Review article: Slavery and slavishness in Russia and America

Hellie, Richard, Slavery in Russia 1450–1725. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. xix, 776 pp.

Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. xiv, 517 pp.     

Between Slavery and Freedom on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras

African slaves exhibited considerable geographic and social mobility in late colonial Spanish Honduras. In the contested terrain of the Atlantic coast especially, people of African descent occupied a broad range of social roles. While English-owned slaves who escaped to Spanish territory were freed and then utilised as settlers and workers along the coast, the esclavos del Rey (‘Crown slaves’) originally employed in the construction of the fortress of San Fernando de Omoa found other avenues to enhance their status and even obtain varying degrees of freedom.     

Gender and the Public Sphere: Alternative Forms of Integration in Nineteenth-Century America

This paper intends to evaluate two competing models of multicultural integration in stratified societies: the multiple publics model of Nancy Fraser and the fragmented public sphere model of Jeffrey Alexander. Fraser and Alexander disagree on whether or not claims to a general common good or common humanity are democratically legitimate in light of systemic inequality. Fraser rejects the idea that cultural integration can be democratic in conditions of social inequality, while Alexander accepts it and tries to explain how it may be realized. In order to address this debate, I analyze the cultural foundations of the female-led, maternally themed social movements of nineteenth-century America. The language of these movements supports Alexander's position over Fraser's, though it also suggests that Alexander is mistaken in the specifics of his cultural theory of a general and democratic common good. While Alexander's model of integration is structured uniquely by what he and Philip Smith have called the discourse of civil society, the evidence suggests a distinctly alternative, equally democratic code at play in this case, which I have labeled a discourse of affection and compassion.     

Gender and the Economics of the Sentimental Market in Nineteenth-Century America

This essay explores the cultural history of nineteenth-centurybusiness failure as based on textual analysis of five hundred"begging letters" from strangers who sought assistance fromJohn D. Rockefeller between the Panics of 1873 and 1893. Failurewas an economic crisis as well as an identity crisis that strippedmen of their opportunities to achieve normative ideals suchas independence and family breadwinning. Sandage analyzes beggingletters as an epistolary genre, a mode of surveillance, anda declaration of "the political economy of the Forgotten Man."Businessmen and their wives reinscribed masculine selfhood byconceiving market relations as an inseparable mixture of bothgift and commodity exchange, an amalgam of sentiment and economicrationality. Begging letters illuminate the persistence of informaleconomies—a black market in alms conceived in oppositionto the bureaucratic surveillance of "scientific charity." Byshowing how beggars preferred the language of commodity exchangeto that of gift or charity, Sandage analyzes masculinity asa transactional status, wherein esteem depended on being adjudgedworthy to buy, sell, borrow, and repay. By creating an informaleconomy, failed men and their wives deployed sentiment as aform of capital to buy back manly self-respect and to reacquirethe resources and credentials necessary for striving in theformal, commodity market.     

A Documentary History of African-American Freedom: An Introduction to the Race,Slavery and Free Blacks Microfilm Collection

This essay offers an introduction to the Race, Slavery and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures and County Courts microfilm collection, edited and published by Professor Loren Schweninger and the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 2003–04 the author joined the RSPP staff as the National Historical and Public Records Commission's Fellow in Documentary Editing. This essay identifies how the petition testimonies included in this unusual microfilm collection can inform our understanding of African-American freedom before emancipation. More specifically, it examines petition testimonies filed with county courts and legislatures for evidence of how slaves, slaveholders and free African-Americans experienced the legal process of manumission. It argues for petition testimonies as a unique form of African-American narrative.     

William Blake and America: Freedom and Violence in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In this article, I consider the absence of a general readership of William Blake's poetry in nineteenth-century Britain and compare that neglect to the American Transcendentalists' reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) in the 1840s. The American interest in Blake's poetry is complemented by his fascination with the events in the Atlantic World in the years culminating in the American War of Independence. I will offer a reading of Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) showing that the Civil War fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict. This is developed first by considering Ralph Waldo Emerson's changing responses to slavery and race during the turbulent middle decades of the century, and then by addressing Walt Whitman's attempt to negotiate postbellum America. This negotiation, I argue, results in the emergence of those two powerfully conflicting strains in his mature poetry: emancipatory fervour and simultaneous despair at the violence intrinsic in liberty.