A200, History of American Capitalisms

This book was a landmark achievement of research.  The anti-slavery movement in the United States kicked into a higher gear in the 1830s with the formation, by white and black reformers and activists, of local and state anti-slavery societies, swiftly leading to national anti-slavery societies — which in turn spurred the formation of more local anti-slavery societies.  These anti-slavery societies sought to bring attention to the issue of slavery, in order to turn slavery from a simple unquestioned fact of American life into a controversy — into something that fundamentally did not belong in American life.  These societies sought to publicize testimony against the horrors and terrors of slavery by emancipated and fugitive blacks.  Predictably, with a few exceptions, almost no white Southerners were willing to testify publicly against slavery.  Hence, for this book, a fleet of volunteer researchers in the North sifted through many issues of numerous Southern newspapers, and gathered statements in those newspapers indicating and sometimes boasting of brutal treatment of enslaved individuals, families, and communities.  In other words, inadvertent Southern testimony aggainst the brutal reality of slavery.

Such testimony certainly provided an exposing window into the experience of slavery on the receiving end, but not into every dimension of slavery as an institution and a system.  It left out, for instance, Northern complicity in the supplying, provisioning, and financing of slavery.  Indeed, it left out many broader structural dimensions of slavery beyond subjective experience.  And this is where economics and politics come in, as they are present a bit in the text, and also quite absent.  To add them is your task for the writing assignment, based on our other readings as well as lecture materials ... and on your analytical skills, always to examine both the stated and the unstated.

Tuesday

The reading for this week is in a different mode from the previous articles we have read, in that it does not make an argument based on archival research, but instead presents a synthesis derived from both archival research woven together with various historical interpretations.  So, instead of close focus on one particular historical phenomenon — such as the article on the nascent Pennsylvania oil industry we read last week — Heather Cox Richardson’s approach brings together numerous variables:  slave emancipation, industrialization, immigration, labor activism, party politics, women’s activism, and much more.  Richardson tells a narrative story of four crucial years in the aftermath of the American Civil War:  1868-1871, during which much happened, and much more began to change.  These years saw the origins of amplifying industrialization and immigration, and the conflicts they prompted ... and the origins of violent white supremacy (the Ku Klux Klan) and the so-called First Gilded Age characterized by massive class inequalities second only to what you are currently living through.  This is what Richardson tried to weave together, in a sweeping account.

Perhaps try to imagine such an account being written about the present-day United States, with its own versions of massive class inequality, reinvigorated white supremacy, and so forth.  History repeating itself?

In Richardson, the framework she utilizes to interpret the era is that there were then, 1868 to 1871, two operative visions of the American political economy:  one premised on an imaginary of class harmony, and another premised on an imaginary of class conflict.  Certain interests favored each imaginary, in the aftermath of a shattering Civil War, and with the onset of tumultuous economic change.

Thursday

Writing assignment #3 is due.