Copies and Originals, Premo

In a terrific book about notaries in colonial Cuzco, Peru, Kathryn Burns reminds us how frequently official writers distorted, left blank, and forged contracts and parts of court cases, leaving traces of their control over the order of the historical record.[1]  But, if official writers held the power to shape the archive, at the same time, ordinary Spanish colonial subjects—many of whom did not read or write themselves-- commandeered the form of legal protocols and served as legal agents outside of court. 

The notary-free contract was a part of daily life, and it crossed any simple divide between colonizer and colonized, enslaved and free, state and subject.  People picked up and reproduced, out loud, in rough orthography, on the backsides of printed text and scraps of paper, the formula for contracts that had been set in manuals for legal personnel. (cont'd)

Downs, "The Second American Revolution The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic"

The University of North Carolina Press has published The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Nov. 2019), by Gregory P. Downs (University of California, Davis). A description from the Press:

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name: the Civil War. In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics.

Here Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized.

Advance praise:

"A bold and refreshing interpretation of the Civil War that challenges scholars to bring the singular story out of its narrow, hyperspecialized confines of national history, reframing it into a watershed moment shaped by hemispheric and global forces that remade the nineteenth-century Atlantic world."--Matt D. Childs

"With beautiful, elegant prose, Downs takes the old topic of the revolutionary quality of the Civil War and moves it forward in unexpected and exciting ways by putting it in conversation with the revolutionary nature of the Atlantic in the same period. This is a truly pioneering and innovative book."--Michael Vorenberg

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

A Better Book: The ASLH Book Series

              Perhaps the most important decisions of my transition from dissertation to book was mine to publish with the American Society of Legal History’s book series at Cambridge University Press and theirs to have me.  In a word, the reason was: editing.  In a person, it was: Sally Gordon.  More specifically, I gained a mentor, a booster, a reader, a quarterback, and a promoter.

              From the outset, Sally shared and shaped my vision for the project. I first reached out to her about the book on the suggestion and introduction of my mentor Dan Ernst, himself a former editor of the series.  To my amazement, she read my entire dissertation with her discerning and constructive eye. She saw the same promise in the dissertation that I did. It already had characters, a narrative, and evidence that constitutional change sometimes occurred outside of courts. The promising strands it had left dangling included the place of Reconstruction in U.S. empire, mechanics and details of who drove what legal change how, the relationship between Puerto Ricans and both American Indians and mainland women and minorities, and the shadow that U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines cast over everything.

              An unexpected (but not surprising) benefit of publishing with the ASLH series is that it brings instant credibility with society members. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Sally also introduced me as an up-and-coming scholar with plans to publish in the series.  Anyone who’s seen Sally in action knows that means meeting a lot of society members. I’ve always felt welcome at the annual meetings, but since then the meetings have been a sea of friendly faces.

               Joining the series also meant receiving a level of editing and mentorship that I associate with literary presses of yore, not the tight margins of modern academic publishing.  Almost Citizens was my first book, so I had no experiences identifying – much less making – many of the decisions that book writing  requires. Fortunately, as I wrote (and rewrote), Sally read (and re-read)–the book proposal, an annotated table of contents, individual chapters, and finally the full manuscript.  Every major element of the book bears her mark. Through emails, phone calls, and coffees, she pressed me to specify and “surface” my biggest claims and to open my geographic and temporal lenses wide enough to bring those claims fully into focus. We discussed what books I liked, how they were structured, what writerly voice the authors had employed, who read those volumes, and who might read mine.

Equally important, Sally was an enduring source of encouragement. She kept me optimistic and energized throughout the long and lonely endeavor that is book writing. Our conversations spanned years. During each she reminded me what I had accomplished, then identified the further progress now within reach.

As my draft chapters accumulated, Reuel Schiller joined Sally as a co-editor of the series, to its and my good fortune. Sally and Reuel were a crack pair of text massagers and arrangers. They also knew how to leverage their insights. When they saw room for improvement but lacked the time to provide detailed feedback (the series had other authors; they had day jobs–and lives), they recommended that I use development editors (a subject of an upcoming post).

Working with the series also meant that I had experienced editors in my corner as I navigated the unfamiliar, far-from-intuitive publishing process.  When I negotiated my contract, Sally knew which details mattered: commit to a number of images and ask for preapproval; ensure that the series can choose the copy editor and indexer; choose a publication deadline that can slip a month or two without endangering your tenure case.  Someone had to pay for editing, indexing, and the like. The series helped me ask my home institution for the funds by providing me evidence that peer institutions were already providing such funds to their junior faculty. When I became concerned with one or another of the press’s decisions, Sally and Reuel helped me sort out which items were worth raising in what ways. They were always willing to speak on my behalf to Cambridge, with whom they maintained a strong and cooperative relationship.

Mostly, the series steered me away from pitfalls. I never had to contemplate the disadvantages of a machine-made index because my contract let me hire the wonderful Derek Gottlieb. Where some authors tell horror stories of overseas copy editors who insert more typos than they correct, the series snagged for me the excellent Julie Hagen.

              With my book now out under the series imprint, I can add that I am happy being judged by the company I keep. Cambridge University Press’s august imprimatur makes it more likely that readers will pick up the book. The American Society for Legal History is my foremost academic home. It has also published many of the legal historians that I most admire, including the first books of several of the best up-and-coming scholars in the field.

--Sam Erman

On the Indigenous Experience in the Americas

One of the issues that habitually frustrates me is the disconnect between historians who work on the colonial period and those who specialize in the indigenous world. Theoretically, both engage with the same period and depend on similar or even (on occasions) identical sources, but their aims and their readings are often diverse, the bibliography they consult is habitually distinct, and they frequently belong to different fields and professional associations. The result is that they are seldom in conversation with one another. Having participated recently in a search for a historian of Indigenous North America made this clear to me, but so have many years working as a scholar of Spanish America.

How could one place colonial and indigenous history in dialogue? To answer this question, I authored two pieces. The first piece was concerned with Indigenous right to land, the other focused on campaigns to resettle natives in new, Spanish-style communities.[i]

Attempting to understand why some historians insisted on Spanish respect to native land rights (mostly historians of the Spanish colonial state) while others criticized Spain for the massive dispossession of natives (mainly historians interested in the native experience of empire), I observed how respect to native rights operated in the colonial period.  I argued that respect did not guarantee continuity. On the contrary, it (often) introduced change. This could happen because Spanish judges, although willing to recognize indigenous right to land, understood land rights not according to Indigenous law but according to European juridical traditions. These judges tied land rights to occupation and described occupation in ways that resonated with the European experience. The result was both the suppression of ancient rights as well as the invention of new entitlements. In other words, examination of how European norms were applied vis-à-vis natives enabled to affirm that respect to native rights and native dispossession could operate simultaneously.

With regards to native resettlement, historians of native Spanish America usually denounced resettlement campaigns as a colonial measure aimed at controlling, converting, and exploiting the native population. Yet, as a historian of Spain in both Europe and the Americas I knew that resettlement did not only target natives but also Spaniards and that it operated in both the Old and the New World. Justifying it were contemporary convictions that only people who resided in proper communities (and indigenous communities were not considered “proper”) could be tied to the polity religiously and civically. The question when resettlement was required, against whom, and for which end, thus demanded a larger and a longer vision. As happened in the case of native land rights, just looking at natives, just looking to the Americas, was insufficient.

These remarks are not meant to diminish the plight of native Americans. European colonialism turned the native world upside down. It was a human-made hurricane that touched and upset almost everything. But, regardless of how terrible it had been, if we wish to understand how it operated, we should not separate the study of the native world from the study of the colonial (and by extension European) world, with which it was closely entangled.

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[i]  Tamar Herzog. “Colonial law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America.” The Americas 63(3) (2013): 303-321 and Tamar Herzog. “Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue.” Ler História 72 (2018): 9-30 (an earlier version of this work was published under the title “Terres et déserts, société et sauvagerie. De la communauté en Amérique et en Castille à l’époque moderne.” Annales HSS 62 (3) (2007): 507-538)).