Asked about the relationship between fact and fiction in his work, the historical novelist typically defends his enterprise by pointing to the perquisites of poetic license and urging respect for his application of tools such as conjecture, imagination, and intuition. At best, a defense on those terms leads to a reassessment of certain isolated facts, but rarely does it pose a challenge to the very categories of fact and fiction, categories which make praise available to the historical novel only insofar as it conforms to paradigms generally belonging to traditional historical writing. I like to think Last Refuge of Scoundrels, a novel about the relationship between fact and fiction in the telling of history, offers a new answer to the question, an answer consistent with its attempt to capture the American Revolution not as written, but as lived.

Notwithstanding valiant dissenting renditions by Howard Fast, Gore Vidal, Edward Bellamy, Kenneth Roberts (and scant few others), popular renderings of America’s founding have remained largely unchanged since Parson Weems first foisted his cherry-tree folktale upon our culture in 1806. And, like it or not, the Weems view of the Revolution still influences the American imagination: the hallowed light around Washington shines upon each of the Founding Fathers, revealing them as men of unalloyed virtue who, with selflessness, enlightenment, and an appreciation for all things fair and true, inspired an entire country to arms solely upon the strength of their great ideas.

Meanwhile, traditional military and political history, with its exclusive focus on battles, meetings, and writings of the Founding Fathers, embraces Weems-style protagonists: these histories require not human beings to people its narrative but symbols of righteousness. As a result, the common folk who actually fought the war with revolution–not independence–as their goal (the case with my protagonists John, a feminized aide-de-camp of Washington, and Deborah, a prostitute who fought disguised as a man) are either eliminated from the story altogether or branded enemies of the cause. And those who fought for independence without concern for democratic revolution don’t fare much better, rendered as mere mouthpieces for the Founding Fathers’ documented ideals. Consequently, when it comes to popular representations of the “lesser sort,” last year’s Hollywood film The Patriot is, sadly, about as good as it gets.

Certainly our narratives of the American Revolution have grown smart and plucky over the years (Jefferson in Paris, the History Channel series Founding Fathers); these days it seems Americans prefer their Founding Fathers warts and all: fresher, snappier, even naughty. John Adams’s fantasies included being crowned the next American king when the war was over. Samuel Adams was a slob and an embezzler. Ben Franklin had a girlfriend, one Madame Helvetius, who would kiss her lap dog on the lips and swab up its excretions with her chemise. While I, too, am admittedly guilty of having great fun with such details in Last Refuge of Scoundrels, one could argue that these touches–in making the Founding Fathers more identifiable, more fun–only reinforce their longstanding stranglehold on the story of the American Revolution. A seemingly patriotic hold that, in misrepresenting the Founding Fathers as front and center, marginalizes the efforts, thoughts, and ideas of common people (as detailed in sources such as diaries, letters, etc.), and, thus, creates powerful textual support for their continued marginalization across the board: from the history books we read to the political infrastructure we live.

To those who deem alternative sources (diaries, etc.) and the details they generate unreliable, I have only to say that I cannot see any reason why, for example, Samuel Adams’s accounts claiming the fervor in 1765 for the lawyer-driven, anti-Stamp Tax movement should be considered more reliable (particularly given his avowed mission to propagandize on behalf of the movement) than contemporaneous accounts of:

ordinary folks documenting protests for fair bread pricing; women protesting a system that accorded them little or no authority in their male households;

indebted farmers holding the likes of John Hancock responsible for the prohibitive cost of land, and decrying the emerging shenanigan by propertied men to fence in land once deemed common and then exact a fee for farmers to graze their cows where once they had freely roamed;

indentured servants imagining a day when they would not be expected to step in the sewage sludge that ran in rivulets along the sidewalk so that a rich man could be afforded easy passage.

While some reviewers have called Last Refuge of Scoundrels groundbreaking for exposing such facts, these “revelations” are not what is new about the book. As anyone familiar with recent American historical scholarship is aware, perspectives which incorporate these kinds of details have been found in academic writing for decades. If the book is groundbreaking it is because it avails itself of these facts to spin a story–a novel–of the American Revolution unlike anything popular culture has, to date, produced.

Facts alone seldom change how people think about their past. Stories, however, go where facts cannot, speaking directly to myths that shape culture. Those of us who want to change collective memory are compelled, in my view, to take stock of how traditional historical narratives have managed to achieve such deep entrenchment in our culture. I hazard the hypothesis that were it not for two hundred years’ worth of storytellers supporting the single-minded apotheosis of the Founding Fathers (from Weems on), our popular myth of the American Revolution as merely a parade of the Founding Fathers would not be nearly as unevictable as it is.

I feel strongly that current historical scholarship, especially social history, must find its port of entry into the popular marketplace. Some recent works, such as Alfred Young’s excellent The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston, 1999), stride significantly in this direction. Yet even this pioneering work alone is not sufficient. In my view, to successfully shake the popular hold of traditional “cherry-tree” mythology, social history must tell its own stories based on its own paradigms of history. We must become historytellers. I recognize fully that the exigencies of stories that appeal to a broad public–good vs. evil, pace, structure–require above all else an overarching viewpoint, and this might seem, at first blush, incongruous with the basic methods and principles of historical inquiry. But in answer to the concern that such consensus making must involve compromise, nostalgia, or false heroics, I offer Last Refuge of Scoundrels, which I like to think achieves consensus sufficient for good storytelling while avoiding these pitfalls. The novel is the dramatization of the American Revolution told from the vantage point of many people, from all ranks of society, coming to the Revolution for a myriad of purposes. Purposes coalescing in a story. A story of the Revolution as it was lived, breathed, experienced: as the struggle amongst a people to claim its meaning, to name it for themselves and call it their own.

So what is the relationship between fact and fiction in Last Refuge of Scoundrels?

It’s the story itself. Now is the time to begin a dialogue, the particular approach of Last Refuge of Scoundrels notwithstanding, about what historytelling is and could be. For I fear that, without embracing story, the noble endeavors of social history will remain as marginalized and ghettoized as the lives of ordinary men and women whose perspectives we must continue to hail.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

Common-place asks screenwriter and novelist Paul Lussier about the relationship between fact and fiction in his novel about the American Revolution, Last Refuge of Scoundrels (New York, 2001).

