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The best thing about this book, which in my mind definitively proves the Civil War was one fought over slavery, is when Oakes makes the point that, whereas the Union’s PURPOSE may have been to reunite the Union, the CAUSE of the war was due to increasingly untenable conflicts over the institution of slavery. The North elected a president whose goal was to strangle slavery to death in the South, so the South seceded in order to preserve their class and labor system, based around slavery, and the political importance of its extension into the territories.

Oakes gives a detailed but completely understandable and very legible account of the laws that went into forming slave policy in the Union, including critical constitutional debates over the meaning of property and the way war powers granted by the Constitution allowed the Union to confiscate property. He traces the evolution of emancipation laws into abolition laws and ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment, navigating the labyrinth of policy without losing the reader along the way.

While deftly researched by all the contributors to this collection, Slavery Hinterland leaves much to be desired. The focus of the essays appears to be on proving slavery played a role in the European hinterland instead of going beyond proving this point and exploring HOW it effected the hinterland. With a universal narrow focus on the people of the hinterland who participated in the slave trade in some way (mostly through economic exchanges involving goods used in the slave trade) valuable insights on the way this trade may have effected people/culture/economics/politics living in the hinterlands in lost. This may be due to a lack of sources, but other authors of slavery in traditional and non-traditional areas have done reasonably good jobs of constructing histories out of sparse sources. A valuable project that falls short of its goals (proving that players from the hinterlands had interactions with and thoughts about the slave trade while failing to prove that they had more than limited effects on the population at large) this work may benefit being turned into larger/longer studies that examine not just those great men/women involved in the trade but the way their involvement effected the hinterland.

While clearly thoroughly researched and repeated with rich detail, this book might have been more accurately titled “The Slave Trader,” as it’s really about the technicalities of the process of the slave trade and those who oversaw this process. Very little space in the 800 pages are given to anything that might be considered as being written from the slaves’ point of view, though to be fair the author does acknowledge this is due to the lack of sources available on this perspective. It often reads as a very long list of actions taken by slave traders, and more information on the culture of the slave trade would have been welcome. A valuable resource for those seeking to understand the ins and outs of the European side of the trade, but lacking in other dimensions.

A Eurocentric history that shades into one focusing heavily on the role of the United States as the author moves through the time, this book could have benefited greatly from an expanded focus on the indigenous and African peoples of Latin America (the mestizos get some representation, though perhaps not enough). Also largely absent are voices of peasants, as this is definitely a top down history. History is more than a recounting of the actions of great men, though credit is due to the author for including brief passages on women and also dipping his toes into cultural waters with discussions of Latin American novelists and poets, though a multitude of other cultural practices are ignored. Overall, Born in Blood and Fire reads like an introductory textbook to Latin American politics that, while deftly tracing the history of Latin American government and to a lesser extent economy, leaves out important components of the large regions history in the form of groups and topics that do not fit Chasteen’s chosen focus.

This book is a good primer for a college freshmen who wants to learn the bare bones about the Indian Ocean. It’s really just a list of events with very little detail filled in about the cultures and societies that made up the Indian Ocean and how they interacted. So if you’re looking for a basic historical narrative this is it, but if you’re looking for a more complex understanding of this oceanic system, look elsewhere.

Though the title would lead you to believe this book focuses on the Atlantic slave trade, this slim volume does not neglect to pay at least some attention to slavery on a global scale. It is a strong introduction to the slave trade, and less so to the nature and conditions of slavery. I would happily assign it for an undergraduate course on slavery – it would also serve as a good review for a graduate student who has little to no experience with the subject. I will be teaching an undergraduate course this semester and plan to use this book as a framing device for my lecture on slavery. Can’t recommend highly enough

This book is a very interesting comparison of the simultaneous Iberian encounters with Mexico and China during the age of European exploration. Gruzinski seeks to explore why the Iberians were able to conquer the Mexicans but failed to even make headway in China, and he does this by exploring the perspective from both sides of the coin, though there is a bit more information on the Chinese than the Mexican, most likely because of a scarcity of sources. This is a great book on which to base a world history class that, while shaped in pat by European actions, equally presents the viewpoint of non-Western actors. Can’t wait to bring the arguments and information in this book before my students and see how they react.

Unfortunately I did not find this book very engaging. It reads just as a description of the sources Wheat used to complete his book. I keep waiting for a narrative or analysis and not much was coming. If you’re looking for what reads close to a primary source on the topics covered, this book will well supplement your reading, but as a history it’s very thin, which is unfortunate because I think it’s a great topic.

She-ra, Princess of Power

Wonder Woman

Lots of similarities between these two (down to the outfits), especially the (eventual) understanding that the world exists in gray but humans are still worth saving because you believe in their ability to choose good. One of the major differences is that She-ra has the power to heal, a traditionally feminine trait that sets her apart from her brother. Wonder Woman does not have this feminine power – she is all force and strength and, unlike She-ra, she will kill. But, like She-ra, she eventually chooses the feminine traits of compassion and empathy as two of her defining characteristics. While these are also traditionally feminine traits, here they are seen as a source of core strength from which all other power flows.

Both woman are both super beings and the question of who is more human is begged. She-ra can literally transform herself into a human, but still retains her qualities of leadership and virtue. She struggles with her double identity, trying to define how she values herself and how others value her in light of her roles as both Adora and She-ra. Wonder Woman, however, makes no real effort to hide her identity except at the request of Steve Trevor, but she still has to reconcile who she thinks she is (an Amazon warrior) with the super power that lives inside her and which emotions will ultimately drive her actions.

As feminist icons they’re both difficult to parse. Both are strong women in leadership roles dedicated to fighting for what is right and good. Both wear skimpy outfits that Gal Gadot pointed out are not un-feminist – feminists wear what they want to, even though it may not be practical to fight in high heels. These women are super so, their powers are not hampered by clothes. She-ra (and Adora) and Wonder Woman are allowed to shine through against the men who surround them both through their senses of compassion and empathy (traditionally female traits) and also their bravery and ability to, quite simply, kick ass (traditional male trait).

Wonder Woman self-consciously explores Diana’s feminine consciousness and refuses to lose her identity in the masculine world that she finds herself immersed in. Diana leads the action but also works as part of a team. She-ra is also part of a team. Both characters value their teammates, but are often thrust into leadership roles.

I would say Diana is both on equal footing and also of elevated status relative to her male companions, and this to me is empowering. The men she work with recognize her superior ability and they value it, seeing her as part of a team just as she sees them as part of a team. This seems pretty revolutionary to me. The male characters are not threatened by her and once they realize her strength and ability they encourage her to use it instead of trying to protect or marginalize her. In effect, this movie is just as much about how the male characters deal with an empowered, self-assured woman as it is about Diana learning to navigate the world of the 1910s. Similar things could be said about She-ra and the men in her life, though the team she fights with is dominated by women.

I don’t want to give too much away but this film was really great at exploring gender roles without feeling heavy handed. There were big revelations of character and there were also little personal moments between characters that explored gender. Clearly the movie has a feminist subtext, but I think it presents this ideology in such a way that is digestible and acceptable to an audience that may not have envisioned themselves as receptive to such a thing. It’s a great introduction into female empowerment and negotiating power relationships between the sexes.

It’s also a well-written movie with, for an action movie, with an interesting enough plot. Kind of simple good and bad, but part of the movie is about moving away from binary oppositions to a world where identity and human relationships are more gray. Who is worth saving? The action sequences were also pretty good. Usually action movies bore me, but the slow cuts were really great because they highlighted the beautiful fight choreography and really let Wonder Woman shine. But she is not a caricature of a hero, she is a person with incredible abilities. That’s feminist

Also, Chris Pine stole every scene he was in. He has great comedic timing. And his character treated Diana with respect, always viewing her as an equal to gradually recognizing her incredible emotional and physical strength and celebrating it instead of feeling threatened by it. He openly and eagerly connects with her emotionally, taking on the traditionally feminine role of emotional guide. That is feminism too.

While I doubt we’ll ever see a She-ra movie, Wonder Woman continues the thread of the cartoon made in the 1980s where women were powerful, well-respected, well-rounded characters who connected with those around them and always saved the day.

Earlier this year I wrote an essay about HBO’s The Leftovers. I’ve decided not to take the original essay down, but to rewrite it completely and create a new blog post as a result. It’s not that my opinion of the show has changed outside a deepening appreciation for its superlative writing and riveting acting. What has changed is my opinion of the essay I wrote – in retrospect to me it is an inadequate literary and historical document, and in order to adequately analyze the show’s impact on me and its dialog with culture at large, I need to reassess my reaction and write my analysis anew.

From the days of paper and ink, we’re used the finality of published work, and I think there’s this idea that what we commit to writing and then publish is somehow permanent. While it is true that my essay is now permanently part of the internet memory database, and while I can’t erase the existence of what I wrote, new mediums of digital publishing raise questions about the nature of documents as living entities. Historians and other scholars can now edit their digital publications in real time. And while I don’t think that means scholars should try to remove previous writing from the record, I do think it means that now we can have more honest and immediate conversation about the ways in which our thought processes and ideas grow and change. Dialogs are living things – why can’t the source material be as well? As long as we are honest about the original intent of our work and the changes we are making, to me it stands to reason that the academic community can take advantage of the malleable and present nature of the digital medium to produce more fluid and adapted products without having to wait for the paper and ink publication of new books and scholarly articles.

Kevin Garvey and Nora Durst work to form a new family unit.

That said, let’s re-evaluate The Leftovers, which, for me, means starting at a beginning with a brief synopsis of the HBO drama, now in its third and final season. The Leftovers is a program that adds a new chapter to the dystopian subculture that has so captivated American culture for at least the last ten years. In what might be termed a secular twist on Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind books, a series about The Rapture, The Leftovers takes place in a world where, on October 14^th in a year contemporary to our own, 2% of the Earth’s population vanished without a trace or explanation. The lack of definitive answer about the event throws humankind into a species-wide existential crisis in a world where neither science nor religion can offer even the most minor relief.

But, though the Departure, as it is called, was a global event, The Leftovers is a show about the loss of self and family in the Western world, most notably (as forcefully pointed out by my husband) the middle class, (initially) white, Western world. American suburbia to be most exact. And because of the way the Departure destabilizes social systems already threatened by changing global conditions, the show acts as an inverted mirror for those ideals in America we claim to hold most dear, most specifically the heteronormative middle-class, suburban family system. And while this demographic has been over-exploited by cultural producers for literally decades, if not centuries, The Leftovers is unique as a post-Cold War, post-September 11^th examination of what it means to be an individual as part of the American family system.

To understand the loss experienced in The Leftovers, it is necessary to understand what, exactly, the characters believe they lost. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that the audience needs to understand what it perceives the characters to have lost. That entity increasingly throughout the show becomes defined as the nuclear family, in this case the heteronormative white nuclear family (the show has no LGBT characters and so it is does not explore the effects of the Departure on what are initially non-traditional family structures or individuals).

The Leftovers finally added POC in Season 2.

For much, if not all, of its history, America has viewed itself as a country whose core values are vested in and upheld by the white, heteronormative, middle-class nuclear family (that is a long string of adjectives to repeat so frequently, but precision is required in our examination of the cultural artifact under examination, attack, and rebirth in the show). While I could discuss the construction of Victorian family values on which so-called “traditional” notions of American families are based, or could discuss the history of family formation in minority groups, most notably American slaves, who came to define the right to form and control their own families as fundamental, I am a historian of 20^th century America, so my best understanding of “traditional” families comes from a viewpoint more contemporary to that of The Leftovers.

When I think of the formation of the white, middle-class, heteronormative American family I think of Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 classic Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. I have four copies of this book, which has now in its 3^rd edition. Why the multiples? Because I’ve had to read the book so many times due to its extreme influence and importance on our understanding of the domestic ideal in the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s that each copy became increasingly worn and marked-up, necessitating a new edition up to and including when it was on my Comprehensive Oral Exams. Though perhaps dated in some ways, it still stands as one of the best explanations for where the idea of “traditional” American family in the 1950s and 60s came from.

