Sacred tribal politics and the money factor

One of the reasons I became interested in politics is because of the ways that different politicians refer to certain ideas/ideals as somehow "sacred"; my interest in history also comes from how different political or community values affect the religious realm.  This article from the Sunday NYTimes, written by a psychology professor, discusses how our political groupthink/tribalism revolves around "sacred" narratives that have nothing to do with economics. Another article about one of the "hottest" academic political scientists today posits that economic success comes only to those countries who are able to get citizens at all levels involved and invested in growth.  I think these two viewpoints are eminently sensible, as I see both happening historically--getting a nation's people involved in an economic project involves making them feel "tribally" connected, that they have a stake in a positive "moral economy."  Can you work either of these explanatory narratives into your own projects?

Microhistory and defining rights in the post-revolutionary Caribbean

This talk at the University of Puerto Rico (Q&A in Spanish) features Rebecca Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at University of Michigan.  It encapsulates some of her latest research following individuals from one St. Domingue family who ended up playing a key role in Louisiana's constitutional convention in order to gain that state's readmission to the Union after the Civil War.  I've heard Dr. Scott talk before, and her ability to bring the lives of lesser-known individuals to light through microhistory mirrors what we learned about in Landers' book.

Links to the news

Last class we talked about David Brooks' most recent editorial, "The Materialist Fallacy," and the new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart--both of which try to explain the "weakening of the social fabric" in late 20th/early 21st-century America.  In our examination of the revolutionary era, we often think about how war and economic upheaval led to a "weakening of the social fabric," while new nations attempted to build institutions that could repair those fissures.  In the works we've read so far as a class, what "lessons" might you apply from the past to our own times--or do these social commentators help you think about the past in a new way?

On the value of political understandings of the past

Rich sent me two links last week: one to a commentary by Stanley Fish on the academic (versus the political) debates over constitutionalism/originalism, and another to a review of Gordon Wood's latest book lamenting the decline of political history.  Like it or not, what we write about as historians is deeply embedded in the "culture wars" of our day.  Since this week's class is considering what makes a "good" article discussing "Revolutions in Thought and Society," it may be useful to reflect in your process journal about ideas raised in one or another of these pieces. What does it mean to you to study "traditional" political or intellectual history topics, or to bring into the conversation ideas of contemporary concern such as race?  What role do your own politics play in defining what's "important" to study, or in how you define what you do as a historian as opposed to an educated voter/conversationalist?

Conference on Florida

I'm going to be attending much of the upcoming conference on Florida at the Crossroads, sponsored by the University of Miami's Center for the Humanities.  Sessions on Friday morning and Saturday morning are particularly related to what we learned about in Landers' Atlantic Creoles book, and in fact, she will be presenting on Saturday morning! Registration is free, so come down to Miami to learn more about Florida's history during the Age of Revolutions, or to find out what academic conferences look like.  I'll even introduce you to Jane Landers if you want to get your book signed!

The U.S., Cuba, and rethinking the end of slavery

The documentary I referred to tonight in class, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, is one I showed last semester in my course on New World Slavery.  It covers the journey of one Rhode Island woman (and a few extended family members) who sought to discover the roots of her family's wealth in the U.S. slave trade--via the contraband slave markets that Landers talked about in her chapter on the role of Cuba in the 19th century.  The documentary is a fascinating one, as it delves into issues of silencing "unthinkable" histories (like the New Englanders' myth of not being involved with slavery), and of considering the consequences of economic privileges and handicaps that have trickled down since slavery and the slave trade ended. It can be requested from the Jupiter Library, or browse through the clips and materials available for teaching.

The Revolution Will be Forgotten?

I added to the wiki bibliography on the Haitian Revolution a fascinating web initiative called The Louverture Project.  It is an open-source collaborative wiki/clearinghouse for primary source documents, images, links to archives and libraries, and all kinds of information that historians have uncovered in the past few decades--especially enhanced since the bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 and the tragedy of the 2010 earthquake (which included the near-destruction of the National Archives and the loss of many books and other documents).  Is it possible that Trouillot's assertions that the Haitian Revolution remains "unthinkable" have been broken by this surge of scholarship?  What do you think of the title of their proposed online narrative, "The Revolution Will be Forgotten"?

Homage to Enlightenment scholar Margaret Jacob

Historian Margaret C. Jacob is one of those names that didn't make it onto my starter bibliography about the Enlightenment, but as evidenced from this January's meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, her work has helped revolutionize scholars' understanding of the Enlightenment and its spread during the early 18th century.

Check out some of her titles on the library shelves here at FAU, or go to her online C.V. or to Historical Abstracts (one of FAU's most powerful electronic databases) to search for articles that might be compelling reading for your research project.

Haiti can be rich again.

Just the title of this op-ed piece in Sunday's NYTimes struck me as a fabulous re-thinking of the standard narrative of Haiti's modern "failures."  I wasn't at all surprised to see that it was written by Laurent DuBois, the pre-eminent scholar of the Haitian Revolution (you'll see his name a few times in our course bibliographies). Another related article on the "rural road to recovery."

History and the danger of stories

I saw this TED talk by economist Tyler Cowen posted to my friend's Facebook page the other day and got to thinking about our conversation on the first night of class about whether we think of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions as the "spring of hope" (as Dickens and many nationalist historiographies have painted independence movements) or as a "season of irony" (Egerton's take on the counter-productive social goals of Simon Bolivar and Denmark Vesey).  The jist of Cowen's talk is that we should be suspicious of these types of heroic/tragic narrative tropes, for any familiar story--the struggle to survive, the fight against tyranny, the tragedy of broken promises--just flattens out the messiness of reality.  What do you think?