High-altitude flights across American History

It was early December, the end of the fall semester, and I was sitting in my office, having just taught my last class. The usual mixed feelings of exhaustion and elation had given way to equally predictable and tangled emotions: relief and regret. Though the class had gone well, there were the inevitable pangs of disappointment over missed teaching opportunities and the regular resolves about how to make it all work a little better. Surely I could shake up more members of the cell-phone generation—reaching them sooner and challenging them more deeply—the next time around.

But there would be no next time. This wasn’t just the last class of the 2006 fall term; it was the last course in my short and enjoyable thirty-two-year teaching career at Duke. With a knock on the door, a history department secretary asked in an off-hand way if I could “help move some furniture in the graduate lounge?” Even as we chatted going down the hall, I had no inkling that I was innocently being ushered into a retirement celebration cooked up by busy graduate students—the same kind of unpretentious and energetic young historians that I had been working with for more than three decades.

After I mastered my total surprise, we toasted each other in champagne and cider and devoured a homemade cake. They even gave me a little clock, marked, “With Best Wishes and Thanks”—which sits on our mantel piece, the perfect gift for an early American historian. Before they dispersed to grade term papers, we chatted about the U.S. history text, Created Equal, which I was revising for its third edition, and the unusual class I had just finished, entitled One Nation-One Semester.

Since then, I have had a full year to think about both those topics and the surprising, satisfying way that they came together. I can now see more clearly, in retrospect, that working hard on a U.S. survey with four impressive American historians boosted me out of my engaging, comfortable “colonial” world. It gave me the renewed excitement about big-picture historical themes I needed to attempt such an unorthodox final fling.

What did I learn from teaming with other scholars to tackle an undergraduate text, writing the eight colonial and revolutionary-era chapters of a one-thousand-page U.S. survey for Pearson Longman? To state the obvious first: lots of teamwork is involved in such an extensive collaboration. Fortunately, after nearly a decade of drafting and revising, sharpening and expanding, the friendships among our far-flung team are stronger than ever. We set out with a desire to weave together the political history we had learned as students with the social history we were practicing in our research. We wanted to tell a story that was more inclusive than the one we had inherited, not just in terms of race, class, and gender, but in terms of geography as well. Along the way, we learned a lot about the mysteries of textbook publication and the complexities of outsourcing. (One draft map came back to us with the Atlantic labeled as the Pacific!) I also gained some basic insights into student demography, our professional blinders, and my own shifting sense of the relation of the forest and the trees.

As a writer, I learned something that should have been obvious to me. If most of tomorrow’s students of American history will inhabit the Web, many of today’s most committed students attend community colleges. When I first arrived in North Carolina to teach on Duke’s gothic campus back in 1975, the struggling tobacco town of Durham also contained a small vocational institution devoted to industrial education. I paid no attention a decade later when that school added a university-transfer program to its curriculum and changed its name to Durham Technical Community College. A similar school in neighboring Alamance County became Alamance Community College in 1988.

The huge expansion of community colleges that took place around me in North Carolina was also going on all across the country. But somehow, with my nose buried in research notes and recommendation letters, I had missed most of it. Working on Created Equal has finally given me a chance to gain a better sense of this explosion and to meet some of the impressive teachers and students at places like Collin County Community College in Texas. (Since Created Equal now exists in an Advanced Placement edition for high schools, I have also had a chance to talk shop with scores of dedicated history teachers at recent AP annual meetings, sponsored by the College Board.)

I am now intrigued, as a textbook coauthor, by how readily many of my peers still dismiss the enterprise of textbook writing. Granted, I once rowed in that same boat, and I would still agree that these tomes seem far too numerous, too costly, and too bulky. Some of these “aircraft carriers,” as students often call the largest behemoths, are also too bland, stilted, or old-fashioned. But one could argue that for writers and readers alike surveys represent a strong antidote to the overspecialization and narrowness that has bedeviled our field. (If only our profession’s overabundance of monographs could be converted into ethanol!) Sadly, most historians have lost the art of talking in persuasive general terms to the broad public, while most citizens and public leaders have all but given up on seeking useful commentary and insights from academic historians.

Helping to design a survey text may be one way to make the best research in our profession available to a broader audience. But such overviews are harder to write (and certainly less lucrative per hour spent) than most colleagues suspect. So for me the main motivation became personal. Could I pull together the diverse threads of early American history into coherent and suggestive chapters? Could I run a swift and respectable first lap in the U.S. history relay race, getting Created Equal off to a suitable start before handing the baton off to my teammates (Jackie Jones, Elaine May, Tim Borstelmann, and Vicki Ruiz)? It was an exhausting leg but also a satisfying one.

In retrospect, I wish I had tackled such an assignment earlier in my career, since it forced me to read widely, weigh priorities, and hone my prose. It improved my teaching in ways I had not foreseen, since it obliged me to get above the trees and look at the general contours of the entire forest. Undoubtedly, this extended exercise in exploring wider vistas set the stage for one last, highly enjoyable pedagogical experiment: One Nation-One Semester.

Why would anyone ever tackle such a course, attempting to cover all of American history in a fifteen-week semester? I had learned from experience that the standard two-semester survey had several weaknesses. For one thing, the pace, though brisk, often seemed slow to impatient, instant-messaging sophomores. And even aspiring history majors sometimes bogged down in such historical twilight zones as the 1720s, the 1830s, or the 1950s. Also, for credit-counting undergraduates, the luxury of a two-semester overview cut into their busy course plan, so they often settled for only half of the year, skipping over how the saga begins or never discovering how it ends up. This was especially true for scientists and other non-history majors who were eager to build on their high school knowledge of the American past but who could not spare two terms to delve into the national attic.

In a department where many professors shun year-long survey courses and where drawing non-majors into history classrooms is always a plus, the experiment seemed plausible. So I jumped at the chance. It would put an exciting wrap on a teaching career that had included such prior adventures as Native American History, History and the Visual Image, and the History of Documentary Film.

Besides, I had once covered the same ground at a much faster speed. Years earlier, a dean at Duke’s Fuqua Business School had called unexpectedly, inviting me to meet with an international group of MBA students and “give them some background in American history.” When I asked how many days or weeks this survey would take, he suggested, “I think three hours would be enough. Feel free to take the whole morning, but leave time for breaks and discussion.”

“You bet,” I said, though he couldn’t see the expression on my face. I decided to emphasize four themes—pulled from dozens—that seem necessary to understanding America’s past. My short final list, as I recall, included our Christian, and predominantly Protestant, religious roots; our unusual ethnic and racial diversity; and our long track record as an entrepreneurial, capitalist nation; along with our distinctive geography and abundant natural resources. Armed only with several handouts, I tracked these variables across the 1700s, the 1800s, and the 1900s. We even had time for breaks between centuries and for discussion at the end!

What probably sounds like a useless cop-out or an exercise in lunacy turned out to be, from my perspective, a novel exchange, full of new insights, juxtapositions, and connections. The invitation to transit the vast territory of the American past at a velocity of Mach 2.0 had come about as a chance encounter, a “busman’s holiday” joyride. But this brief Top Gun exploit, talking about U.S. history while moving at twice the speed of sound, proved to be one of my most exhilarating and memorable teaching experiences.

By comparison, History 103, with its eye-catching title, One Nation-One Semester, would be a leisurely fly-over in a Lindbergh-era biplane. I would meet twice a week with thirty students, giving two midterms and a final exam. If all went according to plan, we would fight the U.S.-Mexican War and visit Seneca Falls before fall break in mid-October; we would be approaching Watergate when Thanksgiving arrived. Since I was most familiar with Created Equal, we would use that text to guide us, along with a connected book of primary source readings.

Naturally, we would keep an eye on main themes that had intrigued my team as we were writing Created Equal, such as the remarkable diversity of both the American land and the American people, the ebb and flow of power between the nation’s elites and its democratic masses, and the large and ever-shifting relationship between the United States and the wider world. But we would also track themes that seemed most important to class members or that emerged during the semester: the persistence of discrimination; the scope of American religious tolerance over time; the democratic, or tyrannical, strength of the public media. With the 2006 political campaigns in full swing during much of the fall term, party politics was in the air, though we worked hard to avoid predictable red-blue debates and to de-escalate the still-simmering “culture wars” wherever possible.

I assigned a money-saving, unbound version of Created Equal, punched for three-hole notebooks. This limited the resentments that arise from high prices and from having to lug a large book around campus all semester. Also, bringing two new chapters to class each week, instead of thirty, underscored the sense that we were constantly progressing onto different terrain, not wandering in circles through the same hinterland. Each session we would tackle one chapter and some connected documents.

On the first day of class, I distributed a handout urging students, among other things, to read assignments carefully in advance . . . and to get enough rest. (Lack of sleep had reached epidemic proportions on campus in recent years, and I wanted everyone to bring their minds, not just their sleepy bodies, to our sessions!) I had learned over time that many Duke students prefer to play their cards close to the vest, so the sheet also urged everyone to speak up freely. “Engaged give and take, with respect for varied opinions—and the right of everyone to change their views, generally makes for the liveliest classes.”

Before “closing the cabin door,” I reiterated the non-stop nature of our mission, so that anyone looking for a more leisurely flight was free to exit. No one departed, so I divided the students into ten groups of three. After that, on their assigned weeks, all members of one group would take responsibility for doing the reading early and posting brief, suggestive responses (signed and proofread) on our electronic blackboard site. That way, the rest of us could read these “postings” before class, and they often helped to shape and advance our lecture and conversations.

For me, and for most who took part I gather, the experience was overwhelmingly positive. It would take another column to discuss all the individual breakthroughs that occurred along the way. But the general pattern was clear. Even more than in most American history classes, this wide overview (mixed with lively discussions in a class of limited size) allowed lots of students to get beyond the strange barrier that often separates personal and family history from broader events and patterns.

Many of us who have become historians did so because we intuited these connections; they intrigued us from the start, so they often seem self-evident. But it does not take much time in front of history classes to realize that most students, having conceded the most obvious ties (or claimed the most self-serving ones) often resist more subtle or unflattering linkages between our personal and our collective heritage, at least until given space to open up. This kind of rapid overview provided an excellent space for finding and exploring such meaningful links.

By term’s end, two things struck me particularly, one that I anticipated and one that I did not. I knew at the outset that we would obviously be sacrificing “depth” all along the way, but I figured that much of the detail that students cram into their minds or their computers during a survey course is lost or forgotten within months anyway. So I was willing to trade elaboration for connections.

In short, I hoped that our accelerated speed would bring diverse periods, people, and problems into useful proximity. It is harder to induce and capitalize on such juxtapositions in a course that moves at a statelier pace. From the start, I described our journey as a rapid airplane ride at a rather high altitude, where we were giving up the benefits of a hike in the woods for the advantages of seeing wide vistas and the ways that changing historical landscapes fit together in logical and surprising ways. To illustrate this, I regularly traced our “flight” with a simple chalk timeline across the long blackboard at the front of the room. The far left side became the most distant, pre-Columbian, North American past—our initial runway, so to speak. The right edge of the board became the present, and as the term progressed we were steadily approaching that familiar landing zone.

But as we were traveling forward in time, week-by-week from left to right, we could also think our way back through the twentieth century, moving from right to left. This provided the teaching tool that I had not expected. In our discussion on any given day, we could pause to explore different generations of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents in the most recent century and how they might have viewed the subject we were discussing. It became clear early in our flight that even while we were still talking about Puritan religion or Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, we could also talk about historiography. We could, to put it another way, triangulate a given topic, looking back at it from several different chronological vantage points.

These interludes were often only brief asides, but they soon became a key part of the course. I would go to the right side of the board, standing “in the present,” and we could look back together along the timeline toward the worlds of the students’ recent ancestors. Then we could all comment on how those individuals, diverse as they were, might have understood the same topic that we were discussing. Perhaps they learned about it in an American school of the 1920s or the 1960s, or in some distant foreign country, for that matter.

Take Columbus, for example. Clearly his voyage looked quite different in 1792, when colleges, rivers, and cities were eagerly being named “Columbia,” or in 1892, when the expanding United States was beginning to look overseas. A century later, viewed from the vantage point of 1992, Columbus’s saga was seen from still another angle by many. Alfred Crosby’s seminal book, The Columbian Exchange (1972), had had two decades to sink in, and the decimation of indigenous Americans from exposure to new foreign diseases had become a topic of active debate.

Similarly, a class discussing the Civil War and Reconstruction period in 1915, when D. W. Griffith’s racist extravaganza, The Birth of a Nation, was being promoted in movie theaters and praised from the White House, would have different assessments of that past era than a cohort that had watched reruns of Edward Zwick’s 1989 film Glory while still in high school. Likewise, history students during the 1950s, the heady postwar era of penicillin and the Salk polio vaccine, surely had more trouble comprehending the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 than undergraduates in the 1990s, who were suddenly confronting the horrendous AIDS epidemic on a global scale. As we zoomed over recent decades late in the semester, we had already glimpsed some of the different ways that earlier generations experienced their own present and understood the national past.

Needless to say, our ground speed sometimes seemed especially fast during our long decent across the twentieth century. (“Keep an eye out on Tuesday for the New Deal, coming up on the left side of the plane. We will be passing over World War II shortly.”) But by the time we landed safely in early December, most of the passengers, and the pilot too, had a refreshed sense of the terrain of American history and also of the changing ways in which historians and other citizens have viewed this varied and continuous landscape.

As a historian, I have been lucky enough to go on lots of long archival hikes over the years, and I look forward to others. Still, I always wanted to fly extra fast across American history at least once before I retired. Now I can say that I did it. It proved a liberating trip, and I learned a great deal along the way. These days I am finding the steady pace of the little clock on the mantel to be plenty fast enough.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Peter H. Wood has written about colonial slavery, the demography in the early Southeast, the French explorations of LaSalle, the history of North Carolina, and the black images of American artist Winslow Homer. He has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; his most recent book is Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (2004).

Early missionary printing in Thailand

Imagine what it feels like to find yourself in the backseat of a black limousine, speeding through congested Bangkok traffic as part of an armed convoy! This is exactly where I found myself in December 1982. At least the car was air conditioned, but that seemed small consolation at the time. I didn’t feel much better when we were waved through a checkpoint into a large compound protected by coils of barbed wire. I was not sure what I had done to deserve this treatment, but from all appearances it hadn’t been good.

Let me explain. In early 1980, my partner, later to become my wife, had enlisted in the Peace Corps and had been assigned to Thailand to work as a field worker in malaria prevention. At the time, I was employed by the Bibliographical Society of America as an editor to complete the final volumes of its long-term project, Bibliography of American Literature, based in an office at the Houghton Library at Harvard College. I had also become interested in and, more and more involved with, what was then an emerging discipline in the United States, the history of the book. This new discipline, which was inspired by work of French scholars in what they termed histoire du livre, had been introduced in America by two influential books of the 1970s: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) and Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (1979).

In 1980, when my partner left Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Thailand, it seemed that it might be a good idea if I were to find a topic for research that would justify occasional trips to Thailand, so that we could visit. What about the history of Thailand’s introduction to printing? One of the major arguments of Eisenstein’s book was that the introduction of the printing press and the subsequent rise of “print culture” had profoundly affected European society during the Renaissance and Reformation, though this thesis was being hotly contested by other scholars. Perhaps a similar study of the introduction of printing into Thailand, a Buddhist society that was certainly literate without the benefit of printing, would provide a useful test case.

Preliminary investigations proved promising. The introduction of printing into Thailand, then Siam, had been chiefly the work of Western missionaries: preliminary efforts were made by French Roman Catholic missionaries at the end of the eighteenth century but more permanently by American Protestant missionaries from the 1830s. Furthermore, the archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), one of the leading missionary societies that had played a role in early Thai printing, were right there in the Houghton Library, and thus I would have ready access to important primary materials. The archives of other American missionary societies were available on microfilm, and their work was also documented in published reports and periodicals, which were also at hand. So I set to work with my investigations, evenings and weekends, and compiled a checklist of early Thai imprints and gathered evidence of its impact. Looking back, I suppose I imagined that my investigations might end up in a decisive graph that would map the number of pages printed against the number of Buddhist converts to Christianity and that that data would thus support or undermine Eisenstein’s thesis.

Here is what I discovered. Regular contact between Thailand and Europe dates from the early sixteenth century. The first Roman Catholic missionaries settled at Ayutthaya (then the capital of Thailand) in 1554 and in 1674 wrote to France requesting printing equipment. No evidence survives that this early request was granted, and the honor of being the first printer of Thai belongs to another French missionary. In 1788, Arnaud-Antoine Garnault wrote from Pondicherry in India, reporting that he had had a catechism and a primer printed in romanized Thai. In 1796, with Garnault now settled in Thailand, the first press arrived there, sent from France, and over the next few years it was used to produce a few small books and pamphlets, also in romanized Thai.

If the early efforts of the Roman Catholic missionaries were limited, both in scope and intended audience, this was not the case of the American Protestant mission presses that were established in Bangkok in the 1830s. During the final decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, an outburst of evangelical religious enthusiasm swept both England and the United States. This revival, in part a reaction against the rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment, led to the founding of various societies dedicated to distributing tracts, translating the scriptures, and funding missionary activities at home and abroad. As with their Roman Catholic predecessors, Protestant missionaries in Asia followed in the footsteps of merchants. The lucrative trade of England and the United States with India, China, and Southeast Asia inevitably drew Protestant evangelicals to these areas, and early in the nineteenth century a number of missions and missionary presses were established there, most famously at Serampore, a Danish trading center just upriver from Calcutta. The Serampore press became a veritable factory for scriptures in Asian languages.

The first printing in Thai characters was accomplished at Serampore in 1819: a Catechism of Religion that had been prepared by the American Baptist missionary Ann Hasseltine Judson for distribution to a small community of Thai prisoners of war in Burma. In 1823, this Thai font was shipped to Singapore, where the London Missionary Society (LMS) had established a press late the preceding year. Plans to establish a printing center foundered, however, and it was not until the end of the decade that the type was put to use, a direct result of the first visit by Protestant missionaries to Thailand in 1828 and 1829. The primary goal of this visit was to distribute Chinese tracts among the junks that regularly traded between Thailand and southern China, but the missionaries recognized the opportunities for missionary work among the Thais as well. Accordingly, they had six thousand copies of a tract and seven hundred copies of the Gospel of Luke and the first six chapters of the Gospel of John printed at the LMS press, and when one of the missionaries returned to Bangkok in 1831, he carried the tract with him—the first printing from moveable type in Thai characters to find its way to Thailand.

The LMS missionaries also wrote to several American organizations asking for help with this new missionary opportunity, and as a result in 1833 American Baptists sent a missionary to Bangkok from Burma to establish a permanent mission there. The following year the missionary arm of the Congregational Church of America, the ABCFM, established its own mission in Bangkok. The ABCFM took possession of the LMS printing establishment in Singapore, and in July 1835 brought it and an old-fashioned press to Bangkok from Singapore. In July 1836, the Baptist Board sent a trained printer, together with a proper press and equipment, to Thailand. The Baptists had not, however, been able to acquire Thai type for their press; the Congregationalists were willing to share their type, and with this combination of resources and expertise, a dozen or so tracts were prepared over the next eighteen months. When the Congregationalists received two new presses and other equipment in 1837, these too were shared with the Baptists. This cooperation came to an end in May 1838, and from then on the Protestant missionaries in Bangkok maintained two separate printing establishments, the Baptist “Mission Press” and the “ABCFM Press.”

