In this installment of the Highlight Series, The Life of a Historian presents a quick summary and review of…

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Affiliate Disclosure

Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

The story of civil rights and the Cold War is in part the story of a struggle over the narrative of race and democracy.” ¹

A work by historian and legal scholar Mary L. Dudziak.

An Abridged History of Cold War Civil Rights

As with most works of scholarship, seemingly, Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights germinated from another process of intellectual inquiry. During law school, Dudziak spent a summer working for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For an ongoing school desegregation litigation, the ACLU needed her to construct a history of segregation in Topeka, Kansas. This project engendered Dudziak’s interest in understanding how Topeka felt about its role in the broader civil rights movement.

Initially, Dudziak intended “to write a community-centered study” on this topic to serve as her Ph.D. dissertation. ² However, her curiosity in a school board member’s use of ‘American practice’ when discussing desegregation guided her to investigate why. This scholarly exploration led to connections between the Cold War, foreign and domestic policies, and the civil rights movement.

Eventually, and years later, Dudziak compiled her research and thoughts on this topic to produce Cold War Civil Rights, a work that internationalizes and reframes the civil rights movement within the Cold War.

Purpose & Argument

Purpose

Dudziak’s “Cold War Civil Rights traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy by setting a U.S. history topic within the context of Cold War world history.” ³

By reframing the civil rights movement within the broader Cold War history, Dudziak internationalizes a seemingly domestic topic to illuminate on the interconnections of national and global affairs. Thus, her approach adds another layer of analysis to understanding both the civil rights movement and the Cold War.

Arguments

In her introduction, Dudziak states “World War II marked a transition point in American foreign relations, American politics, and American.” ⁴ Her arguments throughout  Cold War Civil Rights emerge from this starting point. Even though she does not detail why–as it is out of the scope of this work–Dudziak does make clear the period of history that followed World War II offered a strikingly different relationship for America at home and abroad. America, unlike before, stood as one of the world powers in the newly established bi-polar world. This led to a conscientious effort to define ‘American’ as unique and wholly superior to the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR).

As a result, politicians and citizens alike placed American democracy on a moral pedestal above the tyrannical and oppressive system of communism. According to Dudziak, this simultaneously had a positive and negative effect on social movements within the United States. The Cold War climate led to restrictions on “discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class.” ⁵ Also, it facilitated the denial of discourse on the relationship between racism and colonialism.

However, the politics of the Cold War, even with its constrictions, created a narrow avenue that enabled the passing of selected civil rights reforms and legislations. Dudziak’s arguments rest on this foundation. She illustrates how racism at home undermined America’s international leadership and claim as leader of the free world. USSR, and even allies, routinely publicized events that displayed America’s hypocrisy through its treatment of its African American citizens. In doing so, Dudziak claims that much of the federal government’s receptive response to grass-roots efforts for civil rights during this time derived from an international policy perspective.

Methodology

Dudziak examines the civil rights movement through the reactions of the international community and the responses of the US federal government. As a result, she takes a top-down approach, bringing national and international leaders to the forefront. Specifically, she addresses the actions and rhetoric of presidents and members of the US Department of State.

Although Dudziak’s narrative seemingly ignores the agency and determination of everyday African Americans and grassroots activists, she addresses this concern early. She states that “this focus on particular events and often on prominent leaders should not be seen as an effort to privilege a top-down focus as ‘the’ story of civil rights history. The international perspective is not a substitute for the rich body of civil rights scholarship but another dimension that sheds light on those important and well-told stories.” ⁶ Furthermore, throughout her work, Dudziak repeatedly emphasizes the fact that international criticism and US response would not have occurred without African Americans actively fighting for racial equality.

Sources

Dudziak utilizes a variety of sources including foreign and domestic newspapers, State Department records, publications from the United States Information Agency (USIA), diplomatic correspondences, and Supreme Court briefs. As noted before, her sources reflect her ‘top-down’ approach. However, it also enables a thorough analysis of the federal government’s assessment and response to the international reaction and reception of the American civil rights movement within the geopolitical context of the Cold War.

Other Works by Mary L. Dudziak

• War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

• Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey

Additional Reviews of Cold War Civil Rights 

• The Life of a Historian

• H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online)

In this installment of the Highlight Series, The Life of a Historian presents a quick summary and review of…

Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700 – 1750 .New York: Cambridge Press, 1987.

Affiliate Disclosure

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700 – 1750

The omnipotence of the elements and the fragility of human life marked the consciousness of every early-eighteenth century seaman.” ⁷

A work by historian Marcus Rediker

Purpose & Argument

Purpose

According to Rediker, the purpose of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is to “recover the experiences of the common seaman in the first half of the eighteenth century, to continue and extend the path-breaking work of Jesse Lemisch, and to do so in the spirit of ‘history from the bottom up.'” ⁸

Additionally, his work is “part of a larger current effort to transform ‘labor history’ into ‘working-class history.'” ⁹ That is to say, labor history should be more than the political and economic conflicts between capital and labor. It should include the cultural background and social relations that defined and bounded individual and collective groups of workers.

Therefore, his narrative is more inclusive than traditional labor history and expands on the historiography by continuing its trajectory toward a working-class history.

Arguments

Rediker’s contribution to historiography is the expansion of the theoretical framework for the relationship of capital and labor to include seafarers of the pre-industrial period. His work is founded on the central idea that “the seaman was central to the changing history and political economy of the North Atlantic world.” ¹⁰  According to Rediker, early eighteenth-century seaman accomplished such a feat by entering “new relations both to capital–as one of the first generations of free waged labors–and to each other–as collective laborers.” ¹¹

Rediker argues that not only did the merchant ship engender a sense of collectivity among the entire ship in “confrontation with nature and by the need for survival,” but also a collectivity among the common tars. ¹² The latter led to a pre-industrial class of workers delineated by shared language, culture, and characteristics of anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperation for the common good of all seamen.

The free wage laborers nineteenth-century and twentieth-century–the field hands, the factory workers, the skilled and unskilled laborers–descended the eighteenth-century seamen. The conflicts over pay and working conditions and the negotiating tactics and strategies seaman employed not only represented a shared experience for later laborers but also marked the beginning of collectivism among workers against capital. In essence, the merchant ship was the precursor to the factory.

Methodology

For Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Rediker uses an interdisciplinary approach to construct his working-class history. He draws upon recent scholarship in history, linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and ethnography. Such an approach allows Rediker to elaborate on the work of eighteenth-century seafarers. More importantly, it enables Rediker to explore and illuminate the cultural and social identity and consciousness of these seamen.

The necessity of employing an interdisciplinary approach stems from Rediker’s view of history. He believes “that the history of seafaring people can and must be more than a chronicle of admirals, captains, and military battles at sea: It must be made to speak to larger historical problems and processes. The seaman’s life and labor require an international history, linking the pasts of Britain and America to broad intercultural histories of continental Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the East and West Indies.” ¹³

Furthermore, and in a similar vein to E.P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman, and Eugene D. Genovese, Rediker approached and conducted his interpretation of source material in a way to present history from the bottom up.

Sources

Rediker relies seemingly equally upon, both, primary and secondary sources. As mentioned above, his choice of secondary sources derived from an array of historical fields and academic disciplines. This is required for two reasons. First, to build his theoretical framework that includes expanding characteristics associated with nineteenth-century global industrial capitalism to a pre-industrial period. And second, to detail how early-eighteenth century seamen formed a collective identity and consciousness. One that was acknowledged even among the general populous in port towns of the British Empire.

Although Rediker employs newspapers, ship logs, an assortment of governmental documents, and personal correspondences, journals, and diaries, “the records produced by the admiralty courts–documents on more than 2,200 cases between 1700-1750–have served as a foundation for this study.” ¹⁴ The records of the admiralty court records provide a variety of perspectives from those aboard the merchant ship. Thus, offering invaluable insights into the daily life and relationships of seamen and their captains.

However, as Rediker notes, these sources are not without their “problems and inconsistencies.” ¹⁵ Namely, the admiralty courts favored merchants and captains over seamen and final court decisions are often unknown due to appeals and settlements outside the court.

