Issue of slavery in the united states
Answer five of the questions below with short-answer responses of four or five lines using complete sentences.
Why, according to Karl Marx’s analysis of “The North American Civil War,” (1861) did the London press seek to portray that conflict as centered on tariff and trade policy rather than about the issue of slavery in the United States?
Briefly identify the major developments that according to Marx’s analysis, effectively removed any restrictions on the spread of slavery into newly acquired territories of the United States by the late 1850s.
Briefly summarize Marx’s arguments that slavery in the American south could not survive unless there was continuous expansion of territories where new slave plantations on fresh soil could be opened up.
Why according to Marx did the U.S. Democratic Party split on the issue of slavery in the presidential election of 1860, thereby enabling the Republican Abraham Lincoln to win?
In pp. 457-458 of Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Making of a Bourgeois Revolution,” (on-line at http://www.jstor.org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/stable/pdf/40971710.pdf? )
Hobsbawm argues that revolutions cannot be judged solely by what revolutionaries themselves intend to accomplish. What are his stated reasons for this judgement?
On pp. 460-463 Hobsbawm argues that efforts to deny the historical importance of the French Revolution of 1789-99 by some historians in the late 20th century were at least partly motivated by the supposed influence of Karl Marx on the view of that event as bourgeois revolution, even though Marx himself had little to say about the event. Who were the thinkers, then who in fact first interpreted that event as a revolution of the bourgeoisie against monarchical and aristocratic society as identified in Hobsbawm essay?
On pp. 466-469 of his essay, Hobsbawm acknowledges that there was no self-identified “bourgeoisie” at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Yet he maintains on pp. 470-472 that such a social class existed by the end of the Revolution (and its aftermath under Napoleon) by 1815. Briefly identify the circumstances that in Hobsbawm’s view created a bourgeois class consciousness among people who merely thought of themselves as individuals rather than as a social group before 1789.