For May, the twin forces of communism and fear of nuclear annihilation drove the creation of the American domestic ideal in the 1950s and 60s. The use of the word “ideal” as a descriptor is particularly important because this vision of domestic bliss never really came true but instead was something to strive for or pretend you had achieved. To spell it out, perhaps repetitively, the domestic ideal involved a heteronormative marriage between a (white) middle-class man and woman with the addition of two to three (white) children who, as a unit, lived together in suburban American and acted as the foundation of American patriotism and played their part as American citizens by enacting their roles as dutiful consumers in order to fuel the bonanza of prosperity for this social and economic group in the post-WWII economy.

Destablizing and terrifying forces threatened the American family in this time period in the form of communism and possible nuclear annihilation. While many books have been to written to analyze how Americans responded to these fears, May’s contribution is to explain that Americans sought safety in the home, believing that if they achieved the domestic ideal they would defeat the untraditional social system of communism and would escape destruction by nuclear weapons through turning their homes into literal fortresses by the use of civil defense. The government encouraged these beliefs, particularly through use of the civil defense program, which never gained much traction as an actuated movement but did embed itself so deep in the American psyche that it is still seen as one of the key totems of the Cold War.

What, then, do we take away from May’s book? To me one of the most important messages is that when Americans feel threatened, one of their favorite tactics is to (using another American trope) circle the wagons around the family and find faith in this structure that they can survive the crisis. The family is seen by many as the most important building block of American society, which is why such phenomena as gay marriage seem so threatening to a large segment of the American population – to them altering the American family can send the whole house of cards tumbling down. And that fear is precisely what The Leftovers plays upon – what happens to Americans as individuals, and society as a whole, when the family system is suddenly, inexplicably, and seemingly irrevocably dismantled?

The Leftovers’ title sequence visualizes absence.

It is easy to say that The Leftovers is one of the most disturbing shows on television, precisely because it rubs up against what we see to be one of the key organizational units of our society and of our lives. For families who have lost members to the Departure, there are no explanations, no reassurances that the vanished are fine, no way to confirm meaning in the loss, and the terrible, physical void that cannot be filled. For the Garvey family, who lost no one to the Departure, the crisis aggravates existing tensions that causes a rift in the family anyway. For the characters of the show, finding new meaning in a life after the Departure means finding new families and new family systems, and the show painfully details how each character confronts this reality and does or does not choose to accept it. Even for those who do form new family units, the mundanity of life, which tortuously does not just go away because 2% of the world’s popular disappeared, insists on interfering and damaging or straining new social connections.

After September 11^th, it could be argued that Americans responded to the trauma of the terrorist attacks by ramping up an already burgeoning security state and lashing out at supposed perpetrators aboard. But the Departure is a phenomenon that lends itself to no identifiable enemy; it is the very definition of senselessness. Further, in the case of the Departure, the turmoil and destablization comes from within the family, making it incredibly hard to find safety in existing family structures. In a world after the Departure, the characters react mostly by lashing out at individual and personal levels, though the resultant cult the Guilty Remnant works tirelessly to remind people of the fragility of family structures, positing that all personal connections are meaningless and should be destroyed on the path to embracing a deep nihilism that The Leftovers almost casually drifts into time and time again in a way that no other popular show has been quite as comfortable doing. When you’re fighting against an enemy you don’t understand, do you give up, do you attempt compassion, do you ignore the problem, or do you lash out and destroy?

Kevin Garvey as Mapleton’s Chief of Police

Though The Leftovers operates at a local level, its characters stand in as archetypes for American family members, often time with characters playing the same archetypical role reflecting different character traits to present the conflicting way families actually operate as opposed to the idealized way the domestic ideal would have us believe they should. Kevin Garvey, the show’s main character, begins the show as the middle-aged Chief of Police in fictional Mapleton, NY, which could also be called Everytown, USA. Kevin is the show’s patriarch, a replacement for his own father who had a psychotic break of unexplained origins following the Departure. Kevin’s job is to shepherd the town as well as his own traumatized family through the time after. Just as Kevin can’t control the town, he cannot control his own family. His wife has joined the Guilty Remnant for reasons that do not become apparent until the penultimate episode of the first season, and therefore she is a member of the main antagonizing force seeking to interrupt the grieving process of the town and its families.