During the opening years of the American Revolution, a young white Methodist convert from Maryland underwent an amazing transformation of self. Freeborn Garrettson experienced a “series of disturbing dreams and visions” that launched a process of radical self-transformation. Preaching to an African American audience, “he heard the voice of God telling him, ‘You must let the oppressed go free.'” He immediately freed his own slaves. At risk of his own safety, he opposed the War of Independence, feeling that he “should not ‘have any hand in shedding human blood.'” He was even guided by his dreams “to renege on a marriage proposal . . . so that he would be free to devote his life to preaching the word” (79-80). Garrettson “emerged from this time of inner turmoil and outer conflict with slave owners, Revolutionary mobs, and the temptation of a sexual and family life as a recognized leader in the new Methodist Church” dedicating “all his time and all of his self to oppressed people, black and white” (80). He had responded to God’s command “by freeing both his own slaves and himself.”

Garrettson’s remarkable experiences are but one of the many stories of self-fashioning that Teach Me Dreamsexplores. This important work looks at the changing relations between self and society in Anglo-America during the “Greater Revolutionary era” of 1740 to 1840. As in her other works, Sobel remains concerned with the interconnections between white and black–the hatred and affection, envy and appropriation that permeated relations between Euro-Americans and African Americans.  Teach Me Dreams is based upon some two hundred life narratives written by Americans from all walks of life. Landon Carter, Elizabeth Ashbridge, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass find their place in these pages alongside William Grimes, Solomon Mack, Maria Stewart, and K. White.

Sobel draws upon several schools of psychoanalytic thought, including both object relations and self psychology theory, to explain the shift in self that she identifies with this pivotal period. From the permeable, communal “we-self” of the early modern era, Americans moved to a more “interior,” individuated sense of self. The autobiographies reflect this change, in which lives formerly narrated as “a random string of events” were now infused with “a dramatic pattern” (1-2, 18). Individuals internalized an “enemy” or “alien other” as an important part of this process of individuation. Disavowed attributes of the self might be split off and located in the other (defined respectively as black or white, female or male). Such projections might then be reincorporated or introjected into the self in a more acceptable form. Dreams offered an important venue in which individuals could experience these disavowed parts. Both the extraordinary attention to dreaming in Revolutionary America and the interest in autobiographical reflection would prove to be important arenas (Foucauldian “technologies of the self”) in which individuals might engage with their “alien others” in a transforming way (11-15). “Both Africans and Europeans began developing in opposition to each other–those whom they would ‘not be’–however, this process actually made them dependent on their oppositional others” (4). Sobel explores this process of othering, both consciously and (most originally) unconsciouslythrough a series of four chapters, each of which focuses on a different side of the two key dyadic relations she identifies: white/black, male/female. She ends her book with a lengthy coda in which she explores changes in the life cycle, new attitudes towards death, the development of gendered spheres for the nineteenth-century middle and upper classes, and, most important, an increasing rejection of dream experience. By the mid-nineteenth century, as Abraham Lincoln noted, dreams, dream interpretation, and the search for self in dreams were regarded as “very foolish,” and had all been relegated to the province of “old women” or youngsters “in love” (240-41).

Sobel’s book is notable in turning our attention back to a topic too long thought off limits to historians: the psychological origins of race and racism. She connects this hot-button issue to the formation of the modern, individuated self that would become the hallmark of modern capitalism, also a notable development of the early nineteenth century. As she nears the end of her story, she cautions, “by relating to their dreams . . . a wide spectrum of the population had become reconnected with disassociated parts of their selves. As dreams were increasingly ignored, these aspects became more alien and more dangerous, and selves began to develop in more polarized and menacing directions.” In a perceptive twist, she notes that this rejection of “‘the world of dreams’ . . . ostensibly because of the growth of rationality,” unleashed a sadly modern racist and sexist “irrational hatred of the other” (241).

Readers either unfamiliar with or skeptical of psychoanalytic interpretations may find Sobel’s work to be somewhat tough going. She makes few concessions to the lay reader, dropping analytic concepts (“projection,” “introjection,” “extractive introjection,” “repression,” “unconscious guilt”) into her narrative with the sparest explanations of the analytic thought that informs each one. She scants other, more familiar modes of inquiry in favor of her psychological model. I longed for a fuller exploration of the autobiographical genre and its literary precedents, as well as for explanation of the commercial demand for and reader reception of the published life narratives. Such an exploration would have helped build a better historical context in which to allow the reader to credit or discount these highly refined sources. Indeed, both the structure of the narratives and the dreams retold therein were products of extensive secondary revision (another basic psychoanalytic concept) through which the true intentions of the dreamer’s or narrator’s unconscious were disguised and distorted.

Psychoanalytically inclined readers may have different reactions to Sobel’s analysis. While her readings of dreams are often fruitful, why did she shy away from reading the complete narratives psychoanalytically? To do so would require massive in-depth research into the narrators’ lives, although it might have been better to trade breadth for depth in order to uncover the multi-determined nature of character formation known to clinicians. Puzzling too is her privileging of race and gender over the other dyad that permeates analytic literature: that of nurturer and infant. One could, and should, argue that relations between black and white, male and female are often intertwined with this defining self-other relationship in the infant’s experience. Yet Sobel privileges the relationship between black and white, declaring it “the defining self-other relationship for most of the narrators in this study and [one which] has remained central in American culture since that time” (6). Analysts and historians alike would doubtless agree that such an exclusive focus overlooks much critically important historical, regional, temporal, domestic, and cultural complexity in the American experience.

Still, despite its flaws, this is a brave and welcome addition to the literatures of both early American history and American cultural studies. Sobel has worked hard to teach us these dreams. She uses them as new and deeper sources of historical evidence, uncovering their pivotal role for Americans (especially evangelical Americans like Freeborn Garrettson) in the wake of the Revolution. Such texts served as sources of reassurance, edification, and inspiration for individual narrators and for their countless readers, and, in Sobel’s hands, they bring a fresh message to modern readers as well.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

Ann Marie Plane is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She recently published Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, 2000) and is at work on an article on dream narration and dream interpretation among English colonists and Native Americans in seventeenth-century New England.

