The imperialist imagination from filibustering to reality TV

The Empire is back, and no, I’m not referring to Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Nor am I talking about the imperialist-sequel America of George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, and preemptive strikes. Not directly, anyhow. The latest iteration of CBS’s Survivor, TV’s longest-running reality show series, is to be set, yet again, in the tropics. “Survivor Guatemala: the Mayan Empire” began filming in June. According to CBS News (always happy to plug its lucrative reality-TV franchise), officials in Guatemala are hoping that this latest Survivor will spur American tourists to visit the country’s remarkable Mayan ruins. 

That may well happen, and good luck to Guatemala and its infomercial. But as edifying as it might be for large numbers of Americans to steep themselves in someone else’s empire, Survivor is probably not the best vehicle for encouraging educated foreign travel. Previous Survivors have been set in Palau, Vanuatu, Panama, the Marquesas, the Amazon, and the Australian outback. But they looked pretty much the same: plenty of bathing suits, and bugs, attempts to spear fish, and beach-front shack construction. More importantly, contestants did the same things in these diverse settings. They formed and broke alliances, romanced one another, struggled with the heat, and competed in physical and mental challenges that rewarded individual strength, willpower, and agility—all in the pursuit of a million-dollar prize for one driven winner. The longevity of Survivor can perhaps be attributed to the fact that for the purposes of the competition, these tropical and quasi-tropical settings (even, oddly enough, the Australian outback) are effectively interchangeable. Contestants may occasionally interact with photogenic indigenous peoples in highly scripted and heartwarming ways or bear witness to the natural wonders around them (by swimming with stingless jellyfish, for instance), but none of this faux exoticism interferes with the business at hand, which is to endow the strongest, toughest, and most Machiavellian American with a big pile of U.S. greenbacks. In Survivor, it’s “American values” that are rewarded and endlessly strategic individualism that prevails. Sorry, Guatemala, but Survivor is ultimately about one empire only, and that one is America’s.

Nor is Survivor unusual in co-opting the tropics in the service of American enterprise. Temptation Island, The Real Gilligan’s Island, and portions of The Great Race—in all of these reality shows the tropics function as fantasy spaces, where otherwise undistinguished individuals can single-mindedly pursue riches and usually sex as well. Where is this new Gilligan’s Island? Does it matter? Like the first Survivor, originally set on an unidentified beach on an unidentified island, the TV tropics are fiercely anonymous and never actual countries whose governments, cultures, and societies have significant bearing on the behavior of the American interlopers. Of course particularity of place is not a noted strongpoint of reality TV. Even shows that are explicitly about their locations tend toward the universal. (Is that glossy nightclub on MTV’s The Real World in San Diego or Paris? Is that Jacuzzi in Austin or London?) Or they revel in cliché. When strapping young American men are exported to England on VH1’s Kept, for instance, they compete in polo matches, attend formal parties with royalty, and prepare spotted dick (a British dessert) in their attempts to become the kept man of ex-supermodel and ex-wife of Mick Jagger, Texas-born Jerry Hall.

But the TV tropics are something special, not only for their anonymity and interchangeability, but also because of their unequalled appeal as the setting for these shows. Why are the tropics so appealing to reality-TV producers and viewers? True, bathing suits bring in better ratings than parkas, but Jerry’s “boys” manage to find opportunities to shine, and show skin, in temperate Old England, while the aspiring male strippers/models of VH1’s Strip-Search and the Oxygen Network’s Mr. Romance rarely wear shirts or venture out-of-doors. The promise of the tropics is not so much the bikini (although bikinis are clearly important) as the certain victory of American values abroad and the ability of Americans to survive and become rich by dint of will and sexiness in a “primitive” environment.

Survivor was a sequel from the start. The appeal of the tropics as idealized location for the triumph of American enterprise and individualism is nothing new and, in fact, is a reoccurring theme in periods of American imperial expansionism. The tropics were similarly visualized in the two decades before the Civil War, when the conviction that America had a God-given Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent shaped presidential elections and helped justify a bloody war against Mexico in 1846. Thirteen-thousand Americans and twenty-thousand Mexicans died in that war as America’s popular literature extolled the opportunities for American men in the “fertile tropics” of Mexico. As Americans debated whether or not to annex all of Mexico as spoils of war in early 1848, Sam Houston, founding father of the Republic of Texas, assured a large crowd of New Yorkers gathered at a public meeting that Mexico was meant to be settled by Americans. He recommended that they “take a trip of exploration” to Mexico, find some “beautiful senoritas” and “if you should choose to annex them, no doubt the result of this annexation will be a most powerful and delightful evidence of civilization.” Equating personal and national annexation, Houston promised that what was good for the country would also be good for the individual and suggested that Mexican men were too unworthy as opponents to even factor into the equation.

Although the so-called all-Mexico movement failed, and midcentury expansionism ended with Mexico transferring half of her territory to the United States, expansionists continued to gaze longingly to the south. Tropical travel narratives, in both book and article form, proliferated in the 1840s and 1850s and offered a vision of the tropical portions of the Western Hemisphere, from the Caribbean to Hawaii, as ripe for American takeover. Less concerned with the civilizations of the south, than with spreading American civilization to the south, travel writers repeatedly pointed out that “the enterprise of the states” was all that was needed to turn tropical land into “a paradise” and contrasted the “slothful” and “lazy” local men with the energetic and hard-working American settlers who were bound to displace them. Appealing both to expansionists convinced that America’s Manifest Destiny was yet to be fulfilled and to displaced workingmen searching for opportunity, these narratives of Americans in the tropics promised, as Survivor and its kin do today, that yesterday’s failure in the United States could be tomorrow’s success in the tropics.

The tropics thus offered the perfect second chance to the American man willing to make the effort. The leading magazines of the day, including Harper’s, Putnam’s, and the Atlantic Monthly all ran travelogues that situated tropical lands firmly within the reach of America’s Manifest Destiny. These exotic locales, whether in Central America, the Caribbean, or the Pacific, were imbued with the promise of both romantic and economic success, predicated on the fact that any American man, even a failure, had the strength, intelligence, and will to succeed among the lesser men of the tropics. Within this genre, the equivalent to Survivor’s million-dollar paycheck was the indigo, sugar, or banana plantation, or possibly a yet-undiscovered gold mine, complemented by a beautiful local woman. Unlike in Survivor, however, the American’s competition for this prize was the supposedly lazy and racially inferior native man, and the conclusion, a foregone one. As one booster of the annexation of Mexico wrote in 1857, “it is now for a new race, a race possessed of iron will, to turn” these lands “to account.”

Filibusters, mercenaries who attacked countries in the Caribbean and Central America with disturbing regularity in the 1840s and 1850s in hopes of gaining new U.S. territory, also visualized the tropics as sites of easily won victory for American men. The chorus to a song sung by Cuban filibusters declared “O Cuba is the land for me,/I’m bound to make some money there! And set the Cubans free—.” (One filibuster, Narciso López, made three attempts on Cuba with American recruits between 1849 and 1851.) An 1856 poem in the New York Picayune celebrated the brief victory of filibuster William Walker—who ruled Nicaragua for less than a year before fleeing to the United States in the face of a stronger Central American army—by declaring that Nicaragua was a place:

“Where all things grow without the taming of a plough,
Where men grow fat by feasting, sans the sweat of brow.
Offers its steaming wealth to those who like to seek it,
And own their masters, if they’ll stick by and keep it.”

Even the forty-niners traveling through Nicaragua and Panama in the great race to the gold fields of California imagined the possibilities for “men of enterprise” of “our own race” in lands where so much grew “in the greatest luxuriance, and without apparent cultivation.” One gold-rush travel guide declared that Central America, and not California, was in fact “the real El Dorado” and advocated the immediate annexation of the Central American isthmus.

What the tropics so seductively promised was success to Americans simply by virtue of their being American, reassuring them of the universality of their values. The tropics were appealing not only because they were inhabited by scantily clad women but because the supposed racial superiority of the American Anglo-Saxon and his culture seemed to insure success to the individual who, borrowing a slogan from Survivor, was willing to “outwit, outplay, and outlast” his competition. From the antebellum travel narrative through reality TV, some things just haven’t changed. Being an empire means never having to say you are sorry for turning the rest of the world into backstory for your own national drama.

Further Reading:

All quotes are taken from Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum Empire (New York, 2005). On the American image of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico War, see Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York, 1985). On cultural production after the war see Shelly Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, 2002). On images of foreign lands in antebellum America, see Bruce Albert Harvey, American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865 (Stanford, 2001). The best study of filibustering is Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2002). On imperialism and American culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, 1998).

Outstanding examples of the antebellum expansionist travel narrative include: Peter F. Stout, Nicaragua: Past, Present and Future; a Description of Its Inhabitants, Customs, Mines, Minerals. Early History, Modern Filibusterism, Proposed Inter-Oceanic Canal and Manifest Destiny (Philadelphia, 1859); William V. Wells, Explorations and Adventures in Honduras, excerpted in “Adventures in the Gold Fields of Central America,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 12 (February 1856): 315-36; and Marvin Wheat (as “Cincinnatus”), Travels on the Western Slope of the Mexican Cordillera in the Form of Fifty-One Letters (San Francisco, 1857).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.1 (October, 2005).

Amy S. Greenberg is associate professor of history and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University and acting director of the Richards Civil War Era Center. She is author of Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York, 2005) and Cause for Alarm: the Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998). She is currently conducting research for a cultural history of the U.S.-Mexico War.

Bloomfield, New Jersey, bookbinders’ tool maker

It all started in June 2006 when my good friend and mentor Sue Allen asked me what I could find out about Samuel Dodd, a nineteenth-century New Jersey engraver. In 1998 I took Sue’s course on publishers’ bookbindings at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. After having spent the previous twenty-five years collecting books on nineteenth-century science and technology, my focus made an abrupt shift from the contents to the covers of books.

I first encountered Samuel Dodd in 2001 at a book fair where I purchased a friendship album, also called an autograph album, published by John Riker of New York and dated 1836 (fig. 1). The stunning embossed leather cathedral design is subtly signed S DODD N JERS^Y at the base of the stained glass window in letters only 1/32 of an inch high (fig. 1a).

My extreme nearsightedness has proven to have a silver lining. It allows me to see extremely fine print without a magnifying glass, and I believed that I had discovered an important new American embossed binding example. When I got home, I was dismayed to find that Edwin Wolf 2nd, former librarian of the Library Company in Philadelphia, had already discovered Dodd. He illustrated an identical example, although dated 1835, in his bible on embossed American bindings. Wolf reported relatively little information on Samuel Dodd other than that he was an engraver from Bloomfield, New Jersey, a rural town three miles northwest of Newark. Although virtually unknown today, Dodd’s engraving skills were recognized at the prestigious annual American Institute Fairs in New York. He won a silver medal for the best bookbinders’ stamps in 1848 and a diploma in 1855 for bookbinders’ ornaments.

Sue Allen knows that I love to research obscure people, and I swallowed the hook. I immediately began to search online and microfilm census databases and city directories. In addition to Samuel Dodd’s 1850 and 1860 census records, I located a valuable Dodd family history. There, I learned that Samuel Dodd was born on April 7, 1797, in Bloomfield; married Elizabeth Young Baldwin on April 3, 1823; had six children; and died in Bloomfield on August 1, 1862.

I then found a tantalizing online reference to archival materials in the Winterthur Library from the Newark engraving business of Samuel Dodd’s two sons, William H. C. and Walter S. Dodd. In addition to several hundred 1860s and 1870s letterheads, there was a design book with thousands of engraved images used in the son’s engraving business.

I faintly hoped that there might be some mention of Samuel Dodd in his sons’ records. I soon visited the Winterthur Library, just ten minutes away. It was one of those rare and wonderful moments of discovery. The instant that I saw the design book, I realized that it was Samuel Dodd’s own pattern book. The designs are not in fact engraved but instead are smoke proofs of bookbinders’ hand stamps and plaques. Smoke proofs are made by holding the engraved brass stamp in a sooty candle flame and stamping the resulting blackened engraving onto paper or leather. These were used to track the progress of the engraving and filing process, as well as to provide a lasting impression for future duplication.

Two major clues suggested that this was the working pattern book of Samuel Dodd and not of his sons:

• The paper appears to be early nineteenth century laid paper and not from the 1860 period. Also, the style of the stamps appears to be much earlier than the sons’ working dates of the 1860s to 1870s.
• A large corner plaque, number 580, caught my attention because it looked vaguely familiar (fig. 2).

I excitedly went upstairs to Winterthur’s reference library and located a copy of Edwin Wolf’s definitive reference for American embossed bindings. I was both amazed and thrilled to find that the unique corner design in the Dodd stamp catalog appeared to be the same one used on the ca. 1835 Riker album with the signed Dodd cathedral design (fig. 3).

As I marveled over the eighty individual leaves, it became apparent that Dodd’s pattern book was assembled chronologically as each tool was made, probably starting in the early 1820s. Sometime later in the century, the individual five-inch by seven-inch leaves from the small notebook were pasted onto muslin with two leaves per page. The pattern book was then sturdily bound in suede, to protect the contents from rough handling in a dirty workshop environment.

Considerable planning went into the pattern book. Dodd initially ink-ruled each page into one-inch by one-inch grids, sequentially numbering each square in ink. As each stamp was completed, Dodd made a final smoke proof in the center of each grid (fig. 4). A stamp larger than the gridlines was stamped onto paper, which was then cut out and glued into the pattern book, because this size is generally too big for a binder to hand stamp and still get a sharp impression. These large stamps would have been engraved on flat plates, called plaques, for a press, rather than for bookbinders’ hand tools.

In this way, over a working period of approximately thirty-five years, Dodd systematically constructed a pattern book of twenty-five hundred numbered and priced stamps (fig. 5).

The total price for all twenty-five hundred stamps is approximately forty-five hundred dollars, an average of under two dollars per stamp. The cheapest stamp is ten cents and the most expensive is fifty dollars for the large four-corner plaque used on the ca. 1835 Riker album with the cover design signed by Dodd.

In addition to these bookbinders’ stamps, there are many pages of designs for plaques for stamping borders and entire book covers in blind (i.e., without gilt). There are even a few designs for stamping the velvet in daguerreotype cases.

There are also a number of advertising or ownership stamps for hotels, hat manufacturers, and libraries. American clients included locations in Rochester, New York; New York City; Newark, New Jersey; Montgomery, Alabama; Alton, Illinois; and Columbus, Georgia. Stamps were made not only for customers in the United States but also in Mexico City and Paris. Clearly, the world of Samuel Dodd encompassed far more than just designing and cutting a single large plaque for a mid-1830s friendship album.

A stunning stamp of a three-inch-tall winged lyre with a Masonic all-seeing eye was also vaguely familiar. Winterthur agreed to make me a photocopy of this stamp along with four other pages for further research.

As soon as I returned home, I immediately compared the smoke proof of the corner plaque number 580 (fig. 2) with my red morocco copy of the Riker album with the cathedral binding signed by Dodd (fig. 6). It was a thrilling moment to see the agreement.

I next located my copy of an 1833 John Riker album with a winged lyre (fig. 7). The Dodd pattern book winged-lyre stamp, number 561 (fig. 8), proved to be identical to that used on the cover of this album.

Now convinced that this was Samuel Dodd’s pattern book, I began to study him in earnest to learn as much as possible about this little-known engraver and bookbinders’ tool cutter.

I soon discovered bookbinder Tom Conroy’s exhaustive reference book on bookbinders’ tool cutters. I had several discussions with Tom, who patiently educated me on many aspects of bookbinders’ tool making. I was astonished when he told me that this is the only example of an original American bookbinders’ pattern book that he had heard of, which was a thrill for both of us. Well-known bookbinders’ tool cutter firms, such as John Hoole in New York and Gaskill and Copper in Philadelphia, published valuable nineteenth-century trade catalogues of bookbinders’ tools. However, these are re-engraved facsimiles of tool designs for multiple copies of catalogues and not proofs for a single working catalogue.

Tom Conroy had researched Samuel Dodd in the Newark City Directories and located his first appearance in 1849 as “engraver, Bloomfield.” I decided to take a fresh look and checked every advertisement, starting with the first Newark directory in 1835. I confirmed that Samuel Dodd did not appear in the alphabetical listings until 1849 but then discovered he took out a wonderful full-page engraved ad in 1848 (fig. 9).

Dodd used the same engraved border from 1848 through 1851, with only minor text or font changes.

This ad explains much about Dodd’s bold marketing techniques, as well as his versatile engraving skills. Not only did he advertise himself as a bookbinders’ tool cutter, but he also promoted his diverse engraving trade with charming vignettes. These depict stamps, rolls, scrolls, lines, sides and backs for books, stamps for saddlers and trunk makers, and embossing rolls and plates. In addition, there are vignettes for engraved door and bell plates, ornamental plates for harness makers, and dies for stamping silk hatbands for hatters. Newark was a major center of the hat making industry, and virtually all hats contained a silk hatband with the hat maker’s name stamped in gilt.

The doorplate vignette is proudly emblazoned S. DODD, further advertising his name and showing his self-promotion. In all likelihood, Samuel Dodd himself engraved the border for the ad, as he certainly had the technical capability.

The text within the engraved border also offers valuable historical information. It confirms that Dodd’s engraving business was located in Bloomfield, rather than in Newark as is often claimed. However, Dodd cleverly used several popular locations in Newark for customers to drop off and pick up engraving work, to make it more convenient by avoiding a carriage or train trip to rural Bloomfield. Dodd’s drop-off points occasionally changed between 1848 and 1851 and included a bookbinder, a printer, a drug store, and a coffee shop.

In 1851, Dodd advertised his business as “A few rods from the Turnpike Road, leading from Newark to Bloomfield, NJ.” A rod is around sixteen feet, and the 1850 Essex County New Jersey property map shows S. Dodd’s house, as advertised, just off the Bloomfield/Newark turnpike (fig. 10). His home no longer stands.

Another serendipitous discovery occurred while searching the manuscript collection card catalog of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for the only known Samuel Dodd line engraving. This is an undated trade card for the Washington Bleach Works, signed S. Dodd Sct.-New Ark. Although the historical society was unable to locate the engraving, I found a reference to a silhouette identified as “Saml. Dodd.” Unfortunately, there was no provenance, date, or a place, and this is a relatively common name. The silhouette is of a young man, identified only on the reverse as Saml. Dodd, father (fig. 11).

However, when I studied the entire group of eight Dodd silhouettes in the collection, the family relationships I had found earlier in the Dodd genealogy read like a DNA analysis. This silhouette is indeed that of a young Samuel Dodd, the New Jersey engraver, along with two siblings, his mother, and several members of his mother’s family. All the silhouettes are hollow cut and of a similar style and are backed by black silk fabric. They appear to have been cut at the same time, around 1815-1820, by the same artist. Samuel Dodd’s father, also Samuel, a farmer, died unexpectedly in 1815, when Samuel Jr. was seventeen years old. As the oldest of nine then-living children, the pressure on Samuel to begin earning a living must have been tremendous.

It appears very likely that Samuel Dodd apprenticed as a young man in the Newark, New Jersey, shop of well-known engraver Peter Maverick, as a lot containing the Washington BleachWorks trade card was sold at the auction of Maverick’s print shop upon his death in 1831. Hopefully an example of Samuel Dodd’s line engraving work will surface.

With the generous help of book historians, librarians, and book dealers, further research has led to the identification of several additional Dodd stamp patterns on spines or covers of books. These range in date from as early as 1827 to as late as 1862, the year that Dodd died. Work continues to identify additional stamps on books, and a facsimile of the pattern book will be published to aid other researchers.

A clue to Dodd’s resting place is offered in his obituary notice, first posted in the Newark Daily Advertiser on August 1, 1862. “Died, At Bloomfield, on the 1st inst., Samuel Dodd, in the 66th year of his age. Notice of funeral tomorrow.”

Dodd’s funeral notice appeared in the Newark Daily Advertiser for Saturday, August 2, 1862. “Died at his residence in Bloomfield, on the 1st. inst. Samuel Dodd, in the 66th year of his age. The relatives and friends are respectfully invited to attend his funeral from the Presbyterian Church on Sunday at 3 PM. The relatives will meet at the house at 2 ½ PM.”

This confirms that Samuel Dodd’s final residence was in Bloomfield and also that he was a member of the Presbyterian Church. The present Bloomfield Cemetery is connected with the old Presbyterian Church. After several hours of searching in a light rain, I was able to find Samuel Dodd’s gravestone among the multitude of Dodds. He is buried in a simple family plot with his father, mother, wife, and two daughters (fig. 12).

