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i_drink_bleach [any, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

Term Paper Topic?

Hexbears. I need your help. I have a term paper that I need a topic for. Here's the rub: It's for US history, and the topic has to be US history before 1893. I wanted to write about labor unions, which took off in the US around the 1870s, but the real "history" of organized labor in the US takes place well past 1893. So the professor will very likely reject that.

I'm not a history person. I know, I know "those who don't learn from the past..." I don't want to write about the American civil war and all that shit though. It's been done to death. Any ideas on a topic I could pick that would be more interesting and more left-leaning?

Not asking for any help writing it. I just need some help picking a topic that would be interesting to research.

18 comments

  • How to kill a Slaveowner.

    It turns out that most of the black women who were executed in the era of slavery had killed their white masters. According to Baker, “slave women mostly strangled, clubbed, stabbed, burned, shot, poisoned, or hacked to death their White masters, mistresses, overseers, and even their owners’ children (p.66).” Poisoning and arson were the most prevalent methods slave women used to kill their oppressors.

    [CW: for SA and all sorts of horrible shit] https://www.usprisonculture.com/2010/11/09/killing-black-women-capital-punishment-during-slavery/

    Counter-revolution of 1776 is a good read on a ton of uprisings, touches on poisonings.

    Haven't read this yet, not about US in particular but is supposed to be good:

    • I definitely appreciate it. I'm trying to not have to do research on a bunch of shit that I would have to put a [CW] tag on though. I'm old, I'm exhausted, I'm unemployed and going back to college, I've got a kid, the world is rapidly turning into even more of a cesspool than it already was. I know history isn't a light-hearted affair, but researching that sounds like a fucking horror show.

  • Reconstruction might be a good topic. How it came to be, what led to it being abandoned, the backlash against it - it's a big enough topic that you can kind of focus in on one aspect of it if you want and still have enough to write about

  • It may be Civil War-adjacent, but there is John Brown.

  • Its kinda cringe but maybe the early anarchist movements/communes in the u.s pulled from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_the_United_States

    Historian Wendy McElroy reports that American individualist anarchism received an important influence of three European thinkers.

    William Godwin's anarchism which "exerted an ideological influence on some of this, but more so the socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

    After success of his British venture, Owen himself established a cooperative community within the United States at New Harmony, Indiana during 1825. One member of this commune was Josiah Warren, considered to be the first individualist anarchist.

    The Peaceful Revolutionist, the four-page weekly paper Warren edited during 1833, was the first anarchist periodical published, an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type and made his own printing plates.

    After New Harmony failed, Warren shifted his ideological loyalties from socialism to anarchism which anarchist Peter Sabatini described as "no great leap, given that Owen's socialism had been predicated on Godwin's anarchism".

    The emergence and growth of anarchism in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s has a close parallel in the simultaneous emergence and growth of abolitionism as no one needed anarchy more than a slave

    Josiah Warren put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental "labor for labor store" called the Cincinnati Time Store, where trade was facilitated by notes backed by a promise to perform labor. The store proved successful and operated for three years after which it was closed so that Warren could pursue establishing colonies based on mutualism. These included Utopia and Modern Times.

    Henry David Thoreau was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist. Civil Disobedience is an essay by Thoreau that was first published in 1849.

  • Aren't there some interesting Utopian communes? Not necessarily as successful but it's always an interesting thing to consider/learn from.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_communities

    There's probably no one as based as the Luddites/Diggers/Levellers in the 17th Century in England, but sometimes these groups can have fascinating ideologies.

  • Wdym the "real history" takes place after 1893? Half a million workers, nearly ten percent of the US population at the time, went on strike in 1886 demanding the eight hour workday. Some estimates say the Knights of Labor alone counted 20% of blue collar workers as their members. The late nineteenth century labor movement is only rivaled by the peak of the twentieth century labor movement. There's a substantial history of industrial struggle and worker organizing dating back centuries in the US. It's not as well documented or state sanctioned as twentieth century union activity, but it most certainly happened.

    If you wanted to write an interesting paper, exploring why people think labor history started in the twentieth century and the effects of that would be interesting but maybe too broad. There are plenty of individual events, people, struggles, and perspectives in pre-1893 labor history you could focus on though.

    • Not my requirement. The professor stated that anything after 1893 is not part of the course and cannot be included in the term paper. Kinda bullshit, but it is what it is. I mean fuck man, so it started in the 1870s but went well past that, so I can't cover it? That's kind of bullshit.

      I definitely agree. the Knights of Labor were huge. But I don't have a lot of data on pre- Knights of Labor. Also it's just a pre-req course. I'm not looking to make a masterpiece. XD

  • 1893 rang a bell for me because that was the year the Western Federation of Miners was established. There's a lot of interesting research to be done on the early attempts to organize in western mining towns, and the Couer d'Alene strike of 1892 and the subsequent founding of the WFM (which later helped found the IWW) would make for a perfect stopping point for your narrative.

    The first volume of Philip Foner's history of American labor takes place entirely within your time period (it ends with the founding of the AFL), so you can mine that for other ideas that could be worthy of a paper.

    ...

    A great book that just came out last year, Dylan Penningroth's Before the Movement, uses local archives (in Virginia and Mississippi mainly) to investigate how Black Americans made use of the legal system before the Civil Rights Era. The first few chapters may give you ideas of something to investigate in your own state's archives - how people even without formal rights went about getting married and divorced, slaves who owned property, lawyers who catered to Black clients, etc.

  • Agricultural Revolution, especially post-Civil War. There were major leaps in technology that completely changed how food was grown. Barbed wire for both keeping animals in and animals out. Trains allowing food to be delivered farther and remain fresher. The John Deer plow. Mechanical reapers. There's a bunch of cool shit being invented as the Inudstrial Revolution makes its way into agriculture.

    This study is an interesting place to start with the topic. There's a discussion to be had on the impact of agriculture on American capitalism, looking through a Marxist lens.

  • I second reconstruction

  • Company towns would be a good topic. The best-known one culminated in the Pullman Strike, which happens to be one year outside your time frame.

    Slave-state expansionism might be something to cover. This could be Bleeding Kansas, or the cross-border settling of Texas, or even attempts to move to Belize or Brazil.

    For something particularly left-coded, you could cover the Trail of Tears, and the broader context of how some of the most compliant and friendly indigenous peoples were expropriated and mass-deported.

    Or, idk, listen to a couple episodes of The Dollop to find an idea that sparks excitement.

  • "The Lowry Wars"

    there's a chapter in this book that places them in the context of a multiracial, insurrectionary movement in the south.

    https://files.libcom.org/files/Dixie%20Be%20Damned%20-%20300%20Years%20of%20Insurrection%20in%20the%20American%20South%20-%20Neal%20Shirley%20and%20Saralee%20Stafford.pdf

    there's an earlier chapter titled "a subtle restless fire" that is also cool.

    the best histories of America are hidden, never taught, and purposely forgotten lest anybody get any ideas. it's a great book overall.

    edit: you can read the wiki entry for the Lowry Wars to get the basic, kinda sanitized outline of what was a big, national event at the time. the book chapter I linked gives an insurrectionary leftist account with rich details of folk heroism and the concerns of regional/national power about how popular the "gang" was. because, in truth, it was large indigenous family with kinship ties and general acceptance of anyone who wanted to live communally, subsistence style out in the swamps... places the law couldn't pursue. it came to the attention of the war because free persons of color an whites would join the group to hide/avoid being conscripted to the Confederacy. so the equivalent of the national guard at the time started trying to fuck with them through kidnapping aka "arrests" and made up charges, so the group went to war against the plantation families as the real engine behind the conflict. and regular working class peopled supported them.

    it was a fucking mess for the powers that be.

    anyway, it's a great story.

18 comments