“Hearing Nat Turner”: Within the 1831 Slave Rebellion

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 910-916
Author(s):  
Holly Brewer
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
American History ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Small Window

AbstractIn this chef d’oeuvre, Tomlins offers a heuristic for how to extract the words, ideas, and actions of Nat Turner, the Black, enslaved man who led the most important slave rebellion in American history. Tomlins makes such an effort from within a cluster of different kinds of sources, each one a small window on the past, none of which Turner personally wrote. How to see beyond these particularly distorted glass windows on the past is not obvious. Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner provides a key not only to Turner, and to his powerful sense of how to fracture the fragile legitimacy of the southern slaveholding elite, but also a metaphysics of interpretive strategy that can serve as a theoretical model.

Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christen Mucher
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
American History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
British America ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ruling Elites

Before American History examines the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two of North America’s republics—the US and Mexico—through an analysis of historical knowledge production. As the US and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent republics—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. Before American History approaches two iconic imaginings of the past—the carved Sun Stone and the mounded earthwork—as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, Indigenously-produced but settler-controlled and settler-interpreted. In making the connection between earthworks built by an allegedly vanished people merely peripheral to US citizens and the literal touchstone of Mexicans’ history, Before American History details how Mexican and US nationalists created national histories out of Indigenous pasts and thereby wrote Indigenous pasts out of their national histories and out of national lands. It uncovers how the manipulation of Indigenous pasts and (mis)interpretations of “American Antiquities”—Indigenous documents, objects and monuments—served the purposes of a trans-imperial/transnational network of creole ruling elites, first in New Spain and British America, and later in Mexico and the United States, as they struggled to construct new political, geographic, and historical orders.

Analogies at War

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. CHRISTOPHER JESPERSEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Events

The frequent use of the Vietnam analogy to describe the situation in Iraq underscores the continuing relevance of Vietnam for American history. At the same time, the Vietnam analogy reinforces the tendency to see current events within the context of the past. Politicians and pundits latch onto analogies as handles for understanding the present, but in so doing, they obscure more complicated situations. The con�ict in Iraq is not Vietnam, Korea, or World War II, but this article considers all three in an effort to see how the past has shaped, and continues to affect, the world the United States now faces.

The History of Africanization and the Africanization of History

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 85-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esperanza Brizuela-García
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
American History ◽  
African Studies ◽  
African History ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Challenges

The idea of Africanization is arguably one of the most important and prevalent in African historiography and African studies. I first encountered this notion some eight years ago when I started graduate school. With a background in Mexican and Latin American history, I found it necessary to immerse myself in the historiography of Africa. It was in this process that I encountered the idea of Africanization. It was not always identified in this manner, but it was clear that historians were, in one way or another, articulating a concern about how “African” was African history.The objective of this paper is to examine the history of Africanization in African historiography. It departs from two basic premises. First, the issues that come with the idea of Africanization are more pronounced in the field of African history. When compared to other fields, such as Latin American history, this indigenizing of history is not given nearly so much attention. Second, the idea that African history needs to be Africanized has been taken for granted, and has not been critically examined. Here I will contend that the historical conditions that have framed the emergence and development of African historiography have made it necessary to emphasize the issue of Africanization. I will also argue that those conditions have changed in the past fifty years, and that the questions raised in the quest to Africanize history should be redefined in view of the new challenges for African history and of historiography at large.

Gilding American History through Song Culture in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Ryan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
American History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
American South ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Depression Era

In the first of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Platte reveals how Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which proclaims its debt to Homer’s Odyssey in the opening credits, also re-enacts Homeric epic’s creation of a golden age. Platte focuses on the role of song in generating ancient and modern societies’ gilded memories of the past, including the nostalgia-laden misremembering of the Depression-era American South in which the film is set. Platte emphasizes how technological change affected the American folk-song tradition through recording – a phenomenon similar to that which changed Greek song culture into “Homeric” epic. By focusing on a moment of epochal change, the filmmakers undercut the notion that folk music is a simple and genuine artefact of the past. Instead, invoking nostalgia through song exposes the artificiality of the traffic in nostalgia, which has shaped attitudes toward the ancient Greek and modern American pasts. Through the protagonist’s encounter with two Homer avatars, the Coens dramatize both the process of nostalgia-creation for such a golden age and the rejection of attempts to politically weaponize it: in this case, by obscuring racism in romantic depictions of the “Old South.”

A Critical Review of Online Consumer Behavior

2011 ◽  
pp. 262-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christy M.K. Cheung
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Behavior ◽  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Integrative Model ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Online Consumer Behavior ◽  
The Past ◽  
Online Consumer

The topic of online consumer behavior has been examined under various contexts over the years. Although researchers from a variety of business disciplines have made significant progress over the past few years, the scope of these studies is rather broad, the studies appear relatively fragmented and no unifying theoretical model is found in this research area. In view of this, we provide an exhaustive review of the literature and propose an integrative model of online consumer behavior so as to analyze the online consumer behavior in a systematic way. This proposed framework not only provides us with a cohesive view of online consumer behavior, but also serves as a salient guideline for researchers in this area. We conclude our paper with a research agenda for the study of online consumer behavior.

History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks

PMLA ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 982-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Native American History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Accounts

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

SEMINARIES AND WRITING THE HISTORY OF NEW SPAIN: An Interview with Stafford Poole, C.M.

2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-254
Author(s):  
Susan Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Past Half

Over the course of the past half century, the field of colonial Latin American history has been greatly enriched by the contributions of Father Stafford Poole. He has written 14 books and 84 articles and book chapters and has readily shared his knowledge at coundess symposia and other scholarly forums. Renowned as a historian, he was also a seminary administrator and professor of history in Missouri and California. Moreover, his background and formation are surely unique among priests in the United States and his story is certainly worth the telling.

Essay Reviews

1973 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-283 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
American History ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Educational History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Mountain

ON AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL HISTORY These essay reviews all deal with American educational history. Laurence Veysey evaluates Martin Duberman's account of Black Mountain College, while Harold and Mildred Coy review Raymond and Charlotte Koch's consideration of Commonwealth College. Both Black Mountain and Commonwealth were ambitious experiments in higher education that,with very different intentions, organization, and personnel, flourished and failed in the past fifty years. Marvin Lazeron analyzes several works of the revisionist educational historians. He sees their work as an outgrowth of criticism of present-day schooling and a response to more general reinterpretations of American history.

Father Marquette’s Place in American History

1949 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-438
Author(s):  
Francis Borgia Steck
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past

To Judge from the numerous monuments erected to honor Father Marquette during the past century; the festive demonstrations held at intervals to pay tribute to his name; the prominence accorded him in textbooks and literary productions as discoverer and explorer; the naming for him of localities, social groups and commercial enterprises—to judge from all this, one must conclude that Marquette deserves to rank among the foremost celebrities in American history. Assuredly, no one would think of depriving him pf this place in our annals if it tallied with the testimony which the available records of the past supply. But does it?

The Perpetuation of War in U. S. History Textbooks

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth B. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
American History ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Insight Into

American history textbooks, for the better part of the twentieth century, have focused on war as the primary actor. This article investigates the pervasiveness of war in textbooks and considers the e ect of such on students and their role as future policymakers. In the past decade, history textbooks have undergone a total transition toward an emphasis on social history. An examination of what this entails, and what impacts this may have on schoolchildren and society as a whole, lends insight into the e ects the study of history can have. Finally, I argue that a historian must not only choose events that illustrate the past, but also determine how those choices may a ect the future.

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