With City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, David M. Henkin has produced a brilliant and exhilarating book. It offers nothing less than an utterly original answer to the question: What is the nature of human experience in capitalist cities, and how might we speak historically of such experience? By extension, the book further takes as its subject the nature of human experience outsidecapitalist cities, in all those niches and regions where the spread of technological change, for nearly two centuries now, has facilitated the introduction of social conventions possessing urban origins. In short, City Reading is analytically expansive, sure to alter the way in which one perceives modernity itself.

Henkin’s interest lies in the public (that is, outdoor) spaces of antebellum New York. In particular, he seizes upon the presence of written words in the streets of Manhattan, identifying four kinds of “urban texts” that veritably colonized Gotham’s environment with printed words in the three or four decades leading up to the Civil War. “Fixed,” especially commercial, signs represent the first sort of text treated by Henkin. “Mobile” signs, such as handbills, represent the second; newspapers the third; and banknotes the fourth. Why should these signs, papers, and notes matter? Because Henkin shows that their proliferation in antebellum New York provided the material basis of a new type of social formation: “a new kind of public” (7). As Henkin says of his book, “At the thematic core of this tour of urban texts is the proposition that those forms of engagement and disengagement that characterize big-city living emerged fairly early in New York around the experience of written words posted, circulated, fixed, and flashed in public view” (x).

In other words, at the heart of Henkin’s study lie so many acts of reading, a practice usually understood apart from the category of urban experience. “In the historical imagination,” Henkin notes, “the nineteenth-century city appears as a place of cacophonous commotion, while the nineteenth-century reader sits in silent solitude, engrossed in the pleasures of a novel” (4). But City Reading makes it clear that to wend one’s way through the burgeoning world of antebellum New York, its streets increasingly filled with strangers, entailed the reading of one sign or poster or daily or dollar after another. To be sure, this was a markedly different experience than that had by the solitary reader–precisely Henkin’s point. For the difference between the lone reader and the reader out on the street, Henkin argues, was the difference between one sort of public and another. It was the difference between an abstract, bourgeois public and a concrete, mass public. It was the difference between an invisible public of isolated readers and a visible public of anonymous ones.

City Reading thus offers a counterpoint to the notion of the public prominently advanced by Jürgen Habermas. And in contrast to those who simply lament the decline of bourgeois institutions of public reflection (for example, the coffeehouse), Henkin puts forward a story about a public that succeeded–and in some ways exceeded–those earlier institutions. In the vocabulary of this story, perhaps the single most important word is an adjective: “impersonal.” For Henkin rightly recognizes the impersonality of modern urban experience as one of its leading features. He recognizes other significant features of city life too, but Henkin speaks, most of all, about the “impersonal authority” of his urban texts, about the ways in which these texts garnered legitimacy before an undifferentiated public on the streets of antebellum New York.

To consider how the personal authority communicated in a world of familiar faces receded before the impersonal authority wielded in the modern city, let us regard the frenzy of commercial signs that came to mark the outdoor environment of New York in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s. Henkin provides ample, indeed striking, evidence of this frenzy. One is astonished, for instance, to look upon a photograph of lower Hudson Street in which a printer’s, a carpenter’s, a clothier’s, a painter’s, and a druggist’s signs subordinate all else within the physical environment, including its buildings and people (frontispiece, 50). Henkin establishes that the power of such signs–private signs–owed to their enormity and elevation, and that these traits enabled the anonymous circulation of people on the streets of Manhattan. “In a city,” he writes, “where, every day, strangers would arrive with few, if any, acquaintances and no point of entry into a world of face-to-face contact that might orient them, a sign on a building offered direction indiscriminately” (50-51). More than this, Henkin demonstrates that private signs moved toward “typographical regularity” in the antebellum period, toward an “image of uniformity” despite the competing commercial interests represented by these very same signs, so that they consequently gained “an aura of being official” (56, 57). In all, then, commercial signs achieved “an impersonal authority associated with the public sign” of today (65). And in this connection, Henkin introduces the case of New York’s Central Park, whose increasing number of signs in the years after 1860 “would have been neither conceivable nor effective without decades of previous sign use in which New Yorkers had grown familiar with words appearing in public” (67).

Today, we are so familiar with the public appearance of words that City Reading is thoroughly remarkable for questioning what others have taken for granted. “After all,” Henkin submits, “we have come to expect cityscapes to be legible, much as we expect consumer goods to come with labels, instructions, and promotional copy. But there was once something novel in the spectacle of so many words, and something radical in the notion that buildings and streets ought to be marked” (3). Henkin informs us that no small part of this novelty owed to the widespread introduction of cheap daily newspapers, themselves public objects that were sold, scattered, and read on the street. But Henkin is also interested in the papers’ “print spaces,” and here his analysis merits special attention for its originality (113). For, while much has been written about the penny press in antebellum America, nothing akin to Henkin’s interpretation has been proffered. In brief, he poses the daily as a public space in its own right. First Henkin establishes the lack, in the antebellum press, of any clear line distinguishing what we would call “news” and “advertising” from one another. Next he points to the daily’s “rectilinear layout” and “even columns,” analogizing them to Gotham’s grid (117). And finally he identifies the daily’s “typographical uniformity” (117). What, then, was the cumulative effect of these features? “Discrete news stories, tendentious political commentaries, competitive commercial claims, and ostensibly unrelated bits of information blended together in the print columns of the metropolitan press in a characteristically urban juxtaposition of unlikely neighbors that also imbued all of the texts with the appearance of sharing a single, impersonal authority” (119). Put differently (and ingeniously): “In many respects, perusing the columns of the major dailies resembled and paralleled walking down the city’s major thoroughfares . . . ” (125).

“Perusing” and “walking” seem the right note on which here to conclude. If the act of reading has come unmoored in recent decades, invoked metaphorically in the pursuit of sundry objects of inquiry, then David Henkin has alerted us to all those acts of reading that have literally taken the city as their subject; he has clarified the meaning of those acts; and he has rendered for those acts a history where previously none existed. Ultimately, as well, he has fashioned a book that is itself nothing if not urban in character, so rapid-fire in its delivery that the reader vicariously enters the energetic world of the modern city.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

James Kessenides is completing his dissertation for the department of history at Yale University. The dissertation is entitled “Before Hollywood: A Prehistory of Los Angeles.” He teaches history at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.

Sally E. Hadden brings sharp eyes and listening ears to the activities, significance, and composition of southern slave patrols in her important and stimulating study. The introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue span the colonial period through Reconstruction, treat Virginia and the Carolinas, and draw on evidence ranging from legal statutes to slave narratives. Hadden is the first to interrogate precisely and thoroughly those most responsible for surveilling and policing the Old South’s slave population.

She begins with an examination of the evolution of patrols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fear of slave revolts helped establish the patrols and the process of their formation followed a similar trajectory in the three colonies with private efforts to control the slave population giving way, albeit in sometimes convoluted fashion, to state-sponsored patrols. By the end of the Revolutionary era, “except in urban areas, patrols served as separate groups, apart from militia, constables, and sheriffs” (40). Hadden then turns to the consolidation of the patrols after the Revolution, considers whether or not they were effective, and claims that “[p]atrolling had the same appeal of jury duty in the modern era: it might seem onerous, time-consuming, and people might try to avoid serving, but it was indubitably important” (69). The chapter concludes with a bit of a red herring when

Hadden argues the patrol’s obligation to protect the property of others “was repugnant to Southern white ideas of individual freedom and, indirectly, their sense of personal honor” (70). Patrols, contends Hadden, were entirely too communal, too suggestive of white fear of black revolt, and too intrusive on the slave-master relationship to sit comfortably with elite antebellum Southern men. Thus, efforts to “change and strengthen the slave patrols ran directly counter to Southern white notions of honor and self-sufficiency” (70). Hadden’s characterization of Southern whites as resolutely individualistic is an exaggeration. Certainly, many were fiercely independent but, as a good deal of work has shown, ties of kinship and economic reciprocity bound fairly disparate groups of white southerners. Perhaps failure to strengthen antebellum patrols indicated that although some found aspects of them unpalatable, many nonetheless considered them effective; or, perhaps men (women never patrolled) found the patrols to bolster their ties to community and notions of masculinity. Hadden herself later points out that members of a patrol were “routinely composed of men who knew their fellow patrollers well” (85). In other words, serving in a patrol may have reaffirmed Southern notions of community, kinship, masculinity, and honor.

Hadden’s third chapter is noteworthy for several reasons. Here, she compares patrollers to slave catchers, plantation overseers, and urban constables [no one summarized the difference between the police and the patrollers more poignantly than a former slave: the police “were for white folks. Patteroles were for niggers” (84)]. Most significantly, Hadden shows that that poor whites did not make up the bulk of southern patrollers. Based on her analysis of tax and tithe data for two eighteenth-century Virginia counties (Hadden’s use of difficult sources is exemplary), she finds that “slave patrollers were neither wealthy nor at the bottom among the landless and propertyless of their community” (98). Although this began to change after the 1820s, the importance of the patrol to antebellum slaveowning society ensured that patrolling was not left solely to poor whites. Men of some means had to be involved, argues Hadden, not only to protect their property but also to monitor poor white relations with slaves.

A powerful discussion of the patrol’s day-to-day functions and activities, its methods of surveillance, and slaves’ tactics of evasion constitutes the fourth chapter. Hadden is rightly sensitive to how patrollers used not only their eyes but also their ears to ferret out illicit slave activity, most frequently betrayed by noise emanating from slave cabins. Conversely, she also shows how slaves used sight and sound to try to evade and confuse the patrol. A discussion of how the patrols responded during times of slave revolt and war is the focus of chapters 5 and 6. Hadden’s examination of insurrection scares, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and, in chapter 6, the Civil War, enables her to conclude that wars and rebellions resulted in the desire for tighter surveillance but that wars especially sometimes limited the patrol’s effectiveness. An epilogue, which examines the similarities between antebellum patrol and postbellum Klan–unsurprisingly, there were many–concludes the study.

What to make of Hadden’s fine survey of Southern surveillance? Beyond the important and immensely helpful data she presents about the nature and working of southern patrols, Hadden’s book is refreshing and suggestive for a couple of reasons. First, Hadden’s study invites and, indeed, facilitates, comparative work. Future studies of the patrol would do well to compare Hadden’s portrait of the old southeast with patrolling practices in the southwest and, in fact, other slaveholding societies. The second is suggested by Hadden herself when she seems to anticipate criticism from scholars interested principally in how slaves perceived the patrols and how they resisted white surveillance. Of course, Hadden is not unmindful of slave perceptions of the patrol, as she demonstrates in chapter 4, but her focus is on the public regulation of slavery. She wants to move “beyond the worlds of slave and master to include a third party–the slave patrols” rather than dwell on strategies of subaltern resistance (2). In this context, there is much to recommend such an emphasis for, above all else, this book is a healthy reminder and exploration of the authority, nature, and power of Southern slaveholding society. For Hadden, slaves had agency, but it was one often hedged by the stifling presence of the patrol. In this respect, her study goes some way toward answering what remains a critical question: why the relative absence of large-scale slave insurrections in the Old South? Hadden’s book suggests an answer and much more, besides.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

Mark M. Smith is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997), Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (Cambridge, 1998), and editor of The Old South (Oxford, 2000). This fall he will publish Listening to Nineteenth-Century America with the University of North Carolina Press.

What is it about the Puritans? From The Scarlet Letter to The Crucible, black-hatted, steely-eyed Puritans have been every author’s favorite villain. Puritanism itself is portrayed as an intolerant, joyless, self-satisfied religion of mealy-mouthed, slave-owning, protocapitalists. As a historian who studies these people, I spend much of my time battling these images. Indeed, over the years I have even developed a reluctant affection for the real Puritans, who fit some, but by no means all, of these literary stereotypes. Thus, it was with both hope and trepidation that I opened the first of Stephen Lewis’s three mystery novels set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts–hope that I would find a likable Puritan at last, and fear that I would not. I discovered that Lewis has written three decent detective stories, and has described the material conditions of life in early New England well enough. However, like his literary predecessors, Lewis has succumbed to the image of the villainous Puritan.

