The University of New South Wales

SCHOOL OF HISTORY Session 1, 2003

HIST2025

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM: AMERICAN HISTORY FROM REVOLUTION TO
CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1750-1890

Course Director: Ian Tyrrell
Morven Brown Room 352
Phone 9385.2345

COURSE AIMS

This is an introductory course in American history and no previous knowledge is required.

The course will explore different topics each week, but the major emphasis will be upon synthesis: --the interrelation of economic change, social structure, cultural life and politics. It will be argued that slavery and its nemesis in the form of free labour provides the central theme around which the American nation was made. It is hoped to explain the emergence by the 1890s of a nation-state and a marked oriented society based upon free labour.

An attempt will also be made to put the subject into comparative perspective in order to make American history intelligible to an Australian audience which possesses its own history–a history superficially similar to American history but which differs in significant ways.

ASSESSMENT

1 essay - 50%. 3000 words. DUE: Wednesday lecture, last week in May. School guidelines for submission and presentation of essays are obtainable from the History Office.

Tutorial participation - 25%.

Take-home — 25% (answer two questions)

LECTURE PROGRAM

The lectures will provide an overview of the main structural changes from c. 1750 to the 1880s, and will include a critical assessment of methods and interpretations adopted by historians. Students are encouraged to contribute to discussions in the lectures.

Topics will include:

Three Colonial Empires
Adapting to a New Environment
American Society on the Eve of the Revolution.
The American Revolution.
The Paradoxes of Slavery and Freedom.
Nation, State and Empire
The African Slave Trade.
Slave Society: Planters, Pro-Slavery Ideology, Paternalism, etc
Slave Culture and Resistance .
The Economics of Slavery.
The non-Slaveholders.
The Western Frontier, Indian Survival and Cultural Adaptation.
Democracy and Inequality, c. 1820s - 1860.
Jacksonian Democracy
Indian Removal and the Reservations.
The "Separate Sphere" of Woman.
Religion and Reform Movements
Reform
German and Irish Immigration and the Nativist Reaction.
From Abolitionism to Free Soil
War and Empire: American Expansion in the 1840s and its Impact
Lincoln, Race Relations and the Coming of the Civil War.
Blood and Iron: The Civil War, Racial and Economic Change in International Perspective
Reconstruction and the New Slavery
The Aftermath: America in the 1880s

There will be detailed summary handouts for each lecture. These are important for exam preparation.

READING LISTS

A SEPARATE LIST OF AIDS FOR RESEARCH IN U.S. HISTORY WILL BE DISTRIBUTED.

THE READING list below is designed for the tutorial topics. Students are expected, in consultation with their tutor, to complete their own reading lists to explore the separate research essay questions, though many items on the tutorial reading lists will be relevant. For convenience and to show the linkages in the course these essay questions are listed below each tutorial topic to which they are most closely related. READINGS IN BOLD TYPE WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE STUDY KIT. Because this is a course on U.S. history, the readings are conventional U.S. history. However I have provided with a star some items that provide comparative or transnational perspectives on each topic. These perspectives will also be discussed where appropriate in each lecture.

This course does not rely heavily on textbooks. However recommended works are:

B. Bailyn et al The Great Republic, 3rd ed. (Lexington, Mass., 1985)
G. Nash, et al., The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001)
C. Degler Out of Our Past, 3rd ed. (New York, 1985)

Nash et. al. is available in the bookstore for purchase.

TUTORIALS

Note well: The question set in each tutorial is for general guidance in the preparation of tutorial presentations; discussion will cover also the larger issues of the wider topic contained in the heading for each tutorial.

GENERAL NOTE ON THE USE OF INTERNET AND OTHER ELECTRONIC SOURCES:

The school document, THE ESSAY provides detailed instructions for the use of and citation of internet sources and outlines problems of plagiarism.

These can be included in your reading, provided full citation of the site is given; however these sources should be used critically in terms of comparing different sources and citing in quotation marks any sections taken from such sources.

CD-ROM RESOURCES: See especially Who Built America? (Santa Monica, Cal., 1994), in library.

Week 1 - No tutorials.
Introductory Film: Glory (1989)

Week 2 - How Different Was America?
Allocation of tutorial topics

Come prepared with your questions on the course.