Over the next decades, the American missionary presses printed tracts and books at a prodigious rate—hundreds of thousands of pages were produced! Most of this material was of a religious nature, intended to aid in the project of Christianizing the local population; by far the greatest achievement of the Baptist Mission Press was the publication of the New Testament in Thai, completed in 1843. But the press also produced nonreligious publications, including textbooks, two works intended to aid in the study of the Thai language, and from 1847 to 1851 an English-language almanac entitled the Bangkok Calendar. The output of the ABCFM Press was also largely religious in nature, mostly tracts that explained the message of the scriptures and Christianity in simple language. Other works included a series of almanacs in Thai, produced annually from 1843, and the Bangkok Recorder, the first periodical produced in Thailand, which appeared monthly for eighteen issues from July 1844. It contained summaries of foreign news and tables of prices current, as well as more general educational material—such as discussions of chemistry and the human circulatory system—and entertaining stories and fables. This press also produced several works on Western medical practices (including treatises on vaccination and midwifery), a work on Western astronomy, and a series of woodcut maps with the place names given in Thai. English-language promotional and informational material was also printed for friends and supporters in the United States. Both presses also produced some Chinese-language material, aimed at the local Chinese community as well as China itself.

There is some evidence of experimentation with printing by Thais themselves before the arrival of the American missionaries, but clearly the Protestant tracts and the technology that produced them spurred renewed curiosity. Experiments continued but were, with a single exception, of little success. In several instances, Thais collaborated with the mission presses, most notably in the production at the ABCFM Press of 10,700 copies of a broadside version of King Rama III’s May 1839 proclamation against the sale and use of opium. This was the Thai government’s first official printed document. In 1850, the Baptist press began printing, at the expense of a Thai nobleman named Kh’un Mote, 125 copies of a two-volume edition of the laws of Thailand, but the work was suppressed by order of King Rama III and was only issued in incomplete form under the more enlightened regime of his successor, King Rama IV. This person, who as chau fa yai (crown prince) served as the head priest of an important Buddhist monastery in Bangkok, was the first Thai to establish a true press. In 1841, the ABCFM missionaries, with whom he collaborated, reported that he had acquired a printing press and type and type-casting equipment from England with the intention of printing the Buddhist scriptures in romanized Pali. Early in 1843, the ABCFM Press presented him with some of the new Thai type it had produced, but in 1848 he is reported to have invented a new script, called ariyaka, for use in printing the Pali language. This new script required only forty-one matrices for a full font rather than the nearly one thousand required for the Khmer script, which had traditionally been used for the Pali scriptures in Thailand. In late 1849, the chou fa yai ordered a lithographic press from the United States, which he then used to produce several works, mostly in the Pali language using his ariyakascript.

All very interesting, but most of this information was well documented in the outstanding collections at Harvard University. In addition, I had discovered that Harvard possessed what turned out to be the most important surviving collection of early Thai imprints, largely hidden on the shelves of the Widener Library and the Harvard Divinity School library, which had earlier incorporated the library of the Andover Theological Seminary. Among many things, I discovered a copy of that 1839 royal proclamation on opium. But to complete my research, I was eager to discover what evidence of the impact of printing remained in Asian collections.

And this brings me back to that armed convoy in 1982. During a visit to Bangkok the preceding year, I had consulted the collections in the research library at Chulalongkorn University, to little avail, but the librarian had provided me with an introduction to Kamthon Sathrikul, who was not only the owner of the largest textbook publishing firm in Thailand but also an expert on the history of Thai printing. Earlier in 1982, during a business trip to the United States, Mr. Kamthon had called on me at the Houghton Library, where I showed him the fruits of my research. He was clearly interested and enjoyed seeing actual copies of books that had been printed in Thailand nearly a century and a half earlier, but when I brought out the copy of the royal proclamation, his excitement was palpable. Its existence and text were well known in Thailand, he explained, but no other copy was known to exist. This was a treasure, indeed!

Accordingly, I arranged to have the proclamation properly conserved and to have high-quality photographs made for presentation to the National Library of Thailand. When I returned to Bangkok in 1982, I carried these with me when I visited the library. As I registered in the reading room, I explained to the staff that I would like to make an appointment to see the national librarian, as I had a gift to the library from Harvard University. I then settled down to examine material from the library’s collections; their holdings of early Thai imprints were unfortunately limited but included the first copy that I had found of the treatise on midwifery, which turned out to be illustrated with simple anatomical woodcuts that must have been prepared locally. As I worked away, I was interrupted and introduced to a serious-looking, middle-aged woman. Communication was difficult, as her knowledge of English was as limited as mine of Thai, so we proceeded with the usual exchange of greetings that polite etiquette in Thailand required. Only gradually did I realize that this was, indeed, the national librarian herself!

I had expected that any appointment with the librarian would be scheduled for some future date, if at all, but I now suppose that the Harvard name had worked its familiar magic. Once I understood the situation, I explained to her, as best I could, the purpose of my visit and showed her the photographs that I carried with me. If anything, her reaction was even more excited than Mr. Kamthon’s had been. After carefully taking possession of the photographs, she immediately invited me to her office, where she proceeded with the standard sign of hospitality in Thailand and ordered two bottles of ice-cold Coke. But before the drinks arrived, I found myself whisked away and sitting with her and the photographs in the back seat of a car, part of an armed convoy, sirens screeching, careening through the streets of Bangkok.

As it turned out, I was being delivered to the Ministry of Culture in order to be introduced to the minister himself. Once he arrived, there was considerable conversation, which I only vaguely followed, but he was also clearly interested in the photographs. The Coke finally arrived. Our meeting was brief, and I was soon returned to the National Library, where I continued my work, but every year since then, I have received an elaborately illustrated desk calendar, together with a form letter of thanks, from the Ministry of Culture. Unfortunately, the calendar does not reach me until March, as it is sent by surface mail, but it still reminds me of that unexpected meeting many years ago.

This was just the most extraordinary of my experiences while researching the history of early Thai printing. During my trip to Southeast Asia in 1982, I also managed to visit the National Library of Burma in Rangoon, where I hoped to discover evidence of Adinoram Judson and his wife’s missionary activities among Thai prisoners of war. Alas, the collections of the library were meager and scarcely historical, and access to them was limited, especially as the humidity had swollen shut many of the drawers in the card catalog. I had better luck in Calcutta; at the National Library of India—now housed in the residence of the last viceroy of the British Empire—bibliographers arranged for me to visit the collections of Serampore College, which occupies the buildings of the Serampore mission. The college’s collections, which incorporated those of the mission, were spotty but rich in historical material, especially as the missionaries had adopted the practice of infusing the paper they used with arsenic in order to discourage insect infestation.

But all in all, my research in Asian collections proved disappointing. In retrospect, that result is understandable, given that the climate and politics in these countries have not been conducive to the preservation of documents from that period. Furthermore, I had followed those early Western missionaries in believing in the effectiveness of the printing press as a means of proselytizing. In 1835, the American Baptist Board of Missions had expressed its faith that the printing press was “the great instrument of enlightening the world” and its belief that the board’s “chief reliance must be placed on this, among the means of saving mankind.” In 1859, however, a Congregationalist missionary in Bangkok was forced to admit that, despite the many hundreds of thousands of pages that had been produced and distributed, only eight or ten Thai and little short of one hundred Chinese souls had been saved over the previous thirty years. It is hardly surprising that the best documentation of early Thai printing survives in the great collections in the West.

I do not consider my project a failure, though I eventually abandoned it, for it did give me a reason to visit a number of interesting collections and to meet many fascinating people. Nor do I reject Eisenstein’s thesis that the printing press acts as an agent for change, though my project did make me recognize that the press’s impact may be more subtle, but perhaps more far-reaching, than I had first understood. If it proved to be an ineffective tool for Christianizing the Thai people, it must have played an important part—in ways that neither I nor the Western missionaries had imagined—in the great transformation of Thailand into a modern nation.

Further Reading:

A full account of the results of my investigations into early printing in Thailand is printed as “L’Imprimerie thaïlandaise: des origines à 1851” (trans., Douglas Gallagher), Revue française d’histoire du livre, n. s. 43 (1985): 315-29 and “Early Thai Printing: The Beginnings to 1851,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 3 (1986): 45-61. Early Roman Catholic printing in Thai is documented in Gerald Duverdier, “La Transmission de l’imprimerie en Thaïlande: du catechisme de 1796 aux impression Bouddhiques sur feuilles de latinier,” Bulletin de l’école française d’Extrême-Orient 68 (1980): 209-59. A fascinating discussion of the implications of missionary printing in general is D. F. McKenzie, “The Sociology of a Text: Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand,” The Library 6:6 (1984): 333-65.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Michael Winship is the Iris Howard Regents Professor of English Literature II at the University of Texas at Austin and an editor and contributor to the recently published The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, volume 3 of A History of the Book in America (2007).

Here is an 1880 description of a human skull from the List of Specimens on display in the Anatomical Section of the United States Army Medical Museum:

(292) Cranium M. aet. C.40, Cap. 1495 c.c., L. 187 mm., B. 141 mm., H. 136 mm., I.f. m. 49, L. a. 391 mm., C. 467 mm., Z.d. 145 mm., F. a. 70°. “Vendovi,” chief of one of the Fiji Islands. Received in exchange from the Smithsonian Institution.

We can learn this much from the description’s cryptic phrases: a man from Fiji had died at about age forty. Someone had taken his skull, measured it, inside and out, and logged it into the museum’s collections as specimen 292. A reader versed in craniology would picture the skull parsed out in its angles and volumes. Most of the rest of us would stop at the nouns: the man’s name, his station, and his origin. Specimen 292 was the skull of a man the museum called “‘Vendovi,’ chief of one of the Fiji Islands.”

Odds are that “Vendovi” never planned to have his skull end up in the United States, let alone in a museum display case. The skull took a great long trip from Fiji to New York and then through several collections in Washington. It is sometimes troubling to find human remains on display, but museum visitors were little troubled by this head, and brochures touted it as one of the museum’s star attractions. Perhaps visitors would have responded differently had they had a piece of information dropped from the cataloger’s description. Thirty years before it wound up on the Army Medical Museum’s List of Specimens, one collector had labeled it the skull of “the Feejee Chief and Murderer.” Murderer? Murder would have been too sensational to slip into a medical museum’s scientific description. But there must be a story behind specimen 292.

Here is the beginning of that story: Vendovi was brought back to the United States in 1842, a prisoner aboard one of the ships of the United States Exploring Expedition. On June 10, 1842, four ships from the expedition sailed into New York harbor. The U.S. Ex. Ex., to use the popular shorthand, was nineteenth-century America’s greatest voyage of oceanic discovery. In August 1838, when the small fleet of six ships left Norfolk, Virginia, to sail south to Antarctica, out across the Pacific, back to the coast of Oregon, and then back to New York via the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, the United States had no Pacific Coast (or didn’t have one yet). But just in case, the U.S. Ex. Ex. would demonstrate to the great powers—England, Russia, and France—that the United States was ready to jostle for position in the Pacific.

Controversy swirled around the expedition’s commander, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, but even accusations against him, of unjust punishment dished out in high-handed ways, could not diminish the value of the charts his surveyors produced or of the forty-odd tons of natural treasures the expedition’s corps of scientists collected.

Vendovi was a prize among the specimens, and the expedition’s naturalists knew it. While the ships waited for a pilot in the waters off New York’s Sandy Hook, Charles Pickering, a senior member of the scientific corps, wrote to America’s preeminent skull collector, Dr. Samuel George Morton, and told him to come quickly to New York. “Our Feejee Cheif [sic] is on his last legs and will probably give up the ghost tomorrow. As you go in for Anthropology, it would be well worth your while to come on immediately, for such a specimen of humanity you have never seen, and the probability is, that you may never have the opportunity again.”

Pickering knew that his “specimen of humanity” from Fiji was particularly interesting to an “anthropologist” like Morton, who was trying to sort the world’s diverse peoples into races. He also knew that any existing systems of racial categorization would have to be adjusted in light of what he discovered on his voyage with Wilkes. The racial diversity of the Pacific was so staggering to Pickering that he began to argue that the standard five races—the Ethiopian, the Mongolian, the Malay, the American, and the Caucasian—could not possibly account for all the people he had seen. Fijians were particularly puzzling; they had dark skin and curly hair but sharp features. Were they a race of their own or a mix of many?

Maybe a live Fijian would help race-expert Morton solve this puzzle. Morton owned a few shrunken heads from the Pacific. These were not difficult to obtain. American whalemen occasionally brought them back, even though missionaries and government officials in Australia and New Zealand were trying to stop the trade. But full-size human skulls from Southeast Asia and the South Seas were still rare in American collections. (Morton once complained that there was not a Malay skull to be found in all of Philadelphia.) He knew that most sailors still did not like packing pickled or even cleaned human remains in a ship’s hold. Dead bodies went overboard.

But here was Vendovi who had been good enough to carry his own skull all the way from the Pacific. On that long trip, Vendovi became friends with the crewmen. He crops up in their accounts, playing a Jews harp, telling them about love in Fiji, adding to Fijian vocabularies, and telling harrowing tales of a mysterious flood that destroyed island villages (which, his American companions assured him, was caused by an undersea earthquake off the coast of Peru, not by the Fijian gods). Vendovi was especially close to the pilot, Benjamin Vanderford, an old Salem hand who had learned Fijian during his years in the bêche-de-mer or sea-slug trade. When Vanderford died, Vendovi’s heart was broken, the sailors said. Maybe it was to humor sorrowful Vendovi that Wilkes named an island in Puget Sound “Vendovi Island.” Vendovi is still on our maps.

In June 1842, Vendovi was dying in New York harbor. If Morton could rush up from Philadelphia, he might have the rare chance to compare measurements of a man, alive and dead. But Morton was not a man to do anything quickly, and while he dawdled in Philadelphia, Vendovi died in New York. Fortunately Wilkes had made notes. Vendovi was five feet, eleven inches tall; had a facial angle of sixty-seven degrees; a head that measured twenty-two inches; a foot of eleven and a half inches; an arm of thirty-four inches. He had thirty-two teeth and a resting pulse of sixty-five beats per minute.

When Vendovi’s heart stopped, New York’s penny press had a field day with the dead man’s story. The Herald reported that he had died of “consumption in consequence probably of having no human flesh to eat.” “We have understood that the body of the Fejee chief, Vendovi is about to be embalmed by the learned faculty of the University of New York. We hope Dr. Mott will be prevailed upon to deliver a lecture on his remains.” As far as I can tell, there was no lecture about the remains, but we know that Vendovi’s head, cleaned of flesh, went to Washington; his headless body, to a cemetery in Brooklyn. In just a few years, the specimen skull, tattooed with its number 292, turned up on display in case 37 in the Great Hall of the United States Patent Office, part of the collections of the Smithsonian precursor known as the “National Cabinet of Curiosities.”

From the cabinet, from the pages of the penny press, and from tales of the Wilkes expedition, the story of Vendovi made its way into American culture, coloring the stories of Herman Melville’s white whale and P. T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid,” two of the greatest imaginary creatures to come out of midcentury America.

But it would be wrong to leave Vendovi among the creations of the American imagination. His skull’s more interesting “object lesson” may lie in the real man and what we can learn from him about the history of Fiji and Fiji’s encounter with the modern world and its search for profits.

Wilkes had been instructed to map the reefs around the islands of Fiji, an archipelago considered so dangerous—for its seas and its cannibals—that sailors heading there sometimes prepared their wills and insurance companies refused to underwrite voyages. But by the late 1830s, America’s Pacific interests were substantial enough to compel the government to send Wilkes to chart Fiji’s uncharted waters. According to one of his marines, Wilkes had also been instructed “to revenge some injuries and insults that the Chiefs of some of these islands have committed on American ships and citizens.” Vendovi, it seems, was wanted for murder, accused of masterminding the deaths of eleven men who were curing “bêche-de-mer” (more commonly known as sea slugs) on a Fijian beach in 1834.

A history of the “bêche-de-mer” trade might be one lesson too many to take from the poor skull, but if it were not for the lowly sea slug (holothuria), Vendovi would not have become specimen 292. In the 1830s, Salem traders, who had cut down and sold off Fiji’s valuable sandalwood, found they could make good money by drying and selling the sea slugs (which abounded in Fiji’s coral reefs). They shipped the dried sea slugs to Manila or directly to Canton, where the prized soup ingredient fetched handsome profits.

But catching and drying sea slugs was a delicately orchestrated, labor-intensive practice, and—even though some Fijians were pleased that it maintained a flow of trade goods into island villages—to insure profits Salem traders meddled their way into Fijian ecology, economy, politics, and labor practices. Traders drew local men from traditional tasks and put them to work harvesting and drying sea slugs.

It did not take long for the sea-slug trade to fall on hard times. In an all too familiar pattern, a commercial market reduced the sea-slug population, although the trade was playing its part in Fijian politics. And the nine or ten men (Americans, Tahitians, Hawaiians) drying sea slugs for the “Charles Doggett” were killed, probably by Vendovi and his kinsmen. It is not entirely clear why Vendovi might have helped murder the men. Some said he was just being a Fijian and giving vent to a uniquely Fijian kind of violence. Others said he was after the “Jew box” that contained the trader’s supply of whale’s teeth, made plentiful by sea-slug traders but still highly valued by Fijian chiefs.

Whatever Vendovi’s role in the murders, Wilkes carried out his orders to arrest the man. He sent Captain William Hudson to capture Vendovi. Hudson invited all the locals to a party on his ship. He was sure that Vendovi would come, but when he did not show up, Hudson locked up all the Fijians and said he would hold them until someone brought him Vendovi. A half-brother and political rival volunteered to go after the man he and his family knew as “Ro-Veidovi.” While Americans and Fijians waited through the night for the pair to return, the foreign sailors put on a black-faced minstrel show to entertain their Fijian guests. It is hard to know what the audience thought of Jim Crow mounted on the back of his dancing donkey, but the Americans thought the Fijians were amused.

It is also hard to know what the Fijians made of Ro-Veidovi’s trial, particularly the principal evidence against him. The latter had been taken under oath from a yarn-spinning white beachcomber widely known for his vivid imagination (his great boast of 150 wives). While the Fijians wept, the Americans slapped Ro-Veidovi in irons, cut off his great head of Fijian hair, and carried him off to teach him a lesson: “to kill a white man is the worse thing a Fijian man can do.” The Americans told themselves that the whole affair was a lesson in American justice. Historians of Fiji think Ro-Veidovi was surrendered for Fijian reasons, one opening salvo in the great wars of the 1840s.

News of Ro-Veidovi’s fate in America (if not the fate of his skull) would make its way back to Fiji and become one piece of the story Fijians told themselves in the 1840s as their kingdoms of Rewa and Bau fought bloody civil wars. A prophet had once described the fates of the four brothers of the King of Rewa.

That one would die a natural death, another would float away, two would be killed, the most diminutive of the whole would be made king, and principal chief of Bau would be shot during a war with Rewa.

Ro-Veidovi was the man who had floated away. The Fijians waited for the rest of the prophecy to come true.

The Americans sailed away, although they were not through with violence on Fiji, and an ugly scene unfolded just weeks after Ro-Veidovi’s capture. Two Americans were murdered in an altercation, which seems to have happened too quickly for anyone to understand. In their grief and rage, the Americans burned Fiji villages, but as their anger waned, the slaughter of innocents disturbed even the mourning sailors. The most eloquent of them wondered if America’s “path through the Pacific is to be marked in blood.”

Have we begun to fill out the cryptic caption on specimen 292? Pickering, Morton, and Wilkes thought they had taken the measure of the man and his skull. We might better use specimen 292 to take a measure of American culture in the early 1840s and to begin to chart differing American and Fijian versions of this improbable encounter from the great age of American expansion.

Further Reading:

Nathaniel Philbrick wrote a wonderful account of the U.S. Ex. Ex. in Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York, 2003). Although lacking Philbrick’s narrative drive, there is still much of value in William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (Berkeley, 1975). The best accounts of the materials collected by the naturalists of the U.S. Ex. Ex. appear in the essays published in Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds., Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (Washington, D.C., 1985). The official accounts of the voyage and related materials are available online.

First-hand accounts from the voyage are scattered in archives around the country. I have used “The Journal on Board the Vincennes” of Simeon A. Stearns in the manuscript collections at the New York Public Library and the Diary of William Hudson from the American Museum of Natural History. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick have edited The Private Journal of William Reynolds: The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York, 2004). There is little doubt that Reynolds was the best writer to sail with Wilkes.

To understand the wars in Fiji, it is best to begin with Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago, 2004) and his “The Discovery of the True Savage,” originally published in 1994 but reprinted in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York, 2000). Readers interested in the “bêche-de-mer” trade will want to start with Mary Wallis, Life in Feejee: Five Years Among the Cannibals (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2002), originally published anonymously in 1851, and R. Gerard Ward, “The Pacific Bêche-de-Mer Trade with Special Reference to Fiji,” in R. Gerard Ward, ed., Man in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1972): 91-123.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Ann Fabian is dean of humanities at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and a professor of history and American studies. She is writing a book about skulls.

In his extensively researched, clearly written analysis of Virginia during the War for American Independence, Michael McDonnell provides an authoritative study of enslaved Virginians, bound white laborers, tenants, and small farmers—the majority of Virginia’s population—as they sought their own brand of liberty and freedom. During their fights for independence, these Virginians often encountered a conservative, nervous elite who steadfastly clung to traditional hierarchies and who hoped to preserve as much of the political and economic status quo as possible. Each side, however, quickly realized that to attain their objectives they had to take or keep liberty and property from the other: whatever political or economic power lower-sort Virginians hoped to win, they had to take from elites, and whatever property and power elites sought to preserve, they had to keep from lower-class white and black Virginians. This multi-layered internal conflict—one of the ironies of the struggles for freedom waged by the racially and economically diverse inhabitants of North America during the Revolutionary era—characterized the struggle for independence in Virginia and sits at the center of McDonnell’s study of how race and class relations altered Virginian society during the Revolutionary War.

In the process of telling a rich, complex story, McDonnell focuses on three interrelated issues that drove the movement for independence in Virginia. Virginians continuously struggled to muster enough people for military service. Initially, elite Virginians wanted to arm lower-class whites to protect the colony from slave rebellions, but as the war with Britain intensified and the possibilities for slave revolts increased, Revolutionaries desperately sought to put more soldiers in militia units and in the regular army. However, middling and lower-class men continued to avoid that service. When Virginia’s rulers enticed them with promises of land and money, poorer Virginians took advantage of the need for soldiers and pressed for promises of even more money and more land. While elites stopped short of giving in entirely, the combined threats of an inadequately protected Virginia, the growing possibility of slave revolts, and the danger of a British invasion compelled elites to enact drafts that cut across class lines, to allow a somewhat more democratized political arena, and to grant promises of even greater bounties, which went largely unfulfilled after the war.

To pay for military service, Virginians in power had to levy and collect taxes. But racial and class tensions pushed them to alter the way taxes were assessed and collected. Rather than make poorer people pay a disproportionate share of the taxes, the regular method in Virginia, Revolutionaries distributed widely the cost of the war as a way to encourage more people to pay their assessments and accept military service, which included serving on slave patrols. In 1777 and 1778, for example, legislators began taxing the value of landed and human property instead of simply taxing acreage, and inventories, quit-rents, and incomes were also assessed, which meant that wealthier men would pay more taxes than they had in the past and that they would also pay a greater share of taxes. Legislators also made provisions for the popular election of the tax commissioner, a move designed to generate popular support for the law. Elites had hoped the new tax law would spread out the pain of paying for the war more evenly among Virginians of all classes and might ease the sting of a new draft, but lower and middling Virginians balked at the draft and then voted into office new men who represented their perspective. Taken together, McDonnell argues, disputes over service and taxes helped create a political world that, after the Revolution, was characterized by interest-based politics and dominated by middling men.

Enslaved Virginians’ persistent attempts to acquire their personal liberty shaped nearly every discussion of taxes and military service. Blacks knew that conflict among whites offered them the best chance to improve their condition by escaping slavery, and enslaved Africans “made the first bid for independence,” doing so before Lord Dunmore issued his famous proclamation (49). Once conflict between Revolutionaries and the British started in earnest, enslaved Africans began making their way to British camps, an exodus that deeply troubled white Virginians. While slave owners were losing property and labor, the British tacitly promised to put guns in the hands of escaped slaves, increasing the likelihood of what white Virginians feared most—armed slave uprisings. That fear, as much if not more than others, McDonnell argues, drove Revolutionaries in authority to concede political and economic power to lower- and middle-class whites in several desperate attempts to put men in the field to protect against the dual threat of the British and armed escaped slaves.

After the war, the general movement for independence inspired some Virginians to push for manumission, and a manumission law passed in 1782 eased some restrictions on masters who wanted to manumit their slaves. Other whites, however, remained angry that some enslaved Virginians joined the British during the Revolution and, after the war, sought to limit changes in manumission laws. Moreover, middling white Virginians believed the Revolution had given them the chance to secure their property claims, and for them, that meant owning land and slaves. While this middling sort lobbied hard to decrease taxes on property of all kinds, they also besieged the Virginia legislature with proslavery petitions that limited attempts to reduce slavery in the state. As McDonnell shows, abolitionism in Virginia was short lived.

But McDonnell does more than describe the nearly constant racial and class tensions that plagued Virginia during the Revolutionary period. He restores contingency to the movement for independence and agency to the actors to show how Virginians of varying classes and races defined liberty and scrambled to secure their rule over others. And he illustrates how some rebels classified their rebellion as legitimate, in part, by outlawing any movement that challenged their authority. In this excellent study, McDonnell outlines the brick-by-brick construction of legitimacy and authority during the Revolutionary era and thereby offers a blueprint for how historians should examine the attempts by various groups of Americans to acquire liberty and independence in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Further Reading:

The social history of eighteenth-century Virginia has been the subject of much scholarly discussion. For some representative works, see Edmund S. Morgan American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1976); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982); John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 (Williamsburg, Va., 1988); Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, Va., 1992); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Thomas J. Humphrey teaches at Cleveland State University and is the author of Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution (2004). He is also coeditor, with John Smolenski, of New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas (2005).

In this short but exhaustively researched book, Joshua Smith provides a detailed account of the maritime smuggling trade between Maine and New Brunswick. The story begins in 1783, the year that the former became an American state and the latter a British colony, and ends in 1821, the year that the New Brunswick government’s efforts to control its plaster trade were abandoned. Aside from this commerce, smuggling from the United States was largely the product of the British Navigation Acts, which banned American ships from the new colony’s ports, and the 1807 American trade embargo, which banned the colony’s ships from American ports. Most of the resulting smuggling took place on Passamaquoddy Bay, which the author describes as “one of the great smuggling centers of the Atlantic world in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (66).

Passamaquoddy was an ideal location for smuggling because of “the indeterminate border, frequent fogs, numerous secluded coves, beaches, and islands, and its placement at the interface between the mighty commercial British Empire and the rising agrarian American republic” (13). But this was not smuggling as we normally think of it, with low-bulk, high-value commodities such as alcohol or drugs hidden in small compartments. Rather, the main products in question were American flour, salt beef, naval stores, and New Brunswick gypsum or plaster. The latter may have been “mere stone,” as one observer noted, but its properties as a calcium-rich fertilizer made it highly valuable to farmers in the American wheat-raising heartland of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Indeed, it may well have been “British North America’s most valuable export to the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (97).

The plaster trade through Passamaquoddy Bay jumped from one hundred tons in 1794 to thirteen thousand by 1802 (42), and it would continue to increase thereafter. Because of its low unit value and the high freight rates, producers transported the product across the border on their own small vessels, thereby upsetting the merchants of Saint John who wished to carry it in their larger vessels directly to market in New York and Philadelphia. By necessity, such an activity took place largely in the open and depended on the support of the local populace, which ensured that customs officials had little choice but to turn a blind eye if they wished to remain in the community. Indeed, these officials generally played a supportive role in what was often a complex process of evading state regulations. Crown customs officers operated quite independently, for they were not responsible to the colonial government, and their American counterparts were equally corrupt. During the embargo period, for example, a shipload of plaster would be nominally seized by the U.S. customs officer; it was then valued at 25 to 50 percent of its real worth by court-appointed appraisers who were usually plaster merchants and smugglers themselves. When a bond for this amount was put up by the owners of the plaster, the ship was released, effectively meaning the owners still made a profit while the appraisers were paid a per diem by the government and the customs officer received a portion of the plaster’s value as a reward for the “seizure.”

Smugglers also used more violent tactics such as kidnappings and beatings in order to intimidate the authorities, leading to the so-called flour war and plaster war, but Smith insists these were not examples of preindustrial popular resistance, in the Thompsonian sense. Rather, the smuggling business represented the effort of small producers (who claimed simply to be free traders) in an economically marginal environment to take advantage of external market demand, and it contributed to the growth of the local middle class that took part in it. The fact remains, however, that the farmers who were also the builders and owners of the coasting craft that carried the gypsum were claiming the fruits of their labor by defying the political economies of mercantilism.

Loyalties were largely to the local community, and the border only strengthened those ties by necessitating mutual cooperation against outside authority. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the smuggling trade represented a refusal “to believe that their neighbors across the border were different from themselves” (10). Borderland studies generally examine long-established populations that have been divided by an arbitrary boundary, but this was not the case for Maine and New Brunswick. Many of those who settled north of the border did so for political reasons. Smith’s assumption that smuggling fostered a mutual sense of community is clearly true, to some extent, and all preindustrial rural populations shared a deep distrust of outside authority, but smuggling could and can take place between peoples of distinctly different values and cultures who were and are simply willing to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by an international boundary. In his concluding chapter, Smith provides some interesting examples of a common borderland outlook on Passamaquoddy Bay, but he also states that—contrary to the charges of New Brunswick’s governing elite—there is no evidence that the colonial population had been infected with “a leveling American ideology” (106).

While he leaves the impression that the boundary line and customs duties represented a hindrance to local economic development, Smith does not dispel the possibility that the opposite was true. Certainly, the Passamaquoddy area experienced sudden prosperity during the embargo and War of 1812. Further research is required, then, to test some of this study’s assumptions, and little reference is made to the broader borderlands literature. But the book is well written, with relatively few typos or errors (e.g., on page 116 one sentence states that William Newcomb died in 1796 while the next says that this took place on October 2, 1795). The most glaring oversight is the failure to include a map to guide the reader through the complex geography of the Passamaquoddy area. Borderland Smuggling is, in short, an interesting and informative account of how material self-interest and local loyalties trumped broader allegiances in the northeastern borderland of the early nineteenth century.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Jack Little is a member of the history department at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. His most recent books are Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852 (2004) and The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society (2006). Forthcoming in 2008 is Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812-1840.

For too long, studies of working class activism have focused almost exclusively on working men’s public lives—on their political and social activities and their developing class consciousness. In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians in examining the private lives of men. Yet while these studies have revealed a great deal about middle- and upper-class men as husbands, fathers, and breadwinners, the domestic experiences of working men remain invisible. Thus far, our entire understanding of working-class households—our entrée into this private world—has been through the eyes of women.

In Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Market Revolution in New York, 1800-1840, Joshua R. Greenberg bridges this gap in the literature, providing scholars of the early American republic with an entirely new perspective on both the private and public lives of working men. As Greenberg persuasively asserts, political activism and demands for higher pay, better working conditions, and protection of craft integrity were “closely intertwined” with men’s “lived domestic experiences” (intro.: para. 3 [note that this review references the e-book by chapter and paragraph number]). Men and women, particularly of the working class, did not reside in separate spheres. The practical day-to-day needs of a growing family—from putting food on the table, paying the rent, and providing a proper education for children to laying away some money to provide for the unknowns of sickness, injury, and death—remained at the forefront of men’s concerns as they ventured out of the household and into the workplace. Thus, any attempt to comprehend the motivations of workers in forming unions, organizing political parties, or otherwise engaging in collective activities must begin in the household.

Reflecting this interdependence of the private and public, Greenberg devotes the first section of this study of organized labor in New York City to an analysis of the household and neighborhood composition of the men who actively participated in the labor unions and workers’ political parties. Greenberg compares a “sample” of these organized working men against the average demographic characteristics of journeymen. He concludes that activists were more likely than the average working man to be older, married men who headed large households. Thus, in direct contrast to the stereotypical young, single, male worker with no household responsibilities and a loose moral compass, those most likely to resort to collective action were men with the greatest domestic responsibilities. Greenberg then couples this statistical overview with case studies of a house carpenter and a printer, both of whom (he alleges) serve as “typical examples of organized working men” (chap. 2: para 39).

This first section comprises the weakest portion of the book. In repeatedly employing the term “sample”—and then in statistically comparing this demographic data with that of average journeymen—Greenberg misleadingly implies that he has compiled representative statistics on a randomly selected sample of organizing men. In reality, Greenberg’s “sample” instead consists of those activists about whom he could locate demographic information. Since people with stable household lives are more likely to leave their imprint in historical records, it is perhaps not surprising that Greenberg found them to be older, married men with domestic responsibilities. Nor does Greenberg indicate what percentage of all organizing men his “sample” represents. While much of the problem in compiling this type of demographic information lies in the limitations of the historical record itself, Greenberg needs to be much more forthcoming regarding his method and much more circumspect with respect to his results. Likewise, I am skeptical with regard to his “typical” working men. Printer Theophilus Eaton, for example, was a failed entrepreneur who tried to make his fortune first as the publisher of a political newspaper and later as the author of a book of poems and of a gazetteer that reflected “a mercantile bent” (chap. 2: para 16). None of these characteristics seems truly representative of the “average” journeyman.

However, the aforementioned weaknesses of this first section do not undermine Greenberg’s overall argument. Even without being able to demonstrate definitively that organizers were more likely to be family men, his next two sections convincingly show that working men viewed their market relations and couched their arguments for collective organization in domestic terms. While past studies of early nineteenth-century workers’ movements have focused on the political content of pro-labor newspapers and pamphlets, Greenberg reconsiders these publications more holistically. Discussions of a living wage, paper money reform, and barriers to entry into crafts appeared alongside marriage notices, debates over how best to provide an education for workers’ children, and poems about domestic life. As reflected in these publications, there was no line separating the public rhetoric of workers from their private interests.

Furthermore, these domestic interests infused the political language itself. In demanding better compensation and security in the workplace, workers emphasized their fundamental duty as husbands and fathers to provide for the material as well as the “moral, spiritual, and emotional” well-being of their families (chap. 5: para 50). On the one hand, this equation of workplace complaints with domestic hardships was politically expedient. Women and children were more sympathetic victims than male laborers. Yet this language regarding the household responsibilities of male breadwinners was not limited to external tracts intended to sway public opinion. Even when these organizations internally discussed the merits of providing health insurance, death benefits, or strike pay, their debates revolved around the ability of workers to adequately fulfill their domestic duties.

Advocating the Man presents historians of the early republic with a fresh perspective on the daily trials, tribulations, and motivations of laboring men. Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men. Rather than viewing laborers as solely the product of their work relations and public experiences, future studies will now be obliged to consider the role of domestic concerns in shaping these men’s public activities.

Further Reading:

The standard labor history of the early republic is still Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984). Notable works on the lived experiences of working men include Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992), and Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1986). The literature on working women includes Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Chicago, 1988) and Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York, 1979). Some works that do examine the interaction of working men and women include Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, 2002), Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995), and Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991). Finally, the much more developed literature on masculinity, which almost exclusively focuses on middle- and upper-class men, includes E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), David C. Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Conn., 1983), Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York, 2001), and Stephen Frank, Life With Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Sharon Ann Murphy is an assistant professor of history at Providence College. Her forthcoming book is tentatively titled Security in an Uncertain World: The Social History of Life Insurance in Antebellum America.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

Despite the fact that print culture, abolitionism, and the American legal system matured together during the nineteenth century, they are strange bedfellows in many scholarly studies. For print scholars, slavery and abolitionism remain at the margins of “book history.” For many abolitionist scholars, exemplary antislavery reformers remain those “passionate outsiders” who defined themselves against mainstream institutions, including those of politics and law. As Jeannine DeLombard shows in her wide-ranging and thoroughly researched study, print, abolitionism, and the law formed lasting bonds in the early republic. “During the three decades preceding the Civil War,” DeLombard writes at the outset of her indispensable book, “slavery was on trial in the United States” (1). No mere courtroom drama, abolitionists’ case before the “bar of public opinion” had lasting consequences for northern liberty, southern defenses of bondage, and the coming of the Civil War.

DeLombard begins Slavery on Trial by placing antebellum abolitionism in a dynamic historical context. By the time her study gets rolling in the 1830s and 1840s, new-style abolitionists like Garrison and Douglass had already shed their movement’s elite beginnings by focusing intensely on print culture. Realizing that immediate abolitionists formed a small minority, new-style reformers turned to mass media to make their case. DeLombard argues that abolitionists had to first “decriminalize” their movement before the public at large. At the same time, antebellum abolitionists came to see legalistic discourse—including metaphors of trials, prosecutions, eyewitness testimony, and cross-examinations—as an essential means of battling bondage in the public arena.

Thus did the antislavery movement use American print culture to create a national trial on slavery. As DeLombard observes, both the adversarial model of American law that came into vogue during the early nineteenth century and the discourses long associated with criminal litigation inspired antebellum abolitionists to become the architects of a courtroom-like drama that condemned slaveholders and their apologists. “[A]bolitionists’ trial trope facilitated a radical reconceptualization of civic participation in America,” she notes. “By patterning their behavior on the personae of the criminal trial, those who approached the bar of public opinion challenged prevailing hierarchies of race, gender, class, and condition by modeling new forms of civic presence” (222).

