Authentic assessment in an age of standardized testing

We have a friend, Jim Nehring, a historian and longstanding critic of standardized testing, who is now on a committee to help Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick think through the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). Here is a person who once set up a little table on the sidewalk in front of the State House and offered to give a sample of the history MCAS to the members of the legislature who were to vote on education reform. If “content” was important, Jim believed, well then let’s see what these important adults remembered from their history classes. Passers-by took the test, but, we’re told, the politicians dodged it and entered the State House from the back. A few staff people were sent down to take the test; most scored in the “Needs Improvement” category.

But, as Jim says, “When you’re in the opposition, you’re on the streets; when you’re in the majority, you’re on a committee.” He’s hard at work, looking for a way to address the accountability issue honestly and fairly. What sorts of things should our high school graduates know and be able to do? And how should we find out whether they have the intellectual qualities to be responsible adults?

Whatever the answers, we’re convinced standardized tests won’t be of much help in finding them. The subject of history is particularly harmed by the tests’ emphasis on endless individualized memory work. A standardized paper and pencil test tackles content but only imperfectly. As an example, although Nancy has studied Chinese history for many years, when she looked at the MCAS history test, she was unable to select the “best” response for the question on Sung China. It seemed as if the longer one had studied a subject, the less able she would be to eliminate responses. Moreover, that is only one way in which content is mishandled by standardized tests’ format: an inherently fascinating enterprise, full of stories about heroes and villains, challenges met and squandered, is made dull by concentrating on the trees instead of the forest—let alone the ways in which the forest is changing over time.

Learning history in the most engaging way emphasizes discussions: about cause and effect, about the importance of context, about the role that human personality can play in determining events and then about their long-term consequences for human action. It involves a student’s own research, and there is no time for that in standardized testing. Furthermore, in rewarding competition and acquisition of facts (as opposed to collaboration and dialogue about ambiguous evidence), standardized tests encourage the very opposite kind of thinking to that required of critical thinkers and mature citizens. History teachers have gladly taken on the role of enabling citizenship, whether directly or indirectly. But that enterprise is undercut by standardized testing.

Thus, history teachers have a special stake in new kinds of curricula and new forms of accountability. For Jim’s first paper before the MCAS committee, he was asked to present his main thoughts in one page. One of his statements was that we should be concentrating on twenty-first-century thinking skills instead of those that may have been more suitable for earlier centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, students were exposed to a narrow canon: Greek and Latin, the Bible (to keep “that Old Deluder, Satan” at bay), and enough reading and writing to continue these classically derived studies on their own. In the twentieth century, the information base was broader, but students needed teachers to gain access to it. Nancy distinctly remembers a course on Chinese history in her sophomore year in college. She had never heard of the Opium War and was totally shocked at the way the Europeans treated the Chinese. Now we are awash in information: teenagers can watch simulations of the Opium War on television and find all kinds of articles about China on the Internet. Students still need teachers but not so much to tell them things as to help them sort out information and to motivate them to access that information.

Most of us nod agreeably when we hear that we and our students will need “twenty-first-century thinking skills,” but what are those anyway? We’d like to propose a set of criteria that constitute a substantial and demanding—for evaluated and evaluator alike—basis upon which to develop metrics for the skills students need to perform well in history, among other subjects.

Observation. Too often teachers tell their students what they are seeing: in a picture, in a paragraph, in an essay. But what students need is not prepackaged interpretations; they need the tools to interpret such texts on their own. Those tools can be cultivated by building observation exercises into the regular curriculum. We can ask our pupils to look at the colonists’ artistic renderings of the Boston Massacre and compare those images with written versions of the same event. We can ask them to look at different sources, not just to gain information but to notice the different approaches that each source reflects. Consider what a newspaper journalist writing against a daily deadline yields, as opposed to the magazine author who has had months to interpret the evidence. In what ways are each effective observers? How does that recognition help historians years later? We can advise students not to rush to judgment, not to decide which observations are more meaningful before all the data has been collected. When they are reading a biography, at what point did they begin to think less well of the main character? And why? Will they agree to read a source like Mein Kampf even though they expect to disagree with it? A student who expects to observe carefully is a student who expects to understand, which is a deeper form of knowledge, one that lasts beyond the test.

Discrimination. All too often, teachers present facts as if each is as significant as any other. For example, although the reasons for needing a written constitution and the personal stories about that long hot summer in Philadelphia are often taught, once students and their teachers face the results of that summer’s labors (the Federal Constitution), they are often so intimidated that they either tune out or, at the other extreme, begin memorizing details. Too often, tests on the subject focus on such details as where the commerce clause is located, rather than the nature and need for such a clause and how it changed an evolving economy. Why do we lose ourselves in specifics? Because they are more black and white, easier to grade. Criteria for what should be asked and answered should be subject to scrutiny, by students as well as their teachers. Is something important because it was popular? Because it survived “the test of time”? What is the “test of time” anyway, and why do historians emphasize it so much? Why not invite our students to share in deliberations on the subject?

Synthesis. Discrimination may well be at the heart of our consideration of twenty-first-century thinking skills, and it permeates the others, but there are other skills that are also worth developing. Ted and some colleagues taught a course called Synthesis while he was the headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover. The purpose of the course was to demonstrate that while analysis is crucial—and the students were asked to demonstrate it in their discussions and papers—in modern problem solving, it should not come at the expense of interdisciplinary thinking. Problems are best solved by drawing on the full array of available tools. The course was also a way for Ted, a historian by training, to learn from others whose ways of thinking and of assembling evidence were different from his own. The teachers also found authors who were able to demonstrate the kind of synthetic thinking they were trying to introduce to their students. Students in the course who had never valued history felt valued themselves as their expertise was sought and then connected to the contributions of others. Assessment was based entirely on reasoning through issues and suggesting and defending solutions; information was used only to support those solutions and was assessed only in that context. In other words, no multiple choice tests!

Creativity: The students whom we admire are those who bring more of themselves into their studies. Feeding the teacher’s own ideas—and even words—back in biweekly tests is no longer engaging or challenging enough. Instead, we try to help them develop their own varied capacities. We must know what these capacities are, and we must consider them as we devise assignments. Years ago when we were in the history department at Andover, we had a visiting teacher from Eton who told us he felt that in our American history course, our students read too much and wrote too little. He said, politely of course, that our students listed facts without tying them to ideas that seemed important to them. He accepted our philosophy that generalizations without support were mindless and derivative, but he urged us to rethink our course so that the students’ own thinking would be more readily evoked. Giving students this practice is time-consuming work, for students and teachers. Moreover, students often feel hesitant to introduce their own ideas when they think teachers know so much more than they do. Indeed, they must be persuaded that we really want to consider their distinct perspectives. There is also a fine line, especially when a student is doing original research, between coming up with an original interpretation and coming up with a feasible one. Nothing works as well, however, as a research paper—with its familiar thesis that must be formulated and then demonstrated—to help students decide the purpose of the paper, shape the topic, and make themselves understood. Furthermore, especially if there is the frequent feedback that e-mail allows, teachers can judge the degree of creativity that has gone into the work even before it is presented. In the end, the students “own” their work in a way that no history test allows. Having that experience, as Mihali Csikszentmihalyi has demonstrated, enables the students to find and then to develop their own voices and to make their own contributions even at an early age.

These are a few examples of ways in which the history classroom can become a more vibrant and interactive place, the kind best suited for the development of the particular twenty-first-century thinking skills that we—and many others—have proposed. But what of assessment? The “old” way of judging one’s speed and accuracy of recall is relatively easy, which is why we teachers—and testing companies—have relied on it for so many years. Judging a student’s skills at using her imagination will turn out to be more tricky.

We have seen good work done toward this purpose at The Parker School in Devens, Massachusetts, a small public charter school for junior high and high school students, which we helped found in 1995. When studying historical topics, Parker teachers make frequent use of role-playing. This encourages empathy and allows students to tackle such complex, factually diffuse topics as the relationships between Native Americans and colonists or the development of industry at the expense of agriculture. By introducing different roles with different viewpoints and then asking the students to discuss them, teachers encourage young people to dig more deeply into the subjects. The deeper they go, the more engaged they often become. The first round of assessments of role-playing comes when the teacher pulls the class together to discuss its performance. She highlights certain sentences that had been spoken by the actors, asking for explanation and the students’ own evaluations as to accuracy, effectiveness, or where the sentence led the discussion. This is a low-stakes way to develop the discussion and to build into the students their own ability to assess themselves. Oral and written answers can be discussed, revised, increasingly graded, and as the students grow comfortable with these new kinds of assignments, “standardized” (meaning bubble-filling) tests can be devised from this more organic model of assessment. This approach has its risks, especially for the shy or defensive. But over time, the fear in facing that kind of challenge is more easily overcome.

Historians are just as interested as anyone else in making sure their students can use their minds well and can apply these minds to purposes both familiar and unanticipated, now and in years to come. Our graduates need more than just well-stocked memories and good work habits. They need to look far and wide, with all the breadth available and demanded in our curriculum. At the same time, they need to study historical failures as well as successes and to look at problems in individuals and in communities as do-able and solvable. They need to get deep down into the details, into the murky places, and sort them out. If our classrooms provoke and engage them, they will become more capable of embracing challenge as a spur to the well-led life.

Further Reading:

We suggest Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work (New York, 2000); Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy (New York, 1996); and Grant Wiggins, Assessing Student Performance: Exploring the Purpose and Limits of Testing (San Francisco, 1993). See also The Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Ted Sizer, who wrote his doctoral thesis in 1961 under the direction of Bernard Bailyn at Harvard, is University Professor of Education emeritus at Brown University, the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and former Headmaster of Phillips Andover Academy.

Nancy Sizer, who taught history at Andover and the Wheeler School, is the author of Crossing the Stage: Redesigning Senior Year (2002). The two have taught together at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, helped to found the Francis W. Parker charter public school in Devens, Massachusetts, and authored The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (1999), among other books.

John Ellis in the English Enlightenment

The eighteenth century was an important period in the history of botanical transportation and transplantation. Imperial and commercial ventures opened up new worlds for natural discovery, and the influx of new plant specimens into Anglo-European cultures generated new ways of seeing and categorizing natural objects. A few summers ago, my interest in this eighteenth-century story led me to the Linnean Society of London, named for the great Swedish botanist-taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).

My research focused primarily on John Ellis (1710?-1776), a merchant, amateur naturalist, and avid experimenter who became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1754 and who made several contributions to the society’s Philosophical Transactions. The conservator at the Linnean Society had on her desk a box of miscellaneous Ellis materials waiting to be cleaned and properly conserved. Learning of my interest in Ellis, she allowed me to examine the contents of the box, which contained six folders. In each folder was a dried plant specimen wrapped up in paper and labeled: “Pimento or Jamaican Pepper called Allspice”; “Eugenia”; “Browniae”; “Ellisia—Linnai”; “Mynica cerafina—candle berry or myrtle [ ] tree”; “Chlamydia from New Zealand.”

The distribution of such dried samples was essential to the task of taxonomic classification, which preoccupied many naturalists in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Ellis corresponded with Linnaeus whose system of classification and development of binomial nomenclature made him the center of botanical taxonomy in the eighteenth century. The period is often characterized as driven by an imperialist tendency to break down the natural world into static, abstract units, and one way of understanding the classificatory impulse is to see it as a means to control and dominate. However, botanical objects have histories, and tracing some of these histories makes it harder to generalize about Enlightenment forms of producing and controlling knowledge of nature.

For example, one of the seed packets had the words “Theobroma augusta from the D & D of Portland” written on one side and, on the other side, “A branch of the Theobroma augusta with a flower open’d before its Time in order to preserve it the better upon the sample because the full blown ones are extremely deciduous. The large leaf is one that grows remote from

the flowers, design’d to show the difference between them” (figs. 1 and 2). Lying in the packet were a large leaf and some smaller ones, as well as a tiny folded packet showing the outline of a five-petalled flower inside (figs. 3 and 4). The following words were written on the outside of this smaller packet: “A flower of the Theobroma augusta full blown, taken out of the calyx & expanded. The Antherae may be seen between the Lobes of the [minor?] nectarium—one of the petals is unfortunately broken off.”

Along with the packet, the folder contained a sheet of paper with a character description of the plant, written in Ellis’s hand, titled “The Generic Characters of a Plant which flower’d in the Hot House in Bullstrode in August 1768” (fig. 5). Morphological character descriptions, an important component of systematic botany, outline each part or “character” of a botanical specimen, allowing naturalists to identify the specimen. Ellis’s character description of the “Theobroma augusta” concludes:

As the Antherae grow in five distinct Bodies or Clusters I apprehend this plant must belong to the Class of Polyadelphia, tho’ for want of visible filaments it is somewhat irregular. There is no known genus with which the characters agree, tho’ the Theobroma comes the nearest, as having a Nectarium; but this has a double Nectarium, a Calyx divided into five leaves & five styles & therefore it cannot properly be a Theobroma. It had the habit of an hibiscus & grew to the Height of 7 or 8 feet, & branching. It died after flowering.

Here was a glimpse of botanical work in progress. This dried specimen had engaged Ellis’s curiosity, and his writing reflects the effort of learning to look at a botanical object with an attention nurtured by empirical modes of analysis. Still, Ellis’s words point to the difficulties facing systematists in this period. Mobile botanical objects enlarged the world by making more plants available for analysis. This expansion excited and fueled naturalists, even as it was a constant struggle (especially in the realm of botany) to order the specimens and consolidate the information they presented.

The exceptions and uncertainties of the systematic process are written into Ellis’s empirical description of the “Theobroma augusta,” in his acknowledgement that the specimen is “somewhat irregular” as a member of the class of Polyadelphia and, most obviously, in the hesitation expressed in the grammar of the following sentence, which nevertheless strives to be true to empirical detailed observation: “There is no known genus with which the characters agree, tho’ the Theobroma comes the nearest, as having a Nectarium; but this has a double Nectarium, a Calyx divided into five leaves & five styles & therefore it cannot properly be a Theobroma.” In attending to the particulars of the material object, Ellis confronted the limits of observation and classification: even with the dried specimen before him, he was unable to determine its genus, and such uncertainty inhered in the Enlightenment classificatory project.

In addition to illustrating the analytical and rhetorical work of botanical classification, Ellis’s packet highlighted the expansiveness of the natural history community. Ellis’s comment that the Duke and Duchess of Portland were the source of the sample points to the role of patrons in the history of botanical collection. Ellis held these patrons in high regard, and at one point he tried (unsuccessfully) to have Linnaeus name a previously unnamed genus “Portlandia,” “after that eminent patroness of botany.” An interest in botanical objects allowed people to communicate across class differences and, in fact, had the power to collapse all sorts of distances between people, including geographical, educational, and social.

The mobility of plant specimens enabled them literally to collapse the distance between people and places. A seed packet was one mode of transport, and the history of botanical collection is inseparable from the history of travel and exploration. For example, Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in HMS Endeavour (1768-1771) represents one of the touchstone moments of English imperial exploration, and Ellis’s seed packets offered a personal perspective on the aims and achievements of that voyage.

One of the large packets had the words “Chlamydia from New Zealand” written on the outside. I unfolded it and found that it was actually a sheet of newsprint containing “The Election List of the Royal Society MDCLLXXI (1771).” The packet contained some leaves, part of the flower stem, some seed pods, and a bit of woven cloth (fig. 6). As it happened, a botanist from the Natural History Museum in Londonwas working in the library that day. After examining the sample of “Chlamydia from New Zealand,” he declared it to be a sample of what is now called Phormium tenax, or New Zealand flax. The small piece of cloth, he said, was woven from the plant and was an example of one of its many uses, including the making of rope.

As I later learned, Ellis wrote a letter to Linnaeus on January 14, 1772, about his work with the “Chlamydia” specimens. Linnaeus had complained to Ellis in December of 1771 that he had not yet seen a single specimen from Cook’s Endeavour voyage. One of his favorite students, Daniel Solander (1733-1782), who had been living in London since 1760 as an assistant at the British Museum, served as a botanist on the expedition, and Linnaeus, feeling injured by Solander’s neglect, asked Ellis to intervene. 

Ellis’s January letter reports that he fulfilled this obligation and provides further details of the voyage, before expressing a “hope [that] I shall be able, in the spring, to raise the seeds of a most valuable plant, which they call Chlamydia, from the people of New Zealand, in the latitude of 40 deg. South, making themselves cloaks of it.” Ellis describes the specific features of the plant and then writes, “As the seeds of it were all destroyed by the sunshine and bad weather, I begged Solander to let me look at the specimens which they had preserved in papers, and was so fortunate as to find several seed vessels perfectly sound and full of ripe seeds. I have got some of them from him, and given them to our best gardeners, and have examined them in the microscope, and find the germ in the seed perfectly sound.” 

Ellis’s letter provides insight into the complex interpersonal relations that grounded the work of botanical collection and classification. Linnaeus, sitting at home in Uppsala while his students traveled all over the world collecting natural objects for him, could be quite peevish and demanding. Ellis’s letter suggests that he soothed the situation by bringing the wayward Solander into line. The letter was a dominant form of natural history writing in the eighteenth century, and one of its strengths was in negotiating interpersonal relationships and facilitating a productive, ongoing exchange of information. 

Ellis’s letter also highlights the contingency of the work of botanical collection and classification—seeds could be “destroyed by the sunshine and bad weather” and luck alone determined whether transported seed vessels contained “ripe seeds.” Linnaeus’s urgent desire to see specimens from the voyage reflects his awareness of such contingencies, in his fear that the objects would be destroyed before they could be analyzed and described, before their information could be recorded in a more pubic and permanent way. As he wrote to Ellis, if Solander did not publish his “botanical discoveries,” the “collection may long remain in the British Museum, a prey to moths and other insects, and the fruit of so much care, labour, expense, and hazard, may share the lot of but too many human projects, to the grief of the whole world.” Such contingencies attended all aspects of botanical collection and classification.

The story of the dried sample of “Chlamydia” at the Linnean Society was thus connected to several histories: to the expansion of empire and the exploration of the South Seas; to evolving methods of seed collection, transport, and preservation; to a network of naturalists and gardeners, bound together by a desire to expand knowledge of the natural world for both use and delight; to personal relationships involving mutual obligation and responsibility; and to emerging ways of seeing and describing natural objects.

Before I left London, I visited Painshill Park, a landscape park in Surrey created between 1738 and 1773 by the Honorable Charles Hamilton, the fourteenth child of the sixth Earl of Abercorn. Hamilton took the information gleaned during his first European Grand Tour in 1725 and followed the trend toward a more naturalistic style when designing his 250-acre pleasure garden. During my visit, the park was running an exhibit called “American Roots,” designed to show how Hamilton capitalized on the transatlantic trade in botanical objects in developing plans for his new landscape park. The effects of this trade are visible in the landscape of Painshill Park, now almost fully restored to its eighteenth-century appearance (fig. 7). The American Roots exhibit presented many live specimens of plants that would have been sent by colonial collectors to their English correspondents. In wandering around the exhibit, I encountered a “Theater of Plants.” According to the guide, such theaters were a feature of eighteenth-century landscape design and “displayed treasured plants in a graduated arrangement similar to seats in a theater.” There, sitting in a pot on the second tier, was Phormium tenax—Ellis’s “Chlamydia from New Zealand” (fig. 8).

Botanical objects like Ellis’s seed packets collapse the distance between the past and the present. They illustrate the ways that the classificatory impulse was not only an example of the Enlightenment project to abstract and categorize the natural world in order to understand and dominate it, but was also connected to living objects and to curious, engaged individuals—individuals like John Ellis, who recorded his observations of “Theobroma augusta” and “Chlamydia” with painstaking care. Learning to look at how eighteenth-century naturalists themselves learned to look at plant specimens deepens our understanding of Enlightenment natural history endeavors. Tracing the various histories—personal, empirical, horticultural, imperial—attached to botanical objects illuminates the ways the project of eighteenth-century botanical collection and classification was driven by a process of fruitful contingency.

Further Reading:

The best way to trace the history of eighteenth-century botanical exchange is to read the letters of those engaged in the process. The Linnean Society of London contains wonderful resources on the subject, and I am grateful to the society for permission to quote from the seed packets (transcriptions are my own). The American Philosophical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania also offer a collection of materials concerning transatlantic botanical exchange, especially the work of John Bartram.

Many letters are buried in archives, but letters of Ellis and Linnaeus, among several others, appear in the invaluable two-volume Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists from the Original Manuscripts, edited by James Edward Smith (London, 1821; Arno Press Reprint, 1978). To understand the colonial American context, readers should start with Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777 (Gainesville, Fla., 1992). Several previously unpublished letters of Peter Collinson, an English merchant engaged in botanical exchange and Bartram’s primary London correspondent, appear in Alan Armstrong, ed.,“Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .”: Selected Letters of Peter Collinson, F.R.S., 1725-1768 (Philadelphia, 2002). 

Readers interested in a general introduction to natural history endeavors in the eighteenth-century British world should examine two excellent collections of essays: Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996) and David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge, 1996).

To get a glimpse of some of the botanical objects collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during the Endeavour voyage, visit the Website of the Natural History Museum in London. The site contains information as well as illustrations by Sydney Parkinson (1745-1771), an artist who accompanied Banks on the expedition.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Stephanie Volmer is the managing editor of Raritan Quarterly. She recently completed a dissertation at Rutgers University titled “Planting a New World: Letters and Languages of Transatlantic Botanical Exchange, 1733-1777.”

Los Angeles before the movies

In 1887, the writer Charles Dudley Warner, who had (with Mark Twain) named the late nineteenth century the Gilded Age, visited a booming Southern California and assessed its frenzied appeal. “If the present expectations of transferring half-frozen Eastern and Northern people there by the railway companies and land-owners are half realized,” Warner said, “Southern California, in its whole extent, will soon present the appearance of a mass-meeting, each individual fighting for a lot and for his perpendicular section of climate.” Warner’s projection (his sarcasm aside) was only the latest symptom of a regional identity that had been taking shape since the end of the Civil War—an identity whose characteristic images and themes would be magnified and multiplied through the twentieth century. That we do not readily recognize the nineteenth-century part of this story owes, in a word, to the movies—or, to the wholesale naturalization of the Gilded Age imagery of Los Angeles in the era of the classical Hollywood cinema and beyond—the era of, as it were, mass culture. So strong have the signs and signals of this era been, encompassing not only the movies but also literature, art, and architecture, that we have neglected an entire, earlier way of seeing Los Angeles—and “Southern California.”

