Suchergebnisse

"From an award-winning historian, a groundbreaking portrait of pervasive exploitation and radical resistance in America, told through the turbulent history of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike -- a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States."--

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction: Boom -- 1. Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana -- 2. The Panic of 1835 -- 3. The Steamboat Sublime -- 4. Limits to Capital -- 5. The Runaway's River -- 6. Dominion -- 7. "The Empire of the White Man's Will" -- 8. The Carceral Landscape -- 9. The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton -- 10. Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade -- 11. Tales of Mississippian Empire -- 12. The Material Limits of "Manifest Destiny" -- 13. "The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny" -- 14. The Ignominious Effort to Reopen the Slave Trade -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

This work looks at the history of the Mississippi River Valley in the nineteenth century and the economy that developed there, powered by steam engines and slave labor. When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. This book places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Here, the author traces the connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale. But at the center of the story the author tells are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton - the people who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.

This wide-ranging book presents the first comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade.The contributors cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades. The book investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South. Together, the authors offer fresh and provocative insights into the interrelations of capitalism, sovereignty, and slavery

The field of U.S. history today is characterized by a mania for management. The "new" history of capitalism has focused its attention on the creation and daily reanimation of the grand abstraction from which it draws its title: the mid-level market makers who take capital and transform it into capitalism. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, increasing numbers of historians have turned their attention to the histories of powerful historical actors we have too long ignored or dismissed as "dead white men" unworthy of the attention of the properly progressive historian: financiers, bankers, and businessmen of all kinds. Despite the obvious importance of the task and the avowedly critical purpose of the turn towards the study of the mechanisms of market practice, however, some of the bolder claims that have been used to mark out the novelty of this "new" history seem unwarranted, perhaps even misguided.

Lay or ordained Christians who come to the Gulf area, on company transfer or through a church, will encounter a variety of external and internal pressures that will impact their Christian witness. These pressures may be all for the good. The external pressures of having to adapt to the new culture may help weed out religious bias from genuine religious conviction while the Islamic social and religious restrictions can help sharpen Christian apologetics. Additionally, internal pressures within the Christian expatriate community, with all its cultural and denominational diversity, can help clarify one's theology. Both Bahrain and Oman, countries where I enjoyed the privilege of ministry over the last two years, are in the Arabian Gulf. Oil-rich countries, they are monarchical in government and tribal in outlook. The oil has brought change quickly here during the last fifty years, particularly in Oman. Bahrain and Oman have raced to develop the infrastructures common to developed countries, and this race has necessitated an influx of huge labor pools. While the government filled technical, military, and advisory jobs primarily with Westerners, the grunt work (the bulk of the task) was carried out by Asians. Even so, there is in these countries scant public acknowledgment of the expatriate contribution. There is instead a plan to replace expatriates by nationals as quickly as possible. In recent years the internal political pressures to provide greater employment for their own nationals have forced Bahrain and Oman to attempt to "Bahrainize" and "Omanize" many jobs. Certain sectors (banking, for example), have progressed well towards this goal but entry level jobs in the service and construction sectors do not attract Gulf nationals. As Jordan before them, Gulf countries are discovering that there is an absolute minimum number of expatriates below which they cannot go without affecting productivity. This fact virtually assures a continuing expatriate population in these two countries for the next decade. Only the "complexion" of these groups will change as more and more Asians, working for lower salaries, take the jobs of Westerners. Since many of these people are Christians, the church in numerous denominational expressions will continue to be a part of life in the Gulf. Christians here will always face a variety of external and internal pressures, and the struggle will be to adapt in the non-essentials while retaining the essentials of the Christian witness.