recursal/Fanatic-Fandom huggingface dataset:
Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863 – 1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

## Summary

This
book, an abridged version of *Reconstruction:*
America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, *examines the contentious legacy*
of the Reconstruction Era. Foner argues that nonrevolutionary character and conservatism of the period is incorrect. Through this
framework, The related issues of land and labor and the persistent
conflict between planters’ quest to re-exert control over their labor force and
blacks’ quest for economic independence, race and class became inextricably
linked. Construction expanded the
authority and created a new set of purposes for the federal government,
including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship,
regardless of race. Foner argues that the expanded role of the state and its
threat to local autonomy and political corruption weakened the support for
Reconstruction. Taken collectively, Foner thus argues that the period was **revolutionary, but ultimately was a failure***.*
*The depression of the 1870s, the stagnation of world demand for cotton, the*
early rejection of land reform, factionalism, and corruption all contributed to
its failure. Most significantly, by the 1870s, class issues replaced sectional
issues, which led northern industrial bourgeoisie to establish a partnership with
Southern planters, rather than black workers.  The shift in political concerns contributed to
the abandonment of equal rights and the emergence of an unapologetic racism
after the depression of 1873.

See also: WEB Dubois, Amy Dru Stanton, David Roedegger,
Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

## Summary

Tracing
the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the
Renaissance to Romanticism*,* William Clark *''***reframesthe**
"Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production
in the modern world. Clark argues that the research university—which
originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries—developed in response to ***market forces and bureaucracy***,
producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and
achieve fame through publication. Academia ***lost its theological, transcendental***
mission ***during the Enlightenment, when religion moved from the affairs of the***
state to the private individual. Further, Ministries and markets worked to
***rationalize practices*** of authority and “bureaucratic and entrepreneurial
interests worked to alter or subvert the traditional authority of faculties and
colleges.” It resulted in the transition from the traditional or medieval
(Church-state) juridico-ecclesiastical academic world into the ***modern politico-economic regime***
of research*. '**Vested in the***
clothing, books, furniture, titles, and so on, “charisma at the traditional
university served to uphold authority by sanctifying traditions and
differentiating academics as a group from others groups in society.” (18) In
contrast, “The strength of the modern research university consists in its
ability to rationalize and routinize such prophecy and revolution” and “make
equilibrium dynamic.” Rather than being invested in a collective, corporate, or
collegial body, academic charisma at the research university inheres more in
individuals***.***

Example: German Policey Staat monitored behavior of subect by paper work. They policed the guilds and sought to transforms them from complext traditional groups into occupational groups. University as a result became regulated and required to produce a politico-economic report about their affairs.

See also: Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University*The Making of the Modern University;* Thomas Bender, *The University and the City*

New Yorker Review
Blower, Brooke. Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

## Summary

This
book overturns the old American clichés about “Gay Paree“ and the “free
mingling” of Americans (black and white) in Paris and offers a darker and more
nuanced portrait of how **Americans helped to** **shape the cultural politics** of
Paris between the wars, and, at the same time, how **Paris helped to shape modern**
American political culture**. '***Americans in Paris encountered a complex terrain'***,**
which forced them to grapple with pressing questions about being American as
well as Americans’ relationship to the world. “American-ness” emerged as an
“international concept during the first half of the twentieth century” as French and Americans turned to the **other** to define themselves. (3)  America became a potent symbolic in transatlantic political culture
during the decades prior to WWII. Along with the more famous American artists
and novelists that lived in Paris after WWI, there was also a larger American
community made up of **journalists, scholars, students, and businessmen**, all of
which created a distinct American community within Paris (Chicago Texas Inn and
Boy Scout Clubs). This community interacted with
a growing immigrant community (Paris had the highest percentage), dealt with
the detrimental effects of WWI (debt, coal rationing, government polarization –
largest concentration of communists/”Red Belt”), and felt the effects of salient international politics. Thus, Blower writes,
“Here, at the intersection of European and American history, where the fluid
sweep of **international networks** meets the rooted context of an urban landscape,
a new story emerges about how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics
of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape American
political culture.” (13)

Example: The Sacco-Vanzetti Trial in the United States impacted French-Parisian views of Americans. In particular, Left-Parisians attacked Americans and their establishments as the trial developed. Americans and their businesses were political symbols (cultural politics).

See also: Matthew Jacobson, *Barbarian Vritues*
Borstellman, Thomas. The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

## Summary

Contrary
to previous scholarship that largely treats the 1970s as a decade of decline or
as one lacking any grand transformations (like the 1960s or 1980s), Borstelmann
argues in his book that the 1970s was not only a crucial period of change and
adjustment, but was one of such importance that is reshaped the contours of
American and global history. In this book, Borstelmann highlights two key
undercurrents during the 1970s. The first was a spirit of egalitarianism and
inclusiveness that rejected traditional hierarchies and asserted the equality
of all people (gays, lesbians, women, and people of color). The second was the
decisive turn toward free market economics as the preferred means of political
and social problems (move away from government/New Dealism). These
undercurrents gained significant traction in the 1970s as empires declined and
capitalism spread. They also reflect a key transformation, as these two values
– complete equality and faith in the market place – are often antagonistic
forces. Borstelmann writes: “These prototypical American beliefs created a
society committed to treating everyone equally, while simultaneously become
increasingly unequal.” (4) Just as old hierarchies of race and class were ended
(in the U.S. and abroad), a new hierarchy was formed (often treated as “more
natural”) by the sorting out of people through the operation of the free
market. One was equal as long as they had the money. The 1970s, he argues,
created this tension that continues to shape American and global society.
Bender, Thomas. The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

## Summary

Since
their inception, universities and colleges based on the model of Cambridge and
Oxford have been ***identified with cities***, often the great cities that dominate
the political, economic, and cultural life of nations. The university, like the
city, has mutual medieval origins. Bender concludes, based on these essays,
that the urban university is a “semi-cloistered heterogeneity in the midst of
un-cloistered heterogeneity.” The relationship between the two, while at times
can be seen as homologous, are better understood as ***necessarily tense***, as one
cannot assimilate into the other. “To do so,” he writes, “either practically or
conceptually, is to empty each of its distinctive cultural meaning and to
falsify the sociology of each.” Both are ***bounded fields of contention***,
“comprising various traditions, interests, and ideals.” ("Town/Gown" tension) The university is
contingent on local processes (city), but is directed to the universal and
trans-local. Nonetheless, as many of these essays reflect, city shaped and influenced the nature of the university, just as much as the university influenced the character of the city (***reciprocity***)

Examples:Stephen C. Ferruolo “Parisus-Paradisus: The City, Its Schools, and the Origins of the University of Paris”  shows how it was in the city, by living and working in close quarters with merchants and artisans that scholars began to think of teaching as a “business” and change their methods. For example, he notes, theologians began to become less speculative and creative and more practical and routine.

See also: William Clark, *Academic Charisma and The Origins of the Research University*;
Joseph, Peniel. Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Hold and Co., 2006.

## Summary

Joseph’s
*Waiting for the Midnight Hour* reconsiders
the story of the Black Power Movement, one that traces its origins to Stokley
Carmichael’s defiant declaration in June 1966. Its reinterpretation, he argues,
helps us better understand how Black Power revised black identity and
“transformed America’s racial, social, and political landscape.” (xiv). After
WWII, black power emerged in the “space between new rights and unclaimed
freedoms” with marginal radicals (Harold Cruse, Malcolm X, etc.) who were both
inspired and repulsed by civil rights struggles. These activists tied local
struggles with international events and laid the groundwork for what became the
Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. (6) Joseph details through
figures as Malcolm X, Alber Cleag, and Robert F. Williams how the specter of
armed self-defense was always hiding in the shadows of the civil rights
movement. These figures shaped an ideology that “promoted self-reliance,
self-defense, pan-Africanism, internationalism, and cooperation among blacks –
and, at times, violence and misogyny.” (303) The Meredith March in 1966 brought
this out through the public witness of Stokley Carmichael. Joseph concludes:
“Inspired in part by the same legacy that buoyed civil rights activists, Black
Power advocates took the notion of righting historical wrong to a whole new, if
also more combative, level.” (302) Over time, Black Power activists, like their
civil right counterparts, discovered that there were no easy solutions to
America’s racial problems.
Rueben, Julie. Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

## Summary

Julie
Reuben examines the interaction between institutional and intellectual change
and argues that the rejection of the “broad conception” (encompassing knowledge
and morality) was tied to the changes in educational and scholarly practices at
the turn of the 20th century. She converts the “triumph” of
scientific research into a problematic by showing how ‘unbiased’ scientific
research led to a loss in the universities’ ethical and moral purposes. By the
1930s, ‘value-free’ science had pushed the moral and ethical purposes of the
university to the marginalized humanities and, even more consistently, to the
extra-curriculum and administration of ‘student life’. The term “truth” thus no
longer “encompassed factual knowledge and moral values.” (2) This book examines
the intellectual transformation and marginalization of morality in higher
education, “from the nineteenth century broad conception of truth to the
twentieth-century division between facts and values.” (p. 2) The new conception
of knowledge, which emphasized empirically verifiable knowledge, drew on a
sharp distinction between “facts” and “values.” Moral and spiritual values
could not be objectively verified. The university, from the 1880s to the 1930s,
experienced three overlapping stages of reform to reconcile the loss of its
moral and ethical purposes. Religious reform (1880-1910) attempted to make the
study of religion scientific and objective, but in the end, it affirmed
religion’s intellectual marginality. Scientific reform (1910-1920) attempted to
encourage good personal habits just as much as liberal Christianity, better
knowledge would produce better people. This approach, however, failed by the
twentieth century as biological and social scientists argued that the
information yielded was practical knowledge, not of moral value. The last
reform efforts, Humanistic and Extracurricular (1915-1930) based their claims
“to service on their direct moral influence on students” (verse practical
knowledge of the sciences) (p. 7). The result of this intellectual
transformation, Reuben argues, was similar to religion. “Just as religion had
been dissociated from ‘cognitive’ truth, morality became divorced from
‘factual’ knowledge and aligned instead with ‘fictive’ and ‘aesthetic’ truth.
The good, then, became associated with the beautiful, not the true” (p. 7) This
form of “knowledge” affected how institutions operated and how faculty
“pursued” knowledge. Reuben writes, these new conceptions of knowledge “associated
agreement with intellectual progress” and “discouraged professors from engaging
in controversial moral issues” (p. 3-4) It also led to over-specialization,
rather than intellectual synthesis.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

## Summary

Cohen's *Making a New Deal* argues
that the debilitating effects of the Great Depression on ethnic institutions
(stores, churches, associations, etc.) led workers to identity as a “working
class” rather than their ethnic identity (\*Gugliermo!) and thus were able to
more successfully unionize and agitate the state for improved working
conditions. “Mass culture and mass consumption in the 1920s had kept workers
tied to, rather than unmooring them from, their ethnic and working-class
communities and then, in the 1930s, had helped them build influential
class-based political institutions.” Cohen argues that the social and cultural
changes that took place during and after the depression – the rise of an
activists welfare state, the consolidation of radio stations and chain stores,
and the collective suffering of the depressing – changed the attitude of
Chicago’s industrial workers, creating a working class identity that could make
a higher commitment to unionization.
Kelley, Mark. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

## Summary

This
book examines the movement of women into public life during the post-revolutionary/antebellum
period and looks at the impact this transformation had on individual and social
identities. It centralizes the ***role of schooling at female academies and***
seminaries ***in mediating this process and argues that education was far more***
expansive and radical (than previously recognized) and t***ransformed a generation***
of women***. Kelley argues that educated (elite) women created social identities***
as learned women that signaled their ***entrance into civil society***, their
increased influence on public opinion, and an expanded (though gendered) role
in the republic. As writers, editors, teachers and reformers, women entered the “public sphere” or the
social space between the institutions of family life and the nation-state and
***challenged normative binaries*** (private/public, male/female) and through
voluntary organizations (literary societies) women ***increased their claim to a***
public voice and intellectual authority***. In schools, literary societies, and***
other organizations, “women addressed the larger meanings of knowledge…
practiced the art of persuasive self presentation, and instructed themselves in
the values and vocabularies of civil society.” (14) These women thus created and
configured what Kelley calls a ***“gendered republicanism.”***

See Also: Anne Scott
Bender, Thomas, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

## Summary

This
volume of essays extends the debate about the relationship between capitalism
and the antislavery movement started by Thomas L. Haskell in 1985. At the core
of this debate is the following question: **Is there something to be made of the**
near simultaneity of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of organized
antislavery? (Causation or correlation?) **Few scholars today discount the**
possible connection between the two, but the question is how to phrase that
connection and what explanatory weight to give it. This debate, in many ways,
goes to the core of historical explanation: the relation between social
structure, practice and change to culture, ideas, and ideology. Haskell offers
a cultural history of capitalism, seeing the rise of a “market” as reshaping
individual consciousness. Individuals felt empowered, able to take a stand
against slavery. His work, however, is more in line with the historical
sociology of Max Weber and draws very little from historical sources. In
contrast, David Brion Davis and John Ashworth see anti-slavery rooted in class
interest. In the case of Davis, the anti-slavery movement reflected the ideals
of English Quakers, who embodied a capitalist mentality. The end of slavery
served their capitalist interests in an emerging free labor economy. Ashworth
reinforces much of Davis’ argument, and adds to it. He emphasizes the rise of
wage labor and the creation of new values. In particular, he argues, the home
and family became a place of “rejuvenation.” Bender, based on his readings in
the debate, attempts to strike a compromise: He sees the concept of class
interest (Davis and Ashworth) supplementing Haskell’s theoretical framework of
Market consciousness.

Example (David Brion Davis): English
Quakers, he argues, were the very embodiment of the capitalist mentality. They
were central in eighteenth century commerce, banking, and industry (Quakers:
The Lloyds and the Barclays would come to be designated as the world’s greatest
banks) and had built a transnational network (U.S. and Britain).“Useful improvements” that Quakers supported – canals and better roads, credit
and insurance faculties, and railroads – were linked to a variety of other
philanthropic endeavors, most prominently the manumission of slaves.

Vs. Haskell: Capitalism
created a “can do” mentality and a heightened awareness of the remote
consequences of ones acts as well as inactions (beyond class, humanitarianism).

See also: Amy Dru Stanton, Barbara Jean Fields, Walter Johnson
Egerton, Douglas R. Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford, 2009.

## Summary

This
book looks at how tens of thousands **Africans and African Americans**, from the
Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the election of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as
president in 1800, waged their **own struggle for independence**. Before the
century was over, the revolution, together with the changing economy of
northern states, served to “eradicate slave labor in half of the new Republic”
and weakened it in the border of the south. At the same time, white elites
reconstituted slavery, especially in the south, to help the economy recover. Just
at the moment that the founders trumpeted the success of a revolution, slavery
expanded rapidly in the frontier South and Black Americans, Egerton contends,
were not passive to this process; they **helped shaped the politics of the early**
republic **through their demands and actions, such as Crispus Attucks fight for**
the ideal of liberty and Gabriel’s Rebellion.

Example: Experiences
of Quok Walker, a black slave in Worcester, MA. after being
denied his freedom (though promised by his previous owner), didn’t run away as
most escaped slaves would have, but turned to the courts and hired Levi
Lincoln. He filed suit for damages as well as assault and battery in the local
court of common please. Walker assumed his freedom in the post-1776 world and
thus turned to the courts not for freedom, but for receiving justice for the
damages against him (*Walker vs. Jennison*).
While acknowledging the economic shifts in the north and weakening demand for
slave labor Egerton argues that activists like Walker, combined with the
assistant of such whites as Lincoln forced every state Supreme Court or
legislature north of Delaware to eliminate slavery.

See also: Linda Kerber, Ashli White
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

## Summary

This
book tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the
cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic
slave trade. Johnson depicts
the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class-consciousness,
racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the
centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and
slaveholders alike. Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’
letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial
documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power
that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Johnson thus tells
the story of the slave trade from three perspectives (traders, buyers, and
slaves), moving away from the demographic map and assesses how the asymmetric
information, expectations and power and how each shaped the final outcome. “In
the slave market,” Johnson argues, “the central tension of antebellum slavery
was daily played out as slaveholders invested their money and their hopes in
people whom they could never fully commodify.” (16) Traders packaged their
slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but
they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable
commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts,
seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn,
these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize,
sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage. In emphasizing the
everyday life of the trade (the arrow on the map), Johnson thus shows how
contingent the process was; slavery was being pulled apart at the seams even as
it unfolded and expanded across the Atlantic and in the American South.

Example: Physical
examination of slaves in the slave market – size, skin color, scars, physical
carriage – were made meaningful (knowledge) through medical, managerial, and
sexual concerns. “In the slave market, the racial ideologies by which
slaveholders organized their society were put to work doing the hard work of
differentiating commodities and negotiating prices.”

See also: Eugene Genovese, Walter Johnson (2), Leslie Harris,
Horowitz, Helen. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

## Summary

*Campus Life* looks at the how undergraduate cultures
have changed since the end of the 19th century. She identifies three
variants of undergraduates and college life: college men and women, outsiders,
and rebels. “College men” took its shape from the late 19th century
and created a world that attempted to protect themselves from the authority of
faculty, relied on mutuality of fellow students, and defined a reasonable of
academic work by distinguishing themselves from “Brownnoses.” This subculture
tends to attract wealthier students and emphasize style. The “Outsiders”
similarly took shape in the late 19th century from those students
that studied ministry and wanted no part of the “college men” life. “Outsiders”
“focused on academic, not extracurricular, success; sought the approval of
their teachers; and hoped … that achievement in the future would compensate for
the trials of the present.” (14) In the early 20th century,
marginalized students – women, immigrants, Jews, and Blacks took the place of
ministry as outsiders and did not participate in the “college men” subculture
as there was often no space for them (e.g. No athletic teams or student clubs
allowing Jews or blacks, if they were even in the university). For those that
sought out the college men subculture but were denied led to the formation of
the third college subculture: rebels who collectively opposed college life. Rebels demanded
content, not form, and identified with artists, writers, and the few
iconoclastic professors. College students enter “social orders” and collegiate
canons and influence how students perceive their formal education of courses,
classes, and books as well as their informal education of social relationships,
organizations, and rituals. She argues that these variant student subcultures,
created in particular historic moments, persist over time and that they still
at some level inform the present. At different historical moments (e.g. Rebels
and the 1960s), one subculture becomes more predominant than the others.
Gerstle, Gary. “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84:2 (1997): 524-58.

## Summary

This
article (historiographical essay) ***challenges the myth of Americanization*** – that
Europeans came to the American to shed “the old ways” of Europe and embrace the
political virtues of the American republic. This myth has four distinct claims:
European immigrants wanted to shed their old world ways and become American;
Americanization was quick and easy; Americanization “melted” immigrants into a
single race, culture, or nation; and lastly, immigrants experience
Americanization as emancipation from servitude, deference, and poverty (of the
old world). He argues that scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s by Frank
Thistlewaote, Rudolph J. Vecoli, and Herbert Gutman, challenged this myth: “Americanization
was a coercive process forced on the newcomers, who preferred maintaining their
old cultures to becoming ‘new,’ exploited men.” More recently, such scholars as
Lawrence H. Fuchs and Werner Sollors, while rejecting the myth, present a more
complex understanding of Americanization and recognize the varying aspirations
of immigrants. Influenced by the culture/post-modern turn, these scholars
presented the idea that ethnicity and other American identities were unstable
and re-created. Thus, Gerstle contends, “Americanization lost the clean
linearity it had possessed in earlier accounts and became a chaotic,
pluralistic site of postmodern invention.” (527) However, Gerstle also argues
that these scholars ignored historical contingency as part of the immigration
experience. He thus concludes (unsurprisingly echoing his own work as well as
that of Lizabeth Cohen) that ***class and gender constrained the process of***
invention ***and works by Fuchs and Hollinger fail to take into account these***
power hierarchies.

1880-1920
immigration (23 million)
Putnam, Lara. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

## Summary

This bookexamines the
experiences of **Caribbean migrants** in the context of an emerging international
system (during the interwar years) of (national/racial) exclusionary policy.
These migrants believed they were “at the center of linked processes” that were
fundamental to the modern world: **“the transformation of race, of nation, of**
empire.” **(3) British Caribbean Migrants were at the forefront of the creation**
of a self-active “Our People” (“Great Negro Race”); lived at the moment when
relation of people to government was redefined as members of national
communities expanded; and, finally, were at the center of the crisis of the
British empire as it attempted to reconcile race and national identity.  Putnam
thus argues that “the making and unmaking of the **circum-Caribbean migratory**
sphere **over the first four decades of the twentieth century was key to the**
emergence of globally influential black internationalism **and to the course of**
British Caribbean decolonization.” (8) Black internationalism did not move
outward from the U.S. but was **shaped by the migratory experience** as well as the
exclusionary practices of the state. Concomitantly, the migratory choices also
led to the creation of exclusionary state polices. The black
internationalist and anti-colonial movements that would shake the twentieth
century were rooted in this process and the **experiences of ordinary men and**
women **not only in Harlem and Paris, but also the banana ports and dance halls**
of the tropical circum-Caribbean.

Example: Black Press and new forms of dance and music in the Carribean formulated a race-based solidarity, although with diverging ideologies: Some understood it as a matter of race and blood; others argued that it was the international arrangement of political and economic power.

See also: Vivek Bald, Thomas Guglielmo, Daniel Immerwahr (Race/Caste)
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s. New York: New York University Press, 1984.

## Summary

This
book examines how the market economy influenced the way Americans thought about
politics and the human potential for reordering social institutions. **Capitalism**
is thus more than a system for producing and distributing goods; it is also an
intellectual stimulus to men and women trying to come to terms with the forces
for change in their world. By attending to the material circumstances and the
ideas those circumstances supported, she argues that **economic changes in the 18th**
century **influenced how Americans thought about government and shaped**
Jeffersonian republicanism. For example, in the mid-18th century,
populations in England and Spain began to grow, requiring a higher demand of
grain to feed their populations. As a result of this international demand, more
and more American farmers came into the market; food and fibers began to possess
a strong commercial value (not just subsistence). “The prospect of prosperity
in the grain trade,” for example “could be linked with opportunity for each man
to make his own way on his own terms with his own initiative.” In the U.S. opportunities
for enterprise grew at a much more rapid rate than the capacity of government
to oversee them and ordinary men initiated many of the new trade connections
and production schemes. Moreover, the notion of natural economic relations, of
**self-interested rationally acting individuals, challenged habit and authority**
(Smith, *The Wealth of Nations*). The
rise of Jeffersonians reflected these changes and their **idealized vision of a**
class-less society**, a social order of free and independent men, challenged**
Federalists and the old “aristocratic” notion of authority as the organizing
principle of society. However, Jeffersonian idealism was undermined by the
second great awakening, which challenged the secular faith in the natural
social order, and the growth of industry that **strengthened the tendency of**
capitalism to divide workers and employers**.**

Example: The
Jeffersonians coalesced around a set of ideas that propagated less by a class
of men – that is, person tied together by common economic interests – than by a
kind of man – men attracted by certain beliefs. The common vision – reform of
politics and the liberation of the human spirit – made a national democratic
party possible in the 1790s. She argues that the modern notion of liberty that
undergirds the free enterprise system gave shape and direction to “the
Republican Vision of the 1790s.”

See also: Charles Sellers, Christopher Clark, James Henretta
Williams, Heather. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

## Summary

This
book examines the centrality of literacy for African Americans during slavery,
during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Contrary to
scholarship that has emphasized the role of the ***American Missionary Association***
and *white Northerners***, Williams argues that African Americans placed education**
on a short list of priorities (land ownership, suffrage and equal treatment)
and initiated the ***educational movement** in the South*. African Americans invested
great faith in the ability of literacy to first enable them to escape from
slavery and ***make freedom meaningful*** during emancipation. The right to education
was at the core of their struggle. They demanded education and *built schools,*
taught, paid tuition and worked to garner additional resources*.* Williams
writes: “They went to extraordinary lengths to gain this literacy: in slavery, they
defied laws and disobeyed owners; in freedom, they sacrificed scarce materials
and their personal safety.” (202) African Americans thus launched the
educational movement in the South that led to the establishment of public
schools systems that not only ***accommodated black students but also white students***.

James D. Anderson
 argues that this movement was co-opted by White industrialists and
philanthropists, transforming black education from a liberatory endeavor
 to one that served the interest of capitalism and the labor force.

See also: William Reese, *America's Public Schools**;*
Matson, Kevin. Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

## Summary

Kevin
Mattson’s *Creating a Democratic Public* explores
various activists and figures who attempted to form a more democratic public (a
“real” democracy where the public is at the center of political life). Mattson
defines a democratic public as a “place” where “citizens gather to deliberate
and make public judgments about local and national issues that affect their
lives.” (4) This book, Mattson believes, is beyond the typical academic history
(more in the cloth of Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson) and aims to use
history to better understand and grapple with the present; in this case, the
lack of a democratic public. Mattson writes: “This books takes contemporary
concerns about the state of American democracy and asks how things could have
been different. It is both a work of history and social criticism.” (6) Mattson
examines the Progressive Era, a time period when Americans “committed
themselves to reexamining political institutions and intellectual assumptions
guiding Americans into the modern age.” (7) The reform activists during this
time period (from muckrackering journalists to urban activists) accepted, to
varying degrees, that the American political system was corrupted and
influenced by many of the big corporations that emerged at the turn of the 20th
century. They thus advocated for democratic publics, via forums, universities,
and public schools, that would provide citizens a platform to debate the key
issues and, over time, reform and remake the American political system. Mattson’s
book focuses particularly on the urban center and how activists envisioned
cities to be potential spaces for democratic publics. Ultimately, the argument
of this book is that the “political thought and work of the activists and
intellectuals” of the progressive era can “inform our current hopes for a
better American democracy” as they provide an institutional basis to think
critically about constructing a better democracy. (10) While unsuccessful in
their larger vision, these progressive activists, Mattson contends, “succeeded
in replacing a nineteenth-century system of government ruled by bosses and
corrupt patronage with a more modern, efficient administration run by expert
civil servants and democratically elected officials.” (129)
Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. Vintage, 1980.

