Hexbears. I need your help. I have a term paper that I need a topic for. Here’s the rub: It’s for US history, and the topic has to be US history before 1893. I wanted to write about labor unions, which took off in the US around the 1870s, but the real “history” of organized labor in the US takes place well past 1893. So the professor will very likely reject that.

I’m not a history person. I know, I know “those who don’t learn from the past…” I don’t want to write about the American civil war and all that shit though. It’s been done to death. Any ideas on a topic I could pick that would be more interesting and more left-leaning?

Not asking for any help writing it. I just need some help picking a topic that would be interesting to research.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    “The Lowry Wars”

    there’s a chapter in this book that places them in the context of a multiracial, insurrectionary movement in the south.

    https://files.libcom.org/files/Dixie Be Damned - 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South - Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford.pdf

    there’s an earlier chapter titled “a subtle restless fire” that is also cool.

    the best histories of America are hidden, never taught, and purposely forgotten lest anybody get any ideas. it’s a great book overall.

    edit: you can read the wiki entry for the Lowry Wars to get the basic, kinda sanitized outline of what was a big, national event at the time. the book chapter I linked gives an insurrectionary leftist account with rich details of folk heroism and the concerns of regional/national power about how popular the “gang” was. because, in truth, it was large indigenous family with kinship ties and general acceptance of anyone who wanted to live communally, subsistence style out in the swamps… places the law couldn’t pursue. it came to the attention of the war because free persons of color an whites would join the group to hide/avoid being conscripted to the Confederacy. so the equivalent of the national guard at the time started trying to fuck with them through kidnapping aka “arrests” and made up charges, so the group went to war against the plantation families as the real engine behind the conflict. and regular working class peopled supported them.

    it was a fucking mess for the powers that be.

    anyway, it’s a great story.