Reviewed by: First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory by Mitch Kachun Joanne Pope Melish (bio) KEY WORDS Crispus Attucks, American Revolution, Boston Massacre, Slavery, African American First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory. By Mitch Kachun. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 308. Cloth, $29.95.) Breathes there a soul so dead as never to have heard of Crispus Attucks? Surely not today. Yet as Mitch Kachun explains in First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory, Attucks’s death was not always so familiar. Kachun traces the memory of Attucks as a named participant and, in some versions, the instigator of the 1770 event later called the Boston Massacre. Attucks was unfamiliar to most black Americans until 1840, and Bostonians did not memorialize him with a monument until 1888. Most Americans did not learn of Attucks in school books and fictional treatments until another sixty or seventy years after that. Kachun explains why Attucks’s story was variously forgotten, resurrected, embellished, invoked, or excoriated in particular moments like these in the two and a half centuries that followed his death. Most historians know the same five or six things about the actual Crispus Attucks. He was born somewhere near Natick, Massachusetts, around 1723, probably of Native and African descent, possibly the child of Nancy Peterattucks, and was probably enslaved by William Brown of Framingham. After 1750, he seems to have liberated himself in some way [End Page 340] and begun working as a seaman or dockworker around Boston. He was apparently a large man. Note the relentless ambiguity of this summary of the “facts.” The only absolute certainty in this man’s biography is that he was the first of four men who died in a confrontation with a detachment of British soldiers outside the King Street Custom House in Boston on March 5, 1770; a fifth man died a few days later of wounds sustained in that encounter. All five were interred in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground. That’s it. In the first chapter, Kachun lays out the particulars of Attucks’s origins and fatal 1770 encounter with British troops, as far as they are known or surmised. While John Adams, defense attorney for the British soldiers charged with the shootings, characterized the mob as “a rabble of negroes &c” and Attucks as the “stout mulatto” who apparently had “undertaken to be the hero of the night” (16), local newspapers portrayed the incident as an unprovoked assault on upright citizens. In this interpretation, and in the commemorations that followed for the next thirteen years, Attucks’s race, and indeed the individuality of any of the victims, disappeared; they were simply virtuous citizens who died resisting tyranny. Yet because Attucks was the only man of color among the five victims, his race and class position made it desirable for some in later generations to disparage him, others to forget him, and yet others to laud his as a noble example. Kachun traces the infinitely malleable public memory of Attucks, and the Boston Massacre itself, in eight chronologically organized chapters. For almost a century, Attucks remained virtually anonymous, and it was not until 1839 that the first surviving reference to him by an African American was recorded—Jehiel C. Beman’s characterization of him as a “colored man by the name of Airtiks” whose death was “the first blood spilt for independence in this country,” published in the Liberator (41). Led by William Cooper Nell, black activists invoked Attucks as an African American hero and patriot to support their antebellum fight for citizenship and suffrage rights. In Boston, they petitioned the state legislature of Massachusetts to erect a monument to his memory, an effort that was unsuccessful then but finally came to fruition in 1888 with biracial support. But the efforts of black activists to mobilize Attucks’s public memory to fight Jim Crow in the 1880s and 1890s, and again in the 1930s, were met with resistance by public officials who feared that lauding the ostensible hero of the Boston Massacre would [End Page 341] seem to sanction mob actions in an era characterized by working-class strikes and violence. Kachun...

Once nearly invisible, slavery in New England has become an integral part of the region's public history, although it remains a stunning revelation to many Americans who still understand the enslavement of African-descended people as solely a southern phenomenon. Almost always, the story told is an eighteenth-century one. But New England slavery has a much older history. By 1641, Massachusetts had enacted a Body of Liberties that legalized slavery, the first British colony to do so, and amended it in 1670 to mandate the heritability of enslaved status through the mother. Yet the growing body of scholarly literature on African enslavement in New England also has given the seventeenth century relatively short shrift. Wendy Warren's New England Bound is therefore a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on New England slavery. Warren locates her study between the arrival of Africans in Salem, Massachusetts, on board the Desire in 1638 and the publication of Samuel Sewall's antislavery tract, The Selling of Joseph, in 1700. Her intention is to explore the daily lives and experiences of the enslaved, rather than to rehearse the legal, social, and political parameters of their enslavement. Warren is adept at teasing out Africans' experiences from the various records left mostly by whites. The many extended anecdotes she offers give voice, personality, and emotional resonance to the people plucked out of Africa and transported to an unfamiliar and forbidding New England landscape.

