Reading Response Paper - Abby Dow

“Reading the Runaway” by David Waldstreicher

In “Reading the Runaway, David Waldstreicher analyzes print advertisements about runaway slaves to draw conclusions about print culture, the identity and self-fashioning of runaway slaves, and the social importance of slavery in the mid-Atlantic. While I had previously read about the importance of runaway slave advertisements to the enforcement of boundaries and punishments for runaway slaves, I had not realized the many conclusions about the identity and self-fashioning of runaway slaves that one could draw from what at first glance seems to be the simplistic and biased perspective of the disgruntled slave owner. Waldstreicher, however, with the help of many secondary sources, draws many such conclusions, and he extrapolates larger conclusions about slavery in the mid-Atlantic from various aspects of identity. These aspects include how the runaway slaves changed their hair and clothes to re-fashion themselves, the many artisan skills they possessed, and their language abilities.

Waldstreicher is also able to draw larger conclusions about the mid-Atlantic slave trade from these advertisements. For example, he describes how confusing the large number of free blacks in the North by 1790 made it extremely difficult to tell who was a runaway and who was free. Further trouble arose at the time in telling the difference between servants and slaves. Additionally, in underselling their former slaves’ skills, literacy, and language abilities, owners not only made it more difficult for their slaves to be identified, but also showed how whites tended to avoid aspects of their slaves’ identities that made their exploitation less “justifiable.” Finally, Waldstreicher’s paper illuminates how essential the print culture was to the identification and re-capture of runaway slaves. I found this to be one of the most striking parts of the piece. Like many of the institutions in our country, the press’s roots are tied to the maintenance of the institution of slavery.

Overall, while I found Waldstreicher’s look at slave advertisements to be an interesting use of primary sources, and while he drew some important conclusions about identity and slavery in the mid-Atlantic, I wish his conclusions were a bit more specific and focused. Finally, I found the citation format in the article a bit difficult to navigate because each footnote contained so many different sources lumped together.

Gay New York by George Chauncey

            One aspect of Chauncey’s piece that I will strive to emulate in my paper is the focused nature of his study in terms of zeroing in on one geographic location. I appreciated Chauncey’s choice to focus specifically on New York for two reasons. First, I thought his focus on New York allowed him to delve into questions of relations between men of different classes of ethnicity, the nature of resistance, and changes in sexual practices in a way that he could not have achieved had he looked, for example, at gay men across the entire United States from 1890-1940. Second, I found this choice to be particularly effective because the focused study he undertook was indicative of wider trends, though he does make sure to specify that New York was a unique case. I too want to choose a topic that is   indicative of larger phenomenon, such as a case of a policy in California’s education system that perhaps indicates how the Civil Rights Movement was being taught in schools across the U.S.

            Though I found Chauncey’s chapter of “Fairy as an Intermediate Sex” to be very informative in terms of the social environment gay men faced, it clearly used antiquated language in terms of gender and sexuality. Though this is understandable because the book was written in 1994, I still found it a bit frustrating to read a secondary source about queer identity that used language many today would find inadequate. For example, even when he is attempting to use “modern” language as he explains certain past phenomenon (meaning not using the language of the period he studied but trying to explain the old language in “modern” terms), I wish that there was an update version that did not rely on a binary of hetero- or homo- sexual, or referred to gender as a binary identity.