Commons Academy | Race, Gender, and Class in Colonial America
In this episode of History of the American Left, Karl the Producer lays out the conditions of colonial America and how the negative changes that were happening in the colonies started to inspire the first egalitarian movements in the Americas in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
OK Jason, this is pretty bad—and I don’t mean the ideological perspective. Significant historical errors abound, to include
1. Historians will tell you that prior to 1776 the percentage of white indentured servants was not 80% like the video asserts—it was somewhere toward the middle of a range of 50-75%
2. The reference to the first Africans arriving in Jamestown in 1619 has been debunked since the late 1990s, even though it still shows up in the history books
3. The use of Virginia as the normative narrative for the development of slavery is, oddly, extremely “old school” and has been dropped by most modern historians. For example, the colony of South Carolina was intentionally designed as a slave-colony by English planters from Barbados, not having anything to do with English population changes.
(What #2 and #3 reveal, oddly, is that the producer apparently has not relied on much modern scholarship, and is basing his historical factual basis on some of the more outdated, conservative histories.(His treatment of Bacon’s Rebellion is directly attributable to a book that’s forty years old.)
4. The gender development argument is really, really weak. It gets to the right place, but it’s route is quite counter factual. For example, the producer ignores the fact that women’s rights and liberties in the American colonies were actually better than their sisters in Europe at least through the 1730s. The use of the Salem Witch Trials as an enforcement of gender norms is an intellectually indefensible interpretation of the event. I’m not saying gender roles played no role in the event, but to make it into part of a larger pattern, is, frankly, pretty ludicrous.
5. The Quaker narrative is almost hilarious—within one of the most torturous connections between Quaker oppression at the hands of the Puritans to Abolitionism is really bad, and ignores a number of Quaker anti-slavery writers who were far more influential than the ones he cites.
6. Asserting that the Great Awakening (a) first brought Christianity to the enslaved Africans and (b) were the cause of early slave rebellions is just out and out inaccurate. Slave rebellions and revolts have existed in significant numbers since the Spanish first brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. The reality is that significant slave rebellions, and even a number of free societies inland, far predate the Great Awakening.
The primary issue with this video is that the producer has (a) moved a number of events/trends from the early 19th Century back into the 18th and even the 17th Century without any evidence; and (b) has actually ignored many of the moves toward egalitarian societies in port towns, while presuming an egalitarianism on the frontier that is a function of romance, not reality.
In other words, this is pretty bad history.
It’s sad, because there are a lot of people out there—beginning with Gary Nash and Bernard Bailyn, and moving up toward today with the likes of Alan Taylor who are actually doing the kind of work this video purports to be interested in doing.
It’s a pity Karl has never apparently bothered to read them.
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I’m eager to hear Karl’s take.
Hi Steve. First of all, thanks for watching the video, though I am sure it was not easy with the errors I do appreciate the critique. With the colonial era, I had a particularly hard time finding sources as I wasn’t entirely sure where to start, which clearly led me down some incorrect lines of reasoning. I certainly don’t want to mislead anyone, so I’ll probably take the video down and work on boosting the historical accuracy. Though just a few questions on the various points.
1 and 2. Where would I get information on this, because I believe that both of these in my video came from a history that was on the Department of Labor website by Richard B. Morris that clearly is at the least out of date.
4. I did realize near the end that I was reaching with the Salem Witch trials account, and was perhaps adapting points from Europe that were not applicable, so I apologize for that, but I do wonder if the situations regarding gender ratios and the effects they brought were accurate as I realize I did use an older piece of literature for that.
5. This was actually an area where I was using a bit more modern literature, A Slave’s Cause. It made an offhand comment about how many Quaker settlers were quite poor and when looking into that I might have overextended the importance. However, it did have those writers as important figures, so I wondered if you had heard of or read the book, as I was planning on using it in the future but don’t want to use it if it’s giving an inaccurate picture.
6. That was definitely poor formatting on my part. I was perhaps more eager to have a throughline from the Quaker section to the slave rebellion and plopped the Great Awakening as a sort of transition in there in the middle when it should have come afterward.
