Great Crossings
Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4154874 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Carson (0000-0001-8887-9774, Griffith University, corresponding author), James Taylor Carson (Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 166-167 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jay057 |
| OpenAlex | W2804001406 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Christina Snyder's first book, Slavery in Indian Country (2010), expanded our understanding of the history of captivity and enslavement in America by drawing first peoples' experiences into the center of the story. Great Crossings further extends such insights to the practices of race making that gave such brute force to the expression of Jacksonian America. How racism shifted from the environmentalist underpinnings of the eighteenth century to the allegedly scientific ideas of the nineteenth, Snyder argues, cannot be understood without coming to grips with first peoples' implication in the change. What Snyder has found in the story of a modest school that ran for twenty-odd years in the bluegrass of Kentucky is the perfect confluence of the ethnic cleansing of Native America, the absolute manacling of black America, and the consequent creation of white America's modern United States. Richard M. Johnson founded the Choctaw Academy in 1825 at the village of Great Crossings. The school's origins are ambiguous. Johnson advocated a Jeffersonian vision of racial amalgamation whereby education would level what were understood at the time to be racial distinctions and create a new society premised not on whiteness but on Americanness. He lived it as well, having taken one of the women he owned as his common-law wife and ensuring that their daughters and other relations enjoyed social opportunities closed to most enslaved people. At the same time, though, Johnson's debts gave him no peace, and the people he enslaved with whom he did not have sexual relations enjoyed no fair shake. It is telling of his ambitions and ideals that when the school closed its doors he lamented not the collapse of his vision of an amalgamated America but rather the stoppage in his transfer payments from the Department of War
Jeffersonian democracy · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,86 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |