 This is Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts and we're going to talk today about American history, approaches to it and approaches to conflict, the different ways that history can be studied according to what you think the major area of conflict within society is. However you approach history, whatever your vision, there's a periodization of history that comes out of your vision of what are the major things to understand in history. Conventionally American history is studied in terms of periodization by president. So we talk about the age of Jackson, Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 30s. We talk about the Roosevelt administration which often gets blurred between, do you mean Teddy? What do you mean Franklin? We talk about the 60s, the Kennedy Johnson years. Periodization in this way comes out of the sense that oh America is a united country, everything's basically okay and the only issue is how we get richer and richer over time. So we got richer under Jackson because we spread west, we got richer under Roosevelt because we dealt with industrial problems, we got richer in the 60s and 70s because we laid the groundwork with improvements in education for the rise of technology and the internet. Whatever, this is all part of the triumphalist vision of American history, Whig history. We're not going to say much more about that for right now. There are issues for triumphalism in terms of the sources of economic growth, how did the factor endowments change, how did technology change, but they're not issues that involve conflict. It's kind of weird because you scratch beneath the surface and obviously there were conflicts here. Why did America get bigger under Jackson? Why did we get all that land in the west? Because we drove the Indians away. It's like you can't really talk about history in this way, but people do and we will talk about that throughout the rest of the semester. There are other visions of American history in terms of conflict that are more interesting to me at least. The oldest of these is sectionalism, which goes back to Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier thesis, which you may have heard about in high school or in college courses. Frederick Jackson Turner was a historian trained at Johns Hopkins, taught at Wisconsin, and then at Yale. He was an interesting guy. If you ever get a chance, read a biography of him. He was neat. His vision is American history, is shaped by conflict between sections. And what's interesting in his vision, which is post-reconstruction, and Jackson Turner was part of the, you know, bring the South back into the country move of the progressive era. So he didn't see the conflict as north-south. He saw it as east-west. Between, excuse me, between the old areas of the east, New England, the old cotton south and Virginia in South Carolina, and the emerging west, which was more democratic, more open. He had a lot of students and his work has had a lot of influence over the decades. And you still hear people talking all the time about sectionalism, issues of sectionalism, geographic expansion, conflicts over the tariff and land policies. This is a vision of America, which sees Americans as united within section, but divided between sections. It's a lot easier for American politicians to deal with than some of the other issues that we'll be talking about. Next, for example, is race. Oh, this is a tough one. We're a country that was settled by whites and Africans. Even defining these is no easy thing. Those who see racial conflict as the key to American history look at issues like do all whites as a group benefit from oppressing blacks? Issues of constant search to discover who's white, who's black. The Irish used to be black, now they're white. Jews were black, now they're white. Asians, are they white or black? Well, I guess Japanese are white. Cambodians are black? I don't know. But these are all ongoing issues. And then, of course, you have Michael Jackson, was he white or black? The thing is, if whiteness is socially constructed, both in terms of who's white and what it means to be white, what sort of privileges go with being white, then you get to a whole set of chronological issues like when did this happen? What is the significance of slavery, the significance of emancipation, the significance of segregation, the significance of the civil rights movement? Similar issues involve if you see the major conflict in society being over gender, men against women. And you say, oh, no way. But every human society has been divided into at least two genders, some more than two, but at least two men and women, often with different roles, with different privileges. If you think gender does not involve privilege, then try walking in high heels for a while. Or once I stood outside my 8am class and asked people coming in what time they got up in the morning. The women got up about an hour earlier than the men because they washed their hair and put more effort into dressing. A lot of the men said, oh, I sleep in my clothes. They get up at 7.30 for an 8 o'clock class. Some of them looked at it. Law and chronology again become the site for investigation. When did women get the right to own property? Married women property acts were passed in northern states in the 1830s and 40s. Before that, married women didn't own property. Unmarried women, the property was controlled by their fathers or their guardians. These are historical issues, issues of conflict. Women were largely excluded from the Social Security Act of 1935. They kind of forced their way into it, getting some of the benefits of it, but it took a while. Law as a site of male privilege is a historic construct and gives a chronology to our understanding of history. Then, coming more directly from the Marxist tradition, there's a vision of history as the playing out of different social structures of accumulation. Every society is organized to allow a particular elite group to dominate the surplus, what is produced over and above what's needed for immediate consumption and to maintain the society. How does this play out? In feudalism, landlords ride around on horses beating up the serfs, and slavery, slave owners whip the slaves and kill them if they protest. Capitalism doesn't work that way. Capitalism, you hire workers for a time, you have to get them to work hard, like in the economics department, we're making sure that Dan over there works really hard working with films, and then we sell the product that they produce. Well, we mess up on that one. We're not going to be selling these videos, but I guess we sort of are because they're part of the course that we sell, and presumably what we sell is worth more than the money we put into hiring the workers. If not, you're a bad capitalist and you go away. If yes, then you're a good capitalist and you're going to reinvest, hire more labor, produce more stuff, more videos, more courses, and get richer and richer, which means all the time you're looking for new markets, you're looking for new workers, and you have to drive those workers. You need an ideological apparatus. You need laws. You need ways of relating social institutions, social structures to facilitate accumulation. A thing about capitalism is it's a way more flexible system. It's constantly changing, constantly growing. That's why human population is so much richer than 200 years ago, because capitalism is constantly pushing for faster accumulation and reinvestment, unlike feudalism and slavery. That means that social structures of accumulation break down faster. They generate more conflict, more problems, they break down, and you need to build new ones. That's happening all the time under capitalism. It happened in the 1890s in the United States. It happened in the 1930s and new social structures were erected. It may be happening now, and we'll see what comes out of it. That part we'll see in the future. The understanding of the past parts we'll see in this course, and I look forward to talking about that with you some more. Thank you, and have a nice day. Bye-bye.