Laurie dressed in the white of the Guilty Remnant

Kevin struggles between protecting the rights of the cult, whom he still sees as individuals, and attempting to stop them from sowing discord and unhappiness against the town’s other inhabitants. Simultaneously, Kevin is challenged with accepting that his wife has left the collective of his family to join the collective of the Guilty Remnant. Somewhere Kevin still has hope for humanity, whereas his wife, Laurie, and the group’s leader, Patti Levin, have interpreted the Departure as a rude awakening meant to trumpet to humankind that family is meaningless. If there is no safety in your family, there is no safety anywhere.

Interestingly, most of the villains (or deviants) of The Leftovers are women who take on a matriarchal role, and even Nora Durst, a protagonist who lost her whole family to the Departure, is defined by her failure as a mother, as assumed by her inability to protect her children from seeming disaster. While Kevin steadfastly fights for his community’s right to grieve and reform families, Nora drifts between wishing to end her life to finding meaning in the reformation of a new family. But when this new family is destabilized she reverts to her traumatized state, desperately trying to solve the mystery of the Departure and reunite with her children and becoming emotionally unstable when she is denied this reconciliation. As a result, she, perhaps unwittingly, destroys the other new family connections she has made, leaving her alone in what Kevin calls her victimhood, and what might also be called her martyrdom.

Kevin Garvey and Patti Levin have different views of family.

Contrary to Nora’s vacillation between sinner and saint, Patti Levin, the leader of the Guilty Remnant in Mapleton, is bent on actively destroying the family. Her cult lives in constant silence and smoke cigarettes without cessation as a declaration that life is not worth valuing enough to practice self-care or to expend energy on. “Stop wasting your breath,” their sign declares as they crash the celebration of the third anniversary of the Departure on the town green, an action that leads to a violent confrontation that finds Kevin in his role as Chief of Police protecting a cult that has stolen his wife from him and caused pain to every citizen of his town. As if he is a dutiful father trying to separate and discipline two young siblings, Kevin must struggle to confront and subdue the real troublemakers, Patti Levin and the Guilty Remnant.

The Guilty Remnant is the most blatant manifestation of the show’s nihilism.

Why are women failures in this show? It’s not as if men aren’t either. But women are the ones railing against family, abandoning their children, and refusing to grow up. Though characters like Laurie change over time, and even Patti is given a more sympathetic examination, it is hard to ignore this show’s ambivalence about the saintliness of motherhood. The male characters are deeply flawed as well, but one wonders what leads the show to present such complicated and sometimes negative portraits of mothers and mother figures. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough family history to trace a line in the sand from past to present, but it seems to me that The Leftovers values most a world in which mothers are assiduously dedicated to upholding the home and the family, and when women step outside that role they are punished at best and become active antagonists doomed for elimination by Kevin the White Knight at worst.

Easily one of the best scenes in the show takes place at the end of Season 2.

The Leftovers is a show so complex that it is hard to know both where to start and when to stop talking about it. It’s most crucial service is that it painstakingly picks apart our ideas of what family is and what it should be. It experiments with the formation of new families in the face of the loss of old ones, and again and again reminds us that no family or relationship is ever static or idyllic but must constantly be cultivated. Like another brilliantly written show, Mad Men, it takes the much nostalgized domestic ideal of the 1950s and rips it apart to demonstrate all its inherent flaws and fragility. But in another way The Leftovers is deeply conservative, because despite all the shit that the show throws at the characters, and it can be a real shit show, they all keep trying to form families, demonstrating the deep tenacity of this social structure in American social and cultural consciousness. The show allows us moments to cherish these new families, but only does so briefly because snatching them away and upending order again. Perhaps this what makes it most appealing and most lifelike: in whatever era, families are groups based on trust and negotiation. They are living entities, and members come and go, sometimes again and again. Treating families as if they are static will knock you on your ass when the dynamic changes. So cherish what stable moments you can, and accept change and the need to do so when it comes. It is this idea that most challenges the rigidity of the domestic ideal without devaluing the family system. There are a lot of social formations left unexplored in The Leftovers, but when examining the core of one of our most cherished institutions, it encourages us to indulge our fear of loss and destabilization and embrace the ability to adapt and form new systems without giving up or wasting our breath.