At the heart of abolitionists’ legalistic print strategy was the notion that the American people could upend formal decisions rendered in courts of law. In prosecuting their case, DeLombard comments wittily, abolitionists “effected a change of venue” from courts to print (18). This “extralegal” maneuvering was far from evidence of abolitionists’ anti-institutional thinking. Rather, antislavery reformers viewed print as a critical part of the civic realm—an essential institution. Moreover, this brand of popular constitutionalism—the view that the people out of court could render a verdict as powerful as any judge—borrowed from a tradition of popular sovereignty dating to the eighteenth century. Jacksonian democracy abetted popular constitutionalism by not only emphasizing the power of the people but by resurrecting Americans’ age-old fears of arbitrary figures (namely recalcitrant judges) foiling liberty. DeLombard shows that well before the famous fugitive slave trials of the 1850s, fears of “atrocious judges” figured prominently in abolitionist discourse (18).

DeLombard makes her own case more powerful by reading deeply in both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist archives. While Garrison, Douglass, and Stowe make headlines, so too does the rather obscure Latimer Journal and North Star, which began publication after the real trial of a southern fugitive in Boston got underway in 1842. For DeLombard, it serves as a window onto the parallel legal universe created by abolitionist printers (9). Similarly, William MacCreary Burwell’s White Acre vs. Black Acre (published in 1856) illuminates “the surge of proslavery and Southern responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that deluged trans-Atlantic print culture throughout the 1850s.” Though not the best known anti-Stowe publication, she writes, it shaped the “South’s countersuit” against abolitionists (177). Because most southern ideologues favored non-legalistic defenses of slavery (the very terms of the faux criminal trial worried masters), abolitionist propaganda put them in a difficult position. White Acre vs. Black Acre mocked abolitionist printers’ advocacy for slave victims and parodied the very notion that slavery was a crime.

As DeLombard points out, antislavery writers’ support of black victims left “little room for the free black abolitionist” to either imagine life beyond bondage or take a front seat at the prosecution’s table (26). Citing Douglass’s midlife complaints against white reformers, she notes that African Americans were often relegated to supporting roles as witnesses. Nevertheless, African American publicists contributed mightily to the national prosecution of slavery. As she asserts, Frederick Douglass became one of the era’s “most influential literary abolitionists” both for his incredible “renderings of the slavery debate as a criminal trial” and its limitations to black reformers (27).

What difference did it make? DeLombard argues that abolitionists transformed northern conceptions of sectional interest. If during the 1830s abolitionists defended themselves against charges of extremism, then by the 1850s their constant manipulations of the printed sphere—and reactions from Southerners—had convinced many white Northerners that liberty itself was on trial in America. As slaveholders and their allies undermined freedom of the press, many northern citizens felt betrayed. That the struggle over black slavery ultimately became a battle over white rights is certainly not news; but DeLombard’s journey to that conclusion makes clear that abolitionists forced the issue by maintaining their prosecutory zeal. Indeed, by the time of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, both Northerners and Southerners seemed ready to go beyond the world of a make-believe courtroom.

One of the legends of Civil War studies is that American culture violently divided in 1860 because of the unique presence of hectoring abolitionists who called slaveholders evil (nowhere else in the Atlantic world did a Civil War occur because nowhere else did a slave regime face such comparative moral blasts from reformers). DeLombard shows clearly that this is no legend. Abolitionists were not simply yelping from the sidelines (nor did slaveholders overreact to their prosecutorial campaigns). No, abolitionists, comprising just a few percentage points of the American population during the 1830s, rose disproportionately in prominence by the 1860s because they used a key American institution—print—and resorted to well-known legal discourses (criminal trials) to build their moral case against bondage. DeLombard illustrates that abolitionists knew precisely what arguments they were making. She also shows that they should never be discounted in studies of print, American legal culture—or the coming of the Civil War.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Richard Newman teaches in the history department at Rochester Institute of Technology. His new book, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers, will be published in March with NYU Press. He is also coeditor of the series Race in the Atlantic World, published by the University of Georgia Press.

With the publication of The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer has cemented her status as one of the leading experts on the classics in early America. Remarkably prolific, she has published an impressive array of insightful articles on various aspects of American women’s evolving relationship to the classics. While incorporating into The Mirror of Antiquity the findings of these articles and, to a lesser extent, the discoveries of her equally superb book, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002), Winterer adds much previously unpublished material as well.

The most fascinating portion of The Mirror of Antiquity is Winterer’s thoughtful discussion of the conflicting demands of eighteenth-century American society on aristocratic women. Winterer writes, “Ancient history was acceptable for women, but the classical languages (especially Greek) were not; admiring the heroism of Cicero or Scipio was acceptable, but tying the heroism to prescriptions for modern statecraft was not; reading about ancient orators was acceptable, while declaiming aloud less so. A woman’s conversation should be ornamental but not instructive in its own right; she should have learning enough to take an interest in her male companion’s conversation, but not be so learned as to surpass his grasp of the subject. The precarious balance between feminine frivolity and petticoat pedantry was so difficult to achieve that magazines and books rushed in to fill the void with advice” (14-15). Affluent women were expected to acquire this moderate degree of knowledge with little or no formal schooling in the classics.

In the nineteenth century the educational opportunities of upper- and middle-class women increased considerably. In fact, the United States became the only nation to establish large numbers of female academies and colleges that taught the Greco-Roman classics. Classical education led to the formation of female reading societies and other social networks that proved crucial to the reform movements that rocked antebellum America.

Meanwhile, the founders’ preference for the Roman republic gave way to the Jacksonian glorification of Athenian democracy. As a result, college students, both male and female, studied the masterpieces of Athenian drama, including Sophocles’ Antigone, for the first time. The play proved ripe with meaning not only for the question of women’s proper role in society but also for the controversy concerning the classical theory of natural law, one of the principal ideological tools of the abolitionist movement.

Nevertheless, Rome did not fade completely from American thought. A number of abolitionist editors compared runaway slave women with Roman heroes who had also risked death on behalf of liberty. By contrast, the legend of Cornelia, the mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus who once responded to a frivolous lady’s request to see her jewels by presenting her sons, continued to provide dual lessons in motherhood as the appropriate focus of women’s lives and in frugality. Ironically, the latter lesson was often inculcated through depictions of the story on various mass-produced luxury items, such as silk embroideries and fans.

Indeed, the love-hate relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the classics is one of the most interesting aspects of nineteenth-century classicism. While the simplicity and frugality taught by the classics were often marshaled to combat the materialism of the industrial age, it was the new factories and railroads that filled middle-class homes with classical knickknacks for the first time and steam-powered presses that churned out inexpensive new editions of the classics and periodicals that discussed them in detail. Even ordinary homes were now adorned with classical objects, such as small statues, busts, and urns, as badges of taste and culture. Tables, mantels, teapots, pitchers, ewers, urns, candelabra, and even stoves were richly ornamented with caryatids, cupids, griffins, scrolls, columns, cornucopias, garlands, satyr masks, lyres, grapevines, and other classical motifs. Greek decorative motifs, employed on a large scale for the façades of the neoclassical buildings that dominated every county seat, were also used on a small scale for windows, cornices, and fireplaces, according to a very high standard of craftsmanship. Inexpensive English translations of the classics, combined with cheap journals that obsessed over the details of ancient life, now allowed even uneducated women and men to become conversant in Greco-Roman history and literature.

Meanwhile, an increasing popular interest in classical mythology proved liberating for American women. The focus on mythology by such women as the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller demonstrated how the expansion of classical interest beyond political history and theory, the great preoccupations of the founders’ age, to encompass drama and poetry could give politically disfranchised women and others focused on self-improvement a greater connection to the classics than had been possible in the eighteenth century.

Winterer’s rumination on the Statue of Liberty brings a fitting close to the book. The classically educated Emma Lazarus dedicated a poem entitled, “The New Colossus” (1883), to the robed icon with the strikingly classical features. The poem that famously ends, “Give me your tired, your poor . . .” actually begins with a declaration of American superiority to the ancients eerily similar to the numerous proclamations of American nationalists over the previous century. The poet’s very obsession with antiquity, in a poem dedicated to a neoclassical icon, lends an ironic tone to her declaration of independence from the ancients. In short, like her forebears, Lazarus doth protest too much.

I have only one caveat to add to my praise for this excellent book. The subtitle’s end date of 1900 is misleading. Three-quarters of the book concerns the period 1750-1820; only about ten pages of the work regard the post-Civil War period. Winterer’s focus on the late eighteenth century is certainly defensible, since the classicism of American women in this period has been explored far less than that of the nineteenth century (in stark contrast to studies of the classicism of American men, which have tended to focus on the founders). But, in view of the few pages devoted to the late nineteenth century, an end date of 1860 in the subtitle would have conveyed the content of the book more accurately.

Nevertheless, The Mirror of Antiquity is the best treatment of American women and the classics from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century ever published. Lucid, thoughtful, and well researched, it is certain to become its own object of study, a classic.

Further Reading:

For more information on the education of American women in the nineteenth century, see Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, 1985); Christie Ann Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York, 1994); Mary Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 83 (September 1996): 401-424; and Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006). For more information about classical decorative motifs in middle-class American homes see Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America, 1800-1840 (Baltimore, 1993).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Carl J. Richard is a professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette whose books include The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994), Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World (2003), The Battle for the American Mind: A Brief History of a Nation’s Thought (2004), Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield, and The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

In this impressive book, David Brion Davis, one of our foremost historians of slavery, provides us with a comprehensive historical narrative of the central place of slavery in the making of the New World and of the movements to abolish it. The book opens with the famous rebellion aboard the ship Amistad (1839) and the equally famous legal cases surrounding it, addressing the issues of the international slave trade, racial slavery, abolitionist opposition, and the place of slavery in the American political and judicial system. Davis uses this incident as a jumping off point to provide us with a sweeping historical overview of the rise and fall of slavery in the United States and the Western world.

Well known for his magisterial works on slavery that span world history, Davis begins his story in antiquity. He compares the relatively favored and socially mobile slaves of Babylon with those held by the Tupinamba in preconquest Brazil. The latter murdered and cannibalized their slaves, revealing, Davis argues, how slaves were dehumanized and seen as animals. The process of enslavement was comparable to the domestication of animals. According to Davis, slavery can be best defined as reducing human beings to the status of chattel property, what he refers to as the “animalization” of human beings. Such a definition would incorporate Orlando Patterson’s definitions of slavery as “natal alienation” from the society of one’s birth and the general dishonoring of slaves in societies of their enslavement. Thus Plato compared the slave to the body and the master to the soul, and Aristotle claimed that some people were slaves by nature. In the New World, slavery would be equated with race and antiblack racism.

Davis traces the roots of racism in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions that used the biblical “Curse on Ham” story to justify the enslavement of Africans and equated blackness with sin, slavery, and pollution. These ideas received a powerful impetus with the rise of the pseudoscience of race during the Enlightenment, which linked Africans and apes in the Great Chain of Being. They percolated into the thought of Thomas Jefferson, the American apostle of liberty, who crudely speculated that black women had sexual intercourse with apes. While some Enlightenment figures criticized slavery, the “scientific” and philosophical ideas of the day bolstered notions of racial inferiority among some famous thinkers including Hume, Kant, and Voltaire.

It was precisely at this time that the European voyages of discovery and the start of the Atlantic slave trade linked the destiny of West Africa with that of the New World or, in Davis’s words, made Africans integral to world history. With great clarity, he argues that although African participation enriched a few elites, the insatiable European demand for slaves resulted in a holocaust of African lives and geared the internal economies of Africa for slave production. Various European powers entered and dominated the African slave trade in its dismal four-hundred-year history. The failure of Indian slavery, as large numbers of Native Americans succumbed to European diseases and warfare, sealed the fate of Africa and people of African descent in the New World.

The Spanish and the Portuguese exported the slave-based sugar-plantation economies of the islands off the coasts of Africa and southern Europe to the Western Hemisphere. While slavery also became legal in all the British colonies, it was in the plantation colonies of the West Indies, Virginia and Maryland, and South Carolina and Georgia that it became the central socio-economic and political institution. In the nineteenth century, sugar, tobacco, and rice would soon be joined by other staple crops dependent on the use of slave labor, like coffee in Brazil and cotton in the southern United States. Slavery thus flourished and contributed considerably to the wealth of European nations and the early American republic. In two excellent chapters about the American South, Davis shows how slavery gave rise to a slave society that constructed an elaborate proslavery argument to justify the enslavement of African Americans. He also shows how it created distinct black cultures and communities that allowed slaves to survive the daily brutalities of the slave system.

However, the enslavement of Africans was challenged systematically in the Age of Revolution when slave rebellions, national revolutions, and abolitionist movements inaugurated emancipation in much of the West. In the second half of the book, Davis shows himself to be as astute a scholar of abolition as of slavery. Antislavery writers drew ideological inspiration from revolutionary ideas. Even more than the American and French revolutions—which abolished slavery in the northern states and led to one of the first national emancipation decrees in France—the Haitian revolution, the only instance of a successful slave rebellion in world history, spelled the doom of slavery. Massive slave rebellions convulsed South America and the Caribbean. In the United States such attempts proved to be suicidal. Beliefs in the superiority of free labor and the iniquity of human bondage spurred the growth of an Anglo-American abolitionist movement. Religious revivalism further led the movement to view slavery as a moral evil and sin, an idea that influenced Abraham Lincoln, who was not so much an abolitionist as antislavery in conviction.

Davis’s last chapters trace the politics of slavery and emancipation during the Civil War and the political career of Abraham Lincoln. He shows growing southern aggressiveness over the expansion of slavery into the West and in plans to reopen the African slave trade. In the North, abolitionism evolves from a minority position to a broad-based political antislavery represented by Lincoln’s Republican Party, which was committed to the non-expansion of slavery in the West. The Civil War, Davis argues cogently, was a revolutionary moment in American history when the actions of runaway slaves, Congress, radical Republicans, and the president inaugurated emancipation and the arming of black men in the Union Army. During Radical Reconstruction, the nation even experimented with notions of black citizenship and an interracial democracy before the “redemption” of the South inaugurated the long nightmare of segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching.

In a short epilogue, Davis extends his epic tale to Cuba and Brazil where Lincoln and abolitionists like Clarkson, Wilberforce, Garrison, and Sumner inspired emancipation movements. This book is perhaps the single best work we have on the rise and fall of slavery. As Davis perceptively concludes, the Western Hemisphere and the “devastated continent of Africa” (331) still live with the historical legacies of modern racial slavery.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Manisha Sinha is an associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

When asked to contribute to this discussion of Bercovitch’s landmark work, I decided that I wanted to reflect on the impact of The American Jeremiad upon my small piece of the current jigsaw puzzle of Americanist scholarship, the study of Jewish American literature and culture.

Like many other scholars of my generation, I suppose, I narrowed my Americanist focus in the mid-1980s for a combination of reasons, personal and political. It was in the air, it was in the blood. The idea was to oppose the totalizing, to celebrate ethnicity, and to embrace difference, and like other fields of Ethnic Studies, Jewish Studies was on the rise. But what I found when I began to survey the field of Jewish American literature gave me pause. From Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin to Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and beyond—so much of the literature commonly studied in Jewish American literature courses were narratives of assimilation or the adventures of already deracinated Jews. What I found, in other words, was not difference, but an aversion to difference, the anxiety of ethnicity, Jewishness under the pressure of America. Here were self-styled marginal men and women streaming into the American literary mainstream. Here were writers denying as publicly as possible that they were Jewish writers only to be celebrated by readers and critics as standard-bearers of the tribe. I was perplexed. When I looked beyond the Jewish American canon to the unstudied literature of the earlier Sephardic and German waves of immigration—I was, after all, trained as an early Americanist—I found something even more startling: Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, writing under the byline of the American Jewish Novelist, retelling the story of Hanukkah in the words of Thomas Jefferson and Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, in a Fourth of July sermon, berating the retrospective Jewish traditionalists for not seeing the American Revolution as the fulfillment of the Revelation at Sinai. Here, I thought, was not difference but a bold-faced relinquishing of Jewish difference in the name of the American consensus. It was not what I was looking for. All this, as I said, gave me pause. But there was something that struck me as even stranger. I was not the only scholar who noticed what I noticed. But was I the only one to think it was in the least bit peculiar? As a very wise man once said, I felt like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes.

So I turned to other disciplines—to history and sociology—and I found more of a willingness to recognize a perceptual problem in American Jewish culture. In 1988, sociologist Steven Cohen published a study of American Jews whose titular question, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?, touched off a scholarly controversy in the following decade that came to be known as the assimilationist-transformationist debate. Both sides agreed that something significant, something pronounced, something unusual had happened to Jews in America. But was it the triumph of assimilation, that bogey-man of modern Jewish pulpits, the great enemy of Jewish difference, or was it the emergence of a new, transformed, revitalized, and responsive Jewish culture, a creative assertion of difference in an American context? Some fine scholarship issued from these debates, such as Jonathan Sarna’s analysis of what he called “the cult of synthesis” in Jewish American culture. But while this half-empty/half-full tug-of-war raised significant questions and laid bare the ideological divide, it answered little.

Something significant, something pronounced, something unusual had happened to Jews in America. But was it the triumph of assimilation, that bogey-man of modern Jewish pulpits, the great enemy of Jewish difference, or was it the emergence of a new, transformed, revitalized, and responsive Jewish culture?

So I turned back to The American Jeremiad, and here I found a way out of the maze. Bercovitch offered an approach to American culture that allowed for a more nuanced understanding of assimilation, an approach that did not denigrate difference, or resistance, but was skeptical about how different difference really was, was curious about the way resistance resisted. In America, he suggested, consensus did not necessarily mean ideological uniformity or behavioral conformism but “symbolic cohesion,” not uncritical allegiance but a shared rhetoric that could sustain a complex constellation of competing values and even encourage dissent—as long as it was dissent in the name of America, as long as consent and dissent were made to correspond.

Bercovitch opened the way for a deeper appreciation of assimilation and transformation and for a nuanced revaluation of Jewish American literary creativity. The patriotic bluster of Wise and Kohler could be seen not simply as surrender to the American consensus, as the cooptation of Jewish difference, but also as a reappropriation of the rhetoric of the jeremiad, an inversion of Christian supersessionism, a Judaization of America—consensus and dissensus conjoined, a rhetorical triumph through surrender. And those members of the canonized and lionized mid-twentieth century cohort of writers and intellectuals—Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, Howe, Kazin, and Fiedler—their frenetic emergence onto the American literary stage flaunting the Jewishness they purported to leave behind, brandishing their alienation as a badge of acceptance, both in and out of the game: here, too, was the complex product of the American jeremiad, the astonishing achievement of the art of assimilation.

Looking at Jewish American literary history through the lens of the American jeremiad suggested that the answer to Steven Cohen’s titular question, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? was an emphatic, Yes, in thunder! An answer that could satisfy neither side, a sure sign of its explanatory power.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Michael P. Kramer, Professor Haver at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, is the author of Imagining Language in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War (1992), and the editor (with Hana Wirth-Nesher) of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003) and, most recently, of Before the Flood: Early Jewish American Writing (Studies in American Jewish Literature 33:1, 2014). He is co-editor of The Turn Around Religion in American Literature: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch (2011).