Title: Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939

Author: Peggy Pascoe

Year of Publication: 1990

Thesis:

White, middle-class, Protestant missionary women attempted to reach outside of the narrow confines of domestic authority prescribed by previous forms of Republican Motherhood. Reforming women whom they considered victims of male lust to their natural state of virtue by creating "rescue homes" in San Francisco, Colorado, Salt Lake City, and Omaha allowed them to test their female moral authority. Changes in funding structures from small collections from women's homes to larger, male controlled donors, and the professionalization of social work as a field contributed to the decline in power for the matrons in charge of these homes. Pascoe argues that it is fundamental to consider how women being "served" by these institutions didn't always conform to the matrons' images of reform and used the services to their advantage, despite the sometimes mismatch between reformers' lack of cultural knowledge about the people they were attempting to rescue and the needs of those being served.

Time: 1874-1939

Geography:

San Francisco (Chinese women sex workers)

Denver (unwed mothers)

Salt Lake City (wives of polygamists)

Omaha (Women from Omaha Reservation)

Organization:

Introduction: The Search for Female Moral Authority

- WMCW draw on 19th-century conception of women to challenge male authority in the West - effective because it didn't ask for equality per se (xviii)

- This approach solidifies gender roles (xix) - ***I would argue also racial and class lines, too

- Revisit this reference on women who sought female authority through men vs. challenging them (xx)

- Can't just pay attention to WMCW but also the folks they are attempting to exert their authority upon (xxi)

ORIGINS AND IDEAS

1. Institutional Origins

- How these rescue homes were established (xxiii)

- Finds roots in early 19th benevolent activity, even though late 19th is the popular (3)

- "piety & purity" the locus of women's power (4)

- Many Protestant evangelical women's orgs pop up after Civil War (6)

- Groups that didn't appear to them to have sexual constraint ("unmarried mothers, Mormons, Indians, and Chinese immigrants") easily become their focus (6)

- Slogan "woman's work for woman" sums up attempt to enter more broadly the public sphere of influence (30)

- Appears to be a definitive shift from WMCPW seeking power in relation to men & seeking their authority over other women (31)

2. The Ideology of Female Moral Authority

SYSTEMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL AND RELATIONS AMONG WOMEN

3. Some Women's Culture and Other Women's Needs: Motivations, Maternalism, and the Language of Gratitude

- Anecdote of Chin Leen, who leaves husband & goes to Chinese Mission Home (73)

- Frank Wong claims kidnapping - gets help from white men (74)

- Residents as "inmates," this is an interesting term (women used this for women in private homes, too) (80)

- Language of gratitude buries differences between women - is this something like respectability politics? (110)

4. Home Mission Women, Race, and Culture: The Case of "Native Helpers"

5. Homes Outside of the Rescue Homes

ANTICLIMAX

6. The Crisis of Victorian Female Moral Authority, 1890-1939

- Women's National Indian Association removes "women" from the title - impetus - attract more members + men & women making a home together idea (1901) (177)

- Expansion: funding, working w/law enforcement, social workers (179)

- Newer leaders change & shift fundraising from women's small contributions to larger donors (from male-led households) - paradoxically reducing women's power

Epilogue: A Legacy to Ponder--Female Moral Authority and Contemporary Women's Culture

- Cultural feminism has served as a powerful call to action (anti-nuclear campaigns, sex work, etc.) (209)

- Problems with "universality of values" (210)

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index 

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Female moral authority (vs. the loaded term, "female moral superiority" that, according to Pascoe, connotes more power than white, middle-class Protestant Victorian women had - see quote below from xvii)

egalitarianism

cultural feminism (essentialist-leaning & gender emphasized - "women's values")

modern cultural feminist

Victorian missionary women (sexual purity, Protestantism (xv)

socialist feminism (class emphasized over gender oppression) (xiv)

mid-20th century feminism (eliminate difference) (xiv)

social feminism (a term too limiting - see explanation) (xviii)

social control - misunderstood - it's read back (contemporary example - public school as "social control," doesn't do a good job of class differentiation (especially b/c it mostly didn't connect with race & class),  xix-xx

home mission - from missionary work to "home mission" as an ideological pharse around molding all after the model Christian home (6)

Inmates - "The extent of the separation between the rescue homes and the wider community is suggested by the fact that both matrons and residents referred to residents as "inmates." Yet we should not be too quick to assume that if residents were inmates, missionaries were jailers; for Victorians often spoke of the "inmates" of private homes, even their own homes, as well as the inmates of prisons or other institutions.17 At least in part, the harshness of the term reflected the sharp boundaries middle-class Victorians drew around "private" homes to set them off from the "public" world of busi- ness and politics." (80)

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

On the argument:

"While their projects took many forms, the most common was the establishment of rescue homes, institutions designed to provide a loving, home- like atmosphere in which unfortunate women rescued from pred- atory men might live under the watchful eyes of white, middle- class Protestant women. Creating a network of rescue homes in western cities, Protestant women carried on what they called "woman's work for woman" for more than fifty years.11 Not until the missionaries' Victorian assumptions could no longer stand (in some cases as late as the 1930s) did the institutions falter." (xvi)

On "female moral superiority":

"The enduring belief that Vic- torian women "cleaned up" the wild West rests on the racist as- sumption that the West only became "civilized" when white women entered it. Furthermore, it encourages disproportionate attention to their activities after they arrived on the scene." (xvii)

On the book's purpose:

"this book focuses on three aspects of the Victorian search for female moral authority in the American West: its ben- efits and liabilities for women's empowerment; its relationship to systems of social control; and its implications for intercultural re- lations among women." (xvii)

On connections between the past and the present:

"I am only too well aware that, in exploring the past to unearth the roots of present dilemmas, I challenge traditional scholars who advocate a kind of pure history purged of its contemporary asso- ciations and understood solely on its own terms. I have come to believe, however, that such a purist stance merely disguises and mystifies our inevitable involvement with the present. For the moment, let me simply say that I understand history as a kind of conversation between the past and the present in which we travel through time to examine the cultural assumptions—and the possibilities—of our own society as well as societies that came before us." (xxiii)

Pitfalls:

"To the extent that focusing on women makes men peripheral to the analysis, it hampers the creation of effective strategies for dislodging the male-dominated power structures that affect most women's lives. This was a problem that Protestant missionary women were unable to solve. Concentrating their efforts on es-tablishing homes for women alone allowed them much-needed and otherwise unavailable space to care for the victims of male abuse. It also allowed them to lose sight of how widespread those abuses were. Unable to exert much control over men outside the rescue homes and increasingly dependent on them for financial and legal help, they exempted "Christian men" from their critiques of male dominance. In the end, home mission matrons watched their charges return to a world outside the homes where male dominance was so ubiquitous that the concept of female moral authority was more an illusion than a reality." (211)

Notes:

This is where "the future is female" comes from (cultural feminism - xiv)

- finds connection between modern cultural feminists and Victorian missionary women in their essentialization of "women's values" (xv)

The language of gratitude idea is really interesting - the language provides the facade that all women are equal, yet it hides the power imbalances (but, only to the people in power) - is this one of the key critiques of respectability politics? (110)


Gilmore, Glenda E. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Gender & American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Title Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920

Author: Glenda Gilmore 

Year of Publication: 1996

Thesis:

Gilmore explores contingencies with a nuanced critique of the Progressive Era, arguing that racial (and gender) repression reordered society. It redrew racial boundaries, realigned white women behind white men, and eroded fragile alliances between Black and white women. Even as racial terror disfranchised Black men (and therefore Black communities) Black women organized their own progressive units in churches, clubs, and mutual aid organizations while maintaining fragile diplomatic ties with white communities and demanding 

Time: 1896-1920

Geography: North Carolina

Organization:

Preface to the Second Edition: Changing Histories

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Place and Possibility

- The Sarah Dudley Pettey family - race relations before disfranchisement

- See: Charles Chesnutt - light-skinned and sometimes passing white; he comments on the experience of white supremacy (Procrustes' bed is a bed he forces guests to conform to by stretching their bodies or cutting them down).

- Black progress a threat to "place"

- Argument similar to Laurel T.Ulrich that the mundane and individual life is important. (4)

- Super interesting - the Petteys own All Healing Springs Resort from 1892-1912 - all-white patrons & Black owners. This has a connection to mental health; that Black people formed central actors in the preservation of white mental health. (29)

2. Race and Womanhood

- Education, civics

- Charts growing parity between # of Black men and women teachers from 1890s on.

- Funding of schools was piecemeal and by collection - whites did not want to pay

- Whole black families learned together at times

- Black women move more freely despite prescription for sex segregation b/c of the doctrine of "usefulness." (36) Black ppl are therefore much more integrated in education across age & gender than white folks (36)

- Livingstone model is example - based on equality & religious education - tends to give Black women a slightly stronger foothold (40)

- White women split from Black women in the WCTU - lured away by Democratic party platform through their promise of prohibition passing (1890s)

3. Race and Manhood

- Also before disfranchisement - examines men both black & white

- Rudyard Kipling anecdote denigrating Black people

- ideology of the "Best Man" - Black "Best Men" evaluated in terms of entire race vs. New Men (white) as individuals (62)

- Reputation important to Southern whites vs. "frontier" whites value agriculture & self-sufficiency (64)

- Defining Black men as rapists a coordinated campaign (88)

4. Sex and Violence in Procruste's Bed

- New take on Democratic disfranchisement of Black people (in that it includes Black women)

- Backlash against Black men is also wrapped up in control over white women

- Wilmington massacre also shows us about the power of political rhetoric for people to do bad while they think they are doing good (92)

- Focus on Black people's actions is useful (92)

- * Disfranchisement seems to be a euphemism for racial terror

5. No Middle Ground

- Assault on Black men, the Black family

- White women actively goad white men to kill to defend them against perceived threat from Black men (& women) (95)

- Examples of white people rejecting orders by Black magistrates & police officers (94)

- Black men's vote is key to Black community (101)

- Black M/C seeing themselves as inclusive leaders, classwise (102)

- On the double standard of rape (105-6)

- Manly - suggests white women freely sought Black men's company in a highly volatile political climate (not a new claim - see Ida B. Wells) (106)

- Pettey family knows Manly & stays publicly mute on this subject (108)

- See end of chapter on results - white women fully aligned behind white men as dependents (choosing race over gender) / Black people finding it very difficult to voice themselves publicly.

6. Diplomatic Women

- As Black men lose political ground, Black women gain ground (suffrage, etc.)

- Critique of the "progressive" in the Progressive Era (white people progress; Black people do not) (148)

- * Would have been WORSE if Black women had not worked for enfranchisement and social welfare (thinking really of Martin Summers' book now)

- Black ministers end up having to temper their rhetoric - church shifts from spiritual to social welfare, organizing women, and community improvement (150-151)

7. Forging Interracial Links

8. Women and Ballots

Epliogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Type:

Political / Cultural / Social

Methods:

Sources:

Primarily sources written by Black people, especially women. Census, newspapers, family papers, organizing meeting minutes. Interestingly, Gilmore finds lacunae as white women tended to obscure their thoughts and interactions on race (xxviii)

Historiography:

Argues similarly to Laura Edwards that the campaign to stoke fear about Black male-led sexual violence against white women was an effective means of disfranchising Black people during Reconstruction; the difference here being that Black women were powerful organizers in the Black community and as informal diplomats to white people. Ultimately, Gilmore's work is one of contingency, as well.

Keywords:

Place:

"Place assembled the current concepts of class and race into a stiff-sided box where southern whites expected African Americans to dwell. South- erners lived under a caste system in which skin color, class, and gender dictated the pattern of every daily interaction. For example, African Ameri- cans riding in carriages irritated white North Carolinians because such luxury challenged the connections of race, class, and place. How could whites maintain the idea that African Americans were lowly due to laziness if some African Americans worked hard enough to purchase carriages?7 By embracing a constellation of Victorian middle-class values—temperance, thrift, hard work, piety, learning—African Americans believed that they could carve out space for dignified and successful lives and that their examples would wear away prejudice.8 As African Americans moved to North Carolina's hamlets and cities to pursue professions and commerce, urban African Americans of the middling sort became increasingly visible at a time when most whites worked diligently to consign blacks to the preindustrial role of agrarian peasants." (3)

Themes:

Public/private vs. personal/political (preface)

Critiques:

Questions:

Given the complicated (sometimes ally, sometimes not) dynamic of white women, I'm curious about where and when else they aligned behind white male supremacy... is this a new phenomenon? Or was this always happening & then there is a moment of possibility where you see these fragile ties based on convenience for white folks (e.g. once it became convenient to align behind Democrats' promise to champion temperance, for example)

Quotes:

On white men:

"The white men in these pages are a self-selected lot: those who publicly oppressed African Americans. They include leading Democratic politi- cians, rowdy white supremacists, and calculating disfranchisers, but they do not represent the racial views of all white men. The leaders depicted here wielded an inordinate amount of power to structure a discriminatory so- ciety and to influence other white men's racial ideologies. Missing here, for the most part, are the white men who became interracialists and tried to mitigate the worst of white supremacy or those who simply disapproved of white violence and tried to practice individual acts of kindness. I did not deliberately count them out; they simply did not have much influence on the racial climate and politics of the state from 1896 to 1920." (xv)

On white women:

"White women move in and out of the spotlight as their politics intersect with and diverge from black women's strategies. Most of the white women I introduce are middle-class leaders. Some actively worked for black dis- franchisement; others tentatively began to foster interracial cooperation in the years before woman suffrage. Occasionally, the same woman did both. White women were overwhelmingly complicitous in shoring up white su- premacy in 1898, yet they were at the vanguard of the movement for interracial cooperation by 1920. s feminist historians rewrite the past to reveal women's agency,we should retain a cautionary approach that takes into account the limits of the possible. Most white women simply could not overcome the racial contexts in which they lived, even if they had thought to try. A very vew changed over time, broke with white men, and responded to black women's efforts." (xxv-xxvi)

On resistance and agency:

"But what is most important about white supremacy remains least documented: African American resistance. The black men and women in these pages fought back, even though history has not regis- tered battles won so slowly and victories so flawed. Justice slumbered throughout Sarah Dudley Pettey's life and beyond, and merit lay unre- warded for a longer time than she ever dreamed possible." (xxviii)

On white men's aggressiveness/dis content:

"The New White Man's carefully cultivated modernity sprang mainly from his economic aspirations, but his disappointment in his father and his bitterness about his mother's stunted life contributed to his rage for change. Although he would never have said so straightforwardly,when the New White Man cataloged his region's ills, he recognized his father's fail- ings. New White Men could blame their fathers for losing the Civil War, retarding industry, neglecting public education, tolerating African Ameri- cans in politics, and creating a bottleneck in the Democratic Party. They had ample evidence that the older generation of men had mistreated white women by failing to provide for them after the Civil War." (67)

On factors in Black women's activism:

"When black women are included in southern history, the narrative most often posits their self-sacrificing community activism rolling inexorably toward the civil rights movement.10 Although, in fact, black women did cleave to a common political culture, one that privileged communitarian- ism over individualism, their tactics—how they voiced their beliefs and the forums in which they chose to act—depended on their class, their age, and the centrality of gender to their thinking." (93)

Fascinating analysis of encounters between Black and white women:

"That done, we meet white women out in public space, getting into fights with black women. If we eliminate the subjectivity of the reportage on black women— the impudence, ignorance, and viciousness—they emerge standing up for their rights and abandoning deference. The African Americans in the sto- ries are either young girls or working women going home with the laundry or leaving the tobacco factory. The white women are shopping, sashaying out for air, or riding bicycles. In almost every encounter, the black women comment—with either words or actions—on white women's freedom to pursue leisure in public while they have to work, even as they puncture the white women's superior demeanor." (104)

On terror & property:

"But to her heartbreaking complaint she added these words, equally heartbreaking: "The Negroes that have been banished are all property owners. . . . Had they been worthless Negroes, we would not care." (113)

Notes:

Re-read and mine this preface for an inspiring reading list.

Good points to bring up:

- Importance of family studies (Pettey family)

- Gilmore's excellent & nuanced critique of progressivism

- "Best Man" issues

- Account of the Wilmington Massacre

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Title: Home & Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic

Author: Jeanne Boydston

Year of Publication: 1990

Thesis:

Argues that unpaid women's labor proved critical to the northeastern U.S. industrial development. In so doing, she critiques a Marxist framework (along with others before her) that only appears to value wage labor as a negotiation in the "work" sphere. Women's unpaid labor then must be considered inside the capitalist framework, and therefore a reorganizing of gender as well as labor relations happens hand-in-hand. In fact, she argues that "the growing social invisibility of labor women performed for their own families made housework in many ways the prototype for the restructuring of the social relations of labor under conditions of early industrialization." (xi-xix, xx)

Time: Early American period

Geography:

Organization:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

- Introduces the idea of the title, where "home" and "work" were considered two separate things & how it erased women's work (ix,x)

- Points to Blackwell - she shows how housework is unpaid labor. (x)

- This demonstrates the prioritizing of wage labor 9x)

- Cites Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution - between Civ. War & Depresssion, women seeing housework as "core mechanism of gender inequality." (xi)

- Shift is from the "Colonial goodwife" to the dependent (xi)

- Draws on Wally Seccombe (1974), who showed that women's unpaid labor actually figured into capitalist wages (which would bring the wage much lower) (xiii)

- Domestic/public is an ideological separation (draws on Michele Rosaldo as well as Linda Kerber) (xiv, xv)

- So, by removing "production" from the home, it appears that there is a shift, even though women are still working in the home. (xv)

- Also finds error in the argument that the home went from work to management

- Defensiveness of men in labor force more likely as an explanation for women being pushed out than an overarching capitalist framework (xix) <-- I guess if we think about slavery and capitalism as intertwined, and gender (especially as white m/c women are mostly concerned in this pody of literature) and capitalism as intertwined, this is another way of marginalizing within and without groups to produce the labor surplus and reproduce the inequality capitalism requires in order to function. (xix)

I. An "AEconomical Society"

- On how changes in social life undermined the perception of value in women's labor.

- Colonial life idealized by scholars and said to worsen as the world industrialized (1-2).

- "most historians now consider it unlikely that self-sufficiency ever characterized colonial settlement. Merchant capital was the driving force behind the European colonization of North America, and most European settlers arrived in North America with robust commercial aspirations." (this contests the "golden-age" theory (2)

- finds that neither economic status determines political and social status, nor the inverse." (5) Not a fan of Bourdieu, then?

- Concept of a wife as "profit" (6)

- Ministers showing women's value as contributing emotional support vs. producing (8-9)

- Attitudes change, but the work does not (11)

- Women also compelled to act as surrogate men in absence of husbands when need arose (14)

- Class, of course, affects type of work, type of surrogacy (17)

- 

II. "A New Source of Profit and Support"

(1776-1812)

- Market relations are developing quickly (xix)

III. How Strangely Metamorphosed"

- Narrates the development of market relations (xix)

IV. "All the In-doors Work"

(4,5,6 describe the shift in antebellum labor in the home & its significance) (xx)

V. "The True Economy of Housekeeping"

VI. The Political Economy of Housework

(6,7 - "ideological history of housework")

VII. The Pastoralization of Housework

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Type:


Methods:

Research Questions:

- What were the objective characteristics and material value of housework at various times as the United States Moved toward and through the process of early industrialization; and how did the gender culture of America before the Civil War affect the perception of the characteristics and material value of housework? (xix)

Sources:

Historiography:

- Takes Dolores Hayden's The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) and pushes it back into Early America.

- Faye E. Dudden's Serving Women (1983)

- Ulrich - social organization vs. economic necessity much more important to look at in charting Colonial vs. post-Rev. period (3)

Norton - perception of housework declining prior to industrialization (3)

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Black women are negotiating for wages IN households.

Questions:

Quotes:

"Metaphor too easily serves as description, obscuring 'more complex questions about the social relations of the sexess,' and vieling the possibility that 'the language of separate spheres itself is a rhetorical construction which responded to changing social and economic reality.'" (xv)

Notes:

- Reminder to look more closely at the end of coverture laws (1840s-1880s, state by state)

- See Gayle Rubin - "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex"

- I'm beginning to think the shift being described in much of this literature is focused on upper-class women who can afford to hire servants and attend to the emotional needs of the family.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Title: Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson

Year of Publication: 1998

Thesis:

Argues that whiteness was negotiated through social relations against a white-over-black continuum in which European immigrants were successfully able to consolidate and code themselves as white. Importantly, Jacobsen points how inclusion was as important as exclusion, and how "race" and "color" are two separate but often conflated phenomena. He marks three major historical phases in which whiteness was established: the Naturalization Act of 1790, mass European immigration in 1840, and reconsolidation in the 1920s (followed by 1965 Immigation Act, which offered preference to relatives of previous immigrants).  

Time: 1790-1965

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Note on Usage

Introduction: The Fabrication of Race

- Discussion over arbitrariness of race (ex: under which category do Jews go / what is a Caucasian)

- Race developed through court system (ex: Rollins vs. Alabama - no miscegenation b/c Sicilian woman had not been proven to be white)

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF WHITENESS

1. "Free White Persons" in the Republic, 1790-1840

- Irish anti-Native American rhetoric

- Parallel anti-Black groups even though "non-Nordic" groups discriminated against

- Discusses Theodore Allen's Invention of the White Race & Roediger's Wages of Whiteness

2. Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840-1924

- The 1790 Immigration Act paved the way for Chinese Exclusion and Japanese Internment

- During Draft Riots, Irish also policed miscegenation borders and went after other non-whites and whites racially mixing

- Normalizing of Italians as criminals enabled a mass lynching.

- Discusses Leo Frank lynching (Jewish man who owned a factory & a white woman was found dead in the basement)

3. Becoming Caucasian, 1924-1965

HISTORY, RACE, PERCEPTION

4. 1877: The Instability of Race

5. Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews

THE MANUFACTURE OF CAUCASIANS

6. The Crucible of Empire

7. Naturalization and the Courts

8. The Dawning Civil Rights Era

Epilogue: Ethnic Revival and the Denial of White Privilege

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Type:

Cultural

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

importation

Themes:

Critiques:

Quotes:

Notes: It seems like race between the 1840s-1920s was fluid for people with European backgrounds; the construction of whiteness is all against that background.

Whiteness seems to be about pure blood, access to power, and "fitness for self-government"

Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. 1st ed. Vintage Books. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1992.

Title: The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities

Author: Richard Bushman

Year of Publication: 1992

Thesis:

Argues that a culture of "gentility," seemingly antithetical to capitalism, turned out to be the driving economic force that turned producers who would otherwise be savers and reinvesting in business (think of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) into consumers. Primarily concerned with (white) middle-class interests, he shows how much of gentility proved to be presentation, creating an inwardly and outwardly critical sense of distinction by appearance and behavior. This not only allowed for the (white) middle class, who, according to Bushman, adopted a "vernacular gentility," to heap disdain on people they considered peasants, and selectively adopt what they perceived as values and appearance of the aristocracy. 

Time: 1690-1850

Geography: American Colonies, especially Delaware

Organization:

With vignettes from families, then a systematic accounting for their material culture.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

- Increase in number of mansions after 1720 in Delaware

- Shift in location of rooms

- "They wished to transform themselves along with their environments." (xii)

- Idea of gentility moves from Renaissance (1690) in Europe -> England -> U.S. (xii)

- U.S. style eventually changes in sync with England (this seems similar to style shifts in Mexico - need to check on this, but mid-1800s along with Díaz or did this happen before? ...)

- People who appear not to belong are mocked (xiii)

- Middling people acquire "vernacular gentility" - end of 18th, early 19th century (xiii)

- This book as a curation (cool idea, xiv)

- Performance & gentility go hand in hand (Irving Goffman idea) (xiv)

- Performing on the outside, judging internally - if this hasn't stuck with us I do not know what has (xiv)

- Ugliness important to contrast with beautiful (xiv)

- "Not only was criticism directed outward to others, but people had to watch themselves through the eyes of others. They had to perform for themselves and suffer from their own self-criticism. Performance was unrelenting." (xiv)

- The parlor as genteel performance, but seldom used (xvi)

- Owners had to physically transform themselves as they came into the parlor - describes this as an uneasy event (xv)

- On the paradox of capitalism and gentility:

- "Capitalism rested on an ethic of disciplined work and self-denial in the effort to maximize production and reinvestment. To flourish in a capitalist economy one had to husband resources for investment and devote oneself doggedly to productive effort." But later, he points out that capitalism also relies on consumption. So an ideology of gentility actually fuels capitalism buy turning producers into consumers (xvii, xviii)

GENTILITY 1700-1790

I. The Gentrification of Rural Delaware

II. The Courtesy-Book World

III. Bodies and Minds

IV. Houses and Gardens

V. Cities and Churches

VI. Ambivalence

RESPECTABILITY 1790-1850

VII. Vernacular Gentility in Rural Delaware

- Uses Ridgely family to show rising merchant class alongside existing aristocrats.

- Assessment of their material culture.

- Ends with Mary Welsch, who is indicative of her connection to aristocracy and demeaning of laborers/famers (all considered "peasants.") (235)

VIII. The Comforts of Home

(8,9,10 - gentility, domesticity, and religion interact with one another to create a composite of middle-class virtue) (xvii)

- No professional architects prior to 1800 "as we understand the term" (243)

- architecture as art (includes the house as well as the surroundings - reminds me of Frank Lloyd Wright) (245) & also seems to draw on the Renaissance descriptions of women in pastoral settings.

- *esthetics and utility become a thing (250)

IX. Literature and Life

X. Religion and Taste

XI. City and Country

XII. Culture and Power

- Gentility used to establish respectability, distinction (404)

- "Appearance and manners" become the way people judge others (404)

- Gentility becomes a marketable industry in and of itself (406-407)

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations and Credits

Type:

Material Culture

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

genteel
civil
urbane
gentility
polite society

"With the houses went new modes of speech, dress, body carriage, and manners that gave an entirely new cast to the conduct and appearnace of the American gentry. Altogether these changes created what the eighteenth century called polite society.

- architectural author

Themes:

- Paradox of social equality w/aristocratic leanings (xv)

- Irony of an anti-capitalistic culture (gentility) fueling the economy (xviii)

- Past as aristocratic (and authoritarian) and future as democratic and capitalistic

- rural/urban

Critiques:

Discussion of slavery and gentility 392-396, but no apparent discussion of servants and how they fit into this equation.

Questions:

Quotes:

"Gentility flecked lives without coloring them." (xii)

On the paradox of gentility and equality:
"Gentility was worldly not godly, it was hierarchical not egalitarian, and if favored leisure and consumption over work and thrift. These values ran at cross-purposes with religion, republicanism, and the work ethic, powerful complexes of values subscribed to by the same people who wanted to become genteel. But instead of leading to competition for dominance, as might be expected, in most instances the result of the interplay was mutual exchange and compromise." (xvi,xvii)

On Gentility and Commerce:
- "The irony and incongruity of this exalted impulse is that it was so fully put to the service of commerce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Capitalism joined forces with emulation to spread gentility wherever the lines of commerce could reach. Without the mass production of genteel goods, ordinary people with limited incomes could not have afforded the accoutrements of refinement. Entrepreneurs responded to every sign of increasing demand for fabric, furniture, parlors, clothing, and ingeniously provided them at affordable prices." (406) - so you really need to look at where the raw goods are to make this analysis whole.

"At the same time, gentility did its part in advancing capitalism. A large market for consumer goods was a prerequisite for industrialization. Industrial capitalism would not come into existence in America until workers willingly spent all they earned to purchase the products of the factories. Gentility served the vital role of turning producers into consumers, helping to form the national market on which industrialization rested. Gentility and capitalism collaborated in the formation of consumer culture, gentility creating demand and capitalism manufacturing supply. All the participants in the emerging industrial system had a vest interest, understood or not, in the promotion of gentility.

Notes:

This is so interesting with respect to Bourdieux. And now that I am thinking about it, from there must develop whiteness as social, political, and economic capital.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840. Jefferson Memorial Lectures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Title: The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840

Author: Richard Hofstadter

Year of Publication: 1969

Thesis:

A healthy and functional pluralistic party system was not something the Founders anticipated; in fact, the Founders staunchly opposed the idea of a party system. Based on their own notions of party systems, they foresaw problems with the peaceful transfer of power. What makes the U.S. unique, according to Hofstadter, is that the U.S. did develop a culture that accepted  legitimate party opposition. The book resolves a paradox of anti-party thought and pro-party action. In fact, either the Federalists or the Republicans imagined absorbing the other into its folds. Ultimately, he sees a shift in the 18th century that decidedly looks at parties as evil and corrupt (destroying unity), to the 19th, in which it is critiqued for being overly exclusive, to the 20th, where the party system offers "superficial" conflict, never resolving anything to anyone's satisfaction. (see quote on p.293)

Time: 1780-1840

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Preface

- Founding Fathers didn't believe in parties (viii)

- This comes from responding to parties they had already been exposed to, so conflict between these groups didn't seem effective to them (ix)

One - Party and Opposition in the Eighteenth Century

- What is responsible opposition (see quotes)

- "Non-responsible" critiques of government - concedes they may have value (5) - agitation as a different means

- Effectiveness as a principle (see quotes) (5)

- See Duverger's def. of democracy (democratic republic + organized opposition)

- More definitions from different theoriests including parties are included on p.6

- Why so anti-party?

