Communications

ARTICLES

To the Editor:

Although Thomas Bender is one of my favorite scholars, I respectfully disagree with his thesis in "Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History" [/journals/ahr/107.1/ah0102000129.html]. Bender maintains that there is no strategy suited to a narrative synthesis in American History. The strategy that he misses resides in the tension between truth and politics, between what one regards as true and what one regards as "politically correct."

     A definition of terms explains the truth-versus-politics tension. Truth is congruence between two types of reality: the one mental, particular, and subjective reality and the other extra-mental, transcendent, and objective reality. The resulting tension allows for disagreement among different perceptions.

     Politics is the exercise of power by any agency, e.g., church and state or group and individual. Power politics can and often does determine why people agree and disagree. Power politics, in other words, can and often does determine what people proclaim externally as true. Narrating how people relate to the tension between truth and politics is conducive to refining the hidden values of Western Civilization and of the United States.

     The hallmark and grace of Western Civilization rests in prioritizing truth in and of itself, independently from external political considerations. Western universities, including those in the Americas, exemplify this prioritization. Pursuing truth in the face of countervailing politics is what the West has enshrined as academic freedom.

     Briefly following Bender's outline, the tension between truth and politics can be found permeating all of culture from work to leisure, whether "Peoples, Economy, Politics, Things Material, Things Spiritual." Refining the relationship between truth and perceptions of truth, a cultural approach to history can integrate otherwise isolated topics and enable narrative explications.

     Prioritizing truth over politics also extends to how the West perceives other traditions. Western Civilization values diversity for the sake of the different aspects of the relationship between truth and politics that diversity reveals. Western Civilization does not value diversity for the sake of diversity. Bender's examples from Indonesia and the Sonoran highlands of Arizona illustrate the point.

Raymond J. Jirran, retired

Thomas Nelson Community College

Thomas Bender does not wish to reply.

The Editors

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

To the Editor:

My book Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast (2000) has been widely reviewed and well received in scholarly journals and the popular press with one glaring exception, Robert J. Schneller, Jr.'s review in the December 2001 issue of the American Historical Review [106, no. 5: 1806]. The reviewer's preconception of what he terms "pop history" appears to have kept him from looking past the "comic-book-like" dust jacket and the first two chapters. The effective and inviting dust-jacket design has heretofore elicited only favorable commentary. In the setting of brief biographical sketches, which are not intended to be definitive but are designed to whet the appetite for more, there is considerably more delving into "motivations, relationships, and personalities" and much more new material than the reviewer reported from his perusal. The chapters on pirates draw on my firsthand experience in the archaeological work at Beaufort Inlet and incorporate recent scholarship that has eroded the stereotypes.

     The issue, however, is not so much the review as one's view of history. Although Schneller acknowledges that the research is thorough, he states that "argument and analysis are absent." While there is a place in the canon for polemics that pass for history, there should also be a place for soundly researched and meaningful narrative that engages the reader and imparts understanding of his past. If we in the profession continue to produce history that is interesting only to our colleagues in the particular subfield, then we are in danger of becoming irrelevant to the citizenry, constituents of our public institutions.

     Some of the specific criticisms and apparent contradictions that Schneller cites are baffling and distorted when quoted out of context. Pirate scholars are aware of the pitfalls of Captain Johnson's 1724 work and the uncritical use of it in the past; however, sometimes Johnson is the only source available, and in the instance cited, the story about his wife seemed in character and appropriate. Furthermore, there is no contradiction about Blackbeard's alleged post-pardon piracy. Whatever actions he committed late in 1718, he always had sanction from the colony's admiraltycourt.

     Regarding the reviewer's comments on the Civil War material, the South's limited maritime experience and resources are evident in the "mosquito" gunboat coastal defense fleets that were cobbled together in the first year from available vessels. Commodore Josiah Tattnall described his fleet as "those d—d old tubs" and threatened to sink them himself, but the Union navy soon obliged him by easily brushing his fleet aside at Port Royal. Confederate vessels routinely were poorly built, had design defects, and were underpowered with a variety of engines salvaged from sunken vessels and even from sawmills. The most effective blockade runners and nearly all of the cruisers were foreign built. Most Civil War scholars disagree with Schneller's assertion that it was a "myth that the South lacked a 'heavy industrial infrastructure.'" Although the Confederacy accomplished amazing results from a naval arms industry created in the desperation of a war for survival, the exceptional Tredegar Iron Works, for all of its achievements, did not constitute an antebellum heavy industrial infrastructure. Only the reviewer surmises what the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, an achievement of the U.S. government and its navy, has to do with pre-war Southern industrial development.

     This book is indeed in the "bookstores all along the Carolina coast," as well as in bookstores across the country. Contrary to the reviewer's belief, it is also on the shelves of many scholars, who have themselves thoroughly enjoyed reading "real-life sea tales . . . about flesh-and-blood historic characters" (p. xi).

Lindley S. Butler

North Carolina Maritime History Council

Robert J. Schneller does not wish to reply.

The Editors

To the Editor:

In his review of my Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888 [AHR 107 (February 2002): 258–59], Douglas Libby asserts that there are serious flaws in the basic arguments and methodologies used in the book. He contends that I ignore regional variations in slave demography, despite the lengthy textual analyses of numerous statistical tables and figures documenting changes in local economies and in the demographic characteristics of the slave and free populations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

     Libby observes that the book "lacks originality." The presentation of a nuanced analysis of the largest slave database ever constructed for the Americas consisting of detailed demographic data on over 110,000 slaves derived entirely from manuscript sources apparently went unnoticed. This database was constructed from archival sources in three distinct geographical and socioeconomic areas precisely because of the academic debates on regional slave demography in the extant literature. Additionally, the book presents and analyzes a whole series of new economic data from manuscript archival sources never examined or presented by historians.

     The supposed flaws in my arguments and methodologies seem to revolve around Libby's contention that the 1831–1832 nominal population lists demonstrate different results on the percentage of Africans found in the slave population of exactly one Minas district. The example given is the 1831 data for Diamantina (administratively different from, and not, the Diamond District as Libby states), which indicate that 51 percent of all slaves were Africans, compared with my data, which reveal that 37.5 percent of all slaves were Africans between 1830 and 1834.

     First, the 51 percent African figure was derived from Clotilde Paiva's doctoral dissertation "População e Economia nas Minas Gerais do Século XIX" (University of São Paulo, 1996)—page 210, appendix 2, table 1—which is based on the nominal lists for 1831. Paiva computerized these materials and graciously provided me with the raw data files. In this statistical table, Paiva emphatically notes that the sample for Diamantina was based on 2,757 slaves and that data for 6,381 slaves, or 67 percent of all slaves, was missing. Libby forgot to mention this fact. Conclusions on the African slave trade to Minas based on a sample of incomplete data on less than 3,000 slaves in one locale in one year are questionable.

     Second, Libby does not take into consideration the age structure of the sample. If Africans were older, they would have been imported in a previous period. Third, there are serious problems with the coding of the 1831 data set itself, which I have carefully analyzed separately. It is not certain if the word preto, which means black in Portuguese, was in fact taken for "African." If it was, the African origin data are entirely erroneous, since color and origin are not synonymous. It also ought to be noted that only 5 percent of the total Minas Gerais slave population lived in the Comarca do Serro, where Diamantina is located, according to the 1833 census, also computerized and made available by Paiva.

     With respect to the data I present, Libby read the wrong table (D.4). The inventory-derived data for Diamantina (Table D.3) indicate a constantly falling ratio of African to Brazilian-born slaves from the 1790s, when some 89 percent of all slaves in the sample were African-born, to the 1830s, when their portion had fallen dramatically to 34 percent (not 37.5 percent).

     Libby has chosen one static piece of highly questionable data as the sole evidence for my supposed argumentative and methodological flaws. He has not considered other critical data on the demography of slavery in this region and throughout the rest of the province, especially the dramatically growing population of young children and the constant decline in the sex ratio. I might add that the dimensions and timing of the very small-scale slave trade to Diamantina are specifically discussed in the text (pp. 112–13).

     In this regard, Libby mentions, without documenting it, a source indicating that 45 percent of Africans exported from Rio between 1818 and 1831 went to Minas. Even if true, this may be entirely meaningless, depending on the volume of the trade. Regardless, I note in the book quite emphatically (pp. 144–46) a small-scale trade in African slaves to Minas during the 1820s. This, however, was dwarfed statistically by the numbers of slaves born in the province.

     Finally, Libby accuses me of a "lack of attention to . . . sources," since for him I have not extracted enough information from the over 10,000 postmortem inventories examined. In fact, as I make crystal clear in the introduction, my intent was to focus on specific variables in the voluminous sources consulted, and to leave a whole series of issues, themes, and data out of this study. I spelled out clearly what this book set out to do and the topics it would and would not address. Rather than recognizing any of this, Libby has chosen to make unsubstantiated claims, as well as distortions of the material presented in, and even outside of, the book.

Laird W. Bergad

City University of New York

Douglas Cole Libby does not wish to reply.

The Editors

FILM REVIEWS

To the Editor:

In the December 2001 issue, Andrew Stein (p. 1915) writes that the marquis de Sade was arrested on December 8, 1793, "less than one month after the beheading of Marie-Antoinette." Since the latter was executed on October 16, my math says it was nearly two months after.

Bernard Sinsheimer

Boulogne, France

Andrew Stein replies:

I would like to thank Bernard Sinsheimer for his response to my review. Of course, he is absolutely correct about the math. My essay should have said: the marquis de Sade was arrested a little over a month following the beheading of Marie-Antoinette rather than that the marquis de Sade was arrested less than one month . . .

Andrew Stein

University of the Arts, Philadelphia

ERRATUM

Due to an editing error, in Barbara Mennel's review of Love Story (directed by Catrine Clay [AHR 107 (February 2002): 320–21]), the name of the film's distributor was given as Zeitgeist Film. Love Story is actually distributed by Women Make Movies. We apologize for the error.

The Editors

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