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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Hesperus’s website.

Sound files:

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

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

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

Comments on the American Revolution Reborn

The essays that were delivered at the American Revolution Reborn conference are substantive and creative, and in their larger iterations, they will surely make real contributions to our understanding of the unrest on North America’s eastern seaboard in the 1770s. Instead of reviewing those works, however, I would like to take the opportunity to consider what was not discussed, to outline themes and subjects that were absent from the proceedings in Philadelphia. The conference sought “new perspectives for the twenty-first century,” and though a number of papers identified new avenues of exploration, I wonder if we need to be still more adventurous if we wish to chart a course that captures the imagination of coming generations. We could strike out in any number of new directions, but in this brief reconnaissance, I will identify four that seem pertinent to both the 1700s and to our lives today.

The Environment

With the exception of David Hsiung’s wonderful essay, the environment was notably absent from the work presented at the American Revolution Reborn conference, though it is difficult to envision a more relevant perspective for the twenty-first century. Species extinction, invasive species, zoonosis, climate change—these are words that speak to current concerns. Open the newspaper (I should say go to the Times URL), and there is yet another alarming story about sudden beehive collapse or white-nose syndrome, the fungus destroying bats in North America. Or about tornados, droughts, polar vortexes, and global warming.

Though climate has long been a subject within the historian’s ken, global warming has sparked renewed interest in the subject, and scholars are exploring the cultural, political, and economic consequences of climate change with increasing urgency. Geoffrey Parker investigates the worldwide impact of disruptive weather patterns in the seventeenth century in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. And Sherry Johnson tackles a related subject in her recent book Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution. As she pointed out in a recent William and Mary Quarterly article, the unusual climate fluctuations in the Age of Revolution had implications for mainland as well as insular colonists. But that is just the tip of an iceberg that is worth exploring further.

In what ways will digital humanities change and enhance the study of the American Revolution?

Biological Sciences

Like the environmental sciences, the biological sciences may help us map new terrain in Revolutionary America. The discipline grows daily by leaps and bounds, and at least one part of it—emerging infectious diseases—has crossed over from the pages of Scienceand Nature into the public arena, as suggested by a spate of popular books on the subject (Hot Zone, Killer Germs, Rising Plague) and by Steven Soderbergh’s feature film Contagion. Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana is a brilliant example of what can be accomplished by a historian who takes biology and epidemiology seriously, as is J. R. McNeill’s Mosquito Empires, which contains several chapters relevant to the eighteenth century.

Those studies are forerunners in an interdisciplinary enterprise that will continue to advance. In the near future, it may be possible to write an early American history that considers the role of gut microbiota, which, as scientists are documenting, play a critical role in everything from obesity to disease progression. Perhaps it will even be possible to explore historical epigenetics—how the environment in the wider world and in the womb shaped gene expression—though such path-breaking work would for the moment have to be largely speculative.

Geographic Information Systems

GIS (geographic information systems) is a third direction worth pursuing. It is everywhere in our lives today, and is at the root of every location-based app, including the ubiquitous Google Maps. As a historical tool, it gives scholars the ability to store information spatially and to explore spatial correlations. Ironically, though GIS did not make an appearance at the conference, Revolutionary Philadelphia is the subject of at least two major GIS projects, one created by Nancy Hagedorn and Ann Deakin, the other by Billy Smith and Paul Sivitz. In addition, the Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network collects geographically organized historical information about the city from all eras.

This enormously powerful and flexible technology could have all kinds of applications to early America—from plotting population to mapping land use, crime, markets, epidemics, and the like. Brian Donahue used it with award-winning results in his book The Great Meadow. I am currently plotting the North American population between 1500 and 1790, using a combination of historical maps, county-level population statistics, and statistical modeling. (Updates to this project will be posted at www.ehistory.org.)

Digital Humanities

A fourth direction leads to the digital humanities. The meaning of the term is frustratingly nebulous—it encompasses the digitization of traditional printed sources, the statistical analysis of texts, and innovative experiments in crowd-sourcing—and many existing projects unintentionally underscore the difficulty of building and maintaining easy-to-use, functioning Web applications. Despite these growing pains, the potential of Web-based projects to reinvigorate a profession that is too reliant on the monograph is very real. Crowd-sourcing—harnessing the knowledge of thousands of people—makes it possible to accomplish a much larger project than any one or two scholars could undertake on their own. It also can engage a broad public audience in ways that are not possible with most books. In collaboration with Steve Berry, my fellow co-director at eHistory.org, I recently completed one such project, IndianNation.org. A kind of Facebook for the dead, the site contains a profile page for every Native American on the 1900 census and invites the public to upload documents, photos, and stories. With the assistance of Elizabeth Fenn, we have also created an interactive site mapping every reference to the great smallpox epidemic that swept through North America in the 1770s.

West of the Revolution

It is not by chance that Fenn’s work on smallpox is continental in scope and Parker’s on climate change is global. Viruses and weather patterns do not honor political borders. We have a better understanding today than we did in the twentieth century that environmental transformations cascade across the land, with impacts felt far away. We recognize that we are not often in control of our lives, that in an age of global trade decisions made an ocean away by people we have never met can affect our lives, and that microscopic viruses and invasive fungi can do the same.

If and when we turn to these subjects, I wonder if the American Revolution will still occupy its central, dominant place in the study of early American history. Perhaps, as we increasingly appreciate the manifold ways that we are interdependent—on bacteria and bees, on climate and keystone species—our focus on the Declaration of Independence will wane.

In fact, in the 1770s in North America there were numerous regions undergoing their own tumultuous revolutions that underscore human interdependence, as I discuss in my forthcoming book, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. In Alaska, Russians were moving up the Aleutian archipelago, destroying sea otters as they went, transforming the ocean environment and the island communities they invaded. In San Francisco, the Spanish established the first European colony in the area, triggering an environmental cataclysm that most of us can only imagine. In the Black Hills, Lakota migrants founded their own colony, part of the environmental transformation of the Great Plains that was set off by the rise of equestrian bison hunting. In Saskatchewan, the Hudson’s Bay Company built its first inland trading post, the initial step in a transcontinental race for beaver, a keystone species whose disappearance remade entire forests in ways that are far-reaching and revolutionary. Across the continent, people struggled to come to terms with their rapidly changing world.

Imagine if the most renowned departments in early American history encouraged their graduate students not to locate a bit of untrammeled ground on the Revolution’s well-trod eastern seaboard but to strike out for the West. The subject matter of early American history would be revolutionized at a stroke, making an old field new overnight. All this is to say that our search for new perspectives for the new century may take us to places that we have not yet visited.

Further reading

On the East-Coast bias of early American history, see Claudio Saunt, “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 65:4 (October 2008): 745-78; and Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York, 2014). On climate change and history, see Sherry Johnson, “El Niño, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Alternative Markets in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1760s-70s,” William and Mary Quarterly 62:3 (July 2005): 365-410; Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011); and Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2013).

Books that popularize epidemiology include Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (New York, 1994); Brad Spellberg, Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them (Amherst, N.Y., 2009); and Barry E. Zimmerman, Killer Germs: Microbes and Diseases that Threaten Humanity (rev. and updated. Chicago, 2003). Two outstanding works that merge history and the biological sciences are Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York, 2001); and J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Great Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York, 2010).

For basic introductions to epigenetics and gut biota, see respectively Nessy Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (New York, 2012); and “Human Microbiota,” Science (special supplement). For a cautionary note on using epigenetics to understand human behavior, see Greg Miller, “The Seductive Allure of Behavioral Epigenetics, Science 329: 5987 (July 2, 2010): 24-27.

