America in the Nineteenth Century
Скачать книги из серии America in the Nineteenth CenturyA Brotherhood of Liberty
In A Brotherhood of Liberty , Dennis Patrick Halpin shifts the focus of the black freedom struggle from the Deep South to argue that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1870s and early 1880s, a dynamic group of black political leaders migrated to Baltimore from rural Virginia and Maryland. These activists, mostly former slaves who subsequently trained in the ministry, pushed Baltimore to fulfill Reconstruction's promise of racial equality. In doing so, they were part of a larger effort among African Americans to create new forms of black politics by founding churches, starting businesses, establishing community centers, and creating newspapers. Black Baltimoreans successfully challenged Jim Crow regulations on public transit, in the courts, in the voting booth, and on the streets of residential neighborhoods. They formed some of the nation's earliest civil rights organizations, including the United Mutual Brotherhood of Liberty, to define their own freedom in the period after the Civil War. Halpin shows how black Baltimoreans' successes prompted segregationists to reformulate their tactics. He examines how segregationists countered activists' victories by using Progressive Era concerns over urban order and corruption to criminalize and disenfranchise African Americans. Indeed, he argues the Progressive Era was crucial in establishing the racialized carceral state of the twentieth-century United States. Tracing the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations, A Brotherhood of Liberty highlights the strategies that can continue to be useful today, as well as the challenges that may be faced.
Force and Freedom
From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of «moral suasion» and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war. In Force and Freedom , Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.
The Alchemy of Slavery
In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed institutional form, Heerman traces practices of slavery through indigenous, French, and finally U.S. systems of captivity, inheritable slavery, lifelong indentureship, and the kidnapping of free people. By connecting the history of indigenous bondage to that of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, Heerman shows how French, Spanish, and Native North American practices shaped the history of slavery in the United States. The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds the diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, attempting to outmaneuver their antislavery opponents. In time, a formidable cast of lawyers and antislavery activists set their sights on ending slavery in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Trumbull, Richard Yates, and many other future leaders of the Republican party partnered with African Americans to wage an extended campaign against slavery in the region. Across a century and a half, slavery's nearly perpetual reinvention takes center stage: masters turning Indian captives into slaves, slaves into servants, former slaves into kidnapping victims; and enslaved people turning themselves into free men and women.
Luxurious Citizens
After the Revolution, Americans abandoned the political economy of self-denial and sacrifice that had secured their independence. In its place, they created one that empowered the modern citizen-consumer. This profound transformation was the uncoordinated and self-serving work of merchants, manufacturers, advertisers, auctioneers, politicians, and consumers themselves, who collectively created the nation's modern consumer economy: one that encouraged individuals to indulge their desires for the sake of the public good and cast the freedom to consume as a triumph of democracy. In Luxurious Citizens , Joanna Cohen traces the remarkable ways in which Americans tied consumer desire to the national interest between the end of the Revolution and the Civil War. Illuminating the links between political culture, private wants, and imagined economies, Cohen offers a new understanding of the relationship between citizens and the nation-state in nineteenth-century America. By charting the contest over economic rights and obligations in the United States, Luxurious Citizens argues that while many less powerful Americans helped to create the citizen-consumer it was during the Civil War that the Union government made use of this figure, by placing the responsibility for the nation's economic strength and stability on the shoulders of the people. Union victory thus enshrined a new civic duty in American life, one founded on the freedom to buy as you pleased. Reinterpreting the history of the tariff, slavery, and the coming of the Civil War through an examination of everyday acts of consumption and commerce, Cohen reveals the important ways in which nineteenth-century Americans transformed their individual desires for goods into an index of civic worth and fixed unbridled consumption at the heart of modern America's political economy.
Remaking the Republic
Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was «now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government.» Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
In Union There Is Strength
In the 1840s, Philadelphia was poised to join the ranks of the world's great cities, as its population grew, its manufacturing prospered, and its railroads reached outward to the West. Yet epidemics of riot, disease, and labor conflict led some to wonder whether growth would lead to disintegration. As slavery and territorial conquest forced Americans to ponder a similar looming disunion at the national level, Philadelphians searched for ways to hold their city together across internal social and sectional divisions—a project of consolidation that reshaped their city into the boundaries we know today. A bold new interpretation of a crucial period in Philadelphia's history, In Union There Is Strength examines the social and spatial reconstruction of an American city in the decades on either side of the American Civil War. Andrew Heath follows Philadelphia's fortunes over the course of forty years as industrialization, immigration, and natural population growth turned a Jacksonian-era port with a population of two hundred thousand into a Gilded Age metropolis containing nearly a million people. Heath focuses on the utopian socialists, civic boosters, and municipal reformers who argued that the path to urban greatness lay in the harmonious consolidation of jarring interests rather than in the atomistic individualism we have often associated with the nineteenth-century metropolis. Their rival visions drew them into debates about the reach of local government, the design of urban space, the character of civic life, the power of corporations, and the relations between labor and capital—and ultimately became entangled with the question of national union itself. In tracing these links between city-making and nation-making in the mid-nineteenth century, In Union There Is Strength shows how its titular rallying cry inspired creative, contradictory, and fiercely contested ideas about how to design, build, and live in a metropolis.
