On the Early Black Church

On the Early Black Church: In April 1787, Rev. Richard Allen and Rev. Absalom Jones co-founded the Free African Society (FAS) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As two of the earliest African Americans to become ordained Christian priests, Allen and Jones used the FAS as a community outreach organization to help black Philadelphians satisfy some of their basic needs with education and employment opportunities. But after the turn of the nineteenth century, the FAS grew into separate African-American church groups. Jones and many FAS members joined the Episcopal Church, while Allen considered starting an independent Protestant denomination of his own. In 1816, Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Pictured above is the Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, which served as the first black church in the United States. It specifically appealed to Afro-Christian free men and women who understood Allen's theology as a force of liberation. In other words, Allen saw his purpose in the pulpit as two-fold. First, he advocated abolition in his weekly sermons, and second, he spoke against the vitriol in antebellum race relations, especially in cities such as Philadelphia. Across town at the African Church of St. Thomas, Jones too condemned the evils of slavery in his sermons. In fact, Jones' congregation even petitioned Congress about the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law, which kept runaway slaves living in constant fear of being re-enslaved.

On Racial Slavery's Capitalistic Contradiction

On Racial Slavery's Capitalistic Contradiction: In 1965, historian Eugene D. Genovese published The Political Economy of Slavery, which uncovered a deep contradiction at the heart of American racial slavery. For the most part, this contradiction entailed the idea of racial slavery as a capitalistic institution. It contrasted the quasi-aristocratic, Southern slave-holding planter class with the emerging laissez-faire spirit of the industrializing American economy. The persistence of Southern slave ownership, which ran counter to liberating aspects (wage labor, cheap housing, etc.) of American industrialization, was central to antebellum conflicts between the North and South. And as Genovese stated, "The essential features of Southern particularity, as well as of Southern backwardness, can be traced [almost exclusively] to the relationship of master to slave." Such a relationship, with its paternalistic dependencies, inhibited the growth of a capitalist market where independent industrialists and merchants would have otherwise flourished. For if antebellum Southern "planters were losing their economic and political cold war with Northern capitalism," then it was the South's failure "to develop sufficient industry" that offered the most plausible explanation.

On the Early Black Press

On the Early Black Press: In March 1827, Rev. Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm began to co-edit Freedom's Journal, which served as the first African-American newspaper in the United States. It's founding coincided with the abolition of slavery in New York state on July 4, 1827. Yet one of their primary objectives in co-editing Freedom's Journal was to deconstruct the negative impressions of Africa and African-Americans in the New York press. Although the newspaper only lasted two years, Cornish and Russwurm were able to raise significant doubts in the minds of many whites about the perceived racial inferiority of black Americans. In effect, Cornish and Russwurm were strong believers in the idea that ancient Egypt and Ethiopia constituted bastions of African high culture. That is, ancient Egypt and Ethiopia were on par with ancient Greece and Rome in terms of their contributions to the growth of Western civilization. In the 1820s, however, there was an emerging effort by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to have free blacks emigrate from the United States and recolonize Africa, specifically Liberia. Even though Cornish and Russwurm vehemently opposed this effort, they welcomed pro-colonization opinions on the editorial page of their newspaper. The main problem they saw with colonization was that it appeared to be a panacea for Southern slaveholders who viewed free blacks as an existential threat to slavery.

On the Atomic Bomb

On the Atomic Bomb: When FDR created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) with Executive Order 8807 in 1941, he directed the U.S. government's resources at producing an atomic bomb. With calls from University of Chicago physicists (Enrico Fermi, Arthur Compton, etc.) in the late 1930s to investigate uranium-235 as a potential source of these bombs, the feasibility of producing a bomb according to the principles of nuclear fission became doable. Even designing an atomic bomb seemed relatively straightforward by the early 1940s, but separating U-235 from U-238 presented the biggest problem to physicists and chemical engineers alike. As an isotope, U-235 made up less than 1% of all naturally occurring uranium in the world (unlike U-238, which constituted 99%). On its own, U-235 was not sufficient enough to initiate a chain reaction, so it had to be enriched to at least 80% purity. The first man-made chain reaction with U-235 occurred on December 2, 1942, in a rackets court under the football field at the University of Chicago. There was no cooling system, no radiation shield, and millions of Chicagoans going about their daily routines above ground. With man-made nuclear fission reactions now possible, everything from nuclear bombs to nuclear medicine to nuclear power appeared in reach. Ultimately, through the process of gaseous diffusion, Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, and Crawford Greenewalt were able to place about a billion dollars worth of uranium into "Little Boy" (the bomb that leveled Hiroshima in August 1945).

On the New Industrial Designers

On the New Industrial Designers: In the 1930s, there was a belief among many American artists and architects that they could essentially design the United States out of the Depression. According to cultural historian Jeffrey Meikle, by melding art and industry, these new industrial designers felt they could "reverse the Depression's plummeting sales and create a harmonious environment unknown since the Industrial Revolution." This kind of blind optimism about the possibilities of industrial design was very much in line with the idea that "social change follows technological innovation." If the Depression's fundamental economic problem was an over-saturated market caused by mass production, then industrial designers such as Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, and Raymond Loewy believed they could incite mass consumption by designing streamlined household products. But on the whole, mass produced objects were considered too plain and ugly for mass appeal, so it would take the introduction of new industrial materials like plastics for designers to create their new streamlined objects. The cultural effects stemming from these new designs and materials were two-fold. First, it became O.K. to consume in America, and second, consumption became a necessary prerequisite for being considered modern. And perhaps there was no better demonstration of this modern consumerist mentality than the 1939 World's Fair in New York.