Part I

Drive up Main Street in Chester, Vermont, and you will see all the staple ingredients of a small New England town, and then some. Its four churches tell a tale of waves of growth and change: a white clapboard Congregational, a red brick Baptist, a pale gray and blue Victorian Episcopal, and the Scots-influenced old stone. From the Romanesque library to the Pollyanna-esque Country Girl Diner, the town is dense with the various sizes, shapes, and periods of New England’s past.

The Main Street production facility of NewsBank, Inc., seems right at home in these surroundings: the company resides in a white clapboard building that, long ago, was the Adams Funeral Home. Out back, the printing shop runs off color copies and other small orders for local customers. Yet, inside, among a generic assemblage of office cubes, a couple dozen people and a handful of computers labor at a decidedly nonlocal project: ushering the Readex Microprint Corporation’s microform collection of Early American Imprints, Series I, 1639-1800 into the Digital Age. Here, photographic copies of thirty-six thousand plus of the nation’s oldest printed documents are dissolving steadily into ones and zeroes that will dramatically reshape the study of early American history and life.

NewsBank began the fascinating process of creating the Evans Digital Edition (as this new incarnation is called) in July 2002, and the project is scheduled to be in production through July 2004. Yet, the creation of Evans Digital encompasses another history that lies between the immediate one of digitization and the distant one of the founding of the American nation. Three men, in particular, toiled in that middle ground, and their grand plans still dot the landscape of scholarly inquiry today, as well as profoundly shape the structure of the Evans Digital Edition.

Librarian and longtime cataloger Charles Evans laid one foundation in 1902, when he aimed to compile a “chronological dictionary of all books, pamphlets, and periodical publications printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of printing in 1639 down to and including the year 1820, with bibliographical and biographical notes” (as his advertisement trumpeted). Supporting himself and his family almost entirely on subscriptions to the American Bibliography, the aging Evans obsessively went after his quarry armed with pencils and corset boxes bursting with note cards, working alternately out of his home in Chicago and numerous East Coast archives. He died in 1935 after tracking down 35,854 imprints and publishing twelve volumes, but before he could complete the listing of publications for the year 1799.

As Evans’s astonishing and extraordinary work gained prominence, he found himself torn between the archivists who sent lists of errata for and oversights in early volumes and the librarians who excitedly pressed him for the next volumes in the series. During this period, one fellow librarian consoled Evans, “No one has ever prepared the perfect bibliography and no one ever will.” Happily, though, someone kept trying.

That someone was Clifford Kenyon Shipton, the early American scholar and head librarian at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, who, in 1954, built a new level on Evans’s base. Shipton completed the catalog of imprints for 1799 and 1800 and initiated the AAS’s publication of the Evans volumes in a series of indexed books. He also contracted with Readex Microprint Corporation to shrink all the books in the Evans series down onto Microprint in an ambitious effort to begin carefully correcting the bibliography and widely disseminating the film for every extant imprint listed. As if all that were not time consuming enough, he created “target cards” (each with the basic bibliographic information about a document) for every title.

In choosing Readex, Shipton tapped another man who knew something of fantastically large, impossibly idealistic projects: Albert Boni, founder of the Modern Library. Boni had let Vermont’s granite ledges and millstreams lure him from the New York publishing world to Chester in 1945. There, while Luther Evans and Verner Clapp experimented with space-saving methods for converting hundreds of thousands of titles to microfilm at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., Boni tinkered away trying to solve what he understood to be the problem at the heart of microreproduction: microfilm itself.

From the start, Boni’s objectives for his technology ran counter to the vein unearthed by Nicholson Baker in Double Fold (Random House, 2001). Boni neither rejected paper as a storage device nor crusaded for clearing library shelves. He actually hoped to convince librarians to buy more titles printed on more paper, albeit in the modest form of six-by nine-inch cards, each of which could hold one hundred pages of a standard book. The problem with microfilm, Boni thought, was that it was inordinately expensive. Miniscule reproductions on special quality paper would be much more affordable both to produce and to acquire, and could last up to two hundred years, according to one U.S. Bureau of Standards’ estimate. Moreover, Boni did not seek to replace titles, but to induce librarians to supplement their collections with cabinets full of some of the world’s greatest and rarest works—and, of course, the patented machines necessary to read them.

As a collector, Boni had plenty of curiosity about photographic processes but little experience with them. Attempts to read early versions of Microprint with existing magnifying lenses and lamps only produced micropiles of ashes because of the enormous amount of light (and thus heat) required. But the fifty-three-year-old innovator could not be deterred by illegibility and incineration, and by his fifty-eighth year he had perfected his process and machine: pages reduced on microfilm were printed and reprinted like so many copies of a photograph onto emulsion-coated cards at the Chester printing shop and then read with a cheap lens that filtered out heat and a lamp with the intensity and power of an automobile headlight.

In June 1950, Boni opened the doors to Readex and began work on the entire series of British House of Commons Sessional Papers under the sponsorship of the American Historical Association. Soon the company was filming and printing the New York Times for the New York Public Library, as well as the Annual Subject Catalog for the Library of Congress and the declassified papers of the Atomic Energy Commission. Five years later, when Clifford Shipton contacted him regarding Evans’s Imprints, Boni must have relished the opportunity to erect not only a monument to America’s past and Evans’s effort, but to the usefulness of his own invention. Readex promptly rented space in the basement of the AAS, and began issuing the Microprint versions of Early American Imprints. It finished the first series of Early American Imprints in 1968, the year after Shipton retired from the AAS.

Part II

It took thirteen years to create Evans’s Early American Imprints, but it took only a decade for Boni’s Microprint technology to fall out of favor with librarians and their patrons. Although Microprint remains indispensable to historical research today (despite the fact that machines that can read the cards are now few and far between and nearly impossible to repair), by the 1980s institutions favored microfiche and microfilm, which were read on relatively easy-to-use machines that also offered printing capabilities. In answer to the demands of the market, Readex switched to making archival quality duplicates of the original film used for producing Microprint cards, and in 1983, when Connecticut-based NewsBank, which specialized in archiving and filming newspapers, purchased Readex, the company simply expanded Boni’s old printing shop in Chester.

Newsbank still occupies space in the basement of the AAS, in a dimly lit room crammed with file cabinets, a precariously overstacked desk, and—the very heart of the operation—a gigantic, Recordak (Kodak) microfilm camera. This is where, for the past forty years, Stanley Shapiro, who bears a remarkable resemblance to a trim St. Nick, has run the microform operation, carrying on the work started by Evans, Shipton, and Boni.

Today, Shapiro and his staff still follow the same basic procedure in filming the twelve hundred AAS imprints to be added to Evans Digital. Whatever is to be filmed—from pamphlets to schoolbooks to broadsides—is positioned carefully in a large, jointed cradle under a wide pane of glass. Gently the item is pushed upward with the help of a bicycle chain and a crank until it is pressed flat against the bottom of the glass, at which point the operator photographs it with a camera situated about three feet above. But the film created now is only a master copy to be sent to Chester to be digitized.

Naturally, the architecture of Evans Digital Edition resembles in some respects its predecessors’. To begin with, NewsBank’s technicians in Chester have chosen to use the non-archival microfiche “originals” from the 1950s and 1960s as source material, since they yield better quality scans, though at a slower rate, than the archival copies made in the 1980s. To effect the transformation to sleek, modern binary code, staff members feed each carefully cleaned fiche into a high-quality Mekel scanner. The Mekel looks like an unassuming beige plastic rectangle attached to a fairly ordinary Dell desktop. Upon loading, a small green replica of the fiche appears on the monitor allowing operators to track each page as the computer scans the image at 400 dots per inch (dpi). The resolution of 400 dpi seems modest, below what consumer scanners offer now, until one considers that, on fiche, each page measures about seven-eighths (or less) of an inch wide. To achieve a final, enlarged resolution of 400 dpi, the scanner is acquiring an astonishingly dense 6,400 dpi, all while separating documents page by page, converting them to grayscale, and tagging them with a unique file name that will help trace their every step toward inclusion in the Evans Digital database.

Because each page is independent in the system, in the next phase of production, a computer running optical character recognition (OCR) software can pluck multiple scans from a holding computer’s memory to generate ASCII text. To “read” a scanned page, the OCR machine runs a ten-second automated sequence that makes the image high contrast, adjusts the angle of the page, transcribes the text, and reconverts the image to grayscale. If left running day and night, the machine would probably finish perusing the thirty-six thousand books in Evans’s Imprints in about nine months.

Even at the highly technical OCR stage, though, a tension between present and past technologies exists. Colonial American documents present a particular problem for OCR because of the quality of originals (many have broken type or show the effects of uneven hits on the press), variations in typefaces (such as the old style s that looks like an f to twenty-first century eyes), abrupt and inconsistent abbreviations (like Quest. for question or play’d and playd for played), and orthography (consider republick or rejoyce or booke). Therefore, before a page travels back to storage, filters “clean” the text with a series of algorithms designed to find and fix errors. While NewsBank places fierce pride in these filters, real limits to the abilities of OCR to master the impressions made by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metal type remain, evidence of which lies in the Help Section of the Evans Digital portal. There, patrons are instructed to abandon formatting their searches with the character s and instead insert a wildcard character like ?—as in Ma??achu?ett? for Massachusetts.

After being machine read and cleaned, the page image again rests in storage, where it awaits a quality control review and the addition of “metadata,” which includes bibliographic data and cross-references. In the final stages of production, staff members call up a fiche’s worth of pages looking for Shipton’s target cards, which were also filmed and positioned on the fiche at the beginning of each document. Early on, using Evans’s American Bibliography as a strict guide, the editorial staff for Evans Digital compiled categories for the information; in addition to creating a structure for the archive’s digital portal, these classifications have become part of the metadata that organizes the database. Here, a page from the Bay Psalm Book, for example, would be marked with not only its page number but also the fact that it belongs with the other pages of The Whole Book of Psalmes, a Psalter printed in 1640 by Matthew and Stephen Day of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and electronically filed under cross-references like “Music in Churches” and “Psalmody.” (Since every title in Evans Digital Edition is indexed to the AAS’s catalog, they are all also keyed to subject headings.)

At this point, too, other staff members review pages, comparing them to the microfiche versions and manually adjusting the image for maximum readability. Staffers may reject pages marred by cutoffs, bad skews, or light or broken text. In each case, a rejection means staff will pull the microfiche again and try to improve the scan.

So far, each month, NewsBank’s staff has captured about a terabyte—that’s over one trillion bytes—of colonial thought—more information than can be stored on ten ordinary desktops. When the project is finished, seven drawers of fiche will need to be digitally stored on the equivalent of over three hundred desktops. But don’t go to Chester hoping to see armies of computers assembled to deploy America’s founding documents; NewsBank built from scratch several high-end computers for storing the ever-growing Evans, which is also backed up on at least $16,000 worth of digital tape. While on the material level, the digitization of Evans means the shifting of information from one type of plastic to other types of plastic (and some metal), on the experiential level, the change effected is nothing short of enchanting.

The interface for Evans Digital Edition, developed with the assistance of a panel of librarians, looks like commercial Websites, with stylish lettering, a tasteful palette, and an uncluttered layout. Screens offer browsing and searching capacities coupled handily together on one page, guided by a comfortingly familiar row of browsing tabs. If an institution decides to invest in the expanded cataloging software developed by the AAS—offered, like access to Evans Digital, at different pricing levels to match the sizes and missions of various purchasers—any hit on an Evans reference in a library catalog would produce a direct link to the electronic image and text of the document. Once a patron locates an item, she can look at full citations, move through the book page-by-page, choose from two different formats for printing, use the “Table of Contents” feature to skip around or locate pages that matched her search criterion, and scale the images up to 300 percent or down to 25 percent in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion. Future improvements in searching and printing designed to assist teachers and researchers may also be integrated. In addition, NewsBank recently announced a text-creation partnership with the University of Michigan whereby the text of six thousand imprints, selected by the AAS, will be hand-keyed into another database (available separately, directly from the University of Michigan)—an initiative that will produce as close to 100 percent accurate searchable text as is humanly possible for some of the period’s most widely used or historically significant documents.

As Newsbank staff members readily admit, the construction of Evans Digital Edition means the market for Evans’s Early American Imprintson microfiche has been demolished. Already fifty-one institutions, large (Columbia, Ohio State, and the University of California system) and small (Williams, Hanover, and Calvin), are on board, and NewsBank has halted fiche duplication. Libraries that own Evans Imprints and that subsequently opt for Evans Digital must face a difficult decision: what to do with all these little plastic artifacts of twentieth-century Americana and the file cabinets that house them? Inevitably, some libraries will simply discard the fiche and print, as machines available to read them fall into disrepair and users voice their preference for the digital edition’s seductive searchability. Still, perhaps some librarians will take a cue from NewsBank’s Chester surroundings and let the past accumulate organically in all its forms—books, Microprint, microfiche, and terabytes—cheek by jowl, like so many churches in a small New England town.

Further Reading:

Those interested in the history of microreproduction may consult Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York, 2001), but should keep in mind that Evans’s Imprints and similar initiatives had a profoundly different set of objectives than did the projects Baker chronicles. In addition, the Association of Research Libraries has collected many responses to Double Fold‘s assertions. Although a few links are now broken or expired, this remains an excellent source for a broader picture of the debate surrounding microreproduction, digitization, and the multiple missions of libraries in the twenty-first century. Edward G. Holley wrote a truly fascinating biography of Charles Evans entitled Charles Evans: American Bibliographer (Champaign, Ill., 1963)–despite its age, it is still a terrific read and has a lot of interesting information about Evans’s project and the creation of Readex’s Imprints, Series I. Those interested in Albert Boni’s early career should refer to Jay Satterfield, The World’s Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library (Amherst, 2002). The Whiting Library, in Chester, Vermont, maintains a Vermont Room, which is also an outstanding source for articles about the history of Chester and the Readex Microprint Corporation (many thanks to the librarians for their assistance). Readers interested in the history of the American Antiquarian Society and its librarians should click here or consult Under Its Generous Dome: The Collections and Programs of the American Antiquarian Society, 2nd edition (Worcester, 1992). Many thanks to NewsBank staff members Ken Dufort, Georgia Frederick, Kelly Lauren, Steve Osterland, Caroline Reyes, Stanley Shapiro, Debbie Swisher, Cindy Tufts, and Mike Walker for taking time out of their busy schedules to show me Evans Digital Edition; special thanks to Vicky Gardner, Korrie Heiden, and Jim Hornstra for making time on many occasions to answer my repeated queries. Thanks, too, to the librarians who helped give me a sense of how this product will be used, and to Crowley Micrographics for information about the Mekel scanner.

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

Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey was born in Vermont, teaches at Boston University, and is at work on a history of spectacle use in America.

With roughly six million visitors per year flocking to see everything from George Washington’s sword to Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, the National Museum of American History in Washington would seem to be a going concern. Yet in the past two and a half years, the country’s only truly national museum of American history has gained a reputation as the sick man of the Smithsonian, the mammoth museum and research complex that is, in the words of its current leader, “the guardian of America’s greatest cultural, scientific and historic treasures.” An often fevered public debate about the museum, one that began to rage in the spring of 2001 and is just now beginning to cool down, has raised the same question posed by the ancient medical practice of bloodletting: Which is worse, the disease or the cure?

In the version that has attained the widest circulation to date, the villain of the story and the truly sick man of the Smithsonian is its bloody-minded chief executive, Secretary Lawrence M. Small, aided by, or indentured to, big-time donors. The facts behind the fierce controversy that has arisen around Small’s stewardship of the Smithsonian in general and the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in particular are complex, occasionally murky, and, of course, subject to differing interpretations on the two sides of a divide that it has opened up inside and around the museum.

In most versions, the plot begins with Small’s arrival at the Smithsonian in January 2000 after a thirty-five-year career as a financial services executive, first at Citicorp/Citibank and then at Fannie Mae. As the first nonscholar to run the Smithsonian since its creation in 1846 (an event that followed a long debate in Congress about, among other things, the propriety of accepting the bequest from English scientist James Smithson that led to its founding and naming), Small was controversial from the start. He also brought a distinctly top-down, damn-the-torpedoes, management-by-objectives approach that was probably bound to clash with the culture of a place that is much more like a university than a corporation. While acknowledging that the organization he had inherited had already achieved an “impressive” degree of public engagement, Small quickly proclaimed that the Smithsonian could—and now would have to—do much better. To attract bigger audiences, particularly among the young, the Smithsonian’s sixteen museums (seventeen counting the National Zoo) needed “modernization.” To modernize in the thoroughgoing way that Small had in mind (for example, he said that many permanent exhibitions “should be completely reimagined and redone for today’s audiences”), the Smithsonian would need buckets of money.

Since the Smithsonian (which is legally a “trust instrumentality of the United States,” independent of the government) receives only 70 percent of its budget from the federal government, Small’s vision for the institution entails a heavy reliance on private funding. According to an article last winter by Washington Post reporter Bob Thompson, one of Small’s first significant actions as secretary was to steer one of the Smithsonian’s largest existing donors, real estate baron Kenneth Behring, in the direction of NMAH. Behring’s subsequent gift of $80 million, announced in September 2000, was the biggest ever by an individual to the Smithsonian. Although most of the relevant details would not become known even to museum staff for months afterwards, Behring’s donation turned out to have gained him several substantial privileges—including an advisory role on two new exhibits on subjects of his choosing—beyond the most visible one: the attachment of the name “Behring Center” to the museum’s official moniker.

Then in May 2001, before most of the specifics of Small’s gift agreement with Behring had leaked out, the Smithsonian announced a $38 million donation to NMAH from Catherine B. Reynolds, a Virginia philanthropist who had risen from modest origins to make a fortune in the private student-loan business, and who shared Small’s interest in making the museum compelling to young people. Reynolds’ gift—intended to create a ten-thousand-square-foot space in the museum for an exhibit celebrating American “achievers,” possibly including living individuals who could just as accurately be termed “celebrities”—quickly set off alarms both within and beyond the walls of NMAH. It was bad enough, critics charged, that all negotiations with the donor had again been handled by “the Castle” (Smithsonian headquarters, located in the gothic-revival Smithsonian Building on the National Mall), leaving NMAH’s professional staff out of the loop entirely. The larger implication of these complaints was that Small was allowing a particularly vulgar parvenu with no idea of what NMAH was about to create her own personal shrine to the rich and famous.

In the vehemence of the outcry that followed, the critics missed a couple of important nuances. Still, the aggregate facts of the Reynolds and Behring cases (especially in the context of other actions Small had already attempted around the Smithsonian) appeared damning enough to warrant strong action.

On May 23 of last year, the NMAH branch of the Smithsonian’s Congress of Scholars sent a memo to the Board of Regents (the institution’s governing body) charging Small with forging donor relationships that breached “established standards of museum practice and professional ethics.” Groups including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Council on Public History soon followed suit. Some of the most strident protests among the many that followed in the next few months came from groups such as Ralph Nader’s Commercial Alert, which now attacked Small for offering General Motors naming rights to a refurbished NMAH transportation hall in exchange for $10 million to support a new exhibit there. That Small, by this point, had given his critics several megatons of ammunition (notably by actions that appeared to attack the whole research function of the Smithsonian) lent credence to the view that he was trying to drain NMAH of its institutional lifeblood and turn it into a zombie controlled by donors.

In January 2002, a group of 170 scholars and writers sent an open letter to Chief Justice William Rehnquist (the chancellor of the Smithsonian Board of Regents) citing a litany of Small’s transgressions. A few days later, Bob Thompson’s long piece about NMAH in the Washington Post Magazine portrayed an institution that had completely lost its way (albeit over a period extending back beyond Small’s arrival at the Castle), and presented the Small-Behring-Reynolds triad as a kind of tacky, vaguely right-wing cabal. Two weeks after Thompson’s article appeared, Catherine Reynolds withdrew all but the $1.5 million of her $38 million gift that the museum already had in hand, despite months of effort to reach a compromise (which historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, who was part of that effort, believes to have been achievable) between her vision and the views of NMAH and outside historians. It was—and is—a depressing tale, and today it is by no means over.

What, if anything, can be said in defense of Lawrence Small, the demon barber of the Castle on the Mall? At least a couple of things, it turns out—starting with the fact that NMAH actually does need “modernization and money.”

Small’s critics seem to fear that his vision of modernization entails dumbing history down or, at the very least, moving what is now NMAH away from its tradition of collecting, presenting, and interpreting real physical objects and propelling it into the weightless world of virtuality. In their book Legacies: Collecting America’s History at the Smithsonian (Washington and London, 2001), NMAH scholars Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick affirm their stance “on the side of the artifact” and against certain intellectual successors of a late-nineteenth-century Smithsonian curator who said that a modern museum should not be a “cemetery of bric-a-brac.” Even so, there seems to be widespread agreement that today’s NMAH, for all the richness of its collections, must think more carefully about the needs and tastes of contemporary audiences in presenting them to the public. In particular, it is said, the museum is cluttered, poorly lit, difficult to navigate, and virtually impossible for a visitor to take in as any kind of physically or thematically coherent environment. Its exhibits also neglect many subjects and themes that one would expect to find treated in a place such as NMAH, including such fundamental ones as freedom, democracy, and equal opportunity.

Given these circumstances, NMAH’s need for money is real, as is the probable necessity, in the new era of gaping federal budget deficits, of seeking it from private donors. (It should be noted that the Bush administration was relatively generous to the Smithsonian in its first proposed federal budget last winter.) To be sure, there are purists such as the progressive journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, who have stated (apropos of Smithsonian “partnerships” with corporate sponsors) that “there should be a stark dividing line between public and private institutions in America.” Yet Small is on solid historical ground in pointing out—as he has in his own defense—that the Smithsonian itself is the product of a private bequest with a stipulation of naming rights, and an institution that has long benefited from the munificence of private donors with names such as Freer, Sackler, and Hirshhorn. Given its unique origins and historical identity, the Smithsonian would seem to deserve protection not just from private exploitation but also from the rigid ideological prescriptions of some of its would-be defenders.

Of course the main argument these days is not about the necessity of raising private funds for NMAH but only about the terms on which it is done. One stubborn reality here is what is sometimes called the “new philanthropy,” the tendency of today’s many aggressively hands-on individual donors to proclaim, as Catherine Reynolds has, “You don’t just write a check and say, ‘That solves the problem.'” Another is that corporations—admittedly with the encouragement of museums increasingly desperate for their support—are now more and more likely to insist on terms for corporate sponsorships that effectively turn museums into advertisers and marketers for companies and their products. Although, under such circumstances, it is clearly an institution’s responsibility to keep its donors in check, Small and his handful of reputed loyalists within NMAH maintain that they have been doing just that.

One of these dissenters from the prevailing climate of dissent within the museum is curator Steven Lubar, a polite, soft-spoken fellow who seems to arouse strong feelings in some who disagree with him (and whom Washington Post reporter Thompson obliquely compares to Rasputin). Speaking, for example, of the controversial transportation show “America on the Move” (slated to open in November 2003), with which he has been involved, Lubar maintains flatly that GM has had no influence, direct or indirect, over the content of the exhibit, which is being underwritten by a variety of donors. “It’s not just GM that is supporting the transportation show,” Lubar points out. “The federal Department of Transportation, the American Public Transportation Association, and AAA are also supporting it.” The resulting exhibit, he adds, will represent a vast improvement over what passes for a transportation exhibit at NMAH today, which Lubar calls a mere “celebration of technological progress.” If GM garners some favorable publicity in the process, Lubar finds this a matter of no concern.

Time will tell whether the transportation show (along with a planned new introductory exhibit for the museum and a new show on the American military, both being underwritten by some of Kenneth Behring’s $80 million) vindicates those who have denied all along that NMAH has sold out to pushy donors. Meanwhile, for anyone who cares about the future of NMAH and of its custodianship of the nation’s past, there are bigger issues to consider. As Lubar and Kendrick’s book makes clear, NMAH and its predecessor institutions within the Smithsonian have always been, among other things, a forum in which Americans have fought over such bedrock issues as the nature of American identity and ideals. Since the passions aroused by the recent controversy at NMAH may have obscured as much as they have clarified what is at stake in this particular argument, it is worth stepping back from the fray to try to understand just that.

This means, first of all, sorting through differing explanations of what has appeared to some as an attempted barbarian takeover of the Smithsonian. In one version of this scenario, the villains are political conservatives trying to correct the left-wing historical bias that the Smithsonian has allegedly shown in the past (as in the infamous Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995-98) and that supposedly dominates contemporary historical scholarship. In another, Small and his allies are interested not so much in silencing errant historians as in stifling civic discourse generally. NMAH curator Barbara Clark Smith (who has been a vocal critic of Small throughout the recent imbroglio) opines, for example, that the secretary’s ultimate goal is to turn the Smithsonian into a “privatized public sphere” sustained by tax dollars that amount to corporate welfare. “To some degree,” says Smith, “when Small says ‘modernization,’ what he has in mind is making the Smithsonian more anti-intellectual, more conservative, more private, more responsive to corporate America.”

While critics such as Smith see a broadly political trend behind recent events at NMAH, others take the position that Small and a donor such as Reynolds are simply philistines who can’t tell the difference between history and entertainment. This view, it must be said, is based largely on speculation about exhibits that no one has actually seen. Yet cultural columnist Michael Kilian of the Chicago Tribune cited better evidence when he commented just as the Reynolds controversy was about to explode: “[Small’s] tenure has shown that his chief interests are donations and the financial bottom line and attendance. And my point would be that these are the same values of, say, Disneyland or Six Flags over Georgia, and the Smithsonian is quite a different place.” Indeed, one might add, not only is the Smithsonian a “different place” but NMAH itself has different responsibilities than, say, the National Museum of Air and Space when it comes to upholding values other than those of the box office.

These overlapping political and cultural theses have an obvious appeal, for they satisfy our natural desire (one to which even historians can fall prey) to reduce complex, ambiguous events to thematically vivid narratives focused on dastardly or heroic individuals. Yet a more realistic explanation for the events that have recently unfolded at NMAH may be that the Smithsonian—like other large institutions in America today—faces imperatives for certain kinds of change to which its organizational structure, culture, and history offer strong resistance. In hiring Small, moreover, the regents may well have succumbed to a simplistic illusion that afflicts Americans from the voting booth to the corporate boardroom these days: that the way to effect change in an organization is to bring in a take-charge, iconoclastic outsider to lead it. And while he may or may not be a capitalist apparatchik and/or a cultural troglodyte, it seems clear that Lawrence Small is a babe in the woods as a nonprofit and public manager.

To frame the problem in terms of organizational and managerial dysfunction is not to deny, however, that there are important cultural issues at stake in the way that the Smithsonian and NMAH are managed. The issue of commercialism, for example, involves more than just the question of whether a corporate sponsor such as GM exercises influence, acknowledged or not, over the content of exhibits. As corporate logos become increasingly visible at NMAH (companies including the History Channel and Ralph Lauren already command attention in prominent locations there), the danger is that the museum will come to resemble those American campuses today where ubiquitous commercial messages create an atmosphere subtly at odds with teaching and learning the disciplines of citizenship. In such an environment, will anyone notice if—as Barbara Clark Smith expresses the fear shared by many—NMAH becomes a place where there is “no room for honest work” by historians?

The good news amid such gloom and doom is that a group of prominent citizens in a position to help appears to have taken these dangers seriously. In June 2001, as Small was being pilloried in the national press for allegedly putting the nation’s heritage up for sale, the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents announced the appointment of a blue ribbon commission to advise it on “the most timely and relevant themes and methods of presentation for [NMAH] in the 21st century.” Underwritten by Kenneth Behring, chaired by NMAH board member Richard Darman, and with a membership including such eminent historians as David Herbert Donald, Eric Foner, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (a member of this journal’s editorial board), the commission took this charge as an invitation to address the most serious accusations made by Lawrence Small’s many outspoken critics.

Issued last May, the report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on the National Museum of American History starts from the encouraging premise that “because NMAH holds a very special place in American culture, there is a special obligation—and duty of care—to be attended to by those who would attempt to help shape its future.” The report’s sections on donor relations amount to a tacit rebuke of Small for his seeming overeagerness to please funders, while the document elsewhere warns against “succumbing to the general societal tendency to indulge excessive commercialism.” The commission’s recommendations for the future development of exhibit themes and content are prefaced by the statement that NMAH “must assure that its process of developing themes and topics is perceived as having legitimacy.” Attempts to resolve “issues of balance” in exhibits, the report goes on to affirm, must “meet the highest standards of scholarship.” And without presuming to tackle the problem, it also notes that perceived assaults on such fundamental principles have significantly undermined morale among NMAH’s professional staff.

As people connected with the museum point out, how effectively the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations are acted upon will depend greatly on who NMAH’s new director turns out to be—the museum’s former director, Spencer Crew, having resigned in September 2001, making him the fifth of what are now six Smithsonian directors to have quit under Small’s regime. (A search to replace Crew was still under way as of this writing.) Undoubtedly the new director’s greatest initial challenges will be to carve out some degree of independence from Small, and to heal the wounds from what appears to have been a long and bitter struggle among a factionalized NMAH staff. Meanwhile, now that the temperature of the public debate about the museum has dropped enough to afford an opportunity for calm reflection, a lesson from the historical trade may be in order for those of us on the outside looking in.

That lesson concerns the obstinate tendency of groups, institutions, and the actions of those who play their parts in them to be less rational and perspicuous than we would like—and the need to recognize this when interpreting events such as those that have recently transpired at NMAH. While Catherine Reynolds (who declined, through a spokesman, to be interviewed for this article) has offered conflicting explanations of why she withdrew her gift to NMAH, a museum staffer who worked on her proposed exhibit ventures a reasonable-sounding guess as to what caused her to walk away in discouragement. “The Smithsonian was a difficult place to read throughout this,” says NMAH historian Peter Liebhold, noting that the Castle, NMAH management, and disgruntled museum staffers were sending what must have seemed like inconsistent and confusing messages to someone unacquainted with the internal struggles that, in Liebhold’s view, got stirred into the public debate about the Reynolds gift. Moreover, Reynolds is surely not the only person involved in the fundraising controversies at NMAH to have made the mistake of misreading the environment. As the study of history teaches us, such errors and confusions—as much as the purposeful pursuit of deliberate ends—are the very stuff of human conflict, and we pay a price in more than just understanding when we insist on having the simple, clear, emotionally satisfying version.

Now that the fever gripping NMAH these many months has broken, with the prognosis still unclear, we as interested citizens should now require from ourselves what we want for our nation’s museum of American history: balance, judiciousness, and a respect for the complexity of facts along with a determined defense of what we find most worth preserving.

Further Reading: See Bob Thompson, “History for $ale,” Washington Post Magazine, January 20, 2002. The Smithsonian relates its own history in the online exhibition “From Smithson to Smithsonian.” Lawrence Small described his vision for the Smithsonian in his talk “A Smithsonian for the 21st Century,” delivered in 2000 to the Cosmos Club in Washington. Sources of information on the debate about NMAH and the Smithsonian generally, other than those already cited, include the newsletter NCC Washington Updates, available on the Website of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of Historyand the Websites of the advocacy groups Commercial Alert and Common Dreams. For Patricia Nelson Limerick’s views on the Reynolds affair, see her article “How Reporters Missed ‘The Spirit of America,'” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2002. The report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on the National Museum of American History can be found here.

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

Daniel Penrice, a freelance writer and editor specializing in management theory and practice, has also worked as a development writer for universities and other nonprofits since receiving his Ph.D. in American literature from Harvard in 1984.

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the American frontier, while it lasted, defined American life. More than a century later, Turner’s “frontier thesis” still tops every AP history student’s cheat sheet, but historians have begun to wonder whether anything can be salvaged from a theory that defines the frontier as a boundary between “savagery and civilization.” Turner’s thesis is now routinely dismissed as outdated at best and racist at worst. In fancier, post-colonialist circles, “frontier” has become the new F word.

And now, just when you thought the frontier was dead, comes Frontier House, a new six-part PBS series chronicling the experiences of three ordinary modern American families sent to the frontier to endure the rigors of life as 1880s homesteaders. Co-produced by Channel 13/WNET in New York and Britain’s Wall to Wall Television (producers of the BBC’s 1900 House), Frontier House won’t be aired until 2002. But the filming begins this spring, when the Frontier House families will start their six-month stint in rural Montana. Each family will be given 160 acres of land and a wagonful of seeds, axes, and cookbooks. Like all homesteaders, they’ll begin by building houses, “relying exclusively on the tools, techniques, technology, and resources they would have had in the 1880s.” No Home Depot, no spackle, no Tyvek wrap. Little House on the Prairie meets Temptation Island?

A mere four hundred British families applied to live for three months in London’s retrofitted 1900 House (see Talk of the Past, September 2000), but nearly ten times as many Americans are seeking to live for twice as long in the far more physically grueling Frontier House. Why? Consider the home lives of some of the thirty-six hundred American families eager to participate. As part of the application process, each was asked, “What’s the most challenging thing you and your family have ever experienced?” Among the responses (posted at the show’s Website): a Florida man who was “fatally shot” but miraculously survived, a New York teenager whose mother and sister were attacked by a neighbor’s pit bull (“not too badly, but still”), and a Mississippi family “held hostage at 4 a.m. by a crazed gunman.” Yikes. No wonder these people want to go back in time.

Frontier House families will be in grave danger of accidentally amputating fingers with scythes and herniating disks while pushing plows, but they probably won’t have to worry about muggers, pit bulls, and crazed gunmen. None of the applicants seem to have any idea what they’re getting into (and how could they?), but, like actual homesteaders, they do appear to believe they’ll find a better life–a particular kind of better life, a touchy-feely, New Age of good old days. Asked what they hope to get out of the experience, a California family answered that they expected to “really get in touch with each other and ourselves without all the noise of the modern world.” One man from Washington confessed, “I need a direction in my life.” (How ’bout West?) And a couple from California philosophized, “A great challenge brings a person great personal power.”

Time travel as an opportunity for personal growth? Series producer Simon Shaw seems to agree with this sense of the past. “Frontier House is as much about personal discovery as it is historical,” he explains. “The experience will undoubtedly provide our pioneers with an opportunity to contemplate much of what gets lost in the blur of life in modern society: values, relationships, emotions, priorities.”

The frontier of Frontier House is not a boundary between savagery and civilization. It’s the boundary between an emotionally shabby, technologically bountiful now and an emotionally vital, technologically impoverished then. “I have been looking for this kind of opportunity to be a catalyst for a new trajectory to my life, propelling me in new directions like a comet around a star,” writes one New York applicant. Frontier House families don’t need Frederick Jackson Turner; they need Robert Bly. The last frontier? The endless frontier of the self.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

In 1998, the National Archives and Records Administration embarked on a project to re-encase the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, collectively known as the Charters of Freedom. This decision led to a multiyear collaborative project involving National Archives staff as well as scientists and technical experts from the National Institute of Science and Technology and other agencies and organizations. Our tale is a trip through time, starting with the critical moment of opening the encasement, then thinking back two hundred years to the creation of the document, and moving forward again to reflect on the conservation and scientific bases for deciding to re-encase the Charters of Freedom after fifty years.

A Moment of Action: Wielding the Knife

The moment had arrived. The vault was quiet, the conservators wore gloves and lab coats, and the camera was ready to roll. A small sharp blade probed the pinprick hole in the lead to enlarge it and permit insertion of a larger tool. This simple task normally would not give us pause. But this time we were on the verge of opening the encasement created almost a half century ago to house the Transmittal Page of the United States Constitution, the parchment letter of conveyance signed by George Washington as president of the Constitutional Convention. Successfully opening this encasement would permit us to test and confirm our procedures and to gain confidence before moving on to the encasements containing the remaining four pages of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights.

The time had come to liberate the parchment after fifty years, a step fraught with uncertainties and concerns. We were breaking new ground, but at the same time, undoing beautiful craftsmanship that had achieved hermetically sealed encasements in 1951. The encasement design was elegantly simple: two sheets of glass with metallic copper flashed on the edges, joined with solder to a lead ribbon that sealed the three-eighths-inch gap between the glass. Between the glass sheets the historic parchment lay on handmade paper, surrounded by a brass collar or spacer, with a second loose piece of glass resting on the parchment surface.

We knew the structure of the encasement and–theoretically–the path to its opening, but had neither written instructions nor a training film to guide us. We had to learn by doing. While all the calculations and tests on surrogates that preceded this moment indicated that breaking the seal would not result in damage or catastrophic change, we couldn’t help but wonder: Would the glass crack? Would the encasement implode? Would the parchment stick to the glass? Though such speculation was not scientifically based, it was understandable in the circumstances. It was a moment that few conservators had experienced, a moment long anticipated and flavored with a dash of uncertainty and a bit of nervousness, as befitted the responsibility and honor of working with one of the most significant documents in U.S. history.

We inserted a tool with a curved end, handmade of hardened metal, into the breech in the lead strip joining the top and bottom glass of the encasement. We had wondered how readily it would open, but the cutting was easy. With a rocking motion, the blade sliced the lead cleanly, sometimes leaving long curling flourishes of lead in its wake. Only in areas of excess solder surrounding the leak detector was the process difficult and time consuming. A variety of small blades were used carefully to break through the seal, and finally the deed was done: the sheets of glass that had covered the parchment for fifty years could be lifted away. It was a momentous if quiet success, with no resulting alteration to the parchment.

A Moment of Action: Wielding the Pen

Jacob Shallus dipped his quill pen in ink and placed it onto a bare sheet of parchment lined with pale brown crayon guidelines to begin to write out the formal copy of the new nation’s Constitution, to be approved by the Constitutional Convention on Monday, September 17, 1787. The clerk’s job was demanding. He had little time to take the corrected draft and write out a “fair” or final legible copy over the course of a weekend in Philadelphia. Corrections were difficult to make since parchment was such an unforgiving medium. Words were scraped away with a penknife or inserted carefully in the lines of text, and then listed in an errata paragraph to attest that the approved document was unaltered.

Shallus could never have imagined that two centuries later conservators would peer through a binocular microscope to examine his pen strokes. Shallus was a clerk trained to create a fine handwritten text. In his work, he wrote a very legible script with titles that were engrossed, that is, made larger and darker. His tools were quill pens cut from large feathers, and ink made from oak galls, iron, and gum arabic, often with a colorant such as logwood added to the initially pale ink. Following English practice, Shallus wrote important legal documents on parchment, animal skin that was specially treated with lime and stretched. It was expensive, generally imported from Great Britain, but could be expected to last a very long time.

More than two hundred years later, conservators in the no-longer-young nation examined his handiwork to determine its condition. The parchment, sensitive to changes in humidity, now undulated in many cockles or “hills and valleys.” While the text remained very legible, we could see under the microscope that many small flakes of ink had disappeared and other lifted flakes were tenuously attached. In the past insects had nibbled the parchment, leaving lacey, vulnerable edges on some sheets. The treatment we devised to address these conditions was conservative, designed to stabilize and preserve the legibility of the text. We adhered insecure ink flakes with parchment size (a gelatin made by cooking small parchment scraps), using the fine tip of a 0000 watercolor brush to apply drops of size no larger than a period at the end of a sentence.

We also carefully cleaned dirt and grime in bare areas of the parchment–taking special care to avoid disturbing Jacob Shallus’s rule lines–and removed old adhesive on the reverse which distorted the parchment sheet. As a final step, the parchment, humidified to fully relax it, was dried under tension to return it to a flat plane. The challenge was to make the parchment limp without softening the ink so that it could be realigned to remove the distortions of fifty years or more.

Science in the Support of History

Opening the encasement was a step in a process that began almost twenty years earlier with questions raised about the safety and stability of the Charters’ encasements. In 1982, the National Archives invited a panel of respected scientists and preservation professionals to assess the preservation needs of the Charters of Freedom. They advised comparing images of the Charters made at intervals over time, to look for changes that might raise concerns. The National Archives turned to the Imaging Processing Lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to assist in this effort. Borrowing NASA technology, the JPL developed an imaging system like that used in space exploration. The resulting Charters Monitoring System (CMS) created digital image files by scanning one-inch squares on each document. During imaging, the encased document lay on a tabletop with legs that floated on nitrogen in cylinders, which acted as shock absorbers to eliminate vibration. An overhead charged-couple device “camera” captured the relative brightness of 1028 lines of 1028 pixels in each patch through glass layers, using precise positioning to allow return to the exact spot in future scans.

The National Archives received the Charters Monitoring System in 1987. Our staff made baseline measurements for patches on the pages of the Constitution. In following years, patches were re-scanned and compared pixel by pixel to the baseline image, to show physical changes. In 1996, after more than 125 scans, staff reported the findings. The CMS did not reveal feared changes in ink intensity or loss of ink. In all the scans on the seven encased documents, just one insecure flake of ink was noted on a raised ridge of parchment on the Transmittal Page of the Constitution. Jacob Shallus might have been befuddled by the technology, but he surely would have been pleased that his text had survived so well.

But if the ink of 1787 was holding its own, the encasements of 1951 were not. The CMS space-age technology ultimately confirmed findings made in 1987 with the microscope: minute crystals and microdroplets of liquid on surfaces of the two glass sheets over each document. The scans confirmed that these changes in the glass progressed between 1987 and 1995. Conservators using a binocular microscope could focus to see crystals and liquid droplets on the glass surfaces. These signs of glass deterioration were a clue to the relative humidity inside the encasements. Glass deteriorates at a relative humidity over 40 percent. But the encasement helium had been carefully humidified to 30 percent. This low humidity was to minimize parchment hydrolysis, a chemical term that means “water cutting.” Evidence emerged of progressive glass deterioration and raised concerns of possible parchment deterioration by hydrolysis.

What was going on inside the sealed encasements in the 1980s could only be learned indirectly. Conservation staff peered through a glass window looking for clues about whether moisture was excessive and whether any helium remained. A few simple techniques gave some answers. An ice cube placed briefly on the outer glass made water condense on the inner glass. Measuring the resulting dew point temperature confirmed a relative humidity higher than 30 percent. To see if helium remained, we relied on an encasement with an odd visual effect that indicated a tight seal. The encasement for the Transmittal Page had a faint pattern of concentric rings at its center. These so-called Newton’s rings result when a very narrow space diffracts light. In this encasement, the narrow gap was between the surfaces of the two glass sheets pressed closely together by atmospheric pressure. The rings indicated the container was sealed but at a partial vacuum. After fifty years helium may have escaped, but the seal was intact.

The rings were intriguing, but did helium remain inside or was there a vacuum? Were the other encasements without Newton’s rings still sealed? And what was inside them: air, helium, a mixture, or a vacuum? Helium is so small a molecule that it escapes slowly through some types of glass and very readily through the smallest hole. The leak detectors indicated that air had not infiltrated. But would the leak detectors work in a vacuum if the helium had escaped?

So the question persisted whether helium was still in any of the encasements. We wanted an answer before breaking the seal, to permit sampling the interior gas for analysis before it dissipated. We contacted a NASA scientist who had attempted to sample “old” air in sealed colonial lead coffins. But we needed answers without penetrating the encasement seal. His NASA team worked to measure gasses in the upper atmosphere by aiming a laser beam out an airplane window to the wing tip. In the Charters’ encasements, the laser beam would traverse a millimeter gap between the glass layers. Amazingly, the NASA laser beam study showed the absorption pattern of helium in each encasement they studied. Helium–some helium at least–remained. Knowing this led to developing special procedures to sample the gas inside of each encasement before it was opened and lost forever.

A Moment of Contemplation: Looking to the Future

As the vault door closes, we think of the work accomplished and what lies ahead. The Constitution has now been examined, documented, and treated–and sealed in elegant and technologically advanced encasements. Two sapphire window ports in the side of each encasement permit a light beam to traverse the inner atmosphere below the document platform allowing conservators to monitor the conditions within. Changes–such as the presence of oxygen–that could have a detrimental effect on the documents will let future caretakers know that it is time to act. Intervention could be simple–replenishing the inner atmosphere with argon or, more complex, unbolting the encasement lid to break the seal designed to hold for one hundred years or more and again exposing the Constitution to air. We can’t help but wonder how long this work will hold and what new tools will be available to preserve this document in the future.

Could any of the Framers of the Constitution have ever imagined the steps that future caretakers would take–and the amazing space-age tools and technologies that would be brought to bear–to ensure the preservation of their words written on parchment in 1787? While some might argue that the Constitution is merely a musty document–old ink on old parchment–the ideas it contains continue to be argued and brought to bear on every aspect of American life. The concepts remain fresh and pertinent to the latest-breaking news–to events that the Framers could not have imagined.

The Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence will be back on public view in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in the fall of 2003. For further information on the Charters Re-encasement Project, click here.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Catherine Nicholson are senior staff members in the Document Conservation Laboratory, Preservation Programs, National Archives and Records Administration.

“She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind.”
Bob Dylan, “Not Dark Yet”

Abigail Adams often complained that her husband, John, did not write her enough. When he did write, his letters were too short and didn’t adequately convey his sentiments. “I have to acknowledg the Recept of a very few lines dated the 12 of April,” Abigail reported to John in 1776, but “you make no mention of the whole sheets I have wrote to you,” she chided him. This complaint resonated with my students in Gender in Early American History. A few of my students designed a meme to capture Abigail’s protest. The meme depicted a skeleton with folded arms sitting at a desk. It was captioned: “Me waiting for your letters.” One simple image and a few words translated Abigail’s words into a contemporary media form. I had not even asked students to design memes. I had only asked them to compose a series of Facebook posts or tweets for an assignment in which they “translated” eighteenth-century correspondence into contemporary social media. Far ahead of me on social media trends, my students surpassed my instructions and expectations. Their enthusiasm illustrated to me the possibilities of engaging them in the world of eighteenth-century letters through their own use of social media.

Literary critics and historians such as Konstantin Dierks, Eve Tavor Bannet, and Lindsay O’Neill have recently expanded our understanding of the letter-writing practices and correspondence networks that connected people in eighteenth-century America and the Atlantic world. Letters enabled them not only to communicate with each other across great distances, but also to build relationships, develop associations and movements, and advance themselves socially, politically, and economically. During the eighteenth century, letter-writing manuals circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Middle-class men and women turned to these manuals to learn the proper conventions of correspondence. The epistolary form shaped other media too. Pamphlets sometimes took the form of letters, and newspapers frequently published letters to the editor. Early novels such Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady appeared as series of fictive letters that revealed the complexities of the characters’ (especially women’s) inner lives.

Letters were even made public sometimes. For instance, Benjamin Franklin intercepted the correspondence of the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, and leaked it to the press. The published correspondence mobilized the colonial opposition to Crown officials. Indeed, letters made revolutions. In the years before 1776, the Committees of Correspondence organized inter-colonial resistance to British imperial authority. British Corresponding Societies, United Irishmen, French Jacobin clubs, and American Democratic-Republican Societies expanded this practice of revolutionary correspondence to the rest of the Atlantic world in the 1790s. Letters mattered in the eighteenth century in the same way that the explosion of new media forms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, memes, gifs, and Instagram have reshaped communication and politics in our own time—yet twenty-first-century students sometimes struggle to relate to the old-fashioned medium of letters.

Consequently, I have used these new media forms to teach about old media in an upper division course for the past three years, each time revising and expanding the activity because of its popularity with students. Students form groups of three to five members, and I assign a different set of six to ten letters for each group to read before class. Students spend two class periods working on the “translation,” writing a minimum of twenty social media posts based on that correspondence. They also usually collaborate outside of class to finalize their posts. Each group then presents its work to the rest of the class. During these discussions, students’ newfound enthusiasm for eighteenth-century letters is often palpable. In the process, students sharpen their reading and writing skills and their understanding of how correspondence works. 

The correspondence of John and Abigail Adams—one of the most famous in early America—encompasses over 1,000 letters written between 1762 and 1801. Of course, John and Abigail wrote to each other only when they were apart, but they were frequently separated during their fifty-four years of marriage. Their correspondence began during their courtship, and included letters written when John was being inoculated against smallpox and was so contagious that he could not meet with Abigail. After their marriage, they were often separated when John worked as a lawyer in the Massachusetts county court circuit, as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, as a diplomat in Europe during the Revolutionary War, and as vice president and then president during the 1790s. John and Abigail’s correspondence continued the conversation of their marriage throughout those years of absence.

Their letters are widely accessible in several edited compilations, in the documentary edition of The Papers of John Adams, and in The Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, a digital archive of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Searchable both by keyword and by date, this archive offers links to digital images of the original letters and transcriptions. When I selected letters for this assignment, I highlighted the conversational nature of the correspondence by choosing examples from the Revolutionary War in which John and Abigail were responding to each other’s comments and queries.  The digital archive made this easy to do since the transcribed letters feature convenient hyperlinks to the other letters mentioned in the correspondence.

In class, I lectured briefly on the historical context of eighteenth-century letters and on John and Abigail’s relationship, then advised students to begin the assignment by brainstorming in their small groups the issues, events, and topics that John and Abigail discussed in their correspondence and pinpointing which sentiments would make good social media posts.  They immediately observed that the correspondence addressed a wide variety of topics, jumbled and sometimes incongruent. A single letter might refer to political news as well as medical issues, family concerns, and neighborhood gossip, a diversity, they noted, that parallels the range of topics that appear in people’s social media feeds today.

Students imitated John and Abigail’s flow of ideas, composing posts that reflected this mix of subjects, personal and political. For example, students learned about how Abigail struggled with a smallpox pandemic in Boston, while John argued for Independence in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The current controversies over vaccination made many students especially curious about the letters in which Abigail discussed her decision to inoculate herself and her three children against smallpox, a decision that was simultaneously personal, familial, and political. “Hope the necessity [of inoculation] is now fully seen,” Abigail commented in July 1776. Accordingly, a group of students had Abigail tweet: “Got the kids inoculated,” adding in pro-vaccination hashtags like #vaccinateyourkids and #vaxwithme to reflect Abigail’s endorsement.

Meanwhile, John wrote to Abigail on July 3, 1776: “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A Resolution was passed without one dissenting Colony.” Students had John Adams post this news as: 

“So excited about the things getting done here with congress. Great choices being made that even Delaware and South Carolina agreed on #freeandindependentstates #spoilers #declaration.” 
 

Yet, students recognized that John’s letters did not solely discuss politics. They created posts based on quotidian matters too. “Yesterday I dined with Captain Richards,” John wrote to Abigail on June 2, 1776, “We had Cherries, Strawberries, and Green Peas in Plenty.” Students noted that John’s remarks on food would have been worthy of sharing on Instagram, where users frequently post photographs of their meals and they added #somuchpeasandberries to their post.

This intermingling of the personal and the political humanized John and Abigail Adams for my students. “These historical figures,” one student remarked, “can be made out to be larger than life,” but the social media assignment made them more “relatable for students today.” In learning that the Revolutionary War did not stop John and Abigail from worrying about their children’s education and health or relishing what they ate for dinner, students saw the overlap between political and social histories.

They also began to understand the American Revolution not just as a fight over abstract concepts such as “taxation without representation,” but as a lived experience.  In her letter of March 2, 1776, Abigail confessed that “I have been kept in a continual state of anxiety and expectation ever since you left me.” Written during the Siege of Boston, the letter related the terrifying sound of the cannon fire, which interrupted Abigail’s writing several times: “but hark! the House this instant shakes with the roar of Cannon,” she wrote. Students dramatized this letter as a tweet: 

Cannon fire is preventing any worthwhile sleep.  #NoSleep #The Struggle Continues

Like the letter, the post conveyed Abigail’s fears and anxieties in wartime and the uncertainties that the Adams family faced during the Revolution.  “We live, my dear Soul, in an Age of Tryal,” John wrote to Abigail on May 12, 1774. “What will be the Consequence I know not.” Translating these letters into social media familiar to their own generation turned out to be an excellent way to make students understand the uncertainty and contingency of the slowly unfolding struggle for American independence.

At the same time, “translating” the correspondence made students probe John and Abigail’s personalities and the dynamics of their relationship. Generally, students agreed that John would have embraced Twitter as a means of broadcasting his political opinions to the public, while his personal communications on Facebook would have been more limited. One student remarked that Abigail would have posted and commented on her husband’s page, while John’s interactions on his wife’s page would have been fewer and less emotional. On April 14, 1776, John wrote to Abigail: “You justly complain of my short Letters, but the critical State of Things and the Multiplicity of Avocations must plead my Excuse,” which students translated into this post: “My dear Abby complains too much of my letter writings. There IS a war going on you know.”

Nonetheless, many students sympathized with Abigail’s frustrations. “I want to hear much oftener from you than I do,” Abigail wrote to John on April 5, 1776, adding “You inquire of whether I am making Salt peter. I have not yet attempted it, but after Soap making believe I shall make the experiment.” One group imaginatively translated this line into Abigail telling John: “I want to hear more from you and all you can ask me is if I am making Salt peter?” They added #men to the post, putting a modern spin on the correspondence. Drawing on another letter of Abigail’s from August 14, 1776, one group had Abigail tweet:

 “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women.” #micdrop #protofeminist.

Though the tweet derived from Abigail’s letter, the hashtags added a contemporary touch. Interpreting eighteenth-century letters requires close reading, a task with which some students struggled. One student admitted that “understanding Revolutionary Era speech was the most challenging part [of the assignment],” but her group read through the sources multiple times, trying “to break down their correspondence into 140 characters or less.”  Another student added that the activity was useful because they “had to translate the meaning of [the] letters into the terminology of how we speak today,” which enhanced their comprehension of the primary sources. Distilling eighteenth-century letters into their own language helped students to build their reading and analytical skills. As I listened to the conversations among the students, I overheard students asking each other questions about the meaning of words, the historical context of events mentioned in the letters, and the motivations of their authors. Grappling with the meaning of these sources, my students were doing history.

Their intensive and intuitive reading of the correspondence generated new insights into the history of everyday life during the American Revolution. The students got to know John and Abigail through their letters: Abigail’s pragmatic efficiency in running her household during wartime and her occasional sauciness; John’s vanity, his brusque and impolitic manner, and his exasperation when other people, including Abigail, did not see the world the way he saw it. The correspondence opened up for my students the intimate and emotional dimensions of history that are too often lost in the imposing political and military narratives of the American Revolution that we teach to students.

Translating John and Abigail’s correspondence into contemporary social media posts further prompted students to look outward and consider the continuities and discontinuities between past and present social media. The assignment helped them reflect on their own social media use. In a time of rapidly changing communication technologies, my students connected with an older media form. They found common ground with John and Abigail Adams, as students recognized their own struggles to communicate with loved ones in the correspondence of that extraordinary eighteenth-century couple. Perhaps a sign of the assignment’s success was that a student wrote a thank-you letter to me at the end of the semester. The letter was written on a sheet of paper, folded into an envelope, and delivered to my departmental mailbox.

Further Reading

On correspondence, see Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, 2009); Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia, 2015); and Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (Cambridge, 2005). Russ Castronovo has made some insightful comparisons between old and new media in Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (Oxford 2014).

The biographical literature on John and Abigail Adams is extensive. See especially Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York, 2010) and Edith B. Gelles, Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (New York, 2009), and Gelles, Abigail Adams: A Writing Life (New York, 2002).

Frank Shuffleton edited a volume of their Revolutionary War correspondence: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams (New York, 2004), while Gelles edited a volume of Abigail’s correspondence: Abigail Adams: Letters (New York, 2016). The Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, organized by the Massachusetts Historical Society, is an invaluable resource for research and teaching. All quotations in this article are from that electronic archive.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

Michelle Orihel is associate professor of history at Southern Utah University. Her research focuses on politics and the print media in early American and Atlantic history. She is writing a book about the Democratic-Republican Societies and opposition politics in the trans-Appalachian West during the 1790s. She has published articles in The Historian, The New England Quarterly, and The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. Her essay on pamphlets in early America is forthcoming in United States Popular Print Culture to 1860, the fifth volume in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, published by Oxford University Press.

This roundtable is another installment in an ongoing series devoted to “First Person” experiences with early American culture. We envision “First Person” features as an exploration of what it means to inhabit history in extraordinary ways. What alchemy occurs when we set sail on a whaling ship, put on period clothing, perform the words and deeds of an earlier life? In short, what happens when we put our bodies in the very spaces we’ve spent so much time reading about? Of course, we all know that we can’t really feel what our subjects felt, but this feature thinks critically about our desire to do just that.

This issue’s First Person feature focuses on reenactments of Charleston’s 1865 Reconciliation Banquet, a sumptuous feast hosted by Nat Fuller, a formerly enslaved man who was one of Charleston’s most famous chefs. Fuller invited black and white residents in Charleston, S.C., to sit down and enjoy a meal, even as the city reeled from the destruction of the Civil War. This roundtable features the voices of the guests, of the culinary scholar who helped put the event together, and of the chef who stood in Nat Fuller’s place as he cooked the food and welcomed the diners.

Nat Fuller’s generous invitation to the residents of Charleston to find a space to talk, to give, and to find common ground has taken on a particularly powerful resonance in the wake of the tragic events of June 17, 2015. On that day, a man who identified strongly with symbols of the Confederacy murdered congregants of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Fuller’s beloved Charleston, forcing us to realize, yet again, the power that past hatred continues to exert in our present moment. Nat Fuller’s banquet—both in its original and present-day manifestations—reminds us of the urgent need to inhabit the past in ways that not only acknowledge wrenching violence and loss, but also offer the hope of inclusion, of nourishment, and, perhaps, Nat Fuller would urge us to hope, even reconciliation.

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

We are used to hearing stories of Captain Cook, Captain Bligh, and the other big names of Pacific exploration. Their adventures have captivated countless readers since the middle of the eighteenth century. There was another set of explorers, though, who were travelling alongside these Europeans. And their stories are no less dramatic or remarkable. 

As Greg Dening observes elsewhere in this issue, Pacific Islanders have always been adept travelers. Their history is filled with long-distance sea navigations, far migrations, inter-island trade, and inter-island battles. When European ships started anchoring by Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawai’i, or the islands of Micronesia, there were islanders who found the prospect of a new type of voyaging appealing. They decided to join some of the onward journeys. Ahutoru, a Tahitian, left with Louis Antoine de Bougainville and in 1769 became the first Pacific Islander to visit Europe. He enjoyed the charms of Paris for a year before boarding a ship that would have, had he not caught smallpox on the way, returned him to his island. Another well-known figure is Mai (Omai), visitor to Britain and one of the few among these travelers to survive the trip and return home. Less familiar are the names of Tupaia, Taiato, or Hitihiti; men who went exploring with Cook, and whose stories are included here.

The attractions of a trip with a British or French crew were sufficient to inspire many young men to present themselves as willing navigators, translators, or sailors. It was primarily young men who asked to go. (One woman stowed away on Cook’s ship Resolution before it left Tahiti to catch a lift to nearby Ra’iatea but she was an exception.) The reasons the young island men had for embarking varied, but there were social advantages in associating with exotic foreigners and in acquiring European goods and firearms. There was also the tantalizing opportunity to extend their horizons.

What follows is a simple telling of some of these men’s stories, short reductions of great yarns. But we must tell these tales: doing so offers some insurance that these dynamic, colorful strands are not omitted from the weave of Pacific history.

Tupaia: navigator and translator

When Captain Cook anchored in a bay on the northern coast of Tahiti for the first time in April 1769, he met Purea, the most powerful woman on the island. He also met her collaborator, a priest from the island of Ra’iatea named Tupaia. They were working towards a monopolization of the island’s sacred and political power. Tupaia was a respected figure in the Society Islands and something of a virtuoso. A member of the elite arioi society of travelers and performers for the god ‘Oro, he was a ritual specialist, skillful navigator, and negotiator. He had also witnessed in 1767 the extraordinary visit of the first ship from beyond the Pacific: Samuel Wallis’s Dolphin. He knew something of what to expect from these visitors. He established a friendship with the naturalist Joseph Banks, helped Cook in relations with chiefs and learned from the ship’s artists how to draw in European style. Near the end of the Endeavour’s stay he announced he was going to accompany them to England. Cook and Banks, on the lookout for a guide, felt he “was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.”

After leaving Tahiti, the Endeavour made several stops among the Society Island archipelago. In each place Tupaia used the correct ceremonial forms when greeting the chiefs, easing some of the tensions of these early meetings across cultural divides. In August they departed, as Banks said, “in search of what chance and Tupaia might direct us to.” 

They steered southward towards New Zealand, to try to determine if it was the northern tip of a great southern continent. Tupaia drew maps and read the currents, weather, and sky. On reaching New Zealand, Tupaia helped establish working relationships between the Maori people and the European visitors. He was able to translate, as the language of the Society Islands was the original basis of the language of the Maori. His lineage was important: he was from the Maori’s ancestral homeland, Hawaiki (Ra’iatea), and was seen to hold substantial spiritual power (mana). There were still violent clashes and misunderstandings. Tupaia, though, created a lasting impression on Maori communities and it was the great priest, rather than Cook or Banks, who was most persistently asked after when voyagers stopped by. 

After establishing that the two islands of New Zealand were not the bountiful continent they sought, Cook and his men departed for the east coast of Australia. In April 1770, Cook tried to land with a few officers, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, and Tupaia in a bay that would later form part of Sydney. Two men (of the Gweagal or Eora people) met them with shouts and spears. Tupaia tried in vain to find any words in common and Cook offered gifts, but the visitors only managed to get ashore after firing on the men. Without the ability to obtain food and information from the locals, Cook had to continue on up the coast. Tupaia was of help in northern Australia, when he was able to establish a trusting relationship with the Guugu-Yimithirr people.

From Australia, the voyagers made their way to Dutch Batavia (present-day Jakarta). There, in December 1770, Tupaia and his servant Taiata fell ill. Dismayed at ever having left Tahiti, Tupaia died a few days after Taiata. 

Mai meets George III

The most well-known Pacific traveler of the Age of Enlightenment is Mai (fig.2), a Ra’iatean who joined Cook’s second voyage at the Island of Huahine. Mai was born around 1753 into the ra’atira, a land-owning class. Like Tupaia, he had been exiled from his home island by the warriors of Bora Bora. He had also lost his father to them and remained bent on revenge. In September 1773 when Cook’s two vessels arrived, Mai saw an opportunity. He struck up some friendships with the men on the Adventure and, as he bragged to his compatriots, decided to travel to England and get the weapons he needed to avenge his father’s death. 

Mai did not have the linguistic experience of the better-travelled Tupaia, but during the voyage he―and his fellow Society Islander, Hitihiti―helped the ship’s two naturalists, Johann and George Forster (father and son) with a vocabulary of the Tahitian language as well as with the ship’s relations in Tonga and New Zealand. Things did not run happily with the Maori they met, a rash of offenses being made against each side. After one incident in Queen Charlotte Sound on the south island, Mai went with one of the officers to look for a party of ten who had gone missing while collecting greens. They found them, cut up and being roasted. The Adventure had by this time lost company with Cook’s Resolution. Shocked and disheartened, Mai and the crew left New Zealand. Captain Tobias Furneaux, Cook’s second in command, directed their course back to England, eastward through empty, freezing latitudes, erasing hope of finding a southern continent.

In England Mai met the crème of English society, including the king and queen. Those at the royal reception applauded his grace, good humor, and charming manners, and extended a shower of dinner invitations. Mai’s chaperone, Sir Joseph Banks, was happy to promote his protégé, introducing him to the foremost figures of science, art, politics, and literature, and taking him on tours of cities and country estates. Mai learned to dance in the English manner, to shoot, to play chess, to ice-skate, and to read and write English. Philosophic debates in Europe on the nature of civilization were given extra fuel by observations of Omai’s “natural” civility, and the education he was receiving (containing so little Christian instruction) became a matter of public controversy. As interesting as his English experiences might have been, Mai retained his desire to return to Ra’iatea.

King George III had already promised a ship to return Mai to the Society Islands and the Admiralty Board was eager to find the coveted Northwest Passage, a theorized northern water route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Cook was the natural choice for the voyage and in the summer of 1776, just as the Americans were declaring their independence, he set sail on his third and final Pacific expedition. 

On reaching the Society Islands in August 1777, the voyagers spent time in Tahiti and Moorea, then established Mai in Huahine (near Ra’iatea) on a piece of land where the crew assembled a prefabricated house for him. Mai’s English possessions ranged from pistols, ammunition, a suit of armor, cutlasses, a pair of horses and a monkey, model buildings, toy soldiers, an organ, a jack-in-a-box, and an electrical apparatus. He was not as careful as he should have been in distributing his gifts, but retained enough weapons and supporters within Huahine to achieve his desired military victory over the Bora Borans. He did not have long to celebrate. He died of a fever only two and a half years later. 

Hitihiti’s Polynesian and Antarctic adventures

Hitihiti was as much an adventurer as Mai (fig. 3). He was of higher rank, being linked to the Puni chiefly line of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the Society Islands and home of Mai’s enemies. While Mai was negotiating to travel on Captain Furneaux’s Adventure, Hitihiti was volunteering for a place on Cook’s Resolution. Like many islanders, Hitihiti (also known by his former name, Mahine), had a workable command of English, was judged to be personable, and was accepted as a crewmate by the British mariners.

During the ships’ next stop, in Tonga, Hitihiti and Mai found that red feathers, a potent and sacred item in Polynesia, were abundantly available. They bartered for what they could of the feather-decorated clothes and lengths of cloth made of beaten bark (tapa). Hitihiti advised Cook to do the same; he knew how valuable they would be as trade items back in Tahiti. This advice was to prove important: at several points along the journey the islanders they were meeting would only give up pigs and other provisions in return for some of these feathers.

In March 1774, after spending over a hundred days at sea and desperately in need of food, the Resolution’s crew finally sighted the coast of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The first islander to come on board was bombarded with questions; Hitihiti tried to make some headway but was constantly interrupted. He went ashore with the officers and although the island was bare, hot, and parched, some food was available for trade. Hitihiti’s eye was caught by the peoples’ carvings of human figures, feather headdresses, and a carved wooden hand. He managed to barter his lengths of tapa, a valuable commodity in Rapa Nui, for some of these items. He later gave the wooden hand to the Forsters, who in turn donated it to the British Museum, where it can be seen today.

Leaving Rapa Nui, Hitihiti’s verdict was “a bad land, a good people.” He was more pleased by the Marquesas, similar in so many ways to his own island home. He was also delighted with his visit to Takaroa, of the Tuamotu Archipelago, where he was able to secure some dogs with white, long hair of the sort valued for warriors’ ornaments in Tahiti. Returning to the Society Islands, though, was Hitihiti’s greatest moment of triumph. As the ship anchored in Matavai Bay in Tahiti, the people were amazed to see him there on deck, in European clothes, with an unsurpassed collection of exotic objects and red feathers. He was an instant celebrity. People flocked to hear his stories, women flocked to his bed, and people of ambition scrambled for his support.

Hitihiti decided to remain within the Society Islands rather than travel on to Europe. His fortunes waxed and waned, but he was still able to retain some of the advantages of his experiences. He also retained his role as friend of the British. In 1777 Cook met up with him and presented gifts from the British Admiralty and a personal gift of a chest of tools. William Bligh dined with him in 1788 during the Bounty expedition and, on returning in 1792, heard that Hitihiti had gone with Captain Edwards of the Pandora in search of the Bounty mutineers. His appetite for adventure seems to have been undimmed.

New Horizons

There were others; the Maori chief’s son Te Weherua and his friend Koa who went with Cook to Tahiti; Lebuu, son of the Palauan Ibedul, who traveled to Canton and England. The risk they all took in embarking with Europeans was that they would never return home. Like Ahutoru, Tupaia, and Taiata, the aspirations of the Maori and Palauan boys were defeated by European disease.

From the late eighteenth century an increasing number of European ships made stops at the islands of the western as well as the eastern Pacific, opening up more opportunities for travel. Islanders started to accompany missionary ships from the late 1790s as they took on the role of “native teachers” to help in the work of Christianizing the Pacific. In the decades that followed, increasing numbers of islanders would take to the sea aboard the many trading, whaling, missionary, and settler ships arriving in the region. Although some of this traffic represented the grim lurch of the colonial labor trade, islanders continued to employ the ships to their own ends.

Further Reading:

The cross-cultural histories of the Cook voyage are explored most effectively and enjoyably by Ann Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (London, 2004) and Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London, 2003). Cook’s shipboard journals have been edited by J.C. Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1955-67). For more on each of the islanders, see Salmond and Thomas as above, and also, for Tupaia: Greg Dening’s Performances (Chicago, 1996) and chapters in M. Lincoln, ed. Science and Exploration in the Pacific (Suffolk, 1998). Tupaia’s watercolors are in the British Library. For more on Mai, see E.H. McCormick, Omai: Pacific Envoy (Auckland, 1977) and Francesca Rendle-Short, ed. Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas (Canberra, 2001). On Hitihiti, see Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, eds. A Voyage Round the World by George Forster (Honolulu, 1999). On Li Buu (Lee Boo): K. Nero and N. Thomas, eds., An Account of the Pelew Islands (London: 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Jenny Newell is a curator (Polynesia) in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, British Museum. She is writing a doctoral thesis on cross-cultural exchanges and ecology in eighteenth-century Tahiti.

Presenting multiple perspectives, growing ideas

“We are about to embark on a journey! We are going to stand in the shoes of the men and women who made America!”

The call to participate in the Revolutionary Town Meeting rang out! Working closely, Dinah Cohen and I challenged the fourth graders to “become living replicas” of the significant historical figures of Revolutionary America. It was early in April, and the study of the American Revolution provided a perfect backdrop for the notion that all history is a story—usually a story told with a particular angle. Twenty-seven nine-year-olds traveled with us as we taught them to appreciate multiple perspectives, to reconstruct divergent points of view on independence, and to defend differing positions. The plan called for these young revolutionaries to deliver speeches, to engage in debate, and to share differing interpretations of the decision to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Developing the Content: Historical Context

Dinah Cohen was convinced from the first day that if we want children to write passionately, we must provide opportunities that allow them to step into those events. She wanted them to see “the gravity and the magnitude” of the times and “to live it!” First, she immersed the children in the historical context of the late 1700s. In addition to delving into biographical and background information, students investigated their figures’ actions and their figures’ reactions to events that led to the Revolution. Carefully checking for source reliability and validity, students examined primary and secondary sources from textbooks, trade books, and various Internet sites. Figure 1 details the way that Joe concisely summarized the expectations (“Joe” and other student names below are pseudonyms).

Building on the students’ systematic research skills, we designed scaffolds aimed at teaching these young historians the tools of the trade. We hoped to move children beyond knowing what to do towards knowing how to do it. We needed to teach children that if they really wanted to understand and reconstruct multiple points of view, they would need to actively “do history.”

Immersed in this rich historical content from texts, trade books, picture books, and children’s magazines, the children easily drew on a virtual toolbox of reading and writing structures. Multiple configurations of conversations erupted constantly: peer conferences, small group talks, whole-class conversations. Sometimes listening, sometimes coaching, Mrs. Cohen and I witnessed a myriad of conversational moves. These fourth graders expected their peers to substantiate conversation with content: names, dates, places, and events. Students challenged each other’s claims, asking for clarification or probing with new questions. Often simultaneously, these young historians were scattered across the classroom developing timelines or charts, jotting notes, and writing reflectively in response to a primary quote. Sitting silently in creviced corners or collaboratively paired at a table, children developed (and supported) theories about revolutionary independence using an impressive range of writing-to-learn strategies. Notebook pages were littered with marginal notes, Venn diagrams, questions, quick writes, and double entries coupled with conclusions.

Growing Interpretations: Constructing Meaning

Two weeks later, a quick scan of this fourth-grade classroom revealed pint-sized historians engrossed in content research. Collectively, these young Abigails and Thomases accumulated an inspiring arsenal of textbook and trade book chronicles. Eavesdropping on their conversations and peeking into notebooks convinced us that these children could fluently spout multiple authors’ perspectives on independence. Clearly, our historians were ready for a bend in the road, and it was time to teach children how to reconstruct divergent viewpoints, searching for the meaning of independence for themselves! In a simple, yet significant teaching move, we taught the students to hold onto and extend the connections that they were making among the different document sources in two key ways: “writing-to-learn strategies” and “social studies talk.” A look into Matthew’s work provides a window into this approach.

Focused on a single page of text, Matthew thought out loud: “So Thomas wrote a book, Common Sense. He thought it’d change people’s minds.” Almost immediately, Matthew narrowed his search, ready to find evidence to support his idea that Paine valued independence. Matthew moved from text to text; read, then reread; and then focused on pictures on the side panels. Throughout the process, Matthew chronicled the events of Thomas Paine’s life in his notebook, citing sources and liberally using marginal notes to agree, and then disagree, with varying authors’ presentations. In a conference with his teacher, Matthew compared his process of putting together different pieces of information as he developed his ideas about Thomas Paine to collecting the pieces of a pie: “one piece, two . . . until I get the whole story.” Matthew began his notebook entry,

Evaluation: Living the Mantra

In a deliberate three-stage series of lessons, we implemented the second planned and purposeful teaching move. We taught the children to defend differing positions. First, we taught them to replicate (in dress and action) the designated historical figure “who changed the world.” Next, Mrs. Cohen and I taught the fourth graders revision strategies that focused on first-person narration weaving direct quotes with thinking. Finally, we taught our historians to “have a conversation” with their listeners. A close look at Jenny’s progress through her final preparations for her role as Anna Green Winslow in the Revolutionary Town Meeting shows the effects of this teaching on her ability to construct and defend her decision to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Jenny used the final days before the meeting to become a living document, authentically replicating twelve-year-old Anna. She designed her costume to include layered petticoats covered with a simple, hand-sewn, buttoned dress, capped by a matching bonnet. In her left hand she carried a basket with cloth and an array of needles. Tucked into her basket were original diary entries, marked with the words: Spinning for Liberty. In a conversation with Jenny, the fourth grader filled us in on her research to date: “So, I wrote a page about Anna . . . she joined a patriot sewing circle and helped the cause of Liberty.” Jenny elaborated, “They were sewing to protest British taxes by making their own clothes so they wouldn’t have to pay for it from England.”

At first, Jenny read and reread Anna’s diary, listing evidence that supported a patriot stance. With guidance, Jenny revised her first ideas. After underlining the fragment, “I might have told you that notwithstanding the stir about the Proclamaiten, we had an agreeable Thanksgiven,” Jenny almost automatically combined the two skills at her fingertips. First, Jenny’s prior examination of the Proclamation of 1764 allowed her to make sense of this statement, and more importantly, her prior knowledge helped her recognize its potential to support her angled position. Jenny worked through the statement, taking precise one-word notes in the margins of the diary: “annoyed,” “disturbed,” and “bothered.” She concluded, “maybe Anna was annoyed or bothered by the stir of the proclamation.” In this entry, Jenny not only added new content details but also began to incorporate her thinking.

Those last sessions before the Revolutionary Town Meeting were sprinkled with revision conferences. Mrs. Cohen taught the speechwriters deliberate grammar choices that allowed them to incorporate passion into their conversation with the listener. Jenny opted to speak directly to her audience. She began, “You must be thinking . . . ” Furthermore, Jenny learned that she could couple her systematic use of the present tense with judicious control over the exclamation point, e.g., “If only I could!” These moves added specificity, credibility, and power to the final version.

Conclusion

The spiraling effect of Mrs. Cohen’s direct, angled teaching was simple, yet significant. These children actively constructed versions of the call to independence in 1776. This active participation resulted in students who made informed decisions, developed reasoned arguments, and engaged in problem solving.

The Revolutionary Town Meeting proved to be an enormous success. Mrs. Cohen managed to teach her fourth-grade students how to “get the person in their heads.” Early one June morning, twenty-seven nine-year-old historians took the stage and passionately proclaimed the ideals of 1776, advancing the mantra: “These were people who changed the world!”

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

Paula S. Marron is the assistant principal at Chatsworth Avenue School in the Mamaroneck School District. She conducted research on writing as the thread for higher level thinking in social studies in elementary classrooms on Long Island and in New York City.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

This special issue of Common-place on the early cities of the Americas offers several opportunities. First, the nineteen individual essays invite Common-place readers to make comparisons about the character of life in the early years of cities spread throughout the Americas–south to north, from Lima, Peru, to Quebec City, Canada; and east to west from Boston to Los Angeles. By adopting an Americas-wide approach, we hope to stimulate your thinking about comparisons among Spanish, English, Dutch, and French cities. Almost one third of the featured cities were Spanish (two of which, Los Angeles and Santa Fe, are now American cities). Three of these cities were French at the time of their founding (two of them, St. Louis and New Orleans, are now American cities). Two were Dutch (New Amsterdam is now New York). It will surprise many readers that two of these Spanish cities–Potosi and Tenochtitlan/Mexico City–attained populations of 150,000 or more, a scale that put them near the top of a list of the world’s most populous cities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some others, such as Lima, were larger in the mid-sixteenth century than Boston and Philadelphia in the age of Jefferson. None of North America’s urban villages would reach the population levels of the major cities of Spanish America until well into the nineteenth century.

Second, though these nineteen cities were founded, variously, over a very long period of time–from about 1500 to 1860–they were each very young cities at the point where our authors examine them. Some of the adolescent cities our authors look at were very small indeed; Boston, New Amsterdam, Quebec, St. Louis, Havana, Paramaribo, and Washington, D.C., were really only overgrown villages, not even attaining populations of ten thousand, at the point we paint their portrait. Our attempt is to look at the dynamics of urban life when these cities were in their second generation or so from founding: a moment when they were by no means fully formed; yet a point by which they had acquired characteristics that continued to shape them for a long time.

Third, our authors have consciously adopted an untraditional approach to urban history, illustrating the social, legal, and political workings of these young urban societies by writing about a particular incident, a place, an encounter, a person, or a group of urban people. Think of these essays as worm’s eye views: moments in the early history of each city that convey the feel what it was like to live in these places hundreds of years ago. For example, Claudia L. Bushman and Richard Lyman Bushman ask readers to stand in the cemetery in Salt Lake City where Dick Bushman’s grandparents are buried. Joyce D. Goodfriend introduces us to New Amsterdam with the story of an African father who is bringing his newborn twins to the Dutch Reformed Church in 1647 to be baptized. In another case, Christine Hunefeldt shows us Lima, Peru, as María Dolores Quispilloc and her husband Antonio Martínez entered the city on a mule in the early 1760s. And Billy G. Smith has the indentured servant William Moraley take us on a tour of Philadelphia in 1729, when the city founded by Quakers in the 1680s had attained a population of about seven thousand. In all the essays, vignettes of this sort lead us into considerations of the dynamics of urban political life, of cities’ economic workings, their cultural efflorescence, and, especially, the social relations that city life fostered between man and woman, master and slave, parent and child, employer and worker, priest and parishioner, plaintiff and defendant.

It needs remembering that these early cities were all founded in overwhelmingly agricultural societies where the hoe and horse, the field and the farmhouse, and the rhythms of life followed sidereal rather than clock time. Yet cities were the cutting edge of change in the early Americas. It was there that almost all the alterations associated with the advent of modern society first occurred and then slowly radiated outward to the small farming communities of the hinterland. In the early cities of the Americas, people first made the transition from a predominantly oral to a largely written culture, from a medieval economy where most transactions were regulated with an eye to the public good to a market economy where entrepreneurial freedom privileged the individual over the group, from a social order where status assigned at birth was displaced by a competitive scramble for rank, from a community-centered to an individual-centered orientation, from a hierarchical and deferential polity to a participatory and contentious civic life, from a deeply religious to a more secularized outlook.

Readers will learn about several elements of early urban life in the Americas that were ever present: violence, racial fluidity, and disease. As we worry about SARS and the possible reappearance of smallpox as killer epidemics, ravaging diseases that have always flourished in urban settings because of population density, we can put our concerns in historical perspective and see how modern medicine has mitigated, if not eliminated, one of the most lethal aspects of early urban life in the Americas. And of course today, we worry about urban violence, and rightly so. But reading these essays cannot but help readers gain some historical perspective on this modern condition. By seeing how violent were the early cities, where no such thing as the modern police force existed to dampen urban vice, we can quickly set aside romantic notions of a simpler and more placid quality of life.

Finally, as several of the essays show, racial slavery was a major part of urban violence in the Western hemisphere, and vice versa. Richard Price’s chilling description of what he calls “a veritable theater of terror” in early Paramaribo, Suriname, is another reminder of how brutal life was in the early modern era. In other essays, including those on New Amsterdam, Tenochtitlan, Potosi, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and St. Louis, readers will get vivid portraits of the mingling of peoples from Africa, Europe, and the Americas at a time when the concept of “race” was still forming (and indeed when the main use of the word was to describe contests of speed). It is much to our benefit, in a day of rapidly rising interracial marriage, to revisit early cities when this was not unusual or thought improper.

As readers will discern, life experiences in the early cities of the Americas varied widely depending on climate, religion, racial composition, and other factors. Life in early Lima and early Boston, for example, was not the same. A Spanish Catholic and Indian mountain mining town such as Potosi and a river-oriented, Quaker-dominated commercial town such as Philadelphia were worlds apart. Readers are invited to make contrasts and comparisons. In the “strange new world,” as Europeans often described the Americas they reached in the late fifteenth century, urban societies developed along a variety of trajectories that these essays begin to explore.

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

Gary B. Nash, guest editor of this special issue, has taught history at UCLA for the last thirty-seven years, and directs the National Center for History in the Schools. He has published many books and articles on the history of colonial and Revolutionary America.

A mid-nineteenth-century prelude

The introduction of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1989 has ushered in an era of much closer economic relations in North America. Could this relationship soon extend to the creation of a monetary union? The birth of the euro in 1999 has generated new interest in this question. Although few expect the U.S. government to embrace a new supranational North American currency any time soon, a number of analysts have speculated that Canada might create a monetary union by simply adopting the U.S. dollar in the coming years.

Would Canadians really ever agree to transform their monetary system in such a dramatic way? Little attention has so far been paid in the contemporary debate to an interesting historical precedent. At the time of the last comprehensive free-trade agreement between the two countries during the 1850s and 1860s, Canadian politicians did indeed embrace a new “dollarized” monetary system that was modeled on that of the United States. What lessons can be learned from this neglected episode in North American monetary history?

The First Era of North American Free Trade and Monetary Reform

The idea of an integrated free-trade zone between the United States and Canada was first born in the wake of Britain’s decisions to abolish its Corn Laws in 1846 and reduce timber preferences throughout the 1840s. These moves sent economic shockwaves through the Canadian colonies by ending their protected export market in Britain. Many Canadian businesses quickly turned to the United States as their best alternative market, and cross-border trade expanded rapidly. Indeed, at one point, many prominent Montreal merchants even called for annexation with the United States. To forestall annexationist sentiments and to facilitate trade with the United States, the Canadian authorities successfully pressed for a free-trade deal with the United States, the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854-66.

Then as now, intensifying North American economic integration prompted new interest in the idea of closer monetary ties between Canada and the United States. At the time, the bulk of the money supply in the Canadian colonies consisted of a motley collection of foreign coins whose value was rated according to the local sterling standards using the familiar terms of pounds, shillings, and pence. Each colony valued foreign coins slightly differently than the others, and in all cases, the official exchange rate between the two dominant coins in circulation—British and U.S. coins—contrasted with that existing in the United States at the time. The contrast was particularly large in the colony whose trade was growing most rapidly with the United States: the Province of Canada (which had been formed by merging Upper and Lower Canada in 1841). The British pound was rated at US$4 in the province, whereas its value was US$4.86⅔ within the United States. This difference in monetary standards, as well as that between the decimal-based dollar system and the sterling system, was a source of frustration to merchants involved in the growing cross-border commerce. These differences increased the costs merchants incurred in exchanging money, making cross-border price comparisons, and conducting basic accounting operations.

In the early 1850s, politicians in the Province of Canada made clear their determination to reform their monetary system. Particularly keen was Francis Hincks who held the post of inspector general from 1848-51 and that of prime minister from 1851-54. He had been a strong supporter of the political reforms that created the first elected Legislative Assembly in 1841, and he believed strongly that the province should be allowed to address its monetary problems without British interference. To this end, he proposed in 1850 that Canada issue its own silver and gold coins for the first time.

These coins, he argued, would be a source of pride to Canadians and allow the government to provide a more homogeneous and well-managed coinage by ending the colony’s reliance on foreign coins. But an equally important goal of the initiative was to facilitate trade with the United States. As early as 1841, when he had overseen the creation of a unified monetary standard for the new Province of Canada, Hincks had called for the adoption of a decimal-based dollar standard in order to simplify and foster cross-border trade. British authorities had opposed his idea then on the grounds that it would strengthen the colony’s ties to the United States and encourage annexationist sentiments. They had insisted instead on the introduction of the local sterling standard whose value was not determined by a U.S. dollar standard.

By 1850, Hincks was much more intent on implementing his proposal to reform the Canadian monetary system along U.S. lines. Though a leading opponent of the annexation movement, he still believed strongly in the need to expand trade with the United States, and he was closely involved in the early negotiations that led to the Reciprocity Treaty. In this era of rapidly expanding U.S.-Canada commerce, he found much more domestic support for his initiative to introduce a dollar-based monetary system. While under half of local businesses polled in the early 1840s had supported this option, a full 100 percent of those surveyed a decade later backed the idea.

British Resistance and the Birth of the Canadian Dollar

To minimize British resistance, Hincks initially proposed in 1850 that the province retain a sterling standard but simply alter its value to emulate that of the United States (i.e., to make one pound equal US $4.86⅔). But the British government would not accept this proposal and suggested instead the adoption of the British sterling standard and British coin (at least until a common coin for the colonies could be agreed upon). British authorities argued that this reform would ensure that the colony’s monetary system facilitated “the adjustment of Trade with the Mother Country.” They also objected that Hincks’s proposed coin issue would infringe on the royal prerogative.

When the British government disallowed Hincks’s act (despite its approval by the provincial legislature and local governor-general), Hincks submitted a new bill. In it, he accepted that Queen’s approval would be necessary for any coin issue by the province and even suggested that a separate coinage was not absolutely necessary. “That was more a matter of national pride than anything else,” he argued. While conceding this point, he became more provocative in arguing that a U.S.-style decimal-based dollar standard was now necessary for the province. His reasoning was as follows: “With the people of the United States . . . Canadians are brought into constant daily intercourse. They travel on the same Steamers and Railroad Cars—lodge at one another’s Hotels and carry on a most extensive Commercial intercourse with each other. To have an entirely different Currency . . . would be an intolerable inconvenience.”

Hincks’s new proposal was greeted enthusiastically in the province. One member of Parliament even “congratulated the House on the fact that people can now talk of dollars and cents without imputations of disloyalty.” Recognizing the political mood, the British government now backed down and agreed that the province could not only issue its own gold and silver coin (subject to the Queen’s approval) but even introduce the standard of value that Hincks suggested. In return, the British authorities asked Hincks to consider naming the new standard the pound and the new coins royals, half-crowns, and shillings. Discussing this request, one contemporary writer suggested that the British “may have considered it [the proposal for a dollar-based standard] to have too Americanizing a tendency, and been afraid that it might prove ‘the insertion of the thin end of the wedge.’”

Showing some flexibility, Hincks suggested that coin names were “of little consequence,” and he proposed the issuance of coins named royals, shillings, and marks, which would be based on a decimal accounting system (there would be one hundred marks in a royal and ten marks in a shilling). But other politicians in the provincial legislature were much less inclined to compromise on this point. Arguing that dollars and cents were “universally understood,” they favored a dollar-based system. So too did many outside the legislature. As Canadian monetary historian Adam Shortt has put it, “the very general opinion of the press was fairly expressed by the Toronto Leader in the statement, that in a country like Canada, situated on the borders of the United States and with more than one-half of its trade carried on with that country, it is necessary to adopt the system in force there.”

Responding to these sentiments, the legislature passed an act in 1853 that allowed for the issue of silver coin and legalized the use of a dollar standard. Although the government initially allowed the use of either the dollar-based standard or the old sterling-based one, the former quickly prevailed. By 1855, one government document reported, “[the adoption of the dollar standard] has taken place already in many parts of Canada; merchants keep their books, railway boards transact their business, hotel-keepers and traders make out their bills, in dollars and cents; bankers place their dollar on their notes as a regulating unit; the reciprocity treaty will greatly increase our trade with the United States, and our people are daily becoming more familiar with the decimal system in use there. The County Council of Lambton has recently ordered that dollars and cents shall be adopted as the system for keeping the county accounts, levying rates, etc.” The provincial government finally declared the dollar standard to be the exclusive standard of the province in 1857, and it issued the first silver coins denominated in this standard the next year.

The Province of Canada was not the only colony to introduce a decimal-based dollar standard in this period. New Brunswick adopted an identical one on an optional basis in 1852 and soon made it compulsory in 1860 when the colony first issued its own coins. Nova Scotia also embraced a decimal-based dollar standard in 1860, although it chose to value the dollar standard in a slightly different way to facilitate its maritime trade with the British West Indies. After Nova Scotia joined New Brunswick and the Province of Canada to form the new federation of Canada in 1867, Hincks (who had reappeared as finance minister in 1869) took the lead in eliminating that province’s distinctive valuation system, arguing once again that it was “necessary to assimilate the Currency with that of the United States.” Before they too joined Canada, the colonies of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island (PEI) had also already chosen to embrace decimal-based dollar standards in 1865, 1870, and 1871, respectively, with values identical or very close to that of the United States.

Back to the Future?

The fact that Canada, still to this day, bases its monetary system on a decimal-based “dollar” standard (although one whose value is no longer identical to that of the United States) is thus a product of the last era of North American free trade. As we have seen, the Canadian dollar’s birth was the product of a desire to deepen North American economic integration in the mid-nineteenth century through the adoption of a monetary system based on the U.S. model. As we find ourselves in a new era of North American free trade, will history repeat itself? Will the desire for closer monetary ties this time around encourage Canadian policymakers to go one step further and fully embrace the U.S. dollar?

Some contemporary developments are indeed reminiscent of the mid-nineteenth-century period. A number of prominent Canadian business leaders and policy analysts have highlighted how the adoption of the U.S. dollar would help to facilitate cross-border economic transactions by reducing currency-related transaction costs. They also argue that the case for monetary union is strengthened by the fact that economic integration is encouraging some unofficial “dollarization” within Canada. Similar arguments were made by Hincks and others in the mid-nineteenth century.

At the same time, it is clear that contemporary Canadian supporters of North American monetary integration are encountering fiercer opposition than did their nineteenth-century counterparts. In the mid-nineteenth century, few policymakers took seriously the idea that a floating exchange rate could be used to bolster monetary autonomy by helping to insulate the national monetary system from external influences and constraints. They also did not consider that governments might use exchange-rate movements to encourage or discourage exports and imports in ways that fostered adjustments to balance of payments disequilibria. Both of these lines of thought would have been anathema to the gold-standard orthodoxy of the time. Since the 1930s, however, Canadian policymakers have been strongly wedded to a floating exchange rate for precisely these reasons. Indeed, so strong has this commitment been that they have been willing to accept a fixed exchange rate for only two brief periods: 1939-50 and 1962-70. In this context, the case for dollarization encounters stronger opposition on economic grounds.

Proposals to adopt the U.S. dollar also provoke significant nationalist opposition in Canada today. Here, the contrast with the mid-nineteenth-century period is stark. In that earlier era, the project of dollarization was in fact supported by a kind of nascent nationalism in the Canadian colonies. This was because it was associated with demands for self-government and the rejection of an inadequate colonially imposed monetary order. Today, instead of creating a national currency for the first time, Canadians are being asked to give up their national currency. And to make matters worse, they are being asked to adopt a currency issued by the country that has emerged since the nineteenth century as the dominant power in North America. No wonder then that dollarization now appears to many Canadians as a kind of quasi-colonial idea that could undermine their country’s sovereignty and identity.

Further Reading:

The sources for quotations in this article can be found in Eric Helleiner, Towards North American Monetary Union? (Montreal, 2006). For additional readings, see Adam Shortt, History of Canadian Currency and Banking, 1600-1880 (Toronto, 1986) and D.C. Masters, “The Establishment of the Decimal Currency in Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 33 (2) (1952): 129-47.

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

Eric Helleiner is CIGI Chair in International Governance and associate professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. He is author of Towards North American Monetary Union? (Montreal, 2006), The Making of National Money (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), and States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994) as well as coeditor of Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005) and Nation-States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies (New York, 1999). He is currently coeditor of the book series Cornell Studies in Money and the journal Review of International Political Economy.