An Intellectual History Grab-Bag Of Links, January 21, 2018

First, apologies for my near-radio silence on the blog in recent weeks. Rest assured, I’ve been as intrigued and fascinated by recent blog posts as well as a few various reads on the web. The following links are some of the most fascinating that I came across this week that have something to do with varieties of intellectual, political, and cultural history. Later today I’ll also be posting part one of a two-part interview Andy Seal did for the book reviews section with Jon Lauck, author of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism—look for it!

The Radicalism of South Carolina’s 1868 Constitutional Convention—Historians Blaine Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle have done a wonderful job of recapping one of the most politically radical moments in American history: the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868. The writing of the state constitution, which included the participation of numerous African American men (some of whom had been enslaved up until the end of the American Civil War), altered the relationship between the state government and the people of South Carolina. Up to that point, South Carolina had been one of the least democratic states in the Union. Slavery permeated the entire state government, and the franchise was limited to only the wealthiest of men in the state. But the state would never be the same after 1868—and the long history of white supremacy in the state, and active resistance to said supremacy, was a reaction to this short, noble experiment in democracy. The University of South Carolina’s South Caroliniana Library, a major repository of numerous primary sources on South Carolina and Southern history, is “live-tweeting” the Constitutional Convention of 1868, using the hashtag #1868Convention. I’ve written about aspects of this convention and its importance to South Carolina’s history, and expect more from me about the convention here and elsewhere on the web.

The misuses of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Francois Duvalier—over at Black Perspectives, Brandon Byrd has a fascinating piece on how Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier appropriated the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The ways in which King and his tragic death have been appropriated has been written about before, but I have never encountered a piece that situated that moment in international history. Here Byrd, an expert on Haiti and African Americans, chronicles the ways in which Haiti’s dictator tried to use the symbolism of King for his own political ends. It’s another enlightening read that should challenge us to think beyond America’s borders when it comes to memory of African American political figures.

Star Trek and the Black Family—Finally, a personal favorite of mine: an essay by Angelica Jade Bastien on the way in which Star Trek: Deep Space Nine presented the African American family of Benjamin and Jake Sisko. It’s an imaginative use of popular culture to look at the issue of the “black family” in American history. That Bastien does so with the popular Star Trek franchise is a reminder of how we can find the intersections of cultural history and popular culture in many facets of modern society. Of course, here at S-USIH we’ve written extensively about Star Trek and history, and I’ve tackled Deep Space Nine’s intersection with history and culture elsewhere. For all those reasons, I heartily recommend this piece to our readers.