Gary B. Nash. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. xix + 548 pages.

Re-reading by Shane White

I blame Gary Nash and this book for several years of my youth that went missing sometime in the early 1980s. It was not even as though I passed the time enjoyably, playing snooker or learning how to hit a draw with a three iron. Those years were misspent, alone, in a small, badly ventilated room with piles of photocopied tax lists, census schedules, city directories, enormous stacks of index cards, and a calculator that was rather bigger and heavier than the laptop computer I am now using. There are a few tables in the early pages of Somewhat More Independent (my thesis and first book) that I figure took the best part of two thousand hours to construct. If you allow that the average undergraduate works twenty hours a week, over say thirty weeks a year, then those tables involved slightly more work than a BA degree. The tables gave me material for about a dozen pages of text that I would estimate roughly one in a hundred readers managed to get through. And just to rub salt into the wound, I had a luxuriant crop of hair on the top of my head in those wasted years (there is a photo to prove it).

It is probably only fair to get a couple of things straight right from the start. Firstly, this is a book review and, consequently, is mostly about my work and my prejudices, with the occasional artfully revealed glimpse of my public persona. If you want to know about Urban Crucible, you should go away and read it; if you want to know about Gary Nash, I’d recommend Richard Dunn’s fine memoir at the end of Inequality in Early America (Hanover, 1999).

Secondly, I should add that, to the extent that Nash manages to elbow his way into these paragraphs, I am hardly objective about him. Nash has long been a sort of hero of mine. Two decades ago, I was a young graduate student writing my dissertation on the end of slavery in New York, at the University of Sydney, an institution almost completely unknown in America. For me, American academe was the show, the big time–I have since learned that I had an outsider’s inflated view–and I had no idea whether my work was good enough to cut it there. As a result of my admiration for Urban Crucible, I wrote Nash a begging letter asking him to look at my stuff. He read and commented on every chapter as they slowly emerged through the 1980s. Gary Nash’s reputation for generously welcoming younger historians, and not just his own graduate students, is well deserved.

I was hardly the only young would-be historian whose fancy was caught by Urban Crucible. Indeed, there were a number of reasons why it was a book that appealed particularly to graduate students. In many ways Nash was simply doing, admittedly at a very high level, what we were supposed to be doing when we wrote our dissertations. Nash was in total control of the historiography and was seemingly aware of everything written on or near his subject. He had also immersed himself in the sources and dirtied his hands plowing through any number of tax lists, inventories, newspapers, and account books. It sounds trite stated like that, but, then and now, a considerable number of historians, once they have made a name for themselves, publish books that are, to quote Nash, “written from the armchair, not the archives.” A few don’t even get out of the chair for their first book.

Nash’s work did not just legitimate the idea of colonial urban history but it also took the investigation of the cities to the cutting edge of early American history, totally overthrowing the older genteel tradition associated mostly with Carl Bridenbaugh. Where Bridenbaugh had rested content with description, Urban Crucible and some of Nash’s articles from the 1970s provided a model of how crucial and previously unknown details of the lives of ordinary people could be extracted from dry-as-dust tax lists, account books, and the like, and used to tell a new story of how the colonial city worked. Graduate students as far away as Australia locked themselves off and tried to emulate his example.

But probably the most important factor in his appeal to graduate students was that Nash was clearly a scholar of the Left. He took seemingly intractable sources and made them reveal evidence of inequality and of class structure and class consciousness. Not only did he contribute, along with other young scholars, towards the disruption of the consensus school’s benign view of colonial America but he also showed how the social and economic developments in the port cities in the 1760s and 1770s contributed towards the coming of the Revolution. Nash helped rescue the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, Bostonians, and Philadelphians from what E. P. Thompson called the “condescension of posterity” and the “waste bin of history”–it should be remembered that two decades ago every graduate student in history owned a well-thumbed copy of The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)–and provided a counter to those who, following Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock, seemed intent on reducing the American Revolution to an event in a rather narrowly defined intellectual history. Nash is still sometimes called a neo-Progressive, and there is a logic to that rather ugly label.

It was not only graduate students who were reading Urban Crucible. Nash’s peers certainly took notice of the book as well. The Pulitzer Prize can throw up some very odd winners (witness 2003), but 1980 was a good year. Urban Crucible was one of the three finalists eventually losing out to Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long (New York, 1979). There were also plenty of good reviews. According to a writer in the TLS, Urban Crucible was “one of the finest works on colonial America since the revival of interest that began some twenty-five years ago.” As well a few historians writing for more specialized audiences liked the book. Raymond Mohl in the Journal of American History praised the depth and breadth of Nash’s research and thought the book “a major reinterpretation of urban life in eighteenth-century America.”

Generally, though, Urban Crucible got a bumpier ride in the academic journals. Gerald Gunderson in the Journal of Economic History grudgingly wrote, “One has to admire the breadth of the scholarship and some of the insights which are derived from it” (my emphasis). Gunderson and Nash, it seemed, had rather different views of the way the world worked. As Gunderson alliteratively put it, there were other better explanations of a more pronounced class identification in this period than “Nash’s cumbersome contrivance of class consciousness arising in poverty.”

Marc Egnal in the William and Mary Quarterly thought Urban Crucible “a work of first importance,” but spent most of his review detailing how he was unconvinced by “Nash’s discovery of class consciousness,” proclaiming that the half of the book dealing with “urban politics and lower-class ideology” was where the “work seems weakest.”

Jack Greene, in the American Historical Review, thought Nash’s conception of the social process “rather narrow,” focusing as he did “very largely upon a single aspect of social development,” to wit “the changing distribution of wealth.” For all that, Greene did like the “rich detail” of Nash’s complicated comparative argument about his three cities. In the last paragraph of the review, though, Greene dragged Nash over the coals for “regrettably perpetuat[ing] the antique and serious distorting myth, itself largely a Puritan artifact, of an early harmonious golden age from which there was a subsequent long-term declension.” Greene concluded that Urban Crucible was “an obviously technical work that will be of interest mainly to scholars and students.” Generally, it seems, the Urban Crucible appealed more to the next generation of historians than to Nash’s contemporaries.

Going back, after nearly a quarter of a century, to look again at a book that you read as a graduate student can sometimes provoke what might be called the teddy-bear syndrome. The teddy bear that lives on in memory as being rich, dark brown, and shaggily massive turns out, when rescued from the attic decades later, to be anemic and disappointingly scrawny. With other books that you once thought wonderful, you know that reading them again will ruin them, that now you will undoubtedly see the origins of the appallingly complacent neoconservatism that emerged in the author’s later work.

I am happy to report that Urban Crucible is no teddy bear, and also that I at least can discern no sign of Gary Nash’s incipient mutation into a late-flowering neoconservative. For the most part, my reactions to Urban Crucible today are very similar to what they were twenty plus years ago (I still have four foolscap pages of single-spaced typed notes). The book is best on Philadelphia, very good on Boston, and weakest on New York, which just happens to be the city I know best. Urban women are almost absent from Nash’s book; even in 1979 his claim that “it seems better to leave this task to others” was lame. More surprisingly, he devoted little space to the role of slavery in the cities. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of work on all of these subjects since then, much of it in dissertations (and not a few of them have been directed by Nash). Based on my listening to conference papers and reading articles over the years, my sense is that if Nash were to update Urban Crucible now his footnotes would balloon in length to almost comical proportions, but he would not have to correct too much of what he wrote over a quarter of a century ago.

I should explain that last carefully written sentence and confess that, if I can possibly help it, I do not read American dissertations. Life is short and some time ago I realized that you had to draw a line somewhere. American Ph.D. theses, to borrow from the Australian vernacular, do not come within a cooee of that line. There is something mildly perverse about a genre that takes so long to complete, but is so unreadable. Typically, the newly bedoctored author then has to start all over again and spend at least another five years rewriting the thesis to make it fit for human consumption. One possible justification for some of the salaries reputedly paid to superstar professors at American universities is that, I imagine, they have to read a large number of dissertations.

What did surprise me was the amount of what now seems like almost old-fashioned political history that there is in Urban Crucible. I had no memory of this material, although my notes show that, dutifully, I did read it all those many years ago. Urban Crucible was written before almost all of us became cultural historians of one sort or another and before Al Young published his exquisite piece on George Robert Twelves Hewes (later reworked as The Shoemaker and the Tea Party [Boston, 1999]). Reading Nash’s book now, I craved more about the politics of everyday life and rather less about formal Politics. But this is highlighting little more than the fact that fashions change.

A few lines above I suggested there was little point in updating Urban Crucible, but there is room for a bit of recasting of the book. What I would like to see is Gary Nash, or someone of his skill, predilections, and prominence, writing a big book on the lives of ordinary city dwellers in the 1760s, 1770s, and during the Revolution, a book underpinned by the social and economic analysis of Urban Crucible but one also informed by the wonderful social and cultural history written since 1979. At the very least such a book might provide the American public interested in things historical with some sort of alternative to the seemingly endless celebratory studies of the founding fathers, brothers, mothers, and cousins.

In the end, then, Urban Crucible remains an important book. As far as I am concerned, Nash’s finest piece of work is his next book, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), in many ways a natural and more cultural extension of his earlier work. I doubt that Urban Crucible has quite the impact it once had on me and others, but I hope that graduate students are still reading it.

I still can’t hit a draw with a three iron. It doesn’t matter much anymore. As retirement and pension loom, I mostly play old man’s golf, plodding safely up the middle of the fairway. But there are still occasional moments when the gods smile, the juices flow, and the sweetly struck ball soars into the distance. It is on those glorious autumnal days that I am bedeviled by my inability to shape the ball’s flight as needed, and it is then, too, that I cast my mind back to all those days spent poring over tax lists and census schedules when the time would have been much better spent learning to hit a draw. Sometimes as I gingerly poke around with a club looking for my ball in the snake-infested rough I curse the day that Gary Nash wrote this bloody compelling book.

Note: In 1986, Harvard University Press published an abridged version of The Urban Crucible, still in print, entitled, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution. xv + 241 pp. Cloth, $53.50; paper, $19.95.

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

For a heinous sin he committed in a former life, Shane White has been sentenced, indefinitely, to being chair of the history department of the University of Sydney. In the few hours left after he has finished attempting to remake the world in his own administrative image, he tries to do a bit of reading and writing in African American history. The Sounds of Slavery, a book and a CD, co-authored with the unrelated Graham White, should be completed some time next year.

Give that little girl a handkerchief / Geben Sie diesem kleinen Mädchen ein Schnupftuch / Donnez un mouchoir a cette petite fille / Date un fazzoletto a quella ragazzina.

–Karl Baedeker, The Traveller’s Manual of Conversations, 1862

So what if you protested against the Vietnam War when you were in college? Visiting the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, on its aircraft carrier anchored in the Hudson, may tap surprising wells of patriotic sentiment as your kids explore their innate fascination with guns and vehicles.

–Holly Hughes, Frommer’s New York City with Kids, 2001

 

In 1862, the well-known travel guide writer Karl Baedeker published the sixteenth edition of his phrasebook. Addressed to male travelers, the phrasebook tutored Mr. Sophisticate to attend to his female companions’ needs in English, German, French, and Italian. “Steward, will you assist this lady to go on deck, she is very unwell?” “Can we get a pony or a donkey for Madame, to mount up that hill?” As for Madame, Baedeker gave her phrases for but one activity: making her toilet. “Clean that looking-glass a little,” she learned to command a maid in four languages, “it is quite dull.” All was not lost, because then as now, it was possible to salvage any day with good hair: “Come, make haste. Plait my hair, and make the curls; for I want to go out.”

With or without men and maids, and with or without Baedeker, women and children have always traveled from country to city and back again. In early modern Europe, cities as well as country towns consistently served as appealing destinations to travelers, male and female. Members of the ruling classes with roots in landed estates would head to cities in winter for diversion. By the eighteenth century, European capital cities offered visitors clubs, coffee houses, theaters, operas, shops, balls, and assemblies. The fashionable could expect to see and be seen as they promenaded along grand boulevards or through landscaped parks. They would make reverse pilgrimages in spring and summer. Nobles, especially those attached to the pope or a king’s court, would escape the perceived pressures of town for the comforts of country retreats. Italians even coined a special word for this seasonal move into the countryside: villeggiatura.

As wealth expanded into merchant classes and relative peace descended on Europe at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, Europeans and Americans sought to follow the circuits nobles had for centuries made between city and country. By the 1830s, the newly rich bought their own country estates, while the majority sought to become “travelers,” “tourists,” and “excursionists,” words all new to the nineteenth century.

Publishers rushed to take advantage of this relatively ill educated bunch, providing information (for a price) that would ensure smooth travel and good times. In London in 1836, John Murray produced his first guide, intended to educate and inform. Three years later, in 1839, Karl Baedeker followed suit. By 1840 in America, the Appleton Company began issuing guides featuring resort and countryside travel and provided information about big cities. British entrepreneur Thomas Cook organized European tours with temperance themes as early as 1841. After the Civil War, he took an American business partner and encouraged middling sorts in the U.S. to use his itineraries and guides to approximate the Grand Tour. At about the same time, Americans had access to fifteen-cent city guides and inexpensive travel magazines, including Sunset.

Social and cultural historians have posited that women and children largely went to the countryside, practicing a middle-class form of villeggiatura, arguing that travelers, especially women, wanted to escape from cities, which they viewed as unhealthy and corrupt. Although other kinds of evidence may well support assertions that women frequented country and seaside resorts more than they visited cities, the guides, themselves, don’t bear out these presumptions.

Consider New-York Scenes, more chapbook than guidebook, first published in 1816. It used vignettes of city life to “entertain” and “instruct” children in early-nineteenth-century America. In addition to describing New York buildings and neighborhoods, it quoted liberally from the moralistic novel Jack Halyard, a story about two country boys new to the city. Jack’s visits to courts and jails and his observations of the down-and-out taught young readers about the importance of telling the truth, not coveting “useless glitter,” avoiding strong drink, and helping the poor, especially those burned out of their homes (fig.1).

Almost in spite of itself, New-York Scenes also communicated excitement and delight about the city. If New York was pockmarked with sin and vice that would teach important lessons, it was also sprinkled with fascinating sites, especially for kids (fig.2). After detailing the “charming promenade fronting the Bay of New-York,” the little book posited that “children from the country would gaze with wonder at the numerous vessels, entering and leaving the harbor, and sailing in every direction. The steamboats, too, form an additional interest to view from this spot.”

Guides eventually picked up and capitalized on cities’ potential to delight. By the late 1870s, guides mentioned a few pastimes as specifically well suited to women and children. Guides began to list carousels, circuses, pantomimes, and magic and marionette shows in conjunction with kids. Baedeker’s 1876 Paris explained that both the Theatre Miniature and the Funambules were meant “for children.” Appleton’s 1876 Illustrated Handbook of American Cities did not single out zoos as especially good for kids, but it mentioned that the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens charged just ten cents for children and twenty-five cents for adults, acknowledging, at the very least, that parents and children might be touring together.

Even when mentions of children and women venturing to cities were few and far between, guidebooks included advertisements for hotels catering to the needs of traveling families. The Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York touted itself as “the best family hotel in the United States,” (fig.3) while the Windsor, located on Fifth Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets billed itself as having “elegant apartments, en suite for families, permanent or transient.” In New York in 1876, kids aged two through fourteen rode all “modes of conveyance” for a half-price fare, reported Appleton’s Illustrated Handbook of American Cities.

The implication in such glimpses is that this sort of travel was the exception rather than the rule. Those planning trips needed to be reminded that not all establishments were, indeed, suitable for ladies and children. Baedeker’s 1899 guide to the United States and Mexico advanced prevailing attitudes towards travels with children, if not with women: “The seats in the American [rail] cars offer very limited room for two persons, and their backs are too low to afford any support to the head; a single crying infant or spoiled child annoys 60-70 persons instead of the few in one compartment.”

By the turn of the century, city guides began to report the existence of museums specifically targeted for children. Not focused on men or women, a 1917 guide to New York listed a “Children’s Museum” as a branch of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in Bedford Park. The museum, founded in 1899, included a “Busy Bee Room”–a prototype for “nature centers” everywhere–where children could categorize and label insects and plants as well as look after pets and fish.

After World War II, travel guides to cities made sure to list such serious enterprises, but they also acknowledged, like the writer describing train travel with children, that kids could be bratty. For instance, Fodor’s 1966 guide to New England chunked up each geographical region with sections on “industrial tours,” “historic sites,” “museums and galleries,” “shopping,” “what to do with the children,” and “hints to the motorist.”

One reason guidebooks began to emphasize children and their preferences doubtless had to do with changes in household staffing. In the late nineteenth century, families wealthy enough to visit cities took their maids or governesses to care for children, but by the 1950s and ’60s, child care was the preserve of mothers and even fathers. Hart’s Guide to New York City sheds light on an early phase of this shift. Perhaps Mom and Dad brought the kids to New York to explore, but they certainly did not wish to spend all of their time as a family. “The problem of how to care for Junior while you’re doing the town is quite easily solved in New York City. Most hotels will secure baby sitters for you.” Ever thorough, Hart’s listed seven temporary childcare agencies, including “Bivins Nurses Registry Agency,” which, the guidebook explained, was, literally, never closed. “Mrs. Bivins is a most pleasant woman, who has about fifty sitters on call, most of whom are practical nurses, and are especially skilled in handling infants . . . If necessary, a sitter will stay overnight.”

Somewhere between 1964 and 1966, the competition between wanting to take children everywhere and wanting to park them with Mrs. Bivins settled out. The babysitting agencies went the way of the brachiosaur, and city guides focused on parents–specifically mothers–who would assume sole responsibility for making kids’ recreational time meaningful. The emphasis, at this stage, was still on children and their entertainment, while, a quarter century later, that focus would settle on mothers, themselves.

In 1966, Bernice Chesler published In and Out of Boston with Children, which travel book specialists acknowledge as the first guide to make a city explicitly safe and fun for women and children. Every entry provided a kids-eye view of Boston, with running commentary about what would make life easier for the mother-in-charge. Chesler evaluated dining spots not for the quality of their cuisine but instead for their appeal to children–which had the biggest “gobs of whipped cream” or the best “half-scale mast of a clipper ship in the lobby.” Chesler let travelers know how to enjoy historical sites and exhibits with kids (“The primitive homes with few rooms are a good introduction”), how to look at the city with kids (“While on foot, always notice the tops of buildings; often the upper portions have original architecture even though street floor renovations have been made”), and even how to walk the Freedom Trail with kids (do it backwards). Her focus was on the kids, themselves. How could adults–educated, inquisitive, babysitterless women–make sure that children had a good time?

Nearly a century and a half after Baedeker circulated its handy phrasebook, publishers began asking a slightly different question. How could totally liberated, sitterless women used to setting their own agendas have a good time with children? The very concept seemed oxymoronic. Guides such as Frommer’s New York City with Kids extolled the virtues of bringing along children and encouraging them to set the itinerary, even if that meant making Mom and Dad go places they’d once considered politically incorrect. Frommer’s author Holly Hughes explained that she initially concluded her “life as a Manhattanite was over” once she’d given birth, but eventually decided that, rather than taking all the fun out of travel, kids actually enabled Baby Boomers–members of her audience who may have protested the Vietnam War–to experience cities more deeply and authentically, putting adults in touch with the “real” New York.

“We actually talk to passersby now–there’s no better way to strike up conversations with New Yorkers than by the simple virtue of having a baby strapped to your chest in a Snugli,” she wrote. “Taxi drivers, most of them immigrants from far-flung foreign lands, teach us about their native countries and coach us to speak words in their own languages.”

No longer in need of phrasebooks to teach their men how to speak foreign languages to protect them, women are strapping on Baby and making nice with the cabbie. Who’s having a good time now?

Further Reading:

Readers interested in the history of tourism may want to consult Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (Oxford, 1999); Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley, 2001); John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst, 1989); Alan Sillitoe, Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel 1815-1914 (London, 1995); and John Towner, An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World (Chichester, 1996). I consulted a wide range of travel guides for this piece and quote from many, including New-York Scenes: Designed for the Entertainment and Instruction of City and Country Children (New York, 1833); Appletons’ Illustrated Hand-Book of American Cities (New York, 1876); Baedeker’s Guides to Paris, Switzerland, Scotland, Canada, Palestine and Syria, and the United States and Mexico (Coblenz, Leipsic, London, Edinburgh, and New York, 1862-99); Murray’s Handbooks to Scotland and Switzerland (London, 1864, 1913); George N. Pindar, Guide to the Nature Treasures of New York City (New York, 1917); Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York, 1964); and Fodor’s New England (New York, 1966); Bernice Chesler, In and Out of Boston with Children (Barre, Mass., 1969); Martha Shirk and Nancy Klepper, Super Family Vacations: Resort and Adventure Guide (New York, 1995); Elin McCoy, Where Should We Take the Kids? The Northeast (New York, 1997); and Holly Hughes, Frommer’s New York City with Kids (Foster City, Calif., 2001). Thanks to Matthew Hartzell, who helped identify and gather many of these materials.

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

An independent scholar and writer, Catherine A. Corman is currently a nonresident fellow of the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. She is working to complete a manuscript about Indian removal for the University of California Press and is collaborating with psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell to produce a book profiling successful adults with Attention Deficit Disorder.

March 31, 2008

March 29, 2008

March 28, 2008

March 25, 2008

March 22, 2008

March 21, 2008

March 20, 2008

March 19, 2008

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

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

I write history for kids.

Most people may not think it’s really history. They might call the stories of three guys who can travel through time historical fiction, or fantasy, or just goofing around. But most people don’t think about how kids learn history.

I taught elementary school in Manhattan for ten years and learned the hard way: in the instant-feedback, no-holds-barred encounter called classroom teaching. I wandered into my first fifth-grade American history classes way back in 1988 armed with little more than a textbook, my own fascination with history, and the earnest belief that every little scholar in the class would be just as interested as I in uncovering the details of our historical heritage, from Plymouth Rock to the Hawley-Smoot Tariff.

This, you are doubtless surprised to learn, was not the case. Initially, I assigned pages every night from the textbook, asked kids the next day to discuss what they’d read, and unfailingly bored ninety-five percent of the class into a slight coma. Two months of this, and I figured out that something was not working

I sat myself down and thought back to what had sparked my interest in history. One man came to mind: Al Nagy, my 1972 high-school American history teacher at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana (“Behind the Cornsilk Curtain,” as Dean Nagy used to say). Al Nagy was the head of the history department. He had a razor sharp intellect, an inquiring mind, and a wry sense of humor. He described himself as hailing from a time when “boys were men, and men were giants.” Studying history in Dean Nagy’s 8:40 a.m. American history class was time travel of the first order. We read textbooks, yes, but we also analyzed primary source materials. Dean Nagy lectured. We took notes. Somehow, he got us to visualize another world, to see other real people, and—best of all—to imagine ourselves there. Al Nagy could take us to meet those most-clichéd people of early American history—from the Colonists to the Overlanders—about whom all kids in American elementary schools seem sentenced to learn and relearn. He introduced us to taciturn George Washington, rowdy Benjamin Franklin, and hotheaded Alexander Hamilton. We willingly met them. We were there.

When I recalled those early morning classes with Dean Nagy, I realized that kids need to be there to learn (and then maybe even enjoy) history. I brought my epiphany back to the classroom. I like to think that I reached more of my little scholars. I know we at least had much livelier discussions and a much lower percentage of lecture-induced coma cases.

In 1992, I began writing for kids full time. I was wrestling with the idea of writing an entertaining educational series. I thought about connecting kids to the range of events and characters in world history. I thought about Al Nagy. I thought about putting kids there. I thought, “What if three regular guys from one of my classes could travel anywhere in time?” And so the Time Warp Trio series was born. My trio consists of Joe, Sam, and Fred—three characters formed of bits and pieces of all the crazy little guys who were ever in my classes. They travel by means of a mysterious book and run into figures from the historical past, including King Arthur, Blackbeard the pirate, and King Tut.

I consciously decided not to include a girl in the trio because I wanted the three friends to be true to the friendships I saw in school. Boys would hang out with girls, but groups of best friends were almost always of the same sex. I also wanted to show real boys as I know them: messy and wild and goofy and gross, yet funny and smart and loyal and thoughtful. The best letters I get from kids say, “That was just like me and my friends.”

After I had published a few books in the series, the girls in my classes demanded more girls in the adventures. So I wrote 2095 (New York, 2002), where the guys go one hundred years into the future and meet up with their own great-granddaughters. It turns out the girls have inherited the mysterious time travel book and can hop around time too. So, now the guys and their great-granddaughters cross paths in all sorts of unlikely times and places.

I structure the Time Warp adventures to be short, fast paced, and action packed. Each has about twelve cliff-hanger-ending chapters. My goal is to stuff them with as much true historical detail, goofy humor, and gruesome and/or disgusting tidbits as I can. I want to keep the reader dying to find out what happens next. When I start a new Time Warp, I immerse myself in researching the general period into which the guys are traveling. I find out a hundred times more than I ever put into the final story. I want the known and verifiable history in the fictional adventures to be as true and accurate as possible. When the trio travels back to nineteenth-century Brooklyn in Hey Kid, Want to Buy a Bridge? (New York, 2002), it runs into Thomas Edison, Washington Roebling, and the beginnings of organized baseball. If curious readers like my story, I hope they will want to look up any of those people, places, or events and find that, yes, indeed, what I describe was really there in Brooklyn in 1877.

History, presented in fiction in this way, can be a fantastic way to motivate kids to read and explore more. I always feel that if just one reader stops and thinks for a second, I’ve been successful. I want them to wonder, “Did that really happen to Blackbeard when he got caught down in North Carolina?” If they’ll only ask, “Did gladiators really eat that stuff?” Can I push them to ask, “Did samurai warriors really wear those clothes?” The haiku forms the guys use in Sam Samurai, the description of the weaponry in Viking It and Liking It, and the vestal virgins in See You Later Gladiator are all part of my plan to intrigue, entertain, and inspire kids to dig into history.

As the trio ventures into the Mayan past in Me Oh Maya!, as they journey into places past and future, my mission is consistent. I want to take kids into history and get them asking those ultimate historical questions: What were other people like? Did they have to brush their teeth every day? Did they wear underwear?

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

A former elementary school teacher, Jon Scieszka lives in Brooklyn, New York, and writes for children of all ages. He is the author of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs (New York, 1989), Caldecott Honor Award winner The Stinky Cheese Man (New York, 1992), and the Time Warp Trio series (New York, 1991-). His next installment in the TWT series, Me Oh Maya!, will appear in the spring of 2003.

History matters. It shapes our perceptions of the present, our understanding of who we are, and it ultimately helps us determine the inheritances that we must carry forward or overcome for the next generation.

That’s why it’s not surprising that history engages the attention of politicians. Since the “history wars” of the 1990s, Americans have been acutely aware that our efforts to write our past are shaped by the needs of the present.

We should be thankful that history remains a source of public concern, that Americans continue to recognize history’s relevance. It is a healthy reminder that the liberal arts—that the study of culture—is of vital importance to a democracy.

Recently, the Republican National Committee condemned revisions of the College Board’s Advanced Placement standards for being overly critical of the United States and downplaying American accomplishments. In response, the American Historical Association offered a defense of the new standards, and teachers and students in Jefferson County, Colorado, walked out of class to protest what they saw as conservative efforts to censor the truth about American history, making front-page news. Meanwhile, in Texas, where history standards have long made news, conservatives and liberals continue to fight about what is inaccurate and what is political, while Oklahoma considered cutting funding for the new AP standards. Responding to this criticism, the College Board revised the standards.

We should be thankful that history remains a source of public concern, that Americans continue to recognize history’s relevance. It is a healthy reminder that the liberal arts—that the study of culture—is of vital importance to a democracy. And it is because of the particular need of history in a democracy that these conflicts are so intense.

In fact, these conflicts have existed ever since history was introduced into the curriculum. When the public schools expanded after the 1830s, history was a relative newcomer. Historical essays and biographies had been part of primers and readers for a long time, but educators now sought to teach young Americans the history of their country.

History textbook writers were influenced by new ideas about student learning that emphasized critical thinking. Early textbooks, such as the English author John Robinson’s An Easy Grammar of History, Ancient and Modern (1807), had urged students “to commit all the historical facts to memory.” This practice lasted much longer than it should have—in the Little House series, Laura Ingalls, aged 15, earns her teaching certificate because she impresses a superintendent by reciting from memory an outline of the first half of American history.

In contrast, Emma Willard’s widely assigned History of the United States (1843) condemned teaching history through memorization. History should engage all the “faculties” and offer a “frame-work” of interpretation. Moreover, Willard continued, students should start with the history of their own nation because—as the influential Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi taught—“the natural order of things must be regarded,” and each child starts with “himself the centre of the world” and moves outward.

By studying the past, Americans came to see progress. To Americans, the past was a long tale of struggle between liberty and despotism. History would place common school students not just in the stream of time, but in the stream of American time. Students were urged to think of the present as the result of the flow of events, which began with Native Americans and the earliest European settlers, but ultimately climaxed in the colonists’ efforts to resist English tyranny and establish a republic.

Textbook authors hoped that young Americans would come to see themselves as citizens who inherited a past and were now responsible for carrying the torch of liberty forward. Progress, it turned out, relied on citizens living up to their duties. Thus, to Willard, historical study would lead to “improvement in individual and national virtue.”

Even as American history became tasked with cultivating national unity, students learned much about the history and geography of the world. World history and geography textbooks divided the world into societies, each at different stages of “civilization.” Despite scientific pretensions, the most popular world history and geography textbooks presented people around the world, especially those outside of Europe, from an ethnocentric perspective. Samuel Goodrich’s best-selling Peter Parley’s Common School History (1841) concluded, “the whole of Asia is involved in darkness as to the character of God, and the destiny of man; and thus we see, that the conduct of mankind is such as might be expected, where such ignorance and such error prevail.” Relying on the Old Testament for much of his ancient history, Parley wrote that “in all those countries where the Christian religion is unknown, the greater part of the people are ignorant, degraded, and miserable.”

Samuel Mitchell, in his popular A System of Modern Geography (1848), began the history of the world with “our first parents, Adam and Eve.” The world’s diversity was due to environmental, cultural, and other “causes which we do not understand.” Mitchell classified the peoples of the world into five races, “the European or Caucasian, Asiatic or Mongolian, American, Malay, and African or negro,” but then moved from classification to judgment: “The European or Caucasian is the most noble of the five races of men. It excels all others in learning and in the arts, and includes the most powerful nations of ancient and modern times.” Christians were described as “those who believe in Christ, as the Saviour of Mankind”; other religions were described as simply incorrect. “Mahomed” was a “religious imposter,” while “Pagans and Heathens” believed in “false Gods” or worshipped animals.

Classifying the world by race was made more complicated by America’s own racial politics. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, debates raged about whether all the world’s peoples originated from common parents—Adam and Eve—or whether different races emerged from different stock, what was known as polygenesis. The latter had the benefit of justifying white domination of African Americans, but the drawback of violating the clear text of the Bible, leading many Americans to feel uncomfortable about it. Thus, most common school students would have learned of common creation and that diversity followed humanity’s ejection from the Garden of Eden.

If world history and geography textbooks emphasized difference, the goal of American history textbooks was unity. They sought to teach Americans of their special role to play in the drama of history. Benson Lossing’s A Primer History of the United States, for Schools or Families (1857) stated that “every one born in this free and beautiful country, should be proud of it, thankful to God for it, and willing to do everything that is right to keep it free and good,” concluding, “and to make you feel so, is one great reason why I wish you to listen to the whole story attentively.”

To history textbook authors, the success of the American experiment depended on two things—first, protecting liberty, and second, upholding the union of the states. The second required students to put aside their regional interests to see North and South as part of a common nation. Union was vital to protecting fragile American liberty in a hostile world. Textbooks thus focused much of their energy on Americans’ efforts to come together for liberty, most notably during seventeenth-century crises over the king’s authority during the Glorious Revolution. From the very earliest moments, textbook writers argued, American colonists were willing to come together against the forces of tyranny.

Marcius Willson’s History of the United States (1846) argued that in the colonial era, despite having separate governments, the colonists “were socially united as one people, by the identity of their language, laws, and customs, and the ties of a common kindred; and still more by a common participation in the vicissitudes of peril and suffering through which they had passed.” The colonists were also united by their shared commitment to “the republican, or liberal party.” Ignoring the divisive nature of the Revolution, Willson argued that “the Declaration of Independence was every where received by the people with demonstrations of joy.”

To Willson, the New World was committed to freedom, the Old World to tyranny. Thus, Bacon’s Rebellion in seventeenth-century Virginia was about “justice, freedom, and humanity.” Rhode Island was notable for religious freedom. New York’s settlers struggled against the Duke of York—the future King James II—for representative assemblies. The Revolution pitted British “desire for power” against Americans’ “abhorrence of oppression.”

Willson offered a balanced appraisal of the conflict between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, but then sought to transcend partisan and sectional conflict in an imagined West, where “rail-roads and canals, navigable rivers and inland seas, by the facilities of communication which they open, bring closely together the most distant sections of the Union” to “harmonize the diversity of feelings and of interests which would otherwise arise.” If Americans did not “cultivate a spirit of mutual concession and harmony in our national councils,” however, the experiment could fail, and the cost of failure was high: “The monarchies of the Old World are looking upon us with jealousy, and predicting the day of our ruin.” Americans must thus embrace “the Union, one and inseparable.” Young people were asked whether they would be willing, like their Revolutionary forefathers, to “die freemen, rather than live as slaves.” Samuel Goodrich’s revised A Pictorial History of the United States (1852) admonished young Americans to “cherish the sentiment of love to our country” and “gratitude to Heaven for all that has been done to exalt our native land.”

Textbook authors did not ignore Native Americans. Willson recognized that Native Americans had their own “history, customs, religion, traditions, &c.” but his story was just not about them. Willson also shared a common perception that Native American ways of life were backward, noting that the Cherokee were the “most civilized,” suggesting that others were less so.

Goodrich was more dismissive. Yet, Goodrich recognized Native Americans’ importance in history. His book closed with a chapter on “the Indian Race.” Despite how little we may know of Native Americans’ origins, Goodrich wrote, we can anticipate “their fate”: “the white race” would overwhelm Native America “to the everlasting shame of civilized man.”

Emma Willard began her history with the earliest settlers crossing the Bering Strait, and then turned to the powerful Indian confederacies that antedated Columbus’s arrival, an approach not that different from recent scholarship. She also made clear that in America’s wars, Native Americans were powerful adversaries. Americans before the Civil War knew well that Native Americans were geopolitical players for control of the continent, something historians are now emphasizing once again.

Textbooks were less explicit about slavery since one of their avowed goals was to use history to unite Americans across sectional boundaries. Yet slavery was not ignored. Goodrich portrayed the slave trade as cruel and asked students to sympathize with the intense suffering of African captives on European slavers. In his A Pictorial History of the United States (1844), he devoted a chapter to slavery and efforts to abolish it. Willard emphasized the horrors of the Atlantic crossing, describing captives on ships “crowded, and they are manacled. Water and food fail; disease agonizes their frames. They shriek,—they seek to burst their chains, that they may plunge into the deep,” preferring death to enslavement in the New World.

Southerners worried about this. In fact, U.S. history textbooks seemed to exacerbate sectional tensions despite their efforts to do otherwise. An 1844 Alabama advertisement promoted schoolbooks “carefully revised and freed from all objectionable pieces.” The editor of the influential Southern magazine DeBow’s Review, criticizing Goodrich, urged in 1856 that “our school books . . . should be written, prepared and published by southern men” who, unlike Goodrich, would not corrupt their history with “the inexpressible horrors of slavery.” A Southern commercial convention in Savannah called for schoolbooks “to elevate and purify the education of the South,” by not allowing “our foes to compose our songs and prepare our nursery tales.” North Carolina’s Calvin Henderson Wiley published his North Carolina Reader to prove to Southern students “that mind and industry are not confined to one end of the Union.”

Thus, then, as now, efforts to teach history in the common schools fell apart on issues of race and labor. Southerners in particular worried about the implications of teaching young Americans critical lessons about the past, especially when that history involved questions about the South’s labor regime.

Reading these textbooks a century later, we also see the prejudices that shaped Northern writers, especially in relation to other cultures and religions. Some of the prejudices were self-conscious, others widely shared assumptions of the time. This is not an excuse, but a reminder that certain judgments are easier in hindsight. A hundred years from now, historians will no doubt look back on our textbooks and wonder about—and criticize—our own prejudices, whether known to us or not.

For textbook writers in the antebellum era, the most pressing problem was America’s survival. The country was young; there was much uncertainty about its future. Slavery threatened to divide the new nation, destroying its experiment in liberty. History textbooks thus urged young Americans to take their civic obligations seriously, to see themselves as responsible actors who would have to work together to resolve the nation’s problems. They urged unity.

Today, we have our concerns. The content of our historical textbooks—the insights we seek to share—reflect today’s issues: discrimination, inequality, and the challenges of forging common stories for a diverse nation. In other words, today’s history wars give expression to the same aspirations as those in the past, to use history not just to inform the present, but also to shape the future.

Successful criticism, however, depends on the existence of a “we”—on a community of citizens engaged in a project with a common past and a shared future. The politics of unity are not some relic of a bygone era. We must continue to tell stories that will bring us together, but we should never imagine that we can tell only part of the story to make ourselves whole.

Because we use history to gain insight on the present, because it brings us together and tears us apart, it can never escape politics. The danger is not that history—or historians—will have politics, but that politics can overwhelm historical judgment. We must therefore be vigilant that all who write and teach history maintain a deep respect for the historical craft, for its use of evidence and methods, and an appreciation of context. That may in fact be the best that we can do.

Further Reading

On American conceptions of history and historical writing, see Eileen Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism & Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860 (2008); E.C. McInnis, “History’s Purpose in Antebellum Textbooks,” American Educational History Journal 39:1 (2012); and George Callcott, History in the United States 1800-1860: Its Practice and Purpose (1960).

David Thelen, “Making History and Making the United States,” Journal of American Studies 32:3 (1998) and Peter Onuf, “American Exceptionalism and National Identity,” American Political Thought 1:1 (2012) explore the relationship between history and nation-making.

For nationalism in antebellum history textbooks, see David B. Tyack, Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society (2003), chapter 2; William Reese, Origins of the American High School (1995), chapter 6, and Ruth Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the 19^th Century (1964). For thoughtful assessments, see Margaret Nash, “Contested Identities: Nationalism, Regionalism, & Patriotism in Early American Textbooks,” History of Education Quarterly 49:4 (2009), and Martin Bruckner, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” American Quarterly 51:2 (1999).

On the South, in addition to Edgar Knight’s classic Public Education in the South (1922), see Keith Whitescarver, “Schoolbooks, Publishers, and Southern Nationalists: Reforming the Curriculum in North Carolina’s Schools, 1850-1861,” North Carolina Historical Review LXXIX:1 (January 2002): 28-49, and Irving Gershenberg, “Southern Values and Public Education,” History of Education Quarterly 10:4 (1970).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Johann N. Neem is professor of history at Western Washington University and a visiting faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is author of “American History in a Global Age,” which makes a case for the importance of national history in a democracy, and “Taking Modernity’s Wager,” which argues that the erosion of social trust facilitated the violence of the Civil War.

From the moment Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in single-volume form in 1852 the figures of Uncle Tom, Eva, and Eliza became cultural curiosities with endless adaptive potential on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the novel’s strangest reincarnation was as the centerpiece in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1951 musical and subsequent 1956 Cinemascope movie hit The King and I. The play-within-a-play version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin takes up a crucial place in the film version of the musical. Yet why this curious adaptation is there, and what it might mean, has never been closely examined. Uncle Tom travels in book form to England, then east to Siam (present-day Thailand), then via a series of unpredictable textual translations he returns to England, then back over to America, where he emerges a Siamese Tom in a Hollywood Siam. The evolution of this bizarre, circuitous, pseudo-Diasporic, pseudo-Siamese vignette emerges out of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel as well as its extended and often distorted interpretive history in text, performance, and film. This series of metamorphoses that Uncle Tom’s Cabin underwent almost from the instant that it appeared in book form was perhaps best characterized by Henry James: “Uncle Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through the medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily round about it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful leaping fish, had simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished the surprising creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up and carried further, even violently to the furthest, the fate of Mrs. Stowe’s picture was conclusive.”

For James the novel emerges as a surprising literary freak or curiosity, a fish out of water, but shockingly still in its element. James’s disturbing metaphor of the flying fish is a stark warning that when it comes to questions of textual translation and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the normal rules do not apply. The manifestation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The King and I is perhaps the most extreme example of the adaptive extremes Stowe’s text is capable of generating. As the central love story reaches its height in the musical, it suddenly breaks into a strange new interpretive space. Singers and dancers wearing a Hollywood version of late-nineteenth-century Siamese royal costume perform a full-fledged parody of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the benefit of a fictional English ambassador and his flunkeys. Only one figure in the vastly stylized production wears a black mask; the rest of the cast stare through porcelain-white makeup or bone-white masks. The novel’s slave catcher, Hayley, has been replaced by “King Simon of Legree” who has been moved up from his plantation in the deep South and now pursues Topsy, Eliza, Uncle Tom, and little Harry. They flee across a magically frozen Ohio River–represented by an undulating swathe of white silk–which soon melts and engulfs the evil hunters. This finale is of course a thinly disguised retelling of the story of the parting of the Red Sea. How did this ultimate Tomistic curiosity evolve, and what does it mean?

One way to solve the puzzle is to look back at the source of The King and I, Margaret Landon’s 1945 novel Anna and the King of Siam. This in its turn was adapted from two texts published by Anna Leonowens, the actual governess who taught the royal children and concubines in the king’s harem in Siam. Leonowens did not give Uncle Tom’s Cabin the centrality in either of her books that it was to gain in the American adaptations. Yet she did introduce Stowe’s novel, and its impact, in ways that planted the seeds for what was to happen. The original references to the book and to Siamese slavery and abolition occur mainly in Leonowens’s follow up to her 1870 The English Governess at the Siamese Court, which came out in 1873 and was entitled Siamese Harem Life. Typical of British texts about slavery after Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and colonial slavery in 1833, Leonowens’s second book is, among other things, a triumphalist, morally superior late-Victorian abolition tract with a constant focus on the operations of slave systems in Siam and on the working of sexual slavery in the court in particular. In the first account of the noble woman called “Hidden Perfume” (who became, as we shall see, the somewhat strangely named “Harriet Beecher Stowe Son Klin”) her essential civilization is construed through her reaction to the antislavery novel: “Her favourite book, however, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin . . . she knew all the characters by heart, and spoke of them as if she had known them all her life . . . ‘I am wishful to be good like Harriet Beecher Stowe”–or Stowa, as my friend persisted in pronouncing that name–”and never to buy human bodies again, but only to let go free once more, and so I have now no more slaves, but hired servants. I have given freedom to all of my slaves’ . . . Thenceforth . . . she always signed herself Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

Hidden Perfume is made to mimic the personal gesture of emancipation with which George Shelby, the principled Kentucky slaveholder, concludes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, transforming her slaves into efficient hired servants. Yet in Leonowens’s text things are not quite this simple, and her account of Hidden Perfume, the Siamese Harriet Beecher Stowe, then leads directly into the chapter called “The Siamese System of Slavery.” This is an objective account of the labyrinthine rules and relationships governing slave systems within wider Siamese culture. It is on this dark note that the volume concludes, bringing Stowe’s straightforward emancipation fantasy into collision with the implications of the myriad social and psychological subtleties of Siamese bondage systems.

Leonowens’s books were themselves complex: they drew upon, but did not exclusively follow, any single form. They were loosely memoirs, but they also combined accounts of local religion and mythology. The key scenes relating to the young concubine Tuptim’s escape and subsequent punishments, as with the majority of Leonowens’s sexual vignettes, are set out from the rest of her account as chapter-length mininarratives. It is out of this material that the American adapter Margaret Landon was to form the novel, which served as the more direct source for the musical. Landon had a complicated agenda of her own that again directly relates to the legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Landon’s adaptation focused squarely upon Leonowens’s activities as an abolitionist missionary in the court of Siam. In this version, Uncle Tom’s Cabin appears but does not yet hold center stage. The key passage in the novel presents Son Klin, one of the young ladies of the harem, and the fictional extension of Hidden Perfume, as fixated with Stowe’s book. Traumatized by the experiences of the characters and the death of Eva in particular, she decides to translate the book, and even changes her name to Harriet Beecher Stowe Son Klin. The translation is alluded to only once but this is the detail that inspired the idea for the musical adaptation.

In Landon’s novel, slavery and abolition within Siam are the central moral focus. The tragic fate of Tuptim, who later became the central figure in the “young love” secondary narrative of The King and I, constituted an illustrative aside in Leonowens’s Siamese Harem Life. Tuptim’s story is much bleaker than in its later musical incarnation, and in the earlier version she becomes the ultimate victim of Siamese slavery and the king’s concubinal despotism. In the novel and its source, Tuptim is devoted to a Buddhist monk, disguises herself as a man, and becomes one of his disciples. There is no romantic involvement, just discipleship, on her part. Tuptim is however recognized and both she and the monk are publicly burned after a gory and protracted public torture. The torture is deliberately carried out, by order of the king, in full view of Anna Leonowens’s window; she faints watching the torture and revives after the executions have been performed. The musical version omitted all of these scenes. And yet, while the musical avoided any discussion about the details of Siamese slavery, it did develop the Uncle Tom’s Cabin theme far more fully.

In fact, the entire adaptation of The King and I could be seen as a parody-like dialogue with Stowe’s novel. This relationship is explicit at the start, during the king’s first audience with the young English widow who has arrived as a schoolteacher at the court of Siam. As Anna awaits her introduction she sees the beautiful young Burmese slave-girl Tuptim presented to the king as a gift from the subjugated king of Burma. Anna’s outrage at this exchange of female slaves defines both the moral barbarity, and the depravity, of the king: he is immediately the equivalent of Simon Legree. The rest of the musical revolves around Anna’s missionary calling to educate the king away from an unquestioning belief in female sexual slavery, indeed all slavery. In dramatic terms this involves a bizarre merging of two of the novel’s characters, whereby the king eventually embodies both Simon Legree and Topsy. He is Simon Legree in his dictatorial slave-holding role; he is Topsy in his subservient role of the savage innocent eager to learn. Desiring to absorb the mysteries of Western culture from Anna he also exhibits the self-sufficient and mischievous qualities of Topsy. In this aspect of the relationship, the Anna character appears as Stowe’s plantation visitor from the North, Miss Ophelia: she lectures and catechizes the king, while he in turn plays tricks on her, frolics about, and contradicts her with his petulant childlike rationality and hilarious misuse of English. The king is presented throughout the film via a ruthless metaphorics of infantilism.

In the relations between the barbarian king and his female educator, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is set out as the central paradigm for the discussion of slavery and freedom. The plot’s crucial narrative tension over master-slave relationships comes to a head when the lovelorn Tuptim manages to get her stage adaptation of the book performed before the British ambassador. The performance of the play in the musical has two functions. First, it constitutes the central cultural offering used by the king to persuade visiting diplomats that Siam is not a barbarian country. The king is thrown into despair by the threat that the French will attempt to make Siam a protectorate. He seeks Anna’s advice, and is told that his only chance is to convince the visiting British ambassador that his country is civilized. Anna decides that the ultimate proof of the king’s civilization will be to put on a play for the ambassadorial delegation: the version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin translated by Tuptim. For the king the very fact that a play can be staged in English is a testament to his civilization: “We shall give them theatricals! We shall show them who is Barbarian.” The king does not realize that in Tuptim’s adaptive hands the play now constitutes a radical critique of Siamese sexual slavery via a crudely allegorized reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which the character of the spirited slave Eliza in Stowe’s novel now holds center stage.

Eliza constitutes the fragile, female, maternal, fearless, and mythic liberationist icon at the heart of Stowe’s original. The scene of Eliza bounding over the frozen Ohio River with her son, Harry, dominated American, European, and (according to the historian C. L. R. James) even Caribbean adaptations of the novel. But Rodgers and Hammerstein’s rendition of this famous vignette challenges even Henry James’s assertion regarding the novel’s transformational potential. In the musical, Eliza comes to the raging river’s edge and is saved by an angel sent by Buddha who creates the apparently unknown Siamese phenomenon of a snowstorm. Eliza, hidden by this “veil of lace,” crosses the river. Legree and his bloodhounds follow, but Buddha then brings out the sun, melts the snow and ice, and the pursuing party is drowned in a deluge. Here we move from allegory to an inverted biblical typology, whereby Eliza becomes Moses and the Legree/Haley hybrid “King Simon of Legree” turns into Pharaoh, with his army drowned in an Ohio River that, via Buddha’s intervention, is transformed into the Red Sea. The most fascinating thing about this bizarre cultural gallimaufry is its reference, at this climactic stage, to an Old Testament story that slaves all across the Atlantic Diaspora had made their own within spirituals and plantation song. The traces of slave culture as a culture of radical dissent seem capable of appearing anywhere, even in Hollywood.

It is at this point that Topsy suddenly appears in the playlet as she is shown on the bank celebrating Eliza’s escape:

Topsy glad that Simon die. Topsy dance for joy. I tell you what Harriet Beecher Stowe say that Topsy say. I ‘spect I’ze wickedest critture in world.’ But I don’t believe that Topsy wicked critture for I too am glad for death of King–of any King who pursue a slave who is unhappy and who tried to escape . . . Your Majesty and honourable guests. I will tell you end of story. Is very sad end with sacrifice. Is Buddha’s wish that Eva come to him and thank him personally for saving of Eliza and baby. And so she die and go to arms of Buddha.

Little Eva, the Evangelista par excellence, finally moves from the hands of Stowe’s Christian God to the arms of a Hollywood Buddha. Topsy’s self-confessed wickedness in the face of petty theft now becomes the crime of wishing Legree dead. This version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most minimal and distorted reinventions of the narrative on stage or film, is the climax in a series of curious moves that a number of texts, supposedly all dealing with a Siamese harem, make around Stowe’s novel over the course of nearly a century. Stowe’s book is taken out to Siam, forms the basis for Leonowens’s work as an abolitionist critic, converts a Siamese concubine (herself a slave holder) to the abolition cause, then in increasingly elaborate ways infiltrates American popular musical culture until it finally re-emerges as the play within the musical in The King and I. Henry James was right: this novel is a miraculous creature that seems capable of adapting to any cultural environment where slavery is an issue. If slavery can be construed as a comparative experience, is there a visual or verbal language that can be used to encompass its complex variations and differences? This short digressive history considering how Stowe’s book operated on Anglo-American interpretations of Siamese sexual slavery for a century suggests that Uncle Tom’s Cabin will continue to undergo its Jamesian metamorphoses, and that it will consequently go on to inflect debates over global slavery in ever more curious reincarnations.

Further Reading:

For more on the history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London, 1853); Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit (New York, 1947); Sarah Smith Duckworth, “Stowe’s Construction of an African Persona and the Creation of White Identity for a New World Order” in The Stowe Debate, eds., Lowance Westbrook and De Prospo (Amherst, 1994); Margaret Holbrook Hildreth, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Bibliography (Hamden, 1976); Marcus Wood, “Beyond the Cover: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Slavery as Global Entertainment” in Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-1865 (Manchester, 2000), 143-214; and the rich online resource, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive.  

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

Marcus Wood is a reader in English studies, University of Sussex; he is also a painter, performance artist, and film maker.

Thinking about women in slavery

I suppose I will begin with a confession: Initially, I had no intention of writing about reproduction. I distinctly remember (after crafting dissertation proposals and grant applications) that I was intent on a study of women that did not reduce their lives to the domestic. Of course, in retrospect, I can see that in part this research plan I’d crafted was excessively narrow. In many respects I had accepted a slightly retrograde position regarding the lives of women—despite a high comfort level with feminism and feminist theory, I’d managed to incorporate an unproblematized notion of reproduction as “less than,” as apolitical, as the space outside of the Real. I suppose that, in part, I believed that the truly revisionist gesture would be to refuse an overly determinist and embodied association between women and the domestic sphere. I wanted to understand the lives of enslaved women as laborers and to think about the ways that their gender identity may or may not have crafted a particular response to their enslavement and to the world of work around them. I also had a set of questions about resistance and about the extent to which women’s participation in slave revolts may or may not have been misunderstood. What I wanted, then, was to firmly situate women into categories that I already understood to be central to the study of slavery—categories that I also knew to be primarily populated by unmodified “slaves” in scholarship that almost always neglected to center gender.

That was the plan, anyway.

Luckily, while I arrived in the archives with this semiformulated analytic frame, I also arrived knowing that I needed to cast an extremely wide net in my search for source material. That meant reading and transcribing anything on Barbados and South Carolina in my predetermined time periods that included the word negroe or slave. And so it was in my struggle to make sense of the source materials that found their way into my notepads that I began to reconceptualize the project in light of evidence that quickly began to suggest a project on reproduction. Reproduction meaning both the physical act of childbearing and birth but also, of course, the act of creating and recreating communities of enslaved people. Reproduction meaning parenting and slave owning. Reproduction meaning the maintenance of or abandoning of ties of affinity between adults and children. Reproduction meaning the creation of racialized slave owners. In all these regards, reproduction is about enslaved women’s lives and also about the ways in which slave owners constructed the edifice of slavery upon the fictive and material lives of those they enslaved. And so, even as I mobilized the concept of reproduction, I remained keenly aware of the complicated symbolic terrain it covers and of my own struggles to bring that landscape into relief in my work.

In search of descriptions of women’s lives, I began looking for primary sources on seventeenth-century West Africa. I wanted to be able to talk about the practices and the assumptions that those women ensnared in the transatlantic slave trade were forced to leave behind. I knew that to read early modern travel narratives would require me to sort through descriptions embedded in assumptions about savagery and barbarism, and I was prepared for that kind of descriptive language. What I was not prepared for were the images of African women’s monstrous bodily experience of birth and childrearing. I began to keep a log of descriptions that focused on African women’s distended breasts or the claim that they gave birth without pain, and I soon realized that rather than a footnote to my discussion of West African cultural practices, these claims functioned as a window into the process by which race and racial slavery were articulated in and for both Europe and the New World. Reproduction thus became both theory and practice—a way to understand women’s lives, transatlantic trade, and racialist discourse.

And so I found myself thinking and reading about childbirth and about the ways in which women experienced pregnancy and birth historically. The obviousness of reproduction as a frame for hereditary racial slavery did not come quickly to me nor, I would argue, does it come so for most. Historians have rightly focused considerable attention on the ways in which family formation, and indeed the very foundation of heredity, were destroyed or mutilated under slavery. Marriage, parenthood, childhood, the interwoven relationship between family and geography—these are all destroyed or, at best, destabilized by the conventions of racial slavery. Moreover, the institutions of family and kin in many ways stand in direct contradistinction to the prerogatives of slave ownership and thus become intensely weighted with violence and violation rather than stability or, at the very least, the prosaic possibilities of family. Thus, reproduction or family formation gets understood primarily as a sight of resistance or as evidence of slave owners’ violence—both of which are important facets of slavery studies but neither of which fully encompasses the material and symbolic valence of reproduction as an analytic category. In this formulation, moreover, women and their bodily experience of birth get lost. I have come to believe that reconsidering women’s bodily experience of birth under slavery is critical because it is that process of thinking through the effect of racial slavery on the experience of birth that brings us much closer to accounting for the quotidian violence of the entire slavery system.

Perhaps part of the reluctance to grapple with the reproductive body under slavery has been connected to the ways that another category has driven the historiography of slavery in the colonial period. Historians of early African American history are often drawn to the concept of creolization to explain or explore the process of culture change that enslaved persons take on once in the Americas. Primarily as a means to think through social or cultural institutions like marriage or religion, the concept of creolization is rooted in a notion of linguistic transformation and helps us to understand the processes by which West African cultureways are maintained and transformed in the Americas. The concept entered studies on the African American past that were devoted to understanding the resilience and resistance of the enslaved and to unearthing the ways in which African culture survived the violence and violation of the Middle Passage. Because it is rooted in a commitment to the tangibility and materiality of culture as a grammatical system, it tends to evoke a before/after dyad that I find inadequate in dealing with the messiness of intimate change. Even in its most straightforward application, the creolization model implied that to be Creole was to be born in a place different from where your parents were born and to speak a language that was rooted in their tongue but that reflected the changed circumstances of your family life. And so, in the historiography of early slave societies you have two foundational concepts—hereditary racial slavery and creolization—that are entirely rooted in women’s reproductive lives and yet offer no particular place for women themselves. Reproduction, then, became the way in which I could both center women’s lives and think through the theoretical and symbolic implications of the systemic development of racial slavery and racial ideology without neglecting either gender or whiteness. It became clear to me that an entirely new logic of difference (that of “race”) had to be mediated through a familiar vector. European travelers and slave owners understood and had access to the reproductive bodies of the women they enslaved. The familiarity of those bodies is disrupted by mobilizing that which would otherwise most profoundly produce an understanding of a common humanity—childbirth. Either through claims that African women’s experience of childbirth was entirely distinct from the “descendents of Eve” or by treating the children and potential children of those women as objects of property rather than as members of families, slave owners constructed their own strictures of whiteness.

As more and more scholars work through the complicated logic of racial formations in the early American colonies and do so with a historicized body in the forefront, I am confident that the frame of reproduction will continue to resonate. We can look to ideologies of reproduction and the body to denaturalize and re-historicize embodied experiences and to center women in our histories. Particularly in times and places during which women left little or no record of their presence, thinking critically about reproduction forces our attention on those women—in part because those in power leave records that illuminate the central relationship between women’s reproductive lives and the production of citizens and subjects for the state—and to gendered frames of power more generally. In other words, we are no longer able to write the histories of the past without attention to both women and to gender. At the same time, I am not sanguine about the centrality of women’s lives in histories of early America for current or future historians. To unearth the lives of women—of African American women particularly—from the detritus of the archive remains a significant challenge. And once we have initiated the process of doing so, the women who emerge may not conform to our expectations of them. As I finished Laboring Women, I was struck mostly with the lingering sense of indeterminacy. What did it mean to be a mother under slavery? Do my efforts to answer that question even approximate the alchemy of pain and indifference and self-possession and bodily violation and emotional brokenness and integrity? My experience was that attempting to unearth that alchemy fundamentally challenged the theoretical models I had inherited. As I approach new projects on women enslaved in early American colonies, I will continue to grapple with the implications of a historical model in which race and gender are fully centered. I am not yet ready to offer premature congratulations for a historiography that has been repositioned by work on systems of race and gender, but I count myself as part of a growing community of scholars who are committed to exploring the transformative possibilities of this approach.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Jennifer Morgan is associate professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of numerous articles and the recent book, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004), one of the very few books on early America (and the only one we know on slave women) that focuses so intently on reproduction. Common-place asks Morgan, “What led you to that focus, and how did it reshape your understanding of the larger history of slavery in the Americas and of women more generally?”

An introduction to topic modeling of early American sources

In the 1990s, for a research project on colonial sexual coercion, I read hundreds of microfilmed early American newspapers for references to rape trials. Partway through my research, Accessible Archives released CD-ROMs of the Pennsylvania Gazette that were fully text searchable. I remember waiting eagerly for the processing of each new Gazette folio so that a simple keyword search could generate a list (printed on a dot-matrix printer) of all occurrences of the word rape in that folio’s years.

A mere decade later, I am disappointed when an article or source is not available at the stroke of a few keys. Despite justified concerns over this exploding technology (Who will have access to these documents? Does the digitization of select documents re-privilege certain kinds of history?), historical-document digitization has enormously expanded research capabilities. What used to require months of searching can now be accomplished in an afternoon.

Yet having this material available electronically and fully searchable has created some new problems. Already we are seeing the limitations of keyword searching. In any given set of documents, some keywords are too broad in their meaning, some are too narrow, and others have too many different meanings. The results of keyword searches are quite often incomplete or full of “noise,” irrelevant results that make it hard to find what you are looking for. For searching to be effective, access needs to be supplemented by analysis.

One promising way to move beyond keyword searching is to program computers not only to find words in these huge document collections but also to analyze documents by grouping them in subject classifications. This would provide a comprehensive indexing system that would far surpass human-indexing capabilities, but, even better, it would give scholars a complete picture of how their particular subject related to other subjects in that collection of documents: How much relative print space did the colonists give to discussions of Indians, of crime, or of politics? How did the entire contents of an eighteenth-century newspaper change over time?

A new kind of data-mining technique called topic modeling does just this. Topic modeling is based on the idea that individual documents are made up of one or more topics. It uses emerging technologies in computer science to automatically cluster topically similar documents by determining the groups of words that tend to co-occur in them. Most importantly, topic modeling creates topical categories without a priori subject definitions. This may be the hardest concept to understand about topic modeling: unlike traditional classification systems where texts are fit into preexisting schema (such as Library of Congress subject headings), topic modeling determines the comprehensive list of subjects through its analysis of the word occurrences throughout a corpus of texts. The content of the documents—not a human indexer—determines the topics collectively found in those documents. Sound hard to wrap your mind around? Before the math-challenged historians stop reading, let me try to put this in more accessible terms.

The Concepts behind Topic Modeling

Remember the $10,000 Pyramid hosted by Dick Clark? It was a game show started in the 1970s in which minor celebrities shouted a series of words or phrases and their contestant partners tried to guess the category to which those words belonged. So “dog…parrot…cat…goldfish…pot-bellied pig” would be possible hints for the category “Animals you keep as pets!”

The Pyramid show was based on the notion that our brains tend to look for patterns and make connections between similar items. Similarly, topic modeling determines a topic from the words that make up texts. In anthropomorphic terms, it “reads” hundreds of thousands of documents and “figures out” what words various documents most have in common. It then makes interpretable topics by ranking the words that are most likely to appear in those grouped sources. The words most likely to appear in documents that contain a given topic appear at the top of the list. By looking at the top ten to fifteen words, a scholar can then title the list with a short topic heading.

For instance, the topic model might group together the following words as those most likely to appear in a particular subset of documents: indian fort men town party off killed people came letter day french… In this case, we can easily identify that list as a topic related to interactions between colonists and Native Americans—perhaps we might label it INDIANS, for simplicity’s sake. By having the topic model divide an entire collection of documents into these list-of-word topics, topic modeling effectively indexes an entire corpus of texts.

Much of this is less than intuitive: How does topic modeling figure out what topics to make from the documents? How can a computer analyze which documents relate to which topics if it doesn’t already know the topics? Rather than going into a detailed explanation of the formulae, statistics, and probabilities the computer scientists use in topic modeling, I’ll turn to some colonial-era examples to show, if not how it works, at least that it works.

A Topic Model of the Pennsylvania Gazette

I recently entered into a joint project with computer scientists at the University of California, Irvine, to try newly developed topic-modeling techniques on historical documents. We’ve detailed the technical concepts and equations elsewhere, so here I will concentrate on a historian-friendly exploration of what one can do with a topic-modeled colonial newspaper. I’m using the topic-model algorithm made available by Padhraic Smyth and executed by David Newman, both of the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine.

We began with the entire eighteenth-century run of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which includes approximately eighty-two thousand articles and advertisements from 1728-1800. Then we had to decide into how many topics the computer should divide the corpus of documents. We chose to do a forty-topic analysis of the Gazette. (While we specified the number of topics, the topic-model program determined the content of each topic without any human input.) The topic model then determined the forty topics and their prevalence in the Gazette.

Figure 1 shows a selection of some of the topics created from the Gazette’s articles and advertisements. It lists between ten and thirteen of the most highly ranked words in each topic (depending on how many fit in the table), the prevalence of that topic in the Gazette, and a human-added title for each topic. Throughout this essay I’ve listed the most likely words that make up each topic in an alternative font, and the human-added topic labels in SMALL CAPS to make identification of each easier. Readers may quibble over the exact topic label, but should be able to see the relationship between the words listed in each topic. Indeed, this transparency of topics is one of the wonderful things about topic modeling. Users don’t have to rely on what an indexer means by a particular subject label; they can look at the list of words in any given subject and decide for themselves how they understand the meaning of that collection of terms. And again, it is worth pointing out that these categories were not preselected before running the topic model; the computer used the Gazette’s contents to determine these topics.

Overall, our topic model shows that most Gazette articles and advertisements related to economics and politics. Despite the occasional poetry or fiction, the overall distribution of topics in a forty-topic run of the topic model confirms that the Gazette was fundamentally a newspaper about land, shipping, sales, and politics. Only about ten of the forty topics did not directly focus on economics or politics, and even these often indirectly related to those topics (e.g., topics on INDIANS or WAR).

Beyond this picture of the overall content of the Pennsylvania Gazette, the topic model can be used to link topics to specific documents, to link specific words to the topics in which they are most likely to occur, and to track changes in topic prevalence over time. The rest of this article provides examples of such results and briefly suggests the research possibilities related to each finding.

Linking Topics and Documents

Because each set of topic words can be linked to the documents that most highly correlate to that topic, users can find individual documents on those topical subjects. Those documents that most exclusively focus on a topic are that topic’s most highly ranked. For instance, in the topic I’ve labeled MILITARY above, the top-ranked Pennsylvania Gazette article is on the “OPERATIONS of the Allied Armies of France and America” (October 31, 1781), and the second-ranked article focuses on the European war theater (July 16, 1794)—both clearly documents that are primarily about a MILITARY subject. In the category of CLOTH above, the most highly ranked documents include lists of a “great variety of plain and changeable mantuas” recently imported from Europe (April 14, 1773) and lists of broadcloths, flannels, swanskins, velvet, silk, and camblets (September 27, 1758). Beyond using this as a subject-based finding aid, researchers can get a better sense of a topic’s definition from a ranked list of the documents most likely to contain a given topic.

The topic model allows users to see the multiple topics that a document simultaneously contains. Figure 2 shows how the topic model analyzed the reprint of the 1790 Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania in the September 8, 1790, Gazette. The topic model determined that the Constitution was focused primarily on a topic we might call LAW & COURTS, secondarily on LEGISLATION, and more minimally on topics related to Political Ideology and Government.

The topics contained in the 1790 Constitution seem appropriate and thus can confirm the accuracy of the topic model; if the model determined that the Constitution was primarily about CLOTH, for example, we would wonder about the model’s precision. Other topical categorizations are equally accurate but perhaps not so immediately apparent—and as such, can suggest research possibilities. For instance, a poem published in the Gazette on July 28, 1737, titled “Women’s Prerogative,” correlates most strongly (over fifty percent of the article) to a topic that seems to be associated with the ideologies of Revolution (country men people liberty friend let man world god ever life mind virtue…), reminding us that the rhetoric of Revolution grew from existing vocabularies, including ones related to gender ideologies. Thus, scholars may be able to use topic modeling to trace how specific language was put to different uses across time and subject matter.

Linking Topics and Words

Topic modeling can also show users the most likely topics associated with particular words—type a word into a search box, and you can get a list of the most likely topics in which that word appears. Analyzing the significance of the appearance of words in various topics takes more careful contextual analysis than I can do here. But the results suggest the uses of this new approach to digital documents. Here are just a few examples.

Throughout the eighteenth-century Gazette, the word slavery is most highly associated with two topics that are both related to Revolutionary ideals and government forms: 1) COUNTRY MEN PEOPLE LIBERTY FRIEND LET MAN WORLD GOD EVER LIFE MIND VIRTUE … and 2) RIGHT GREAT PEOPLE POWER LAW COLONY ACT WITHOUT BRITAIN SUBJECT COUNTRY AMERICA LIBERTY … These associations suggest that readers of the Pennsylvania Gazette were far more likely to see discussions of the concept of slavery in relation to the rhetoric of political enslavement than in relation to the actual enslavement of Africans.

We can also use this technology to ask how colonists talked about firearms in the Gazette. The word gun is most highly related (over eighty percent of the time) to discussions relating to sea-going vessels that often carried an array of weapons (CAPT SHIP TAKEN ARRIVED FRENCH PRIVATEER GUN MEN VESSEL FLEET WAR SAIL … ). About ten percent of the time, guns were discussed in relation to conflicts with Native Americans (INDIAN FORT MEN TOWN PARTY OFF KILLED PEOPLE CAME LETTER DAY FRENCH … ), and only about six percent of the time did a mention of gun relate to a topic associated with advertisements for goods (IRON BRASS SILVER SORT DITTO LARGE WATCH STEEL PLATE SMALL POT GOLD … ). Gun-related words (gun, firearms, musket, pistol) did not relate strongly to topics about crime or disasters, perhaps providing another approach to questions about the popularity and use of firearms in early America.

Relating multiple words to topics can also raise an array of research possibilities. As figure 3 shows, looking up the most likely topics in which the words Cherokee and Negro appear shows the literal marginalization of these groups from general colonial commentary. The word Cherokee appears in the newspaper only in discussions of Indian-related topics (INDIAN FORT MEN TOWN PARTY OFF KILLED PEOPLE CAME LETTER DAY FRENCH … ). The word Negro appears primarily in advertisements that discuss servants and slaves (YEAR NEGROE MAN SHE WELL SERVANT AGE COUNTRY LIKELY ENQUIRE MASTER SOLD … ), although the word secondarily appears in a category that describes disasters (GREAT FIRE SHE MANY DOWN TOWN HEAR NIGHT FOUND CITY DIED POOR … ). Woman, on the other hand, appears in somewhat more varied categories, including one for runaway servants (AWAY REWARD SERVANT WHOEVER NAMED JACKET OLD HAIR SECURE PAID RUN PAIR … ), yet significantly overlaps the topical appearances of Cherokee and Negro. Like Negro, woman tends to be mentioned as a descriptor in advertisements for laborers and in tales of disasters. Woman also appears in documents focused on the topic of Indians—perhaps suggesting the importance to colonists of gendered interactions with Native Americans. Overall, the narrow subjects in which these words appeared may suggest new ways to think about how print discourses operated to marginalize particular groups in early America.

These examples are meant to suggest the possibilities of topic modeling, not to provide conclusive determinations about these subjects. Rather, they show that the ability to quickly categorize the ability to quickly categorize the thematic appearance of various words can open new directions for investigation. 

Tracking Topics over Time

Topic modeling can also chart the changing prevalence of each topic over time. Not surprisingly, a topic related to the kinds of political issues discussed at the founding of the United States (STATE GOVERNMENT CONSTITUTION LAW UNITED POWER CITIZEN PEOPLE PUBLIC CONGRESS RIGHT LEGISLATURE …) increased in prevalence when it is supposed to: in the Revolutionary and early national eras (fig. 4).

The ability to trace subject categories as they occur over time means that scholars can track changing relationships of various topics. For instance, as figure 5 shows, the 1750s zenith in cloth advertisements occurs at approximately the same time as the nadir of religious content in the Gazette. Were colonists (or at least Gazette editors) choosing consumption over spirituality during those years? The topic model also shows similar (though not exactly parallel) increases in early national RELIGION and CRIME topics (also fig. 5). Does this suggest heightened concerns over morality and civic virtue in the new nation? Again, only careful research into the details of these shifts can explain such trends, but topic modeling is already doing scholars a service by mapping changes over time that might not otherwise be obvious or easily accessible.

Conclusion

I hope that this brief foray into the possibilities offered by topic modeling shows how we can move beyond keyword searches to consider new methodologies that take advantage of the growing body of full-text resources. Topic modeling can provide a valuable sense of the contents of enormous sets of documents and can suggest answers to an array of questions about the relationships of words, texts, and historical subjects.

By combining the promise of digitization with cutting-edge topic-modeling technologies, we are no longer limited by the number of items that individual researchers can analyze. For instance, Charles Clark and Charles Wetherell’s excellent (and undoubtedly painstakingly time consuming) 1989 analysis of the contents of the Pennsylvania Gazette sampled less than ten percent of the total number of articles in just a thirty-three-year period.

While I am a huge fan of the possibilities of this kind of topic modeling, I present it with one important caveat: topic modeling is only a tool. It requires historians’ knowledgeable input and analysis. Unfortunately, it is also a tool that requires not only access to the text (rather than page images) of documents but the cooperation of a computer scientist. Should you not have a computer scientist on call (as I have lucked into), there are some indications that digital-document providers are beginning to consider the usefulness of topic modeling for their digital content. California Digital Library, for example, is currently working with seven partner institutions to create a central Website to access documents on the American West with subject headings created through topic modeling. Although much of this material is chronologically beyond the interests of some Common-place readers, this important project is already yielding new ways for scholars and educators to use digital documents.

I am under no illusions that topic modeling will change historical research as we know it. Archives will still be visited and documents will still be read. But this new technique may allow scholars to use digital archives not just to access increasing numbers of documents but to analyze those documents in entirely new ways. I hope that early Americanists will be among the first to consider embracing such new techniques.

This work was supported by a University of California, Irvine, Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing, and Library Resources Grant.

Further Reading:

For an exemplary human analysis of the Gazette, see Charles Clark and Charles Wetherell, “The Measure of Maturity: The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1765,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989), 279-303. For technical details on topic modeling, see David J. Newman and Sharon Block, “Probabilistic Topic Decomposition of an Eighteenth-Century Newspaper,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, forthcoming 57:5 (March 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Sharon Block is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Her book Rape and Sexual Power in Early America will be published in 2006 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the University of North Carolina Press. She is using topic modeling for her current project on colonial notions of beauty.

A transnational landscape for early America

Visually retentive readers of Fred Anderson’s award-winning Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000) will recall its centerpiece, the Scenographia Americana: or, A Collection of Views of North America and the West Indies . . . From Drawings Taken on the Spot, by Several Officers of the British Army and Navy, a twenty-eight print series of North American landscapes from Quebec to Guadeloupe, published in London in 1768. It is unquestionably the most impressive representation of Anglo-American landscapes in the eighteenth century, with no subsequent rivals until the publication of William Birch’s Views of Philadelphia in 1800 or, more appositely, Joshua Shaw and John Hills’s Picturesque Views of American Scenery (Philadelphia, 1819-21). Anderson and his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, performed a much-needed service to scholarship in reproducing the series in full for the first time since the eighteenth century.

Assiduous readers of this journal will recall that its first issue featured a roundtable on Anderson’s book. None of its participants mentioned the Scenographia Americana. Indeed, no reviewer of Crucible of War mentioned these landscapes, with the telling exception of my fellow Canadian historian Ian K. Steele. Something about the Scenographia Americana causes visual amnesia. The William and Mary Quarterly has never indexed the Scenographia Americana, despite publishing its prints as illustrations. My quixotic task here is to try to gain for this remarkable work more of the recognition it deserves.

The Scenographia Americana begins with views from Canada: Quebec City, the Montmorency Falls, Cape Rouge, the Gaspé, Rock Percé, the Miramichi Valley, Montreal, and Louisbourg (fig. 1). Then follow four views of cities in long-settled British North America: New York (twice), Boston, and Charleston. Next are four views of dramatic riverine landscapes in New York and New Jersey: the Jersey Palisades, the Catskills as seen from the Hudson, the Great Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk River, and the Passaic River Falls (fig. 2). The next two prints show the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and an imaginary scene of an American farm (fig. 3). The rest of the series shifts to the Caribbean, with four views of the harbor and city of Havana, two street scenes of Havana, one view of the British attack on Roseau, Dominique, and three scenes around Guadeloupe (one of a battle and two of the British occupation forces).

What view of the world could consistently include the fortifications of Havana, the Passaic Falls, and a village on the Miramichi River? The answer is: a global perspective on the vastly expanded British Empire that developed after the Seven Years’ War. Though some of its most striking scenes are of places in what would become the United States, the landscape of the Scenographia Americana does not fit an American national paradigm. (Perhaps for this reason, Crucible of War silently reordered the series, so that it began with the views of places that became parts of the United States: Boston, Charleston, and New York, and then landscapes in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—in defiance of the series’ table of contents.) The Scenographia Americana is implicitly an imperial travelogue through the British North American colonies, drawing eclectically on previously published visual narratives of events during the recently concluded war. While it has elements of a battlefields tour, its strongest emphasis was geographically scenic: how did places of British involvement during the Seven Years’ War look?

In defiance of the war’s narrative, the series takes the viewer down the Saint Lawrence from Quebec, passing by Louisbourg when chronology would dictate that it begin with the siege of that fortress in the year before the attack on Quebec. General James Wolfe’s aide-de-camp Captain Hervey Smith drew the Miramichi valley, the Gaspé coast, and the Rock Percé while the invasion fleet sailed from Halifax up the Saint Lawrence to Québec in 1759. The series privileges scenic itinerary over historical narrative.

As a commemoration of victory, the Scenographia Americana has an oddly tranquil, picturesque quality (fig. 4). Why have views of three long-British ports where no battles took place? Why the scenes of waterfalls? Why so much dramatic scenery along the invasion route to Québec? Why such emphasis on the exoticism of Havana’s peoples and vegetation? Why conclude with British military lounging at Fort Royal on Guadeloupe? For that matter, why remind British viewers at all that Guadeloupe and Havana had been given up in the Treaty of Paris after massive British losses to take them? The overall impression conveys satisfaction with the peaceful beauty of Britain’s North American realms, with an aversion to conflict and triumphalism (fig. 5).

Nearly all of the ScenographiaAmericana’s prints had already been published as parts of shorter series issued during or shortly after the Seven Years’ War. Captain Smyth had dedicated Six Views of the Most Remarkable Places in the Gulf and River of St. Laurence to prime minister William Pitt in 1760, when his war strategy still prevailed. Former Massachusetts governor Thomas Pownall had published Six Remarkable Views in the Provinces of New-York, New-Jersey, and Pennsylvania in North America/ Sketched on the Spot in 1761, shortly after his return from the colonies and just before he became commissary of British forces on the Continent. Lieutenant Archibald Campbell, royal engineer, had already published his views of Dominica and Guadeloupe in 1762 and 1764. In 1764, Elias Durnford, royal engineer, dedicated his Six Views of the City, Harbour, and Country of Havana to the Earl of Albemarle, commander in chief of the expedition to Cuba, to whom Durnford was aide-de-camp.

An apparent peculiarity of these earlier wartime series is their use of bi- and trilingual titles, including the languages of Britain’s defeated foes, France and Spain. This multilingualism signaled a profound shift in Britain’s cultural relations with the Continent: it had become a net exporter of graphic art. The publishers of the Scenographia Americana—John Bowles, Robert Sayers, Thomas Jeffreys, and Henry Parker—were among the foremost entrepreneurs of the British print industry, and Pownall’s artistic collaborator, Paul Sandby, was a successful promoter of topographic landscape art. In the same year that the Scenographia Americana was published, Sandby helped found the Royal Academy (an institution dedicated to the improvement and dissemination of visual art in Britain), and he became drawing master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. In these roles he helped redirect British landscape art toward recording scenes “on the spot” and trained British officers to do so wherever they went in Britain’s newly global empire.

Students of early America may also neglect Scenographia Americana because its most powerful appreciations of distinctively American scenes were drawn by Thomas Pownall, erstwhile lieutenant governor of New Jersey, governor of Massachusetts, and appointee to the governorship of South Carolina—all provinces represented in the Scenographia Americana. Pownall secured these appointments as a favorite of Lord Halifax, president of the Board of Trade, and he actively supported William Pitt’s strategy of eliminating France’s colonies in North America. His governorships allowed him military ambitions on a continental scale, and he took a keen interest in the strategic implications of North American topography. In 1755 he sent survey parties up each of the major rivers of northern New England, with orders to pay particular attention to waterfalls and riverine defiles. In that same year, Lewis Evans published his Map of the Middle British Colonies in North America and dedicated it to Pownall. As the prints from his drawings show, Pownall’s military interest in topography was entirely harmonious with the practice of a landscape art that appreciated American scenery, especially its wondrous rivers.

Pownall was an arch exponent of a reorganized British empire that would have benignly integrated the American provinces’ social and economic development—including their representation in an imperial Parliament. In 1768, the year of the Scenographia Americana, Pownall, now a member of Parliament, reiterated and elaborated these views in the fourth edition of his Administration of the Colonies, first published in 1764.

The winter of 1767/68 was the highpoint of British governmental optimism about administration of its North American colonies. The year before, Parliament had rescinded the miscalculated Stamp Act. Under the leadership of Charles Townsend, Parliament then devised a hopefully inoffensive fiscal program for the North American colonies and a specialized bureaucracy to administer it. Revenue would accrue from duties on imports to the colonies and be spent solely on their imperial administration. A new American Board of Customs Commissioners, based in Boston, would collect the duties. Townsend died in September 1767, but the Duke of Grafton, who succeeded him as de facto head of government during William Pitt’s incapacitating illness, furthered Townsend’s strategy of Parliament’s systematizing colonial administration. New Vice-Admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston would enforce and adjudicate the actions of the new customs service’s officers. A new Colonial Department, with Lord Hillsborough as its first secretary, would provide the colonies with a coherent administration for the first time. Lord Halifax had been urging such an administration since the late 1740s, and its program made sense to nearly everyone who thought about colonial government. Benjamin Franklin endorsed it. Vehement parliamentary denouncers of the Stamp Act, such as Colonel Isaac Barré and Edmund Burke, tacitly approved it.

The Scenographia Americana corresponded closely with this imperial optimism. Its sublime landscapes of the Middle Colonies linked them with those of the empire’s vast accessions in Canada; together they implied a reassuring familiarity with the territories to be governed (fig. 6). The scenes from Havana and Guadeloupe reminded viewers that prosperous peace had succeeded fiscally ruinous war. Though Cuba and Guadeloupe had been returned in the peace settlement, the Free Port Act of 1766 authorized trade with Spanish and French colonies from Jamaica and Dominica respectively. The rising sun in the last print provides a subtly optimistic symbol of these liberalized trades by visually echoing the sun’s rays in the stripes of the enormous Union Jacks flying off the transoms of three British ships returning home (fig. 7).

The optimism manifested by the Scenographia Americana was as ephemeral as the rising sun’s rays. The cold light of day shown when word reached London in April that the Massachusetts General Court had endorsed Samuel Adam’s circular letter condemning the Townshend Acts as taxation without representation. Lord Hillsborough, as secretary of the Colonial Department, instructed Governor Francis Bernard to require the General Court to rescind the circular letter, and he instructed the other governors to dissolve their colonies’ assemblies before they had a chance to approve the circular letter. Both directives backfired. In June, threatening protests against the customs commissioners’ seizure of John Hancock’s Liberty propelled them to take refuge at Castle William and to request military protection, which arrived in October. After the Boston Massacre seventeen months later, Paul Revere commemorated these developments by publishing A View of Part of the Town of Boston in New England and British Ships of War Landing Their Troops! 1768, with a sarcastic dedication to Lord Hillsborough’s “well plan’d expedition, formed for supporting ye dignity of Britain & chastising ye insolence of America” (fig. 8).

Revere showed no topographic interest in designing this print: he was creating iconic propaganda for anti-imperial militancy. British officials and military officers ceased constructing a landscape of the now-insurgent American colonies, though they continued to do so in other North American colonies. Yet to the bafflement of American cultural nationalists—such as Thomas Jefferson, the publisher Mathew Carey, and the painter Charles Willson Peale—indigenous efforts languished fitfully for decades.

In the development of a British global landscape, however, the Scenographia Americana was just an early example of a broadening effort. Over the next several decades many dozens of agents of empire—royal officials, army and naval officers, professional artists, and their respective spouses—made drawings of overseas scenes for reproduction back in Britain. From Quebec, military officers, cartographic surveyors, and officials’ wives sent home watercolors and sketches for reproduction as engravings to show the newly conquered province’s sublime rivers and picturesque countryside. Artists aboard Captain James Cook’s voyages also created transfixing images of the Pacific’s exotic scenery and peoples to feed a growing domestic appetite for images of global Britain. In the 1770s, for the first time British topographic artists extensively recorded Caribbean scenery and peoples. At roughly the same time in India, professional landscape artists were beginning to undertake systematic painting expeditions, and, in New South Wales (which would become Australia), naval and military officers and convicts began creating a visual record of antipodean peoples, scenery, and natural history.

Had the thirteen colonies remained a part of the British Empire their inhabitants would unquestionably have identified with this global British landscape. And they would have had a stronger, and earlier, visual appreciation of their landscape than would prove to be the case. Take Niagara Falls for an example. In 1760-61, while exploring Britain’s newly acquired territory, a young British officer, Thomas Davies, made the first recorded on-the-spot drawings of the falls. Two of these drawings were published in 1768; they established the classic view of the Horseshoe Fall from the Canadian side. A sketch that same year by another officer, William Pierie, inspired Richard Wilson, Britain’s premiere landscape artist, to paint The Falls of Niagara, which he exhibited in 1774 at the Royal Academy. A series of British officers in the 1780s and 1790s continued to sketch the falls, each seeking a new vantage point from which to represent them. In 1799, Ralph Earl, a proscribed Loyalist, would render the falls from his own observations, the first American to do so.

American landscape art of the early nineteenth century was largely a by-product of this late eighteenth-century British global landscape. This is something historians of American art have generally overlooked, tending as they have to focus on burgeoning American nationalism. But in doing so they are liable to the anachronism of neglecting the inherent cultural contingency of revolutions: revolutions depend on overthrowing a political regime, but the previously sustaining culture still has ineffable force. Appreciating the visual development of an American landscape depends on a transnational perspective on Anglo-American landscape art, an appreciation that attention to the Scenographia Americana may encourage.

Conversely, the Scenographia Americanais a stark reminder of the challenges facing British authorities in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War: they now possessed an empire that would require the accommodation of French Roman Catholics, the appropriation of an existing empire in India, the expansion of a slave regime throughout the Atlantic, and the quelling of rebellion within the most thoroughly British of Britain’s overseas realms, the original mainland colonies of North America. By creating harmonious images of Britain’s colonial periphery, the Scenographia Americana deflected attention from the growing burdens of empire.

Further Reading:

The Scenographia Americana can be viewed at a number of libraries, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New York State Library, and the William L. Clements Library.

For an exceptional discussion of the Scenographia Americana, see Bruce Robertson, “Venit, Vidit, Depinxit: The Military Artist in America,” in Edward J. Nygren, Bruce Robertson, Amy R. W. Meyers, Therese O’Malley, Ellwood C. Parry III, and John R. Stilgoe, Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, DC, 1986), 84-87; this collection is the best book on early American landscape art, but see also Karol Ann Lawson, “A New World of Gladness and Exertion: Images of the North American Landscape in Maps, Portraits, and Serial Prints before 1820” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1988) and Lawson, “An Inexhaustible Abundance: The National Landscape Depicted in American Magazines, 1780-1820,” Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (Fall 1992): 303-30. The most comprehensive survey of topographic art of the United States and its colonial predecessors is Gloria Gilda Deák, Picturing America: Prints, Maps, and Drawings Bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory That Is Now the United States (Princeton, 1988). The fullest description of the Scenographia Americana is still I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island 1498-1909, 2 vol. (New York, 1916), 1: 281-95.

On the development of a global British landscape, see John E. Crowley, “A Visual Empire: Seeing the British Atlantic World from a Global British Perspective,” in The Creation of a British Atlantic World, Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, ed. (Baltimore, 2005), 383-403; Crowley, “‘Taken on the Spot’: The Visual Appropriation of New France for the Global British Landscape,” Canadian Historical Review, 86 (March 2005): 1-28; Crowley, “Picturing the Caribbean in the Global British Landscape,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 32 (2003): 323-46; Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Bernard Smith, “Art in the Service of Science and Travel,” in Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven, 1992), 1-40; Michael Jacobs, The Painted Voyage: Art, Travel and Exploration 1564-1875 (London, 1995); Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688-1802 (New Haven, 1997).

On the Scenographia Americana’s political context, see Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766-1770 (New York, 1965); C. A. Bayly, “The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760-1830,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998): 28-47; P. J. Marshall, “Britain Without America—A Second Empire?” The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, (New York, 1998), 576-95; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000). On the inherent instabilities of imperial hegemony, see Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest (New York, 2001).

On the reorientation of early Anglo-American history from its proto-United States teleology toward transnational perspectives on the Atlantic World and beyond, see David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Ian Tyrrell, “Making Nations / Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History: The Nation and Beyond: A Special Issue, 86 (December 1999): 965-1155, 1015-44, 1093-1114; “AHR Forum: The New British History in Atlantic Perspective,” American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999): 426-500; Heinz Ickstadt, “American Studies in an Age of Globalization,” American Quarterly, 54 (December 2002): 543-62. Common-place demonstrated the potential of such approaches in its special issue on “Pacific Routes” (January 2005). The best history of British America from a transnational perspective is Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (Hanover and London, 2005). Hornsby’s analysis uses a rich array of graphic evidence, including the Scenographia Americana.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

John E. Crowley is professor emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is writing a book, tentatively titled Counterfeit of Empire, about the development of a global landscape in British visual culture in the period from the Highland Rebellion of 1745 to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In rough chronological and geographic order, it studies the relationships between artistic and political interests in representations of landscapes in Scotland, England, Canada, the Pacific, the Caribbean, the United States, India, and Australia.

In November 1817, the portraitist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale urged his wayward son Raphaelle to “act the man.” Raphaelle was a perpetual disappointment to his father; prone to wandering, illness, and mischief, and embracing the lowly genre of still-life painting over the public work of portraiture, Raphaelle failed Peale’s expectations as a husband, father, son, and artist. Peale wanted his eldest child to be more like him—or at least, as his advice suggests, to act that way. Peale always chose his words carefully. In this instance he betrayed something about the way he led his own life: as a sequence of highly self-conscious performances, a never-ending process of self-invention. Peale’s own lifelong effort to “act the man” is the subject of David Ward’s compelling new book.

It has become increasingly difficult to say something new about Charles Willson Peale. Like other public figures of the founding era, Peale—together with his famous Philadelphia Museum—has been the subject of numerous books, essays, exhibitions, and dissertations. Microfiche and print editions of Peale’s archive have helped make much of this scholarship possible: the Smithsonian’s Peale Family Papers, where Ward serves as historian and deputy editor, has to date released five volumes of Peale’s letters, journal entries, broadsides, pamphlets, and autobiographical manuscripts.

Ward, who has previously written several articles on Peale, here intends to offer a “biographical interpretation of his life and art” as opposed to an “empirically all-encompassing biography” (xxii). One may ask, what’s the difference? Aren’t all biographies interpretive and inevitably partial, the result of authors’ decisions of what to include and omit, emphasize or gloss? Where Ward departs from an “all-encompassing” model (presumably meaning a fact-driven, great-moments approach) is in refusing to take Peale at his word. Instead, he evaluates Peale’s writings and pictures against the often contradictory record of Peale’s actions, and, in the gaps that emerge, he locates Peale’s efforts to construct a persona. Personas, actually: Peale famously made and remade himself as a painter, soldier, politician, naturalist, educator, father, husband, and, in establishing a museum, cultural arbiter. Throughout, Ward argues, Peale struggled to reconcile “opposing impulses of appetite and restraint” (xxiii), or, as Freud would have it, the id and the ego. Although Ward does not subject Peale to Freudian psychoanalysis, Freudian theory does seem to inform the attention he devotes to identifying and understanding Peale’s drives, desires, perceptions of lack, and self-imaginings. At the same time, Ward fully considers how Peale was shaped by his external worlds, including the class system of Chesapeake planters, social hierarchies of “artist” and “artisan,” Enlightenment notions of family, and the political radicalism of republican ideology.

Ward’s book is organized in three parts. Although the structure is loosely chronological, each section also explores and synthesizes certain thematic issues. Part 1, “[W]hy Not Act the Man [?],” examines Peale’s early life and art through the 1790s, devoting particular attention to matters of family: the negative example set by Peale’s father Charles, a convicted forger exiled to the colonies; Peale’s own determination to forge his way into Tidewater society and find a wife; and Peale’s self-invention from saddler’s apprentice to London-trained portraitist. Part 2 is entitled, “I Scru[t]inize the Actions of Men,” but it could just as well be called “Peale’s Self-Scrutiny,” for it interrogates Peale’s obsession with health, hygiene, discipline, labor, and bodies (his body as well as the abstract body of the republic). Chapters 5 and 6 are especially persuasive and original. Here Ward connects the dots of Peale’s seeming eccentricities—his fixation with the merits of enemas, his preoccupation with speed and efficiency—to show how Peale subjected his private and public selves, not to mention the people around him, to programs of reform. Part 3, “It Would Seem a Second Creation,” investigates Peale’s autobiography, late paintings, and self-portraits (six produced between 1821-24!). Reading Peale’s portraits of families—his own and his patrons’—against each other, Ward sees Peale struggling to articulate and project patriarchal authority. Likewise, in The Artist in His Museum, which pictures Peale lifting a curtain onto a fictionalized view of his main gallery, Ward detects unresolved tensions of self-display and self-concealment. Ward has much earlier scholarship to reckon with in analyzing this painting, yet he reinterprets the figures within the image in novel, if initially startling, ways: Peale reveals himself as a “killer” in highlighting his taxidermy tools and a stuffed turkey (170); somewhat less persuasively, his form is linked in a “bluntly sexual” way to the Quaker woman behind him, who may or may not represent, as Ward suggests, a coded reference to Peale’s third wife Hannah Moore and the nature of their intimate relations (186-187).

One of the strengths of this book is that Ward gives equal consideration to the historical evidence of text and image, reminding us that portraits are not just cultural commentary, but are in fact culture itself (57). In addition, he reframes Peale’s artistic accomplishments in refreshing ways. Ward imaginatively recreates the material circumstances of colonial portraiture, suggesting how climate or the artist’s self-conscious entry into a great house may have influenced his working processes. He also contends that an emerging revolutionary consciousness helped inform Peale’s decision, about 1771, to begin working in a naturalistic style—to paint from the “rude line of nature.” The point is important, if underemphasized: Ward misses an opportunity to refute the tenacious art-historical trope that American “realism” was an aesthetic born of necessity and spirit, a mode of representation that reflected Puritan plainness and pragmatism. Elsewhere, he takes the fact that Peale seldom wrote about his art to mean that the artist was “uninterested in the mechanics of painting”—a point contradicted by Peale’s fascination with perspective machines, his construction of extra-long brushes, and his experiments, together with his son Rembrandt, on the chemistry of pigments and properties of color (48).

Such objections, however, cannot detract from the great merits of this book. Ward has written a deeply textured and often surprising account of Peale, revealing the man in the many roles he successfully acted.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Wendy Bellion is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Delaware. She is currently at work on a book entitled Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Discernment in Early America.