Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labor and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914. (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1994).

(8) Theme of book, "Social relations of production shaped the patterns of production on the wheatlands of Argentina and Canada."

(9) "Interaction of rights covering the means of existence can be called property relations."

(12) "The interaction between agents gives content to the rights to use property, not vice versa."

(13) Canadian historiography stresses instead an external "staple approach," where external forces define development.

(14) In comparative view, dependency theory can't explain why Canada was less subordinated than was Argentina.

(22-23) Canadian prairie settlement part of the national myth; settlement followed land act of 1872, which was closely modeled on U.S. Homestead Act of 1862.

(24) In addition, large tracts of land donated to CPRR and Hudson's Bay Company.

(25) After 1881, experiments with other private land companies, Colonization Associations, but these often went into trouble from expense of bringing over settlers.

(38-40) Because of mortgage security laws, many farmers purchased land in expectation of capital gains.

(63) Before wheat, Pampas were site of jerked beef and hides, and (after 1840s) sheep-raising for wool, which became a mainstay of Argentinian economy.

(64) Expansion helped by military expulsion of Natives.

(65) From 1850s to 1876, state settlement efforts informal and ad hoc, and reliant on private colonization entrepreneurs.

(66) Homestead Act of 1877 allows essentially squatter's rights. "Inappropriate and confusing policy at the national level was matched by provincial legislation.

(68) Failure to regulate uses of public property, coupled with excessive unregulated bonds, led to speculative frenzy.

(68) In contrast to Canada, legacy of herding in Argentina lent uncertainty and competing understandings of property regulations into wheatlands precedents.
posted by Lloyd at 5:14 PM

Anya Jabour, Marriage in the New Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal.

Product Description

William Wirt practiced law in Virginia and Maryland in the early national period and served as attorney general under James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Elizabeth Wirt managed the household and cared for the Wirts' large family during her husband's frequent work-related absences. For more than three decades, the couple struggled to reconcile different daily pursuits with a commitment to marriage as a partnership of equals. In Marriage in the Early Republic, Anya Jabour provides detailed analysis of a marital relationship so thoroughly documented that it illuminates gender relations in nineteenth-century America.

On one level, this is a story--a rich narrative full of the joys, sorrows, tensions, and the give-and-take of an American marriage. But because changing gender roles and expectations in this period caused discordance and forced adjustments, Jabour also provides a microhistorical analysis of a broad pattern. Placing the Wirts' marriage in a larger context, she shows how problematic marriage--and the balancing of domestic and childcare responsibilities--could be as well-to-do Americans developed their own cultural and social expectations. By examining patterns of love and marriage in a formative era, Marriage in the Early Republic offers insights into romance and relationships in our own time as well.
posted by Lloyd at 3:33 PM

Notes on Ed Baptiste, Creating an Old South

7 Frontier settlers couldn't escape their history but created a new society "because they were on unsettled ground in every political, social, and cultural sense."

8 Conflict between planters, who idealized Virginia, and yeomen, who idealized revolutionary egalitarianism.

10 Not just replication of an older South. A place whose own history and tensions created a new world that now gets read back as old. "contingent, unplanned, riddled with conflict."

19 Perceptions of Florida derived from private letters and oral accounts, newspaper accounts (Niles Register), books.

22-23 Emotions and Fears as spurs to migration; soil exhaustion as "metaphors for concerns about declining family power."

24-26 Centrality of Kinship networks to engage plantation society, but considerable concern, esp. among women, of dangers of frontier. Women "assumed a more obvious role about migration than in any of the other political or economic decisions made by planters until the Civil War." (26).

27 Frames concerns of both men and women in terms of view of history related to "stages of civilization."

28 but Florida also of hopes and dreams, of "exciting kinds of power, represented by the myth of the sugar planter, and the reality of a new territory in which wealth and office would be up for grabs among family-based factions."

29 Migration among extended families and settled near kin.

31-2 Kin and friends as sources of capital.

40-42 "Economic Factors helped drive countrymen south and west." Factors incl. soil exhaustion, cotton production driving up land prices, and lack of capital to achieve a (psychological) state of independence. It "called into doubt their own manhood." Migration as "pride and manliness of feeling." (citing mccurry and sellers)

44. After migration, too, thwarted by "speculators" who became mythic enemies to be condemned in political language on new frontier.

46 "Lesser command of labor power and capital constrained the countrymen's choice of farm sites." Poorer families left the (expensive to clear and drain but more fertile) bottomlands to the wealthy planters.

46-48 Preemption and squatting as back door to independence, in turn requiring sweat equity of lesser household members.

52 "The necessity of economic independence, which was as much of an imperative of manhood as of economic calculation, was more important to them of fear of, or desire for, participation in the market."

55-56 Poorest families managed to live in interstices of plantation society b/c too difficult and courts to clogged to make property enforcement difficult.

58-59 "Countryman resentments, and planter's own fears of loss of social control on the frontier" worsened b/c subordinate whites could not be "held in their place."

62+ Uses records from Freedman's bureau bank to uncover slave migration patterns.

73 While pre-1830s slaves mostly came with white households, after 1830s, slaves usually came through interstate trade.

98 Elites repeatedly use local power to benefit themselves and close associates.

103 Struggle over control of land office and its rewards highlights differences between planters and countrymen on the meaning of manhood. "The icon of elite frontier masculinity was the 'hot-blooded fellow' who not only submitted to no one but also attempted to compel obeissance from all others in this world."

104 Richard Call and criticism as "degradation."

106 Duel as exemplar of "deep and powerful thirst for dominance that made territorial middle Florida so unstable."

119 Planters used every tool at their disposal to achieve dominance.

145 Contra the literature on evangelical frontier religion, Baptiste suggests that females had unusual power and numbers in Florida churches.

150 after describing influence of older post-childbearing female matriarchs in churches, he describes their role beyond the church in organizing neighborhoods.

151 enduring resentment of haughty hot-headed planter elite masculinity, which was denied to countrymen and resisted through tricksterism (previous chapters describe this.)

153 Initial class confrontations only resolved in whites-only herrenvolk after angry contestation from yeomen. "The agreements that eventually united white southern men across the barriers of class were unplanned and contingent."

154+ Bank wars, economic collapse and planter debt defaults, fever, fire, etc., would recast the story.

210-211 Preview of chaps 8-9 in which "white planters began in the 1830s and 1840s to desire to act like a historically stable ruling class, shaped by something resembling nobless oblige."
posted by Lloyd at 1:09 PM