REMINDER: CALL FOR PAPERS

Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era

Special Issue of the _Journal of the Civil War Era_

The American Civil War Era was transformative for American capitalism. The destruction of slavery proved the occasion for an unprecedented mobilization of economic resources, dramatic changes in the nature and scale of federal taxation, financial experiments that included a wholesale revamping of the banking and monetary systems, struggles over corporate privileges and labor protections, a slew of expressly developmental policies ranging from railroad subsidies to agricultural research and education, and still more. That all this occurred in a time of governmental crisis, breakdown, and reconstruction underscores the connections between the economy and the state.

This special issue seeks original papers that explore the Civil War Era as a defining period in American economic development. We seek to publish original scholarship that will reenergize an ongoing conversation among historians about political economy, capitalism, and governance. Our goal is not only to uncover American state capacity – which has by now been revealed beyond any doubt – but to explore government’s concrete role in shaping the country’s economic trajectory during this formative period. We are particularly interested in studies that examine specific government actions and policies, on the federal, state, and municipal levels, that shaped important economic outcomes by reconfiguring markets in various ways. Contributions may address any aspect of economic statecraft, including finance, monetary management, legal doctrine, infrastructural projects, tariffs and trade policies, mobilization of labor, and acquisition and use of land. They may also look into political alignments, divisions, mobilizations, and conflicts around any of these issues. The proposals need not be limited to the war itself or its consequences. We finally seek to prioritize historical work that positions the US in a comparative light and engages themes and questions from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.

Deadline for proposals: April 25, 2025.

More at https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2025/03/call-for-papers-jcwe-special-issue-on-politics-the-state-and-american-capitalism-in-the-civil-war-era/

#histodons @histodons #civilwar #civilwarera #jcwe #cfp #ushistory #capitalism #state

Review of Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss #bookreviews #civilrights #ushistory @netgalley.bsky.social @atriabooks.bsky.social #readnonficchal

https://thebookstop.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/review-of-spell-freedom-the-underground-schools-that-built-the-civil-rights-movement-by-elaine-weiss/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ufQpU8v9-I

‘The Regulars Are Coming Out!’ Inside The True Story Of Paul Revere’s Ride At The Dawn Of The American Revolution

By Amber Morgan

It wasn't just Paul Revere riding that night.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/paul-revere-ride

Books by Henry Wadworth Longfellow (author of the poem "Paul Revere’s Ride")

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/16

Revere's depiction of the Boston Massacre

Did you know that Brent Spiner starred in a revival of the musical "1776"? Have a listen in honor of the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution.
#UsHistory #Musicals #StarTrek

1776 (1997 Revival)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1T3N4t2kUgTRf0gvgNLpXrp-7ZTFqFfJ

No one talks about the sheep wars, much less how much the violence of cattle ranchers was driven by racism.

Sojourner Truth's Escape from Slavery comes from the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, an account of the famous abolitionist's life as given to her friend and admirer Olive Gilbert and published in 1850. #History #SojournerTruth #Abolitionism #Slavery #USHistory #HistoryFact https://whe.to/ci/2-2694-en/

Hubby, who used to teach American history, reminded me of the #HartfordConvention from 1814-15. #Maine, #Massachusetts, #Vermont, #Connecticut, #NewHampshire and #RhodeIsland had considered leaving the union and forming their own "independent republic" in opposition to "political problems arising from the federal government's increasing power. "

Excerpt:
"Some delegates may have been in favor of New England's #secession from the United States and forming an #independent republic, though no solution was adopted at the convention. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison rejected the notion that the Hartford convention was an attempt to take New England out of the Union and give treasonous aid and comfort to Britain. Morison wrote: 'Democratic politicians, seeking a foil to their own mismanagement of the war and to discredit the still formidable Federalist party, caressed and fed this infant myth until it became so tough and lusty as to defy both solemn denials and documentary proof.' "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Convention

Sojourner Truth (l. c. 1797-1883) was an African American abolitionist, women's suffrage advocate, and civil rights activist who famously "walked away" from slavery in 1826, sued in court for the return of her son and, between 1843 and her death in 1883, became one of the most popular lecturers and preachers in the United States. #History #SojournerTruth #Abolitionism #Slavery #USHistory #HistoryFact https://whe.to/ci/1-24323-en/

"[T]his #newRight does not really reject globalism but advances a new strain of it [...] The fix it finds in race, culture, and nation is but the most recent iteration of a pro-market philosophy based not on the idea that we are all the same but that we are in a fundamental, and perhaps permanent way, different." - #QuinnSlobodian

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/free-markets-and-fixed-natures

#neoliberalism #inequality #USpolitics #AltRight #UShistory #SiliconValleyRight #FarRight #MontPelerinSociety #racialistRight @histodons

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
"The Great Gatsby" was published 100 years ago today. @npr looks at the continued relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, with its commentary on immigration, race, class, and the liberated "new woman."

https://flip.it/M7QMbC

#Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon #TheGreatGatsby #FScottFitzgerald #USHistory @histodon #Culture

Analysis: US policymakers won't accept that Palestinians are rooted in their land.

It "is a complete dehumanisation of what Palestinians represent & an acceptance of that dehumanisation across the board.

"It’s very similar to the language you would have seen about Native Americans in the US 100 years ago.”

~HA Hellyer, Royal United Services Institute

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/upfront/2024/11/29/rashid-khalidi-this-genocide-worse-than-any-phase-of-palestinian-history

https://aje.io/z0dtpf?update=3632070

#uspol #dehumanisation #ushistory #genocide #freepalestine #racism .

Happy 160th anniversary of a bunch of murderous cowards finally giving up on the idea that they should own other human beings.

"The Battle of Appomattox Court House [...] was the final engagement of Confederate General in Chief Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia before they surrendered to the Union Army of the Potomac under the Commanding General of the United States Army, Ulysses S. Grant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Appomattox_Court_House

Analysis: US policymakers won't accept that Palestinians are rooted in their land.

It "is a complete dehumanisation of what Palestinians represent & an acceptance of that dehumanisation across the board.

"It’s very similar to the language you would have seen about Native Americans in the US 100 years ago.”

~HA Hellyer, Royal United Services Institute

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/upfront/2024/11/29/rashid-khalidi-this-genocide-worse-than-any-phase-of-palestinian-history

https://aje.io/z0dtpf?update=3632070

#uspol #dehumanisation #ushistory #genocide #freepalestine #racism .

"Theirs was a political and intellectual partnership from the beginning. King married a feminist intellectual freedom fighter with unflinching determination, and he could not have been the leader he was without her. Scott King’s activism—her understanding of the evils of racism, poverty, and militarism—started before her marriage, complemented and influenced her husband’s work, and extended well beyond his assassination, in 1968."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/coretta-scott-king-wrong/682305/

Fear of Insurrection comes from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs (l. 1813-1897) describing the reaction of the White community of Edenton, North Carolina, to news of Nat Turner's Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in August of 1831. #History #Abolitionism #HarrietJacobs #Slavery #USHistory #HistoryFact https://whe.to/ci/2-2693-en/

In the next episode of #TheComfortableSpot podcast, I’m joined by author & historian Don Wildman, host of the hit podcast American History Hit. We talk about the role of history in shaping today’s America. Out Monday on all podcast platforms.
#Podcast #History #Culture #USA #US #USHistory #AmericanCivilWar #AmericanRevolution

Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is the only full-length work by Thomas Jefferson (l. 1743-1826) published in his lifetime and was written in response to questions from France regarding the thirteen states that formed the United States at that time. #History #ThomasJefferson #Slavery #USHistory #HistoryFact https://whe.to/ci/2-2685-en/

Recently, a number of media analysts who seem to have forgotten fascism is a word, have looked towards the dark days of McCarthyism in the US to find historical comparisons for the Trump regime's fascist attempts to transform American society into a white ethnostate dictatorship. There are valid reasons to use this comparison as there *are* eerie parallels to be found between the McCarthyist American right's ever expanding war against made up "communist infiltrators" and both Trump's actions, and the responses to it from a mainstream establishment far more committed to profit than civil rights; including the weaponization of fear to silence objections and quell dissent, the pre-marking of folks ideologically opposed to fascism for reprisal, and the willing capitulation in advance of much of the US establishment to a fascist agenda. Placed in the proper context, which includes noting that the Trump regime is merely installing a fascist dictatorship through a new type of McCarthyism, the analogy is quite useful for getting people to understand how the regime is operating, and how its methods might be countered.

The problem of course is that context is often missing. Few if any of the folks referencing McCarthyism would be willing to admit that even McCarthyism was just another fascist takeover project designed to eradicate dissent under the guise of "anti-communism." Hell, you can still find articles about Senator Joe McCarthy using conspiracy theories to defend Nazi war criminals who slaughtered American soldiers on the Smithsonian website (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/senator-mccarthys-nazi-problem-180975174/) - at least until Trump deletes them. In that context, the use of McCarthyism as a more genteel accusation than fascism, which is how a lot of folks writing in mainstream sources appear to be using it, is nonsensical; McCarthyism was just a project to install fascism in America.

How successful that project was depends a lot of whether or not you think it ended with McCarthy's fall, the defeat of Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential election, the implosion of Nixon, or basically never; speaking for myself I'd say you don't get Trumpism without the US War on Terror, which in turn doesn't happen without the legacy of Vietnam and the COINTELPRO program, which ultimately spawned out of McCarthyism and the Cold War struggle against "communism." In that context, it's probably better to understand the modern American fascist movement as a descendent of McCarthyism, rather than a totally novel expression of it.

Furthermore, while the repressive tactics and ideological policing of the Trump regime patterns well with America's fifties-era Red Scare, it's important to understand that Trumpism has already moved beyond many of the goals the McCarthyists were trying to accomplish. While anti-communism often stood in for white nationalism, and supremacist power structures, it ostensibly focused on ideological policing; the Trump regime however is already targeting people for who, or what they are, not just what they believe; the anti trans pogrom, the bipartisan war on migrants, and War on Terror style Islamophobia have already paved the way for eliminationist policies in a way McCarthyism existed to accomplish.

Given the term's ability to both heighten awareness of, and still minimize the threat posed by the Trump regime's project to install a fascist dictatorship, I'm going to proceed cautiously with sharing articles adopting McCarthyism as a framework to explain the actions of Trump, and his apparent Secretary of Nazi Shit, Stephen Miller. In doing so however, I'm begging readers to keep in mind that Trumpism, is definitely a fascist project, and the fact that during the installation phase the regime's activities pattern match so closely with the 1950's US Red Scare says a lot more about how fascist this country already was, than it does about why there's a meaningful difference between McCarthyism and fascism in general.