Revolutionary Ferment Research Articles

The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community by Matthew J. Clavin Adam Pratt (bio) Keywords Slavery, Fugitive slaves, Florida, Negro Fort, Marronage The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community. By Matthew J. Clavin. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 253. Cloth, $24.95.) An increasing number of scholars have begun treating the American South as the locus of U.S. imperial tendencies. Their studies have shown how the War of 1812 and the resulting efforts of U.S. troops to clear space for white settlers and their Black slaves constituted the growing imperial state with a racial outlook. Nowhere was this form of empire-making more evident than Negro Fort, a former British post on Prospect Bluff on the banks of the Apalachicola River. Claudio Saunt put the fort on the map of modern historiography in A New Order of Things, when he situated Negro Fort as a last-ditch effort by Seminoles, Redsticks, and Blacks to oppose the racial, political, and economic order that the United States sought to impose across the Deep South.1 Since Saunt's study, historians have begun to include events that transpired at Negro Fort in narratives of the period and studies of Black inhabitants of East and West Florida.2 In his new book, Matthew Clavin draws together insights from these fields of study to offer a closer look at Negro Fort that poses new, important questions about the coalition of people who gathered there to oppose the expansion of the United States along the Gulf Coast. Clavin deftly traces the rise and fall of Negro Fort in six readable chapters that highlight the important players and the implications for the fort's construction and destruction. Its early purpose was to recruit Creek warriors to the British cause and to act as a hub for runaway slaves, thus destabilizing the growing might of the American slavocracy. Those two tasks first congealed very early in the post's history with Edward Nicolls, a marine officer who "devoted most of his life to fighting slavery" (25). He armed local Creeks and trained a band of runaway slaves, and then enlisted them into the Colonial Marines. However, after the British disaster at New Orleans and the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent, Nicolls was forced to [End Page 149] abandon his recruits, but not before supplying them with enough firepower to pose a serious threat to U.S. interests. Over the next several years, U.S. officials grew more alarmed at the threat posed by the fort's inhabitants. Clavin calls the U.S. military expedition to destroy the fort, launched in the summer of 1816, "the first ever large-scale American slave-hunting expedition" (116). To begin the process, U.S. troops built a small fort south of the Georgia border, inside Spanish territory. With the aid of Creek warriors, U.S. land and naval forces began operations against the fort's inhabitants on July 15. The ensuing battle came to an end on the 27th when a U.S. gunboat lobbed a shell that entered the fort's powder magazine and leveled the fort, killing at least 200 inhabitants, while nearly two dozen survivors were re-enslaved. Instead of ending the narrative here, Clavin continues his telling of U.S. efforts to eradicate marronage and Native power with Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818. In doing so, Clavin expands readers' view of this "slave-hunting expedition" by introducing them to Fernando, a man who had escaped slavery to become a Colonial Marine. He had continued his revolutionary activities after the fort's destruction only to be captured by U.S. forces at Suwannee. Jackson "resisted his initial urge to execute the black rebel and instead ordered him to be taken … to Nashville," thus continuing his trend of kidnapping his spoils of war (154). Fernando spent the rest of his life enslaved at the Hermitage. Here, Clavin uses Fernando's life to situate the fate of Negro Fort in the revolutionary ferment of the Atlantic world. He draws on Jane Landers's work to...

Les Bas­fonds, un film de Jean Renoir (1936) d'après la pièce de Maxime Gorki

The transition from Russian to French has made the movie The Lower Depths by Jean Renoir , an adaptation of a stage play into a strange hall of mirrors. The transposition demonstrates a substantial misconception of the Russian context. Maxim Gorky wrote Na Dne in 1902 , in the midst of a revolutionary ferment, while Renoir made his film in 1936 at the time of the victory of the leftwing Popular Front. In contrast to the hopelessness at the end of the play, the film finishes with an optimistic outlook, in the manner of Charlot . As in Chaplin’s Modern Times, we see the hero and his fiancée escape a miserable destiny and leave , hand in hand , to seek their happiness. The director asked the eminent author Evgenii Zamyatin to write the screenplay and assigned a central role to Vladimir Sokoloff, two Russians ; there is little of their Russian influence in the overall tone and the film stays remote from Russian reality. To satisfy the audience he called in two great stars of French cinema , Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin. Taking the viewer’s subconscious back into a purely French context, the film is completely detached from Gorky's work.

Information Warfare and Slow Media: Loyalism and the Lesson of Revolutionary Failure

The wager of this essay is that consideration of an antiquarian media environment—the American colonies in the era of Revolutionary ferment—can help identify tactics for slowing the communications juggernaut that threatens to overwhelm public political discussion. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the speed of propaganda, political operatives in America loyal to the Crown deliberately sought to slow the flow of information, including the stream of satire, rumor, and diatribe that inevitably accompanied it. Broadsides, pamphlets, and poems written in reaction to what Loyalists called the “American rebellion” provide an occasion for assessing what can be done, specifically at the level of discourse, to offset flows of radical publicity.

Nicaragua: navigating the politics of democracy. By David Close

Nicaragua: navigating the politics of democracy. By David Close. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2016. 215pp. Index. £62.50. ISBN 978 1 62637 435 5. This is a book, as Canadian political scientist David Close succinctly puts it, about ‘Nicaragua's transition to, through, and from democracy’ (p. 155), in the period between the triumph of the Sandinista revolution over the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979 and 2015, when Daniel Ortega, one of the leaders of that revolution, was firmly entrenched in power. Close seeks to explain the reasons why the political elite has failed to find, during this period, a governing formula acceptable to most Nicaraguans, resulting in political polarization and the eventual return of one-man rule, conforming to certain historical features embedded in the country's political culture. In contrast to most observers who see the 1990 elections—in which the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) unexpectedly lost power to a broad opposition coalition—as bifurcating the post-1979 period, marking the point of political transition to electoral democracy after a decade of revolutionary ferment, Close discerns no less than four political transitions: in 1979, 1984, 2000 and 2011. These transformations were not, in the last three cases, the result of changes of administration, as the sitting governments actually initiated them, but rather ‘full-scale makeovers of the political system: the entire logic, function, and purpose of the state’ (p. 4); they were sufficiently distinct to constitute different political regimes. The first two regimes, Close contends in a reprise of the argument set forth in his 1999 work, Nicaragua: the Chamorro years (Lynne Rienner; reviewed in International Affairs 75: 3), left Nicaragua more pluralistic and democratic, the last two moved the country away from democracy, so that by 2015 Nicaragua was neither a democracy nor an authoritarian state but a hybrid system, exhibiting a ‘balance of democratic and non-democratic traits’ (p. 157).

Student politics, teaching politics, black politics: an interview with Ansel Wong

Ansel Wong is the quiet man of British black politics, rarely in the limelight and never seeking political office. And yet his ‘career’ here – from Black Power firebrand to managing a multimillion budget as head of the Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minority Unit in the 1980s – spells out some of the most important developments in black educational and cultural projects. In this interview, he discusses his identification with Pan-Africanism, his involvement in student politics, his role in the establishment of youth projects and supplementary schools in the late 1960s and 1970s, and his involvement in black radical politics in London in the same period, all of which took place against the background of revolutionary ferment in the Third World and the world of ideas, and were not without their own internal class and ethnic conflicts.

