The Republic of Labor
December 08, 2012
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1929698.The_Republic_of_Labor The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 by Ronald Schultz …
Ronald Schultz
Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Mestizo Logics, American Encounters, America in an Early Modern World, Colonization in the First Global Age, World History. He has always been interested in the ways that people construct and interpret the world around them. That explains, in part, the fact that my initial undergraduate and graduate work was done in the field of psychology. But, it also explains the character of the courses I teach and the research and writing I do. He teach the World History survey at the lower division level as well as upper division and graduate courses in comparative early modern colonization and cross-cultural interchange in Atlantic America and the United States. Whether it took place in Atlantic America, Qing China, or the vast forests of Siberia, early modern colonization brought outsiders and indigenous people together in volatile and uncertain circumstances. Misunderstanding, violence, and simple incomprehension marked many of these early interchanges, but so too did trade, cultural exchange, and intermarriage. His American and world history courses explore this central relationship between indigenous people and colonizers and show how this developing relationship decisively shaped not only colonial societies, but the settler societies that developed from them. We may live in a post-colonial world, but those formative relationships continue to influence the majority of the world's people today. I have explored the transatlantic nature of early American popular thought in a book about Philadelphia artisans (The Republic of Labor, 1993) and in articles about artisan thought and the importance of religion in the lives and thoughts of American craftsmen (Past and Present, 1990; Religion in a Revolutionary Age, 1996). His most recent project, Mestizo Logics, explores the cognitive side of colonization in the first global age (roughly 1200-1800). The forced and sustained encounters that accompanied colonization in this era challenged both colonizers' and indigenous peoples' ways of parsing experience, leading some to conserve their established cognitive maps and actions and others to create new ways of viewing and dealing with their newly commingled world. These cognitive rehearsals and restructurings, or mestizo logics, were an integral part of the colonial process and provided the crucial cognitive foundations of colonial social and cultural life. Without these old and new schemas, colonial life would have been impossible. These mestizo logics will be the subject of two related books, Colonial Mindscapes: Mestizo Logics and Colonial Encounters in the First Global Age, which will explore the variety of mestizo logics used by indigenes and colonizers in the worldwide colonies of the first global age and Many New Worlds: America and the Colonization of the Early Modern World, a study of early America that places the nation's colonial history in the context of the other colonizations taking place in the early modern world. The colonization of America played an important role in this global process and my aim is to show the social, economic, and cultural processes that linked Virginia to Chile, Iroquoia to Polynesia, and New Mexico to Siberia. I'm always happy to discuss my courses or my work with interested students, parents, or the public at large. If you have any questions or would simply like to open a conversation, please use the email link above to contact me.
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