There’s a lot to celebrate these days:
- a certain co-editor of TUSH.0 received tenure
- some seniors are graduating
- I had lunch with Pamela Klassen yesterday, an amazing scholar of religion
- and friend of the blog Gregory P. Downs just published a new essay in the American Historical Review.
Ten years from now, I’m guessing that when we teach Reconstruction, we’ll be relying on textbooks that have been changed by Gregory Downs’s new work. So if you want to get ahead of the curve, here’s the skinny. Downs is a professor at the City College of New York. His disseration/first book Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 is a tremendous study of how white and black North Carolinians deployed the language of dependence (a political relationship Downs links to patronalism). It should be on every graduate students’ “must read” section on Reconstruction.
And now, Downs’s essay in the AHR, “The Mexicanization of American Politics” examines how American society and politics became stable after the Civil War. Through and by various comparisons with Mexico, political and military leaders within the United States helped institutionalize and then create a rhetoric for stability even during the traumatic decade from the end of the war to the contested election of 1876 (which could have easily resulted in another war with George McClellan leading the troops for the Democrats!).
As we’re celebrating all the wonderful occasions, let’s not forget: late August will be here before we know it.
