Category Archives: Readings in 19th Century US History

This week I think I finally figured out how to approach all the material I read this semester in order to cohere it into a meaningful historiographical critique. My previous post and a helpful conversation with Caleb led me to consider more fully the way in which contemporaneous political issues have a powerful informative effect on the way history is written. An author’s stance on political issues, broadly defined, reveals the premises and logic of their thinking. Often historians are motivated to write on a particular topic, or even make the decision to become a writer in the first place, based on their engagement with an issue that is meaningful to them. Though I have long felt this way, writing the final essay for this class will allow me to take the time to spell out my thoughts on this subject more clearly. Because if your ideas are not written down, and they only exist in your head, they basically don’t exist at all.

One of the big questions our class has been grappling with is the question of resistance and the extent human agency has the ability to affect a given situation. Since my readings have been structured around Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet (2003), which tells the story of African-American sociopolitical resistance to white supremacy from slavery to the Great Migration, the question of what constitutes resistance to oppression and how we conceptualize and write about such activity has been perhaps the foremost question of the semester. However, it has become clear to me that Hahn’s work will likely play a relatively small role in my essay, which will incorporate writings about events far removed from slavery in the southern United States. My purpose instead will be to focus on the way in which resistance to oppression has been written about and conceptualized over the course of the last seventy-five or so years, and the relationship between current events and historiography. Of course, my discussion will necessarily be incomplete and synoptic due to the sheer expansiveness of the topic and timespan, but I do hope to cover the broad outlines.

My survey will begin with two works of extraordinary influence: W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins (1938). Despite their seventy-five year provenance, these two works remain consistently cited as foundational in current scholarship. I will argue that their enduring influence is closely related to the author’s political approach to their subjects – post-civil war reconstruction in the US, and the Haitian Revolution, respectively – which emphasized the power and humanity of some of the most oppressed people in history: African slaves in the Americas. While asserting the “humanity” of particular groups of people may seem quaint to us now, in our supposedly “post-racial” era in the US, doing so in the 1930s was nearly unheard of, and both works were strongly against the grain of mainstream scholarship. In fact, it took a generation of historians asserting this to really hammer the point home. DuBois and James were motivated to write their books by the ongoing systemic oppression of black people in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. They wrote with purpose and urgency, and they shared Marxian conceptions of class struggle and revolution as the fruit of the oppressed and exploited themselves. Liberation could not be delivered by reformist elites committed to piecemeal, “responsible” political change. For them, revolutionary changes for the better were made – and, importantly, should be made again – through mass popular action. Both DuBois and James advocated for multiracial, multicultural, and multinational democracy in which working people – ordinary people – would hold political sway. Both treated race as ideological categories, categories that have the power to create, enforce, and justify material inequality and exploitative labor regimes that disproportionally subjugated black people. At the same time neither were cultural nationalists or nativists who insisted the culture of the oppressed be the only exalted culture; they were committed to have black people and black culture be recognized and honored as any other. And they both lived cosmopolitan lives as international activists on a variety of issues, namely African-American human rights, the independence of Africa and colonized people around the world, and the struggle to build an economically just society.

The powerful ideas and examples of DuBois and James left a lasting impression on generations thinking about the struggle to end oppression. Hahn cites both authors liberally throughout his 2003 work. But their idea of revolution was informed by their time, where they saw an a number of restive colonial populations were in active revolt against their European masters, an active and organized European working class struggling to achieve their aspirations, and the Great Depression of capitalism was ravaging America and the world. Mass collective action was happening around them, and they wanted to instigate further. This trend would by and large gather steam into the 1960s, when their works were lifted from obscurity and nearly became the mainstream amidst the ongoing march of anticolonial revolutions, the Black Freedom Movement in the United States, and mounting currents of opposition against the bureaucratic state socialist regimes.

As old struggles came to an end, new struggles emerged, and there became new ways of looking at the past: the variegations of identity, gender, race, class and individual subjectivity became the emergent call signs of the New Left, new social history, postcolonialism, and subaltern studies.

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While this has been a somewhat hasty sketch without textual references, from here I intend to go into the more specific readings of the works I have blogged about, to show how the works of Guha, Kelley, and Scott, for instance, reconceptualized historiographies of resistance, and how they were influenced by macropolitical changes. This week I have also been considering the ways that the work of Edward Said, in Orientalism (1979) and Culture and Imperialism (1994), also has much to say about how knowledge is shaped and informed by the wider context. Wish me luck.

A post regarding Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb 1990).

This week, I wanted to explore how theories of subaltern resistance have been explored or utilized within scholarship on the Arab World. The text I chose is by a highly respected anthropologist in the amorphous and contested field of Middle East Studies, Lila Abu-Lughod. As a testament to the immense power of this traveling, interdisciplinary theoretical debate, this article was cited in Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels as influential on his own conceptions of African-American modes of subaltern resistance.

Abu-Lughod’s perceptive article makes a number of points worth considering regarding broader debates. First, she helpfully advances a suggested explanation for the popularity of resistance scholarship in a particular world-historical moment, which she attributes to “a growing disaffection with previous ways we have understood power” (41). While this may seem rather vague, it is important to consider her 1990 essay was written during the end of “the Cold War” showdown between official Capitalism and Communism, or what some pompously labeled “the end of history.” Along with the collapse of official “Communism,” Abu-Lughod argues that by the 1980s, “a number of social-political movements, including feminism, [shook] the hegemony of Marxism as radical discourse and open[ed] up possibilities for rethinking power and resistance” (53 n2). Indeed, she cites James C. Scott, one of the most prominent practitioners of the resistance framework, as pointing directly to his “disillusionment with socialist revolutions” as the inspiration for his pioneering work on everyday resistance. I think Abu-Lughod is right in trying to understand this widespread turn in scholarship within larger historical events. A host of people around the world turned to this framework because it resonated in an important way.

Moving away from Abu-Lughod for a moment, allow me to attempt to flesh out how I think this turn in scholarship played out a bit more clearly. Since around the 1980s (until now?), leftists and socially engaged academics have been disillusioned both by the crassly unequal, imperialist, and structurally racist and sexist consumer societies constructed by western capitalism and with the dictatorial, bureaucratic, and lifeless command economies constructed by the nominally “socialist” regimes in Europe, as well as the “radical nationalist” states in the Third World. Looking around the world, on a humanistic level all systems failed to work according to their best aspirations. This state of affairs appeared to mark the failure of numerous collective movements for social justice in all corners of the globe, under nearly every system of political-economic organization. However, a turn to the sphere of “everyday resistance” demonstrated how people on the receiving end of power continued to fight with dignity against oppression on the micro-level, without necessarily being connected to wider social movements. While some scholars began pushing subaltern resistance, or “history from below” in the 1960s-70s, we have seen from some of my other posts that such works largely took inspiration from W.E.B. DuBois’ and C.L.R. James’ pioneering work of the 1930s. And to this list of antecedents we must add Antonio Gramsci, from whom the term “subaltern” is taken. In light of the current stagnation of the “resistance” debate, it is important and illuminating to note that Gramsci, James, and DuBois all explicitly worked for open collective rebellion and revolution as the means to transform society – and they did not appear to counterpose everyday resistance with revolution. How little have we advanced from their work…

But back to Abu-Lughod. For her, the most lamentable result of the everyday resistance craze is its greater “[concern] with finding resistors and explaining resistance than with examining power,” which results in studies that “do not explore as fully as they might the implications of the forms of resistance they locate” (41). Going further, Abu-Lughod calls into question some of her own work in this vein, stating “there is perhaps a tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated” (41-42). This seems to me very similar to Walter Johnson’s famous thesis “On Agency,” expressed thirteen years earlier.[1] Drawing from Foucault, Abu-Lughod suggests what can be done instead is to “use resistance as a diagnostic of power…We could continue to look for and consider nontrivial all sorts of resistance, but instead of taking these as signs of human freedom we will use them strategically to tell us more about forms of power and how people are caught up in them” (42). In other words, we need to look at resistant people(s) not as having liberated themselves from power, but as reacting to and reconfiguring, but working within power structures.

