Black Reconstruction: An Introduction

Introduction. The Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) has been of considerable interest to historians, lawyers, economists, and political scientists for more than 150 years. The internal political struggle that broke out in the middle of the 19th century between the two regions of the young democratic state seems to be a valuable object of research. However, scientific approaches to the study of the causes of the “inevitable conflict”, their transformation and rebirth depending on the historical period and the political situation are of even greater interest. This article attempts to summarize the main trends in the historiography of the causes of the Civil War in the United States, mainly in foreign historiography. Methods of research and materials. The methodological basis of the study was made up of general scientific and private scientific methods. The historical-legal, comparative method, as well as sociological, concrete-historical and systemic methods are used. The theoretical basis of the study was the work of mainly foreign historians, lawyers, political scientists and state historians. Analysis. Without denying the centrality of slavery among the causes of the Civil War, researchers identify religious, economic, political and social factors as the key determinants of the separatist movement in the South. A special place in American studies is occupied by the consideration of the role of African Americans in inciting conflict, the personality factor of A. Lincoln, as well as the influence of the abolitionist movement and journalists on the growing confrontation between the North and the South. At the same time, all directions, one way or another, boil down to the fact that it was slavery that was the fundamental cause of the Civil War. The peculiarities of the formation of each of the scientific directions were determined by the socio-economic and political conditions that took place in a particular historical period. Results. The periodization of scientific approaches to the study of the causes of the Civil War in the United States in the historical and legal literature can be carried out by dividing the research into three main periods: the “confrontational” (second half of the 19th century); the “socio-economic” (beginning – middle of the 20th century); the “industrial” (middle of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century). In the period from the beginning of the 21st century to the present, there is an obvious consensus on the central role of slavery among the determinants of war, but approaches to this problem in recent years have been characterized by interdisciplinarity, complexity, taking into account completely different sides of the conflict. Each of these areas has contributed to the formation of a holistic view of the causes of the Civil War, allowing us to realize the complex, multifaceted nature of the causes of the conflict and to reject two-dimensional approaches to their understanding. Key words: American Civil War, causes of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, slavery in the United States, the Missouri Compromise, abolitionists, history of the USA.

Illustration by Paul Spina minority a curious reflection of majority. I say curious because in human social system minority provides a double reflection: It indicates what society has been and what it can be. Richard Wright recognized this several decades ago when he wrote, We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all manifold experiences of America. Whites, he said, can better understand themselves majority by coming to know minority. I begin this discussion on future of black colleges and universities by emphasizing function of minorities in society in hope of replacing frame of reference used by national leaders such Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He suggested that progress of minority seriously retarded when its way of life is out of line with rest of American society. This implies that minorities should be other-directed, that their behavior should be imitative, that they should be remade in image of whites. And Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, in a 1967 Harvard Educational Review article, American Negro College, called black college of midtwentieth century ill-financed, ill-staffed caricature of white higher education. Michael Meyers of NAACP has attempted to dismiss argument for continuation of black colleges an outcry of emotionalism, ethnic chauvinism, and paternalism. He summed up his view with this statement: No matter what else taught or how well it taught, fact that a school segregated teaches that there a qualitative difference between students in black and white colleges. Clearly Meyers's assumption that black colleges are second rate. Apparently, any approach to education that differs for blacks does not make sense to Meyers or Moynihan. In this respect, they are bedfellows. The logic of positing a different educational approach for minority lost on both critics. Meyers has formulated question wrongly in assuming that the issue at stake in current controversy over all-black colleges segregation. Others believe that issue education! With this kind of criticism coming from friends of black institutions, it difficult for these colleges to get a hearing regarding what they can, could, and should do not only for blacks but for education of nation. Yet our national history offers evidence that approach of minority may in end be of great value to majority. W.E.B. Du Bois said that public school system in most southern states began with enfranchisement of blacks. The idea that masses should be educated to effectively participate in public decision making was formulated by Thomas Jefferson several decades before Civil War, but was not implemented until blacks became members of southern state legislatures during Reconstruction. In early 1800s there was no public educational system in South, except perhaps in North Carolina. In his study, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois said that education was regarded by poor whites before Civil War as a luxury connected with wealth. In Thomas Jefferson's Virginia, for example, less than one half of poor white children were attending any The laws passed in South Carolina between 1856 and 1870 that authorized tax-supported schools open to all were described in book the most beneficial legislation state... has ever enacted. These laws were initiated and supported by black lawmakers. One could say of Reconstruction black legislators that progeny of former slaves fulfilled for all people slave owner's dream of publicly supported education in South. In contemporary times, blacks have continued to link legislation and idea of liberation in a way that has improved education for members of their own race and for whites. Each day before he leaves home for his classes, Allan Bakke should thank God that there are racial minorities in America whose political action resulted in a law that guarantees his right to attend medical school. That law Civil Rights Act of 1964. John Monro of Tougaloo College (see box, page 30) has said that if more white colleges used readings from black authors, readings that develop a full and accurate awareness of American black experience, this country would be much better off. He acknowledged, however, that the white colleges are not going to do it, or anything like itwhich one reason sensible people prefer to teach in black colleges. CHARLES V. WILLIE, a sociologist, professor of education and urban studies, Harvard Graduate School of Education. He and Ronald R. Edmonds are coeditors of Black Colleges in America, reviewed in this issue.