Reviewed by: Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause Joanne Pope Melish (bio) Civil War, Labor, Working class, Strikes, Unions Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class. By Mark A. Lause. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. 296. Cloth, $95.00; Paper $28.00.) A curious gap lies at the intersection of labor history and Civil War history. Except for its role in the New York City Draft Riots, labor activism during the war years has received relatively little attention from Civil War historians; while in labor histories, workers have tended to morph into soldiers for the duration of the war, bracketed by their antebellum and post-war labor struggles. Of course, a labor issue—slavery—lies at the heart of the Civil War, but it is treated as such mostly in terms of the labor shortage incurred by slave owners when their slaves decided to become rebels, fugitives, "contrabands," or Union recruits; few have looked at slaves' actions themselves as labor activism. Mark A. Lause has stepped into this breach with a labor history of the Civil War—a detailed examination of the experiences of working people as they resisted, negotiated, exploited, and survived (or not) the war. He attempts to pay careful attention to all categories of workers—North and South, male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant, free and freeing themselves. His goal is to show how their collective wartime experiences forged a post-war American working class in the Thompsonian sense—"as a process of self-definition through which workers come to see themselves as playing a distinct role in society" (x). Most transformative was the emancipation of four million slaves in the course of the war; what Steven Hahn has called the greatest slave rebellion in American history, Lause characterizes as its biggest and most consequential strike. The book is organized into four main parts with three chapters in each, along with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue introduces the various categories of American working people and gives an overview of their efforts to assert their interests, ranging from advocacy of land and labor reform and trade unionism on the part of skilled workers to ad hoc job actions and resistance on the part of slaves. Lause emphasizes the stratification of the workforce, with its great inequalities of working conditions depending on race, gender, and status (as native-born versus immigrant, and free versus enslaved), that made a shared class sensibility impossible at the outset of the war. The twelve main chapters trace an astonishing crescendo of ever more [End Page 396] militant strikes, riots, and other job actions in both the old crafts and new industrial trades that accompanied worsening economic conditions in both the northern states and the Confederacy as the war went on. Male workers in one occupational category after another organized and struck for higher wages and shorter hours; slaves walked off their jobs in a "rolling strike" (58). A few groups of working women, too, struck over wages, working conditions, and competition brought on by the war; more frequently, however, working women's causes were championed by middle-class advocates stressing workers' essential roles as wives and mothers. While some workers were exempted from military service and others successfully evaded it, many labor activists served, and some died. Lause has painstakingly tracked many of them into and through their enlistments. Lause argues that the war brought about many changes for working people. First, it taught them to embrace the power of the government to effect fundamental social change, and thus to channel their earlier cooperative impulse through politics. "To a great extent," he suggests, "American socialism grew directly from the experience of the Civil War" (173). But hopes for the triumph of an egalitarian notion of free labor were disappointed. The organizing efforts of women during the war did not transform paternalism. While the war emancipated human beings from enslavement, it also "emancipated race from slavery, making it an issue in itself" for labor as in all other aspects of American life (163). So, then, did the great upsurge...

The Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) takes visitors on a spellbinding journey through the African American past and present. Patrons enter the 400,000-square-foot building on the ground floor, directly into Heritage Hall, a vast open space that houses an information desk, gift shop, coat and bag check area, and the Corona Pavilion theater, which shows introductory videos. At the north entrance, a bridge spans the concourse level below, a multistory space that includes the Oprah Winfrey Theater, the Sweet Home Café food court, and the entry point to the history galleries. Once on the concourse, guests can watch a multimedia presentation about the meaning of the black experience to the nation and world. To access the history galleries, visitors take a glass-enclosed elevator three levels down. It is a slow descent, as though one were truly journeying back in time. The historical odyssey starts as soon as visitors step off the elevator. The first exhibition, “Slavery and Freedom,” begins with parallel examinations of African and European societies as they encounter one another on the coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century. An ascending ramp provides access to the next two history exhibitions, “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: Era of Segregation, 1876–1968” and “A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond.” Sightlines from the ramp have the effect of collapsing time and space, making the past and the future simultaneously visible and everpresent. Reflection booths on the main level of each gallery allow visitors to record their responses to the exhibits.

Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863, Rita Roberts, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2011, 261 + 10 pp., Cloth $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-3708-6...

