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I want to stress that “farming matters,” to use the words of historian Steven Stoll. “It is the central biological and ecological relationship in any settled society,” Stoll argues, “and the most profound way that humans have changed the world over the last ten thousand years.” Agriculture has seen many changes since 1865—mechanization, specialization, intensification, the application of biotechnology, the rise of organic farming—all of which can be discussed under the framework of industrialization. With the likelihood of a real energy crisis increasing each year, industrialized agriculture is even more important to understand. It is, in short, a present concern.

In my second half of the U.S. survey, then, the industrialization of agriculture will be a prominent theme. This theme could take the form of one or two lectures, or it may be woven throughout the course in smaller pieces. As a disclaimer, I will simply quote Jim Cobb, who once defined teaching as “seeing how much oversimplification you get away with without misleading anyone.”

I. The Jeffersonian Ideal

Another final assignment: a lot of the same reading as the sugar plantation essay (sometimes even the same phrasing), plus some tendentious theoretical speculations. This was fun.

It seemed to me that the mysteriousness that accompanied my seeing, at one and the same time, cane growing in the fields and white sugar in my cup, should also accompany the sight of . . . raw iron ore, on the one hand, and a perfectly wrought pair of manacles or leg irons, on the other.

The connection between production and consumption—what Sidney Mintz calls “the mystery of people unknown to each other being linked through space and time”—is one of the most promising veins yet mined by historians. Mintz’s story, of course, is of sugar—its production on plantations powered by slave labor, its consumption by the working class peoples of Europe, and its place in the exercise of power over the last half century. But there are many other stories to be told. Tropical commodities like coffee, henequen, rubber, and bananas have their place in the historiography, as do more temperate crops like tobacco, cotton, and citrus. The value of these tales is in taking something so mundane as to be invisible and allowing it to open a new window on the worlds of the past: history from an commodity’s perspective, as it were.

The project here is first to sketch out the twin theoretical tensions of scale and causation, and second to show how they inform one of the richest seams of commodity-chain history: Caribbean sugar plantations. In the case of sugar, the materialistic approach of Karl Marx is more useful than Max Weber’s ideological tack, while attention to both global and local scales is illuminating. Finally, we will suggest some ways the history of sugar might inform histories of another, mostly unexamined agricultural commodity: peaches.

For background, see the article, Beyond Compare by Micol Seigel.

Transnational history presents a two-pronged revision to comparative historical scholarship, one methodological and one ethical. The first expands on what students of Atlantic History and African Diaspora have long recognized: many historical phenomena (slavery, trade, migration, kin-networks) overflow nation-states. Histories that confine these phenomena within national boundaries are simply inadequate, imprecise. The second revision roots transnational scholarship in a critique of U.S. imperialism, insisting that comparative history actually helps produce differences between the nations it purports to study. Far from reifying the nation-state, for Micol Seigel and other transnational historians, history should be criticizing nationalism, steadily eroding this foundation of inequality.

This double imperative is crucial to understanding the promise and peril of transnational revisions. The first revision, a challenge to what Micol Seigel calls the “hermeneutical preeminence of nations,” represents transnational history’s most enduring contribution. The second, a plea for ethical critique, is more problematic.

The assignment here was to argue that gender is/is not a useful category of analysis for understanding phenomena like imperialism and class.

The tour of Don Chombo’s hillside hortaliza had been impressive. Everywhere, his slashed-and-burned land yielded maize, red beans, tomatoes, chiles, and green squash. Toward the end of our visit, my agricultural development friend Lorenzo offered to loan Don Chombo some fertilizer. “I don’t know much about working with fertilizer,” Don Chombo replied curtly, and turned toward the next field.

Why did Don Chombo refuse what seemed to be in his interest? Was his refusal based in racial prejudice, since Lorenzo was a white North American? In class, since Lorenzo seemed wealthier? In gender, since Lorenzo was unmarried and known for compassion and gentleness? Perhaps the answer is all or none of the above. But the questions illustrate the principle categories historians use to analyze and explain the past. As academic history narrows its focus to the story of oppression, categories of race, class, and gender have become increasingly prominent.

Historians love novelty. Every year university presses publish hundreds of new interpretations of history, and reject hundreds more. The field is marked by “turns”: the literary turn, the cultural turn, the transnational turn. Professors and authors must labor to stay up-to-date, lest they be charged with a lack of secondary literature in their own work. Somewhat paradoxically, historians have helped create a flash-in-the-pan sort of business.

