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Title: Teach Me Dreams : The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era by Mechal Sobel ISBN: 0-691-11333-5 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Comment: This is a difficult book. People will find it repetitive and others will find it narrowily sourced. Yet the book offers an important account of a change of transcendent importance. People have often talked about the rise of modern individualism in the prologue and aftermath of the American revolution. Sobel, however, offers a much more radical thesis. What the years from 1740 to 1840 saw was the rise of a radical new sense of SELF. Previous our inner persona had been passive and communal. People often went through lives believing they did not have choices. But in the triumph of the American revolution and the rise of a new market society, the self became ostentatiously active and individualist. The very concept that we use to see ourselves is a relatively recent invention. (pp. 3-7) Sobel's specific contribution is to examine dreams. Recent research on dreams suggests that elements of dream correlate with the amount that one is individualist. Studies of dreams in Nazi Germany suggest that people started supported the Nazis in their dreams before they supported them consciously. (p. 10) At the time Sobel's study begins dreams were of particular importance to people as signs or portents, though by the end of our period they were viewed as comparatively unimportant.
The rise of the self is not the unmitigated triumph of individualist freedom. Quite the contrary, for concepts of the self are often defined in hostility, and increasingly hatred of the abstracted, reified "Other." Increasingly many whites viewed themselves in opposition to blacks. Yet at the same time blackface reflected the envy of proletarianized whites for what they saw as the laziness and abandon of African-Americans. (p. 97) Blacks in turn often viewed whites with hatred, yet had to keep their opinions to themselves for fear of violent retaliation. Meanwhile men faced the struggles of increasing dependence by emphasizing their own individuality while idealizing women and children (pp. 160-63). The costs of these idealizations was to deny women part of their sexuality (p. 225), to depoliticize them as part of the politicization of public life. At the same time men were placed in a peculiar new emotional world: on the one hand the more "emotional" style of African-Americans seeped into evangelical religious practices. On the other hand, crying, once an expected mark of masculine true emotion in the eighteenth century, was now seen as a sign of effeminate weakness (p. 142). As a consequence modernity is built upon a sense of otherness that is based on racial and gender inequality.
A very important hypothesis, with many stimulating implications. I would like to point out some demurrals. Sobel's work is based on roughly two hundred dream memoirs which, while impressive, is only a fraction of the American population. Moreover, this sample is often tilted to the minority of evangelicals and relatively small religious sects which concentrated on the production of such works. Similar problems of proportion arises from the somewhat untypical women Sobel studies who wrote down their paths to individuality. Much of Sobel's chapter on whites images of slaves deals with the even smaller minority of Quakers who were able to reject slavery and achieve a certain sense of empathy and maturity. This account does not deal so much with the many whites in the North who rarely if ever saw blacks and yet relatively little qualms in supporting slavery. Back in the sixties Orlando Patterson criticized James Baldwin in the New Left Review for failing to recognize the strong sense for many Americans that blacks are not existing, the sense of absence from their lives. (A process, of course, encouraged by segregation.) This deserves as much emphasis as the neurotic obsession about the other. More could be said about the economic and social background Still, this is an important work that clearly is deserving of more research. One wonders how E. Roger Ekirch's upcoming history of sleep will deal with this problem. We applaud our capacity for moral choice, yet its origins are afflicted with hatred.
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Title: A Nation under Our Feet : Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn ISBN: 0674011694 Publisher: Belknap Press Pub. Date: 10 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) by David Brion Davis ISBN: 0674011821 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: How Early America Sounded by Richard Cullen Rath ISBN: 0801441269 Publisher: Cornell University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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Title: Sensory Worlds in Early America by Peter Charles Hoffer ISBN: 0801873533 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves by Ira Berlin ISBN: 0674010612 Publisher: Belknap Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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