“Seek, and You Will Find”: The Spatial Politics of African Americans Petitions for Civil War Pensions
“Seek, and You Will Find”: The Spatial Politics of African Americans Petitions for Civil War Pensions
Stanley Maxson explores the spatial politics of African Americans who mobilized the resources of kin and community in their struggle for Civil War pensions. He recasts African American interaction with the U.S. Pension Bureau as a question of competing information practices—the bureaucratic and the vernacular. Reconstructing a day in the life of Richard Blanton, a Black minister and pension sub-agent in Nashville, Tennessee, Maxson argues that African American struggles for pensions were based on the shared ownership of information, widely dispersed among people and across space.
Stanley Maxson explores the spatial politics of African Americans who mobilized the resources of kin and community in their struggle for Civil War pensions. He recasts African American interaction with the U.S. Pension Bureau as a question of competing information practices—the bureaucratic and the vernacular. Reconstructing a day in the life of Richard Blanton, a Black minister and pension sub-agent in Nashville, Tennessee, Maxson argues that African American struggles for pensions were based on the shared ownership of information, widely dispersed among people and across space.