But the nineteenth-century invention of Southern California deserves our attention. It resulted in the creation of a mythology and iconography that continues to surround Los Angeles, even as the early origins and full implications of this “L.A. style” continue to escape our notice. In the aftermath of the Civil War, “Southern California” meant something very different than it does today. To the extent that the name signified anything at all, it functioned negatively—a covering term for all that was not San Francisco, a city catapulted into the mental geography of the nation by the Gold Rush. This was a broad and indeed amorphous notion: Southern California as the territory stretching from Stockton in the north to San Diego in the south. When the author Charles Nordhoff wrote of it in his popular 1872 book, California, he meant Stockton (the city due east of San Francisco) and all points south. “Southern California,” he stated, “which includes the San Joaquin Valley and its extensions, . . . as well as the sea-coast counties parallel with these, is the real garden of the State.” Yet by 1890 things had changed, and Southern California as we know it today had emerged—a region centered on Los Angeles and perceived in all of those ways that have seemed, until now, to be the pure product of the twentieth century: of the movies and television, of artists like Ed Ruscha and critics like Reyner Banham. An entire prehistory to such developments lies back in the nineteenth century. Recovering a modest portion of this prehistory’s images and themes—and situating them in their own historical moment—is the purpose of this essay.

That prehistory begins in the turbulent—the industrializing, urbanizing, and diversifying—years after the Civil War, when Los Angeles’s promoters projected the idea that one’s senses rather than one’s mind would be stimulated in their small corner of the tropics, that prospects of things like palm trees would rid the body of the external as well as internal (the spatial as well as subjective) constraints of the Eastern metropolis, relieving the body of too much crowding and divesting the mind of too much thought. It was an idealized picture, leaving out all manner of contradiction and bespeaking the class as well as racial position of its authors, and it took shape against the backdrop of a major trend in the political economy of post-Civil War Los Angeles: the Anglo-American expropriation of Californio land (Californios being the Spanish-speaking people born in California prior to its U.S. annexation) and the subsequent subdivision of that land for commercial purposes. By the 1880s real estate had emerged as a distinct, dominant, and segregating economic sector, a development that coincided with the spread of increasingly visual technologies of communication, especially photography. The result was the onset of a speculative as well as spectatorial habit, a joining of “speculation” and “spectatorship” (both words derive from the Latin for “to see”), as the trade in land and the trade in images now began a peculiarly intimate association in the history of Los Angeles.

Consider first H. T. Payne, a photographer who displayed nearly one thousand views of Southern California in 1876 at the nation’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In Payne’s views, collected in series like his “Semi-Tropical California,” equatorial plantings at the homes of leading citizens became agents in their own right—carriers of civilization in this latest imperial move westward. Palms and cacti draw the eye, mirroring the built forms of hearth and home and supplying the pictures with their very titles, as with Payne’s “CACTUS, Feb. 10th. 1876” (fig. 1). Here the subtitle names an early subdivider, N. C. Carter, who was developing the L.A. suburb of San Gabriel at the time. Viewed in isolation, the picture seems like an oddity, a strange testament to a lost era bound between tradition and modernity, the familiar and the exotic. But it was more than that: a first statement in a Southern California discourse that invited viewers to imagine their own tropical homesteads and to substitute their own names for N. C. Carter’s, as though transmitting their signatures upon the document (a contractual commitment was, after all, the characteristic goal of subdividers). In the flash of Payne’s camera, then, private property received a new and different look but one that already augured its own repetitive mass market—an early example of Southern California’s emerging tropical identity. Other examples included people themselves, as with Payne’s “Ladies in the Orange Grove” (fig. 2). A stately home presides over this improbable tableau, confirming the arrival of L.A.’s sun-splashed white newcomers in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

Such images gave no hint of the ugly colonial reality of nineteenth-century California, even if elsewhere Payne acknowledged L.A.’s shabby frontier appearance (see, for example, fig. 3). Ultimately Payne came no closer to the truth than to offer picturesque renditions of the region’s Catholic missions, established by Spanish friars in the late eighteenth century. His stereograph, “Mission San Gabriel,” was one such illustration, setting the monument within a frame of appealing decay (fig. 4). The depicted property was the origin of where, one hundred years later, N. C. Carter’s home would stand (as in fig. l), and where Carter himself would subdivide land as part of the entire area’s then quickening real estate nexus. Significantly, in the image of the San Gabriel Mission, Payne included the date of founding: “est’d, Sept. 8th. 1771,” which reminded the late nineteenth-century viewer that American history had a Pacific, not just Atlantic, component. In this telling, New Spain was to be seen as an ancestral ground prepared by the missionaries while America had carried out a revolution against Britain in the name of freedom. The missionaries, in turn, were to be seen as the progenitors of California landscape design—they had, after all, been the first to bring the palm tree, that most emblematic of tropical plants, into the region. All of this meant that such abuses as the forcible employment of Native Americans on the missions earned no mention, and ignoring the state’s long history of conquest and violence, the varied images of Payne’s “Semi-Tropical California” file thus leapt from the Spanish American past to the Anglo American future with hardly a word for what had come in between—that other geopolitical formation, Mexico, against which recent and bloody battles had been fought. This, finally, made the Spaniards’ acts of transplantation seem like divine favor, garnering the sympathy of promoters such as Benjamin C. Truman, who, in 1874, wrote, “The Anglo-Saxon pioneer found here a pueblo, the site of which had been selected with that almost intuitive recognition of the fitness of locality which seemed to be characteristic of the founders of the early Spanish settlements in the Occident.” For Truman (who had, among other things, reported on the Civil War for the New York Times), the Spanish American missions were “objects of profound interest.”

Projecting the world of the missions as the Romantic precursor to post-Civil War California, H. T. Payne and other promoters were assembling the elements of a new tropical identity for Los Angeles, and in this they were not alone. Indeed, by 1876, a group of promoters had begun to coalesce and to do exactly the same. They cited, if they did not outright copy, each other’s work. They produced imagery not only of palm trees and other decorative plants but also of commoditized things, like citrus fruit. Invariably, too, they found themselves checking their own promotional momentum, as when Benjamin Truman wrote, “No enchanter’s wand summoned up these orange groves, these fruitful vines, these waving fields of grain. Hard work and plenty of it wrought the miracle of transforming grove and thicket into these productive acres.” “Hard work” on the one hand and a “miracle” on the other, Los Angeles mirrored itself—magical and ordinary, artificial and real, blessed and damned—a dialectic of promotion that suited this prototypical culture industry, invoking truth and falsity at once and ultimately extending such values to language itself, which seemed by turns capable and incapable of representing the place.

In 1877, a promoter from Kansas, James De Long, who had been inspired by Charles Nordhoff’s California(1872), published his own short account, Southern California. He told of having toured several citrus groves and vineyards in Los Angeles County, reminiscing that “for several days the beauty of those lovely places haunted me, and I had almost come to the conclusion that what I had seen was merely imagination, and that such sights could not be found in 34 degrees north latitude in the United States, and so to satisfy myself I paid another visit and was fully convinced of the reality.” Reassured, De Long nevertheless insisted that “neither pen, pencil nor painter can describe those lovely places. They must be seen to be appreciated.”

Ironically it was De Long himself who also warned of the dangers of promotional excess, flatly stating, “Thousands of families have been ruined by the inducements held out in the glowing descriptions in hired newspapers, prize essays and stereoscopic views, in the interest of land speculators.” Ruin or not, the conventionalized identity of tropical Los Angeles had emerged in the short span of time since De Long’s source of inspiration, Charles Nordhoff, had published his own book in 1872. And when, in 1878, the travel writer Benjamin F. Taylor wrote of visiting Los Angeles, he expressed nothing but disappointment over the failure of the actual landscape to meet his expectations. “My idea of an orange grove,” he sighed, “was of an orchard where the trees laden with golden fruit sprang up from a smooth, green turf ‘of broken emeralds,’ that invited you to sit down on the dapple of a shadow every few minutes and be happy; of trees with a tropic brightness of foliage that would dispose me to listen to such fowls as the bulbul and sing gay little canzonets in two parts.” Instead he found and gave notice: “When you feel like reposing in a well-weeded onion bed you can take lodgings in an orange grove.”

By the 1880s, the outline of the region’s promotional image was set. The publisher of an 1883 guidebook chose to include tropically themed pictures of the sort that others had first put into circulation in the prior decade. His “Century Plant.—Residence of Mr. O. H. Bliss, Los Angeles,” cast the region’s flora as actors in the drama of development—in the subdivision, purchase, and display of private property (fig. 5). “There is a strange mingling,” the guidebook explained, “of mountains and plains, hills and valleys, gardens and deserts; and their unusual and unexpected combinations are ever ready to interest the intelligent observer and to confuse the careless sight-seer. Climate and seasons are unlike anything known in the Eastern States. The weather may be said to ‘let one alone’ physically, but it is always exciting [one’s] wonder and study.” Other guidebooks expressed similar sentiments.

William R. Bentley’s Hand-book of the Pacific Coast (1884), which featured the illustration, “Palm Trees, Los Angeles County” (fig. 6), recommended that a visitor to Los Angeles find “one of the numerous bluffs surrounding the city” in order to take in the view, and in doing so Bentley was merely repeating visual instructions from the previous decade—Benjamin Truman in 1874 saying that “the denizen of Los Angeles, or the stranger within her gates, need only ascend the first eminence north of its business streets, to look out upon a scene which rivals in picturesque variety any vision which ever inspired the poet’s pen, or fascinated the beholder’s eye,” or another promoter, A. T. Hawley, writing in 1876 that “from almost every point of view a splendid panorama of mountain scenery greets the vision, while from the higher lands the view embraces the valley reaching to the ocean,” or James De Long reflecting on “the most beautiful horizon that can be imagined” in 1877.

All of these projections shared literally in the long view—the panoramic form as applied to what was, in truth, a relatively open and modestly settled location. Los Angeles was developing but not in the manner of the walking city (its suburbs emerged before its downtown). This meant, in turn, that vision could be uninterrupted, and promoters made sure that their readers (and viewers) knew this, different as it was from the frenzied visual experience of the “great cities” of the East. When the sociologist Georg Simmel addressed the latter in his seminal essay of 1905, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” he considered it a kind of sensory overload whose discontinuous cycle of rapid-fire “impressions” had trained up the “intellect,” which was necessary in order to safeguard the integrity of one’s inner self. By contrast, the image of tropical Los Angeles sidestepped all such incursions and requisite defenses. “All over this beautiful landscape,” Bentley’s  Hand-book resumed, “are dark patches of orange, lemon and lime groves; palms, pepper, eucalyptus, . . . and a multitude of other plants, trees, and shrubs, that have, as if by magic, sprung into existence to adorn a scene beautiful beyond comparison.”

Here again was the dialectic of promotion: tropical Los Angeles had materialized “as if by magic,” but there was, in fact, evidence that reveled in displaying the artifice, as with one promotional photographer’s testament to the human labor and organization involved in transplanting such big plants as Bentley had catalogued (fig. 7). Such an image did not have to be marketed, but that it was marketed indicated a public appetite for it—a popular wish to assemble as well as disassemble such constructed landscapes. Meanwhile, Los Angeles was in the process of becoming an increasingly viewable place—the Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe Railroad Company determined, in 1884, to extend its rail lines to the city, leading to a rate war with the Southern Pacific and the onset of a land boom that put Los Angeles on the nineteenth-century map. As a result, more and more publishers of travel literature began to stock Los Angeles subjects.

The Ohio-based company, Ward Brothers, which produced an entire catalogue of the period’s typical “souvenir” albums, began a series on L.A. Its 1886 edition featured palm trees in various settings, juxtaposed with the missions where the plants had originally been introduced (fig. 8) or depicted within the grounds where they had more recently been transplanted (fig. 9). Visitors too were arriving in greater numbers, among them a popular writer named Emma H. Adams, whose To and Fro In Southern California appeared in 1887. Adams proposed that “the apparent rapid flight of time” was a “singular feature of life” in the region. “How to account for this influence is difficult,” she admitted. “There seems to exist in the country a something which cheats the senses. Whether it be in the air, the sunshine, in the ocean breeze, or in all these combined, I can not [sic] say. Certainly the climate is not the home-made, common-sense article of the ante-Rocky Mountain States. It is a product of consummate art.” Here again tropical Los Angeles seemed both real and artificial. The weather cast “an unreality around life,” said Adams. “All alike walk and work in a dream.” This was, in short, a senseless landscape. By evening time, Adams insisted, “I find myself unspeakably tired, but have had no appreciation of the passage of the day. Had I been at home, on the southern shore of much maligned Lake Erie, I should have ‘sensed’ the going by of nine honest, substantial hours, though I had been just as busy.” In the accretion of moments like these, the double-sidedness (not to say double-talk) of L.A.’s promotion held out the empty truth, and still people wanted it. “Now,” Adams herself concluded, “I am not finding fault with this state of things. I rather like it. I think all the people do. It is in keeping with every thing [sic] else on this coast. Every thing [sic] is new and peculiar and wonderful.”

Such talk of climate and landscape drew the skepticism of Charles Dudley Warner, who had, again, visited Los Angeles in 1887 amidst the commotion of its railroad-to-real-estate boom. Invoking the Social Darwinian ideas of the time, Warner wrote, “One of the great uses of New England in the world is that of an object lesson, for the devotees of the development hypothesis, of the survival of the fittest.” But “Southern California,” he forthrightly declared, “offers to illustrate the converse.” For Warner, the mammoth migration of Americans animating the Los Angeles land boom constituted “both in quality and volume, the most striking phenomenon of modern times.” Yet, unlike the movement of people tied to the Gold Rush of 1849, the “present emigration is not for adventure at all, and primarily not for gold; it is a pursuit of climate.” It was, in other words, the consequence of a “human desire for dwelling in a place genial and tolerant of human physical weakness.” Warner was pointing to the much advertised healthfulness of the region—but this was the rub. Did not the promotion of a tropical Los Angeles ultimately underwrite the grandest paradox of them all—that a domesticated tropics should entail, in the very act of domestication, a migration of disease and mortality as terrible as anything that promoters and their audience took to characterize the tropics themselves? In this regard, the promotion had been fraught all along. Didn’t Warner now demonstrate the falseness of the commodity once more? As he dryly insisted, “the buyer, amid the myriad signs of ‘Real Estate for Sale,’ ought not to be confronted by so many legends of ‘Undertakers and Embalmers.’ It chills ardor.” In other words, deaths still occurred, despite the city’s happy promotion, and if the publicists of Los Angeles had wanted, they could have further boasted possession of the American West’s first crematorium.

Warner was fascinated by the place all the same. A few years later, in 1891, he published an entire book on Southern California. “It must be confessed,” he wrote at that time, “that there is a sort of monotony in the scenery as there is in the climate,” and he proceeded to judge that “the present occupiers have taken no hints from the natives. In village and country they have done all they can, in spite of the maguey and the cactus and the palm and the umbrella-tree and the live-oak and the riotous flowers and the thousand novel forms of vegetation, to give everything a prosaic look.” Warner did not like this look, but the promotional words and pictures of the previous two decades had projected it consistently, just as a picture presumably taken by the photographer Carleton E. Watkins, titled “Street View in Los Angeles” and published in William Seward Webb’s California and Alaska of 1890 (fig. 10), did nothing so much as evoke H. T. Payne’s earlier tropical take, “CACTUS, Feb. 10th. 1876.” Imitation or, as one guidebook put it in 1886, “emulation” had become the name of the game.

It was the ongoing predicament of tropical Los Angeles—and of a promotion already beginning in 1883, 1886, and 1890 to be exhausted by its own success. The movies, when they arrived, would simply give all of this second life, and in turn we would eventually receive the postmodern estrangements of an artist like Ed Ruscha, whose book of 1971, A Few Palm Trees, took the palm-planted landscape of Hollywood and made it seem unfamiliar once more. See, for example, figure 11, where (as in all of the book’s images) the city receives a literal whitewash, leaving only the trace of isolated palm trees behind and, opposite them, captions that disclose their true locations (in figure 11, the address is “5529 W. Sunset Blvd.”). What is this if not a late twentieth-century take on—and part of—a process begun a century earlier?

Can we, then, truly understand such comments as A Few Palm Trees, such period styles as the classical Hollywood cinema, or such symbolic formations as the twentieth-century “culture industry” itself without stopping to recall the likes of H. T. Payne, Benjamin Truman, and Emma H. Adams, or to review the words and images that they and others disseminated, or to remember their now forgotten views of late nineteenth-century Los Angeles? The answer, if we care to look, lies in the years before Hollywood—in the nineteenth not twentieth century—and in the still not moving pictures of a moment waiting to be seen anew.

Further Reading:

An early survey of the region’s social and cultural history is available in Carey McWilliams’s Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York, 1946). McWilliams’s narrative style shares much with that of Kevin Starr, whose Americans and the California Dream (New York, 1973) provides a particularly good introduction to the intellectual history of the state as a whole. David Wyatt masterfully traces what he calls The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge and New York, 1986). A different, more workaday aspect of the garden motif is treated in John E. Baur’s The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870-1900 (San Marino, Calif., 1959). Groundbreaking books in the scholarship of the region’s social history are Leonard Pitt’s The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley, Calif., 1966) and Richard Griswold del Castillo’s The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (Berkeley, Calif., and London, 1979). Anders Stephanson discusses the entire era’s key expansionary dynamics in the middle chapters of his Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995). For the imperial nexus marking Los Angeles itself, see William Deverell’s state of the art Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). The photography of the American West is authoritatively examined in Martha Sandweiss’s Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, 2002). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” which appeared as part of their Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Amsterdam, 1947), was written (not coincidentally) from their home in exile: Los Angeles.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

James Kessenides is assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. This essay grows out of his current project, a cultural history called Before Hollywood: A Prehistory of Los Angeles.

Following a time-honored American literary tradition (see, for instance, the Leatherstocking Tales) and suited to our own age of random access, this well-designed, masterfully researched, and highly readable third volume of A History of the Book in America appears after the first volume but before the second, which is not yet published. No matter; with the OED‘s likely abandonment of printed and bound volumes, the luxurious ambition and material heft of these volumes (and their relative affordability, at $34.95 for the paperback of volume 1) is welcomed in any order. The new volume’s “industrial book” evokes a discourse of Franklinian “industry,” hinting towards an “industrious book,” making its virtuous and commercial way through nineteenth-century culture. The “industrial book” moreover compellingly suggests an artifact that condenses within itself the labors of many men, women, and children (the latter were often employed in binding and hand coloring); their technologies and their machines (or, à la Thoreau, perhaps the other way around); and their economic, communications, and transportation networks.

Some books of these midcentury decades fall easily under the rubric—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, famously churned out by steam presses running round the clock, or Moby Dick, whose “Cetology” chapter wryly links the industrial whale to the codex. And yet, of course, by “book” the series means not only books but that harder-to-name object of study, sometimes a printed artifact, sometimes any inscription or anything in print’s general neighborhood (handwriting, say, but also Dickens’s Little Nell in Parian ware), as well as the practices or attitudes associated in some way with print (reading, for example, and diary keeping but also union organizing, copyright case law, school curricula, literary taste, etc.). As to the parameters of 1840 to 1880, the editors don’t elaborate. But by eluding traditional periodization, the identification of this four-decade period of fervid geographic, demographic, and cultural expansion (vaguely, antebellum through Reconstruction, encompassing the “American Renaissance”) with “the industrial book” liberates this volume from the thrall of curricular- and discipline-bound chronologies.

The introduction describes the 1876 meeting of the American Book Trade Association (ABTA) in Philadelphia and its centennial fanfare. While a trade show may seem a pallid starting point, it helpfully positions literature, literacy, and literary culture in the demystified context of trade and finance, of masculine clubbiness and display, and, as importantly, of failure: the ABTA folded two years later. During the period this volume covers, book production and distribution began, if very unevenly, to assume its modern form: printing shifted from a craft to an industry, printers became publishers, authorship became a profession, literary property became regulated, and reading became, increasingly, a value as much as a practice.

As its loose frame indicates, this volume is a collection of essays providing specialists’ syntheses of broad areas of inquiry, rather than an overarching narrative. Organized thematically, around such matters as manufacturing and labor, trade and government, serial publication, ideologies and practices of reading, and cultures of print, and moving, generally, from economic and institutional history to cultural history, each of the eleven chapters (many divided into mini-essays by various authors and all supplemented by rich bibliographic essays) is charged with covering the whole period. The most elegant essays—among them, Meredith McGill’s on copyright, Bruce Laurie’s on labor, David Henkin’s on urban print, Louise Stevenson’s on books in the home, Susan Williams’s on authorship—offer a panoramic history in and around the period and zoom in on representative events. Henkin, for example, contrasts the Philadelphia the friendless young Benjamin Franklin famously encountered with Horace Greeley’s New York a century later, which welcomed that ambitious youth with a riot of raucous and abundant signage. Like these wordy urban streets, the capacious “book” takes in a wide range of cultural forms and locations, from the African American Amos Webber’s diary, kept from 1854 to 1903, to the professionalization of learned culture through journals, research universities, and scholarly societies, to the circulation of religious tracts in staggering numbers during the same period.

In his essay, “The Census, the Post Office, and Governmental Printing,” Scott Casper writes, “What seems a largely administrative history—of statistical categories, postal regulation, and a printing bureaucracy—is also a political, social, and ideological one” (179). Indeed, sections about new technologies and new business practices (on manufacturing and on international trade, for example, both by Michael Winship) not only provide the statistics that make this a durable reference book—drawing out and interpreting data of this massively documentary epoch from census and congressional reports—but also suggest directions for social, cultural, and literary history. For example, the robust international trade in print in the midcentury—which shows, among many other things, a spike in exports to Brazil, Colombia, and Spain in 1865-6 (152)—cries out for interpretation and research, especially given the hemispheric and transatlantic turn in American studies.

Amid these riches, readers may still wish for more in the field or approach that most interests them or that they most lack in their own reading and research. In this volume, for example, there is not even an index entry for “children,” “children’s literature,” or “juvenile literature.” Nonetheless, I’ve annotated my copy with some two dozen such index entries, which is by way of saying that this is a topic that is inescapable in the period and, in my view, worthy of a sustained examination rather than glancing references. At the 1876 American Book Trade Association meeting, here offered as a framing heuristic, eighteen of the ninety-five publishers’ displays featured schoolbooks and/or juvenile books (20-23); whole schoolrooms (in one case with a real kindergarten teacher and students demonstrating the Froebel system to spectators) were replicated throughout the exposition (30-31). While a portion of one chapter is devoted, importantly, to the trade in schoolbooks, nothing is made of their content, and yet children of the nineteenth century who read “the industrial book” in the 1840s and ’50s became its adult consumers and producers in the 1870s and ’80s.

But it’s in the nature of such a magnificent beast as A History of the Book in America to stimulate and even to invite alternate genealogies. In what amounts almost to a prospectus, John Hench, formerly vice president of the American Antiquarian Society, suggested as much, writing in 1994 that the “multivolume work we have undertaken to produce will be a giant step toward a new understanding of American culture through a systematic, collaborative examination of the mediating role of print, but it will certainly not be the last word on the subject. Did we believe that it would be definitive, we would have substituted the article ‘The’ for ‘A’ in the title.” Such scholarly generosity is a marker of this magisterial series, whose volumes one anticipates eagerly and will return to again and again.

Further Reading.

John Hench’s article, “Toward a History of the Book in America,” appears in Publishing Research Quarterly 10:3 (Fall 1994).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Patricia Crain is associate professor of English at New York University and the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000); she is working on a book about children’s literacy in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States.

In November 1755, as the Seven Years’ War brought hostilities to western Pennsylvania, several hundred German settlers walked some sixty miles to Philadelphia alongside a wagon heaped with the scalped and dismembered bodies of their neighbors. Once in the city, they escorted the display to the governor’s house and, according to one observer, threw the body parts at the door of the State House, “cursing the Quakers[‘] Principles” (78). Peter Silver’s powerful book details how, beginning in the 1750s, colonists’ displays and descriptions of mangled bodies helped to create the increasingly meaningful rhetorical categories of “Indians” and “white people.”

European Americans’ construction of racial categories is well-worked ground, but Silver’s extensive research, trenchant analysis, and elegant prose make the tale clearer and newly chilling. The unprecedented mingling of diverse Europeans in the middle colonies did not at first lead to mutual understanding. Different religious and ethnic groups saw themselves as the “chosen people” in the midst of a disturbing Babel. What began to bind them together was not a belief in European superiority but the opposite—a shared feeling of victimization at the hands of Indians and other enemies. Silver’s ability to convey the terror of living in a war zone makes the transition comprehensible. As he explains, Indians fighting against the colonial settlements intended their attacks to be terrifying. They succeeded. The most common response to wartime violence was moving away, exactly the desired outcome of Indian attackers from the Seven Years’ War through the early 1790s. As European settlers stressed their common suffering, they omitted cause and context. A rhetoric that Silver calls the “anti-Indian sublime” appeared in English and German newspapers, near-illiterate petitions, academic essays, and sensationalistic plays and poems. Standard images included babies torn from their mothers’ wombs and “clotted gore” smeared on walls and floors, all evidence of Indians’ devastation on a “bleeding country” (87-94).

One of Silver’s great achievements is never letting the inflated rhetoric blind him to more complicated realities, not only the larger wartime context but also the limits of the rhetoric itself. A growing sense of common victimization did not miraculously do away with existing linguistic and cultural barriers. And, as the 1755 display of bodies in Philadelphia reveals, not all Europeans were included in “the white people.” The anti-Indian sublime was as much about lambasting particular non-Indians as dividing whites from Indians. As Silver explains, writers usually defined Indians as “co-bogeymen” (xxii) with the French, with Quakers whose efforts to restore peace seemed to betray the western settlements, and with the British during the Revolution. For failing to serve “white people’s” interest, Quakers got some of the worst of the name-calling. The Episcopalian Reverend William Smith in 1755 called Quakers “the bloodiest People in our Land” (198). While Philadelphia’s press had once called western settlers worse than savages, by the time of the Revolution, most accounts cast them as much-suffering heroes. Erasing the colonies’ own British heritage, the Philadelphia paper Freeman’s Journal charged in 1781 that “the Britons are the same brutes and savages they were when Julius Cesar invaded them above 1800 years ago” (251). Continuing British savagery was evidenced by the desire for empire and the willingness to ally with Indians.

Yet some Indians were exempted from the category of “Indians.” Fear of enemy attacks made most settlers concerned that neighboring Mohegans or Delawares were treated well and thus not angered into violence. When wandering bands of men trying to protect their homes from enemy Indians occasionally failed to distinguish among Indian groups, other Pennsylvanians usually condemned them. Still, the rhetoric of Indian-hating decreased opportunities for peace by making colonial and Indian authorities reluctant to come together to conduct treaties.

As fighting continued after the British lost the Revolution, the rhetoric became more purely anti-Indian. Some writers advocated extermination, either literally killing all Indians or expelling them to the west. However, Silver resists the simplistic determinism so common to analysis of the rise of race. He points out that it was nineteenth-century reformers opposed to anti-Indian sentiments who became some of the strongest proponents of Indian removal (an irony that continued through the federal allotment and termination policies). As Silver makes clear, simply labeling conflict of the past as racism “is lazy, and one of the most interesting things about the whole tangled history of American intergroup relations turns out to be not how much they have stayed fundamentally the same, but how drastically they have changed” (xxii).

A warning: this book takes a long time to read. It is filled with sentences as beautiful as that one, sentences that this reader had to savor, rereading them for their poetry and their significance. Silver takes us deep into the terror of violent interactions. To give only one example of Silver’s astute combination of comedy and tragedy, he judges Hugh Brackenridge’s Death of General Montgomery “not a good play” and reveals that “Brackenridge’s own preface observed that it would have been improved if he had spent more than a few weeks writing it.” Yet Silver gives enough of the play’s garish imagery, including Montgomery’s blood seeping into the snow outside Quebec’s walls, to prove that it was “little short of a masterpiece” as political writing (234). Throughout, the book shows how fear led to hatred but never excuses the results.

This care is most evident in the discussion of the infamous systematic killing of pacifist Moravian Indians at the Gnadenhütten mission in 1782. At first, Silver writes with the demoralized air of someone who has spent too much time meditating on a horrific event: “however much one tries to understand the events of those days and to take them apart step by step, something cold and alien—an irreducible emptiness—is likely always to remain at the core of what happened.” Yet he picks himself up in the next sentence, recommitted, as throughout the book, to a seldom-flinching “effort at historical sympathy” and goes on to describe both the ghastly details of the slaughter and the frustrations and fear that led to it (267). By this point in the book, Silver’s historical sympathy has been so effective that we can almost believe the war-weary settlers who later claimed that the hymns coming from the mouths of unarmed men, women, and children sounded like war songs.

Silver’s superb analysis and stunning prose create unsettling implications for other times of war. Lambasting Quakers’ efforts at peace and toleration as “collusion with killers” (108) and accusing thoughtful people of being “tasteless” (85) for discussing context when white bodies had been damaged—these attacks on reason are hardly confined to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. In Silver’s skilled hands, they are both historically specific and frighteningly timeless.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Kathleen DuVal is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She is currently writing a history of the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast.

Contagious disease requires three things to spread: First, an infectious agent must be present. Second, there must be a population of susceptible individuals. And third, there must be connections between them. It is in his exploration of this last requirement—connections—that Paul Kelton makes a major contribution to our understanding of the biological encounter that decimated the indigenous populations of the American Southeast from 1492 to 1715.

The gist of Kelton’s argument is that the spread of imported pathogens through the Southeast was not “inevitable.” Instead, he says, it was “contingent on the type of colonial system that Europeans chose to impose upon the region and its indigenous inhabitants” (xxii). The most devastating “epidemics thus followed rather than preceded the spread of European influence” (99).

As the title suggests, Epidemics & Enslavement puts the emergence of a commerce in native slaves at center stage. The growth of the English-Indian slave trade after 1659 laid the groundwork for a series of deadly epidemics at the end of the seventeenth century. It did so by uprooting people, by altering lifeways, and by changing patterns of contact far and wide. Around 1659, for example, the Westo Indians fled from Virginia to the Savannah River under pressure from English expansion and the Powhatan Confederacy. But the Westos retained their trade ties to Virginia and used English firearms to enslave Hitichis and Muskogees they transported north to the Old Dominion. These attacks, Kelton says, led to the coalescence of the upper Creeks from a variety of Muskogee communities and allowed the Cherokees to expand into the vacated territory (113, 121).

Power and people shifted constantly. Like Allan Gallay before him, Kelton demonstrates that the effects of the English-Indian slave trade extended deep into the continent. In 1679 Carolina slave traders enlisted Shawnee allies to enslave and expel the Westos. Soon the Yamasees joined the Shawnees on the Savannah River and ensconced themselves as suppliers of Cherokee captives to the Carolinians. The Upper Creeks—former Muskogees—sought to avoid enslavement themselves by raiding westward and offering Choctaw captives to English traders.

The result for native peoples, Kelton says, was a “highly vulnerable state of warfare, slaving, resettlement, and malnourishment when smallpox spread through the region in the last four years of the seventeenth century” (143). This epidemic is the centerpiece of Kelton’s story. The pestilence started in Virginia in 1696 and followed trade routes south and west all the way to the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi Valley. The connections and conditions created by the slave trade facilitated its spread and made it more deadly. Compact, fortified villages, for example, rendered transmission of the virus more likely. But in the face of constant war, this was a living pattern that made sense (145).

War and smallpox were bad enough. But southeastern natives also suffered from a wave of follow-up infections—what Kelton terms “aftershocks”—from 1698 to 1711. Some, like certain dysenteries, may have been present before Columbian contact. But others, like influenza, yellow fever, and measles, were newcomers from the far side of the Atlantic.

The havoc went from bad to worse. Population collapse meant that warriors had to travel farther in their search for human quarry. By 1708, one Englishman reported that South Carolina’s slaving tribes had “to goe down as farr on the point of Florida as the firm land [would] permit” to find captives (186). The Yamasees in particular could not get their hands on enough slaves to satisfy either the Carolinians’ demands or their own desire for trade goods. When they saw the Carolinians cultivating the powerful Choctaw nation, they came to fear enslavement themselves. Thus, in 1715, they attempted a preemptive strike in what became known as the Yamasee War. The Yamasees’ defeat and enslavement by the English capped two decades of spiraling decline.

Kelton’s account of the syncretic interplay between contagion and colonization is utterly convincing. But he is so attached to this interplay that he sometimes excludes whole realms of possibility from his analysis. In addressing areas of knowledge where the evidence is thin, it seems wiser to leave such possibilities open than to dismiss them prematurely.

This is particularly true in Kelton’s effort to demonstrate that the smallpox outbreak of 1696 was the first widespread epidemic to afflict the Southeast. He claims, for example, that earlier imported plagues could not have reached the Southeast from Mexico because there is “no credible evidence of direct links” between the regions and “no goods of Mesoamerican origin have been found at southeastern archaeological sites” (50). Direct links, however, are not necessary. What matters is the chain of contagion. Nor do we need to find Nahua gold in Alabama Indian mounds to understand that person-to-person connections extended to Mexico and to other places as well.

Kelton is likewise too eager to dismiss the possibility that genetic differences might have made Native Americans more vulnerable to Old World pathogens. Genetic resistance, he says, “only develops after tens of thousands of years” (44). “The genes of indigenous peoples of the Americas, therefore, did not make them any more or less vulnerable to epidemic diseases than were Europeans” (46). Thus all variations in immune response had to be situational, a consequence of the slave trade and the mayhem of colonization.

