June 30, 2008

June 22, 2008

Popular Constitutionalism Illustrated

 

Readers of my book, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, may be interested in a much more lavishly illustrated rendition of some of the book’s points that has been just been published in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s magazine Pennsylvania Legacies. The article, “Popular Constitutionalism in Philadelphia: How Freedom of Expression Was Secured by Two Fearless Newspaper Editors,” is part of a special issue on “Defining Civil Liberties in Pennsylvania.” Naturally, the two editors are Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Duane of the Philadelphia Aurora. It looks like you have to join HSP to actually read the whole thing, but there is a preview available here.

(I love the cartoon of a lightning-swathed printing press that the HSP has posted with the preview, which I am borrowing for this post. It looks like it should be the chest emblem of a printing-themed superhero, if there ever were to be such a thing.)

As usual with small assignments covering old ground, I tortured myself to put something new into this piece, only to have most of the extra material not make it into the final version. In this case, I tried to go a little further than the book did with the idea of popular constitutionalism — constitutional interpretation as worked out and enforced in the arena of popular politics rather than the courts — as the driving force behind what Americans came to see their constitutional rights. In the case at hand, the expansive American version of press freedom was worked out in the political battle of 1798-1801. Constitutional law and elite political thought only caught up many decades later. At any rate, I have posted a “director’s cut” of the article here. (Having an outlet for my long versions was a good chunk for my motivation for starting a website in the first place.) It is still unfootnoted and pitched to a relatively popular audience, like the Pennsylvania Legacies version, but it will be a starting point for an argument I hope to be making at greater length and with more scholarly rigor in the future.

 

June 16, 2008

June 10, 2008

June 7, 2008

June 4, 2008

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 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.

Technology and democratic intent

While the contested presidential election of 2000 famously offered Americans a five-week lesson in civics, it also provided a crash course in the metaphysics of representation. Political representation was at issue—one “man,” one vote—but a second form of representation proved at least as vexing: How do the television networks represent outcomes on election night? How did Palm Beach County’s “butterfly” ballot represent electoral choices to voters? And exactly what sort of punch mark or dimple in a ballot should represent a voter’s intent? The political importance (in a pretty narrow, partisan sense) of questions like these was obvious throughout the Bush/Gore controversy; however, such questions address representation not as a function of politics but as a function of media. American voters count on media (conventionally “the Media”) to represent the outcome of elections accurately and quickly. They similarly count on the media of voting—the materials of ballots and voting machines—to aid them in representing their individual electoral choices to the public at large. Though ballots and voting machines are less familiarly “media” than televisions, newspapers, or the Internet, their mediating role is at least as important to the democratic process.

As it turned out, the electoral controversy of November and December 2000 revealed a central tension that forever attends this second form of representation: Whether it means switching on the TV or stepping into a voting booth, media are deployed precisely because they are expected to efface themselves. The television and the punch-card ballot are supposed to answer questions about election returns, not to stir up thornier questions about televisions and ballots. Put another way, audiences expect to look through media, not at them. Yet in 2000 the American public was forced to reckon with the question of how the material properties of punch-card ballots and voting machines, far from effacing themselves, had helped to determine the outcome of the election.

The eight U.S. patents granted to John E. Ahmann in the 1980s together describe the kind of voting machine that greeted so many Floridians on Election Day 2000 (fig. 1). Voters using the VotoMatic type of punch-card machine step up to a voting booth, insert their ballot card into a frame, and then use a stylus to punch selections into the card. My Aunt Irene, who used to winter in Palm Beach County but who votes in Pennsylvania, jokingly disparaged her Florida neighbors for not voting “like normal people,” standing inside old lever-type voting machines as Pennsylvanians do. Unlike the lever machines with their Wizard of Oz-like curtains and internal tallying devices, the punch-card machines rely upon 1960s-era data processing technology to tally votes. Fully one in three Americans who voted in the 2000 election used punch-card machines, of which VotoMatic is the major brand. VotoMatic inventor John Ahmann is a former IBM engineer, who appeared after the 2000 election as a witness for the Bush campaign in Florida’s Leon County Circuit Court. Two of Ahmann’s voting-related patents are particularly noteworthy.

Ahmann’s 1981 patent on the “Punch Frame” for holding ballot cards is noteworthy in hindsight, given the closeness of the Florida election and the ensuing disputes over undercounts and recounts. Ahmann’s patent specifies that, “Precautions must be taken to insure that all of the chips punched from the card are expelled [from the device]…If chips are permitted to accumulate…this can interfere with the punching…Incompletely punched cards can cause serious errors to occur in data processing operations utilizing the cards.” This kind of precautionary statement is extremely rare in the text of any patent document, since patents are legal instruments that must claim novelty and usefulness, and thus must rhetorically vaunt the excellence of the specified invention over its predecessors. Ahmann and his patent lawyers were unusually cognizant of potential errors.

Ahmann’s patent on the “stylus” for punching ballot cards more typically presents his invention as a decisive improvement over existing technology (fig. 2). In earlier stylus devices there had been a tendency for the point to break off, Ahmann notes, “when improperly bent to one side with the tip portion” inserted into “a marking hole of the voting device.” Such mishandling of the stylus is cleverly made irrelevant by his new invention, because,

Embedded within the tapered portion 30 is an elongated tip member 32, which is adapted to be inserted…in order to perform the normal punch-out function…This tip member is made from a hard, durable material…An outer exposed portion of the tip member…has a smooth cylindrical portion 38 adjacent a short ribbed…section 40, and this outer end portion is preferably heat treated to increase hardness…Thus, in use, the ribbed end of the tip member will readily punch-out the precut area of a tabulating card and assure the removal of this punched out portion (or “chad”).

Presented in the notoriously dry and legalistic language of patenting, Ahmann’s stylus nonetheless accrues a certain salacious charge when described as a heat-hardened member with ribbed tip for insertion.

Though Ahmann’s stylus patent only cites four recent patents that his invention improved upon, the broadest features of his voting machine have a very long history. The first patented voting machine in America, a device its inventor Robert Monaghan dubbed “the vox populi” in 1848, worked through the action of tiny knives or “lancets” that perforated paper (fig. 3). This mechanized voice of the people relied upon perforated ballot sheets, its inventor claimed, because such perforations were “in the present connection a simple and at the same time indelible mode of recording the vote.” Ahmann’s stylus refigured Monaghan’s “lancets” as well as innumerable other means of perforating or punching paper. The varied terms by which such means were described hint at how many different ways Ahmann could have described his stylus. For instance, John McTammany, an especially prolific inventor of voting machines, in 1895 used what he termed a “hand punch,” which, like Ahmann’s stylus, came tethered to his voting machine (fig. 4). In 1897 the Supreme Court of Rhode Island decided in the context of McTammany’s machines that a puncture in a piece of paper is as much a record of voter intent as “a pencil mark thereon.” So performed absence got legally constructed as semiotic presence: ever since then, a hole is a readable mark, because both are intentional and both are lasting.

Even apart from the peculiarly (that is, the unnecessarily) gendered character of the ghostly, phallic voter whose fingers appear in the drawing of Ahmann’s stylus, what Ahmann’s patents help to suggest is that voting machines themselves represent a voter prone to error (or to scandalous bending of his inserted tip member) who can be redeemed by the right machine. Built into the machinery, in other words, are at least 1) an imperfect and abstract voter of dubious intent and 2) a dispersed and bureaucratized system prone to inefficiencies. By extension and precisely in proportion to these features are built in 3) an ideological commitment to the technological fix and 4) not a little anxiety that “normal” voting—the diction is Ahmann’s as well as my Aunt Irene’s—may be an elusive goal. Machines, by this light, are representations. They are not only representations, of course, but they are meaningful in part according to the order of things they represent.

I am making a strong claim. As critic Langdon Winner puts it, “There is no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities.” And yet to identify voting machines as themselves representations, in addition to conduits for representation, is to suggest that they can possess an inherent politics, that “they can embody specific forms of power and authority.” During the Florida controversy, James Baker III flatly denied such a possibility when he remarked regarding machine recounts, “Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats, and therefore can be neither consciously nor unconsciously biased.” To be sure, machines are neither registered Republicans nor registered Democrats, but by representing abstract voters, voting media are biased toward their inventors’ and adopters’ socially derived sense of what normal voting is. And normality in voting, like normality in so much else, is culturally and historically contingent: remember all of the years when it would not have seemed normal for Aunt Irene (or me) to vote at all. Put another way, like the layout of a newspaper and the layout of a ballot, the layout of a voting machine harbors implications about meaning, about what is and what is important, and therefore harbors politics in its broadest sense. The changing design of voting machines (where “design” means a literal organization of parts as well as a desire) offers one index of varying relationships between the American public and its constitutive private voting subjects.

Americans like Ahmann have dedicated themselves with amazing ingenuity to the invention of various voting machines. I made a cursory search and found more than four hundred U.S. patents that have been granted on the subject. Each of these inventions in effect expresses a theory of democracy, of what a voter is, and each theory is framed by the assumption that technology is appropriate to voting. Such a framing assumption forms the lifeblood of today’s technocratic society (where technology is appropriate to everything) but seems only to have emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century, when inventors like Monaghan made the first scattered efforts to connect voting to machines. Before and even while these men invented, the phrase “voting machine” was an oxymoron. Men voted, not machines. “It has been asserted,” the German-American statesman Carl Schurz wrote in his report on conditions in the South immediately after the Civil War, “that the Negro would be but a voting machine in the hand of his employer.” Likewise, a few years after the contested Hayes/Tilden election of 1876, The Atlantic Monthly looked ahead to reform, calling the electoral college system “out of gear” with contemporary politics and noting with contempt that “the electors are mere voting machines.” Comments like these suggest at once how paradoxical the addition of machinery to voting once seemed and just how deeply the pejorative semantics of “machine politics” run. Machinery was the categorical opposite of democracy, at least until Monaghan, McTammany, and the others got busy in their attempts to derail political machinery in its control of voters by providing those voters with literal machines.

Almost all of the earliest voting machines had to do, like Monaghan’s lancet device, with “taking the yeas and nays” or “ayes and noes” in legislative assemblies. Patents on these devices often picture an empty legislative chamber of some kind, making legislative space an arena of moving parts in which members of the legislature gather to serve as operators internal to the system. These inventions were less absolute theories of democracy than theories of legislative process. Particularly after the Civil War, when the government grew much more complicated in scope, members of Congress increasingly voted according to cue (by watching how others voted), were tutored by partisan social relations amid increasing party discipline, or were instructed by lobbyists. In their patents, inventors thus billed their devices as a way to bring honesty into politics. 

Among the most innovative legislative machines were gravity-activated devices, relying upon balls as ballots (thus acting on the derivation of the word ballot), which were dropped into pipes that went under the floorboards or dropped into automatic sorting and counting boxes. Some were mechanical devices, using what one inventor classed vaguely as “cords, wires, levers, pulleys, etc.,” to cast and display votes. Many more were electrical, designed as legislative telegraphs, one inventor explained, so that members could send in their votes from around the chamber. In their most ideal form, seldom realized, these voting machines did four things: they “took” votes, displayed them, counted them, and produced a lasting, tangible record of some sort. This quartet of functions possessed many different associations for the authors of patents. Different devices had parts that worked “like the keys of a piano,” like “bells [for service that] are hung in private houses or hotels,” like “hotel registers,” as well as like telegraphs, adding machines, and electrotype or other printing technology. The legislative chamber was like a fancy hotel, perhaps, at which visiting members conducted the business of state, or it was a nexus of communications, where far-flung members transmitted the will of their further-flung constituents. Thomas A. Edison’s first patent was for an electrographic vote-recorder of this sort. Invented in 1869, his device counted the number of votes “yea” and “nay” and then printed the names of voting members for and against in two different columns (fig. 5). The legislators themselves applied the current, which printed their names by ionizing chemically treated paper.

Few if any of these nineteenth-century voting machines, including Edison’s, appear to have been successfully used. But debate over the use of voting machines in Congress continued for decades. In 1914 members of the House minority observed a damning contradiction between voting and machinery: “Congress is and should be a deliberative body,” one Representative explained, “and electricity and mechanism are no more essential in grinding out legislation than a slot machine would be useful in dispensing justice.” Proponents for the devices meanwhile noted that machine voting was quick and (by that odd and yet widely accepted calculus) would therefore save money. Elements of the proposed system would be accurate, like adding machines, and unobtrusive, like drop-head sewing machines, which disappeared into the tables when not in use.

Nineteenth-century American inventors proposed only a handful of voting machines for balloting in general elections. But by the end of the century a new generation of voting machines was beginning to appear. These machines were aligned with broader reforms in the same period, which directly addressed what had been the great weakness of prior voting systems. In place of easily identified color-coded party tickets, voting reforms and the machines that followed them introduced ballots prepared by municipalities rather than parties (fig. 6). Every voter got a copy of the same printed ballot and could exercise his franchise without the intrusion or surveillance of party agents. Massachusetts adopted these new ballots in 1889, and the other states followed suit over the next two decades. It was a justly celebrated reform, though results were uneven. Voting methods continued to vary from state to state and even from county to county (as they still do). Voters in California and Louisiana marked their ballots with a rubber stamp, in West Virginia voters used ink, and in New York it had to be a black lead pencil. In many states voters made a mark to the right of the name of the candidate they wished to vote for, but in other states voters made a mark to the left. In Wisconsin marks had to be under the middle of the names. Other much more important variations remained in provisions for illiterate voters (e.g., different party symbols or various color coding methods), the layout of rows and columns (e.g., whether by party or office), and the ease or difficulty with which voters were permitted to vote a “straight” ticket or to “scratch” candidates and “split” tickets.

The most singular advantage of the new generation of voting machines was their ability “to guard against the failure of ‘the human element,’” particularly against the “enormous loss of votes resulting from defective, spoiled, and doubtful ballots” that were improperly marked by voters. One study had found, for example, that “more than 3000 persons in Maryland who qualify as voters regularly disenfranchise themselves in every election by incorrect markings,” most of them presumably accidental, but also “including drawings and comments on the city government.” Inventors and other reform-minded citizens agreed with politicians who amended the applicable voting laws: “The voting machine must prevent the voter from doing what he ought not to do.” Gone and forgotten was any sense that voters had to be protected from corrupt party hacks. Voters in the new century would need to be protected from themselves.

Voting machines and the patents that describe them render the voter an abstract, impersonal, or hypothetical citizen, available to drop, pull, press, stamp, puncture, or insert as directed. And the more complicated the gizmo, the more it risks derailing the process. A related worry about complicated ballots was evident in the last minute instructions that one election supervisor tried to relay to the polls in Palm Beach County in November 2000: “Please remind all voters,” Theresa LePore wrote, “that they are to vote for one (1) presidential candidate and that they are to punch the hole next to the arrow next to the number next to the candidate they wish to vote for.” The varied media of voting conspire to separate voters from candidates along a chain of signifiers—a name, a number, an arrow, a hole—that can be extended to include all manner of machinery—a pencil, a stylus, a lever, a knob, gear work, housing, wiring, hardware, software, and so on. The chain that separates voters and candidates—and that mediates between voters and the collective will or the vox populi—is an ongoing construction of law, since judicial decrees and state statutes, for instance, make a hole into a mark. But it is also an ad hoc construction, cobbled in part from the practices of local voting commissions, who decide when a dimple is like a hole that is a mark. And it is cobbled as well from the material conditions of voting, from the stuff that voters experience as part of their signifying acts.

If voting machines have rendered voters into an abstraction by generalizing the functions and—particularly—the pitfalls inherent in casting, collecting, and counting votes, they have also variously mystified the experience of voting, complicating it with machinery that few voters understand but all must operate. Running parallel to increasing technological complexity has been an attendant mystification of differently dematerialized ballots. Gone is the certainty of one “man,” one ballot, if in so many cases voters use machines that produce only a mechanical or an electrical tally, not a material record of individual voting acts. Confronted by more and more complicated things at the polling place, in other words, the voter loses any clear perspective on votes as things. Though punch-card voting and optical-scan or “bubble” ballots still offer an individual piece of paper to every voter, the old lever machines and the new direct recording electronic devices (DREs) do not. In one sense, these devices make literal the analogies to adding machines and cash registers that recur so often in the history of voting machines and that are notably reiterated in frequent identifications of DREs as versions of automatic teller machines (ATMs). The speculative equation of votes and money works, at least insofar as money has proved to be one thing (unlike population, for instance) that can be counted exactly, no matter how many millions are at stake. Nor is the equation of paper ballots and paper bills without weight, since both are particularly sacrosanct instances of representation, the individuated paper manifestations of voter choice and consumer confidence, those two sustaining abstractions of today’s liberal nation state.

Very few patented voting machines were ever built or used. Their inventors were truly theorists, theorizing in metal and other materials as they proposed and patented what they thought was a better democratic future, a better version of voting. Successive voting machines for the most part have harbored a reform, Mugwump, or Progressive ideology, with its generous helping of what might be termed technoblesse oblige: The right machine saves the voter from error and the state from confusion. In this sense, the built-in bias of voting machines is less politically partisan than it is culturally political, adapted to the contexts of “normal” voting in any historical moment. Machines represent the normal voter, and, if implemented, help that voter to represent her or his will.

It remains to note in conclusion that no theory remains unmoved by practice. Like all representations, voting machines are non-static; their meanings arise in part from their reception and use, not just from the authorial intentions of their patent-holding inventors and manufacturers. Thomas Edison may have meant one thing by his voting machine in 1869, for example, but today that same machine means something else. Likewise, John Ahmann’s invention represents a stylus-wielding, chad-punching voter. In retrospect, it also represents a voter who is a bit more likely to be African American than not, since those were the hands that held the stylus, according to a New York Times survey of Florida precincts and their equipment. James Baker III was correct; machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats, when they are invented by people like Ahmann or adopted by states like Florida. Only in use was the VotoMatic so emphatically a Republican machine, when its inventor testified for the Republicans in court and when its relatively high rate of residual votes or undercounts (combined with confusing ballot design in several counties) helped George W. Bush to win the 2000 election.

Further Reading:

Details of the Bush/Gore recount controversy, including comments by James Baker III and Theresa LePore may be found in 36 Days: The Complete Chronicle of the 2000 Presidential Election Crisis, by correspondents of the New York Times (New York, 2001). Langdon Winner asks, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in Daedalus 109 (Winter 1980): 121-136. Material on present-day voting machines is drawn from the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project’s report, “Residual Votes Attributable to Technology: An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment,” by Stephen Ansolabehere, et al., Version 2 (March 30, 2001). Material on voting machines of the past may be found in T. David Zukerman, The Voting Machine: Report on the History, Use and Advantages of Mechanical Means for Casting and Counting Ballots (New York, 1925) as well as the government’s database of patents. (For a full list of patents referred to in this essay, please contact the author.) Material on the history of ballots in the United States comes from Spencer D. Albright, The American Ballot (Washington, 1942); in American Ballot Laws, 1888-1910, prepared by Arthur C. Ludington, University of the State of New York Education Department Bulletin 488 (February 1, 1911); Philip Loring Allen, “The Multifarious Australian Ballot” North American Review 191 (1910): 602-611; and particularly Philip Loring Allen, “Ballot Laws and Their Workings,” Political Science Quarterly 21 (1906): 38-58. Carl Schurz’s comment on voting machines may be found in Message of the President of the United States…Accompanied by a Report of Carl Schurz on the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana (Washington, D.C., 1865). Helpful works on political process include Margaret Susan Thompson, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985) and David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869-1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). See also Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Lisa Gitelman is the author most recently of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006). During 2008-9 she is teaching history of technology at Harvard University.

Common-place asks its founding editors about their collaboratively written novel, set in Revolutionary-era Boston—Blindspot, a Novel, by a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise (2008)—and about relationships between history and fiction in general. For more on the novel, see its official site.

A lot in Blindspot draws on topics in your previous books—slavery, paper money, gender, and the politics of speech and print. But the 1760s seem to be a halfway point between your most recent projects. Was this “neutral ground”? How much research did you have to do—especially in areas that seem newer to you as historians, such as art history or the history of sexuality?

Kamensky: Blindspot takes place in a relatively tight time frame, from June to November of 1764. We chose that moment less as “neutral ground” in our own lives as historians than as a hinge between past worlds. Blindspot’s moment is a liminal one—not yet American, not happily colonial—and our characters find themselves caught up in rushing currents of change. Their economy is reeling from the depression following the Seven Years’ War. Their ways of thinking are unsettled—and enriched—by various streams of Enlightenment thought and homegrown radicalism. In other words, their world is poised between the early modern world of, say, 1620 and the more recognizably modern one of two centuries later, the approximate bookends of Jill’s and my scholarly work. Blindspot helped us think about that trajectory in new ways.

There was a lot of research involved in the writing. But for the most part, it wasn’t the sort that took us into journal literatures and monographs. Yes, the novel’s reader will find traces of what we’ve been up to in our scholarly lives: my own recent immersion in art history and Jill’s in Revolutionary-era social and political history. The novel owes big debts to what we’ve learned from the rich history of women, gender, and sexuality—the very fields in which both Jill and I started out, now decades ago.

But Blindspot is a different kind of enterprise than the important scholarship that theorizes the early American body. Much of our research involved a kind of imaginative transportation: trying to make those bodies real and sensory and three dimensional, in our own minds and on the page. We found ourselves asking a lot of what-was-it-like questions: what did it feel like, taste like, smell like? We had a breakthrough moment in a visit to the Pierce-Hichborn House, a modest, vernacular, brick home, built by artisans in the 1710s, which survives today because of its proximity to Paul Revere’s house. Pacing about those cramped rooms, experiencing the light, the press of the ceiling, the tight turn of the stairs; walking the narrow streets of the North End; sitting in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts among the Copley portraits and trying, in our minds’ eyes, to animate Copley’s sitters and their world—that was the most important new research we did for the novel. If this sounds more like attending a séance than taking a trip to the municipal archives, that’s about right.

Is the Revolutionary-era Boston in Blindspot an alternate universe, a possible past, or something in between? Would anything here have been impossible in 1760s Boston?

Kamensky: In most ways, Blindspot’s past is a probable past, even a known past. The narrative is interleaved with documents, from laws to newspaper editorials, many of which are lightly edited versions of the things themselves. Themes of masquerade and deception and self-invention suffuse the plot. These are eighteenth-century concerns, as historians from Steven C. Bullock to Al Young have demonstrated so vividly. The novel’s debate about the connection of slavery to Revolutionary liberty is, of course, Edmund Morgan’s famous paradox. It’s also very much History’s debate and Boston’s debate; our Samuel Bradstreet often speaks the words of James Otis Jr. The cosmopolitanism of the African genius Ignatius Alexander likewise pays homage to what Ira Berlin and others have taught us of the world of Atlantic creoles, and it borrows, more particularly, from the lives and letters of Francis Williams and Ignatius Sancho.

This is not to suggest that everything in Blindspot is true in the world outside its pages. Boston had a less fully elaborated club life than the novel creates. Our Red Hens might better fit Franklin’s Philadelphia or Alexander Hamilton’s Annapolis than post-Puritan Boston. There’s a big public art exhibition at the climax of the novel’s mystery. This is possible and necessary in Blindspot’s city of painters and patrons. In Boston proper, a shared, public visual culture came a generation later, in the early nineteenth century. Historian readers will also find one glaring—and deliberate—elision of time. In Blindspot, British regulars sail into the port of Boston and take over the Town House in 1764, four years sooner than actually happened. Blindspot’s work required us to compress the first and second phases of the imperial crisis. When we’re doing History’s work, we keep them separate.

Have you used novels in your history courses? Did writing the book give you new perspectives on the relationships between literary writing and other forms of historical evidence?

Kamensky: Jill and I have both used period fiction as an integral part of courses on early American history and culture. Charlotte Temple is the text I’ve assigned most often, and Fanny Easton’s voice—and plight—owes a great deal to Susanna Rowson’s woebegone Charlotte.

I’ve sometimes used contemporary novels set in the past as well, especially Brian Moore’s Black Robe, which is based quite closely on the Jesuit Relations. I ask students to read the seventeenth-century documents alongside the novelist’s version and to think about what Moore borrowed, what he changed, and why. I also teach a course on the Salem witch trials, where we look at several centuries of representations of 1692 in various genres and media. Arthur Miller’s Crucible is a key text in that class. Its concerns are purely contemporary, the zeitgeist of 1953 rather than that of 1692. But the voices are marvelous, an unparalleled example of a modern sensibility let loose on a foreign vernacular. Scholars of visual culture have been, of late, concerned with recovering the “period eye” of a given place and time. Miller translates what we might call the period ear. That was one of our goals for the novel: to communicate to a new set of readers something of the music of our work in the archives. Fiction may offer us different avenues—more palpable or visceral paths—for doing that sort of work.

The key models seem to be Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Richardson’s Pamela, and William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy. Did you have other favorite novels in mind as you wrote? 

Lepore: The models for Blindspot are as much portraits as novels, actually. Jane’s work on Gilbert Stuart and on eighteenth-century visual culture, that “period eye,” very much infuses the novel. The book is full of plot twists having to do with sight, all of them allusions to the conventions of British and American literary, artistic, and scientific culture, in the age of Newton’s Optics and the gentleman’s magazine The Spectator. The peep hole. The ocular truth. Spectacles. And, of course, the blind spot. We riddled the book with that stuff and with actual paintings, too (Copley’s 1765 Boy with a Squirrel, for instance, plays a crucial role, as does Sarah Goodrich’s 1823 self-portrait, Beauty Revealed). But we meant the conceit of the portraitist as both novelist and historian to go deeper, too. If the rise of the eighteenth-century novel is a story of the rise of the self, the portrait is involved in much the same transformation. We wanted to bring faces onto the page. But, yes, the voices we adopted very much borrow from eighteenth-century fiction. Jameson is, quite self-consciously, a lesser Shandy. Okay, much lesser. But his gambit, in straining toward the blustery, swaggering, manly picaresque, is certainly Sterne’s, and Fielding’s. Fanny Easton styles her own voice after the heroines of sentimental epistolaries—Pamela and Clarissa—and rather a lot after Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill, too. 

Blindspot seems to be partly a hilarious send-up of eighteenth-century novels and partly a very serious polemic: an indictment of the Founding Fathers for their blind spot when it came to the question of slavery. Did you feel any tension between these aims?

Lepore: I am a sucker for eighteenth-century fiction. I love its artfulness and its silliness and its bawdiness. I laugh when Fielding wants me to laugh. I cry when Richardson wants me to cry. And when Franklin tells a dirty joke, he’s totally got me, no matter how many times I’ve read it before. I also laugh, always, at Jane’s jokes. That’s why writing the book was, above all, fun. We didn’t write Blindspot as a polemic, but, well, we do, of course, have scholarly claims to make about this period. Jane’s work on exchange, for instance, is all over the book, as is my work on slavery. Was there a tension between trying to write an entertaining novel and wanting to write fiction with something we might think of as historical honesty? Absolutely. We had to wrestle with very great changes in tone and in the emotional register of the plot. Deciding not to have our convicted murderer burned at the stake—as was the punishment in the actual case on which our murder is based—was a decision we made about what the emotional range of the novel could bear and what it could not. The lives of ordinary people in Boston in the 1760s weren’t uniformly a farce or uniformly a tragedy, either. That’s why the book’s a genre send-up: a mystery, with traces of the gothic; a love story, with an overwrought romantic sensibility; a picaresque, somewhat overblown. But that’s all part of Blindspot’s gambit, to use the literary forms of the age to tell the story of the coming of the American Revolution.

Does the book implicitly argue for a specific relationship between fact and fiction—or between history and imagination—either in the eighteenth century or today?

Lepore: We didn’t write the book to make an argument, but I think we came out on the other side, each of us, having made a series of different arguments, both in the book itself and in our own minds. The eighteenth century marked a turning point in the writing of history, one that warrants closer inspection and one that has as much to do with the boundaries between realism and romance as between history and fiction. Eighteenth-century novelists were often accused, and not only by historians, of suffering from an excess of imagination. Some novelists admitted as much. A “certain drunkenness of imagination” was what Hugh Mackenzie claimed inspired him to write, in 1771, The Man of Feeling. In 1750, Samuel Johnson complained about the “wild strain of imagination” that plagued a class of books “produced without fear of criticism, without the toil of study, without knowledge of nature, or acquaintance with life.” Johnson wasn’t opposed to fiction; he was opposed to fiction run amok, that is, to romances—tales both gothic and sentimental—in which ordinary men and women are swept away by passions Johnson considered extraordinary. What Johnson preferred were novels that were, as he put it, “engaged in portraits of which every one knows the original.” I find Johnson’s distinction specious. But Blindspot was a very good way to think about portraits and landscapes, about realism and romance, about fictions and histories, and, finally, about the past and the present.

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

Jane Kamensky is professor of history and chair of the history department at Brandeis University.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard, where she is chair of the history and literature program.

The Newberry Consort presents historically informed programs of early music, often drawn from the collections at the Newberry Library, through an annual concert series in Chicago, national and international touring, residencies at colleges and universities, and recordings. The Newberry Consort was founded in 1986 to present public concerts of music from the collections at the Newberry Library and has offered an annual concert series continuously since 1988.

As part of our ongoing commitment to excellence in programming, we expand the usual definition of “early music” (Western European medieval, Renaissance and Baroque) to include historically informed performances of other genres, such as Polish Renaissance music and Mexican colonial Baroque music. When we began work on this program, we were astonished at the Newberry’s holdings of late nineteenth-century books and music. Then we remembered that this wealth of material came from the time when Walter Loomis Newberry and his industrialist friends were first assembling the collection. It made sense that their personal libraries would include many items from their recent history. In 1968, the Newberry Library added substantially to its holdings of Americana by acquiring the Driscoll Collection of American Sheet Music, amassed by James Francis Driscoll (1875-1959). One of the largest and most representative collections of its kind, the Driscoll Collection includes 80,000 pieces of sheet music and related materials. Driscoll was by profession a civil engineer, but music was always his passion—for many years he was the organist and choir director at Boston’s Sacred Heart Cathedral—and having a great interest in American history and music, he began collecting. As early as the 1890s, he was well on his way to amassing one of the largest collections of American sheet music.

So much of our time as an early music ensemble is spent exploring European cultures that it was a welcome diversion to explore the early music of our own county. Music from late nineteenth-century America reflects the panoply of styles of the country’s vast melting pot of cultures and classes (much as it remains today). But the music also reflects the huge, untamed wilderness at the doorstep of the urban centers that fueled the imagination of performers and composers. Stories of life and death experiences rubbed shoulders with the centuries-old traditions of European cultures. As a result, our program presents an array of musical entertainments, from the fireside recreations of pioneers and sod farmers to the concert hall performances and parlor soirees of high society. We spent the same care finding old instruments or reconstructions of old instruments to play this music as we do to play Renaissance or medieval music. Nineteenth-century pianos and violins are easy to find, but a gut-strung fretless banjo from the 1860s was another challenge. We are lucky to have in our city one of the world’s experts in historical banjo, Michael Miles.

While our audience was surprised when we first presented this program on our series, they loved it, and audiences who have heard early American music only through the lens of folk traditions are surprised at the elegance and complexity in the music of Foster, Gottschalk, and others when played in a historically informed manner.