Thank you for this critique though. Colonial history was one of the areas I was least comfortable with going into this and it’s good to have a full accounting of the mistakes I made to be more thorough and accountable moving forward. I know it may be a lot to ask, but is it possible that I could use you as a resource, at least for the remaking of this video, to make sure that I’m using the most up-to-date sources and not making any blatantly incorrect history takes? I started this project as something that I was legitimately interested in, if not perhaps fully schooled in, so learning and purveying the most accurate information is something I want to make sure I do in the future.
Steve. I’m going email you on this. Would love to have you suggest the best sources for Karl’s work. Should I use the uni email address or the personal?
As he mentioned in the prologue video Karl isn’t a historian. This is a side project so any help identifying the most sound scholarship to date will be very helpful. Thanks.
“1. Historians will tell you that prior to 1776 the percentage of white indentured servants was not 80% like the video asserts—it was somewhere toward the middle of a range of 50-75%”
Didn’t get to see the video but I was wondering how the convicts who were sent here through the English penal system were classified in those numbers.
For instance, I have an ancestor who instead of being executed after The Monmouth Rebellion, was sent to Barbados as many were, and sold for transportation to the American colonies essentially as slave labor on English tobacco farms. Apparently at the time, farmers could buy convict labor at a “lower price than indentured white or enslaved African laborers”.
RSE use the email you collect through the site. I will be happy to communicate with you and Karl (you may share the email with him), although I do t have time right now today.
Karl, I will be more than happy to discuss with you—any of the DL posters can give you my email.
For a start, the best general introduction for what you are trying to do, which will give you a framework is one of the more recent editions of Gary Nash’s Red White & Black. It’s a textbook but doesn’t really read like one, and it is written by a pre-eminent historian. Of particular importance to you and your project is his treatment of how the Atlantic crossing worked as a filter to change the social composition of the English colonists in subtle but important ways.
For a more in-depth look at who peopled the colonies, and the world view they brought with them, Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West, though a bit outdated (late 1970s/early 1980s IIRC) is still indispensable.
Alan Taylor is the effectively the Dean of modern colonial historians, and if you just put him into the Amazon search bar you will find more than you can handle. I would suggest his The Thirteen Colonies as a start.
I tend to advise people to stay away from making either Bacon’s Rebellion or the Salem Witch Trials a fundamental part of their larger, pattern-based arguments. Both of these events have in common that we actually KNOW far less about them than we often think we do, and both have been appropriated so many times by so many ideological causes (with concurrent twisting out of shape of the known facts) that to do so automatically makes you suspect to a literate audience.
For slavery, begin with Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom, and be sure to read Peter Wood’s groundbreaking if slightly older Black Majority about slavery in South Carolina prior to 1710. I will leave the Quaker role to Foner—it’s not one of my areas of specialization. The critical classic on the development of slavery in American cultural thought remains Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom.
For women, start with Linda Kerber (I think her pre-revolutionary book is entitled Daughters of Liberty) and work backward through her sources.
No project like yours should skip the environmental aspect that began being covered in William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, and Colonial-Indian relations is best approached by reading James Axtell’s The Invasion Within and Francis Jennings’ The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, with a modern reprise in William Englebrecht’s Iroquoia.
There is a tremendous amount of great writing on the main port towns as entrepôt, political hotbed, and source of much egalitarianism in Colonial America, but a lot of it is still best found in journal articles, the titles of which I’d have to look up. As for the frontier, there’s been a lot that I have glanced at, but again I’d have to look, I do know that you can’t talk about the frontier in the colonial period without dealing with how elite land speculators controlled the process as much as anybody.
That should more than get you started (there’s a Master’s degree all that reading I just gave you). I wish you well. Sorry, perhaps, for being so dismissive in my initial analysis, but if you aspire to something better than the skewed Trumpian historical propaganda on the right it takes some serious work.
Oh wow this is awesome, thanks for all of this. Luckily I have lots of time for reading over the summer so I’m going to dig into some of this. I figure it’s better to spend a lot of time to make a better, more accurate video than to try to rush through it and get basic things wrong.