Daniel Day-Lewis, American historian

Anyone trying to construct a U.S. history syllabus—or, for that matter, anyone trying to follow a prescribed U.S. history curriculum—must contend with a number of pedagogical questions: What primary sources are available? What is a reasonable workload and pace for both students and teachers? But there is another question, perhaps the most important for any teacher of history: how does one confront the challenge of boredom, the default setting for most students? Those of us in the profession may savor shared enterprises like producing scholarship, attending conferences, or reading publications like this one. But as far as many of our employers are concerned, the principal justification for our livelihoods lies in making sense of the past for young people who do not necessarily know—or care—about the things we cherish.

So while it’s all fine and good to try to encourage students to think like historians, a successful teacher is going to have to be a historian who thinks like an adolescent. And in my experience, an adolescent would much rather watch a movie than read a book. That’s one reason why films have become a staple of my survey course ever since I left academe to become a high school teacher a half dozen years ago. (Other reasons include the simple fact that I meet with my students four times a week for seventeen weeks a semester; gone are the days when I could assign a book in a seminar and convene a week later to talk about it.) At its best, such an approach allows me to achieve a number of objectives at the same time. For example, I can demonstrate what the early film industry was like while illustrating the problems of immigration broached in Charlie Chaplin’s perennially entertaining The Immigrant (1917).

This kind of film-centered pedagogy is all fine and good for the twentieth century, when films are bona fide primary sources. But what about early American history? Here there are more difficulties, ranging from a dearth of truly good films to a responsibility to point out the seemingly inevitable distortions that accompany even the richest historical recreations. Still, over the course of the past few years, I’ve settled on a core battery of relatively recent movies that effectively fill that void: The Crucible (1996), Last of the Mohicans (1992), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Age of Innocence (1993). If indeed a picture is worth a thousand words, and a few thousand words is more than my lexically challenged students can comfortably handle each night for homework, this strikes me as a relatively efficient, even if imperfect, method for cultivating an informed imagination.

It was only after I had settled on my first-semester slate of films that I realized they all had something in common: Daniel Day-Lewis. (I’ve now taken to telling my students that I run an annual Daniel Day-Lewis film festival.) The British-born, adoptively Irish actor has been justly celebrated as the finest performer of his generation, in no small measure for the sheer variety of performances he has given over the course of his distinguished career. He first burst into international prominence in 1985 by playing two dazzlingly diverse characters: Johnny, the punk East London homosexual of My Beautiful Launderette, and Cecil Vyse, the priggish aristocrat of E. M. Forster’s Room with a View. He won an Academy Award for his 1989 portrayal of the Irish poet Christy Brown in My Left Foot and also played Irish characters in In the Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997). Yet over the course of the last two decades the highly selective Day-Lewis has portrayed a gallery of American characters, beginning with a now obscure role as a contemporary art collector in Stars and Bars (1988) and ending most recently with the wildcat oil prospector in There Will Be Blood (slated for release later this year). To some extent, this American accent surely reflects the historical realities of the film industry: the U.S. market still dominates to a now-rare degree, and Americans are notorious for their cultural provincialism. So international actors tend to go where the action is.

Taken as a whole, however, Day-Lewis’s choices seem to reflect more than just industry realities or access to the juicy roles someone of his stature commands. Actually, his recent body of work shows a remarkably textured, yet consistent, vision of American history. If, as even the most die-hard academics would now concede, history is too important to be left to the professors, Day-Lewis would have to be regarded as one of its most prominent, and even influential, practitioners. That influence may be all the more striking for the way it effectively sneaks under our intellectual radar, viscerally shaping emotions that more often than not are the source of the most powerful, and durable, ideas. But what is he showing us?

We begin our survey with Lewis’s portrayal of the doomed John Proctor in Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 film version of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible (for which the late Miller, who was Day-Lewis’s father-in-law, wrote the screenplay). The Crucible, of course, is one of the true canonical texts of American literary education, right up there with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It has become exactly what Miller intended: a cautionary tale in which the literal witch trials of the Puritan era foretell the figurative witch trials of the McCarthy era. I must confess, however, that I’m not particularly interested in this angle, not only because I use the film to illustrate life in the colonial period, but also because I regard the deeply ingrained perception of the Puritans as hypocritical prudes—even people who have no idea who H. L. Mencken was have thoroughly imbibed his version of them—as too easy a cheap shot in the age of Paris Hilton and Cam’ron. Instead (and here I know I’m swimming against the tide, which is fine because I don’t insist on a particular reading of the story), I hope to convey the richness of the Puritan life: the emotional intensity of a world in which living spirits are taken for granted; in which class and racial conflict jostle with religious obligation; in which a harshly beautiful landscape reflects the jagged longings of the characters.

Those characters are the key. There are any number of objections one can make about The Crucible, ranging from the way it creates composites out the original players in the Salem drama to anachronistic interior sets that are far more grand than any interiors the Puritans could have or would have made. But looking beyond these failings, the film brings to its characters a depth of feeling rarely acknowledged among the Puritans. Even more than in the play, for example, the film forces us to see the sexual intensity and jealousy of which the Puritans were so capable. These feelings are particularly evident in Winona Ryder’s portrayal of Abigail Williams. On a more historically specific note, Joan Allen’s Elizabeth Proctor dramatizes the characteristically Puritan struggle with the sin of pride. She says she forgives her husband’s transgressions—she may even want to forgive her husband’s transgressions—but for most of the story her persistent self-righteousness blocks the better angels of her nature. Allen’s performance illustrates the human cost for those who struggled to uphold impossibly high standards of piety.

Ultimately, though, this is John Proctor’s story and Daniel Day-Lewis’s movie. Literally and figuratively, his Proctor is a man on the edge, living on the outskirts of town, maintaining an initial stance of detachment about the accusations of witchcraft, and then refusing to compromise his good name and personal integrity by confessing his alleged “guilt.” Yet—and to me this is the key to the movie, the reason why I like to use it—Proctor’s fierce moral energy and his ultimate sacrifice of his own life is at once deeply personal and deeply communitarian. His insistent individualism (and that of the motley compatriots who also refuse to confess) is finally what saves Salem. As such, he is as much a reflection of Puritan life as the hysteria that surrounds him. One thing I try to mention in this context is the role of Samuel Sewall, who has a bit part in the movie and whose later apology for his role in the Salem affair is a useful reminder that many of the reasons the Puritans are condemned (such as their naïve moral intransigence) simply do not fit the facts.

This notion of the marginal but righteous communitarian is also important in understanding Last of the Mohicans. Much more than The Crucible, this is a movie that adapts and updates its source material. Part of a five-part series featuring a variously named character generally known as Natty Bumppo, Last of the Mohicans, set during the French and Indian War, was a wildly popular novel at the time of its publication in 1826, but it has been considered almost unreadable since Mark Twain’s now-legendary 1895 swipe at “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” The novel’s protagonist in particular comes off as a ridiculous country bumpkin, a portrayal that carries over into a number of film adaptations of the book. Director Michael Mann, who also co-revised the screenplay with Christopher Crowe, overhauls the character as Nathaniel Poe, a much more formidable figure. Yet it’s Day-Lewis—whose notorious obsession with developing and inhabiting characters even when offscreen has impressed and irritated crews of many productions—who transforms the character into a riveting embodiment of understated competence (a transformation all the more impressive given the nerdy Day-Lewis’s conversion into a magnificent specimen of masculine power). He is, in short, a babe magnet.

The babe in the woods he attracts is Cora Munro, daughter of a British army captain, ably played by Madeleine Stowe. This too represents a significant change from the original novel, as Cooper’s protagonist was the ultimate loner, the frontiersman who embodied Frederick Jackson Turner’s archetype of the restless wanderer who keeps pushing west to stay ahead of civilization (the final installment of the series is The Prairie, with Natty Bumppo out on the Great Plains). In traditional versions of the story, Cora dies, and amid the various romantic permutations between her, her sister Alice, and various Britons and Indians, Nathaniel is not an available partner. In this movie, however, the two form an unshakeable bond and end side-by-side with Nathaniel’s adoptive father, Chingachgook, the last Mohican of the title, about to lay the foundation for a distinctively new American society.

That society, we’re given to understand, will be multiracial. This of course is a stretch—while the notion of a white person being adopted and raised by Natives was hardly surprising in an eighteenth-century context, the character of Nathaniel in the movie comports nicely with a twenty-first-century social constructionist model of race (pigment be damned, Day-Lewis is extravagantly comfortable negotiating as a fellow Native with a Huron Sachem for the release of the Munro sisters, at one point offering the wampum belt of “my” people as ransom). In those cases where the facts seem to get in the way, the filmmakers have few compunctions about rearranging them. As a number of historians, among them Richard White and Ian K. Steele, have noted, the filmmakers take great liberties with the actual events surrounding the capture of Fort William Henry in 1757. For example, they make the massacre that followed English evacuation of the fort appear to be bloodier than it really was. Moreover, the ethnic composition and orientation of the Indians is seriously jumbled, making the Hurons in particular seem to be much more numerous and decisive French allies than they ever were.

I will confess that many of these inaccuracies escaped me until I began researching this article. (It has made me wonder how much false information I have disseminated over the course of my career through ignorance, unconscious mistakes, or accurately reporting the work of historians who subsequently proved to be incorrect. I shudder at the thought.) But I can’t say I regret showing the film. Indeed, I intend to do so again and again. Actually, the very messiness and confusion of the story—of colonists arguing with the British government; colonists arguing among themselves; Indians fighting the colonists and the British and each other; the French fighting them all and yet having more in common with their British opponents than their Huron allies (and French as the lingua franca for Indians and Anglos alike)—is a truth more important than any particular fact and the one students consistently offer unbidden as the message they take from the film. At the center of it all, and yet standing apart, is Day-Lewis’s Nathaniel, who embodies the prototypical American in a way that would probably turn James Fenimore Cooper’s (and many an Algonquian’s) stomach. But as Jefferson told us long ago, the earth belongs to the living. And history is very much an earthly thing.

Of course the living are constantly buried. This is the topic of Chigachgook’s final soliloquy in Last of the Mohicans—and it’s the core subject of the next film in the Daniel Day-Lewis film festival: Gangs of New York, directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese. A bowdlerized version of the bowdlerized 1928 history of New York street culture of the same name by Herbert Asbury, Gangs makes Mohicans look positively fastidious by comparison. Conflating time periods and gangs, relying on a creaky patricidal plot, and lingering over stylized violence that is brutal yet sentimentalized, the movie was widely criticized by historians and reviewers alike.

There are two things, however, that make Gangs unforgettable. The first is its tremendous visual impact—I remember gasping back in 2002 when I first saw the trailer, which showed the downtown docks (actually recreated on a set in Italy). The other is Day-Lewis’s performance as the brutally charismatic William Cutting, a.k.a. Bill the Butcher, Bowery B’hoy extraordinaire.

In an important sense, the Butcher, as he is called (only in part because of his profession), is the heir of Nathaniel Poe; Nathaniel is the man the Butcher might have become if, instead of being locked inside an urban jungle and forced to turn his fierce energy inward, he were restlessly moving toward new frontiers. Both consumed and sustained by his hatreds—among them the Irish immigrants who swarm into the Five Points neighborhood he runs with an iron fist and celebrates in a patois of profane poetry (inspired by the angry white hip-hop artist Eminem, to whom Day-Lewis listened as he prepared for the role)—Cutting is a man out of time. The pressure is coming from a variety of directions: from those immigrants, whose numbers will soon render his nativism obsolete; from a new breed of politicians, represented by William (soon to be Boss) Tweed, who sees possibilities for power in the ballot box, even if it has to be bought; and from the gathering force of the federal government—temporarily enmeshed in the Civil War—which will break the power of the clannish local lords, whether on the plantation or in the ghetto. Cutting sees the walls closing in; there’s a terrific scene of him wrapped in an American flag, fondly remembering the vanquished Irish foe whose son he has unwittingly adopted as protégé. And it’s a virtual death wish that sends him into a final self-destructive spiral of violence against the backdrop of the New York City draft riots.

Superficially, at least, there could not be a man in New York more different from Bill Cutting than his contemporary Newland Archer, protagonist of The Age of Innocence, Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name. One man is a lawbreaker; the other is a lawyer. One is quintessentially downtown; the other, part of the emerging scene uptown (there’s a great shot of a huge estate on a cavernously empty Fifth Avenue). The Civil War looms and finally overtakes Cutting, but for Archer, who comes of age in the 1870s, it barely registers, except marginally, perhaps, in the wobbly fortunes of his buccaneering peers, the Beauforts of South Carolina. Cutting is a thug who revels in his provincialism; Archer, ever the gentleman, is an instinctive cosmopolitan.

Yet beneath these obvious differences are surprising core affinities. Both men navigate their way through their respective societies with a firm social compass—one pointing west, the other east—but are perfectly willing to buck convention when they consider it necessary. Further, the very personal vision they pursue also engenders self-imposed limits, limits that are mistakenly perceived by their peers as a form of social conformity. Archer’s passion for the beautiful Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) pulls him into open rebellion. That this rebellion is never fully consummated is less a matter of social custom than of honor and a commitment to the deceptively simple-minded May Welland (Winona Ryder, who would team up with Day-Lewis three years later in The Crucible). This sense of honor is seen by some as a form of capitulation, though more sophisticated observers (alas, relatively few of my students among them) recognize it as a form of inner strength. And yet even as he maintains a connection to the society in which he came of age, Archer, as his name suggests, quietly insists on going his own way in the books he reads, paintings he views, and travels he (belatedly) takes.

Nevertheless, the role marks a turning point in Day-Lewis’s vision of American history. For even as Archer extends the line of restless communitarians in the actor’s body of work, he also suggests its descent. One can only go so far in plausibly describing him as a maverick. Compared to John Proctor, Nathaniel Poe, or Bill Cutting, he is a smaller, even diminished figure. (Newland’s precocious taste in art marks him as a proto-modernist, but he is finally too thoroughly the Victorian to cross over to that promising symbolist land.) Though one could argue this is simply one role in one movie, his character seems to suggest a larger point: centennial America is just not as big as it used to be, and its protagonists are smaller. This assertion seems to get more emphatic reinforcement when one considers Day-Lewis’s performance in the 2005 film The Ballad of Jack and Rose, directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller. As Jack Slavin, Day-Lewis portrays an aging hippie who, cut off from his humanitarian past, retreats into incestuous isolation. Proctor, Poe, Cutting, and Archer are impressively tragic figures. Slavin, by contrast, veers uncomfortably close to pathos. His beautiful daughter carries his memory forward—or is it back?—to a Vermont commune, but one has a strong sense of a narrative terminus. Four centuries from the roiling furies of the Puritans, at the end of a hundred years since Newland visited the Old World, a frontier has gone, its archetypal character now trapped on an island off the Down East coast of Maine.

Assigning the title of “American historian” to a Hollywood actor might seem like an implausible act for any number of reasons, among them the simple fact that the creation of history is generally a matter of generating words, and an actor’s job is typically a matter of speaking those of someone else, even if, as Day-Lewis surely has, that actor collaborates on his lines. In most of the cases discussed here, those words are effectively twice removed, as they were adapted—make that invented—by a series of screenwriters from a play, a novel, and popular history, each themselves derivative in one way or another.

But like all the arts, history is above all a matter of choices—of subjects, of sources, of shadings of fact and strokes of imagination. When one considers the body of work of this particular individual, one is left with a surprisingly suggestive interpretive arc. The engine of American history, Daniel Day-Lewis tells us, is a restless individualist who strains against an inherited culture, an individual as likely to look back as to look forward, but an individual who, in that very restlessness, also paves the way for a new generation, one that will ultimately produce a new rebellion for a new age.

Of course, there’s nothing uniquely American about this; Day-Lewis himself has portrayed similar Czechs and Irishmen, for instance. But the American settings in which such dramas unfold are distinctive. They’re settings in which people are repeatedly told, as a matter of birthright, that dreams are valid and realizable—though not all people realize those dreams, and for those who do (or those in the proximity of those who do) the dreams often turn into nightmares. This friction is what gives so many of Day-Lewis’s characters a tragic dimension. It’s also what gives them a powerful sense of relevance. There are few places where such questions and issues are more relevant than high schools—settings that, whatever their specific deficiencies, are veritable workshops of dreams.

In its broadest outlines, the Daniel Day-Lewis school of American history is not particularly complex, and it’s certainly debatable. That’s precisely the point. Day-Lewis may or may not be right that restless individuals are the engine of American history, and if he is, one can argue about whether this is a good thing or not—or whether, for example, those individuals can be women as easily as men. This is the stuff of which good classroom discussions are made.

Further, the Day-Lewis message is not a particularly fashionable one in the academy. In the long, ongoing argument about whether the heroic individual or the impersonal process shapes history, the pendulum has long lingered on the latter. It’s a little surprising to realize that in some respects the argument that Day-Lewis is making is not that much unlike the one John Wayne did in his body of work—or by broadening the frame of reference a bit to bring Alan Ladd into the picture, one might dub it the Shane school of history, where misfits with good hearts redeem and renew a country. I believe Day-Lewis’s interpretation is a bit more textured than that; his characters have a richer and more reciprocal relationship with their communities than these other examples might suggest. But the heritage is there nonetheless.

There is one other aspect of Day-Lewis’s vision of American history that distinguishes it from others propagated by popular media. And that is that it is a vision, a sweeping interpretation that takes in the American past as a whole. Not many professional historians (Sean Wilentz comes to mind as an exception) consider it appropriate to even try. In this regard, Day-Lewis harkens back to earlier generations of American historians: Hofstadter, Parrington, and, especially, Turner, and maybe a few modern descendants such as Patricia Limerick. For a variety of structural and ideological reasons, the contemporary professional vision of the past is fractured, slivered into shards that are constantly being recombined into often compelling new arrangements. A postmodern playhouse. That’s fine for graduate students, maybe. But that’s not what the kids I see need right now.

They need to grapple with a frontiersman in the woods.

Further Reading:

Arthur Miller’s screenplay version of The Crucible (New York, 1997) includes valuable pieces by the playwright and director Nicholas Hytner on the making of the film. Richard White analyzes Last of the Mohicans in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York, 1995); Ian K. Steele reviewed the film in The Journal of American History 80:3 (December 1993). The major inspiration—as opposed to an important source much beyond the names of the characters—for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York is Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1927; New York, 2001). A shooting script of The Age of Innocence screenplay by Jack Cocks and Scorsese is available through “The Newmarket Shooting Script Series” (New York, 1991).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, where he serves on the board of trustees. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the recently published Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumphs, recently published by Palgrave Macmillan, among other books.

Reflections of an accidental privileged insider, 1989-1994

I am often asked what I think of the National Museum of the American Indian. That I have nothing to say surprises the people who ask the question because usually they know that I worked for the museum for the first four years of its existence. The fact is, I have never visited the National Museum of the American Indian and declined the invitation to attend the opening. In her “Why I Cannot Read Wallace Stegner” (1996), an essay in a collection by the same name, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn expresses her rejection of Stegner’s autobiography Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1955) and his Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954). Cook-Lynn protests the colonial privilege and ideology that inspired Stegner’s romanticized view of the American West, with its tragically vanished American Indian. Such works have aided the disappearance of Native people from history. My inability to visit the National Museum of the American Indian stems from a similar sense about its mission and its exhibits. To me, the museum represents a lost opportunity to integrate American Indians into the national consciousness.

“We’ve been trying to educate the visitors for five hundred years; how long will it take to educate the visitors?” spoke an elderly Native woman at one of several community-based consultations I organized for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) between 1989 and 1994. Her words—strong, angry, and impatient—formed a response to the question we carried to each consultation: what should the museum say about Native America? Her agitated comeback affected the remainder of my experience as one of the museum’s early planners and has remained with me for the past fourteen or fifteen years. Smithsonian representatives had no response for the woman then; today, the finished museum stands as a reminder of how the small-but-growing museum staff failed to find, in that tense moment of public scolding, inspiration and encouragement to tell the story that we know and the nation denies.

The museum began before the arrival of the director Richard West. Following the passage of the legislation that established the National Museum of the American Indian in late 1989, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Robert McCormick Adams, requested that an internal committee be formed. Undersecretary Dean Anderson headed the internal committee composed of seven to ten staff members, including me, the sole Native to sit on the committee. A number of well-known Native scholars and others sat on the newly formed NMAI board. The internal committee, however, made decisions regarding daily museum work that would begin to shape the character of the museum.

This was a troubling experience for a junior Native staff member. Non-Native persons, save me, were beginning to direct the course of the museum, a development that ran counter to the idea that this was to be the “museum different” (translation: a museum by Indians, not just about Indians). Until this point, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and museums of similar scale with large Native object collections exemplified the colonial practice of taking possession of Native cultural patrimony and human remains and then, without consultation with Native communities, creating exhibits that falsely represented Native people. I looked at the internal committee and wondered, “What’s so different here?” and I offered my resignation. The undersecretary asked what would make me stay. My naive and earnest response centered on a plan to take “the suits” from Washington to Indian Country.

We held the first of numerous consultations with Native communities in the summer of 1990 shortly after Secretary Adams’s announcement naming Rick West as the museum’s founding director.

For the next four years I organized similar consultations throughout the United States from my home in Oklahoma where I had moved to undertake a graduate program in history. The staff in Washington commenced consultations around specific issues such as “traditional care and handling” of objects (March 1992). Much was at stake. Together, the community consultations and topical meetings in Washington informed the architectural program for the Suitland, Maryland, housing facility, which came to hold the Georg Gustav Heye collection of some one million objects of indigenous origin from throughout the Western Hemisphere, then located at 155th and Broadway, in New York City. Reflecting the desire of many Native communities, the Suitland facility was built to provide an appropriate home for tribal cultural patrimony and religious objects. The building’s design was informed by the expertise of numerous Native scholars and cultural practitioners educated in the history, purpose, and care of tribal objects. The Philadelphia-based architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates translated the direction they received from Native consultants into an architectural plan for a structure worthy of some of the most precious of Native cultural and religious material objects.

The work of coordinating consultations provided a window into the formative years of the National Museum of the American Indian, a period during which the new director assumed his duties. This was also the period during which the museum hired most of its staff and developed its unique institutional culture. In hindsight, red flags were everywhere, and I have since come to question whether Native people should ever look to the state for solutions to the destructive outcomes of colonialism and hegemony.

To a large extent white staff were in charge of the real nitty-gritty stuff like budgets, administration, exhibition coordination, and publication. Indians, mainly male, were in charge of translating and defining Indianness, which, in addition to contributing to planning for the Suitland collection facility, also informed exhibition content, community relations, public programming, and museum policies. The division of work along white and red lines was especially significant in the area of exhibition development. Until 2001 when Jim Volkert, a non-Native, stepped down to assume other responsibilities, he had acted as project coordinator and had final approval of all exhibitions. Each exhibition was planned by a team that included a Native curator. This early absence of Native control challenged the promises implicit in the language of the “museum different.”

The racialized and gendered division of labor required multiple translations between team coordinator and Native curator. The NMAI project coordinator’s role required command of the curator’s language: tribal cultural language, Native pedagogical practices, and Native epistemologies. In addition, the coordinator, and if not the coordinator then the curator, needed to successfully translate Native ways of knowing and practicing to people unfamiliar with the Native world and its history. The absence of Native knowledge and the consequent inability to effect the required translation undermined exhibitions. Were the principal players held accountable? Not so much in the early days, which might help explain the disastrous opening. From my observations, exhibition team members were accountable to a project coordinator, who knew nothing about Native history and culture. He was dependent on the smattering of selected Native men, and few women, for his view of Native America. Lacking cultural knowledge and capital, he consequently lacked the authority to hold curators and others accountable or even to lead effectively. His important contribution was limited to creating a productive division of labor within the team.

Until recently the museum has been awash in money. Travel, meals, consultation, research, and more travel filled the exhibition team’s calendar. Consultants were flown to Washington and paid for their services. Money bought much information and advice through contractual consultation, but it was also a corrupting and distracting force, more so without stringent accountability. Amazingly, a few very hardworking staff members resisted the party and imposed accountability on themselves—both for how they used the museum’s money and how they understood its mission. Too few staff members followed suit. I look back at them now with great admiration and appreciation.

The dominant presence of male Native artists in the early museum years has left a lasting stamp on the museum’s work environment and on its exhibitions. Art and material culture were the preferred media for transferring knowledge about Native America to an unknowing audience. Why art and culture? For many artists, Native creative expression is a presumed window on Native inner life and culture. The exhibit teams have thus relied on art and material culture, the ultimate expressions of Native inner life, as a vehicle for teaching unfamiliar visitors about Indianness. But such thinking represented precisely the problem with the museum: it had become an elite enclave, divorced from the reality of most Native people, where explaining Indians to museum visitors assumed primacy. Moreover, the museum early on made the decision that it would eschew the historical context from which modern Native America has sprung. This meant, astonishingly, no treatment of the history of genocide and colonialism, then and now, or even of the basis of tribal sovereignty.

Jolene Rickard, an NMAI contractor, is quoted as saying, “There are other places where you can learn the exact dates of the Trail of Tears. It’s less important to me that someone leave this museum knowing all about Wounded Knee than that they leave knowing what it takes to survive that kind of tragedy.” As much as I admire Jolene Rickard for her artistic achievements, I wince at her easy dismissal of historical context as an essential prerequisite for understanding “what it takes to survive that kind of tragedy.” Rickard’s statement reflects the “group think” of the NMAI as conceived by the director—what I call, “There will be no unhappy history here.”

Rickard’s statement also suggests that the museum’s senior and curatorial staff imagine that destruction and colonialism have ended. Just as nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists froze authentic Native people in exhibitions while Indians starved on reservations, the museum’s staff has created a modern hermetically sealed Native “community” that has “survived” something long passed. This distancing, forgetting, and desire to divert the public’s gaze from the past simply perpetuates the on-going erasure of authentic Native histories.

Experience, personal and otherwise, has shown me that it is not just white Americans who need to grasp the full scope of Native history. Native people can also benefit from a more just and accurate depiction of their past. No one can understand the experience of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indians without understanding the U.S. laws and policies that radically reshaped their lives. In my mind’s eye, I see an image of a river (federal Indian policy and law) fed by many streams that shape the flow and form of the river: colonial-era treaties; the U.S. Constitution; early nineteenth-century Trade and Intercourse Acts; the Indian Removal Act; ex parte Crow Dog, which clearly and unambiguously acknowledged Native sovereignty; and the legislative assault on tribal sovereignty in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Through it all, Native people fought back against the Americans’ assault on the American Indian. They fought in Washington; they fought from the reservation; they fought through hired lawyers; and they fought in the courts, all the while preserving much of what the United States had relentlessly tried to destroy. This is more than mere “survivance”; it is productive, structured, and structuring struggle that kept Native people from extinction.

The river is shaped by the actions of ancestral and modern men and women, tribal leaders and Indian activists who resisted removal, resisted allotment, maintained tribal social values and culture, overturned termination, and who continue to fight to this very day to protect tribal sovereignty. Much is at stake: reserved treaty rights for hunting, fishing, and gathering; the trust responsibility that binds the United States to its obligations to Native people as stipulated in treaties and court decisions; and treaties themselves, the Maginot Line for indigenous peoples who have been swept up under the American state umbrella. Native people continue to fight the genocidal policies of the United States government and the equally destructive practices of the private sector. Native lands contain the highest concentrations of toxic waste anywhere in the United States. Devastated Native economies, which never recovered from forced migrations and other government-imposed dislocations, leave numerous tribes with few economic options beyond the very unhealthy ones of selling toxic dumping permits to the government and to private companies.

Toxic waste is, of course, not the only health problem Native peoples face. Native women are raped and murdered by white males at a rate higher than any other racial or ethnic female population. A part of the explanation for non-prosecution of such crimes goes back to the Federal Major Crimes Act of 1883, which extended federal authority over Indian lands in cases of major crimes, including rape. Because U.S. prosecutors fail to pursue white perpetrators and tribal authorities have no jurisdiction in such cases, the criminal goes unpunished. It seems likely that such injustices have contributed to the high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction in the Native population. Diabetes, which attacks a higher percentage of the Native population, had its genesis in the destruction of Native economies and diet and the introduction of rations. For example, Plains people subsisted on buffalo meat and the meat of other ungulates, small game, and hundreds of plant sources for nuts, fruits, berries, legumes, tubers, and teas. The extermination of the buffalo, the appropriation of Native lands, the collapse of indigenous trade, and the introduction of government rations of lard, bacon, coffee, sugar, corn, rice, and poor beef radically changed the Indians’ diet. Rations were insufficient, irregularly delivered, and frequently unusable either because they were spoiled or because they were unfamiliar to the Indians.

For Native people, especially young people, these trials, and the changes they produced, explain their world today, whether they live on reservations or have dispersed to cities with their families. This knowledge can be a source for recovery from a historic wound. It can also publicly affirm the experiences of younger generations of Natives and inspire them to follow their elders into activism and community leadership.

The importance of historical context to the stated mission of the NMAI had been raised in at least one community consultation. A Lakota man noted that Native ways of life have not been respected since the late nineteenth century. He called for creating a “better environment for our people because the way history books are written and the way we feel when you go to different places[, is] that we need to create a better environment, update our history. There are some things that cannot change our ceremonies, but we change the way we live.” What non-Natives see of Indians, in other words, are inauthentic and degraded people. Why? Because actual Natives do not uphold non-Natives’ crude nineteenth-century understanding of Native culture. This, too, is a form of colonial thought and ideology that is destructive to Native people but that can be corrected.

Native communities and individuals have emerged today from long struggles with the destructive consequences of American hegemony. The Chickasaw Nation, located at Ada, Oklahoma, is a shining example of a tribal success story. As one of the removed southeastern tribes in the early nineteenth century, the Chickasaws rebuilt their lives in Indian Territory only to lose land to other relocated Indian tribes. The tribe also lost lands as a result of the Curtis Act (1908), which brought about allotment (the federal government’s program to distribute reservation lands to individual Native landholders) to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma. The Chickasaws use casino proceeds to benefit the people in the form of a wellness center, counseling center, library, scholarships, an aviation and science summer academy, and rebuilt stomp grounds (for an annual green corn dance). The Chickasaw Nation is also promoting the increase of scholarship about Chickasaws and is funding a project to carry out that mission under the direction of a Chickasaw scholar. Governor Bill Anoatubby, who has led the Chickasaws for many years, embraces a forward-looking vision for the tribe and extends the tribe’s friendship, services, and resources to the town of Ada.

Cherokee professor Andrea Smith, University of Michigan, is an example of a Native academic who seeks to bridge her activism and her academic work. Her recent book, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, broadens the meaning of colonial sexual violence to boarding school experience and rape and pollution of the land. In addition to being a central focus of her scholarly work, sexual violence against Native women is also an area of her activism. Conquest draws from Smith’s activism through the creation of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization. She is one of a growing number of Native scholars who address the continuing consequences of U.S. internal colonialism and who are bringing international attention to U.S. indigenous issues. Her activism, along with that of Sarah Deer, a Muskogee lawyer and activist from Minneapolis, is the reason Amnesty International began studying violence against Native women in the United States. That work resulted in a stunning and highly disturbing report about the abuse of Native American women. The successes of the Chickasaw Nation, the devoted activism and scholarship of Andrea Smith, and the ongoing work of community-based activists are also Native America.

As a professor of history who teaches the history of Native North America and federal Indian policy and law at a midwestern University, I am frequently reminded of the depths of non-Native ignorance of Native America. Questions I pose in class might go something like this: What do you know about American Indians? Silence. Do you know any American Indians? Heads shake from side to side. What do you think a reservation is? The discussion picks up. “It’s where the Indians live.” Why? How did they come to live there? “They just live there.” Why? “So they can be together.” But why do they live at that particular place? “They just picked that place because they liked it or because it was away from the white people.” By the end of the semester, students have become fascinated with this destructive history and how it worked. I have delivered on my promise that a semester studying American internal colonialism and federal Indian law and policy will be like a trip to Mars. At the end of each semester a student will inevitably ask, “Why didn’t they [parents and teachers] tell us this stuff.” I remind them of the first day of class when I told them that if they were seriously wedded to the fictional national narrative, they might not be happy with my class. At semester’s end, they know what I mean by a fictional national narrative. I tell them that people will take extreme measures to protect and preserve it. And each semester, in that moment, some of my students and I experience reconciliation.

I wish I were confident that visitors to the NMAI experienced a similar sort of reconciliation. But reconciliation cannot happen in a vacuum. One must know the history before reconciliation can occur. Yes, the previous five hundred years represent but a brief moment in the long history of indigenous occupation of this land, as Rick West likes to point out. But those five hundred years have radically changed Native America for all time. The NMAI imparts no understanding by ignoring those five hundred years but only reinforces the invisibility of Native people and replicates practices of the Department of Education, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the academy. What else but willful ignorance can explain the continued existence of a sports team with a name like Redskins? or of romanticized movies like Dances with Wolves? Where do we find reconciliation in the midst of such denigration? Can we find reconciliation in a state institution?

For me, the National Museum of the American Indian represents a broken promise, no less consequential than the many broken treaty promises made by the United States to Native people. It represents a betrayal of our trust that this museum would be the Natives’ museum. In place of the stories of the Native past, it focuses on arts, culture, and commerce—the stuff of commodification. To paraphrase the historian Paul Kramer, cultural recognition and power do not connect. Sitting there in close proximity to the Capitol, one might think that the Indians were finally within reach of social justice, political power, and economic change. Not yet. Cultural recognition will not create a working arena where Native America might engage the United States government on something resembling level ground. Rather, cultural recognition is a distraction for Native people, a painless amusement for non-Natives, and a way for U.S. government politicians and bureaucrats to avoid the hard questions raised by the history of U.S. internal colonialism.

Further Reading:

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s essays can be found in Why I Cannot Read Wallace Stegner (Madison, Wisc.. 1996). Jolene Rickard is quoted in Amy Lonetree, “Missed Opportunities: Reflections on the NMAI,” American Indian Quarterly (2006). Some of the Chickasaw tribe’s projects can be seen on the tribal Website. Andrea Smith’s book is Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). Sarah Deer works for the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in Minneapolis. Learn more about the institute and access numerous reference sources at its Website. The Amnesty International report mentioned above is titled “Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA,” Amnesty International, April 24, 2007.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Jacki Thompson Rand (Choctaw) is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa history department. She has contributed to Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History, edited by Janet Catherine Berlo (New York, 1996) and to Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, edited by Nancy Shoemaker (New York, 2002). Her forthcoming book, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State, will be released in spring 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her research interests are state Native American/American Indian/Indigenous policy and law. Her next project focuses on Canada.

Feminist scholars in the 1970s made rape a legitimate topic of research by arguing that it was the most elemental expression of patriarchal power. Sharon Block’s Rape & Sexual Power in Early America unravels the power dynamics of rape by merging the microhistories of individual women with the macrohistories of institutional and cultural views of sexual behavior. By combining many strands of interpretation—individual women’s experiences, community reaction, institutional mandates, courtroom practices, print culture, and mainstream ideology—Block reveals the varied interpretations of an act that was “both pervasive and invisible” (1).

Extensive research into court records, newspaper accounts, private letters and diaries, published documents, and contemporary fiction has provided Block with 920 incidents of “sexual coercion.” She uses these incidents to explore the gap between the actual experience of rape and what was publicly acknowledged as rape in the villages and courtrooms of early America. Block differentiates between rape as a “legal judgment of forced heterosexual intercourse” and sexual coercion, in which force was an act of social, racial, or cultural power. By using this two-tiered classification, Block demonstrates that the “identities and relationships of participants, not the quality of sexual interaction . . . most easily defined rape” (3).

In a society built around marriage, regulation of sexual conduct was crucial to the creation of social order. In early America, husbands and fathers controlled sexual access to wives and daughters and protected women from unwanted sexual encounters. But men were also expected to be sexually aggressive toward women; sex could involve violence without being considered rape. Given such assumptions, it is not surprising that women’s claims of rape were often suspect. Adding to victims’ burdens was the widespread presumption that male arousal was generally the woman’s responsibility, or fault, as it were. Men could thus cast a woman’s “no” as a pro forma expression of resistance.

Legal and community responses to claims of rape establish that sexual coercion was a gendered act of power always linked to considerations of race and status. Both the opportunity for rape and the likelihood of its classification as rape depended on the social identities of both parties. Status was integral to a man’s ability to force sex. Elite white men could use their status to “redefine coercion into consent,” while poor and black men “had” to use “brute force” (12). Not only could elite whites avoid court prosecution, they could also cast their actions (to themselves) as acceptable. Elite white women supposedly had the protection of patriarchy, and their claims of forced rape carried greater believability. Both white and black women who were economic dependents could be subject to coercive sexual assaults that did not necessarily involve force.

In prosecuting a claim of rape, the female victim had to overcome cultural beliefs that held her responsible for all sexual activity. Again, the path to legal remedy followed a victim’s social position. Community beliefs about who was or was not considered capable of rape meant that the community ultimately shaped the character of the sexual act. The privilege allotted elite males in a patriarchal system meant that powerful men could not “rape”—their sexual pressure was not rape.

If the meaning of force depended on who used the force, then race was the ultimate dividing line for believability. White women were always assumed to have resisted a black rapist, and black women were never allowed to resist. Block argues that the exclusion of women of color from the category of rape victim was an essential part of creating a consciousness of race in early America.

Although Block does not find much change in the definition of rape over the 120 years of her study or across its geographic span of the Atlantic seaboard, she does identify two developments in the treatment of rape claims between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the “racialization of rape” (4) and the treatment of race as public discourse. Black men remained the targets of prosecutions, convictions, and executions for rape throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the culpability of white men diminished. Popular seduction novels portrayed white men as seducers, not rapists. During the Revolution, allegations of rape by British soldiers in newspapers and pamphlets were construed as attacks on American rights, rather than as the violation of an individual.

Block’s analysis of how early America’s definition of rape “created and reflected [its] technologies of power” (4) also illustrates the trans-historical continuity of ideas about rape. By blurring boundaries of coercion and consent, expressing social power through sexual power, and exploiting the sexual vulnerability of the socially vulnerable, white males of early America used the idea of rape to create and sustain their roles in the political, social, and racial hierarchies of the new nation. And their actions are, in Block’s concluding words, “startlingly reminiscent of sexual coercion in other times and places” (241).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Elizabeth Urban Alexander is associate professor of history at Texas Wesleyan University and author of Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines.

For some time now, historians of the United States have been exhorting each other to link historical writing on the United States more effectively to historical writing on the rest of the world. Prominent among these historians has been New York University history professor Thomas Bender. In A Nation Among Nations, Bender heeds his own advice. His goal, as he explains in his introduction, is to “end” American history in a double sense: he seeks both to terminate it as it has been conventionally understood and to give it a new purpose for the world in which we live (3). The result is a highly stimulating analytical narrative that is consistently informative, occasionally revelatory, and never dull.

Bender rejects the presumption, which he traces to nineteenth-century historical writing, that the nation is freestanding and self-contained. On the contrary, he contends, national history has from the beginning been shaped by developments both larger and smaller than the nation itself. In making this claim, Bender most emphatically does not reject the nation as an object of historical inquiry. The nation, he contends, is far too important for historians to ignore, as the “most effective structure” not only for military mobilization and economic development but also for the clarification of “ethical responsibility” within the “human community” (298, 8). At present, there does not exist—and for the foreseeable future in all likelihood there will not exist—a “more effective or alternative institution” to “defend and protect citizens and human rights” (298). For all of these reasons, the nation must remain a “central object” of historical inquiry (8). Bender’s goal, rather, is to historicize the American nation by locating it in a global context.

A Nation Among Nations is filled with illuminating observations on a multitude of topics that have been culled from the scholarship of historians around the world. Only occasionally does Bender miss the opportunity to cast a familiar event in a new light. Historians of technology have for several decades underscored the global context in which American technological innovations occurred; had Bender drawn more extensively on the rich literature in this field, his thesis would have been even more compelling. A case in point is his brief discussion of telegraph inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse, Bender contends, fundamentally changed the relationship of time and space by devising a mechanism that made it possible for the “first time in human history” for a message to “travel more rapidly than a messenger” (153). In fact, Morse’s electric telegraph had been preceded by the electric telegraph of the English inventors Charles Wheatstone and William F. Cooke, and as the historian of technology Daniel R. Headrick demonstrated in When Information Came of Age (2000), it drew much of its inspiration from, and was an incremental improvement upon, a French optical telegraph, which had been transmitting information faster than messengers for fifty years.

Much of the distinctiveness of Bender’s approach lies in the simultaneous focus on history—which he associates with temporality, or change over time—and geography, or what is calls territoriality. Territoriality, it turns out, has a history; in fact, its emergence in the nineteenth century was a major outcome of nation-building projects in the United States, Italy, and Germany.

The historicizing of territoriality is but one instance in which “self-aware communication” regarding common challenges has strengthened bonds among individuals whose lives would have rarely intersected prior to the great nineteenth-century innovations in communications: the modern postal system, the elaboration of the press, the electric telegraph, and the ocean-going steamship (10). Sometimes the medium was the message. At one point, for example, Bender makes an analogy between present-day interactions on the World Wide Web and the fin de siècle information exchange among social reformers: no analogy better captured the “circulation of information” among these reformers than the “computer file sharing of the sort we are familiar with in the exchange of music files on the internet today” (287). Elsewhere Bender links information sharing with the cultivation of a praiseworthy cosmopolitanism. The more Americans know about the world, Bender posits, the more they can be expected to become “worldly citizens” who retain a concern for the “Opinions of Mankind” (297, 300). Only occasionally does Bender link self-awareness with intolerance, bigotry, or paranoia. An intriguing example is his comparison of the worldviews of historians of the United States in the 1890s with those in the 1950s. Though the 1890s generation was the more cosmopolitan, it embraced a racist conception of human potentiality that the latter rejected.

A Nation Among Nations is organized around five thematic chapters, which locate in a global context topics long familiar to historians of the United States. These topics are the age of discovery; the “great war” between France and Britain in the mid-eighteenth century; the Civil War; westward expansion; and progressivism. Each chapter, with the exception of the first and the last, revolves around warfare. If history department hiring committees took Bender’s intellectual priorities seriously—which, if present trends continue, they almost certainly will not—they should make the recruitment of historians of warfare a top priority. Indeed, A Nation Among Nations can be read as a thoughtful brief for the provocative claim that the history of war, broadly conceived, should occupy a central place on the U.S. history curriculum of every university, college, and community college history department in the country.

American history began, in Bender’s view, with the “ocean revolution” set in motion by the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus. What Columbus discovered was less a new world than a new ocean. For humanity, this discovery was no less consequential than the invention of agriculture; for the inhabitants of the continents that it linked, it was the “central experience” during the long period that preceded the late-nineteenth-century industrial revolution (246).

The global context remained highly consequential during the eighteenth century, when Great Britain bested France in the Seven Years War—a conflict that Bender, like Fred Anderson and Drew Cayton, considers of fundamental importance to the making of the United States. Indeed, this chapter can be fruitfully compared with the related discussion of this theme in Fred Anderson and Drew Cayton’s Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2005). Foreign relations remained of enormous concern to the founders of the republic, while the successful slave revolt known today as the Haitian Revolution had enduring consequences for the antislavery movement. Paradoxically, Bender posits, the Haitian Revolution hindered the antislavery movement by frightening slaveholders who might otherwise have endorsed compensated emancipation. The Civil War, similarly, was one of several “federative crises” to engulf the world during the 1860s (134). Yet it remained distinctive to the extent that, in contrast to the somewhat analogous struggles in Germany and Italy, its catalyst was slavery. And, in particular, the “new idea” of public authority that northern leaders linked with territoriality—an idea that owed much of its credibility to prior improvements in communications—challenged the paternalistic authority that slaveholders maintained over their slaves (151).

Events originating outside of the territorial confines of the United States also shaped the westward movement, which Bender treats as a chapter in the history of empire. With the exception of the Civil War and emancipation, the dispossession of Native Americans was the “most important activity of the U.S. government in the nineteenth century” (191). The Spanish-American War, or what Bender terms the Spanish-Cuban-American War, was less an aberration than a continuation of American empire building that began with the founding of the republic.

By globalizing American history, Bender hopes to “imbue” American civic discourse and national history with an “appropriate humility” (298). This is an inspiring—and worthy—goal. Yet it remains to be determined whether it will be realized. As Americans learn more about the world through experiences other than book reading—e.g., terrorist attacks, corporate downsizing, warfare—it is at least as likely that they may, instead, become increasingly prideful. Americans have long presumed—Bender perceptively observes, in one of his many suggestive forays into the history of political economy—that the “free individual” should have privileged access to “all the goods of the world” (186). A Nation Among Nations underscores, often implicitly, the perils that this kind of hubris can entail. It is likely to find a wide audience among general readers, college and university professors intrigued by the “global” turn in U.S. history, and high school teachers seeking fresh perspectives on such venerable classroom staples as the age of exploration, the westward movement, and the Civil War. Engaging, accessible, and thought provoking, it provides an excellent introduction to recent historical writing on a variety of themes and may well point the way to a new, more globally oriented, history of the United States.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Richard R. John is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His publications include the edited collection Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (2006).

Few policies evoke a more visceral response than gun control, so public discourse concerning firearm ownership generally ranges from anemic to inane. Do guns or people kill people? Obviously, replacing or with the conjunction and or the phrase in conjunction with would settle the question quickly. Even serious scholarly discussion of the meaning of the Second Amendment is rare because partisan feelings run high. Agreement extends to only two issues. First, Michael Bellesiles went too far when he fabricated data to support a radical gun control agenda in his now discredited book Arming America (2000). Second, the Constitution grants an individual right to bear arms or a collective right to maintain a militia. Unfortunately, that second area of agreement turns out to be a Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) false dichotomy that keeps us as flummoxed as the poor sap enjoined to respond yes or no when asked if he had stopped beating his wife yet.

In A Well-Regulated Militia, Ohio State University history professor Saul Cornell frees us from the fallacy of the loaded question (excuse the pun) “Is the Second Amendment an individual or a collective right?” by showing beyond a reasonable doubt that it was sort of both but ultimately neither. Originally, keeping and bearing arms was as much a tax or civic obligation as a right. In most colonies, every able-bodied adult man was enjoined by law to own and maintain a military-quality musket or rifle and to drill on muster days. Those who failed to comply were fined because the militia protected Americans from external threats and, in an era before powerful police forces, from domestic unrest. After passage of the U.S. Constitution, some Americans feared that the new federal government might strip them of their military arms as King George had attempted to do during the pre-Revolution imperial crisis. With this view of the matter, the controversial amendment’s seemingly odd construction makes sense: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” (1). In other words, individuals must be able to own firearms so they can help protect the community from a wide assortment of possible external and internal threats.

The right of individuals to own and carry arms for other purposes, including hunting and self-defense, was already well protected under the common law, Cornell shows. There was no more need to secure that right via constitutional amendment than there was to guarantee individuals the right to eat, defecate, or procreate. In short, free American males could have owned firearms to further their personal happiness and should have owned firearms to help protect the community. The latter was so important that it was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and most state constitutions. The former was important, too, but only a few states, like Pennsylvania, saw the need to protect that uncontroversial personal option via their constitutions.

Cornell also explores the origins of the individual- and collective-rights views of the Second Amendment. In the 1830s, a wave of armed violence spurred state legislatures to pass laws regulating pistols, dirks, Bowie knives, and other ostensibly non-military weapons. “These early efforts at gun control,” Cornell shows using a variety of historical sources, including court cases, “spawned the first legal challenges to these types of laws premised on the idea of a constitutional right to bear arms for individual self-defense” (4). History rhymed with itself in the twentieth century when the National Rifle Association (NRA) also responded to gun control laws with arguments based on an individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Cornell also details the emergence of the collective-rights view of the Second Amendment, which found root in the rank partisanship of Reconstruction. Eager to help freedmen protect themselves from the KKK, Republicans argued that the Fourteenth Amendment aimed to give the national government the power to guarantee Americans the rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights, including an individual right to bear arms. Democrats countered that the Second Amendment was a collective right granted to the states, not to individuals, and that its sole purpose was to prevent the national government from disarming state militias. The Democrats won the argument during Reconstruction and then again in the twentieth century, when legal scholars and the Supreme Court sanctified the collective-rights view in law journal articles and U.S. v. Miller (1939).

Although Cornell has freed us from the tyranny of two erroneous, ahistorical interpretations of the Second Amendment, his account is not flawless. His research was partly funded by the Joyce Foundation, which advocates stricter gun control laws, and it shows. Ultimately, Cornell hopes to bolster the view that governments can successfully and legitimately regulate gun ownership. “Registration, safe storage laws, and limited bans on certain weapons,” he concludes, are all consistent with the original, civic-duty view of the Second Amendment (216). He also argues that “wholesale gun prohibition or domestic disarmament is not” consistent with the Founders’ intent (216), but he knows that nothing close to that is possible anyway, at least not without prying weapons from millions of “cold, dead hands” (1). While there appear to be no Bellesiles-sized falsehoods proffered, Cornell’s portrait of a long history of Anglo-American gun control is distorted. For example, he claims that “under British law one could not travel armed,” a sweeping, undocumented claim directly contradicted by Joyce Malcolm in To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).

Despite those shortcomings, Cornell should be applauded for presenting a powerful “new paradigm for the second amendment” (211).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Robert E. Wright is clinical associate professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of seven books on America’s early financial system, economy, and government.

The idea for this project began with an unlikely provocation. Brooklyn Magazine ran a “literary map of the United States,” highlighting the “best book” from each of the 50 states. The whole point of putting lists like this on the Internet is to cause disagreement, but the list troubled my early Americanist self beyond second-guessing the individual choices.  As the creator of this map points out, lists like this “tend to be dominated by white men, most of them dead. And Margaret Mitchell.” Even as the editors do a solid job of moving beyond dead white guys, it was hard not to notice that the list was overwhelmingly composed of twentieth-century novels. Early Americanists know there is more to literature than that.

As a belated response, here are thirteen emerging early American scholars introducing a pre-1800 text available online to the public for free. We were not able to pull off the initial goal of having one text per colony, but the choices do represent a wide array of genres, perspectives, and identities.

Indeed, the only thing our texts have in common is that their authors are dead. The greatest joy of working on this project came in the astonishing choices the “13 for 13” authors made. Among other things, we have possibly the most NSFW edition of Common-Place ever, as Sarah Schuetze shares a seventeenth-century sex manual, and Stephanie McKellop shares an image of Britain, embodied as an elegant lady, punching America, embodied as a topless native woman, in the bosom. A different kind of perversity comes in The History  of a French Louse, an “it narrative” that Julia Dauer shares.  On the more conservative side, Laura Asson and Xine Yao share texts condemning dancing and decrying the sin of a man sentenced to death for sodomy. It would not be early America without a few samples of eloquence on the scaffold, and Ajay Kumar Batra shares an unheralded example of this genre with The Address of Abraham Johnstone.

Several authors chose texts that are not even books, in the conventional sense. Steffi Dippold shares images of a detector lock, while Emily Mann shares an early Caribbean map, and Lara Rose shares a digital archive of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. Lauren Grewe shares other important early American digital humanities work with her account of the Occom Circle project.

Appropriately enough for an online publication like Common-Place, this issue highlights resources available for free to anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection. Some of these introductions discuss approaches to teaching these texts and more generally, it is worth noting that every text  here offers something students probably never imagined as part of early America—and they all come at students’ favorite price. As Ana Schwartz’s introduction to Mourt’s Relation, Kimberly Takahata’s introduction to Madam Knight’s journal, and Michael Monescalchi’s reading of a Wheatley poem suggest, many of the central texts of early American literature have escaped from pricey anthologies, and are available to students at no cost.

I hope that you enjoy reading these texts as much as we have enjoyed writing about them. If they find your way into your classrooms, your research, or your reading, we would love to hear about it.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Jonathan Beecher Field is associate professor of American literature at Clemson University. He is the guest editor for this issue of Common-place.

Early reports from America told of boundless fecundity in the natural world; bounteous nature seemed to promise that all the commodities Europeans gathered from around the world would grow there. But experience appeared to indicate to some that American nature could be deceptive, that plants and animals had different properties in that environment than they had in the world previously known to Europeans. Thus hopes for New World products were mixed with deep curiosity about their essential natures and fears for the instability of categories. Samuel Purchas, who succeeded Richard Hakluyt as the great compiler of travel accounts, wrote that the cartographer Gerard Mercator actually believed America had escaped Noah’s flood because the species were so different in the New World, “(which I dare not thinke with him).”

It was an absolute article of faith that the American environment, particularly in southerly regions, would produce all the rich commodities of the “best parts of Europe.” Promoters extrapolated from global positioning and assumed that the products in each strip of latitude around the world would be the same. Thomas Harriot was a young Oxford graduate when Raleigh sent him with the painter John White to create a natural history of Raleigh’s Virginia in 1585. Harriot, who would go on to become a distinguished scientist, wrote that England could expect to grow in North America’s southeast everything that grew in Persia, Turkey, Japan, China, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, southern Spain, and North Africa because these were all in similar latitudes. Failure to find rich commodities in the early plantations was explained by analogy to a tree whose rough bark concealed and protected its valuable interior; it was an article of faith that inland America would make good all the disappointments experienced on the coast. Virginia’s rough exterior was just maidenly modesty, according to Samuel Purchas, a way of repelling the Spaniards’ lust.

American riches did prove elusive in the regions open to English settlement; and even when they were found, they could also deceive and prove hollow within. Travelers to southern climes often claimed that, because of its very fecundity, nature produced foods that looked wonderful but provided little or no nourishment; they just grew too fast to accrue the nutritional value of more humble European plants. Thomas Gage, who was in Mexico with the Spanish in the 1620s and 1630s as a Dominican before he turned Protestant and became a principal advisor to Oliver Cromwell, wrote that he had always been hungry again a couple of hours after eating while he was in New Spain. He recounted a story that Queen Elizabeth, upon being shown some delicious-looking fruit from America, remarked “[S]urely where those fruits grew, the women were light, and all the people hollow and false hearted.” According to Sir Henry Colt, the proportion of seed to flesh was also deceptive in the Indies: “All your fruit carryes to great stones to the proportions of their bignesse.” Richard Ligon, writing of Barbados, affirmed that meat was not “so well relisht as in England; but flat and insipid, the hogs flesh onely excepted, which is indeed the best of that kinde that I thinke is in the world.” Moreover, gorgeous flowers had no scent or, worse yet, a putrid smell and the “Pastills” he brought with him “lost both smell and taste.” Everything looked luscious, but appearances were deceptive.

Transplanted Europeans had to figure out how to penetrate to the reality behind the possibly misleading appearance of American species. An innocent facade might hide a sinister interior, as when Thomas Harriot wrote that the Roanoke colonists had discovered “a kinde of berries almost like unto capres but somewhat greater.” If they were boiled eight or nine hours, they were “very good meat and holesome,” but if eaten before long boiling “they will make a man for the time franticke or extremely sicke.” Moreover, some believed plants that were wholesome when grown in one environment became poisonous if gathered from another context. Curiosity was essential for health, and native informants were necessarily its prime satisfiers. The essential natures of Old World plants brought to America did not necessarily remain fixed either. John Josselyn wrote that summer wheat in New England “many times changeth into Rye.”

Even the heavens were different. Many reports claimed, according to Purchas, that there were fewer stars in the New World night sky and constellations were strange. Richard Ligon, writing of his experience in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century, explained the relative paucity of stars; he believed that, because lands near the equator were closer to the sky, the sun and moon were brighter and outshone the light of some small stars seen in England. More disturbing was the absence of familiar constellations and the presence of strange ones, especially the Southern Cross; nothing was familiar. Henry Colt, one of the earliest English visitors to write about Barbados, described the Southern Cross, but he was particularly struck by the absence of twilight. Describing the setting sun he wrote, “In his descent it goeth not sloopinge downe as with us, butt strikes right downe & it is a wonder how this great bodye becomes so soone covered with the sea.”

Other bizarre American phenomena seemed to be associated with these strange skies. John Winthrop recorded an invasion of caterpillars that did “Great harme . . . in Corne (especially wheat & barly)” in the summer of 1646. “It was beleeved by diverse good observations, that they fell in a great thunder showre, for diverse yardes & other bare places, where not one of them was to be seen an howre before, were presently after the showre almost Covered with them besides grasse places where they were not so easely discerned.” William Pynchon in Western Massachusetts and John Endecott in the east both wrote to Winthrop about the terrible plague; they, like the missionary John Eliot, interpreted the “suddaine, innumberable armys of Catterpillers” as, in Eliot’s words, “a very strang hand of God upon us.” Pynchon prayed that “the Lord affect our harts and humble us kindly in the sight of our sines and provocations.” Winthrop testified that prayer was indeed the pathway out of this strange meteorological phenomenon. Not only had they appeared mysteriously, but the caterpillars vanished equally suddenly. As Eliot wrote, “[M]uch prayer there was made to God about it, with fasting in divers places: & the Lord heard, & on a suddaine tooke them all away againe in all parts of the country, to the wonderment of all men; it was of the Lord for it was done suddainely.”

American modes of eliminating harmful insects also broke down normal categories of experience. John Josselyn wrote, for example, of a “somewhat strange” method of ridding fields of predators “which the English have learnt of the Indians”: if one gathered a quantity of caterpillars in a dish made of birch bark and set it afloat on an ebb tide, all the worms in a field or garden would disappear.

Not only did it seem possible that species were radically different in the New World, but some early observers reported evidence that the boundaries between the plant and animal kingdoms were crossed in some cases. One voyager to Barbados about 1650, whose account survives in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, wrote of

a wonderfull plant or litle tree . . . known here by the name of the Sensible tree, because it is thought to have the Sence of feeling. Touch but a Leafe of the tree with your finger, that leafe will presently Shrinke, and close upp itselfe, and hang downe as if it were dead. Cut of a leafe with a paire of Sissors, then all the other leaves groweing on the same tree will instantly shrinke, and close upp themselves, as if they were withered, and within halfe a quarter of an hour, will by degrees open themselves againe, and florish as aforesaid. And as oft as you touch or cutt any they will doe the like, which whether it bee an invincible argument of Sence, I leave to the Philosophers to determine.

Richard Ligon saw and remarked on this plant that seemed to shrink away from contact at about the same time: “One other Plant we have, and that is the Sensible plant, which closes the leaves upon any touch with your hand, or that end of your staff by which you hold, and in a little time will open again.” We continue the notion that this plant has feelings in its botanical name, Mimosa pudica, which implies that the plant experiences shame when it is violated.

William Wood, who came to New England in the vanguard of the Puritan migration of the 1630s, speculated that beavers were truly social animals with virtually human understanding of the principles of social organization. He described their cooperative labors in hauling heavy logs and argued that they were capable of foresight and therefore built their three-storied houses to withstand floods from heavy rains. Like human beings they made dams with “Art and Industry.” Wood wrote that beavers were clannish; if one happened into another family’s area, “he is made a drudge for as long as he lives there, to carry at the greater end of the logge, unlesse he creepe away by stealth.”

Anthony Parkhurst, who wrote to Richard Hakluyt about his experience in Newfoundland in the 1570s, was one of the few who played with American anomalies and the apparent breakdown of the separation between animals and plants. In his accounts of earlier travels in Africa and America, he had reported “trees that bare Oisters;” now he reminded Hakluyt of that claim and explained that the trees’ branches hung down into the water and oysters and mussels stuck to them. Another of his “merie tales” offered his claim that shellfish and squids washed upon shore in Newfoundland actually came in response to his verbal command.

But for most commentators, breakdown of established categories was real and disturbing. Wood, for example, wrote that New England wolves “had no joynts from the head to the tayle, which prevents them from leaping, or suddaine turning,” and he told a story to illustrate his claim that this animal differed fundamentally from European norms. Samuel Purchas’s earliest work, first published in 1613, described the American marsupial, the opossum, as a monster composed of parts of several animals: “They have a monstrous deformed beast whose fore part resembleth a Fox, the hinder part an Ape, excepting the feet which are like a mans; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse wherein shee bestowes her young untill they can shift for themselves.” In the same year, the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the Puritan son of a distinguished Cambridge University professor, wrote more sympathetically on the subject from Virginia. He said there were two “most strange” animals; “one of them is the female Possown, which will let forth her young out of her bellie, and take them up into her bellie againe at her pleasure without hurt to herselfe.” He warned readers not to think this a “Travellers tale.” Rather, it was the “very truth, for nature hath framed her to that purpose.” Moreover, not only had Whitaker himself seen this phenomenon with his own eyes, but several opossums and their babies had been sent to England. The other “strange conditioned creature” in Whitaker’s account was the flying squirrel, which could glide from tree to tree “if she have the benefit of a small breath of winde.”

Rattlesnakes were a subject of great interest; the problem was how they conveyed their poison. Although Wood had said firmly early in New England’s history that the danger lay in the snake’s teeth “for she has no sting,” some, like Josselyn in the 1670s, continued to believe that they had a sting in their tail like a scorpion; he described the snake’s rattle as “nothing but a hollow shelly bussiness joynted.” Wood wrote that their poison could kill a man in an hour unless he treated the bite with snakeroot, moreover if the victim lived, the snake died. He also sought to calm reports in England about extreme danger from the rattlesnake: “For whereas he is sayd to kill a man with his breath, and that he can flye, there is no such matter, for he is naturally the most sleepie and unnimble creature that lives.” Thomas Morton, the Puritans’ nemesis in early New England, also downplayed the danger from rattlesnakes. His discussion of this “creeping beast or longe creeple (as the name is in Devonshire,)” argued that they were no more or less “hurtfull” than adders in England, and affirmed that he had cured his dog of a snakebite using a traditional English mode, “with one Saucer of Salet oyle powred downe his throat.” A boy had similarly been cured with oil.

The Royal Society sought to put all speculation to rest with a truly scientific approach. “Mr. Henry Loades, a Merchant in London,” who had been sent a rattlesnake from Virginia, “was pleased not only to gratify the curiosity of the R. Society in shewing it them alive, but likewise gave it them when dead,” whereupon Dr. Edward Tyson conducted and recorded minutely his dissection of the snake before the society in January 1683. Although he described it as “so Curious an Animal,” he saw many similarities to European vipers and therefore “I have taken the liberty of placing it in that Classe” by giving it the name “Vipera Caudi-Sona Americana.” Tyson described the fangs on the upper jaw that carried the poison into the snake’s victims; they were controlled by muscles so that the snake could “raise them to do execution with; not unlike as a Lyon or a Cat does it’s claws.” They were great hollow teeth and “towards the point there was a plain visible and large Slitt.” By manipulating the side of the gum, Tyson was able to see the fang fill with poison.

Tyson determined that the rattle was attached to the last vertebra of the tail; he thought some of the bones that made up the rattle had been broken off in the specimen he examined. He quoted from Willem Piso’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Amsterdam, 1648) on the function of the rattle, but sharply rejected the claim that it was so dangerous “if thrust into a man’s fundament (which how it can I don’t well see) as to be more fatal than the poison of his Teeth.” He also doubted the theory that each segment of the rattle represented one year of the snake’s life.

The perceived instability of forms among American plants and animals, and the way that many of them seemed to defy inherited categories from the Old World, made them objects of acute curiosity among early reporters on American experience. Sometimes curiosity was occasioned by perceived or actual danger, but often curiosity about the nature of nature on the western shores of the Atlantic stemmed from or led to speculation about the natural history of the continents. These early discussions are impressive in their scholarship. Some are based on first-hand experience and an experimental outlook, but many are impressively scholarly in the range and depth of the sources they have digested in the quest for complete information. All were united in their fundamental curiosity about this newly revealed world and convey the frisson of suspicion that this might be a new world indeed.

Further Reading:

On hopes for the ability to grow plants that would free England of reliance on the rest of the world and on the deceptive qualities of American plants see Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588) in David Beers Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590, 2 vols. (London, 1955), 1: 325-6, 336, 353, 383; Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 2nd ed. (London, 1614), 717, 732-3, 754-7 and “Virginia’s Verger” in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1906), 19: 232, 240-56; Nicolas Monardes, Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde Worlde, trans. by John Frampton (1577), ed. by Stephen Gaselee, 2 vols. (London, 1925), 1: 143, 2: 4, 35; Thomas Gage, The English-American, His Travail by Sea and Land (London, 1648), 43, 200; “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas,” 1631, in V. T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667 (London, 1925), 92; and Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History Of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 27, 99, 106-7. Colt’s observations of the night skies is in Colonising Expeditions, 72, and Ligon’s is in his History of Barbados, 19-20. Harlow’s Colonising Expeditions also contains the discussion of the sensible plant in Anon., “A Breife Discription of the Ilande of Barbados,” c. 1650, 47; Ligon’s mention of it is in his History of Barbados, 99. John Josselyn’s claim that European grains were unstable, his description of his mode of ridding fields of harmful insects, and his thoughts on the rattlesnake can be found in Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New England, 1674, (Hanover, N.H., 1988), 23, 82-3, 131, and further comments are in his New-Englands Rarities Discovered (London, 1672), 110. The episodes of the caterpillars are in John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, ed. by Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 632-3; William Pynchon to John Winthrop, July 7, 1646, and John Endecott to Winthrop, July 9, 1646, Winthrop Papers, (Boston, 1947), 5: 90, 92-3; and “Rev. John Eliot’s Records of the First Church in Roxbury, Mass.,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 33 (1979), 62-65, quoted at 65. The oppossum accounts are in Purchas, Pilgrimage, 732-3, and Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 41. William Wood on beavers, wolves, and rattlesnakes is in his New Englands Prospect (London, 1634), 24, 44-5, 55-6. Thomas Morton’s rattlesnake story is in New English Canaan, 1637, in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1844), 2: 56, and the illustrated record of the snake’s dissection appears as “Vipera Caudi-Sona Americana, Or the Anatomy of a Rattle-Snake, Dissected at the Repository of the Royal Society in January 1682/3 by Edw. Tyson M. D., ” Philosophical Transactions 13 (1683), 25-61, quoted at 25-6, 45-6, 53-4. Recent scholarship on early modern natural science is very rich, and the field is a growing one. On the species discussed here, see in particular Susan Scott Parrish, “The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 475-514, and David Scofield Wilson, “The Rattlesnake,” in Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling, eds., American Wildlife in Symbol and Story (Knoxville, 1987). Notes 11 and 12 in Wilson’s article list seven communications about rattlesnakes published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions during the colonial period in addition to Tyson’s account of his dissection.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is Silver Professor of History at New York University and is currently Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society and a Guggenheim Fellow working on a book on Jamestown in its Atlantic context.

On the snowy afternoon when we first knocked on Pang Toua Yang’s door, he thought he had won something. Actually, we were there to tell him that his house is going to be the subject of a new Minnesota Historical Society exhibit: Open House will tell the story of a single, existing house—Pang Toua’s house on St. Paul’s East Side—and the people who lived within its walls, from the German immigrants who built it in 1888 to the Italians, African Americans, and now Hmong who have followed. The exhibit will be at the Minnesota History Center—Pang Toua’s house will be untouched—but we wanted his support and feared he would tell us, translator Foung Heu and myself, the Hmong equivalent of “hit the road.”

Instead, Pang Toua told us that he and his wife, Mai Vang, had recently become citizens. The previous week they had voted for the first time, helping to elect Mee Moua, the first Hmong legislator in America. Was it their ballot that had led us to their house, they wondered? “They think this is how American democracy works,” smiled Foung after translating their question. Awkwardly I explained that no, their house had been chosen because of its location in the history-rich Railroad Island neighborhood and because, by chance, we had a 1925 photograph of it in our museum’s collection. I waited apprehensively for Pang Toua to say thanks but no thanks. Instead, he let us into his house and, even more generously, shared with us his life story, a story of family, farming, war, and forced migration, of old world and new.

The exterior of Pang Toua’s house is almost unrecognizable from its 1925 incarnation. What pharmacist Albert Schumacher had built in 1888 as a single-family home was by 1910 already a duplex; today it’s a triplex, and Pang Toua and his family enter from a side door. The spacious front porch shown in the photo has long been enclosed. The third floor, where Italian families cured sausages, is gone, destroyed in a 1970 fire. And every remnant of Victorian ornament, flourish, and gewgaw on the facade has disappeared, replaced by smooth pink siding.

The house’s interior furnishings, too, would seem foreign to the German and Italian immigrants who lived there before, but perhaps the stories they tell of relocation and adaptation would resonate. On the wall of Pang Toua’s house are two framed documents—one his U.S. citizenship certificate, the other a record of his service in the CIA-supported army of General Vang Pao in Laos. In 1975, after the American army withdrew from Laos in defeat, Pang Toua and Mai were forced to flee with their parents and their six young children. As they tried to escape into the forest, the Communist Pathet Lao troops opened fire on them. Pang Toua and Mai surrendered, but their parents did not emerge from the woods. Presumably they were killed. After their capture, Pang Toua, Mai, and their children spent four years on a Pathet Lao work farm and two more in a Thai refugee camp before the family faced a choice: stay in the camp, with its continual food shortages and cramped conditions, until it closed; return to Laos and face likely persecution; or come to America. Reluctantly they left their homeland, arriving in Minnesota in 1986.

Settling in St. Paul has been a mixed blessing for Pang Toua and his family. Mai finds life easier here. She and Pang Toua grow vegetables in their garden and in a community farm plot, but the work of putting food on the table is not as taxing as it was on the farm in Laos. Pang Toua and Mai’s children have embraced America. Their oldest daughter, Mee Yang, has become an entrepreneur. Tired of people pronouncing her name as if it rhymes with “sang” instead of “sung,” she has changed it to Elizabeth Young. She now owns fourteen properties, including the house on Hopkins Street, part of which she rents to her parents. When I meet her, she teases me for owning “only” one home.

Pang Toua himself is struggling to navigate between American and traditional Hmong cultures. He tells me he would be happy to help on the exhibit project because, “In Laos, I was a useful person—my own farmer, my own blacksmith. Here I can’t do anything.” Compounding his feeling of dislocation, he recently suffered a terrible accident. He had a dream that some children were poking a bee’s nest with a stick and that the bees swarmed out and stung his whole body. The next week, he recounts, he was grilling in his backyard. The bottle of lighter fluid he was using had a hole in it, causing flames to shoot up and burn him severely. To Pang Toua, these stories—the dream and the accident—are connected. And so he has consulted both Western doctors and Hmong shamans to treat the injuries he suffered. The first thing one sees upon entering the Hopkins Street house is a shaman shrine. “If it’s a disease,” Pang Toua tells me, “then doctors can cure it, but if it’s spiritual, then you need shamans.”

Thrilled that our initial conversation with Pang Toua has gone so well, Foung and I decide that the next step is to give him and his family more of a sense of what they’re getting into; we will invite them to our museum building, the Minnesota History Center. Foung calls them a couple of weeks after our first meeting and arranges the visit. Cheerfully I say to Foung that it’s a good sign that they are interested in coming. “Well,” Foung says evenly, “in my culture once we invited them they pretty much had to come”—a system of mutual social obligation that any Minnesotan bearing a hotdish would recognize. In the week before the Yangs’ visit to the museum, I obsess about details. “Do you think Pang Toua and his family would like turkey, ham, or cheese?” I nervously ask Foung. I’ve been reduced to asking a consultant for advice on sandwich selections; even lunch becomes a minidrama when you’re working across cultures. Foung, a world-class culture straddler, smiles patiently and gives me just what I need, a decision: “Let’s go with ham.”

On the day of the visit, my nervousness at first seems to have been well justified. Foung and I have arranged to meet the Yangs at their house at 11:00 a.m. That morning Foung leaves me a message saying he’ll see me there at 10:45. Confused, I call back. Yes, Foung says, we arranged 11:00, but they will expect us to come and mingle first. So, I arrive at 10:45 and knock on the door. Their youngest daughter, a teenager, lets me in with complete indifference. Pang Toua and Mai don’t say a word to me either. The only sound is from the TV—what seems to be a documentary about the Mayans, droning on with no one watching. It feels like hours later but is probably only 10:46 when Foung arrives and we all get moving. We go next door, where daughter (and landlord) Elizabeth and her husband Michael live, and then we all pile into the ridiculously large state-owned van I’ve brought.

At the History Center, conversation gets somewhat easier. The ham sandwiches are devoured, and the exhibits are looked at with quiet interest. I make a point of showing them an exhibit on music in Minnesota that includes a hand-made Hmong instrument called a qeej and video footage from a Hmong nightclub in St. Paul. Pang Toua and Mai are more impressed with a different exhibit, one about Minnesota’s notorious weather, in which a huge fabric tornado spins. They have their picture taken in front of it.

Next we go behind the scenes, underground to where the Historical Society’s artifact collections are preserved for posterity in state-of-the-art, humidity-, temperature-, and light-controlled environments. Collections curator Claudia Nicholson shows Pang Toua and Mai the objects of Hmong culture that the Historical Society has accessioned—woefully few, really—and explains, through Foung, that we are eager to do more to document the contemporary Hmong experience in Minnesota. Out of nowhere, Mai, who has been almost silent to this point, says, “So when we’ve lost our traditions we can come here and learn them from you.”

After the museum tour, we head back to Hopkins Street for a more extended look at the house, an object clearly of more interest to me than to them. Walking in, I’m immediately struck by the warm rush of a strong food smell that I remember from the first time I stood in Pang Toua’s doorway—boiled chicken, maybe, but with an unfamiliar pungency. A large pile of shoes overflows a bin by the door, and I add mine to the sheet of plastic next to it. Pang Toua and Mai immediately move back into their lives, so the job of showing us around falls to landlord and son-in-law Michael. The tour is short because the unit really only has four small rooms, all crammed full with objects. In the living-dining-kitchen area, Mai and her teenaged daughter are serving a rice and vegetable mixture from a huge bowl to grandchildren, while the TV continues to blare, cartoons this time. To the side is a tiny bedroom where Pang Toua’s teenaged sons sleep and behind it is another (formerly an enclosed porch) for his daughter. In a back bedroom off the kitchen, Pang Toua has changed back into more casual clothes and is adjusting the protective sleeve on his injured arm. I see trays of green seedlings in the room, but Michael is unable to identify the plants for me. A back door leads out to the snow-covered garden. An internal stairway off the kitchen, which leads to the upper-floor apartment unit (occupied by another Hmong family), is completely blocked with objects—an improvised closet. Another small space off the kitchen, probably once a side porch, holds more overflow objects, including a large freezer.

Later, I ask Foung whether he thinks Pang Toua and Mai will stay in this house or move to another place. “Oh, I think they will be there a long time.” Then I raise the question I really have in mind: if Elizabeth owns fourteen properties, why does she put her parents in such a small, cramped space? “Well it’s part of our culture to save the worst for ourselves,” says Foung. “But in this case, it’s not herself; it’s her family,” I say. “In our culture,” Foung says simply, “the family is you.”

Heading back to the museum, I think about how far Pang Toua and Mai have traveled—from mountain farm to refugee camp tent to this house that, in my mind’s eye, is all tangled sheets. How do they make sense of the distance they have traveled? Or has part of them never left?  Is their world contained by 470 Hopkins Street, or is part of them elsewhere? To me, the house is a powerful framing device, but somehow I doubt it contains their core.

Pang Toua and Mai’s tale is only one of many wrenching, buoyant, comic, and tragic stories we’ve uncovered in researching the fifty families who passed through 470 Hopkins Street between 1888 and 2003. Strikingly different in their details, these life stories share a rich and idiosyncratic humanity that one could never script. As we delve into census records, birth records, marriage and death records; page through faded family photo albums; and talk to anyone who might have known someone who might have once lived in this house, we are gaining a sense of the texture of history and of home: how ordinary people build their lives within four walls and within circles of family, ethnicity, neighborhood, city, and nation. The house has become a vessel of dreams, a stage for successes, setbacks, tragedies, and transformations. Number 470 Hopkins Street has led us into worlds richer than we could have imagined—worlds where the boundaries between Old World and New World blur, where “American” takes on layers of meaning that transcend any dictionary definition, and where a knock on the door can open up conversations that reach across cultures, geography, and time.

Further reading:

The idea of building a major exhibit around a single, seemingly ordinary house comes most directly from the rich work done by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. That ongoing project is described at www.tenement.org and in two books: A Tenement Story: The History of 97 Orchard Street and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum by Stuart Miller (New York, 1999), and, for younger readers, 97 Orchard Street, New York: Stories of Immigrant Life by Linda Granfield (Plattsburgh, 2001). A somewhat similar approach was taken by the Smithsonian Institution in its exhibit Within These Walls.  The exhibit’s Website features curricular materials and how-to tips on house research. More broadly, the impulse to tell a narrowly bounded story comes out of a vein of narrative-driven history, including (among many examples) Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, 1980), Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990), John Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994), Nick Salvatore’s We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (New York, 1996), Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998), Carlo Rotella’s Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (Berkeley, 2002), and Jill Lepore’s A Is for American:Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York, 2002). The complicated situation of the Hmong in America is recounted movingly in Ann Fadiman’s spellbinding The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York, 1997). Examples of Hmong folklore are compiled in Charles Johnson’s Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos (St. Paul, 1981).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Benjamin Filene is an exhibit developer at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul and the author of Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill, 2000), which won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award. The Open House exhibit will open for a five-year run at the Minnesota History Center in January 2005.

Public education is an idea, not a structure. The idea is that every citizen must have access to the culture and the means of enriching that culture. It arises from the belief that we are all equal as citizens, and that we all thereby have rights and obligations to serve the community as well as ourselves. To meet those obligations, we must use our informed intelligence. Schools for all assure the intelligence of the people, the necessary equipment of a healthy democracy. A wise democracy invests in that equipment.

—Theodore R. Sizer, Horace’s Hope (1996)

In late November, an estimated thousand mourners, including Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, gathered at Memorial Church at Harvard University to honor the life and work of Theodore R. Sizer, the internationally recognized education reformer who died this past October. (Sizer, a friend to this publication, co-authored a piece with his wife, Nancy, on the misguided emphasis on standardized testing for the July 2008 issue of Common-Place.) Sizer received his Ph.D. in History in 1961, writing his thesis under the directorship of Bernard Bailyn on the so-called “Committee of Ten” who sought to reform American education in the 1890s. Published by Yale University Press in 1964, Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century became the first of eleven books Sizer wrote or edited. Over the course of the next 45 years, his productivity as a scholar proceeded alongside a career that included serving as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Headmaster of Phillips Andover Academy, Professor of Education at Brown, and spearheading a reform initiative that came to be known as the Coalition of Essential Schools. It was followed about a decade later by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, a broader effort at Brown that sponsors research and analysis. Rarely has any figure in modern intellectual life so successfully harnessed the power of private institutions for public good, or achieved the fusion of thought and action, that Sizer did in his remarkable career.

The seedbed of that career was a childhood and training saturated in the culture and traditions of New England. New England, of course, is the cradle of American educational civilization. Early colonies such as Hartford and New Haven (Sizer was born and buried in the town of Bethany, situated between the two cities), mandated free public schools within a decade of their founding in the 1630s, as did Massachusetts. But the region was also the seedbed of private academies such as Phillips Academy Andover, founded in 1778, where Sizer served as headmaster two centuries later. For all their differences, these educational institutions were characterized by a powerful communitarian spirit in their mission, and an avowedly moral orientation that stressed the importance of independent-minded people who would also be civic-minded participants in public life—a seeming contradiction that Sizer finessed with notable grace in forging public-private partnerships at Harvard, Brown, and the Coalition, founded in 1984. These characteristics remained discernible even in the nineteenth century, when strong-minded reformers like Horace Mann sought to adapt public schools to the needs of an emerging industrial capitalist order. Mann no less than Cotton Mather would have endorsed deceptively simple Coalition precepts such as “The school should focus on helping young people learn to use their minds well,” or “The school’s goals should apply to all students.” (For more on these and other essential principles, see the CES website.)

Sizer had the good fortune of coming of age as the American Century crested; a beneficiary of the G.I. Bill, he entered university life and became the youngest dean in the history of Harvard at age 31 as much because of the rapid expansion of postwar academia as for his evident talent and social skills. But he was at the helm of Phillips Andover during the rocky 1970s, and was keenly aware of the economic challenges facing public education in the face of receding collective commitment. In this difficult environment, Sizer’s commitment to egalitarianism in education guided his work, whether in making co-education a condition of his acceptance of the Andover post, creating a free math and science program for minority students while there, or in founding a charter public high school in central Massachusetts (and serving as co-principal with Nancy Sizer in 1998-99 to plug a personnel hole).

Sizer was sometimes characterized as a “progressive” educator, and the label makes sense—to a point. Certainly, his vision was broadly consonant with Progressive-era pioneers like John Dewey, a clear and important influence on his work. And use of the word “progressive” to describe those like him skeptical of test-driven curricula and information delivery systems is also accurate, if a bit imprecise. But “progressive” is a word that can obscure at least as much as it reveals. Sizer’s progressivism owed a lot more to, say, Jane Addams than Theodore Roosevelt. It was the bottom-up progressivism of the urban reformer, not the top-down progressivism of the elitist technocrat. His emphasis on the local and the empowerment of the individual made him a compelling figure to President George H.W. Bush, who invited Sizer to the White House to discuss his ideas, no less than President Bill Clinton, who worked with Sizer as governor of Arkansas on Re:Learning, a progressive-minded effort to launch school reform at the state level, and who summond him to visit the White House as well.

Perhaps a better term for understanding Sizer’s work is “pragmatist.” The figure most prominent in this regard is another New Englander, William James. The Jamesian faith that truth is something that happens to an idea is evident in Sizer’s famous precept that “unanxious expectation” is the optimal stance in a teacher’s relationship with a student. By acting as if a student will succeed in accomplishing a complex, independent project, you can in effect make it so: faith has catalytic power. Calling Sizer pragmatic might sound a bit odd to some, given that much of the criticism of his work centered on a belief that his ideas were impractical. This was the critique leveled at Sizer by respectful critics like E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch, who long argued that a more content-based approach is ultimately the most practical one for students to make their way in the world. “Some ‘essential’ schools are a little loosey-goosey for my personal curricular taste,” another friendly critic, Chester Finn, recently wrote. “But my chief anxiety about Ted’s approach to education reform isn’t that there’s anything wrong with the schools; it’s that this approach is not easily replicated or scaled. To which he, of course, would reply that no other approach will actually succeed, at least not when it comes to delivering bona fide education (which he never confused with embedding basic skills in scads of kids).”

To the end of his days, Sizer remained relentlessly focused on what actually works—and solutions that were the product of close empirical observation at thousands of schools. He was an early champion of vouchers so that public school families could vote with their feet, a position that put him at odds with some liberals. While determinedly opposed to the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law of 2002, Sizer was never opposed to standards per se. What he insisted upon is that the standards for those standards be high, that those doing the evaluating did their homework no less than the students. The often unspoken appeal of standardized tests for those who champion them is the ease with which they can be administered rather than the value of what they measure. Authentic assessment is difficult; good work always is.

Moreover, Sizer understood as a matter of instinct and reflection that the search for the truth is never simply a matter of gathering information, one reason he lamented the mindless quality of so much education research and the misplaced priorities of most Ed schools. That’s why, when he tried to convey the reality of everyday school life in the United States, he did so through a fictional character: Horace Smith, the beloved teacher (and later principal) of the archetypal Franklin High. Horace lives on in the pages of Sizer’s celebrated trilogy: Horace’s Compromise (1984), Horace’s School (1992) and Horace’s Hope (1996). In capturing the granular details of the classroom, and the often painful dilemmas that prevent good people from doing their best work, Sizer both comforted and inspired hundreds of thousands of students on the road to becoming teachers.

Further Reading:

Theodore R. Sizer’s best known book is Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Boston, 1984), followed by Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School (Boston, 1992) and Horace’s Hope: What Works for the American High School (Boston, 1996). Other notable works in the Sizer canon include The Students Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract, co-authored with Nancy Sizer (Boston, 1999), and The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (New Haven, 2004). For an anthropologically-minded critique of Sizer’s reform efforts, see Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan, Reform and Resistance in Schools and Classrooms: An Ethnographic View of the Coalition of Essential Schools (New Haven, 1996). See also Chester Finn’s adversarial tribute to Sizer at Flypaper, an educational blog at Fordham University.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, was Theodore R. Sizer’s son-in-law. Cullen’s most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History. He blogs at American History Now.

Hesperus was founded as a baroque ensemble in Arlington, Va., in 1979, but quickly expanded its repertoire to include colonial American music. The D.C. area, including Virginia and Maryland, is a marvelous place to research and perform music from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America; there are many restored historical sites, most of which regularly present concerts and festivals. The Library of Congress has one of the best collections of colonial and Federal American music in the country, and Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello both provide many additional resources.

The earliest colonists brought the music of their homelands with them; American music before the mid-eighteenth century represents the diversity of our nation of immigrants. As the colonies began to see themselves as independent from Great Britain politically and economically, they began to develop a cultural independence as well. The creative energy that carved out a new nation also fueled its lively, idiosyncratic musical style. That energy wasn’t reflected in its pleasant but undistinguished parlor/classical music, but rather in other genres: dance music, broadside ballads and ballad operas, dissonant, modal devotional hymns, marches, and play-party songs.

Our concerts feature a mixture of classical and popular musics, with a good representation of Scots-Irish ballads, dances, variation sets, and airs. We frequently program such British composers/collectors as John Playford (The English Country Dancing Master), Benjamin Carr (The Division Flute), and Thomas Ravenscroft (Deuteromelia, Pammelia); Scots-Irish composers/collectors Burke Thumoth, Turloch O’Carolan, and James Oswald, as well as tunes from such lute manuscripts as the Rowallan and the Dixon. We also program vocal music by composers of the First New England School: William Billings, Daniel Read and Supply Belcher, whose music became the cornerstone of our current Sacred Harp repertoire. One of our biggest sources for dance music is the Library of Congress’s collection of Cotillion books. Printed between 1780 and 1850, they drew from an intriguing mixture of French round-o’s and rigaudons, Irish jigs, Scottish reels, English country dances, opera arias, and a smattering of other European popular tunes. The broadside ballad was vastly popular: taking a familiar tune as a model, scribblers would pen a lyric about some happening of the day—such as a battle, a murder or hanging—and print it on a wide sheet of paper known as a broadside. Since it was “sung to the tune of,” people didn’t have to read music. Particularly during the ups and downs of war or an especially vituperative presidential election, the broadside ballads expressed current popular sentiment as up-to-date as any blog.

Our approach to this eclectic repertoire can be summarized as informed and participatory. In our opinion, very little written music was meant to be played as written (even there, the eighteenth-century printer’s typical slipshod proofreading can obscure a composer’s original intentions). Much written popular music was meant as a memory aid, a foundation for improvisation and arrangements. Rather than reading the music and playing it as written in the classical style, we learn from current, continuous living traditions, extrapolating from modern-day traditional rural fiddle players like Tommy Jarrell and Clyde Davenport; ballad singers such as Jean Ritchie and Molly Andrews; Irish fiddlers like Kevin Burke and Brendan Mulvihill, and Scottish fiddlers Bonnie Rideout and Elke Baker. In order to best reflect the different styles of music, we’ve studied with many of these performers, as well as inviting many of them to perform with us.

Visit Hesperus’s website.

Sound files:

“Bobbing Joe Medley: Bobbing Joe,” Tina Chancey, violin, Mark Cudek, recorder, Scott Reiss, hammered dulcimer. Track from Early American Roots (1997). Courtesy of Chancey/Hesperus.

“Federal Overture,” by Benjamin Carr. Scott Reiss, recorder, Tina Chancey, fiddle, Grant Harried, lute, guitar. Track from Colonial America: spirited sounds from across the sea to the shores of the new land (2003). Courtesy of Chancey/Hesperus.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).