This stamp pattern book opens up a rare glimpse into a small nineteenth-century American business, revealing just how many designs one man produced in his lifetime. Bookbinders’ stamps were only one part of Dodd’s many engraving skills, which suggests that he had to significantly broaden his customer base in order to make a living. There would have been additional Dodd pattern books, and hopefully other examples will surface. This example had been undiscovered for thirty years.

Further Reading:

The finding list for the Dodd Collection at Winterthur Library is available online. Several Riker albums are illustrated in History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy—Riker. Major collections of nineteenth-century friendship or autograph albums are located in the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Illustrations of modern bookbinding tools are in Fine Cut Graphic Imaging Limited—Bookbinding Equipment. For a thorough treatment and exhaustive directory of tool cutters, see Tom Conroy, Bookbinders’ Finishing Tool Makers, 1780-1965 (New Castle, Del., 2002). For a detailed study of American embossed bindings, see Edwin Wolf 2nd, From Gothic Windows to Peacocks (Philadelphia, 1990). For an excellent genealogy of the Dodd family, see Allison Dodd and Rev. Joseph Fulford Folsom, Genealogy and History of the Daniel Dod Family in America: 1646-1940 (Bloomfield, N.J., 1940). See also John Littell, Family Records or Genealogies of The First Settlers Of Passaic Valley (And Vicinity) Above Chatham—with Their Ancestors and Descendants As Far As Can Now Be Ascertained (Feltville, N.J., 1851). The section from Davis to Dodd has been transcribed.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Steve Beare is a retired research chemist. In addition to studying nineteenth-century book cover design, he is writing an online Directory of Nineteenth-Century American Scale Makers.

There are two Jamestowns. The first is a physical location near the territory inhabited in the early seventeenth century by the Pasapeghs, one of the thirty or so indigenous groups who lived in a region they called Tsenacommacah. The English called these people Powhatans. The second Jamestown is a mythic place that reappears every fifty years and becomes the focal point of a national discussion about the meaning of “America.” The first place has been studied by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists; the other has been (and remains) fodder for politicians and entrepreneurial patriots. The tangible Jamestown was initiated by 107 English men and boys who settled there in May 1607. The imaginary Jamestown has been created and recreated by presidents and promoters who have seen opportunity in boasting that it is “the cradle of American democratic traditions, cultures, ideologies and principles,” in the words of the official anniversary Website. William M. Kelso’s Jamestown: The Buried Truth merges both Jamestowns and leaves the reader wondering where “truth” can be found.

As is obvious to every early American historian and thousands of other readers, books about Jamestown have never been so popular or received such wide attention as in this four-hundredth-anniversary year. Any serious review of the field will need to include Kelso’s study, which is one of the most significant works of American archaeology to appear in recent years. The University of Virginia Press has produced a beautiful book containing scores of images, many in full color. Kelso has given the press much to work with: he has been, as he reveals in these pages, the most important archaeologist working at what has become one of the most intensively studied archaeological sites in eastern North America. Digs at Jamestown have produced around seven hundred thousand artifacts.

In such able hands as Kelso’s, archaeological evidence can reveal a past hidden to those who study only texts. Careful digging in Jamestown has shown, for example, the size of dwellings, the contents of diets, and the range of goods that arrived in this small seventeenth-century outpost on the edge of the Atlantic economy. Even the garbage is revelatory: the abandonment of goods such as suits of armor reveals major shifts in settlers’ perceptions of the region and its challenges at any given time. When archaeologists find valuable clothing in graves, it suggests that colonists died of something so dreadful that none of the survivors wanted the hand-me-downs. An excavation of a well might reveal what kinds of pathogens, if any, invaded the bowels of those unfortunate enough to ingest them. This kind of analysis can provide clues into the desperate early months of Jamestown when sixty-seven of the first settlers died. Kelso and his team investigated these questions along with more mundane artifacts—such as Delft tiles, Elizabethan coins, conch shells from Bermuda, and a German stoneware bottle. These reveal, among other things, settlers’ engagement with the larger Atlantic economy. Kelso ably demonstrates how the analysis of human detritus can reveal what lies invisible in texts, thus substantiating the special role of archaeologists in the collective scholarly understanding of the past.

While archaeology lies at the heart of this study of the tangible Jamestown, other parts of the book promote the mythic Jamestown. “The American dream was born on the banks of the James River,” Kelso writes in the first sentence of his introduction. In case the reader becomes so lost in the minutiae of archaeological reconstruction that she or he forgets this motto (and to his credit Kelso is a far more felicitous writer than many who fill the pages of archaeological journals), Kelso repeats this theme in the last sentence of the book: “The American dream was born on the banks of the James River, at a place first called James Fort, in 1607” (214). Why such a deliberate redundancy? Perhaps because the mythic Jamestown has cast its spell over even the most scientific scholar to study the place. Yet some might question the idea that the “American dream” was born at Jamestown, and Kelso is too capable a scholar to ignore the fact that the establishment of a permanent English presence in North America proved nightmarish for Native peoples and Africans.

Nonetheless, it is hard for Kelso to shake off a heritage that seems at once so romantic and so compellingly patriotic. “The ideals that distinguish and guide the United States today trace back to the Virginia settlement where free enterprise, the rule of law, and the spirit of discovery took hold in the hearts and practices of the American people.” Those words are not Kelso’s. They come instead from President George W. Bush’s proclamation marking the anniversary, issued by the White House on April 6, 2007. This is how Kelso put it: “There is evidence that some of the immigrants worked hard and achieved a better life. Those who first met them at the shore usually did not share this good fortune. Still, a political system was born and migrated across the seventeenth-century Jamestown landscape establishing principles that would some day make possible a more equal access to that better life” (214).

There is nothing wrong with writing a work of history that emphasizes the contribution of a particular individual or group or place to a larger historical drama. Kelso, who spent many years digging at Jamestown, certainly deserves the opportunity to tell his readers about the significance of what can be found there. The question for many readers will not be the conclusion, which will either seem an accurate reflection of the American past or an apology for it. Instead, the issue here is the nature of historical truth. Presidents can be forgiven an excess of rhetoric, for in our time no one seems to expect them to speak honestly. But Kelso, the scholar, has claimed in this book that archaeological analysis has brought us closer to what he calls “the buried truth,” as if material objects tell only a single story that is obvious to those who unearth them.

It is true that documents often obscure as much as they reveal. But so do material objects, including those found at Jamestown. Remains from the site provide evidence about the complexity of the settlement’s founding but speak less explicitly about the decline of Native Americans or the birth of the English mainland slave trade. Those other stories, although equally true, do not fit so well into the versions of Jamestown that the current president and fellow organizers of the official anniversary celebration have been marketing to the nation in public spectacles, children’s stage plays, or trademarked mugs and caps. Sometimes archaeology helps to rebury elements of early Virginia’s past rather than reveal them as, for instance, when Kelso writes that “documents and digging lay bare the places of American democracy” (213). When Kelso lets the patriotic past promote the mythic over the tangible Jamestown, readers of this book will need to trust their judgment about where the truth lies.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Peter C. Mancall, professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California, is the director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute and author, most recently, of Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (2007).

A conventional biography of Richard Hakluyt the younger (1552?-1616) cannot be written. Famous for publishing collections of travel writings in order to promote English colonialization, Hakluyt left no personal papers. We know he married twice, the first marriage producing a son. Beyond dates of marriages, deaths, and births, no trace of his private life survives. Literally the only information of a quasi-personal nature comes from a passage in one of his published works, in which he describes the introduction to geography that would later launch him on his publishing career. It is an exceedingly thin record for a man whose name is so well known.

Peter C. Mancall skirts this problem mostly by focusing on the larger context rather than by trying to fill in what cannot be known with “might have beens.” The relative conservatism of his approach can be seen by contrasting Hakluyt’s Promise to Natalie Zemon Davis’s recent Trickster’s Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). Unlike Davis, who uses general information to illuminate her subject, Mancall demurs almost entirely from speculative reconstructions. On one uncharacteristic occasion, he unequivocally declares the years 1590 to 1600 “the most personally painful part of his life” (196). This unusually direct factual statement depends on the knowledge that during this decade a number of people close to Hakluyt died, including his first wife. This tentative foray into the inner life of the man is not supported by the sort of ancillary information (for instance about early seventeenth-century attitudes toward death) that Davis would have used to fill this gap.

Mancall uses what has survived to depict Hakluyt’s interest in English expansion and especially colonization in the Americas. Using Hakluyt’s own publications as well as other exploration accounts that were available at the time, he charts the widening awareness of other places that Hakluyt both experienced and fostered. Mancall describes in detail the adventures of various explorers and analyzes Hakluyt’s editorial choices. In this treatment the geographer comes through as the consummate advocate for English involvement in the wider world. He argued relentlessly in favor of a greater role for England, trying to present the available materials in the best possible light. Reading Mancall will help the reader who is already familiar with Hakluyt understand the decisions he made about what to present and how to present it. The reader can also see the trouble he went to in order to collect what he published, interviewing travelers and pouring over their accounts. The reader who is less familiar with Hakluyt will get the flavor of his books, since Mancall provides detailed summaries of each. Hakluyt’s life’s work, to the extent that it is captured in his publications, takes center stage in this history.

Despite the evidentiary hole that has swallowed up most of what one would want to know of the life of this famous colonial promoter, the book jacket of Hakluyt’s Promise nonetheless claims that it “describes in detail the life and times” of its subject. It might not be entirely fair to hold an author accountable for publisher’s claims on book jackets—possibly not every press asks its authors to ghost write these embarrassingly effusive descriptions. Yet, the book itself brings to mind the “life and times” genre. It attends more to broad context than to its ostensible subject. The writing is also vividly detailed, making a bid for the popular audience associated with the typical “life and times.” Yale has produced a handsome volume, the lovely cover image of two geographers (from the 1516 Sebastiano del Piombo oil painting Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary, and Two Geographers) hinting at the many illustrations inside.

Mancall does not entirely conform to the requirements of popular history writing, however, as he neglects to provide information on basic aspects of life in Elizabethan England. For instance, when discussing Hakluyt at Oxford, Mancall does not describe college life generically, though this would help readers see how Hakluyt would have spent his days, what he was expected to learn, and how he would have done so. Instead, Mancall limits himself to suggesting opportunities that might have existed for Hakluyt to learn about geography. He wants to explain the man’s future obsession, which the book’s subtitle refers to as “An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.“

The “times” that Mancall explores are largely confined to what was contained within the covers of books. Many chapters offer lengthy descriptions of books that Hakluyt wrote or compiled. Since these publications make up the preponderance of surviving material, it is not surprising Mancall devotes so much space to them. In addition to these summaries, Mancall provided extensive descriptions of other products of the contemporary press. A chapter on Hakluyt’s time in Oxford in 1577 takes up an epidemic in that year and an earthquake that occurred three years later. Mancall lays out the debates in the press about how to interpret God’s intention in these events, reviewing differing messages that observers might have drawn, given the providential framework they all used. Leaving these topics to return to Hakluyt (who left no information on his experience of or views on these events), Mancall notes that these interpretive battles over community hardships “would have symbolized the traditional views of the Church of England and its orthodoxy” to Hakluyt (69). While speculation on earthquakes and epidemics makes for interesting reading, the relationship of any of this to Hakluyt is tenuous, and these popular publications offered a very odd angle on the views of a man trained as a Church of England clergyman.

The book’s title, Hakluyt’s Promise, refers to a promise or perhaps a resolution that Hakluyt made after he became interested in geography while visiting his older cousin at the Middle Temple in 1568. The cousin, also named Richard Hakluyt and also interested in geography, is dubbed “the lawyer” to keep his identity separate in the text. The effect may be to emphasize his identity as an attorney more than is warranted, since his biggest impact on his younger cousin’s life was as mentor. What precisely the younger Hakluyt may have promised himself at this moment is nowhere clearly stated, however.

The subtitle, An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America, is an accurate presentation of Mancall’s interests, although not entirely of Hakluyt’s. In his last years the geographer and promoter turned toward the East, expending more of his energies on promoting an English presence in that direction. He thought America a likely arena for English success, but like all his contemporaries, he valued the trade with the East above all else. Much of the obsession with America was with finding a way through it or around it, as in the famed but elusive Northwest Passage. One might even say that Hakluyt was mostly obsessed with how to get beyond America. Hence his late-life interest in the Orient did not represent a turn away from an earlier focus on America.

The book is thus perhaps of most interest to an American audience. For those who want a Hakluyt biography, this book will disappoint not only for the information about the man’s life that is unavailable but also for Mancall’s choice not to recreate the context of his life to the extent that surviving records make possible. For those who want a “life and times,” it comes a bit nearer to the mark, although it lacks the broad perspective on the larger society and its political and cultural framework that one might expect such a volume to contain. For those who, like Hakluyt himself and like Mancall as well, are interested in books, this volume offers a well-written guide through Hakluyt’s own writings, as well as those of other popular contemporary authors. While it cannot give us enough to understand how Hakluyt became obsessed with America or with expansion more generally, it clearly shows what he did with that obsession once he had been bitten by the bug of geography.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Carla Gardina Pestana is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University. She has written on religion and the early English Atlantic colonies.

A 1788 July Fourth parade in Philadelphia included an extraordinary group of seventeen clergymen representing Christian churches and a single synagogue, walking arm-in-arm before cheering crowds. Three years later, John Carroll, the United States’ first Roman Catholic bishop, was cordially received in that once most anti-Catholic of cities, Boston, by Protestant clergymen who treated him to “great civilities.” So begins Chris Beneke’s debut monograph, Beyond Toleration, and an auspicious and timely debut it is, as this still-new century has begun to ask fresh questions about religion and harmony in multicultural and religiously diverse societies, especially in Western countries faced with growing numbers of Muslims. Owing much to Thomas J. Curry’s The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (1986) and Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990), Beyond Toleration digs deep into the intellectual history of early American Christianity to explain how Americans could go from executing Quakers and barring Catholics from public office to codifying freedom of religion in state and federal constitutions. Certainly “late eighteenth-century America” was not “some inclusive nirvana” (10), but the hurdles to ecumenism and broad toleration had been significant; that they were overcome, Beneke shows, was made possible by the pluralistic nature of early American society.

Beneke offers a general history of Christianity in early America, concentrating on the development of a religious landscape in the early eighteenth century that came to resemble that of Europe after the Peace of Augsberg in 1555: cuius regio, eius religio (as the ruler, so the religion). Before 1730, most of the colonies strenuously enforced laws punishing “blasphemy,” “atheism,” and heterodoxy. Likewise, it was considered treasonous to criticize the government publicly, and questioning theological doctrines and otherwise criticizing churches or denominations was tantamount to heresy and dissent. Dissenters’ efforts to garner toleration and relief from ministerial taxation were harshly rebuffed in language replete with epithets such as “sectaries,” “infidels,” or “atheists.” This was so largely because in the late seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries printing was controlled by the clerical intelligentsia. However, the importation of books from Europe was impossible to control, and those of John Locke expressed a new liberalism that attacked the notion of innate ideas and championed the right of private conscience in religious matters. The dissenters harnessed Locke in their defense. By the 1700s it was becoming clear that the law protected the right to private conscience, while religious societies (denominations) reserved the right to define and defend their doctrines through their own internal judicatory organs. The rapid proliferation of newspapers created an enormous forum for opinions by elites and the literate middle class alike, which made it completely impossible for the clergy to control the flow of ideas in the public sphere. Colonial governments decreasingly prosecuted citizens for blasphemy and seditious libel after 1715, and the liberalizing trends opened up by the influx of Lockean ideas forced churches to relax their guard against dissenting opinions.

Beneke credits the First Great Awakening for the fundamental right to private judgment in religious matters and for encouraging ordinary people to explore alternative expressions of Protestant faith. “[R]eligious boundaries . . . came under nearly unrelenting assault” (53) at this time and so did parish boundaries, as itinerant ministers moved from place to place up and down the eastern seaboard and—in the case of the era’s most famous preacher, George Whitefield—across the Atlantic. The activities and antics of the New Lights, had they taken place in the previous century, would have resulted in numerous imprisonments, prosecutions for heresy, and occasional capital punishments, but instead the New Lights were confronted by Old Lights who used Lockean language and what Charles Chauncy insisted had to be “gentle persuasion” to discredit the revivalists. The achievement of the Great Awakening was the belief that religious experience is inherently subjective. The rigid intolerance of the previous century had, by the eve of the Revolution, become intolerable.

“In religion as in politics, the call for unanimity was never more insistent than it was during the American Revolution, as distinctions once made between Churchmen and Dissenters gave way to distinctions between Whigs and Tories, Patriots and Loyalists” (193). In this Beneke follows Jon Butler’s claim that the Revolution was essentially secular in nature. A nation at war and struggling to define itself along liberal Lockean lines could no longer afford the distraction of religious bigotry. This made it possible for Protestant America to ally with Catholic France. However, for racial minorities there were no such magnanimous gestures. Indians and blacks were not considered citizens of the republic, and discrimination against them remained as virulent as ever. Church establishments, which had been the norm in the eighteenth century, declined rapidly as a result of the Revolution and disappeared altogether by the mid-nineteenth century, but that did not dilute the competition for adherents that is the hallmark of a religiously diverse society. An ecumenical spirit prevailed into the nineteenth century but only among closely related Protestant denominations. Beneke is assiduous in noting that any sense of quiet respect was not extended to the Mormons and was practically revoked from Catholics in the period from the 1830s to the 1850s. Even among Protestants, there developed a divide between evangelical and nonevangelical conceptions of scripture. The gains of the eighteenth century seemed to lose ground in the nineteenth. But that is not Beneke’s point. Instead, his point is that America experienced a rapid progression from intolerance, to tolerance, to religious freedom and equality.

There is much to commend here: the thoroughness of the research, the dovetail construction of the arguments, and the candid presentation of contrary evidence, which Beneke convinces the reader does not compromise his fundamental thesis. However, in his discussions of African Americans, Beneke relies a bit too heavily on Jon Butler for his understanding of African American Christianization and religio-cultural survivals from Africa; on these topics, Albert J. Raboteau, in the second chapter of Slave Religion (rev. ed., 2004), is more reliable. As to American Indians, Beneke notes that “by the late eighteenth century, Native American faiths survived mostly in fragments” (11), which was only true in those areas that had been thoroughly colonized. He should have stated that native religions persisted, especially in the West, but in altered forms suffused with elements of Christian theology.

In spite of these minor imperfections, Beneke eloquently demonstrates that while there was a legal revolution that amended the laws discriminating against dissenters and religious minorities, there was also a broader cultural process whereby ordinary and elite Americans of different faiths achieved a degree of religious harmony. Careful to note that religious establishments were maintained in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods and that the scope of his study is limited to white, Protestant, male clergymen, Beneke is clear that in relative terms postrevolutionary Americans achieved something quite singular: the capacity to tolerate religious differences. Ours is the open, liberal, and tolerant society it is because of this achievement.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

John Howard Smith is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Commerce, specializing in the history of religion in early America. His first book, “The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion”: A History of Sandemanianism in the Eighteenth Century, is under contract to the State University of New York Press. He is currently at work on a second book, “To Hear News from Heaven”: A History of the First Great Awakening.

In the early 1790s, Annis Boudinot Stockton wrote to her daughter that “the Empire of reason is not monopolized by man” (22). Julia Stockton Rush was in a position to understand; her husband, Benjamin Rush, was a founder of the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia. A century later, women’s rights activist Lucy Stone recalled in a letter to fellow reformer Antoinette Brown Blackwell that she had “learned to stand and speak” in literary societies at Mount Holyoke Seminary and Oberlin College (275). These two stories bookend Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, which explains the entry of privileged white women into American civil society by examining their education in all-female schools, academies, and reading circles in the seven decades before the Civil War. Kelley argues that “although women also worked with men in parallel literary societies and reform associations, these exclusively female institutions were at least equally if not more important sites at which women gathered locally, regionally, and nationally to chart the nation’s course” (54).

Kelley begins with schools, noting that “approximately the same number of women and men were enrolled in institutions of higher learning” in early nineteenth-century America (41), a remarkable finding in itself. And these women were not studying merely ornamental subjects like embroidery and dancing; instead, Kelley’s research shows, women pursued a curriculum very like the one offered at male colleges, especially after 1820. Although middling as well as elite women attended seminaries and academies, those at single-sex schools were more likely to come from “families with significantly more access to economic, social, and cultural capital” (32). An education in the “values and vocabularies of civil society” prepared such women for both leadership in benevolence and social-reform organizations and “entry into the market economy as educators, writers, and editors” (32). And enter they did. However, although they positioned themselves “at the center, and crucial to the success, of the republican experiment” (27), they continued to couch their influence in the traditional language of family and home. Thus, these women struck a compromise: educational equality in Enlightenment terms but a still-circumscribed—though widened—sphere of influence.

Kelley’s extensive research makes clear that the educated women of the early nineteenth century reveled in their learning; the book is packed with quotations from letters and diaries that celebrate the joys of knowledge. Their dedication is also evident from their participation in literary societies and in the reading and writing they did as adult women, the subjects of the book’s second half. Literary societies at female academies, where members circulated their own writings and where they read and discussed books, “acted as schools within schools,” teaching members “to read critically, to write lucidly, and to speak persuasively” (117, 118). After graduation, many of these women replicated such circles among adult women. Engaging with a wide range of books in conversation and in writing, these women “sanctioned and supported intellectual productivity” (117). Crucially, Kelley argues, these mutual endeavors also gave women the confidence to step into civil society and work actively to shape public opinion.

Although Kelley’s interest is in the roots of women’s activism rather than in its fulfillment, her discussion of reading circles includes an extensive treatment of the connections between literary education and civic action. She shows that debates about the content and form of women’s education stood in for and reflected larger debates about women’s role in society. She traces the extensive networks that women built through literary societies and the ways that such networks built women’s influence within and beyond their communities. In particular, such groups focused on creating broader roles for women in civil society; Kelley locates the political development of such suffragists as Blackwell and Stone in precisely these circles.

Although the book focuses on white women either already members or aspiring to be members of the elite, Kelley is also attentive to the experiences of African American women. Her discussion of African American literary societies, drawing mostly on scarce clues in antebellum newspapers, is particularly thorough. As slavery was gradually eradicated in the North in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, African Americans found themselves subjected to increased racial hostility. For them, literary societies “were ideal vehicles for developing the arguments for, and the strategies of, resistance” (141). In Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Rochester, African American women gathered, like their white counterparts, to read and write together and to develop what Kelley calls “avowedly political subjectivities,” using meetings to sharpen their arguments against racism and slavery and as a prelude to publishing those arguments in the antislavery press (142).

A subgroup of literary women chose the writing of women’s history as their contribution to civil society. Kelley examines Judith Sargent Murray, Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Josepha Hale, Margaret Fuller, and a handful of other women who published works of history focused on women. Kelley’s careful analysis of these writers’ choices shows that their narratives were designed to claim for women a gender-inflected moral authority that justified their participation with men in creating the nation as a beacon to the world. Establishing the public voices of their female subjects, these writers simultaneously made themselves exemplars of civic actors for their readers.

Because Kelley proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, it is sometimes difficult for a reader to pick out the threads of change. With evidence from the 1790s joined in a single paragraph with stories from five decades later, shifts over time are sometimes buried under the wealth of detail. Yet, the thematic focus is also a strength, allowing Kelley to explore in great depth each of her topics and to make connections across region and time.

The book’s greatest strength is its archival depth and breadth. Drawing on dozens of archives in many states, Kelley recovers the experiences of well-known women like Blackwell and Stone but also of their little-known schoolmates. Learning to Stand and Speak presents an impressive number of examples drawn from the experiences of women across seven decades and at least a dozen states. These anecdotes and stories give Kelley’s analysis weight as well as color, peopling her schools and reading circles, private homes and social libraries with vividly present women and girls. Kelley’s painstaking research convincingly places education, especially reading in the context of mutual improvement, at the center of elite women’s antebellum experience. Two dozen illustrations are an outstanding addition to the text. Learning to Stand and Speak will be an important resource for all historians of gender, education, or print culture in early republic and antebellum America.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Lynda Yankaskas is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Brandeis University, where she is completing a dissertation entitled “Borrowing Culture: Social Libraries and the Shaping of American Civic Life, 1731-1851.”

How can we teach Americans about our violent and sordid urban past? Certainly the movie Gangs of New York introduced countless Americans to the idea that the nineteenth-century city was an inhospitable place with crime, slums, and a core of violence that boggles the imagination.  Gangs of New York was visually enthralling with a complicated love triangle and an overly simplistic plot that was more a mixture of The Godfather, Braveheart, and Gunfight at the OK Corral, than a reflection of the historical reality. The problem with the movie was that while it was evocative–with at times carefully detailed language and costume–it was wrongheaded in its historical narrative. The American movie public got no real sense of what it meant to live in the Five Points or what life was really like for any immigrant in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Martin Scorsese based his movie in part on Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, a sensationalist book that was originally published in 1927 and rushed into a new printing to capitalize upon the release of the movie. In fact, Thunder’s Mouth Press also published Asbury’s The Gangs of Chicago and The Barbary Coast hoping to build on the interest generated by the movie. These books are much the same: they are a compendium of horror stories from the American past highlighting the urban underworld. Asbury was a popular journalist who did a great deal of research for these books, but who did not always carefully separate fact from fiction. In one incredible section of Gangs of New York, Asbury recites the “history” of the mythical Mose, the Bowery B’hoy who existed on the stage and popular imagination, but not in reality. Facts, however, do not get in the way of Asbury’s prose. He declared that Mose’s favorite weapon was the butcher’s cleaver–reminiscent of Bill the Butcher of the movie–and that he was eight feet tall and that “his hands were as large as the hams of a Virginia hog.” Mose once pulled an oak tree from the earth and flailed out at the Dead Rabbit Gang of the Five Points “even as Samson smote the Philistines.” He could lift a horse car over his shoulders, swim the Hudson in two strokes and around Manhattan Island in six (32-33). Perhaps the reader is supposed to know that all of this description is fiction. But Asbury does not distinguish it as such and he so frequently gets information slightly awry or exaggerates events that his books are virtually useless as a guide to the past. All three books are packed with gory details of a poverty that drove men and women into crime. He relished telling us about this gang or that gang, describing great fights, chronicling the activities of prostitutes and the many dives that existed in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. But we are left incredulous and wondering where reality based in sources ended and fiction began.

Neither the movie nor Asbury’s books help historians in getting Americans to understand the true nature of nineteenth-century urban America. Tyler Anbinder’s Five Points, however, offers us a better opportunity to introduce the general public to how historians understand the past. Based on prodigious research, Anbinder’s book is written for the all-too-elusive “educated reader.” Published by a commercial press, Anbinder’s book opens each chapter with a prologue that focuses on some story, usually about an individual, that highlights the thematic nature of the chapter that follows. The idea is to suck the reader in and get the reader thinking about thematic issues centered around America’s first great slum–the Five Points. The book begins with violence, always a nice hook for a popular audience, with a prologue on the 1834 race riot. Anbinder goes on to describe how Five Points became associated with crime and disorder. Anbinder builds a detailed socio-economic portrait of the Five Points as it developed before the Civil War. He describes the nature of Irish immigration, housing, working, politics, leisure, crime, and vice, and then religion and reform. He culminates this section of the book, which comprises the meat of his research and three quarters of the pages, with a return to violence in the 1850s and during the Civil War. The remaining one hundred pages describe the postbellum transformation of the Five Points with the influx of new immigrant groups–Italians and Chinese–and the initiation of urban renewal at the instigation of Jacob Riis.

As an academic I admire Anbinder’s achievement. Having used some of the same sources, I know how hard Anbinder has had to work to patch together a vivid picture of life in the Five Points. I wonder, however, if the effort has been worth it. Anbinder has filled his book with great stories of bare-knuckle fighting, barrooms, corrupt politics, and mayhem. There are also a host of great illustrations, including a color cover of an original painting of the Five Points that served as the model of the more frequently republished print that appeared on the cover of my first book. The detail and attractiveness of Anbinder’s book may or may not carry the general reader through more than 441 pages of text. But as an academic I am interested in what I learn that is new from a book and I want to see an author’s thesis that makes me think, “Gee, I wish I thought of that.” Anbinder states in his preface that he hopes “to set the record straight” about the Five Points. In this goal he succeeds both in the small and the large picture. For example, Anbinder convincingly argues, to the contrary of the movie Gangs of New York and Herbert Asbury, that there never was a Dead Rabbit’s Gang. More importantly, he demonstrates that while poverty and crime permeated much of the life of the Five Points, the immigrant groups who lived there strove for their piece of the American dream and ultimately succeeded in leaving the slum behind them. While recognizing that this thesis offers a corrective to the movie and Asbury, it is not a new idea for anyone familiar with the history of nineteenth-century urban America. Immigrant groups repeatedly crammed into city slums only to have the second generation succeed economically and move to better neighborhoods. In other words, Anbinder has only provided a case study for something we–the scholarly community–already knew.

Has Anbinder been successful in his other goal of reaching a popular audience? On April 15, 2003, I visited Amazon.com to get some means of answering this question. Anbinder’s hardcover book ranked 17,555, but his paperback was at 7,822. This ranking represents success by academic standards (and much better than the six-figure rankings of my own books), while Asbury’s Gangs of New York stood at 9,048. Unfortunately, millions have had their image of the Five Points warped by the cinematography of Martin Scorsese.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Paul A. Gilje teaches at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), Rioting in America (Bloomington, 1996), and Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution which will appear in fall 2003.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Lincoln/Net: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/

With an emphasis on Abraham Lincoln’s years in Illinois, 1830-1861, and a wealth of material outside that period, “Lincoln/Net” is a multi-media, multi-purpose Website. Created and maintained at Northern Illinois University, “Lincoln/Net” represents a collaborative effort by educational institutions, archives, and museums, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Illinois State Archives, and the University of Chicago. Designed to reach a general audience, which the site’s creators believe “historians have largely abandoned in recent decades,” this online archive guides visitors through the sources in a focused way by bringing the “findings and debates of American historians” to the Internet. The goal is to help users think historically and to ask questions that make full use of the site’s databases. Accordingly, the materials have been grouped into eight thematic sections: frontier settlement; Native American relations; economic development; women’s experience and gender roles; African-Americans’ experience and American racial attitudes; law and society; religion and culture; and political development. There is, of course, significant attention devoted to Lincoln’s biography.

For each of the major themes, there is a guide to accompanying primary sources, with image galleries, maps, and audio and video clips. Slide shows offer good visuals and helpful narration, and they succeed in providing overall background context for major historical developments of the period. In the “Lincoln’s Biography” section, there is a similar organization in place, with a summary, primary sources, and visual images. To help viewers through this material, the site provides video clips of historical commentary by prominent historians, including Eric Foner.

Educators especially may appreciate the contents and organization of the site. The “Teacher’s Parlor” link takes visitors to well designed and engaging lesson plans. For example, in a lesson on alcohol and temperance in the nineteenth century, the lyrics and downloadable rendition of “King Alcohol” lend immediacy to the subject. The “lesson plans” section is divided into materials for teaching the antebellum era, the Civil War era, and the Gilded Age. With detailed objectives, clear instructions for background reading, links to primary sources, and exercises based on the site, the lessons are ready to use and linked to state standards.

Much of the site is easily adaptable to classroom purposes. Indeed, a laudable feature of “Lincoln/Net” is how user-friendly it is. Easily downloadable audio and video links can be readily integrated into the lessons on the site or used for creating new ones. Thirteen video clips comprise the “women and gender” video section. For the history of the Black Hawk Indian War of 1832, in which Lincoln served as a member of the Illinois militia, the site documents his activities but more importantly provides the larger historical context, with maps, first-person battlefield accounts, and government records. In the section on “Native American Relations,” the selections break down a full video, “Lincoln and Black Hawk,” into many discreet and briefer subsections. Other video clips include eminent scholars such as John Mack Faragher and Kathryn Kish Sklar presenting brief overviews of topics such as “Singing on the Illinois Frontier” and “Education, Culture, and the Patterns of Frontier Settlement.”

In the interactive resources section, visitors will find informative maps that can be manipulated to highlight topics of interest, such as the distribution of churches of different sects in 1850 and 1860; this distribution can then be explored to break the numbers down according to sect, for example. Other maps detail voting patterns in presidential elections from 1840 through 1864. Clicking on two interesting maps showing U.S. population distribution in 1850 and 1860 allows users to view the figures by state and by numbers of free blacks, slaves, and whites.

With links to other online archives, such as Mr. Lincoln’s Virtual Library and From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909, both at the Library of Congress, and to The Valley of the Shadow project on two communities in the Civil War, the site’s creators steer visitors to some of the best sites on the Web for those interested in the histories of slavery, race, and the Civil War.

“Lincoln/Net” seeks to foster deep historical understanding while reaching multiple audiences, including history buffs and educators. With a site that locates its central figure, Abraham Lincoln, within the context of numerous complex historical developments, “Lincoln/Net” promises to go a long way toward succeeding in its goals.

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

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

American Shores: Maps of the Middle Atlantic Region to 1850
http://www.nypl.org/research/midatlantic/index.html
New York Public Library

Wayne Bodle, author of The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (2002), teaches history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is finishing a book on the Middle Colonies from first settlement until shortly after the American Revolution.

The New York Public Library is one of the most distinguished research institutions in the world, and its renowned Map Room contributes to that reputation. American Shores is a searchable Website created by the library with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring a portion of its cartographic resources to your own reading room, no matter how far you are from the library’s famed lions on Fifth Avenue. The site’s focus, the Middle Atlantic, is a less-celebrated descriptor for a piece of the geographical pie that was first the Dutch commercial outpost of New Netherland, then colonial British North America, and finally the early national United States.

Definitions of that region are legion. The project’s choice—”from New York south to Virginia”—more closely follows the administrative usage of modern federal agencies than recent scholarly ones, which generally exclude Maryland and Virginia. Reflecting its title, the site’s definition more problematically places the region “east of the Appalachian Mountains,” without saying whether that includes their easternmost ridges, which parallel the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna rivers and bisect the states in question. The project is not about definitions—its scope may reflect the contents of the maps in its constituent collections more than a definition of the region—but academic users should be aware of the implications of these organizational protocols.

The project itself seems designed to accomplish two objectives: to instruct visitors on the fundamentals and applications of cartographic scholarship and to let oriented users roam at will in search of early American spatial knowledge. This review takes the first objective on its own terms and the second one more literally, by testing it on an embryonic actual research project.

The iconic image of “American Shores,” a colorful strip of Atlantic littoral running from south to north (and left to right) from the central Carolina coast to near Riverhead on Long Island, suggests this double objective. Four clickable headers across the top of the site—”Overview,” “Basics of Maps,” “Maps Through History,” and “Geographical Areas”—summon a series of subheads running down the left side that preview the “Overview” section’s stated design to “highlight and explain a few of the hundreds of maps that have been digitized, and offer suggestions for using them in the study of historical topics or geographic areas.” With that opportunity either availed or declined, a large button—”Search Map Collection”—turns you loose into the database.

The clarity and utility of these preliminary elements varies considerably. The marginal subbars on the left border of the “Overview” section include the “Mid-Atlantic Region and [its] Wider World” and a group of narrower spatial frames from the “World” to the “Atlantic Ocean” to the “United States.” Each of the latter brings up a map or two, with commentary and an interactive “catalogue record.” Use of these maps provides a kind of tutorial on cartographic practice. The header “Basics of Maps” offers definitions used by specialists in the field and a “Note on the History of Cartography.” “Maps Through History” is both intriguing and strange. When clicked, it lays out an asymmetrical and somewhat fragmentary categorical catalogue of the Website as a whole (one presumes), under the subheads “Nautical New York,” “Coastal and Oceanic Nautical Charts,” “Early Transportation,” and, most oddly, “American Revolution Battle Sites.” The specific rationale for the selection of these topics—or why other and potentially equally useful subjects, such as “Religious Denominations” or “Newspaper Circulation Zones”—are not included alongside these idiosyncratic headings is never articulated. “Geographical Areas” leads to a more predictable, conventional survey of largely political jurisdictions into which the larger region has been divided, each with its selection of illustrated starter maps.

This arrangement serves as a noncoercive introduction to the map collection itself, with no requirement to linger, and an early opportunity to actually interact with the maps. Clicking on thumbnail sample maps enlarges them but also discloses that running the pan and zoom features “require[s] MrSid plug-in.” A link takes you to a proprietary Website with free software downloads, but nothing clarifies what you are to do next. Once inside the larger map database, the efficacy of the interactive features, including pan and zoom, seems to vary considerably.

Rather than just browse randomly, I wanted to go into “Search Map Collection” with an actual research project. By chance, the invitation to do this review coincided with an embryonic project fit to the region: an inquiry into a migration and settlement salient in the 1720s and 1730s southwest from Esopus (Kingston), New York, on the Hudson River, to the Delaware Valley at Mahackamack (Port Jervis), and then down both sides of the Delaware through the “Minisink Country” to the famous Water Gap. The settlement process involved multiple jurisdictions, ordinary farmers, mysterious folkloric ancient miners, and alarmed royal and proprietary officials in Philadelphia and elsewhere wondering why it was happening. With mouse at hand, the possibility of discovery beckoned.

The resulting trip was both bumpy and intriguing. Under “Search Map Collection,” the subhead “search maps” offered a clickable “New Search Page (Digital Gallery),” which led into an ambiguous new space. Titled the “NYPL Digital Gallery,” it was not clear whether this was a part of “American Shores” itself or an auxiliary New York Public Library (NYPL) domain. The new page offered two search boxes, one of which seemed connected to the “Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection and Others” and the second of which linked to the “Digital Gallery.” It presented some background information on the NYPL, the history of the Slaughter Collection, and a bibliography on cartographic history.

Wanting to get on the ground in the Minisink as quickly as possible, I tried keyword terms in both boxes. It was unclear if either was connected to a database defined by information in the maps in question or just to their titles, but trial and error suggested the latter. Queries directed to names on the ground in adjacent parts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania mainly went nowhere. Esopus produced no entries and Kingston only a few. Minisink, Wallkill, Shawangunk, and Mahackamack all failed. Queries aimed at counties in the area did better. Ulster brought up some maps, but figuring out how to manage and control the pan and zoom features was difficult. I wasn’t sure whether I was even in the “Digital Gallery” or was instead in the “Slaughter Collection,” reminding me of the fact that early American regions were themselves layered and contested, with royal and proprietary holdings, overlays from New England’s “sea-to-sea” charters, and other murky phenomena. Several queries into the “Digital Gallery” search box returned large numbers of photographs, which suggested that I had wandered out of the Map Room. My sense of challenge intertwined with frustration.

Flailing about digitally for orientation did not help. A click on “Browse: Names A-Z” disclosed an “alphabetical list of 13,636 names [of] artists, authors, publishers, collectors, and others responsible for the creation of items found on the site.” “Browse: Subjects A-Z” brought an even more unwieldy list of “over 58,000 subject terms [which] includes people, places and topics . . . ,” along with the unsettling news that “many gallery records do not have subject descriptions.” It was starting to get dark, and I wanted to get back to “American Shores,” or to any shores, for that matter. This page at least had a tool, “Explore Subjects,” with an “Exact Match” and an “Expanded Search” option, which turned up intriguing items. It was at least the third search box I had encountered since leaving digital Manhattan. It bore the disclaiming title “BETA,” but it gave some sense of at least partial closure, albeit hardly one of real completion.

“BETA” sounds like an appropriate grade for the project as a whole at this early point. Any inquirer using this site will by definition learn some things about cartography, cartographic history, and cartographic approaches to historical interpretation. They may very well come away with useful insights into their own specific project or object of research. Whether the site, in its current configuration, is recommendable over a straight Google search—under “Images” and with the keyword “maps” and their topic—may be a matter of some debate. But, recalling my own first research expedition between the actual stone lions on Fifth Avenue, as a high schooler—when a foray for a paper on Mao Tse-Tung revealed thousands of interesting sources but most of them in Chinese!—I would suggest patience, resourcefulness, and regular return trips. The site will doubtless be fine-tuned, and your own instincts for virtual navigation will mature.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

The Sesquicentennial, the National Park Service, and a Changing Nation

It’s a great irony of our history: the places of such fierce combat during the U.S. Civil War became, in the decades that followed, quiet places of reflection and reconciliation, where veterans gathered to heal rather than cause wounds, where the nation looked for regeneration. For most of its history, the National Park Service facilitated this healing process, encouraging Americans to derive from these places of conflict common values and virtues that would bind rather than divide. But more recently, the role of the National Park Service and the Civil War sites it manages has become more complicated, reflecting evolving scholarship and the varied demands of a public that does not see the Civil War in monolithic terms. For the National Park Service and the nation at large, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is an important touchstone on an evolutionary journey that has provoked both praise and censure in a nation still struggling to reckon with its most tumultuous, destructive, and transformative epoch.

No historic event has a more complicated place in American culture than the Civil War. We can’t even agree on its name, re-phrased variously depending on one’s perspective: the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, the War of the Rebellion (once the official U.S. government name), the War for the Union, the War for Southern Independence, the Second American Revolution. Born of conflict, the memory of the war has a conflicted history of its own. In the immediate post-war years, an abiding sectional hostility simmered—personal and deep, it was rooted in the immense personal loss suffered by American families and communities. Later, as the quest for reconciliation reigned, a narrative of mutual virtue evolved, statues of Confederate heroes went up in the U.S. Capitol, and federal tax dollars funded the memorialization of Confederate graves. Some protested angrily at theabsence of sectional hostility, at the seemingly easy acceptance back into the cultural fold of a people and section that had been bent on the Union’s destruction.