We will be paying special attention to putting American history into comparative perspective, and to the issue of American exceptionalism--what makes the U.S. to be considered radically different from the paths of development pursued by other nations. A straightforward introduction is contained in Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity (Chapel Hill, 1993)

A recent debate has been generated over this issue: see Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review, October 1991 [on reserve]

We will also discuss Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955), chap. 1

For discussion in the first tutorial:

In its classic forms, American exceptionalism refers to the special character of the United States as a uniquely free nation based on democratic ideals and personal liberty. Sometimes this special character is inferred from the nature of American political institutions founded in the 1776-89 period–the declaration of independence (1776), revolution (1776-83), constitution (1787) etc. Thus the "revolution" and its aftermath freeing the US from British control are important in ideas of American exceptionalism. But often the political differences are said to be underpinned by material differences brought about by the wealth/resources of the United States, sometimes seen as a direct product of the freedom of the American people, but by others as the product of the inheritance of the North American continent’s abundant resources. This is the frontier version of the theory, and this and the ideas of social mobility and immigrant assimilation in the following course are closely tied to this set of ideas of American material prosperity. Many aspects of American history are left out or distorted in the traditional narratives--particularly the histories of Amerindian peoples and the contribution of other ethnic groups that preceded the Anglo-Americans, e.g. Hispanics. Race and slavery are seen as tragic exceptions, and the abolition of the latter was viewed as a partial resolution, encompassed in Lincoln’s idea of a "new birth of freedom" in the Gettysburg Address.

It is also important to realise that there is a "negative" version of exceptionalism, i.e. that the US has been exceptionally bad, racist, violent. While this is less a part of the common myths about American history, the attempt to compensate for American exceptionalism by emphasising unique American evils is equally distorting. We will need to think more in the session about this matter, especially when we deal with racial divisions and gender prejudice. Is the US experience a variant on wider racial and gender patterns? While social history has provided new perspectives on the role of women, African Americans, and ethnics in the making of American history, has that new history discredited or qualified ideas of American exceptionalism?

The actual term "American exceptionalism" was originally coined by German Marxists who wished to explain why the US seemed to have by-passed the rise of socialism and Marxism. (Actually the US had much class conflict, some Marxist parties and theorists, and a lively socialist movement, though the latter was not on the scale of, say, France and Germany.) But exceptionalism is much more than about class conflict.

Some historians prefer the terms "differences" or "uniqueness?" Are these suitable substitutes. Whatever the terminology, the implications of American difference/uniqueness have long been debated. Some have said the difference was temporary, and eventually the US would be like other countries. Others have argued that American "specialness" stems from its political, intellectual, and even religious heritage, and is enduring.

The United States is often said to be a model which should be emulated by the rest of the world, but at other times it has been argued instead that the conditions which gave birth to the United States could not be reproduced elsewhere. Thus other countries are generally seen as trying to follow or catch up, but never do.

You can see that American exceptionalism contains a complicated and often contradictory set of assumptions. Do these stand up to the test of logical and empirical analysis?

Week 3 - The Invasion of America
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Which was the more important in gaining European dominance, the loss of land, alcoholism, disease, or something else?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: What was the impact of the American revolution on Indian/white relations?

OR

Examine the evidence for miscegenation of Native-Americans and Euro-Americans. Were Spanish and French more likely to intermarry with Native-Americans and if so why?

Film: Roanoke (excerpts only)

Introductory Reading:

William Cronon Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), chaps 4-5

Alfred Crosby "Ecological Imperialism," in Worster, The Ends of the Earth (New York, 1988), pp. 103-17

Peter Mancall Deadly Medicine (Ithaca, 1996), pp. 182-91

G. Nash, et al The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001), pp. 298-304

Richard White The Middle Ground (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 131-34

Reading:

Axtell, James The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1981)

Alfred Crosby The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972)

Alfred Crosby Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986)

Francis Jennings The Invasion of America (Chapel Hill, 1973)

Carolyn Merchant Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill, 1989)

James Merrell The Indian’s New World (Chapel Hill, 1989)

Gary B. Nash Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood-Cliffs, N.J., 1973)

Daniel Ritcher The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Expansion (Chapel Hill, 1992)

Timothy Silver A New Face on the Countryside (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 89-91

Daniel Unser, Jr. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992)

Wilcomb Washburn The Indian in America (New York, 1975)

*Comparative perspectives

Henry Reynolds The Other Side of the Frontier, rev. ed. (Ringwood, Vic., 1990)

Week 4: The Land
TUTORIAL QUESTION: What were American attitudes toward natural resources in the period c.1600-1850? How did attitudes towards the land change after the Civil War?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: Examine the extinction or near extinction of such species as the buffalo, passenger pigeon, mountain cats, wolves and beaver (you need not deal with all of these). What key factors were involved both for and against preservation of America’s wildlife?

Introductory Reading:

William Cronon Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), pp. 127-56

Donald Pisani "Forests and Conservation, 1865-1890," Journal of American History 72 (1985): 340-59

Clive Ponting A Green History of the World (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 167-70

Reading:

William Cronon Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983)

William Cronon Nature’s Metropolis (New York, 1991)

Carolyn Merchant Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill, 1988)

Carolyn Merchant Major Problems in American Environmental History (Boston, 1993)

Roderick Nash Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 1982)

Timothy Silver A New Face on the Countryside (Cambridge, 1990)

Henry Nash Smith Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)

Michael Williams Americans and Their Forests (New York, 1989), pp. 9-19

*Comparative and transnational perspectives

Clive Ponting A Green History of the World (Harmondsworth, Mdx., 1991), 127-40, 165ff.

Week 5 - Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Economy
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Was "Jacksonian democracy" a response to the relentless pressures of the market economy, and to what extent did Jacksonian politics exacerbate the transformations of the economy and society associated with the market revolution?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: Discuss the removal of the Cherokee and other "civilized" tribes as an aspect of "Jacksonian democracy".

Introductory Reading:

Sean Wilentz "The Market Revolution," in E. Foner, ed., New American History (Washington, 1992)

G. Nash, et al. The American People, 5th ed.(New York, 2001), 292-98, 364-75

Michael Rogin Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York, 1975), chaps. 7-8

Reading:

J.W. Davidson & M. Lytle After the Fact (New York, 1982) Chs. 4-5

Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (New York, 1994)

Edward Pessen Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, Ill., 1969)

Robert Remini Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York, 1981), chap. 15

Charles Sellers The Market Revolution (New York, 1992), pp. 308-12

George R. Taylor The Transportation Revolution (New York, 1951)

Sean Wilentz Chants Democratic (New York, 1985)

*Comparative perspectives

Henry Reynolds The Other Side of the Frontier rev. ed., (Ringwood, Vic., 1990)

Week 6 - The Self-Made Man (and Woman?)
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Was the United States becoming a more class-based society from the Revolution to the Civil War despite the dream of upward social mobility? Distinguish between the experience of (free white) men and (free white) women.

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: Was equality of condition or of opportunity greater in the American West in the nineteenth century than in more established areas?

Introductory Reading:

B. Bailyn et al The Great Republic (3rd ed. Lexington, Mass., 1985) 301-305, 323-326

Edward Pessen "The Egalitarian Myth and the American Social Reality: Wealth, Mobility and Equality in the ‘Era of the Common Man,’" American Historical Review 76 (1971): 989-1034

Herbert Gutman "The Reality of the Rags to Riches ‘Myth’: The Case of the Paterson, New Jersey, Locomotive, Iron, and Machinery Manufacturers, 1830-1880" in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (eds.) Nineteenth-Century Cities (New Haven, 1969), pp. 98-124

G. Nash, et al., The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001), chap. 10.

Reading:

Merle Curti The Making of An American Community (Madison, Wisc., 1959)

Thomas Dublin "Women Workers and the Study of Social Mobility," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (1979): 647-646

Thomas Dublin Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts (New York, 1979)

John M.Faragher Women and their Families on the Overland Trail (New Haven, 1979)

James Henretta "The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias," Labor History 18 (1977): 165-177

Edward Pessen Riches, Class, and Power in America before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass., 1973)

Daniel T. Rodgers The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (1978)

Mary Ryan Cradle of the Middle-class (New York, 1981)

Christine Stansell City of Women (New York, 1986)

Stephan Thernstrom Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)

Barbara Welter "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-174 (also in B. Welter, Dimity Convictions)

*Comparative perspectives

Wilentz, S. "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working Class History, no. 26 (Fall 1984): 1-24

Week 7 - Immigrants: Melting Pot?
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Was the United States a melting pot in regard to immigration before 1880, a "salad bowl", or is some other metaphor appropriate?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free." [Inscription on Statue of Liberty] How far does this sentiment represent American responses towards immigrants from 1830 to 1860?

Introductory Reading:

Carl Degler Out of Our Past (New York, 3rd ed., 1985), chap. 10

Harald Runblom & Hans Norman From Sweden to America (Minneapolis, 1976), 311-24

Reading:

R. Billington The Protestant Crusade (New York, 1938), chap. 13, pp. 322-344, 536

Kathleen Conzen Immigrant Milwaukee (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)

Oscar Handlin Boston’s Immigrants (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1959)

John Higham Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1955)

Michael Holt Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh (New Haven, 1969)

Michael Holt "The Politics of Impatience," Journal of American History 60 (1973), 309-331

Maldwyn Jones American Immigration (New York, 1960), chaps. 1-6

Brian Mitchell Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1826-61 (Urbana, Ill., 1988)

Theodore Saloutos They Remember America (Berkeley, 1955)

S. Thernstrom Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)

Phillip Taylor The Distant Magnet (New York, 1971)

Ian Tyrrell Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Ante-bellum America (Westport, Ct., 1979) Chs. 10-11.

*Comparative and transnational perspectives

Donna Gabaccia "Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History," Journal of American History, 86 (December 1999): 1115-34

James Henretta "The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias," Labor History 18 (1977): 165-177

Harald Runblom & Hans Norman From Sweden to America (Minneapolis, 1976)

Week 8 - Women: Public and Private Spheres
TUTORIAL QUESTION: What was the impact of the ideology of domesticity on American women before 1880? Did that ideology only repress women, or were there any positive benefits?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: Compare and contrast the roles of Catharine Beecher and Elizabeth Cady Stanton among American women from the 1830s to the 1880s?

Introductory Reading:

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg "The Female World of Love and Ritual," Signs 1 (1975): 1-30 Barbara Welter "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (1966): 131-175.

Reading:

Katherine Sklar Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973)

Lois Banner Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Boston, 1982)

Catherine Beecher A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841, repr. New York, 1972)

Nancy Cott The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, 1977)

John Mack Faragher Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, 1979)

Lori Ginzberg Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven, 1990)

Elizabeth Griffith In Her Own Right (New York, 1984)

E. Hellerstein, L.P. Hume & Karen Offen (eds.) Victorian Women (Stanford, 1981) documents 63-66, 69- 70, 76, 78, 79-82, 84, 88-89

Blanche Hersh The Slavery of Sex (Urbana, Ill., 1978)

Edward and Janet James (eds) Notable American Women, vol. 1, pp. 121-24 ; vol. 3, pp. 342-47

Alice Kessler-Harris Out to Work (New York, 1982), 49-56

*Comparative perspectives

Catherine Hall "The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology," in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (1979)

Week 9 - Religion and Social Change
TUTORIAL QUESTION: The visiting French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s that the Americans were a most religious people. What evidence was there for his assertion of the critical importance of religion in American society prior to the Civil War?

ESSAY TOPIC: Why did Mormonism emerge and flourish in the early and mid-19th century?

Introductory Reading:

B. Bailyn The Great Republic (1st ed., Lexington, Mass., 1977), chap. 16

Paul E. Johnson A Shopkeepers’ Millennium (New York, 1977), pp. 136-41

Alice F. Tyler Freedom’s Ferment (Minneapolis, 1945), chap. 2

Reading:

Fawn Brodie No Man Knows My History (New York, 1945)

J. L. Brooke The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology (Cambridge, 1994), especially the preface

Richard L. Bushman Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, Ill., 1984)

Richard Carwardine Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Westport, Conn., 1978)

W. Cross The Burned-Over District (New York, 1965)

David B. Davis "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature," Mississippi Valley Historical Review [now Journal of American History ] 47 (1960): 205-224

Ronald Formisano The Birth of Mass Political Parties (Princeton, 1968)

Lawrence Foster Religion and Sexuality (New York, 1981)

Klaus Hansen Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago, 1981) [Fisher Library, Sydney Uni, only]

Curtis Johnson Islands of Holiness (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989)

Paul E. Johnson & Sean Wilentz The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (New York, 1994)

Donald Mathews "The Second Great Awakening as an Organising Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis," American Quarterly (Spring 1969): 25-43

T. O’Dea The Mormons (Chicago, 1964)

Alice F. Tyler Freedom’s Ferment (Minneapolis, 1944), pp. 31-45

R. Walters American Reformers (1978), chaps. 1-2

*Comparative and transnational perspectives

R. Carwardine Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Westport, Conn., 1978)

Week 10 - Temperance and other Moral Reforms
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Was the drink question more prominent in the antebellum period as an issue than the anti-slavery movement, and if so, why?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: How are American anti-slavery reformers treated in the movie Amistad? How does this treatment compare with what historical scholarship since the 1960s has established?

Introductory Reading:

B. Bailyn et al The Great Republic (3rd ed., Lexington, Mass., 1985), chap. 13; and chap. 14, pp. 355-362

Jack Blocker American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston, 1989), pp. 30-60

Ronald Walters American Reformers (Boston, 1978), pp. 123-43, and chap. 4

William Rorabaugh The Alcoholic Republic (New York, 1979)

Reading:

Jed Dannenbaum Drink and Disorder (Urbana, Ill., 1984)

David Davis Ante-Bellum Reform (New York, 1965)

Natalie Davis Slaves on Screen (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 69-93

Joseph Gusfield Symbolic Crusade (Urbana, Ill., 1963)

Blanche Hersh The Slavery of Sex (Urbana, Ill., 1978)

Edward and Janet James (eds) Notable American Women, vol. 1, pp. 179-81

Mark Lender & James Kirby Martin Drinking in America: A History (N.Y., 1982)

C. Sellers The Market Revolution (New York 1991), pp. 259ff

James B. Stewart Holy Warriors (New York, 1976)

Ian Tyrrell Sobering Up (Westport, Ct., 1979)

Ian Tyrrell "Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860," Civil War History 28 (June 1982): 128-52

*Comparative and transnational perspectives

Carl J. Guarneri, "Abolitionism and American Reform in Transatlantic Perspective," Mid-America, vol. 82 (Winter-Summer 2000): 21-49

Week 11 - Slave culture
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Was there a slave culture, and how can historians reconstruct it?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: How common were slave rebellions in North America? Compare and contrast with the Caribbean and Latin America.

Film: "Digging For Slaves" (BBC)

Introductory Reading:

B. Bailyn The Great Republic (3rd ed., Lexington, Mass., 1985), chap. 14

G. Nash, et al The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001), pp. 346-57

John W. Blassingame "Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems," Journal of Southern History 41 (November 1975): 474-492

Lawrence Levine Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York, 1977) chap. 1; also printed in T. Hareven (ed.), Anonymous Americans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971)

Peter Kolchin American Slavery (Harmondsworth, Mdx, 1995), chap. 5

Reading:

Ira Berlin Slaves without Masters (New York, 1972)

John Blassingame The Slave Community (New York, 1972)

J.W. Davidson & M. Lytle After the Fact (New York, 1982), chap. 7

Paul D. Escott Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill, 1979)

Drew G. Faust "Culture, Conflict, and Community: The Meaning of Power on an Ante-Bellum Plantation," Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 83-97

Eugene Genovese Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974)

Herbert Gutman The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1975)

Jacqueline Jones Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York, 1985)

Peter Kolchin "Reevaluating the Ante-Bellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective," Journal of American History, 70 (1983): 579-601

Albert J. Raboteau Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978)

*Comparative perspectives

Peter Kolchin "Reevaluating the Ante-Bellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective," Journal of American History, 70 (1983): 579-601

John Hirst Convict Society and Its Enemies (Sydney, 1983)

Week 12 - Profits and Paternalism
TUTORIAL QUESTION: Were slave plantations well-functioning businesses, or places of terror, or both?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: Describe and analyse pro-slavery arguments. Did they amount to a critique of the capitalist, market-oriented society?

Film: Amistad

Introductory Reading:

B. Bailyn, et al The Great Republic (3rd ed., Lexington, Mass., 1985), chap. 14

Drew G. Faust "Culture, Conflict, and Community: The Meaning of Power on an Ante-Bellum Plantation," Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 83-97

G. Nash, et al The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001), pp. 337-45

Kenneth Stampp The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956), chap. "Profit and Loss."

Peter Kolchin American Slavery (Harmondsworth, Mdx, 1995), chap. 4

Reading:

Paul David Reckoning with Slavery (New York, 1976)

Robert W. Fogel Without Consent or Contract (New York, 1989)

Robert W. Fogel and S. Engerman Time on the Cross, vol. 1 (Boston, 1974)

Eugene Genovese Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974)

Eugene Genovese "Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders’ Democracy," Agricultural History 49 (1975): 331-42

Herbert Gutman Slavery and the Numbers Game (Urbana, Ill., 1975)

Richard H. King "Marxism and the Slave South," American Quarterly 29 (1977): 117-131

Peter Kolchin Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)

James B. Oakes The Ruling Race (New York, 1982)

Eric Perkins "Roll, Jordan, Roll: A "Marx" for the Master Class," Radical History Review 3 (1976): 41-59

Fred Seigel "The Paternalist Thesis: Virginia as a Test Case," Civil War History 25 (1979): 246-261

*Comparative perspectives

Peter Kolchin Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)

Week 13 - Race and Slavery in the Civil War Era
TUTORIAL QUESTION: What were Lincoln’s attitudes towards slavery in the period before the emancipation proclamation of 1st January, 1863 and what were his attitudes towards racial equality? Were there contradictions in his stances? How far did he align with the Free Soil position?

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: What military, political and other roles did African Americans play during the Civil War, 1861-65?

Film: The Civil War (Ken Burns, 1991)

Introductory Reading:

Eric Foner Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York, 1970), pp. 11-39

James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), chaps. 2-7

G. Nash, et al The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001), chap. 14

Reading:

Eugene Berwanger The Frontier Against Slavery ( Urbana, Ill., 1967)

Steven Channing Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York, 1970)

D. Fehrenbacher Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, Calif., 1962)

D. Fehrenbacher "Only his Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro," Civil War History 20 (Dec. 1974): 293-310

George Fredrickson "A Man But Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality," Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 39-56

William Gienapp Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987)

James McPherson The Struggle for Equality (Princeton, 1964)

James B. Oates To Purge this Land with Blood (New York, 1973)

Benjamin Quarles Lincoln and the Negro (New York, 1962)

James B. Stewart Holy Warriors (New York, 1976)

John L. Thomas Slavery Attacked (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965)

V. Jacques Voegeli Free But Not Equal (Chicago, 1967)

Forrest Wood Black Scare (Chicago, 1968)

*Comparative and transnational perspectives
Ernest Scott The Shenandoah incident, 1865 (Melbourne, 1925) to be distributed in class

Week 14 - Reconstruction
TUTORIAL QUESTION: The Civil War has been called an unfinished revolution. What is meant by this statement, and what factors prevented further improvement in race relations after about 1870? 

RESEARCH ESSAY TOPIC: Describe and analyse the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan.

Film Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)

Introductory Reading:

B. Bailyn The Great Republic (3rd ed., Lexington, Mass., 1985), chap. . 20.

W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction (Cleveland, 1969), chap. 16

Peter Kolchin American Slavery (Harmondsworth, Mdx, 1995), chap. 7

Leon Litwack "Free at Last," in T. Hareven (ed.), Anonymous Americans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971) , pp. 131-171

G. Nash, et al The American People, 5th ed. (New York, 2001), chap. 16

Kenneth Stampp The Era of Reconstruction (New York, 1965)

Reading:

James W. Davidson & Mark Lytle After the Fact (New York, 1982), chap. 7

Eric Foner Nothing But Freedom (Baton Rouge, 1983)

Eric Foner Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988)

Peter Kolchin First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama’s Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, Ct., 1972)

Jacqueline Jones Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York, 1985), chap. 2

Leon Litwack Been in the Storm So Long (New York, 1979)

Alan Trelease White Terror (New York, 1971)

Wyn C. Wade The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (London, 1987)

*Comparative perspectives

Eric Foner Nothing But Freedom (Baton Rouge, 1983)