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The Education of Betsey Stockton

Born into slavery in Princeton, New Jersey in the waning years of the 18 th century, Betsey Stockton’s life illuminates how many different paths were taken from slavery to freedom. Stories like hers are each remarkable in their own way but very few of them are told. They are overshadowed by the much better known lives of people like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

But that is changing as historians are bringing broader and more nuanced stories to light, as Gregory Nobles does in The Extraordinary Life of Betsey Stockton: An Emancipation Journey from Princeton, Around the World, and Back. Deeply researched and absorbing, the narrative follows Betsey Stockton as she traveled the complicated geography of race in the antebellum North.
Emancipated in her teens, Betsey Stockton left to join a missionary trip, on which she would be the first African American and the first unmarried female missionary to the Sandwich Islands. She would return to Princeton where she worked for thirty years as a teacher and community leader in the African-American community. Her accomplishments serve to highlight the extent of the inequality faced by free people of color in northern cities and college towns, where slavery had ended but racism persisted. The impact of her courageous work went well beyond the community in which she served.

Betsey Stockton is but one of the people who should have a more prominent place in our understanding of the struggle for equality. Though largely written out of history, as were so many women of her time, in The Extraordinary Life of Betsey Stockton, Nobles gives her story the attention it deserves.

The Globalization Myth

Regional hubs in Asia, Europe, and North America are becoming increasingly important in the manufacturing and selling of goods. Global supply chains are becoming much more local, as changes in technology mean that the benefits of collaborating regionally outweigh the savings from longer distance partnerships.

And so, China’s Lenovo computers are assembled across Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand and France’s Airbus is the product of Polish R&D and parts from Spain, France, and the UK. Ford assembles cars in Canada, with parts from Mexico and South Carolina.

In The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter, Shannon O’Neil, vice president and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that this trend is accelerating, with urgent implications for the US. Of the three regional hubs, the North American hub may be the most at risk. If we are going to compete with Asia and Europe for customers around the world, it will be essential for us to solidify our partnerships with Canada and Mexico.

The current trade climate notwithstanding, Shannon O’Neil calls not only for a continuation of NAFTA, but for a better NAFTA and, even, more NAFTAs. As we compete with powerful trading partnerships abroad, we can’t go it alone.

Mason-Dixon

For all the talk about borders in the news, most Americans don’t think of border issues as having been central in American history. Battles over boundaries don’t feature in our historical narrative as they do for European nations or their colonies around the world.

In Mason-Dixon: The War for America’s First Heartland, Edward Gray revisits a border – albeit one that did not separate nation states – that was the suffused with all the same tensions and conflicts as any international boundary. Over the course of its long history, the Mason Dixon Line would become a metaphor for a country divided by the issue of slavery, and understanding its origins sheds a new light on the importance that borders, and all they signify, have played in American history.

America’s Great Divide is the first history of the Mason Dixon Line in over a century. In it, Ed brings a new perspective to a story that has largely been forgotten, but one that has enormous resonance in the current political climate.

Making Money in the Early Middle Ages

Between the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the economic transformations of the twelfth, coined money in western Europe was scarce and high in value, difficult for the majority of the population to make use of. And yet, as Rory Naismith shows in this illuminating study, coined money was made and used throughout early medieval Europe. It was, he argues, a powerful tool for articulating people’s place in economic and social structures and an important gauge for levels of economic complexity. Working from the premise that using coined money carried special significance when there was less of it around, Naismith uses detailed case studies from the Mediterranean and northern Europe to propose a new reading of early medieval money as a point of contact between economic, social, and institutional history.

Naismith examines structural issues, including the mining and circulation of metal and the use of bullion and other commodities as money, and then offers a chronological account of monetary development, discussing the post-Roman period of gold coinage, the rise of the silver penny in the seventh century and the reconfiguration of elite power in relation to coinage in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the process, he counters the conventional view of early medieval currency as the domain only of elite gift-givers and intrepid long-distance traders. Even when there were few coins in circulation, Naismith argues, the ways they were used—to give gifts, to pay rents, to spend at markets—have much to tell us.

Discovering Empire

Americans know much about the British empire that spanned the Atlantic, but few realize that as early as the 1500s, a French web of influence extended across the Atlantic, moving people, products, disease, technologies, and ideas between and among the Americas, Europe, and Africa. By the middle of the 18 th century, France claimed nearly one third of North America, ran the Caribbean’s most profitable plantations, and was deeply involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

As significant as it is fascinating, this story is largely unfamiliar – attention is focused instead on the British and, to a lesser extent, Spanish empires. The French Atlantic Empire has, for all practical purposes, been defined out of existence – so much so that nearly everyone has accepted Napoleon’s assertion that his was the “first French empire.”

Historians Brett Rushforth and Christopher Hodson have set out to recover this lost but vitally important chapter in the history of European expansion in Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Era of the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions. The story of France’s early modern empire from its beginnings in the medieval era to its decline and transformation under Napoleon, the book tells an original, and engaging, story of how the peoples of France, Africa, and the Americas together formed a new imperial world.

Their insights are by no means confined to the distant past. France’s expansion in the first era of globalization has echoes that apply to the empires of our own time. The narrative comes to an end two centuries ago, but its lessons are very modern.

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