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AARON CARICO |
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Let's begin, just as we'll end, with the debts, which already couldn't be repaid.
Near Helena, Arkansas, someone told Ann Ulrich Evans that a man in that
state, or Alabama, or Missouri, wanted "a gang of niggers to do some work
and he pay you like money growing on trees," but then after bringing in the
"fine big crops" on those "great big farms," she was told she owed more than
when she arrived. A storekeeper in the Brazos Bottom of Texas promised
Laura Smalley anything she'd like, any kind of money, any dress her daughter
desired, if she'd just open an account before Christmas and stick around
another year. And Henry Blake got such offers in Arkansas, too—twenty
dollars in food, a gallon of whiskey, whatever clothes he wanted. "They'd
let you go jus' as far in debt as you wan' to go." "Anything that kept you a
slave." "We never did git out of debt." These were the voices of former slaves
and their descendants as they stood before the counter of the country store,
facing the white merchant on the other side. And that scene, fraught and
repeated, was the cornerstone of the South in the decades surrounding the
turn of the twentieth century.
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BRADY BROWER |
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It's probably not surprising that in a practice like that of the spiritualist medium,
rooted as it was in displaced and disavowed subjectivity, uncertain
authorship would invite a dispossession of ownership. Such was the claim,
at least, that would come to characterize the acrimonious relationship between
one of the late nineteenth century's most famous mediums and the
scientist who wrote about her in a bestselling book with the unforgettable
title, From India to the Planet Mars. What at first glance appears as just a banal
episode of estrangement—between the Genevan medium known as Hélène
Smith and the psychologist Théodore Flournoy—serves here to highlight
the ways in which authorship, property, and the mediated forms of desire as
described by psychoanalysis all signaled the incompatible terms into which
subjectivity was rendered in late nineteenth-century Europe. In this case, the
unitary subject of liberal philosophy and of law (the author and proprietor)
was opposed on the one hand by the transcendent subject of spiritualism
and, on the other, by the internally riven subjectivity of the new psychology.
At issue in each of these discourses was not only the now-classic question
of the author—of who is speaking and to whom a given text belongs—but
also the question of writing as the means by which language was historically
transfigured, from a form of interpersonal address into a formal and
universally accepted discourse like law or science.
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CASEY SHOOP |
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With the evidence more or less in on the precarious climatological state of
the planet, the desire for universal history, as the popular press avers, has
returned. Its latest incarnation has been called Big History. In a spate of
recent books, the story of human history—leading up to and even beyond
the present predicament of global climate change—is placed within the even
larger explanatory framework of the universe. This interdisciplinary attempt
to view history on the largest possible scale—the span of 14 billion years from
the big bang to the present and into the future—is announced by an adjective
at once modest and immodest. Coined by historian David Christian in
the early nineties, Big History has a folksy flippancy and open-handedness
that aims to walk its ambitions right past the once-formidable postmodern
skepticism of grand narratives.
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ETHAN KLEINBERG |
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The above quote by Ranke follows his more celebrated but also vilified historical
aspiration to show the past event wie es eigentlich gewesen—"how it
actually happened" or "how it actually was." And it is here that I want to
begin my exploration of the fantasy of a historical science. I do not wish to
point to Ranke as indicative of scientific history. Instead, I want to emphasize
the way that Ranke's later statement about the limitations of historical
inquiry has been effaced by his bolder, more positivist, and definitive claim
about presenting the past "as it actually happened": just the facts. Historians
have always been adept at offering paradigms they know are unattainable
and then effacing those aspects that expose the instability or limitations of
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