Thanks to everyone for the great first posts about Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. I’m looking forward to reading what you have to say in response to Ryan’s post about the Cotham book, which should appear here by midnight tonight or shortly thereafter.
Last week all of you were struck by the powerful arguments Trouillot makes about the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution. Jocelyn also wondered, after reading Trouillot’s account, what things are happening today that might be too “unthinkable” for us to notice. A related question worth thinking about is this: are there ways of looking at the history of the American Civil War that have remained as “unthinkable” to historians as the Haitian Revolution once was to historians of the Age of Revolutions?
Historian Steven Hahn thinks the answer is “yes.” In fact, in a series of lectures he published a couple of years ago, Hahn argued that the Civil War was not just a war between the United States and the Confederacy, but was actually “the greatest slave rebellion in modern history”–a slave rebellion comparable in its causes, character, and consequences to the Haitian Revolution. But Hahn also argued that for various reasons historians have bypassed that interpretation, in spite of the evidence for it. The idea of the Civil War as a slave rebellion, he suggests, has traditionally been as unthinkable as the Haitian Revolution.
I’m going to post a PDF version of Hahn’s article on the online Fondren reserves for this course and also email it to each of you. I think you’d find it interesting to read as an afterword to Trouillot’s book that may help you see connections between the Trouillot book and the Civil War era. You are welcome, but not required, to post any reactions to the Hahn article to this post.
Initially, I put a different article on the syllabus for this week–an article by Bruce Levine on the “black Confederate” myth. I’m going to post that on Reserves, too, but read it only if you find the time. The Hahn article might be a better follow-up to the Trouillot book anyway.
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A few other follow-ups to our meeting last week.
First, you may want to look more closely at the Omeka examples I briefly showed you at the beginning of class. Here is the Woodson Center’s Omeka site, and here is the one about Lincoln at 200. There is also a more extensive showcase of Omeka exhibits here.
Second, as mentioned last week, you may find it useful to set up an RSS reader to keep up with the blogs I’ve recommended that you follow for this course, as well as to know when this blog is updated. Here’s a useful introduction to using RSS, as well as a tutorial about how to use Google Reader, one of the many available web-based services that allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds.