Seeking a microhistory that matters

Well, I say in answer to Common-place‘s question, there are great continuities in addition to the obvious contrasts between my first and second book. In this latest work I am still attempting to be anthropological, but I have had to adapt to my new task and to respond to changes in the relationship between history and anthropology that have profoundly altered my sense of where the ethnography of the past must begin. I have also a new pride in history and its place among the human sciences.

History, I now think, is best understood as “stories that historians write on their own pages fashioned from the stories they find in the archives.” We have a grave responsibility in this—to boldly tell the story that needs to be told without compromising the voices we encounter in the archive. What stories were they telling in their words and deeds? What, for them, was the point? It became my strongest aspiration in Uneasy Kingdom to be attentive to the everyday-life narratives I was absorbing while crafting a story for our times.

I had researched and written Transformationvery consciously as dramaturgic description and narrative. This was my version of the inclusive, “everybody-in” ethnographic history that three of us—Greg Dening, Inga Clendinnen, and myself, all then at the newly established La Trobe University—were teaching each other to write. (Soon a second early Americanist, Donna Merwick, was added to this “Melbourne Group.”) Inspired by my participation in that fellowship, I set out to read colonial Virginia’s historic landscape as a vast stage set; I would learn and represent the culture (or cultures) by the conventionally “scripted” forms of action that occurred on the “sets” designed as courthouses, parish churches, gentlemen’s plantation seats, farmers’ houses, and even the yard spaces of slave quarters. The revolutions that I wanted to narrate, I hoped to reveal in the same way—that is, I would show radically new forms of action transforming the historic landscape. There was illusionism in my approach: I wanted readers to feel as if they were personally watching the action at these characteristic settings. I was a “New Light” historian; the unconverted “Old Light” historians seemed to me to have let history become merely words about words.

I was already uneasy about using narratives from the documentary record to sustain the illusion that one is actually witnessing the action. But my turn toward the story performances in the record was hastened by the serendipity of getting to work with a profound linguist—Alton L. Becker, many of whose wonderful essays have now been collected in Beyond Translation (Ann Arbor, 1995).

Becker takes his readers into the profound dramaturgy of language, which he has explored in many contexts, including Burmese proverbs and the Javanese puppet versions of the Ramayana, as well as the works of his favorite American, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As my mentor, he taught me to parse the central source for my work on Landon Carter—the planter’s personal diary. I was exulted to observe that he seemed to find the old curmudgeon’s sentences as exciting (almost) as those of Emerson or the Ramayana! And it goes on from there—the diarist’s story-telling prowess did not escape the eye of this linguist of rhetorical forms. I was sent to that terribly titled, ought-to-be-a-classic work of a former Becker student, Mary Louise Pratt. I eagerly read Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington, 1977) and learned how a scholar accomplished in this field might use the findings of live-speech linguists to illuminate the performances at the heart of written narrative texts.

I now had a little of the specialist’s equipment needed to address a rare attribute of my primary document. Landon Carter the diarist did not just (as is usual) enter notations of narratable occurrences; time and again he told artfully rendered stories. These—as I could now appreciate—had all the introducing, developing, evaluating, and concluding parts that narratologists have identified as essential to the genre. Realizing the opportunities this created, I wanted to use this diary to explore the potential of stories told in the historical record. I would shift my attention from performance in action to a close concern with the performances in the written documents themselves. Stories became the motif of the new book-in-gestation. The impulse to develop the reading of the Carter diaries in this light was further strengthened when I turned to the diarist’s surviving annotated library. I realized that not just the themes of the day-by-day record but also the accounts of the vast cosmos derived from the books the diarist so keenly read and reread could best be reconstructed by taking up the stories in the books that Carter had embellished with marginal notations. In one of these, Carter offered a sympathetic address to that legendary father of ungrateful children, King Lear. The resulting library chapter, as an experimental venture in the ethnography of texts, became a central essay in my new book.

The diary’s profusion of planter narratives about slaves presented a great challenge. I found myself both pulled back into the methodology of Transformation and propelled further beyond it into the ethnography of the utterance. The stories were representations of actions—performances—that called for interpretation; but the stories were strong performances in their own right. To grasp them, I turned to the literary category “genre” and found I was dealing with an ancient tradition that seemed to have no precise name; I coined the term gentrylore. These are the stories that, ever since humanity divided into exploiters and exploited, the masters have told each other about the waywardness of their laborers. (Henceforth, wherever I had the opportunity to meet with Europeanists, Asianists, and Latin Americanists, I would ask for equivalent recorded narratives from some other landlord-peasant society. No one has yet come up with a match, and so I have reached the provisional conclusion that Landon Carter’s diaries may be the biggest collection of told-from-life “is-my-servant-more-drunken-fool-than-thieving-knave?” stories in all the world’s literatures!)

The discovery that the diary included so much of an ancient, important, and yet much neglected genre, was an exciting one, but I could not leave it at that. Landon’s enslaved people should not appear framed only in gentrylore. I felt compelled to tap into other traditions to get closer to the stories the enslaved might have told of themselves. That took me to African and African American folklore, with Roger D. Abrahams as my chief guide and mentor. I came also to the 1930s WPA ex-slave narratives. By close attention to the genres of these narratives and to their distinctive themes, I would honor the traditions that had kept alive an oral history of slavery told by Virginians who had endured it; I would use their testimony to answer a master’s tales with matching narratives drawn from the oppressed. I would be making no claim that I could “upstream” and use 1930s memoirs to gain access to the consciousness of Landon’s slaves; but I would be including voices whose framing of experience drew on deep African American traditions.

Historical inquiry may often be blocked by the prior agenda of the historian. I was earnestly seeking “the world of Landon Carter” through his diaries, when—quite late in the work—I suddenly saw that the compulsive telling of stories had a distinct beginning in the diary. The flow of dramatic stories that would become a flood started in the little volume for 1766. This was the year that opened with all the American colonies effectively in rebellion against their king’s imperial government. Landon was a passionate American patriot, but he loathed the rebellion forced upon him and his peers by the betrayals of the king’s ministry and the Parliament they had evidently bought. Suddenly the diary began to fill out with angrily told stories of rebellions in Landon’s own little kingdom. Indeed a whole Virginia Anglican jeremiad began to be unleashed in this diary!

I concluded from the synchronicity of the diary’s rebellion stories and the mounting colonial resistance to imperial assertion that there was a deep thematic relationship between the conflicts of the little realm and the politics of the great kingdom. The synchronicity became positively eerie in the crisis time when Landon (and all the patriots) had to recognize that the great betrayal stemmed from the king himself. I could measure how the intensity of father-son clashes in the diarist’s own house increased to the most extreme levels during the spring of 1776 when Landon knew that revolution—a decisive break—must soon come. Reading the diary in this light, I saw an opportunity to open up for readers the family-drama aspect of the American Revolution—a version much in need of telling if the magnitude of what was begun in that birth-of-modern-politics upheaval is to be grasped. Landon Carter’s long-kept series of diaries powerfully bears witness to the conflicted emotions racking the American patriots during their great struggle.

