Michael A. McDonnell

Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas

That Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was keenly interested in colonial genocides is virtually unknown. Most commonly, and erroneously, he is understood as coining the term genocide in the wake of the Holocaust of European Jewry in order to reflect its features as a state-organized and ideologically-driven program of mass murder. An inspection of his unpublished writings in New York and Cincinnati reveals that this is a gross distortion of his thinking. In fact, the intellectual breakthrough that led to the concept of genocide occurred well before the Holocaust. Already in the 1920s and early 1930s, he had begun formulating the concepts and laws that would culminate in his founding text, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), and in the United Nations convention on genocide four years later. It is a signal failure of genocide studies scholars in North America in particular, where the field has been primarily based until recently, that they have neglected his manuscripts sitting on their doorstep, preferring to regard themselves as fellow “pioneers of genocide studies,” although there is surely one pioneer, namely, Raphael Lemkin. Rather than investigate what he actually meant by the term and its place in world history, the field has rejected or misunderstood his complex definition and engaged instead in comparative study of twentieth century mass killing and totalitarianism, all the while claiming Lemkin as a legitimating authority. Contrary to the weight of this scholarship, what Lemkin’s manuscripts reveal is that early modern and modern colonialism was central to his conception of genocide. Indeed, the very notion is colonial in nature because it entails occupation and settlement. The link is made plain by Lemkin in his description of genocide on the first page of the salient chapter of Axis Rule:

Rethinking the Age of Revolution

Revolution, it seems, is once again in the air. In the last decade or two, scholars have rushed to re-examine revolutionary experiences across the Atlantic, through the Americas, and more recently in imperial and global contexts. While Revolution has been a perennial favorite topic of national historians, a new generation of historians have begun to eschew traditional foundation narratives and embrace the insights of Atlantic and transnational history to create a new-old field of study – the Age of Revolution – already replete with books, articles, collections, texts, workshops, blogs, conference panels, and even its own genealogy. And the topics are diverse – from analyses of honor to the role of international Protestantism across revolutions – and range ever more broadly – from the revolutionary reverberations of the Wahhabi movement in the Persian Gulf region to Indian and slave Royalists in the northern Andes. Judging by the buzz, many more, and more diverse, studies are in the works. In historiographical terms, we are in the midst of another kind of “age of Revolutions,” as Thomas Paine put it in Age of Reason, “in which everything may be looked for.” As Sarah Knott recently noted, the revolution in Revolution scholarship has had a curiously long and somewhat halting gestation period. Despite an oft-ignored call to arms by C.L.R. James in 1938, and a more publicized intervention by R.R. Palmer starting in 1959, the historical profession was too mired in nationalist debates and perhaps too wary of international entanglements to revive wholesale an idea of transnational revolution. Arguably, it was not until the publication of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s landmark book, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic in 2000, that scholars began connecting the concurrent rise in interest in Atlantic history with an Age of Revolution. That connection was cemented with the rediscovery of the importance of the Haitian Revolution starting with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s powerful work Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in 1995, followed by a spate of new works in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and furthered and extended by contributions from Spanish-American, West African, Indian, British imperial, and global historians. Given the relative infancy of the field of the Age of Revolution, and the explosion of literature, there are of course many definitional questions yet to be explored let alone agreed upon. Even the umbrella term often gets modified as circumstances dictate. Should we call it an Age of Revolution, Age of Revolutions, Age of Atlantic Revolution, Age of Democratic Revolution, or Age of Imperial Revolution? The reasons for these modifiers often lie in how we define this Revolutionary Age and its scope and whether we

Dancing with Shadows: Biography and the Making and Remaking of the Atlantic World

Let me start where I have grown accustomed to start this story, at Pickawillany — a tiny place at the confluence of several rivers in what is now known as the Ohio Valley.1 There, on a June morning in 1752, a force of about 250 warriors from the powerful and influential Anishinaabe communities of Odawa, Potawatomi and Ojibwa Indians of the upper Great Lakes burst out of the woods and attacked a thinly inhabited Miami village. The raiders killed 13 of the defenders and captured several Indians and British traders who were residing with them before the remainder of the village found refuge in a stockade. From within the walls of the fort, the helpless villagers watched in horror as the attackers stabbed one of their captives to death, ripping out his heart and eating it. Next they killed, boiled and ate the Miami village chief, before melting back into the forest in the direction of Detroit. This attack, far from an insignificant skirmish in the woods, set off a chain reaction of events and became the opening salvo in the Seven Years’ War in America, a war that would quickly spread to Europe and the Pacific and ultimately transform the imperial and global landscape of the early modern world.2

Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution

doubt, the nuances of Freund’s argument could easily be lost by readers, including undergraduates unfamiliar with the basic contours of the story of post-war suburbanization. Nevertheless, I will be cribbing from this truth-telling book in my urban history and US survey lectures. I hope that my American colleagues do the same in an effort to dismantle the most destructive myths and practices undercutting the possibilities of genuine equal opportunity in the United States. Karen Ferguson Simon Fraser University a 2009, Karen Ferguson