Leon F. Litwack (1929–2021)
Autor de Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
Sobre El Autor
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Obras de Leon F. Litwack
Obras relacionadas
The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2002) — Preface, algunas ediciones — 41 copias
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Winter 1991 (1990) — Author "In Review: "The past is not dead. . . ."" — 11 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1929-12-02
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 2021-08-05
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Santa Barbara, California, USA
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Berkeley, California, USA
- Causa de fallecimiento
- cancer (bladder)
- Lugares de residencia
- Santa Barbara, California, USA
Wisconsin, USA
South Carolina, USA
Colorado, USA - Educación
- University of California, Berkeley (BA | 1951)
University of California, Berkeley (PhD | 1958) - Ocupaciones
- professor
lecturer
teacher
historian - Organizaciones
- Organization of American Historians (Lecturer ∙ Past President)
American Antiquarian Society
Southern Historical Association (president ∙ 2008)
University of Wisconsin
University of South Carolina
Colorado College - Premios y honores
- Organization of American Historians
Guggenheim Fellowship
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
Pulitzer Prize (History, 1980)
Francis Parkman Prize
American Book Award (mostrar todos 8)
Golden Apple Award ( [2007])
American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2009)
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- 1,011
- Popularidad
- #25,500
- Valoración
- 4.1
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- 10
- ISBNs
- 30
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If America is misled, it means the founding fathers promised a union they either could not build or had no intention of building. It also means that even had Lincoln lived his plans to bring southerners back into the Union would have given blacks no real say in government or economic opportunity.
If America is misguided then we must assume that the kind of capitalist state based on equal rights and equality of opportunity Americans envision is based on the supremacy of whites and was as much in the 19th century as it is now a pipe dream.
Slavery was baked into the union from the very beginning not only in the design of the Electoral College which gave slave states enough power to elect many US presidents, but also in the promise to return fugitive slaves as if they were Fedex packages gone amiss in the delivery system.
(Today Americans shackled under the Electoral College system see sparsely populated rural states stymie the population centres on the coasts in the election of their president, pace Donald Trump.)
Southern planters had good reason to believe they were betrayed when resistance grew to returning runaways (read “The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War” by Andrew Delbanco), when radical Republicans supported abolitionist sentiments in Congress, and when the north fought mightily to prevent new territories from becoming slave states.
From their perspective it looked as though they were tricked into supporting New England break away from Great Britain. Northerners didn’t believe blacks were any more equal to whites than they did, and as history has shown us (in Isabel Wilkerson’s majestic “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”) northerners weren’t all that accommodating when the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers finally moved north in huge numbers to seek a safer life for their families and better economic opportunity.
Slavery lasted more than 260 years in America. It was so profitable (“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward E. Baptist) that slaves were used as collateral for speculative loans in property west of the Mississippi and Texas. It was so unusual that English linen manufacturers couldn’t replicate it anywhere else in the world (Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton: A Global History.”)
Four million blacks lived in the South at the time of the Civil War. More than 186,000 blacks fought in the war, mostly on the side of the North. Almost all of these people were illiterate.
With emancipation came the opportunity for black families to reunite, for women to devote time to building their families, for adults to move about the countryside without asking permission, and for black families to openly educate their children. It also gave blacks a chance to reflect on their very names and decide who they wanted to be.
But emancipation did not bring 40 acres and a mule, the rallying cry for blacks who believed the Union Army would give them the resources to start their own farms from plantations taken from the rebels. Many blacks became embroiled in contracts working for their former masters, or others like them, often incurring debt and most usually not improving their independence a bit.
Freedom. Independence. Two concepts not necessarily alligned at the close of the war.
In addition to enduring complete powerlessness for the better part of two and a half centuries, they were repeatedly insulted, beaten, and whipped. Their young and adult women were repeatedly raped. Many thousands of them had their families torn apart by the sale of their family members to other plantations. Children taken from mothers. Husbands taken from wives.
It was in this backdrop that Southerners told themselves that blacks were childlike, incapable of governing either themselves or others, or deserved to take control of their own lives. Southerners sought compensation for lands torn from them in war, but never considered for a moment compensation owing to the slaves themselves.
Southern men considered the blacks lazy, even though it was the blacks from the sweat of their own brows who built the wealth of the South, and southern women despaired when their house slaves abandoned them after emancipation and left them to cook, clean, mend clothes, and entertain on their own. (And cooking and cleaning and particularly ironing in those days ain’t what it is today.)
America is still living with the aftermath of slavery. Politicians cheat to keep blacks from voting. Rich parents cheat to get their largely white children into elite schools. And Silicon Valley apes the Old Boys Clubs of yore.
I was struck by a quote from the black poet W.E.B. Dubois who looked back at the newly “freed” men and women. Their first images of themselves were taken from their white masters. How heroic was their quest to build their self-respect and their dignity from a whole new cloth.
You could also say that the planters — and Northerners who benefitted sometimes directly, and sometimes indirectly from slavery in America— took their identities from their position of power over the blacks. The same could be said of white Americans over the aboriginal peoples. Had Americans not traded in blacks or murdered Indians, would they see their manifest destiny in quite the same light?
Whites were so dependent not just economically but emotionally on free black labour that the destruction of slavery fractured their self-esteem.
In fairness to America, it did not invent slavery or bigotry or white nationalism. These are among the carbuncles of our civilization. It remains an open question whether we will ever rid ourselves of their influence. Emancipation in America was only a beginning.… (más)