2 July 2007

Volume 3, Issue 7

The main news around town this June was the passing of Pastor Esther Dozier of the Clinton A.M.E Zion Church. Esther, 65, was a dear friend and will be greatly missed. Over the past years we've been honored to work with her on the creation of two books.

In Sewing Circles, Dime Suppers, and W. E. B. Du Bois the title underscores the central themes that resonate throughout the church’s history, from its inception in 1870 to the present. In constant need of money to maintain and expand the church, dime suppers sustained both the people they fed and the church itself. The crucial and complex role that women fulfilled as caregivers, cooks, fund raisers, and go-betweens with the white community is examined through their membership in sewing circles. And Du Bois plays a crucial role in the national fight for social justice, of which the church has an important part.

A guide to the African American Heritage Trail in the Upper Housatonic Valley was published in late 2006. This book tells the stories of the Black luminaries who have lived in the Housatonic Valley and details the life and times of the many ordinary yet extraordinary African Americans who have made their mark in the region from the 1700s to the present.

In honor of Esther Dozier and W. E. B. Du Bois, this issue of World History to Go focuses on events that brought an end to slavery.

Slavery on the World Stage

By the early nineteenth century slavery was on the wane in the Americas. Antislavery sentiment began to gain ground; by 1807 Great Britain prohibited the slave trade between Africa and its dominions, and the United States followed suit in 1808. The British abolished slavery in their dominions in 1833 and began to fight the slave trade in the rest of the world. Most Spanish American countries abolished slavery by the 1850s. The issue of slavery was most divisive in the United States. The political conflict between the slaveholding South and the industrial North came to a head in 1861 with the U.S. Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 and the Union victory in 1865 eliminated slavery from North America. In the rest of the hemisphere, although slavery played as large a role as in the United States, abolition was not a bloody affair. Cuba abolished slavery in 1886. Brazil ended the slave trade in 1850 and emancipated all slaves in 1888.

Industrialization, which began to accelerate in the nineteenth century, generally did not favor slave labor. Slaves would see it in their best interest to wreck delicate machinery so that they did not have to work; for this reason it was easier and cheaper to hire free labor that depended on wages to make a living. Also, slaves were not, by and large, economic consumers, and the industrial system needed consumers who earned wages and thus had money to spend on the goods produced by industry. [From the article “Labor Systems, Coercive,” by Erick D. Langer in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.]

Civil War

By 1832 Lincoln developed an interest in politics and served in the state legislature and in the United States Congress. He allied himself with the Whig Party, which distrusted what it perceived as a growing slave power in the South that corrupted the cause of democracy. Lincoln joined the Republican Party shortly after its founding in 1854. His reputation as a lawyer with great personal integrity made him an obvious choice to challenge the incumbent Democratic senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas. Their campaign centered on a series of debates over the extension of slavery into the territories that caught the attention of the entire nation. Newspapers printed the speeches verbatim. In the end the Democrat-dominated Illinois senate reelected Douglas, senators being elected by the state legislature rather than by popular vote at the time.

The losing senatorial campaign propelled Lincoln to the Republican nomination for president in 1860. Lincoln won the election, though with only a plurality of popular votes, from the northern tier of states. Many considered the Republicans too radical; most in the party, like Lincoln, were not abolitionists, but were opposed to the spread of slavery. Yet for many in the South, Lincoln was seen as especially dangerous, which prompted Southern states to begin to secede from the union in December 1860. In spite of calls for him to intervene, Lincoln remained silent, thinking that it would be imprudent to act before his inauguration the following March. By then, however, eleven states had seceded and adopted a new constitution creating a Confederacy.

On April 12, 1861, the Civil War began, when troops of the newly formed Confederacy fired on Federal troops attempting to resupply Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. Scholars disagree over responsibility for that event: Lincoln for ordering the fort resupplied, or the South for firing. [From the article “Lincoln, Abraham,” by Dorothy O. Pratt in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.]

Laws of War

Western nations also made efforts in the nineteenth century to reduce the destructive effects of warfare by distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants and by protecting those captured in battle. In the United States, President Abraham Lincoln asked Francis Lieber to draft a code to govern military conduct during the U.S. Civil War (1860–1865). The laws of armed conflict were further developed by international treaties such as those promulgated at the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conferences, which attempted to protect civilians from the scourge of war and focused on prohibiting the use of weapons that caused unnecessary suffering without providing a significant military advantage. [From the article “Human Rights,” by Jon M. Van Dyke in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.]

"Though attempting to cover as broad a subject as world history in five volumes seems impossible, the editors and their contributors have pulled the feat off with aplomb. No article runs more than approximately 10 pages, but each captures the essence of the topic being addressed as well as the distinct style of the contributor. . . . As McNeill states in his preface, the title is 'designed to help both beginners and experts to sample the best contemporary efforts to make sense of the human past by connecting particular and local histories with larger patterns of world history.' The encyclopedia succeeds admirably and belongs on the shelves of all high-school, public, and academic libraries. In short: buy it. Now." --Booklist **Starred Review** and Editors’ Choice

• Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History
• Edited by W. H. McNeill, Jerry H. Bentley, David Christian, David Levinson, Heidi Roupp, and Judith P. Zinsser
• Five volumes, 2,500 pages, US$575
• ISBN: 0-9743091-0-9 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Online: BerkshireWorldHistory.com

This Fleeting World

A great historian can make clear the connections between the first Homo sapiens and today's version of the species, and a great storyteller can make those connections come alive. David Christian is both, and This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, makes the journey - from the earliest foraging era to the agrarian era to our own modern era - a fascinating one.

"Julius Caesar famously summed up the surprises and confusion of ten years of war in Gaul with three Latin words: veni, vidi, vinci - I came, I saw, I conquered. Here, David Christian performs a similar feat by summing up the surprises and confusion of 250,000 years of human history in just 92 pages; and improves on Caesar's boast by showing how persistent collective learning expanded human skills, and enlarged our numbers, wealth, and power across the ages. What a quick, convenient, and persuasive way to begin to understand the confusing world in which we find ourselves." --William H. McNeill, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Chicago; author of The Rise of the West (National Book Award) and The Human Web

With warm regards,
Karen Christensen
karen@berkshirepublishing.com
Berkshire Blog