory - fuel; cedar - roofing and fences.

• Fenced in areas - forced on (especially Native) farmers because they prevented pigs/livestock from eating up people's crops.

Scope: 1620-1800

Geography: New England

Significance: Jumpstarts field of environmental history. Looks at native fires as useful. Explores the roles of pigs. Examines how Native Americans and Europeans viewed property.

Question Brainstorm:

• How can I use this in the future?

• What does later scholarship look like that builds on this?

Reis, E. “Teaching Transgender History, Identity, and Politics.” Radical History Review Winter, no. 88 (2004): 166–77.

This is an excellent article on teaching transgender using a historical framework by Elizabeth Reis, Emeritus professor at University of Oregon. Published in 2004, the article functions simultaneously as a personal exploration of pedagogical experiences and an invitation to a practical dialogue about what literature to offer students. 

Her pedagogical choices are valuable points of departure, such as insistence to students that transphobia will not be tolerated or her forcing students to think about how questions within the transgender field upend our assumptions about the hard lines drawn that determine biological sex. 

Reis also engages with current and age-old historical debates, such as how to avoid the issue of presentism when searching for a way to describe "transgenderism" before the term "transgender" became part of popular discourse. Using the term berdache coined by French colonists to describe Native Americans (mostly men) "who lived, dressed, and worked as the opposite sex," (169) she demonstrates how the problematic use of terms such as berdache and two-spirit people tend to distort, rather than clarify. She concludes that far more useful, however difficult, would be to use names Native Americans "themselves employed." (170)

To further support this line of reasoning, Reis echoes frameworks such as D'Emilio and Freedman's Intimate Matters (1988, 2012), noting how "women who dressed as men" were initially and simply assumed to have interest only in carnal relations with other women (170).

Reis touches on complications with other terms such as intersex and transexuality: the former a result of activists shrugging off the mantle of a pathologized body and critiquing the practices of medical professionals who made decisions for people with so-called "ambiguous anatomy." (171) In so doing she critiques the DSM's GID (Gender Identity Disorder)* This has largely been replaced with "Gender Dysphoria," but is still coded as a disorder in some sense. She questions the privilege of transexuality--who can afford to alter their bodies? And without a diagnosis, one is often denied services.

After revealing several of the questions facing scholars and activists in her course, Reis offers her syllabus with reading list, and it begins strongly organized by chronology and later rests more heavily in theme, though often they are more contemporary themes.

Canaday, M. “LGBT History.” Frontiers-A Journal Of Women Studies 35, no. 1 (2014): 11–19.

In a few short pages, Margot Canaday describes the field of LBGT history with high regard for the overarching framework of Intimate Matters, a groundbreaking work written in 1988 and revised in 2012 that explores the separation of sex and reproduction, the changing meanings of sex and sexuality over time (from "procreative," to "romantic," and then to "liberalized and commercialized"). These major shifts from the Colonial era and subsequently into the 19th and 20th centuries chart helpful shifts within the field of women's history.

At the same time, Canaday asserts that LGBT History has a "serious gender problem" (12) related to gender subordination. That is, a predictably uneven history privileging men's experiences has been a prominent issue. Regardless, Canaday remains very positive about LGBT history based not only on her experience going to conferences packed full with new scholars, but also the more concrete steps being made in the field of family, church, and the workplace, offering not only published, but forthcoming scholarship in each of these areas.

Daniels, Bruce C. “Did the Puritans Have Fun? Leisure, Recreation and the Concept of Pleasure in Early New England” 25, no. 1 (1991): 7–22.

In recognizing how ""puritan" has been a synonym for joyless, repressed behaviour" (7) for several hundred years, Daniels shows how since the 1930s, scholars have contested this view. In 1930 and 1939, respectively, Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison argued that Puritans also sought pleasure, didn't avoid drinking, and were even encouraged by the ministry to enjoy a certain balance in life--that is, they don't appear to have been sanctioned for enjoying themselves, nor did they believe joy implied sin (12). For example, Edmund Morgan, a student of Miller, further argued that sex was treated candidly (13). Complicating these assertions, according to Daniels, is that in contrast to what the ministry said, we are not clear on how the average person behaved (15). More recent debates cite Miler and company as painting "Puritans as twentieth-century moderates in their views on pleasure," which they were not (16). One interesting line of inquiry has come from psychologists, who note how notions about child raising involved repression and submission, and with a current lens, it is possible that successive generations may have had trauma that may have affected their behavior as adults. The same difficulty applies, however. We cannot accept a guide on childrearing as a set of rules to which people adhered. Rather, we might see them as the complex characters they prove to be.

