Presentation to the
Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia
at the Fort Myer Officers' Club in Arlington, VA
on November 13, 2018
The images used during his presentation are available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/109JLL4iz8jmI85xdR3u5_sD33ZEnypke/view?usp=sharing
About the Topic:
Andrew Zimmerman is an award-winning professor of history and international affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Professor Zimmerman was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is now writing a history of the U.S. Civil War as an international revolution. The project is tentatively titled Conjuring Freedom: A Global History of the American Civil War. His presentation will cover his current undertaking.
Dr. Zimmerman explains that Conjuring Freedom offers not only a new interpretation of the U.S. Civil War, but also a model for rethinking such archetypical national events from a perspective that is transnational, de-provincializing, and “from below.” (Note: “from below” refers to a historical narrative from the perspective of marginalized people or groups rather than leaders).
His research began with the study of the multi-racial and multi-ethnic plebeian intellectual and political worlds that intersected in the mid-19th-century U.S. and then focused on a revolution against slavery that extended beyond the Civil War both spatially and temporally. He studied the political traditions stemming from African American conjure and German-American communism. (Note: “conjure” was the North American counterpart of Haitian Vodou and other Afro-Atlantic religions whose connections to the politics of slavery have been well studied).
Dr. Zimmerman explains that Conjuring Freedom offers not only a new interpretation of the U.S. Civil War, but also a model for rethinking such archetypical national events from a perspective that is transnational, de-provincializing, and “from below.” (Note: “from below” refers to a historical narrative from the perspective of marginalized people or groups rather than leaders).
His research began with the study of the multi-racial and multi-ethnic plebeian intellectual and political worlds that intersected in the mid-19th-century U.S. and then focused on a revolution against slavery that extended beyond the Civil War both spatially and temporally. He studied the political traditions stemming from African American conjure and German-American communism. (Note: “conjure” was the North American counterpart of Haitian Vodou and other Afro-Atlantic religions whose connections to the politics of slavery have been well studied).
Dr. Zimmerman contends that those who turned the war from a battlefield contest over the fate of the Union into a grassroots and often illegal revolution against slavery served to advance longstanding democratic struggles that began in Africa and Europe well before 1861 and continued long after 1865. This revolution against slavery was more than a discrete struggle within the U.S. Civil War; it played a decisive role in the Union victory, especially in the Mississippi River Valley, where the most important Union advances and political innovations (if not the best-known battles) took place. According to Dr. Zimmerman, “Lincoln and them other big emancipator men” (which one former slave called the Union leadership) depended on this revolution, but ironically could not tolerate its radically democratic aims. This tension between the revolution against slavery and the war to save the Union helps explain the contradictory outcomes of the war itself, which not only ended slavery but also inaugurated new forms of coercion in the Gilded Age North and the Jim Crow South.
With Conjuring Freedom, Dr. Zimmerman presents a model of how different approaches to social theory reveal new historical actors and events as well as force us to reconsider some of the most venerable topics of historical writing, including the U.S. Civil War.
Source: https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/andrew-zimmerman
About the Speaker: