Rediker makes a point that other historians of the Atlantic slave trade confirm: many African captives feared that the European slavers were cannibals who were going to eat them.
This passage from Rediker's The Slave Ship, about captive African women singing their histories, is powerful. #slaveryarchive#GUhist286
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Normally I would be tempted to tweet some annoying pig-related pun, but this story is too important, and the processes of modern industrial hog farming are too horrifying, to joke about. nyti.ms/3xrOAMl
"In the early 1970s, North Carolina had about 18,000 hog farms, with an average herd of about 75 hogs. Today, it has only 2,000 hog operations, with herds as large as 60,000 hogs."
"And the waste sprayed on fields often fell on the roofs of nearby houses, Addison writes, with “the soft pitter-patter of rain.”"
The article shows that support peaked in early June 2020 and has declined since, primarily among Republicans. Of course Republican politicians have demonized #BLM, but there is a deep problem with the concept of "racial justice" itself. A short thread: nyti.ms/34afsBf
My thinking is influenced by Racecraft by Barbara and Karen Fields. In an essay on Woodward's Origins of the New South, Barbara Fields writes, "'equality' and 'justice', once modified by 'racial', become euphemisms for their opposites." (Racecraft, 159) versobooks.com/books/1645-rac…
The racecraft in this NYT essay resides first in reifying racial categories - endorsing race with a false reality and abstracting it out of the social and political process that makes it seem real; and second in the folly and ambiguity of measuring "racial attitudes"...
Thank you to Thaddeus Russell for having me and Barbara Fields on #Unregistered. Please watch. We discuss the Hannah Fizer case, racecraft, and history.
Here's the episode. If you've never heard Barbara Fields speak about racecraft before, you are in for a treat and an education. @ThaddeusRussell#Unregistered
Teaching a grad class for @GUHistory on the US to 1900 this semester. Just had an invigorating first class, despite being on Zoom. Always fun to get to know a new group of students. Let's go!
Kicked off the semester with *Our Declaration* by @dsallentess. All historians should reflect seriously on this line from the book: "While history can serve to help us understand many things much better, it can also function as a barrier to entry."
Book #2 in my grad class on US to 1900 is Robert Parkinson's The Common Cause, which shows how fears of slave revolt, Indian war, and foreign mercenaries inspired the patriot rebellion against Britian. Great on revolutionary-era information networks. uncpress.org/book/978146962…
Historians often invoke contingency to imply that nothing is inevitable. Things could have gone one way or another. The concept goes hand-in-hand with agency, that all things are possible. Except that all things are not possible...
As Marx famously wrote in the 18th Brumaire, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please..." The historians' task is to explain why things happened as they did. That isn't our only task, but it is an important one...