Introduction to Transatlantic History

I picked an easy one, since Bernard Bailyn is one of the most famous historians living in the world today!! I’ll talk about him briefly, but I thought you might enjoy this summary of his career from the History News Network.

For the purposes of our class, I  recommend that you do NOT read book reviews until you have finished reading the book in question and writing about it. But it is important to know that book reviews are out there, and how to access and use them. Here are a handful on the Bailyn book.

1. J. A. Geltzer, “A Review of Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours,” American Foreign Policy Interests 28, no. 1 (2006): 85.
2. William E. Doody, “Review of Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours,” Journal of World History 17, no. 1 (2006): 105-107.
3. Ane Lintvedt, “Review of Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours,” World History Connected 3, no. 3, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/whc/3.3/br_lintvedt.html.
4. Federica Morelli , “Review of Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours,” Text, November 28, 2005, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/index2151.html.
5. Trevor Burnard, “Review of Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours,” Journal of American Studies 40, no. 02 (2006): 415-417.

As an example of the “set-up” for our Bailyn discussion, here is a list of some recent books on the Atlantic, together with some classic texts mentioned by Bailyn.

1. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, The British Atlantic World 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
2. Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic 1713-1763 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
3. Paul Butel, The Atlantic (London: Routledge, 1999).
4. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman, (eds.) The Atlantic in Global History: 1500-2000 (Prentice Hall, 2006).
5. Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique: 1504-1650 (Paris: Sevpen, 1955).
6. Douglas R. Egerton et al., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Harlan Davidson, 2007).
7. David Eltis et al., ed., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A database on CD-ROM, ed. David Eltis et al., Pap/Cdr. (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993).
9. Jacques Godechot, Histoire de l’Atlantique ([Paris]: Bordas, 1947).
10. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
11. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
12. John McNeill, Atlantic empires of France and Spain : Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
13. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, The British Atlantic World 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
14. Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic 1713-1763 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
15. Paul Butel, The Atlantic (London: Routledge, 1999).
16. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman, (eds.) The Atlantic in Global History: 1500-2000 (Prentice Hall, 2006).
17. Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique: 1504-1650 (Paris: Sevpen, 1955).
18. Douglas R. Egerton et al., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Harlan Davidson, 2007).
19. David Eltis et al., ed., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A database on CD-ROM, ed. David Eltis et al., Pap/Cdr. (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
20. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993).
21. Jacques Godechot, Histoire de l’Atlantique ([Paris]: Bordas, 1947).
22. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
23. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
24. John McNeill, Atlantic empires of France and Spain : Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
25. R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).
26. Pablo E. Perez-Mallaina, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, New Ed. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
27. Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake a history of the French tobacco monopoly, 1674-1791, and of its relationship to the British and American tobacco trades (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973).
28. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2005).
29. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
30. Eric Williams, Capitalism And Slavery (Williams Press, 2007).

This is hardly a definitive list, but here is a list of some of the articles that have appeared in the last 10 years either about Atlantic history or about Atlantic historiography.

1. Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 124.
2. Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History: or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1093-1114.
3. John Thorton, “Cultural Contacts in the Atlantic World, 1500-1825,” Radical History Review, no. 77 (Spring 2000): 131, doi:Article.
4. P. A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 169–82.
5. Jack P. Greene, “Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective,” History Compass 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): **, doi:doi:10.1111/1478-0542.026.
6. J. Adelman, “Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum,” Hispanic American Historical Review 84, no. 3 (2004): 399-410.
7. Donna Gabaccia, “A long Atlantic in a wider world,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 1-27, doi:10.1080/1478881042000217188.
8. William O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic history,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 66-84, doi:10.1080/1478881042000226124.
9. Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills, “A Catholic Atlantic,” in The Atlantic in Global History, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman (Prentice Hall, 2006).
10. Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741-757.
11. Trevor Burnard, “Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History,” Historically Speaking 7, no. 6 (August 2006): 19-21.
12. Maria Lauret, Bill Marshall, and David Murphy, “Introduction: The French Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 4, no. 1 (2007): 1-4, doi:10.1080/14788810701195159.
13. David Northrup and Peter Mancall, “The Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic World,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
14. William Boelhower, “The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” American Literary History 20, no. 1-2 (December 24, 2007): 83-101.
15. Eric Slauter, “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” Early American Literature 43, no. 1 (2008): 153-186.
16. Alison Games, “Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (January 2008), http://libproxy.uta.edu:2665/journals/wm/65.1/games.html.
17. Eliga H. Gould, “Atlantic History and the Literary Turn,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (January 2008), http://libproxy.uta.edu:2665/journals/wm/65.1/gould.html.
18. Carla Rahn Phillips, “Atlantic Worlds: Review essay,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 1: 110-113.

Here’s the course reading list — you can get the entire syllabus above!

Read More…

I’m in the final stages of putting together our syllabus. Hopefully by now you’ve seen the booklist on my faculty webpage [see the list of links on the right]. We’re reading 8 books and using a handful of free software that I think will help you learn about Atlantic history — and historiography! you might want to get started with the downloading process. Here’s that part of the syllabus.

Required Software Tools [all free] and Policies:

1. I require you to subscribe to our class blog and the blogs of the rest of the class members using Google Reader, which is free once you establish a Google account.

2. I require you to maintain a blog for the class. This is where you’ll post your papers and links to other electronic assignments in the class. You can get a free blogs from several services, including Google, but I recommend http://edublogs.org or http://wordpress.com.

3. I require that all documents you submit to me come as electronic links to your Mavspace account. Go to http://mavspace.uta.edu to review the user manual and log in to your account.

4. I require that you use Google Earth, a free software program available from that company once you have an account. http://earth.google.com

5. I require that you use the bibliography manager Zotero [free from http://www.zotero.org]. Zotero, in turn, requires that you use the Firefox web browser. [free from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/]

6. I will post all grades to our WebCT page, which you can access at http://webct.uta.edu

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