What are words worth in the face of a great evil, especially when the evil in question–American slavery–dwells in the distant past? Not much, Americans seem to believe. Although demands for a formal apology for slavery made headlines in 1997 and 1998, during then-President Clinton’s oft maligned “national conversation on race,” the pressure has since abated. And, despite an end-of-the-millennium global frenzy of what one pundit labeled “apologiamania”–by the Brits for the potato famine, by the Vatican for the Crusades and the Inquisition, by the Canadians and the Australians for long-ago crimes against indigenous peoples, by Clinton himself for so many, many things–no official repudiation of the legacy of slavery has been issued. Nor is one likely to be offered any time soon, in large measure because people spanning a political spectrum from Newt Gingrich to Jesse Jackson agree that words simply won’t do. Why?

The argument from the Right is predictable: such a national lamentation, conservatives hold, comes too late and risks too much. An apology, they argue, would revive ancient history–and misplace blame in the process. “I don’t know what place it has with our modern problems,” an Atlanta businessman told the Boston Globe. “Why are we responsible for what went on 200, 300 years ago? . . . I never owned a slave.”

From others, on both the Right and the Left, comes the worry that an apology would act as a proverbial camel’s nose peeking under some larger and costlier tent. Thinking more like defense lawyers than repentant sinners, those who gainsay sorry-saying fear that words of regret would amount to an admission of liability. Which, in turn, could become an obligation for payment. Thus President Clinton’s own tortured, passive-voiced, sue-proof statement on the subject: “Going back to the time before we were even a nation,” he told an audience in Uganda in March 1998, “European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that.” Depends on what the meaning of “were” is.

Those on both sides of the political aisle who would stop short of a genuine apology concur, ironically, with African American activists, many of whom have moved past speech in their efforts to answer history. Indeed, conservatives who see an official repudiation of slavery as a flimsy pretext for a more tangible form of judgment are, in essence, correct. The cry for “apology,” no matter how heartfelt, sounds positively quaint against the hotter rhetoric today’s activists embrace: Restitution. Redress. And, especially, reparation.

As Randall Robinson, a leader in the apartheid disinvestment campaigns in the 1980s and a central figure in the growing reparations movement today, explained last year in his popular book, The Debt (New York, 2000), the legacy of slavery is monetary as well as moral: centuries of unpaid wages and lost property valued at between $700 billion and $4 trillion. The weapons needed to lay claim to such an inheritance are torts in courts, not apologies on bended knees. And so at least two organizations, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and the Reparations Assessment Group, led by Johnnie Cochran and Harvard Law School’s Charles Ogletree, are readying massive class-action lawsuits against the United States on behalf of the descendants of slaves. Can mere words pay out such claims? Hardly, says Dorothy Lewis, co-chair of N’COBRA. “We’re not having a damn thing in lieu of reparations,” she told reporters. An instance, as a title of a recent collection of essays on the subject puts it, When Sorry Isn’t Enough (New York, 1999).

Hard to disagree. Yet it’s worth pointing out that such an understanding of the relative value of words and things is itself deeply historical, a product of our own place in time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries–the very period that witnessed the twinned growth of European settlement and African slavery in the future United States–many plaintiffs would have preferred an apology to other forms of redress. Including money. In an age before markets were mature and widespread, cash didn’t buy much. But words–and the reputations they made and broke–counted for a great deal. Worth a thousand pictures, you might say, even if the pictures in question were portraits of kings and queens on currency. Not to mention the value of words on writs of manumission, forged passes, abolitionist lectures, and proclamations of emancipation.

Times have changed of course–often, though not always, for the better. Still, perhaps our forebears were onto something where the power of apology was concerned. Recent episodes remind us that even in these days of 24/7 multimedia chatter, words can still act like weapons. Even, or perhaps especially, words about slavery.

How else to understand the almost atavistic reaction to leftist-turned-rightist David Horowitz’s witless and inflammatory advertisement entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea–and Racist Too“, which ran in nine college dailies last March? Too patently specious to merit serious rebuttal, Horowitz’s paid screed nonetheless prompted not just heated speech (op-ed writers on the Right and the Left had a field day with the episode), but swift action as well. At Brown University, outraged students destroyed a whole press run of the school’s Daily Herald and stormed the paper’s offices to demand further redress. Mere words, it seems, can still wound.

But can they still heal? Consider that one of the most common remedies in the Horowitz case was that age-old salve, the formal public apology, which several college newspapers offered in earnest. Meanwhile, the arguments that ultimately cleared the way for the publication of The Wind Done Gone (Boston, 2001), Alice Randall’s parody of the iconic Gone with the Wind, reveal at once the harmful power and redemptive potential of words. Gone with the Wind, Randall’s publisher explains, “has harmed generations of African Americans.” Randall’s own counter-novel, in contrast, “might help heal some of our culture’s oldest and deepest wounds.”

If words are still weapons, then, maybe they’re medicine, too. And if a formal government apology for slavery rings hollow, what about the words that make up history? The legal struggle to publish The Wind Done Gone, as Toni Morrison points out in her brief to the court, is a battle over nothing less than “who controls how history is imagined” and written–about “who gets to say what slavery was like for the slaves.” In this special slavery issue of Common-place, scholars, novelists, archivists, activists, and museum professionals all take their turns answering Morrison’s profound and difficult charge.

Who gets to say what slavery was like? Don’t be left speechless. Join the discussion on our Republic of Letters. Power for words, indeed.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Follow Link to Video by Larry Young

Further Reading

Material in this performance is based on several sources. In Builders of the Mass Bay Colony (Princeton, N.J., 1934), Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the first modern historians to attempt to paint a kinder, gentler picture of the Puritans. Percy A. Scholes’ thorough and persuasive book The Puritans and Music in England and New England (London, 1934) remains invaluable. Music historians Barbara Lambert, Joy Van Kleef, and Kate Van Winkle Keller expand upon Scholes’ work with their lively and well researched contributions to the subject in the massive collection of articles in Music in Colonial Massachusetts 1630-1820, Vols. I and II (Boston, 1980). Also extremely useful is Bruce C. Daniels’ Puritans at Play-Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York, 1995). Also see William Wells Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1883). Lastly, I highly recommend J.A. Leo Lemay’s New England’s Annoyances-America’s First Folk Song (Newark, Delaware, 1985).

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

Larry Young is a performer who has long been fascinated with the music of colonial America. He pursued music at Dartmouth College where he studied music history with Charles Hamm and violin with Andrew Jennings. He is passionate about bringing history to life with his costumed performances of period music, for which he has appeared on PBS. He has published two CDs, Lovely Nancy and Other Popular Musick of 18th Century America and Salem’s Musick: Songs and Dances of the Puritan. He maintains the website www.historicfiddler.com.

If you dare take the Ghost Talk, Ghost Walk in Savannah, Georgia, and are willing to fork out ten dollars for an evening’s entertainment, guide Chris Connelly will try to horrify you. Pointing to the placid Savannah River, he will paint a scene of frightened slaves disembarking their stinking ships, trudging in chains toward a tunnel, leading to a holding area where they will suffer the indignity of intimate examinations before being auctioned to labor-hungry Georgia planters. Connelly, an earnest young man with a soft Georgia accent, will tell you that even today people who stand on this spot hear the ca-tink, ca-tink of clanking chains and the moans of miserable slaves carried on the wind.

Few historians will be surprised to learn that slavery caused untold suffering in Savannah. After all, this was the town about which the African-born slave-turned-abolitionist Olaudah Equiano said, with considerable understatement, “I had not much reason to like the place.” Equiano had traveled the world from Africa to the Caribbean, from Turkey to Greenland, and perhaps in no place was he subjected to greater cruelty than Savannah. There he was beaten within an inch of his life in 1765, threatened with flogging in 1766, and, even as a free man in 1767, spent a night in a Savannah jail for no real cause.

What is surprising is that Connelly tells his horrible ghost story at all. Mainstream heritage tourism in Savannah shies away from slavery the way a Southern matron avoids the subject of money in polite conversation. Brochures and tourist offices would rather focus on Spanish moss hanging lazily from live oaks and the lovable oddballs of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. If they venture into the world of early American history at all, Savannah’s mainstream tour guides are most likely to wax eloquent about the heartwarming friendship between Georgia founder James Oglethorpe and Creek leader Tomochichi.

This is the strange position of ghost tours in the U.S. and Canada today. Compared with most heritage tourism, ghost tours—by turns campy and didactic—offer visitors unblinking and, no doubt, at times unwelcome views of the skeletons in the closet of early American history: slave coffles, Indian massacres, debtors’ prisons, and the sundry other sad and sorry fates of people you might expect would want to haunt America’s cities.

Ghost tours are a relatively recent phenomenon in North America. Such tours have been around in England for as long as anyone involved in the trade can remember, but the first on this side of the Atlantic was Richard T. Crowe’s Chicago Supernatural Tours, which started in the mid-1970s. Crowe was well ahead of his time: the real boom in ghost tours began only a few years ago.

Today, it seems, every city with a vigorous tourist trade has ghost tours year-round (or nearly so). Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia. Sure, all those make sense. But Orlando? Is there a less spooky city in America? Yet there in the town that Mickey built, a “professional, costumed guide” leads weekly, year-round tours. If you’re lucky the guide will tell you about the time spooks took over the controls at Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion and replaced the usual soundtrack of screams and moans with something even more horrifying: a never-ending loop of “It’s a Small World After All.”

And once October rolls around every even vaguely historic hamlet looks to cash in on the craze. In my own little corner of western New York, Halloween means hunting spooks in the sleepy Erie Canal town of Lockport, listening to ghost stories in Forest Lawn Cemetery, or summoning the courage to visit “Fortress Possessed” (or Old Fort Niagara as it’s known the rest of the year) to hear guides work through their psychological issues related to years of dealing with poltergeists within the fort’s dark stone confines.

Perhaps because of the remarkable growth of ghost tours in a short period of time, they follow a fairly standard format. You go to a designated location in the city of your choice: a haunted hotel, perhaps, or a landmark on the site of a grisly murder. Evening tours are most common but daytime tours are not unheard of. You pay your fee, in cash, usually ten to twenty dollars—kids under five free! The guide then tells you ghost stories while taking you on a short stroll. And I mean short in distance, not time: either in deference to Americans’ appalling lack of fitness, or because garrulous guides prefer talking to walking, ghost tours rarely cover much ground, even though they last two or even three hours.

Let me be frank: even for me, who confesses to a nearly bottomless fascination for history, ghost tours can be tedious. Guides vary widely in their historical knowledge and storytelling ability. And, because the tours follow geography rather than chronology, they offer a jumble of anecdotes covering several centuries with no particular connecting thread, except that the tales all relate to a single, small city neighborhood.

But, other than restless toddlers strapped into strollers, skeptical and disappointed paying customers seem to be in the minority on most tours. On ghost tours I’ve taken in the last few months, I’ve paraded through spooky streets with mostly contented customers. In San Francisco, a local mother and her ten-year-old son, celebrating the boy’s birthday, traded stories with the guide about ghosts they’d seen. In Toronto, a hulking Filipino-Canadian man named Raff insisted quite earnestly that he felt the presence of a spirit as we trudged through the cold rain past a haunted house in Chinatown. For those open to the possibilities of the paranormal, ghost tours offer a pleasant blend of haunts and history, not to mention a sense of community, as they can meet others similarly inclined to ascribe unusual feelings or events to the activity of ghosts.

If you ask guides why they think there has been such a proliferation of ghost tours, they sound more like sociologists than ghost hunters. Some point to the flowering of New Age beliefs in angels and spirit communication (what religious studies folks call a turn toward “spirituality” rather than “institutional religion”). Others mention the broader growth of heritage tourism, of which ghost tours are a relatively small part. In a postindustrial world, cities manufacture not transmissions and tires but images of their historic past.

Another reason there are so many ghost tours is that it requires very little capital to start a tour outfit. Jim McCabe, founder and chief storyteller of New England Ghost Tours, looks like a banker because he was one, until the Bank of New England went belly-up in the recession of the early 1990s. Rooting around for something more fulfilling than credits and debits, McCabe thought historical tours were a perfect match for his love of history and his Gaelic flair for spinning tales. Other tour outfits were similarly put together on a shoestring and have since grown into thriving operations. But many guides still aren’t about to give up their day jobs in museums and retail sales.

Students and salesmen: ghost tour guides are a more ordinary lot than you might have imagined. Indeed, most go to great lengths to distance themselves from the psychics of late-night TV that many tourists seem to expect. Chris Connelly of Savannah has the demeanor of a librarian (and a degree in architectural history to go with it). My tour guide in Washington, D.C., Elaine Flynn, has as much of the air of the paranormal as a suburban soccer mom. And the founder of Toronto’s A Taste of the World, Shirley Lum, wears dark-rimmed glasses and carries a three-ring binder and looks uncannily like a graduate student.

Ghost tour guides like to present themselves as historians. Even the kookiest tour guide I’ve encountered highlights his scholarly approach to research. Jim Fassbinder of the San Francisco Ghost Hunt dresses for his tours in an all-black outfit that conjures the image of a nineteenth-century itinerant preacher—or maybe a patent-medicine huckster. Fassbinder has a goatee and flowing locks, a tall top hat, a long leather Dickensian coat, and a black bag with the words “GHOST HUNT” in silver studs.

He gets plenty of attention in this garb, even in San Francisco. But once Fassbinder begins his tour, he adopts a scholarly demeanor. He starts by assuring us, “all the stories you hear are very well documented.” Later he re-emphasizes the thoroughness of his research: he knows a particular woman did not die in the Queen Anne Hotel because he “checked all the records.”

And like professional historians, ghost tour guides accuse one another of plagiarism. Jim McCabe of Boston is one of the most affable fellows you’re likely to meet, but his voice turns icy when he tells me about being ripped off by a rival tour outfit. According to McCabe, a more established tour group sent a representative to take his tour and, unbeknownst to McCabe, the man was a mole, complete with tape recorder. The rival group now runs a suspiciously similar tour—they even copied his promotions!

Like historians, ghost tour guides are also outsiders to mainstream heritage tourism. Even though they are part of the heritage tourism industry, they generally have no chamber of commerce connections and no particular incentives to put their cities in a favorable light. Indeed, their focus on the paranormal requires them to delve into the seamier side of history. This means not just unsolved murders and grisly suicides, but slave pens and violations of Indian burial grounds. I suspect that for many tourists the resulting picture of early American history is very different from what they received in high school. For some tour guides this educational purpose is not merely incidental. As Elaine Flynn of D.C. proudly told our group of twenty-two tourists, such subject matter “is not just politically correct but correcting political history.”

Consider the story told by Mike Brown of The Original Charleston Walks. Drawing on the lowcountry’s culture of Gullah—a creole language with African and English elements spoken by slaves and their descendants—Brown gives tourists chills with his description of boo hags. These freaky vampires without skin enter your house through a keyhole or crack, sit on your chest while you sleep, and suck your breath. If successful, the boo hag inhabits your skin and causes you to hunt for more victims.

The climax of Brown’s story is that the presence of boo hags is tied to Charleston’s long history of racial inequality. Much of Charleston today is built upon reused land, some of which was colonial-era slave graveyards. Boo hags are most often found, Brown insists, above these displaced burial grounds. Tourists come away with a striking metaphor for how Charleston’s past racial sins suck the life out of its present self-satisfied sense of heritage-based dignity.

Thirty-five miles west of Boston, Jim McCabe’s “Colonial and Native American Spirits” tour likewise connects past injustice with present pain. In the Scratch Flat section of Littleton (immortalized in John Hanson Mitchell’s 1984 environmentalist classic Ceremonial Time), McCabe weaves a tale grounded in millennia of Indian occupation. Many Indian spirits haunt the area, according to local residents. One reason for all this ghostly activity is the tragic history of Nashoba, a “Praying Town” of Christian Indians established by the Puritan missionary John Eliot. During King Philip’s War of 1675-76, many Puritans saw Christian Indians as a dangerous fifth column. So the entire village of Nashoba was rounded up and herded to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, the infamous prison isle where hundreds of Indians were interned and dozens of Indian corpses were interred. One Nashoba Indian in particular, Tom Dublet, is said to have cursed Nashoba—now Scratch Flat—because of the shabby treatment he received.

Ghosts linger above Scratch Flat, tormenting the locals and providing plenty of fodder for McCabe’s tales. One of his favorites is that the ghosts seem to have disrupted several development attempts, including a massive office park planned but never completed by Cisco Systems. McCabe and residents seem to believe the story of the antidevelopment spirits, but a spokesperson for Cisco is less impressed by the ghost of Tom Dublet. “We don’t have a policy,” she says, “regarding predictions from medicine men.”

Like Scrooge meeting Clio, Ghosts of History Past haunt these tours. In their quest for spooky stories, ghost tour guides mine sources overlooked by most other heritage tour operators. We could do worse than a ghost tour for a lesson in local history.

This cautiously celebratory reading of ghost tours must be tempered, however, by the recognition that such tours ultimately reproduce some of the most troubling facets of early American society. Euro-American colonists, like tour guides today, were fascinated by the deathways of Others they encountered in North America. Whites collected Indian ghost stories, drew pictures of slave funerals, and recorded the deathbed words of countless Indians. Sometimes this Euro-American interest was respectful and driven by a desire for cross-cultural understanding. Experience Mayhew, an eighteenth-century Christian missionary to the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, immersed himself so fully in Indian society—spending his entire life on the island and speaking Wampanoag like a native—that he seems to have absorbed the Indian belief in ghosts’ presence at deathbeds and forgotten the orthodox Protestant skepticism toward the same. He recorded without comment the appearance of “two bright shining Persons, standing in white Raiment” at the deathbed of an elderly native woman named Ammapoo.