book reviews265 North, Foner has made an invaluable addition to our knowledge of the antebellum period. Michael F. Holt Yale University Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War. By James A. Rawley. (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1969. Pp. vü, 304. $5.95.) Professor Rawley has written a very important and useful book. He provides much more than simply an excellent overview of the complex issues and events surrounding "bleeding Kansas," and the coming of the Civil War. Although he believes traditional interpretations of those factors as causes of the Civil War must be considered, the question of race was of paramount importance. The Civil War was, in his view, an irrepressible conflict brought on by a blundering generation. It was a blundering generation essentially because it was a "flawed generation," flawed by its belief in Negro inferiority. More specifically, he emphasizes the variety of responses to the long standing racial prejudice in America as the crucial element in the controversy over slavery in the territories during the decade before Sumter. Other historians have dealt with racialism as a cause of the Civil War, but Rawley is the first to apply the concept to the Kansas controversy, and he does it convincingly . With regard to Kansas, men who supported slavery opposed antiextension as a menace to stable race relations. Antislavery advocates viewed extension mainly as a barrier to white opportunity, not primarily as a detriment to Negroes. The questions raised by whites on this issue involved whether the black man in the territories would remain a slave, a second-class citizen, or be excluded entirely. Virtually no one advocated equal rights for him there. The national "folk belief" that the Negro was inherently inferior, that he represented an economic danger, and that race mixing must be prevented drastically limited the political choices open to the northern and southern politicians of the 1850s. This, more than anything else, destroyed any opportunity for successfully settling the slavery question short of war. "Race," says Rawley, "is the one thing that has defied the genius of the American people. If there had been no color bar, the United States probably could have coped with the issue of slavery." Rawley expresses disdain for the role played by most of the people, institutions, and proposed solutions connected with the Kansas controversy . Regardless of section, party, or political office, almost without fail, the American people and their leaders evaded, misunderstood, or misrepresented their responsibility for finding a just and lasting settlement in Kansas. Trapped by politicai philosophies inadequate to meet 266civil war history the needs of the era, hungry, in most cases, for political power, and above all, riddled with a gnawing race prejudice, they stumbled on from disaster to catastrophe. The Dred Scott decision, for example, drew from Douglas and Lincoln almost immediate racialist responses. Douglas used his belief in Negro inferiority to defend slavery, popular sovereignty , and opposition to what he described as the Republican tenet of Negro equality. He asserted that racial amalgamation would be the disastrous result of Republican policy. Lincoln, in turn, denied that Republicans desired social equality for Negroes, and used his belief in black inferiority to justify opposition to slavery, the necessity of containing the institution, and declared that Democratic policy would foster amalgamation. As the decade wore on, each of these men and their parties escalated their efforts, through word and deed, to convince the voters that they, rather than their opponents, represented the doctrine of white supremacy. During the debates over the Lecompton Constitution , southern congressmen and several of their northern colleagues found themselves agreeing that "slavery was the best arrangement for the inferior Negro." Border state Republican, Frank Blair Jr., introduced a resolution to colonize the Negro as the best solution to the race problem . Free soilers continued to argue with growing enthusiasm that exclusion of black men from the territories would provide increased economic opportunity for white men in a growing nation. It was essentially this hardening of racialism in America, expressed in a multitude of ways in the wake of "bleeding Kansas," that made the slavery problem so difficult to solve, and set the stage for civil...