Responding to this invitation to compare Uneasy Kingdom with Transformation, I become self-conscious about the increasing engagement of my work with what is now called microhistory, but—as I have shown—big history has been equally an obsession of mine. So I do not apologize for focusing on something as “small” as a diary. History is the most particularizing of the social sciences; it must stand tall to remind the others of the power of contingency in human life. For all that historians should study hard to understand the cultural, structural, and economic systems by which societies work, they have a responsibility also to proclaim the deep truth that the world is what it is because of the particular sequences of what has been done. This is not just a stand in a scholars’ debate; it is an affirmation of the possibilities of changing the disposition of things. The future is always being made by the present generation. I am proud to be a historian even as I tell myself that the strongest lesson that the discipline teaches is that, however we read the signs of doom and gloom, we cannot predict the future. The shape of the world to come remains to be made by human action in circumstances that can never be foretold.

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

Rhys Isaac was born one of identical twins at the Cape of Good Hope in what is now the Republic of South Africa; after study at the University of Cape Town and Oxford University he has taught history in Australia and researched it in the United States for more than forty years. Common-place asks Isaac, who now straddles two worlds as a professor of history at La Trobe University, Australia, and at the College of William and Mary, what are the principal differences between the approach adopted in his new book, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom (New York, 2004), and the approach of his celebrated earlier work, The Transformation of Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1982).

America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, by Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, is an ambitious culinary history “that chronicles the region’s cuisine from the English settlers’ first encounter with Indian corn in the early seventeenth century to the nostalgic marketing of New England dishes in the first half of the twentieth century” (inside cover). Librarians and independent scholars, this husband-and-wife team explores New England foodways using three centuries of culinary, historical, and literary sources as well as an impressive array of secondary sources. Subtitle aside, America’s Founding Food moves beyond the realm of the kitchen and cookery to explore the Anglo-American society in which these foods were prepared, consumed, and eventually celebrated.

The title of the book is sure to provoke some well-deserved debate in food history circles. The cookery of New England has no more claim to the title of “America’s founding food” than other early regional cuisines. Curiously, despite the bold title, the authors make no attempt to look at the influence or place of New England cookery outside of the region. Such a discussion might have more fully justified the title.

America’s Founding Food is organized around New England’s foodstuffs with an emphasis on the dishes that have become icons of the region: Indian pudding, Johnny cakes, baked beans, and pumpkin pie. In addition to chronicling the evolution of classic New England recipes and foods, the authors explore what these dishes meant to the people who ate them and the reasons why “such culinary wallflowers” were elevated to “virtually canonical status” (2) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Happily, the authors also spend time looking at some of the lesser-known foods that—despite their past popularity—have fallen by the culinary wayside. (Just when was the last time you were offered a wedge of savory eel pie or a slice of Election Cake?)

The most significant accomplishment of America’s Founding Food is the truly impressive collection of lively and illuminating primary-source accounts. The book is worth reading for this alone. The narrative that weaves these accounts together relies quite heavily on a wide range of secondary sources. The notes at the end of the book are excellent, and those interested in New England history may find themselves flipping back and forth between these notes and the book’s text.

While America’s Founding Food is arguably the best survey history of New England foodways to date (there are better works that deal with narrower subject matter), there are some problems with the book that are difficult to overlook. For example, there are a number of occasions when the authors’ interpretations are flawed or incomplete. “For their own victuals the English considered cod ‘but coarse meate,’” the authors claim, quoting from a contemporary source. “But by the eighteenth century, the cash-producing fish had become a featured item on wealthy colonial tables” (115).

Did the colonists initially disdain cod? A reading of the original quote from Edward Winslow, included in A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mourt’s Relation (New York, 1963), reveals a far different picture: “I make no question but men might live as contented here as in any part of the world. For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meate with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter . . . ” Here, in fact, is a colonist reveling in a land so bountiful that normally valuable fresh (i.e., not salted) cod became mere “coarse meate . . . “

In this same vein, a lack of familiarity with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglo-American foodways lead the authors to erroneously claim that butter was “a novel flavoring” in the mid-1600s and that the presence of butter in an eel recipe “distinguished this recipe as an eighteenth-century creation” (82-83). And, despite the authors’ best intentions to avoid the “fakelore” of much earlier work about New England foodways, they too repeat some old saws. For example, we are told that an unfired hearth was viewed with disapproval and “only an inattentive housewife would allow her fire to burn out completely” (13). The narrative is peppered with these small but troubling errors.

More troubling than these small errors is a provocative but largely unsubstantiated interpretive thread running through the narrative. Stavely and Fitzgerald contend that colonials rejected the adoption of “savage” Native foods. The notion that the colonists resisted indigenous foodstuffs makes its first appearance in the chapter about corn. The authors argue that “if the advent of the English was designed to move the New World from barbarism to civilization, then the fact that the civilizers were subsisting on the savages’ food was, at a minimum, highly embarrassing.” Further, the authors claim that a “lack of discussion of Indian corn in early accounts” supports their contention (12).

This interpretation may be novel and intriguing, but the authors provide little documentation to support these claims. In fact, they make this argument in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary. Early New England sources are full of laudatory references to corn as both a food and trade commodity. John Winthrop, in his 1662 Letter to the Royal Society (reprinted in New England Quarterly Vol. X No.1 [1937] p.121-133), wrote that corn “is now found by much Experience, that it is wholesome and pleasant for Food of which great Variety may be made out of it.” These accounts make it clear that the colonists quickly incorporated corn into their diet and used the new grain in traditional English ways as a bread grain, porridge, or a thickener in meat stews. What is hard to glean from these New England accounts and the author’s own arguments is substantial evidence for a “suppressed connection of the cuisine to Indian foodways” (278).

Despite these criticisms, America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking is important reading for people interested in the history of New England and its food. Given the unevenness of the primary-source record and some substantial gaps in available information, writing a survey history of New England foodways is truly a daunting task. These authors have done considerable work that will undoubtedly spark further scholarly and popular interest in the subject.

Further Reading:

Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and their Food, at Sea and Ashore, in the Nineteenth Century (Mystic, Conn., 1995) by Sandra L. Oliver is unquestionably the best work yet written about New England foodways. Oliver’s clearly written, carefully researched, and award-winning book is filled with primary-source accounts and insightful commentary, and it includes nearly two hundred recipes (with helpful notes for modern cooks) for readers who truly want to savor the past. In the spirit of full disclosure, Sandy Oliver is a friend and the co-author of my upcoming book. Another useful source is Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (New York, 1981), transcribed by Karen Hess with “historical notes and copious annotations.” Hess’s introduction to the book and thorough recipe commentary is must reading for anyone interested seventeenth-century Anglo-American food history.

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

Kathleen Curtin, is Colonial Food Historian, Plimoth Plantation, and co-author of Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie (New York, 2005).

Since the men, from a party or fear of a frown
Are kept by a sugar-plum quietly down
Supinely asleep—and depriv’d of their sight
Are stripp’d of their freedom, and robb’d of their right;
If the sons, so degenerate! the blessings despise
Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise.

—Hannah Griffitts

In this elegant, well-written book, Carol Berkin provides us with a wonderfully diverse range of female characters, from liberty’s daughters to Mohawk mothers, who experienced the turmoil of the American Revolution and its aftermath. Abigail Adams is here, urging her husband to “remember the ladies” when he helps draft the new nation’s laws and modify the harsh restrictions of coverture, under which a married woman could not legally control her own property, earnings, or children. So is Frederika von Riedesel, who traveled to North America with three young daughters to join her husband, a German general in the British army. Riedesel nursed wounded soldiers in a cellar while bullets flew outside, openly criticized General Burgoyne for drinking and carousing while his men starved at Saratoga, and toiled as a prisoner of war for four years with a nearly incapacitated spouse. We also learn about Nanyehi, a Cherokee “warrior and diplomat,” who negotiated peace treaties, rescued white captives, and, for her troubles, was taught to spin and churn in the English fashion.

In these and many other fascinating accounts, Berkin focuses on wartime realities, not the ideological causes or implications of the American Revolution. After a succinct summary of the prevailing mid-eighteenth-century view of white women as first and foremost men’s helpmates, she explores how these women struggled to survive wartime scarcity, murderous home-front fighting, the grim realities of life with the army, relocation and abandonment. Politics are secondary because, in Berkin’s view, although the Revolution may have eventually inspired movements for white women’s and African Americans’ rights, the experience of war bred short-term social conservatism. The “Daughters of Liberty” nobly arose only to sit back down again. “No sweeping social revolution followed in the wake of the political revolution; indeed, like women and men after many wars, white Americans seemed more eager to return to the life that had been disrupted than to create a new one” (x). The transformations of the war, she argues, tended to be personal and often temporary.

How, then, were these women different from those in any war where the lines between battlefront and home front were blurry? The answer for Berkin is the larger context of their actions—the economic weapons of nonconsumption, the political language of dependence and independence, the legal challenges to natural hierarchy—which touched women’s lives and women’s roles in new ways. From the first glimmerings of the Revolution, in the boycotts of the 1760s, free women were front and center, as their domestic activities and decisions about what to eat and what to wear took on new political and economic importance. Skilled as frugal housewives who knew how to strike a bargain and evaluate quality, these same free wives, mothers, and sisters added political criteria to their decision making. Some women went further by signing public declarations resolving to eschew the corrupting commodities and gathering in the homes and yards of clergymen to spin thread symbolizing self-sufficiency and liberty. But the political implications of these civic-minded activities evaporated as soon as the war ended, leaving only a small group of intellectuals to champion better education for free white women—to make them better mothers.

In place of powdered wigs and radical ideals, Berkin shows us bloody legs and dirty shirts. Thousands of women experienced the war close-up, as camp followers who washed, cooked, nursed, sewed, and served as sexual partners for soldiers. As Berkin deftly demonstrates, joining the British or Continental army as a camp follower was an independent choice. It fostered new experiences and travel over hundreds of miles, and the wages women received for performing maintenance tasks for soldiers meant the difference between eating and starving for themselves and their children. Yet it was not a liberating choice. In fact, becoming a camp follower not only placed women under a regimented male hierarchy, it also marked them as unfit to receive the perquisites of new attitudes that were emerging among the upper classes about the delicacy and sensibility of ladies. Women who drank in the tents, stripped corpses for clothing, and took regular payment for washing duties (unlike wives, mothers, and sisters who washed for free) were ugly “furies” and “wild beasts,” to be kept with the baggage at the back of the line. These camp followers contrasted sharply with the officers’ wives, who received the best housing when they visited and served not as reminders of the grim horrors of war, but of what many men were fighting for: a prosperous civilian life marked by predictable differences between “masculine” and “feminine.” Women’s helpmate role might have been similar across classes, but war highlighted the significant differences in how they fulfilled that role.

African American, Native American, and loyalist women each get a separate chapter in this book, “told separately in order to avoid treating them as detours, or deviations, from the dominant story and in order to ensure that their perceptions of events are not portrayed as a misunderstanding” (xvii-xviii). In exploring the lives of enslaved African Americans, Berkin’s focus on the disruption of war rather than its ideological justification serves her well, since it was that very disruption—masters and mistresses who fled, invading armies who offered refuge, the confusion and turmoil that made slave patrols difficult—that created the opportunities for African Americans “to enjoy small blessings of liberty at last” (122). Those blessings could be small, indeed. Midway through the war, Mary Postill and her children escaped to British-occupied Charleston where they received certificates of freedom. Hired as a servant by a devious loyalist, Postill found herself reenslaved, transported to Florida, then Canada, and, after a brief escape attempt with her daughters, literally sold down the river.

The case of loyalist women, who also coped as best they could in the face of community hostility and exile, raises deeper political questions, which Berkin leaves open. When the wife of a loyalist stayed behind on the family farm, was she an innocent proxy to be pitied? A treasonous collaborator whose property should be seized? A patriot who had defied her wifely obligations to follow her husband and so deserved respect? These questions had practical wartime answers but also pointed to deeper social and legal dilemmas, which Berkin notes but does not explore at length. Again and again in these case studies, female choices made under duress signal the ambiguities of economic and political agency in the late eighteenth century.

Writing her Women of the American Revolution a decade before the Civil War, historian Elizabeth Ellet created an Abigail Adams, a Martha Washington, and other Revolutionary women that suited the needs of her nineteenth-century readers. In her retelling, powerful and humble women alike proved their worth in their devotion to family. Self-sacrificing and virtuous, these women, as Ellet portrayed them, exhibited “endurance in the face of tragedy and an ability to inspire and encourage the men whose lives they touched” (xii). Berkin’s book, which opens with a tribute to Ellet, raises an important question in our current age of “founders’ chic”: what does this new cast of Revolutionary women say about our needs in the twenty-first century? Founding “fathers” and “brothers” get their titles from imagined and metaphorical relationships to future generations and to each other. Berkin’s “Revolutionary Mothers” are less the mothers of us all and more mothers in fact—people who were constrained and encouraged by real family relationships that gave meaning to their wartime activities. Motivated by pragmatism more than idealism, they testify to tough-minded female endurance that wins applause but not power.

Further Reading:

Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, 2002); Susan Branson, These Fiery, Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2001); T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004); Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980; Ithaca, 1996); Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York, 2004).

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

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is an assistant professor of history at San José State University. She is completing a book manuscript on women’s economic lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, in the revolutionary era.

Anyone who has even a fleeting knowledge of American art history knows that portraits abound in the eighteenth century. The typical American-art survey begins with face after face from the past . . . and little else. Why did Americans commission only portraits from their artists? Other genres flourished in Great Britain, the model for much of American culture in this period. Why not here? Was it all vanity and conspicuous consumption—the same class ambitions that drive Americans to covet today’s Hummers and BMWs? According to art historian Margaretta Lovell, the answer is a surprising but firm “no.” In her new book, Art in a Season of Revolution, Lovell takes on some of the big questions of eighteenth-century painting and culture and reveals a somewhat different story than that often taught in art history courses.

Lovell approaches her study by selecting discreet groups of objects, largely paintings, and examining them from a variety of angles. In an effort to move beyond the connoisseurship model used by many earlier scholars, she has selected for her case studies not only canonical masterpieces but also intriguing “lesser” works. Quality aside, each work in turn reveals a great deal about eighteenth-century artistic practice. Lovell also takes the novel approach (for art history) of including a chapter on cabinetmakers among the several she devotes to painting. Although the book might have benefited from a few additional studies of craftsmen, this single example raises provocative questions about just how much we know about well-known artisans such as the Townsend-Goddard cabinetmakers.

Following a common practice among scholars of material culture, Lovell treats the objects of her study as primary documents. For instance, Lovell finds in family-group portraits new ideas about childhood and family “that had become visible by 1760, but would not reach the horizon of audibility in the written record for another two decades” (269). For example, fathers, who in the first half of the eighteenth century dominated family portraits, were by midcentury placed in positions that “encourage us to focus on his progeny and not on him” (156). Similarly, mothers in the later period often move into the center of the canvas, elevated by their custodial relationship to the child. Lovell makes her point through a compelling array of examples culled from Anglo-American portraits of the period.

Family ties are also central to her argument. While many other scholars have characterized these portraits as self-aggrandizing monuments to wealth and vanity, Lovell pokes two holes in this observation. First, according to probate records, portraits of family members were often hung not in parlors frequented by guests but in rarely visited private rooms. Second, she notes that unlike other luxury goods, such as furniture or silver, family portraits had almost no resale value. They were valued for their subject matter rather than their aesthetic qualities. Art buyers were thus unlikely to be drawn to portraits of another’s kin. Additionally, Lovell observes that portraits were not purchased merely by those who could afford them but instead tended to end up in the hands of those with inheritable estates. This, according to Lovell, reveals a core function of portraiture—the reinforcement of kinship ties and familial obligation among leading heirs.

Kinship ties also play an important role in artist-patron relations. Among artists and craftsman, Lovell notes how kinship and patronage were often closely aligned. For example, John Singleton Copley’s marriage to the wealthy Susanna Farnham Clarke afforded him access to a new network of wealthy patrons. In her thorough study of the Townsend-Goddard cabinetmakers, Lovell goes even further in connecting the dots between artisans and patrons, suggesting that women “performed the function of permanent adhesive” (241), cementing business partnerships between men in the same trade. She also examines the Townsend-Goddard patron base, noting that many of their local purchasers were either kin or coreligionists.

Lovell performs a similarly revealing piece of research as she unravels the connections between three of Copley’s female sitters, each shown wearing the same blue dress. Although we know that Copley sometimes recycled costumes in unrelated portraits, the case of the blue dress is one of those instances that puzzles. Unlike cases where Copley derived multiple compositions from a single print, his portraits of the women in the blue dress each show their sitter in distinctly different poses, revealing an entirely different view of the dress. After disproving a number of possible reasons for the duplication of the dress—for example, that it was owned by Copley himself—Lovell works to establish the connections between the three women, suggesting that the dress was owned by one and borrowed by the others. She affirms this unlikely scenario by connecting the three sitters through distant kinship ties and their links to real estate on Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts. With such evidence neatly laid out, Lovell’s conclusions seem plausible.

This slim but dense volume also has much more to add about the nature of drawing, originality, classicism, and the crafting of a professional identity in eighteenth-century British America. With so much between its covers, Lovell’s book is a remarkably important addition to the study of American art history. Not to diminish its significance, but its geographic limitations should be acknowledged—Lovell’s study examines only a narrow sliver of New England visual culture, with an equally limited cast of characters. Hopefully, others will continue this line of scholarship in the mid-Atlantic as well as the South and perhaps even begin to incorporate more vernacular objects along with such high-art examples. Given the emergence of a number of younger scholars in this area, it seems certain that American art of the eighteenth century, long suffering from extended periods of neglect, is finally getting its due.

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

Akela Reason holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland. She is currently preparing a book on the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins.

Olympia stares directly at us from Eduard Manet’s 1865 canvass with a demeanor as casual as her body is naked. She defies us to make sense of her, to give her what we would call an identity, on any terms others than her own. Olympia is the incarnation of modernity, asserting her independence and subverting tradition in ordinary details. “My body is my own, and I will do with it as I please,” she seems to declare. “I am what I am, whatever meanings you ascribe to me.” Manet’s painting, rejected by Parisian salons because of its flippant mockery of genre conventions, not to mention taste, is a masterpiece of perspective. Olympia looks at us as we look at her. Her defiance has a populist, anarchic, liberating quality. This, we are led to assume, is a free woman.

Yet the Olympia with whom we exchange looks is an image, a representation, created by a man. The story of the painting is a tale of Manet’s defiance of tradition. The model for Olympia may have been a real Parisian courtesan named Victoria Meurent, just as the African maid in the background reflects the existence of colonialism. But the canvass ultimately tells us more about Manet and art in nineteenth-century Paris than it does about women or empire. Manet’s commentary on the history of nudes is all the more compelling because he honors tradition as he subverts it. Capable of painting like Titian in the Venus of Urbino, he chooses not to do so, using quick brushstrokes and creating two broad planes rather than smooth surfaces and linear perspective. The radical content matches the subversion of form: Olympia shocks because her creation is as defiant as her demeanor.

Like Olympia, the great cities of nineteenth-century Europe and North America stare at us, full of defiance and naked energy that obscure the process of their construction, both physically and metaphorically. The dominant image is motion. Constructed (theoretically) as places of individual autonomy, with brand-new facades that affirmed revolution, facilitated change, and celebrated choice, cities offered multiple manifestations of movement. These, or so we are led to assume, are free places. Perfecting the traditional role of urban centers as sites of exchange, their residents traded goods, people, and information with abandon. Enslaved African Americans sold at auctions in New Orleans were the ultimate symbols of the calculus of the urban marketplace, in which space and bodies were bought and sold as freely as meat or shoes. The fact that in New York or Paris human beings could find anything they craved gave a sinister dimension to Samuel Johnson’s remark that a man who was bored with London was bored with life. The bodies of women (like Olympia) were like the bodies of slaves, valued to the extent that they fetched in a competitive market. The proliferation of cheap newspapers, chock full of advertisements and sensational stories about individuals transformed into celebrities, were the engine of what seemed to be an anarchic world in which everything was a potential commodity. Vital cities–Amsterdam in the 1600s, London in the 1700s, Paris in the 1800s, New York in the 1900s, Istanbul in the 2000s–are collections of provincials, immigrants from other places, in search of refuge and opportunity. Whatever the local, personal, or idiosyncratic origins, power comes only with recognition at the seat of commercial power. And then culture returns the favor by affirming the power of commerce.

The collision of desires and goods created enormous energy that radiated from cities like warmth from a stove on a cold night. Dangerous up close, attractive from a distance, cities proved to be irresistible to tens of thousands of people who had grown up in rural areas or other continents. The bright lights of Delmonico’s and Moulin Rouge promised excitement, life, and possibilities otherwise unimaginable. It was hard, indeed, not to feel something in a city. And in the nineteenth century, Europeans and North Americans prized feelings. The bourgeoisie, wanting to be entertained and edified simultaneously, courted at museums full of bright colors, congregated in parlors full of lively conversation, and listened to big, bold music in cavernous concert halls. In the words of the astute reactionary Louis Veuillot, “a democratic nation is a nation of second-rate actors,” and the city was their primary stage (Higonnet, 201). At times, the primary appeal of this new world seemed to lie in its sheer novelty. Newness was, almost by definition, progress. Even the tales of distortions and disappointments by the likes of Dickens and Balzac have movement. The pace of life in a nineteenth-century city was frenetic.

In the early twenty-first century, a great many Americans visit European cities as tourists and come away enthralled with how different they are from cities in the United States. The former supposedly have a character rooted in a sense of tradition and history, both of which have been washed away in most American cities by single-minded obsession with commercial development. In Paris and London, monuments to war and empire crowd the horizon. Broad avenues lead the eye to a focal point in the Arc de Triomphe or Nelson’s column. More than charming, nineteenth-century urban landscapes are full of representations of national power, their presence testimony to the solidity of that achievement. Like Olympia, they defy us. And, like Olympia, they both affirm and obscure power.

Exploiting Roland Barthes’s insight that “modern myth is deception” that deliberately “ignores the origin and true purpose” of whatever it is representing, Patrice Higonnet argues that Paris in the 1800s was all about the making of facades (3). The elaborate rebuilding of the city in the mid-1800s under the direction of Georges-Eugene Haussmann blended enlightened concerns with order and rationality together with the public (and private) ambitions of middle-class citizens. He laid out two hundred kilometers of streets and inspired the construction of thirty-four thousand buildings.

Like Manet, Haussman took the genre of the city and subverted tradition by presenting revolution as an act of liberation, of individual defiance. Unlike Manet, however, Haussman was not deliberately subversive, nor did he invite multiple readings of his creation. His new Paris of grand vistas, gleaming monuments, and steel towers presented the world of exchange in a magnificent setting that organized change as a legitimate, and essentially final, achievement. It does not welcome criticism. Neighborhoods it did not destroy, it made peripheral and quaint. It imprisoned art, music, and books in secular temples. Libraries, concert halls, museums, and government buildings took pride of place from churches. The myth of the modern city was a “machine, ordered and rationalized” (203).

The new Paris of public space in the service of commerce and empire was as radical a structural change as the revolution of 1789. The Place de la Concorde, site of thousands of public executions in the name of a Republic of Virtue, became a grand traffic exchange, facilitating the mobility of Parisians as efficiently as a stock exchange. Railroad stations became the face of the city. Paris, like Beethoven, is overpowering, a loud, brazen assault on the senses that achieves a specific kind of harmony through conscious design. It prettifies revolution, ennobles change, and gives disruption credibility.

There is no better way to see the extent to which the facades of Paris were a distinctly nineteenth-century achievement than to look at Amsterdam. Once one of the great cities of Europe, the Dutch city had long since faded from prominence as a major marketplace. “Stagnation has set in, it is sleeping country,” wrote the de Goncourt brothers of Paris during a visit to Amsterdam in 1861. “One enters a museum, and one meets the house or the canal exactly as one has seen it in a painting by Peter de Hoogh” (Mak, 192).

The capital of an empire built on commerce and freedom and little else, a city-state without a hinterland, an army, or even a consistently powerful prince, Amsterdam had peaked in the seventeenth century. Because its facades are from an earlier era, the city hides the structures of power even more effectively from twenty-first-century eyes than Paris or London. Full of energy, it has nevertheless a muted, confined quality dictated as much by the arrangement of space as anything else. Like a Dutch house, plain and unassuming externally and enormously rich and complex internally, Amsterdam contradicts itself. In the canvasses of Johannes Vermeer (of Delft), women are not ostentatiously defiant or overtly sexual (like Olympia). Rather, they are caught in the middle of motion, energy not fully released, autonomy tamped down by the details of polite domesticity. Choice abounds in Vermeer, but not liberation.

In the 1800s, Amsterdam, once the center of global exchange, precocious beyond any other city in this regard, was the antithesis of Paris. “[O]ther European capitals competed with one another in building substantial urban palaces, tearing down old parts of the city and transforming them into imposing boulevards, and creating new streets and whole new districts of a hitherto unknown theatricality,” writes Geert Mak in his biography of the city (200). Only the Reichsmuseum and the Centraal Station offer hints of what might have occurred had Amsterdam flourished in the nineteenth century. Because it was a seventeenth-century city, “the culture that emerged . . . was one in which possessions were held to be more important than honour and where money usually counted for more than fashion, morality, social origin, and prestige.” It become a “character trait,” this “lack of pride,” this “unspoken ban on displaying high spirits” (5).

Taken together, Paris and Amsterdam throw into bold relief the radical nature of the nineteenth-century city. Like Olympia, nineteenth-century Paris is a representation of populist defiance and bourgeois affluence emerging inexorably toward freedom but a carefully constructed architecture of desire created and maintained by state power. In a larger sense, Rembrandt and Manet, the Dam and the Place de la Concorde, are more than variations on the themes of mobility and exchange; they express the different ways in which human beings experience and organize the structures of economic power culturally.

Why should historians of North America care about Paris and Amsterdam? Because when we consider other places on their own terms, we move beyond the value of straightforward comparison to locate the development of American cities within larger patterns of human development. To do so is neither to deny the importance of national history nor to delineate the contours of American exceptionalism. It is simply to think of nineteenth-century American cities–their spiraling demographic growth; their remarkable diversity in race, religion, and ethnicity; their incredible range of wealth and comfort; their endless disputes over development and infrastructure; the unceasing conflicts between markets and governments–as variations on a global theme. Place matters. But it should not prevent us from exploring American cities as something more complicated than configurations of a unique obsession with capitalism, immigration, and class.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the leaders of Cleveland, Ohio, barely a century old, stagnant until the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, overflowing with immigrants from all over Europe and the Americas, cursed with pollution and poverty and other consequences of the industrial order that sustained it, tried to revive their city with monuments, museums, halls, government centers, and libraries. Their ultimate model was Paris, a city revised in the 1800s to embody a new world. We could do worse than consider Paris occasionally ourselves, if only to visit Olympia in the Musee d’Orsay and contemplate how effectively a gaze of casual defiance can mask the structures of power.

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

Andrew R. L. Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is the author of Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus, 2002) and co-editor, with Susan E. Gray, of The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington, 2001).

Since the sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1961 critique of the “total institution,” scholars have tended to see insane asylums and many other sorts of institutions that developed in the nineteenth century as disciplinary institutions. Michel Foucault’s analysis of the historical emergence of professional psychology and medicine helped to further formalize an instinctive (and well-founded) distrust of institutions, which was perhaps particular to students who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, into a wide-ranging account of the complex ways in which forms of knowledge operate as means of social control. To inhabit a prison or an asylum or a clinic was to become a “subject” of power: to internalize particular norms of rationality and standards of deviance as the very terms of how we know ourselves and to take over from police, doctors, and judges the job of supervising, evaluating, and punishing one’s own conduct. Given the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences and humanities over the past thirty years, which emphasized the symbolic coherence of how people live in a particular time and place, “culture” itself has often appeared in recent academic debates as a sort of totalizing institution.

Through a series of case studies related to the nineteenth-century asylum, Benjamin Reiss’s fascinating Theaters of Madness explores the institutional history and meaning of culture: at once “the aggressive reshaping of patients’ cultural lives that secured the authority of those in power,” recourse to cultural knowledge by inmates navigating their institutional lives, and “the representation of the asylum” by outsiders (17). The first three chapters explore literary life inside the asylum, demonstrating some of the ways in which practices of reading, writing, and performing entered into the meaning and experience of mental health for patients and doctors alike. Patients at the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica published a literary journal, the Opal, for which they composed anonymous sketches, dialogues, criticism, poetry, and social commentary that emulated the genteel miscellany of the Knickerbocker. They attended performances of visiting minstrel troops and performed their own “Ethiopian Extravaganzas” in blackface, leaving a stream of writings and criticism in which the social categories of blackness and mental alienation came to resemble each other. Physicians filled pages of the first journal devoted to mental illness, The American Journal of Insanity, with case studies of Shakespearean characters to demonstrate how the Bard’s truths about human nature anticipated the new “science of mind” that psychiatry was “purporting to turn into its field of expertise” (91).

In interpreting these extraordinary materials, Reiss invites us to think in fresh ways both about nineteenth-century social reform and its relation to American literary and intellectual history. In the second half of his book, Reiss interprets the meaning and experience of mental illness beyond the asylum walls. In a particularly moving chapter, Reiss explores the case of Jones Very, who soon after hearing Emerson’s 1838 Divinity School Address was committed to McLean Hospital. Now known mainly as a religious poet, Very had come to see himself as the second coming of Christ and confronted the Transcendentalist circle with an acutely personal example of the limits of self-reliance. After all, when does writing upon the doorposts “whim,” as Emerson put it, become a symptom of madness rather than an assertion of moral autonomy? For Reiss, Very’s travails become an opportunity to see the “shared ground of American romanticism and psychiatry, both of which saw themselves as fortifying the self against the threats of modernization and social atomization” (19). Another chapter uses a story by Poe to think capaciously about blind spots of liberalism, reaching back to the origins of the asylum movement in the French Revolution while also looking forward to Peter Weiss’s 1964 play Marat/Sade. Chapter 6 considers the emergence of captivity narratives in relation to gender roles, focusing on how Elizabeth Packard’s exposé of her forced confinement shaped feminist protest against the asylum.

The larger lessons that Reiss draws from his various case studies are ambiguous. Seeking to avoid the abstract master plots about ideology and social control that have dominated scholarly accounts of the asylum, Reiss treats the subjects of his case studies with subtlety and complexity, “as individuals caught up in a system that would erase their particularity in order to return them—paradoxically—to a society that valued individual liberties above all” (17). But so too, Reiss seems finally to view the problem of individual “particularity” within a familiar account of social power. “Packaging the worldview of the elites for an as yet-unreformed population,” asylums “adopted the role of a prefecture in a sort of neocolonial cultural warfare” (43). Within the asylum, then, patients “were objects, rather than agents, of their own discourse; they were constructed by what they wrote, rather than the other way around” (49).

All scholars of nineteenth-century America confront this challenge of “particularity”—of interpreting the meaning and status of individuality as it came to be shaped by increasingly complex norms and institutions. During our more recent cultural warfare since the 1960s, most scholars have sought to liberate individuals from the psychic and social damage of conformity, identifying freedom with social difference: opening up the literary canon to previously unheard voices, telling new social histories from the bottom up, understanding the diversity of cultural identities. In the nineteenth century, however, the fight for freedom moved in the reverse direction, towards progressive accounts of both “character” and “culture”: to be civilized or sane was to internalize and practice a normative script for autonomy, to become “objects” in the reforms of private and public life. As Reiss observes, the asylum imparted “bourgeois norms of behavior,” and was “an institution devoted to the purification and rationalization of culture” (8). But like the common school, temperance societies, and the lyceum before the Civil War or public libraries, museums, and parks established later in the nineteenth century, asylums were agencies of reform, advancing social progress through the cultivation of moral virtues and rational capacities deemed requisite to self-government in liberal democracy.

So what then can the history of the asylum tell us about meanings and forms of liberal culture? If the literary life of the asylum offered a “rational, polite, elevating model of culture that came from the top down” (7), as Reiss puts it, these literary practices were not particular to the asylum. Indeed, throughout the mid-nineteenth century, once-elite forms of literary leisure were popularized for an expanding middle class, not only in the innumerable literary and library societies, debate clubs and reform associations, lyceums and popular lectures that sprang up in towns and cities across the antebellum United States, but also in the informal habits and networks of sociability shared by friends, family, and neighbors. It was one of the historic innovations of political liberalism in Great Britain and the United States to institutionalize these practices in the interest of expanding philanthropic and governmental commitments to mass education, public health, social welfare, and civic life. Where asylums had essentially been for warehousing the insane, they became institutions devoted to “moral treatment,” offering patients and their families the possibility that an ordered environment of intellectual and recreational activities might be conducive to a more “normal” life.

Engaging and thoughtful, Theaters of Madness captures the “texture of a time unlike our own” when “the treatment of mental illness was central to national debates about democracy, freedom, and modernity” (2). As treatments for insanity turned away from moral treatment towards medicine, mental health ceased to occupy debates about public welfare. We might also mourn the loss of public commitments to culture made in the nineteenth century—loss of the liberal faith, perhaps, in human perfectibility and the progressive evolution of norms and institutions that can realize freedom as a democratic practice and not simply a right. Our drugs of choice these days tend not to be reading and writing and conversation, after all, but rather alcohol or television or (for those with access to them) antidepressants, treatment spas, and recovery holidays—palliatives and placebos for the ailing souls of modernity.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Thomas Augst is associate professor of English at New York University. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003) and the coeditor, with Kenneth Carpenter, of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (2007). He is currently writing a book about the literature and culture of temperance reform.