Many white southerners rallied around the memory of the Confederacy as they constructed a post-war society akin to apartheid. To many Americans—especially African Americans—the Confederate battle flag (indeed, the Confederacy itself) became not a symbol of courage and sacrifice, but an emblem of oppression.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Civil War’s battlefields in the process of national reckoning with our most deadly national epoch.

A people’s view of their own history always reflects the views of those who have power. In the decades following the Civil War, Southerners quickly regained political voice, and thus our American narrative has somewhat happily and uncommonly incorporated into its collective story the view of the ostensible losers in a national rebellion. Since the centennial of the war in 1961, the women’s rights movement and the subsequent upsurge in American women’s history has produced new work on the role of civilians in the war. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement gave voice to African Americans and other minorities, who have in turn sought (rightly so) to tell stories that reflect the immense and complicated role played by slaves and slavery in the evolution of the nation. Political power has expanded among all classes of Americans—rich and poor—and so history has delved beyond the Great Men of the past to reflect the experiences of everyday people. We are in a constant process of taking second looks at our past.

This process of re-examination has threatened the cherished view held by some Americans that our nation should have, as battlefield preservationist Jerry Russell has written, a singular, “shared understanding of American history,” a “culture that unites us, not one which divides us.” The Civil War would seem to be an obvious point of friction in that quest, but early in the twentieth century the war’s battlefields were places where sectional animosities and lingering resentments could be laid aside. They became (and remain) places where the common virtues of Americans North and South were celebrated, where by focusing on American “good,” the ugly blemishes of history could be painted over in the name of national unity. For more than a century, the war’s battlefields became something of a refuge for a nation still wounded by war.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Civil War’s battlefields in the process of national reckoning with our most deadly national epoch. It is likely that the United States preserves more acres of battlefield land in its borders than the rest of the world combined. For nearly a century—from the creation of the first federally owned battlefield site at Antietam in 1890—Americans demanded of their battle sites a congenial neutrality. At Manassas, the deed conveying Henry Hill from the Sons of Confederate Veterans to the National Park Service (NPS) stipulated that the government would “care for and preserve this battlefield without prejudice to either the North or the South” and not detract from “the glory due Confederate heroes.” At Fredericksburg in the 1930s, when someone objected to the NPS exhibits in the new visitor center on the Sunken Road, arguing that they ought to provide greater context for the battles, he received a rather terse reply from the NPS. “To what end?” the exhibit planner wrote. “The consequences of a major war are infinite … and these things shift with the bias of every writer.” Yet, he declared, “one result is simple, striking and indisputable … Death admits of no argument.”

In the long history of our battle sites, there have been few hard questions and little discussion of the larger issues that either gave rise to or were resolved by the war. Instead, the most intense debates raged about remarkably specific questions: was Sickles (not Lee!) wrong at Gettysburg? What if McClellan had committed all his men at once at Antietam? The battlefields became places of reverence, engines of empathy, platforms for national reconciliation (none of which are bad things). Visitors and NPS historians alike engaged in a rhetoric of affection and nostalgia that still persists. At the dedication of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in 1928, the keynote speaker from Massachusetts declared, “We do more than to dedicate these fields in memory of things which have passed. We consecrate them, in the spirit of Robert E. Lee and of Abraham Lincoln, to a more perfect understanding between the South and the North, and to an abundant increase in brotherly love.” A slim 1930s volume of regulations that governed the work of rangers at the nation’s various military parks admonished, “The story of the guides shall be limited to the historical outlines approved by the superintendent and shall be free from praise or censure.” This language still exists in the federal regulation governing licensed guides at NPS sites.

To be sure, interpretation at NPS sites has evolved over the decades, mirroring academia’s progression from a focus on great leaders to increased attention to the experiences of the common soldiers and civilians amidst war. This trend found its greatest expression in the proliferation of living history programs at NPS sites in the 1960s and 1970s. To the details of battle, the NPS added the details of the human experience. A 1978 publicity photo for a living history camp at Chancellorsville proclaimed, “Here at Chancellorsville the National Park Service has attempted to recreate in every possible detail the camp of a Confederate ordnance detachment.” But this trend only perpetuated the intense interest in the details of war—rations, equipment, uniforms, the fabric and rhythms of camp and battle—without reference to the war’s larger issues.

Interpretation of the battles themselves reflected change, too. The National Park Service sought to understand its battles and landscapes better, and so in the 1960s commenced an intensive effort to document battles through minutely detailed battle maps. Later, on-site historians gave increased, often singular attention to the experience of men in combat. The use of quotes from soldiers’ letters and diaries, carefully related to the specific site of a certain event, made for a powerful combination. While these efforts surely told us important things about the war on the ground, they did not challenge the concept of battlefields as a place of national refuge. The focus on shared experiences, shared sacrifice—the commonalities rather than the differences between soldiers—reinforced the traditional (and rather ironic) role of battlefields as places of congenial neutrality, healing empathy, and patriotic expression.

Of course, historians and the more learned fringes of the American public continued to explore the war’s many complexities in academic journals and thick books. New scholarship exploded myths, corrected long-cherished historical misperceptions, and provoked public discourse about the cause, purpose, nature, and significance of the war itself. But into the 1980s, the traditional role of Civil War battlefields as sanctuaries within our society remained largely unchanged: they were places of commemoration, places of reflection, sites whose stories reflect larger American virtues and honor most participants. Indeed, the dream of a singular, uncontested memory of the Civil War was a reality for a century on America’s battlefields. Historians working at these sites continued to focus on narrow themes of history and commemoration, largely avoiding controversy—and largely ignoring the swirl of new thought that engulfed Civil War historiography in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Their cautious, non-controversial practice of history sustained the public perception of NPS historians as memorialists.

Many Americans have found comfort in this image of NPS sites and staff. But not all. In February 2011, my colleague Steward Henderson and I gave a tour, “Forgotten: Slavery and Slave Places in Fredericksburg.” We had given the tour before, but that day’s audience consisted of about 70 members from three historically black churches in Fredericksburg. The tour went well, with a high energy level all around. In the midst of it, an older gentleman pulled me aside and said, “Are you going to get in trouble for doing this?”

I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know,” he said. “Your bosses. I didn’t think you guys were allowed to do things like this.”

During the day, I received a number of comments along the same lines, expressing surprise that we, NPS staff at a battlefield site, would create a tour dealing with slavery. Clearly, this group of people perceived me and my colleague as part of an organization bound by rigid (if unspoken) limits of inquiry and interpretation, an organization at best ambivalent and at worst hostile to an interpretation of the war that strayed beyond traditional topics or sites.

But more importantly, the question highlighted a great irony: while the traditional role of Civil War battle sites as sanctuaries offers comfort to some, for others it is a barrier to their engagement with both the history of the war and the National Park Service. As one man explained at a community forum just months after the tour, sustaining a positive image of the war meant sustaining a positive image of the “white-supremacist Confederacy.” The American tradition of “celebrating” the war through its battlefields—re-enactments, pageants, concerts, idolatry, and even commemorative ceremonies—has become, to some, offensive.

Something else renders the National Park Service’s relationship with the Civil War and its battlefields more complicated than most. Tens of millions of Americans have a blood relationship with a Civil War soldier, the men whose deeds the battlefields were set aside to remember. These Americans often see the war not with the dispassion of a historian (even an amateur historian), but through the intensified lens of a family connection. Many visitors to NPS sites often understand the war in a way that reflects generations of conventional wisdom rather than historical knowledge acquired through formal study. Unlike any other event beyond our direct memory, the Civil War has constituent groups that patrol the intellectual universe, intent on protecting and advocating a specific memory of the war—usually one that reflects positively on their ancestors, communities, or regions. Historians have demonstrated that many aspects of this “true history” (as it is often called by heritage groups) are at best incomplete and at worst not true at all. Still, the beliefs endure in parts of the general public—and most commonly in those members of the public who visit National Park Service battlefield sites.

This personal connection to the past has helped shape our nation’s relationship with and understanding of the war. At least as it relates to the Civil War, we as a nation have permitted the personal motivations of soldiers (often imperfectly remembered or revised over time) to define the cause and purpose of war for the public. If you work at a Civil War site any amount of time—say, more than a week—you will hear something like this from a visitor: “My great-great-grandfather didn’t own slaves. He sure as hell didn’t fight to preserve slavery. He fought to defend his home, the way of life of his community and state. The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and you are wrong to tell people it was.”

We have heard such assertions so often they qualify as a mantra. Of course, virtually every credentialed historian in America accepts a connection between slavery and the Civil War, and most of them see the connection as central to its cause, its progress, and its outcome. But to acknowledge, for example, that the South formed the Confederacy largely to protect the institution of slavery is to suggest to the millions of Confederate descendants that their ancestors fought to sustain what by any measure was a vile institution—perhaps the darkest stain on America’s national fabric. Many remain vehemently opposed to scholarly arguments about the war and slavery, and don’t hesitate to tell you. It was this vehemence—first articulated by the founders of the United Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy more than a century ago—that inspired the nation to simply avoid the topic and focus on the shared virtues of men fighting for life and principle (whatever they might have been) on our nation’s battlefields.

Since the 1980s—as scholarship from earlier decades started to take root in the American mind, and as scholars started exploring the role of historical memory in American culture—Americans have increasingly seen the Civil War not through the lens of personal connection, but through the prism of national purpose. This is by far the most important change in the cultural landscape of Civil War history in the last three decades, and it is one that portends dramatic change to come. Among those changes will be that America’s battlefields will likely no longer provide the quiet and happy historical refuge where history is neatly compartmentalized to provide comfort for Americans struggling to understand and reckon with their past.

The sesquicentennial is a touchstone in a process of change that began in the 1980s and will continue for years to come. The scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated clearly that the Civil War constituted far more than just a confrontation between men in uniform on battlefields, and the turn to studies of historical memory and historic places helped launch the National Park Service into a new era. Edward Linenthal’s Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991) gave NPS public history professionals important context on the evolution of the industry in which they worked. Later studies by David Blight and many others illuminated the conscious manipulation of memory in the name of national reconciliation, and its consequences—including, notably, the alienation of the African American community from the history of the Civil War.

The first recognizable hints of change came in 1991, when Congressional staffer Heather Huyck (who holds a PhD in history and was formerly an NPS employee) inserted language into new boundary legislation for Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park that directed the park to interpret not just military events, but the impact of the war on civilians. Similar language followed in other bills related to Civil War sites. Throughout the 1990s, NPS battle sites responded in various ways to the emerging scholarship and greater understanding of the foibles and virtues of seventy years of practicing public history on Civil War battlefields. In a new General Management Plan, Antietam National Battlefield placed increased emphasis on the relationship between the battle and the Emancipation Proclamation. Monocacy National Battlefield embraced themes that viewed that site through the lens of the civilians who worked and shaped the land. At Manassas, archeological investigations illuminated not just the battle, but also the lives of slaves and free blacks who lived in the area. By mid-decade, close observers could see change happening at many NPS battle sites.

In 1998, superintendents of Civil War sites across the country met in Nashville with an eye toward formalizing the changes already appearing at battle sites across the land. While the conference generated agreement for collective action on issues like recreational use, managing layers of historic resources, and road expansion in parks, the issue of interpretation clearly emerged as the headline. The Nashville conference commenced a process that would result in a service-wide interpretive plan, called Holding the High Ground. It was this plan that, a decade later, would become the basis for NPS involvement in the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In their introduction, the authors of Holding the High Ground stated:

The challenge that faces the National Park Service today is a huge one: to convey the significance and relevance of the Civil War in all its aspects while at the same time sustaining the Service’s invaluable tradition of resource-based interpretation (a concept that is at the very foundation of the National Park Service’s mission). … This plan urges a broader approach to interpreting the Civil War—it seeks to have parks challenge people with ideas, challenge them to not just understand the nature and horrid expanse of the bloodshed, but the reasons for it, and the consequences of its aftermath.

The plan acknowledged the inherent limits of battlefields as venues for interpreting the Civil War and urged an expanded definition of “Civil War sites” to include those that can vividly address “causes, politics, social change, the military experience, civilian experience, and the legacy.” Holding the High Ground also urged managers of Civil War sites to re-examine and expand how they interpret events and sites by giving voice to observers with perspectives beyond the military: civilians, slaves, and observers on the homefront. And finally, the superintendents embraced a broader set of themes that addressed everything from causes to the war’s evolution to emancipation to industrialization and the civilian experience to consequences and legacy. These themes constituted not a mandate, but an option, allowing each site to embrace those that most closely fit its story and resources. The superintendents realized that not every site can effectively interpret every theme, but collectively NPS Civil War sites can convey the immensity, complexity, and enduring relevance of the Civil War.

Holding the High Ground was a working document rather than a public proclamation. Though it received little notice outside the NPS, its vision for interpreting Civil War sites—as evidenced in new exhibits and interpretive programs—provoked an intense public debate that especially riled traditionalists. NPS Chief Historian Dwight Pitcaithley took to the road to argue in favor of a new vision for Civil War sites. Congressman Jesse Jackson weighed in, inserting language in a bill that directed NPS sites to interpret “the unique role that the institution of slavery played in causing the Civil War.” Traditionalists took to their computers and microphones in response. Given the historically gentle relationship between most white Americans and Confederate history, it is not difficult to understand why.

For decades, NPS battlefield sites had been placidly neutral places, where forgetting and remembering sometimes competed for ascendance. Staff at NPS sites had practiced history diligently and well, but usually played the role of memorialists. In the decade before the sesquicentennial, some feared that the NPS was abandoning its traditional role of honoring the men of both sides—often to the detriment of the Confederacy. A Confederate heritage advocate saw the NPS in harsh terms: “Not every ranger or guide exhibits hostility to all things Confederate,” he wrote, “but, the National Park Service, as a governmental agency, is avowedly hostile, and plans to present the story of the War Between the States as a simple conflict between good and evil.”

When in the early 2000s the NPS placed an interpretive panel in the museum at Manassas that discussed the nexus of slavery and the war, some members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans pondered a legal challenge. The SCV had once owned the heart of the battlefield at Manassas, and in conveying the land to the National Park Service in the 1930s had included a condition in the deed that required the federal government to manage and interpret the site in a way that would not detract from “the glory due Confederate heroes.” To some in the SCV, the new panel on slavery in the museum did exactly that; the Park Service had “become defamatory to the memory of our ancestors,” and in so doing had violated the 1936 deed restriction. Ultimately, talk of a lawsuit faded, but the episode highlighted the sensitivities of some organizations to a more scholarly interpretation of the war. The offending panel (by most measures mild in its interpretation) still stands in the museum.

The protests of heritage groups and a few individuals matter not because they threaten to derail efforts to broaden NPS interpretation at Civil War sites, but because they signal just how important the changes have been. Which brings us to the sesquicentennial itself. For much of the public, the 150th anniversary of the war has been the first time they have encountered this broader approach to interpretation at NPS sites. Harpers Ferry commenced the sesquicentennial in October 2009 with thoughtful, popular programs related to John Brown’s raid. Later events focused on Lincoln’s 1861 journey to Washington, fugitive slavery in Fredericksburg, emancipation at Antietam, secession at Fort Sumter, slaves at Lee’s Arlington House, mobilization at the Boston Harbor Islands, and civilians at Richmond. The NPS has published new booklets on slavery as a cause of the war and explored the role of Native Americans and other groups commonly ignored in traditional narratives.

Events during the sesquicentennial have demonstrated that the evolution of interpretation at NPS sites has largely been a process of addition, not subtraction. Events at battle sites continue to focus on the military conflict and to offer traditional interpretive and commemorative moments. At the heart of these events are the “real-time” programs, conducted on the precise ground where the battle took place precisely 150 years after the event. The proximity of time and place remains a powerful attraction to visitors to NPS sites, who have attended these programs by the thousands. But they also offer more. At Fredericksburg, “Ten Thousand Lights to Freedom” remembered the more than 10,000 slaves who crossed the Rappahannock River to freedom behind Union lines during the spring and summer of 1862. On the battle’s anniversary in December, more than 2,000 visitors, surrounded by tolling bells, joined a slow procession through the streets of Fredericksburg—a program intended to connect the story of the town to the story of the battle. In 2014, the culminating commemorative event at Spotsylvania Court House will include a procession that reflects on the experience of slaves and civilians before concluding with a remembrance of the fighting men and the immense cost of war at the Bloody Angle.

What has been the public response to these activities? There has been hardly a complaint, and most often the programs have been met with overwhelming praise. With few exceptions, programs have been at or near their capacity. More than 200,000 visitors attended 150th anniversary events at Gettysburg, and tens of thousands more flocked to Manassas, Richmond, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Abetted by the incredible reach of social media, millions of people around the world have engaged with the National Park Service during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Some in the field of public history have seen the sesquicentennial as an intellectual destination for the National Park Service. Once we are done with the 150th, they say, it is time to declare victory and move to the next big thing (notably the centennial of the NPS itself in 2016). But for those working at sites related to the Civil War, the 150th is a chance to gauge where the nation and the National Park Service stand in an interpretive process that will continue beyond our lifetimes. It seems clear that the vast majority of the interested public has embraced the more comprehensive and just approach to Civil War history reflected in NPS programming and media over the last twenty years. Louder than the complaints from traditionalists that the NPS has done too much are complaints from some circles—notably academics—that the NPS has not done enough. In public history, the intellectual winds rarely wane, even if they do change direction.

The changing place of the Civil War in American culture presents the National Park Service with some profound and fascinating challenges. At their root are two competing phenomena: the Park Service’s traditional role as memorialists, and the increasing inclination of Americans to view the Civil War through the lens of national purpose, to lay claim to a national, not merely personal, narrative of the Civil War. As advocates for Confederate heritage clearly understand, seeing the Confederacy in terms of its purpose as a nation makes embracing the Confederacy—a nation founded in a quest to perpetuate slavery—a difficult proposition. Not long ago, the “chief of heritage defense” for the Sons of Confederate Veterans argued, “We don’t need to give visitors an entire history of the antebellum South so they come away with the idea that one side was the villain.”

Still, millions of Americans are descended from Confederate soldiers. Can the nation and the NPS continue to ignore or downplay the national purpose for which Confederates fought? Or should we simply help visitors distinguish between the stated purpose of the Confederacy and the myriad personal motivations that compel men to wage war for a nation? Is the Park Service’s traditional role as the nation’s non-partisan, bi-sectional facilitator of honor and reflection incompatible with its charge to practice robust, just history, which is often rejected as “politically correct” or “revisionist” by traditionalists? In thirty years, will the nation permit the National Park Service to manage a place called the “Stonewall Jackson Shrine?”

Here is another perspective on the same questions: can the National Park Service honor and memorialize Confederate soldiers (and by implication the Confederacy) and still hope to engage the nation’s African American community in the history of the Civil War and its legacy of freedom? For all its expanded programming, the sesquicentennial has failed to alter the basic reality that African Americans largely continue to avoid events or sites associated directly with the military experience of the war. Given the recent past, it’s not difficult to understand why. Clearly this is an issue that goes beyond simple programming; it might take a generation for the vast chasm between the African-American community and the legacy of the Civil War to be bridged. But, a start surely has been made during the sesquicentennial.

The National Park Service serves all Americans, with the charge to preserve places central to the nation’s identity and experience. The organization, however, invariably reflects rather than leads society in its exploration of our past. When the nation demanded it in the last century, the NPS emphasized themes of shared sacrifice, courage, and reconciliation. Until the 1980s the organization gave little thought to its narrow interpretation of the war. In response to the women’s rights and Civil Rights movements, the NPS has incorporated new themes in its interpretation and has expanded the number of sites deemed worthy of National Park status. Today, the National Park Service engages in a more diverse history than it did fifty years ago because our society is more diverse and demands a telling of history that reflects the experiences of its own communities and ancestors. The programming of the National Park Service will continue to evolve over time, pulled along by the demands of the society it serves.

We are, without question, in a period of historic change as it relates to America’s understanding of the Civil War. It is a messy and often painful process, especially in a nation with an aversion to cultural controversy and a preference for constancy. The sesquicentennial is not a turning point in that process, but a touchstone—a time to step back, to see and understand the progress made, and to ponder the profound challenges that lie just ahead.

Further reading

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Champaign, Ill., 1991); J. Christian Spielvogel, Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2013); Kevin M. Levin, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (Lexington, Ky., 2012).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

John Hennessy is the author of three books and dozens of articles on the Civil War and preservation. He presently serves as the Chief Historian/Chief of Interpretation at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia.