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Why I turned the ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ video game into a history class on America’s violent past

Preface for Not Even Past: What place do video games have in the history classroom? Until recently, most educators dismissed this medium as frivolous and sensational. But given the staggering time that students spend in these digital landscapes, and the increasing thoughtfulness and diversity of major games, it may be time for a reassessment. My own experience in teaching a college class on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history through the Red Dead Redemption franchise has convinced me that there’s tremendous future potential in the intersection of games and serious history. My experimental course at the University of Tennessee has seen unprecedented enrollments each semester, and student enthusiasm during class has similarly shot upward. I’ve adapted the course into a book, Red Dead’s History, which has also convinced me that digital games can provide a bridge for professional historians to reach wider audiences and share the academy’s wealth of knowledge. The book has granted me opportunities for public engagement that I could never have imagined previously – many made possible by my audiobook’s narrator, actor Roger Clark, who played Red Dead Redemption II’s protagonist. Roger and I spoke to a packed auditorium at San Diego Comic-Con, and were interviewed by one of YouTube’s most popular game streamers. When Roger and his fellow actor Rob Wiethoff made a surprise visit to my college class, game news site IGN broadcast the footage to millions of viewers. While this short-form public engagement often lacks the depth that academic scholars are accustomed to, it leads viewers toward a book that is very much a scholarly product, as Red Dead’s History is a synthesis of recent historiography in U.S. Western, Southern, and Appalachian history. And as early reader reviews indicate, new audiences are finding that scholarship is fresh and illuminating. As video games continue their astronomical growth in future decades, historical games will remain central to the medium. How will professional historians leverage this public passion toward serious study of the past? The future is wide open.

This article was originally published in “The Conversation” on 7.19.2024.

Title of course:
Red Dead’s History: Exploring America’s Violent Past Through the Hit Video Game

Q: What prompted the idea for the course?

This course was born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Confronting the lockdowns of 2020 and uncertain months spent at home, I rekindled a high school hobby that I had neglected for two decades – video gaming.

Picture of video game case — Used copy of Red Dead Redemption II. *Source: Not Even Past*

One of the first games I picked was “Red Dead Redemption II,” set in a fictionalized America of 1899. The game follows the Van der Linde gang, a diverse crew of idealistic outlaws, as they flee authority in an increasingly ordered and hierarchical world. Since its 2018 release, the game has sold more than 64 million copies, making it the seventh on the list of all-time bestselling video games – and the only historically themed one on the list.

While video games had been a mindless pastime in high school, this time around, I was playing as a professor who specialized in U.S. history since the Civil War. And though that made me a far more critical gamer, I was also genuinely surprised at how often RDRII – as it is often called – alluded to major topics that historians have spent generations debating.

These topics include corporate capitalism, settler colonialism, women’s suffrage, and the inequalities of race in an era that Mark Twain had called the “Gilded Age” – a period where the dazzling wealth of a small handful sharply contrasted with the misery of common people. These weighty topics were often on the game’s sidelines rather than at center stage – but they were present nevertheless.

Q: What does the course explore?

Given the centrality of violence to the video game, the course seeks to understand what really spurred bloodshed in the United States between 1865 and 1920.

In RDRII, gunfire is usually sparked by personal grudges, robberies, or the overconsumption of alcohol. But in Gilded Age America, it wasn’t so simple. Instead, broader social problems were the primary catalyst of violence. First, Americans fought over the emerging regime of corporate capitalism. Should new businesses like U.S. Steel and the Union Pacific Railroad, who wielded never-before-seen power and influence, dominate workers and consumers alike? Many resisted such an idea through protests, strikes, and sometimes bloodshed.

The Pullman Strike of 1894. Railroad workers who protested poor working conditions and low wages committed arson and destroyed property, which was followed by brutal state and federal law enforcement crackdown efforts.
*Image source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Secondly, Americans came to blows over the unfulfilled promises of racial equality that were written into the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. Especially in the South, where the vast majority of African Americans lived, the formerly enslaved and their descendants demanded inclusion in politics and a chance to progress economically. But many white Southerners resisted such efforts, often using terrorism to push their Black neighbors into subservient positions.

Q: Why is this course relevant now?

American society in the late 19th century was ruptured by inequalities wrought by capitalism and race – and so is ours today. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, it’s wise that we look back at the long road that brought America to its contemporary dilemmas of racial violence and the gap between rich and poor. A handy way to open that conversation with young Americans is through video games – an industry that has now surged in value to eclipse both music and movies and which might be the key to reaching this generation’s students, as studies are beginning to show.

Q: What’s a critical lesson from the course?

One key lesson is about the city of New Orleans, fictionalized in RDRII as “Saint Denis.” In the game, the outlaw protagonists trade fire with the city’s blue-coated policemen following a botched bank robbery, leaving bodies in the streets. Few gamers could guess that a similarly bloody firefight with the police riveted the actual city in 1900, just a year after the game is set, leaving seven officers dead. Yet here the outlaw was a Black man, Robert Charles, who took a violent stand against police abuse and the emerging system of Jim Crow segregation.

In response to his attacks on the police, white mobs roamed the city and indiscriminately killed Black civilians. Therefore, the explosion of violence in New Orleans was produced not by simple banditry but by one of America’s towering social dilemmas.

Illustration in "The Mascot" newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. "Results of Police Outrage Investigations." — Illustration in “The Mascot” newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. “Results of Police Outrage Investigations.” The first panel of the cartoon entitled “As the Public See Him” shows a policeman with the head of a lion, waving a pistol and bloody billy-club over two prostrate bleeding bodies, as a citizen in the distance reacts in horror. The scond panel entitled “As the Committee Makes Him” shows policeman with the head of a lamb and angel wings, carrying a beribboned staff, exiting from a portal labled “Police Examining Committee” with a sign “Whitewashing Done Cheap”. A man with a top hat and cane looks on through binoculars.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Q: What materials does the course feature?

I frequently begin course sessions with a brief video cutscene or gameplay footage from RDRII before we dive into the actual history that the games represent – or sometimes, misrepresent. For reading, students dive into scholarly monographs such as historian K. Stephen Prince’s “The Ballad of Robert Charles,” on the violent dilemmas of race in New Orleans. They also read various original sources, such as cowboy memoirs, train schedules, and a Texas newspaper from 1899.

Q: What will the course prepare students to do?

Anyone who has taken my class – or read my new book – will know that the big social problems we are wrestling with today have deep roots and took their modern shape during the same 1865-1920 period that is memorably captured in RDRII. They’ll also become much more discerning consumers of digital media and games in particular; they’ll be better able to assess and critique representations of history on the digital screen.

Tore Olsson, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tore Olsson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in History at the University of Tennessee.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Fellowship of the Tree Rings: A ClioVis Project

My grandparents and I looked down onto the vast Sonoran Desert from Mount Lemmon, north of Tucson, Arizona. At nearly 8,000 feet, quaking aspen, cottonwood, alder, and other tree species surrounded us—a stark contrast with the desert below. An audio guide played on my grandma’s Samsung Galaxy as we took in our surroundings. The voice, who I later learned is a singer named Joey Burns, told us about how researchers at the University of Arizona learned that fires are essential to healthy forests by studying tree rings.^[1] Burns continued, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”^[2]

Fast forward six years: Dr. Erika Bsumek sends me a podcast called The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, which explores connections between tree rings, hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and even the Sugar Revolution.^[3] The podcast is based on research from Valarie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley, reconstructing 500 years of Caribbean hurricane records by studying tree rings.^[4] It is a remarkable resource that sheds light on the intersection between climate science and history.

A dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus, Germany.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meeting at the Second American Dendrochronology Conference in Tucson, Arizona, near Mount Lemmon, the three researchers discussed how shipwreck records and tree ring data could be combined to reconstruct a history of hurricanes in the Caribbean.^[5] After successfully reconstructing a chronology, the researchers observed a dip in the number of hurricanes between 1645 and 1715.^[6] Trouet noticed that this correlates with what is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” a period of low solar radiation.^[7]

This made sense—less solar radiation meant cooler temperatures, which is not the ideal environment for forming hurricanes. Hurricanes thrive in environments with warm water and air.^[8] But why is the connection between the “Maunder Minimum” and a period of fewer hurricanes significant? The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley illustrates the ability of climate proxies to reveal new perspectives on history that would go otherwise unnoticed. Assistant Professor of History Melissa Charenko, whose research was influential in the creation of my project, defines climate proxies well in another article for Not Even Past. She writes:

Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, pollen, and lake sediments. They are material traces that indirectly reflect the climates of the past. For example, scientists can use tree rings to reconstruct past temperature and moisture. Or they can use the air bubbles trapped in ice to study the composition of the atmosphere through time.^[9]

In the case of The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, researchers used tree rings as a climate proxy to reconstruct a chronology of hurricanes in the Caribbean. Their use of climate proxies is especially interesting because of the subsequent historical connections they made using the chronology.

