Cordelia’s title <\/a>made me laugh aloud \u2013 but I also like that she points out how reified historical characters are often more complicated that simple historical narratives cast them. This also links back to group B’s presentation, which reminded us that historical narratives and national myths are often consciously created, rather than naturally occurring.<\/p>\n I want to highlight a passage from Cordelia’s post, though, which I thought beautifully summed up the tension between what Franklin thought he was doing, and how we see him as historians:<\/p>\n Waldstreicher further mentions how Franklin’s print culture \u201chad far more to do with slavery than previously believed\u201d as runaways used their knowledge and skills to change their condition \u2013 an ideal that resided deeply with Franklin. Franklin, therefore, appears to only apply intellectual precepts to the white men who can make a difference in the printing or political world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I hope we’ll get to this issue in class \u2013 how the structures of information transmission that enabled (according to some authors) the spread of revolutionary politics, also served to marginalize some people in the early United States.<\/p>\n Sherwood problematizes<\/a> both articles for this class, and asks a question that is central to how we understand non-elite resistance in the early republic: How can we be sure that enslaved people (or the poor, or servants, or anyone else) were not simply reacting to their circumstances (running away) but were instead consciously fashioning themselves. I hope we’ll talk more about this issue in class, and particularly about how to assess how historical actors felt<\/em> about their quotidian actions, whether we can access those feelings, and what \u2013 as historians \u2013 we should do about them.<\/p>\n By Dr. Shrout Cordelia’s title made me laugh aloud \u2013 but I also like that she points out how reified historical characters are often more complicated that simple historical narratives cast them. This also links back to group B’s presentation, which reminded us that historical narratives and national myths are often consciously created, rather than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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