Table of Contents |
There is no single correct way to view and interpret the past. In a similar vein, there is no single correct way to view and interpret the history of the United States. When historians approach a broad topic, like that of the history of the United States, they often find themselves asking questions like the following:
For this reason, it is often helpful to think of the historian trying to capture the past as a photographer with a camera. The historian can use and apply a variety of lenses, like a photographer, that change or influence the picture of the past that is being created.
Another way to think about the historical lens is to imagine a multisided geometric shape similar to a diamond or a tetrahedron much like the image above. In the middle of this shape is the historical document, event, person, or place that the historian is studying. The interpretation of that document, event, person, or place will change, however, depending on which side of the tetrahedron you are on.
It is important to note that even though your interpretation of the past may shift depending upon the lens you use to understand it, all lenses are interconnected and part of the same geometric pattern that is history. It is also important to note that there is no set number of perspectives to consider. In fact, the more lenses you consider, the fuller your understanding of the past becomes. Historians constantly develop new questions, approaches, and methods to interpret past events. All of these techniques expand the size and breadth of historical lenses.
There are more lenses than we can talk about in this lesson but let us take a quick look at three of them that historians have used to approach U.S. history. We will accomplish this by highlighting the ways that historians have applied the lenses of class, race, and gender to the history of slavery in the United States.
One way to approach the history of slavery in America is to think about and analyze it through the lens of class. Class refers to the structuring of human society in terms of economic position and status. In other words, to view American history through the historical lens of class, you would examine the economic systems that defined not only the experiences of enslaved people but also the ways that slavery defined American history.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was probably the biggest advocate for using class as a tool to understand history. In 1846, he described American slavery by writing:Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the [European] colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance (as cited by Marx, 1955).In other words, Marx interpreted slavery as an economic system that exploited forced labor for the benefit of the upper classes (i.e., “bourgeois industry”). A class view of slavery means to emphasize the economic conditions in which enslaved individuals worked.
Historians could continue to use a class-based narrative and argue that enslaved labor created an elite class of enslavers who gained significant political influence in the United States. These people most likely supported secession and later the Confederacy during the Civil War. In this way, focusing on class sheds light not only on the types of marketplace interactions that occurred in American systems of slavery but also explains how slavery influenced the entire American political system and American history as a whole, as Marx suggested.
Viewing slavery in America in terms of class represents only one lens to interpret the past. Historians have also turned to the lens of race as a way to better understand U.S. history and American slavery, in particular. The term “race” is commonly used today, but it was not always the case. Race is a concept that has shifted over time and has changed meaning since slavery was legal in the United States.
Contemporary observers and subsequent historians have argued that a new form of human bondage evolved in the Americas following Christopher Columbus’ voyage in 1492. This form of enslavement gave rise to a system characterized by race or the viewing of Africans as part of a different race from that of White European masters.
Because of this racialized form of slavery, the American system of slavery took on characteristics defined by race. For example, during the early 19th century, enslavers in the Southern states argued that the people they enslaved were members of the “Negroid” races and, therefore, completely different from their White counterparts. This led to a series of attributes that were identified in each of the “races.” These attributes ultimately served to reinforce the social and economic system of slavery.
Viewing American slavery in this way has also allowed historians to argue that race and class were both part of the same history. Discussions of race and the slave economy feed off of one another and deepen our understanding of U.S. history.
Another lens that historians have used in their approaches to understanding the past is that of gender. This term generally refers to the social and cultural ideas about what it means to be male or female. Historians have used this analytical tool to consider how gender was used to help create the sense of racial difference between White European enslavers and the Black men and women they enslaved. The contrast between the gender roles of White Europeans and Black Africans was used to support the development of the race-based system of slavery.
When Europeans settled in North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, they brought with them ideas about gender and the proper roles of men and women. These roles differed from those of various African groups. As the system of race-based slavery was taking hold in the New World, Europeans increasingly began to justify their enslavement of Africans through a process of social differentiation. This process of differentiation was accomplished, in part, by comparing African women to European women.
For example, historians have found that representations of African women in travel narratives published by European mariners and traders in the late 1500s and early 1600s helped reinforce the perception of racial distinctions. These travel narratives, which were widely read, depicted African women as culturally coarse, highly sexual, and accustomed to hard agricultural labor. This contrasted with the European ideal of women who were supposed to be refined, modest, and responsible for the home. These travel narratives helped fortify the sense that Africans were different in crucial ways from Europeans.
In this way, ideas about gender helped European slaveholders justify their enslavement of Africans. This is just one example of the way in which historians have been able to show how race, gender, and class interacted in the history of slavery in the U.S.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History”. access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
REFERENCES
Marx, Karl. (1955). The poverty of philosophy: A reply to M. Proudhon’s philosophy of poverty (pp. 49-50). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Poverty-Philosophy.pdf
