Research and Responsibility

In Monday’s seminar we spent much of the class discussing the implications of Professor Rockman’s arguments about the relationship between the success of Early Republic ‘market revolution’ and the desperate material reality that many wage workers faced. As a productive post-seminar discussion, I wonder if it is worth interrogating the mechanics of incorporating such disparate types of evidence into a coherent body of work and argument—specifically, in relation our own projects. We are all in the process of building projects based on archival materials that are, oftentimes, unwieldy and contradictory. I mention this because I think it is useful, as we conclude the seminar readings, to consider not only scholars’ arguments, historiographical interventions, and methodology, but to also pay close attention to their organizational strategies. While none of us are completing full-length monographs for this seminar, our original work should provide a contribution to the historiography. The question then, in relation to Professor Rockman’s, and others’ works, should be, not simply what is his argument but how did he do it and are there elements of this approach that might be productively incorporated into my own work?

In the case of Scraping By, Professor Rockman emphasizes the day-to-day material struggles of the laboring class of Early Republic Baltimore, and, as he suggested in seminar, he consciously stopped short of suggesting intentionality on the part of historical actors. That is, while he found it acceptable to construct arguments based on peoples’ wages and subsistence strategies, he avoided moving into the realm of psychology. How workers felt about their plight very often was not an essential component of this work; this was likely the direct result of the limitations of source materials. Catalogs of wages did not, for example, include notations about workers’ thoughts on receiving one dollar each day as compensation for their labor, and, even if they had, it might be argued that these notations would be problematic. Clearly, it might be argued that, by avoiding suggestions of relational-consciousness based on material conditions, or even—indeed—based on more overtly confessional materials, scholars can avoid stepping in to the role of historical narrator and retain some modicum of objectivity. This, I think, is a useful lesson for any project based on source materials.

However, it might also be worth considering a more incorporative cultural reading of certain evidence. If, for example, workers receive low, uncertain wages, which are spent on basic subsistence and alcohol, is the scholar necessarily constrained from suggesting certain potential psychological implications of this behavior based on cultural norms? And while this was certainly not the aim of Professor Rockman’s work, poverty has cultural implications, which transcend basic survival. Simply put, I think it is worth considering, as we complete our research objectives, the interplay of material evidence and cultural analysis based on the tactics deployed in our course readings.

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