Historiography
Opposing forces
According to Schrag, One common type of comparison juxtaposes the words and deeds of two or more actors or groups of actors who disagreed about some point. Schrag provides a useful example of opposing forces at work using historian Alan Taylors Liberty Men and the Great Proprietors. Taylor argues that the tensions that developed in the new Republic in the years after the Revolution, revolved around two competing interests. On one side were the gentlemen of property and standing who sought to exercise control over the new nation by concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the few. Their challengers were the small yeoman farmers, who sought a more equitable distribution of land ownership and power.
Opposing forces
Schrag further notes, Another common use of the opposingforces comparison is in the history of technology. Historians often list the pros and cons of two competing technologies or systems, to explain why people chose one over the other. Sacks of grain or grain elevators, wooden airplanes or metal airplanes, and septic tanks or sewer systemsall were debates demanding resolution.
Opposing forces
For Schrag, A thesis concerning two opposing forces should explain why people disagreed about an issue and, ideally, how they resolved their disagreement. Taylor, of example, argues that, faced with the conflict between agrarians and elites, Jeffersonian politicians reframed political ideology in a manner that permitted compromise legislation and defused the confrontation. Keep in mind that that resolution may have been amicablecompromise or persuasionor coercive, with one side driven into bankruptcy, chased out of office, or defeated in the courts or on the battlefield.
Internal Contradictions
According to Schrag Not all debates take place between opposing forces. Just as psychologists portray peoples minds as soups of conflicting impulses, historians have traced ways in which people have found themselves torn between contradictory goals.
Schrag notes that in his book In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (1996), historian Michael Katz identifies four primary goals of U.S. social welfare policy since its inception including: relief of misery, preservation of social order and discipline, [the] regulation of the labor market [and] political mobilization . . . Katz then goes on to demonstrate the internal contradictions in these aims noting that they have always been inconsistent with each other, and how the unresolved tensions between them have undercut virtually all attempts to formulate coherent welfare policy.
Internal Contradictions
Internal Contradictions
In his well documented study American Slavery, American Freedom, historian Edmund Morgan purports to deal with one of these internal contradictions American Slavery. As he conceptualized the problem how could a people have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.
Paradox Defined
How could the founding fathers who envisioned a nation where all men are created equal also hold other human beings in bondage and preserve the concept of slavery? This is a question that has plagued historians for decades.
Imperfect gods?
The Slaves also exercised agency. Despite the provision in her husbands will, Martha Washington chose to free her slaves two years later. According to Abigail Adams this was because Martha feared that one of the slaves might be induced to hasten their freedom by harming her. As historian Fritz Hirschfield explains, despite their wishes neither George nor Martha had the power to free the dower slaves because they were held in trust by the Custis estate. (Fritz Hirschfield, George Washington and Slavery, University of Missouri Press, Columbia.1997, 214)
Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, "Origins of the Southern Labor System," William and Mary Quarterly 7 (1950), 199-222
Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550 1812, (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books Inc., 1968).
A framework of discrimination
Prejudice against men of color, whether free or unfree, preceded the legal establishment of slavery in the 1660s, and it was this framework of discrimination, (Degler pg. 52) that is referred to as the leading cause behind the enslavement of African Americans specifically.
Carl Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States, (New York: MacMillan,1971).
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).
A. Leon Higginbotham. Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Primary Sources
Bibliography
- Handlin, Oscar and Mary F., "Origins of the Southern Labor System," William and Mary Quarterly, April 1950, pp. 199-222 - Morgan, Edmund S., "Toward Slavery," American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia - Vaughan, Alden T., "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97 (1989), pp. 311-354 - Walsh, Lorena S., "The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications," William and Mary Quarterly, January 2001