Unfortunately, evolutionary biology does not support Kelton’s claim. One example will suffice. In 1950, Australian pest control experts deliberately introduced a pox virus called myxoma into the country’s burgeoning rabbit population. The effort was a phenomenal success. Myxomatosis killed ninety-nine percent of the rabbits infected, and their numbers plummeted. But then, very quickly, the population stabilized. Two things had happened: The myxoma virus evolved to become less virulent. (An infection that kills too effectively may die out itself.) But the rabbits also evolved. By 1957 many Australian rabbits could survive even the most virulent strains of myxoma.

Obviously humans do not breed like rabbits. But this does not mean genetic selection takes “tens of thousands of years.” As the Australian experience suggests, the timeframe depends upon many variables, including the lethality of the microbe and the speed with which it kills. Native Americans today may well have more resistance to some imported plagues than their ancestors did five hundred years ago.

Epidemics & Enslavement grapples with some of the biggest questions confronting early American historians. Opinions differ, and arguments hinge on the most fragile threads of evidence. None of us has it all figured out. But Kelton’s appraisal of the southeastern smallpox epidemic of 1696 has filled in one piece of the puzzle, showing how the upheavals of colonization augmented the killing power of disease in the Southeast.

Further Reading:

For additional reading reflecting a variety of views on the topics addressed here, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); Frank Fenner and Bernardino Fantini, Biological Control of Vertebrate Pests: The History of Myxomatosis; An Experiment in Evolution (New York, 1999); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002); David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976); and Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1987).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Elizabeth Fenn is an associate professor of history at Duke University and the author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (2001).

In The King’s Three Faces, a brilliant, bounding study of Anglo-American political culture, Brendan McConville smashes a false idol of American history: the “neoliberal perception” of the colonial period “as a long prologue to the revolutionary crisis” (3). McConville rejects the notion that Britain’s North American colonies were populated—as it might appear in the hindsight of a later, more democratic society—by “protorepublicans, readers of Country pamphlets, rising assemblies, plain-folk Protestants, budding contract theorists, protocapitalists, protoproletariat, protoliberals, (and) modernizers” (4). To the contrary, he argues, those colonies were inhabited by ardent, purple-eyed king worshippers, perhaps the most devoted royalists in all of the British Empire.

In the first part of this three-part monograph, McConville examines the royal political culture that developed in British North America after the Glorious Revolution. McConville discovers this political culture—committed to limited, Protestant monarchy—in an astoundingly vast array of phenomena and events. Folk rituals such as the Pope Day parades by which colonial crowds commemorated the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot; public holidays such as the anniversaries of accession on which the monarch’s greatness was proclaimed; and consumer goods such as the mass-produced prints of the king and queen, which American colonists hung alongside portraits of their own kin: these are but very few of the ceremonies and artifacts that integrated colonial America into the British empire.

In tracing the rise of this political culture, McConville offers an interesting spin on anglicization: the thesis that eighteenth-century North American society grew to resemble more closely that of the British Isles. As McConville explains, the richly royalized political culture that flourished in the American provinces never took root in the metropole, where a large administrative bureaucracy doled out ample patronage, where the liturgy of the state church gave meaning to people’s spiritual existence, and where an organized system of land tenure tended to preserve the social order. These assimilative forces all bound home islanders to their nation but allowed them to remain phlegmatic toward the Hanoverians’ monarchical rites (8). Thus in McConville’s ironic formulation, Americans were becoming more British than was in fact British.

In the second part of his study, McConville reveals just how firmly royalism had taken hold of the American imagination. To accomplish this, he explores the myriad rhetorical purposes for which British colonists invoked the king’s name. On both sides of the Zenger Crisis, for example, disputants waved the banner of Georgian liberty. Much more intriguingly, enslaved African Americans in several instances justified rebellion by proclaiming the righteous English king’s supposed intention to abolish slavery. As these moments demonstrate, colonial Americans envisioned their monarch as a benevolent defender of their rights. At the same time, however, they also imagined the king in neoabsolutist terms. McConville explains that by midcentury, as if to repair the dynastic breach of an earlier generation, Americans had restored to the Hanoverians the glory, if not the prerogative, of divine right. Resulting in part from a popular revival of Stuart remembrance, this process culminated in use of “solar imagery and other absolutist metaphors” to describe the Georges (203).

Why was it, then, that such reverential colonists came to desecrate the king? To a considerable extent because George III fell short of their vaunted expectations. Despite Americans’ pleas for royal intervention, King George never protected his loving subjects from a corrupt Parliament or a scheming ministry (neither of which figured heroically in British Americans’ imagined constitutional order). So profound was Americans’ resulting disillusionment that, as McConville details in Part III, the Revolutionary crisis touched off a frenzy of anti-royal iconoclasm.

Regrettably, McConville does not question the limitations of political culture as a mobilizing force; rather, he presumes its efficacy to integrate the nation and reconcile its members to their sovereign. His evidence makes it easy for readers to do the same. But just how potent was this political culture? What other social and political ends did it serve? Was it conducive to more consensus than conflict? Did every colonist who disdained royal festival, like the Puritan Samuel Sewall, ultimately come to accept it (55)?

These questions are not simply academic but would rather seem to press upon McConville’s central thesis. For even if we join McConville in his assumption that American colonists fêted the Crown out of heartfelt regard for their king, the question persists, why? Did British colonials tote about his majesty’s miniature portrait because they thought that a hereditary sovereign monarch was an essential component of benevolent government? Or did colonial Americans, situated at the far reaches of the Atlantic, adulate the Crown because to do so confirmed their identities as trueborn Englishmen? For McConville the answer is clearly both, but he does not weigh these considerably different impulses against one another. In fairness, he likely cannot: such intentionality does not readily yield to rigid quantification. Still, somewhere in this dichotomy, false though it may be, rests the balance of royalism and republicanism. Under the former interpretation, the Declaration of Independence and the republican constitutions written in its wake would seemingly represent a monumental abrogation of past principles. But under the latter, the War for Independence would be more remarkable for patriots’ violent repudiation of national allegiance than for the republican institutions they subsequently adopted.

Readers who wish to burn their own golden calves must lace up their boots, for McConville ranges far and wide. His analysis of rough music and skimmington as rituals for the enforcement of early American gender norms ranks among the very best treatments of the subject. And yet not until a belated and maddeningly brief discussion of patriarchy and family roles does McConville relate those folk customs to the rise and fall of royal America. (Would that the Elizabethtown Regulars who flogged a notorious wife beater on his “Posteriors” had instead branded the royal arms on that same spot [183].) Similarly, McConville’s chapter on imperial reform offers a fruitful exploration of the many imaginative proposals floated by imperial consolidators for the reorganization of Britain’s eighteenth-century dominions. Aligning this book with a late renaissance in imperial history, this chapter points the reader toward a breathtaking vista of Albion and Indian what-might-have-beens. It further discloses certain colonists’ willingness to resolve their political grievances within a constitutional framework, a testament to their thorough integration into the British Empire. And yet this chapter stands apart from the rest of the book in its detachment from the ceremonial and material culture by which British North Americans avouched devotion to the Crown.

All of these observations amount to little more than praise by faint damnation, for The King’s Three Faces is a compelling book. If McConville argues for the power and pervasiveness of royal political culture with the fervor of a recent convert, that is because he is. “Like most scholars of my generation, I accepted the whiggish schools’ central imperatives,” McConville confesses. “Belief that some form of modernization drove change in colonial America still dominated the historiography of the period, and I endorsed its logic” (6). McConville’s new faith may not entirely displace the old republican and liberal orthodoxies, but it will certainly force a rethinking of their creeds.

Further Reading:

On the anglicization thesis, see John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966); T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467-99; and Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), especially chapter 8. Readers will find a take on anglicization similar to McConville’s—that the American colonies were becoming more “English” even as England was becoming something rather different—in James A. Henretta’s “Magistrates, Common Law Lawyers, Legislators: The Three Legal Systems of British America,” in Christopher Tomlins and Michael Grossberg, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America: Early America, 1580-1815 (New York, 2008): 555-92. In its concern for political culture, McConville’s study contributes to the so-called “newest political history,” which includes works by Joanne Freeman, Simon Newman, Jeff Pasley, Len Travers, and David Waldstreicher, to name only a few of its practitioners.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Benjamin H. Irvin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Arizona. He is now completing a book about the Continental Congress and the political culture by which it endeavored to promote American independence.

If you have even a passing interest in seeing what the history of the book looks like when it achieves intellectual maturity, then The Pilgrim and the Bee is certainly worth your time. If (like many of us) you wonder about how to forge productive links between close reading and the enterprise of social history, Brown’s carefully crafted examples will illustrate how to make a book clasp and an end-rhyme resonate with equal force. This important study has implications for a wide range of readers. So first the pilgrim, and then on to the bee.

The pilgrim of Brown’s title is the reader we think we know from history and the reader we think we are. Undertaking reading as one would undertake a pilgrimage, this reader advances line-by-line, word-by-word across any stretch of text. This reader cannot (and does not) abide distraction or delay; divergences from the straight and narrow path amount to intellectual and moral cul-de-sacs, sloughs of despond serving no ultimate purpose and disconnected from the true task at hand. He’s the reader whom studies of “the word” in early New England typically connect to the onset of “redeemed subjectivity.” His progress as a reader leads to the progress of his self. It is as though the nineteenth-century realist novel reader—the reader of a genre organized around the linear unfolding of time—were transported back to the seventeenth century. This reading subject accrues his sense of place and of self through sustained attention to the (assumed) protocols of reading in Western culture: left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end.

Yet Brown’s close and sensitive attention to the materiality of early New England’s steady sellers—commonplace books, sermon notes, elegies, and other devices of devotional literacy—discloses a constant companion to this first reading subject, one whose practice of reading has been largely ignored: the “alvearial” reader or bee. As Brown describes it, the “reading program” he unearths “is defined through two central tropes: on one hand, the pilgrimage, wherein readers treat texts as continuous narratives and follow a redemptive journey, a progressive telos or ‘growth in grace’; and, on the other, the alvearial, wherein readers, like bees, extract and deposit information discontinuously, treating texts as spatial objects, as flowers or hives which keep readers active but anchored” (xii). The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation. Likewise, early New Englanders were incited to achieve a form of sacred subjectivity that moved fitfully forward and back, side to side, and occasionally hovered…like a bee. In Brown’s account, the accent falls on book culture as opposed to the theological (although he does not neglect the relevant theology). He reminds us that the culture of the codex associated with the steady sellers of this period—Christian conduct manuals—was distinctly unnovelistic and nonlinear. Not only did these conduct manuals mimic the various sermonic forms already familiar to us from this period, which were themselves decidedly nonlinear, the indexical features of the codex encouraged episodic and selective engagement of the text contained therein. The pilgrim and the bee, it turns out, are one and the same. An ingenious figure who oversees the enterprise of Brown’s “reader-based” reassessment of early New England’s literature, Brown’s reader is both more and different than we could have imagined (4). As Brown writes, “the bee metaphor has a particular power for devout settlers. It integrates the other common tropes for reading in early New England: the bee suggests the directional motion of the pilgrim, while it evokes the hovering stasis of the ruminator” (10).