## Summary

Sara Evans’
classic study, *Personal Politics,* looks
at the roots of the modern feminist movement in the civil rights movement and
the New Left. The radical feminists that would emerge by the end of the 1960s
and revolutionize housework, child care, family decision-making, and sexuality
drew on a particular set of experiences in the south civil rights movement and
parts of the New Left. These movement experiences “catalyzed a new feminist
consciousness” and created an environment where these young radicals “found the
inner strength and self-respect to explore the meaning of equality” as well as
an ideology that encouraged them to do so. They also discovered the same contradictory
treatment most American women experienced (thrust into subservient roles as
secretary, sex object, housekeeper and ‘dumb chick’) and thus from it spun a
movement of their own. Thus, Evans argues: “The women’s liberation movement was
initiated by women in the civil rights movement and the new left who dare to
test the old assumptions and myths about female nature against their own
experience and discovered that something was drastically wrong.” (212) The *personal became political:* Participating
in these movements, these activists experienced an “egalitarian ideology, which
stressed the personal nature of political action, the importance of community
and cooperation, and the necessity to struggle for freedom for the oppressed.”
(213) Their tactic became known as “consciousness raising” (journals, small
group discussions, protests) reflecting their personalized approach to
politics.
Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

## Summary

This
book examines what soldiers thought about the relationship between slavery and
the Civil War. Manning argues, on both sides of the war – union and confederate
– soldiers “recognized slavery as the reason for the war.” This book places
slavery as the center of soldiers’ ideas about the war and compares and
contrast the experiences of Union and Confederate soldiers and how, when, and
why their ideas about the war changed. Confederate soldiers, even those
non-slaveholding, forged a patriotism based on white men’s perceptions of the
best material and ideological interests of their loved ones, which they assumed
to depend on the survival of slavery. Slavery was closely connected to Southern
notions of manhood. “A true man protected and controlled dependents, which for
white Southerners meant that a man competently exercised mastery over blacks as
well as over women and children.” (12) Southerners feared that emancipation of
slaves would lead to the murder and the sexual violation for white women. Union
Soldiers, on the other hand, fought because they believed the war was about the
survival of ideals like liberty, equality, and self-government for all humanity
(millennialist overtones of improving society). Manning argues that the
enlisted men in the Union Army forged a link between the slaves and policy
makers. “Slaves themselves did force emancipation onto the Union agenda” but
one of the most important was converting Union Soldiers, who developed into
emancipation advocates in 1861 and 1862 and expected their view to influence
the prosecution of the war. Union soldiers came to examine and redress how
their own racial attitudes made them complicit in slavery. Wartime experiences
convinced union soldiers that slavery needed to be destroyed in order to win
the war and redeem the American republic. And, finally, black Americas, those
that joined the Union fight, grasped from the beginning that the war was about
slavery, and interpreted their involvement as a struggle for black freedom,
equality, and inclusion within the promises of the American Revolution. On each
side, slavery was the central motivating factor for fighting in the Civil War.

Example: The
length of the war – especially the battles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg – as
well as the performances of black union soldiers forced white union soldiers to
further confront their racial attitudes. Manning writes: “The events of the
summer of 1863 urged many white members of the Union Army to look critically at
themselves and their own society, and to act on the impression that they had not
yet please God by calling for an expansion in the reach of founding ideals like
equality beyond the racial limits that had once seemed fixed and intractable.”
(125)

See also: James Oakes, Eric Foner,
Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, and Clarence Lang. “The "Long Movement" as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom.” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 265-288.