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsW. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in AmericaRayford W. LoganRayford W. Logan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 21, Number 1January 1936 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2714546 Views: 7Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1936, 1964, 1969 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

SPHERES OF INTERVENTION: FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COLLAPSE OF LEBANON, 1967-1976 James R. Stocker Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (vii + 296 pages, notes, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Jeffrey G. KaramIn Spheres of Intervention: Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976, James R. Stocker reconsiders the role of the United States in Lebanon's path to the civil war that erupted in 1975. Combining declassified documents from the National Archives and various American presidential libraries, as well as some Arabic and French sources, Stocker advances two main arguments. The first is that US policy toward Lebanon was subordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East; the second is that the US played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse (4, 5). Both arguments are meant to convince the reader that rather than focus on one set of factors, a proper study of involvement in Lebanon between 1967 and 1976 should incorporate the different domestic, regional, and international factors that shaped policy at the time. Stocker considers Lebanon's slide into mayhem alongside other regional and international events, such as the October War of 1973, the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the various disengagement agreements and disagreements between a number of Arab states and Israel during the 1970s, making his account of the underlying factors that ignited the Lebanese Civil War among the most comprehensive.Spheres of Intervention consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Stocker discusses interests in Lebanon and surveys existing literature on the causes of the civil war, which include the fragility of Lebanon's political system, foreign meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and poor socioeconomic development. The first three chapters deal with important junctures between the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, known as Black September. Chapters four and five focus on the heightened tension and subsequent skirmishes between Palestinian militants and the Lebanese government leading up to the October War of 1973, as well as the state of sociopolitical affairs in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war. The last three chapters examine the first two years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76) and the intense negotiations between various Arab states, the United States, and Israel to broker temporary peace between the warring factions. More specifically, chapters six and seven demonstrate that Lebanon became a battleground for regional contestation between Syria and Israel, as well as between Syria and different Arab states. The epilogue fast-forwards through Lebanon's civil war and ends with the United States calling on the Lebanese government to implement UN resolutions, particularly regarding the disarmament of Hizballah's armed forces and other militas on Lebanese soil and, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.As the product of serious research drawing on multiple sources, Spheres of Intervention is unique in the way it approaches policy and the beginning of Lebanon's civil war. Parts of the book's analysis, however, prompt concerns about the interpretation of sources and linkages (or lack thereof) between important events in the time period covered. The first concern relates to the author's extreme reluctance to connect the dots between the various archival materials. It is understandable that Stocker refrains from making grandiose assertions that cannot be properly substantiated. Nevertheless, the author's analysis of military and financial support to right-wing Christian militias is very limited and troubling. As a matter of fact, Stocker vacillates between implicating the United States in taking sides, particularly by supporting Christian militias in the build-up to the Lebanese Civil War (18, 63-64, 131-32), and dismissing this partisanship by claiming that the United States refrained from actively fueling civil conflict (63-64, 144, 166, 224). …

