Africans in America – PBS Documentary

In 1998, WGBH and PBS put together a four-part series about the history of Africans in America. The very late-90s website is still up and running, and has a nice collection of primary sources and other background resources that connect with our reading for this week.

Parts of the documentary also seem to have made their way (illicitly?) to YouTube, so you can watch the episode, "Africans in America: Revolution (1750-1805)" in two parts below.

Week 7: Slavery and the American Revolution

The effects that both Racial Slavery and the American Revolution have on each other are discussed in this week’s reading of the Davis. In particular, he points out the central paradox of white Americans seeking freedom from the “enslavement” of the British while they simultaneously enslave another group of people. In this sense, Davis showed that the colonies were in danger of “a revolution within the Revolution” (147).

Davis discusses how during the time of the Enlightenment and, more specifically, the American Revolution, opposition to slavery transformed into a more concrete ideology. Davis makes the claim that in the cases of many slave revolts throughout history, the slaves merely opposed their own enslavement, rather than the actual idea of slavery. However, the American concept of liberty in regards to the British allowed slaves to have a new ideological discourse opposing slavery. Davis explains a few cases in which slave owners emancipated their own slaves when confronted with this ideological contradiction (144-6). Although these manumissions were relatively atypical, they do show that some slave owners were open to an ideological change. So one question I had was whether on not all slave owners really grasped the moral implications of slavery, seeing as some were willing to free their own slaves when they were shown their own hypocrisy (i.e. seeking freedom while denying it to others).

What jarred me the most while reading was when Davis described how the British (Dunmore) attempted to get slaves to run away, and how the Americans (Clinton) tried to counteract it (150). It seemed to perfectly foreshadow the Civil War when describing how the South’s (in this case, Georgia’s) economy was ruined when slaves escaped. I also found it shocking to realize that despite the many movements to emancipate slaves or at least restrict slavery, very few people actually opposed slavery based on its morality. For example, the British tried to emancipate slaves as a strategy against America (which often times led to them being sold as slaves elsewhere) and many Americans only wanted to restrict slavery because they did not like Africans and African-Americans and did not want them to live in their country (154).

Davis clearly describes how and why Racial Slavery and the American Revolution become entangled with each other. But, what were the ultimate effects that this clash of ideologies had on America’s road to Abolition? Hypothetically, could the emancipation of slaves have come sooner if events played out differently during the Revolution, or was the time simply “not ripe” so to speak?

Week 6: Slavery in North America

In this week’s reading, Davis and Olaudah Equiano demonstrate the ways in which slavery is not as restrictive as it is usually perceived to be. Davis gives examples of slave doctors and slaves who employed white workers. Equinano buys his way out of slavery and uses his experience to write a novel to contradict the racial myths that Africans are not completely human and push the abolitionist movement forward. There were cases similar to Equinano’s and in Inhumane Bondage, Davis points out that some slaves negotiated for their freedom or “half-freedom”. Not all slaves were confined to working on a plantation. In some cases, black slaves entered artisan trades such as carpenters, wheelwrights, tanners, etc. Black slaves are usually seen as weak and helpless and confined to only working on a plantation. What all forms of slavery include is the idea that these human beings can be owned as property and sold to other people. However, not all slaves are confined to one profession and in many cases the Africans slaves are not helpless but educated and adept when handling different cultures to break out of enslavement and negotiate with their masters.

Davis describes the attempts towards the abolition of slavery and its regression. Puritans became shocked after hearing that two Africans had been seized by treachery and violence and agreed that they should have been returned to their home country. In Rhode Island, a law condemned the “practice of enslaving Negroes for life” but the ten-year limitation on slavery was never enforced. In 1735, Georgia outlawed slavery but trustees asked for the repeal of the law and many slaves had been smuggled. Unfortunately, the attempts failed and the dependence on slavery and its integration in American society was so great that it proved difficult to outlaw slavery.

While reading about Olaudah Equinano, it was interesting to learn that he had been involved in the slave trade but does everything “to comfort the poor creatures”. Due to the mindset of the 1770s, do you see his actions as justifiable or hypocritical?

Wikipedia Historiography Paper: Some Considerations and a Potential Structure

As it looks like most people are choosing to write the Wikipedia historiography paper for the Oct. 15 deadline, I thought I'd post some thoughts about how you might go about approach this assignment as well as a potential structure for writing it.

Here's a reminder of the official description from the syllabus:

Using the “View History” function of Wikipedia, students will write an 800–1000 word historiography of a Wikipedia page relevant to their subtopic. We will spend time in class discussing how to think about and trace the historiography of a topic, what to look for within this “View History” page, and collaboratively decide how this assignment should be evaluated.