It is remarkable, then, when an interpretation has staying power, when a book is still being referred to and challenged nearly 30 years after its initial publication. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is such a book. Winner of both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft, the book’s influence is also demonstrated by the challenges to its interpretation, including T.H. Breen’s recent Marketplace of Revolution. Breen makes his dispute with Bailyn’s interpretation explicit, citing shortcomings of the ideological interpretation which he means to address. Does the challenge succeed? One way to compare the two accounts is to examine a few pages of each work, analyzing in detail the use of sources and the style of presentation. How do these authors attempt to persuade, and how effective are their methods?

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virgina (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975).

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982).

The American historical profession experienced something of a revolution in the 1960s. As historians gradually came to a general consensus that historical scholarship should be more inclusive of Indians, blacks, and women, they also disagreed sharply on the form of that inclusion. For some, it was a way to “speak truth to power”; for others, a way to reconstruct a more precise picture of the past. Many historians of these marginalized groups at first depicted their subjects as victims of brutal oppression, then corrected that depiction by attempting to show that the marginalized had “agency”: control over their lives and their oppressors.

Historians soon encountered a dilemma. Can the powerless wield power? Do structures – major events and forces – or struggles – everyday lives of ordinary people – deserve the most attention? How does one write history that avoids what Peter Novick calls “overdrawn portrayals of lower-class militancy,” on one hand, and studies of the “minutiae of everyday underclass existence” on the other?

Take the case of colonial Virginia. Clearly the history of the region cannot be told without reference to slavery, the institution described as the “central paradox” and “great transforming circumstance” of American history. But what of slaves themselves? Should they be studied for their own sake or for the impact they had on the broader society? This paper will discuss how three leading historians of early America use African-Americans in their narratives of colonial Virginia and, in turn, what African-Americans themselves contribute to the story. Each is a masterpiece, and each author’s approach makes a vital contribution to the historiography – Philip Morgan’s comprehensiveness, Edmund Morgan’s emphasis on class conflict, and Rhys Isaac’s imaginative methodology – but ultimately Isaac’s study shows the most promise. Slaves in his account present themselves as human beings with crucial connections to the rest of society.

A little exercise for our Theory & Practice class. It may feel a little elementary, but I think there is something clarifying about the idea-material conditions binary.

Seldom has a historical phenomenon so concerned (and disturbed) intellectuals as the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Philosophers, sociologists, novelists, and economists alike sought to exalt and condemn, extend and resist this new thing called capitalism. Amid this sea of intellectual debate, two figures stand out. In fact, capitalism can scarcely be discussed a century later without reference to Karl Marx and Max Weber.

Historytelling: Narrative and Climax in Early American Historiography
ThinkPiece #1

“History,” the accusation goes, is just “one damn thing after another.” And if historians were content merely to record strings of dated facts, we would have to plead guilty. But historians are also storytellers, and the usefulness of an historical study depends not only on its specific findings (the “facts” it uncovers), but also on the story it tells. This is true even though the traditional single narrative is less fashionable in contemporary historical writing. The reader may have to look closely to find it, but the story is there.

Although many histories are optimistic tales of the progress of human rights, democracy, or some other noble dream, today’s historians prefer sad stories, so-called declension narratives. Progress narratives tend to be cautionary in tone (women would not be voting today if not for the vigilance and courage of certain individuals). Declension narratives, on the other hand, speak longingly (or despairingly) of a “road not taken” (if southerners had not chosen the path of cash-crop capitalism, the oppression of blacks could have been avoided). In each case, it is the suggestion of “what might have been” that infuses the narrative with drama.

To engage an historical narrative, then, one must pinpoint the climax, the “what-might-have-been” moment when contingency yields to inevitability. In a story of progress, the climax is often the point at which hope is almost – but not quite – lost; in a story of declension, it may be a final hopeful period before events spin out of control. In both cases, the climax provides the key opportunity for the historian to make his point.

In early American history this climactic moment is often related to the transition between what America was (Indian, colonial, aristocratic) and what it has become (white-dominated, independent, democratic). This is the case with three award-winning books on the colonial period: Jon Butler’s Becoming America, Daniel K. Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country, and James K. Brooks' Captives and Cousins. Although widely divergent in their geographic frames, methodologies, and conclusions, the books share an attention to the creation and expansion of America as well as a delight in shifting the narrative’s fulcrum away from traditional tellings.

For Butler, the real story of American independence is not what happened in 1776 but the long century that preceded it, and in particular the modernization of colonial politics during that period. According to Richter, Indians and Europeans were not brutal antagonists from their first encounter, as we have often heard, but only after three centuries of living side by side. The crux of his story, therefore, is the Indians’ final attempt to find coexistence in the midst of looming European dominance. The climax of Brooks’ narrative, similarly, portrays an attempt at autonomous coexistence: when Indians and colonists in the southwestern borderlands tried to incorporate international capitalism on their own terms – in the face of increasing (and ultimately overwhelming) U.S. government control.