Here is the link to my page on Pirates in Atlantic History. Thank you and stay safe.
URL:http://wpsandbox.freespiritdocs.com/
proselytizingtheatlantic.andre247.com/ProselytizingTheAtlantic/
http://americanrevolution.aloberts.com/cms/neatline/show/american-revolution-project
Here is my final project on Christopher Columbus. Thank You.
http://twinery.org/2/?#stories/290e6a5b-3b6f-8786-b1d5-e573482070a0/play
During our first week in class we were handed a map of the world and asked to give our definition of what the Atlantic world is. While most of us had different interpretations, each of us had distinct physical and temporal boundaries on where the Atlantic realm begins and ends. Even though each one of us were correct in or interpretations, we were only scratching the surface on what the Atlantic world really is. While most people believe that the history of the Atlantic started with Columbus’ voyage to the Americas, but is that when Atlantic history really began? We can say that Atlantic history started earlier, but we do not have any verifiable proof. Since Columbus documented his travels and they are readily accessible, we as historians have definitive starting point. Our final three readings for the class try to encapsulate what we have been studying for the past semester. Even though each of these three historians, David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, and Laurent Dubois have come up with with different views on what the Atlantic world is, there is an over-arching consensus that the Atlantic world is a community tired together by the Atlantic Ocean. As a community, according to Armitage, the Atlantic world brought together states, nations, and regions (Arimtage 20). Even though each of the entities has histories that they could call their own, their actions and the actions of others affected their histories in either a positive or negative way. One of these actions as we all know was slavery which was considered a blight on American as well as Atlantic history. Even though we would like to sweep the ghost of slavery away, we can’t. In his online article, Laurent Dubois contends that the slave ship is the center of Atlantic history (Dubois, Online). While I agree with my colleague Tram Hua, that slavery was one of the defining parts of Atlantic history, I disagree with Dubois that it was the nucleus of the Atlantic realm. Since I stated that we only scratched the surface of this expansive study we call Atlantic history, I found something interesting in our readings. According to Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic history was created by professional historians as a response to the threat from Communism (Bailyn 12). Hence the Western powers needed to claim the Atlantic space in order to promote freedom and the capitalist and Christian ideals that were sacred to the Western world. To sum up, Atlantic history is encompasses and connects the Americas, Europe, and Africa together in a symbiotic relationship. This relationship which began over five hundred years ago has solidified into community of Atlantic states whose well being and stability are dependent on the others in the community.
Armitage, David. Three Concepts in Atlantic History. New York: Macmillan. 2002.
Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. London: Harvard University Press. 2005.
Dubois, Laurent “Atlantic Freedoms” Aeon. (November 2016). Accessed December 1, 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/why-haiti-should-be-at-the-centre-of-the-age-of-revolution
The article “The Three Concepts of Atlantic History” by David Armitage was a simple yet informative breakdown of the entire study of the Atlantic. I found the three concepts to be very broad and possibly a little too eager to put the entire Atlantic history into three distinct categories, but nonetheless, the article was a good finishing piece for this class.
The three concepts discusses essentially break down then relationships in the Atlantic by time period. I found myself thinking that not all countries in the Atlantic were on the same time scale. To me this made the argument difficult to fully accept because of the huge diversity present in the space. His argument was based primarily on the timelines of the largest countries in the Atlantic. The concepts he points are focus on the early Atlantic, the international period, and finally with the post civil war period that focuses on local areas.
The trans-Atlantic period that focuses on the international aspects of the space was the most interesting to me. This time period was the birth of the concept of the nation in the western world. It doesn’t consider the Iroquois nation that had existed hundreds of years earlier. It does however bring up a new point in the sense that this was the beginning of real, cross Atlantic politics between nations. Before this the Atlantic had been a dividing line between European power and American colonialism. Following this, there was a connection across the Atlantic that would shape politics for the rest of the foreseeable future. The best point I think Armitage made was his conclusion that Atlantic history is the sum of all the different cultures, people, nations that existed in the Atlantic. Tram referenced this in her blog post, and I think her analysis is correct.
When a general audience heard about Atlantic history, I imagine one of the first things they think of is the slave trade. For example, Diana Tran stated on her blog, “There are a lot of benefits and concepts that came from the Atlantic history. However, I believe that the most important was the influence it had on slave trade. It really changed and shaped the world differently. Slaves became the base of most productions, labor and land/crop cultivations.”
The slave trade, indeed is an important part of Atlantic history but it is also a very small part of the board and complexity of Atlantic history.
In his book The Idea of Atlantic History, Bernard Bailyn traced the emergence of the subject of Atlantic History. He studies the approaches of past and current historians on Atlantic history. Bailyn made a lot of critiques to Atlantic historians. For example, to historians who wrote about imperial history of the Atlantic, Bailyn wrote “They were describing the formal structure of imperial governments, not the lives of the people who lived within these governments, and they concentrated on the affairs of a single nations. (Bernard Bailyn, 5)”
In The British Atlantic World, David Armitage talks about what he believe are the three concepts of Atlantic history: the transnational, the international, and the national/regional history of the Atlantic world. Armitage, too concluded that Atlantic history is a part of multinational and Multicultural histories.
Laurent Dubois mentioned on his article Atlantic Freedoms about the challenges to write a piece of history. He reminds that us that the basic of every work of history is a question of positioning. Whose history are you telling? And from whose perspective? And that traditionally, the history of the Americas was written largely from perspective of Europeans. Although in recent decades, historians had come to aware of this fact and work to add perspectives and experience of Native Americans, slaves, and immigrants in the Americas. Dubois also warn us to be conscious when read or write a piece of history. He said, “Historians depend on texts to do their work. Although they are increasingly incorporating other materials into their analysis, archives remain largely textual. This lead to a kind of distortion: because we use texts to access the past.” We need to remember that these texts are small parts of much bigger conversations that did not get recorded. This lead me back to what Bernard Bailyn wrote in the preface of his book, “History is what has happened, in act and thought; it is also what historians make of it.”
Here is the prototype of my final project