So, here we go. The kids are back in school, sort of. I’m back to teaching. It is going to be a mess for the next few months for sure. My own space for research, writing, and reflection is going to be winnowed down to a bare minimum. I’m not sure what the opposite of “watch this space” is, but that might be good advice as the schedule gets very messy. Maybe I’ll just turn this into my reflections on football—I’m sure all of you want to know why Matt Doherty to Spurs isn’t a good move, why Klopp should move to a diamond attack, or why Barca should sign Adama Traore from Wolves. So this might be the last hurrah for a while when it comes to scholarly stuff I’m actually reading. I’ll try to keep at it, but if the spring is any guide, I’m not optimistic.
I tried to do some writing in August, mostly on the chapter on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 for my book on runaway slave laws and their legacy in American law and policing. You’ll also find works that I included or considered for my syllabuses—one for an interdisciplinary freshman seminar on the state, and the other for a grad seminar entitled, “The Historian’s Craft.”
Hang in there, everyone.
Books and Articles
J. Willard Hurst, “Treason in the United States: III. Under the Constitution,” Harvard Law Review 58, no. 6 (Jul., 1945), 806-857.
Brandon R. Byrd, “The Rise of African American Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History (2020), 1-32.
Its principal intention is to reflect on the origins, development, and institutionalization of African American intellectual history while showing the relationship between those developments and broader trends within the US and, at times, European historical profession. This framework is meant as a corrective. African American intellectual history is a distinct field with its own origins, objectives, and methods. Yet it also demands centering within US and global intellectual history. Marginalized for too long, African American intellectual history matters for the present and future reimagining of intellectual history writ large. (3)
“Instead, I’m suggesting that their words call attention to how disciplinary fields become racialized (and gendered and classed)—to a subtext that should become the text in a more critical interpretation, contextualization, and decentering of Wingspread.” (14)
“But another way, in the few articulations of possible methods, terms, definitions, and objectives of African American intellectual history, which refused to foreclose other ways of doing that work, we might see the affirmation and function of freedom as a foundational Black theory (25)
Sara-Maria Sorentino, “The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx’ Method,” International Labor and Working-Class History 96 (Fall, 2019), 17-37.
“If Marx constitutively unthinks racial slavery, then the problem of racial slavery cannot simply be integrated into the theorization of capitalism without the entire constellation of the abstract and concrete undergoing a dramatic modification.” (26)
“The slave labors not only in the production of commodities, not only as a commodity, but in the further circulation of labor-power, insofar as the slave regulates between nonwaged work and wage labor, past and present, nature and history, the concrete and abstract, force and form, nothingness and species-being. Thus, when slaves enter the market for the first time, as black workers freely exchanging their labor-power, they bring the force of slavery with them.” (32)
Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King, “The Political Crisis of the American State: The Unsustainable State in a Time of Unraveling,” in Jacobs and King, ed., The Unsustainable American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3-33.
Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Apr., 1982), 334-56.
Lea VanderVelde, “Servitude and Captivity in the Common Law of Master-Servant: Judicial Interpretations of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Labor Vision Immediately After Its Enactment,” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 27, no. 4 (May, 2019), 1079-1112.
John Craig Hammond, “President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery,” Journal of American History 105, no. 4 (March, 2019), 843-67.
“Over the course of the Missouri crisis, Monroe’s actions were driven by his concerns for maintaining the privileged position of Virginia’s planter class both at home and within the Union.” (852)
Kathryn Olivarius, “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April, 2019), 425-455.
For whites, immunity was a prerequisite for citizenship and social advancement; for blacks, immunity increased their monetary value to their owners and strengthened the cycle of racialized assumptions about the black body that bolstered racial slavery. Black people could thus possess immunity, but not immunocapital, an expedient feint of logic that whites used to enrich themselves and reinforce their social political dominance over blacks. (429)
“Immunocapital is not specific to New Orleans and its hinterlands, nor to the nineteenth century or to yellow fever.” (431)
Bathsheba Demuth, “The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic, 1870-1950,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April, 2019), 483-510.
The state of nature conditions the nature of the state. (487)
Gail Bossenga, “The Nobility’s Demise: Institutions, Status, and the Role of the State,” American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (June, 2019) 942-9.
“The elusive, but real, power of status is also critical for understanding the opportunities, identity, and favored position of nobles in the Old Regime. Status is not simply an assignment of rank in a social hierarchy. Status is relational and interactive: it operates through shared cultural codes that continually sort people according to their perceived level of worth based upon social traits that are considered to be honorable or common.” (944)
Michael McDonnell and Briony Neilson, “Reclaiming a Revolutionary Past: War Veterans, Pensions, and the Struggle for Recognition,” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 3 (Fall, 2019), 467-502.
Ana Racquel Minian, “Offshoring Migration Control: Guatemalan Transmigrants and the Construction of Mexico as a Buffer Zone,” American Historical Review 125, no. 1 (February, 2020), 89-111.
“By pressuring other countries to act as buffer zones, the United States and Western Europe were following in the tradition of nineteenth-century imperial practices of controlling what entered and left less powerful countries and sites of informal empire. In the 1850s, the British Empire had begun helping to run China’s Custom’s Serivce…in 1898, Belgium had helped control Iran’s customs service and from 1905 to 1941, the United States had ensured that Santo Domingo paid its debts to Europe by taking over Dominican customs houses and collecting duties.” (91)
“…Mexico’s leaders effectively gave up their country’s sovereignty to determine who was allowed to immigrate. This agreement also had a more sinister consequence: it led to widespread human rights violations against Central American migrants in Mexico.” (92-3)
“While U.S. officials believed that they were defending their country’s sovereignty against an ‘invasion’ by Central American immigrants, Mexico’s sovereign immigration and border practices were being eroded.” (101)
Claudio Saunt, “Financing Dispossession: Stocks, Bonds, and the Deportation of Native Peoples in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of American History 106, no. 2 (September, 2019), 315-337.
Kirsten Weld, “Police Work, Unbound,” International Labor and Working Class History 97 (Spring, 2020), 197-201.
Samuel Moyn, “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007), 174-94.
Randolph B. Campbell, “The Law of Slavery in Texas,” in Campbell, ed., The Laws of Slavery in Texas: Historical Documents and Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018),
Archival
Judge Peter W. Grey Papers, 1841-1870, MS 417, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.
Series I: Legal notes, ca. 1841-1858State v. Nathan, a Slave, instructions to the jury (1855)"There is no Liberty without Law" Lecture given by Peter Gray before the Houston Lyceum February 28th, 1853
Memphis Police Blotter Book, 1858-1860, Shelby County Records, Shelby County Register of Deeds, https://register.shelby.tn.us/memphis_blotter/blotter.php
Report of the Committee on the Judiciary Upon the Petition of Abbeville Praying an Alteration of the laws in Relation to the Duties of Grand Jurors, No. 197, 1848; Report of the Committee on Colored Population on the Presentments of the Grand Jury of Kershaw District, No. 73, December 7, 1858; South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC
Cases
Thompson v. Young, 30 Miss. 17 (1855)
The statute, Hutch. 629, 51T, § 38, expressly confers the right; and the policy of the country, makes it the duty of every citizen to arrest a runaway slave. It follows therefore, necessarily, that if any person, in essaying to capture a runaway, shall meet with resistance, he may lawfully oppose force to force. He may even justifiably, in such cases, slay the resistant, if the resistance offered be of such a character as to threaten imminent danger to the life or great injury to the person of the captor. (18)
Henry v. Armstrong, July Term, 1854, quoted in L.E. Barber, comp., Reports of Cases at Law and in Equity Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Arkansas, at the January and July Terms 1854, and January Term 1855 (Little Rock: Woodruff Printing Company, 1889), 158-9.
Castner Hanway, Report of the Trial of Castner Hanway for Treason… (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1852).
‘An Act to Provide for the Appointment of Patrols and to Prescribe their Duties and Powers,’ in Oliver C. Hartley, ed., A Digest of the Laws of Texas… (Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait, & Co., 1850), 803.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 9 Stat. 462 (1850)