Prairie Imperialists
The Spanish-American War marked the emergence of the United States as an imperial power. It was when the United States first landed troops overseas and established governments of occupation in the Philippines, Cuba, and other formerly Spanish colonies. But such actions to extend U.S. sovereignty abroad, argues Katharine Bjork, had a precedent in earlier relations with Native nations at home. In Prairie Imperialists , Bjork traces the arc of American expansion by showing how the Army's conquests of what its soldiers called «Indian Country» generated a repertoire of actions and understandings that structured encounters with the racial others of America's new island territories following the War of 1898. Prairie Imperialists follows the colonial careers of three Army officers from the domestic frontier to overseas posts in Cuba and the Philippines. The men profiled—Hugh Lenox Scott, Robert Lee Bullard, and John J. Pershing—internalized ways of behaving in Indian Country that shaped their approach to later colonial appointments abroad. Scott's ethnographic knowledge and experience with Native Americans were valorized as an asset for colonial service; Bullard and Pershing, who had commanded African American troops, were regarded as particularly suited for roles in the pacification and administration of colonial peoples overseas. After returning to the mainland, these three men played prominent roles in the «Punitive Expedition» President Woodrow Wilson sent across the southern border in 1916, during which Mexico figured as the next iteration of «Indian Country.» With rich biographical detail and ambitious historical scope, Prairie Imperialists makes fundamental connections between American colonialism and the racial dimensions of domestic political and social life—during peacetime and while at war. Ultimately, Bjork contends, the concept of «Indian Country» has served as the guiding force of American imperial expansion and nation building for the past two and a half centuries and endures to this day.
The Kingdom and the Republic
In 1823, as the first American missionaries arrived in Hawai'i, the archipelago was experiencing a profound transformation in its rule, as oral law that had been maintained for hundreds of years was in the process of becoming codified anew through the medium of writing. The arrival of sailors in pursuit of the lucrative sandalwood trade obliged the ali'i (chiefs) of the islands to pronounce legal restrictions on foreigners' access to Hawaiian women. Assuming the new missionaries were the source of these rules, sailors attacked two mission stations, fracturing relations between merchants, missionaries, and sailors, while native rulers remained firmly in charge. In The Kingdom and the Republic , Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) uncovers a trove of previously unused Hawaiian language documents to chronicle the story of Hawaiians' experience of encounter and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Through this research, she explores the political deliberations between ali'i over the sale of a Hawaiian woman to a British ship captain in 1825 and the consequences of the attacks on the mission stations. The result is a heretofore untold story of native political formation, the creation of indigenous law, and the extension of chiefly rule over natives and foreigners alike. Relying on what is perhaps the largest archive of written indigenous language materials in North America, Arista argues that Hawaiian deliberations and actions in this period cannot be understood unless one takes into account Hawaiian understandings of the past—and the ways this knowledge of history was mobilized as a means to influence the present and secure a better future. In pursuing this history, The Kingdom and the Republic reconfigures familiar colonial histories of trade, proselytization, and negotiations over law and governance in Hawai'i.
Borderlands of Slavery
It is often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two coercive labor systems, debt peonage—in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor—and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondage in the United States. In Borderlands of Slavery , William S. Kiser presents a comprehensive history of debt peonage and Indian captivity in the territory of New Mexico after the Civil War. It begins in the early 1700s with the development of Indian slavery through slave raiding and fictive kinship. By the early 1800s, debt peonage had emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude in the Southwest, augmenting Indian slavery to meet increasing demand for labor. While indigenous captivity has received considerable scholarly attention, the widespread practice of debt peonage has been largely ignored. Kiser makes the case that these two intertwined systems were of not just regional but also national importance and must be understood within the context of antebellum slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Kiser argues that the struggle over Indian captivity and debt peonage in the Southwest helped both to broaden the public understanding of forced servitude in post-Civil War America and to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor in the reunified republic. Borderlands of Slavery emphasizes the lasting legacies of captivity and peonage in Southwestern culture and society as well as in the coercive African American labor regimes in the Jim Crow South that persevered into the early twentieth century.