Sometimes, though, there were darker motives in Euro-Americans’ descriptions of nonwhites’ deathways. African American funeral practices were often Exhibit A when authors made the case for slaves’ alleged barbarity and lack of fitness for freedom. Such was the intent of British proslavery writer Bryan Edwards when he wrote about people of African descent in the West Indies in the late eighteenth century. According to Edwards “their funeral songs and ceremonies are commonly nothing more than the dissonance of savage barbarity and riot.” Even antislavery authors like Frederick Law Olmstead betrayed their racism when they described African American funerals. In 1861 Olmstead was impressed by what he viewed as the primitive simplicity of slave funerals: “I was deeply influenced myself by the unaffected feeling, in connection with the simplicity, natural, rude truthfulness, and absence of all attempt at formal decorum in the crowd.” Olmstead’s condescending attitude turned downright hostile when he discussed the slave preacher at this funeral: “I never in my life, however, heard such ludicrous language as was sometimes uttered by the speaker.”

In parallel fashion, Indian ghosts haunted early American literature, as Renée Bergland’s The National Uncanny (Hanover, N.H., 2000) has recently demonstrated. From the beginning of the colonial period, many whites equated the Indian inhabitants of North America with a satanic presence. As Cotton Mather wrote in 1692, witches “generally say [the Devil] resembles an Indian.” By the nineteenth century, dead and dying Indians—along with their spectral incarnations—helped perpetuate the tragic and romantic myth of the vanishing Indian. Many Euro-American colonists seemed most comfortable with Indians once they were dead; their very deaths seemed to prove Indians’ incompatibility with the march of Euro-American civilization. Fictional Indian characters were often rendered speechless as they died, as was Uncas in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Wind-Foot in Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842). Granted no dying words by their white authors, Uncas and Wind-Foot were the epitome of the vanishing Indian.

Today, ghost tours aren’t so obviously implicated in these patterns. But they do tend to exoticize all things Indian and African, including their dead. That tour outfits profit from the grim history of interracial misunderstanding is still another disturbing legacy.

And there’s another, simpler reason ghost tours sometimes make my skin crawl. Despite the power of stories like the boo hag and the curse of Tom Dublet, tour guides feel the need to keep the patrons happy and the banter light. So they jump from deep reflections on the meaning of history to goofy jokes and magic tricks. History Dark, History Lite.

Sit some day in Warren Square, one of Savannah’s beloved little parks. Gaze across the street at the understated beauty of the early-federal-style John David Mongin House (1793). Admire its graceful entryway and its classic sense of proportion and symmetry. And then think of those in chains who toiled in the sticky heat to build this house, think of those who died in the fields at Bloody Point on Daufuskie Island to give the Mongin family its wealth, and try to keep the goose bumps from rising on your arms.

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

Erik R. Seeman, associate professor of history at SUNY-Buffalo, is writing a book entitled Final Frontiers: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Death in Colonial North America.

Poor George Washington. Life among the eighteenth-century Virginia gentry was hard enough, what with the strains of wilderness surveying, the challenges of managing (if not actually working) Mount Vernon’s eight thousand acres, and the hazards of fighting all those pesky colonial wars—not to mention the daily indignities of contending with his dreadful dentures. But the twenty-first century may be crueler still to the nation’s first president. Washington, it seems, just wasn’t man enough for our times. Or not, at least, the right kind of man. Lacking both the whiff of sexy scandal that trails Thomas Jefferson in the post-Hemmings era (think Bill Clinton), and the aura of hardscrabble virtue that accompanies John Adams in the post-McCullough era (think Harry Truman), Washington’s TVQ remains low (think Dwight Eisenhower). Grim-faced (the teeth!) and remote, Washington comes across as a stranger, an alien—almost, you might say, as a person from a radically different place and time, a past that’s a foreign country.

Fear not, Sons and Daughters of Cincinnati. Help is on the way. Lest our Founding Father remain shrouded in the mists of the time, a pair of unlikely allies is working diligently to drag Honest George, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century. The summer of 2002 witnessed two major Washington makeovers, one at the hands of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, which has owned and maintained the first president’s Virginia home since 1858. The other makeover artist is Mary Higgins Clark.

That Mary Higgins Clark, you ask—America’s self-proclaimed “Queen of Suspense”? The very same. Clark, doyenne of the airport mystery, took last summer’s beach readers on a (very) little trip to the eighteenth century with Mount Vernon Love Story: A Novel of George and Martha Washington (a rerelease of her first-ever novel, Aspire to the Heavens, originally published in 1969). Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created red-blooded and sexy—that Washington was not “pedantic and humorless” but rather “a giant of a man in every way” (ahem)—Clark’s prefatory letter to her readers promises an intimate portrait of “two people I came to respect and love.”

Before you conjure visions of Fabio playing George Washington in the inevitable TV movie, be forewarned: Clark breaks this promise. What Mount Vernon Love Story offers are not steamy sex scenes, of which there’s nary a one (was it the teeth?), but countless moments spent in the throes of hot, throbbing interior decorating. This George Washington, content with chaste blushes and tender embraces in his romantic life, becomes “frantic with desire to see Mount Vernon.” Mount Vernon Love Story is shelter pornography. In the big-screen version, Clark’s Washington might best be played by Martha Stewart in drag.

Far from being pedantic and humorless, Clark’s Washington is henpecked and timorous, the son of an overbearing, whip-toting, Joan Crawford of a mother (First Mommy Dearest?), and the husband of an overprotective, child-toting, porcelain doll of a wife. “[H]eld down, checked, the object of his mother’s whims,” his “teeth [again with the teeth!] set on edge” by the “chaos” of her “grossly untidy” house, the young Washington takes refuge in tract mansion dreams befitting today’s soccer moms. He swears that one day, one day by God, “his home would be warm and welcoming. It would have fine papers on the walls and a marble chimney, papier-mâché on the ceilings and neat mahogany tables . . . George spent much time envisioning that home.”

Luckily, time is one thing Clark’s Washington has plenty of. He doesn’t have to worry about working the land; his trusty and contented servants (almost never called “slaves”) do that. And, fiddle-de-dee, he doesn’t have to worry much about politics, either; some other book can do that. We hear vague murmurs about “troubled days” in the 1770s, or the odd “squabble between Congress and the cabinet” in the 1790s. But for the most part, Clark’s Washington gets to sweat the small stuff: “where flower beds would eventually grow,” the regrettably “hodgepodge effect of the décor at Mount Vernon,” the “dust in the corners” of his quarters in Cambridge. In sum, Clark’s Washington is a hero “suffering the agonies of a housewife”—which apparently include repeated bouts with hemorrhoids and a nervous stomach.

Where the Washington of Mount Vernon Love Story fluffs pillows, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association wants a Washington that busts heads. Last April, Mount Vernon announced an $85 million public awareness campaign “to close an alarming, growing information gap . . . about the nation’s greatest hero.” Concerned, much as Clark was in 1969, that today’s Americans have “lost touch with the real Washington,” Mount Vernon will soon break ground for a new orientation center that will wow the site’s 1.1 million annual visitors with “computer imaging, LED map displays, lifelike holograms, . . . surround-sound audio programs, ‘immersion’ videos, illusionist lighting effects, dramatic staging and touch-screen computer monitors.” At the beating heart of the new facility, two theaters will be devoted to continuous showings of a new “fast-paced 15-minute film.” Produced by Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks SKG, the movie “will provide an action-oriented insight into Washington’s life story.” (Saving Private Washington?) According to the New York Times, the film will be projected “in a theater equipped with seats that rumble and pipes that shoot battlefield smoke into the audience.” Not much room for politics here either, I’m afraid. Forget about the complex ideas Washington was fighting for, and zoom in on a tight shot of a musket.

Surely you’ve already guessed the target demographic for this action mini-epic: where Mary Higgins Clark limns a Washington for women of a certain age, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association is courting fourteen-year-old boys. As Jim Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon, told the Times, the site needs “to reach not just the minds but also the hearts of eighth graders.” Combining the tools of the plastic surgeon and the forensic scientist with “the latest age-regression techniques,” Mount Vernon wants to restore not only life but youth to Washington. “Most Americans envisage George Washington as a stoic elder statesman,” notes Rees. “But Washington at age 23 was already the action hero of his times.” Who will play this eighteenth-century road warrior? Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are clearly too old for the job; even Keanu Reeves may be a little long in the wooden tooth. Will Vin Diesel be Spielberg’s Washington, or will Spielberg have the guts to cast Will Smith?

Washington as action hero, Washington as domestic goddess: will the American public buy this silliness? The verdict, so far, is mixed. Mount Vernon would do well to remember that The Patriot, the last major attempt to turn eighteenth-century revolutionaries into box-office gold, bombed with critics and eighth graders alike.

Mount Vernon Love Story may not fare much better. Despite a marketing barrage by Simon & Schuster (the publisher, not coincidentally, of John Adams as well as Clark’s entire oeuvre), Clark’s slim volume nudged its way onto bestseller lists for just a week last summer—mere spray across the bow of McCullough’s juggernaut. History buffs don’t seem to have touched it; a search on Amazon.com reveals that “customers who bought this book” favor the works of Danielle Steele and James Patterson, not those of Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood. Yet diehard Clark fans hate it. “I have read all of the author’s books and found this one dull,” writes a reader in Cleveland. “Good thing it was small, or I might not have finished reading it.” Notes another “disappointed” fan from Flagstaff, “The only thing Washington truly showed any outward passion for was his home, Mount Vernon . . . he would definitely be in therapy if he was alive now.”

Maybe a session or two on the couch could help poor old George resolve his newfangled split personality. (Diesel or Martha? Martha or Diesel?) Or maybe he’d just beg his therapist for a tonic to relieve the rigors of time travel. Enough with the politics of character, I imagine him pleading. Give me the politics of politics. Put my life back in its times!

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

In November 1849 Dr. George Parkman, a physician and scion of one of Boston’s richest families, was allegedly beaten to death and dismembered by a Harvard professor of chemistry named John Webster. A week after Parkman’s disappearance, the janitor of the Harvard Medical School discovered body parts hidden in Webster’s laboratory. Webster was put on trial in a spectacle that drew tens of thousands of onlookers, as well as journalists from as far away as Europe. Webster was convicted and hanged. But his guilt is one of many uncertainties that have confounded those attempting to tell the story of the Parkman case for the past 150 years, including historian Simon Schama, who explored the case in his aptly named 1991 study, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York, 1991).

Parkman’s murder was nothing if not infamous. Edmund Pearson, the historian of homicide, called the Parkman case “America’s most celebrated murder.” Edward Everett, a president of Harvard from 1846 to 1849, said it was “the most painful event in our domestic history.” And when Charles Dickens visited Boston in 1867, one of his first requests was to see the room where Dr. Parkman was murdered. Even by today’s numbingly sensationalist standards, the grisly tale is shocking and disturbing.

It’s a riveting story, but can it be a riveting documentary film? I hope so. For the past two years, my colleague Melissa Banta and I, along with Schama, have been developing a sixty-minute television documentary about the Parkman murder. (We are also designing an interactive Website, whose prototype is currently online.)

To our endless frustration, this most mysterious crime is made even more mysterious by a dearth of images: Parkman’s murder took place just a few years before the advent of popular photography. Fortunately, because the case was so celebrated, a number of woodcuts, maps, and other illustrations have survived. And some of the principal characters were illustrious enough to have had oil portraits painted of themselves. A search of the archives also yields a few later photos of some of the buildings–including the Harvard Medical School, where the crime took place.But a short stack of drawings, portraits, and photographs of buildings does not add up to a compelling film. Although I’ve produced documentary films for more than ten years, The Murder of Dr. Parkman is my first time tackling a subject that predates photography. And it’s led me to wonder: when the very building blocks of documentary film are images, is it even appropriate to make a documentary about a subject that has left behind only a tiny handful of visual traces?

