I’m an insomniac in the best of times. But even by my paltry standards, I don’t think I got much sleep at all in October. To say I was consumed by the election hysteria would be to vastly undersell things. I was probably even more miserable to be around than usual (sorry fam). So I had a big stack of things that I wanted to get to that I didn’t quite get to. Some choice moments of insomnia—and away from twitter—did allow me to look at the following, though.
Cheers from the Spring,
Gautham
SLAVERY & THE LAW
Laura R. Sandy, The Overseers of Early American Slavery: Supervisors, Enslaved Laborers, and The Plantation Enterprise (New York: Routledge, 2020).
A brief comment: Sandy’s book is a really important contribution to the sociolegal history of slavery. Sandy’s goal is both to understand as much as possible the lives of this crucial class of plantation laborers in early America while also connecting the overseer to broader public, private and ‘mixed-character’ levels of governance (8-10, 11). The legal historian finds careful attention to the changing letter of statutes in Virginia in particular, thus providing an important connection to similar works by Philip Schwarz and more recently by Warren Billings. Chapter 5, “Unmerciful Overseers and Conflicts of Power: Violence, Defiance, and the Practice of Authority,” is particularly helpful in this regard.
Laura R. Sandy, “Divided Loyalties in a ‘Predatory War’: Plantation Overseers and Slavery during the Revolutionary War,” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 2 (May, 2014), 357-92.
William E. Wiethoff, Crafting the Overseer’s Image (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
Anna O. Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—Immigration Federalism and the Early American State,” Studies in American Political Development 28 (October 2014), 107-128.
R.J.M. Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Richard A. Paschal, Negro Rule: Jim Crow in North Carolina: The Legislative Program from 1865 to 1920 (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2020).
Deposition of Christian Breithampt, December 27, 1820, in Breithampt to John C. Calhoun, December 27, 1820, Secretary of War, Letters Received, 1820-1, War Department and Indian Affairs, 1800-1824.
-happened upon this letter in which the deponent casually implicates the Governor of Georgia, John Clark, in the slave smuggling operations on Amelia Island.
Governor of Georgia v. Madrazo, 26 U.S. 110 (1828)
-interesting intersection of 11th amendment application and slave smuggling regulation, e.g.:
“In December, 1817, the Legislature of Georgia passed an act which empowered the governor to appoint some fit and proper person to proceed to all such ports and places within this state as have or may have, or may hereafter hold any negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color as have been or may hereafter be seized or condemned under the above recited act of Congress, and who may be subject to the control of this state, and the person so appointed shall have full power and authority to receive all such negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color and to convey the same to Milledgeville and place them under the immediate control of the executive of this state. The second section authorizes the governor to sell such negroes, mulattoes, or persons of color in such manner as he may think most advantageous to the state. The third directs that they may be delivered up to the Colonization Society on certain conditions therein expressed, provided the application be made before the sale.” (at 119)
Natalie Joy, “The Indian’s Cause: Abolitionists and Native American Rights,” Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (2018), 215-42.
Larry Eugene Rivers, Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Florida (University of Illinois Press, 2012).
James Oakes, “The Political Significance of Slave Resistance,” History Workshop 22 (Aut., 1986), 89-107.
Rick Valelly, “Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War Transformation of the U.S. State,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 1 (March, 2014), 145-52.
Manisha Sinha, “The Complicated Histories of Emancipation: State of the Field at 150,” Reviews in American History 41, no. 4 (Dec., 2013), 665-71.
OTHER GOOD STUFF
Ariel Ron, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).
Joseph Thomas Ross, “‘Strange Doings with Respect to Preemption’: Federal Power and Political Interests at the Chillicothe Land Office, 1800-1802,” Ohio Valley History 20, no. 3 (Fall, 2020), 3-25.
Malgorzata Fidelis, “Tensions of Transnationalism: Youth Rebellion, State Backlash, and 1968 in Poland,” American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October, 2020), 1232-1259.
Rachel Hope Cleves, “Vocabula Amatoria: A Glossary of French Culinary Sex Terms,” American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October, 2020), 132-36.
Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 13-52.
Richard C. Todd, “The Produce Loans: A Means of Financing the Confederacy,” North Carolina Historical Review 27, no. 1 (January, 1950), 46-74.
Chelsea Stieber, “Dessalines’s America: A Decolonial Critique,” September 17, 2020, Insurrect: Radical Thinking in Early American Studies.
Katarina Keane, “New Directions in Civil Rights Historiography,” History: Reviews of New Books 44, no. 1 (2016), 1-4.
Craig R. Whitney, “Arms and the Men,” New York Times, June 22, 2014, A:20.
Rebecca Marchiel, After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Brandon Mills, The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
FOOD
Kirsty Major, “Finding Scouse: The Decline of a Liverpool Stew,” Substack.com, October 7, 2020.
Asha Gomez, I Cook in Color: Bright Flavors from My Kitchen and Around the World (New York: Running Press, 2020).