On 11-12-05 8:57 AM, "Alan J. Singer" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Fairy Tale History at New York¹s (un)Historical Society
>By Alan Singer, Hofstra University
>http://hnn.us/articles/fairy-tale-history-new-york%E2%80%99s-unhistorical-
>society
>
>The New-York Historical Society and the Gilder Lehrman Institute are
>partnering to rewrite and present to the public a revised history of
>slavery in the Americas and the struggle to end it. Unfortunately, their
>version, at least as it is presented in the Society¹s new exhibit,
>³Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn,² is rife with platitudes,
>inaccuracies, and fairy tales.
>http://www.nyhistory.org/node/580
>
>The ideological distortions in the exhibit are consistent with political
>direction being imposed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, co-founders
>of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, who control the
>Board of Directors of the New York Historical Society. They are major
>rightwing players in the war over what should be taught as history.
>Richard Gilder is a founding member, and former chair, of the Board of
>Trustees of the Manhattan Institute. Lewis Lehrman is a trustee of the
>American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage
>Foundation. In a New York Times interview in 2004, Gilder acknowledged
>that their goal was to influence the national debate over history. Their
>view on slavery, as explained by Lehrman, is that it was ³an institution
>supported throughout the world, but Americans took the initiative in
>destroying it.² Lehrman deplored the belief that ³American history
>consists of one failure after another to deal with the issue of slavery.²
>However, he believes that ³One of the triumphs of America was to have
>dealt directly with that issue in the agonies of a civil war, and to have
>passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.²
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/arts/shift-at-historical-society-raises-
>concerns.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
>
>As a teacher and a historian I agree that the trans-Atlantic slave trade
>and New World slavery as well as the revolutionary movements at the end
>of the 19th century played major roles in shaping the modern world. I was
>pleased that the slave rebellion in Santo Domingue that led to the
>creation an independent Haiti received prominent place along with
>revolutions in British North America, France, and Great Britain. However,
>other than the coverage of the struggle in Haiti, I was very disappointed
>when I visited the exhibit.
>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/arts/design/revolution-at-the-new-york-h
>istorical-society.html?pagewanted=all
>
>I have three major problems with what I saw in the exhibit. Many of the
>panels offered very broad simplifications that present platitudes about
>the past two hundred years rather than an accurate account or historical
>analysis. Some panels were more focused but equally misleading or
>inaccurate. A last area that I found particulalry inaccurate was the
>exhibit¹s discussion of the British campaign to end, first the
>trans-Atlantic slave trade, and then slavery in the British Empire. I had
>to copy the text quoted below from the exhibit panels in a notepad so I
>apologize for any errors.
>
>A major theme of the exhibit is that ³The Age of Revolution made us all
>citizens of the world as well as our own nation, loyal to global ideals
>as well as local and group bonds.² I only wish this were true. If it
>were, slavery in the United States might not have continued into the
>1860s until it ended after a bloody Civil War; European imperialists
>might not have sub-divided and colonized Africa and Asia in the 19th
>century; the United States and other countries might not have virtually
>exterminated their indigenous populations; and the world might have
>avoided World War 1, World War 2, a series of genocides, and the nuclear
>arms race.
>
>A second theme was that ³Remaking law rather than remaking society has
>been the nation¹s strongest instrument of change for more than two
>centuries.² I think this represents a fundamental misunderstanding about
>the relationship between law and society. Laws are generally a reflection
>of a society rather than instruments for change. The American legal
>system has frequently codified social injustice. Fugitive slave laws,
>Black Codes, Jim Crow segregation laws, and numerous Supreme Court
>decisions, the most infamous being Dred Scott and Plessy, supported the
>enforcement of slavery and racism. The ³strongest instrument of change²
>has been social movements to extend liberty and democracy that forced
>changes in the law. These include the abolitionist, labor, Civil Rights,
>women¹s, and gay rights movements.
>
>The exhibit maintains that ³gradually during and after the Revolution,
>and particularly in the Bill of Rights² rights were defined as
>³universal.² Actually, the Bill of Rights, which placed limits on the
>ability of congress to interfere with religious practice, speech,
>assembly, and the press, placed no similar or restrictions on state
>governments, hence the legality of slavery, which is unmentioned in the
>Constitution, remains up to the individual states. It is not until the
>14th amendment, approved after the Civil War in 1868, that states were
>forced to respect the rights of citizens of the United States and it was
>not until 1920 that American women were ensured the right to vote. Prior
>to the Civil War, the rights protected by the Bill of Rights were limited
>to a few and could be abridged by the states; they clearly were not
>universal.
