美国人民争取西部土地的斗争与“宅地法”问题

美国人民争取西部土地的斗争滥觞于十八世纪末,在十九世纪四十年代后进入高潮,而内战期间颁布的《宅地法》便是这个斗争的最后成果。这个斗争是十九世纪上期美国政治生活中的一件大事,而《宅地法》是美国历史上的一项著名的经济措施。本文准备对这个问题作较系统全面的介绍。 在外国史学界连篇累牍的著述中,出现过一些错误的观点。有些人对《宅地法》评价过高,说这项立法是美国有史以来在土地政策上的空前创举,它的实施标志了与过去的土地政     

失去的机会:1866年美国“南部宅地法”与黑人获取土地的失败

内战结束后,为了解决美国南部黑人的土地问题,共和党控制的国会通过了"南部宅地法"。"南部宅地法"为广大黑人申请并获得免费的公地创造了一系列相对有利的条件。但是,由于大多数黑人长期深陷贫困,根本无力支付申请并开垦宅地的初始资本,因此,他们始终未能充分利用"南部宅地法"赋予的有利条件实现获得土地的梦想。乡村商人与种植园主的借贷剥削是广大黑人长期陷入贫困的深层次原因。联邦政府在推行"南部宅地法"的同时,并没有意识到借贷问题对于黑人申请者的重要性,因而并没有为他们提供相应的借贷扶持。对于大多数黑人而言,"南部宅地法"最终成为一次"失去的机会"。     

1866年《南部宅地法》土地分配方案及其失败原因

1866年《南部宅地法》为了解决美国黑人自由民的土地问题制定了相对有利的宅地申请条件。然而由于缺乏申请宅地以及从事农业生产的初始资本和其他借贷来源,美国联邦政府也没有在借贷方面为宅地申请者提供相应的扶持,绝大多数黑人自由民并没有利用《南部宅地法》提供的有利条件转变为独立的小农场主。这是1866年《南部宅地法》失败的深层次原因。     

美国南北战争时期反奴隶制的进步史学

美国独立以后,维护和扩大种植园黑人奴隶制同限制和废除黑人奴隶制之间的斗争,随着美国资本主义的发展,越来越成为美国历史中的中心问题。从1850年妥协案的成立到1877年南方重建的结束的近三十年,是美国历史中自由雇佣劳动制同种植园黑人奴隶制进行决战的时期,因为这一决战的高潮是1861—1865年的南北战争,所以一般把这一时期称作为南北战争时期。 围绕奴隶制问题展开的斗争,集中地反映在南     

美国村镇制度的演变

村镇制度是美国历史上的一个重要问题。村镇制度经历了一个长期的历史嬗变过程,在不同时期和不同领域,它具有不同的含义。在英国早期历史上,它是一种具有有限民事职能的自治组织;在殖民地时期的新英格兰,它具有“村镇移植”的含义,主要是一种土地分配和处理以及人口移植制度;依据美国1785年《土地法令》确定的土地测量制度,村镇完全成为一种土地测量单位;随着美国西部的开发与领地和州的组建,村镇又成为西部某些州的基层政治组织单位。综观美国村镇制度的整个演变过程,它既有明显的演变阶段性,又有各种制度相互交叉和平行存在的特征。     

试探美国南部奴隶制种植园的形成

美国南部的奴隶制种植园形成于殖民地时期。种植园最初在北美大陆出现之际,主要是指在开拓的一块土地上相对集中地生产市场所需要的大宗商品作物,它并没有特定的劳动制度。黑人奴隶制的劳动制度是在以后的发展中逐渐形成的历史特征。在以弗吉尼亚和马里兰为中心的上南部和以南卡罗来纳为代表的下南部,奴隶制种植园经历了不同的形成道路。上南部的烟草种植园在北美奴隶制种植园的形成和发展过程中占据主导地位。奴隶制种植园对美国南部近代社会经济和历史发展产生了巨大而深远的影响。     

美国奴隶制史学的发展

奴隶制是美国历史上最重要的问题之一。美国研究这一问题的历史著作历来很多,特别是近二十年来,美国黑人民权运动空前高涨。种族关系出现巨大变化,史学界关于黑人和奴隶制问题的著作更是层出不穷。可以认为,菲立普斯,斯坦普、埃尔金斯和吉诺维斯的著作标志着二十世纪美国奴隶制史学史的不同阶段,代表了不同时期内美国奴隶制史学最有影响的观点。     

美国西部开发与联邦政府的土地政策

西部国有土地私有化是美国西部开发的基础和前提，也是美国联邦政府导引和规范西部开发的主要手段。私有化的主要途径是出售和赠予，在此过程中所出现的土地投机现象和宅地法等在当时和后来均备受争议。有必要将这些现象结合起来进行系统的考察。     

对孔孟反动军事思想的几点批判——兼谈春秋战国儒法两种军事思想的对立和斗争

春秋战国,是我国历史上由奴隶制社会向封建制社会急剧变革的时代,各种社会矛盾错综复杂,阶级斗争异常剧烈。腐朽的奴隶制的生产关系阻碍着社会生产力的发展,奴隶主阶级残酷的压迫和剥削,激起了奴隶反抗奴隶主、平民反抗贵族的斗争。奴隶的解放斗争,特别是他们的暴力斗争,有力地破坏和动摇了奴隶制的基础,为建立新的封建制开辟了道路,推动了历史前进。新兴的地主阶级也逐步壮大,向奴隶主阶级展开长期的,反复的夺权斗争。他们通过频繁的战争先后夺取政权,建立自己的统治。一种新     

美国商品奴隶制性质试析

众所周知,美国历史上曾存在过人类文明史上最野蛮的资本主义商品奴隶制,时间持续了二百多年之久。自1619年黑奴输入弗吉尼亚起,美国南部各州蓄奴之风渐次滋长。1641年马萨诸塞州首先从法律上确定了黑奴的终生奴隶地位,以后黑奴制便相继在各殖民地合法化。早期奴隶制     

Creole Cultures of the Caribbean: Historical Archaeology in the French West Indies

Historical archaeology is a relatively recent development in the French West Indies, in contrast to the Anglophone Americas where for over 30 years, historical archaeologists have investigated the sites of plantation villages in the United States and in the Caribbean to seek insights into the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted to and survived the horrors of slavery, and created unique and vibrant Creole cultures. Although plantations have been archaeologically investigated in the former French possessions of the United States, their Caribbean counterparts, and particularly the enslaved population who labored on them, have only recently become a focus of archaeological research. Yet the historical setting and development of plantation slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean was necessarily distinct from both the British Caribbean and from North American French colonial establishments. This paper discusses the state of historical archaeology in the French West Indies, with particular reference to plantation archaeology in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This research identifies some of the unique aspects of the economic and historical context of slavery on French Caribbean plantations.     

The story of Comanche: horsepower,heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.     

Discovering Wang Yangming

The Ming dynasty Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) has been the subject of a European and North American literature since at least the 18th century. But the rich history of writing about him in the West has been largely obscured by an English-language scholarship published in the 1960s and 1970s. This earlier literature nevertheless provides one window into the broader history of intellectual encounter between China and the West, shedding light on it from the angle of the discovery of one of late imperial China’s most influential scholar-officials. This article’s goal is to provide a history of writing about Wang Yangming in Europe and North America from the 17th century to 1950, demonstrating both how historical circumstances shaped his reception and interpretation, and that these earlier accounts shared valuable insights yet worthy of our attention today.     

Toward a topography of national trauma: mapping the past onto the future of American nationalism

Since the inception of the United States, many of those who have spoken for and to the nation have struggled to define and defend a coherent American nationalism. This article proposes that one of the reasons for this lies in the fault lines inherent in the invented traditions that underpin American, as many other nationalisms. Determined by warfare and by the desire for land, and frequently defined in racial terms, they have undermined more than they have stabilized the nationalist structures they seek to support through what they have excluded from the national imaginary. In common with other settler nations, in fact arguably with most Western nations, America's nationalist narratives struggle to serve as cohesive foundation myths. They represent the lasting legacies of national trauma derived from the nation's violent colonial past and the severing of the imperial bond in the eighteenth century, chattel slavery, and the civil war it caused, and westward expansion and the imperative toward hemispheric control. Through the mapping of a topography of national trauma predicated on these national traditions and located within the tensions arising from warfare, land, and race, scholars can better comprehend the still frequently acrimonious debates over American nationalism that persist today.     