When looking at the larger history of the Caribbean, the lull in hurricane activity can be connected with an influx in Caribbean maritime activity, specifically within the context of the Sugar Revolution and Golden Age of European Piracy, which lasted roughly from 1650 to 1730.^[10] The Fellowship of the Tree Rings asserts that the sun—and, more broadly, the environment—played a vital role in both shaping and uncovering our past. By connecting solar phenomena like the “Maunder Minimum” to historical periods such as the Sugar Revolution, The Fellowship of Tree Rings illuminates the environment’s unseen hand in transforming human history. Furthermore, by understanding how Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley used tree rings to provide insight into a larger Caribbean history, we can reconsider our natural surroundings as a burgeoning resource in explaining our past.

Sugar manufacture in the Antilles Isles, 1665.
Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72094 DLC

As I think back to my trip to the top of Mount Lemmon, I did not understand how impactful the story of a tree’s life might be to understanding human history. Human history is all too often framed as something separate from environmental history when really it should be seen as inextricable. The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley demonstrates that the environment and human history are forever intertwined.

All of this inspired me to build a timeline that contextualized their research.

For this project, I took The Fellowship of the Tree Rings podcast episode and mapped information from it onto an interactive timeline using ClioVis—an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart historical (or nonhistorical) concepts, events, and themes, emphasizing connections between them. The Fellowship of the Tree Rings lent itself well to the ClioVis format as the story contains various historical and scientific connections. After mapping the RadioLab episode, I went through the timeline and added my own events, connections, and eras to give greater context to the story.

While building this timeline, I became increasingly fascinated in how interconnected piracy, the Sugar Revolution, and hurricanes were. I learned about the complex relationship between empires and piracy. Although they were outlaws operating in maritime spaces, pirates paradoxically facilitated the expansion of empires by assisting in territorial conquests.^[11] This took place against the backdrop of the Sugar Revolution, where imperial powers scrambled to gain control of lucrative trading ports and colonies. European states sought to extract as much wealth as possible from the Caribbean. To do so, they plundered indigenous communities and violently exploited enslaved African labor.^[12]

As millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly taken by these empires from Africa to the Caribbean, some African people were able to escape and join pirate crews.^[13] This all took place during a historic period of low hurricane activity. When the idea of the climate shaping these events is added to the picture, it changes things. Did the significantly reduced threat of hurricanes to ships propel both the Sugar Revolution and piracy? In my timeline, I attempt to map out this complex history and answer that question.

As the timeline shows, contextualizing The Fellowship of the Tree Rings demonstrates the complex relationship between the “Maunder Minimum,” hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and the Sugar Revolution. Between 1650 and 1715, a lull in hurricane activity associated with the “Maunder Minimum” transformed the environment. As maritime trade increased, ships simultaneously faced a comparatively lower threat of hurricanes than in other periods in history. This meant that hurricanes did not play their traditional role in the Caribbean ecosystem—their check on human activity was temporarily weakened.

Why is this important? Between 1650 and 1715, European colonial powers cemented their position in the Americas through the Sugar Revolution. European ships transported a massive amount of wealth—including enslaved African people—in the triangular trade, which helped fund Europe’s industrial revolution.^[14] The Fellowship of Tree Rings introduces the environment as playing a role in accelerating that process, sinking fewer fleets because of hurricane activity. This connection reveals how historical periods are impacted by changes in climate, providing us with new understandings of the larger societal shifts that come with them.

Valerie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley make use of tree rings as climate proxies to establish these connections and illustrate the value of studying human history in terms of the environment. Their study joins the growing field of paleoecologists who seek to learn about our climatic history from the natural world around us. In addition to learning about climate history as it is narrowly understood, these scholars are studying the environment to learn about systems of power, like the rise of the Sugar Revolution and its relationship with the Golden Age of European Piracy.

Historians often leave out an important voice in their stories: the planet. In The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, we hear about the environment’s role in one of the most formative time periods in the Western Hemisphere, the Sugar Revolution and the Golden Age of European Piracy. As we enter an era defined by human-made climate change, it is even more important to understand the historical relationship between social changes and the climate. Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley tell us to first look at the environment itself.

Now, when I reflect on my work contextualizing The Fellowship of Tree Rings, I think again about what Joey Burns meant when he said, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”[15] A tree’s rings are not just the story of its life but a perspective on the history of the world around it.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major studying to become a public high school history teacher. He is interested in environmental history, resistance movements, and histories of the Americas. As a future history teacher, Aidan hopes to teach history critically and bridge the community-classroom divide. He is currently a ClioVis intern.

^[1] Joey Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour” (Audio Tour, University of Arizona College of Science, 2015).

^[2] Burns.

^[3] Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings,” RadioLab, accessed October 25, 2023, https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/fellowship-tree-rings/transcript.

^[4] Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 203.

^[5] Trouet, 201.

^[6] Trouet, 204.

^[7] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[8] Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Elizabeth P. Manar, eds. “Hurricane.” In U-X-L Encyclopedia of Weather and Natural Disasters, 398–407. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016.

^[9] Charenko, Melissa. “IHS Climate in Context: Climate by Proxy.” Not Even Past, December 15, 2020. https://notevenpast.org/ihs-climate-in-context-climate-by-proxy/.

^[10] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

^[11] Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge (Mass.): London Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

^[12] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar, and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1972), 50–68.

^[13] Aimee Wodda, “Piracy in Colonial Era,” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1st ed. (Wiley, 2013), 2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj528.

^[14] Barry W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” The Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 213.

^[15] Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour.”

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

By Marisol Bayona Roman

Though the authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene apply their skills as historians of science throughout, the book is far more than a straightforward history. Written at the intersection of science, history, and the broader humanities, Bonneuil and Fressoz provide well-reasoned and well-founded arguments that surgically take apart the dominant view of the Anthropocene as an epoch of human-provoked environmental crises that have only recently come to our attention, and for which scientific advances and sustainability-oriented mindsets are the only solution.

The book is divided into three parts, each oriented toward a particular goal. The first part introduces the scientific data on greenhouse gas emissions, biosphere degradation, changing biogeochemical cycles, and energy mobilization upon which the definition of the Anthropocene rely. Fressoz and Bonneuil show how the distinction between the realms of nature and culture—think, for example, of the opposition that emerges in Europeans’ quests to conquer the wilderness of the New World and impose their ways onto “savage” and “uncultured” natives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is no longer so clear-cut, and how placing the blame for the environmental crises of the Anthropocene on an ambiguous human whole can propagate a hegemonic narrative. These observations set up part two of the book, in which the authors reintroduce the political and break down the hegemonic qualities of the Anthropocene discourse. They show the ways in which scientific research has helped produce an undifferentiated and distanced view of the Earth and the anthropos that minimizes the key role of major nation-states in the development of today’s environmental crises, and the dangers of designating the scientist as the ultimate hero of the epoch. This completes the foundation for part three, a collection of seven histories that expose the imprecision inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene by focusing on one aspect of its development. For example, in their history of energy—the Thermocene, as they call it—the authors note how the dominant account, which asserts that the transitions from wood to coal to oil have been driven by a search for efficiency, obfuscates responsibility for the negative consequences of these decisions. Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate instead that the history of energy is one of successive additions (i.e. wood and coal and oil) shaped by political, military, and ideological decisions that have often gone against principles of efficiency and technological progress. The authors close this history by addressing the political on a global level, highlighting the key role of Anglophone countries such as the United States and Great Britain in the technological changes and environmental consequences of the Thermocene.

This publication is of great merit. The sheer breadth of knowledge on which the authors rely is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research, and the clarity with which they synthesize and present the information is impressive, to say the least. However, this feat produces a dense text that limits its potential readership. The section “The discourse of a new geopower,” for example, is crucial to the transition between Part Two and Part Three because it reveals how the current “authorized narrative” of the Anthropocene represents, reproduces, and supports certain hegemonies on a global scale. But in order to follow the thread of this chapter, the reader must contend with Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, Peder Anker’s imperial ecology, and Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere, all introduced in the span of three pages. These concepts are explained briefly and cited appropriately, but their complexity prohibits this book from being a leisurely read for those who are not already familiar with the ideas. These shortcomings aside, The Shock of the Anthropocene is a welcome and necessary read for scholars of any field concerned with the status of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Black Women in Black Power

By Ashley Farmer

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Portrait of Angela Davis spray-painted on a wall.

Portrait of Angela Davis (Photo: Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr)

Although often thought of as civil rights’ “evil twin,” in the words of historian Peniel Joseph, Black Power was a diverse and diffuse collection of organizations, activists, and ideas. This movement spanned the political spectrum, states and continents, and stretched into both the grassroots and national arenas. Despite these variations, activists across the globe were united in support of the central pillars of Black Power—black community control, black self-determination, and black self-defense—broadly defined. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a bevy of organizations ranging from the Black Panther Party to the All-African People’s Party supported and advanced these principles.

Black women were at the epicenter of this movement. Some joined national organizations and served in both rank-and-file and leadership roles. Others found a way to enact ideals like community control and self-determination through local neighborhood or welfare rights organizations. Whatever avenue they chose, female Black Power activists were not only vital to the infrastructure of the movement, they also advanced gender-specific interpretations of its governing axioms. Complicating common assumptions about their marginalization in the movement, black women activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power, ultimately causing many organizations to adopt a more radical critique of racism, sexism, and capitalism.

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance marching in NYC in 1972 with a banner reading Welfare Rights Organization (Credit: Luis Garza).

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC in 1972 (Credit: Luis Garza).

Women in the Black Panther Party exemplified this gender-conscious ethos. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party in October 1966 in Oakland, California in response to rampant police brutality. However, the Black Panther Party quickly became a collective with a more expansive vision that included defending the black community, developing community programs to increase self-sufficiency, and fostering political education—albeit with a masculinist framing. Women joined the group a year after its founding, participating in all aspects of its programming and endorsing its principles. The first female member, Tarika Lewis, participated in political education classes, attended rallies, and was an artist for the party newspaper, The Black Panther. As the party developed, other women including Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown joined the group. By the 1970s, Huggins edited the newspaper and Brown ran the party. Indeed, women became Panthers in droves, eventually comprising about two-thirds of the rank-and-file across forty chapters. As they organized, they challenged their male counterparts to rethink their commitment to patriarchal ideas of leadership, activism, and revolution, openly debating sexism within the movement and developing artwork and articles that framed black women as the consummate political actors. Their efforts worked. The Black Panther Party, often thought to be an exemplar of Black Power sexism, adopted more egalitarian polices toward women in both name and practice.

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC marching in 1972 and carrying a banner that reads "Hands off Angela Davis" (Credit: Luis Garza)

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC in 1972 (Credit: Luis Garza)

Other women, such as members of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), chose to engender and re-gender Black Power through what historian Stephen Ward calls, “Black Power feminist” groups. This organization originated as a women’s caucus within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which, by the late 1960s, advocated for globally-minded, anti-imperialist politics expressed through Black Power principles and positions. As it developed it became a collective of “black and other third world women” fighting “all forms of racist, sexist, and economic exploitation.” Through their newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, members developed an ideological platform and activist agenda that interpreted Black Power principles through this global, gender-specific, and intersectional lens. Articles about anatomy and reproductive rights fostered gender-specific understandings of self-determination; images of black and brown women arming themselves supported a capacious understanding of self-defense. These publications, as well as their collaborations with other Black Power era groups, helped produce more nuanced understandings of Black Power. Their multi-faceted approach to liberation also laid the groundwork for what we now call intersectionality.

Female Black Power organizers’ diverse organizing efforts are visible in activism today. The grassroots networks that progressive candidates like Abrams used to win the primary, as well as her endorsement of universal pre-K and affordable housing, build on the efforts of women such as Huggins and Brown, who dedicated much of their lives to developing capacious forms of community control. More radical organizers, such as the three women founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, carry on TWWA-like traditions of global anti-imperialist solidarity, intersectionality, and black self-determination through self-definition.

My new book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, examines these and other women activists in order to better understand black activism past and present. It centers on black women’s ideas and organizing in order to foreground how they might help us rethink the historical and historic uses of Black Power in addressing all facets of oppression. Understanding the historical activism of black women organizers can reveal new sites of theoretical and organizational possibilities and shine light on the ways that we might move toward different and more equitable worlds today.

Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era

“Online roundtable on Ashley Farmer’s Remaking Black Power,” in Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, April 13, 2018.

For more on black women and Black Power, Prof. Farmer recommends these.

Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (2016).
A great book for anyone looking to learn more about the gender politics of the Black Panther Party.

Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (2009).
A strong collection of essays that explore black power and black radicalism from its origins to its apex.

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1988, 2001)
The life story of Assata Shakur, her journey into activism, membership in the Black Panther party, and her arrest and her current exile in Cuba.

Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Women’s Story (1993).
A great autobiography that describes Brown’s journey to becoming a leading Black Power activist and leader of the Black Panther Party

Nico Slate ed. Black Power Beyond Borders: the Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (2012)
A collection of essays that speak to the global scope and reach of U.S-centered ideas of Black Power.

Featured image photo credit: Black Panthers at a rally in Oakland, Calif., in 1969, from the documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.” (Photo: Pirkle Jones and Ruth Marion-Baruch).

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008) by Yasheng Huang

by Zhaojin Zeng

China’s two-digit annual economic growth since 1980 has been seen as a modern economic miracle. But the China story does not seem to conform to standard academic theories of economic development, which emphasize the importance of secure property rights, free market, and economic and political institutions. A widely accepted explanation is that China’s takeoff relies on its specific context, which incorporates an immature market economy, state control, and rampant corruption. All these factors together lead to efficient economic outcomes under apparently inefficient policies and institutions. As a result, China has often been treated as an outlier in development economics studies.

In Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Yasheng Huang challenges this conventional view by offering a detailed account of the policy reversal in the 1980s and the 1990s. He argues that private entrepreneurship, facilitated by access to capital and microeconomic flexibility, was at the center of China’s takeoff in the 1980s. However, in the 1990s the Chinese state reversed many of its previous policies. Capitalism in China changed from a market-driven, rural-based, entrepreneurial system to an urban-biased, state-led capitalist system that is anti-poor and anti-private capitalists. This change was not reflected in GDP numbers, but it showed up in the welfare implications for the Chinese population. Since the 1990s, as Huang notes, household income lagged behind the growth of economy and the labor share of GDP also fell.

Huang starts with a detailed analysis of the ownership structure of China’s township and village enterprises (TVEs), which were thought to spearhead the rapid growth of the Chinese economy from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. Many Western and Chinese scholars believe that TVEs, as their name indicates, were owned and run mainly by the local government, which means they were under collective or public ownership. By digging deep into bank documents unexamined before, Huang finds that the Chinese definition of TVEs only refers to their location, not their ownership status. TVEs were located in the countryside, but most of them were completely private. Huang reveals that in the 1980s China saw an explosion of indigenous private entrepreneurship in rural areas. These private businesses were mainly engaged in the industry and the service sector. So, he claims that a rapid rise of rural entrepreneurship characterized the economic development of China in the 1980s, which established the actual, but often neglected, foundation of the China miracle. Huang calls it “the Entrepreneurial Decade.”

Huang then presents a detailed analysis of the policy reversal in the 1990s. As is well known, 1989 was a year of political turmoil in China as well as in other former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the era from 1989 onward, there was a significant policy reversal, which was first and foremost manifest in rural finance. Credit for rural entrepreneurs contracted and loans for rural private industrial enterprises were tightened. Other policy changes included centralizing the administrative and fiscal affairs of rural governance and repressing private informal loans. TVEs also started to decline in the deteriorating national policy environment no longer friendly to rural private entrepreneurship. Huang says that in the 1990s China continued to march toward capitalism but toward one different from the capitalism in the 1980s. Before 1989, China was developing a market-driven, small-scale, and welfare-improving rural entrepreneurial capitalism. However, since 1990, it was state-led capitalism, featured by substantial urban bias, heavy investments in state-owned enterprises and infrastructures, favoring FDI over indigenous private capitalists, and subsidizing the urban boom by taxing the rural population. Huang looks specifically at the case of Shanghai, the best example of urban Chinese, state-led capitalism. Contrary to the economic growth driven by entrepreneurial activities, Huang argues that, the state-led GDP growth as evidenced in Shanghai is neither sustainable nor welfare-improving. He further points out that in Shanghai model, GDP grows rapidly, but private entrepreneurial activities are repressed and personal income lags.

Most economists and China observers claim that economic reforms continued and even expanded in the 1990s and 2000s, because China’s GDP kept growing rapidly. Huang counters this view by evaluating the Chinese economy based on its benefit to human welfare. His evidence shows that the policy reversal in the 1990s resulted in the adverse welfare impacts: the illiterate population rose again in the 1990s and the growth of personal incomes lagged behind the rapid GDP growth. In comparison, personal incomes grew faster than GDP in the 1980s. He argues that economic growth under the entrepreneurial capitalism in the 1980s was broad-based and thus benefited the vast majority of the population, while the rapid growth under of state-led capitalism in the 1990s did not.

In the end, Huang cautions that the policies of the 1990s directed China onto the wrong path and he calls for fundamental institutional reforms so as to sustain high speed economic growth as well as to resolve mounting social problems. Overall, Huang offers a nuanced analysis of China’s economic growth. His explanation departs from the prevailing gradualist perspective of the China miracle, revealing the decisive policy change between the 1980s and the 1990s and its crucial impacts on Chinese people’s welfare.

More on Asian economies on Not Even Past:

Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan

Great Books on The Rise of American Capitalism

by H. W. Brands

Ron Chernow. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. The best combination of narrative and analysis on the banking house that made J. P. Morgan the towering financial figure of his time.

Matthew Josephson. The Robber Barons:The Great American Capitalists. The classic muckraking account of the generation of industrialists and financiers who built modern American capitalism. More than any other book, this one is responsible for the shadow the captains of industry still labor under in history.

Jacob Riis. How the Other Half Lives. Danish-immigrant-turned-investigative-journalist prowls the Lower East Side with notepad and camera in hand, recording and depicting the lives of the desperately poor.

Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery: An Autobriography. The best-titled memoir in American history and one of the best overall. Recounts the life of the great African American leader, who rose from bondage to international fame by dint of intelligence, shrewdness and sheer hard work.

William Riordon. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. A delightful primer on big-city machine politics, by a prominent politico. The machines have largely vanished, but Plunkitt’s philosophy still goes far to explain American politics.

Willa Cather. My Antonia. A beautifully crafted evocation of life on the Plains frontier, which was disappearing even as Cather wrote.

Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. The last days of the free Sioux, as told by one of their medicine men.

H. W. Brands on the Rise of American Capitalism

By H. W. Brands

During the quarter millennium since American independence, two institutions and sets of values have come to characterize American society: democracy and capitalism. Each had roots in the eighteenth century, but each blossomed only in the nineteenth century. Democracy emerged first, during age of Jackson, as ordinary people began exercising political power and electing candidates who seemed much like themselves. By 1850, while the practice of democracy left much to be desired (neither women nor African Americans could vote), the principle had become unassailable in American politics.

Capitalism emerged later, during what Mark Twain derisively called the Gilded Age. But it burst forth with an energy and thoroughness that made the final third of the nineteenth century the era of America’s capitalist revolution. The revolution transformed American finance, turning Wall Street into the hub of investment and speculation and New York the budding capital of world finance. The capitalist revolution reshaped the larger economy, converting America from a nation of farmers into a country of urban workers, managers and professionals. It recast American geography, pulling the recently feudal South into the web of capitalist commerce and exploiting the natural resources of the West. It altered American politics, injecting money into elections as never before and making the nurturing of American business the principal agenda of the dominant Republican party.

The capitalist revolution spun off personal fortunes for John D. Rockefeller, the titan of oil; Andrew Carnegie, the sultan of steel; J. P. Morgan, the master of money; and a hundred lesser winners in the capitalist struggle for profit and dominance. It drew millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, men and women who dreamed of achieving not the enormous wealth of Rockefeller and Carnegie but merely a modest piece of America’s prosperity for themselves and their children. It built cities of brick and steel and concrete, of skyscrapers and mansions and tenements and slums. It lifted the average American to a standard of living never attained anywhere else in previous history, even as it intensified inequalities between the rich and the poor.

John_D._Rockefeller_1885 — John D. Rockefeller

The capitalist revolution, like all revolutions, swept along the willing and unwilling alike. The winners outnumbered the losers, but they didn’t always outshout them. Farmers burdened with deflation-aggravated debt attempted to rein in the big capitalists. They created the Populist party and promoted candidates who promised to restore the traditional values on which the country had been built. Railroad workers, steel workers and other industrial laborers organized unions that waged strikes against their employers—and, in effect, against the government, when state and federal officials sided with the employers. Intellectuals challenged the ethos of capitalism, contending that the clamor for profit coarsened society and commodified life.

