JSTOR with Shawn

For this sixth blog post, I’ve decided to reflect on the significance of the claims made in the JSTOR two articles I read. The first advocated the methodology of global labor history, considering a variety of arrangements across the globe where one’s labor power is exploited as work and highlighting the exploitation of workers on the periphery who produce raw materials that are refined in the industrial core. The second argued that the French peasants who regained control of their land were soon transformed into entrepreneurial farmers. I think the significant difference between the claims of the two articles is that the former considers some of those who own the means of production as work while the latter documents that the French peasant’s status as cultivators of their land gave them the goal of becoming private landowners instead of the social ownership desired by industrial workers. In addition, coercion and state power is a factor. The French peasants could easily escape their f...

 Hello all, I unfortunately did not have the time to read a JSTOR article this week, so instead I will be discussing my planning for my Agora Days class, which is on labor and social history. Initially, I was planning for the class to mainly consist of lectures but soon realized that an hour-long presentation is a little less than 8,000 words. Thus, I have chosen to incorporate more discussion and videos (and possibly pre-work!). The class will mostly be about how the lived experience of everyday people impacted broader historical events, so if you're interested in that, be sure to check it out!

The link between the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of capitalism in France has confounded historians, as it contradicts the traditional blueprint of capitalist development based on the English transition to capitalism, wherein land was expropriated by the owners of merchant capital (the proto-bourgeois) and peasants who formerly worked the land and paid feudal dues were reduced to wage earners. This process of land enclosure in England encouraged capitalist enterprise because landowners were incentivized to develop the land as efficiently as possible and create a surplus for investment, meaning they would employ less of the former peasantry, who could now supply an urban workforce for enterprises in cities. However, in the French Revolution, land shifted from feudal property to largely being owned in small plots by peasants. This paper argues that these small plots were also well-suited to commercial development because the peasants were relieved of the feudal dues they tra...

Hi there! I'm not done with my response to the last article I read, but I thought that it would be fun to apply some of the methodologies it mentioned. So, I wrote an analysis of a cultural feature of society in light of working conditions in the vain of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class . If you've read Jojo's blog posts, she discusses a study group vc we're both in, and one of my friends in that vc mentioned they listened to nightcore, which is basically music that is sped up for the purpose of dancing. I'm not a big fan of nightcore, so I decided to critique it from the perspective of 21st-century notions of work and productivity:   "The Political Economy of Nightcore" Nightcore is an attempt to condense the experience and power of music into a smaller and more easily consumable timeframe, particularly for the purpose of dancing. In some respects, it is a merely a reflection of the current economic base of modern society. Unde...

For this post, I chose to review the article the "The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History" from the journal International Labor and Working-Class History . I had previously found the papers in this journal to be high-quality, and unsurprisingly, I found this paper to be a well-written exploration of important questions. Labor history is essentially the history of the working class, and this paper elucidates a methodology in which that history could be understood globally. One argument in the paper I found interesting related to the definition of work, given that the wage-earning relationship in a capitalist society is a fairly recent development. In order to expand on that definition, the paper suggests defining work as any relationship within which the labor of a class is exploited for the uses of another entity. This analysis covers both coerced and 'uncoerced' forms of labor, which I think is useful. Slavery and feudalism are often thought of as arrangem...

Hello! In the past, while researching for projects, I've come across many an intriguing JSTOR article but often don't get the chance to use all of them. In light of that, in this blog, I'll discuss and review JSTOR articles on history and literary criticism. I'll evaluate the arguments made by the articles and their significance. Finally, I'll email the authors with my feedback and publish any response I get. I hope you'll join me in my enlightening journey through the depths of JSTOR!