English

Africa is transiting through a trying phase in the history of its evolution as a major world civilization. These trying challenges are characterized by the extremes of hunger, the conditions of massive refugee flow and internally displaced persons occasioned by the gruesome phenomenon of violent conflicts and wars. The paper sets out essentially to establish the connection between the massive flow of small arms and light weapons (SALW) since the end of the Cold War and the equally catastrophic revolutionary ferment that characterized the Arab Spring across the fertile crescent and the Maghreb. The paper is sustainably driven by core normative paradigms covering the vast area of illicit armaments and their orchestrating influence in igniting violence. To weave the perspectives captured herein, the paper depended almost exclusively on the content analysis of existing literary materials in the humanist and social science traditions. Findings confirm that indeed small arms and light weapons abound within our case studies (Nigeria and the CAR), a phenomenon that both ignites and sustains violent conflicts within these previously peaceful national territorial entities. By way of recommendation the paper advocates the strengthening of existing legal and political protocols and the fortification of the borders of these countries if they are to remain virile and relevant in the international socio-economic and political order.   Key words: Arms, conflicts, proliferation, war, insecurity, hunger, light weapon.

The Role of Small Arms and Light Weapons Proliferation in African Conflicts

Africa is transiting through a trying phase in the history of its evolution as a major world civilization. These trying challenges are characterized by the extremes of hunger, the conditions of massive refugee flow and internally displaced persons occasioned by the gruesome phenomenon of violent conflicts and wars. The paper sets out essentially to establish the connection between the massive flow of small arms and light weapons (SALW) since the end of the Cold War and the equally catastrophic revolutionary ferment that characterized the Arab Spring across the fertile crescent and the Maghreb and the increasing incidences of contemporary intra state conflicts on the continent. The paper is sustainably driven by core normative paradigms covering the vast area of illicit armaments and their orchestrating influence in igniting violence. To weave the perspectives captured herein, the paper depended almost exclusively on the content analysis of existing literary materials in the humanist and social science traditions. Findings confirm that indeed small arms and light weapons abound within our case studies (Nigeria and the CAR), a phenomenon that both ignites and sustains violent conflicts within these previously peaceful national territorial entities. By way of recommendation the paper advocates the strengthening of existing legal and political protocols and the fortification of the borders of these countries if they are to remain virile and relevant in the international socio-economic and political order.

The Religious Meaning of Culture: Paul Tillich and Beyond

AbstractThroughout his theological career Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was fundamentally concerned with the question of the religious meaning of culture. The answers that he gave – initially in the revolutionary ferment of 1920s–1930s Germany and then again in the brave new world of post‐World War II America – were profound and far‐reaching in their importance for twentieth‐century theology. This article will explore the development of Tillich's interpretations of the religious meaning of culture and apply his analyses to our contemporary religious and cultural situation by suggesting a trinitarian enlargement of Tillich's concept of theonomous metaphysics towards a multidimensional theology of culture.

The long and winding helix

Molecular biology celebrates its diamond jubilee this month, the 60th anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's seminal paper on the structure of DNA. It's an appropriate moment to ask how far the subject has come, and where we are headed.

