[Marxism] Historians Challenge NYTimes on Slavery - American System Now
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[Marxism] Historians Clash With the 1619 Project - The Atlantic
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[Marxism] Historians . . . .
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Historians' online petition on impeachment . . . . . https://medium.com/@historiansonimpeachment/historians-statement-on-the-impeachment-of-president-trump-6e4ed2277b16 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Historians expose early scientists’ debt to the slave trade | Science | AAAS
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[Marxism] Historians and economists clash over slavery
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * THE CHRONICLE REVIEW Shackles and Dollars Historians and economists clash over slavery By Marc Parry DECEMBER 08, 2016 PREMIUM For Edward E. Baptist, the scandal was a gift. It had taken the Cornell University historian over a dozen years to produce a study tracing the creation of American capitalism to the expansion of slavery. It took less than one day for a short book review to turn his 400-page narrative into a cause célèbre. The inciting review appeared in The Economist magazine. It faulted Baptist’s study, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014), for exaggerating the brutality of bondage based on the questionable testimony of "a few slaves." Baptist fired back in Politico and The Guardian. The magazine’s critique, he wrote, "revealed just how many white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the experience of being black." The Economist, widely denounced online, published an apology. The controversy stimulated both public discussion of slavery and sales of Baptist’s book. Within academe, though, some think it had another effect: to squelch debate over The Half Has Never Been Told. Skeptical scholars may have been wary of criticizing its arguments for fear of being perceived as apologists for slavery. That silence is breaking. In a series of recent papers and scholarly talks, economists, along with some historians, have begun to raise serious questions about Baptist’s scholarship. Their critiques echo parts of the Economist review, only this time backed up by reams of economic research. The attack is notable because it has expanded beyond The Half Has Never Been Told to assail the wider movement to which that book belongs. Over the past several years, a series of books has reshaped how historians view the connection between slavery and capitalism. These works show the role that coercion played in bringing about a modern market system that is more typically identified with freedom. At a moment of rising frustration with racial and economic inequality, they have won a level of attention and acclaim that academics dream about but almost never get. Some think the books’ forensic accounting of how slave labor was stolen may buttress the case for reparations. What the economists are now assembling amounts to a battering ram aimed at the empirical foundations of these studies, which include Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press) and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf). The critics, whose own scholarship stakes out similar turf, say the new histories are riddled with errors, make overblown claims, or distort evidence to suit their story lines. "The shocking thing is how far they have deviated from the traditional strengths of history, in terms of using evidence and evaluating arguments," says Paul W. Rhode, who chairs the economics department at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and until recently served as co-editor of The Journal of Economic History. The clash is a reckoning for two disciplines that have long developed in isolation. Some researchers believe that economic history would gain strength if historians and economists worked together. By September, though, the sniping over slavery had gotten so nasty that one scholar trying to build bridges between the camps, Caitlin Rosenthal, described herself as "kind of terrified." Rosenthal, a historian at the University of California at Berkeley, was about to visit Dartmouth College to speak at a public debate in which Baptist would confront the economists face to face. "I have no idea what’s going to happen," she said, adding, "It’s possible that it’s going to just be a huge fight." The best way to understand this fight is to take a closer look at the book that has caused the most friction, The Half Has Never Been Told. When you think about the slave trade, what probably comes to mind are the voyages that brought some 600,000 to 650,000 African captives across the Atlantic to the territories that would eventually become the United States. The heart of Baptist’s study is a different slave migration, one that took place within those states. Between about 1790 and 1860, traders and owners moved some one million enslaved people from older states like Virginia and Maryland to newer territories within the South’s dynamically expanding cotton economy. The slaves were marched in chains or shipped on boats to lands the U.S. had acquired from other empires and cleared of native peoples. At first, they ended up in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carol
[Marxism] Historians of Slavery Find Fruitful Terrain: Their Own Institutions
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22 2016 Historians of Slavery Find Fruitful Terrain: Their Own Institutions By Corinne Ruff Crystal S. Rosson had spent years tracing her family roots — poring over courthouse documents, asking relatives to show her the unmarked graves of their ancestors, even quitting her job at a Virginia high school to devote more energy to her research. With every new picture and article she uncovered, one thought lingered in her mind: Where had her great-grandfather Sterling Jones lived? One day she found her answer. It was a well-kept cabin, once a farm-tool museum, now mostly vacant. And it sat only a stone’s throw from the back door of the mansion of the president of Sweet Briar College. Ms. Rosson had chills. She lives just three miles down the road from Sweet Briar, and she says her family always felt a connection to the women’s college, but she never fully understood why. Since the first day she stood outside that cabin, she has learned more about that connection. Her great-grandfather was a bricklayer; in fact, he was employed by the college to construct some of its first buildings after the former plantation became an institution of higher education. The cabin, she discovered, was also where Jones’s father probably lived as a slave. Ms. Rosson called administrators at the college to see if anyone knew anything about Jones. That’s when she met Lynn Rainville, a research professor in the humanities. Ms. Rainville is director of the Tusculum Institute, which she helped create in 2008 to research and preserve local history. For the previous 15 years, she had been doing just the opposite of Ms. Rosson — tracing Jones’s descendants to find out where they ended up. "It was a fluke," Ms. Rosson says of meeting Ms. Rainville. "We had long, crazy, amazing conversations that started us on this path together to piece my great-grandfather’s connection together to the college." In 2014 the two researchers reopened the cabin with an exhibit to teach students and the public about the college’s historical ties to slavery. The collaboration between Ms. Rosson and Ms. Rainville was accidental, sparked simply by their own curiosity. But the professor and the genealogist are by no means alone. As more institutions grapple with their own thorny histories, a growing number of scholars are digging into public history and raising questions about colleges and universities’ responsibility to acknowledge and explain those links to slavery and racism. That represents a shift in scholarly thinking, says Kirt von Daacke, an assistant dean and associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. "Scholars haven’t been deeply involved in micro-institutional history," he says. "They see it generally as a bit of navel-gazing, but they think it’s great for students to do." A ‘Living Laboratory’ Since Brown University took major steps in the early 2000s to explain its connection to the Atlantic slave trade, more scholars have felt an urge to investigate institutional histories. Now, with the escalation of student activism on race and the national influence of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, scholarly interest has reached a "critical mass," Mr. von Daacke says. At UVa, efforts to dig into the university’s complicated racial past sprang from a desire among professors to see the campus as a "living laboratory." Professors across humanities disciplines sent their students to the archives to learn to conduct research. In some cases they discovered a deeper history that they felt the college should address. Elsewhere, high-profile cases of colleges’ reckoning with their racially fraught pasts have drawn considerable news-media attention. Yale and Princeton made controversial decisions this year to keep names tied to slavery and racism on their buildings. Many universities and colleges across the South, such as the University of Mississippi, have debated — or are still debating — whether to remove Confederate statues on their campuses or to add context with plaques. Those cases have given many administrators a new interest in their institutions’ pasts — partly out of sympathy for students’ demands for greater transparency, and partly to forestall potential protests. "Faculty and students push for change and suddenly have gotten more traction," Mr. von Daacke says. "Everyone is saying, If we do this now, we may avoid protests." In some cases, administrators’ heightened attention has given new validation and influence to scholars who study their institution’s histories. But that recognition doesn’t always
[Marxism] Historians reveal African-Americans’ role in WWI—and how it influenced later civil-rights struggles
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Other black soldiers suffered as well. And the problems continued back home, where the hoped-for expansion of civil rights failed to materialize. That partly explains why scholars for years largely neglected the black experience in World War I. The era, Williams says, was seen as a "disillusioning moment" of racial retrenchment. As he writes, black soldiers returned home to "a wave of racial violence unmatched since the aftermath of the Civil War." At least 11 black veterans were lynched in 1919. Some 25 race riots flared up across the country. Black soldiers from the South were urged not to return home in military dress. Some were met at train stations by white mobs and forced to remove their uniforms. full: http://chronicle.com/article/Roots-of-Freedom/146551/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
