Hello, historians! We, the #USIH2020 Program Committee, are working hard to finalize the schedule for our newly reimagined conference. Look for it by the end of this month, with an all-access, one-stop hub for you to register for Zoom presentations, enjoy related reading material, skim FAQ’s, and download free resource packets. One big reason why we chose this year’s theme of “Revolution & Reform” is, well, we sure love to talk about it here on the blog. A quick search of our rich back catalog yields over a thousand hits on these topics alone. Here (in no order) are a few classic #USIH reads that we’ve been revisiting before #USIH2020 kicks off in September. Please add more in the comments. Let’s keep the conversation going!
“It’s possible that ‘the Reformation’ or something like it might have come about without the epistemic shock of a New World. But it would have come about differently, and, for better or for worse, it would have made for a different world than the one we live in now and seek to understand.”—L.D. Burnett, “Readings in Western Culture: Martin Luther, 500 Years Later,” 31 Oct. 2017.
“Aside from the introduction, Black Jacobins mostly reads like a dramatic narrative history of the Haitian Revolution. Narrative that is jaw-dropping exciting and makes for a great book on its own. But to me, the greatest quality of Black Jacobins are the lightning bolts of historical wisdom that James nonchalantly drops into the narrative here and there.”—Andrew Hartman, “There is no drama like the drama of history”: C.L.R. James and The Black Jacobins, 15 March 2017.
“The 1876 national exposition model is even less viable today than it was in the 1970s and, as far as I know, nobody is suggesting it. And while some aspects of the 1976 celebration are likely to be repeated—there will almost certainly be commemorative coins—other aspects of the celebration are yet to be decided.”—Ben Alpers, “How Should We Mark the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution?” 9 March 2019.
“Latin American resistance to U.S. policies was fierce, as revolutionary movements spread throughout the region. It was in engagements with radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s that liberation theology emerged.”—Lilian Calles Barger, “Dismantling the Imperial Imagination,” 31 Oct. 2018.
“As an undergraduate, I too railed against the book. How far, I asked with youthful bluster, were minutemen really inspired by the cautionary tale of seventeenth-century Denmark? And yet, like the profession itself, I have found it hard to shake Bailyn’s shadow. How is it that a book that is often only grudgingly admired still occupies such a large part of the field’s mental imagination?”—Kenneth Owen, “Teaching Bailyn’s Ideological Origins, 14 June 2017, part of a joint series with The Junto on the legacy of Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution as it turned 50.
“From astute scholars that you have read, to graduate student friends who live in different places, I believe that the SUSIH crowd is wonderful. You might come to an organization for the content, but you’ll stay for the people and sense of community.”—Rebecca Brenner Graham, “SUSIH: Conferencing While in Graduate School,” 23 Sept. 2019. [Love this whole post welcoming newcomers to our conferences, so I’m adding it in! You can read more of Rebecca’s scholarship here]. Back to #USIH throwback picks…
“After all, the revolution that created the country toppled a king, but left slavery untouched; chose the classic liberal Locke over the budding socialist Rousseau; and looked favorably on religion to moderate the passions unleashed by popular enthusiasm for democracy. The legacy of the Founders is gloriously and frustratingly ambiguous.”—Ray Haberski, “To Make Which World Over Again?” 29 Jan. 2009.
“This march was, perhaps, the most ideologically diverse of them all—including not just civil rights activists, but also nuclear disarmament proponents and women’s rights activists, among other groups. This reflects not so much a move away from African American civil rights—on the contrary, this march was an early moment in Jesse Jackson’s preparations to run for president, and gave other civil rights advocates their biggest platform of the early 1980s—but an increasing understanding of how so many problems perceived by progressives in American society could only be tackled in what we would now call an ‘intersectional’ analysis.”—Robert Greene II, “Marches on Washington and African American Intellectual History,” 11 Oct. 2015.
“Present among my social media feeds were those who insisted that rebellions are actually built on anger, not hope. Of course, the easy way to solve this riddle is to say that both are required: anger intense enough to make acquiescence or accommodation unacceptable, and hope vibrant enough to maintain the will to carry on when things look dire.”—Robin Marie Averbeck, “Apparently, No One Knows What Rebellions Are Built On.”, 26 Jan. 2017.
“I should say that the 1810s are a really interesting moment, I think: the first flush of reforming zeal/optimism after the Revolution about the possibility of various racial ‘uplift’ schemes has now passed in the North and the upper South; but the brutal logics of industrial cotton production and mass Native dispossession/expulsion are still in the future. For younger scholars of racial thought/practice who are looking for a decade to mine more deeply, I’d humbly suggest that the 1810s are worth more scrutiny than they’ve received to date.”—Nicholas Guyatt, author of Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Segregation, in an interview with Eran Zelnik, 4 July 2017.
“I also hope that people will develop a better sense of how black women, particularly members of the working poor and individuals with limited formal education, have functioned as key leaders, theorists, and strategists in US and global history. I hope these women’s stories will broaden readers’ understanding of American and global politics by challenging the neat frameworks that so often dominate mainstream historical narratives.”—Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, in an interview with Holly Genovese, 14 Jan. 2019.
“Adler articulates a philosophy that reinforces slow, patient institutional change, or reform, and rejects any revolutionary philosophy that would destroy or deregulate existing institutions. As such, you can see why he made his prediction.”—Tim Lacy, “‘Almost Always Polemical’: Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part II),” 7 Juy 2007.
“Given divergent understandings of poetry and the work it can do in a society, U.S. countercultural poets and Cuban revolutionary poets did not see eye to eye on much that was specific despite genuinely mutual enthusiasm and attraction. Underlying an increasingly widening disjunction between U.S. and Latin American poets were epistemological differences that were possibly more important than ideological constructs like anticommunism.”—Richard Cándida Smith, “Review Essay on The Poetry of the Americas,” 17 Feb. 2019.
“My book Scientists at War examined competing ideas among Cold War scientists about how best to influence policy: whether to work inside or outside the system, or—by the time of the Vietnam War—whether to try to destroy the system itself. I tend to be attracted to the study of competing visions of politics, economics, and ethics in times of social upheaval, so ‘Revolution and Reform’ connects very closely to my own scholarly interests.”—Sarah Bridger, USIH Book Prize Winner, in our Spotlight/Insight interview series.
“Of course, we do have brilliant studies of transatlantic crosspollinations of reform driven by those kind of emotions, with Daniel Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings and James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory taking pride of place. But those are also histories where the master’s tools are precisely the instruments being taken up in the cause of reform, where power is looking for something to fix even before a demand is made.”—Andy Seal, “The Reformism of Fear,” 12 Aug. 2019.
“African American intellectuals in the revolutionary and early national periods, including Thomas Paul and Primus Hall, had called for increased access to education as a means of racial uplift. What was new about Stewart was the fact that she said these things in public, before audiences of men and women, becoming the first American woman, white or black, to do so.”—Chris Cameron, “Maria Stewart, Black Prophet and Black Feminist,” 30 June 2014.
“Again by way of analogy between the individual person and the nation-state, the revolutions that proclaimed the Rights of Man also helped establish the sovereignty of nation-states and their interests; the rights of universal individuals became the rights of nationals, and others such as refugees were deprived of the ‘right to have rights.’”—Pete Kuryla, “Some Thoughts on Interest in Arendt’s The Human Condition,” 6 Dec. 2017.
“So what happens when we invoke a continental/hemispheric approach? First and foremost, it foregrounds the problem of race. Americans encountered both the indigenous bodies who populated the continent as well as the African bodies who had been imported to work the land. Everywhere they looked in their new continent they faced non-white populations.”—Benjamin E. Park, “Continental History: It’s So Hot Right Now,” 12 Sept. 2016.
“It leads me to wonder what something like the legend of Inkpaduta, especially when contrasted to his complicated life, means for the history of ideas and reputations, particularly in rural areas and in the history of the West. It’s hard to trace directly the history of an idea passed by word of mouth around campfires or in barns overflowing with local history ephemera.”—Andrew Klumpp, “The Idea of an Unrepentant Sioux Chief,” 17 Jan. 2019.
“In resignifying figures like Martí through a U.S. centric narrative, we may end up overlooking the relations such individuals and their communities continued to have with Latin America, not to mention the practices of identification that tied them affectively, culturally, and politically to their places of origin (in the case of Martí, one can point to his revolutionary discourse of a race-less Cuban nationality and his mestizo conception of a Latin American identity in ‘Our America’). My emphasis on maintaining the epistemological oscillation between the Latino and the Latin American in the nineteenth century represents a way to articulate this hemispheric relationality: the act of reading the North from the South and the South from the North, in dialectical fashion.”—Kahlila Chaar-Pérez, “Between Two Americas?: José Martí as a Latin American/Latino Intellectual, Part 3,” 31 March 2013.
“But the inside work is on-going. The goal is revolutionary, transformative change. I don’t mean in the sense of overthrowing an existing political structure. I mean in the sense of overthrowing an episteme; I mean a revolution in the dominant understanding of how the world is, how people are, and what’s valuable.”—Anthony Bart Chaney, “The Yogi’s Work: A Transformation of Values,” 17 Oct. 2018.
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