Reviewed by: Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880 Joanne Pope Melish (bio) Keywords Native Americans, New England, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880. By Daniel R. Mandell. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 343. Cloth, $57.00; Paper, $35.00.) Daniel Mandell's history of the Native peoples of southern New England between 1780 and 1880 focuses on the struggles of Native groups to maintain their autonomy, identity, and cultural values, both as Indians and as particular tribal groups, within the dominant economic and political structures of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. He is interested in interpreting the way Indians' lives, the relationships of their [End Page 726] communities with state governments, and whites' perceptions of Indians changed over the course of the century and shaped New England identity and history. For the most part he has succeeded admirably, drawing upon an immense collection of archival sources to fashion an extremely detailed and nuanced story. The book is organized into six chapters, each focusing on paired aspects of Native experiences in southern New England, followed by an epilogue that explores the effects of state termination of tribal status and the subsequent emergence of pan-Indian and revitalization movements in the 1920s. "Land and Labor" establishes the key elements of Native identity—connection to legally protected tribal reserves whose land and resources were managed in common, and participation in transient wage labor near the reserves and in towns, cities, and ports. Indians worked as whalers, farmers, servants, peddlers, basket makers, and herbal doctors, participating marginally in the emerging regional market economy while maintaining subsistence ways and communal values. The reserves served as "reservoirs of antimarket forces" (36); but this made them attractive to poor whites and blacks uncomfortable with the impersonal market economy. "Community and Family" focuses on the increasing rates of (usually informal) marriages of Indians to whites and especially African Americans in nearly every Indian community. In the emerging racist climate of the 1820s, whites began to distinguish "real" Indians from "mongrels." While some Indians condemned exogamous marriages and made racist statements about blacks, Mandell argues that most were really concerned about "foreigners" of whatever race; "race became significant among Indians largely as a useful code for speaking to white men." He notes that "only . . . Mohegans and Narragansetts adopted rules that seem to echo American racism, and those rules were rarely followed or enforced" (53). But the many examples of racial antipathy that follow suggest that Mandell is understating the case. He also argues against the claim of scholars such as Ruth Wallis Herndon, Ella Sekatau, and myself that the reassignment of Indians to categories of "black" and "negro" by town officials in the early republic exaggerated the numbers of exogamous relationships and their offspring, citing "figures recorded by Anglo-American men who worked closely with Native communities" that "reflect the reality of the increasing rates of exogamous marriages rather than racist distortions" (48). But why should such men be more immune than town officials to the unconscious changes in their ways of seeing wrought by ideology? [End Page 727] Chapter 3, "Authority and Autonomy," describes how Mashpee and other Indian communities combined Revolutionary ideology and radical evangelical religion to challenge the political and religious authority of the guardians and orthodox clergy assigned by state governments to manage them at the end of the Revolution. The successful revolt of the Mashpee community in 1834 that abolished their guardianship and ousted their assigned Congregationalist minister essentially marked the end of elite demands for moral order and deference from Native groups. "Reform and Renascence" chronicles the efforts of Native communities, with the support of reformers and state legislatures, to improve their schools and churches, form temperance societies, reform agricultural practices, expand craft production, and promote tourism. While Indian groups continued their traditional forms of transient employment, preserved women's roles and many communal practices, and revitalized traditional crafts like basketry, they also were drawn into the market economy. At the same time, many Native people resisted the encroachment of bourgeois values by maintaining informal marriages, acting boorishly in public, and in other ways. "Reality and...

Journal Article Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. By C. S. Manegold. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xxiv, 317 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-13152-8.) Get access Joanne Pope Melish Joanne Pope Melish University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 97, Issue 3, December 2010, Pages 783–784, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/97.3.783 Published: 01 December 2010

Since the 1960s, there has been an explosion of scholarship on the experiences of African Americans in the era of the American Revolution. Much of the most recent work has taken as its mission dismantling the stubbornly held belief that enslaved and free people of color were overwhelmingly supportive of the colonists in this struggle; surely freedom-seeking blacks and freedom-seeking whites must have been on the same side. But as several scholars—most notably Gary B. Nash, Simon Schama, and Cassandra Pybus—have reminded us, the side fighting for freedom from British “slavery” was not the side that offered liberty to actual slaves, and a great majority of the latter knew it and acted accordingly. Nor did the ultimate independence of the American colonies translate into immediate freedom for more than a handful of slaves who actually had fought with the Patriots and survived the war. Very slow, hesitant, and partial postrevolutionary progress toward abolishing the institution of slavery in the northern states left a virulent racism directed at free blacks in its wake, and even these gingerly steps had ceased from Virginia south by the early 1830s, leaving the nation fatally divided on slavery and united on race.

Stories of Freedom in Black New recreates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the 19th century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture. Through exhaustive research, Shane White imaginatively recovers the raucous world of the street, the elegance of the city's African American balls, and the grubbiness of the Police Office. It allows us to obd<@serve the style of black men and women, to watch their public behaviour, and to hear the cries of black hawkers, the strident music of black parades, and the sly stories of black conmen. Taking centre stage in this story is the African Company, a black theatre troupe that exemplified the new spirit of experimentation that accompanied slavery's demise. For a few short years in the 1820s, a group of black New Yorkers, many of them ex-slaves, challenged pervasive prejudice and performed plays, including Shakespearean productions, before mixed race audiences. Their audacity provoked feelings of excitement and hope among blacks, but often disgust by many whites for whom the theatre's existence epitomized the horrors of emancipation. Stories of Freedom in Black New intertwines black theatre and urban life into a powerful interpretation of what the end of slavery meant for blacks, whites and New York City itself. White's story of the emergence of free black culture offers a unique understanding of emancipation's impact on everyday life, and on the many forms freedom can take.

Research Article| December 01 2008 Workers and Whiteness Revisited Joanne Pope Melish Joanne Pope Melish Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2008) 5 (4): 65–68. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2008-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Joanne Pope Melish; Workers and Whiteness Revisited. Labor 1 December 2008; 5 (4): 65–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2008-026 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Up for Debate You do not currently have access to this content.