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Historical Discourses Editors 2012-2013 Editors-In-Chief Historical Historical Discourses Discourses The McGill Undergraduate Journal of History Volume XXVII, Winter 2013 Volume XXVII Historical Discourses !e McGill Undergraduate Journal of History Vol. XXVII 2012-2013 McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada Funding generously supplied by the History Students Association (HSA), Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS), and the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU). Cover Logo: Amanda Liao is a U3 History Major who procrastinates through art. Some of her doodles and snapshots can be found online amandaliao.tumblr.com. Historical Discourses is published annually by McGill University undergraduate history students. All essays become property of Historical Discourses and cannot be reproduced without the permission of the authors. Discours historiques est publié chaque année par les étudiants d’histoire de premier cycle de l’Université McGill. Chaque dissertation devient la proprieté de Discours historiques et ne peut pas être reproduite sans la permission de l’auteur. Historical Discourses accepts history papers written by McGill undergraduates. Submissions in either English or French are welcome and may be sent to: Discours historiques accepte les dissertations d’histoire écrites par les étudiants de premier cycle de l’Université McGill en anglais ou en français. Nous recevons les dissertations à l’addresse suivante: History Department O!ce (Room 625) Stephen Leacock Building 855 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7 "e opinions expressed within this journal do not necessarily represent the views of the History Students’ Association or McGill University. Historical Discourses Editors 2012-2013 Editors-in-Chief Jonathan Newburgh Matthew Chung Editorial Board James Lampe Jean-Robert Lalancette Corinne Wolfson Keegan Butler Sarah Balakrishnan Disha Jani Karel Asha Vincent Carney Matthew Signer Anna Hutchinson Naomi Braude Ilannah Donohue Design Editor Emily Nedwidek Layout Editor Katherine Wilson Contents Foreword Jason Opal i Acknowledegments Jonathan Newburgh and Matthew Chung v Excused Homocide: A Study of the Acquittals of Six African-Americans for Killing in Self-Defense in the Jim Crow South Jonathan Cohen 1 Selective Memory: A History of Civil War Monuments in Washington DC Honor Lay 29 No Day But Tomorrow: "e Delayed Evolution of Jewish Social Action in the Context of HIV/AIDS Maurice Neishlos 46 Co-opting Discourse, Capturing History: Perestroika and the Estonian Revolution Hanna Jones 67 Bucking the Iron Horse: "e Destruction of China’s First Railroad !eodore Na" 94 "e Jewish Question and the Woman Question: Constructions of the Jewish Woman in Victorian London Laura Moncion 107 "e Poet’s Revolution: Rhetorical Violence, Irish Nationalism and the Easter Rising Nathalie O’Neill 132 “Double Oppression”: Homosexuality and the Irish Republican Movement Benjamin Stidworthy 152 "e Reinterpretation of Gokhale’s Political Legacy: Gandhi’s Probationary Period, 1915 Benjamin Sher 165 Diet and Disease in the A#ermath of the Black Death: "e Case for the Role of Diet in Overcoming Population Stagnation in England, 1350-1600 Rozman Lynch 182 Performing the Private: Nineteenth-Century Parisian "eatre Culture and the Haute Bourgeoisie Hannah Wood 195 i Foreword "ere is an important distinction between learning history, on the one hand, and doing history, on the other. Learning history is the usual preoccupation of university-level coursework, at McGill or elsewhere. It is largely a matter of reading and discussing, of committing to memory some basic chronologies and frameworks and then steeping oneself in the vast—if radically incomplete—range of sources that have come down to us from medieval France, or Meiji Japan, or $rst-century Rome. "e intellectual as well as the social bene$ts of learning history are fairly obvious, at least to those of us in Departments of History. Besides sharpening the cognitive skills of information gathering and organization and the professional skills of writing and researching, learning history o%ers us a vital perspective on the human experience. Someone who has seriously studied history might still be an unlikable or anti-social person, but he or she should at least have a deeper sense of how much our species has gone through since it started keeping records. Doing history is a di%erent kind of endeavor. It involves taking responsibility to narrate a given event or process in the past, usually through the use of primary sources. It is a matter of knowledge creation rather than retention. It is a way to contribute to the sum total of human wisdom, no matter how distant in time or space its subject might be. It is also extremely di!cult, o#en tedious, and sometimes thankless. Everyone who has contributed to this year’s edition of Historical Discourses—including those whose essays do not appear in the $nal product—has done history in this fashion. "ey all deserve our thanks and congratulations for having done so. As a way of introducing the articles, I want to o%er some thoughts about the social and indeed political bene$ts of doing history and then leave it to the reader to appreciate the collective work of the authors. ii Historical Discourses ********** In undemocratic societies of one miserable kind or another, powerful and ruthless people feel no need to pretend to be honest. "ey simply do what they want to do: shoot protestors, imprison journalists, threaten workers. Sometimes they go through the motions of pretending when addressing the alleged “international community,” unless, as in the case of North Korea’s leaders, they no longer even care enough to do that. Obviously we are fortunate here in (take your pick) Quebec, Canada, and North America to live in societies where democratic concepts carry real meaning, even though those concepts are fragile, contested, and incomplete. But living in such societies brings its own perils, some of which we historians are surprisingly well-positioned to face. "ose who have power but not scruples are o#en and unfortunately quite clever. "ey adapt to democratic milieus. "ey learn how to get around those irritating journalists who ask questions, those damnable commissions that issue subpoenas, and, worst of all, those rights-bearing citizens who go on strike, organize political parties, and take to the streets. What to do with such impediments to their insatiable desires for power or pro$t? Usually they just try to keep uncomfortable information from seeing the light of day, meaning the light of public notice. Or they &at-out make things up and hope no one will go to the trouble to $gure it out. But sometimes they also pretend to level with whatever public they have to face. In many respects this is the biggest threat to democratic ways of life. “We look forward to cooperating fully with the [insert toothless government agency here] and will do everything we can to bring to light what happened during the [insert horri$c human rights violation here].” "is is a standard way for a government or corporation that has done something very bad, or that plans to do something very bad, to deal with a democratic milieu. You know the drill. A smug, bland person in Foreword iii a blue suit and green (sometimes red!) tie stands behind a podium and stonewalls with prefabricated phrases that do not constitute lies per se but that also o%er no information whatsoever about the issue at hand. "ey speak in such generalities and abstractions as to prevent any concrete understanding, with the usual e%ect that anyone who was listening stops doing so. Why listen, when there is nothing to hear? If speech is a process whereby information, ideas, or sentiments are exchanged, this is anti- speech. And it o#en works, in the sense that it enables many actual crimes and much more malfeasance to unfold more or less unmolested. Doing history trains the mind to recognize and contest such dangerous blather. For in tracking down sources and constructing an argument, someone doing history must constantly pose concrete, speci$c questions and $nd sound, logical answers. "ey must play the role of the dogged and annoying journalist at the well-orchestrated press conference. Let me o%er an example. Just this past week, in my seminar on early American democracy, we discussed the Indian Removal Act of 1831. Aggressively supported by President Andrew Jackson, this Act paved the way for the deportation of the entire Cherokee Nation to the trans-Mississippi west, during which several thousand Cherokees died of hunger, exposure, and, according to some sources, heartbreak. "e President and many interested land speculators from the state of Georgia used anti-speech to explain what they were doing: “the Indians,” they said, were both a threat to their white neighbors and threatened by those white neighbors. Removing them was both prudent and humane. "is was not entirely or literally untrue, in that whites and natives had indeed killed one another in deeply depraved ways during wars in the 1790s and 1810s. And the overall population of native peoples had indeed declined disastrously in rough proportion to their contact with whites. But none of this was relevant to the Cherokee Nation as of 1831. "ey posed no threat to their neighbors, and they were in no danger of disappearing. "ey had undergone a remarkable process of adaptation iv Historical Discourses and acculturation over the past two generations, embracing in various ways all the trappings of Anglo-American “civilization”: livestock-and- tillage agriculture, the English language, the Christian religion, and even chattel slavery. Someone doing history will notice this, because they will respond to the anti-speech they encounter with speci$c questions: How were the Cherokees threatened? Who were they threatening? Exactly what was at stake in their removal from the hills of northern Georgia? Doing history, in other words, is a way to $nd good information through speci$c inquiries.
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