The black jacobins summary

Today we take it for granted that history is much than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring Other forms of history the histories of gender class rebellion and nonconformity add much needed context and color to our understanding of the past But this has not always been so In CLR James s The Black Jacobins we have one of the earliest and most defining examples of how history from below ought to be written. The black jacobins book pdf James s approach is based on his need to resolve two central to understand why the Haitian slave revolt was the only example of a successful slave rebellion in history and also to grasp the ways in which its history was intertwined with the history of the French Revolution The book s originality and its value rests on its author s ability to ask and answer productive questions of this sort and in the creativity with which he proved able to generate new hypotheses as a result As any enduring work of history must be The Black Jacobins is rooted in sound archival research but its true greatness lies in the originality of James s approach The Black Jacobins The Macat Library