Do the Americas have a common History ?

1. Do the Americas have a common History ? Comparative Lecture, Monday 25 January, 1.0 pm, H060 Dr Guy Thomson g.p.c.thomson@warwick.ac.uk

2. Introduction • CAS’s Uniqueness: continental scope, inter-disciplinary approach (History, Film, Literature, Language) • Yet, even CAS syllabus admits limitations in what can be practically covered: due to immense geographical and temporal scale, staff and students’ reading time, but, above all, limitations of the literature....

3. Warwick Syllabus • US Specialists generally keep within the US • Tim Lockley: Colonial Anglo Am and Slavery in the South • R Fagge: US Social History & McCarthy to Elvis (1950s) • T Burnard: Atlantic History & N.Am Revolutions of Independence • Jennifer Smyth: Film in the US • US Lit people also keep within US: Shapiro, Lawrence, Katz, Dennis • LA specialists stray sometimes across cultural boundaries: • A M.cF.: Pre-Columb. & Col. Spanish America & Independence Revolutions in Spanish America • G Thomson: Mexico and the US & Indians 1750-Present • Broader comparisons more practicable using cultural approaches: R Earle’s courses on Food & Sexuality (Wenches & Machos), and J King’s Comp. Lit of the Ams.

4. “Parochialism” • Historians now mostly work on regions: New England, Middle Colonies, the West, the South Mexico, Colombia • And even “regional history” is generally based upon “local history” / “micro-history” • Lockley: Georgia • Thomson: Puebla (Mexico) and Eastern Andalucia • Burnard: Kingston, Jamaica

5. Exceptionalism and Oppositionism Parochialism is also evident when viewing the wider picture: US :“exceptionalism”......model republic, paragon of modernity, end-game for everyone else....Why bother to learn about the rest of the world. ? As for our back yard...forget it ! Latin American : defensiveness, anti-Americanism, “arielismo” (versus Caliban of the North), dependency, utopianism, the cult of Revolution..... Yet the Americas, obviously, do have a common history.....

6. Common History • Pre-Conquest migrations... • Conquest and relations with Amerindians.... • European colonisation, Christianisation, Europeanisation... • African Slavery... • Revolution, Republicanism & Nationalism, .... • 19th Progress and Modernity .... • Indian Wars and rebellions.... • Mass immigration.... • Suffrage, elections and boss rule.... • Anarchism and Socialism.... • Industrialisation and urbanisation.... Yet, apart from slavery and immigration, v. Little comparative history or hemispheric “American” history Why ?

7. Travellers • Europeans made and experienced America separately, even within the dame cultural areas. Travellers rarely crossed cultural boundaries: Alexis De Toqueville in 1830 could compare French and English North America, Anthony Trollope in 1861 just travelled within the US. • In 1840, Scottish born, New England wife of Spain’s 1st Minister to independent Mexico, Frances Calderon de la Barca, experienced both sides of the cultural divide but emphasised difference, predicting that the US would absorb Mexico:

8. “If any one wishes to try the effect of strong contrast, let him come direct from the United States to this country ….it is in the villages that the contrast is most striking. Travelling in New England…we arrive at a small and flourishing village. We see four new churches, proclaiming four different sects; religion suited to all customers… wooden…painted white, or perhaps a bright red. Hard by is a tavern with a green paling, as clean and new as the churches, and there are also various smart stores and neat dwelling houses; all new, all wooden, all clean, and all ornamented with slight Grecian pillars. The whole has a cheerful, trim, and flourishing aspect. Houses, churches, stores, and taverns, all are of a piece...they will never make fine ruins. Everything proclaims prosperity, equality, consistency; the past forgotten, the present all in all, and the future taking care of itself. No delicate attention to posterity, who can never pay its debts. No beggars. If a man has even a hole in his coat, he must be lately from the Emerald Isle.” (p.355-7)