Thinking about The Murder of Dr. Parkman has also led me to take another look at how other documentary filmmakers have approached the problems of portraying pre-photographic stories. In my admittedly cursory survey, I’ve looked particularly at historical documentaries that rely on “reenactments”–putting people in costume and having them act out an historical scene or event. While reenactments share important conventions, they range widely in quality–and credibility.

Documentary reenactments are almost always shot without dialogue, through fog or haze, or in a shadowy half-light. The camera often focuses only on close up details–a hand on a quill; feet running through the woods; a sword being buckled on–and almost never on an actor’s face. (The American Experience film, George Washington, the Man Who Wouldn’t Be King [1992], by David Sutherland, is a good example.) Or, conversely, the reenactments are shot so wide that we see only a distant figure on horseback wearing a three-corner hat–à la Ken Burns’s Thomas Jefferson (1996).

These visual cues send several important messages: that the reenactment is not fictional (if it were, there would be dialogue); that the reenactment is only a “suggestion” of what might have happened (signified by the ambiguous fog or haze); and that the actors are not portraying specific people so much as representing them (e.g., this pair of hands is not George Washington’s hands, but hands that represent his; the figure on horseback could be Jefferson). Each of these devices, it bears mentioning, also saves money. Speaking roles require skilled actors and directing; scenes that portray actual events require sound stages, expensive locations, props, and costumed extras.

The trouble with reenactments that rely on the camera slowly panning across interior spaces where something important once happened and hazy shots of quills, weapons, and detached body parts is that they leave viewers feeling distanced from the action instead of closer to it. Too often reenactments come across as just what they are–halfhearted attempts to make history come alive in a dramatic way without using the elements that make for dramatic storytelling: language, facial expression, bodies reacting in relation to one another. Burns’s Thomas Jefferson is in many ways a thoughtful essay on a fascinating man, but is it really a film? Do the endless slow-moving images of Monticello, the pans across portraits and drawings, the tilts down documents, and the occasional distant figure on horseback really add up to something that is driven by visual images which in turn are supported by spoken words? I think it’s the other way around–an illustrated lecture that could have worked equally well as a lavish magazine spread or coffee-table book.

The question of how to visualize the past–pre- or post-photographic–brings into sharp focus the central issue of putting history on film: is it entertainment or is it some form of serious inquiry?

Do reenactments ever work? Sometimes. For dramatic moments like the fatal confrontation between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in a recent American Experience documentary, The Duel (2000), reenactment works quite well because the filmmakers, Carl Byker and Mitch Wilson, actually break the PBS convention and let the camera dwell on the actors’ faces. Rather than watching decapitated stand-ins we get to see complete human beings we can come to think of as Burr and Hamilton, even though we know the duelists didn’t look quite like that. Some of the reluctance of documentary filmmakers to show actors’ faces comes from the fact that in a documentary–unlike a feature film–portraits are usually included, so viewers can’t help but notice the differences between the actors and the likenesses. But part of the fun of watching any film is suspending our disbelief long enough to be sucked into the story. After all, we know Elizabeth I looked nothing like Cate Blanchett, but is that the point?

A dramatic moment like the Burr-Hamilton shoot-out is so violent, passionate, and dramatic I could imagine it working as a reenactment in many different ways. But how can documentary filmmakers bring alive the important moments that are quiet and small but nonetheless crucial: for example, the inner struggle of a Revolutionary-era colonist deciding to become a patriot? In another departure from the increasingly hackneyed conventions of reenactments, Muffy Meyer and Ellen Hovde, co-directors of the public TV series Liberty, the American Revolution (1997), selected letters and diary or journal entries by well-known and not-so-well-known participants in the events, from Ben Franklin to Joseph Plumb Martin, then had actors perform the words of the journals and letters while looking directly into the camera. The use of letters and journals is certainly not new. But the usual convention is to have the letters read in voice-over, as Burns did, usually to great effect, in The Civil War (1991). Yet voice-over is always a trifle distancing, and particularly so when the language of the 1770s sounds so archaic to our ears today. Hearing Revolutionary-era letters in voice-over would have been simply a bore. But when a skillful actor is performing the reading, a smile or smirk, a pursed lip, a furrowed brow give the words flair and interpretation–in a word, drama! Although all depends on the actors (and there are some duds), overall it’s a successful device that brings some immediacy to the otherwise remote events surrounding the Revolution and stands out as a welcome breath of innovation.

Yet both reenactments and dramatic readings strike many people–some academic historians among them–as detracting from the seriousness of the material at hand and blurring the line between history and fiction. But where is that line, exactly? And more to the point, does it ever serve the purposes of historical inquiry to blur it–perhaps even to cross it altogether?

This isn’t simply a matter of stylistic approach. The question of how to visualize the past–pre- or post-photographic–brings into sharp focus the central issue of putting history on film: is it entertainment or is it some form of serious inquiry? Can it ever be both?

In his book Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), historian Robert Rosenstone’s critical but friendly look at historical documentaries, he tells an anecdote from his experience as a collaborator on The Good Fight, the 1984 documentary about the Spanish Civil War. Part of the story he thought was critically important was left out of the film because the filmmakers had no visual materials with which to tell it. Drawing from his own experience, Rosenstone concluded that history on film can never be analytical, theoretical, or critical; it is instead “history as homage.”

He’s absolutely right. But had I been the filmmaker behind The Good Fight, I, too, would have asked Rosenstone, “OK, but what will we be seeing?” It’s a question that has become my mantra. Whenever I work with nonfilmmakers as collaborators I have to take time to get across the most obvious but not always appreciated fact of the medium: for every word uttered, there has to be footage on the screen. And not just any footage, but the right image. In fact, ideally it is the image that will drive the words (this is, after all, filmmaking–not an illustrated lecture).

Rosenstone attempted to convince the directors of The Good Fight to include material on terrorism among the Stalinist Left–a complicated twist in the already complex story on intra-Left battles. The filmmakers told him there was simply no visual material and that getting into the issue would lengthen the film and slow down the narrative. I’m inclined to agree. In my own experience making films about the American Left of the 1930s, I’ve found that it’s a big enough struggle first of all to convince viewers there ever was an American Left. Getting into the differences between the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Stalinists, and the Trotskyites is practically impossible. There are reels and reels of wonderfully evocative newsreel footage of the many street demonstrations of the 1930s, but, to modern viewers, whether the demonstrators are socialist or CP, Lovestonite faction or Browderites, it all looks the same.

Abstract points introduce even greater challenges. In a film I made about Jesse H. Jones, a little known financier who ran the New Deal’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, we had to explain issues of financing and credit (boring no matter what–even with images); why banks were afraid to make loans during the Depression (showing somebody NOT doing something does not work on film); and Jones’s contradictory role as a staunch capitalist who also believed in activist government intervention in financial affairs (inherent contradictions are especially hard to convey on film–strong pictures do not often carry mixed messages). Abstract points again require “talking heads.” But of course talking heads are widely known to bore viewers. Sometimes, inevitably, the best decision–the decision the directors of The Good Fight made–will be to skip the point.

Rosenstone’s experience reminds us that, from the moment film is the format chosen for telling a piece of history, a huge act of selective storytelling has taken place. From that moment on, the process is a matter of jettisoning detail, nuance, and evidence in order to make the historical events fit the visual material available.

To an historian’s ears, “making the events fit the material” sounds like blasphemy, like doing history backwards. But I would argue that, on the contrary, the difficulties of making a satisfying hour or ninety minutes of history come alive on screen push filmmakers to find artful and inventive ways of presenting stories that–when they work well–rival the best written historical narratives (if not for completeness, at least for compelling storytelling).

One of the best examples of how well a mostly pre-photographic documentary can work is Ric Burns’s The Donner Party (1992). Though Burns uses the usual techniques–David McCullough’s narration, diaries and letters read in voice-over, maps, drawings and a few photos, and newly shot images of mountains and blizzards–the pieces come together into a riveting story that’s impossible to switch off.

But it is storytelling first and foremost. And while it could be argued that the story of the Donner Party is too atypical to be really useful in understanding the larger history of westward expansion, there’s no question that in its uniqueness it captures one small part of what drove people west and the price they paid to get there. Like so many historical documentaries The Donner Party can be accused of reducing history to a kind of ad hominem experience, or as Rosenstone says, history as homage. But film works best when it tells smaller stories about just a few people, and for that reason film or TV can never take the place of books and articles in serious history; the scale is usually too small and the tools are simply too blunt and imprecise for the job. Even when we’re lucky enough to have massive archives of photographs, newsreel, and film and video footage at hand, filmmakers start from a completely different premise than historians do. By choosing to use visual materials to convey information, the filmmaker is already jumping into history with one hand tied. Imagine writing a history book using only the most minimal one or two sentences of explication between the documentary selections. Tricky work, indeed, and probably a trickier read.

In making a film, it’s only one kind of document–those we can see–that carry the weight of presenting evidence; the brief explications only make connections or transitions between subjects. And the explications can themselves be a problem, largely because most take the form of the dominant convention in documentary filmmaking: narrative voice-over. In most historical documentaries, expert talking heads intercut with archival film and photos, all stitched together by the omniscient narrator who provides transitions and keeps the narrative humming along with the occasional reenactment added for dramatic effect. This is not a format that easily provides room for divergent points of view, for messily contradictory evidence, or indeed even for important aspects of the historical events at hand that may not have obvious visual images connected with them.

So why bother? Because, despite these obstacles, history on screen simply does some things better than history on the page. Reaching the millions, for one. What history on TV and film does best is entertain and engage while issuing an invitation to the viewer to learn more. What it lacks in depth it makes up for in reach. Few books or articles will ever have the sheer impact of The Civil War series, nor even the audience of millions that will watch a reasonably popular American Experience offering. If for no other reason than this, putting history on film will always be worthwhile.

But there is another reason. Screened history can have a different kind of impact than most written history does. It hits us in a different place: someplace deeper, more emotional, more visceral. We feel–and remember–images differently than we do words. Moving images, in short, are moving. I don’t think I ever truly understood the sheer cruelties of New World colonialism as well as I did after watching Black Robe, Bruce Beresford’s 1991 movie of Brian Moore’s historical novel about French missionaries in mid-seventeenth-century Canada. In this dark movie, the sun never shines on French Canada–all the events take place under oppressively leaden skies. Sure it’s hyperbole as metaphor, but it’s a potent example of what the power of images can achieve. After watching Black Robe I will forever associate the European conquest of the New World with chill gray drizzle, dampness, and death.

What story will we make visual in our documentary about the murder of Dr. George Parkman? One that, we hope, will be as riveting as the first accounts of it to hit Boston newspapers in 1849. We’re solving the footage problem by using actors in speaking roles–but we’re cheating: all the action takes place through the imagination of historian Simon Schama, who also appears on camera. Is it history or drama? Does the fact that it comes from the head of an historian make it history? Does the fact that he’s imagining make it fiction?

We’re not sure ourselves. We only hope that it will be entertaining enough to keep viewers from switching the channel and, if we really do our jobs, intriguing enough to send them to a library.

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

Eric Stange is an award-winning independent documentary film producer, director, and writer who specializes in history and science subjects. His films include Zamir: Jewish Voices Return to Poland (2000), Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? (2000), Love in the Cold War (1992) and Children of the Left (1992).

Wallace Stevens once observed that “poetry is a scholar’s art.” I am interested in the ways that poetry and research might intersect and the ways that poetry can explore “voice” beyond the poet’s individual experience. My book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, looks at what happened in Salem in 1692 from a variety of perspectives–the accusers’, the accused’s, bystanders’–those whose lives were forever changed by the accusations, trials, and executions.