The Causes of the American Civil WarRecent Interpretations and New Directions (1974 Reprint) Eric Foner In 1960, as Americans prepared to observe the centennial of the Civil War, one of the foremost historians of that conflict published a brief article entitled, “American Historians and the Causes of the Civil War.”1 Most readers probably expected another survey of the changing course of civil war interpretation. Instead the author announced that as a subject of serious historical analysis, Civil War causation was “dead.” Looking back over the decade and a half since David Donald wrote, it would appear that he somewhat exaggerated the death of this field of inquiry. In the 1950’s, historians were concerned with investigating periods of consensus in America’s past. But in the 1960’s, as the issues of race and war came to the forefront of national life, earlier times of civil strife in American history attracted renewed attention. The 1960’s, for example, witnessed a renascence of the study of slavery. It is now no longer possible to view the peculiar institution as some kind of accident or aberration, existing outside the mainstream of national development. Rather, slavery was absolutely central to the American experience, intimately [End Page 41] bound up with the settlement of the western hemisphere, the American Revolution and industrial expansion. It was what defined the Old South and drew southern society along a path of development which set it increasingly apart from the rest of the nation.2 At the same time, a striking reversal of interpretations of the abolitionists took place.3 In fact, there was a paradoxical double reversal. On the one hand the abolitionists, previously castigated as fanatics and agitators, suddenly emerged as the conscience of a sinning nation—much as the Garrisons and Welds had portrayed themselves a century earlier. At the same time, a number of writers argued that not only were the friends of the slave not immune from racism, but, far from being truly “radical,” they seemed to accept the middle-class values of northern society.4 The flood of studies of slavery, abolitionism, and the race issue does not seem, however, to have brought historians much closer to a generally accepted interpretation of the coming of the Civil War than they were fifteen years ago. As the late David Potter pointed out, the irony is that disagreements of interpretation persist in the face of a greatly increased body of historical knowledge.5 This is partially because the Civil War raised so many still unresolved [End Page 42] issues. Perhaps, however, there is another reason. Historians’ methodologies and value judgments have changed considerably over the past fifteen years, but the questions historians have asked of their data have remained relatively static. Like the debate over slavery before the appearance of Stanley Elkins’ study in 1959, discussion of the causes of the Civil War continues to be locked into an antiquated interpretive framework. Historians of the Civil War era seem to be in greater need of new models of interpretation and new questions than of an additional accumulation of data. There have, however, been a number of works in the past fifteen years which have attempted to develop entirely new ways of looking at ante-bellum America and the origins of the Civil War. One of the most striking developments of these years has been the emergence of the “new political historians,” who have attempted to recast our understanding of ante-bellum political alignments. They have de-emphasized “national” issues like slavery and the tariff, and substituted ethno-cultural conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, or between pietistic and ritualistic religious groups, as the major determinants of voting behavior. These works have broadened our understanding of antebellum political culture, and demonstrated the inevitable failure of any “monistic interpretation” of political conflict. And they should force historians to abandon whatever economic determinism still persists in the writing of political history. Perhaps most important, they have demonstrated the virtues of viewing voters not as isolated individuals, but as men and women embedded in a complex network of social and cultural relationships.6 The “new political history” involves both a new methodology—the statistical analysis of quantitative...

This study draws from W. E. B. Du Boi’s urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addressing underlying inequalities that reproduce harm. After drawing out the distinct intellectual trajectories of these two approaches, we turn to two contemporary cases of racialized police violence—Syracuse, NY, and the Antelope Valley, CA—to illustrate the theoretical and methodological significance of a Du Boisian mended windows analysis of urban policing across time and place. We conclude by considering what this approach might have foretold about contemporary movements to defund policing in favor of investing in community vitality.

In this essay, James Edward Ford III addresses Du Bois’s extensive use of poetry in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, particularly the multilevel argumentation through form and content that allows the poetry closing each chapter to act as a door allowing concepts to flow between disparate modes of articulation. The tension between the poetic passages and the prose pushes the reader to engage heavily with the text and discover why Du Bois chose particular poems, as well as how the poetry connects with and enhances the prose analysis of racist national culture and imperialism.Though the prose of the text never addresses the questions arising from Du Bois’s argument that racist assumptions precede legal concepts, the poetry throughout the text provides glimpses of the answers.

This essay examines how Du Bois’s critique of global political economy proceeds as a critique of American constitutionalism in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Analyzing how Du Bois reworks a set of Marxian concepts—phantasmagoria, fetish, and transubstantiation—toward a theory of the “new imperialism,” Powers argues that Black Reconstruction subverts a triumphal narrative of American constitutionalism as exceptionalism by undoing the temporality of legal progressivism that sustains it. Writing against a generation of historians who treated Reconstruction as an anomalous deviation from an American constitutionalism thought to embody the realization of immanent reason at the end of history, Du Bois demonstrates that the forms of barbarism, custom, and status posited as prior in this telos of constitutional progress to be products of the American juridico-political regime. Through examining the ways in which the Constitution operates as a fetish that doubly posits a fiction of race war as an alibi for its own lawlessness, and a fiction of world-historical lawlessness as an alibi for empire, Du Bois punctures a doctrine of race that phantasmagorically distorts human capacity for both juridical and phenomenological modes of recognition.

When Mississippi voted to abolish slavery in 1865 “times were especially tough for Mississippi’s newly freed slaves.”1 Mississippi’s decision to retain its Confederacy status2 signaled that the end of the Civil War was not, however, the end of oppressive conditions for blacks. In a move that would have devastating consequences for freed-persons of color, Mississippi adopted black codes3 to regulate African Americans’ participation in the state’s civic life. The adoption of these codes by most southern states was one way to “forecast, to a remarkable degree, the future attitude of former Confederates toward the place of blacks in the South and in American life,”4 asserted historian John Hope Franklin. Almost as a symbol of both allegiance to southern traditions and defiance of the Union’s military victory, these policies—implemented to control a recently emancipated labor pool—were essentially “systems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery,”5 as historian C. Vann Woodward noted. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his extensive research on Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, emphasized that black codes were a vehicle by which “Mississippi simply re enacted her slave code.”6 After all, as Franklin pointed out, “most of the laws employed such terms as ‘master’ and ‘servant’ and clearly implied a distinction that consigned blacks to a hopeless inferior status.”7KeywordsSouthern StateBlack CollegeWhite SupremacySunday SchoolMoral SituationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Previous articleNext article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHarold J. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University and was previously Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. Recipient of the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society and the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, he is author of five books and coeditor of six others, together with well over sixty articles. His primary research interests are in the emergence of the new medicines and sciences of early modern Europe; global knowledge exchanges; the coproduction of science and commerce; and processes of translation.William Deringer is Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research excavates the history of economic and political knowledge practices. His first book, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), reconstructs how numerical calculation became an authoritative mode of public reasoning in Anglophone political culture. His new project, Discounting: A History of the Economic Future (in One Calculation), traces “present value” calculations from their early modern beginnings to contemporary debates about climate change.Julia Fein is a historian of Modern Russia, specializing in the intersecting histories of science and empire. She spent two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University, where she was affiliated with the “Networks of Exchange” seminar at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. She has also taught modern European history at Macalester College.Courtney Fullilove is Associate Professor of History, Environmental Studies, and Science in Society at Wesleyan University. She is the author of The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (Chicago, 2017) and of articles on claims to natural and cultural heritage. She is currently writing a history of international biodiversity preservation.Arunabh Ghosh is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Harvard University. A historian of modern China, his interests include social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, and transnational history. His book, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early PRC, 1949–1959, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, BJHS-Themes, and the PRC History Review. He is currently working on two new projects: a history of Chinese dam building in the twentieth century and a history of China-India scientific networks, ca. 1900–1960.Martin Giraudeau is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Sciences Po, in Paris, and a researcher in the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He has published articles on the history of business plans, the invention of entrepreneurship, and the roles of accounting in organizations and society. He recently coedited, with Frédéric Graber, a volume on the modern history of projects: Les Projets: Une histoire politique (16e–21e