9. “Transport yourself in imagination from this New England village to… (one)… not far from Mexico (City)…The Indian huts, with their half-naked inmates, and little gardens full of flowers; the huts themselves built of clay, or the half-ruined beaux restes of some stone building. At a little distance an hacienda, like a deserted palace, built of solid masonry, with its inner patio surrounded by thick stone pillars, with great wall and iron-barred windows that might stand as siege. Here a ruined arch and cross…There…the church, grey and ancient, but strong as if designed for eternity; with its saints and virgins, and martyrs and relics, its gold and silver and precious stones, whose value would buy up all the spare lots in the New England village; the lépero with scarce a rag to cover him, kneeling on the marble pavement. Leave the enclosure of the church. Observe the stone wall that bounds the road for more than a mile; the fruit trees overtopping it… with their loaded branches. This is the convent orchard…the reverend old prior riding slowly from under the arched gate up the village lanes, the Indians coming from their huts to do him lowly reverence as he passes. Here everything reminds us of the past…It is the present that seems like a dream, a pale reflection of the past. All is decaying and growing fainter, and men seem trusting to some unknown future which they may never see. ” (p.355-7)

10. Frances Calderon de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 1843 • Fanny Calderon warned Mexico to • “beware lest half a century later, they be awakened from their delusion, and find the cathedral turned into a meeting house, and all painted white; the railings melted down; the silver transformed into dollars; the Virgin’s jewels sold to the highest bidder; the floor washed (which would do it no harm), and round the whole, a nice new wooden paling, freshly done in green – and all this performed by some of the artists from the wide-awake republic farther north.”

11. “New England Village”, Jose Clemente Orozco, Library Mural, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (1930)

12. Modern Industry: La Constancia Mexicana (f.1830)

13. Modern Industry: Lowell (Mass.) 1845

14. So, is the wider vision and comparisons across the diverse cultures of the Americas, entirely left up to you ? • Fortunately, there is a wider literature of hemispheric approaches....the topic to be explored today

15. The Depression and Greater America • 1930: recession and refection....... • In 1931 US progressive economist, Stuart Chase, published • best-seller Mexico, A Study of Two Americas 1931, compares active, neurosis free, “machineless man” in Mexican town (Tepoztlan) in 1930 with the mass unemployment of neurotic “modern man” in depression-ravaged Muncie, Indiana, US • In 1932 U.Cal. historian Herbert Bolton published “The Epic of Greater America” : pleaded for historians of the American “Borderlands” to write an “epic of Greater America” on premise that the Americas shared a common History. • (see Bolton’s essay in Lewis Hanke, ed. Do the Americas Have a Common History : a critique of the Bolton theory NY, 1964 E18.H2)

16. Stuart Chase, Mexico, A Study of Two Americas 1931

17. The Bolton Thesis • Bolton was reacting to US “exceptionalism”, especially to Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”. • In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (AHA lecture in 1893 delivered on eve of US emergence as a global power) Turner had argued that the experience of the frontier lay at the core of the US psyche : spirit of fearless enterprise, individualism, .... Bolton asserted that the conquest of the Plains and SW was as much a consequence of Hispanic expansion starting in 16th C as it was a heroic movement of Anglo settlers coming from East. Hence, to understand the US plains and Far West it was essential to appreciate influences from the South; the encounter between Hispanics and Indians long before Anglos arrived on the scene.

18. Bolton presided over a boom in SW US “borderlands history” during the 1930s and 40s. Still a rich a area: David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America New Haven, 1992, F799.W3 Yet beyond the borderlands, Bolton’s plea fell largely on deaf ears....except at Warwick ! Alistair Hennessy, Frontier in Latin American History London, 1978, F 1410.5.H3

20. Herbert Bolton, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, 1939

21. British Hispanists influenced by Bolton (1) • Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas The History of a Hemisphere (2003)  E 18.F3

22. Professor Felipe Fernandez- Armesto, QMC London University

23. Atlanta police manhandle Tufts professor for jaywalking

24. F-Armesto’sThe Americas The History of a Hemisphere • A brief (170 page) & daring overview of five centuries with great insights. • For instance, in reply to the belief that North Americans epitomise individualism he attests that : • “People in the United States are cloyingly gregarious, profoundly communitarian, boringly conformist. They get glutinously embedded in any community they can, outside their own families: the workplace, high school and college alumni associations, the neighbourhood, the city, the church, the innumerable ‘membership associations’ they all seem to belong to. Membership is treated as a religious obligation; it doesn’t matter what you belong to as long as you belong to something....Civic mindedness, not individualism, is what makes ‘America’ great.” • Ambridge ?

25. American Nationalism • US civic-mindedeness = US civic nationalism ? • Gary Gerstle, in “Race and Nation in the United States, Mexico and Cuba, 1880-1940” in Don Doyle, ed., Nationalism in the New World (2006),  JB 2441.N2 • distinguishes between two nationalisms in the US: • - “civic nationalism” rooted in the colonial and early republican period • - “racial nationalism” (racial exclusionist) that prevailed from the Civil War until the more “pluralistic nationalism” emerging with Barack Obama.

26. Gerstle explores two other versions of “American” Nationalism alongside the US’s “racial nationalism”: • Mexico’s post-revolutionary cult of mestizaje: “Razacosmica” of Jose Vasconcelos, Min of Edication, 1920-24 • Cuba’s emphasis on “racelessness”, developed in 1890s by Cuban patriot, Jose Marti, adopted later by Fidel Castro

27. US racial nationalism and Mexico’s cult of mestizaje shared common characteristics: • - racially essentialist • - emphasis upon homogeneity • - civilising mission • Cuba’s cult of “racelessness” also betrayed a fear of the Afro-Cuban population......

28. “Racial Nationalism” in the South • Barbara Weinstein compares early nationalism in the US South and Brazil before abolition. • In 19th Brazil, in spite of slavery lasting longer than anywhere else, there was never any plausible moral defence of slavery. • The US South, by contrast, was the only part of the Americas “where the architects of national identity were able to construct, in tandem. A potent nationalism and a strong pro-slavery argument” • Barbara Weinstein, “Slavery, Citizenship and National Identity in Brazil and the US South” in Don Doyle, ed., Nationalism in the New World (see also essay by Susan-Mary Grant “Americans Forging a New Nation, 1860-1916” in Don Doyle).

29. British Hispanists influenced by Bolton (2) • J.H Elliott, “Do the Americas have a common history? : an address”, John Carter Brown Library, 1996, E 18.E5 • Ideas developed in depth in magisterial: • Empires of the Atlantic World Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Yale, 2006  E 18.82.E44

30. J.H.Elliott, Regius Professor of History, Oxford

31. John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World • “Spaniards possessed both the advantage and the disadvantages commonly associated with the role of the pioneer...” (p.405) • In his hemispheric/Atlanticist approach, Elliott avoids tight thematic compartments and listing of similarities and differences, seeking instead: • “by constantly comparing, juxtaposing and interweaving the two stories...to reassemble a fragmented history and display the development of these two great New World Civilizations over the course of three centuries, in the hope that light focussed on one of them at a given moment will simultaneously cast a secondary beam over the history of the other”.

32. John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World • Elliott’s analogy of the of accordion: • “The movements involved in writing comparative history are not unlike those involved in playing the accordion. The two societies under comparison are pushed together, but only to be pulled apart again. Resemblances prove after all to be not as close as they look at first sight; differences are discovered which at first lay concealed. Comparison is therefore a constantly fluctuating process, which may seem on closer inspection to offer less than it promises...(yet)... Even imperfect comparisons can help to shake historians out of their provincialisms, by provoking new questions and offering new perspectives.”

33. John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World Elliott contrasts Spanish and English treatment of Indians and Blacks as a key to understanding later developments: “Although their (Anglo-American) refusal to include Indians and Africans within the boundaries of their imagined communities would store up a terrible legacy for future generations, it also gave the English colonists more freedom of manoevre to make reality conform to the constructs of their imagination. Without the impulsion to integrate the indigenous population into the new colonial societies, there was less need for compromises that their Spanish American counterparts found themselves compelled to accept. Similarly, there was less need for the external mechanisms of control through imperial government adopted by the Spaniards in order to bring stability and social cohesion to racially divided societies.” (p.410) Hence, habits of social exclusion though race and “small government” created a legacy of a leaner state and a “simpler” republican political project in the US during the 19th C. Read the Introd. and Epilogue

34. Other recent hemispheric approaches • James Dunkerley, Americana The Americas in the World around 1850 London, 2000 • daring look at the American continent in one moment – 1850 - : the Mexican defeat, the California Gold rush, the onset of the steam ship and the telegraph... • avoids national contexts or even customary comparative themes , such as slavery or immigration... • favour the dramas of every day life, court cases, etc..

35. James Dunkerley QMC (London)

36. James DunkerleyAmericana: The Americas and the World, around 1850 (Verso, 2000) • “offers a vision of an Atlantic world developing into its recognizably modern form. The book is filled with multitudes of voices that emerge with great immediacy. Often it's as if Dunkerley had finally given these nineteenth-centuries voices a platform on which to hold forth.... There are familiar friends, such as Walt Whitman. There are notable and notorious figures, from Karl Marx to William Walker, the US mercenary who declared himself emperor of Nicaragua. There are also more obscure yet no less fascinating characters whom Dunkerley has encountered in his archival forays, such as Francisco Burdett O'Connor the Irish soldier who became an independence fighter under Bolivar in South America and who eventually settled down as a prefect in the Bolivian region of Tarija.”

37. Charles Jones, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge • Charles Jones inspired to write “American Civilization” by two post-cold war books by distinguished Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington • The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order New York, 1997 • predicted a New World Order characterised by a clash of cultures (especially religions) rather than ideologies: the cultures would be the “West” (meaning the US, Canada and Europe) versus the rest. Latin America was left out of the “West”. LA regarded as a distinct civilization alongside “Western, Islamic, Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and African” • Who are We ? America’s Great Debate New York, 2004 • In which “Hispanics” in the US were presented as a threat to - and will ultimately have to be absorbed by – “America’s” core Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.

38. San Francisco Sentinel The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order

39. Charles Jones, American Civilisation(London, 2007) • Aim: “to re-establish the fact of a common American history” Observes paradox that the “naturalisation of the Latin/Anglo distinction...a process more or less complete by 1890” coincided with period when Brazil and Sp Am emerged from period of relative stagnation to share similar features to the US: high growth rates, mass European immigration, political stability... • Hence, “America might have been thought of as constituting a relatively homogeneous and distinctive realm”, much as had been wished and expected after 1776 by nation builders: Jefferson, Adams, Miranda, Bolivar, Belgrano, Morelos, etc..

40. Huntington’s exclusion of Latin America from West • Difference for Huntington lay in LA’s legacy of: • Catholicism (v. West’s combination of Cath.& Prot. culture) • Corporatism (v. US Individualism) , • Incorporation of indigenous cultures (vs. US -lamentable -displacement) • Jones goes on to qualify or demolish “Six pillars of US Exceptionalism”:

41. Jones’ “Six pillars of US Exceptionalism”: • i) French cultivation of Pan-Latin Identity from 1860s • ii) Black Legend (from 16th C) • iii) Perpetuation of Black Legend during Romantic period (see Fanny Calderon de la Barca’s Letters to Prescott ) • iv) Myth of the Protestant work ethic • v) Scientific racism • vi) Discourse of US post-Imperialism (democratic imperative and war on terror)

42. Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007) • Ch.IIA Common American History • “What marks off the Americas and only the Americas ?” • (here Jones contrasts the Americas with Europe, splitting concept of the “West”) • -historical need to embrace modernity: ongoing colonising projects, opening and occupying “empty” space.... Jones: “Latin Americans generally failed, but they were engaged in the same enterprise as their northern cousins” • Ch 3 “A Grand Scheme and Design” In Charles A. Jones American Civilization p.57 • -Religiosity: US an LA as one of the most religious parts of the world • -Ethnic diversity and the “racialisation of minorities” • -Violent crime and social violence (riots, rebellions, lynchings, assassinations, death squads, etc.) • Much potential for Comparative Essay topic

43. Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007) • Jones demonstrates that, far from being a unique entity, the United States is the most American of nations. • shares with its neighbours to the south an aspiration for equal opportunities and freedoms in a society both defined and divided by race. • the United States is distinguished from its neighbors chiefly by the greater material capabilities it has been able to apply to this historic task • Although it is sometimes regarded as Western, Jones points out the extremes to which the United States differs from Western Europe: from distinctive levels and styles of religiosity, to public violence, to respect for law, to concern with material accumulation.

44. Charles Jones, American Civilisation (2007) • These traits, far from constituting a claim to exceptionality, bind the U.S. firmly to the rest of the American hemisphere. • In fact, Jones argues, it was separated only by the strange accident of historiography that created a "Latin" America little more than a century ago. • He projects that these perceived differences between the United States and its southern neighbors will fade in the near future, and looks forward to a truly inclusive America