-> Lack of consensus bread conflict and disorder (12)

-> Special interests could take over party & impose its will (tyranny) (12)

-> Anti-"civic virtue" - takes away judgment (13)

- Finds even within a group of anti-party thinkers (Hamilton, Adams, and other less-high-profile folks) gentle concessions that keeping a balance between parties might be necessary, & even effective. (36)

Two - A Constitution against Parties

- Looking at England as devolving into degeneracy:

"On the eve of the Revolution, most colonials thought of re- cent English history simply as a story of moral degeneracy, political corruption, and increasing despotism, marking a sharp and perhaps irreversible decline from the glories of that earlier England whose principles had been the inspiration of American liberties. Indeed one reason for the Revolution was the felt necessity of severing connections with a state that was losing the pristine purity of its constitution and was cutting itself adrift upon the seas of corrupt and tyrannical government." (43)

- Madison unafraid of minority tyranny (but a majority tyranny (68, 121)

- "Madison’s pluralism, then, had substantial merits as a generalized model, but as to the parties it was mislocated. Envisaging political parties as limited, homogeneous, fiercely aggressive, special interests, he failed to see that the parties themselves might become great, bland, enveloping coalitions, eschewing the assertion of firm principles and ideologies, em- bracing and muffling the struggles of special interests; or that they might forge the coalitions of majorities that are in fact necessary to effective government into forces sufficiently be- nign to avoid tyranny and sufficiently vulnerable to be dis- 

placed in time by the opposing coalition. Liberty, he had always understood, would sustain a political atmosphere in which a conflict of parties would take place. The reverse of that prop- osition, the insight that underlies our acceptance of the two- party system, that the conflict of parties can be made to reinforce rather than undermine liberty, was to be well understood only in the future." (72-73)

Three - The Jeffersonians in Opposition

- No dictatorship as a result of American Revolution stands out, argues Hofstadter (76)

- Washington pushes Hamilton and Jefferson to heal their divides (91)

- Attacks on Alien & Sedition Acts come from VA & Kentucky (example of effective power outside gov't/party & strengthened by geographic locale) (112)

- 

Four - The Transit of Power

- Jefferson as reticent as Washington to proclaim himself on the side of the Federalists or anti-Federalists. However, feared Federalists were attempting to restore monarchy & therefore not legitimate (123)

- John Adams' election unique b/c peaceful, no majority of electorate, decision made in House. (128)

Five - The Quest for Unanimity

"They might have expected, as few Republi- cans could, that Jefferson, the high priest of political anti- centralism and the supposed foe of presidential power, would use the presidency to make the central government an engine of oppression through the instrumentality of his embargo—and of an oppression more keenly felt than any act of government since Parliament’s Coercive Acts of 1774. " (172)

- 

Six - Toward a Party System

- New group of leaders exemplified by Van Buren - "They were considerably more interested than their predecessors in organization, considerably less fixed in their view of issues, considerably less ideological. They were less thoroughly imbued with eighteenth-century anti-party doctrines, and hence more capable of finding clues to a novel political outlook in the cumulative experience of a quarter century of political life under the Constitution." (213)

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Federalist papers, private correspondence

Historiography:

See Gordon Wood later on. See Bailyn for a comparison - he sees founders as drawing on English concepts of parliamentary government as purity corrupted.

Keywords:

Federalists

Republicans

Party/Faction (argues these were used synonymously, with faction being the more "evil" of the two) (10)

Constitutional Opposition - "both government and opposition are bound by the rules of some kind of constitutional consensus. It is understood, on one side, that opposition is directed against a certain policy or complex of policies, not against the legitimacy of the constitutional regime itself. Opposition rises above naked contestation; it forswears sedition, treason, conspiracy, coup d'etat, riot, and assassination, and makes an open public appeal for the support of a more or less free electorate. Government, in return, is constrained by certain limitations as to the methods it can use to counter the opposition; the free expression of oppositional views is permitted both inside and outside the halls of the parliamentary body." (4)

Responsible Opposition -

"When we speak of an opposition as being responsible, we 

mean that it contains within itself the potential of an actual alternative government—that is, its critique of existing policies is not simply a wild attempt to outbid the existing regime in promises, but a sober attempt to formulate alternative policies which it believes to be capable of execution within the existing historical and economic framework, and to offer as its executors a competent alternative personnel that can actually govern." (4)

Effectiveness:

"effective, we mean not merely that its programs are expected to be capable of execution, that its alternative policy is real, but that its capa- bility of winning office is also real, that it has the institutional structure and the public force which makes it possible for us to expect that sooner or later it will in fact take office and bring to power an alternative personnel. If opposition, no matter how constitutional its methods and realistic its program, is too minuscule or too fragmented to offer this alternative, it hardly qualifies on the grounds of effectiveness.2 It might then be an educational force, but it is not a political one. Now it is an essential question, to which Western theorists usually give a 

negative answer, whether the requirement of effectiveness can be adequately met without opposition party structures. Ef- fectiveness and organization, they conclude, complement each other." (5)

Alien and Sedition Act - 1798 - Federalist efforts to absorb Republicans

Treaty of Ghent - 1814 - (Crown cedes territory/control)

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Hofstadter's research question:

"How did this nation come to develop a responsible, effective, constitutional opposition?" (4)

On the shift in idea as to what a party is from 18th-19th-20th centuries

"It is, in fact, the very drastic nature of this change that makes it necessary for us to recreate with care the early development of the argument for parties. In the eighteenth century, parties had been charged with creating gratuitous strife and with destroying the unity and harmony of civil society. By the middle of the nineteenth century and afterward, the party system was charged with creating a corrupt (and perhaps overcentralized) government and with barring the ablest men from politics. In the twentieth century the characteristic criticism of the eighteenth has been all but reversed, since the party system is now most typically criticized not tor divisiveness bur fui offering a superficial and false con- flict to the voters, for failing to pose the “real” issues with clarity and responsibility, and for blocking out dissent—in effect, for protecting the unity and harmony of civil society all too completely, for blunting and minimizing conflict at too high a cost." (293)

Notes:

Does the two-party system support or undermine liberty? (73)

What is the significance of a search for unanimity/consensus? (171)


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

Title: Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830

Author: Clare Lyons

Year of Publication: 2006

Thesis:

Clare Lyons finds a contingent moment in Philadelphia, a relatively newer colony and later state compared to its New England counterparts. The largest city in the new U.S., it also boasted the most diverse population in terms of race, class, and hosted the largest group of free African Americans. An intellectual lighthouse of the Enlightenment, it offered more likely place for more nuanced forms of sexual, gender, and race relations. Before long, however, Lyons demonstrates how Englightenment thinking was used to establish natural difference between (white) male virility and passive (white) female sexuality. In turn, these dynamics were pitted against the representation of poor people and especially African Americans as naturally licentious. Tightening gender boundaries rooted in a presentation of racial and sexual biology proved a powerful way to subvert this contingent moment in Philadelphia. The shift we are seeing in the latter part of the 18th and early part of the 19th centuries is one where gender and race are reaffirmed as loci of power.

Time:

1730-1830

Geography:

Philadelphia

Organization:

List of Illustrations and Tables

List of Abbreviations and Short Titles

Introduction

- Largest city in U.S. with ethnic, intellectual, class diversity w/greatest population of free African Americans. (7-9)

Part I. The Sexual Terrain of Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia

1. A Springboard to Revolution: Runaway Wives and Self-Divorce

- Also includes "popular representations of marriage." (9)

2. The Fruits of Nonmarital Unions: Sex in the Urban Pleasure Culture

- "investigates the development of the urban pleasure culture and examines bastardy and prostitution." (9)

3. The Pleasures and Powers of Reading: Eroticization of Popular Print and Discursive Interpretations of Sex

- Reading the media representation of this "multiclass, mixed-gender reading public" against their sexual behavior." (9)

Part II. Sex in the City in the Age of Democratic Revolutions

4. To be "Free and Independent": Sex among the Revolutionary Rabble

- This section analyzes race & class (9)

"But the Revolution had fundamentally changed the relationship of the common people to the state. In their turn away from monarchy to a govern- ment of the people, Americans embraced a political philosophy that relied on the virtue of its citizens. If the people were to be self-governing, republican leaders professed, they must be virtuous and rational and act for the com- mon good. Uncontrolled sexuality could become dangerous: because the body would come to rule the man, such men would not make good citizens. The implications of the Revolution seemed to lead in two di√erent directions." (188)

- "Bastardy" becomes a concern of local governments

- Turns out that middle-upper classes are more likely to commit adultery / have out-of-wedlock children than poorer classes (who were more likely to have serial relationships) - this is a case of the white middle-upper class policing itself, then. (207-208)

"For some of the lower sort, sexual nonconformity was an assertion of the primacy of love or romantic attachment over the propriety of marriage. For many of the middle and elite classes, expansive sexual experience meant casual and multiple sexual a√airs, and adultery be- came a component of their marriages. For them, such behavior was personal indulgence in libertine excess." (236). <-- this isn't a hard line she draws, but it is interesting. So the important thing is HOW the w/m-c saw itself - adultery and "bastardy" as aberrant, vs. "lower sort" as their natural inclination.

5. Sex and the Politics of Gender in the Age of the Revolution

- Women's citizenship curtailed by men's control over them. (238)

- Comes straight out of enlightenment thinking: "The subordination of women to men through marriage, Locke argued, existed in the state of nature; women were, therefore, excluded from the status of indi- viduals in the state of nature. As individuals formed the social contract upon which republican government rests, women had already been excluded by their position as subordinate wives within male households—and thus excluded from becoming full citizens. Other thinkers, most notably Rousseau, argued that women were naturally inferior to men and lacked the mental capacity to participate in important affairs of the world, particularly governance." (239)

- Women's education became a central goal to improve gender equality, where attacking non-marital relations became the counter-attack.

- Shift in representations of white m/c women as being chaste against a backdrop of unchaste behavior in lower classes

Part III. Normalizing Sex in the Nineteenth Century: The Assault on Nonmarital Sexuality

6. Through Our Bodies: Prostitution and the Cultural Reconstruction of Nonmarital Sexuality

7. Through our Souls: The Benevolent Reform of Sexual Transgressors

8. Through Our Children: Bastardy Comes under Attack

- "This final section of the book demonstrates how the establishment of the middle-class gender system normalized sex and created the illusion of deviancy among the rabble to explain and thus justify the subordinate status of nonelite women, African- Americans, and the lower classes in antebellum America." (10)

Conclusion and Reflection

Appendix

- Establishing Class

- Bastardy Totals

- Mother's Requests for Out-Relief Bastardy Child Support

Manuscript Sources

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Sexual behavior:

"Sexual behavior, like any other fundamental human experience, has no fixed meaning. To write a history of sexuality one must perform an act of cultural translation by re- covering and explaining the meanings attached to familiar behaviors. This study interweaves two story lines to accomplish that: it explores sexual be- havior left in the historical record, and it analyzes the meanings, often various and in conflict, associated with those behaviors." (8)

Gender:

"the set of beliefs and ideas acrived to the social categories of man and woman." (9)

Sex:

"Erotic desire and erotic bodily practice." (9)

Sexuality:

"an invention in Western culture at some point during the transformations discussed in this book and was tied to both the emergence of normative heterosexuality and the invention of a rigidly bounded intert definition of female sexuality." (9)Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Curious how this compares to the wider world beyond Philadelphia.

Quotes:

Notes:

- The more I read on Enlightenment thought, the more it seems like it applies differently to the individual than it does to a state.

Title: Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea

Author: Edmund S. Morgan

Year of Publication: 1963

Thesis:

Argues essentially that we can find subtle roots in the way Puritans operated in New England by looking at the Separatists in England, who wanted the Anglican Church to reform itself under Queen Elizabeth. Key in their argument was to decouple default church membership with affiliation in a parish and wanted the ability to exclude folks. Not having developed or reformed Anglican churches to their satisfaction, Puritans attempted to insert themselves into the British court. Pushes back on the notion that Plymouth was the genesis of New England Puritans, placing it instead in Mass., where they developed the idea of admitting people to the church based on specific criteria - essentially their voluntary professing of a love of God at the center of that. Embracing a doctrine that pointed out human frailty, their goal was to get folks as close to holiness as they could. The "visible saints" were the parishioners who attempted to get as close to the "invisible church" as possible. One of their challenges was how to get members in and how not to lose them all by attrition, but they made a law that essentially brought in the children of those who were deemed worthy in the church, even though they had fewer rights--they got baptized, followed the doctrines, and professed their fealty to God. Church membership was key for membership in society (voting, etc.). After this period of consolidation, Morgan ends with a brief chapter on how ministers began to interpret their roles outside of the church community (essentially, to help it grow).

Time:

1620-40s, ish

Geography: New England, with a focus on MA & CT.

Organization:

Preface

1. The Ideal of a Pure Church

- St. Augustine - the predestined church for all (dead, alive, unborn) (3)

- vs. visible church - those alive & professing belief but not all pure (3)

- Henry VIII dumps Aragon to consolidate power

- Also translates authorizes Bible translation to English

- Queen Elizabeth not happy with Puritan critiques (assailing clergy, lack of religiosity on the part of Q.E. (6)

- Puritans also criticize ministers who have other positions (barbers, etc.) (7)

- Idea was: corrupt leadership = corrupt members of Ch. of England (9)

- Puritans enter politics as their churches not supported by the Crown/no sufficient reformation of the Anglican Church (14)

- 1580 - see: Robert Browne - a Separatist (establish a church w/out waiting for the Crown - folks lose the battle but later called "Brownists" (18)

- Argument: Separatists driven out/excluded developed much thinking that influenced Puritans to follow (18-19)

- Separatists seek to have a "company of the faithful" and folks who joined voluntarily (31-32), so deciding who gets to join forms part of their main preoccupation.

2. The Separatist Contribution

- No such thing as a pure church, but it needs to be purer than the Anglican Church (32)

- Critiques: membership by parish, no ability to expel (33)

- Determined who was faithful & holy (see quote below)

- Being a member of the Anglican Church was grounds for exclusion

- Criteria: self-proclaiming of faith, covenant, behavior (58)

- These criteria move to the "new" world

- By 1630s membership criteria is solidified (63)

3. The New England System

- Winthrop proclaims fealty to Church of England, but establishes Separatist-looking churches anyway (even though Mass. Bay recognizes the legitimacy of the C.O.E., contrary to Puritans (64)

- Research Question: How did the process of determining worthiness for the Church develop? Argument: NOT from Plymouth, to MA, but begins with NON-separatist Puritans in MA, then Plymouth, etc. (65-66)

- Believes non-separatist Puritans developed admittance criteria. (66)

- Predestination a feature of Protestants, Calvinists, Puritans (67)

- MA churches pledge not to separate in 1636 (

- Membership in church meant civil rights (vote, holding office) - so essentially fealty to the church means a visible connection, in some sense, to the Crown? (104)

- Winthrop actually ousted before this happens (106)

- Ct - divided - Windsor doesn't require membership for freemanship, but New Haven yes (begs the question what else was going on) (108)

- Anne Hutchinson - R.I. - seems as though this group can determine without more bureaucratic measures the faith of someone.

"The main group of emigrants to Rhode Island were fol lowers of Anne Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson was an ad mirer of John Cotton, and she carried Cotton's insistence on unmerited saving grace far beyond her master, to the point where she ultimately claimed to be in direct com munication with the Almighty. Her followers allegedly maintained that God enabled them to tell with absolute certainty whether a man had saving grace or not. They therefore proposed to make their own discernment of this quality the only basis for admission to the church. " (109)

- New England Puritans communicate with English Puritans and influence them (110)

- The question was: autonomous churches or all affiliated Presbyterians? (Independents in England demur). N.E. favors autonomous, English favor all under an umbrella (111) <-- this begins to look similarly to the liberty vs. power question / Federalists vs. anti-Federalists

4. The Halfway Covenant (This chapter covers the how of the choosing, especially when you have imperfect leaders)

- "Visible Saints" refers to the members of the church. This is the new thing happening in the colonies. (113)

- Differentiates from early separatists, who looked at exclusion of those who didn't fit. So the new model is really one of selecting in people vs. selecting them out. The idea of this initially resting on parish boundaries makes this question really interesting - where are these geographical (and other boundaries) and who is included in them?

- "How to discharge this basic responsi bility of the church became an increasingly difficult prob lem for the New England Puritans as they developed their idea of restricted church membership: their churches must not only be gathered out of the world but must continually gather in the world, continually search for new saints. " (116)

- Separatists don't really have an answer for inclusion, only exclusion (118)

- Puritans think they are leaving the bad for the good & get a wake-up call. (120)

- Cites the difference as those who profess in their hearts their love of God, so sinners & "civil" people alike can be kept out of the Church. (121) <--so I said this elsewhere with some skepticism that it seems like there is another piece of the puzzle governing people's belonging to the Church.

- Can't get baptized if out of church - NE rules appear harsher than England, as you are default in church by parish membership (and is this only a geographical question? (121) 

- Evangelical role important b/c you can't profess love for God without knowing about it. Nice way to employ the church as both messenger and adjudicator of legitimacy for membership (123)

- What to do? Educate children? Baptists handle the loss of folks due to death by converting adults (leaving out children) (125)

- Church leaders then struggle with the question of hereditary faith (saving faith) - you aren't born with it, so you have to do something to demonstrate it later - & when was it appropriate to include/exclude based on their development? (125-127)

- Turns out children who grow up in church & are baptized can lead a faithful life (more or less) free of sin & learn/profess Christian doctrine don't get kicked out - HOWEVER, they didn't have voting power in the church & couldn't attend certain rites & rituals - they are 1/2-way members (131-2) <--- this is the meaning of the title of the chapter

- "The halfway covenant, while wholly insufficient as a 

recognition of the church's relationship to the world, was 

probably the most satisfactory way of reconciling the Puritans' conflicting commitments to infant baptism and to a church composed exclusively of saints. " (133)

- The half covenant is the answer to the problems specific to NE Puritanism (137)

- Decline in conversions not necessarily indicative of decline in membership precisely because of these half-conversions (137)

"The halfway covenant brought into the open the diffi 

culties that had been lurking in the Puritan conception of church membership from the beginning. From the time when the first Separatists left the Church of England until the establishment in Massachusetts of tests for saving faith, 

1 that conception had developed toward making the visible A J church a closer and closer approximation of the invisible. I With the halfway covenant the Puritans recognized that 

i they had pushed their churches to the outer limits of visi bility; and the history of the idea we have been tracing reached, if not a stop, at least a turning point. " (138)

5. Full Circle

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Anabaptists
Donatists
Presbyterians/Independents (13) - some split in 1640s
Anglican Church
Saving grace
Saving faith
Congregationalism
The Puritan Dilemma: "the problem of doing right in a world that does wrong." Involves the necessity of trying to be perfect but realizing those efforts limitations because interacting with the world involves sin - this is Winthrop (114)
Synod
Lord's Supper & Baptism (the former a stronger demonstration of membership)
Open communion (147)

Themes:

Critiques:

Anne Hutchinson gets short shrift here (and women in general not a significant part of this study given their significant roles).

Questions:

So curious how economics had a role in the dynamics of who was included. Thinking about Ruth Herndon's book - where people are warned out & kicked out for not being able to care for themselves economically... I mean, Separatists in England seem like they are answering a social question of how to exclude as they lose social (and perhaps specie) capital by having people that damage their reputation inside the church.

Quotes:

On reconciling the "invisible" with the "visible" church (thus, visible saints, the title...)

"These later Congregational ists, like the Separatists and like all other Puritans, began with the premise that human merit is negligible and that salvation depends entirely on saving faith, which cannot be attained by human effort but comes only from God's free grace. Or to put it another way: though no human deserved salvation, God in his mercy had chosen to save a few, and to them He gave saving faith. They belonged to his real, his invisible church. To make the visible church as much as possible like the invisible, the later Congregationalists argued that the visible church in admitting members should look for signs of saving faith. Granted that the signs would be fallible, for only God knew with certainty whom He had saved and whom He had not, the church should nevertheless try to form an estimate, try to assure itself of the probability of faith in every candidate it accepted. Men, being human, would make mis takes, and the visible church would therefore remain only an approximation of the invisible; but it should have in appearance the same purity that the invisible church had in reality: it should admit to membership only those who appeared to be saved, only those who could demonstrate by their lives, their beliefs, and their religious experiences that they apparently (to a charitable judgment) had received saving faith. (34-35)

On who is "faithful & holy" and who isn't:

"The Separatists, in defining church membership, gen erally used the same language as other Puritans. The church was to be "a companie and fellowship of faithful and holie people." 3 The crucial question is what they meant by "faithful and holie." They answered in part by stating what they did not mean: outside the church were to be "dogs and Enchaunters, and Whoremongers, and Murderers, and Idolatours, and whosoever loveth and maketh lyes." 4 They answered also in indictments of the English parish churches or "mixed assemblies," as they insisted on calling them. They condemned these assemblies for "their generall irreligious profannes ignorance, Atheisme and Machevelisme on the one side, and publique Idolitrie, usuall blasphemie, swearing, lying, kylling, steal ing, whoring, and all maner of impietie on the other side." (35)

"it is necessary to begin with a consideration of the attention given by English Puritans, before the settlement of New England, to the problem of attaining and recognizing saving faith. By the time Massachusetts was founded, two generations of Puritan writers had devoted themselves to describing the proc esses through which God's free grace operates in the sal vation of men. They had not addressed themselves to this question with a view to establishing tests for church mem bership. In their writings on the subject they were con cerned with the individual rather than the church. They wished to trace the natural history of conversion in order to help men discover their prospects of salvation; and the result of their studies was to establish a morphology of conversion, in which each stage could be distinguished from the next, so that a man could check his eternal con dition by a set of temporal and recognizable signs." (66)

On the limitations of causality in membership in different states:

"I do not wish to imply that the settlement of Connecticut and Rhode Island were the result simply of a disagreement about the new test for church membership. This was only one element in a complex situation. It however, an element that may help us to understand the distinguishing characteristics of the several New England colonies." (110)

On the children of the church:

“Proposition 3d. The Infant-seed of confederate visible Be lievers, are members of the same Church with their parents, and when grown up, are personally under the Watch, Dis cipline and Government of that Church. 

Proposition 4th. These Adult persons are not therefore to be admitted to full Communion, meerly because they are and continue members, without such further qualifications, as the Word of God requireth thereunto. 

Proposition 5th. Church-members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, wherein they give up themselves and their Children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their Children are to be Baptized. " (130)

Notes:

- Not sure I ever realized some of the implications of the term "ministry" until reading this. As in - to minister outside of the church (see last chapter)

- See Winthrop's "City on a Hill"

- See: Through Women's Eyes, DuBois, et.al. 5th edition, pp.61-70. Notes:

- Contradiction: women seen as equal before God to Puritans; however, it notes the difference between their religious "radicalism" and their social conservatism. Unclear what this radicalism refers to - if anything, given Morgan's book, the Puritans were fairly conservative, and like so many other reformers sought to correct a wrong they saw in the Anglican Church in England while simultaneously dealing with the on-the-ground realities in New England. Anne Hutchinson seems like the answer to that dichotomy, though. Society ordered around the family with the father at the hed & everyone having their prescribed roles, plenty of children/fertility, so it shows folks are coming to settle. Women cheating is adultery, and for men it's just fornication. Notes a rise in discipline of women in the courts during the "crisis" Hutchinson causes. Alludes to Norton's In the Devil's Snare as it mentions anxieties about frontier wars with Native Americans & the emphasis on old, poor, powerless, salty, or women with prestige & authority. Doesn't mention male witches as a key factor as Norton does. 



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

Title: Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence

Author: Bruce H. Mann

Year of Publication: 2002

Thesis:

In an environment where specie was scarce, Mann demonstrates how confidence in others' debt served a key role in the economy. As commercial ventures increased, people increasingly shifted from informal means of ensuring debts were paid to more formal means, such as bills of exchange and mortgages in order to secure those debts. One's reputation served as key in these exchanges. Bankruptcy, ultimately, was the domain of those who had accumulated large enough debts (usually large commercial interests) to allow them a way to negotiate their debt, where insolvency was the domain of people without means to repay the debt. Mann highlights the ubiquity of debt for rich and poor, but the uneven ways people were able to manage it. A major shift in thinking was one of a failing based in religious thinking to one of secular thinking, though the moral component has never faded away completely (see quote, p.5 and also 254). Sentiments against it were based in similar anti-Federalist thinking, which explains its short-lived nature heading into the 1800s.

Time: 1750-1800

Geography: American Colonies

Organization:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Debtors and Creditors

2. The Law of Failure

3. Imprisoned Debtors in the Early Republic

4. The Imagery of Insolvency

5. A Shadow Republic

6. The Politics of Insolvency

7. The Faces of Bankruptcy

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

"keeping close." (27) this is an interesting dynamic where people were not jailed, but if they left their homes their creditors could take action against them. Creditors were not allowed to bang through the door, but they could find other ways, so it severely limited the means by which an indebted person could pay back the debt (some forced to do business out of their window, etc.)

honor - seen as less an obligation of the debtor but of the creditor. see pp.260-261

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

"When Congress, in response, considered bankruptcy legislation that would relieve only large commercial debtors, the resulting debate went to the heart of what the character of the new nation should be." (4)

"As we shall see, the redefinition of insolvency from sin to risk, from moral failure to economic failure, was not complete by the end of the eighteenth century. Nor is it yet. Although weakened, Moody’s moral economy of debt still shaped attitudes toward insolvency in the Revolutionary era, whether as an ideal to be guided by or as a hindrance to be rejected. Its continued influence assured that insolvency could never be simply an economic issue but rather one with religious, moral, social, political, legal, and ideological dimensions as well. In the chapters that follow we will observe debtors, creditors, lawyers, judges, legislators, ministers, writers, and others struggling with how the law should address the inability of men and women to repay their debts, whether through insolvency, bankruptcy, or imprisonment. At bottom, they were struggling with the place of failure in the new republic." (5)

"The traditional restriction of bankruptcy to elite mer- chants hinted at aristocratic privilege and so made bankruptcy untenable in the new democratic politics that erupted from the election of 1800." (258)

"These promises illustrate how completely the moral economy of debt had lost its religious underpinnings by the end of the eighteenth century, at least for commercial debtors. The redefinition of insolvency from moral failure to economic risk did not eliminate debtors’ legal obligations to repay their debts. Rather, it secularized the foundations of the moral obligation to repay, which now rested on “honor” and “character,” and changed the general understanding of how the law should treat failure." (260)

"Then, when the foundational belief of free Americans was in independence, whatever weakened independence reflected upon the re- public itself. Hence the unease over failure and the difficulty of creating a legal framework for something so redolent of dependence. The solution eludes us still." (263)

Notes:

Du Bois, W.E.B. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History. New York: International Publishers, 2015 [1965, 1946].

Title: The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History. New York: International Publishers, 2015 [1946].

Author: W.E.B. Du Bois

Year of Publication: 2015 [1965]

Thesis:

Time:

Geography:

Organization:

Forward:

- Du Bois takes a similar approach as he does in the introduction to Black Reconstruction, pointing out the importance of Africans as human beings. With a Marxist lens, he points makes the point that it is impossible to understand the fall of Europe as a dominant power without understanding the role of Africa and Africans. It has a contributionist feel to it.

Quotes:

- “here is a history of the world written from the African point of view; or better, a history of the Negro as part of the world which now lies about us in ruins.” (viii)

- “…that black Africans are men in the same sense as white European and yellow Asiatics, and that history can easily prove this—then I shall rest satisfied even under the stigma of an incomplete and, to many, inconclusive work.” (xii)


Chapter I - The Collapse of Europe: This is a consideration of the nature of the calamity which as overtaken human civilization


In this chapter, Du Bois reiterates the importance of Africa. Offers a list of actions Germany took leading up to war. Mentions spheres of influence in Africa (6). Most importantly, he points out the Pan-African Congress, where in an article his interest in participation in creation of an “Africa” based on common experiences and common needs (he outlines them when he discusses the list of changes former German colonies demands) he also reveals his elitism & poorly thought out ideas of civilizing projects. Points out U.S. enters WWI primarily to protect economic interests. Notes how appeasement fails. (14) 

Quotes:

- “We realize that history is too often what we want it to be and what we are determined men shall believe rather than a grim record of what has taken place in the past.” (2)

- “The real battle then Bega; the battle of the Nazi-Fascist oligarchy against the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (14)

Chapter II - The White Masters of the World: This is an attempt to show briefly what the domination of Europe over the world has meant to mankind and especially to Africans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Stated purpose of this chapter is to outline the effects of colonial domination, and he points out that the 19th century had 150 wars, mostly by Europeans trying to maintain control over colonies. The doctrine of “superior” and “inferior” races aligned science, religion, and other forms of social thought to support it. He notes how this caused a number of paradoxes to arise: the golden rule, the White Man’s Burden, the idea of poverty as natural, democracy, peace (17) This, according to Du Bois, was the first time in which “negro” was pinned not only to negative stereotypes (and conversely “white” to positive) but also to slavery. Any progress made by Black people was explained as a matter of miscegenation, not racism. (20)

…

By way of comparison and making the point that slavery has oriented the world toward these contradictions, he shows the Fanti Federation’s points against apartheid & the Herrenvolk regime in South Africa. (39) He goes on to use an example of a suburban woman playing piano, blissfully unaware of of how she was able to enjoy that positionally, as the problem the world faces: there is nobody to blame. He argues finally that understanding slavery is key to understanding how we got to this point.

Quotes:

- “to us it is ludicrous that this same South African Herrenvolk should speak abroad of a new beginning, of shaping a new world order, whereas in actuality all they wish is the retention of the present tyranny in South Africa, and its extension to new territories….For of what value can it be that the very same people who speak so grandiosely abroad of the inviolability of human rights, trample ruthlessly underfoot those same in-alienable rights.” (40)

“When a culture consents to any economic result, no matter how monstrous its cause, rather than demand the facts concerning work, wages, and the conditions of life whose results make the life of the consumer comfortable, pleasant, and even luxurious, it is an indication of a collapsing civilization.” (41)

“I believe that the trade in human beings between Africa and America, which flourished between the Renaissance and the American Civil War, is the prime and effective cause of the contradictions in European civilization and the illogic in modern thought and the collapse of human culture. For this reason I am turning to a history of the African slave trade in support of this thesis.” (43)

Quotes:

- Carnegie: “…we are not talking about peace among unimportant people; we are talking about peace among the great states of the world.” (18)

Chapter III - The Rape of Africa: Nothing which has happened to man in modern times has been more significant than the buying and selling of human beings out of Africa into America from 1441 to 1870. Of its world-wide meaning and effect, this chapter seeks to tell.

In this chapter, Du Bois points out shifting culture & thought in Europe happening simultaneously with mass trade and slavery. He points out Portuguese in Africa created mixing of peoples within Portugal and even with the Portuguese, and then Italian royalty. As slavery knew no particular color line in Europe, in the West this phenomenon was developing differently. Religion used for a convenient excuse to subjugate people as improving the lives of “heathens,” but not in the sense it improved their lives at all. (53)

…

The latter half exposes the hypocrisy of the British as they sought to slow the ivory trade yet built up a market system based on colonial exploitation in goods (good quote, p. 74). He calls it “colonial imperialism,” and points out how keeping existing leadership in place and coercive extraction proved most effective. The legacy of slavery, then, creates a legacy of despotic leadership within states trading/as subjects of British Empire.

Quotes:

- “The idea of the ‘barbarous Negro’ is a European invention which has consequently prevailed in Europe until the beginning of this century.” (79)

“All that was human in Africa was deemed European or Asiatic. Africa was no integral part of the world because the world which raped it had to pretend that it had not harmed a man but a thing.” (80)

“Rape” as a metaphor for this deserves some attention by readers of this.

Chapter IV - The Peopling of Africa: This is the story based on science and scientific deductions from the facts as we know them concerning the physical development of African peoples.

Chapter IV - The Peopling of Africa: This is the story based on science and scientific deductions based on the facts as we know them concerning the physical development of African peoples.

In this chapter, Du Bois discusses the history of the continent and peoples, noting the diversity both in climate and geography as well as in people. He moves against collapsing the continent into a singular entity with a singular people.

Quotes: “Africa is a beautiful land; not merely comely and pleasant, but haunted with swamp and jungle; sternly beautiful in its loveliness of terror, its depth of gloom, and fullness of color; its heaven-tearing peaks, its silver of endless sand, the might, width, and breadth of its rivers, depth of its lakes and height of its hot, blue heaven. There are myriads of living things, the voice of the storm, the kiss of pestilence and pain, old and ever new, new and incredibly ancient.” (85)

“These Negroid busts are most attractive and intelligent looking and have no exaggerated features.” (88)

“The name ‘Negro’ originally embraced a clear conception of ethnography—the African with dark skin, so-called ‘wooly’ hair, thick lips and nose; but it is one of the achievements of modern science to confine this type to a small district even in Africa. Gallas, Nubians, Hottentots, the Congo races, and the Bantus are not ‘genuine’ Negroes from this view, and thus we find that the continent of Africa is peopled by races other than the ‘genuine’ Negro… Nothing then remains for the Negro in the ‘pure’ sense of the word save, as Waitz says, ‘a tract of country extending over not more than ten or twelve degrees of latitude, which may be traced from the mouth of the Senegal River to Timbuktu.’” (91)

Chapter V - Egypt: This is the story of three thousand years, from 5000 B.C. to 2000 B.C., and it tells of the development of human culture in the Valley of the Nile below the First Cataract.

Du Bois brings up the question as to how Egyptians viewed themselves and were viewed by others; were they African? (Yes) vs. an intent to whiten them because of the kinds of civilizations they were able to create.

I am reminded in this chapter that Du Bois continues to describe people’s physical characteristics. At first I assumed this was part of him trying to argue within the racist pseudoscientific structure for their beauty, but in several places he argues that Black people who history has repainted white may have been Black by their appearance and descriptions (Hannibal Barca, for example). 

Quotes:

“It would be interesting to know what the Egyptians, earliest of civilized men, thought of the matter of race and color. Of race in the modern sense they seemed to have had no conception.” (105) He goes on to discuss their categories, but this fits into his argument that slavery was the cause for the modern conception of color and race.

“…but in Egyptian monuments slavery was never attributed solely to black folk.” (106)

“We conclude, therefore, that the Egyptians were Negroids, and not only that, but by tradition they believed themselves descended not from the whites or the yellows, but from the black peoples of the south. Thence they traced their origin, and toward the south in earlier days they durned the faces of their buried corpses.” (106)

Chapter VI - The Land of the Burnt Faces: This is the story of fifteen hundred years in the valley of the Nile from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 500.

Du Bois opens the chapter pointing out that similar efforts on Ethiopia took place as on Egypt to whiten their history.

He goes on to describe trade, politics, and famous folks who had physiological traits attributed to Africans. By the end of this chapter, it is clear to me that “influence” in his sense of the word referred also or even predominately to offspring created by the union of Africans and other peoples around the world.

Quotes:

“The theory of absolutely definite racial groups was therefore abandoned, and “pure” racial types came to be regarded as merely theoretical abstractions which never or very rarely existed.” (116)

“…in the usage of many distinguished writers there really emerged from their thinking two groups of men: Human Beings and Negroes. And the thesis of this book is that this extraordinary result came from the African slave trade to America in the eighteenth century and the capitalistic industry built on it in the nineteenth.” (116) I would argue the roots of this began much earlier.

“Egypt brought slaves from black Africa as she did from Europe and Asia. But she also brought citizens and leaders from black Africa.” (117)

“The attitude of scientists toward these questions has thus been colored almost entirely by their attitude toward modern Negro slavery.” (118)

“Again, the mixture of blood among the three races is referred to as an explanation of the advance among Negroes and the retrogression among whites. Is this scientific? A “white” or Asiatic aristocracy is repeatedly adduced as accounting for the rise of the Sudan, the government of Uganda, the industry of the Bushongo, and even the art of the Ashanti. Nothing is ever said of the influence of the Negro blood in Europe and Asia, yet distinct Negroid features can be seen today all over Europe.” (118) I see connections with this even with ideas around desegregating schools; both Du Bois and Carmichael talked about how the folly around integration was that white people somehow conferred better learning onto Black folk. Also, I believe this is the first moment I realized why he was so careful about explaining the physiological features of African Americans.

“We may give up entirely, if we wish, the whole attempt to delimit races, but we cannot, if we are sane, divide the world into whites, yellows, blacks, and then call blacks white.” (119) Perhaps it was here when I realized even further his description of physiological traits and their connection to “progress.”

“His granite head in the British Museum [Tuthmosis III] has distinct Negro features.” (128) Here is where I wrote: “Now it’s clear why he focuses on “Negro/id” featuers—it is to show how Black people have been erased from history and changed into white people.”

Chapter VII - Atlantis: This is the story of the West Coast of Africa and its relation to the development of the world from A.D. 500 to 1500.

This chapter begins with a restatement of an earlier claim, that white society is collapsing. Surely this is the same collapse that was part of the popular discussion about the World Wars. 

He goes on to discuss art, music, architecture, and technology, especially iron smelting, which was unique to the African continent. It was on page 157 I began thinking about what other goods were trafficked on these routes besides human beings. He discusses secret societies, and I also notice he seems wedded to an idea of societies on a continuum of progress (interrupted by slavery, of course, but there is still an overall sense of history as progress).

Quotes:

“Science was built on Africa and Religion on Asia.” (149)

On the written document and the confluence of all sources of history, including secondary sources but especially inclusive of oral histories, beautifully stated:

“This brings the curious assumption that lack of written record means lack of matter and deed worth recording. The deeds of men that have been clearly and accurately written down are as pinpoints to the oceans of human experience. To recall that experience we must rely on written record, varying from direct narrative to indirect allusion and confirmation; we must rely also on memory—the memory of contemporary on-lookers, of those who heard their word, of those who over a lapse of years interpreted it and handed it on; we must rely on the must but powerful testimony of habits, customs, and ideals, which echo and reflect vast stretches of past time. Finally, we agree upon as true history and actual fact any interpretation of past action which we today believe and want to believe is true. The relation of this last historical truth to real truth may vary from fact to falsehood.” (150)

“The population invented systems of writing of which at least two on the Guinea Coast and the Cameroons have come down to our day. There were probably others. Thus alphabets which were never invented in Europe came to the world through Asia and Africa.” (159)

“But the English during these days were wavering between two ideas: between the suppression of the slave trade to America and emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies, and the newer idea of reducing West Africa to colonial status.” (161) He mentions again the concept of colonial imperialism, on which they eventually settled upon.

“Of all this West African cultural development our knowledge is fragmentary and incomplete, jumbled up with the African slave trade. There has been no systematic, general study of the history of humanity on this coast. Nearly all has disappeared in the frantic effort to paint Negroes as apes fit only for slavery and then to forget the whole discreditable episode, wipe it out of history, and emphasize the glory and philanthropy of Europe. The invaluable art treasure which Britain stole from Benin has never been properly classified or exhibited, but lies in the British Museum.” (163)

“‘Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, West Africa had a more solid politico-social organization, attained a greater degree of internal cohesion and was more conscious of the social function of science than Europe.’ What stopped and degraded this development? The slave trade; that modern change from regarding wealth as being for the benefit of human beings, to that of regarding human beings as wealth. This utter reversal of attitude which marked the day of a new barer in human flesh did not die with the slave, but persists and dominates the thought of Europe today and during the fatal era when Europe by force ruled mankind.” (163) In a sense, I can hear the Ira Berlin echoing the concept of a society with slaves vs. a slave society.

Chapter VIII - Central Africa and the March of the Bantu: The story of Central Africa, the Congo valley, the region of the Great Lakes and the South-central lands, together with their invaders.

Du Bois begins this chapter by discussing how history has often been told by the winners, and particularly for Central Africa, on which he looks at Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other countries with Bantu-speaking peoples. He emphasizes, like in other sections, their development of economics through agriculture and trade, gold mining, and a one-thousand-year migration. He also mentions the positive comments by travelers of their culture and societies (this rhetoric, it seems, is prevalent everywhere it seems prior to the onslaught). 

Quotes:

“Unfortunately, any reconstruction of this ancient African culture and history must be pursued today mainly in the Negro-hating atmosphere and amid the color-caste system of South Africa. Despite some eminent and fair scholars, the main situation is like setting Nazis to study Jews.” (172)

“The Africans, even in modern times, were so resentful of European exploitation that they prevented the whites as far as possible from learning the whereabouts of the mines. In the nineteenth century English explorers found natives gold mining at depth, with buckets, ropes, axes, and charcoal.” (173)

Chapter IX - Asia in Africa: The story of the outpouring of Asia into Africa from A.D. 500 to 1500, and the effect to which the interaction of these two continents had on the world.

This chapter might be also titled “Africa in Asia,” as Du Bois points out the long-reaching influence of Africans in Asia, either as traders or enslaved people. He builds a case, for example, that the Buddha had African blood. Subsequent pages discuss successive Muslim rulers, and the chapter ends with how Black folks of different religions (Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim) were pitted against one another as part of a larger global struggle over religion. He pauses to mention the Mamelukes, who were white enslaved people, to emphasize the difference between chattel and African slavery. One of the most poignant points is using Napoleon’s observations of Africans, and how in his estimation, the union of insiders and outsiders through “polygamy” was a way to increase equality. Modern objections to miscegenation then make a lot of sense in light of this. Finally, I wonder how or if he conceives of a “pure Negro” race. (See p.184)

Quotes:

“The contrast between this white slavery and black American slavery was striking. It involved no inborn racial differences, and because of this Nordic historians have neglected white slavery and tied the idea of slavery to Negroes. The difference between the two groups of slaves was clear: the white slaves, under leadership like that of the colored Mustansir and Saladin the Kurd, opened the way to civilization among both white and black. Had it not been for the attack on this culture by the heathen East and Christian West, the flowering of civilization in Africa might have reached great heights and even led the world.” (193)

Napoleon Bonaparte - “These countries were inhabited by men of different colors. Polygamy is the simple way of preventing them from persecuting one another. The legislators have though that in order that the whites not be enemies of the blacks, the blacks of the whites, the copper-colored of the one and the other, it was necessary to make them all members of the same family and struggle thus against a penchant of man to hate all that is not like him.” (194)

“So, for a thousand years Asia and Africa strove together, renewing their spirits and mutually fertilizing their cultures from time to time, in West Asia, North Africa, the Nile valley, and the East Coast. But at last Europe encompassed them both. In Africa she came to the south as settlers, to the west as slave traders, and to the east as colonial imperialists. Africa slept in a bloody nightmare.” (200)


Chapter X - The Black Sudan: How civilization flamed in the Sudan in a culture which was African and not Arabian and which helped light a renaissance of culture in Europe.

Du Bois begins by pointing out that rather than all “high culture” in Africa coming from Islam, it was precisely the reverse—that Islam and Muslim garb came from the existing cultures in Sudan. As I read this chapter, I get the sense that Du Bois is arguing that as everyone has African blood and culture, it makes no sense we should fight with one another. It makes sense to look at “integration” with more depth than a simple question of white and non-white people sitting together at a desk.

In the latter part of the chapter, Du Bois discusses the ways in which capitalistic endeavors, along with religious battles sealed the fate of the continent. He briefly pontificates on an alternate route if “the Christian Church had retained its hold upon Asia and Africa instead of expelling these countries and turning to the Nordic barbarians.” But he quickly about faces, noting that “[w]hen Christianity met black folk in the African slave and red men in America, it regarded them as lost heathens to be exterminated or enslaved. Thus the Church upheld the slave trade and its consequences.” (220) Note to return to pp.221-223 to figure out what he is saying.

Quotes:

“Nothing that ever touched Africa could evade fertilization of Negroid culture and Negroid blood. Black universities sent black scholars to learn and lecture to the Mediterranean world… From this Africa a new cultural impulse entered Europe and became the Renaissance.” (223)

Later: Capture quotes on pp.223-224 - all on erasure of Black history, racialization of slavery, and the relevance of color in the 12th century only insofar as it pertained to culture.

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

Come back to this.


Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Title: The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

Author: Gordon Wood

Year of Publication: 1969

Thesis:

Radical shift in thinking between the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the U.S. Constitution from classical to modern republicanism (viii). (return later to fill this out)

Time: 1776-1787

Geography:

Organization:

Preface

- Thought creates reality, essentially (from Barlow, vii)

Chapter 1 - The Whig Science of Politics

- British Americans claimed they were arguing to keep rights they already had, though they were not rooted in British constitution & chose their foundational writing selectively (13-14)

- House of Commons strengthening/therefore ideas about "people's" power strengthening (26)

- Am. Whigs believe Crown is corrupting the legislative process in England - therefore anxieties about U.S. (33)

- Therefore, this is about preserving existing principles

Chapter II - Republicanism

Chapter III - Moral Reformation

PART TWO - THE CONSTITUTION OF THE STATES

Chapter IV - The Restructuring of Power

Chapter V - The Nature of Representation

Chapter VI - Mixed Government and Bicameralism

PART THREE - TEH PEOPLE AGAINST THE LEGISLATURE

Chapter VII - Law and Contracts

Chapter VIII - Conventions of the People

Chapter IX - The Sovereignty of the People

Chapter X - Vices of the System

Chapter XI - Republican Remedies

PART FIVE - THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION

Chapter XII - The Worthy Against the licentious

Chapter XIII - The Federalist Persuasion

PART SIX - THE REVOLUTIONARY ACHIEVEMENT

- Chapter XIV - The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams

Chapter XV - The American Science of Politics

A Note on Sources

Select List of Full Titles

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Pamphlets printed during the Revolutionary era, sermons, letters, legislative debate records, newspapers, state papers, magazines (619-622)

Historiography:

Keywords:

Liberty

"Public liberty was thus the combining of each man’s individual liberty into a collective governmental authority, the institutionali zation of the people’s personal liberty, making public or political liberty equivalent to democracy or government by the people themselves."

Themes:

Critiques:

"Slavery," in the sense that it is a part of the metaphorical discussion by folks who felt oppressed by the British enters here, but chattel slavery is all but ignored.

Questions:

Quotes:

"The Americans of the Revolutionary generation had con­ structed not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception or politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern." (viii)

Liberty, defined as the power held by the people, was thus the victim and very antithesis of despotism. Yet the people, like the rulers, could abuse their power; such a perversion of liberty was called licentiousness or anarchy. It was not so much a collective as an individual perversion, each man doing what was right in his own eyes, running amuck and ultimately dissolving all social bonds. “Liberty,” good Whigs continually emphasized, “does not consist in living without all restraint.” For it seemed certain “ that nothing next to slavery is more to be dreaded, than the anarchy and confusion that will ensue, if proper regard is not paid to the good and wholesome laws of government." (23)

Notes:

12/3/20 - need to return to this book & look at https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/tneq_a_00821

Breen, T H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Title: The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence

Author: T.H. Breen

Year of Publication: 2004

Thesis:

A bottom-up look at how the political will was created for the American Revolution, which involved the creation of a common language and actions among ordinary people surrounding consumer goods imported from England, and how without the participation of these consumers (he argues that middling and some other downtrodden folks were able to engage) by denying themselves these goods in protest, the Revolution never could have occurred. Breen argues it's important to pay attention to this at least as much as we do ideological origins. (xiii) 

"The Marketplace of Revolution argues, therefore, that the colonists’ shared experience as consumers provided them with the cultural resources needed to develop a bold new form of political protest. In this unprecedented context, private decisions were interpreted as political acts; consumer choices communicated personal loyalties. Goods became the foundation of trust, for one’s willingness to sacrifice the pleasures of the market provided a re- markably visible and effective test of allegiance." (xv-xvi)

Choice also key in developing consumers' image of themselves as well as status (xvii)

Time: 1764-1775

Geography: England/American Colonies

Organization:

Acknowledgments

1 - Tale of the Hospitable Consumer: A Revolutionary Argument

- "shared consumer experience facilitated new forms of collective political action" (xvii)

Part One: An Empire of Goods

2 - Inventories of Desire: The Evidence

- The way goods traveled from England to the colonies

"What should become clear from this discussion is that a spec- tacularly new material culture provided a social and economic framework— a realm of intensely personal experience—in which people could work out for themselves the implications of core liberal values which we now associ- ate with modernity." (xvii) 

3 - Consumers' New World: The Unintended Consequences of Commercial Success

4 - Vade Mecum: The Great Chain of Colonial Acquisition

5 - The Corrosive Logic of Choice: Living with Goods

Part Two: "A Commercial Plan for Political Salvation"

- "traces how this private world of personal choice became the foundation for new political solidarities during the decade following the Stamp Act crisis." (xviii)

6 - Strength out of Dependence: Strategies of Consumer Resistance in an Empire of Goods

7 - Making Lists--Taking Names: The Politicization of Everyday Life

8 - Bonfires of Tea: The Final Act

Type:

Material Culture

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

"The Marketplace of Revolution explains popular mobilization from an entirely different point of view. In fact, it breaks with most previous accounts of this period, putting forward a new interpretation of what precisely was radical about the politics of the American Revolution. Instead of assuming the existence of political collectivities, it asks how such a dispersed popula- tion generated a sense of trust sufficient to sustain colonial rebellion. It ex- plores how a very large number of ordinary Americans came to the striking conclusion that it was preferable to risk their lives and property against a powerful British armed force than to endure further political oppression." (xiii)

Keywords:

- boycott (not a term used then, but has the same implications)

- Empire of Goods

- "Corrosive logic of choice"

Themes:

Bourgeois virtue

Critiques:

Enslaved people also "consumed," no? They themselves and the products they produce form a part of the supply chain, yet, they do not figure into this analysis.

Questions:

Quotes:

"It survived the violence of war and the abuses of time, reminding those who reflect on such matters today that common goods once spoke to power." (xii - about a teapot)

"The Marketplace of Revolution thus provides a richer intellectual under- standing of the capability of ordinary men and women to reform the character of larger political structures, even ones of global dimensions. Against staggering opposition, it is still possible to come together to create powerful collectivities which might ameliorate the conditions of our shared civic lives. At the commencement of the new millennium, therefore, we return to the years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence not to reaffirm myths about national origins but rather to discover something about our own ability to transform political society through collective imagination." (xiv)

Notes:

This is like the "bottom up" version of Bailyn's Ideological Origins. Also like the market version of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.


Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.

Title: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Author: Bernard Bailyn

Year of Publication: 1967

Thesis:

The American Revolution is something that happened in the minds of thinkers long before the Revolutionary War (see Jefferson quote in 1815 in Chapter I) and especially rooted in British thought, much of what was consumed with concern over the limits of power and conflict with liberty. Questions of representation and limitations of government into distinct spheres to check absolute power were key.

Time: 1600s-Am.Rev. (1776)

Geography: American Colonies

Organization:

Foreword

- That political theorists using terms such as "slavery" "corruption" and "conspiracy" felt these deeply and weren't simply propaganda (to them).

Chapter I - The Literature of Revolution

- Pamphlets are small but long enough to contain full arguments / cheap to produce. Types: public events, polemical series, "ritualistic character of its themes and language." (this style comes from English pamphleteering (includes satire, sarcasm, direct attacks (5,9)

- Denigrates the literary quality of the American pamphlets vs. the British (12-13)

Chapter II - Sources and Traditions

Chapter III - Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics

IV - The Logic of Rebellion

V - Transformation

- Section in Slavery on "the vengeance of God" added to anti-slavery tracts. (245)

VI - The Contagion of Liberty

Postcript - Fulfillment: A Commentary on the Constitution

Type: Intellectual

Methods:

Sources:

Newspapers, personal correspondence, state papers, speeches (vii) historical essays, political theory & arguments, sermons, poems (ix)

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

power vs. liberty

conspiracy

virtual representation

Critiques:

"It was not grasped by all at once, nor did it become effective evenly through the colonies. But gradually the contradiction be- tween the proclaimed principles of freedom and the facts of life in America became generally recognized. How embarrassing this obvious discrepancy could be to enthusiastic libertarians was re- vealed early in the period." (235) - Seems to me that Black folks had unveiled this critique long before the intellectuals Bailyn is talking about did.

Doesn't use a single slave narrative or any Black thinkers in the slavery section. This definitely centers the antecedents of the Revolution all within European thought.

Questions:

Quotes:

"The transmission from England to America of the literature of political opposition that furnished the substance of the ideology of the Revolution had been so swift in the early years of the eighteenth century as to seem almost instantaneous; and, for reasons that reach into the heart of early American politics, these ideas acquired in the colonies an importance, a relevance in politics, they did not then have - and never would have - in England itself. " (xv)

"The pamphlet of this middle length was perfectly suited to the needs of the Revolutionary writers. It was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument- to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions; it could accommodate the elaborate involutions of eighteenth-century literary forms; it gave range for the publication of fully wrought, leisurely-paced sermons; it could conveniently carry state papers, collections of newspaper columns, and strings of correspondence." (3)

"For while the colonial writers were obviously acquainted with and capable of imitating the forms of sophisticated polemics, they had not truly mastered them; they were rarely capable of keeping their literary contrivances in control." (15)

"For the primary goal of the American Revolution, which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the over- throw or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent cor- ruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty. " (19)

"The original issue of the Anglo-American conflict was, of course, the question of the extent of Parliament's jurisdiction in the colonies. But that could not be discussed in isolation. The debate involved eventually a wide range of social and political problems, and it ended by 1776 in what may be called the conceptualization of American life. By then Americans had come to think of themselves as in a special category, uniquely placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man's existence. The changes that had overtaken their provincial societies, they saw, had been good: elements not of deviance and retrogression but of betterment and progress; not a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before. Their rustic blemishes had become the marks of a chosen people. "The liberties of mankind and the glory of human nature is in their keeping," John Adams wrote in the year of the Stamp Act. "America was designed by Providence for the theatre on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace." (20)

Notes:

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Title: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

Author: Richard White

Year of Publication: 1991

Thesis:

"mediation itself can be an instrument of power." (but not simply imposition) (xvi)

"A fundamental thrust of The Middle Ground is to assert that Indian peoples in the pays d’en haul were modern, a people of history whom events had forced to charter a new' and dangerous route into the future." (xviii)

"The middle ground did not involve the achievement of a widespread mutual understanding and appreciation between Europeans and Indian peoples. People did not come together to love one another. Xor does the concept of a middle ground envision the elimination of either native cultures or of European cultures and their replacement by some common hybrid. I pre sume the persistence ofmany aspects ofthe old alongside the creation ofthe new." (xxi)

"I don't claim the two groups did this by understanding and appreciating the other's cultural perspective, but rather I claim they did it by capitalizing on creative misunderstandings." (xi)

Time: 1650-1815

Geography: pays d'en haut/upper French Canada

Organization:

List of abbreviations

Preface to the twentieth anniversary edition

- Never wanted to be the arbiter of others' application of the Middle Ground

- It's a "process of mutual and creative misunderstanding" (xii)

- It is grounded in historical space (in this case, the pas d'en haut)

- Requirements: "a confronttion between imperial or state regimes and non-state forms of social organization, a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability of one side to commandeer enough force toc ompel the other to do what it desired. Force and violence are hardly foreign to the process of creating and maintaining a middle ground, but the critical element is mediation." (xii)

- emphasizes its particularity

- Argues that Levi-Strauss in talking about hot and cold societies is similar to a continuum of modernity. (xviii)

Introduction

-"The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. It is a place where many of the North American subjects and allies of empires lived. Il is the area between the historical fore ground ol European invasion and occupation and the background of Indian defeat and retreat." (xxvi)

- Algonquian speakers dominant in region, even though not all were part of that language group and it extended beyond that region (shows the limits of Western attempts to define Native American spaces)

1 - Refugees: a world made of fragments

2 - The middle ground

3 - The fur trade

4 - The alliance

5 - Republicans and rebels

6 - The clash of empires

7 - Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground

8 - The British alliance

9 - The contest of villagers

10 - Confederacies

11 - The politics of benevolence

Epilogue: Assimilation and otherness

Index

Type:

Methods:

"New Indian" history (centers Indian peoples)

Sources:

Historiography:

Greg Dening Islands and Beaches

Keywords:

Middle Ground:

Is the creation, in part through creative misunderstanding, of a set of practices, rituals, offices, and believes that although comprised of elements of the group in contact is as a whole separate from the practices and beliefs of those groups." (xiii)

Bricolage (Levi-Strauss)

- "using materials at hand to overcome a new obstacle." (xiii)

accommodation

- upstreaming - mapping more current interpretations onto previous histories

creative misunderstandings

Themes:

gift exchange

patriarchy

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Title: In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Author: Mary Beth Norton

Year of Publication: 2002

Thesis:

Salem Witch Trials must be understood in the context of war in New England (King William's, King Phillip's) (see intro). Must also consider theocratic worldview of Puritans (pre-Enlightenment). Argues for a larger picture outside of courtroom into the neighboring areas, as well as looking at men who were accused (and previously ignored). Notes a shift in accusers in prev. cases from adult men to women 25 and younger. Charges changed, too, from "maleficium" to torture & temptation. To the settlers, warring Native Americans and witches proved to be enemies brought by Satan.

Time: Early 1690s

Geography: Essex County, MA

Organization:

  • Title Page

  • Dedication

  • Praise

  • Introduction

  • Chapter One - Under an Evil Hand

  • Chapter Two - Gospel Women

  • Chapter Three - Pannick at the Eastward

  • Chapter Four - The Dreadfull Apparition of a Minister

  • Chapter Five - Many Offenders in Custody

  • Chapter Six - Endeavors of the Judges

  • Chapter Seven - Burroughs Their Ringleader

  • Chapter Eight- All Sorts of Objections

  • Appendices I-IV

  • Conclusion - New Witch-Land

  • Acknowledgments

  • Epilogue

  • Notes

  • About the Author

Type:

Methods:

Sources: Correspondence, journals, court records, gossip

Historiography: Previous studies focus too heavily on women only, on1692 itself, and in the courtroom

Keywords: Salem Witchcraft Crisis

Themes: Class (note that many women accusers are not considered high-status) (introduction)

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

"New Englanders instead suffered repeated, serious losses of men and women, houses, livestock, and shipping. In the aftermath of each devastating defeat, they attributed their failures not to mistakes by their military and political leaders but rather to God’s providence. He had, they concluded, visited these afflictions upon them as chastisements for their many sins of omission and commission." (conclusion)

"Accordingly, as in no other event in American history until the rise of the women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century, women took center stage at Salem: they were the major instigators and victims of a remarkable public spectacle."

"The influential Salem Possessed (1974), by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, attributes the crisis to long-standing political, economic, and religious discord among the men of Salem Village, denying the significance of women’s prominence as both accused and accuser."

"In the Devil’s Snare, though, contends that the dramatic events of 1692 can be fully understood only by viewing them as intricately related to concurrent political and military affairs in northern New England."

"Regardless of the specific interpretations they advance, most historians have adopted the same metanarrative, in which the examinations and trials of accused women constitute the chief focus. Accounts of legal proceedings fill their books. Scholars emphasize the common characteristics of many of the accused and largely ignore the background of the key accusers. Few pay much attention to accused men (even the six who were executed), to the important role played by the many confessors who validated the accusers’ charges, or to the judges’ possible motivations." 


"In the Devil’s Snare moves out of the legal realm to examine the origins and impact of the witchcraft charges in Salem Village, Andover, Essex County, and Boston as well." 


"A large proportion of those accused at Salem were indeed the quarrelsome older women, some with dubious reputations, who fit the standard seventeenth-century stereotype of the witch. Most of them were accused of practicing maleficium—of harming their neighbors’ health, property, children, or livestock—over a period of years, just as had been the case with other suspected New England witches for the previous half- century. Many others among the Salem accused were closely related to such stereotypical women; husbands, sisters, daughters, mothers, and sons of witches also had long been vulnerable to the same charges."

"Moreover, key accusers in previous witchcraft cases had most often been adult men; at Salem, the key accusers were women and girls under the age of twenty-five."

"the conviction and execution rates are rendered even more difficult to interpret because the young women who instigated the Salem witchcraft outbreak were precisely the sort of people commonly given short shrift by the high-status men who served as magistrates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony."

"any of those involved in the crisis, it turns out, had known each other previously on the frontier. Most notably, as already mentioned briefly, a significant number of the key accusers and confessors came from Maine."

"New Englanders instead suffered repeated, serious losses of men and women, houses, livestock, and shipping. In the aftermath of each devastating defeat, they attributed their failures not to mistakes by their military and political leaders but rather to God’s providence. He had, they concluded, visited these afflictions upon them as chastisements for their many sins of omission and commission."

"This is not to say that the war “caused” the witchcraft crisis, but rather that the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did."

(Quotes from intro)

Notes: Much of this goes through a single court. (intro)

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Title: Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America

Author: Daniel Richter

Year of Publication: 2001

Thesis:

Argues that more complex stories develop when centering Native American experiences and that a method of "looking over the shoulders" of Native American people is a framework by which this can happen without pretending to know their viewpoints due to lack of historical documents. Conceding the paucity of evidence, he embraces a historical imagination and adopts a multi-layered framework of "looking east" that includes material culture, reframing well-known stories, emphasizing parallel and overlapping histories of empire, and finally sees the development of an "Indian" identity from shared struggle as evidenced in his invocation of William Apess.

Time:

16th-19th century

Geography: Eastern North America

Organization:

Prologue: Early America as Indian Country
- Discussion of Cahokia
1. Imagining a Distant New World
- Initial Encounters & imagination
2. Confronting a Material New World
- Trade & Disease
3. Living with Europeans
- Pocahontas, Kateri Tekakwitha, Metacom/King Philip
4. Native Voices in a Colonial World
- Conversion narratives
5. Native Peoples in an Imperial World
- As active/not passive agents in the Atlantic world
- Emphasizes parallel histories
6. Separate Creations
- Separation & Genocide (uses "ethnic cleansing")
Epilogue: Eulogy from Indian Country
A Technical Note
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
- Questions about how far the historical imagination can go.
- Leaves out histories of Native Americans who did not have contact.
- Gender & sexuality then, would be an excellent way to see. Archeology. The role of African Americans. One way to think about this book is as a point of departure.

Questions:
- How are oral histories important to the work of Early Americanists trying to understand Native American histories? What role do they play in largely Eurocentric narratives?
- What can we take from works that revise perspective without uncovering new documentary evidence? (thinking of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in this light)

Quotes:
- "Perhaps the strangest lesson of all was that in the new nation Whites were the ones entitled to be called "Americans." Indians bizarrely became something else." (2)

Notes:
See: [Facing East From Indian Country] | C-SPAN.org

Notes from presentation:

- BR effectively expel French after 7 Years War - playoff system no longer works
- Am Rev. - allows Americans to have "carte blanche" on expansion
- Jacksonian Era - genocide
- Starts with thinking about how to teach Early American history
- "standing on shoulders" metaphor vs. adopting actual viewpoint
Ex: De Soto / Cartier (imagines looking on as a reporter)
- See: The Unreedeemed Captive for historical imagination
Not *just* facing east, but multiple ways of facing east:
- Example: "material forces" (chapter 1), people (chapter 2), how to read texts to try & read native voices (chapter 3), Adapting to imperial system & "carving out" their own world (chapter 4), Am. Rev. - "Pontiac's Rebellion" & "Paxton Boys Affair" - where ideologies of Native American & Settlers solidify against assimilation & "frontier" takes on harder lines. Epilogue - William Apess

Treaties - "about a process of having a treaty." Ceremony, ritual, having many people present. Native Americans did treaties en masse vs. backroom deals. Treaties as a process, not a one-off event. This is also a process by which we may see how a shared identity is being created over treaty making.

British were thinking about incorporating Native Americans into the BR empire (vs. British Americans, who on the whole reject this idea)

White people becoming "the new Indians" -- I need to grab Berenstein Bears Go To Camp for an example of this.

Argues that on-Native folks need a less Eurocentric perspective.

Nominated for the Pulitzer

Bernard Bailyn. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

Title: Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

Author: Bernard Bailyn

Year of Publication: 1986

Thesis:

Following migration patterns from England, Bernard Bailyn argues that distinctive but simultaneous journeys took place between 1773-1776. A "metropolitan" migration from the South of England comprised mostly of young (less than half indentured) artisans and craftsmen vigorously recruited by middlemen sending them to the middle colonies while farming families left the North of England in response to economic instability. These farmers arrived largely on the frontier, where Bailyn expands on the dissonance between "civilization" and "savagery" and violence.

Time: 1760-1776

Geography: British Atlantic

Organization:

Part I - Background: The Magnet of the West (explains British anxieties about the exodus of people)
Part II - Dimensions (Quantitative Analysis)
Part III - Mobilizing a Labor Force (Demand for labor and recruitment of southern migrants)
Part IV - Peopling the Peripheral Lands: The Extremities (Northeast, Gulf, and Delta)
Part V - Peopling the Peripheral Lands: The Great Inland Arc (NC, Georgia, NY)

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

His work breaks up a monolithic notion of English immigrants, noting class and regional differences in both England and the colonies.

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:
- African and Native peoples get short shrift.
- American Exceptionalism

Questions:

Quotes:

*"the sudden intensification of this fundamental process [migration and settlement] after 1760 affected the entire fabric of American life."

"While Americans of the Revolutionary generation struggled for freedom and equality in public life, they remained remarkably insensitive to the human consequences of deprivation. In such a world--where the blatant humiliation of inferiors by social superiors was a matter of common experienced and where degrading physical punishment for civil and criminal offenses was routine--the utter debasement of chattel slavery needed little justification, and lesser forms of servitude were regarded as normal." <---this suggests that some evolution in societal attitudes would make slavery and other forms of abject servitude recede.

"They lived in the outback, on the far marshlands, where constraints were loosened and where one had to struggle to maintain the forms of civilized existence." <---this (and really the few sentences preceding it) further clarify Bailyn's perspective on advanced and "primitive" society

"And it was a world at constant risk, its gentility preyed upon not only by natives culturally disoriented and dispossessed of their land, but by marauding "crackers" and other "banditti"--creoles gone savage--no better, it was said, than bloodthirsty aborigines." <-- this did not age well.

* Will return to add page #’s. All from introduction.

Notes:

He won his 2nd Pulitzer prize for this book.

Published during the last few years of the Reagan Era, this work seems to typify what we now call the master narrative.

Out of interest, I checked the Slave Trade Database to see what the importation of enslaved Africans looked like during this period, and a huge influx are headed for major cities in England (London, Liverpool).

Wilderson III, Frank B. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2020

Title: Afropessimism

Author: Frank B. Wilderson III

Year of Publication:

2020

Thesis:

Black people as 'vectors of violence.'

"Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous the- oretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta- aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true. 

If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hob- bled by a meta-aporia: a contradiction that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action— Black people are the wrench in the works. 

Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers’ agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left—think Bernie Sanders—because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of social, political, or national redemption. This crisis, no, this catastrophe, this realization that I am a sentient being who can’t use words like “being” or “person” to describe myself without the scare quotes and the threat of raised eyebrows from anyone within earshot, was crippling." (14-15)

Time:
Geography:
Organization:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I

CHAPTER ONE - For Halloween I Washed My Face

- Even while experiencing a mental breakdown, he is considering how to stay alive by having to figure out how to 'make white people feel safe.' 

"Make them feel safe, I had thought to myself, even though I had never felt more at risk. I would think it again when the nurse and the doctor first came into this white sepulchre where I lay. Make them feel safe, the cardinal rule of Negro diplomacy." (6)

- Has a twitch and an ulcer

- Quits his job at a brokerage firm - later sees colleagues while waitering at exclusive club

- The concept of statelessness as he develops into an afropessimist (not analogous experiences to his friends (10)

- Anti-Blackness even present as he attempts to identify with Palestinian freedom (12)

CHAPTER TWO - Juice from a Neck Bone

- Makes reference to DuBois's double consciousness

"She was learning something valuable about White upper-crust Northerners, something that she would not have imagined possible before she moved to Kenwood: how one can fight a war by proxy through someone else’s child. She knew now how it must feel to be killed by a guided missile. What kind of woman would hurt you through your child? " (29)

- Not feeling remorse when he cracks his friend's fontanel

- Vietnam & waiting for news about his uncle

- post-King murder riots

- Slavery & blackness - p41 - important

- Parents' activism & particular involvment in fair housing

- Relates the similarities of anti-Blackness in white suburban homes & Native American communities

"I took pleasure in his pain, because his ruin made me a part of a community. By jeering this "n*" I was one with the "we." (45)

CHAPTER THREE - Hattie McDaniel is Dead

- Difficult to understand cause of anti-Black violence on the individual level

- The world functions on anti-Blackness

- "It has taken me forty years to understand how neither he nor Josephine had violated anyone’s space. The cabin where they slept belonged to him as much as their flesh belonged to him. The regime of violence that made them his property and prosthetics of his desire made it impossible to see what he did as a violation. This is to say that I was wrong to think Jose- phine did something wrong. " (72)

-"she carried with her the ensemble of dilemmas that seems to afflict mixed-race children into adulthood—a fear of slipping into the darkness of their Black side and without ever having ascended to the light of White redemption." (74)

- It's interesting that he compares Josephine to the film representation; I wonder how he sees this connected to Northup's work. Nevermind - he gets to it beautifully.

- "Josephine raised her voice so that they could all hear and said, Are you threatening me? First you assault me, now you’re threatening me." (84) Josephine is today's Karen.

- "What went down between Stella and Josephine can’t be reduced to a fight between neighbors. The antagonism between them was pre- figured before they even met. In other words, the die was cast hun- dreds of years ago on the plantation. The fact that Josephine was, on a conscious level, oblivious to this antagonism doesn’t diminish it. In fact, when driven by the force of one’s unconscious one often plays out one’s role with a deeper sense of commitment to maintaining the paradigm of despotic violence into which one has been stitched and stamped from the beginning. Stella, however, was a student of racial antagonisms. Her seeming obliviousness to the irreconcilability between her position in the world and Josephine’s was not so much the labor of unconscious disavowal as, I would say, a tactical maneu- ver of the mind—one she’d designed for years in order to postpone, if not avoid altogether, the very moment at which she and Josephine had arrived: the moment in which the antagonism insisted upon a stage on which it could be played out in the open." (86)

- "You can live a lifetime as a White woman’s mirror, Stella once told me. She was the implement of Josephine’s renewal and sense of herself. What happens when a tool talks back; when the mirror breaks itself?" (87)

- "Yet, in some strange way, every single scene in America is played out on an antebellum stage. It’s just that in the North it can take the actors some time to learn their lines and play their roles." (89)

- Excellent parallels with Northup on pp90-92 - pleasure as a basis for violence (vs. cover of jealousy or whatever)

- Getting radioactive poisoning from Josephine, who works in a lab. (98)

- "When you intuit for the first time in your life that you live in a soup of violence that is prelogical, a kind of vio- lence that is as legitimate if it’s wielded by “ordinary” citizens, such as Josephine, as it is if wielded by sanctioned enforcers of the law, and that your father’s position and prestige are no more the keys to a sanctuary than the position and prestige of someone who is Black and orphaned, you are faced with two choices: stare unflinchingly at the abyss as it stares unflinchingly at you, or take it out on the Black person near you who won’t leave you to your fantasy of being truly alive. Anything to not have to face the fact that your sense of pres- ence is no more than “borrowed institutionality.”* (100)

- "But their transformative capacity stems not from their positive attri- butes but from the fact that they are not Black, they are not slaves. 

These fully vested citizens and not-so-fully vested citizens live through intra-communal narrative arcs of transformation; but where the Black is concerned, their collective unconscious calls upon Blacks as props, which they harness as necessary implements to help bring about their psychic and social transformation, and to vouchsafe the coherence of their own Human subjectivity." (102)

CHAPTER FOUR - Punishment Park

- Analysis of this film: (172) Punishment Park - YouTube

"In other words, even though Nancy Jane Smith is a revolutionary insurgent, hell-bent on the overthrow of the U.S. government, and the tribunal members are exemplary of Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” at a deep unconscious level they are equally invested in the status and integrity of the White family." (157)

- Repeats again through the analysis of this film that Black people are considered non-human and therefore iredeemable. (158)

- Authority of the white family (159)

"...violence without sanctuary is the sine qua non of Blackness." (161)

- Black revolutionaries told they have no mandate

- The section on his conference in Denmark

- Rape as not requiring penetration (& possible by a white woman to a Black man - 169)

"Solidarity means not crowding out discussions of Black social death just because there is no coherent form of redress on the horizon. I think that’s what we’ve done today. Your participation in this workshop with the Black people in Marronage is an act of solidarity.”  (171)

- Reference to Baldwin & Mailer

- "This structural injunction was what characterized the conference—and this characterization is exemplary of what happens to Black voices when those voices make arguments that are predicated on a theory of violence that (a) does not apply to all suffering peo- ple and (b) suggests that even people who suffer from the scourge of White supremacy, capitalism, and gender oppression are, simultane- ously, agents and beneficiaries of anti-Black violence." (180)

- How people feel as opposed to listening & also addressing what the speaker didn't address vs. what they did address. (181)

- Argues this is not oppression olympics (185)

- "One never really knows which is more severe, the blithe disregard one suffers at the hands of White people or the pious remorse with which they purify themselves." (188)

II 

CHAPTER FIVE - The Trouble with Humans

- Slave breeding and voting explained

- In the ANC - he sees non-Black POC trying to de-identify as POC

- Slavery as universal and timeless in Black caucus

- White people AS the police

CHAPTER SIX - Mind the Closing Doors

CHAPTER SEVEN - MARIO'S

EPILOGUE: THE NEW CENTURY

NOTES

Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Read acknowledgments for intellectual 
Keywords:
historical redemption (12)
aporia (unresolvable contradiction) (13)
meta-aporia (14)
social death
Junior partners
Rape (169)
Solidarity (171, 187)

Themes:
Critiques:
Curious why he chose such conservative numbers for Tulsa...

"We would not have been the first Black family to be run out of town. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Wall Street was burned to the ground, thirty-five people were massacred, eight hundred were hospitalized, Black businesses were bombed from the air. And picnic-lynching is not an oxymoron, but a blending of pleasures and psychic renewal." (88)

Questions:

"If critical theory and radical politics are to rid themselves of the parasitism that they heretofore have had in common with radical and progressive movements on the Left, that is, if we are to engage, rather than disavow, the difference between Humans who suffer through an “economy of disposability” and Blacks who suffer by way of “social death,” then we must come to grips with how the redemption of the subaltern (a narrative, for example, of Palestinian plenitude, loss, and restoration) is made possible by the (re)instantiation of a regime of violence that bars Black people from the narrative of redemption. This requires (a) an understanding of the difference between loss and absence, and (b) an understanding of how the narrative of subaltern loss stands on the rubble of Black absence." (16)

"They are ideas and personas that a young middle-class Black man like me had consciously fought against to the point of being kicked out of college, while deep in my unconscious I was a loyal supplicant who cared more about not simply the master’s feelings, but the stability of the master’s world, than I did about my own suffering and the suffering of Stella. It is hard to be a slave and feel that you are worthy, truly worthy, of your suffering as a slave." (101)

Curious how Bourdieu would fit in here.

"Ian Bryce led the charge. The way his chin thrust out when he spoke, and the small, involuntary cannonballs of breath that burst between his words bore a resemblance to Reg in Seattle as he steered young Luke to the parking lot; a man I had seldom conjured in more than fifty years." (177)

Would Wilderson argue for whiteness as a type of ethnicity?

- Voting - 196

- Making white people feel safe. (211) Not sure how my question is formulating, but how do non-Black people build/break down forms of solidarity or reinforce anti-Blackness by "making sure people are comfortable?" Is it simply defending whiteness?

Quotes:

"“Last night,” he informed me, “a friend of mine from Palestine and I met these two gorgeous women. White, of course,” he added under his breath, and I didn’t bother to question the “of course,” because I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t wrong. That “White” means beauty goes without saying is the message one is fed all of one’s life. To protest to the contrary is like saying, It’s not about money, after you’ve been shortchanged." (9)

"How was it that the people who stole his land and slaughtered his relatives were somehow less of a threat in his imagina- tion than Black Jews, often implements of Israeli madness, who some- times do their dirty work?" (12)

"Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metathe- ory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of inter- pretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous the- oretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta- aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true. 

If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hob- bled by a meta-aporia: a contradiction that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action— Black people are the wrench in the works. 

Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers’ agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left—think Bernie Sanders—because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of social, political, or national redemption. This crisis, no, this catastrophe, this realization that I am a sentient being who can’t use words like “being” or “person” to describe myself without the scare quotes and the threat of raised eyebrows from anyone within earshot, was crippling." (14-15)

"for Halloween I washed my face and wore my
school clothes went door to door as a nightmare." (17) - I'm understanding now - no costume needed because this is how Black people are seen.

"White people and their junior partners need anti-Black violence to know they’re alive" * "Junior partners are people who are Human but not White hetero males. For exam- ple, people of color and White women who are targets of White supremacy and patri- archy, respectively, and, simultaneously, the agents and beneficiaries of anti-Blackness. This category also includes LGBT people who are not Black and Indigenous commu- nities. They are “partners” because, as with White hetero males, anti-Blackness is the genome of their paradigmatic positions and because they suffer at the hands of contin- gent violence rather than the gratuitous or naked violence of social death." (94)

"The Black is held captive in the joy and terror of the master as it whiplashes between Negrophilia (as, for example, in the vapid consumption of hard-core rap by White youth in the sub- urbs) and Negrophobia (as in the interrogation, void of meaningful dialogue, of Robbins by the tribunal)." (162)

On anti-Black violence:

"...anti-Black violence murders, destroys, subjectivity (eviscerates the capacity for relational- ity), whereas misogynistic and anti-Semitic violence, along with the genocide of indigenous people, exploits and alienates subjectivity with-out obliterating relational capacity...the difference between someone dying and something dying cannot be analogized." (163)

"But if Blacks were completely genocided, Humanity would find itself in the same quandary that would occur if Black people were rec- ognized and incorporated as Human beings. Humanity would cease to exist; because it would lose its conceptual coherence, having lost its baseline other. Humanity would find itself standing in the abyss of an epistemological void. The Black is needed to mark the border of Human subjectivity." (164)

"In short, the conscious mind of a radical says, “I don’t see color,” whereas the unconscious mind is “saying” (in ways that are rarely legible) “I live in fear of a Black planet.” (167)

Notes:

(170) Frank Wilderson: Afro-pessimism And Modern Slavery (podcast) | Town Hall Seattle - YouTube

- Hartman - Scenes of Subjection

- Common referent in Black experience is violence without context/can't refer to a time prior to violence.

- Afropessimissm allows us to think through our suffering

- 90s - Marxism, gender analysis

- -> these tools of analysis are inadequate for explaining the suffering of Black people

- Pessimism is geared toward these inadequate forms of analysis for any type of liberation. Critical of "emancipatory claims."

- "already guilty and you cannot be injured."

- 'when things get better OR worse, you are still a slave'

- Problem - we work from empiricism vs. "relationality"

- How did Black people go from folks who had status as citizens & then BAM in the 18th century? Afropessimism explains this.

- 

(170) Frank B. Wilderson III | Afropessimism - YouTube

[Afropessimism] | C-SPAN.org

- Black suffering 'can't be reconciled with other forms of suffering'

- Not a new intervention (it's been in the folklore, but it's been theorized now)

- Explains footnotes - this is a way of making the trade book useful as a way of finding one's way through the vocabulary

- Quotes Patterson - necessity of repeating process of transforming free person to slave.

- Continues - only want the violence to rise again in Capitalism when there is resistance. However, for enslaved people - they live with the violence constantly (there is no shift to hegemony).

- Absolutely fascinating how he can make Afropessimism account for his own life and as a useful tool of analysis in fictional and nonfictional spaces.

Young, Jason R. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Title: Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery

Author: Jason R. Young

Year of Publication: 2007

Thesis:

Africans used religion as a form of resistance, and the extent to which they adopted Christianity had to do with the extent to which they could attach it to their own purposes. Africans attacked the underpinnings of slavery & Christian theology by doing so.

Time:
Geography:
- Precolonial Kongo
- Lowcountry coastal GA & SC

Organization:

Acknowledgments
- Appreciation for enslaved people
- Appreciation for Sterling Stuckey (advisor)
- Also Margaret Washington & Michael Gomez
Introduction
- Important reflection and lessons on the pitfalls of oral history and making scholarship unreccognizable to the people being questioned.
- Cites David Scott on "verificationist" epistemologies
- Cites Herskovitz (against claim Africans had/retained no culture)
- Centers study of West Central Africa
- Eschews the idea of measuring "blackness" by rubric
- References Jason Roach - dissension also marks culture
- References Saidiya Hartman - culture as a "phantom limb"
- Defines the "African Atlantic"
- Argues that black history must be transnational & fluid
1. Kongo in the Lowcountry
2. Saline Sacraments, Water Ritual, and the Spirits of the Deep: Christian Conversion in Kongo and along the Sea Islands of the Deep South

*Fix/separate ch1&2 later
- Strong presence of Kongolese 
- Kongolese kingship considered divinely gotten
- Stratified into nobles, villagers, slaves (war captives)
- Trade w/Portuguese in enslaved people initially modest; develops into illegal capture
- Points out prior studies relied on unique demographics of the Lowcountry
- "The prior experience and exposure of some Africans to Christianity in Kongo undoubteedly colored their interactions with Protestant missionaires in the Americas." (return to mark page)
"Afonso believed that his own adherence to the Christian faith had placed him in conflict with his father and members of the Kongo elite, noting that 'because we remaiend firm in the true faith...we were hated by the king (João I) and by the nobility of the kingdom." (return to mark page #). To me this speaks to the ways religions from foreign powers can have a divisive function, especially exacerbating existing power struggles. 
- Afonso wins by divine intervention?! This sounds like similar stories in LA where the presence of a significant army is downplayed or erased. 
- Points out competition by King and local spiritual leaders over religious authority/power
- 340k baptized by late 17th century
- "When translated into kiKongo, key Christian concepts took on a complexity of meaning not always understood by Christian missionaries. Itinerant Kongolese Christians, accompanied by European missionaries, traveled the countryside, translating key terms, spreading the gospel, and administering sacraments. This raises the very real possibility that communications occurred between the translator and the congregation without the knowledge of priests." (return for page #)
- Power vacuum/wars of succession after territory disputes with Portugal, he argues, partially explains desire for Christian baptism without "state-sanctioned Christianity."
- Pushes back on Thornton's interpretation of Christianity as expressing itself in more than one way by showing influence in Kongo, but that he does not pay enough attention to Kongolese religious forms.
- Also argues against the notion that missionaries were the sole arbiters of Christian conversion.
- Kampa Vita / Dona Beatriz - has religious conversion but also challenges Christian theology (argues Jesus was born locally, Mary as slave status, etc.) & criticizes church for recognizing no Black saints (demonstrates conversion as negotiation)
- See Mafuta as well.
- Section on slave trade and conversion during the Middle Passage
- Religious instruction required, but often postponed
- Salt vs. water as blessing
- Shows how SC/GA Anglican leaders saw Kongolese Christians as entirely something else.
- Conversions according to Church there were relatively small
- Builds on arguments that enslaved people in Stono Rebellion were from W. Central Africa.
- Protestants object to Catholic Church missionaries.
- Baptists highly popular among enslaved populations due to ability to congregate & use ring shout, etc.
- References Margaret Washington - emphasis on similarities in existing rituals/structures (poro/sande, for example)
- Symbolic whiteness in after death as a feature of conversion
- Factors in attraction to Protestantism: familiarity with Christian conversion among Catholics, concept of baptism (even if with water vs. salt), experiences of distress & commune w/God, Stuckey notes cross also similar to Kongolese cosmology (cycle of birth/death), Michael Gomez - baptism also allows for multiple rituals to happen @ same time --> Young gets his interpretation of the cross from Gomez - that there are more things happening at the same time w/same symbol. Had different meanings depending on where (in Kongo or Lowcountry).
- Archeology to show pottery w/crosses supporting this contention
- Enslaved people developed "praise houses"
- Notes power of religion to empower resistance.
3. Minkisi, Conjure Bags, and the African Atlantic Religious Complex
- Fetish as pejorative term but challenge to modernity
- Garcia II (Kongo king) orders minkisi eliminated as challenge to throne after Father de Geel's murder in 1661
-  Important to note that nkisi can also be considered agents in their own right.
- Nailing into nkisi to discover "wrongdoers" (return to ch3 for page #)
- Slavecatchers armed with powerful nkisi.
- puncturing/cutting conjure bags also key in Lowcountry.
- Belief & use of conjure is evidence enough that W. Central Africans challenged Christian cosmologies.
4. Burial Markers and Other Remembrances of the Dead
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Type: Cultural

Methods:

Comparative method charting how Kongo dealt with slavery at the same time it charts GA & SC. This counters the tendency for Kongo to appear monolith  or interpreted as fixed/ahistorical. (intro - find page later)

Sources: Slave narratives, Protestant missionary reports, Kongolese letters, anthropological studies, folklore, WPA narratives, criminal court records.

Historiography: Herskovitz, Thornton, Sweet, Margaret Washington, Thornton, Lovejoy.

Keywords:
African Atlantic
Minkisi - (also +"complex") healing/protection/funerial/attack
Nkisi - "is a ritual object invested with otherworldly power, allowing it to affect spriritual and material functions in the world." (return for page # in ch3)
nganga - spiritual leader/abilities to communicate with ancestors/understand dreams, etc.
Fetish (from feitiço-fetisso-fetish) - derogatory - see ch3
African Atlantic
African Atlantic religious complex

Themes:

tradition-inheritance-memory:
"So I return to the notion of "tradition," mentioned above, as an ongoing praxis based not only on an inheritance--that which one receives from ancestors--but also on memory--the manner in which we call upon our ancestors and put them to use in our constructions of ourselves." (intro - find page later)
Death (both real and symbolic)

Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:

On the positionality of the researcher:
"In the meantime, the observer maintains distance, revealing nothing of the smoke and mirrors that constitute this particular portrait. The observer transcends gender and the camera's lens, funded by the foundation." (intro - find page later)

"This project reflects my own motivations, interests, gifts and deficits, and in the midst of a narrative about brutality and resistance, racism and religion, I am left, somewhere, swirling all about it." (intro - find page later)

On transcending the verificationist epistemology (quoted in Scott):
"And suppose then that would settle the matter of our identity once and for all, to disperse with the preoccupation as a whole of finding in ourselves the authoritatie proof of an alternate authentic origin?" (intro - find page later)

On the book's purpose:
Rituals of Resistance is not aiming to authenticate black identity in the Americas but to historicize and contextualize the religions, cultural patterns, gestures, and lexical traditions that comprise the African Atlantic." (intro - find page later)

On Ways whites recognized Black citizenship:

"Indeed, some maintain that southern society recognized the slave as human "only to the degree that he is criminally culpable." (find page later)

On the Limits of Demography:

"But demography does not, in itself, resolve critical questions related to cultural formation. As units of historical analysis, demography and culture are not coterminous. One may not reduce cultural formation to a mere matter of percentages, deducing, for example, that because West-Central Africans constituted nearly one-third of the cultural elements and practices exhibited in Lowcountry black culture." (find page later)

On religious justifications for suffering:

"When Laurent de Lucques, a missionary in Kongo, came face to face with the violence of slavery in the Middle Passage, he justified the pain and suffering that he witnessed by suggesting that the victims would enjoy otherworldy redemption. In 1708, after having completed his missionary service in Kongo, de Lucques returned from Kongo to Europe via Brazil aboard a slave ship that departed from Luanda. De Lucques recalled that the ship soon assumed the appearance of a hospital. Confusion reigned on board as some slaves cried and moaned while others, at the edge of sanity, laughed. Space was so constricted in the hold of the ship that the captives could scarecely move or bring food from hand to mouth. In fact, de Lucques himself fell ill with fever during the trip and believed that his life would end at sea. He wondered whether the pains suffered by the captives would be compared best to hell or purgatory and finally settled on the latter because the many sufferings aboard ship were temporary and hell is eternal. And yet, even in the midst of such horror, de Lucques comforted hismelf and justified his faith in the notion that those who 'endure these sufferings with patience, would find the means to extirpate their sins and acquire great merits for their soul.'" (return to find page # - ch1)

On parallel arguments w/other scholars:

"Washington's central contention--that West African secret societies affected teh manner and course of religious conversion and cultural formation in the Lowcountry--is convincing, shedding light on both the long arm of Africa in the cultural formation and versatility of slaves, who so elegantly managed and manipulated certain cultural elements in a new ritual and social context. Her conclusions run parallel to my own formulations." (return for page # - ch1)

Primary source on nkisi:

The nkisi is the name of the thing we use to help a man when he is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to the leavews and medicines combined together...An nkisi is also something which hunts down illness and chanses it away from the body. It is a hiding place for people's souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life... Some people keep them in large bags. The medicines are the ingredients [of the minkisi]; their strength comes from each individually and from their being joined together." (return for page # - ch3)

Debating cultural continuities:

"...some of these oppositions have questioned the validity of any "category of collective identity in Africa" prior to the transatlantic slave trade. Ironically, this hesitation to ascribe to Africans any collective identity before slavery runs the risk of, on the one hand, combining all Africans (or at least those from Senegambia to West Central Africa most directly affected by the slave trade) into large, unwieldy "crows" or, on hte other hand, of reducing them into so many innumerable tribal parts. Neither of these depictions is accurate; both echo older notions of Africans as both generic and provincial, ubiquitous though invisible." (return to find page # in conclusion).

Notes:

Cites David Scott in the intro, pointing out the "verificationist" epistemology that led scholars to be tied up in a continuum of what extent African cultures could be authenticated during/after transatlantic traffic in human beings.

While reading the line quoted from Hartman (footnote 49) "More than this, the subjection of the slave to all whites defined his condition in civil society that the enslaved could potentially be "used and abused by all whites" it occurred to me that enslaved people, even though privately owned, were publicly subsidized.

A key tenet of Young's work is that cultural changes took place both in Kongo as well as GA & SC. I remember well assisting for a course on Colonial Africa by Apollos Nwauwa at BGSU. Students read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and had to figure out how Achebe was demonstrating that all cultures change. It's clearly working against a long-held assumption of white supremacy that I appreciated.

Look at the end of chapters for a recap of the argument & its significance/diversion from other studies (chapter 2 - see specifically paragraph beginning with "This chapter represents the first..."