Given that most of our discussions have been quite engaging and I want to give the discussion leader this week ample time to help the class grapple with this week's readings, I thought I'd post what I had initially thought we'd have time to discuss. Hopefully we can address any questions in class, but this blog post will, I hope, serve as a useful guide as each of you embarks on your analysis.

As a reminder, historiography is essentially the study of how writing history changes over time. As historians develop and embrace new approaches, encounter new sources, and perceive the world in new ways given their present circumstances, the way they analyze the causes of past events change significantly. Wikipedia (what a shocking source to draw on here, I know!) has a nice encapsulation of how these changes have been seen in the historical profession in the past 40 or so years:

So, in order to assess these types of interpretive changes for a Wikipedia page, here's a list of questions to consider as you read through the "View History" tab of your selected topic.

• Who created the page and when? Who are the major contributors?
• What can you find out about these people and their educational or professional backgrounds
• What other pages or types of edits have they made on Wikipedia? Do they seem to have an academic or topical specialty? Do they tend to make particular types of edits on all the Wikipedia pages to which they contribute?
• What sources do these editors cite? What can you tell about the quality of their research and the sources on which they draw?
• What are the major sources of disagreement about the page? Where do the Wikipedia contributors seem to go back-and-forth the most?
• Are there key dates in the history of a page that spur a flurry of edits?
• Are there particular contributions that challenge or directly violate Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" policy (e.g. vandalism)?
• What images have users added to the page and how do these contribute to its usefulness and/or the argument that it conveys?

In terms of then structuring your paper after you've done a close and thorough reading of the "View History" tab, you might consider the following framework (though it is not set in stone):

• Intro ¶
• Brief overview of topic and its origin on Wikipedia
• Structural thesis statement (e.g. clear argumentative claim and a roadmap/blueprint for your body paragraphs) establishing the most significant areas of interpretive controversy or debate AND/OR the most significant contributions to the page.
• Body ¶s
• Elaborate on each of the points from your thesis and provide evidence from the page about the interpretive debates AND/OR contributions.
• Conclusion ¶
• Evaluation of the page's value/trustworthiness as an introductory source on this topic.
  AND
• A consideration of how the page's transformation fits into some of the major trends about historical interpretations and arguments about transatlantic slavery that we've read about thus far in class.

NOTE: Please use footnotes in your paper. If you'd like to use full Chicago Style citations for all URLs you may, but you can also just footnote the URL by itself.

I hope this set of questions and potential structure prove useful in guiding your research and helping you organize the evidence you encounter. Please post any questions you have in the comments so that your peers, who may have the same concerns, can also see my response or provide feedback and guidance of their own.

And for good measure, I'll include my favorite historiography-related cartoon below (because there are sooooooo many to choose from):

Reminder: FIVE Timeline Entries due by Tuesday, Oct. 8

I'd meant to remind everyone in class yesterday that the first FIVE timeline entries related to your particular theme are due by the time our class meets next Tuesday, October 8.

In case it got lost in your email, here's the link to the Google Spreadsheet where you can add the information about the events, significance, and major theme to which it relates.

In terms of the six major themes that you can group each of your events within, let's go with this (albeit overly encompassing and general) set of categories:

• Society/Social
• Politics/War/Military
• Religious
• Ideology/Ideological
• Cultural
• Economic

If you have any questions about where a particular event from your specific theme might fit into this wider scheme, feel free to ask me or leave your question in the comments so your peers can offer some feedback and advice.

Here's the embedded timeline again. I'm excited to see how it changes over the course of the week.

Seigneurial, Semi-Feudal, Paternal

It seems like a number of definitional issues arose during this week's readings, particularly surrounding three terms that Burnard uses to characterize the nature of slavery in Jamaica: "Seigneurial," "Semi-Feudal," and "Paternalistic." Given the centrality of these definitions, I thought I'd draw on the unimpeachable Free Dictionary for some definitions of these terms that we can consider in our discussion of this week's readings.

Pertinent Images and Maps for our discussion of Slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil

Davis offers a thorough description of the process of making sugar on Caribbean plantations, but does not include any images to illustrate that process. Luckily, our good Enlightenment friend Denis Diderot had the savvy to include a number of plates presenting the process of sugar manufacture in the entry for "Sucre" in the 1751 edition of the Encyclopédie.

Here are a few of those:

On the topic of how prominent the Caribbean and Brazil were in the overall dynamics of New World slavery, here's a map from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database that visually indicates just how significant demographically those two regions were from the 16th through the 19th century.

There's one more map from Carla Pestana's book, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640-1661, that I'd hoped to include, but all my Google searches for it yield something along these lines:

So, when I get that map digitized, I'll pass it along, as it does a great job of illustrating one of Davis's points about the extent of English involvement with slavery outside North America in the mid-seventeenth century. Until then, I'll leave you with another relaxing beach scene: