Benjamin E. Park

I had the great honor of being interviewed by the wonderful people who run 99% Invisible, an immensely successful radio show on architecture and design. I provided some historical background for Joseph Smith’s (and later Brigham Young’s) plat of Zion. Originally conceived in the early 1830s for Missouri, parts of it were realized once the Mormons reached Utah in the late 1840s.

You can listen to the 20-minute episode, as well as read more details, here.

And if you want a deep dive into Joseph Smith’s urban vision, you can download my article on the topic.

I have a notes document on my iPhone that keeps track of scenes from tv shows and movies that I might want to incorporate into my classes. (I’ve blogged about my use of these video clips at the Junto.) Let’s just say that I made quite a few entries while watching HBO’s Westworld this last week. (I know–I’m somewhat late to the game.) There is plenty of tensions and anxieties displayed in the series that could work with a wide range of historical topics. One of the most obvious is its engagement with determinism, which I plan to invoke when discussing predestination with my American religious history students in the future. There are several clips that contain poignant rumination on free will, choices, and liberty that should start a good discussion. But one theme stood particularly prominent for me: the fear of insurrection.

(Quick side note: finding usable clips from this series is especially challenging for two reasons. First, a number of important speeches take place in the presence of grotesque nudity, like when the discussion of the confederados and their lost cause is framed by a friggin’ orgy; and second, many of the other significant quotes are tethered to plot spoilers. Why didn’t the series’s creators think of the classroom?!?!?)

We spend quite a bit of time on slavery in my US history survey courses. (According to some of my more critical students, sometimes a bit too much time.) I think it’s essential to emphasize how central the slave institution was to American culture prior to the Civil War. And one of those elements is the slaveowners’ constant fear that their slaves might one day rise up and kill them. This was a constant anxiety during the American Revolution, as several recent books have highlighted. When writing to a fellow Virginian slaveholder about rumored slave insurrections, James Madison counseled that, “It is prudent such things should be concealed as well as suppressed.” The next year he similarly remarked that if word of their vulnerable position spread, “we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.” Alan Taylor’s award-winning Internal Enemy charts how deep this fear went during America’s first half-decade.

Previously, I’ve referenced Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained when discussing this fear. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is laughably ahistorical, but the bloody fighting scenes were a fun way to emphasize slaveholders’ consistent nightmares. But Westworld captures the anxiety just as well. Consider this scene:

“The only thing stopping the hosts from hacking us to pieces is one line of your code.”

This fear is present throughout the entire season. Humans are surrounded by those that could be their executioners. This required a careful implementation of rules, regulations, and protocols—in other words, slave codes—to make sure everything stayed in control. But there was always the legitimate concern that too much time, too much suffering, and too much punishment would eventually lead to a bloody apocalypse. In nineteenth-century America, many anti-slavery advocates, even those who retained racist theories concerning black potential, wanted to disband the practice because it was destined to climax in a war for extermination. It’s clear that those who worked in Westworld feared the same.

Even the fictional Dr. Robert Ford’s theory on the importance of suffering—and I’m trying not to give spoilers!—had historical echoes. Here, for instance, is Thomas Jefferson on why descendants of slaves could never integrate into a society with descendants of slaveholders:

Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.

Memory of suffering, according to Jefferson, was a primary mover of the human will. Dr. Ford would have agreed.

The analogy could of course be taken so far. The past few decades of scholarship on slavery have sought to emphasize the agency of enslaved persons, so I admit that it may very well flirt with the respectability line to bring up any comparison to quasi-sentient beings. And associating humans with robots who were created solely for the purpose of their creators is itself an extension of the slaveholding mentality. So it is important to emphasize the differences here in order to make a clear point. But if we can compartmentalize the issues and focus on a historical feeling, there are usable tools for the classroom.

And for a show that seems at least partly dedicated to exploring the limits and purposes of feelings, that seems appropriate.

I am perpetually on the lookout for the perfect monograph to assign in the US survey course (pre-1877). Finding something that disinterested freshman, who have no plans to major in history (at least not yet), would enjoy is a daunting task. I have a number of criteria: it has to be short (ideally less than 200 pages), readable (light on theory), narrative driven (students like a story), and addresses a broad theme that aligns with my lectures. Lately I’ve been rotating through John Demos’s Unredeemed Captive, Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz’s Kingdom of Matthias, and Tiya Mile’s Ties that Bind. When we get to the Civil War period, I typically turn to Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion, which works exceptionally well because it’s brief (81 pages!) and delivers an ever-important message (that the war was about, well, slavery).

But this year, my first at Sam Houston State, I decided to venture out a bit and try Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Harvard UP, 2015). I’m glad I did, because I loved the book and it worked well with the students. I don’t want to review the book here—I’ll leave the critiquing of methods and arguments to academic journals—but I do want to highlight why the book fits in an undergraduate survey.

Beyond Freedom’s Reach traces the story of Rose Herera, an African American woman born into slavery in rural Louisiana. She is raised on a plantation, but eventually passes through several different owners before landing in the custody of the De Hart family in New Orleans. Once in this big city, where she served as a domestic slave, Rose met her eventual husband, George, and gave birth to five children just as the Civil War commenced. Once union troops took possession of New Orleans, Rose’s master, James De Hart, like many other confederates, fled to Havana. Soon thereafter his husband, Mary, sought to join him. She aimed to bring Rose and her children, as slavery was still allowed in Cuba. When Rose, who was sick and in jail, refused to go with her, Mary took three of Rose’s children. (The youngest child was with Rose in jail, and the fifth would not be born until later.) The remainder of the book follows Rose’s quest to retrieve her children, and the complex and meandering process highlighted the evolving, dynamic, and inchoate legal system in the wake of the Civil War. (See a brief promotional video here.)

I am a sucker for microhistories, and I believe the genre works best in the classroom. Rothman tells a gripping tale, but he’s constantly aware of the broader context. Here’s how he frames the story:

“United States v. Mrs. De Hart was not the trial of the century. It was an obscure child custody case that barely made the local papers, eclipsed by the news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination. Yet the confrontation between De Hart and Herera in New Orleans over the three slave children in Cuba is significant because it illuminates the ad hoc structure of local justice in the twilight of slavery.” (152)

The book isn’t only a story about Rose Herera, but about Rose Herera’s world. This is especially the case for the chapters that cover her life outside of the kidnapping case, given that she left a limited written record. Rothman reconstructs slavery in rural Louisiana during the antebellum period, and makes smart notes about nuanced topics like our narratives of slavery’s “natural growth.” When Herera moves to New Orleans, Rothman paints a colorful picture of a colorful city, where elite slavers, cosmopolitan businessmen, domestic slaves, and freed people of color intermingle. During the war chapter, we get a glimpse of what the city was like under military rule, as confederates struggled to retain their world even as enslaved men and women increased their fight for freedom. Rothman’s discussion of the kidnapping case itself was my favorite portion, as it captured the ad-hoc nature of governance and the liminality of law at the moment of cultural disruption. And then in the chapter that recounts the eventual reunion, the book provides a powerful discussion concerning the numerous rumors of kidnapping in the American South, especially the role played by Cuba.

Reading the book allowed my students to engage the tedious lived realities of slavery, the importance of slave families, the unreliable nature of the domestic slave trade, the lived repercussions of war, the evolution of emancipation laws, and, especially, the persistence of racist governance and undemocratic rule in the immediate post-emancipation era. Slavery was a difficult institution to give up, and southerners fought tooth and nail to retain their old social structure.

But perhaps one of the lessons that I appreciated the most in the book is the observation that a teleological progression toward freedom was impossible. “For Rose Herera and her children, and many others, wartime emancipation did not follow a straight line from slavery to freedom,” Rothman insists. “The experience was more like wandering a maze” (146). Freedom was not merely granted through Lincoln’s signature on the Emancipation Proclamation, nor even with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It was fought for, tooth and nail, by African Americans were forced to clamor for every inch of liberty they could get from a racial system that sought to oppress them in any way possible.

The message of delayed equality and persistent fighting seems particularly relevant right now.

It’s a weird time to be teaching Reconstruction. As I prepared the last lecture for my US Survey course, the connections between the backlash to Reconstruction and the backlash to Obama’s presidency were certainly apparent. As I wrote last week, historians will have a lot to work with in the Age of Trump. But I was especially struck with the irony of assigning portions of Frederick Douglass’s classic (and overlooked) 1869 speech, “Composite Nation” at a moment when immigration is such a hot issue. (Make sure to listen to this new track from the Hamilton mixtape, if you haven’t already.) You can read the entire speech here, which I wholly recommend. It is a voice from the past that speaks directly to the issues of the present. It’s funny how history works like that.

Douglass delivered the address in Boston as the nation was discussing the possibility of extending citizenship to Chinese immigrants. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, passed just a few years previous, dismantled the entrenched American belief that citizenship was reserved for the white race. The Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first bills passed after the Constitution’s ratification, limited citizenship to white men. Triumph over that racist political tradition, only made possible through war, was a fete that cannot be overstated. But it was still just a step. Would other races be included? Thousands of immigrants from China were flooding America’s western states, and a number of radical politicians proposed making them naturalized citizens. Confronting opposition to this idea, Frederick Douglass argued that the American nation could not only withstand interracial immigration, but that the nation’s ideals necessitated it.

A few excerpts that lay the foundation for his argument:

The real trouble with us was never our system or form of Government, or the principles underlying it; but the peculiar composition of our people, the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country. We have for along time hesitated to adopt and may yet refuse to adopt, and carry out, the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the Republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality…

Heretofore the policy of our government has been governed by race pride, rather than by wisdom…[Now] a new race is making its appearance within our borders, and claiming attention. It is estimated that not less than one hundred thousand Chinamen, are now within the limits of the United States…

And then he addresses the issue of racial “self-preservation,” a concept that has unfortunately become prominent again today:

I have said that the Chinese will come, and have given some reasons why we may expect them in very large numbers in no very distant future. Do you ask, if I favor such immigration, I answer I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would. But are there not reasons against all this? Is there not such a law or principle as that of self-preservation? Does not every race owe something to itself? Should it not attend to the dictates of common sense? Should not a superior race protect itself from contact with inferior ones? Are not the white people the owners of this continent? Have they not the right to say, what kind of people shall be allowed to come here and settle? Is there not such a thing as being more generous than wise? In the effort to promote civilization may we not corrupt and destroy what we have? Is it best to take on board more passengers than the ship will carry?…

I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue eyed and light haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world they need have no fear. They have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.

But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men. I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man…

And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United states, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt.

Douglass’s argument failed to win over the nation, at least not for another half-century. The Naturalization Act of 1870 limited citizenship to whites and people of African descent. A decade later, the Chinese Exclusion Act severely curtailed immigration from the nation, and was not repealed until World War II. Chinese Americans could finally become citizens in 1943.

It should be sobering that we are still dealing with these xenophobic concerns at the highest levels of government. Our president-elect’s campaign was founded upon castigating one race of immigrants and amplified when he promised to bar immigration for another. The catapulting of a white nationalist sub-culture—normalized through the serpentine label “alt-right”—both encapsulates a long and unfortunate American tradition as well as demonstrates that tradition’s ability to adapt to new times. Frederick Douglass’s words are just as relevant today as they have ever been.

I predict there will be a lot of work in the next few years dissecting the nativist elements within America’s nationalist tradition. But it will also be important to identify and magnify voices from the past that counter that narrative. Recovering prophetic indictments from the past may help us confront the ugliness of the present.