Last week my review of Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2015) was published by H-Diplo. You can read the entire thing here.

In general, I really liked the book and found it quite useful. (I’m a sucker for theoretically rich accounts that take a broad look at historical phenomena.) I especially found the editors’/authors’ use of “scripts” as an explanatory framework to be quite useful, and I even used it last semester in my graduate seminar on the Age of Revolutions. I heartily recommend the volume.

The topic seems especially pertinent for today’s age, and indeed was inspired by current tensions. Here’s how I open the review:

If the recent Hamilton play is any indication, there is still a cultural appetite for revolutions. In a way, this has always been the case. But the idea of “revolutions” has received renewed attention in recent years following the political unrest that spread across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other nations, now known as the Arab Spring, and many wondered if the new possibilities made available through social networking have opened a new chapter to story of revolutionary protest. Time’s “Person of the Year” in 2011, for instance, was “The Protestor,” a fill-in for the many groups who sought to overturn governments and power structures around the globe. On the one hand, there seems to be something universal about this type of unrest, both in the sense of a cultural moment that can be captured in an “Age of Revolutions” framework that emphasizes connectivity and comradeship, but also through transgenerational principles related to humanity that evade circumstance and context. Yet on the other hand, each revolution seems rooted in a particular time and place, the result of parochial decisions and actions that tether the revolt close to home.

Also, it had to be cut due to H-Net’s formatting, but I originally wanted this excerpt from the musical Hamilton to serve as an epigraph:

And? If we win our independence?
Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?
Or will the blood we shed begin an endless
Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?

Viva la revolutión!

We have witnessed two black men executed by white cops over the last two days. This of course isn’t new–the only novel elements are the cell phones that documented the circumstances and the social media that spread the details. They widen the field of knowledge and community of suffering that was previously relegated, by design, to the fringes of society. Indeed, #PhilandroCastile and #AltonSterling are just the most recent examples of a long tradition that far preceded hashtags. Here is an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s famous narrative, in which he discusses a lack of justice for slaves in Maryland that extended all the way to the destruction of their bodies:

I speak advisedly when I say this,–that killing a slave, or any colored person…is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community.

Sound familiar? Even if the legal system that allowed slavery and perpetuated the ownership of black persons was done away, the code that replaced it was malleable enough to maintain the general degradation of black bodies–either through structural policies like the Jim Crow era, or the selective enforcement like the Age of Ferguson. 

The story of America is a narrative riddled with the dehumanization of black bodies–for profit, for power, for control. To ask for examples of white supremacy within America is to ask for examples of water drops within an ocean: those who know what to look for can’t see anything but, and for those who are susceptible to its dangers are crushed by its weight. American progress is often defined as a trajectory of improvement, but it is also a series of transformations from one brutal regime to another, racial superiorities by another name. 

Digital media provides harrowing documentation of this story, but it is merely shining new light on an old core central to the American experience. 

This is one of my favorite images to share with students when discussing America’s founding. On July 2, 1776, the Pennsylvania Evening Post included notices for two declarations of freedom that had taken place in Philadelphia: the first was the Continental Congress declaring “the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES”; the second was a runaway notice for “a Negro man named ISHMAEL,” who declared his freedom by escaping his master. The first act, of course, was to be celebrated; the second, punished. The ironies of America are usually like that.

It is an important reminder that we often like to think of things like “liberty,” “freedom,” and “rights” to be self-evident and easily assumed, but those terms are almost always tied up to cultural assumptions and demonstrate a sense of unacknowledge privilege. Even today, in the Age ofTrump, we sometimes forget the fraught landscape of unexamined inequality and forfeited justice.

Happy Independence Day to everyone! I’m about to go celebrate by parasailing over the Maui coast, but I thought I’d link to a few things I’ve written on Mormonism and the Fourth of July:

• Over at Religion and Politics, I wrote about the fraught relationship between the LDS Church and the American government, as seen through their celebration of the holiday. (Link)
• As one evidence of that dynamic, here is Parley Pratt “declaring independence over again” after Joseph Smith’s death. (Link)
• While writing for Peculiar People, I wrote about the cultural origins of Mormonism’s modern-day uber patriotism. (Link)

May your holiday be filled with ambiguity and tension!