Working Lives on the Mississippi and Volga Rivers. Nineteenth-Century Perspectives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.10050Keywords:
rivers, labor, race, barge hauler, African AmericanAbstract
Throughout the nineteenth century, major rivers assumed multiple roles for the emergent nation-states of the western world. The Thames in England, Seine in France, and Rhine in Germany all served as fodder for a growing sense of national identity. Offering a unity and uniqueness, the rivers were enlisted by poets, artiss, and writers to celebrate their country's strengths and aesthetic appeal. The Mississippi and Volga Rivers were no exceptions to this riverine evolution. At the same time, however, less vocal populations experienced the rivers differently. To African Americans--enslaved and free--laboring on the Mississippi offered a freedom of movement unknown to the land-bound. While employed on steamships, African Americans escaped the vigilance of an overseer with the possibility to escape bondage. Still the work was demanding and relentless. To the burlaki, the Volga was taskmaster and nurturer. But for both groups, laboring on the rivers resulted in connections that were immediate, intimate, exacting, often tedious and brutal concomitant with marginalized lives, consigned to society's fringe. Still, the lives shaped by working on these rivers, produced rich cultures revealing alternative riverine histories. In these histories, the rivers possessed an agency, enshrining an ambiguity in humans' kinship to the environment; a complexity often missing in the national narratives.
References
Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Harvard UP, 2008.
Balmont K. Poems About the Volga River. Available at https://dversam.ru/en/stihi-o-reke-volga-bogatyi-byl-barin-strast-nekrasova-k.html.
Barca, Stefania. “Ecologies of Labor: An Environmental Humanities Approach.” Through the Working Class: Ecology and Society Investigated Through the Lens of Labor, edited by Silvio Cristiano, Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2018, pp. 25–34. doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-296-3
Barca, Stefania. “Laboring the Earth: Transnational Reflections on the Environmental History of Work.” Environmental History, vol. 19, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3–27. doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emt099
Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Vintage Books, 2014.
Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. H. Bibb, 1849.
Bogan, Lucille. “Levee Blues.” Document Records, BDCD-6036, 1923–1930.
Botkin, B.A. A Treasury of Mississippi Folklore: Stories, Ballads and Traditions of the Mid-American River Country. American Legacy Press, 1955.
Bogolyubov, N. The History of the Ship. Book on Demand, Ltd., 2015.
Bradley, B. “Mary Wheeler: Collector of Kentucky Folksongs.” The Kentucky Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 1982, pp. 54–60.
Bremer, Fredrika. The Homes of the New World—Impressions of America. New York, 1853.
Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. William Morrow and Co., 2006.
Buchanan, Thomas C. Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World. U of North Carolina P, 2004.
Busch, Jason, et al. Currents of Change: Art and Life along the Mississippi River, 1850–1861. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2004.
Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. U of North Carolina P, 2004.
Cohn, David. Where I Was Born and Raised. U of Notre Dame P, 1935.
Cowan, William Tynes. The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative. Routledge, 2005.
Crowley, John. “Shack Bullies and Levee Contractors: Bluesmen as Ethnographers.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 28, no. 2–3, 1991, pp. 135–162.
Daniel, Pete. Deep’n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood. Oxford UP, 1977.
Daniel, P. The Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. Pantheon Books, 1998.
Davis, Winchester. Interviews. 1–3 Jan. 1977; 8 Jan. 1977. Oral History Collections, Percy Library, Greenville, MS. 27 March 2013.
Dyl, Joanna. “Transience, Labor and Nature: Itinerant Workers in the American West.” International Labor and Working Class History vol. 85, 2014, pp. 99–117.
Dyson, Michael D. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. Civitas Press, 2007.
Economakis, Evel G. “Patterns of Migration and Settlement in Prerevolutionary St. Petersburg: Peasants from Iarslavl and Tver Provinces.” Russian Review, vol. 56, no. 1, 1997, pp. 8–24. doi.org/10.2307/131483
Ely, Christopher. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. U of Illinois P, 2002.
Evans, David. “High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood.” Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From, edited by Robert Springer. UP of Mississippi, 2006.
Gilyarovsky, V. My Wanderings. 1928. Book on Demand, Ltd., 2018.
Gooch, Catherine. “I’ve Known Rivers:” Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture. 2019. U of Kentucky, PhD dissertation. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1125&context=english_etds
Gould, E. W. Fifty Years on the Mississippi; or, Gould’s History of River Navigation. St. Louis, 1889.
Greene, Daisy Miller. Interview. 13 Dec. 1976. Oral History Collections, Percy Library, Greenville, MS. 27 March 2013.
Hines, Alisha. Geographies of Freedom: Black Women’s Mobility and the Making of the Western River World. 2018. Duke U, PhD dissertation. https://hdl.handle.net/10161/16874.
Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. U of North Carolina P, 1999.
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2013.
Jones, Robert E. Bread upon the Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703–1811. U of Pittsburgh P, 2013.
Kaye, Anthony E. Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. U of North Carolina P, 2007.
Kelman, Ari. “In the Shadow of Disaster.” The Nation, 15 Dec. 2005. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/shadow-disaster/
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. The New Press, 1993.
Longfellow, H.W. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings. 1847. Edited by J.D. McClatchy, Library of America, 2000.
Mary Wheeler Collection, McCracken County Public Library Digital Collections. Paducha, KY. https://digitalcollections.mclib.net/luna/servlet/McCracken~13~13
McCoyer, Michael. “‘Rough Mens’ in ‘The Toughest Places I Ever Seen’: The Construction and Ramifications of Black Masculine Identity in the Mississippi Delta’s Levee Camps, 1900–1935.” International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 57–80. doi.org/10.1017/S0147547906000044
Merrick, George Byron. Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: Recollections of Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863. 1908. Andesite Press, 2015.
Miller, David C. Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Cambridge UP. 1989.
Mizelle, Jr., Richard M. Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African-American Imagination. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
Mizelle, Jr., Richard M. “Black Levee Camp Workers, The NAACP, and the Mississippi Flood Control Project, 1927–1933.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 98, no. 4, 2013, pp. 51–530. doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.98.4.0511
Montrie, Chad. Making a Living: Work and the Environment in the US. U of North Carolina P, 2008.
Morris, Christopher. The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando De Soto to Hurricane Katrina. Oxford UP, 2012.
Nekrasov, Nicholas Alexeievitch. Lyric Poetry. 1858. Detskaja Literatura, 1976.
Nekrasov, Nicholas Alexeievitch. Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? 1869. Translated by Juliet M. Soskice, 2006. Project Gutenberg, ed., 2011. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9619/pg9619-images.html.
Nikitin, Afanasy. Voyage Beyond the Three Seas, 1466–1462. 1472. Raduga Publishers, 1985.
Olearius, Adam. The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia. 1662. Stanford UP, 1967.
O’Daniel, Patrick. When the Levee Breaks: Memphis and the Mississippi Valley Flood of 1927. The History Press, 2013.
Pasquier, Michael, editor. Gods of the Mississippi. Indiana UP, 2013.
Peck, Gunther. “The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History.” Environmental History , vol. 11, no 2, 2006, pp. 212–238.
Sears, John. Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. U of Massachusetts P, 1994.
Sensbach, Jon F. “‘The Singing of the Mississippi’: The River and Religions of the Black Atlantic.” Gods of the Mississippi, edited by Michael Pasquier, Indiana UP, 2013, pp. 17–35.
Spencer Robyn. “Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 79, no. 2, 1994, pp. 170–181. doi.org/10.2307/2717627
Thorpe, T.B. “Remembrances of the Mississippi.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 12, 1855, pp. 25–41.
Troutt, David Dante, editor. After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina. The New Press, 2006.
Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. 1863. Penguin Books, 2001.
Vinogradov, D.V. “The Image of the Barge-hauler in Proverbs and Sayings” Russian Speech, vol. 2, 2013, pp. 125–127.
Vinogradov, D.V. Russian Burlaki’s Lexics in XIX Century. 2015. PhD dissertation, Institute of Linguistic Research at Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg Region.
Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. U of North Carolina P, 1993.
Wailoo, Keith, et al., editors. Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America. Rutgers UP, 2006.
Washboard Sam. “Levee Camp Blues.” Lyrics.com. Stands4 Network, 2021. https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/17349389/Washboard+Sam. Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.
White, Shane and Graham White. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Beacon Press, 2005.
White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, W.W. Norton & Co., 1996, pp. 171–185.
White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. Macmillan, 1996.
Zeisler-Vralsted, Dorothy. Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers. Berghahn Books, 2015.
Ziolkowski, Margaret. Rivers in Russian Literature. U of Delaware P, 2020.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
- License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
- Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
- User Rights
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