Hine, Darlene Clark. “A Black Studies Manifesto: Characteristics of a Black Studies Mind.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 11–15.

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In her 2014 article in The Black Scholar, Darlene Clark Hine establishes Black Studies as a discipline distinct in method. Hine wrote her article in apparent response to Naomi Schaefer Riley’s specious attack on Black Studies as a field. Riley’s dismissal of the field was based on her selection of a few dissertations as representative of the field and her interpretation of them based on their abstracts (i.e. she did not read the dissertations and rather proudly asserted it was not her job to do so). Rather than engage Schaefer’s Chronicle of Higher Education article point-by-point (as many of the commenters did quite well, exposing the article for its vapidness), Hine identified five critical aspects of what she termed, “The Black Studies Mind.” They are intersectionality (“race, class, gender, sexuality, and location (geographic, regions, nation, space”)) nonlinear thinking (not expecting linear progression, and sometimes significant retrogression), diasporic perspectives and comparative analysis (freedom struggles everywhere), oppression and resistance (the value of incremental progress and veiled forms of resistance), and solidarity (not succumbing to the encouragement to engage in fights over territory and scarce resources), all with an emphasis on the changing needs of students.

See:
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case-for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/black-studies-part-2-a-response-to-critics/46401

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Allen, Robert L. “Politics of the Attack on Black Studies.” Black Scholar 6, no. 1 (1974): 2–7.

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In 1974, Robert Allen wrote this article in the Journal of Black Studies and Research, which describes the imperiled state of Black Studies programs after their hasty implementation across the nation, internal conflicts exploited by opponents, and finally the disastrous maligning Black Studies by the Nixon Administration.

Allen defines three schools of thought around Black Studies: as a purely academic field that could be called "contributionist;" second, under Harold Cruse, a proponent of cultural nationalism; and thirdly, Nathan Hare, who saw Black Studies as a "vehicle for social change" that could break down hierarchical relations between ivory tower profesors and their students and offer a critical lens of race and class.

Black Studies was criticized on many levels, but key to those critiques were that it was not academic (and thereby took the blame for racial tensions on campuses), that it had no intellectual basis (certainly not given the time to develop as had other disciplines), and that it promoted "reverse racism." This "intellectual scapegoating," as Allen calls it, made it easy to drain departmental budgets.

Allen identifies several needs situated within his time: defining the field, developing and standardizing curriculum, faculty and staff recruiting, putting pressure on professional organizations, creating watchdog committees to work in local and national politics, and to investigate career opportunities for graduates in the field. Finally, he points out that it won't be easy, and who Black Studies should serve is a central issue.

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Lockett, James D. “The Deportation of the Maroons of Trelawny Town to Nova Scotia, Then Back to Africa.” Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 1 (1999): 5–14.

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This article discusses the Trelawny Maroons, who Lockett considers not only the vanguard in the fight against slavery in Jamaica but also one of the primary forces in the successful settlement of Sierra Leone. Originating mostly from West Africa, and mostly Ashanti, the Trelawny Maroons provoked a "stalemate" with British forces that Lockett characterizes as a win. The first treaty they participated in was after a fifteen-year war from 1725-1750, in which the British suffered many casualties. As a result, two treaties were signed: the first to provide a 1,500 acre, semi-autonomous land to the Trelawny, and the second that was never fully supported by the Trelawny to return enslaved Afro-Jamaicans back to their owners. The slavecatcher role was unpopular, which eventually provoked a second, much shorter war from 1795-1796. The Trelawny being as unpopular as they were among many Jamaicans, petitioned to leave Jamaica and settle in a different colony, which involved a three-year hiatus in Nova Scoita and finally emigration to Sierra Leone.