>
>The exhibit concludes with the statement about what the modern world owes
>to the Age of Revolution. It claims the Age of Revolution ³created
>several Œnew normals.¹² They included that ³slavery was fundamentally
>inhuman and had to be abolished²; ³Nations should have the right to
>govern themselves²; and ³Even the poor and weak should be treated with
>dignity.² But of course, these were not ³normals² for much of the 19th
>and 20th centuries and are still not ³normals² in much of the world
>today. If they were, how do we explain British policy during the Great
>Irish Famine of the 1840s and the famine in India in the 1940s when food
>was shipped overseas while people starved, and recurrent famine in Africa
>during the last three decades; colonized indigenous people in Latin
>America driven off of their homelands in the name of profit or progress;
>civil wars in Africa financed by outside corporate interests; control
>over the economies of many of the world¹s nominally independent nations
>by banking interests based in the economically developed nations and
>supra-governmental multi-national agencies; and the more than twenty
>million who live in bondage today, more than half of whom are children.
>http://www.freedomcenter.org/slavery-today/
>
>While these criticisms can be dismissed as responses to the underlying
>themes, interpretations, and conclusions that shaped the exhibit and as a
>question of point of view, I was also disturbed by ordinary misstatements
>that good historical work would have avoided. For example, according to
>the exhibit, ³With the signing of this treaty [Treaty of Paris, 1763,
>ending the Seven Years¹ War], the stage was set for a secure period of
>peace. George III and Louis XV could settle into the business of managing
>empires.² At best, this statement is misleading on two counts. This
>Treaty of Paris was not a permanent solution to conflicts between
>expanding British and French Empires. It was only a temporary settlement
>of colonial boundaries and the war between the two super powers quickly
>resumed in 1778 when France decided to support the American
>revolutionaries seeking independence. It was the French fleet that
>trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 and brought the American
>Revolution to a successful end. It is also unclear how much George and
>Louis actually governed their empires. Great Britain was governed by
>Parliament, which George attempted to influence but could not control. If
>anything, Louis XV was best noted for political incompetence, prolific
>spending on his court, and sexual affairs rather than affairs of state.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III_of_the_United_Kingdom
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XV_of_France
>
>The exhibit also minimizes the extent of racism in what would become the
>United States during and after the Revolution. One panel states, ³Despite
>early misgivings, the Continental Army also began recruiting enslaved men
>with offers of liberty.² However, twice as many African Americans fought
>on the British side during the War for Independence. While some New
>England militias and regiments made efforts to recruit Black soldiers
>from the start of the war, and Alexander Hamilton advocated for the
>enlistment of freed Blacks, George Washington ordered recruiters for the
>Continental Army not to enroll any deserters from the British army,
>vagabonds, or Negroes.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_in_the_Revolutionary_War
>
>According to another panel, in Notes on the States of Virginia, Thomas
>Jefferson expressed his ³fundamental opposition to slavery and his fear
>of what emancipation would bring.² I think it would be more accurate to
>say Jefferson expressed his total antipathy towards people of African
>ancestry. Jefferson postulated that emancipation would only be practical
>if the freed Black population were expelled and replaced by new White
>immigrants. Freed Blacks could not remain in the United States because of
>the ³Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand
>recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new
>provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other
>circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which
>will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other
>race.² Jefferson goes on to use pseudo-science to ³document² all aspects
>of the racial inferiority of the African when compared to the White
>European.
>http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html
>
>Later in the exhibit, it states, ³President Jefferson, more attentive to
>southern fears of slave revolt, would embargo trade with Saint Domingue.²
>While this statement is accurate, it tells a very small part of the
>relationship between the United States and Haiti or the attitudes of
>Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson feared that Haiti's revolt would
>inspire similar slave rebellions in the U.S. In a letter written in 1797
>about events in Haiti, Jefferson argued, "If something is not done, and
>soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children."
>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994563,00.html
>
>During Jefferson¹s Presidency, the United States offered to help the
>French defeat the Haitian revolutionary forces. After independence was
>secured in 1804, Haiti sought closer ties with the United States because
>of what its leaders saw as their shared revolutionary heritage. Haitian
>leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines wrote directly to Jefferson who ignored
>the letter. http://hnn.us/articles/3694.html
>
>Unfortunately, Jefferson¹s prejudices were shared by later American
>politically leaders and the government of an independent Haiti was not
>recognized by the United States until 1863, after it had repaid French
>planters for the cost of their lost slaves, and at a time when the United
>States and Abraham Lincoln were considering shipping millions of freedom
>American slaves to the Black nation.
>http://www.slavenorth.com/colonize.htm
>
>While ³Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn² claims to be about the
>revolutions in British North America, France, and Saint- Domingue
>(Haiti), it actually treats British anti-slavery campaigns as a fourth
>³revolution.² Its interpretation here is largely drawn from Adam
>Hochschild¹s Bury the Chains (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). In
>this case, I think Hochschild and the exhibit give too much credit for
>the end of slavery in the British Empire to idealists, religious
>dissenters, and parliamentary reformers.
>
>According to the exhibit, ³Britain¹s economic interests weighed against
>abolition. But culturally and politically, slavery became objectionable
>to large segments of the British public.² In addition, ³Eradicating the
>slave trade, and ultimately emancipating all the empire¹s slaves, would
>assure Britons . . .were a people loyal to a principle as well as a
>homeland . . . Abolition wrapped British nationhood in both moral and
>imperial glory.²
>
>These statements, at best, are debatable. With the withdrawal of
>Saint-Domingue from the international sugar trade, British Caribbean
>colonies dominated the sugar market. The continuing importation of slaves
>from Africa would have benefited Britain¹s competitors, allowing them to
>put more land into production and challenge Britain¹s market dominance.
>It would also have increased the possibility of slave rebellions.
>
>Great Britain ended slavery because of the cost of suppressing slave
>rebellions and fear that sooner or later a British colony would become
>the next Haiti. In the early 19th century there were major slave
>rebellions in the British colonies of Barbados, Guyana, and Jamaica. In
>Barbados in 1816, twenty thousand Africans from over seventy plantations
>drove Whites off the plantations during ³Bussa¹s Rebellion.² In Guyana in
>1823 the East Coast Demerara Rebellion was fueled by the belief among
>enslaved Africans that the planters were deliberately withholding news of
>the impending freedom of the slaves.
>
>Orlando Patterson (The sociology of slavery: an analysis of the origins,
>development, and structure of Negro slave society in Jamaica, Rutherford,
>NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1969), a sociologist and historian originally
>based at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, argued ³with the
>possible exception of Brazil, no other slave society in the New World
>experienced such continuous and intense servile revolts as Jamaica²
>(273). Patterson believed this was because of a number of reasons.
>Jamaica has an inaccessible mountainous interior. There were a high
>proportion of Africans to Europeans, between 10 and 13 to 1, on the
>island. There were an unusually large number of enslaved people,
>approximately fifty percent, who were born free in West Africa and raised
>in a highly militaristic environment in what is now Ghana and the Ivory
>Coast. He also cited the general ineptitude of the planter caste and
>their high rate of absenteeism. It is significant that these were very
>similar to conditions in Haiti prior to its revolution. An excellent
>online source for exploring Caribbean history in general and slavery in
>the Caribbean in particular is the British National Archives
>(http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/caribbeanhistory/default.htm,
>accessed May 19, 2010).
>
>The 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica that shook the British Empire and led
>to the abolition of slavery in British colonies was centered in the area
>around Montego Bay in the northwest portion of the island. It is commonly
>known as either the Baptist War, because its leaders were members of
>Baptist evangelical churches, the Christmas Uprising, because it was
>timed to take place following the Christmas holiday break from work, or
>the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt. Its principal leader was Samuel Sharpe,
>a literate man and Baptist lay preacher, who was born in Jamaica rather
>than Africa. The rebellion never spread to other parts of the colony and
>was largely suppressed within two weeks, although troop actions against
>suspected rebel strongholds continued until the end of January 1832.
>
>Samuel Sharpe and his followers believed, mistakenly, that emancipation
>had already been approved by the British Parliament, and that local
>planters were refusing to obey the law. They used their church
>connections to organize a general strike demanding that they be paid
>wages to work. Reprisals by plantation owners transformed the work
>stoppage into a slave rebellion. Twenty thousand enslaved Africans
>attacked over two hundred plantations in the Montego Bay area. They burnt
>down plantation houses and warehouses full of sugar cane, causing over a
>million pounds worth of damage. Nearly 200 Africans and 14 British
>planters or overseers died in the fighting. Hundreds of the rebels were
>captured and over 750 were convicted of insurrection. Of those convicted,
>138 were sentenced to death, either by hanging or firing squad. The rest
>were brutally punished and/or deported to other islands. Sharpe was
>captured and publicly executed in May 832 in Market Square at Montego
>Bay. Before he was hanged, Sharpe is reported to have said, ³I would
>rather die in yonder gallows, than live for a minute more in slavery.²
>
>Two parliamentary inquiries were launched to determine the causes of the
>insurrection and a week after Sharpe¹s execution, the British Parliament
>appointed a committee to consider ways of ending slavery in the colonies
>(The Abolition Project, http://abolition.e2bn.org/index.php). In August
>1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was approved formally ending slavery in
>British America. A provision of the act was that plantation owners would
>receive compensation for the loss of their slaves. No provision was made
>to compensate enslaved Africans for years of bondage and unpaid work.
>
>The Jamaican and Haitian rebellions should be treated as major historical
>events and given a prominent place in the global history curriculum,
>however they generally are not even included. In McDougal Littell¹s World
>History: Patterns of Interaction (Beck, 2005), Haiti is briefly mentioned
>twice in sections on Napoleon (665) and Latin American revolutions (682).
>Jamaica and Sam Sharpe, the leader of the insurrection that brought down
>slavery in the British Empire are never mentioned. They receive a similar
>lack of coverage in Bedford/St. Martin¹s A History of World Societies.
>
>Life sized bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass stand
>at the entrances to the New York Historical Society greeting visitors.
>The Society placed the statutes there to make a statement about its
>mission. But I think they are probably there as pickets, warning New
>Yorkers and the American public that the NYHS has hijacked the past and
>if they do enter, they should be careful about the untruths inside.
>
>
>
>
>Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
>Department of Teaching, Literacy and Leadership
>128 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
>(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196
>
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