siècles) (Paris, 2018).Eugenia Lean is Associate Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007). Her forthcoming book, Manufacturing China’s Vernacular Industrialism: Nativist Tinkerer and Toothpowder Magnate, Chen Diexian (1879–1940), employs the figure of Chen Diexian, a professional editor, science enthusiast, and pharmaceutical industrialist, to examine the practices of nativist tinkering, innovative adaptation, and knowledge work in the building of early twentieth-century Chinese industry. Her latest research examines China’s involvement in shaping modern global regimes of intellectual property from the early twentieth to twenty-first centuries.Victoria Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Ohio University, where she teaches and writes about modern science and technology. She is currently writing a book about Japanese society’s engagement with microbes in science, industry, and environmental management. She has published in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (ed. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland), and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.Paul Lucier is a historian of science, business, and the environment. He is the author of Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore, 2008) and is currently finishing a book on the geology of gold, silver, and copper mining in the American West. The goal of his research is to understand whether and how science-driven capitalism can be ethical, innovative, intellectually creative, and environmentally responsible.Sarah Milov is Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Smoke and Ashes: From Corporatism to Neoliberalism in Tobacco’s Twentieth Century, is forthcoming. Her recent research focuses on whistle-blowing, particularly the relationship among gender, credibility, and bureaucracy.Emily Pawley is Assistant Professor of History at Dickinson College, where she teaches environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the history of science. Her research focuses on cultivated landscapes as sources of knowledge; recent publications examine analytic tables and the invention of nutritional value, cattle portraiture and markets in blood, and varietal description and counterfeit fruit. Her book project, the Balance-Sheet of Nature: Agriculture and Speculative Science in the Antebellum North, examines the kinds of speculative and futuristic knowledge that emerged to make sense of the rapidly commercializing landscape of post–Erie Canal New York and is under advance contract at the University of Chicago Press. She is also interested in the transatlantic history of moon farming.Lukas Rieppel is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, where he teaches courses on the history of science and the history of capitalism. His forthcoming book, Assembling the Dinosaur, uses the history of paleontology as a means to examine how the ideals, norms, and practices of modern capitalism shaped the way scientific knowledge was made, certified, and distributed during North America’s Long Gilded Age. In addition, Rieppel has written several essays about the material culture of the earth sciences, the history of museums, the valuation of fossils, and the authentication of specimens.David Singerman is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia. His work has appeared in Radical History Review, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Journal of British Studies. He has also written on the sugar industry for the New York Times and on U.S.-Canada trade wars for The Atlantic.Hallam Stevens is Associate Professor of History and Biology and the Head of History at the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is the author of Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (Chicago, 2013), Biotechnology and Society: An Introduction (Chicago, 2016), and the coeditor of Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome (Durham, N.C., 2015).Lee Vinsel is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, where he teaches and writes about government and technology. He is a cofounder of The Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary research network that studies maintenance, repair, and mundane work with things. His forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins University Press examines the history of automobile regulation in the United States from 1893 to today’s dreams of a driverless future. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Osiris Volume 33, Number 12018Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories Published for the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700195 © 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

During William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s sojourn to Germany and co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he engaged in the universal struggle against capitalism. Often congregating with White Socialists, Du Bois’s understanding of class struggle as a material force evolved. He was suspicious of the Russian experience and the communist experience in the United States given the ideological complexities of Afro-American life. However, during the 1930s, Du Bois reached greater clarity of his ideological beliefs, as reflected in his publication Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. Nevertheless, by the 1940s, Du Bois still held contradictory narratives regarding socialism and communism while his evolutionary process persisted. In 1961, Du Bois submitted his application to join the Communist Party USA after a life spent being a reluctant communist. His submission reflected a life dedicated to fighting against racial prejudice and the perils of White supremacy and his evolution toward socialism and communism.