Degler Out Of Our Past Pdf Download

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If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.

I do not wish to diminish these works by linking them too closely to the 1619 Project overseen by Nikole Hannah-Jones and underwritten by the New York Times, but in formal terms 1619, considered in toto, is clearly a polemic (New York Times Magazine 2019).1 The intent of this polemic, on one level, is to dislodge the standard chronology and narrative scaffolding of U.S. history by elevating the importance of racial slavery and what some call “racial capitalism” in explaining both America’s past and our predicament today. On another level, somewhat shrouded, 1619 aspires to make the case, if not clinch the deal, for reparations to African Americans, due them not only because of slavery but also because of Jim Crow and decades of state-sponsored discrimination afterward. Indeed, in many ways 1619 can be seen as an anguished, over-the-top extension of and elaboration on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “The Case for Reparations,” which appeared in the Atlantic in 2014 (Coates 2014).

To cut to the chase, the principal problems with the most objectionable historical pieces—the introductory essay by Hannah-Jones and the essay by Matthew Desmond—are linked inextricably to and, indeed, grow inexorably out of the motivation for and animating spirit behind the project. Bluntly put, despite the 1619 Project’s historical trappings, it is decidedly, even aggressively presentist in orientation, the work largely of journalists and “engaged” scholars hoping both to help to operationalize NY Times editor Dean Baquet’s “secret” 2019 directive to double down on race with the 2020 election in sight and, as a derivative dividend, to provide support for the growing movement for reparations, as Hannah-Jones, the majordomo of the project, has made clear (Feinberg 2019; Rockett 2019). To me and to other scholars of nonactivist bents, the “spirit” behind the project is as chilling as it is brazen, suggesting nothing so much as the famous party slogan of Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Surprisingly, though, several developments came together in the oughties to pump new life into economic history. In history departments, interest in postmodern approaches and in cultural history more generally declined, in a relative sense at least, which created openings for other fields, including economic history. At the same time, growing uneasiness in the United States over matters economic—wage stagnation as well as increasing income and wealth inequality in particular—and, toward the end of the decade, problems relating to the Great Recession spurred both historians and economists to think more about our economic history and, more broadly, about capitalism qua system not only in the present but also in the past (Schuessler 2013).

As suggested earlier, then, devotees of the NHAC approach capitalism far differently—and far more disapprovingly—than do most mainstream (neoclassically oriented) economists interested in the past or than did previous generations of historians doing economic history. Whereas the latter groups legitimately can be criticized for paying insufficient attention at times to the history of capitalism, proceeding, as they often did, as though the system was transhistorical, an outgrowth of what Adam Smith referred to as people’s natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” and leaving it at that, NHAC scholars purport to do otherwise by contextualizing capitalism—that is to say, by situating capitalism in time, locating it in space, and tying it to specific cultures.

To be fair, NHACers, however reluctant to define capitalism, have suggested that the system or concept needs to be approached more broadly than “it” (whatever “it” is) has been in the past. Thus, they have tended to emphasize topics sometimes given relatively short shrift by earlier scholars—war, violence, race, the law, and so on—in their analyses. Note that I say sometimes because it is in fact possible (if one at all tries) to find plenty of earlier scholars of capitalism who have looked at each of these topics in detail. Be that as it may, we have recently seen the publication by an NHAC-related scholar, the aforementioned Caitlin Rosenthal, that includes a real definition of capitalism or at least an explanation of how the author is using the term. In this piece, Rosenthal offers a succinct definition of capitalism, which is based, as she puts it, on “(1) the commodification of labor, as it results from, (2) the accumulation of capital” (2020, 301). She doesn’t historicize the development of said features or go into the motive forces behind their development, but her definition is a start.

The only problem with the idea that identities are socially constructed and that human behavior can be molded at will is that it does not appear to be true. Slowly but surely, evidence has been accumulating over the past generation to the effect that human behavior is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. Biology and culture interact in complex ways, limiting the freedom with which human identities can be manipulated either by individuals or by societies. 2b1af7f3a8