James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 419 pp., cloth $55.00, paper $22.50. Review by Jennifer M. Spear The ricos [rich] have peons or slaves, just as they have in the South, except they are Indians

—Samuel Yost, U.S. agent to the Navajos, Zuñis, and Hopis, letter to the editor, Sante Fe Weekly Gazette, September 9, 1858

In the spring of 1874 on the banks of the Rio Chama northwest of Santa Fe, a band of Weeminuche Utes encountered a group of New Mexicans seeking a place to settle. But in the fluid space of the borderlands, connections between these groups were far more complicated than calling them “Utes” and “New Mexicans” would indicate. Among the New Mexicans were a Ute raised in captivity by New Mexicans and a New Mexican raised in captivity among the Utes until his family were able to ransom him. Cultural familiarity, if not in this case ties of kinship, connected these Utes and New Mexicans, enabling the latter to establish themselves peacefully in Ute territory. Uncovering the histories of captives like these, of their movements among diverse communities of indigenous and Euro-American inhabitants of the borderlands, James F. Brooks demonstrates how, as slaves and kin, people and capital, whether exchanged in violence or in marriage, borderlands peoples were bound together by captivity for more than three hundred years.

Taking a regional approach, Brooks reveals complex and multifaceted stories of captivity and violence, of fictive and biological ties across ethnic and “tribal” boundaries. As the meeting on the banks of the Chama illustrates, this is not a story of Europeans against Indians or even a Spanish-Pueblo alliance against what contemporary Spaniards called indios bárbaros(barbarous Indians). Working against historical interpretations that, in order to clarify the story, categorize the actors into simplistic groups, Brooks reminds us that it was precisely during these moments of contact and colonization that national and tribal identities such as New Mexican, Comanche, and Navajo came into being.

In order to make some sense of these stories, Brooks divides the Spanish borderlands into three ecologically defined borderlands: “the buffalo plains, the canyons and mesas west of the Río Grande, and the mountain ranges that linked them” (164). In each, Indians and Euro-Americans alike were bound together by similar economies—a trading-and-raiding economy on the plains, pastoral sheep-raising in the canyons and mesas—and by the capture and exchange of people that defined the political economy of the entire borderlands region. He then traces out how each of these borderlands was first touched by colonialism, then slowly incorporated into a capitalist economy, and finally subjected to U.S. pacification policy, carefully demonstrating how each of these processes could play out in a myriad of ways both between and within various groups. Take horses, for instance. For Kiowas, the acquisition of horses bolstered their system of social rank as horses improved a noble family’s ability “to give generously of its wealth in horses, to mount noteworthy military efforts in pursuit of horses, honor, and revenge, and to maintain a handsome and dignified demeanor in daily affairs” (171). Comanches, on the other hand, retained their commitment to “political egalitarianism and personal autonomy” (174) even as horse ownership was less equally distributed among them than among Kiowas. Or sheep, for another example. As with Comanches and horses, some Navajos acquired far more sheep than others, a development that led to the emergence of a nascent class system and even to distinct band identities.

Alongside horses and sheep, captives moved throughout the borderlands economies. Captivity served many purposes. It provided sacrificial subjects for the Morning Star ceremony of the Skiri Pawnees and replaced kin lost to conflict or disease. It generated workers who processed skins for market, herded sheep, and worked as domestics primarily in New Mexican households. It produced hostages who could be ransomed for peace or profit and, perhaps most importantly, women who could become wives. Captivity also had many different meanings. For some, captivity was only a temporary situation, while for others, it fully integrated them into a new kinship network or household, whether through marriage, adoption, or compadrazgo (Catholic godparenthood). For many, perhaps most, it initiated a period, if not a lifetime, of servitude or slavery. These experiences of captivity were not mutually exclusive. Many of those held captive by New Mexicans were baptized and had godparents who were putatively their owners.

As practiced in the borderlands, slavery was not a condition that was clearly distinguished from other categories of dependency or semiservility, nor was it based on a “racial dichotomization” (364) between slaves and their owners, nor was it one that precluded “mobility between statuses” (244). Similar in form to slavery in many African societies, slaves in the borderlands could be fully incorporated into their owners’ families, mediating some of slavery’s more exploitative features and making for a much more fluid system in which one’s status could be changed. As Brooks reminds us in his depiction of borderlands slavery and his comparative references to African slavery, Southern chattel slavery was the exception, not the rule. Ironically, of all the borderlands systems of bondage, slavery among the pastoral Navajo developed into an institution that was the most like chattel slavery. While New Mexican slaveholding was widely dispersed with many families owning a slave or two, among Navajos a slaveholding class emerged, with some headmen owning thirty or more slaves. In addition, over the first half of the nineteenth century, some Navajo began to distinguish more sharply between themselves and their slaves, ceasing to consider them eligible for adoption or other forms of incorporation.

Captives and Cousins is a thoroughly researched and richly detailed history of the multivalent consequences of the spread of colonialism and capitalism in North America. Illustrating the complicated and at times confusing nature of contact and captivity in the borderlands, Brooks brings Richard White’s microhistorical methodology to the southwest while heeding Ira Berlin’s call to complicate our understanding of slavery in North America. In doing so, Captives and Cousins has succeeded in bringing together the two most vibrant subfields of early American history: cultural contact and slavery.

Further Reading: See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). For a more panoramic view of the southwest borderlands, see Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (Norman, Okla., 1996).  

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

Jennifer M. Spear is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. Fascinated by the contexts and consequences of cultural encounters in early America, she is currently writing a history of racial formation in colonial New Orleans.

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

France in America—La France en Amérique

Library of Congress and Bibliothèque nationale de France
http://memory.loc.gov/intldl/fiahtml/fiahome.html

The result of a joint venture between the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this fully bilingual digital project documents the role of France in American history from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. The site is part of the Library of Congress’s “Global Gateway” initiative in collaborative digital ventures with other national archives, currently involving libraries in Spain, Brazil, Russia, and the Netherlands.

“France in America” has two phases. The first, now online, covers the history of New France, French involvement in exploring and colonizing a North American empire, and the French role in events “which indelibly marked the history of the United States: the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Louisiana Purchase.” A second phase, to be developed over the course of 2006, will focus on nineteenth-century relations between the two countries, with an emphasis on “trade, immigration, scientific exchange, and literature and the arts.”

The material is organized into several themes, such as “Exploration and Knowledge,” “Imperial Struggles,” and “Franco-Indian Alliances.” Each section has links to illustrative documents, including complete books and prints. Clicking on “Alliances,” for example, and going to the subheading of “To ‘Civilize’ and Convert” reveals a contextual introduction and two primary sources, including Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune’s 342-page Relation for the year 1634. Documents relating to mixed-race unions, or métissage, appear under the “Cohabitation” heading. There is also a chronological table, neatly organized into events in France and events in America, the latter of which are further subdivided according to explorations, colonization, and conflicts and diplomacy.

Explanatory materials and helpful links for online research abound. There are descriptive maps—easily understandable maps, like those found in textbooks, which delineate political boundaries and main Indian groups—as well as contemporary maps generated by explorers and cartographers. Under “About the site,” visitors can find recommendations for further reading as well as a valuable list of links. These include one to a fully searchable English translation of the multivolume Jesuit Relations.

The project directors also recommend two other important sites “dedicated to the shared history of France and North America”: the French Ministry of Culture’s “La Louisiane française, 1682-1803” and a collaborative French-Canadian site, “Nouvelle-France, horizons nouveau”. Both are visually appealing, with attractive flash elements involving maps, abundant primary-source materials, and images; the French-Canadian site is bilingual.

A visitor to “France in America” will be impressed by a key aspect of the institutional partnership: access to huge collections. In the introductory information regarding the French companion site, “La France en Amérique”, the reader learns that Gallica, the Website of the Bibliothèque nationale, has “76 thousand digitized texts and 80 thousand images to date.”

Clearly, the bicentennial commemorations of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark voyage have contributed to renewed interest in the history of Franco-American relations. For researchers, students, and anyone else inclined to pursue that interest, “France in America” is an excellent place to start.

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

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

http://www.virtualjamestown.org/

“Virtual Jamestown” offers visitors the opportunity to delve into the history of English exploration and colonizing efforts in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the spotlight on Jamestown as the four hundredth anniversary of its settlement nears, sites such as this one can serve a useful function as online archives and sources of curriculum materials for teachers. Although the site is far from exhaustive in its coverage, it contains images and documents that can be usefully mined.

The images on “Virtual Jamestown” are wide ranging and include a collection of twenty-two John White drawings. These watercolors—among seventy inspired by scenes and individuals White, an artist and cartographer, observed during his 1585 voyage to America and subsequent thirteen-month stay in Roanoke—are paired with engravings produced by Theodor De Bry. Based on White’s original works, these engravings were created for inclusion in mathematician Thomas Hariot’s 1590 account of the voyage he and White took to America.

A collection of artifacts from seventeenth-century Virginia provides additional visual and material texture. Provided by Jamestown Rediscovery, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the online archive of objects includes such unusual items as a silver ear picker, designed to resemble a “sea rhinoceros” or dolphin. Featuring an ear scooper at one end and a tool for tooth and nail cleaning at the other, this item, at once utilitarian and ornate, was likely displayed on a chain or girdle and worn decoratively by its owner. There is also a seventeenth-century chamber pot, a Spanish olive jar (named so for its shape rather than its likely contents), Indian projectile points, and the skeleton of a man shot through the knee, whose identity and race continue to be the subject of debate.

Original maps offer visitors insight into seventeenth-century representations of the area, and a zoom function enables an up-close examination of John Smith’s 1608 map of Virginia. On the interactive Jamestown page are two maps that generate displays of Smith’s explorations of the region and a virtual tour of the fort. The “Patterns of Settlement” map allows visitors to explore the shifting populations and sites of indigenous and colonial residents of the region in 1607, 1619, 1624, and 1634. More detail about who constituted that colonial population is available in the census records, such as the 1608 supply list—which provides names and occupations of new arrivals, like perfumer Robert Alberton—and the 1624-5 muster records, which can be searched to generate demographic data about households.

One valuable database on the site contains demographic information from the contracts of over fifteen thousand indentured servants from three different seventeenth-century registers and one eighteenth-century register. The contracts can be searched by name, hometown, destination, and occupation. For example, using Sheffield as the servant’s place of origin generates one record, that of Benjamin Hoyland, a tallow chandler headed for four years of service in Jamaica. Using female and Virginia as qualifiers produces a list of over one thousand women’s names, including Mary Giles, a spinster from Salwarpe, Worchestershire, whose agent, a surgeon named Richard Allen, arranged for her to serve for five years in Virginia in exchange for her passage in 1654. Only two contracts, both for men, are reproduced.

The “Virtual Jamestown” project received a 1999 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its development, with additional support from several state entities. A collaborative project of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia Center for Digital History, “Virtual Jamestown” has apparently undergone limited development since 2000. There are numerous references on the site to items still under construction but no apparent recent updates to indicate when these will be up and running. Nonetheless, the site offers engaging and interesting materials. For those who wish to identify additional databases and teaching resources relevant to Virginia’s history, consult Virginia 400: Your Online Guide to 400 Years of Virginia History, 1607-2007, a clearinghouse site with a good annotated list of helpful Websites, produced by the Center for History and New Media (see Common-place Web Library review, vol.6, no.4, July 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

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

The Massachusetts Historical Society
http://www.masshist.org/

Since its founding in 1791, the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) has been devoted to the collection and preservation of documents pertaining to American history. With vast manuscript holdings, the MHS is an important research center, as well as home to the Adams Papers project and a variety of other editorial and publication ventures. Its Website is a model for other historical societies.

Attractive and straightforward design, clear navigation, and a substantial online archive make the MHS Website a useful starting point for members of the public, teachers, and scholars alike. Among the many “Online” offerings is the “Object of the Month,” which draws inspiration from the goal of founder Jeremy Belknap to develop an American history cabinet of curiosities. The background information on this section notes that in response to his appeal for contributions, Belknap received ostrich eggs and a fish hook made from a bone of Captain Cook. He would undoubtedly be pleased to see his idea carried on with, for example, a glass bottle containing tea leaves collected on the shore of Dorchester Neck the morning after the Boston Tea Party.

Most impressive of the valuable “Online” exhibitions is “The Adams Family Papers: an Electronic Archive.” These selections from the Adams Papers—the most important collection at the MHS, with over a quarter million documents—contain fully searchable correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, with over one thousand letters spanning the period 1762-1801. Viewers can also read the over fourteen thousand pages of John Quincy Adams’s fifty-one-volume diary and the three-part autobiography his father wrote.

Another highlight of the “Online” section is “African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” which presents 117 documents from the MHS holdings addressing slavery in Massachusetts from the late seventeenth century through its abolition under the state constitution in the 1780s. Included are facsimile images and transcripts of items such as the Laws of the African Society, Instituted at Boston, Anno Domini 1796, a pamphlet produced by African Americans in Boston who created a mutual aid organization; the 1728-1733 account book of Hugh Hall, a Boston merchant engaged in the slave trade; and, in a section on Phillis Wheatley, images of her writing desk, poems, and letters by and about her.

The “Education” section leads visitors to several items of interest, including resources for teachers and students, such as a fifth-grade lesson on the American Revolution through the eyes of Abigail Adams; a collection of accounts, maps, and images pertaining to the Battle of Bunker Hill; and a group of resources on John Quincy Adams, entitled “One President’s Adolescence,” which features documents, family biographies, and ideas for classroom use and independent study. Teachers can also use the site to find out about opportunities for professional development seminars and fellowships. As a preview of coming attractions, the “Education” section highlights “The Coming of the American Revolution (1764-1776): A Web-Based Timeline/Documentary History,” a work-in-progress digital history project, which promises to become a valuable addition to K-12 curriculum materials available on the Web.

Drawing on its rich holdings, the MHS has created one of the finest history Websites around. It is certainly one worth bookmarking for repeated visits.

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