Basepaths and Baselines

Recent research has established that baseball and baseball-type games predate the 1840s. In other words, they predate the hoary but erroneous 1839 Abner Doubleday/ Cooperstown/Immaculate theory of baseball's invention. Most notable among the books has been David Block's definitive Baseball before We Knew It, and my own articles, 'A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball': Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic and Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries about Pre-1839 North American Ball Games.1 George Thompson's discovery of 1823 accounts of baseball in New York City and John Thorn's uncovering of a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ordinance prohibiting baseball-playing, among other sports, have been two of the more exciting examples of this research.2 The energies of SABR's Origins Committee, expanding to roughly 200 members under the leadership of Larry McCray, have resulted in a valuable database, Protoball, a Protoball glossary, and a monthly newsletter, Originals, updating the finds.Baseball thus existed, but the question now arises: Why did baseball appeal to an increasing number of Americans in the early Republic? Why in those transitional decades, moving from the settlement of the Revolutionary ferment to the volatile Jacksonian trends, did Americans move toward allegiance to baseball-type games? What other American developments may have affected, modified, paralleled, or drawn along the expansion of baseball and baseball-type games? Certainly baseball did not emerge in a cultural vacuum, a total escape from the agricultural and commercial cares of the times.To start down a path toward some sort of answer, it is necessary to revisit the Country Game thesis. According to this interpretation, baseball originated in rural environs and even as the sport exploded in urban locales by the 1840s and 1850s, players and spectators alike ever since have celebrated baseball as some sort of pastoral design, a pleasant recreation of the rural past fading before their eyes, a harkening back to some sort of golden age of rustic simplicity and harmony. Many commentators have celebrated the rural roots of the game, waxing eloquently about green fields as temporal heavens, barefoot boys with cheeks of tan whiling away summer afternoons, and rural virtues manifesting themselves in the practitioners of the game.3 Never mind that once professionalism overtook the amateur game, most players did not hone their skills in cow pastures and the juggernaut of commercialism relegated small-town baseball to minor league, bush league, and farm team statuses. But longings for the rural origins have persisted so strongly that the creation myth of baseball-the Abner Doubleday Immaculate Conception scenario-involves Elihu Phinney's pasture in Cooperstown.These claims often rest heavily on nostalgia, an attractive but fundamentally false collection of sentiments, or on a Leo Marxian model of the pastoral middle landscape, rather than a closer understanding of the material and cultural connections of agriculture and the folk games that gave rise to baseball. As worthy as those emphases on the concept of the middle landscape are, in the end they fuel an idealized portrait of farming that most actual farmers themselves would not have recognized. But those same agriculturalists experienced a concrete specificity of objects in their work duties, tangible materials that provided a framework for their lives and also served as important ingredients for ballplaying.The Agricultural Contexts of Baseball: Getting Good Wood on the BallThe bat is, of course, one of the key instruments for bat-and-ball games. Today bats come in ceramic and aluminum versions, as well as the traditional wooden ones. For early Americans, wood was a constant reality in their lives. In the eastern woodlands colonists found a staggering abundance of forests, which allowed even the most amateur carpenter the choice of very prime wood and encouraged profligacy with wood supplies. …

Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (review)

Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. By Rosemarie Zagarri. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 233. Cloth, $39.95; Paper, $22.50.)Reviewed by Simon P. NewmanFrom quite different vantage points, historians such as Susan Branson and Catherine Allgor have done a great deal to illuminate women's political activities in the early republic. Branson showed elite and some middling women participating in the cauldron of popular political activity in the excited revolutionary ferment of the 1790s, while Allgor demonstrated how leading women politicized the domestic sphere in early national Washington, creating a new and highly significant political arena.1 Their work has informed our understanding of women and politics by broadening our definitions and understanding of just what comprised political activity, from wearing pro-French Revolutionary bonnets and cockades to leading Washington women's salons. Perhaps because of this, what might be termed traditional political history continues to pay little attention to the work produced by Allgor, Branson, and others in the wake of the ground-breaking books published by Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton in 1980.2 Many historians chronicling the political history of revolutionary and early national America continue to regard women as wholly separate from the actual business of politics, and thus conclude that women can justly be excluded from their histories of political parties and the processes of local and national politics.Rosemarie Zagarri's Revolutionary Backlash furnishes a powerful and successful challenge to such conclusions, by reuniting the concerns of political and women's historians. Primarily concerned with exploring why the revolution changed so little for women, and why so many women were - by the late 1820s and the early 1830s - apparently willing to accept their exclusion from the public political sphere, Zagarri's answer provides the book's title and its compelling theme. It is her contention that men and their political parties orchestrated a severe, sustained, and successful counterrevolutionary backlash against women's political activities and identities, a backlash that succeeded in justifying women's exclusion from public political roles to such a degree that many women accepted without question private and domestic roles for themselves and their daughters. Perhaps what is most exciting in this book is Zagarri's strong sense of the revolutionary possibilities of the 1790s and early 1800s, and the ways that women were challenging the very assumptions and practices of politics. Progress ended only when political parties moved to restrict political activity to white men, slamming the door on women and effectively delegitimating a generation of female political activity.This argument places Zagarri at odds with Whiggish interpretations of American women's history that have assumed a revolutionary-inspired progression from women's public activities in support of resistance and independence through to Republican Motherhood, a feminized domestic sphere that supported the separate, male public political sphere, the advent of female moral reform, and women's eventual emergence into public politics embodied in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. …

Temporary Triumph in Timişoara: Unrest among Romanian Students in 1956

AbstractBetween 1952 and 1965, the one‐party regime under Gheorghe Gheorghiu‐Dej ranked as one of the most totalitarian of all communist bloc countries. Aware of the revolutionary ferment in neighbouring Hungary in 1956, the Romanian leaders took strict measures to prevent similar unrest occurring in their own country, including a ban on all meetings numbering more than three individuals. And yet, on 30 October over 2,000 students from the Polytechnic Institute in Timişoara met with party officials and demanded changes in living and study conditions, as well as the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania. Another 800 to 1,000 students convened on 31 October, calling for the release of students who had been arrested the day before. If the Dej regime's measures prevented mass demonstrations in cities such as Bucharest, Cluj and Iaşi, how did they initially fail in the case of Timişoara? How were the students in this city able to speak out so freely? Drawing on memoirs, archival documents and recent scholarship, this article will answer these questions, referring to psychological, logistical and historical factors. These include discrepancies between the Romanian and Hungarian media that sparked curiosity about events in Hungary; cramped dormitory rooms that actually facilitated student meetings; and a tradition of anti‐communist protest prevalent since 1945 in the Banat region. While the students did not prevail in 1956, they set a vital precedent for the Timişoarans who launched the Romanian Revolution thirty‐three years later in 1989.

Development and Globalization as Imperialism

ABSTRACT Both development and globalization can be understood as imperialism—as different faces of the same dynamics arising out of a project of world domination and longstanding efforts of the United States to establish its hegemony. This paper reconstructs some of the major dynamics of international development, both as a strategic project and as an objective process of economic progress. It then turns toward the discourse on globalization and the argument that globalization is little more than a mask for the imperialist agenda of the US superpower. The paper argues that the “new imperialism” as presented and constructed by its neoconservative ideologues is based on the overt projection of political power and military force: as war rather than local development or the projection of economic power (aid, trade, investment, globalization). It concludes that NGOs and other elements of civil society have been pressed into imperial service, providing strategic assistance to the empire to quell the fire of revolutionary ferment on the southern periphery of the system, particularly in the countryside of rural development and social movements.

Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, and: Posmertnaia diagnostika genialnosti: Eduard Bagritskii, Andrei Belyi, Vladimir Maiakovskii v kollektsii Instituta mozga: Materialy iz arkhiva G. I. Poliakova (review)

Specialists in the new sciences of the mind focused much of their attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on classifying mental abnormalities. This was an international endeavor, everywhere tinged by politics and culture, and, as a growing body of fascinating literature demonstrates, Russians were energetic participants. In some respects the efforts of Russian psychiatrists, neuropathologists, and psychologists paralleled those of their counterparts in other societies; in Russia during that era of revolutionary ferment, however, literary culture, medical science, and politics interacted in particularly interesting and distinctive ways.

Who is that (wo)man in the street? From the normalisation of protest to the normalisation of the protester

Abstract.The time has long since passed that protests and demonstrations were regarded as the possible beginning of violent revolutionary ferment. Venting dissatisfaction or making demands in the streets has become commonplace in our ‘demonstration–democracy’. In this article we examine whether this normalisation of street protest also means that more heterogeneous groups of people take to the streets. Have citizens become potentially peaceful protesters or is protest politics still the domain of union militants, progressive intellectuals, and committed students? In answering these questions we will use the three research methods most commonly used for studying collective action: population surveys, protest event–analysis and interviews with protesters at demonstrations.

