Despite the fact that conservatives currently run our country, academia is one of many cultural institutions they believe is both stacked against and out to get them. “The most successful and pervasive blacklist in American history is the blacklist of conservatives on American college campuses,” writes professional ex-radical David Horowitz. Horowitz has lately been spearheading a drive to get Republican state legislatures to impose an academic “bill of rights” that would threaten professors who do not include material supporting the preexisting beliefs of conservative and evangelical students in their classes. Conservative students and faculty would get a powerful basis for claims of discrimination if they hear something they do not like or find the quality of their work or the coherence of their thinking criticized. A proposed Florida law aimed at clamping down on “dictator professors” would “give students who think their beliefs are not being respected”—like a student of mine who wanted to know how I knew the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fake–”legal standing to sue professors and universities.” (That dictator gag is priceless. Apparently, Hitler and Stalin had to undergo teaching evaluations and salary reviews. Who knew?)

Horowitz’s group, Students for Academic Freedom, claims to have 150 campus chapters watching out for professorial oppression nationwide. Among the most recent crimes reported on SAF’s handy Academic Freedom Abuse Centerwere “Introduced Controversial Material” and “Mocked Political/Religious Figures.” An adjunct political science professor in New York apparently “always makes fun of the President and says that he is not smart and says that certain presidents are good while others are bad.” What is the world coming to when political scientists start rating presidents? Next the historians will start telling the kids that the Indians were here first or something. 

As disgustingly and literally Orwellian as it is to set up Websites devoted to academic freedom that encourage students to report their professors to the party commissar, Horowitz is probably right about one thing. Liberal Democrats really do seem to heavily outnumber conservative Republicans on most campuses, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Horowitz’s latest study of “political bias” on campus counted the voter registrations of faculty at “32 elite colleges and universities” and found the ratio was about ten-to-one over the whole sample.

I do not trust David Horowitz as far as my five-year-old could throw him, but those figures more or less track with my experience in history departments. A colleague once observed that our department was in the clear from charges of political bias because we had some Republicans. He was speaking of perhaps four or five people out of thirty-odd faculty. It is an index of the situation that such a ratio probably qualified us as a conservative department because we were only 70-80 percent liberal.

The question is, what has produced this imbalance? If there is a blacklist, I have yet to see it—maybe when I make full professor. Nor for that matter have I ever heard a job- or tenure-candidate’s party affiliation raised. Perhaps, conservatives, we might be seeing market forces at work. Nonscientist academics have one of the worst education-to-income ratios in human history, especially out here in the public sector. Perhaps people whose political values celebrate wealth are simply not interested in taking the required vow of genteel poverty?

I could go on, but let me also suggest a more substantive reason that academics, at least in my field of American history, might tend to veer left: we are members of what an anonymous White House staffer infamously called “the reality-based community.” We actually know stuff, and actual knowledge has a way of making even the most comforting and plausible conservative fantasies very difficult to accept. 

Now I am writing from personal experience. While I cannot truthfully say I was ever a conservative in the present sense, believing in science and social tolerance as I have since toddlerhood (thanks, Captain Kirk), academia really did push me out of my ancestral centrist Republicanism. I was not brainwashed or politicized or intimidated as the Horowitzes of the world would probably have it—modern issues rarely came up in graduate school, and Harvard was still historiographically quite traditional in late ’80s. Nevertheless, I was exposed to certain ideas and facts that I would never have known otherwise. 

Social History as Political Education: The Social Security Debate

The current Social Security debate presents a great example of an issue on which history has changed my mind. Before graduate school—and a forced march through the literature on American social history—I was one of those post-baby boomers who thought Social Security was a big crock, an outmoded boondoggle that transferred wealth from younger workers starting families to older people who did not need it, while still not paying retirees enough to live comfortably. Back in the ’80s, I was encouraged in these views by a series of articles in neoliberal magazines like the Washington Monthly, the Atlantic, and my journalistic alma mater, the New Republic. While out-and-out conservatives openly pushed privatization (much more openly than President Bush does now with his disingenuous talk of saving Social Security by taking money out of the program, the destroying-the-village-in-order-to-save-it option), the magazines I was reading often took the reasonably liberal position that some sort of smaller, means-tested old-age pension program, paid for through progressive taxation, would be greatly preferable to FDR’s universal entitlement.

What Social Security actually accomplished rarely came up in the 1980s debates, any more than it does today. That requires some knowledge of what went before Social Security and the other forms of retirement assistance that now go along with it. Here is where the facts start to cause problems. 

Let us start with the basics. Until the middle of the twentieth century, becoming too old to work meant falling into dependence and poverty, and the onus for preventing this rested entirely on the family, the primary social, economic, and (in many ways) political institution of premodern times. 

Most communities had poorhouses or some other form of poor relief, but these were reserved for unlucky persons who had no local relatives to care for them: widows, orphans, the disabled, and the mentally ill, in addition to the elderly. But town fathers were always concerned about keeping the poor rates low, so unattached people who might need care were often simply warned out and sent to go live or die someplace else. Benjamin Franklin sold Philadelphia’s first true institutional solution to this sort of suffering, the Hospital for the Sick Poor, as a way to save on the poor rates. David Hackett Fisher’s Growing Old in America (an early synthesis on the subject that still bears the Harvard Coop price tag from when I purchased it during grad school) provides examples of indigent old sleeping under piles of brush, foraging along the docks, and being left by the crew of a coasting vessel on an uninhabited island. Even if they did not meet quite such lonely fates, the unattached elderly, especially old women, often became social outcasts, the beggars and wise women and scary old crones who often provided needed community services but also inspired occasional spasms of community fear and disgust. It was witchcraft, baby. 

Family responsibility for the elderly meant that adult children’s lives were dominated by their parents’ needs in ways we cannot even imagine today. Any number of common social arrangements and legal doctrines revolved around the imperative to concentrate power and wealth, especially power over wealth, in the hands of older people, partly to make sure that they would be supported in their declining years. Multigenerational families lived close by each other if not actually in the same house, and the elders were not there to provide free babysitting and emotional support. They were patriarchs and matriarchs wielding the authority of age. Dear Old Dad controlled the family landholdings and held tight to the power this conferred over his children as long as he decently could, with quite lax standards of decency. An eldest son might have to delay his independence and work as Dad’s underling until his forties before he finally got control of the farm. Even then he could count on having to care for his parents as long as they lived, often as a contractual condition for the son’s getting title to the land. The contracts sometimes specified exactly what food and fuel the parents were to be furnished. Youngest daughters (like Emily Dickinson) might be denied the chance to get out of the house at all if their parents required care. Most children could count on the key decisions of their lives being made for them: whether to move west or to take on debt to acquire a larger plot of land; whether to be apprenticed to a trade, or bound out as a servant; whether to be married off to a convenient relative or neighbor, and so on. While the social historians I read sometimes waxed a little nostalgic about these traditional families, they also showed what a pressure cooker of tension they could be, to the point, some suggested, of pushing young Americans toward revolution. Fischer argued that the American Revolution wrought a “revolution in age relations” that delegitimated the superior status of elders, even if their economic power lingered for a while.

While it is not clear that anything radical changed in the material lives of elderly people after the Revolution, my impression is that the traditional system of home care either broke down or never worked very well. The demand for cash relief seems to have been quite high when an opportunity presented itself. Embarking on my own research on early American political history, I was at first shocked at the countless letters that came to government officials and political leaders from destitute veterans, widows, and others begging, wheedling, or demanding pensions, the settlement of claims against the government, minor appointments that might serve as pensions, and just plain money. The Revolutionary War veteran father of one of the newspaper editors I followed pestered the government to supplement his Virginia land bounty for decades, essentially for cost-of-living adjustments. This sort of piecemeal relief seems to have taken a sizable chunk of the government’s time in the early republic, and not a few politicians came to see the American people as a pack of beasts ravening after public assistance. When Congress considered a bill to allow disabled veterans to apply for pensions in 1803, Federalist Roger Griswold saw the deluge coming: “It opened a door for every one who had received the least wound . . . to enter a claim; . . . in every case where . . . the situation of the person was disagreeable, if he was not wealthy, his neighbors would feel for him, and would recommend him to the Government, in order to be freed from the trouble of providing for him themselves.”

During the nineteenth century, demographic and economic trends combined to create a growing population of superfluous older people who commanded less respect than they used to and gradually lost both their former power and the family-based support system—such as it was—that went with it. Life expectancies rose while a greater and greater proportion of the population moved far from families and other relatives in search of wage-paying jobs in factories and offices. At the same time, the middle-class ideal of the nurturing nuclear family, focused on child rearing and mutual affection rather than economic production or the provision of social services, became more powerful, making extra members of the household, such as indigent parents, increasingly unwelcome. For the working class, there was no choice but to labor for as many years as physically possible, sometimes progressing through more menial but less taxing and less remunerative jobs, before spending the rest of their last years in penniless degradation. 

By the later part of the nineteenth century, Fischer writes, old age became publicly identified as a social problem that needed to be solved. The perception was that a large surplus population of superannuated workers had developed, but no one quite knew what to do with them. Private pensions were beginning to appear in some industries, but never for the most vulnerable workers or in significant amounts. Other industrialized nations began establishing national old-age pension systems, while in the U.S. the pressure was relieved by the vast but temporary pension system for Civil War veterans and their immediate survivors. Reformers helped design some state programs, and Theodore Roosevelt, embarrassed that “even the Ottoman Turks” were getting ahead in the compassion race, pronounced the lack of provision for the elderly “a reproach to us as a nation.” However, in general the Progressive Era made little impact on the problem. 

It took a world-historical crisis and Franklin Roosevelt’s deft political hand to finally remove the blocks. The Great Depression threw more than half of the elderly into dependent poverty while only an estimated 5 percent of them had access to pensions. By the mid-1930s, the Civil War pension system that had once served some two-thirds of the elderly population was mostly gone. 

Driven to the political edge, the elderly became a huge constituency for many of the radical movements and crackpot nostrums that roiled the country. This was most obvious in the case of Dr. Francis Townsend’s Old-Age Revolving Pension organization, which favored a $200-per-month government pension for every person over sixty. Townsend clubs sprouted up all over the country, and national conventions full of angry gray champions were held. Dr. Townsend himself was not a threatening figure, but his movement overlapped those of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and other “radical aspirants to dictatorship” (as many critics saw them), and his followers joined many of the other groups in the failed Union Party challenge to FDR in 1936. 

Social Security in its initial form was weak tea that hardly satisfied the acolytes of Townsend and Coughlin. It did not bring down these movements on its own, or even do much to alleviate poverty among the elderly in its early years, but it probably did help forestall more dire political upheavals. More important than its initial impact as a social reform was the ideological sea change Social Security signaled. It became the precedent and institutional basis for the federal government to finally take long-term responsibility for the fate of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. FDR took one of the sticking points that had prevented a national pension system from being enacted in the past—the ideological opposition to permanent, universal poor relief—and turned it into an advantage. Call the retirement assistance “insurance,” paid for with money from a worker’s paycheck, and it became a purchase rather than charity. Make it available to all workers, rich and poor alike, and the charges of socialism and class legislation that had doomed other retirement assistance proposals were easily turned aside.

Messing with Success

With the expansions and additions that came later in the 1930s, and especially after World War II, Social Security was phenomenally successful in making the formerly chronic problem of widespread dependence and indigence among the elderly a distant memory for most Americans. The American family was relieved of much of the burden for elder care, allowing the affection-based, child-centered nuclear family, now wrongly thought of as traditional, to assume its familiar place as the normative model for American life. Ironically, the very success of Social Security allowed for a resurgence of the ideological enmity towards retirement assistance programs that had once been limited to diehard Taft Republicans. Our lives freed of any real impact from our parents’ or grandparents’ retirement needs, Americans my age and younger, few of whom knew their social history, had the luxury of fretting about whether Social Security could ever do anything for us. 

Another thing I have learned as a historian is that history does not move in one direction. Despite all-universe deficits, a collapsing dollar, and many indicators of serious challenges ahead to U.S. economic and political hegemony, President Bush and his minions encourage the idea that Social Security is just like any other government agency or institution. It can be downsized and outsourced with no real impact on ordinary Americans. This attitude depends on the conviction that Social Security is not part of the basic social fabric of this country. In fact it is. Old age poverty may seem to be a problem of the past, but many parts of the United States are one crippled social program and one stock-market or real-estate crash away from a return to the bad old days. All over the Midwest, the Great Plains, Appalachia, and the South, there are aging small towns whose economies are sustained by Social Security and related assistance programs. As Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently pointed out, Social Security “is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it’s the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line.”

That will soon be the case in lots of other places as well. Social Security has often been considered a supplement to retirement income stemming directly from one’s employment, but these other sources are drying up. Traditional defined-benefit pensions are becoming increasingly rare, and even in industries where they were once available, plans are tanking left and right, often because their money was invested poorly. (I am sure with his impeccable track record in private business, President Bush will invest our private retirement accounts much more effectively.) At the same time, many public institutions and companies are trying to convert their employees to private annuity systems that save the employer lots of money but seem unlikely to generate anything close to the returns necessary to match the traditional pensions they replaced. Barring a stock market rally that begins immediately and continues for thirty years straight, workers are in for some distinctly nonshiny golden years (he says, weeping over his VALIC statements). People with middle-class incomes who see the writing on the wall and do not mind home-colleging their children might be able to prepare to live without some guaranteed level of benefits. But lots of American are not and will not be in that position. The day has already arrived when even middle-class retirees, far from accumulating investment income, are still trying to pay off their credit card bills.

I have read that it is a rising trend for adult children to live with their parents, partly recreating the colonial pattern of old-age provision. I suspect there are some on the neopatriarchal right who would welcome a world in which this was again the norm, where families and evangelical churches were the only social-service providers available. The rest of us might consider whether the mobility, individual freedom, and dynamism that makes modern American life possible is really consistent with that sort of system. Our kids better not plan any long stays in graduate school if they are going to support us. At the very least, we might want to start negotiating the maintenance contracts with our kids before they get too old. I have got to get the thermostat in the garret at my son Isaac’s house up to at least sixty-five degrees. And fresh sheets once a week. And no tomato juice.

Further Reading:

While I presume that much literature on the social and policy history of aging has come out in the last fifteen years, it seemed fair given the premise of this piece (and less time consuming, too), to rely on my old comps reading. Thus most of the detail above, except for the congressional debate on revolutionary pensions, comes from David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1978); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976); Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970); Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840 (New York, 1989); and Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser, 33 (1976): 3-30. It is my own spin, however, so none of these authors should be blamed for my lapses. I first learned about the Civil War pension system in Theda Skocpol’s American Political Development seminar, and her book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, 1995) controversially places great interpretive stress on this lost first welfare state. To remind myself about the 1930s, I exhumed a couple of other books I have had for years: Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1983), and William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York, 1963). The neoliberal case against Social Security as I knew it is summarized in Phillip Longman, Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America (Boston, 1987). The best coverage of the current Social Security debate is appearing at Talking Points Memo, a blog edited by Joshua Micah Marshall, the only prominent political journalist I am aware of with a Ph.D. in early American history. I suspect he remembers his comps reading, too. The Florida “dictator professors” bill, one of several Horowitz-inspired measures around the country, came to my attention via the editor of Common-Place and a posting by the king (sultan?) of historian bloggers, Juan Cole.

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

After a nearly three year hiatus, “Publick Occurrences” returns to Common-place with its unique historical punditry. The columnist, Jeffrey L. Pasley, a former journalist and speechwriter, teaches American history at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001), and the co-editor (with Andrew Robertson and David Waldstreicher) of Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2004).

Like wrestling with an angel, writing a biography is hard work against long odds. And the effort has lately been much under attack. A recent collection of scholarly essays calls itself The Troubled Face of Biography (Houndmills, Eng., 1988). Most of the criticism takes off from the view that biographies are constructs, fictions not essentially different from novels. On this ground it’s charged that biographers prepackage their subjects’ lives, or invent them, or falsify them for dramatic effect.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Minutiae Without Meaning,” Stanley Fish, dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois, knocked biography as a “bad game.” Fish observes that biographers obsessively collect details. Since these details “don’t mean anything in particular, or can mean anything at all . . . the biographer is compelled to invent or fabricate a meaning by riding his or her favorite hobbyhorse until every inch of the subject’s life is covered by some reassuring pattern of cause and effect.”

To me, Fish’s grumbling betrays unfamiliarity with the history of biography in the West and with how serious biographies get written. There are many types of biographical expression, each with unique objects and demands. Fish has in mind the biographical study—psychobiographies, for instance, such as Stuart Feder’s searching life of Charles Ives, My Father’s Song (New Haven, 1992). Feder unfolds the composer’s relation to his musician-father not so much for its narrative interest, as to show how Ives’s music grew from an unconscious fantasy of father-son collaboration.

But at the other end of the biographical spectrum are works that seek no pattern at all: the classic life and letters, for instance, which does little more than assemble the subject’s literary remains, or the recent subgenre of testimonial biography, such as Frances Kiernan’s 845-page Mary Plain (New York, 2000), which links by bits of commentary the impression Mary McCarthy made on some two hundred people who knew her. Between these extremes of tightly focused analysis and collage lie many other, varying biographical forms, some more “patterned” in Fish’s sense, some less—memoir biographies such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, brief lives such as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (London, 1918), nonhuman biographies such as the best seller Seabiscuit (New York, 2001), family biographies such as Brenda Wineapple’s Sister, Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York, 1996), cultural biographies such as David Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America (New York, 1995)—as well as critical biographies, children’s biographies, TV or Hollywood biopics, the archaic forms of Graeco-Roman biography, and the saint’s life.

Wrong as it is to accuse all biographers of imposing on their subjects’ lives a pattern of cause and effect, it’s more deeply wrong to accuse them of drawing from the pattern a “meaning.” Fish does not say meaning of what. The meaning of the subject’s life? Biography is not metaphysics, nor is it history. Except for writers of obituaries and elegies, no serious biographer judges his subject under the aspect of eternity. The biographer seeks what the subject’s life meant to the subject, how the subject’s experience registered on his or her consciousness, the satisfactions it supplied, dilemmas it produced. This inwardness is what distinguishes biography from history. History concerns what Napoleon did; biography concerns what it meant to him.

Two related fallacies about pattern making also deserve putting down. One often hears that biographies are autobiographies, that the biographer is always writing about himself. This is just a swipe. What chromosome makes biographers any more narcissistic than other people, any more incapable of empathy, of trying to see things as another human being saw them? On the contrary, serious biographers seek and welcome the unfamiliar, however troublesome to account for. Ron Chernow, the author of rich biographies of J.P. Morgan and of John D. Rockefeller remarks that biographers “like to stub their toes on hard, uncomfortable facts strewn in their paths. They want information that will explode, like a prankster’s cigar, in their faces.” Such encounters with the unaccountable are opportunities for breaking out and breaking through, in new directions, to fresh understanding. I’d say that unless the biographer sometimes feels at sea in the material he’s doing something wrong.

One also often hears that biographers must like their subjects. That would of course rule out such vastly important subjects as Hitler or Stalin. In practice, the biographer must like the subject not as a person but as a subject. Some are good subjects for you, some bad. And what makes one subject better than another for you is wildly overdetermined. Some of the reasons are purely practical. Does the subject need a biography? Virginia Woolf again? Are the materials available? Forget doing J.D. Salinger, like him though you may. How much time do I have? Benjamin Franklin? That’s fifteen years’ work, maybe twenty. A biographer’s knowledge and ability also determine the choice. Albert Einstein is a great subject and you like him. But can you write about quantum mechanics without seeming like a dumbbell? Personal idiosyncrasies matter, too. I’ve always stayed in one place, but prefer subjects who moved around a lot. I’d like to write about Hemingway in Paris, Key West, and the Serengeti Plain, but couldn’t possibly write about Proust in his cork-lined room. Gertrude Stein yes, Emily Dickinson no.

In choosing a subject, the biographer’s main question should be, Can I make an effective book out of this person’s life? Day after day for years, the biographer will be trying to untangle chronology, compress relationships without distorting them, keep the main narrative clear while carrying forward several intricate strands of the subject’s life. What pushes most biographers on in this wilderness is not affection for Mary Wollstonecraft or André Gide, but the feeling, fingers always crossed, that they are writing a good book.

Another recent attack on biography comes, alarmingly, from a biographer. Peter Ackroyd has written lives of William Blake and of Charles Dickens, and has also published several distinguished novels. “Of course there are differences between the two forms,” he says in a recent New York Times Book Review essay. “In novels one is forced to tell the truth, for example, whereas in biography one can invent more freely.” A decent gag, except that he means it. Like a digitized Lyndon Johnson shaking hands with Forrest Gump, the Dickens of his pseudobiography speaks dialogue invented for him by Peter Ackroyd. The practice is becoming common. A certain seven-figure-advance American pseudobiographer morphs himself into his biography of Ronald Reagan, together with an invented AIDS victim and an invented student-revolutionary.

This school of virtual reality biography has a deadly potential. It can create in public memory an Andrew Jackson who never desired the removal of Indian tribes from their lands. Pseudobiography can become David-Irving-the-Holocaust-Never-Happened biography. The present moment makes this willingness to fictionalize all the more lamentable. Recent history has aroused interest in scores of women, minorities, and other neglected figures little known but knowable. We don’t want to see them speaking ventriloquized dialogue to dummy characters. We want to know how they lived and what they did.

Lamentable, and also self-defeating. Biography draws much of its power from its factuality, from relating what life really handed out to real people. Thomas Carlyle remarked on this power in a lively essay entitled “Biography”: “[L]et any one bethink him how impressive the smallest historical fact may become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event; what an incalculable force lies for us in this consideration: The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur . . . had therefore, and has, through all time, an authentic being; is not a dream, but a reality.” Once having learned the fact, who forgets that Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Van Gogh cut off his ear, Lou Gehrig contracted sclerosis, Sylvia Plath suffocated herself in a gas oven.

Our ever fresh fascination with such biographical events comes from knowing that, unlike the trials of fictional characters, they involved permanent cost. Plath is in her grave. Carlyle went so far as to say that, because it can achieve this force of actuality, biography is superior to fiction: “[C]onsider the whole class of Fictitious Narratives,” he wrote in the same essay, “from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakespeare and Homer, down to the lowest froth prose of the Fashionable Novel. What are all these but so many mimic Biographies.” When the biographer introduces fiction, he surrenders the very quality of authenticity to which fiction writers aspire.

Biographers of still-living subjects have different problems, but for the historical biographer, truth can never be the truth of the subject. It consists rather of an inflexible fidelity to the documents. It depends from beginning to end on the conciliation, that is the adding and bringing together, of documentary evidence. Since the biographer cannot know in advance what document may be important, he needs to locate them all. Thoroughness is everything. And the search is tedious, expensive, and frustrating—which helps to explain why some biographers now hasten to invent.

The tedium and expense in part arise from the mindlessness of history, which scatters the past helter-skelter. Letters and diaries become sold, bought, and resold, stashed in trunks, lost, moved from place to place. As a result, the biographer finds himself piling up hotel bills and airfares, collecting his evidence from the Maine Historical Society in Portland, to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, to the Public Record Office in London, and beyond. For Brian Boyd, the unwearying biographer of Vladimir Nabokov, gathering his subject’s documentary remains meant a commute to Montreux, Switzerland, and to Cornell University, from his home in Auckland, New Zealand. Kenneth Murdock of Harvard, a biographer of Increase Mather, is said to have flown to Argentina for a footnote.

Searching of course does not always mean finding. However far the biographer flies, he may get nowhere. Boswell reports that Samuel Johnson, when writing his lives of the English poets, went out of his way to interview a man named Swinney, who had known Dryden. Johnson learned no more than that, when visiting his club, Dryden sat by the fire in the winter, and sat by the window in the summer. In researching the life of Samuel F. B. Morse, I’ve hunted far and deep for information about his second wife, who particularly interests me. During his first marriage, Morse fathered a son who as a result of scarlet fever became deaf and suffered brain damage. After his first wife died, he sent the disabled boy to live with a family in upstate New York. That he chose for his second wife a deaf mute, suggests some need to atone for his near abandonment of his son. Much as I’d like to dramatize and explore this painful situation, I’ve been able to find little information about the boy and nothing at all about Morse’s second wife. He remained married to her nearly twenty-five years, and in that time wrote voluminously about everything else. But of her not a letter, not a remark. Nothing.

Other frustrations in research arise from the biographer’s often adversarial relation to archivists. His feelings about the documents he wants to see are proprietary. I’m writing about Elvis so Elvis’s manuscripts belong to me. But nowadays many rare book and manuscript libraries take a custodial stance. They regard themselves less as pipelines than as guardians of their precious holdings. This is understandable considering the hyperinflated prices in the current rare book and manuscript market. A Poe letter these days, could one find any, might easily fetch thirty-five thousand dollars.

The cash value of such jewels has encouraged thefts of them. In the late 1980s a biographer of Gilbert Stuart was sentenced to three years in prison for possession of stolen manuscripts of James McNeill Whistler, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill. In the good old days, say twenty-five years ago, when I asked for Cotton Mather manuscript letters at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester—a world-class repository—I was led into the vault, handed down some boxes, and told to use what I wanted. Now, many libraries dole out documents one by one. Some require the user to fill out a separate call slip for each. The waste of time produces fatigue and bigger hotel bills. Researchers in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress may even feel fear and trembling. They read and take notes under the Argus eyes of video monitors; the library guards are armed.

From my experience with such frustrations I pass on a few tips. First, get lucky. In doing research on Mather I spent several months in and around Boston—at the Harvard Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Massachusetts State Archives. It happened that an undertaking called the Court Records Project was then quietly in progress. Financed by the state, it employed a corps of archivists to unpack for the first time in over a century the court records of provincial Massachusetts. The thousands of trial transcripts, depositions, and the like had been stored in no-longer-used holding cells of the Boston Supreme Judicial Court. Now they were being taken from grimy trunks and chemically treated by preservationists, to be housed in the State Archives facility.

By sheer luck I heard about the project, which set me wondering whether the legal papers ever mentioned Cotton Mather. This seemed unlikely, but I asked to see the so-far-unearthed records for early Boston. I got better than I asked. I was allowed to sit at a table on the site itself—a surreal scene where three or four men and women in surgical gowns and masks, behind bars, untied bundles of fragile documents and bathed them in troughs of liquid nitrogen (I think it was). To make this long story short, dozens of the court records named Mather as a litigant. I discovered that in the 1720s he had ensnarled himself in administering a debt-ridden estate. Supersensitive about his reputation as a minister, he was being sued by creditors, sought by the sheriff, even threatened with jail. My lucky strike of long-buried information exposed surprising facets of his personality and a disastrous scandal in his career.

Second tip: Hands on. Trust no index, catalogue, or finding list. Not even the most sophisticated librarians can anticipate what may count as biographical information to you. The shelves of the Library of Congress manuscript division hold several cubic feet of so-called Ellis and Allan Company Records—the correspondence and business papers of the Richmond, Virginia, merchant John Allan. It was Allan and his wife Francis who took in and raised the orphaned Edgar Allan Poe after the death of his mother, when Edgar was not yet three. The division’s expert staff had sifted out from the Allen Company Records all references to Poe. These they photographed and made available on a separate roll of microfilm, classified as the Edgar Allan Poe papers. I read through this valuable film. But on the chance that some references to Poe had been passed over, I put in call slips for the eight or ten boxes of Allan Company Records as well. Every other page contained details of the Allan family’s daily life—of the circumstances, that is, in which Poe was raised. There were descriptions of the expensive house and furniture denied to Poe when he was cut out of John Allan’s will, comments on Allan’s tightfistedness and preoccupation with business, on Francis Allan’s recurrent illnesses and restorative trips to spas. Edgar Poe was not mentioned. But this surely looked like Poe material to me—a record of the refusal, neglect, and absence that shaped the lifelong resentment he felt toward his guardians.

My final tip is, Hang on. Writing about Harry Houdini presented a peculiar problem. The first commandment of magic is, Don’t Expose, i.e. don’t tell laymen how tricks work. Given this basis of their trade, magicians are more secretive than most other mortals. Their papers usually end up not in public repositories but in private collections, so finding Houdini material was not easy. I knew that he had kept elaborate diaries, to me the most valuable of all biographical evidence. And after much detective work I tracked down the present owner. I first wrote to him, talking up the sincerity of my work, asking politely if I could take notes on the diaries, diplomatically offering him a week to consider before calling again to get his answer. Two seconds obviously would have been plenty. No, no, he couldn’t possibly let me see them. He wished to keep hidden not just the content of the diaries but his very possession of them, avoiding out-of-the-blue intrusions like my own on his personal life. He did not say so, but I sensed that he also feared theft, collectors of Houdiniana being maniacally passionate. But my idea was, I’m writing about Elvis, those diaries belong to me. I let my appeal rest six months, and tried him once more, hoping he might have changed his mind. No, no, he couldn’t possibly let me see them. After another few months I tried yet once more. No, no, he still couldn’t possibly. I had really given up when about six months later, after nearly two years of trying, Jane Mallison of the Trinity School urged me to hang on, try one more time—just one more time. Embarrassed to barge in again where I was obviously a damn nuisance and maybe a threat, I did however call. Yes, yes, I could see the diaries, yes, sure. Their owner had just emerged from the hospital after major eye surgery. Relieved by its success, he obviously wanted to give thanks to the world, and lucky me happened to again be there. Still, he set two conditions. I must keep his ownership of the diaries secret, a condition I still observe. And I could have only one afternoon.

My now-patron’s apartment turned out to be a Sutton Place minipalace, skyhigh and eerily quiet. Glass coffee tables, splashy postmodernist paintings by name artists, picture windows looking far down on East River traffic. The owner, one eye still taped and padded, led me into his elegant library and left me there. Houdini’s diaries took up an entire shelf—about a dozen volumes, each boxed in an expensive leather slipcase, gold tooled—a treasure surely worth a few hundred thousand dollars.

But how much could I read and annotate in three hours or so? Not a problem if you carry the Biographer’s Friend—the pocketsized Sony VOR microcasette recorder, with pause, cue, and review. It often accompanies me on research trips, taking down my on-the-spot impressions of the street in Rome where Morse lived, my undercover dictation of some letter displayed for sale in a manuscript dealer’s shop. VOR ready, I opened the first leather case and slid out its diary. Then I began quoting and summarizing what I read at the page-a-second pace of a tobacco auctioneer. In three hours I managed to record what turned out to be about twenty single-spaced pages of typed notes. All invaluably intimate—Houdini mourning the death of his mother, exulting that he had piloted the first powered flight in Australia, criticizing his magician-brother Hardeen in rivalrous way, groaning over the physical labor of doing escapes.

To sum up, the biographer’s every statement about the life must arise from documentary evidence, and he can never look too hard for it or have too much. But this is only round one of wrestling with the angel. The management of biographical information is no less difficult and frustrating than the search for it. Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James, gave the most helpful advice on how to begin: “Get a large table.” The biographical remains of some subjects are staggering. Ezra Pound’s correspondence, back and forth, has been estimated at three hundred thousand letters. Biographers who write multivolume presidential biographies often work with basements full of filing cabinets.

In organizing such floods of evidence the biographer is well advised to stock his large table with Tylenol. Any one letter, newspaper article, or diary entry points in several directions at once. It can contain at the same time information about the subject’s personality, appearance, relationships, travel, finances, health. How to organize the documents so that when you come to deal, say, with the subject’s feelings about her brother you can locate information contained piecemeal over twenty different items of different kinds and of different dates? At the very least, the biographer needs both a chronological file that amasses the documents in the order of events, and a subject file that arranges them under likely topics: magnetism, Rembrandt, religion, Paris apartment, whatever. But in what form? eight-by-ten sheets? databases? index cards? (three-by-five or four-by-six?)

Because every biography entails unique research problems it demands its own logistics. In writing about Cotton Mather I typed up all my information on eight-by-ten yellow second sheets. These I cut in strips of different widths—pencil-width, envelope-width, book-width, depending on the content. In drafting individual chapters of the book I gathered the relevant strips and spread them like tiles over the floor of my apartment, a sort of mosaic Matherland. I could walk on and about my chapter-to-be, reading down at and reflecting on the strips, arranging and rearranging them in narrative order. Matherland shrank as I worked on the chapter, stacking and taking to my desk what strips I needed for the day’s writing.

By contrast, my research about Poe and about Houdini went directly into Microsoft Word files, to be printed out as four-by-six index cards, then arranged in a bank of metal filing cabinets. In writing about Samuel Morse I’ve learned what I should have known long ago: get a copying machine. My desktop copier now runs off multiple copies of every-which-way-pointing documents, so that the information they contain can be filed under several different dates and topics.

After the evidence is compiled, the strips gathered, the narrative constructed, another, brutal frustration often remains. Copyright legislation in the last twenty years or so can make it enormously difficult or impossible to publish biographical material. By an act of Congress, unpublished manuscripts now belong in perpetuity to the writer or to his or her descendants. Technically, should the biographer of Genghis Khan happen on unpublished letters by his thirteenth-century subject, he could use them only with permission of the twenty-first century Khan family. Mercifully, many of the best repositories do not require the biographer to obtain the permission. They simply ask him to sign a statement holding himself liable for any copyright infringement, should the conqueror’s descendants decide to hustle anyone to court.

But some libraries, fearing a lawsuit, do insist on written permission. In researching Poe at University of Texas Library in Austin—one of the world’s deepest collections of literary manuscripts—I found an unpublished letter to him from the poet-editor James Russell Lowell, written in the 1840s. The library would not allow me to quote a few sentences of it without leave of a descendant. A network of letters and phone calls, one leading to another, brought me to Mr. James Russell Lowell IV. He instantly said OK, puzzled at being implored out of the blue by some biographer he didn’t know and wouldn’t read, about his great-great-great-great something who had written a few sentences that didn’t matter to him. Or imagine the frustration of the biographer who wished to write about Ralph Ellison, using letters Ellison had written to her. Even these she could not use without permission. Legally she owned the paper and ink but not the words.

A third recent assault on biography is to me the most significant because it involves aesthetic judgment. “What biographer will admit that his subject lacks narrative shapeliness?” Joyce Carol Oates asked, in a Times review; “between an honest but dull book and a not entirely honest but lively one, how many biographers would hesitate?”

In the way Ms. Oates poses the conflict, no conflict actually exists. Biographers can and do use many of the devices of narrative shapeliness, mostly drawn from nineteenth-century realistic fiction. But they do so rhetorically, taking rhetoric in the classical sense, as the art of persuasion. To dramatize the subject’s life, they describe his or her features and costume, set the scene where an event takes place, use dialogue-like quotations from letters and journals, break the narrative at moments of tension. And the best biographers experiment with fiction-like aspects of the form. Look at the imaginative third volume of Michael Reynolds’s life of Ernest Hemingway, entitled Hemingway: The Thirties (New York, 1997). It is biographical narrative in overdrive, a little recalling Dos Passos’s USA. Without compromising his scholarship, Reynolds jumps tense from past to future, switches typography, interjects new points of view, flashes news bulletins. The hypertext of stacked-up voices and events gives Hemingway a startling immediacy and presence.

In practice, the biographer has to choose not between lively and dull, but more subtly and perplexingly, between candid and glib. The Cambridge scholar Eamon Duffy put the case well. “Good history,” he says—and the same is true for biography—”good history gives its reader a sense of the limitations as well as the scope of the evidence on which it is based . . . we need to feel the fragilities of evidence, the nature of the documents, a sense . . . of historical conviction as an outcome, a labor.” In fact, the documentary record is always depressingly full of fragments and gaps. For one twenty-nine-month stretch, Poe’s life is nearly a complete blank. Better in such cases to confide in the reader than to aim at the facile narrative continuity that, sad to say, makes not a few contemporary British biographies seem slick. To confide artfully is the challenge, to use the evidentiary problems to enhance the biography’s feel of authenticity, even to create a certain suspense.

That such a thing as biographical technique exists, one would never know from reading reviews of biographies. Few reviewers have given any thought to or had any experience with how biographies get made, what intrinsic difficulties demand solution, what conventions can be played with or reinvented. Few reviewers are any more capable of judging biographies than of judging sword swallowing. Nine times out of ten they synopsize the subject’s life without evaluating the biographer’s art in treating it.

Yet the aesthetic standard for biography, while complex, is no mystery. Biography aims not merely at informing but also at moving the reader, through the spectacle of another soul’s journey through existence. The art of biography consists of producing an affecting narrative while remaining utterly faithful to the documents.

I’ll illustrate this by one final personal example. Cotton Mather’s life as I presented it had been full of deprivation and loss, including the deaths of nine of his children. I wanted the concluding paragraph of the biography to leave the reader feeling this. At the same time, for my own satisfaction, I wanted to render Mather’s pain through documents alone. The last paragraph would be an emblem of the biographical aesthetic, an homage to factuality.

I worked it all out this way. Each of the five sections of the book begins with a page of quotations by or about Mather. To introduce the final section, covering his last years, I reproduced the inventory of his estate, drawn up the year of his death, 1728. The inventory is nothing more than a list of shabby household goods—”1 pr. of Red Curtains Motheaten,” [pause] “1 Old Standing Candlestick. A Cross cut Saw,” [pause] “2 pr. of Iron Dogs, other broken Dogs,” and so on.

Thirty pages later comes the final paragraph of the biography. The reader can see that it in effect repeats the inventory, but in a different shape. I rearranged the listed household goods to form a sort of litany, a single connected sentence whose thumping rhythm accents the decay and loss that these worn out objects represent: “However luxuriantly he lived in heaven, Mather had not lived affluently on earth, and had lost much. What he left behind, as set down in the inventory of his estate, was dingy and mean: pie plates, lumber, a crosscut saw, three old rugs, four old bedsteads, two old oval tables, two old chests of drawers, old china curtains, old quilt, old warming pan, old standing candlestick, red curtains motheaten, broken stone table, broken fireplace dogs, broken chairs, broken pewter, broken spoons.” It’s not for me to say how well this paragraph succeeds either as a narrative climax or an emblem, much less when thus taken out of context. But my aim was to make pure, inert documentary evidence serve dramatic ends, to marry my form to my research. That remains to me the aesthetic measure of biography, the angel with whom the biographer wrestles longest and hardest of all.

This essay was originally delivered at Kean University, April 4, 2001, as part of the school’s Contemporary Writer’s Series.  

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

Kenneth Silverman is professor emeritus of English at New York University. His biography of Samuel F. B. Morse will be published this year by Knopf.

Bill opens his long coat. Inside, from a leather belt, hang a cleaver, knives, and other butcher’s instruments. Bill selects his weapons, a cleaver and a big knife.

Bill the Butcher By the ancient laws of combat, we are met on my challenge to reclaim the Five Points for them born rightwise to this land, from the foreign invader who’s encroached upon our streets. The last time we met I was shamed! But in shame or glory, we won’t never rest until last of him’s been drove into the sea!

The Natives shake their weapons and roar.

Priest Vallon By the ancient laws of combat, I accept the challenge of the so-called Natives, who plague our people at every turn. We seek no quarrel, but will run from none neither, and the hand that tries to lay us low will be swift cut off!

The roaring is deafening. Every weapon is hoisted and bristling. Smoke rises from the beard of the man who dusted it with gunpowder.

This excerpt from the shooting script of Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-nominated film about mid-nineteenth-century urban poverty, politics, and crime, describes the drama’s opening scene: rival Irish and nativist gangs are poised to do battle to decide who will control the infamous Five Points slum district of lower Manhattan. But it could just as accurately describe the recent confrontation between the film’s critics and its fans. Since Gangs‘ release in December 2002, an unbridgeable gulf has formed between the kudos of many film reviewers and the more subdued but negative response of historians. In the marketplace of opinion—not to mention hype—one would suppose that few care about what historians think. But in a mode similar to, if less sanguinary than, the behavior displayed by the film’s knife- and cleaver-wielding characters, historians have been challenged to accept the film on its own terms. After declaring that Gangs of New York was “historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative,” A. O. Scott in his passionate New York Times review threw down the gauntlet: “People who care about American history, professionally and otherwise, will no doubt weigh in on the accuracy of its particulars and the validity of its interpretation; they will also, I hope, revisit some of their own suppositions in light of its unsparing and uncompromised imagining of the past.” Historians’ criticisms have been met with the familiar, condescending refrain to lighten up: it’s only a movie. But, despite the pessimistic predictions of movie industry observers, the film is likely to end up the most commercially successful work in Martin Scorsese’s long but not very lucrative career. Its recent nomination for ten Academy awards guarantees its screening for at least a few more months. And now that it has revealed the shapely legs of box-office persistence, and perhaps because it depicts a time and subject that few people have heard of, it has gained a good deal of legitimacy. If the many questions directed to a New York City history Website I co-supervise are any indication—including a certain befuddlement by visitors when they fail to locate information about events wholly invented in the film—audiences believe its story. It’s worth asking exactly what that story purports to tell. Gangs of New York is certainly unusual in focusing on the city and its “netherworld” during the Civil War. The film’s inspiration is Herbert Asbury’s 1928 compendium of urban myths, The Gangs of New York, the narrative epicenter of which is the Five Points, the intersection of three streets that was the symbolic heart of one of the poorest city neighborhoods in nineteenth-century America. Covering the 1830s to the 1920s, Asbury’s popular and highly unreliable account depicts decade after decade of lawlessness, corruption, and violence embodied and carried out by a host of colorful, brutish, and often Irish characters. Scorsese’s Gangs has a narrower range, homing in on 1862-63 (after an introductory bloodletting in 1846), grafting onto the mayhem a number of thinly-portrayed historical figures and a worn-out revenge story. That predictable tale involves young Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) who returns to the Five Points to avenge the murder of his father, the leader of the vanquished Irish Dead Rabbit gang, at the hand of the nativist demagogue Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis in the role usually played by Joe Pesci). As numerous historians have pointed out in interviews and articles, very little in Gangs of New York‘s litany of gang warfare, political and police corruption, public hangings, assassination, Catholicism, and gender and race relations is accurate. And, with the exception of the film’s climactic event, the July 1863 Draft Riots, the numerous murders of cops, politicians, the public display of victims and prostrate corpses—they all bear no consequences: New York was the anarchic eastern frontier and its Dodge City was ruled by a mercurial, racist, nativist dictator. It will come as no surprise that, in the end, Bill gets his comeuppance, amidst a naval bombardment of the Five Points that never happened.

This production’s misrepresentations could be filed away as yet more instances of Hollywood obliviousness to historical scholarship and reliance on familiar plot devices that audiences supposedly favor. That disappointing but predictable formula might be a little less unsettling if Gangs of New York did not try to re-imagine a place and era whose meaning and substance have been almost entirely redefined over the last quarter century. Beginning with Carol Groneman’s groundbreaking “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth'” (Ph.D. diss., U. of Rochester, 1973), continuing through studies by historians such as Christine Stansell, Peter Buckley, Richard Stott, Iver Bernstein, and up to Tyler Anbinder’s meticulous, 2001 Five Points, (not to mention Mike Wallace and Ted Burrows’ Pulitzer-prize magnum opus, Gotham), New York historians have discarded the “sunshine and shadow” lens through which nineteenth-century urban society was previously viewed. In contrast to the Five Points depicted in Gangs of New York, the real neighborhood was more notorious for its congestion, disease, alcoholism, and prostitution than for violent crime (the whole city in the mid-1850s averaged about thirty murders a year). Death was more likely to come from contagious diseases that swept through the close, crowded, dark, and damp tenement compartments (claiming one out of three children under the age of five) or from work-related accidents. Indeed, neither homes nor labor seem to play any part in Scorsese’s Five Points (either for men or women, unless in the latter case, petty crime qualifies), which is particularly striking since the gangs that inspired the film arose as a result of the transformation of work. As the customary moral, educational, and supervisory relations between urban master craftsmen and their journeymen and apprentices crumbled at the close of the eighteenth century, young mechanics took to gathering into loose associations after work hours. Identifying themselves by neighborhood, street, and especially trade, the number of these gangs proliferated in the Jacksonian era, their allegiances often merging with other manly and occasionally violent voluntary associations such as fire, target, and militia companies. For many young men the gangs symbolized resistance to an encroaching world of permanent wage labor. Looking back from the 1880s, Richard Trevellick, a leader of the Gilded Age’s largest labor organization, the Knights of Labor, recalled, “[W]ith us in New York, boy or man, we were rather proud to be known as one of the infamous ‘Chichester Gang,’ ‘Sons of Harmony,’ or a ‘Butt-Ender.’ Philadelphia mechanics of that day . . . knew no more coveted distinction than that of a ‘Killer’ or ‘Moyamensing Ranger.’ While Baltimoreans were prouder of the titles of ‘plug uglies,’ ‘blood-tubs’ and ‘roughs’ . . . than they were of being good citizens or skillful mechanics.” “Grassroots” politics, especially in New York, became a particular preoccupation of these usually short-lived and only nominally criminal organizations. In the downtown wards of the city, political power in the local Democratic Party was determined in struggles among factional leaders and their followers. As the Irish made inroads into the nativist-controlled ranks of the party, primaries and elections were often decided by which faction brought the most and toughest fighters. Brickbats, clubs, and fists, the standard weaponry in a fight, could do a lot of damage, but fatalities were not frequent until mid-century with the manufacture and distribution of cheap handguns. The twelve deaths and thirty-seven or so injuries that occurred during the so-called Dead Rabbit-Bowery Boy Riot in the Five Points on July 4, 1857, was so extraordinarily high—and attracted so much attention—because of the use of guns. The cleavers, axes, maces, and other imaginative implements wielded, wedged, and jabbed in Gangs of New York‘s street fights, and the ensuing mutilations and massive body counts, misrepresent the extent and nature of antebellum gang violence. They also overawe the truly horrendous bloodshed during the 1863 Draft Riots. In the end, Gangs of New York‘s violence only perpetuates the belief that, for the poor, life is cheap.

Preoccupation with verisimilitude may be an occupational hazard among historians (for example, I cannot suppress my urge to note that the Dead Rabbits gang did not exist, but instead was the tough and exotic name—possibly derived from street slang in turn influenced by the Gaelic phrase “dod raibead,” meaning an “athletic, rowdy fellow”—that reporters and police labeled a local Five Points gang after the 1857 riot). But as historians should be the first to concede, facts and history are not interchangeable notions. Moreover, dramatic license and telescoping events are but two facets in any film’s vision of the past that we should evaluate with an eye to both the medium and the message. As A. O. Scott observed in his paean to the film, Gangs of New York is unusual in shunning “the usual triumphalist story of moral progress and enlightenment,” instead offering a vision of the modern world arriving “in the form of a line of soldiers firing into a crowd.” Scorsese’s vision does include a class-ridden society, its elites cruelly inured to want, its exploited subaltern classes feeding on one another. But this vision is a variation on themes many historians have rejected or substantially revised in recent scholarship. With certain exceptions (its references to the African American presence in the Points and unequivocally horrified view of racism—in contrast to the film’s utterly stereotyped portrayal of the Chinese), Gangs of New York could have been made forty years ago (okay, thirty-three years ago if we allow for its post-Peckinpah blood). Even taking into account its class consciousness and the occasional sympathy it extends to the Irish in their abjectness, Gangs of New York‘s emphasis on a degraded, criminal underclass with a brogue fits the sunshine-and-shadow social paradigm espoused by the type of antebellum reformers that the film shows bumbling ineffectually about the Points. In short, it’s a profoundly anti-urban film, a historical version of the dystopian fantasies of the 1970s and 80s such as Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Warriors. If the film adulates anything, it’s old movies about New York: various scenes pay homage to, their very premises lifted from, classic if now obscure films about the nineteenth-century city, particularly Raoul Walsh’s The Bowery (1933) and Gentleman Jim (1942).

If some have been dismayed by Gangs of New York‘s approach to the historical record, the film’s production design, supervised by Dante Ferretti, has received almost universal acclamation; for those less enamored of the rest of the saga, the sets succeed in enveloping and anchoring a flawed story in a convincingly detailed physical world. The palpable centerpiece, the already legendary vast Five Points set constructed on the grounds of the Cinecittà studios in Rome, is indeed stunning to behold. And for those familiar with the engravings, lithographs, and fewer photographs of the nineteenth-century Five Points, there is a host of entertaining visual quotes throughout the film (Exhibit C). The visual record of the Five Points and urban poverty in general (examples of which are arrayed about this page) is at best contingent, fractured by sporadic documentation and not a little imagination. Scorsese and his team immersed themselves in the archives and it shows—as does his failure to address these images with any judgement or criticism. Taking the moral narratives of reform tract engravings and their British inspirations (notably William Hogarth’s wildly allegorical Beer Street and Gin Lane prints) at face value as sources for his visualization of urban poverty, Scorsese’s resurrected Five Points landscape is populated by an almost constant charivari of the grotesque and wretched—leering prostitutes, preening bullyboys, stiffened corpses, and scampering children. Alternatively, the interiors (the repertoire is surprisingly limited) are seemingly inspired by Gustav Dore’s prints of London: the infamous rabbit-warrenlike Old Brewery (torn down by the Methodist Five Points Mission in 1852) is imagined as a multi-tiered cavern with the added feature of underground tunnels replete with piles of skulls. In these visual terms, Gangs of New York is to Civil War Manhattan what Fellini’s Satyricon is to Nero’s Rome—with a pinch of straight-faced Monty Python filth added to the faces and clothes. Expressionism is a compelling visual strategy, epitomized in the Italian master’s excessive sets, which operated in harmony with the performances he elicited and the stories he told. In contrast, Scorsese’s production design, enveloping exposition-heavy dialogue and (with the exception of Daniel Day-Lewis) pedestrian performances, may be (as he has proposed) truer to opera but it conveys to audiences documentary. “The Five Points,” the New York Tribune remarked in June 1850, “is the scene of more monstrous stories (at a distance) than any other spot in America; and yet it is not such an awful spot, after all.” Horace Greeley, the newspaper’s editor, is a bumbling cardboard-thin character in the film. One hundred and fifty-two years later, one wishes Gangs of New York had heeded his advice.

Further Reading: Tyler Anbinder’s Five Points: The 19th-century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York, 2001) is the most recent and comprehensive history of the neighborhood and its people; for the Civil War in New York, see Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999) and Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860-1865 (New York, 2002), and Virtual New York City, which includes the most comprehensive online history of the 1863 Draft Riots. For informative critical commentary on Gangs of New York, see: Maureen Dezell, “Film Captures the Feeling But Not the Facts of Life in Five Points,” Boston Globe, December 20, 2002; Pete Hamill, “Trampling City’s History: ‘Gangs’ Misses Point of Five Points,” New York Daily News, December 14, 2002; Robert W. Snyder, “Gangs of New York Gets New York City Wrong,” openDemocracy, January 15, 2003; “History Lesson: Author and Civil War-era Expert Iver Bernstein on the Inaccuracies in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Gangs of New York,'” Newsweek.Com, January 10, 2003; Daniel Czitrom, “Gangs of New York,” Labor History (forthcoming); and Joshua Brown, “The Bloody Sixth: The Real Gangs of New York,” London Review of Books, 25:2 (January 23, 2002).

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

Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002).

When PBS’s Frontier House premiered last spring, one of my students remained unimpressed by the privations of the program’s would-be Montana homesteaders. Forget the rigors of life on the plains in 1883, she said. “They had patent medicines. They had telegraphs. They had railroads. Let people try to make it in the 1680s:  scrofula, Indian captivity, witch trials, slavery, famine.  I wanna see Colonial House, baby.”

Great minds must indeed think alike. For what seemed a wish that only a history graduate student could harbor is about to come true—and not once, but twice. In 2004, PBS viewers will be treated to an eight-part series dubbed Colonial House, co-produced by WNET and Wall to Wall Television, the same team that collaborated on public TV’s earlier attempts at mixing the genres of historical documentary and “reality” programming:  1900 House (1999) and Frontier House (2002). In 2005, WGBH, Boston’s public television station, will try to outdo them with a NOVA series whose working title is the “Mayflower Project.” Prospective “colonists” should act quickly: applications to endure a season in the Colonial House closed in February (four thousand received and counting), but you still have time to secure an all-expenses-paid berth on the hundred-foot ship that NOVA insiders sometimes call the Mayflower III. Priscilla Mullins and John Alden: follow their footsteps if you dare.

The historical “fear factor” is one of the many things the two series hold in common. “No one will pretend it’s going to be easy,” notes the Colonial House Website, which dwells heavily on the “challenges” and “rigors” of this “harsh” way of life. “No TV. No phone. No electricity. No computers. No experience necessary,” runs the program’s slogan. Both shows will ratchet up the level of difficulty contestants—er, colonists—face by plunging them into the remote depths of the colonial past, one-upping my graduate student by sending people back to the 1620s rather than the 1680s. Though the precise location of Colonial House is available on an eyes-only, top-secret, need-to-know basis—producer Beth Hoppe would confirm only that the colony would be “on the East Coast”—both series are set, presumably, in New England. In fact, both seem to borrow quite heavily from the early experiences of Plymouth colony, and experts at Plimoth Plantation are serving as consultants to the ‘NET and the ‘GBH programs.

But despite—or is it because of—the fact that these are public television efforts, the most important common thread binding Colonial House to the “Mayflower Project” may be the money trail. Both series are spurred generally by the reality-television juggernaught, and particularly by the phenomenal success of Frontier House, an out-and-out blockbuster by PBS standards. Its twenty-five million total viewers made it the network’s most watched series of the last half decade, earning Frontier House a star in the public television firmament of Ken Burns’s Civil War. And in the TV world, it goes without saying, viewers mean dollars—not advertising dollars of course, but fat corporate sponsorships that can look curiously like ads to the untrained eye. Viewers bring sponsors and sponsors bring big budgets—about $11 million in the case of the “Mayflower Project.”  Colonial House won’t disclose their working budget, but there’s enough money flowing into the series to make it possible for producers to replace the “colonists'” lost wages during the five-month period of filming.

It’s easy for academic historians to take potshots at the reality-television impulse driving Colonial House and the “Mayflower Project.” “They should set it in Jamestown,” one colleague mused. “Then all the colonists would be young and male, and we’d see them resort to cannibalism before they all gave up and died in the season finale.” There’s something to his cynicism. Both efforts rely not only on a high level of sensationalism, but on situations that create the chance for spectacular failure—sort of like watching a seventeenth-century version of auto racing.  Frontier House even had the occasional whiff of jiggle television about it—ah, to watch those Klune girls chop wood.

But to dismiss these efforts as Gilligan’s Island meets Providence Island would be a mistake on two counts. First, to do so would underestimate the producers of these shows, serious folks who are making every effort to do their homework.  Colonial House‘s Hoppe, for example, offers a very thoughtful explanation of the relationship between indentured servitude (which the show will feature) and slavery (which its 1620s “location” largely renders moot). While she recognizes that the series will necessarily “explore and understand . . . colonial life in thematic broadstrokes,” she’s seeking a more meaningful kind of accuracy than the attention to bows and buttons typically found in Hollywood history. “We want to dispel myths,” she notes, to make the past vital and complicated as well as entertaining.

The second reason that those who are serious about the colonial past should not simply shrug off these efforts is less direct, but perhaps more profound. Public and private money spent amusing the millions with past-based reality television represents money not spent on other kinds of public-history experiments. Off screen, living-history museums across the country are contending with sagging crowds, flagging government support, and lagging visitor attention spans. Can it be mere coincidence that the Mayflower III is awash in a sea of dollars while the “real” Plimoth Plantation and related organizations struggle to stay afloat?

Think of the costs. Where PBS producers call in a roundtable of historians for a few hours of inspired chat, Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village (OSV), and the like train their interpreters intensively. At Plimoth Plantation, interpreters learn their craft—and their colonial history—during a sixteen-month apprenticeship that includes a program of primary-source reading, hands-on experience with period agriculture and technology, dialect coaching, and mentoring by senior staff members. Sure, Colonial House will maintain its “colony” for five months, and Mayflower III will face the costly challenge of building and sailing its replica ship. But Sturbridge maintains forty historic buildings in New England’s harsh climate year in, year out—at a cost of $11 million annually. Think of the economies of scale. Public funding supplies about one percent of OSV’s budget, or $110,000. The rest comes—as the PBS slogan goes—from viewers like you: private contributions, and sky-high ticket prices of $20 for adults and half that for children, adding up to $100 for a family of four. (Prices at Plimoth are nearly identical to those at OSV, while a day in Colonial Williamsburg costs a whopping $37 per adult.) Which means that OSV needs something on the order of half a million visitors annually just to break even.

What do those visitors get for their hundred bucks? Without question, they buy a much deeper, more nuanced, and more genuinely interactive version of the American past than they’ll get sitting on their barka loungers watching TV colonists engage in contests of strength on Colonial House.  But they have to work for it, too: to drive, to pay, to question as well as listen. And, even more, those who do their time traveling at the best of the nation’s living-history museums are forced to wrestle with the untranslateability of the past: to glimpse not only unfamiliar technologies and clothing, but strange and unsettling cultures as well. Faced with a grim economy and a perpetual time crunch, many American families will choose instead to plant their bottoms in front of the TV, or to put down their hard-earned cash at Disneyworld, where the bill of fare costs more but asks less.

As someone who considers Plimoth Plantation utterly transporting, I fear the success of Frontier House and its spawn. Such programs surely will not cause the death of the living-history museum, but they remind us of the fragility and, perhaps, the evanescence of such costly and demanding ventures. Perhaps the Mayflower III and the Colonial House will find ways to share their profits—and their audiences—with some of the poorer, dowdier sisters that make their glitzy success possible.

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

In 1885, Francis Parkman reached the summit of his brilliant career. He had just published Montcalm and Wolfe, the culminating volume of a series of works on France and England in North America that he had begun in the 1840s. Now reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic were proclaiming him to be America’s greatest historian. The Nation called Montcalm and Wolfe Parkman’s “masterpiece,” and the Atlantic Monthly admired his perfect blend of literary art and rigorous scientific scholarship. The Spectator compared him favorably to Macaulay—high praise indeed. In his remaining years, as he tied up the last loose ends in his life’s work, Parkman continued to watch the accolades pour in. Theodore Roosevelt dedicated The Winning of the West (1889) to him, proclaiming that Parkman’s “works stand alone, . . . they must be models for all historical treatment of the founding of new communities and the growth of the frontier here in the wilderness.”

A century after Parkman’s heyday, Roosevelt’s confidence seemed badly misplaced. At that moment, the “new Indian history” that has revolutionized early American scholarship was just coming into its own, and its most vociferous advocate, Francis Jennings, dealt Parkman a death blow in a critical essay published in 1985. Two years earlier, the Library of America had unearthed Parkman’s writings from the seventeen volumes of the nineteenth-century Frontenac edition and re-embalmed them in a new two-volume set, weighing in at over three thousand pages. Jennings countered the canonical authority of the Library of America imprimatur with an assault on Parkman’s much vaunted historical accuracy—”his ‘facts’ cannot be relied on and are sometimes fabricated”—and on the assumptions, biases, and outright prejudices that “poisoned” his approach to the past.

In the wake of Jennings’s diatribe, however, Parkman seems to have experienced a renaissance. Simon Schama featured the Boston historian as a tortured, self-pitying, yet still heroic muse in Dead Certainties. Parkman’s capacity to blend his own identity with that of his historical subjects—in Jennings’s eyes, the root of all evil—made Parkman an enabling figure in Schama’s own transition from academic historian to television raconteur. Meanwhile, the University of Nebraska Press has been issuing paperback reprints of Parkman’s works with eye-catching jacket covers and with new introductions by academic historians. The Modern Library has done the same, but has chosen popular writers like the adventure guru Jon Krakauer to introduce new audiences to Parkman’s work. Judging by reader responses on Amazon.com, Parkman remains a steady if not a best seller, appreciated by those who enjoy a ripping good yarn, who feel comfortable within the clarity of his narrative framework, and who value the visual imagery that Parkman’s prose evokes. If the History Channel’s producers are not already paying attention, they should be.

But why should historians read Parkman in the twenty-first century? If, as Jennings argued, Parkman offers bad history, then why plow through thousands of pages of the stuff? Jennings and his fellow ethnohistorians have so transformed the study of early American history that reading Parkman now is like reading William Paley’s Natural Theology in the wake of the Darwinian Revolution; some of the factual descriptions may be accurate enough, but the interpretations are so outmoded that only creationists and specialists in the history of science would bother. But if Parkman is untrustworthy as “science,” he remains an exemplar of style. In a review of Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War (New York, 2000), Edmund Morgan recommended Parkman for just that reason when he compared Anderson’s narrative of the Seven Years’ War to Montcalm and Wolfe (1884). As Morgan put it, the difference between Anderson and Parkman “lies as much in style as in content. Parkman had his eye on the drama of the conflict and made the American wilderness, which he knew at first hand, into a backdrop for theatrical encounters . . . Anderson [has] neither the talent nor the taste for theatrics. Parkman made great reading in his time and still does, but he has to be read as a period piece.” As proof, Morgan offers a passage from Montcalm and Wolfe in which Parkman describes the wilderness in autumn: “that festal evening of the year, when jocund Nature disrobes herself, to wake again refreshed in the joy of her undying spring.” As theatrics, jocund disrobing would have been banned from any stage in Boston in Parkman’s day; nowadays, it’s a passage that, in Morgan’s words, “Anderson could not have written and could not have got published if he had.”

Morgan’s comparison is not so much an indictment of Anderson as a comment on how much the packaging of history has changed since 1884. But if we think in terms of literary style, then Montcalm and Wolfe is a very curious kind of “great reading.” The experience of reading Parkman is not like reading the best American novels from his era. Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn in the same year as Montcalm and Wolfe, and Twain’s work is not a period piece. It displays a sensibility that we instantly recognize, and it dwells on matters of vital importance to us today. Huck’s voice is beguiling, and part of its appeal is that it mocks exactly the kind of literary theatrics that Parkman employs.

Like Twain, Parkman frequently uses ugly epithets (“squaw,” “savage”), but unlike Twain, he does it without irony. Still, as far as I know there have been no attempts to ban Parkman from school libraries, perhaps because he seems quainter, older, more a man of his times. (In an unscientific poll conducted among my departmental colleagues, Parkman [1823-93] was uniformly assumed to have been a closer contemporary of James Fenimore Cooper [1789-1851] than of Twain [1835-1910], who derided Cooper’s style mercilessly.)

Reading Parkman only for style is a way of acknowledging the distance between then and now. It has the effect of making the old history irrelevant to our current concerns, in much the way that historical re-enactors dressed in quaint costumes and speaking in funny dialects can distance the past from the present. If Parkman is bad history and a stylistic period piece as well, then reading Parkman today is little more than a dubious exercise in nostalgia.

Yet like Twain, Parkman ought to be relevant, very relevant, to our current concerns. By an odd set of coincidences, some of the most pronounced qualities of Parkman’s work are currently of great importance to scholars of early American life. Voice, for example. Parkman was self-consciously literary, even if his voice seems dated now, and his writerly concerns, his desire to reach a wide reading public, are common among historians today. (If these concerns did not exist, then neither would this journal.) With respect to his subject matter, too, Parkman was committed to writing history in which Indians figured as varied and independent agents in the history of North America. Finally, Parkman employed an Atlantic approach to American history. Though a resident of Boston and citizen of the United States, Parkman described the history of North America by exploring the interaction among French, Spanish, English, and Indian peoples, rather than by charting the rise of the United States. To accomplish this task, he immersed himself in archival materials in several languages from European sources, paying careful attention to sources that reveal Indian agency. He also spent time as a young man on various ethnographic adventures, absorbing Indian culture, tradition, and folkways while traveling the Oregon Trail, and experiencing Catholicism firsthand by entering a Passionist monastery in Rome. Given Parkman’s proximity to some of the most compelling (not to say trendy) developments in the study of early America today, surely there must be some way Parkman can still speak to us. To make Parkman relevant today means reading him against his own context in ways that might help us to be more aware of our own.

For Parkman, such a reading is especially difficult because the mythology of the heroic historian gets in the way. When reviewers and critics discuss Parkman’s works, the context they most often describe is the personal one. Much has been made of how Parkman overcame nervous illness, crippling physical ailments, and near blindness. Parkman worked to promote his own legend, offering detailed descriptions of how he would listen in the darkness of his Beacon Hill home as family members and secretaries read documents from the archives of Paris or Madrid, and of how he would then write with a mechanical contraption, in red ink on orange paper, to shield his eyes from the light.

The packaging of the product of these herculean efforts in “classic” editions, with their matched bindings, gilt edges, and intimations of immortality, creates the illusion that these works must have sprung full blown into the world, complete yet isolated products of a singular genius, a detached mind commenting on the still more distant past. Such packaging makes it is hard to remember that these books were written over time—from 1851 to 1892—as Parkman’s project evolved in response to a changing world. If we are ever to see Parkman as anything more than a bundle of racial prejudices wrapped in the lush romantic prose of a bygone era, then it is vital that his works be read as an unfolding effort to make sense of the past in a way that would also make sense of the rapidly changing present. Francis Parkman’s world, for all its broad reach across the Atlantic and into the interior of North America, was profoundly local. Parkman was a Bostonian, and a Boston historian. As such, he was heir to a long tradition in which the city’s historians and writers placed themselves at the center of major world transformations. Winthrop: We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. Mather: I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the depravations of Europe, to the American Strand. Emerson: Here, once, the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ’round the world. Born in 1823 to a genteel family of merchants and ministers, and graduating Harvard College in the class of 1844, Francis Parkman’s view of Boston’s place in the world was profoundly shaped by events and trends of his early life.

During Parkman’s youth, the interests of Boston’s ruling class were increasingly drawn to Europe. Young men such as George Ticknor, Charles Eliot Norton, George Bancroft, and John Lothrop Motley (there were many others as well) went abroad to study languages, to receive European degrees, and to cultivate continental approaches to intellectual endeavor. At the same time, Parkman came of age in the era of Manifest Destiny, when the lure of the West, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, Oregon Fever, and the California Gold Rush were remaking the map of the United States along with the nation’s sense of itself.

Francis Parkman was the rare young man who felt equally drawn by both orbits. In 1843-44, Parkman set out on a European grand tour, visiting the great capitals of the continent and making a lengthy stay in Italy, including an extended visit to a Passionist monastery in Rome. A year after his return to America, bored with studying law and fearing for his eyesight, Parkman set out on his better known excursion on the Oregon Trail. He returned broken and nearly blind, but with his youthful plan for writing the history of the American forest now fixed in his mind. His travels made it possible for him to realize his project as a history of both Europeans and Indians, played out against the backdrop of the primeval American forest, a great conflict fought between two competing models of European civilization—France and England, Catholicism and Protestantism, absolutism and liberty.

Both sets of interests, Europe and the American West, pulled Parkman away from Boston, but in a curious way, his work remained centered there. The city of Boston, like Parkman himself, was pulled between these two orbits, and slowly shifted from one to the other. Traditionally, Boston had been America’s most Eurocentric city. Compared with New York and Philadelphia, Boston’s hinterland was shallow, and it looked toward the Atlantic for its economic and cultural development. As the metropolis of New England, Boston’s connection to the continental project of the early United States was tenuous at best. Boston’s Federalist elites detested the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic that dominated the politics of the young nation, and during Jefferson’s embargo of 1807-09 and “Mr. Madison’s” War of 1812, they made their opposition known to the point of their own embarrassment at the quasi-secessionist Hartford Convention in 1814.

Yet by the 1840s, when Francis Parkman came of age and began his first historical works, his city’s orientation was changing. Migrants from New England’s cultural hearth had spread across the Midwest and beyond, replicating New England villages, churches, and colleges throughout the Old Northwest Territory and on into Iowa and Minnesota. The city’s commercial leaders had rounded the horn from the Atlantic to the Pacific, giving Boston a vital interest in the development of Oregon and California. The political crises of the 1850s, likewise a time of crisis in Parkman’s own life, brought on moments of uncertainty, such as the violent rendition of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. In 1854, some might have predicted that Massachusetts, not South Carolina, would be the first state to secede from the union.

The Civil War would prove to be a decisive turning point in the life of Parkman’s city. A diplomatic delegation, led by Boston’s Charles Francis Adams, managed to keep Britain from joining the war on the Confederacy’s behalf, which would have embroiled Boston in a new and disastrous chapter in its Atlantic history. The ultimate victory of the Union, symbolized by the dramatic deeds of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment of African American soldiers, led by Parkman’s cousin Robert Gould Shaw, meant that Boston’s interests became more firmly national and continental than ever before.

If we look at Parkman’s historical writings as a whole, it becomes clear that on one level, his massive histories of France and England in North America were meant to negotiate, to subtly account for, and to naturalize this transition in the life of his native city. The works in the series were published over a forty-year time span, with the first, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, appearing in 1851. Parkman claimed that his design to write a history of France and England in America was a long cherished dream formed in boyhood rambles in the forest. If so, then Pontiac’s War, the pan-Indian rebellions against British occupation of the trans-Appalachian West that emerged in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, was a strange place to begin, for it meant beginning the story at its end.

And, not surprisingly, The Conspiracy of Pontiac is an odd book. Although its ostensible focus is on the native rebellions of 1763, it reads as a draft of Parkman’s entire project. In its first two hundred pages, Parkman analyzes in ethnographic terms the Indian nations of eastern North America and summarizes the entire history of French and English colonization and conflict, concluding with a brief narrative of the Seven Years’ War. Only then does the book settle into an account of a conspiracy, led by an Indian mastermind, “a great and daring champion” encouraged by the recently vanquished French to deter “the advancing waves of Anglo-American power” (ix-x).

Despite his bold title, Parkman’s idea of calling the Indian rebellions a “conspiracy” never quite seems to work. The strain of fashioning the uprisings into the organized plot of a single leader shows repeatedly through the work, as events keep wandering away from Pontiac. To keep his antihero at the center of a conspiracy, Parkman has to tell some “stretchers,” as Huck Finn would say. Even Theodore Parker, the radical Boston abolitionist clergyman and Parkman’s erstwhile travelling companion in Italy, was hard-pressed to see how the label of conspiracy applied, and Parker was a man who could find conspiracies everywhere. But for Parkman, the title was deliberate and carefully chosen, and one reason why he may have settled on it is the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking in American political culture at the time. National events from the Mexican War onward, and in particular the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, had vaulted to the forefront of Northern antislavery discourse the idea that a conspiratorial slave power was the actual ruling force in the United States, standing in the way of the natural progress and development of Anglo-American liberties. John Gorham Palfrey, another Boston historian, published a series of essays arguing this point in the Boston Commonwealth in the summer of 1851, just as Parkman was sending Pontiac to press.

To make the “doomed” Indians of Pontiac’s uprising the metaphorical equivalents of the slave power of the 1850s was an inspired bit of wishful thinking on Parkman’s part: perhaps the slavocracy would also melt away in the face of Northern antislavery or free-soil values. Before the Civil War, Parkman was no abolitionist, but he was no less convinced than Parker that the slave system was destined to die out, and that only the desperate acts of tyrants might avert its demise. Parkman’s letters from this era reveal how deeply the notion of a South ruled by an anachronistic band of planter autocrats shaped his thinking on the great national conflict—and the national past. In 1865, as the war came to an end, Parkman, despite his physical debilities, traveled to Richmond to collect Confederate documents for the Boston Athenaeum, the victor claiming the records of the vanquished much as he had during his sojourns into French archives in search of material for his own stories of France’s demise and the Indians’ doom.

The other great oddity of The Conspiracy of Pontiac lies in Parkman’s choice to end his narrative there, in 1763, on the cusp of the great upheavals in the British Empire that would bring France back to the North American scene for one more episode. Rather than advancing the chronology forward toward the American Revolution, Parkman made in his future work the extraordinary decision to go back over ground already covered and do it all again. Having written an eight-hundred-page tome on the subject, he felt the need to rewrite it in fine detail.

After debilitating health problems during the 1850s, and after the national crises of these years as well, Parkman was reinvigorated by the Civil War. His health partially restored, he resumed his life’s work in earnest. Between 1865 and 1892, Parkman published seven major volumes (and revised and republished several more), producing the series that he eventually came to call “France and England in North America,” the name by which it has been known ever since. But when he embarked upon the first volume, Parkman’s working title for the series was “France in the New World,” and he continued to refer to it as “a connected history of France in the New World” for some time to come.

The reason for the more limited title is quite natural; after The Conspiracy of Pontiac, England and its American colonies recede from the focus of Parkman’s work. In the five subsequent volumes, Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), The Jesuits in North America (1867), LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869), The Old Regime in Canada (1874), and Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877), England, its colonies, and its armies play an extremely limited role in the narrative. Indeed, Parkman rarely mentions them. More significantly, to the extent that an English presence in North America is acknowledged in these volumes, Parkman attends almost exclusively to New England, as, for instance, in The Jesuits in North America, which devotes a single chapter to “Priest and Puritan,” or The Old Regime in Canada, in which a quarrel between French Canadian claimants to Acadia briefly spills over into Boston in the 1640s. For these five volumes, then, Parkman’s series might more accurately have been called “France and Greater Boston in North America.” This narrow focus allowed Parkman to use New England as his sole reference point when comparing the French and the English, making it possible to conflate all of the English colonies with the characteristics of the New England ones. In Parkman’s view, New England formed the essence of English America, while New France was more fully and completely depicted across the broad sweep of French settlement and exploration. This brand of myopia gives an unusual geographic schema to Parkman’s volumes, offering detailed descriptions of the vast range of France’s continental claims, juxtaposed with New England’s cramped little corner of English America. Parkman’s America, in other words, might have looked like an inversion of the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, transposed onto nineteenth-century Boston.

The larger impact of this skewed, asymmetrical focus becomes clearer as Parkman reaches his last volumes. Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) brought Parkman’s story up to 1700. By its end, the brutal conflict of the 1690s between New France and New England has emerged as a central element in the narrative. At this point, Parkman, now fifty-five years old and fearing, as always, for his health, became concerned that he might not live long enough to finish the series. So he skipped ahead, passing by the Half Century of Conflict from 1700 to 1750 (to which he would later return) and proceeded straight to the conclusion he had always aimed to reach in Montcalm and Wolfe, the climactic account of the Seven Years’ War and the expulsion of France from the North American continent. The effect of this move is to make Montcalm and Wolfe, following on the heels of Frontenac, seem like a direct continuation of the story, so that New England’s war with New France becomes the precursor to Britain’s total war against France. Once again, American history was Boston’s history writ large. Montcalm and Wolfe was written on a grand scale, and the English presence on the continent now had to be treated in full. Given the significance of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York to the conflict, New England could no longer remain Parkman’s eccentric center of English America. But by this time, more than two thousand pages into the series, Parkman’s theatrical habits, his tendency to ascribe character traits to whole societies, and then embody those traits in representative individuals, had firmly planted a New England character on all of English America and its imperial agents, or at least on all the successful ones.

Parkman paints Edward Braddock, the British general who blundered his way to disastrous defeat at Fort Duquesne in 1755, as the antithesis of Yankee virtue: a gambler, a duelist, a rake, conceited, insolent, bullying, rude, and utterly lacking in family feeling. By contrast, General James Wolfe, the heroic figure who brings Parkman’s great drama to a close, has Yankee virtues in spades. Vigorous and active, despite a “delicate” sensibility, “his martial instincts were balanced by strong domestic inclinations.” He was fond of children and devoted to his parents. Wolfe had a very modest opinion of himself and his own abilities, but he was not lacking in self-confidence and he “delighted in every kind of hardihood.” As a military officer, he sought to cultivate “civility and mildness of character,” and maintained a “fear of becoming a mere ruffian and of imbibing the tyrannical principles of an absolute commander” (1322-26). As Simon Schama rightly pointed out, Parkman’s Wolfe was the mirror image of Parkman, a man who would have been at home in any drawing room on Beacon Hill.

For Parkman, Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham sealed the triumph of Yankee virtues over the entire American continent. Nothing remained but for the “advancing waves of Anglo-American power” to sweep aside the desperate but ultimately futile conspiracies of proud but doomed opponents, be they Indians or slave-holding oligarchs. In his introduction to Pioneers of France in the New World, written in January 1865, Parkman had projected just such a conclusion to the entire series. In that volume, dedicated to the memory of Theodore Parkman, Robert Gould Shaw, and Henry Ware Hall, his kinsmen slain in Civil War battles, Parkman explicitly linked England’s vanquishing of “Feudalism, Monarchy, and Rome” in New France to the moment “at this hour, [when] half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendancy of a regulated freedom,” a freedom for which New England was the model and the source (14).

Collapsing the century between 1763 and 1865 into a single sentence, Parkman performed the neat trick of projecting an implicit history of the United States without ever directly addressing the American Revolution. This was no accident. By avoiding the Revolution, Parkman avoided having to address the messy realities of the intense conflict between his native city and the British Empire in the 1760s and ’70s, along with the fateful role of France on the patriots’ behalf. In Boston, concerted resistance efforts against the advancing wave of British power, a movement more plausibly conspiratorial than Pontiac’s rebellion, had dramatically altered the course of the Anglo-American imperial project. And in that effort, Boston’s revolutionaries had advanced a series of radical possibilities that Parkman wanted nothing to do with.

During the years in which he was completing Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman was also publishing essays in the North American Review, arguing vociferously against both women’s suffrage and universal male suffrage, at a time when American Revolutionary slogans were being used to promote these causes. On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in 1873, the Woman’s Suffrage Association met at Faneuil Hall under a banner reading, “Taxation Without Representation is Tyranny.” To Parkman, such arguments ran counter to natural law and to history, which he stated in his North American Review essays and implied in his conclusion to Montcalm and Wolfe. There, he moved rapidly, once again, from 1763 to the 1880s, and predicted a “majestic future” for the United States, but only “if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great” and “resist the mob and the demagogue” (1478).

For Parkman to insist, through his whole long series, on the relevance of the Anglo-French conflict for America’s ongoing history and yet omit the American Revolution was a clever strategy. It allowed him to make Anglo-American dominance of the continent seem inevitable, and to connect Manifest Destiny with British sensibilities. It made it possible to understand Boston’s present position within that imperial project as though it were a natural process of evolution rather than a significant change from the early years of the republic. And it made it easy for him to dismiss the radical and egalitarian elements that emerged from Boston’s conflict with Britain as inconsequential to the larger story.

And what of our own context? In 1891, when Parkman finally ended his long narrative of France and England in America with projections (and doubts) about the future greatness of the United States, America remained but one among several great powers; Britain and France still played very large roles in the worldwide imperial contest.

However grand the scope of his vision, and however confident his moral center, it would have been difficult for Parkman to imagine a time at which the United States would be the only global imperial power. We don’t often use the word “empire” these days—”superpower” has displaced it—but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans and American historians have clearly been in search of new narratives, new frameworks, to make sense of our rapidly changing world. No longer does it seem acceptable to offer a survey of early American history in which the principal aim is to describe the rise of an independent United States, complete and sufficient unto itself. Parkman’s insistence on seeing North America’s history as a process of imperial expansion rather than the story of the birth of an American nation has never seemed more apt.

