One surprise in researching **Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery** was the richness of New England business archives on the material culture of Southern slavery. Here is a pattern book from a R.I. manufacturer in the 1830s specializing in plaids. 1/6 The firm produced a dozen+ plaids, some woven under its factory roof and others distributed to nearby families to produce at home. Fabrics vended in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans and esp. NYC, the hub of the national market in clothing and tools for enslaved people. 2/6

What does scholarship look like at the intersection of Labor History and History of Science?

A thread.

tl;dr Conference in Philadelphia, June 2022, see the cfp:

sciencehistory.org/sites/default/… Both fields have gone far in recent years to think capaciously about their objects of study, expanding what constitutes labor and what constitutes as science; reconsidering where science and labor are performed; and recalibrating who counts as a worker or a practitioner.
2/12

I appreciate all the kind words about the prospective syllabus for a history of capitalism graduate seminar. There was a point I was trying to make about what the history of capitalism looks like, and so I wanted to try again with an alternative model. A 18-tweet thread... Same parameters as last time: a 500 year survey, global, exposing students to multiple methodologies and approaches, with 1 monograph and 2 articles per week (except for week 1 to provide some theoretical touchstones)

2/

History of Capitalism syllabus discussion ahead, a 20 tweet thread.

I'm refining a syllabus for a graduate seminar, essentially a 500-year survey across time, place, and methodology. The idea would be to introduce students to the field (to the extent I see it) 1/ Parameters: each week (except week 1) has a monograph and 2 articles/chapters. The coverage of the course overall needs to be global, it needs to showcase different kinds of approaches (cultural history, economic history, labor history, etc.) and it needs to run 1500 to now. 2/

There is a simpler explanation to why the current slavery/capitalism historiography looks the way it does in terms of the focus on the post-Revolutionary US.

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1165744354385891329

If you started grad school in the early 1990s, you had to read Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, Joyce Appleby's Capitalism and the New Social Order... books that said post-Rev US economy maximized freedom for pretty much everyone.

Question for colleagues in economic history so dismayed about the discussion of cotton, plantation slavery, and capitalism in #1619: Are there ways you would analyze 20/21st c. petroleum that might be useful for thinking historically about cotton/slavery/capitalism? 1/12 In 20th c. economic history, oil presumably has spill-over effects such that we don’t just measure its economic importance by summing up the value of exported barrels and gas sales at the pump? 2/12