Trailblazer: The Legacy of Bishop Henry M. Turner During the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crowism

When the Civil War began in 1861, the conflict evoked feelings of pride, patriotism, and hatred in both blacks and whites. As the war raged on, Reverend Henry McNeal Turner ministered to his brethren serving in the United States Colored Troops (USCT), segregated units of the Union Army. Although slavery ended in 1865 with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction died with his assassination. The Ku Klux Klan and ex–Confederates not only regained control of the South but also resisted the federal government’s early attempts at civil rights legislation by intimidating, murdering, and disenfranchising ex–slaves. In response to the brutality and the rise of Jim Crowism, Turner served as a beacon of hope for thousands of freedmen while respectively serving in state and local politics. Bishop Henry M. Turner’s story deserves more attention because he is an overlooked transitional figure in American history. This paper will examine Turner’s contributions to the A.M.E. Church, politics, and civil rights

Where did British Foreign Capital Go? Fundamentals, Failures and the Lucas Paradox: 1870-1913

A decade has passed since Robert Lucas asked why capital does not flow from rich to poor countries. Lucas used a contemporary example to illustrate his Paradox, the very modest flow of capital from the United States to India during the second great global capital market boom, after 1970. Had he paid more attention to the first great global capital market boom, after 1870, he might have been less surprised. Very little of British capital exports went to poor, labor-abundant countries. Indeed, about two-thirds of it went to the labor-scarce New World where only a tenth of the world's population lived, and only about a quarter of it went to labor-abundant Asia and Africa where almost two-thirds of the world's population lived. Why? Was it caused by some international market failure, or was it due to some shortfall in underlying economic, demographic or geographic fundamentals that made capital's productivity low in poor countries? This paper constructs a panel data set for 34 countries who as a group got 92 percent of British capital, and uses it to conclude that international capital market failure (including whether the country was on or off the Gold Standard) was not involved. It then ranks the three big fundamentals that mattered schooling, natural resources and demography.

Women's clubs: Dispersing Shakespeare across America

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2011 Symbiosis - A Transatlantic Journal.This article explains the importance of women's clubs in America and their role in the dissemination of Shakespeare in the 19th and 20th centuries

Cases and Case-Lawyers

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount of published law after private companies entered the legal publishing market. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was generally acknowledged the number of cases had made it impossible for attorneys to not focus on locating precedents. In the twentieth century most references to case-lawyers were historical, even as the amount of published law facing lawyers continued to grow

Cases and Case-Lawyers

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount of published law after private companies entered the legal publishing market. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was generally acknowledged the number of cases had made it impossible for attorneys to not focus on locating precedents. In the twentieth century most references to case-lawyers were historical, even as the amount of published law facing lawyers continued to grow

Technical Change and the Wage Structure During the Second Industrial Revolution: Evidence from the Merchant Marine, 1865-1912

Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation—the steam engine—on skill demand and the wage structure in the merchant shipping industry. We find that the technical change created a new demand for skilled workers, the engineers, while destroying demand for workers with skills relevant only to sail. It had a deskilling effect on production work—able-bodied seamen (essentially, artisans) were replaced by unskilled engine room operatives. On the other hand, mates and able-bodied seamen employed on steam earned a premium relative to their counterparts on sail. A wholesale switch from sail to steam would increase the 90/10 wage ratio by 40%, with most of the rise in inequality coming from the creation of the engineer occupation.

Endowments, Coercion, and the Historical Containment of Education

Distinguishing the role of coercive labor and political institutions from the effects of economic inequality levels and populations’ ethno-linguistic compositions in explaining the diverging patterns of development across the Americas has remained a challenging task. This paper examines whether the incentives for elite groups to enforce coercive labor and political institutions, holding other factors constant, inhibited economic development by restricting the provision of public schooling. Using 19th-century micro data from municipalities in Puerto Rico, and exploiting variation in the suitability of coffee cultivation across regions and the timing of the nineteenth century coffee boom, we find that coffee-region local governments allocated more public resources to enforce coercive labor measures and repress revolutionary movements, as documented by greater expenditures targeted towards the enforcement of coercive contracts and the size of military and government-backed paramilitary forces. These local governments also allocated fewer resources towards the provision of primary schooling - a decline of 40 percent in the provision of public primary schools and a decline in literacy rates of 25 percent. These findings are consistent with models of factor price manipulation and political repression under elite-controlled non-democratic regimes, in which the returns to labor are depressed as a result of the extraction of rents from peasants’ wages and literacy-based voting rights are restricted through limited access to schooling.labor coercion; political institutions; geography; schooling

Technical Change and the Wage Structure During the Second Industrial Revolution: Evidence from the Merchant Marine, 1865-1912

Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation — the development of powerful and economical steam engines — on skill demand and the wage structure among the merchant marine. Our data reveal a complex range of responses to the new technology. The new technology created a new demand for skilled workers, the engineers, while destroying other skills relevant only to sail. There were also contradictory effects among the less skilled. On the one hand, technological innovation may have been deskilling for production work since many experienced able-bodied seamen were replaced by laborers in the engine room. On the other hand, able-bodied seamen employed on steam earned a premium relative to their counterparts on sail. Our data allow us to identify this steam premium as a skill premium rather than a compensating differential. At the managerial level, we identify a skill premium on steam for mates, whose job became more complex on the larger vessels, but not for bosuns whose job did not. In aggregate, there is little change traditional measures of the skill premium, but such measures are too crude to illuminate the rich wage dynamics induced by a major technical innovation.steam power, wage inequality, skill premium, technical change, merchant marine, Canada

Technical Change and the Wage Structure During the Second Industrial Revolution: Evidence from the Merchant Marine, 1865-1912

Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation the steam engine on skill demand and the wage structure in the merchant shipping industry. We find that the technical change created a new demand for skilled workers, the engineers, while destroying demand for workers with skills relevant only to sail. It had a deskilling effect on production work able-bodied seamen (essentially, artisans) were replaced by unskilled engine room operatives. On the other hand, mates and able-bodied seamen employed on steam earned a premium relative to their counterparts on sail. A wholesale switch from sail to steam would increase the 90/10 wage ratio by 40%, with most of the rise in inequality coming from the creation of the engineer occupation.