Week 3 Reading Response -- Tom Grey

Proceeding in the order in which the readings appear in the reader, I will start with the David Waldstreicher piece. “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic” discusses the ability (or inability) of escaped slaves to refashion their identity in order to “pass” as free men. While the piece discusses at length the ability of escaped slaves to refashion their identity, the main argument of the article lies in the print advertisements for runaway slaves; the workings of print to recapture escaped slaves epitomized the slave system “that depended on the very movement, linguistic skill, and improvisation it sought to contain.” That is to say that the advertisements often highlighted and showed slaves capacity for linguistic skill and improvisation and it was these skills that in turn also made them valuable slaves.
Waldstreicher draws much of his argument from the use of primary sources in the form of print advertisements in newspapers, diaries, and some state records. These sources are effective at proving his point but it is difficult to fully prove such a complex social argument without extensive records of all newspapers in separate geographic regions. Waldstreicher does not geographically contain his argument (except to regions that allowed slavery) and in this regard he perhaps goes too far in equating slavery all regions, without sufficient proof. As far as his engagement in secondary sources, Waldstreicher tends to shy away from directly engaging other historians and instead tends to use other works to support his historic view of eighteenth-century slavery. He references recent works to lay foundation and remove the burden of proof of certain aspects of his historic narrative. The main lesson I take out of this piece is with regards to the use of secondary sources because Waldsteicher is able to proceed to the heart of his argument rather quickly due to his use of secondary sources to support potentially contentious assumptions.
Karen Halttunen in “Confidence Men and Painted Women: A study of Middle-class culture in America, 1830-1870” discusses a similar role of identity in America but in a very different context. Halttunen discusses the role of confidence men in the new urban environment and the sources of societal fear of confidence men. She argues that the fear of confidence men arose out of a powerful anxiety “of nineteenth-century middle-class Americans concerning the problem of hypocrisy in an open, urban society.” The problem lies in the new theoretical boundless potential of each individual in society within the framework of a “’world of strangers’ that was the antebellum city.” She propels this argument through first hand accounts but also through directly engaging other historians’ work. She uses first hand accounts and the pamphlets to extrapolate information regarding the fear of confidence men, but to give context to her fear she relies upon secondary sources. This use of secondary sources is more central to Halttunen’s argument than were Waldsteicher’s secondary sources because here Halttunen is making generally larger societal claims that must be supported by not only primary evidence but also by sociological theory. She brings in some work of Nancy F. Cott regarding the growing importance of women’s friendships during the 1780 to 1835 period to show that peer relationships were budding and are evidence of a more horizontal, rather than vertical, society. A horizontal society is the crux of Halttunen’s argument because it is the development of horizontal society, she argues, that creates the opportunity for confidence men to take advantage of their peers in society. The fear of confidence men is a response to the newly horizontal society.
Finally, the George Chauncey piece, “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940” follows, again, the story of how individuals were able to refashion their identity within a societal framework. This work chronicles the evolution of the gay community throughout the 1890-1940 time period, but in doing so argues that our modern notions of “gayness” are in fact mid-twentieth-century creations and that this change in attitude “demonstrates that sexual desire itself was regarded as fundamentally gendered in the early twentieth century.” In the section that we read, the Introduction and first chapter, Chauncey primarily relies upon primary sources to paint a picture of gay life in New York. He focuses in particular on the accounts of a few men in New York of differing social classes and tells their accounts of the gay community and then puts these accounts in the context of his own argument. The strongest part of Chauncey’s argument, in my opinion, is in his use of “trades” and how the association of any homosexual act with “gayness” led men to no longer call themselves trades or engage in homosexual acts because of the clearly defined division between the normal and the other. Chauncey used secondary sources in much the same way as Waldstreicher in that he cites historians, such as Richard White, to support his general historical claims that would otherwise take pages (at least) to justify. All of these pieces offer a great model for how to use secondary sources to prop up the more controversial assumptions of your argument while the use of primary sources shores up the original arguments that are being built on top of these stip