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Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in Between: edited by Lynsey A. Bates, John M. Chenoweth, and James A. Delle, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 2016. ix, 358 pp., ill., maps. The volume concludes with remarks by Laurie Wilkie (Chapter 14) who draws on her own deep experience with plantation archaeology in both the Bahamas and the southeastern United States, to synthesize the preceding chapters and reflect on which "spaces in between" remain understudied. Seiter points out how on many small islands, sugar monoculture was slow to develop as the climate, challenging topography, and political instability were impediments to sugar cultivation and plantation slavery. [Extracted from the article]

Temporary social networks may have long-term impacts on economic outcomes. This paper focuses on social networks formed during the American Civil War (1861–1865) among African American veterans. I find that wartime social networks (veterans from the same company) persistently affected veterans' location choices in the post-Civil War period. By estimating discrete choice migration models, I show that veterans were more likely to move to a county where men from their military war company lived. By focusing on heterogeneous military companies and using the instrument of "weak" social networks, I rule out the competing explanation that the effect is driven by veterans having similar location preferences. The paper finds long-term benefits of living together as well. Veterans earned higher incomes after the war if they ended up living in the same county with wartime friends who had higher incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the factors behind the failure of British efforts to cultivate significant amounts of American cotton in the Ottoman Empire to compensate for the supplies cut due to the American Civil War. The reports by British consuls on the subject sheds light on Ottoman labor markets, financial strains on Ottoman agricultural workers and land owners, difficulties posed by natural and climatic conditions, the challenges faced in the difficult Anglo-Ottoman partnership, and the extent of central Ottoman authority (especially in terms of the ability of imperial bureaucracy to co-opt or coerce regional elites) in the third decade of the Tanzimat Reforms. British communications also display the varying opinions among British officials of the Ottoman government, officials, population, and the status of the Tanzimat Reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One puzzling omission was Milteer not mentioning Solomon Northrup in his discussion of free people of color being kidnapped and enslaved, even though Northrup is the I poster child i for being kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years on a Louisiana plantation. Milteer describes the ongoing correlation between passing new laws aligned with the population growth of free people of color. Milteer demonstrates a superior use of untapped primary sources of government papers, legislative records, old newspapers, and archival unpublished manuscripts and papers. [Extracted from the article]

The article reports on the availability of various collections for research at the Georgia Historical Society including Mariana Johnson Papers, Lieutenant General Donald E. "Rosie" Rosenblum Papers, and Georgia Historical Society Collection of American Civil War Confederate Medical Records.