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Austin, Curtis J. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. Fayettville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

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Book Review:

Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party is a tour de force with a title that invites the casual browser to make assumptions about it. In particular, people who studied the watered-down, paragraph-long, high-school version of the Black Panther Party (BPP) will recall a familiar photo of black men in formation sporting leather jackets, black burets, and toting formidable weaponry standing proud and ready for trouble. However, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense considered itself a revolutionary group with a ten-point program developed from its true grassroots backgrounds, a solid understanding of the needs of the communities it served, and a willingness to act. Central to that commitment was the presence of guns; however, as the author explains, guns were useful in attracting attention and recruits, but also the attention of Hoover’s COINTELPRO, which devoted most of its energies to destroying the BPP.  In explaining his thesis, then, the author shows that explanations for the making of the BPP are not one-sided. In fact, it was not the violence of the BPP, but the violence of inadequate living conditions, oppression, and police brutality that provided a solid foundation from which the organization was born. (xxii)

In the initial chapters, the author expertly traces the historical roots of the Black Panther Party in the frustration of black communities around the country, illustrating how the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement evolved in direct and overlapping conversation with one another. Indeed, it was “civil wrongs” that provided the necessary fuel for both to work together. The author embeds several conflicts early on that presage the organization’s demise, such as the adoption of violent rhetoric and the police and FBI’s response to it, a problematic hierarchical leadership structure, the fundamental and unresolved differences between Newton and Cleaver, and finally the infighting that was emblematic of that split. The author emphasizes that it was not a geographical “east/west split,” but a wedge between Cleaver who controlled the New York faction from Algeria and Newton who held sway over the rest of the many chapters. (241) The author punctuates the middle of the book with the high-profile murder of Fred Hampton, the imprisonment of Huey Newton and the campaign to free him, and a careful explication of the southern and eastern chapters that formed key parts of the organization as a whole.

All works aspire to perfection, yet no scholarship is without its flaws. Up Against the Wall is no exception. On page 97, a minor typo does not take away from the author’s correct assessment that “Despite having access to their own media outlet and commanding a nationwide appeal, the BBP [sic] was powerless in its ability to persuade most black men and women to pick up the gun.” Media coverage of the BPP, however, emphasized guns and favored badass men, as opposed to the many women who formed the rank and file and who kept the organization going. It is fitting that the author cites Eldridge Cleaver’s ability to explain dialectical materialism (241) to an audience of laypersons. Dialectics, distilled to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, appears not only to be the guiding thesis of the “making and unmaking” of the BPP, but Dr. Austin shares Cleaver’s facility to weave an incredibly complicated set of narratives together into a readable, cohesive whole. The only place where the narrative frays mildly is in the latter chapters. The discussion with the informant BJ, for example, needs to employ the techniques from the previous chapters by more slowly parsing some of the language and allowing the context to reveal itself within the structure of the narrative—a difficult task even for a master oral historian. Finally, while the author shows an organizational chart of the BPP leadership structure, the term “democratic centralism” needs more development; otherwise, it has no useful differentiation from an autocracy. Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power only makes the leadership structure seem less flexible.

Lest the reader misunderstand these minor critiques as a comment on the whole, Up Against the Wall is the work of a master revisionist—clear in its logic and order, detail, and narrative quality. Even the most mundane facts are placed in such a way that it is a book that, once picked up, is impossible to put down. Dr. Curtis J. Austin’s work should be a fixture in Black Studies programs, African American History courses, and any courses on protest movements. It is a historical work that would do well in an interdisciplinary context, such as political science or women’s studies.

Perhaps a feat more remarkable than the prose is evidence that the author won a tussle with his editor. It includes a bibliographic essay and a personal account of his own journey as a scholar. Historiographies often form the bulk of a thesis, and authors begrudgingly jettison them first. Regardless, editors typically locate these sorts of works in the front, where Dr. Austin favors a timeline and a chapter that embeds the BPP within the movement around it. This decision shows a commitment to the subjects of the history as the agents of their own destinies, rather than what other authors thought about them. For a book that reads from front to back with examples of this intentionality, look no further.

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