Visit The Newberry Consort’s website.

David on Bows: 

David on Lincoln’s America:

Michael Miles Lincoln Banjo:

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

What makes American music American? Is there a distinctive American music? What is the relationship between American music and music that is performed in America, that is, musical practices transplanted from other parts of the globe? These questions have commanded the attention of American music historians ranging from George Hood in the nineteenth and John Tasker Howard in the earlier part of the twentieth century, to Charles Hamm and Richard Crawford today. The essays collected in this issue on American music before 1900 provide a range of approaches and answers to persistent questions about the Americanness of American music.

Two scholars (Jeanne Eller McDougall and Nara Newcomer) explore the performance of European musical styles in their original form in North America. Both concern Europeans who travelled and settled in the coastal south during the colonial and early national periods. Other contributors (Myron Gray and Glenda Goodman) are more concerned with hybridity in American music culture. Their essays focus on how musical practices rooted in other places and eras change as a result of the unique musical and political climate of the United States. As essays by Christine DeLucia and me suggest, music could and did reflect political transformations, serving as a form of memory that shaped how composers, musicians, and listeners understood their past.

Finally, two other contributors (April Masten and Carol Medlicott) detail more idiosyncratic forms of American hybridity: Their essays explore jigs based on Irish and African American performance traditions and Shaker music, rooted in their distinctive concepts of family, society, and gender, as well as the special role they created for sacred music.

Rather than trying to define American music according to a narrow understanding and definition, the contributors to this special issue of Common-place explore the multivalent world of British North America and the United States for its first three centuries of existence. They reveal uniquely American trends in music performance, composition, and the climate for musicking, especially in the period predating recorded sound as well as the replication of European practice in the Western Hemisphere and its resonance and use in its new environment. Together, their essays explore the many ways in which music existed in the United States. The result reveals how disparate and quirky American music was in that period. For me, this issue musically captures the sentiment of E pluribus unum so central to our national character.

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

Nikos Pappas, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Alabama, is actively engaged as a scholar and performer of American music from the colonial, early nationalist, and antebellum periods. A recognized Kentucky master traditional musician, he is currently preparing a database of Southern and Western sacred music from 1750 to 1870. His research has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the American Musicological Society, the Bibliographic Society of America, Music Library Association, and the American Antiquarian Society.

The making of Civil War memory did not begin only after the war ended. Americans began shaping their memories of the war in camps, on battlefields, and in homes across the nation as early as the spring of 1861. Officers wrote battle reports and soldiers jotted down diary entries, describing their experiences and shaping the war’s many histories. They picked up cotton bolls and shards of trees, bullets and buttons, and sent these souvenirs home as records of what they lived through during the war. After 1865, veterans and their families pondered these relics and thought about their wartime experiences, telling stories and sharing memories of those who had fallen in battle.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the war generation began to publish memoirs, letter collections, and other accounts while both Union and Confederate veterans’ groups erected monuments on town greens and in cemeteries across the nation, creating the war’s public histories. These texts and objects offered competing versions of the war’s events and ideologies: the North’s won cause, with its assertion of the perpetuity of the Union and the moral victory of emancipation; and the South’s lost cause, with its twin themes of defeated valor and noble sacrifice in defense of states’ rights. In the first decades of the twentieth century, white northerners and southerners began to reconcile their war memories and craft a shared narrative of white, martial manhood that ignored the contributions of black soldiers and denied the centrality of slavery and emancipation to the conflict. This new narrative of reconciliation and reunion was not uncontested, but it was strong, and it endured.

We find ourselves at a critical moment; at the sesquicentennial’s midpoint, we can assess how Americans have remembered the war, and how we might commemorate it in the future.

Fifty years ago Americans commemorated and celebrated the centennial of the American Civil War. On the surface, the centennial reflected a broad consensus among white Americans that had changed little since the turn of the twentieth century. The war was remembered through battle reenactments and in museum exhibits as a gallant struggle between soldiers who fought for their respective — and equally legitimate—causes. The war’s consequences were minimized and often ignored entirely. Below the surface, however, cracks appeared and widened. The civil rights movement, gaining ground in the late 1950s and early 1960s, transformed the nation politically and socially. African Americans challenged the nation’s collective Civil War memory by drawing its attention to the war’s legacy of emancipation and Reconstruction.

As Americans have marked the Civil War’s sesquicentennial over the past few years, the cultural impact of the civil rights movement on the dominant narrative has been clear. The anniversary’s events have emphasized the story of slavery, emancipation, the service of black Union soldiers to the war effort, and to the cause of freedom. Although this is the most salient shift in how Americans are currently remembering and commemorating the war, it is far from the only one.

A range of historical topics that take us beyond the traditional narrative of battles and leaders can now be found in public events, museum exhibits, and classrooms from Georgia to Massachusetts to California. The scholarly output on the Civil War has burgeoned, while Civil War enthusiasts of all stripes are making use of social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to share perspectives that do not easily fit into the standard narrative of Civil War memory.

We find ourselves at a critical moment; at the sesquicentennial’s midpoint, we can assess how Americans have remembered the war, and how we might commemorate it in the future. To this end we have assembled essays for this special issue of Common-place that examine war memory produced from the 1860s to the present, in unexpected places and with surprising results. While each essay focuses on a specific “site” of memory—battlefield parks, for example, or the published memoirs of abolitionists—what brings them together is a shared interest in challenging ingrained assumptions and established dichotomies. Like recent sesquicentennial events, they emphasize the important roles that race, slavery, and emancipation played in the war and its memory, but they also reveal that this narrative has been and continues to be contested. The essays also suggest that the war and its memory-making did not only occur only in the “North” and “South,” but also in Kentucky and Missouri, in Wisconsin and Colorado. And it not only occurred in the pages of published letters, diaries, and memoirs, but also at veterans’ events and memorial dedications. The future of Civil War memory is currently being shaped in classrooms and movie theaters, in government agencies and cultural institutions, and by individuals across the nation.

With this special issue of Common-place, we hope to illuminate the myriad ways that Americans have wrestled with our Civil War past and why we continue to return to it to bring meaning to our own lives.

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

Kevin M. Levin teaches history at Gann Academy in Waltham, Mass. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and blogs at Civil War Memory.

Megan Kate Nelson is visiting assistant professor at Brown University. She is a cultural and environmental historian of warfare and the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012).

Religion is one of the usual suspects that gets rounded up to explain the American Revolution. It looms large for historians mainly because between about 1730 and about 1840—as British North America morphed into the early republic—the same evangelical tsunami that swept parts of the continent of Europe and the British Isles also washed over American shores. Whether Americans went with the flow and welcomed it or tried to fight what looked to them like a reactionary rip-tide has long been subject to debate, but somehow, in some way, everyone got wet. So our suspicions are well-placed that religion—and this surge of evangelical Protestantism in particular—must have shaped the American Revolution.

Efforts to explore this relationship prospered in the late twentieth century. Wonderful studies appeared showing, among other things, how the whig elite borrowed evangelical rituals to drum up support for the resistance to Britain. And how evangelicals earned their chops to defy imperial authority by defying the authority of church establishments, and even their own ministers. And how millennial beliefs in God’s special redemptive designs for the future of America shaped the rebels’ understanding of the war.

But that once so promising analysis of the relationship between religion and the Revolution seems to have sputtered to a halt. I blame—almost entirely—the over-reaching of Jonathan Clark, for whom religion explains everything worth knowing about the long eighteenth century in general and about the American Revolution in particular. To Clark what drove that conflict was “a language of liberty”—a political outlook rooted primarily in the English dissenting tradition—that mobilized colonial sentiment against England and delivered in the American Revolution what he called “the last great war of religion in the western world.” To almost everyone else, that claim was just too super-sized and unsubstantiated to swallow. Maybe that’s what spooked Jon Butler to the point of pronouncing that the American Revolution was “a profoundly secular event.”

But hey: tell that to Tom Paine, who shrewdly cast his electrifying pamphlet Common Sense as a kind of secular sermon. Tell that to the Continental Army officers headed for an assault on British Canada who stopped at a church in Newburyport, Massachusetts, descended to its basement, opened the crypt holding the corpse of the great evangelist George Whitefield, and then cut the cuffs and bands from his rotting clerical garments into little pieces which they took away as talismans. But don’t try telling that to Kate Carté Engel and Ned Landsman, because they’re trying to get our understanding of religion and the Revolution back on track.

Both Kate and Ned draw our attention to the role of the so-called “bishop controversy,” which John Adams believed “contributed as much as any cause, to arouse the attention … of the common people” against British rule. For Ned, it figures as the final battle in “an extended debate about the status of the English church in British provinces,” a vexed question first raised by the union between England and Scotland and one that paralleled and even prefigured some of the political concerns of those who could envision America as the future seat of the British Empire. Here we have a far better supported application of Jonathan Clark’s view that the contention over political and religious subjects was frequently the same conflict carried on at two different levels. Kate comes at the bishop controversy from another angle, viewing it as a crisis that revealed the actual weakness of transatlantic religious networks. Both New Englanders and English dissenters talked the talk of Protestant internationalism and unity, but when the conflict between Britain and the American colonies escalated, they did not walk the walk. Instead, that controversy cleaved that transatlantic community, disabling it from doing much of anything to quell the mounting colonial opposition to the British Empire. Hats off to Kate for an ingeniously perverse argument: in this instance, religion becomes important to the American resistance not because of what it did, but because of what it failed to do.

What I like about both approaches is that they show us that the transatlantic perspective provides an indispensable context for understanding how religion shaped the path to resistance and revolution. Looking at religion on both sides of the Atlantic also raises a question that so far no one has asked: Why did the Revolution make so little difference in terms of the trajectory of the early republic’s religious development?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: No one has asked that question because it’s so dumb. After all, what about the separation of church and state, with its commitment to full religious liberty replacing mere religious toleration? And what about those Calvinist theologians tweaking their doctrine to bring it more into line with republicanism? Well, sure. But if we look beyond constitutions and theology to the religious identities and loyalties of most people and the ways that both were trending, the early republic looks a lot like England. Let me mention only two of the most important similarities.

First, even though a very long revolutionary war interrupted that tsunami of evangelical expansion in the new United States, it welled right up again, more powerful than ever, in the decades following the Revolution. That meant that in the early republic, as in England during the same period, the most rapidly growing religious groups were evangelical in their orientation, and the most successful were populist in their appeal. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was the upstart Methodists who grew by leaps and bounds, and the stunner is that in the United States they even managed to recover from their leaders siding with the Loyalists in the American Revolution. Recent work by Emily Conroy Krutz and Ashley Moreshead also sets forth the many ways that, within those evangelical ranks, the vision of Protestant union endured. Despite the Revolution, even despite the War of 1812, evangelicals, like Kate’s eighteenth-century dissenters, continued to build those “personal, institutional, and textual networks” that bridged the Atlantic. Religious nationalism was growing, but not—at least not yet—at the expense of Protestant internationalism. Second, both England and the United States exhibited an anti-Catholicism even more rabid than its earlier incarnations, and for exactly the same reasons—a combination of immigration from Ireland and the remolding of Protestantism by an evangelical movement that made the animus against Catholics essential to its identity.

These fundamental similarities in the Anglo-American experience raise the question of how much difference, if any, the Revolution actually made in terms of the character of religious life in the early republic. Crucial as religion might be to understanding the resistance and the Revolution, it may well be that the impact of the Revolution on the United States’ subsequent religious development has been overrated—that it’s the dog that doesn’t bark or the gun placed on the mantle during the first act that doesn’t go off at the end of the play. I raise this possibility, at least in part, to match Kate’s perversity, so I would welcome anyone who disagrees to shout Woof! or Bang!

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

Christine Leigh Heyrman is the Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History at the University of Delaware.

“Why are you in school?”

I posed this question to Michael Haynes’s and Diana Maloziec’s fifth-grade classes at Heninger Elementary School in Santa Ana, California. The ensuing discussions revealed that the students wanted to be in school. They felt that education would help them get good jobs and realize their ambitions. I pointed out that they were legally required to attend school until age sixteen. (Actually, I later learned, the legal age in California is eighteen.)

“So I can leave school when I turn sixteen?” asked a boy in Michael Haynes’s class.

This was not my intended message. I was leading teams of college students into the portable classrooms in the yard at Heninger, a structurally small school that has over 1,100 students cycling through on a year-round schedule. We were all participants in Humanities Out There (HOT), an outreach program of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and we hoped to help the two classes of fifth-graders develop the skills and inspiration to go on to college, particularly through exposure to the humanities. We were piloting a fifth-grade U.S. history curriculum that I am developing through a research assistantship; this was the second of five weekly visits to Heninger during fall 2001. HOT works exclusively with public schools in Santa Ana, which was described in a recent New York Times article as “among the poorest districts in the nation” and has a correspondingly low rate of college enrollment. In other words, these fifth-graders are statistically unlikely to achieve the material goals they seem to feel education should make attainable.

“Why do you think children went to school in early New England?”

The students imagined that early American children went to school for the same reasons they did, but I pointed to an early precedent for contemporary compulsory education laws: the so-called “Old Deluder Act” of 1647. The Massachusetts General Court called for every town to establish a grammar school in order to thwart “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from knowledge of Scriptures . . .” I wrote this quote on the board, explaining the unfamiliar words. The “Old Deluder Act” suggests a different set of expectations of education and a vastly different curriculum.

I asked the students what kinds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources we might look at to learn more about education in early America. A few, demonstrating a good understanding of the concept of primary research, suggested letters and journals. No one mentioned textbooks, but when I proposed to look at one they agreed it would be a good idea. At this point, we distributed excerpts from a 1727 edition of the New England Primer and broke up the thirty-plus students in each class into six groups. Each group was accompanied by an adult, either a UCI student or a classroom teacher.

The New England Primer was the ubiquitous schoolbook in eighteenth-century America, not only in New England but in the mid-Atlantic as well. The earliest extant edition is from 1727, but its origins, attributed to a zealous Protestant printer, Benjamin Harris, are in the late seventeenth century.

Our excerpt included the famous pictorial alphabet and the subsequent section, “The Dutiful Child’s Promises.” The twenty-four-letter alphabet (I and V are omitted) is illustrated with woodcut pictures and rhyming verses, beginning:

A may stand for the fall from grace, but the initial letter of the alphabet is also the first signpost on the road to redemption, to be gained by reading God’s word:

Diana Maloziec was excited by this literacy theme; she said it accorded perfectly with the historical novel she had been reading to her students, The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, about a fictitious twelve-year-old passenger on the Mayflower.

It was difficult to avoid getting caught up explicating all the biblical allusions in the alphabet. The students are mostly immigrants from Mexico or the children of immigrants; most are Catholic, some of them churchgoers. While they were unfamiliar with the doctrine of original sin, they knew who Adam and Eve were. Zacheus, however, was a complete stranger (and the s‘s that look like f‘s confused everyone).

“Is it true,” asked Rocio, “that the Devil used to be an Angel?”

“Yes,” I said, “according to the Bible.” She laughed, because I was qualifying nearly every statement with “according to the Bible.” I felt uncomfortable talking about Bible stories in a public-school classroom (just as it had felt quite odd, in writing the “Old Deluder” quote on the board, to spell out S-A-T-A-N). Yet the incongruity of this material was precisely what I hoped to bring out, to illustrate the radical difference between the experience of a ten-year old in eighteenth-century New England and one in twenty-first-century California.

As the literary scholar David Watters points out, the course from Adam‘s fall to Zacheus‘s climb is ultimately redemptive and hopeful. The stations in between, however, are sufficiently stern and morbid. From F, the students could infer that the Puritan schoolmasters were hardly indulgent.

G, R, T, X, and Y are all reminders of imminent death. Y, with the specter’s arrow pointing to a little girl, is particularly haunting. The New England Primer emerged from, in David E. Stannard’s phrase, “a world in which the presence of early death was everywhere.” The progress toward conversion could be construed as a race against time.

“The Dutiful Child’s Promises” offer a glimpse of eighteenth-century pedagogy, with its emphasis on rote learning. It illustrates a culture in which a child’s guiding principle was obedience:

We concluded the hour-long lesson by having the students work on their own alphabet, with verses and pencil drawings in the style of woodcuts. The Santa Ana Primer would be as revealing about the present-day as the New England Primer is of the eighteenth century.

It proved to be a difficult assignment. I had to relinquish my idea of having each group produce a section of the alphabet, so as to have a complete alphabet from each class; instead I let the students choose their own single letters. As it was, they had some difficulty coming up with verses. “What values are important to us today?” I asked. “Who are your heroes?”

Several students drew pictures of flags and wrote verses about freedom. Others echoed the New England Primer’s emphasis on literacy:

The original readers of the New England Primer began their studies with the prospect of heaven ahead and hellfire behind and on both sides. The creators of the Santa Ana Primer wouldn’t define the stakes so dramatically, but they are nonetheless invested in their education.

Further Reading: The New York Times citation is from Jacques Steinberg, “Economy Puts Schools in Tough Position,” 26 November 2001. The groundbreaking study on the Primer is Paul Leicester Ford’s The New England Primer: A History of its Origin and Development (New York, 1962), which includes a facsimile of the New York Public Library’s 1727 edition. Ford’s introduction would be especially useful for teachers interested in showing the fascinating and historically significant changes in the alphabet poem over the publication history of the Primer. See also Gillian Avery’s “Origins and English Predecessors of the New England Primer,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 108:1 (1998) 33-61. The images used here are from the other existing 1727 edition of the Primer, owned by the American Antiquarian Society; see Marcus A. McCorison, “American Bibliographical Notes: The New England Primer Enlarged,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 108:1 (1998) 63-66. David H. Watters presents an intriguing literary reading in “‘I Spake as a Child’: Authority, Metaphor and The New-England Primer,” Early American Literature 20:3 (winter 1985-86) 193-213. The citation from David E. Stannard is from his “Death and the Puritan Child,” American Quarterly 26:5 (December 1974) 456-76. The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple is written by Kathryn Lasky (New York, 1996).

An online facsimile of an 1805 Primer is available on Colonial America Resources run by Timothy Shannon of Gettysburg College. For information on Humanities Out There, please visit their Website.  

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

Andrew Newman specializes in early American literature as a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a 2001-02 research assistantship with Humanities Out There, an outreach program of the UCI School of Humanities.

Early Americanists seeking to write effective Native American history have two cultural frontiers about which to worry. The first, and most obvious, is the one separating a twenty-first-century scholar (particularly one of non-Native descent) from the colonial-era people s/he writes about; the second is the one that divided Natives and non-Natives in early America and that continues to segregate our narratives about this period. Ignoring either does a disservice to both the people we write about and the broader project of understanding early American history. My book focuses on a particular Indian community and on its connections to its non-Native neighbors. I hoped to write a distinctly Native history that was also recognizably American. Or, to put it another way, I wanted to suggest a way to cross both frontiers.

The frontier separating modern-day Americans from the Native inhabitants of early America is a daunting one. Distance distorts; difference confuses. How do we write about people who are so distant from us in time and different in culture? Contemporary politics and the “ownership of history” aside, the answer implicit in my book is simple: take Native culture seriously. This is not, I hasten to add, just another call for treating Indian culture with respect. The need—both moral and intellectual—to do so is widely accepted; whatever the shortcomings of modern scholarship, reputable historians no longer write about Indians as primitive savages. Nor do I mean only to suggest that historians should acquire a broad understanding of the beliefs and practices of the people they study. Again, we know that such knowledge is necessary. By “take Native culture seriously,” I mean that we must treat the culture of the Native people under consideration as something with its own structure, logic, and power. Doing so means accepting some uncomfortable truths. The categories we in twenty-first-century America are conditioned to use may not make sense in eighteenth-century Native society; the values that we assume are natural may have seemed anything but to early America’s Native peoples. And, most disconcertingly, the Natives’ categories and values—their culture’s structure and logic—had the power to shape Native life into forms that we do not expect. Our histories must reflect all of this. Taking Native culture seriously requires that we abandon the attempt to put Native wine into European bottles. Whatever else my book may accomplish, it demonstrates that coming to terms with a Native culture’s structure, acknowledging the logic that such a structure imparted to a group of people, and tracing the impact this logic had on their beliefs and behaviors allows us to write a new sort of Native history.

My book focuses on the Creeks and is built around the central structural tenet of eighteenth-century Creek social life: the world was made up of communities. Creek country contained somewhere between fifty and sixty communities. Whether the Creeks who lived in them were Upper or Lower Creeks, deer or wind clan, they were first and foremost townspeople from Tuckabatchee or Coweta, Cusseta or Okchai. Moreover, Creeks assumed that their neighbors organized the world in similar ways. So, logically enough, they dealt with Chota or Tellico (not with the Cherokees) and with Charleston or Savannah (not with the British). Did the Creeks recognize that larger-scale sociopolitical units existed? Of course, but they knew that towns were the basis of larger polities, not vice versa. This was the world in which they moved; this was the structure and logic that guided their actions. Their history began with the community. 

My book does the same. It is not a history of the Creeks. It is, instead, a history of eighteenth-century Okfuskee, one of the most important Creek towns located in what is now eastern Alabama. The book begins with the Okfuskees’ actions outside of town and, in particular, with their evolving relationship with Charleston. Tracing this cross-cultural dialogue allows us access to the Okfuskees’ geopolitical worldview—their understandings of the options available in a particular present, their stories about the past, and their visions of the future. I then turn to a consideration of how the Okfuskees’ shifting worldview affected their hunting patterns and their relations with Euro-Americans who lived in the backcountry. With these sections in place, I have the framework necessary to discuss life within Okfuskee. I devote separate chapters to the townspeople’s efforts to find a balance between traditional agricultural practices and the imperatives of a new herding economy, to their relations with British traders and their engagement with transatlantic markets, and finally to the Okfuskees’ most personal relationships—those between young and old, male and female. The end result is a unique discussion of both colonialism’s impact on an Indian community and that community’s place in national and international relations. Even more than that, though, I hope the final product is a distinctly Native history, a history that shows that crossing the cultural frontier separating modern-day Euro-Americans from colonial-era Natives Americans is both possible and revealing. 

And what of that other cultural frontier? What of the frontier that set eighteenth-century Natives apart from their Euro-American contemporaries and that continues to divide our histories of early America? Perhaps the best way to think about this particular frontier is to see it as real and important but also as artificial and limited. Its reality divided early America into cultural zones whose importance is attested to by the discomfort people felt when moving from one zone to another. And yet that very movement of people—to say nothing of the goods and ideas that accompanied them—suggests that tracing frontiers is an artificial exercise, that the ability of individuals and groups to remain both socially isolated and culturally distinct was profoundly limited. Our task, then, is to strike the right balance. Early Americans crossed frontiers repeatedly—many did so on a daily basis—but they did not lose track of the frontiers’ existence. As we seek to understand their world, we should follow their lead. Of course, that is easier said than done. 