For an introduction to historical GIS and the digital humanities, see David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds., GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bloomington, Ind., 2010). An award-winning example of historical GIS is Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, Conn., 2007). The environmental and biological threats that we face today are briefly outlined in Matthew C. Fisher, et al., “Emerging Fungal Threats to Animal, Plant and Ecosystem Health,” Nature 484:7393 (April 12, 2012): 186-94.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia and the author of West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, June 2014).

The money debate and immigration at the turn of the century

In 1889, Harvard economist Francis A. Walker described the “social effects of paper money” that ranged from bad taste—”wanton bravery of apparel and equipage”—to dangerous consumer desires, which undermined the father’s authority. Paper money, Walker observed, led to the “the creation of a countless host of artificial necessities in the family beyond the power of the husband and Father to supply without a resort to questionable devices or reckless speculations.” Not only driven to recklessness, these fathers adopted “humiliating imitations of foreign habits of living.” Paper money undermined “that fit and natural leadership of taste and fashion which is the best protection society can have against sordid material aims.” And it elicited “manners at once gross and effeminate,” which led to “democracy without equality or fraternity, and exclusiveness without pride or character.”

Paper money threatened patriarchy; it drove otherwise respectable men to immoral or dangerous speculations. Paper bills produced both “effeminacy” and coarseness, encouraging foreign habits. How did paper money manage this cultural crime spree? Not by raising prices—in this passage Walker never mentions higher prices. Instead, by removing society from a basis in “real values,” paper money overturned natural laws and natural social hierarchies. It decentered the self.

Walker was probably America’s leading labor economist in the 1890s. He was also supervisor of the census. The two roles may seem only indirectly linked, but in Walker’s case, they were not. Like most of his peers, he imagined steady global progress marching directly towards the United States of America and its “fit and natural leadership of taste and opinion.” To reinforce that notion, he founded his economics, his sense of social hierarchy, and his view of money in natural law. “Money,” Walker declared in 1895, “is a product of evolution, a result of the ages.” In political economy as in society, in the markets and cultural capitals of the world, “the better [gold] has gradually crowded the worse out of existence.” Like other “hard money” economists, Walker championed gold as the natural money of the superior races. As supervisor of the census, he also called eastern- and southern-European workers racially inferior and argued vehemently that American society had no place for them. For Walker, bad blood and bad money were of a piece: both displaced the superior products of superior races. Walker’s assumptions about both bad blood and bad money reduced the complex, constant renegotiations of value and identity in the marketplace to simplistic, comforting essentials, a “bottom line” of nonnegotiable truths supposedly written by nature. This reduction made the dazzling, unsettling economic and social world of the gilded age more comprehensible and less disturbing.

Rapid transformations in the techniques of credit and exchange had made it hard to be certain about money. Was it gold? silver? Was it a paper promise to pay or a legal compulsion? a socially convenient medium of exchange or a material with intrinsic properties governed by natural law? The United States in 1896 had “probably the most heterogeneous system of money of any of the civilized countries,” wrote the deputy assistant to the treasurer. Gold and silver coins circulated along with “greenback” United States notes, treasury notes of 1890, and gold and silver certificates, “and it is due solely to the unbounded faith of the people in the unlimited credit of the nation that all these kinds [of money] have for so many years circulated side by side.” But that faith was neither unlimited nor unbounded—each kind of money occupied a different position in the raging debate over hard or soft money that had dominated American politics since Reconstruction. The currency’s heterogeneity in 1896 mirrored the nation’s ethnic, racial, and economic diversity: the anxiety about both that characterized the 1890s makes the connection between money and the sense of self unmistakeable.

The federal government had resorted to legal tender “greenbacks” to pay for the Civil War—fiat money that derived its value from the fact that law compelled acceptance. Greenbacks quickly depreciated relative to gold; but a general prosperity followed the war, and many voters attributed that prosperity and even the Northern victory to the greenback economy’s easy credit and mild inflation. Indignant gold men denounced greenbacks as bad faith, and the prosperity as false: gold formed the only proper basis for a modern economy. Gold bugs fought incessantly with greenbackers from 1865 through the 1870s. Attempts to contract the currency, to “redeem” the greenbacks, alternated with measures designed to preserve and even expand their circulation. Complicating the issue, after 1873, those arguing for a bimetallic, silver and gold monetary standard adopted the greenbackers’ inflationary rhetoric—making silver also a “real money” commodity would increase the amount of money in circulation and raise prices. But silverites shared the gold bugs’ faith in intrinsic value and natural law—silver, they argued, also enjoyed a timeless and universal “intrinsic value.” A series of awkward compromises followed, until the election of 1896 and the Gold Standard Act the year after.

The intrinsic-value claims associated with silver and gold bear a close resemblance to the era’s essentialist notions of identity—that is, its theories of racial character. Both use often identical metaphors and both establish their claims on the authority of what they regarded as natural law. In the work of those political economists who argued most strenuously for specie money and who also opposed immigration, essentialist ideas about gold and silver and about identity come together, and it was this conjunction of “specie” and “species” that gave gold standard arguments their popular force.

Arguments for both gold and silver depended heavily on fantasies of intrinsic, natural value. “Who or what gave these metals . . . their peculiar qualities for serving as coined money?” asked A Currency Primer of 1896. “Men did not,” came the answer. “Law did not. Government could not. It was done by Nature.” “Nature has decreed of what materials our money should be, and has even indicated the proportions of money to be made of each metal”—that is, the ratio of gold to silver—”and nature is more potent than legislation.” Relatively unstudied by historians, the nineteenth-century specie fetish presents an extraordinary wealth, as it were, of preposterous claims about essential value. Arguments for gold and silver described those metals’ intrinsic physical properties using Darwinist language. Economist David A. Wells insisted, for example, that “in civilized nations, natural selection has determined the use of gold as a standard.” An 1897 textbook on the money problem argued for gold on the grounds that “the ultimate value of real money rests on the market value of itself.” In other words, its value is its value, which is itself, its intrinsic properties.

Such essentialist accounts of gold’s magical properties filled this void of meaning by relating gold’s use to evolutionary development. William Trenholm, director of the U.S. Rubber Company and comptroller of the currency under President Grover Cleveland, argued in The People’s Money that “there must be a natural law . . . which tends always to establish as a standard of value the material of highest intrinsic value available at the time” and that “it is obvious that, in fixing upon silver and gold to be the standards of value, modern nations have simply followed a natural law.” Trenholm used the language of the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer and Darwin himself to argue for gold. The fantasy of stability in gold and the fantasy of stability in race have the same root origin or cause: fear of market negotiability. Both fantasies seemed to give existing hierarchies the status of natural law.

Primitive peoples thus used base materials. “Iron once served the Lacedæmonians as money,” Walker claimed, “but it would be an impossible money today for any but a nation of savages.” Over time, humble materials gave way to more valuable metals. “The history of money and the history of the civilization of the human race are intertwined,” argued A Currency Primer. “Gold is the standard of civilization and Christianity,” insisted another gold bug. “As Mexico adheres to the implements of which the farmers of the United States discarded fifty years ago, so does it adhere to a standard of value [silver] which this country . . . discarded in 1834.” “The brass ‘cash’ of China,” A Financial Catechism announced, “indicate[s] that the people are in an extreme state of degradation; the silver dollar of Mexico represents a higher condition of the people; the gold coin . . . of the United States . . . represents the highest condition.” Like monotheism, suggested Trenholm, “gold mono-mettalism is the unavoidable destiny of this country.”

Late-nineteenth-century political economists unmistakably associated gold as money with civilization, advancement, and racial superiority—not coincidentally the ideological cornerstones of American empire. The gold standard became the mark of the imperializing civilization; the silver currencies of “pagan Asiatics,” that of the justly imperialized. “Turn your eyes to the countries having the silver standard alone—Mexico, South America, Asia—and those having the gold standard,” an American gold bug wrote, “and there is no room for argument. The latter countries are prosperous, intelligent, and progressive; the former embarrassed, poor, and ignorant.” A gold-bug tract of 1892 argued similarly that “fair tests of the state of civilization in any country” included “the kind of money it uses”: only the poorer nations of the world used silver. “Congress cannot cause us to be born again, and into the Hindu, Chinese, Japanese or even into the Mexican or South American silver-handling type,” it concluded. “Silver has served a useful purpose as a standard,” another tract argued, “but it has yielded to the survival of the fittest.” These authors connected gold to an interracial economic struggle, linking America’s racial “value” to gold’s intrinsic superiority.

Gold-standard arguments reflected a more generalized concern about and fascination with the insubstantiality of character, race, and value in labor. Mass production changed the meaning of individual labor and work itself. It made workers machine-like and interchangeable, depriving them of their traditional identity as artisans. But it also made identity more negotiable—immigrants might “assimilate” and become American; their “racial” difference was negotiable. Facing intense competition, lowered wages, and deskilling in the 1890s, many workers found refuge in nativism and racial typologies that posed essential, nonnegotiable differences between Anglo-Saxon, “Latin” [Italian], Semitic, Slavic, black, and Asian workers. In this view black Americans were simply not “union material,” and as Samuel Gompers later put it, “The Caucasians . . . are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others.” In the 1890s, native white workers responded strongly to racially based economic arguments about the low character of imported workers. Alarmed by the census of 1890, which revealed a massive increase in immigration from eastern and southern Europe, Walker warned that new immigrants would beat down wages. “They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies” compatible with self-government. “They are,” he claimed, “beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” Walker blamed their poor wages on their poor genetic stock, their willingness to settle. Poor nations try to escape poverty by issuing paper money, he argued in Money, Trade and Industry. And they do this “in defiance of the laws of its distribution,” which demonstrated that the poverty of their people stemmed from “vices of industrial character” or, simply put, bad racial character.

Economist William Z. Ripley similarly contrasted the “urban activity” of the acquisitive, mercantile “Teuton” to the “reactionary passivity” of the “Alpine” and especially of the “Alpine Celt.” As historian Lawrence Glickman and others have argued, native workers feared immigrants as poor consumers, people with few needs who needed only small wages. Undistracted by consumption, unambitious, they simply hoarded with what novelist Frank Norris in McTeague called the “instinct” of “peasant blood”—”saving for the sake of saving, hoarding without knowing why.”

Arguments for gold aimed at the working class often linked gold to both a high standard of living and the intrinsic superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. “Take a look at the company before you sit down at the feast,” an anti-silver tract warned workingmen. Who had silverites invited? “Half civilized, half clad peoples, who are weak and ignorant, who have little or no commerce; where bullfights abound and schools do not; where human labor is in sharp competition with the meek and lowly jackass; where the breech-clout is preferred to a full suit.” A “sound money” cartoon published and distributed free to newspapers in 1896 depicted three workingmen labeled “English,” “American,” and “German” standing in front of a barker’s wagon. The barker sells “Minowners silver elixir: Indorsed by India, Japan, China and Mexico [sic].” The barker’s sign describes the elixir as “especially good in restricting emigration.” Gaunt, poorly clad stereotypes of Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian workers sit beneath the sign looking lean, hungry, and sinister. “If those are its cures,” says the caption, “we don’t want that medicine.” The cartoon linked a high standard of living to the gold standard; it also linked both to the essential racial difference between northern-European whites and peoples of color.

Political economists imagined race relations as problems of exchange. Herbert Spenser saw poorer races perpetuating their inferiority by biologically exchanging and reproducing bad traits, bad genes driving out the good. Walker similarly looked at the 1890 census and saw immigrants overwhelming native stock as they strained resources and drove down wages. They “lacked the enterprising spirit” and so would swamp the economy. The time had come, Walker argued, when “the nation’s birthright shall no longer be recklessly squandered” through open door immigration. Without action, the Anglo-Saxon “birthright,” which included a high standard of living, would vanish, squandered like easy paper money, as lazy immigrants accepted less and drove good character out of the market.

The influence of these arguments was evident by 1903, when workers on the Panama Canal had been segregated by task and by pay into two groups: white workers, known as “gold” workers, who took their pay in gold, and black workers, or “silver workers,” who were paid with silver coins. Economics and racism worked together to produce the basic categories for organizing labor. “What prevents Congress from legislating the value of a dollar?” asked the gold-bug “financial catechism” of 1895. Is it the Constitution? “Not the Constitution of the United States,” came the answer, “but the constitution of man.”

Money, we could say, is a shorthand sign for what difference means. We symbolize the difference between skilled and unskilled workers by paying skilled workers more; we use a shorthand symbol, the price, to say what the difference between “standard” and “deluxe” means. But if money seems unstable, so might the system of making sense of difference. Walker, quoted at the start of this essay, saw paper money as the source of unstable character. Gold drew his interest because it offered, in a time of increasing economic dynamism and ethnic diversity, to stabilize the meaning of difference; it offered a “gold standard” through which immigrants and the racially different might be put in their place. His nativist anxiety masqueraded (as similar sentiments of free marketeers do today) as fantasies of natural market law.

Further Reading:

Pamphlets, tracts, articles, and books on the money question rained down like autumn leaves in the 1890s. Francis A. Walker’s sentiments appear in Money in its Relations to Trade and Industry (New York, 1889) and Money and Banking (Boston, 1902 [reprint of 1895 ed.]). The single best evidence on the gold-bug position may be the periodical Sound Currency, published in the mid-1890s and quoted extensively here. On its extraordinary reach and effectiveness see James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class and Corporate Capitalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986). Among recent books that deal with immigration and economics, Mathew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues (New York, 2001) and Katrina Irving, Immigrant Mothers (Bloomington, Ill., 2000) are most pertinent. The author established some of these arguments in O’Malley, “Specie and Species: Race and the Money Question in the Nineteenth Century,” in American Historical Review 99 (Spring 1994): 369-395; Gretchen Ritter’s Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance, 1865-1896 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) looks at race and money arguments in similar ways. For theoretical background on money as a symbol, see John Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (London, 2001), Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought (Baltimore, Md., 1991) and Art and Money (Chicago, 1995), and Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (Princeton, 1997).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Michael O’Malley is associate professor of history and art history at George Mason University. He is studying the money question in American history, as well as studying the history of recorded sound.

Graphics in nineteenth-century America

From the vantage point of our twenty-first century, so saturated with visual media, it is hard to imagine that the nineteenth century experienced one of the greatest visual revolutions in history. Technological innovations—from the invention of photography to the development of a variety of mechanized processes for reproducing images on a scale never before imagined—coupled with expanding transportation and communications networks, engendered a veritable avalanche of pictorial publications and products. The vast effusion of graphic materials confronting the nineteenth-century American included an ever-increasing range of illustrated periodicals; the blossoming of the political cartoon; individual decorative, portrait, comic, and genre prints; trade cards; greeting cards; sheet music covers; theater and campaign posters; and overbearing billboards. Indeed, faced with what the historian Jean-Louis Comolli has termed “the frenzy of the visible,” nineteenth-century cultural conservatives such as Nation editor E. L. Godkin decried the leveling of American taste to the common denominator of “chromo-civilization”—a metaphor for diluted “pseudo-culture” named after the popular color print so ubiquitous in household parlors.

Until relatively recently, this resplendent or horrifying (depending on your perspective) nineteenth-century visual culture was of little note to historians. Or, to be more accurate, its history was relegated largely to illustrations tipped into the binding of published monographs (usually not even gathered by the authors) or used as mildly informative decoration in survey texts. Trained with a decided bias in favor of the Word and against the suspiciously inviting Image, historians’ orientation to the past remained largely logocentric, or as the art historian Barbara Maria Stafford put it, “anti-ocular.” The visual realm of U.S. history was left to the art historians, who in turn left the popular graphic world to largely unrecognized collectors and aficionados of ephemera.

We owe a great deal to the latter for creating the foundation upon which recent scholarly work on the popular visual world has been built. The twelve essays in this special issue of Common-place reflect the “visual turn” in U.S. historiography over the last decade. They also suggest the stunning range of topics and approaches characterizing the field of visual history, including: caricature and woman suffrage; the visualization of the industrializing city; the impact of pictorial publications on national identity; the role of portrait prints in the invention of public personas; the visual manifestations of popular political metaphors; the transformation of craft and credo in wood engraving; the visualization of progress in the antithetical figure of the Chinese worker; women engravers’ struggle for representation in their trade and in illustrations of women workers; the emergence of alternative African American political cartooning; the unintended vernacular uses of published ephemera; and the creation of graphic archives during the Gilded Age.

In short, as this collection of essays attests, embedded in the seemingly regimented lines, archaic visual codes, and quaint pictorial conventions of nineteenth-century graphics is a universe of actions and ideas that the realm of text often fails to capture. In their explorations of that universe, historians have begun uncovering the myriad ways popular graphics engaged with, embodied, and shaped the tumultuous culture, society, politics, and economy of nineteenth-century America.

This special issue of Common-place comes at a propitious time for the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), one of the journal’s underwriters. In 2005, the society’s governing board approved the creation of a Center for Historic American Visual Culture. The AAS is eminently suited for this activity because of its experience in hosting workshops, seminars, and conferences for scholars in many disciplines. The fellowship program, established in the early 1970s, is well regarded and has for the past decade had two fellowships specifically for scholars using prints or studying visual culture. Recent generous support from AAS member Jay T. Last and his wife Deborah enables the AAS to offer an increased number of fellowships for those studying visual culture. The graphic arts collection at the AAS includes prints published from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth century as well as engraved, printed, and lithographed ephemera, much of it pictorial. There are illustrated sheet music covers, maps of the United States, drawings, and photographs as well. Among the activities planned for the center are workshops for secondary-school and collegiate teachers on interpreting visual evidence for the classroom, lectures for the general public, additional fellowship programs, and conferences focusing on the visual dimension of American history.

But the connection between this special issue of Common-place and the new Center for Historic American Visual Culture is more than a happy accident. There is a profound technological convergence that makes both enterprises possible. In much the way that new printing technologies revolutionized the nineteenth-century visual world, so digital technology is revolutionizing our study of that world. Now, on-line journals such as Common-place can recover and communicate the experience of past visual culture by publishing much more than just textual analyses of visual experience. Unconstrained by the costs of reprinting high-quality images, we are able to present a range of visual materials and (by linking images to larger versions) afford a level of interaction inconceivable for an ordinary print journal. We hope you take full advantage of this opportunity to observe pictorial details and techniques. And we look forward to the many ways the new Center for Historic American Visual Culture will further the project, so beautifully articulated in the work presented here, of bringing together old worlds of print and new worlds of digital technology.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Georgia B. Barnhill is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society and coordinates the activities of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. She has written and lectured extensively on American prints and book illustrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her most recent publication is The Bibliography on American Prints of the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries, published by the American Historical Print Collectors Society and Oak Knoll Press.

Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project and professor of history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His most recent book (coauthored with Eric Foner) is Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

Ian Gordon is an associate professor in history at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (Washington and London, 1998) and an editor of the forthcoming Film and Comic Books (Jackson, Miss., 2007).