The Afflicted Girls is composed of four different kinds of poems: poems that narrate the experience of the trials from the viewpoint of specific people (for example, a man who helped his wife escape from prison, a four-year-old girl accused of being a witch); poems that reference and incorporate colonial American verse and prose forms (including the sermon and the jeremiad); poems that pay tribute to the archival experience and explore the conception of the poet as archivist; and poems that investigate the lasting effects of the Salem witch trials on present-day America (poems that revisit the museums in Salem, for instance). Thus, the poems examine both the social structures contributing to the accusations as well as the relationships between people that were wounded or destroyed by the suspicions, convictions, and executions.

Testimony: He or His Apparition

About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press’d to death for standing Mute. — Samuel Sewall, Diary, September 19, 1692

The girls’ testimony is gravel scattered on the grass.

Ann Putnam: Giles Corey or his Apperance has most
   greviously afflected me by beating pinching and almost
   Choaking me to death

Inside the meetinghouse each afflicted girl repeats the next.

Mercy Lewis: I veryly beleve in my heart that Giles Cory
   is a dreadfull wizzard for sence he had ben in prison he
   or his Apperance has come and most greviously
   tormented me

The copier flattens the page, hammers down identical
   speech.

Sarah Bibber: I have ben most greviously affleted by giles
   Cory or his Appearance

But the man won’t speak to defend or plead. He sits still and
   silent in his pew.

Mary Warren: At the time of his examination I saw: s’d
   Cory or his appearition most: dredfully afflect: Mary
   Walcot An putnam. Mercy lewes & Sarah Vibber

The morning of his execution: the meetinghouse floods with
   light.
Outside a circle rises around the punished man:
the magistrates pile stone after stone on his ribs to crush
   him into speech.

Nobody can see the lesson: nothing can drive the voice
   out of the body.

The Mather Boys

Richard, Increase, Cotton

The one who starts it: who first crosses the cold lead ocean
   to settle in this land

The one who prays and fasts in secret for God to untie his
   tongue

The one who waits all day in his study for proof of Election
   or at least a Remedy

The one whose ship is driven against the white rocks at the
   edge of Isle of Shoals

The one with an Infirmity in his Speech, each word splitting
   open in his mouth

The one who leaves his study only for meals or Family
   Prayer

The one whose hand crosses the page again and again,
   practicing words he cannot say

The one who holds The Book of Martyrs on the ship’s
   slick deck as anchor cables snap, sails rip from masts

The one who explains that Strong affections bring strong
   afflictions and shuts his study door, his son standing
      alone outside

The son who dreams his grandfather’s voyage, who reads
   his father’s prayers, who will write the future down:

It is a world all over defiled with Sin, God will shortly
   burn it for a Witch

Witness, Recantation

For Elizabeth Reis

I enjoy, though in abundance of afflictions, being close confined here in a loathsome dungeon.
— Margaret Jacobs, letter to her father from Salem prison, August 21, 1692

Honored Father, when I remember you

your eyes turn the color of a bruise.
As soon as you speak to me you disappear,
and I have to imagine
the ocean that might lie between us,

then something breaks inside my body
and everyone I’ve hurt returns:
Grandfather, Mother, You,
skin translucent like the oiled paper
we stretched in place of glass
between the window lead.

I see through your body. You never
have to say it: Lying is a sin.
What’s worse to you, false testimony
or a wrong confession? Down here is all
darkness, the only sound the slur
of rain in the dirt, water rats scratching
inside the walls. Grandfather is dead.

Mother locked in Boston Jail. You
escaped. Lying is a sin. Just as any telling
of this story is a lie,

just as in the future,
years from now when you and I are dead,
another woman will write this letter down
in a room with sky-colored walls
and electric candles under a water-
color of the sea, waves capped in white
like dress lace, a girl on the dock waving

goodbye to no one under the caption:
Salem, Massachusetts, New England’s Maritime Paradise.

Poems reprinted by permission of author from The Afflicted Girls.

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

Nicole Cooley is an assistant professor of English at Queens College–the City University of New York. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection (Baton Rouge, 1996), won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also written a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love (New York, 1998).

The publication of the second volume of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale in 1991 marked more than the completion of Art Spiegelman’s painstakingly researched comic book account of his father’s Holocaust experience and survival. It also marked, at least for those readers who were either unaccustomed to the medium or had relinquished it somewhere during their adolescence, the intellectual legitimization of the comic book. While some of the pictorial conventions used by Spiegelman, particularly his depiction of his characters as animals, left some critics uneasy (misunderstanding the device’s goal of subverting the racist tenets of Nazism), Maus received acclaim as an original and indisputably serious work of history–both in the story it told and in the graphical and textual waysof its telling. (For more reviews and commentaries about Maus, see “Maus Resources on the Web.”)

Maus‘s accolades notwithstanding, a certain air of irrespectability still lingers about the comic book as a medium for serious work about the past. Cartoonists such as Larry Gonick, Raymond Briggs, and Joe Sacco have been recognized for the quality of their respective graphical histories, memoirs, and journalism, but the fervent sales and serious critical attention engendered by Maus have not been repeated. Last year, almost a decade after it published Maus, Pantheon released a group of new comic books packaged in formats seemingly designed to belie their actual status: so sumptuous-looking–and expensive–that they

might be construed as art instead of comic books.

But, while two of these new books–Ben Katchor’s The Jew of New York and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth–traffic in the past, unlike their predecessor they are works of graphic historical fiction. As such, their publication by a commercial American publisher might be construed as signaling a further maturation of the medium–at least in the sense that they have boldly relinquished the respectable trappings of scholarship, however crude that might at times end up being, in favor of exploring the past in more fantastical terms. But their status as fiction allows us to raise a useful question often overlooked when the pedantic and didactic virtues of “fact” are offered as the primary goal of a work: Why do history in the form of a comic book? Why use this particular medium as opposed to others? What can the comic book offer in the presentation of the past that is unique and compelling?

In the spirit of fantasy–or, at least, fiction–let’s step out of Common-place‘s ordinary mode and into, around, and through these works and their worlds.