| Reading Guide for Week 3 | |
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Tuesday In 1803 the United States government borrowed money from a British bank in order to pay for the so-called Louisiana Purchase. President Thomas Jefferson had sought to purchase only New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River, but after losing the Haitian Revolution, the French government wished to rid itself of all its North American territory. New Orleans was an important entrepot for the export of agricultural commodities; however, the territory (all of it considered to be “Louisiana Territory”) to the north and to the west was a vast unknown. Jefferson looked to the distant future when American settlement might reach the Mississippi River, and then spill beyond it — what Jefferson blithely referred to as an “empire for liberty.” (Liberty for whom?) As these documents by Jefferson attest, he also had his eye on additional eventual expansion by the United States, playing an imperial game with Britain and Spain, with no consideration for the residents and inhabitants of other places in the Americas. William Apess was one of the first Native American advocates whose writings were printed in the early 19th century. A Pequot who became a Methodist minister in 1829, Apess published a collection of essays in Boston in 1833; An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man is drawn from that collection. In this essay Apess discusses the damage being done to Native Americans within the claimed territory of the United States, in which liberty did not figure. While Jefferson enjoyed the luxury of envisioning a distant future, Apess was preoccupied with crisis in the immediate present. Thursday Peter Manseau responded in this opinion piece to racist Americans who were directing their ignorant venom at American Muslims in the our present day. He makes a deceptively simple historical argument, however, in pointing to the fact that Muslims have been in the United States since the 17th century, albeit as enslaved people for many decades dragged from their original homelands to the Americas. According to Manseau, Muslim culture has been part of the complexity of American culture since the 17th century. In this memoir, Archibald Robbins recounted his experience on an American commercial ship shipwrecked off the coast of west Africa, whose crew was captured and enslaved by indigenous locals. The experience of enslavement prompted the ship’s captain, James Riley, to become an anti-slavery advocate upon his return to the United States. For many white Americans, however, Robbins’s memoir served mainly to inspire outrage at the enslavement of whites in the world, but not at slavery in principle. Robbins’s memoir was published in the aftermath of war between the United States and present-day Algeria, a second war (the first had occurred from 1801 to 1805) in which the U.S. Navy managed to put a decisive stop to the capture and ransom of American commercial ships in and near the Mediterranean Sea. |