The capitalist revolution surged beyond American shores during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A withering depression caused merchants and manufacturers to seek markets abroad. A modern navy constructed in capitalist shipyards provided the means to extend American power to the far corners of the earth. The self-confidence the country’s bumptious growth had fostered encouraged Americans to emulate the imperial powers of Europe and Asia. In the 1890s the United States defeated Spain in battle, annexed islands and archipelagoes in the Caribbean and Pacific, and announced its entrance onto the stage of global power.

The capitalist revolution was the big story of era, but it was a big story composed of many small stories. Jay Gould was a young financier who grew a bushy beard to make him look older, and who remained calm during the tensest moments of difficult speculations, except for the telltale habit of tearing pieces of paper into tiny bits. Gould and his partner Jim Fisk, the P. T. Barnum of Wall Street, tried to corner the gold market in 1869 and nearly succeeded. They were foiled only at the last moment, when the federal government intervened. The ensuing turmoil wracked the financial world, jolted the broader economy, added “Black Friday” to America’s calendar of infamy, and nearly saw Gould and Fisk hanged from lampposts in lower Manhattan. James McParlan was a Pinkerton spy who infiltrated the “Molly Maguires,” the murderously radical wing of the coal miners of Pennsylvania. McParlan assumed a false identity, romanced the sister-in-law of one of the Mollies, and provided evidence that led to the execution of several of the radicals, some of whom quite likely were innocent of the crimes for which they were hanged.

Sleeping_homeless_children_-_Jacob_Riis — Jacob Riis, Sleeping Homeless Children

Jourdon Anderson was a former slave from Tennessee. He emigrated to Ohio after the war, only to receive a letter from his former master inviting him to come back. Anderson declined the invitation, saying he preferred his life in the North. He asked his master to convey his regards to his old friends on the plantation. “Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.” Gertrude Thomas was the wife of a Georgia planter ruined by the Civil War; she tried to make the transition from the prewar slave economy to the postwar capitalist economy, and from the former culture of deference to the new one characterized—for a time, at least—by egalitarianism. But the old habits and thought patterns died hard in her, and her life gradually disintegrated.

Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux who, as teenager, fought in the battle of the Little Bighorn and scalped a federal cavalryman while he was still alive. He was an adult when the federal army had its revenge at Wounded Knee, in the slaughter of women and children on a frozen hillside in Dakota. Charles Goodnight was a ranch man who blazed one of the long trails from Texas to Kansas by which cattle drovers put beef on Northern plates and Texas on the map of the national economy. Howard Ruede was a Pennsylvania boy who went west to claim a homestead in Kansas. He built a dugout home from the virgin sod, but knew he’d never win a wife until he moved upscale to a proper frame house with windows, door and a roof that didn’t leak mud every time it rained.

Mary Fales was a Chicagoan who lost her home and the belongings she couldn’t carry when the Chicago fire of 1871 roared through the city and destroyed her neighborhood. She nearly lost her life but managed to reach the shore of Lake Michigan, where refugees from the flames waded into the water to avoid being roasted on the beach. Jacob Riis was a young Dane who fled his homeland for America when the woman he loved married another man. After several rough years he found his calling as an investigative journalist and photographer; his exposé How the Other Half Lives alerted the country to the poverty that existed within a stone’s throw of the great wealth of New York City. Chun Ho was a Chinese girl who was lured to California on the promise of economic opportunity on the “Gold Mountain,” as America was called in China, but who was forced into prostitution. As an illegal immigrant she feared going to the police, who anyway were in cahoots with the woman who pimped her out. Eventually she made her escape, but knew other girls who were murdered in the attempt.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans had concluded that the capitalist revolution, for all the material benefits it conferred, had tipped the balance too far away from democracy. The complaints accumulated to the point where an unforeseen event, the assassination of William McKinley, pushed the pendulum back in the opposite direction. Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s successor, led a democratic counterrevolution that during the first half of the twentieth century reclaimed for democracy the ground that had been lost to capitalism, and more—preparing the way for another reversal, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which capitalism was again unleashed, and which culminated in a bust that provoked new demands to rein in the capitalists.

H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

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