Catherine Williams, the main character and “detective” of these novels, is a sympathetic and likable character. She is a wealthy widow in Lewis’s fictional town of Newbury, Massachusetts, and like many real seventeenth-century widows, she lives an independent life. Catherine occupies a prominent position in Newbury as both a high ranking woman and the town’s midwife.

Catherine is a strong-willed and courageous woman who is not afraid to stand up to authority when she has to. When we meet Catherine in the first scene of The Dumb Shall Sing, she demonstrates this aspect of her character. A group of Pequot war captives are about to be executed and Catherine is there to bear witness. However, she is also there to see to an obligation made to her recently deceased husband: that one of the captives be spared and his fate left up to her. The gathered authorities object to the idea of a single woman making a decision regarding an unpredictable “savage,” but Catherine stands firm. She chooses the bravest of the Indians–a man named Massaquoit, who stood up to torture and humiliation with dignity and courage. By doing so, Catherine acquires an important ally and friend. Massaquoit’s special knowledge of Indian culture and local woodcraft are crucial to solving the three mysteries.

This first scene also introduces us to three other characters: Joseph Woolsey, the local magistrate, Minister Davis, and Governor Peters. Joseph is a good-hearted man who has been Catherine’s close friend for many years. Unlike Catherine, he is weak willed and unwilling to challenge others with whom he disagrees. Davis and Peters, on the other hand, are typical literary Puritans–self-righteous, greedy, racist, and cruel. It is the minister who gives the order to have Massaquoit’s fellow captives shot, and it is Governor Peters who objects the most strenuously to Catherine sparing one of the Indians. Both Peters and Davis act as Catherine’s nemeses, objecting to her independence and vigorously repressing all forms of dissent in Newbury.

This group of characters comes together in all three of the novels. True to the mystery genre, each plot revolves around a suspicious death. In the first book, The Dumb Shall Sing, Catherine’s role as midwife involves her in the case of Margaret Mary Donavan, an Irish servant girl accused of murdering a newborn baby placed in her care. The Blind in Darkness, number two in the series, begins with Catherine discovering the body of Isaac Powell, a recluse who lives only with a servant boy named Thomas. Massaquoit becomes the first and apparently most likely suspect. Finally, in The Sea Hath Spoken, Quakers arrive in Newbury. Roger and Jane Whitcomb immediately disturb services at the meeting house and soon become pariahs. Clouds of suspicion have already gathered around them when a local sailor drowns. Needless to say, the obvious suspects in each book are not the true villains, and Catherine plays a crucial role in bringing the real killers to justice. Each book provides enough plot twists and red herrings to keep a reader entertained until the end. One warning however: anyone who has read either Mary Beth Norton’s Founding Mothers and Fathers (New York, 1996) or Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs (Chapel Hill, 1996) will immediately recognize the true story on which The Blind in Darkness is based.

As historical novels, the books work well on one level. The material culture, foodways, and most of the medical details of Catherine’s midwifery practice are accurate. I was particularly pleased with the dialogue. Lewis manages to capture the texture of seventeenth-century language in a way that does not sacrifice intelligibility. Lewis has also clearly done his homework on quotidian details of colonial Massachusetts life. His knowledge of seventeenth-century firearms is extensive– I think I could almost fire a matchlock myself from Lewis’s detailed descriptions. Lewis’s depictions of childbirth capture both the atmosphere of the birthing room and the extent of midwives’ medical skills. While the historical details are for the most part accurate, there are a few anachronisms that an alert reader will notice. In general these do not detract from the story.

However, I could not overlook the biggest anachronism of all–that of character. Minister Davis and Governor Peters are caricatures, behaving in ways that even the sternest of real Puritans would have rejected. Even more disturbingly, Lewis succumbs to the trap of making all sympathetic characters models of twenty-first century tolerance and understanding. When the minister refers to Indians as bloodthirsty savages, Catherine replies that they are “Men. . . no more nor less, only without the benefit of your condition” (The Dumb Shall Sing, 4). Catherine also constantly questions her society’s values and her religion’s most basic doctrine–so much so that she sometimes seems more like a New Age spiritual advisor than a devout Puritan. Early in the first book, Lewis states that Catherine “depended on her intuitive understanding of the deity’s intention in a particular circumstance rather than on the applications of the minister’s sermons” ( The Dumb Shall Sing, 20). Passages such as these seem to come from the mistaken assumption that to be likable a character must share modern values, emotional reactions, and worldview.

And that is just what most disappointed me about these novels. I opened them hoping against hope that for once I would find a sympathetic Puritan character–one who accepts the values of his or her religion, who despises Quakers and fears Indians, but who is still understandable. While I did like Catherine Williams, she reminded me more of the nice nurse-midwife that lives down the street than of Anne Bradstreet or even Anne Hutchinson. Novelists have freedom that historians do not, and I long for one to create a Puritan that we can all appreciate and even love. I fear that I will just have to wait a while longer to find one.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

Rebecca J. Tannenbaum is an avid reader of both mysteries and historical novels. She is also the author of The Healer’s Calling: Women, Men, and Medicine in Early New England, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2002, and is a visiting assistant professor of history at Yale.

While the Founders of the United States have seen their reputations downgraded in some quarters over the past few decades, they have usually been able to count on the support of our leading political and cultural conservatives. When George Washington got left out of the National History Standards, when Thomas Jefferson’s DNA patterns were found in the wrong bloodstream, well-financed defenders rushed to the rescue. Pity poor Alexander Hamilton, then, for the Founders’ friends have forsaken him. While other major Founders have monuments on the National Mall and their faces carved into the sides of mountains, Hamilton’s one prominent memorial, his portrait on the ten-dollar bill, is under attack from the very same forces that have so often rallied behind his former colleagues. A well-connected conservative organization has begun a drive to put Ronald Reagan’s face on the ten-spot instead.

Hamilton has long been the least loved of the Founders. A treasury secretary rather than a president, as supporters of the Reagan tenner point out, his major accomplishments were in the arena of public finance rather than war or politics. And unlike his great rival Thomas Jefferson or fellow greenback illustration Benjamin Franklin, he did not leave behind a mass of quotable quotes suitable for use in everyday life and politics. Besides the Federalist essays, co-authored with Jefferson sidekick and historians’ darling James Madison, Hamilton’s major written legacy is a series of brilliant but highly technical reports on such matters as the public debt, banking, and manufacturing. As anyone who has assigned excerpts of them to an undergraduate class knows, those reports are more likely to inspire narcolepsy than patriotic reverence in the average modern reader.

Though Hamilton sought the status of national hero–“fame,” as he might have put it–his chosen route to that goal was “to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.” In other words, he sought fame as a lawgiver, statesman, and bureaucrat, rather than as a popular politician. Unlike the other figures emblazoned on our currency, and most other American leaders, Hamilton was notable for his lack of attention to personal popularity. He rarely minced words or obfuscated his views, and he showed a marked aversion to taking half measures in the pursuit of anything he considered a worthy goal. Popular unrest over taxes? The government “should appear like Hercules,” with troops, and show the punks who was boss. Wages too high for factories to be feasible? Hire women and children. The Constitution? A “frail and worthless fabric” that needed to remain as elastic as possible if it was to survive at all. Indeed, the record of Hamilton’s public career is a tissue of ideas and causes that were or became extremely unpopular: lenient treatment for Revolutionary Era Loyalists, life tenure for presidents and senators, the taxation of ordinary citizens, open subsidies to business corporations, the maintenance of a national debt, the restriction of free speech, and the reduction of the powers of the states, among others. To all of these other “PR” problems Hamilton added a sex scandal to which he, unlike Jefferson, freely and extensively confessed.

Hamilton’s poor public image befitted a political ideology that made little room for democracy and probably would have made little difference to the man himself. He retained the respect of the mercantile and legal elite whose opinions mattered to him, and his main objective in public life was to build a stable and prosperous national state that could govern effectively while thriving in a hostile, heavily armed world. At this Hamilton largely succeeded. But while Americans have always enjoyed feeling rich, powerful, and safe, they have also tended to chafe at the policies deemed necessary to make that so. Hamilton has had his political admirers over the years, but he never caught on with the culture the way that other Founders and political heroes did. Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Franklin Court became popular tourist destinations surrounded by impressive memorial infrastructures, while Hamilton’s home the Grange sits, sparsely furnished and little visited, literally tucked behind a church on a back street in the northern reaches of Manhattan. Builders of governments are hard to love.

Especially for those who hate government. The source of the effort to remove Hamilton from our wallets is the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, the same people who got Reagan’s name added to Washington National Airport and Florida’s major turnpike. An arm of the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, the Legacy Project’s self-described mission is to name “significant public landmarks” after Reagan in each of the nation’s fifty states and three thousand counties, “as well as in formerly communist countries across the world.” Alas, the drive to put a Gipper monument in every county seems to be going slowly. There are some schools, bridges, streets, parks, and museums in the Illinois towns where Reagan grew up, and in California where he was governor. But elsewhere the memorial pickings are slim: a building at a Mississippi Sheriffs’ Boys and Girls Ranch and an historical marker in Iowa are important enough triumphs to list on the “Legacy Project Website.” Also highly touted is the possibility that a new high school in Fishers, Indiana, set to open in 2006, might bear the Reagan name.

The campaign has been much more successful with sites directly controlled by the Big Government in Washington, where the inside-the-Beltway conservative activists who care most deeply about the issue are much more influential, despite their erstwhile commitment to shrinking government. The project’s board of advisors includes Attorney General John Ashcroft and numerous Republican congressional leaders, including House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Among the successful namings and renamings they count not only the Washington airport, but also the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Marshall Islands, and a proposed Reagan memorial on the National Mall.

The head of both the ATR and its Reagan Legacy Project is lobbyist and “issues management strategist” Grover G. Norquist. An ally of Newt Gingrich, Norquist spent the past decade coordinating what he calls a “Leave-Us-Alone Coalition” of right-wing groups, including “property owners, anti-tax activists, gun owners, home- and private-schoolers, small business owners, religious conservatives, and libertarians.” Wielding much of his influence through Wednesday-morning strategy sessions at the ATR offices to which representatives of various conservative causes are invited, Norquist has been given credit for some of the signal conservative policy campaigns of the 1990s, including the scuttling of the Clinton health plan, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and the numerous state-level drives for “paycheck protection” laws (bans on the automatic withholding of union dues) that have now percolated up into the Bush administration’s agenda. Norquist’s group is also responsible for the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” (against raising taxes for any purpose or under any circumstances) that most Republican politicians have routinely signed since George H. W. Bush failed to read his own lips. While Grover Norquist is not a household name, inside Washington he is known as one of the most influential of the conservative activists who currently set the terms of our political debates. Some conservatives regard him as nothing less than a hidden prime mover of modern history. His pal Newt Gingrich hails Norquist as “the most innovative, creative, courageous and entrepreneurial leader of the anti-tax efforts and of conservative grassroots activism in America . . . He has truly made a difference and truly changed American history.” The man himself boasts of “saving” the country from the outbreak of–quel horreur!–“social democracy” represented by a national health plan. Like Richard Nixon but without the charm or social conscience, Norquist regards all government programs as nothing more than attempts to buy votes. And, like Charlton Heston and the Militia of Montana, he regards almost any effort to regulate or tax anything as a horrific infringement of human freedom. Norquist looks forward to cutting all forms of government in half over the next twenty-five years. This will be tough, he concedes. But if the full agenda of extreme economic conservatives were enacted–“if you privatize Social Security, if you voucherize education, if you sell the $270 billion worth of airports and wastewater treatment plants, eliminate welfare, and so on”–then it could be done.

On the surface, it is easy to see why movement conservatives like Norquist would be repelled by Alexander Hamilton, whose great concern was to firmly establish the government that Norquist hates so much, who virtually introduced national taxation in America, and who was not afraid to use force to collect the taxes that were laid. If the Whiskey Rebellion were held today, Norquist (an NRA “life member” and director) would certainly be out shooting up the revenue collector’s house, not marching west with Hamilton and Washington’s army. Still, the Reagan Legacy Project has thus far not cited any substantive objections to Hamilton, other than to state the obvious truths that he was not a president and that his political party no longer has any seats in Congress. (Washington and Franklin, take note.)