Other Works by Marcus Rediker

• The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

• Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail

• The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

• The Slave Ship: A Human History

• Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

• The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

In this installment of the Highlight Series, The Life of a Historian presents a quick summary and review of…

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1st rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Affiliate Disclosure

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

There has been no timeless wilderness in a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis.” ¹³

A work by historian William Cronon.

An Abridged History of Changes in the Land

Originally published in 1983, Changes in the Land developed from a seminar paper Cronon wrote during his first year of graduate school at Yale University. Although his professor, Edmund Morgan, hoped he would publish his work, Cronon seemed reluctant at first. As he puts it, “I had come to Yale not to write about colonial New England, to study Chicago and its hinterland in the nineteenth-century Middle West.” ¹⁶

Thus, the writing and research that would become a foundational pillar to the field of environmental history resided in the purgatory of Cronon’s filing cabinet for two years.

Luckily, as life happens so often, a series of serendipitous events and introductions over a few week period led to Cronon expanding on his original seminar paper and publishing it as the book Changes in the Land.

Purpose & Argument

In the preface, Cronon explicitly and clearly states both his thesis and purpose for writing Changes in the Land. Additionally, and although he attributes much of the ecological changes to European views on property and capitalism, Cronon is adamant that his work is “not a human history.” ¹⁷

Purpose

According to Cronon, his “purpose throughout is to explain why New England habitats changed as they did during the colonial period. It is not my intention to rewrite the human history of the region: this is not a history of New England Indians, or of Indian-colonial relations, of the transformation of English colonists from Puritans to Yankees.” ¹⁸

Thesis

Cronon writes, “my thesis is simple: the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes–well known to historians–in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations–less well-known historians–in the region’s plants and animal communities.” ¹⁹

Arguments

The primacy of Cronon’s argument is the different and conflicting views of land and property held by Indians and colonists, and their effects on the ecology of New England. Whereas Indians perceived the land as something to be used, colonists understood land as property to be owned and to produce commodities.

Before European settlement, New England was the home of a mobile human population that relocated villages from habitat to habitat and viewed property rights according to ecological use and need. Afterward, New England was the home to a human population that believed in fixity and property rights as owners of the land itself. Land and natural resources were now a commodity to be sold, bought, and profited off of in pursuit of more property and material wealth.

This transition in way of perceiving and using the land led to large populations of livestock and other non-native animals, large-scale deforestation and grazing, wide-spread hunting, fishing, and fur trapping, removal of native flora and fauna that proved invaluable as market goods, and the bounding of land with fences and other markers of ownership.

As Cronon illustrates throughout, the effects of such a transition were vast and immense. The fusion of European views of property and land, the global market, and the abundant natural resources of New England forever transformed the ecological landscape of the region.

Methodology

Cronon constructed his narrative and argument, both, thematically and chronologically. He begins by contrasting the precolonial ecosystems of New England with those at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He follows with a comparison of the ecological relationships of pre-colonial Indians and the Europeans arriving in New England. His work then continues on to describe the process of ecological change following European arrival.

Sources

Cronon relied on a variety of sources that range from ones common to the practice of history (e.g. contemporary accounts and records) and ones a bit more unorthodox but no less, and arguably more, important to his particular historical narrative.

The writings and descriptions of travelers and early naturalists, both during the nascent years of English settlement and later towards the end of the eighteenth-century, do much of the heavy lifting. But as Cronon argues, although they provide contemporary observations of New England landscapes and the changes that occurred over the course of colonial settlement, they also require proper evaluation of the individual’s skills as a naturalist. Additionally, what purpose did the individual have to write their account? How much of the land did they explore and detail? These questions shaped much of Cronon’s decision to use and how to interpret these sources.

Although less personal, colonial town, court, and legislative records offered more detailed data and specifics on deforestation, livestock and predators, property boundaries, conflicts between Indians and colonists, and the composition of forests. Furthermore, this information helped assess and corroborate individual accounts.

Cronon also used less traditional sources in the form of relict old-growth timber, fossil pollen in pond and bog sediments, and microscopic changes in soil flora and fauna. Admittedly, he discusses his intellectual limitations in using such sources but argues such sources are needed to illustrate the ecological changes of colonial New England.

Other Works by William Cronon

• Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

• Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

• Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past