Charles G. Sellers, Historian Who Disappointed Post-War Consensus, Dies


The historian Charles G. Sellers, whose work on America in the early 19th century helped subvert the postwar consensus that democracy and capitalism developed together, died Thursday at his home in Berkeley, California, showing that they were more often at odds than in reality. He was 98 years old.

His wife, historian and philosopher Carolyn Merchant, confirmed the death.

The son of a Carolina farm boy and oil executive, Dr. Sellers was inspired by his own family’s rise to material wealth, even while denouncing the competitive, commodified capitalist lifestyle that engulfs them and idealizes the lives they – and America’s – left behind. . “Capitalism commodifies and exploits all life, I remove it from my life and everything I can learn,” he said at a conference in 1994.

Such language is often used by Dr. It caused Sellers to be labeled as a Marxist. He was not one, but a radical in both his writings and politics—especially at the University of California at Berkeley, where he spent most of his career in the 1960s.

He was best known for his 1991 book “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,” in which he argued that the rapid expansion of capital and industry at the time did more than just create a new economy; It changed everything, including the way people worship, sleep, and even have sex.

Such changes were largely unwelcome, and the passionate reaction of most Americans consolidated the coastal elite as president, most famously in the rise of Andrew Jackson, who vetoed the Second Bank of the United States in 1832.

Dr. Sellers hated Jackson’s pro-slavery sentiment and his policies of expulsion from India. But he argued that the primary object of the Jacksonians’ hatred was capitalism and its benefactors, not Black people or Native Americans. It also showed that by the end of his second term, Jackson’s movement, torn by internal contradictions and chosen by mercenary interests, had largely collapsed.

“He saw the Jacksonians as the last great expression of a democratic sensibility doomed to overthrow by a capitalist bourgeois sensibility,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton.The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln” (2005), Dr. He further developed several themes of Sellers’ book.

The impact of the book was profound, at least within academic history. A conference held in London in 1994 was dedicated to this, and the concept of market revolution became a constant part of the space’s skyline.

Historian Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2007, “The seller’s thesis was the one that started thousands of theses.” “Evidence of market revolution appeared everywhere; It seemed to explain everything.”

Charles Grier Sellers Jr. He was born on September 9, 1923, in Charlotte, NC. His ancestors were Dr. His father, whom Sellers later described as “two mule farmers,” had moved to the city as a young man to attend business school. and when the younger Charles was born, he was fast rising as a manager at Standard Oil. Charles’ mother, Cora Irene (Templeton) Sellers, worked for a church community that supported missionaries.

Charles’ parents were strict Presbyterians, and although he later rejected religion, he colored his childhood and continued his dedication to progressive causes later on. As a teenager, Charles became interested in civil rights; He later recalled attending the NAACP meeting, where he was one of only a few whites among hundreds of Black attendees.

He studied history at Harvard, but delayed his graduation until 1947 to join the army. He later returned to North Carolina and earned his doctorate. He studied history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1950. He taught at the University of Maryland and Princeton before moving to Berkeley in 1958. He remained there until his retirement in 1990.

Dr. Sellers’ first marriage to Evelyn Smart, like his second marriage, ended in divorce with Nancy Snow. He was survived by his brother Philip along with his wife; sons Grier and Steen; daughter Janet; and two grandchildren.

Dr. One of the first things Sellers did upon arriving in Berkeley was to attend the local chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality. Working with the division, she fought against housing and job discrimination around Berkeley, and in 1961 traveled with a unit to Mississippi to support the Freedom Riders. Dr. Sellers was arrested, but released on a suspended sentence.

In 1964, he was among the first and most vocal faculty in Berkeley to support the Free Speech Movement, which opposed the administration’s efforts to curb campus activism.

His involvement began when he saw one of his colleagues arrested and put in a police car during a protest. Here, Dr. Sellers joined several students surrounding the car for hours.

He remembered sitting on top of the car as he passed another colleague.

“Charles, what are you doing there?” his colleague asked.

“What are you doing there, Waldo?” Dr. Sellers responded by quoting his hero, Henry David Thoreau, who was imprisoned for not paying taxes as a protest against slavery and the war against Mexico. (“Waldo” refers to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited Thoreau in prison.)

Dr. Sellers’ radicalism earned him a few friends among the faculty, but the soft-spoken Southerner became an inspiration to Berkeley’s more militant students. He introduced Malcolm X when he came to speak on campus, and later spoke to a crowd of 7,000 at an anti-Vietnam War rally.

His activism did not break his scholarship. In the 1960s, he produced two volumes of an estimated three-book biography of President James K. Polk; second, “James K. Polk, Continental: 1843-1846” (1967), won the prestigious Bancroft Award.

Dr. Sellers spent the next twenty years working on “Market Revolution,” which he did not publish until a year after his retirement.

The book nevertheless evokes the counterculture of the 1960s – both its depiction of a precapitalist America drowning in communal life and free love, and Dr. The conflict behind a veil of democratic reconciliation in Early America, Sellers says, as postwar academic historians who seek to hide the reality of class reject their work.

“I was alarmed when historians armed the United States for the Cold War by removing class consciousness,” he said at the 1994 conference in London. “Disguising as democracy suffocates exploitative capital, their mythology of consent-based democratic capitalism has purged egalitarian meaning from democracy.”

“Market Revolution” made waves even before it was released. It was commissioned as part of the Oxford History of the United States series, but its editor C. Vann Woodward – a liberal Southern historian who was also educated at Chapel Hill – turned it down for being too critical and pessimistic about the early period. American History.

Oxford University Press eventually published the book, but outside of the index. It aroused intense admiration, but it also generated tremendous criticism – Dr. Historian Daniel Walker Howe, who worked briefly under Sellers, wrote a book called “What God Made: America’s Transformation, 1815-1848” (2005). , many people like Dr. He saw it as a direct criticism of Sellers’ work.

“This taste of the 1960s makes a lot of people uncomfortable about the ‘Market Revolution,'” Amy S. Greenberg, a historian at Pennsylvania State University, said in an interview. “But he is a writer as well as a historian, and his painting idealizes time.”

Despite extensive research for the third volume of Polk’s biography, Dr. Sellers never finished it. Instead, a few years ago, Dr. He gave Greenberg his voluminous notes.First Lady: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk(2019).



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