Two challenges are at the center of professional practice for me as an early Americanist.
-
-
…because everything we can know about the past is made possible by our present. This does not make us poor historians; it makes us human, and cognizant of the real importance of our work. For early America/nists, investments in national origins are super charged. 5/
Show this thread -
People all around us, our colleagues, journalists, politicians, our own families and communities, are invested in what kind of nation was founded out of what kind of era. Are Americans living in a country that reflects that founding? 6/
Show this thread -
Literally decades of research show us some things very, very clearly, among the most salient for national origins that we can only understand the United States that was founded in the Revolution and then the Federal Constitution when we understand the essential histories 7/
Show this thread -
of Native Americans, settler colonialism, and dispossession, the magnitude of Atlantic slavery and the enslaved, and the ways these phenomena and peoples were fundamentally entwined with the Br Am/ colonial focus of much of the traditional narrative. 8/
Show this thread -
As shorthand, it matters that x% of signers of the DOI or the Fed Constitution were personally invested in slavery, but it profoundly matters that 100% of them were enmeshed in a political economy of slavery. 9/
Show this thread -
I note decades of research because that is measured in traditional professional journals and venues. Really its centuries of knowledge and publication by Native and Black writers. It's been the work of many, many scholars, writers, more to make this as plain as it now is. 10/
Show this thread -
What we do with this is the question that has been made more obvious by the
#1619Project among others. The stakes could not be higher. 11/Show this thread -
The second issue is how early America/nists deal with those stakes, and how our professional practices have been embedded in the same dynamics that have made those histories at stake harder to know, harder to surface. 12/
Show this thread -
We have largely relied on the scholars doing this research & writing to push it to the surface-- unethical & unsustainable. Our professional orgs must support the scholars whose research & interpretive work we need & have all benefitted fr --this is as urgent as the history. 13/
Show this thread -
This is Twitter (obv). I have generalized and flattened very complex issues (obv). These two features have much deeper histories (obv). And I am not writing about
#SHEAR2020 but about the field – my field in toto (likely also obv). 14/Show this thread -
We must be historians of our professional practice, the histories we read, the histories we are crafting & teaching, & the organizations we build & invest in. Attn to the histories of our histories sounds meta because it is- it may be the most important thing we do. finis//
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.