Vocabularies of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: The North American Fur-Trade and the Imperial World

This article examines the particular work that languages of slavery and abolition did in British North American fur-trade territories with an eye to comparing these histories with those of slavery and anti-slavery in Australia. Temporally, it focuses on the two decades following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and geographically it examines the parts of northwestern North America claimed by Britain and administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. Here traders, missionaries and critics wrote of slavery and anti-slavery in the fur-trade in ways that repeated metropolitan patterns but were also arguably distinct, and certainly merit our attention. In British fur-trade space, vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery provided language for the particular unfreedom of Indigenous people, the experience of indentured migrant labourers, and the political arrangements of colonial space. Seeing how the vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery tracked through different colonial spaces reminds us of the uneven and intertwined histories that cut across and through the nineteenth-century world.     

Mr. Jay Rides Circuit

Several years ago, when two John Jay Homestead ¹ colleagues, Louise V. North and Janet M. Wedge, and I contemplated compiling and editing a book of correspondence between John Jay and his wife Sarah Livingston Jay, we agreed that our goal would be to chronicle the personal lives of the Jays in the tumultuous times during and after the American Revolution. In the process of choosing the letters for The Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay , published in 2005, we came to a true appreciation of the Jays' commitment toward their country.     

The Canadian Rebellion,the American South,and Slavery

ABSTRACT

In the past few decades, thanks in large part to the work of several historians that appears in my edited collection, Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion (2019), there is a growing trend to consider the Canadian Rebellion within an American historical and historiographical context. Despite this exciting new research, most studies on the Rebellion and the United States continue to focus on the northern borderland. However, the Canadian Rebellion was a significant event that gained attention all over the United States, including the American South. Similar to the North, the American South was also invested in the outcome of the Rebellion. This was due to one reason: slavery. By specifically focusing on the American South and, more importantly, its influence on American foreign policy during the period, I want to encourage historians to take a more definitive stance; that slavery—just like the Panic of 1837, the Anglo-American rapprochement of thepost-War-of-1812 period, or the fear of British retaliation—played a major role in the United States Government’s official opposition to the Rebellion.     

试析1860～1861年美国南部蓄奴州脱离联邦运动的社会基础

南部蓄奴州脱离联邦运动是美国内战前夕的重要历史事件。在南部蓄奴州脱离联邦的过程中,白人奴隶主是决定性的社会力量。非奴隶主白人在脱离联邦问题上则表现出地区性差异：在奴隶制不发达地区,非奴隶主白人的多数反对脱离联邦;在奴隶制发达地区,非奴隶主白人的多数则接受了脱离联邦的选择。造成这种地区性差异的原因,在于非奴隶主白人民众并不作为一个自为的阶级而行动,因此,在奴隶制发达地区,他们在政治上只能顺从奴隶主的领导,而在奴隶制不发达地区,他们就可以完全根据自己的意愿行事。     

Managing the Transition to a Free Labor Society: American Interpretations of the British West Indies during the Civil War and Reconstruction

American reactions to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 reveal that three decades after abolition, British West Indian emancipation was still considered relevant to policy debates in the United States. The early 1860s saw a significant shift in northern views of the British Caribbean colonies, in particular as a result of the writings of William G. Sewell on the subject. For Republicans, escalating social conflict in Jamaica highlighted above all the need to prevent former slaveholders from monopolizing political power after emancipation, and this interpretation of the West Indian experience reinforced the evolving case for equal rights. Many had argued that former slaves’ economic independence had been the major cause of declining plantation production in the West Indies. However, Republicans tended to accept representations of black farmers in the Caribbean as an incipient middle class, and never concluded from the British case that access to land for freed slaves would be fundamentally at odds with maintaining future cotton production.     

'An unholy row in Lancashire': The Textile Lobby, Conservative Politics, and Indian Policy, 1931-1935

This article argues that the ‘Lancashire lobby’remained a vital presence in British politics in the 1930s,not relegated to the political sidelines by ‘gentlemanlycapitalists’ at Westminster. The region's strength, inConservative circles especially, was based not on its numericalstrength in MPs, or in its economic might, but in the symbolicimportance Lancashire had for Conservatives. As this articledemonstrates, this was most evident during the debates overthe Government of India Bill between 1931 and 1935, when theparty's leadership made great, and successful, efforts to keepthe region's representatives from opposing the Bill, and potentiallyswinging many other Tories into opposition as well.