The current popularity of Atlantic history is in some measure a response to the increased complexity of America’s interconnectedness to the rest of the world in terms of material goods, cultural influence, political power, economic might, military force; the list goes on, but it all points to our awareness of how porous, open, and malleable the nation state has become in an era of globalization. The Atlantic approach to early American history, together with the focus on Indians provided by ethnohistorians, reflects this changing awareness, and scholars in these fields have pushed aside the republican synthesis, the exclusive focus on the American Revolution as the essential event in early American history for understanding America’s subsequent evolution and identity. It seems likely, too, that the desire for literary or narrative history reflects a longing for moral clarity or at least coherence as an alternative to the continuing accumulation of detailed but unmanageable and disorganized knowledge. In this sense, Francis Parkman’s work can remain, if not a model, then at least an inspiration for future generations of scholars. We may not trust the accuracy of his research, and we may not admire his literary style, but we can respect and learn from Parkman’s method of negotiating context, his persistent application to the work of triangulation between himself, his world, and its connection to the past.

Further Reading: Francis Jennings’s critique can be found in “Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 42 (July 1985): 305-28. Edmund Morgan’s comments are in “How the French Lost America,” New York Review of Books, May 11, 2000. Valuable studies of Parkman’s life and works include Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York, 1991); David Levin, History as Romantic Art (New York, 1967); Mason Wade, Francis Parkman, Heroic Historian (New York, 1942), where Theodore Parker’s letter to Parkman on The Conspiracy of Pontiac is reprinted; and Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero (Austin, 1991). For Parkman’s correspondence, see Jacobs, ed., Letters of Francis Parkman (Norman, Okla., 1960). All quotations in this essay from Parkman’s published works are taken from Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, 2 vols., (New York, 1983), that is, the Library of America edition, with the exception of those found in Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 2 vols., (Boston and New York, 1901), vols. 14-15 of the Frontenac edition. On the conspiratorial fears of the 1850s, see David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, 1971). On the crisis among Boston’s elite during the 1850s, see Albert von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). On the Boston Tea Party commemorations of the 1870s, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston, 2000).

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

Mark Peterson teaches history at the University of Iowa, and is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997) and “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 58 (April 2001): 307-46. He currently seems to be working backwards on a history of Boston in the Atlantic world.

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.

In the early 1760s, when María Dolores Quispilloc and her husband Antonio Martínez, together with some of their neighbors, left their community of Sicaya, in Huarochiri, Peru, they carried their few belongings with them. Their most precious item was a mule María Dolores had brought to their marriage as a dowry. On mule back, after four days of tiring travel on small and narrow dirt paths, María Dolores and Antonio arrived at the east gate of the city of Lima.

Lima, the City of the Kings (Ciudad de los Reyes), the Peruvian viceroyalty’s capital city, was founded in 1535 by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. By the time María Dolores and Antonio arrived, Lima was one of the largest cities in the world, counting around fifty thousand inhabitants. Blacks, mulattoes, Indians, and whites coexisted in a walled space of ten square miles, with many houses, churches, and public buildings divided into six parishes (Santa Ana, San Marcelo, San Sebastián, San Lázaro, Cercado, and Huérfanos). On bullfight days, during promenades, and at the market, people from all colors and social standing mixed together.

Peasants and herders from Huarochiri like María Dolores and Antonio were not newcomers to the city. For many years, huarochirinos had provided food and cloth for city dwellers. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, the population in the Peruvian viceroyalty began to slowly increase after epidemics brought by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century had killed thousands of people. A growing population, especially in rural areas, meant that land became scarcer. Matters grew worse when in the 1760s, severe droughts made agriculture impossible, especially in the central highlands. Many indigenous people living in peasant communities and on haciendas in the provinces nearby Lima were forced to leave their homes and find new ways to eke out a living. Some of these peasant families had lived in the highlands from a time even before Spaniards set foot on Inca territory. One of the provinces most affected by the droughts was Huarochiri, located about fifty miles east of Lima. Some Huarochiri peasants migrated to other communities in the highland; some hoped to find a means of survival in the city.

What happened to María Dolores and Antonio in Lima tells a good deal about life in this dusty, sprawling urban center toward the end of the eighteenth century. As they encountered people at work and on the streets, their interactions revealed much about the kinds of people living in Lima, and ways in which people interacted with ecclesiastical and colonial state institutions. Our story is a composite, but it may well have been this way.

When María Dolores and Antonio traveled to Lima, they were not carrying produce to sell and then return to their community; this time they came to stay. Asked by two royal soldiers about their whereabouts, they retorted in Quechua (the Indian native language), hoping that the pardo (partially black) soldiers would not understand their native language. María Dolores and Antonio pulled out their baptismal records and an old letter signed by their cacique back in Sicaya, the documents that had saved them many times before, and pointed out the words indicating their destination: “Plaza de San Francisco,” the bustling market place in front of the church of San Francisco, in the eastern part of the city that carried the same name in Spanish and Quechua. The soldiers, used to seeing many Indians coming to the plaza, let them pass.

At the Plaza de San Francisco, where they had sold their produce in earlier years, they knew they would find María Dolores’s aunt at her market booth, where she sold vegetables she had early that morning bought from hacienda laborers at the nearby tambo (a small hut-like house in the outskirts of the city, used to buy and sell produce, and also used by travelers as a resting place) next to the city wall, in the Cercado parish. María Dolores’s aunt, Doña Josefa, lived among Indians and mestizos in the same El Cercado parish.

Lima’s most prominent and richest people lived around the central plaza, the main square of the city. The plaza–following the Spanish grid plan–was surrounded by blocks of houses belonging to the viceroy, the audiencia (city council) and cabildo (town council) members, the archbishop, the members of the aristocracy, and some rich merchants. The further removed from the central plaza one lived, the lower one’s economic and social standing. People like María Dolores and Antonio only came to the city’s center when they participated in the lively market at San Francisco, or–dressed in their best clothes–they attended the Sunday promenades in the Paseo de los Descalzos, mostly to see better-off people, less often to be seen, or attended a bullfight in Lima’s Plaza de Acho.

Daily life in the city often was an adventure on its own. The usual Lima winter drizzle–it never rains–had turned the way to the Plaza de San Francisco into a mudded chaos. People wore heavy ponchos or covered themselves with coarsely woven blankets. Gallinazos (turkey buzzards) sat on the ground devouring leftovers and rotten food. The closer María Dolores and Antonio came to the plaza, the louder the voices became. Indians were selling their produce, blacks and mulattoes carried heavy bags they would then take home to their masters. Some black women stood behind wooden tables and large charcoal stoves, iron pans, and ceramic pots preparing food for passers-by.

After wandering around for a while, greeting people they knew from former years, and inquiring about Doña Josefa, they found out that she had not come to the market that day. Her place was empty–the people told them–because she had gone to see the judge at the cabildo. Gossip had it that Doña Josefa had had a word-fight with her neighbor in El Cercado, in which one had called the other a “wrecked dark-skinned witch” and a “lover of Black men and a prostitute.” A Doña, like Doña Josefa, could not leave such insults uncontested, and she had sued her neighbor for defamation.

In her neighborhood, Doña Josefa was known as a widow, but everyone in the family and in the neighborhood knew that she had never married. Calling herself a widow gave her a certain aura of respectability, given that she had had two children. One of the children had died at age two, the other, José, was now a twenty-seven-year-old single man who lived with his mother, but spent his nights playing cards in the neighborhood bar (pulpería) owned by a divorced (or, rather, separated) mestiza, Asunción. Rumor had it that José and Asunción were “having a sinful relationship.”

After María Dolores and Antonio heard about all this, in varied versions, they decided to return to El Cercado to find their aunt. They had no address, because there was none, but they remembered where Doña Josefa’s little adobe house was located, and they also remembered that neighbors would call the place the esquina de los suspiros (the sighing corner). When they knocked at the wooden door, Doña Josefa opened. She was wearing her Sunday clothes, and she resembled one of those poor Spanish seamstresses whom one could see on Lima’s streets covering their faces with a black shawl (tapadas). Doña Josefa asked them in and took a seat at the table. María Dolores and Antonio told her about their plights back in Sicaya, and asked for help, while pulling out a large tocuyo (coarsely woven cloth) bag with potatoes they had brought as a gift. Those potatoes, they explained, were once meant to be the seeds for a new crop.

Doña Josefa offered to take María Dolores and Antonio, and their mule, to a nearby hacienda, where she would–once again–buy vegetables from hacienda workers and bring them to the Plaza de San Francisco. She would provide them with a few pesos to purchase the vegetables. With the earnings they obtained they were eventually to repay this initial loan. With a plan in mind, they extinguished the candle on the table and, wrapped in a blanket, went to sleep, Doña Josefa in her bed, María Dolores and Antonio on the dirt ground in the corner of the small kitchen.

Before the sun came out the next day, Doña Josefa, María Dolores, and Antonio were on their way to the nearby hacienda, and three hours later, at 7 A.M. they were laying out their freshly bought vegetables on a cloth on the ground at the Plaza de San Francisco. By noon, everything was sold, and most vendors began collecting their belongings. Gradually the smell of fresh fish and vegetables changed into the smell of cooked food.

At the outskirts of the market place, some black women were preparing traditional dishes in the open air to sell. They had well-known specialties to offer, like anticuchos and cau-cau. Most of these black women were slaves. With the money obtained from selling their specialties, they paid a daily jornal to their owners at the end of the day. If they sold more than the stipulated jornal, they could keep it; if they sold less, they had to make up the difference. This system gave many slaves some kind of freedom in their daily deals, away from the vigilant eye of a master.

María Dolores was especially jealous of a mulatta, Manuela, who sold cau-cau. Every time they had come to Lima in the previous years, her husband would visit Manuela’s booth to try her cau-cau. Nearby vendors had already been gossiping about a possible amorous entanglement between Manuela and Antonio. This time, too, Antonio walked over to see Manuela. Antonio soon found out that Manuela had changed “hands.” While she had once belonged to a merchant who had a store at the Calle de Bodegones, Lima’s main commercial street at this time, she now had been bought by a poor widow in the parish of Santa Ana. Manuela told Antonio about how she had managed to rid herself of a master who was severely mistreating her whenever she could not come up with the money to pay her daily jornal to him, and how he insistently requested sexual favors. Tired of these abuses, Manuela had sought for help in a black brotherhood (cofradia), where many slaves and former slaves originally coming from West Africa had found a place to gather. The queen of the brotherhood was Manuela’s godmother, and she had offered to help her write a legal complaint against her owner and then to bring it to the judge in the cabildo. Fortunately, the merchant did not object to Manuela’s transfer to a new owner as long as he obtained the price she was worth according to her conque (a written certificate each slave had indicating his/her price, abilities, and age). The widow–her new owner–paid five hundred pesos to the merchant, a price that was above the average price of male and female slaves in the city, because Manuela was relatively young (twenty-three), healthy, and had some sought after cooking skills and a booth to sell food.

In their conversation, Antonio also found out from Manuela that the widow lived off what Manuela provided her. This widow, Doña Encarnación Samudio, had been married to a lower colonial state bureaucrat, a scribe of the cabildo, Don Maríano Ugarte. Doña Encarnación had never worked, and to continue to be perceived by her neighbors as a decent mestiza, she was not supposed to. When she was widowed after seventeen years of marriage, she was left with little money and no state pension. Her only recourse was to invest what little she had to make someone work for her. Manuela soon found out that Doña Encarnación, aside from herself, also possessed a small track of land, not too far away from the city, and that since her husband had died, the land lay bare.

While Antonio was talking to Manuela and enjoying some cau-cau served in a little pottery dish with a wooden spoon, María Dolores had remained behind. Soon she found herself surrounded by barefoot children teasing her about her Indian clothes. When Antonio found her, he chased away the children mumbling some words about respect to elders.

It had been a long day, and María Dolores and Antonio decided to return to El Cercado. Soon after they left the plaza, they noticed that someone was following them. It was a tinterillo (an apprentice lawyer trying to make some money) eager to find out if the couple had some complaint to file in the city courts. He offered to help for a small price. María Dolores remembered her aunt’s quarrel with her neighbor; Antonio remembered Manuela’s writing to the judge. Neither María Dolores nor Antonio really understood what all this meant. Never before had they had any encounter with the judicial system, and now–in one day–they had heard two stories that involved the judiciary: the aunt’s defamation case and Manuela’s change of ownership. By then, the only thing they knew was that their cacique back in Sicaya had always been very adamant about a pile of papers–in which, as people in the community knew–it was said that the land they lived on rightfully belonged to the community of Sicaya. The file carried Phillip II’s signature.

The next day, after selling the produce at the market, Antonio went to see Doña Encarnación following Manuela’s indications. Doña Encarnación lived in a small white painted adobe house, next to the church of Santa Ana. He used the heavy iron handle to knock at the worn-out thick wooden door. After many minutes, Doña Encarnación looked out of the window, hiding behind some neatly embroidered drapes. Antonio took his hat off, and respectfully greeted her, indicating he wanted to talk to her. Many more minutes elapsed before Antonio heard the cracking front door slowly opening. Antonio explained why he had come to see her, and told Doña Encarnación that Antonia had told him about the track of land she had. Portraying himself as a successful peasant, he convinced Doña Encarnación to show him the piece of property.

When Antonio came back the next day, he brought the mule and a shovel with him. Doña Encarnación and Antonio walked for about two hours before they reached the track of land, surrounded by other tracks of land and a larger sugar hacienda. A few bushes and much weed lay before them, but the land was good, and it was time to get the field ready to plant. Thus, Antonio and Doña Encarnación agreed that Antonio could get the fields ready and they would split the proceeds in halves (al partir).

Antonio admired the sugar fields and he also knew that it was a good crop. Sugar was consumed in Lima, but more sugar was shipped to Santiago. Prices one could obtain for sugar were high. During the next days, Antonio left the marketing of vegetables to María Dolores, and he began cleaning Doña Encarnación’s field and talking to the neighboring yanaconas (sharecroppers) of the hacienda to find out how and when to begin planting sugar cane. Soon, the hacienda-owner, Don Felipe Santisteban, a former Spanish militia captain, learned about Antonio’s plans, and offered his sugar mill to grind the cane after Antonio brought in the crop. He also explained to him that many small producers brought their cane to his mill because he had the only mill for miles around. For the use of the mill, he would retain 20 percent of the net sugar produced. What he did not tell Antonio was that over the last ten years some small farmers had accumulated debts with him and had been forced out of their land. By absorbing adjacent plots, like Doña Encarnación’s, the hacienda had become ever larger. Moreover, the initial work of cleaning the fields had been done by the farmers and had not cost anything to Don Felipe.

María Dolores and Antonio began working on the land, cleaning, making furrows, and hoping for some rain. One Sunday morning while working on the plot, they saw a black-dressed man on a horse and with a book under his arm approach them. As the man came closer, they recognized the man was a priest. He introduced himself as Don Felipe Sotomayor, and explained that he was coming from a mass he had just held in the small hacienda-chapel, remarking that he had not seen them, either in the El Cercado church or in the hacienda-chapel. Thus, he continued, he needed to remind them of their Christian duties, to confess, take the Holy Communion, and attend mass. María Dolores and Antonio lamented their lack of time. The priest was angry and accused them of disrespecting God and living in sin. Both agreed to attend mass the coming Sunday. Don Felipe then blessed the small plot of land, and told them that thanks to his blessings, God would protect them and that when the time had come, he would hope that in gratitude to his blessings, they would provide him with a share of their crop.

As they continued talking, the priest found out that María Dolores and Antonio–although married in Sicaya by the priest of Huarochiri–had not been married following strict Catholic prescriptions: no banns had been read to find out whether there was an impediment to marriage, which in turn would have required a church-issued dispensation. Moreover, María Dolores’s and Antonio’s fathers had not offered their written consent to the marriage, and neither was María Dolores’s consent to marriage recorded anywhere. Of course, María Dolores and Antonio had no idea what the priest was talking about. They had been living together for three years and had counted, until then, on the approval of their priest and their community. In the community, back in Huarochiri, they had seen a priest once or twice a year, and they had attended the mass he had offered on the little village plaza, often not understanding the priest’s Latin mumbling. But because the priest, like their corregidor (local state bureaucrat) was a white man, they felt compelled to at least be there and listen. Now they had a priest in front of them, telling them not that mankind had to redeem its sins, but that they were living in sin. The priest understood their confusion; it was not the first time he witnessed troubled faces. Before Don Felipe left–during the whole conversation he sat on his horse–he reminded them to come to church the following Sunday.

When María Dolores and Antonio were sitting on the bench outside the church the following Sunday, they noticed that some other couples–looking very much like themselves–were sitting on the next bench or nervously wandering around. They heard some couples speaking in Quechua. Very soon they found themselves talking to each other, wondering about what the priest would tell them. While they were waiting for the church doors to open, they had time to exchange some life experiences, some doubts, some thoughts. All of them had quite recently come from different smaller communities in the surroundings of Lima. Some–as María Dolores and Antonio–had escaped droughts, another couple had been expelled from their land by a neighboring hacendado, another couple had been asked to increase their tribute payment by their cacique, another couple had barely escaped being recruited for mita labor (draft labor) in an obraje.

When the priest appeared at the church door, he invited all couples to come in. Their conversation came to an end, and they found themselves sitting on the dirt ground of the small church. The priest stood in front of them on a little wooden platform. Behind him was a colorful wood-carved altar with a cross and Jesus. The priest asked them to kneel and thank God for allowing salvation. He proclaimed himself as the mediator between God and sin, and underlined his intentions of rescuing them for heavenly life after death.

Before that time, although María Dolores and Antonio knew many struggles lay ahead of them, they had only begun to sense what it meant to live in Lima, a world so different from their own. They also knew there were many sides to the city, as much as to its people.

And whatever happened to María Dolores, Antonio, Doña Josefa, and Manuel? Ten years later, that is around 1770, Indian uprisings in the countryside had swelled all over the viceroyalty, and between 1780 and 1783 the massive Tupac Amaru II uprising took place, an Indian-led revolt in which more than one hundred thousand people died, about 7 percent of the viceroyalty’s total population. It was the beginning of decades of military actions until the wars of independence ended in 1825.

After Don Felipe ousted Antonio and Doña Encarnación from their plot of land, Antonio became an apprentice to a free black shoemaker in the city, where he worked seven days a week for fourteen hours each day. He did not earn a salary, and was paid with shoes instead, forcing him to sell the shoes in order to obtain money. During the Tupac Amaru II rebellion, he was drafted into the Spanish army then sent to quench the rebellion in Cusco. For Antonio it was the first time in his life that he had to leave his Huarochiri-Lima route. By 1782, María Dolores was a widow with one child (two others died in early infancy) blessed with all the church’s requirements. The priest, a Jesuit, who had induced her to do so, was removed and returned to Spain after the Spanish Crown expelled the order from its colonial dominions in 1776. For several more years, María Dolores continued to sell vegetables with her aunt at the Plaza de San Francisco. Manuela finally obtained her liberty when her owner died and in her will granted freedom to Manuela for “her good and faithful services.” The sugar hacienda owner was struck by destiny much later, when in the wake of the wars of independence, his yanaconas escaped, and the few slaves who also labored on the hacienda joined General Jose de San Martin’s army upon his promise that all slaves participating on the patriot side would be freed. The armies ransacked the hacienda and destroyed the sugar mill, and for many years no sugar was produced. What little Don Felipe could rescue, he took with him to Spain.

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

Christine Hunefeldt teaches Latin American history at the University of California, San Diego, and is the author of Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854 (Berkeley, Ca., 1994) and Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (University Park, Pa., 2000).

“Who killed Clio?”

This question is one that a small but vocal number of critics of recent trends in the discipline of history have been determined to pose. Was it the feminists, in the classroom, with the blunt instrument of political correctness? Or Dr. Derrida, in the archive, with a postmodern poison? Did the rise of identity politics bring about the muse’s downfall? Or was it a longing to be thought “professional” and “scientific”? All of these accusations (and others) have been made about history’s death in this strange and now long-running academic variation on the board game Clue. (Some even say that a Butler–Judith–did it.) But even after two decades of culture wars, who done it–and indeed if history’s been done in–remains far from clear.

One thing that has made this Case of the Murdered Muse so hard to crack is that those described at one point as the victim’s best friends sometimes are decried at others as having turned out to be her worst enemies. Back in 1990, for example, Canadian social historian Bryan Palmer wrote a book, Descent into Discourse, which insisted that Clio was alive and well when in the arms of Class Analysis, but then French theorists came along and did her in.  The New Criterion suggests in its April 2001 issue, on the other hand, that the main threat to the muse is posed by Class Analysis itself, personified as a nefarious cabal made up of followers of both Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. And a similar tale is told in Australian conservative Keith Windschuttle’s The Killing of History, first published in 1994 and since reprinted twice. Adding to the confusion, some of those who agree with Windschuttle’s main points think his title overstates the issue. We are dealing here not with homicide, they argue, just attempted murder, thanks to some brave new protectors stepping up to guard the muse.

This, at least, is how I read three recent essays contributed to the Times Literary Supplement (London), beginning with one by Victorian specialist and conservative commentator Gertrude Himmelfarb that appeared in the fall of 2000. In her review of the first issue of the new Journal of the Historical Society, Himmelfarb celebrated the fact that a last minute infusion of good old-fashioned empiricism had been delivered to the discipline. In her eyes, the Historical Society, a group founded in the late 1990s as an alternative to the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, is now Clio’s best friend. Presumably because its members are determined to do all they can to guard the muse from the slings and arrows of outrageous fads. Contributors to its new journal, Himmelfarb claims, unlike those writing for the flagship periodicals of the two more established American professional societies, are worried by the extent that the study of “religion . . . politics, diplomacy and ideas” have become “casualties of the ‘new’ (no longer so new) history” of the 1960s-1980s. The Journal of the Historical Society is refreshing, in her view, since it pays “serious attention” to “serious subjects,” such as the links between economic practices and democratic virtues in city-states and republics.

Also in the Clio-isn’t-dead-but-has-been-endangered category is “All Quiet on the Postmodern Front,” a winter 2001 TLS commentary by historian Arthur Marwick of London’s Open University. Marwick makes points similar to Himmelfarb about the muse’s renewed vitality, after a time of deathbed throes. But the Knights in Shining Armor who came to Clio’s rescue, in his account, were not the American founders of the Historical Society but rather scholars based in London (Mark Mazower and Orlando Figes) and much more surprisingly Paris (Yves-Marie Berce). These heroes, he says, have bucked the trends of the day and dared to write in unfashionable ways about unfashionable things. Too many historians of recent generations, according to Marwick, have been obsessed with theory and with abstractions such as discourse analysis. This is thankfully, he claims, not the case with some of the new stars of the discipline such as Mazower (who has written extensively on European wars of the twentieth century) and Figes (author of a narrative history of the Russian Revolution). These two, and others like them, have been bold enough to turn their attention to the things that good history writing should always be about: how “events are experienced, the outcomes of those experiences, and the place of events in complex chains of causation.”

The third TLS essay that I have in mind is a review by C. Bradley Thompson that appeared in the summer of 2001 and is likely to be of particular interest to readers of Common-place, since it focuses on the historiography of the American Revolution. “Over the past thirty years,” Bradley laments, “narrative historians of the Revolution have been fighting a losing battle against those who would turn history into a social science” and who “scoff at the idea that one can study the motives, ideas and actions of autonomous moral beings.” It is unclear, from his account, whether Bradley thinks that we have learned anything much of value from the “monographs of ordinary people doing ordinary things” that have proliferated in recent times. “Midwives, witches and wenches” (favored topics for new historians), though, seem of at best only cursory interest to Bradley, and he has little time as well for general theories that look for grand patterns and thus ignore the “contingency and drama” of a year like 1776. When Clio is in good shape, he suggests, historians concentrate on Great Men doing Great Deeds. He thus welcomes the resurgence, in studies of the American Revolution, of biography-driven works such as Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers (New York, 2001), Bernard Weisberger’s America Afire (New York, 2000), and John Ferling’s Setting the World Ablaze (New York, 2000)–the three specific books he reviews. Nothing is better for a muse made anemic by a diet of social scientific pap, Bradley suggests, than spending time with authors unafraid to focus on the “riveting history of the great political events” for which Adams, Jefferson, and Washington (not “deep-lying and slowly moving social structures”) were responsible.

The case–at least to those who feel, as I do, that Clio is not just alive but in fairly good shape right now–has just grown curioser and curioser over the years. And recently, New York University Professor Tony Judt, a well-known scholar of modern European intellectual and political life, has taken his readers completely through the looking glass via a tellingly titled essay, “The End of History,” which appeared in the New Republic last May. This article is worth a close look. After all, as a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and other general interest publications, Judt is an unusually influential conveyor of ideas about the state of the discipline to the public at large.

The essay in question, which was not Judt’s first to complain about the direction the profession has taken, was cleverly disguised as a review of Kathleen Burk’s Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor. One of Judt’s main claims is simple: Taylor would have little chance of getting tenure these days–if he was “fortunate enough to find employment” in the first place. Why? Because “the people whose words and actions” interested that great historian of modern Europe were “elderly white Christian men.” Moreover, Taylor’s publications were jargon free and “too frequently to be found in accessible media outside the guild”; he was more interested in nationalists than in theories of nationalism; and he did not allow his concern with detail to keep him from venturing “broad claims.” History since Taylor, Judt implies, was attacked from many directions and everything from obfuscation (in the realm of terminology) to democratization (in the realm of historical actors deemed worthy of study) took their toll on the discipline. Indeed, Judt gives us a complex vision of the death of Clio that is reminiscent of the denouement to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: the revelation that somany blows were struck renders it pointless to try to figure out who exactly did in the victim.

How Judt’s essay strikes a reader is likely to depend heavily on her or his position. It has doubtless evoked more than a few hearty calls of “Here, here” from professional historians who share his gloomy vision of the state of the field. And it has surely made gripping reading for some people fascinated with the past who work outside of the academy and are curious about what has been happening in history departments on American campuses. But professional historians who do not think of the discipline as dead, dying, or even very sick–a large group in which I count myself–are likely to be annoyed by essays such as his and Himmelfarb’s. This is in part because of our sense that seeing such articles will leave members of that second category of readers just described with an erroneous impression of the state of history writing and history teaching today. To many of us, Clio seems, at worst, to be experiencing more than her fair share of growing pains just now. If she feels worn out, this is due to trying to stretch in new directions, attempting to cover more topics and peer into more corners of the world than ever before. To portray this inquisitive and adventurous muse as incapacitated seems to us peculiar to say the least.

This does not mean that we feel historians should be complacent. My own sense at least is that history, like many other academic disciplines, faces important challenges right now. One reason for this is that shifts are taking place in the economic and technological aspects of scholarly publishing that are leading in directions no one can predict. The very existence and form of Common-place is reflective of this confusing situation. On the one hand, new ways to communicate about the past have become possible (in cyberspace, for example), but on the other hand there is deep concern about the difficulty of finding ways to get certain kinds of ideas into print (due to cutbacks at university presses among other factors).

In addition, significant questions have been raised lately in many quarters over whether there has been too much emphasis put on specialized knowledge and too little attention paid to synthesis in recent decades. This is linked to ongoing debates among historians about what is gained and what is lost when more or less attention is placed on storytelling techniques as opposed to other methods of communicating information about the past.

On top of all this, there is now concern, as there should be, with making historical scholarship speak to the issues of a new epoch in which the rapid flow of people, products, ideas, and violence across borders is challenging familiar concepts of the shape of the world. In the United States, there are also many specific political trends and debates–touching on everything from multiculturalism to feminism to the legacy of slavery–that present historians with new challenges. Never before, perhaps, has history been brought into so many different sorts of contemporary arguments in so many different ways. Some look to history as a remedy to past injustices (as is the case with many discussions of reparations). Others turn to it as a provider of analogies to help make sense of unprecedented events (as was the case in the aftermath of September 11 with the repeated use of references to Pearl Harbor). How exactly professional historians can make their work relevant to these enterprises remains an open question, as is that of whether the discipline has become too politicized or too far removed from political engagement in the past few decades.

Then there is the recurring need for historians to strive to connect their scholarship to the interests of people outside of the academy. Here, as in many other cases, one can see a glass that is half full: for example, my sense is that more and more of my colleagues have been putting their expertise to work in recent years as consultants for documentary film projects, museum exhibitions, and the like. Or one can see a glass that is half empty: for example, reward structures at major research universities may seem to go too far in valuing publications intended only for specialists over those designed to reach and engage broader audiences of readers.

To speak of challenges that need to be faced is very different, however, than to speak of a discipline that is dying or dead.

It is important to note one factor that makes it particular easy for the public to be led astray about Clio’s health: those who think in terms of disciplinary challenges as opposed to fiendish plots generally do not write about the issue in general interest periodicals. Conspiracy theorists might see something suspicious in this. They might imagine we keep a low profile so that outsiders will be less aware of how much we have benefited from recent trends. Or they might interpret this as proof that we really do only care about writing things that will interest one another as opposed to nonspecialists (even though some of us do write about other matters for newspapers and popular magazines). There are, however, more mundane reasons for our comparative silence on this issue. Saying Clio is alive and well, just doing more things and fraternizing with a more eclectic bunch of disciplines than she used to, does not seem newsworthy. Moreover, many of us would rather go about our regular work than write polemics. And this “regular work,” incidentally, even among historians influenced by theories that have their roots in Paris, often involves trying to make sense of historical events.

My own case may be instructive. Most of my graduate training took place in the 1980s at Berkeley, then a hotbed of interdisciplinary experimentation and the birthplace of the cultural studies journal Representations. Hence, it is no surprise that my dissertation on Chinese social movements included references to literary and cultural theorists and had a lot to say about symbols and discourse. It also, however, contained chapters that reconstructed what happened and why at key moments in the Chinese Revolution. From that eclectic starting point, I have gone on to publish essays (occasionally in nonacademic as opposed to academic periodicals) that could be categorized as contributions to everything from the study of popular culture to the history of a Great Idea (human rights). In addition, I have just coedited (with an anthropologist) a volume called Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities that brings together work by historians and scholars in other disciplines who share an interest in gender. This eclecticism is, I think, not unusual. It reflects a career that has taken shape during a period when no particular trend has been dominant. Many of the things I have just said about myself could be adapted, in general ways, to describe the publishing careers, for example, of early Americanists who were part of my Berkeley graduate school cohort, such as Nina Silber, Stephen Aron, and Elizabeth Reis (a past contributor to Common-Place)

I would also argue that eclecticism is the best word for what has been appearing in the pages of some of the discipline’s leading journals of late, including the Organization of American Historians’ Journal of American History and the American Historical Association’s American Historical Review.  That, at least, is my sense after having had the good fortune to be closely affiliated with the latter journal from 1997 through the middle of 2001. (I served first as the associate editor and then, for a year, as the acting editor, while the regular editor, Michael Grossberg, took a sabbatical.)

What exactly have the critics claimed about the AHR in the pieces alluded to above?  The New Criterion says it has swung too far to the left–citing as particularly telling its recent publication of radical historian Eric Foner’s AHA presidential address, “American Freedom in a Global Age.” Himmelfarb, without specifically naming it, clearly sees it as one of the “establishment” periodicals that has been ignoring major topics such as American Protestantism and the nature of citizenship. And Judt presents it as part of a system of “self-censorship” that discourages young historians not just from working on A. J. P. Taylor’s favorite topics but also from writing about them clearly.

From my (admittedly biased) perspective as a participant in the editorial process, it seems that what the AHR has actually been doing lately has simply been publishing work that ranges very widely in terms of subject matter and methodology. There has also been a good deal of variation when it comes to the ideological content of the articles and presidential addresses it has run. It is hard to imagine, for example, how Robert Darnton’s 2000 presidential address on the circulation of news in France around the time of the French Revolution could be construed as a Marxist interpretation of the past. Even harder to interpret as radical would be a 1997 AHR article by William Roger Louis, a specialist in the history of the British Empire who would several years later be elected AHA president. This essay explored (in a fashion A. J. P. Taylor would have found very familiar) the diplomatic status of Hong Kong in the wake of World War II.

There is no question that, due to its eclecticism, the AHR has often showcased work on topics that Himmelfarb might consider marginal and that have nothing to say about the Great Men of such concern to C. Bradley Thompson. It has not, though, ignored diplomacy (as the Louis article just mentioned indicates), American religion (a 1999 essay by Susan Juster on evangelical activities in the early Republic comes to mind), or the dynamics of citizenship (a 2000 essay by Mary Ryan on U.S. city halls addressed this). It is not even the case that the AHR has had nothing to say lately about the Founding Fathers: a review essay by Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis appeared in 1997 that assessed the strengths and weaknesses of various works on Jefferson.

Finally, Judt’s arguments notwithstanding, the AHR has gone to considerable lengths to make sure it regularly publishes work by people who care about the quality of their prose–something that is also true of the Journal of American History. One indication of the AHR’s concern with this (and with exploring issues associated with narrative) was the commissioning of a 1998 forum on historical fiction. The lead piece was by novelist Margaret Atwood (who had recently published Alias Grace, a work based on an actual trial) and responses to it came from three professional historians: Jonathan Spence, Lynn Hunt, and John Demos. All of the respondents were asked to write in part because of their reputations as stylists, something that they had earned in part by writing essays or books intended for popular as opposed to specialist audiences.

In the end, however, it is neither as a writer of history nor a onetime editor of a particular historical journal that the debate on the Murdered Muse leaves me most perplexed–but as a reader. It would be easy, but wrong, to assume that someone like me must admire works on the past very different from those that impress scholars such as Marwick, Himmelfarb, and Judt. After all, my work has appeared in venues with such (to them) suspicious sounding titles as Theory and Society and the New Left Review. And yet, if I were to compile a list of the books on the past that I have read and appreciated in the last half dozen years, I suspect that more than a few works on it would be ones that historians of the Clio-is-dead-or-endangered school would also deem admirable.

Some books on my list might not please them. Gail Hershatter’s Dangerous Pleasures, a study of prostitution in Old Shanghai, would probably be too focused on discourse for Marwick’s taste. And the emphasis on imperialist exploitation in Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, a book comparing economic trends in China and the West between the 1600s and 1800s, might rub Himmelfarb the wrong way. Other works on my list, though, would be likely to strike a more positive chord with these two critics and with Judt. Surely, for example, Marwick would like, as I do, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century–after all, it is by Mark Mazower, one of the new generation of historians he credits with helping to defeat postmodern threats to Clio. Himmelfarb could not object to the inclusion on my list of Mary Ann Glendon’s A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  After all, this fluidly written study pays close attention to religion, politics, a big idea, and a famous person. And wouldn’t Judt admire, as I do, Stephen Aron’s How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay?  The prose is clear and forceful, the main protagonists Christian men.

Finally, I would like to think that, if they came across Keith Schoppa’s Blood Road, one of the most interesting recent works on the part of the world I happen to study, they would all join me in admiring it. This is a carefully researched biography of Shen Dingyi, a Chinese politician, poet, and educator who died in mysterious circumstances. And in addition to all it has to tell us about the life, times, and ideas of an intriguing historical figure, it has the attraction of reading in parts like a good whodunit. The fondness that many historians have for this genre is well known, and I am definitely among those whose favorite works to take to the beach tend to be mysteries. I do have certain strong preferences though: one is that, when I read a tale of detection, I like the victim to be a person, not a muse.

Further Reading: Assessments of the State of the Discipline The following essays and books critical of recent trends have been cited above: Gertrude Himmelfarb, untitled review of the Journal of the History Society, in the “Learned Journals” section, Times Literary Supplement (London), November 10, 2000: 30-31; Arthur Marwick, “All Quiet on the Postmodern Front,” Times Literary Supplement (London), February 23, 2001: 13-14; Tony Judt, “The End of History,” The New Republic, May 14, 2001: 36-42; C. Bradley Thompson, “The Return of the Great Men,” Times Literary Supplement (London), August 10, 2001: 26-27; “Notes and Comments,” The New Criterion, April 2001: no pagination (accessed online at www.criterion.com); Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990); and Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past (reprint edition, New York, 2000). For an extended discussion of the state of history writing today that is much more optimistic in tone, though cognizant of challenges facing professional historians, see Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1995). Other works cited above William Roger Louis, “Hong Kong: The Critical Phase, 1945-1949,” American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 4 (October 1997): 1052-85; “Histories and Historical Fictions: An AHR Forum,” American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1502-29; Susan Juster, “Demagogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions,” American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1560-81; Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 1-35; Mary P. Ryan, “‘A Laudable Pride in the Whole of Us’: City Halls and Civic Materialism,” American Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 4 (October 2000): 1131-70; Eric Foner, “American Freedom in a Global Age,” American Historical Review,vol. 106, no. 1 (February 2001): 1-16; Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-century Shanghai (Berkeley, 1997); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1999); R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road : The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley, 1995); Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); and Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a member of Indiana University’s departments of history and of East Asian languages and cultures who also holds an adjunct position in American studies. His most recent books are Human Rights and Revolutions, coedited with Lynn Hunt and Marilyn B. Young (Lanham, Md., 2000), and Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities, coedited with Susan Brownell (Berkeley, 2001).

The nature of the things he carried

On June 26, 1791, the Spanish navigator, explorer, and Enlightenment thinker Alejandro Malaspina neared the Alaskan coast and the towering Mount Fairweather came into view. His two corvettes, the Descubrieta (Discovery) and Atrevida (Daring), tacked offshore as Malaspina “felt at least it would be wise to take a look at the nature of these coasts.” The dramatic coast surely stunned Malaspina as well as his officers, crew, naturalists, and artists: a majestic “snow-capped cordillera” rose above “magnificently luxuriant pine trees,” numerous “flocks of plovers flew about,” and the “beneficial rays of the Sun” spotlighted one of the world’s largest ice fields—soon to be named Malaspina Glacier—at the base of Mount St. Elías. While artists sketched and scientists measured, the practical-minded Malaspina must have allowed himself a private and momentary fantasy that somewhere along this mysterious coastline he would find the long-sought entrance to the Northwest Passage.

Leaving Cádiz, Spain, in 1789, Malaspina’s five-year plan of exploration mentioned America’s Northwest Coast in only the most cursory fashion. The Spanish navy had instructed him to round Cape Horn, inspect the Spanish American colonies, visit Hawai´i en route to the Kamchatka Peninsula of northeastern Russia, sail south to Manila before charting numerous South Sea islands, and then return to Spain via the Cape of Good Hope: a five year voyage that was equal parts imperial inspection, Enlightenment science, and what Malaspina humbly termed “charting the Pacific Ocean.” But two years into the voyage during a stopover in Mexico, Malaspina received new orders from Antonio Valdés, Spain’s Ministro de Marina, to sail north and search for the Pacific’s most imaginary feature, the Northwest Passage. Like other European navigators before and after him, Malaspina was exploring the unknown nature of the Pacific Ocean.

Nature, in all its guises, was central to the expedition’s endeavors. Science, exploration, commerce, health, and navigation all balanced on the fulcrum of natural discoveries and ecological uncertainties. The same may be said for all the late eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century “voyages of discovery” in the Pacific, from Louis Antione de Bougainville’s aboard the Boudouse in the 1760s to Charles Darwin’s on the Beagle in the 1830s. The natures they studied included human biologies (beginning with their own bodies), plant and animal species, and landscapes, with possible discoveries (like a Northwest Passage) governed—as Malaspina wrote in a slightly different context—”by the dictates of imagination rather than reason.” To conduct his investigations into these various natures, Malaspina carried different types of baggage: baggage of the material, intellectual, and imaginary varieties.

The Material

Vessels on voyages of discovery carried the combined accouterments of modern-day department stores, natural history laboratories, and barnyards. The scientific travelers packed instruments and libraries for the long years at sea. Malaspina’s onboard surgeons—Francisco Flores Moreno on the Descubierta and Pedro María González on the Atrevida—brought an assortment of medical supplies, including scalpels for bloodletting, rum and wine for the treatment of most all maladies, and citrus juices. While the British navy increasingly recognized this latter item as important to combat the deadly scurvy on long voyages, Malaspina appeared only dimly aware of its healthful qualities. Nonetheless, Malaspina showed exceptional concern for the health of his crew. Like Captain James Cook before him, Malaspina viewed the ship as a discrete environment with its own collective healthfulness, infections, and dangerous miasmas.

Indeed, Malaspina’s surgeons and naturalists applied miasma theory (the belief that unhealthy vapors induced various illnesses) to ship and shore alike. During one stop in the Pacific, the French-born naturalist Louis Neé concluded, “[T]he constant vapours arising from the earth, here rich in minerals and full of moisture, made it much more unhealthy.” These vapors, Neé suggested, had contributed to the death of fellow naturalist Arcadio Pineda on the island of Luzon. Malaspina could do little about dangerous miasmas once his crew reached shore, but his two ships offered a more controlled environment, and there he ordered frequent testing of the shipboard air quality through use of a new gadget, the eudiometer.

Invented in the 1770s, the eudiometer purportedly measured the healthfulness (actually the oxygen content) of air. In an age when miasma theory reigned, the air’s “salubrity,” “goodness,” “breathableness,” and “dampness” seemed significant indicators to monitor. Malaspina had the ships’ air tested on numerous occasions as they approached the Northwest Coast, perhaps because he had never sailed in the North Pacific. On May 31, 1791, Malaspina reported with delight “a salubrity of ninety-five in the atmospheric air, but also that the air taken below showed a quality very close to this . . . Here it was realized that the lack of salubrity noted in previous experiments” with the eudiometer “was caused almost entirely by a large open cask of pickled sauerkraut, somewhat spoilt.” Two weeks later, fearing dampness in the ships’ air, Malaspina ordered a “cleaning and ventilating below decks, but also by airing all the boatswain’s gear, whose storeroom we feared might have become damp.” With the below deck ports fully open, Malaspina observed, “we saw the whole crew in such a fine state of health and strength that the eudiometers showed, on the morning of the 15th, no difference at all between the air below decks and that of the atmosphere.”

Cleaning and ventilating below decks on long voyages certainly maintained a tidy vessel, even if we now recognize that it had no impact on the most common and dangerous maladies faced by sailors: scurvy, tuberculosis, influenza, and malaria. Seen from our perspective, at least, the eudiometer carried more symbolic resonance than practical purpose. It symbolized Malaspina’s (and the Spanish navy’s) concern for his crew’s health. Like Cook, he assumed personal responsibility for returning home with as few casualties as possible. His frequent use of the eudiometer also signified Malaspina’s allegiance to Enlightenment science, in that he collected and compared the eudiometer’s data and took action based on this data. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the eudiometer revealed the voyage’s investigation of nature as a complex and multilayered system—a system that connected the individual’s diseased or healthy body to the various environments in which the human organism lived. The ship offered one environment Malaspina could control, while the Northwest shore presented unknown natures that might endanger the health and lives of his men.

The Intellectual

Alejandro Malaspina understood the links between his voyage and Enlightenment thought. In political affairs, he hoped the voyage would encourage reform of Spanish colonial policies, and he would pay dearly for his beliefs with a ten-year prison sentence shortly after his return to Spain. His economic vision may be called neomodern, in that he viewed navigation as essential to the global trade that offered “prosperous benefit” to “society.” In science, he sought friendship with the famed British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks and supported the many endeavors of his onboard scientists, proudly noting even the smallest “progress in natural history”: the sighting one day of two albatross, a bird already classified by Linnaeus.

But if the Enlightenment provided the broad intellectual context for his voyage, Malaspina’s professional mentor was another navigator, the late Captain James Cook. That Malaspina had never met Cook was irrelevant. Malaspina consulted Cook’s journals, ideas, and actions at each stage of the voyage, and nowhere was this truer than along the Northwest Coast.

Cook’s voyages, Donald C. Cutter writes, “were the yardstick against which Malaspina measured his own.” And yet there was more: Malaspina sought to achieve an almost psychic relationship with the late British exemplar of Pacific exploration. Less than a week after leaving Mexico for the Northwest Coast, Malaspina studied the methods by which Cook maintained his authority over sailors. Cook could lead his men with discipline and “direct coercion,” while Malaspina believed “in dealing with Spanish seamen one has to consider the sensibility, reasoning, and lively passions so different from those of northern seamen.”

During the following month at sea Malaspina repeatedly consulted Cook’s charts, hoping to prepare himself for the notoriously treacherous coastline of the Pacific Northwest. Nearing Sitka Sound on June 23 he noted, “[T]he very detailed description of this stretch of coast by Captain Cook was just what we would expect of the accuracy of that illustrious mariner.” Thereafter, Malaspina often found it unnecessary to even use Cook’s surname in his journal entries: Cook was simply invoked as “the English navigator” or “the English Captain.” Cook had become a presence, almost a phantom participant, on Malaspina’s voyage. Cook knew something of the nature of the Northwest Coast, and Malaspina studied his mentor’s words and charts as if he were deciphering a map of buried treasure.

Cook and Malaspina pursued the same goal in the icy North Pacific—a waterway to the Atlantic Ocean—and they each viewed the purported existence of this natural phenomena with rational skepticism. Cook explored numerous inlets and bays for the illusive passage, all to no avail. But he left behind the smallest shred of possibility that one could exist. Malaspina recognized this opening, and he held orders from the Spanish navy to search for it. Yakutat Bay (Port Mulgrave) might offer the prize that Cook had missed. While Malaspina shared all of Cook’s doubts, he was willing to explore the bay and share the glory or disenchantment with the English Navigator.

The Imaginary

Once safely anchored in Yakutat Bay, Malaspina’s imagination turned to the legendary “Strait of Anian” which supposedly marked the Northwest Passage. This mission originated with a document discovered in Spanish archives two weeks before Malaspina’s ships left Spain. The “Relación” of Ferrer Maldonado, penned in 1609, recounted Maldonado’s fantastic 1588 journey across the Atlantic Ocean, through the “Strait of Labrador,” and into the balmy Strait of Anian. The Strait of Anian, according to Maldonado, was fifteen leagues in length bordered by high rocky cliffs. It terminated in the Pacific Ocean with a bay (surrounded by fruit trees, no less!) capable of holding five hundred vessels. Maldonado must have estimated this berthing capacity, because the only ship he encountered was a large vessel crewed by Hanseatic Lutherans. Malaspina read Maldonado’s Relación and it left him, not surprisingly, “immersed in doubts.” And yet, there was something oddly compelling about Maldonado’s report: a level of almost convincing detail (for instance, Maldonado could only converse with the Hanseatic Lutherans in Latin) that must have forced its way into Malaspina’s imagination and certainly sparked the interest of his sponsors, the Spanish navy.

Ferrer Maldonado had kindly offered the precise coordinates for the bay, which roughly matched those of Yakutat Bay. So on the morning of July 2, 1791, Malaspina and a few crewmembers paddled the ships’ launches up the channel through numerous ice floes, turned a corner, and encountered the bay’s terminus: not a passage to the Atlantic, but a massive wall of “ice covered rock.” “The harbor,” Malaspina writes, “was given the name of Desengaño (Disenchantment Bay), the outer entrance that of Ferrer, after the ancient mariner, who was the cause of our investigations, and the inner island was named after Haenke, in honour of the botanist who shared with us on this voyage all the dangers and discomforts of sea voyages.” In the spirit of the island’s namesake Tadeo Haenke, Malaspina did a little botanizing in Disenchantment Bay and “buried a bottle containing a record of our survey . . . and the possession taken in the name of His Majesty.” Hopefully, Malaspina understood the irony of taking “possession” of something he had just proven to not exist. Perhaps the act was a gentle barb aimed at those who ordered this mission as well as a playful reminder to hereafter check the flights of his own imagination.

Malaspina returned to the very real sciences of botany, ethnology, geography, and cartography in the weeks that followed. The expedition completed its survey of Yakutat Bay, ran north and surveyed portions of Prince William Sound, and then turned southeast for the Spanish fort at Nootka Sound. The following summer, during the long days and nights of sailing across the Pacific, he wrote a dissertation on Ferrer Maldonado’s claims for the Northwest Passage. Malaspina detailed Maldonado’s many inconsistencies and expressed his own doubts that such a passage existed. But echoing Cook’s conclusions, he thought such explorations should continue for the reason that “the object of navigation is trade” and the shortest route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would cut through the Americas. That shortcut should be discovered if it existed.

While Malaspina carried Maldonado’s map of an imaginary landscape for the Pacific Northwest, he also carried a very real imagination for exploration that united his efforts with those of Cook, Sir Francis Drake, John Ledyard, and many other explorers. Though he failed to discover a Northwest Passage—one would not appear until global warming sufficiently melted the Arctic icepack in the late twentieth century—Malaspina’s imagination nonetheless comforted itself with countless smaller discoveries in natural history and related sciences. He watched with sheer excitement as the Northwest coastline unfolded before his ships, and he expressed an equal thrill when his naturalists discovered unanticipated similarities between species that lived on opposite ends of the Pacific Ocean. “A great harmony,” he wrote, “in the products of nature is revealed at every stop when they are examined and compared over the entire globe.” Similarity and natural variation, Charles Darwin would add decades later, but similarity was remarkable enough for Malaspina.

Malaspina’s ships left the Northwest Coast in September 1791 and sailed south for Mexico, briefly stopping over at Monterey, Alta California. From Mexico the two ships turned west and crossed the Pacific, with numerous sailors on board bedridden by malaria. Fearing for his sailors’ health, Malaspina frequently used the eudiometer to test the air below deck, and he also repeatedly consulted his Cook volumes during the following two seasons of Pacific navigation. But more than anything else, it was Malaspina’s imagination that maintained a connection with the Pacific Northwest Coast. In an ocean filled with stunning coastlines and landforms, the Pacific Northwest’s nature was hard to rival in terms of majestic beauty, a sense of discovery, and terrifying danger. He reflected on that dangerous beauty during the next three years at sea, and his imagination must have taken him to that coastline repeatedly during his subsequent nine years of near solitary confinement in the La Coruña prison. After all, Malaspina’s voyage reflected his (as well as many other Spaniards’) imagination for an enlightened empire—one guided by new political reforms, economic progress, and scientific rationalism. He imagined the discoveries and knowledge brought home on the Descubierta and Atrevida would contribute in some measure toward these goals. In the end, Malaspina paid dearly for his active imagination.

Further Reading:

On Malaspina’s 1789-94 expedition, see The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794: Journals of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina, edited by Andrew David, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Carlos Novi, and Glyndwr Williams, 2 vols. (London, 2001-03); Iris H. Wilson Engstrand, “Of Fish and Men: Spanish Marine Science During the Late Eighteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (February 2000): 3-30; Engstrand, “The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Comes to Spanish California,” Southern California Quarterly 80 (Spring 1998): 3-30; David J. Weber, “The Spanish Moment in the Pacific Northwest,” in Paul W. Hirt, ed., Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada (Pullman, Wash., 1998); Donald C. Cutter, Malaspina and Galiano: Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast, 1791 & 1792 (Vancouver, 1991); and John Kendrick, Alejandro Malaspina, Portrait of a Visionary (Montreal, 1999).

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

David Igler is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (Berkeley, 2001).

Open today’s newspaper and another eBay scandal may be breaking. The recent headlines would scare off any techno-shy historian: “EBay Cancels Art Sale and Suspends Seller.” “Stolen Goods Making Way to Internet.” “Fencing Schemes Use Online Auction Sites.” “F.B.I. Opens Investigation of EBay Bids.”

That last one was the clincher–the Feds were involved! Now there was no way I could mention eBay in an academic setting. How could I, a lowly graduate student, admit at a conference that I too have been bitten by the eBay bug? Or tell a departmental search committee that I spend way too much time browsing in eBay’s “Collectibles” and “Antiques” categories looking for that one item that will make my dissertation? Probably not a good strategy in an especially tight job market.

Yet, despite all the bad publicity, I couldn’t dampen my eBay enthusiasm. I wanted to shout it among the dank library shelves, whisper it across the reading room table. I am a young and serious historian, and I love eBay! My secret would surely be out soon. How long before my colleagues figure out my username is “mac312,” and I have an auction watch list longer than my bibliography?

So, I decided not to panic, and, like any good historian, fell back on the one thing I did learn in graduate school: when in doubt, RESEARCH. There had to be others like me. I surely am not alone. And, thus, I spent the next few weeks in search of other historians equally enchanted by this online auction world. It didn’t take long to find them among eBay’s more than 16 million registered users. They are everywhere. In every corner of the country. They are curators, hobbyists, librarians, department chairs, distinguished scholars, and graduate students. They rave about eBay and seem surprisingly untroubled by its recent bad press.

Still, while many historians embrace the new technology, others seem more disturbed by its implications. Would artifacts and manuscripts normally destined for archives now end up more readily in private hands? Is eBay driving up prices for antiquarian objects once easily acquired by archival institutions? In short, is eBay a good or bad thing for the teaching and preservation of history? What follows is an eBay balance sheet: a brief and frankly anecdotal look at the pros and cons of the web venue that has sparked so much interest among amateurs and professionals alike.

Only recently have many research libraries begun to realize the potential of the Internet. University and government libraries are rushing headlong into digitization projects that will broadcast archival documents across the Web, making them accessible to the most remote researcher or classroom teacher. But Gretchen Adams, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Hampshire, remembers how skeptical her colleagues were when she first went online in 1994. “People thought the Internet was all pornography, sports scores, and chat rooms,” Adams said. “I was warned many times about getting involved in H-Net,” a now popular history listserv network. “I had trouble convincing some of my colleagues of the value of the Web.”

The same people who thought the Internet was limited to our culture’s detritus may think eBay is all about peddling Pokemon cards, Hummel figurines, and fake Diebenkorns.

 

In many ways, eBay is fighting that battle all over again. The same people who thought the Internet was limited to our culture’s detritus may think eBay is all about peddling Pokemon cards, Hummel figurines, and fake Diebenkorns. Adams herself took some convincing when it came to eBay. She was deeply engrossed in a project on the legacy of the Salem witch trials in America when a classmate, Kate Larson, suggested she pull up eBay on her computer screen and plug in a search for items relating to Halloween. “Kate really saw the potential in this ephemera. I went on eBay very half-heartedly,” Adams admitted.

But within a few months, Adams had assembled, with eBay’s help, a visual map of the commodification of the Salem trials. Salem silver spoons. Salt-and-pepper shakers. Even a State Police convention badge circa 1890 sporting a witch emblem. Discovering when the “merchandising” of Salem began is crucial to her research. And, Adams notes, she “would not have known how far back these tourist items went without eBay.” Still, she is quick to add that she has purchased very few of the items she tracked down on eBay. Setting herself apart from a collector, Adams clarifies: “I didn’t want a house full of Salem junk. I’m using it for leads and visuals . . . I have no desire to collect this stuff.”

Indeed, eBay’s association with the world of collectors and collecting may fuel some of the reticence among scholars. A sort of ivory-tower snobbery seems to set in among academics who want to distinguish their interests and pursuits from those of amateur historians and hobbyists. One scholar equated being on eBay with admitting you do genealogy–an analogy that insults eBay users and family historians alike. Another young professor said she had no problem bidding on vintage Fisher Price toys for her toddler but felt “icky and cheesy” after winning an auction for an eighteenth-century family Bible record. When Gretchen Adams mentioned to a colleague that she was going to be interviewed for this piece, the person warned her: “You sure you want to be quoted in that article?”

I, too, have experienced the chill that eBay elicits in some academic circles. In researching this article, I posted a query about eBay to a well-respected book history Listserv. The posting was firmly rejected by the list owner, who made clear that he did not want to clutter subscribers’ e-mail inboxes with anecdotes of the “my experiences on eBay” variety. The list owner ended his reply by emphasizing that the list was a scholarly one, only there to discuss the “history of books.” Ironically, once I did post my query to another, more open-minded, list, it became apparent that many of the respondents were using eBay for book history projects.

Like many scholars who use eBay, John Hench was not drawn to the medium for its research potential–at first. He was looking for a good light meter. A photographer friend suggested he check on eBay. “I was astounded to find the lifelike picture of this light meter on the computer screen. I bought one, and it came pretty quickly,” said Hench, Vice President for Academic and Public Programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass.

That was about two years ago. Before long, Hench was trawling eBay for other things. In November 1998, he began amassing a diverse collection of World War II-related items including homefront ephemera and Armed Services Editions of novels and popular magazines. His collection now boasts more than 400 books, magazines, and homefront collectibles, most of them acquired online. Hench is unashamed about his eBay enthusiasm. “I’d not had much luck in used book stores. And you just don’t see many of these kinds of items listed in dealers’ catalogues,” he notes. “This collection simply would not have been possible without eBay.”

Professional historians who were already avid collectors pre-eBay are the most unapologetic about their eBay habits and tend to scoff at anyone who would not use the technology to its best advantage. “The difficulty is often finding what you want. So, for someone to say they aren’t going to use eBay to buy something they need is like saying you’re no longer going to work on Thursdays. It just doesn’t make sense,” said Terry Belanger, University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia.

At first, Belanger’s interest in eBay was mainly personal. He collects nineteenth-century Victorian pottery and found on eBay a well of transferware dealers he would normally only find at antique malls. However, Belanger wears a variety of hats at UVa and in one capacity helped undergraduate students assemble an exhibition of Thomas Jefferson and Monticello ephemera in the University’s Rotunda Dome Room. They acquired, with Belanger doing the bidding and purchasing, over 250 items on eBay–most costing under $10. The exhibit included Thomas Jefferson milk bottles, money clips, paper dolls, and pencil tablets; a scale model of a nuclear submarine named for Jefferson; and Monticello letter openers. “Monticello tonic was a real find at $26. We spent $52 on a Monticello beer can. That was probably the biggest damage the show did,” Belanger said. Most of the items are now in storage, but Belanger expects before long to put the collection up for sale again with the help of one of the online vendors. “This surely gives loan exhibition a new meaning,” Belanger said. “Go into eBay, buy it, then sell it back with enhanced value because it was featured in your exhibition.”

Don’t get me wrong. All of this eBay cheerleading does not mean we should be uncritical of its faults or unconcerned about the trends it may encourage. Fraud, for example. Six-figure fakes may make headlines, but they aren’t the only frauds on eBay. One archivist witnessed bogus Salem trial testimony put up for sale. A museum curator spotted a Maxwell House coffee can classified as “vintage” when it was an obvious reproduction. And eBay’s not like the local antique shop. You can’t pick up the item, smell it, feel it. Photos are nice, but they can’t substitute for the real thing. Some curators say they just don’t trust the descriptions offered by sellers. They’d rather not participate than risk being burned.

In their defense, eBay executives say that only a small fraction of the house’s auctions go bad. About 5 million items are listed on eBay every day–more than 50 million in the second quarter of 2000 alone. Of those listings, about one in 40,000 results in an insurance claim, according to eBay’s spokesman Kevin Pursglove. “The statistics speak for themselves. Chances are you are going to have a positive trading experience,” Pursglove said.

Price–alongside authenticity–is another sore spot for eBay skeptics. Yet again, it’s not the issue grabbing headlines that is of greatest concern to scholars. When the F.B.I. opened an investigation of shill bidding on eBay, few historians shuddered. Employing or recruiting shills to bid up prices may occur in auctions for the higher-end items like fine art or vintage cars. But it seems an awful lot of trouble for the more measly two-figure sums that many goods of greater interest to scholars command. Yet prices on eBay can reach the sky without the use of shills. Just try bidding against someone you know is an avid collector and your efforts begin to feel futile. Often, resource-starved non-profits just can’t afford to compete with an enthusiast’s deep pockets.

 . . . whether we like it or not, eBay’s made it easier than ever to consume history.

In this charged, competitive atmosphere, surfing eBay becomes, for many historians, a schizophrenic pursuit. As professionals, we tell ourselves we’re pursuing history on eBay. Our participation is simply an extension of our scholarly mission. And what about all the other bidders? They are consuming history, in the dual sense of the word: buying it up, and using it up. They are the ones glued to PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. They are the ones scouring the attic for family heirlooms that might fetch a good price online. And, yes, they are most undoubtedly the ones who prevented you from acquiring that one item essential to your next book project. With such rhetorical gymnastics, we eBay-addicted scholars work to separate ourselves from eBay’s “rabble.”

But of course, scholars too, are consumers. Our interests–whether for scholarly or other ends–are encouraging this online buying frenzy as much as collectors’ are. We may pursue an auctioned object with an eye toward including it in an exhibition or discussing its significance in an academic journal, rather than displaying it on our parlor shelf. Nonetheless, we also inflate its monetary value.

And, whether we like it or not, eBay’s made it easier than ever to consume history. It has opened up the market for historical objects, large and small, and brought with it a dark side. Imagine people prowling public library shelves, county offices, or parish archives for records or books they could turn into quick cash online. It may sound like a stretch, but historians have reported seeing church records that go missing from the local parish mysteriously show up on eBay. And there was a recent case in Anderson County, Tennessee, in which county records were put up for auction on eBay. Luckily, someone alerted the county historian, who “won” the records back. Elizabeth O’Leary, a guest curator at Maymont Foundation, a historic house museum in Richmond, Va., uses eBay to collect images and housewares for an exhibition on domestic life in a Gilded Age mansion. She admits feeling a pang of guilt each time she sees an advertisement on eBay she knows has been torn from an old periodical. “The scholar in me hates that these journals like Harper’s have been cannibalized for their ads … but I just love that I can pull it up and look at it,” said O’Leary.

Before we end the historical (hysterical?) hand wringing, there is one more trend worth mentioning: eBay has become a convenient dumping ground for material libraries are eager to toss. Even though the general public is not likely to gasp at this development, it may bring a chill to many in the historical and library professions. In a recent article in the New Yorker, novelist Nicholson Baker shined a bright and disturbing light on the long-running, if rarely publicized, tendency of repositories including the British Library and the Library of Congress to discard (or de-accession in library lingo) bound volumes of newspapers that have been microfilmed. Although eBay was not Baker’s target, he did mention finding there a 1908 volume of the Panama City Star & Herald that had once belonged to the Library of Congress. At about the same time Baker’s essay appeared, the Milwaukee Public Library announced it would sell more than 3,000 bound volumes of its British patents collection on eBay to free up yards of needed shelf space. EBay officials say there is little they can do about such uses of their venue. “As long as the sellers are the legal owners of the merchandise, the item can be sold on eBay,” explained Pursglove.

All told, the charges lodged against eBay sound grave: peddling fakes, inflating prices, putting history up for sale, and encouraging the pillaging of library shelves. But the long-term impact of these trends may be as difficult to gauge as the future of the Internet itself. Many historians say they will continue to peruse eBay’s offerings despite the obvious dangers of forgeries and high prices. As with any purchase, the best policy is “buyer beware,” O’Leary said. And, when it comes to the over-heated collectors’ market, is eBay really to blame?

After all, eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., has only been around since 1995, while these trends have been happening for decades or longer. EBay itself is simply a new venue for an old addiction–collecting. Many of the great libraries and research archives in the United States began with a personal passion for owning the past. The Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, even the Library of Congress were built on the foundation of personal collections: those of Henry E. and Arabella D. Huntington, Isaiah Thomas, and Thomas Jefferson, respectively. “Private collectors have been consuming history, in the U.S. at least, for easily 200 years, which has made amassing a public manuscript collection of certain time periods and historical figures a very difficult, and expensive proposition,” wrote one curmudgeonly curator by e-mail. “This trend predates eBay, the Antiques Roadshow, the computer, the television …. I think that any hypothesis that postulates that eBay is somehow significantly new, or significantly alters the existing trend is just another inane byproduct of Internet über-hype.”

To be sure, collecting is an ancient pursuit. But eBay has changed the landscape of collecting and scholarship in some key ways. It has transformed the way many historians do research. Take, for instance, Priscilla Brewer, associate professor of American Studies at the University of South Florida. Brewer is currently chair of her department and, thus, has found it difficult to get to archives in the Northeast to examine college yearbooks, student scrapbooks, letters, college brochures, and other ephemera for a project on student life at American women’s colleges. Because she was “desk bound,” she decided to begin sniffing online for material. She is amazed at the success she has had. “The material I’m finding on eBay is similar to antiquarian book shops. If I had the time to go to bookstores all over the world I might have amassed the same amount. But there is a minor revolution in terms of scale,” she said. “I check eBay every day from the office. I now consider it part of my research program.” Brewer’s greatest find, acquired online at an antiquarian book site, is a collection of student letters that had been owned by a book shop in Sydney, Australia.

Never before have scholars had this kind of reach from their homes. And some historians, uninitiated to collecting, have slipped by necessity into this exciting and often addictive pursuit. Indeed, scholars working in less traditional fields of study–in popular culture, for example–find eBay more valuable than most archival collections. The material they study simply is not found in libraries. Psyche Williams Forson is finishing up a dissertation on African American foodways. She scours eBay for advertisements that “herald the stereotype of ‘chicken loving darkies'” and postcards or objects that depict African Americans in “compromising, bedeviling positions with chicken.” Forson, of the University of Maryland, College Park, said she is even more interested in how the sellers characterize these images as “cute,” “hilarious,” or “wonderful.”

EBay also offers a stash of great teaching tools. Ilana Nash, who teaches courses on youth culture in the American Studies department at Bowling Green State University, has found “real treasures (on eBay) that are quite literally not findable anywhere else.” She uses the items she wins on eBay for her own projects and teaching. “When scholars use eBay to find scarce items which they then incorporate into their work, they are establishing a body of knowledge that will grant historical legitimacy to the objects,” Nash said. “Thanks largely to eBay, there will someday, hopefully, be respected academic discourses in subjects that are currently scorned or severely under-studied.”

A boon for scholars like Brewer and Nash, for curators, eBay’s impact has been mixed. Some say they can’t afford to bid on eBay items and generally do not trust the accuracy of the item descriptions. At the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware, curators adhere to an informal policy to acquire materials only on approval and that is difficult to do on eBay, where sellers may be reluctant to accept returns. Others, such as O’Leary, are more enthusiastic and perhaps more creative about plumbing eBay’s riches. Like Brewer, O’Leary says eBay gives her a broader reach. “Whereas Richmond, Va. materials (today I purchased a liquor merchant’s price list, 1911) are available and inexpensive in distant states, they are almost non-existent in the immediate region,” O’Leary said. Even when she can borrow such items from a local history museum, she added, “reproduction and permission fees far exceed [the cost of] actually acquiring artifacts” on eBay.

Those curators logging the greatest success on eBay tend to be those acquiring artifacts or materials for the last century. At the Minnesota Historical Society, Supervising Curator Patty Dean has used eBay to help develop the museum’s rock & roll and furniture and design collections. Kevin Hearle, a scholar of American literature, has purchased yearbooks and other Steinbeck-related ephemera for the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University. At the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, Curator Debra Hughes has found items related to the DuPont Company and acquired artifacts to furnish a 1925-era kitchen.

Does this mean early Americanists should not even bother with eBay? Hardly. It may be harder for us to find the treasures that curators after more modern wares can load up on without much effort, but they are there. I conducted a small, and embarrassingly unscientific, experiment. I gave myself only 15 minutes to cruise eBay’s “Antiques & Art” and “Collectibles” categories in search of pre-1850 matter. In less than 10, I produced a handful of “hits” in various price ranges, finds that would surely make some in the fields of early American history salivate. The short list ranged from a mid-eighteenth-century sampler from Pennsylvania ($1,375) to an 1830 farmer’s account book from Massachusetts ($22). With only a few days left before the end of these auctions, neither of the items had elicited a bid. Now the sampler may be a bit pricey for some historians. It’s definitely not in my budget. But others seemed well within reach.

The fact is historians after modern material may have had more success on eBay because they have nowhere else to go. Let’s face it. Early Americanists, especially those relying on more traditional sources, have plenty of places to turn to find what they need. Libraries have been collecting this material for years. And microform collections bring a lot of the most heavily used items to those working in smaller or more remote libraries. So early Americanists may believe that they don’t need to plumb eBay to round out their bibliographies. Those scholars doing material culture and modern American studies are more likely to invest the time and money required on eBay because there are fewer research avenues open to them. Yet, some early Americanists realize the dangers of that assumption, as one curator commented. “I am concerned that we might be missing out on some worthwhile manuscripts,” he said.

Despite such concerns expressed by some history pros, others stubbornly cling to more traditional methods of acquiring the past. Besides not wanting to their waste their time and money, some scholars claim that the online auction site is peddling the same merchandise you’d see in dealers’ catalogues. The dealers have just moved their markets online, right? Well, not exactly. EBay may be a great resource for avid collectors, but it has also opened up a world of antiquarian goods that may have never found their way into an archive or museum before now. Traditionally, archival or special collections librarians rely on dealers’ catalogues to pinpoint material for acquisition. Oftentimes, a library will develop a close relationship with a dealer who will keep them apprized of items of particular interest. While eBay has not eliminated these modes of acquisition, it has enabled curators to explore other purchasing avenues never before open to them.

For the first time, curators such as Russell L. Martin III of the American Antiquarian Society are able to purchase items from individuals who are not professional dealers. Martin has acquired over 30 items on eBay for AAS, admittedly a fraction of the “hundreds of titles” the library acquires every year through more conventional means. Still, Martin relishes the opportunity to locate small treasures online. He recently won a run of a German-language periodical called Americanische Schul-Zeitung published in Louisville, Ky., in the 1870s. Another of Martin’s most cherished eBay finds is an 1877 pamphlet entitled “Meal Feeding and Animal Digestion: Addresses Delivered Before the Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania State Dairyman’s Association at Meadsville, Pa., 1875.” “More than likely, this pamphlet would never have graced a book-dealer’s catalogue, but it is a previously unrecorded edition …. Who should care? AAS, of course,” said Martin, curator of newspapers and periodicals.

“EBay, at present at least, strikes me as a venue for the ‘little guy’,” Martin notes. “The great majority of my eBay transactions have been with individuals, not dealers.” Thus the former owner of the AAS’sAmericanische Schul-Zeitung was not a professional antiquarian bookseller, but a man from Indiana who was also selling a “Cat Tail Cookie Jar,” some “Cobalt Blue Swirl Salad Plates, and a “Dove on a Nest Milk Glass.” As Martin summed up, “EBay is a national garage sale.” As such, Martin admits, eBay will never replace the AAS’s reliance on booksellers’ catalogues, quotes, and expertise. But eBay does provide an additional and valuable tool.

A lifelong stamp collector as well as a professional historian, Dane Claussen hopes the embrace of eBay among many scholars may encourage historians to seek out private collectors for research assistance. Claussen thinks academics tend to be too arrogant or reticent when it comes to seeking out the assistance of layfolk. “I wonder if some scholars … either a) doubt that nonscholars are/can be experts on subjects of interest to scholars and/or b) are threatened by the fact that some nonscholars really do know more about certain subjects than scholars do,” said Claussen, an assistant professor of communications and mass media at Southwest Missouri State University. “Scholars need to start doing their own detective work and seek out collectors and ask to see their collections.”

Because eBay provides e-mail addresses for all its sellers and bidders, it has never been easier to reach out to collectors who may share a historical interest. While some historians complain that they cannot compete with collectors’ passions and deep pockets, others realize that they don’t necessarily need to own an item to use it for their research. E-mail the winning bidder. She might invite you to view her collection or perhaps even borrow an item or two. You might find someone like Frank Scaglione, who retired early from AT&T Bell Labs to take up his hobby full time. He’s a collector-turned-dealer on eBay and trades in everything from Revolutionary War documents to dinosaur eggs. Or Tim Franklin, who quit a 9-to-5 job to sell on eBay. “The neat thing about [eBay] is that I have the entire world looking in my little window to see what I have for sale, whereas if I had a shop here in Bloomsburg, PA, I’d be starving,” Franklin said. Instead, Franklin now counts on the business of a nation full of addicts . . . like me.

I was introduced to eBay in the summer of 1999 by a retired manuscripts curator who heard me deliver a paper at the Berkshire Women’s History Conference. The paper was on nineteenth-century commercial pocket diaries, a chunk of my dissertation on the evolution of the daily diary in America. Before my talk, I apologized to the small crowd because I didn’t have a pocket diary to pass around the audience. They would have to content themselves with dimly-lit slides. The curator, already an eBay convert, suggested later by e-mail that I might find a few diaries on eBay.

Well, he was right. EBay opened up a world of diaries I never knew existed. Like more traditional archives, eBay had its share of Civil War diaries, travel journals, and farmers’ almanacs. But with a quick click of the mouse I uncovered diary formats it would have taken me years to assemble from more conventional collections. Dozens of Boy Scout diaries. A host of diaries published by the Wanamaker Department Store. Diary almanacs hawking everything from liver pills to horse feed. Even the Spice Girls had their own diary, published annually and geared–I can only imagine–toward teenage girls. I certainly wasn’t going to turn up that gem at the local historical society. More than two dozen diaries later, the only thing I probably need now is a good 12-step program. And the “A-ha” moments continue even though I’ve been browsing eBay regularly for more than a year. I continually find new diaries or diary-related innovations that reinvigorate my undertaking and will push me forward to, hopefully, a rousing finish.

All this said, my enthusiasm for the dot.com auction medium has not erased my doubts about its acceptance in the academy as a venerable research tool, nor eliminated some of the more disturbing trends cited above. But it is a good feeling to know I am not alone. EBay appears to hold great promise for me and many others in the business of doing history, and I’d say more about it if I had time. Got an auction ending in 5 minutes. EBay is calling.

Further Reading:

Baker, Nicholson. “Deadline.” The New Yorker 24 July 2000: 42-56.

Bombardieri, Marcella and John Ellement. “Stolen Goods Making Way to Internet, Fencing Schemes Use Online Auction Sites.” Boston Globe 1 June 2000: A1.

Dobrzynski, Judith H. “F.B.I. Opens Investigation of eBay Bids.” New York Times 7 June 2000: C1.

Hansell, Saul and Judith H. Dobrzynski. “EBay Cancels Art Sale and Suspends Seller.” New York Times 11 May 2000: A1.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Molly McCarthy is completing her dissertation on the history of the daily diary in America at Brandeis University. Before returning to graduate school, McCarthy was a journalist and member of the Newsday reporting team awarded the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the TWA 800 crash.

Eight years ago, inspired by the Columbian Quincentennary, I taught an elective entitled “1492: The Age of Cultural Encounters,” to upperclassmen at the Horace Mann School, in New York City. On the first day of class, to start students thinking about the state of the world in 1492, I distributed the following list:

1. This society had some sort of deity for almost every imaginable ailment.
2. This society assigned supernatural powers to the bodies in the heavens.
3. This society had incredibly limited knowledge of medicine.
4. This society had a commonly practiced organized religion.
5. This society had a limited knowledge of its history.
6. This society’s sacred knowledge was not intelligible to most of its members.
7. This society had few literate members who could read the sacred books.
8. This society was ravaged by plagues.
9. Members of this society tended to live in large communities.
10. This society practiced rituals in order to relieve the precarious nature of its world.
11. Members of this society believed touch by their leaders could heal them from disease.
12. This society’s religion emphasized visions from deities and supernatural possession.
13. This society engaged in ritualized public executions.
14. This society enslaved people.

I then asked my students to tell me which of these statements described fifteenth-century Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. As I had anticipated, the class was quick to assign superstitions, polytheism, and illiteracy to Native American or West African cultures; violence and slavery to Europeans.

The problem–and the opportunity–as I saw it, was my students’ inclination to focus on these societies’ differences. My job was to get them to understand their similarities. I began by reminding my students that we were studying an era that had yet to experience a scientific revolution or its now familiar patterns of rational thought. The universe was a mystery, and systems of belief emerged to explain it. Human misfortune was a reality that could only be confronted in the circumscribed arena of ritual, and the rules were established by an oral tradition relayed by elders and a small group of clerics. The sacred texts were unintelligible to all but a few. It was not an era of free thought or individualism. Christianity in England was, according to Keith Thomas, a “repository of supernatural power.” Miracles, holy shrines, ecclesiastical talismans, amulets, and holy relics were all part of the medieval church; and witchcraft played as vital a part in English cosmology as it did in the religions of Native Americans and West Africans.

As a class, we tried together to find commonalities in other areas of social and cultural life. We looked at specifics: ritualized public executions were as much a part of English civic life as the human sacrifice practiced in Tenochtitlan; human slavery was a vital part of the developing economy of the Iberian countries as it was part of the web of institutionalized life in the Americas and West Africa. And we looked at broader cultural phenomena: for instance, all these societies viewed time as cyclical. To get my high schoolers to appreciate that shared worldview–which differs so much from our own–I asked students the meaning of time in their lives. Most students acknowledged how much their lives are ordered by watches. From an alarm clock waking them up in the morning to serious clock watching as the class period comes to an end, they all recognized how their lives are structured by the clock, by seasons, and years. With our own society’s dependence on clock watching in mind, we then contrasted modern notions of time in the premodern world. The Aztecs believed that four “Suns” or world creations preceded their fifth or last Sun, and the world would come to an end at a fixed but unknown time. Similarly, Christians believed in a Judgment Day that would bring time to an end. West Africans, however, did not think that time would come to an end; instead, they believed that they were caretakers for their ancestors, simply recreating their roles, and caring for the land of their forefathers, just as their children would do for them. As premodern societies, none of them believed in human progress or viewed change as positive.

A great help to me in deepening students’ understanding of the fifteenth-century world were slides I had purchased from a memorable exhibit at the National Gallery, Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Since upper-level students at Horace Mann are usually up to the challenge of reading historical monographs, I assigned readings from several provocative, if challenging, pieces of scholarship: Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs (New York: 1991) and her Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (New York: 1987); John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: 1992, 1998); Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Columbus (New York: 1991); William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips’s The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (New York: 1992); Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: 1971). I also gave the students selections from Marvin Lunenfeld’s excellent collection of documents, 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter (Lexington, Mass: 1991). As they did the reading, I asked the students to keep the following questions in mind: How did these societies apprehend and manage their worlds? Why did magic play central roles in all these cultures? In what ways were these societies threatened by change? How did creation myths and rituals sustain these communities? How did these societies conceptualize time and causality? What did they do to give their lives a sense of purpose and direction?

The students responded especially well to Inga Clendinnen’s beautifully written Aztecs; they were fascinated by her description and analysis of human sacrifice, which made it seem at once wholly terrible and completely comprehensible. They also liked Keith Thomas’s demanding book. They especially appreciated his explanation of the way Catholicism incorporated folk religion. Since we still live with superstitions today, this section of his book led to lively discussions.

Teaching “1492: The Age of Cultural Encounters” proved a rewarding experience for me and, I know from their subsequent comments, for the students. At its best, the course gave students an appreciation–in some cases, a profound appreciation–for the limited range of possibilities and the common cultural practices that tied these societies together. I hope it taught them something, too, about the importance of finding common ground with people they encounter in their own lives.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Barry Bienstock has taught American history at the Horace Mann School in New York City since 1982.