This paper provides a new approach to studying the behavior of groups engaged in civil war termination bargaining by focusing on the commitment problem. Extending the basic Rubinstein bargaining model, the model presented here has the added feature of a reneging option for the stronger group after an agreement is reached. This leads to the prediction that when groups expect the absence of an enforcement mechanism, the stronger group makes a larger concession, while the weaker group makes a more demanding offer, than would be expected according to the relative power dynamic between groups. On the other hand, when groups expect that a third-party peace operator will enforce an agreement, groups' offers more closely reflect their relative power situation. To illustrate the causal process of groups' bargaining behavior, five bargaining attempts during Sierra Leone's civil wars from 1991 to 2002 are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many British travelers who visited America in the first half of the nineteenth century did so in order to see first-hand the democratic system and, depending on their own political views, warn their British readers against its dangers or present the U.S. as a model to imitate. My paper focuses on British travelogues written between the end of the Napoleonic wars (1815) and the American Civil War (1861), exploring how their authors conceived the American system and how they wanted to portray it to their compatriots. While progressive writers such as Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright believed that the young republic could, at most, be faulted on not being democratic and egalitarian enough, Tories such as Frances Trollope, Basil Hall and Charles Augustus Murray believed that the American model was harmful. The word "citizens" was used by them as a term of abuse, to signify people characterized by materialism and bad manners. They warned against equality, which they thought would result in leveling down, the tyranny of the majority and universal suffrage. The American model of citizenship seemed menacing especially in the 1830s and 1840s, when British Conservatives felt that the order of the Empire was threatened by the Radicals and the Chartist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the diagram is a concept that maps the power relations inscribed within the regulatory apparatuses of everyday life, such as schools, social norms, the law, etc. The diagram is the map of forces that make these apparatuses run, and cause them to tend to produce certain outcomes, to the exclusion of others. This paper explores performance as a diagrammatic medium, in that performance schematizes and models the world and the forces of power that make it. Building on Rebecca Schneider's work, the example of American Civil War re-enactment is used to think about the slippage between repetition and difference in the acting-out of quintessentially American themes, both in performance, and in contemporary politics. Can historical re-enactment be a form of psychodrama or political education? Or are Civil War re-enactments echoes of a quintessential, enduring American wish for 'redemptive violence, for domination and a return to a mythic past' (Robcis 2021: 146) that also resonates, for instance, in the 6 January Capitol attack? If the nation tends toward a (compulsive?) repetition of relations of enslavement, domination and violence (while fixating on rhetoric of freedom, liberty and justice) then it is important to ask how, and if, this diagram might be repeated differently within a performative space of play and fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the current state of knowledge of American naval boarding axes from the colonial period to the Civil War. It spans the time when most naval axes were either manufactured in Britain or were locally made copies, through the brief life of the Continental Navy and to the formation of the United States Navy which issued the first government pattern axes. It examines the three types of 'toothed' boarding axe which are uniquely identifiable as American by the inclusion of a serration on the rear side of the blade. It ends with the Civil War and the evolution of the boarding axe to a tool more in keeping with the transition from sail to steam and the introduction of more powerful naval artillery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a specific form of group loss and unconscious responses to it. Defeat in war and the absence of formal and unconditional surrender can lead to profound dysfunction psychosocial outcomes. Our “case example” is the ambiguous conclusion to the Civil War in the U.S. (1865), in which surrender by Confederate generals was a serial process lacking a formal conclusion to hostilities. We explore how this sense of incompleteness left sufficient mental space for Southern whites to think and believe that their defeat did not constitute surrender and that the (white) South could therefore “rise again,” restoring its former glory. Vamik Volkan’s framework of “chosen traumas” provides for retroactively reversing historical events to restore a defeated group’s “chosen glory.” The historical and psychopolitical legacy of this wished-for rewriting of history is explored through to the present and the Age of Trump. The recent emergence of white supremacy and grievance and the rise of overt and violent racism against blacks including renewed restrictions on voting rights is such an example where there is a reversing of history to restore the former glory of the South that was defeated but did not surrender. The article concludes by situating the case study in widespread, if not universal, culture and history, as an expression of unconscious psychosocial dynamics in response to traumatic loss when defeat on the battlefield is not accompanied by formal and unconditional surrender creating a clear time boundary—before and after. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county's propensity to elect former slave owners was positively correlated with cotton production, but negatively with Reconstruction-era progress of blacks. Counties that elected more slave owners also displayed worse educational outcomes for blacks in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• $45.00 Decisions at Antietam: The Fourteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle • Michael S. Lang • Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021 • xx, 306 pp. • $45.00 cloth; $29.50 paper Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War • Lorien Foote • Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021 • xvi, 296 pp. • $29.95 A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era • Andrew F. Lang • Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021 • 558 pp. [Extracted from the article]

Chester Alan Arthur was the twentieth-first president of the United States. His presidency, from 1881-1885, was unplanned and monumental, yet he is an often overlooked figure of history. When he is remembered, it is for domestic reform. Here his part on the international stage, through the events of the International Prime Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington DC, an early success for international relations, and his part in the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885, through recognizing the Congo flag, are explored. How his character influenced his role, how it contrasted with Belgian King Leopold II, and Arthur's place in civil rights history is also examined, as well as the developing imperialism and Anglo-American order of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]