Yet there is clearly something deeper going here. A Republican-led drive to erase Hamilton from the national memory represents a significant shift in American conservatives’ narrative of their own history, a tale in which Hamilton has long played a prominent role. Though Aaron Burr slew Hamilton decades before the modern GOP emerged, Hamilton’s relatively few political fans have almost always been Republicans. It seems to have been the Lincoln administration that first put Hamilton’s face on United States currency, and the Coolidge administration that granted him the prominent location on the ten. Theodore Roosevelt was one of Hamilton’s few vocal presidential supporters. In more recent times, such conservative writers as William Bennett, Karl-Friedrich Walling, and the National Review’s Richard Brookhiser have written admiringly about Hamilton.

More importantly, there are some substantive reasons for modern conservatives to admire the first treasury secretary. Hamilton was to some degree the original theorist of trickle-down economics, taking the view that the creation of large fortunes and intensive development were ultimately good for the nation, however unequally the benefits might be distributed. His financial system quite frankly aimed to lock the government into a tight embrace with its creditors and gave special benefits to business interests. The Bank of the United States was not the Federal Reserve but a private, profit-making corporation that got to use the government’s tax receipts as its capital. From the excise tax to the “funding” at face value of a devalued debt that speculators had bought up from cash-strapped citizens, the financial system amounted to a significant transfer of wealth to an entrepreneurial elite that Hamilton hoped would both support the new government (because they were profiting by it) and invest their profits in developing the still largely rural republic.

Hamilton is the legitimate ancestor of modern conservatives on other counts as well. One recent study, Walling’s Republican Empire, depicts Hamilton as the original Cold Warrior, an “American Churchill” whose vigilance and calls for military preparedness saved America from French aggression just as later conservative leaders saved the world from Nazism and communism. Hamilton can also be considered the inventor of the organized religious right in America. In the presidential campaigns of 1796, 1800, and 1804, Hamilton’s Federalists, assisted by many of the old-line clergy, stoked the fears of pious New Englanders regarding Jefferson’s liberal religious views and personal libertinism. Hamilton suggested taking these efforts a step further and creating a network of Christian Constitutional Societies that would instruct devout citizens in how to follow the inevitably Federalist dictates of their faith. In all of these ways, then, Hamilton offers a highly usable past to twenty-first century conservatives.

Why, then, the drive to remove him from our wallets? The excision of Hamilton from the story of American conservatism meets a critical ideological need for antigovernment extremists of Grover Norquist’s ilk. A Hamilton in the national pantheon presents an uncomfortable contradiction for these people. Here was a great American white male, a Founding Father no less, of impeccably conservative, pro-business instincts and beliefs, who nonetheless recognized that there were public goods that only governments could accomplish. Hamilton would have found the simplistic opposition that the current Republican right depends upon–an opposition between government activity of any kind on the one hand and human liberty on the other–to be manifestly absurd. Hamilton understood that government exists to protect liberty, a fact that today’s conservatives prefer to sidestep–except, of course, when liberty is threatened in some far away and potentially profitable place, such as a Kuwaiti oil field.

If Hamilton was too soft on government to suit today’s conservative tastes, he was also far too honest in announcing his purposes, having not yet grasped the essential strategic insight of modern reactionary politics. One of the most significant changes in the Republican party since the 1950s, a change that came in with Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy and helped usher both Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the White House, was its embrace of an aggressive but basically dishonest populist rhetoric. While the party’s financial backers and preferred policies changed relatively little, its leaders began shaking their fists at evil liberal “elites” in the name of the common man. Yet even Nixon felt the need to give his “silent majority” rhetoric some substantive backing by courting labor leaders and continuing or expanding most New Deal and Great Society programs. In the 1980s and 90s, the Reagans, Bushes, and Norquists came to believe such substantive compromises were no longer necessary: that even policies baldly aimed at redistributing wealth away from ordinary Americans, or making their jobs less secure, or crippling the government services they depended on, could be sold with populist slogans about paycheck protection, death taxes, and tax cuts for “working Americans”–slogans sprinkled liberally throughout the ATR Website in justification of the new Bush administration’s plutocrat-oriented tax proposals. This kind of political inversion is the real legacy that Norquist means to memorialize on the Reagan ten-dollar bill.

Like his friend Newt, Norquist is one of those so-called conservatives who talks, and may actually believe, that he is in fact some kind of social revolutionary. While there is reason to doubt that a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce employee really poses much threat to the social order, Norquist’s revolutionary self-image does seem accurate in at least one sense: he and his friends display a distinctly Soviet penchant for rewriting history to suit the present regime’s needs. By forcibly making Reagan into the towering figure of modern American history, today’s “movement” is trying to install a grandiose view of its own importance and heroism in our collective memory, while they have the votes in Congress and a friend in the White House. The proposed Reagan for Hamilton switch may not be the most important of these efforts, but it manages to seem both chilling and stupid, like the famous doctored images of Stalin conferring with Lenin.

Though the idea of adding Reagan to Mount Rushmore has been rejected, there seems to be a serious intention of transforming Reagan into some kind of honorary Founding Father. These are exactly the terms in which one Legacy Project supporter justified a Reagan-naming proposal. “At a time when the names of our Founders are being stripped from schools in other areas of the nation,” said an Indiana conservative, with no thought for poor Hamilton, “let’s rekindle the spirit that respects those figures from our past who helped give our futures promise.” Perhaps next the Gipper can be painted over John Adams in Trumbull’s Signing of the Declaration on the Capitol walls.

Further Reading:

E. J. Dionne’s Washington Post column for March 23, 2001, commented on the Reagan Legacy Project’s designs to rewrite history and suggested the Soviet comparison elaborated on above. Dionne called Norquist “the Lenin of the contemporary right.” I would pick Stalin or Trotsky myself.

An alarming interview with Grover Norquist from the libertarian magazine Reason is the source of several of the quotations above and is available here.

Conservative appreciations of Hamilton can be found in Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence, Kans., 1999); Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York, 1999); and William J. Bennett, Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches (New York, 1997).

The whole history of currency portraits can be learned from “Dawn’s Virtual Currency Collection,” where U.S. paper money can be browsed by portrait. Who knew De Witt Clinton, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Gallatin, Silas Wright, Daniel Manning (duh! treasury secretary under Cleveland!), and a bunch of generals and admirals were all once the faces of legal tender? Dawn’s site is light on analysis, but a distinct pattern of partisan portrait selection emerges.

For additional, late-breaking comments and information on Hamilton and the Gipper, including a belated response from the Reagan Legacy Project itself, click here.

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

This summer, public television stations across the U.S. aired The 1900 House, a four-part series billed on PBS’s website as “sci-fi drama of time travel meets true-life drama” but perhaps better explained as This Old Housemeets Upstairs, Downstairs. Originally broadcast in the U.K. in September of 1999, The 1900 House transported an ordinary middle-class English family, the Bowlers, back in time “to live in a house restored to the exact specifications of the late Victorian era.” For three months, the Bowlers not only lived without central heating or electricity, but also adhered (more or less) to a strict set of House Guidelines, the most burdensome of which turned out to be the rule requiring wearing period clothes–“including the relevant layers of undergarments”–at all times. Buttoning up said undergarments for the first time, the mother of the family, Joyce Bowler asked, with charming candor, “So, um, how do I go to the loo?” (The answer: unbutton, and aim.)

“Aging hats and casting brass button moulds is all well and good, and probably Oscar worthy, but what’s the point if no one bothers to research speechways or family life or race relations or colonial politics?”

Most of the four hundred English families who applied to live in The 1900 House expected the experience to be both thrilling and enlightening. Even the otherwise levelheaded Joyce enthused, “We might find we don’t need some of the things that we’ve come to depend on so much.” But actually living in The 1900 House turned out to be pretty miserable. By the third day, Joyce was reduced to tears when her nine-year-old son, Joe, refused to eat yet another (admittedly dubious) meal cooked with nineteenth-century ingredients using nineteenth-century appliances. And watching her husband, Eric, a Royal Marine, leave the house for work every day (in period uniform) while she was stuck at home cleaning the three-story house from top to bottom using only rags, soda crystals, and an utterly useless hand-pumped vacuum, left Joyce enraged. “I’m jealous,” she admitted to a camera concealed in her closet, “because he’s a man and whether it’s 1900 or 1999, he gets the better deal.” Beat. Smile. “But I get the frillier drawers.” By the fifth week even the frilly drawers had lost their appeal: the family was forced to call in a doctor after the corsets Joyce and her eldest daughter wore left them chronically short of breath. (“I hate it,” Joyce screamed at her whalebone-and-lace. “I hate the bloody thing. I absolutely hate it.”)

Just as The 1900 House ended, at the beginning of July, and the Bowlers gleefully chucked their petticoats and pinafores for Levi’s and Polarfleece, Columbia Pictures released The Patriot, a two-hour-and-forty-minute epic about the American Revolution starring Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina planter who, according to David Denby in the New Yorker, “is the kind of guy who would never wear a powdered wig.” But Gibson does manage to don a nicely tailored linen shirt and wool knee breeches. Indeed, the costumes for The Patriot, designed by Academy Award winner Deborah Scott with assistance from costume specialists at the Smithsonian, were painstakingly researched and produced. The Patriot‘s website boasts that “83,900 military buttons were made with historic details in three different sizes” for the military uniforms worn by the thousands of redcoats and Continentals marching across the screen, while “[o]ver 1500 hats were created and aged to appear as though they had been worn for several months.”

Aging hats and casting brass button moulds is all well and good, and probably Oscar worthy, but what’s the point if no one bothers to research speechways or family life or race relations or colonial politics? Why bother getting the costumes right if the rest of the film suffers from scenes like the one in which Martin’s love interest replies to his question, “Can I sit here?” with a petulant, “It’s a free country–or at least it will be,” while the African Americans who labor on Martin’s plantation are free men and women devoted to serving their beloved master, to whom they later offer protection at an otherwise all-black seaside encampment where the Martin family happily dances to the music of African drums in a kind of multicultural Beach Blanket Bingo. Not for nothing did historian David Hackett Fischer conclude in the New York Times (July 1, 2000) that “‘The Patriot’ is to history as Godzilla was to biology.” The film may get its costumes right, but it gets just about everything else wrong. In a climactic speech before the South Carolina legislature, Martin explains his unwillingness to fight against the British by declaring, “I’m a parent. I can’t afford principles.” What could be more modern? Benjamin Martin is the Wayne Gretzky of the Revolution, the Joe Kennedy Jr. of the eighteenth century, a man who holds a press conference to announce his retirement from public life and declares, with tear-filled eyes, that he is tired of working hard and traveling too much, and eager to spend more time with his family.

If the past is a foreign country, traveling to Benjamin Martin’s world doesn’t even require crossing state lines. It only requires dressing up. And therein lies the brilliance of The 1900 House, which understands that dressing people up, and putting them in a house filled with props, doesn’t actually transport them to another era. “Remember me?” Joyce Bowler asks her children in the series’ final episode, after she’s changed back into her modern clothes for the first time in three months. “I was still here all along.”

And so, of course, was Mel Gibson, though no one seems to have minded (with the notable exception of historians, whose professional list-serves have seethed with such abundant derision for the film that one posting finally urged, “Get over it!”). The Patriot has received generally favorable critical reviews, even if it’s lost out to The Perfect Storm at the box office. Meanwhile, The 1900 House has nearly drowned in a flood of crocodile tears offered up by media critics who have persistently compared it to this past summer’s other “voyeur TV” shows–Survivor and Big Brother–a new television genre that is always taken as evidence, in one form or another, of the decline of Western civilization. In truth,The 1900 House is better understood as a historical film stripped of pretense, or, perhaps, as a “costume documentary” that unveils the artifice of “costume dramas.” The Bowlers know, far better than The Patriot’s writers do, that the past–especially the remote past–is difficult to visit, even when you dress for the occasion. “It’s an original,” Joyce Bowler says of the antique range on which she cooks the family’s meals, “I’m the fake.”

Living in The 1900 House left Joyce Bowler keen to learn more about the past: “It’s made me want to dig deeper, to know what it was really like then, and not just to accept what’s between the pages of a history book.” Maybe what Joyce Bowler needs is Common-place, which seems, after all, quite a reasonable compromise between reading a history book and wearing a corset for three months. We hope it will take your breath away.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).