If the pilgrim-bee conjunction is one of the prevailing threads knitting this rich study together, it has other notable features as well. First, Brown reminds us just how deeply it matters what kind of text—what genres, what printed formats—we designate as a period’s primary literary archive. He also helps us to rethink what constituted the “literature” of early New England and to identify how this revised sense of the early American “archive” should change our view of this period. He explains, “Book trades and probate research has recovered, along with catechisms, primers, and schoolbooks, a set of devotional works…—manuals of piety, guides to conversion, psalmbooks, and sermons—that, with scripture and almanacs, were the popular literature of early New England.” These devotional works, Brown argues, “reorient our sense of literary culture in the period away from colonial-born ministers, private diarists, or unpublished poets” (7).

In addition to stressing this relative popularity and influence of the steady sellers, The Pilgrim and the Bee also emphasizes that whatever materials dominated daily life, their mode of usage also deserves attention. Early New England writing, like literary culture more generally, is, according to Brown, best understood in terms of the dynamic “communications circuit” that the history of the book encourages us to recognize. Reader-based literary history yields a more nuanced sense of not only this but of any period’s literature; and the history of the book, when practiced as what Brown calls “interpretative bibliography” (15), has the potential to refigure in important ways the practice of humanities scholarship and teaching. Here, Brown’s attention to that communications circuit reveals the broad extent to which early New England’s steady sellers were part of a performative “theater of literacy” (5) in which print culture—a term that Brown rightly questions for its abstracting tendencies (14)—functioned variously as a totemic object, as a resource for oral reading, as a funereal gift, and as part of the transaction of ritual fasting. Given these varied functions, it should not surprise us that the famous “heart piety” of early New England “worked alongside what might be called ‘hand piety,’ the tactile feel of and indexical movement within and across godly books, and ‘eye piety,’ the visual contemplation of material images” (71). Finally, Brown ends his book with a highly suggestive chapter on the relationship of book culture to Amerindian literacy and its relationship to England. He demonstrates the central disciplinary function that the “written record as artifactual wonder” played in the “civilizing” and “salvational” Protestant missions, as well as the ways in which the requirements of those missions underwrote the emergence of a New England book culture (181). 

Near the start of his book, Brown writes the following:

[H]ere is my wager: if I can convince you that the physical properties of texts—their visual appearance, tactile feel, and oral performance—were central to a society conventionally understood as iconophobic and ascetic, where communication is in the “plain style” and where expressive aesthetics are feared, then the case for book history’s significance will be all the stronger when we turn to individuals and societies where such conditions do not prevail (13).

For this reader, at least, that wager has been won.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Lloyd Pratt is assistant professor of English and core faculty in African American and African studies at Michigan State University.

For at least four decades, political, economic, and business historians have asserted that the rise of the corporate organizational form in the late nineteenth century represented the emergence of a new and formative institution of power and authority in modern America. While recognizing the considerable scholarship on early American corporations, these historians’ prevailing assumption has been that the corporation remained a relatively marginal institution in American political economy until the late nineteenth century, after which it began to take on a more central role in organizing politics and the market. In Founding Corporate Power, Andrew Schocket argues that the institutionalization of the corporation in the economy and in politics actually took place much earlier—and in fact was an integral part of the “Revolutionary settlement” that emerged in the early republic.

Focusing on Philadelphia, Schocket documents how the city’s elite, deposed from political office in the years after the Revolution, turned to the formation of corporations to gain control over resources and decisions in the economic sphere, where their “money, technological and legal expertise, and financial savvy” still garnered them considerable influence (205). Men like William Bingham, Thomas Willing, and Robert Morris managed to gain corporate charters to engage in large-scale collective projects such as banking, canal building, and municipal works. Whereas other scholars have seen the emergence of early corporations as a way for policymakers to assemble capital, organizational skill, and other resources to pursue large-scale public projects and economic development, Schocket makes the case that an implicit political agenda was also at work among Philadelphia’s “corporate men,” who used the corporate form as an institution for reasserting their influence over policy and for restoring power to the city’s elite. Using countless examples of the efforts of corporate promoters to subvert regulatory oversight, to sway policy, and to influence the flow of commerce, Schocket builds the case for how the economic elite of Philadelphia reasserted power and authority by using the corporate form to counter the leveling effect of the Revolution.

At the heart of the book lie three well-researched case studies of the rise of corporations in banking, canal building, and municipal projects. In each case, Schocket accounts for not only the public economic benefits created by early corporations but also private consolidation of power and influence in the hands of insiders. The Schuylkill Navigation Company’s efforts at canal building and civil engineering, for instance, opened up the urban market for farmers and coal miners in Philadelphia’s hinterland and enhanced access to inland markets for goods produced by the city’s artisans and entrepreneurs. Yet, at the same time, the state’s charter to the Navigation Company shifted power to the company’s private board, which controlled commerce by setting toll rates and terms of use on a public waterway. The board exploited this authority to influence electoral politics and public policy.

Schocket insists that in none of the cases he examines was the corporate form the only legitimate institutional option for mobilizing resources for large-scale ventures. In particular, he points to state-funded projects and private voluntary efforts. These could undertake large-scale projects without concentrating public power in the hands of economic elites. For specific examples, he points to the land banks of the colonial era and state-funded canal projects, most notably the Erie Canal, but neither is examined in much detail.

One of the more interesting choices made by the author was to focus this study on Philadelphia, a city often characterized in the economic historiography as a place dominated by small artisans and entrepreneurs rather than by corporations. Schocket argues, generally convincingly, that the city’s vibrant artisanal and entrepreneurial culture rested on an underlying infrastructure, which provided utilities, transportation to markets, and credit, that was created and controlled by early corporations. While these were certainly not equivalent to the large vertically integrated corporations of national scope that emerged a century later, the author makes a good case that they had a formative influence on the shape and terms of trade in the regional economy.

Schokett’s interpretation of early corporations as vehicles for the restoration of elite power and authority, on the other hand, is more vulnerable. While he makes a compelling case that elite Philadelphians attempted to use the corporate form to assert authority in the market and in economic policy, it is unclear that the corporation, as it evolved in the United States, was the best institution for that purpose. As the author himself points out, the number of charters granted by Pennsylvania and other states increased rapidly in the early republic and expanded even more quickly with the passing of general incorporation laws in the second third of the nineteenth century—undermining the usefulness of corporations as a means of protecting exclusive privileges for the few. While the British corporations of the eighteenth century, which served as models for early American corporations, may have helped preserve the power of elites, changes to the corporate form in the American context (and especially the liberalization of incorporation laws) made it more difficult for the institution to be used for such purposes. Schocket interprets the proliferation of corporations as evidence that Philadelphia’s “corporate men” were able to “co-opt” opponents of the institution, but the growing number of incorporations in the period is perhaps better understood as evidence that democratic critics of early corporations were able to “co-opt” the corporate form and turn it into something other than a vehicle of special privilege. In fact, expanding access to incorporation allowed the form to be used by challengers who sought to upset the status quo of an industry as much as by those who sought to use it to consolidate their power and influence. In the end, this ability of newcomers to use the corporate form to challengeincumbents in the market is at least as important a legacy of early American corporations as the socioeconomic stratification the author describes.

Nevertheless, Schocket should be given much credit for shifting our attention from the late to the early nineteenth century and for his bold interpretation of the relationship between the evolving politics of the post-Revolutionary era and the emergence of the corporation. By examining the political backdrop to the emergence and institutionalization of the corporation in the early republic, he has helped reintegrate the issue of power into our understanding of the rise of corporations and their place in American political and economic development.

Further Reading:

An extensive literature has developed over the last four decades on how the rise of the large-scale corporate organizational form reshaped the structure of the economy and politics in modern America. Some of the landmark works on this topic include Robert Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967); Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44:3 (1970): 279-90; Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (New York, 1988); Richard R. John, “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand After Twenty Years,” Business History Review 71 (1997): 151-201.

Historians, of course, have long recognized the importance of the corporate form in early America but largely viewed it from the perspective of an instrument used by policymakers to promote economic development. Studies in the tradition of the “commonwealth” school as well as the legal histories in the tradition of J. Willard Hurst tended to interpret early American corporations in this way. Examples of work in this tradition include Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York, 1947); James Willard Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780-1970 (Charlottesville, Va., 1970); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought, 1776-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1948); Harry Scheiber, “Private Rights and Public Power: American Law, Capitalism, and the Republican Polity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yale Law Journal 107:3 (1997): 823-861. Schocket tries to position his work differently: “Rather than considering the state’s actions toward corporations, it asks how corporate men influenced the state through the activities of corporate insiders and allies, such as lobbying, applying financial leverage, and mobilizing voters dependent upon corporate officers’ good graces” (13).

While many northern industrial cities and regions have been used as settings for examining the rise of corporations in the economy and politics, Philadelphia has often been used as a counterpoint to illustrate the persistence and competitiveness of small-scale proprietary capitalism. See, for instance, Phillip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885 (Cambridge, 1983); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia, 1983); Donna Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia, 2001); Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1995).

For an interesting discussion of the expanding use of corporations in the United States (particularly in banking) as it differed from Europe, see Richard Sylla, “Early American Banking: The Significance of the Corporate Form,” Business and Economic History 14 (1985): 105-23. On how corporate law evolved to allow newcomers to challenge incumbent corporations as vehicles of privilege see Stanley I. Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (Philadelphia, 1971).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

R. Daniel Wadhwani is an assistant professor at the University of the Pacific. His book, Creating Citizen Savers: Origins of the Market for Personal Finance in the United States, will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

History explains; film shows. But how does film show slavery, and to what end? And why is slavery such a vexing problem in film, in museums, in national parks, or any medium of public historical representation? To ask these questions is almost to pose a commonplace: why is evil, oppression, trauma, and great conflict in the past difficult to confront in a modern democratic society?

Some answers can be found in the history of representation itself. In the wake of the Civil War, Americans began constructing images of slavery that were almost pure wish-fulfillment. By the 1880s and 1890s, a literary calculus was at work in sentimental fiction about the Old South. The freedpeople and their sons and daughters were the bothersome, dangerous antithesis of the noble catastrophe that the Confederacy’s war increasingly became in reminiscence and in Lost Cause tradition. Omnipresent, growing instead of vanishing, blacks had to have their place in the splendid disaster of the war, emancipation, and Reconstruction. So in the works of several widely popular dialect writers (the Plantation School), especially Thomas Nelson Page, blacks were rendered faithful to an old regime, as chief spokesmen for it, and often confused in–or witty critics of–the new. The old-time plantation Negro emerged as the voice through which a transforming revolution in race relations dissolved into fantasy and took a long holiday in the popular imagination.

In the Gilded Age of teeming cities, industrialization, and political skullduggery, Americans needed another world to live in; they yearned for a more pleasing past in which to find slavery. Page, and his many imitators, delivered such a world of idyllic race relations and agrarian virtue. An unheroic age could now escape to an alternative universe of gallant cavaliers and their trusted servants. Page’s best-selling world of prewar and wartime Virginia was inhabited by the thoroughly stock characters of Southern gentlemen (“Marse Chan”), gracious ladies (“Meh Lady” or the “Mistis”), and the stars of the show, the numerous Negro mammies and the loyal bondsmen (“Unc’ Billy,” “Unc’ Edinburgh,” or “ole Stracted”). In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery, and bring harmony to postwar plantations by ushering Southern belles and good Yankee soldiers to reconciliation and matrimony. How better to forget a war about slavery than to have faithful slaves play the mediators of a white folks’ reunion?

By the time D. W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon began the collaboration in 1913 that would produce Birth of a Nation (1915), this genre of American fiction had become a nearly impenetrable fog of melodrama and racism through which most Americans could hardly see alternative visions of slavery and its aftermath. Griffith, who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, came of age in the heyday of the Lost Cause. A lover of the Southern martial tradition and Victorian melodramas, and eager to portray a lost rural innocence in the new urban age, he was in New York by 1908, acting and making short films.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached in 1909-11, Griffith made several Civil War melodramas. In these films, stock scenes and characters abound: rebel soldiers going off to war with black field hands cheering, genteel but sturdy Southern white women, Confederate and Union soldiers (sometimes brothers) shaking hands while wrapped in the folds of their flags, and ubiquitously, loyal slaves saving or dying for their masters. Indeed, during the semicentennial of the war, American theaters were saturated with Civil War films lasting fifteen to twenty-five minutes, with some ninety-eight produced in 1913 alone. The films’ subtitles repeatedly portrayed the slaves as “happy, contented, and well cared for . . . joyous as a bunch of school children,” as though the obsequious characters on screen did not adequately convey the message. Black characters in these films themselves carry the historical lesson that slavery was not the cause of the war, and its destruction was the lingering misfortune of the nation and the black race. Not only do black mammies and butlers die saving their white folks from marauding Yankees, but in some films, whole families and slave quarters defend plantations, and thereby the South, from its destruction.

In Birth of a Nation, Griffith gave his well-plied audiences the message not only that blacks did not want their freedom, but also that emancipation had been America’s greatest disaster. The lasting significance of Birth of a Nation is that it etched a story of Reconstruction, and of the noble restoration of white supremacy, into American consciousness. The film’s epic visualization of a necessary and noble birth of the Ku Klux Klan to thwart the schemes of deranged radicals and sex-crazed blacks makes this the most controversial film in American cinematic history. Indeed, visually and historically, especially given the persistence of neo-Confederate and genteel white supremacist traditions in America even at the turn of the twenty-first century, historians and filmmakers alike are still responding to the messages ingrained in our historical memory by Griffith’s epic.

Can we imagine any other film carrying such a politics for so long? A friend tells me that in her high school social studies class in 1970 in St. Louis, Missouri, a group from the Black Student Union broke into the classroom, tore the reel from the projector, and burned Birth of a Nation in front of teacher and students. Perhaps only some forms of pornography and some Cold War films may ever have caused such acts of resistance to the images on a screen. Such visceral responses to Birth of a Nation suggest that Americans have difficulty assessing the meaning of slavery outside of a moral language of good and evil and black and white. Slavery is widely seen as an economic institution, but determining its historical responsibility is an inherently moral act. And the origins of the slave trade itself, at least in the popular imagination (and despite decades of scholarship), have not been dislodged from images of benighted Africans stolen from their homelands by avaricious Europeans. The deep complicity of African societies in the slave trade has not found a comfortable place in historical memories on the American side of the Atlantic.

Moreover, any attempt to understand the legacies of slavery requires for some a confrontation with shame–heritage consciousness and ancestor worship, both growing trends in our world, tend to be quests for a positive and uplifting past. Few people would choose to have their ancestors be slaveholding capitalists who made their livings from the blood and liberty of human property; and few would choose to descend from chattel slaves who lost their homelands and liberty, and had to rise from illiteracy and cotton fields they could never own. Racial slavery has never fit well into a popular expectation in America that our history is about progress, that we are a people of good will who solve all of our problems. Broadly speaking, public expectations of the past are at stake in any attempt to represent racial slavery in film. But this doesn’t release anyone from historian Natalie Zemon Davis’s admonishment against “wish-fulfillment” in depicting the history of such a subject. Americans like to be pleased by their history, and that enormous backdrop of melodrama and wish-fulfillment about slavery still stands in the path of genuine understanding.

In her Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Davis writes optimistically about the “differences between telling history in prose and telling history on film.” Those differences, especially in approach to canons of evidence and in portrayal of emotive drama, are striking and troublesome. But Davis wants to keep filmmakers’ feet to the fire when it comes to truth telling. “Historical films should let the past be the past,” she writes. “The play of imagination in picturing resistance to slavery can follow the rules of evidence when possible, and the spirit of the evidence when details are lacking.” In an appeal that can apply to documentary filmmakers as much as movie directors, Davis warns that “wishing away the harsh and strange spots in the past, softening or remodeling them like the familiar present,” can only make building a desired future harder. Take that Steven Spielberg and Ken Burns.

Davis’s admonition is that filmmakers should preserve the integrity of real stories, and not invent alternatives when they don’t like the evidence. “Wish-fulfillment,” she says, “should not steer the imagination in a historical film.” Davis’s argument is not a naive proposition, especially given her own experience as a very active creative force behind the dramatic feature film, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), as well as with some recent efforts to confront slavery on screen. But on the subject of American slavery, filmmakers have always had an enormous sea of sentimentalism and melodrama to cross before even considering the subject. From several experiences working with documentary filmmakers and screenwriters, I have come to cautiously share Davis’s optimism about the possibilities for films about slavery. In the United States, PBS has become a frequent outlet for good films about African American history generally and slavery particularly. WETA in Washington, D.C., and especially the “American Experience” project sponsored by WGBH in Boston, have been homes to many young and talented filmmakers and writers in recent years. In 1993-94, I worked with Orlando Bagwell on his Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History, the first major attempt to represent Douglass’s life on film. In that film, Bagwell and his crew were rushed by an early air date, but they produced a film still in wide educational use; they created a Douglass of heroic proportions, but one who is complicated by the transformations in his life. From that one experience I learned that many filmmakers are themselves good historians; Orlando and his collaborators read everything on Douglass, and they delivered a Douglass rooted in historical time.

For his remarkable four-part, six-hour series, Africans in America, Bagwell and his producers invited me and three other historians to a two-day seminar for the rough-cut screenings (about a year before air dates). This was, again, a lesson in how documentary filmmakers do want to get the history right, at the same time they need to teach historians to think in filmic terms. With Barbara Fields, Gerald Gill, and Sylvia Frey, I sat through intensive, all-day discussions with the teams of producers and writers on each of the four segments of Africans. We had many disagreements and recommendations; all the discussions were taped and transcribed.

Our subject, of course, was how to represent the story of slavery from the slave trade to emancipation in six hours. Specific documents, quotations, and images were openly debated. But the impressive fact was that all of the filmmakers really wanted our criticisms. They were very attuned to what we deemed accurate and historically sound. At the end of the day we were all involved in an interpretive enterprise–debating how much of African complicity in the slave trade to stress, how and when a Christianization process set in among colonial slaves, just what interpretation of the American Revolution the lens of slavery and black freedom provided, how to capture the relationships between black and white abolitionists, which fugitive slave story was best representative of that crucial element of resistance in the 1850s, how to tell the story of slavery as both oppression and survival, and many more questions. We ventured into the filmmakers’ domain, begging for more interpretive commentary here, and less dramatic recreation there, less music in one place, and more talking heads in another. In every case, of course, we were trying to recommend good history that had to be converted into a film narrative. There are many aspects to quibble with, but Africansbecame American history with the story of slavery and race brought to the center of the national narrative.

Yet all of us who have worked with filmmakers, in reading scripts or as interviewees, have had other less encouraging experiences as well. In the early and mid-1990s I worked as an advisor for director Charles Burnett and producer Peter Almond on a dramatic film about Douglass. Burnett wrote many drafts of an impressive script and used me as a sounding board and reader. His was a psychological portrait of Douglass, created from rich documentation, a tale of a brilliant former slave who could never be fully secure in the world of intellect and radical abolition he had entered. Burnett juxtaposed Douglass’s home and family life in Rochester, New York with President Abraham Lincoln’s home at the White House in the Civil War years in interesting ways. He also probed Douglass’s relationships with other abolitionists, black and white.

Burnett would have given us a somewhat tormented young Douglass trying to shape and make history in ways he only half controlled; it was a story about Douglass, but also very much about slavery tearing apart the American nation-state. Lawrence Fishburne had been approached about playing Douglass. But that film has never been made because the company most interested, Turner Broadcasting, never liked the scripts. They wanted a more romantic story of Douglass–more about the war and the women in his life, in short, more melodrama. The scripts were submitted to a second writer who cut them virtually in half; the project languishes like many earlier efforts to present slavery on film. Film can be a blunt instrument for subtlety and nuance. In prose and poetry, a writer can capture the travail and spirit of a human soul. Films, especially documentaries, are married to realism, to the too often assumed power of visual artifacts. But no artifact interprets itself, no picture has meaning solely on its own. And the pictures from the past privilege those elements of history that were more frequently photographed or painted; material culture dominates in the visual record over human aspiration or suffering. So, when historians and filmmakers collaborate they are always reminded of the limitations of this mixed medium. When I first met the original script writer on the Douglass documentary, he told me that he begins every project by reading the children’s literature on the subject first. Initially I was worried about this, but came to understand his point when I realized that Douglass’s life would have to be boiled down to approximately a seventy-five-page script.

But such limitations do not release us from engaging filmmakers and helping them make good history. From my recent work on Civil War memory I came across a story that might provide an opening scene for some enterprising filmmaker eager to construct continuing answers to Birth of a Nation. It is a story worth telling not merely for its sentiment, but because it was all but lost in the historical record. After Charleston, South Carolina was evacuated in February 1865 near the end of the Civil War, most of the people remaining among the ruins of the city were thousands of blacks. During the final eight months of the war, Charleston had been bombarded by Union batteries and gunboats, and much of its magnificent architecture lay in ruin. Also during the final months of war the Confederates had converted the Planters’ Race Course (a horse track) into a prison in which some 257 Union soldiers had died and were thrown into a mass grave behind the grandstand.

In April, more than twenty black carpenters and laborers went to the gravesite, reinterred the bodies in proper graves, built a tall fence around the cemetery enclosure one hundred yards long, and built an archway over an entrance. On the archway they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.” And with great organization, on May 1, 1865, the black folk of Charleston, in cooperation with white missionaries, teachers, and Union troops, conducted an extraordinary parade of approximately ten thousand people. It began with three thousand black school children (now enrolled in freedmen’s schools) marching around the Planters’ Race Course with armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” Then followed the black women of Charleston, and then the men. They were in turn followed by members of Union regiments and various white abolitionists such as James Redpath. The crowd gathered in the graveyard; five black preachers read from Scripture, and a black children’s choir sang “America,” “We Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-spangled Banner,” and several spirituals. Then the solemn occasion broke up into an afternoon of speeches, picnics, and drilling troops on the infield of the old planters’ horseracing track.

This was the first Memorial Day. Black Charlestonians had given birth to an American tradition. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of roses and lilacs and marching feet on their former masters’ race course, they had created the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

To this day hardly anyone in Charleston, or elsewhere, even remembers this story. Quite remarkably, it all but vanished from memory. But in spite of all the other towns in America that claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day (all claiming spring, 1866), African Americans and Charleston deserve pride of place. Why not imagine a new rebirth of the American nation with this scene?

Further Reading:

Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York, 1977).

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

David Blight teaches history and black studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). He has been a consultant to several documentary films, including the PBS series Africans in America (1998).