## Summary

This essay challenges the theoretical and interpretative
framework of the long civil rights movement thesis because, the authors argue,
this paradigm collapses periodization schemes, erases conceptual differences,
and blurs regional distinctions. Contrary to Dowd, these authors argue that
“the Long Movement thesis not only distorts the history of the BLM, it also
undermines the utility of these historical studies to inform future struggles
for social change.” These authors argue that this framework ignores such
ruptures as domestic anticommunism and the Cold War (Von Eschen, et al.) (I
would counter-argue that doesn’t discount the continuity, just the change in
tactics). Ultimately, they argue that the Long Movement advocates miss is the
“ideology, discourse, and long range objectives matter as much, if not more,
than the specific inequities challenged, or the particular means employed
toward those ends.”
Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

## Summary

This
book examines the life of Robert Williams, an African American radical that
Timothy Tyson argues “toppled Jim Crow, created a new black sense of self, and
forever altered the arc of American history.” Robert Williams’ life reveals
that the African American freedom movement “had its origins in long-standing
traditions of resistance to white supremacy.” His victories and defeats reflect
the importance of World War II and the Cold War to the freedom movement, as it
gave black Southerners “leverage to redeem or repudiate American democracy in
the eyes of the world.” (3) Tyson argues that “The life of Robert F. Williams
illustrates that the ‘civil rights movement’ and the ‘Black Power Movement’
emerged from the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the
same question for African American freedom.” (3) Williams’ book, *Negroes with Guns,* became “the single
most important influence on Huey P. Newton” and the Black Panther Party; yet,
Williams in the early 1960s had already influenced many within SNCC and CORE
that by 1962 many CORE field secretaries rarely talked about non-violence
(290-1). When Williams returned to the United States in the late 1960s, he
found the violent rhetoric of the Black Power Movement contrary to his own
beliefs. He believed in the constitution and saw the weapon as the *last* alternative, rather than the first.
Thus, the story of Robert F. Williams shows how the popular narrative of the
civil rights movement characterized as nonviolent prior to 1965 “obscures the
full complexity of racial politics.” (307) All of the elements most associated
with Black Power “were already present in the small towns and rural communities
of the Southern where the civil rights movement was born.” (308) Black
political action, cultural pride, and what Williams called armed self-reliance
“operated side by side in the South, in uneasy partnership with legal efforts
and nonviolent protest.” (308) \*Black militancy and the moral example of non-violence
was always in tension and in tandem throughout the black freedom struggle.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

## Summary

This
book examines how gender and race became intertwined components of the social
order in colonial Virginia. She argues: “Discourses of **gender**, the **division of**
labor by sex**, the** regulation of white women’s sexuality **were integral to the**
process of **defining race** and contributed significantly to the establishment of
slavery in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Racial slavery, in turn,
breathed new life into patriarchal social relations.” Over the course of 150
years, contrasts between the good women and unsupervised wantons (nasty
wenches) gave way to a racial opposition in which women of English descent
embodied the privileges and virtues of womanhood while women of African descent
shouldered the burden of its inherent evil: sexual lust. This transformation
was central to the creation of exploitable categories of racial difference. Faced
with uncertainties in the colonies (native Americans, environment, high taxes,
religious dissenters, outspoken women, and insecurity of property), white males
(after the Bacon Rebellion) constructed a gender norm that marginalized women
and black males and placed the male (white) in political control. Thus, “The
future of Virginia’s system of racial slavery depended not simply on excluding
men of African descent from the institutions of political life, but on denying
them the privileges of white domestic life, especially access to legal sexual
unions with white women.”

See also: Edmund Morgan, *American Slavery, American Freedom*
Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

## Summary

This
book examines the relationship between colonial colleges and colonial slavery
and the legacies of slavery in American intellectual cultures. Many of
America's revered colleges and universities-from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC-were the product and accomplice of
American slavery and intertwined with the social project of disposing Indian
people. “The founding, financing, and development of higher education in the
colonies were thoroughly intertwined with the economic and social forces that
transformed West and Central Africa through the slave trade and devastated
indigenous nations in the Americas.” (2) The earliest academies proclaimed
their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key
role in white conquest as they armed students with theories of racial
difference and scientific claims about the superiority of white people. Later,
the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the
other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of
professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders
aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Wilder
shows that our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became
breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained the slavery and racial
hierarchies. He summarizes: “The academy never stood apart from American
slavery – in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a
civilization built on bondage.” (11)