Who is that (wo)man in the street? From the normalisation of protest to the normalisation

The time has long since passed that protests and demonstrations wereregarded as the possible beginning of violent revolutionary ferment. Venting dissatisfaction or making demands in the streets has become commonplace in our ‘demonstration-democracy’. In this article we examine whether this normalisation of street protest also means that more heterogeneous groups of people taketo the streets. Have citizens become potentially peaceful protesters or is protest politics still the domain of union militants, progressive intellectuals, and committed students? In answering these questions wewill use the three research methods most commonly used for studying collective action: population surveys, protest event-analysis and interviews with protesters at demonstrations.

Situationism and avant-garde

Among the various avant-garde movements in the latter half of the 20th century, the Situationist International has a place all of its own, not least because it is seen as having acted as a platform of theory and revolutionary ferment during the explosion of May 1968. Since 1989, the year of the retrospective put on at Beaubourg, the reprint of the magazine of the Situationist International, combined with the publication of a certain number of critical essays, have helped to further analyse th...

The Wilderness and Revolutionary Ferment in First-Century Palestine: a Response To D.R. Schwartz and J. Marcus

L'A. critique les theses de Daniel R. Schwartz et Joel Marcus sur les intentions qu'avait Flavius Josephe dans sa presentation de la rebellion juive au premier siecle et sur une polemique dirigee contre le judaisme palestinien qui figurerait dans l'Evangile de Marc.

ASSESSING THE MEANING OF MASSACRE: BOSTON (1770) AND KENT STATE (1970)

This essay assesses the meaning of the Kent State Massacre of May 4, 1970, by comparing it with the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Similarities in background and dynamics suggest that the two events are analogous, yet differences predominate. Whereas the Boston Massacre emerged out of a local situation, it drew its meaning from national events that came after it, culminating in the American Revolution. Indeed, by 1795, the details of the Boston Massacre had been all but forgotten. The Kent State Massacre, by way of contrast, occurred more as a result of national, anti‐Vietnam War demonstrations than local circumstances and marked the culmination of the turbulent 1960s rather than the start of a new period of revolutionary ferment. The fact that the 1995 commemoration of the shootings at Kent State garnered both local and national attention suggests that the meaning of the Vietnam War continues to be elusive.

Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century

List of maps Preface Abbreviations Glossary Part I. Wilhelmine Germany, 1900-1914: Rapid Industrialisation and its Impact on Society 1. Stratification and social mobility 2. The Prusso-German political system and its political culture 3. Weltpolitik and the spectre of encirclement Part II. War and Civil War, 1914-1923: The Political and Military Situation at the Beginning of the War 4. The strains of total war 5. Reaction, reform and revolutionary ferment 6. The Revolutions of 1918-19 7. Economic dislocation and counter-revolution, 1919-1923 Part III. The Weimar Republic Between Stabilisation and Collapse, 1924-1933: Intellectual and Cultural Activity 8. Party politics and the problem of parliamentary government 9. Weimar foreign policy 10. Economic tensions and the rise of the Nazis 11. From Bruning to Hitler Part IV. The Third Reich, 1933-1945: The Face of the Nazi Dictatorship 12. Economic conditions and mobilisation for war 13. Nazi foreign policy and war aims 14. Occupation, exploitation and extermination 15. Resistance and collaboration during the final years Part V. Occupation and Division, 1945-1960: Economic and Political Life in the Western Zones of Occupation 16. The Russian Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 17. The shaping of the Federal Republic of germany, 1949-1960 18. Soviet Western policy and the consolidation of East Germany Part VI. The Two Germanies Since the 1960s: The Development of the East German Economy, 1960-1985 19. Society ad politics in contemporary East Germany 20. West German capitalism and the international economy 21. Problems of political stability 22. Culture and society in West Germany Statistical tables Chronological table Select bibliography Index.