My effort to cross this particular frontier involved tracing out “peculiar connections,” a term I borrowed from a Georgia governor who wrote that the Creeks “are peculiarly connected with this Province.” The phrase reminds us that frontiers could be crossed, that connections could be formed between Natives and colonists. So, in Okfuskee, I trace out the Okfuskees’ experiences with developmental processes that crossed cultural frontiers. Thus, for example, Okfuskees who traded freely with Euro-Americans incurred intangible costs that would have been familiar to those same Euro-Americans: living standards rose but so did dependence on imported goods; new avenues for personal expression such as exotic clothes and unfamiliar beverages became available, but with these came new ways for strangers to influence Okfuskees; and goods such as firearms and metal tools eased certain aspects of Okfuskee life but did so at the expense of older methods of sustenance and defense. If these are recognizably American processes, and I believe they are, then Okfuskee was in some sense a American town. But only to a point. Native Americans did not become colonists; they remained “peculiar.” Part of this peculiarity, of course, stemmed from real cultural differences and the effects such differences had on each people’s experience with, for example, trade. But, in trading relations as with other aspects of Okfuskee life, part of the peculiarity was manufactured, the fallout from (to quote the historian Michael Merrill) “the politics in political economies.” 

For the Okfuskees found themselves facing an unlevel economic playing field, one characterized by restricted markets, a European belief that debts incurred by individual townspeople were the Creek nation’s responsibility, and a credit system predicated on a degree of social legitimacy that Indians were not permitted to attain. These were peculiarly Native problems, and they grew more onerous over time.  Okfuskee argues, in fact, that Native peculiarity was to some extent produced during the colonial era; the book demonstrates how, in an Indian people’s relations with their Euro-American neighbors, peculiarity came to override connections, producing Native difference out of broadly American experience. The phrase “peculiar connections” thus allows us to cross a cultural frontier while also suggesting how that frontier became ever more impenetrable over time. In doing so, we move closer to writing histories that are—as I hope Okfuskee is—at once Native and American.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.3 (April, 2005).

Common-place asks Joshua Piker, assistant professor of history, University of Oklahoma, and author of Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), how can an early Americanist cross the cultural frontiers present when writing about Native Americans?

Three poems

In God’s Altar: The Word and Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978), the literary critic Richard Daly writes that, for the earliest New England colonists, “symbolic correspondences occur . . . at the level of perception.” I am interested in the way language, perception, and existence are central to the difficult lives of these American Puritans. My poems explore this phenomenon as the source of distinctly American expression. 

They work specifically with the requirement for publicly delivered conversion narratives, sometimes called professions of saving grace, that were a prerequisite for full church membership in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. [Examples of these narratives can be seen in God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst, 1994), edited by the historian Michael McGiffert.] 

My poem “The 88 Hearts of Wm. Adams” is written around an early conversion narrative I transcribed from the Massachusetts Historical Society archives. The title of the poem is derived from the overwhelming number of times Adams mentions a motion of his heart in the course of his twelve-page narrative. 

“Visible” takes its title from Edmund S. Morgan’s classic study Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, 1965) and the saints’ central dilemma of making oneself an outward, visible sign of an inner, unknowable, and unconditional election to grace. The tortuous tautology of “I must show what cannot be shown” yields much difficult beauty in Puritan expression and, I believe, continues to resonate in American poetry. “Visible” suggests that this beauty exists only where those inner truths and outer impossibilities collide: on the skin, in the eyes, in breath.

Brought into the Puritan fold by the missionary work of John Eliot and joined to their own congregations by full professions of saving grace, the “Praying Indians” of the Massachusetts Bay Colony faced the deep contradictions of visibility during King Philip’s War. They found themselves exiled to Deer Isle in Boston Harbor for the duration of the war where many starved to death. “A Bold Plea for the Easement of Suffering of these Professed and Reading Red Saints” is a voicing of the pleas, not only by the minister Eliot on behalf of fellow Christians, but also by a literary man for the protection of his best linguists and translators—the Christianized Indians. 

The poems presented here explore an array of formal structures and expressive modes; I choose this strategy in allegiance with those colonists—be they antinomians, shy public performers, or native Algonquian speakers—who struggled against the predetermined and mediated structure of a required profession to communicate their experience of God’s saving grace. These poems pay tribute to those who faced the impossible task the Puritans required of themselves above and beyond mere physical survival: describing in words what they insisted was beyond language, what they insisted was the nigh-perceivable evidence of their relationship to God.

The 88 Hearts of Wm. Adams

                                                                d. 1659, Ipswich

Hollowed by shadow or shone forth 
By sometimes more 
Than ordinary stirrings
Against the awful ways

Occasion offers, I will tell you
The incision in my chest,
Let the mouth confess up
What the heart congests:

Pull aside my shirt, my 
Addiction is stitched, stripped 
Of circumstance, stripped of habit,
Confined to four chambers & their flagellation.

Pour black powder below
The smooth balls of shot
Set in each chamber.
Make fire by focusing, take flight

In the off-beat between
Each flutter—such like thoughts
Do much take me up—
It’s said this almost endless 

Muscle is our weapon, in & out
It goes without meaning or sense
Being lost—limited
Only by half-life in a body

That diverts blood away
From less important humors
To keep an extra beat
From tripping the flintlock.

Armed, quitting earth 
For the church turret I saw a bird 
Change energy at higher elevations &
Clear out the thunderclouds

Like a topsail to loose itself 
In the sky—my dull lusts 
Let go as a fistful of dead petals
Flew round my feet & the war

Of good discord went off 
In my chest. I fell with fatigue 
Of breathing in thankfulness
For this new frame. 

Limping home, 
The storm seemed to go over.
I slacked my pace
& was overwhelmed in rain.

Will I falter like faith or 
Will I falter like fear?  
Things fall
From the sky we see

With our eyes. This spring
A swan did move easy
In the river’s shifting ice-splinters 
As my flint failed, its neck motionless 

As if stitched
To the white heart of a bird
Not beating her wings
& not falling.

Visible

waterproof with metaphor         more than encasing
      heaven
            eyes make
every move, each window, wet       lightning hits
the lights out, all us at last see each other      only
                                                           like
                                               souls again
walking this hard, electrified land       in sight
not deeper than skin       thin shallows      
                                       poured upon like milk muddied upward
                                       toward out in the air between us, 
groaning bones to cleave to 
                 as tongues 
           to significance,
to hot, to (I am my map of) when the church 
burned down some got charred, 
repainted the hall and parlor for appearance, 
for appearance degenerates into personality, 
personality a vain plaything—

it’s encased intention attached 
to the small safety of saying      attacked 
to the danger of appearing over and over 
      every day 
you might lovingly release the touch you’ve taken 
too extremely to such      
      outsides       disappear
into ideas, a whole body      fed by      eyes only
                  feel beauty then
to be misleading

A Bold Plea for the Easement of Suffering of these Confessed and Reading Red Saints

Rev. John Eliot
King Philip’s War
Massachusetts, 1675

The sermon of the day is: physicians, books, the lost tribe of knowledge is forecast to unmanifest its fatal arrows: operate in this drastic forest of articulate sounds, please send bread and fish: starving guttural sounds aspirate at back the throat (where we shy from letting our own thoughts go even so deep: the way we think Devil where Oak and Fir cloak their universal sense and church, their not having words and we have nothing to carry them outside our own tongues: For he that speaketh in an unkown tongue speaketh not unto man, but unto God). Sirs, four hundred saved red souls starve on Deer Isle, selecting stones, as other sermons run to prophecies and fort defense: daily we drown in discovering loose heads strewn on the highway, as in the Bible: we must translate this universal nourishment to all tongues: every instrument set to work does press for pay, and in this desert the sermon of the day prays the biggest boats closer, waves the marked arm rising off Death Isle, says bring budgets and bring butter and that best Word: the least generous omniscience of our own utter limit unto death (or coming into sight) of those yet tasting what charity and what, already, we are capable of having done. What? came the word of God out from you? or did it come to you only? The press needs also twelve pounds each of fresh k’s and l ’s to conform this ancient Hebraic language to the rules of our alphabet.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.3 (April, 2005).

Robert Strong is a poet and independent scholar living north of the Adirondack Park. His manuscript Puritan Spectacle, from which this work is drawn, was selected as a finalist for the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and the Wick Prize from Kent State University Press. He completed this collection of poems with the generous help of a Mellon short-term research fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society. He is currently preparing a scholarly introduction and contextualization of William Adams’s conversion narrative.