Abu-Lughod later identifies three analytic dilemmas that may stem from the use of everyday resistance paradigms. First, is the “misattribution” of “forms of consciousness or politics” onto resistant populations (47). Just because the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin women of northwestern Egypt resist patriarchal forms of domination doesn’t mean they have a “feminist consciousness” equivalent to western discourses of feminism. Secondly, Abu-Lughod seeks to acknowledge that subordinate groups “both resist and support the existing system of power,” but she rejects Marxian conceptions of “false consciousness, which dismisses their own understanding of their situation” and “impression management, which makes of them cynical manipulators” (47). Finally, she also seeks to account for forms of resistance tolerated by dominant groups (such as satirical stories or songs), without viewing society as a machine with perfectly calibrated safety valves designed to relieve pressure. All these, I think, are important dilemmas to be considered in writing about resistance and domination.

Like Johnson in “On Agency,” Abu-Lughod is not concerned “about the status of resistance itself” – whether or not a particular tactic is productive toward collective revolution, a la Genovese. Her suggestion to end the stagnation in scholarship (and remember she is arguing in 1990) is to determine “what the forms of resistance indicate about the forms of power that they are up against” (47). In other words, using her examples, how do the subversive stories by women ridiculing men and their genitalia (“pisser[s] that dangle”) diagnose particular practices of patriarchy amongst the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin? In other examples, Abu-Lughod speaks of a generational battle between the youth and their elders in practices of marriage. Instead of the rigidly hierarchical collective negotiations surrounding a marriage, the youth were increasingly taking up paradigms of individual attractiveness and expression in finding a spouse. These practices horrified the elder generation, but the youth saw this as resistance against authoritarian control over their lives. At the same time, Abu-Lughod notes that “In resisting the axes of kin and gender, the young women who want the lingerie, Egyptian songs, satin wedding dresses, and fantasies of private romance their elders resist are perhaps unwittingly enmeshing themselves in an extraordinarily complex set of new power relations” (51-52).

I found this explanation persuasive, but also inconsistent with her focus (and that of others in the resistance school) on discrediting the Marxian notion of “false consciousness.” If Bedouin youth are “unwittingly enmeshing themselves” in a new set of dominating power relations, a set that is far more powerful (and Abu-Lughod identifies this as “the global economy”), in their attempt to escape familial power, are not the youth exhibiting a “false consciousness,” according to the terms Abu-Lughod’s own analysis? While I am in agreement that there have been many clunky misuses of the “false consciousness” concept within Marxian writing, it seems to me that the concept itself is useful if used carefully. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this. To take an example closer to our course readings, did not many slaveowners think their slaves genuinely appreciated their “benevolent paternalism” and desired nothing more than to be slaves? Were not many slaveowners shocked to find their plantations deserted, or destroyed or sabotaged by their slaves during the Civil War? And if this is true, couldn’t their political and social consciousness be determined to be objectively false? Just an idea, and I would be interested to hear other’s opinions on this. But I have a feeling that too often the false consciousness paradigm is treated as a straw man.

"When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.” C.L.R. James at home, Brixton, 11 January 1988

It has become abundantly clear to me over the course of this semester that two books in particular loom large over the development of the various movements determined to write history “from below”: W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins (1938). That these two works, both written by independent black Marxists in the 1930s, share a common political perspective is not a coincidence but a fundamental premise of their pioneering efforts. Both DuBois and James shared a commitment to documenting and analyzing the efforts of oppressed people to emancipate themselves and thus change all of society in revolutionary ways. Because our colleague over at A Nation of Abolitionists is doing such a fine job of expounding on the towering influence of DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, I thought I would take some time this week to take a look at Comrade James and The Black Jacobins.

Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989) was born on the Carribean island of Trinidad, and was an instrumental figure in the Pan-Africanist and socialist movements of his era. The Black Jacobins is his best-known work, and it could be described as a transnational history of the Haitian Revolution and its intimate connection with the contemporaneous French Revolution that both inspired it and made it possible. Writing in London in 1938, James had a clear purpose in mind: to “[make] the forward step of resurrecting not the decadence but the grandeur of the West Indian people…but as is obvious all through the book and particularly in the last pages, it is Africa and African emancipation that [I have] in mind” (James 402). James did not view emancipation as something that was legislated by “the perorating Liberals in France nor the ‘philanthropy plus five per cent’ hypocrites in the British Houses of Parliament” (James 123), but rather as something that was seized by an international proletarian alliance taking direct action toward liberation.

There are several important themes of the book I would like to stress as key to the thought of C.L.R. James:

1) A social revolution is made possible chiefly through the existence of severe divisions amongst ruling elites.

“The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save the situation. It is this division which opens the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power” (James 123).

This important point stands in contradiction to a common understanding of revolution as being the product of a mass campaign against a coherent and unified oppressive order. The advantage of this approach is that it demonstrates how a conflict that appears rather ordinary, or at least “nonrevolutionary,” can lead to a substantial opportunity for sweeping social change. This line of reasoning has major bearing on the interpretation of the American Civil War as revolution that I have been exploring: how the sectional conflict was transformed into a social revolution by the actions of African-Americans determined to take their own freedom. Throughout the book James constantly points out distinctions between contending classes: poor whites and rich whites on the island of San Domingo, French settlers and Frenchmen of the Mother Country, mulattoes and settlers, French bourgeois and French royalists, etc. The existence of divisions brings me to the next point:

2) Revolutions are possible not only due to structural cleavages, but are made by active human agents.

“Men make their own history, and the black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of men and shift the economic currents of three continents. But if they could seize opportunity they could not create it” (James 25).

James stresses the necessity of a committed, visionary, and responsive leadership working in tandem with masses already engaged in what might now be called “everyday resistance.” Within leftist theory, this places James in a unique space between Leninist vanguardism and anarchistic theories stressing the spontaneity of “leaderless multitudes.” In James’ view, Toussaint L’Ouverture provided the right leadership at the right time, and “It is the tragedy of mass movements that they need and can only too rarely find adequate leadership” (James 25). But leaders without masses were at least as problematic as lack of leadership:  “The masses were chained and muzzled; and without the masses the radical democrats were merely voices” (James 75).

3) Keen attention must be paid to racialized oppression.

Unlike some vulgar Marxists who insisted that race is irrelevant at best to the class struggle, James paid careful attention to careful dialogue between race and class. Like DuBois, he stressed the importance of the “wages of whiteness” about fifty years before “whiteness studies” became a fashionable topic in the academy. In this book, whites both “big” and “small” were determined to preserve the privileges of their skin against losses real and potential. For many – but not all – French revolutionaries “liberté, égalité, fraternité” were not considered applicable to slaves and mulattoes in the colonies.

4) No struggle can be divorced from its international context.

“[The San Domingo representatives in the French people’s assembly] tied the fortunes of San Domingo to the assembly of a people in revolution and thenceforth the history of liberty in France and of slave emancipation in San Domingo is one and indivisible” (James 60-61).

While there were many white hypocrites who did not think the famous slogan of the French Revolution applied to other races, there were others – particularly blacks, mulattoes, slaves, and the radical Left in France – who took seriously the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The ongoing French Revolution aroused the latent emancipatory impulse within Toussaint’s slave masses, and the twin revolutions developed in tandem. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike formed international and transnational networks of solidarity. It is impossible to understand one revolution without the other.

This is just a small sampling of the endless stream of wisdom to be found in The Black Jacobins and the thought of C.L.R. James. I hope you check him out!

The mugshot of a young Malcolm X, arrested for his numerous 'hustling' activities, before he became an outright revolutionary

In my previous posts I explored selections from the historiography of the Subaltern Studies Group that impacted A Nation Under Our Feet. When discussing the formative influences on his conception of subaltern resistance, Steven Hahn cites only two books on explicitly American topics: Eugene Genovese’s landmark Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), and Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994). While the influence of Genovese appears to be ubiquitous in nineteenth century American historiography, this week I decided to read Race Rebels in order to see what Hahn took away from this lesser-known work.

Kelley’s book is a rich collection of essays on “writing black working-class history from way, way below” (1). Thoroughly and openly working in footsteps of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. DuBois, and James C. Scott’s concept of “infrapolitics,” much of Kelley’s book revolves around a central question: “If we are going to write a history of black working-class resistance, where do we place the vast majority of people who did not belong to either ‘working-class’ organizations or black political movements?” (4). Kelley thus seeks to account for the wide range of life experiences between outright domination and open rebellion, and in doing so he succeeds in painting a three dimensional portrait of the African-American experience of the last century or so. The book includes essays on topics from African-American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, the resistance of McDonald’s employees, early 90s gangsta rap, Malcolm X (pictured above) and the politics of the zoot suit, and struggles over the right to public space.

For the uninitiated, infrapolitics is the term coined by Scott to describe both the deliberate invisibility of “everyday resistance” and the “infrastructural” role these subversive activities play in supporting future revolutionary outbursts. The first part of Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet, which describes black political activity under slavery, is a useful example of the infrapolitical framework, and it is clear that Kelley played a key role in shaping his analysis. Chapter two of Race Rebels, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: the Politics and Pleasures of Community,” is particularly important in this regard as it explicitly puts forward the notion that the oft-neglected study of the home may hold an important key in coming to understand everyday resistance: “Once we begin to look at the family as a central (if not the central) institution where political ideologies are formed and reproduced, we may discover that households themselves hold the key to explaining particular episodes of black working-class resistance” (37). While much, perhaps most, scholarship on resistance focuses on the point of production, Kelley notes how feminist historians have emphasized the ways in which types of class consciousness are often learned at home, before an individual ever enters the workplace. Perhaps, then, the study of the family and kinship networks may be the missing link in explaining the resilience and continual reproduction of black working-class resistance. Kelley notes, for instance, that family membership in mutual aid associations and religious organizations helped to build and maintain a collectivist, working-class culture (38). In this vein, Kelley describes the role of community-financed black churches in encouraging the growth of labor unions in the South (41-43).

But the realms of the sacred were not the only grassroots arenas of community-building; the more profane centers of commercialized leisure were also instrumental in inculcating an autonomous black consciousness. These “bars, dance halls, blues clubs, barber shops, beauty salons, and street corners” (44) were key in forming a “secular congregation” (45) under the Jim Crow structures of racial and class oppression. However – our class will be happy to know – Kelley does not automatically or necessarily conflate autonomy with resistance: “I am not suggesting that parties, dances, and other leisure pursuits were merely guises for political events, or that these cultural practices were clear acts of resistance. Instead, much if not most of African American popular culture can be characterized as, to use Raymond Williams’s terminology, ‘alternative’ rather than oppositional” (47). For instance, these spaces and practices could also reinforce rank consumerism and misogyny, trends that are able to coexist with the more oppositional characteristics of autonomous black cultural spheres (later in the book, Kelley also extends this insight to his discussion on the politics of early 90s gangsta rap).

Kelley further distinguishes himself from the pack of the “it’s all resistance” school in his discussion of the issue of black collaborators with white supremacy. Historians have to pay careful attention to how struggles are continuously made and remade, and note the multitude of possible (and actual) reactions to conditions of oppression in any given situation:

“That stool pigeons [informers or collaborators] can exist in black communities, and that their reasons for turning informant might be motivated by the same circumstances that led many of Hosea Hudson’s comrades into the Communist Party (i.e., joblessness and poverty), reinforce the idea that neither mutual oppression nor common skin color alone explain black working-class solidarity….When we search for the locus of working-class opposition, we ought to look not only at antiracist activities or workplace conflicts but at the dynamic processes by which social and cultural institutions were constructed and time and space for leisure appropriated” (52).

It is easy to see the impact that Kelley’s nuanced analysis of black infrapolitics had on informing the analytical framework A Nation Under Our Feet. Hahn’s conception of the political, particularly his emphasis on kinship networks as well as spaces of communication and autonomy, were clearly shaped in the wake of Kelley’s inventive scholarship.

I thought I would try something new and create questions that cater to some of the specific interests of the class (or more accurately, what I perceive some of your interests to be, and please forgive me if I am wrong). While I address specific people with some of the questions, I intend to start a discussion that we can all join based on our previous conversations and readings, and not limit this to the individuals named. And you of course have the right to reject these invitations 🙂

1. Hahn’s study more or less obliterates the traditional temporal boundaries of periodization for American historiography, using a nuanced and sustained argument to plow through the Antebellum era, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. In your view, what were the strengths and limitations of this approach?

2. A central argument of the book is “that African-Americans in the rural South contributed to the making of a new political nation while they made themselves into a new people – a veritable nation as many of them came to understand it” (Hahn 9). Did “African-Americans in the rural South” constitute a nation? Why or why not? If so, how was this nation constructed?

3. Do you find Hahn’s take on the Civil War and Reconstruction as “a massive social and political revolution” and “the largest slave rebellion in modern history” (7) convincing? Why or why not?

Cara: Considering your course this semester on comparative revolutions with Prof. Caldwell, would you consider the Civil War and Reconstruction a “massive social and political revolution” after reading Hahn’s book? Does your class utilize any particular definition of what qualifies as a “revolution”?

Wes: How does Hahn’s approach and argument differ from W.E.B. DuBois’ much earlier Black Reconstruction, which also emphasized black self-organization and explored Reconstruction as a revolutionary endeavor?

4. Hahn uses the term “grassroots emigrationism” to describe how black emigration from the south was a conscious, collective action taken in response to increasing expressions of white supremacy and its institutionalization. Did you find Hahn’s take on this convincing, or does he overemphasize freedpeople’s “agency” at the expense of “structure,” such as political economy or the agency of the white supremacists?

Suraya: Have you encountered other works that use a similar framework for conceptualizing mass migration? If so, how have they been received?

5. In consideration of what appears to be “the question of the semester,” how does A Nation Under Our Feet stack up against Walter Johnson’s seminal call to transcend the New Social History approach of “giving the slaves back their agency”?

Important points to consider:

The original inspiration from Karl Marx in “The 18th Brumaire”: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

“…cultural autonomy has been seen as in-and-of-itself a form of resistance to slavery, without careful attention to the ways that it could undermine as well as facilitate the formation of political solidarities among slaves” (Johnson 118).

“To put this another way: the term ‘agency’ smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural (at least for white men) condition was originally defined. By applying the jargon of self-determination and choice to the historical condition of civil objectification and choicelessness, historians have, not surprisingly, ended up in a mess” (Johnson 115).

“History after ‘agency’ might be written around a ‘Copernican revolution’ of memory, an intellectual inversion of the relation of past and present, by focusing attention on the present-life of the past, on what elements of the past are drawn upon at any given moment in history and the power-structured processes though which they are selected and enforced” (Johnson 119).

“If we are to draw credibility by doing our work in the name of the enslaved and then seek to discharge our debt to their history by simply ‘giving them back their agency’ as paid in the coin of a better history, some knowing laughter, and a few ironic asides about the moral idiocy and contradictory philosophy of slaveholders, then I think that we must admit we are practicing therapy rather than politics: we are using our work to make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world better or more righteous” (Johnson 121).

"Editorial cartoon on the “massacre" at Cainhoy, South Carolina, October 1876."

Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet combines the best traditions of historical synthesis with extensive original research to trace the development of black politics in the rural South from slavery to the Great Migration in the first decades of the twentieth century. By recentering the story of emancipation onto the sustained self-activity of African-Americans – as opposed to “[measuring] politicization chiefly by what came to the freedpeople from the outside” – Hahn positions himself against the bulk of the historiography, which has been dominated by a “liberal integrationist framework” that posits assimilation as the presumed endpoint of black struggles against white supremacy (6).

Hahn’s focus on specifically rural actors also distinguishes his approach from the urban bias predominant in most other studies of black politics and working people in general. Slaves and freedpeople did not begin a political life upon their migration from the countryside to the city; rather urban political formations grew out of and built upon the extensive social networks constructed within slave communities. Far from unquestioningly adopting the hegemonic material and cultural power of their slaveowners, African-Americans built extensive networks based on kinship (17-19), religious belief (43-51), and even economic exchange (24-33).

These organized slaves later seized their masters’ secession an opportunity “to turn one rebellion into two” (64). Many (males) actively participated in the fighting, while others built “liberated zones” (80-82). The war brought together African-Americans in physical contact as never before, whether in contraband camps, Union-occupied plantations, or in armed battalions. The hothouse of war grew a new social and political consciousness of the potential for black “liberation and unification” (96).

The defeat of the Confederacy emboldened the newly freed slaves, as well as white Radical Republicans. Union-backed Reconstruction regimes operated as instruments of political revolution (259-260), while freedpeople organized into Union Leagues that attempted to protect and extend the social gains of the revolution. Dreams of significant land redistribution were crushed by the stubborn persistence of the old regime, embodied by the quintessential agents of the counterrevolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and a host of like-minded groups. As the strength of counterrevolutionary groups grew along with white nightmares of “Negro rule,” the resolve of the federal government to implement Reconstruction weakened, and politics gradually devolved into a paramilitary contest to impose the rule of either faction.

"'The Union As It Was' Harper's Weekly cartoon from October 1874 depicting White League and Klan opposition to Reconstruction"

However, the demise of Reconstruction did not end black mobilization. New biracial political alliances with insurgent white political movements brought a new era of experimentation, and Virginia’s Readjusters were notably successful in this vein (382). While Hahn details extensive attempts at forging a lasting black-white political coalition, “the wages of whiteness” proved too tempting: railing against “ignorant and degraded barbarians,” many former white allies proceeded to answer “the question of the supremacy of whites over blacks” (420) in the affirmative, often through extensive violence. While many freedpeople would stay in the South and attempt to withstand the emerging Jim Crow system, “Grassroots emigrationism,” or black collective action and desire to escape the viscerally white supremacist “‘one-party’ Democratic South” (450), appeared to be most popular alternative.

It is during these struggles for African-American self-determination that the foundations of twentieth-century Garveyism, Black Nationalism, Black Power, and the Civil Rights Movement more generally, were built. Hahn connected the dots in an original and highly influential fashion, and I am interested in hearing what you all thought about his treatment of these subjects.

British anti-Jacobin caricature of T. Paine

Seth Cotlar’s Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (2011) is an intellectual history of the development of US political culture in 1790s, primarily as it struggled to define itself against the momentous events of the French Revolution. While I am far from familiar with the literature of the early republic – or indeed of American history in general – it was refreshing to read Cotlar’s internationalized take on US political thought. From the beginning, Cotlar sets out to dispel exceptionalist and nationalist readings of American history that view the polity as isolated from developments across the Atlantic, and even the Caribbean and further afield. Cotlar demonstrates that American political thought and popular nationalism in the formative decade of the 1790s was to a great extent defined by repudiating its transatlantic “Other”: French revolutionary Jacobinism. Furthermore, Cotlar’s “history of ideas from the bottom up”[1] resurrects the obscured contest between the activist, cosmopolitan, and pro-French partisans of Thomas Paine with their anti-cosmopolitan, conservative Democratic, and Federalist opponents. In this way, the French Revolution was transposed onto American soil and fought in newspaper columns of its defenders and its detractors.

Cotlar’s text appears to speak to many of the problems associated with the literature of the early republic as delineated in our common readings by Brooke, Waldstreicher, Pasley, and Robertson. Largely avoiding the high politics of “great men,” Cotlar’s main sources are pamphlets, newspapers, sermons, and books produced by American intellectuals and activists outside of the official political class. Indeed, one of his main objectives is to demonstrate the extent of popular mobilization and discussion of political issues, and in this he succeeds remarkably. Despite earning top billing, Paine plays a relatively small role in the text, functioning mostly as a trendsetting “godfather” figure for the radical democrats of the era. These democrats developed a resonant critique of laissez-faire capitalism, private property, and concentrated wealth, while simultaneously pushing a participatory model of “radical publicity” in the realm of political representation.

But the most significant contribution of Cotlar’s book is its vivid demonstration of the depth of American cosmopolitanism. In these pages, British, French, and Americans are constantly engaged in a debate over the meaning of democracy. Wisely, Cotlar does not limit his attention to radicals – in fact a large portion of his book is devoted to the conservative backlash against the Painites and Jacobin sympathizers. Likeminded thinkers of all persuasions cultivated international alliances to advance their domestic agendas. While it is no secret that the radical democrats’ agenda was thoroughly trounced by their opponents, Cotlar’s contribution shows that a great deal of defining what the American republic was consisted of a concerted effort to define what it was not. Cotlar convincingly argues that the battles of the 1790s were formative in the development of an American political culture: one that would consistently emphasize its own triumphant exceptionalism in the face of foreign depravity. As a historian of the twentieth century, I couldn’t help but notice the rhetorical and substantive similarity between the anti-Jacobin and anti-communist crusades.

However, there are limitations to Cotlar’s brief work. Missing from these pages are substantive discussions of the role of women, slavery, and the indigenous population. While it seems quite natural that scant attention would be paid to such subjects in an intellectual history of the 1790s, considering these sectors of the population (together the majority) were excluded from meaningful participation in society, much less intellectual debates, their omission is scarcely accounted for by Cotlar. One is frequently left wondering just how radical the Painite populace was, but more importantly for our purposes, what might an American intellectual history of the 1790s that does not ignore oppressed groups look like?

My path to the graduate program in History at Rice has been a long and winding one. I earned a BA in Cinema, with a minor in Music from the University of Iowa in 2007. Gravitating toward nonfiction cinema, I worked in various capacities on professional documentaries and video projects, while my own short films have been screened at small midwestern film festivals. The post-9/11 US political climate, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and more particularly the devastating Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, provoked a strong interest in exploring the history of the Arab World, from which my grandparents emigrated to the United States. As my intellectual curiosity grew and my commitments to social and political issues deepened, I decided to move to Lebanon, where I earned an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut in 2010. Though my preferred medium of expression has changed from (or continues to shift between) cinema and music to history, what remains consistent is my interest in acquiring a greater understanding of the world in order to change it.

Broadly speaking, my primary research interests revolve around the construction and maintenance of the post-World War II US imperial order, especially as it encountered the emerging Third World, or the majority of humanity. I am more specifically concerned with this process as it took place in one major arena of struggle, the Arab World, especially the mashriq, or its eastern region (Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq). While these topics may appear quite distant from readings in 19th century American history, I have come to realize that themes of imperial expansion, colonization, intercommunal conflict, resistance to subjugation and occupation, uneven capitalist development, and even the struggle for radical social change are at the heart of 19th century American history. Developing a more meaningful understanding of America’s rise to global dominance in the 20th century seems premised on understanding the consolidation of its inland empire in the 19th.

I look forward to the readings we will do in this course, and even more toward our class discussions. Most of our readings will likely be covering material which is very new to me, but I am excited to explore new fields that should yield fresh insights into my primary research interests.