Ask an academic about the history of gender and you’re likely to get a lecture of dazzling theoretical complexity. It might begin something like this: neither the categories by which we label gender nor the norms we assign to it are natural or inevitable. Instead, the rules that govern gender emerge from a web of complex, contingent, and often contradictory discourses, which are shaped by–and shape–culture.

Sounds abstract? Well, just try explaining this theory (known in the academic world as “social constructionism”) to a bunch of high school kids, whose response is likely to be a combination of mystification and skepticism. Thanks to the inclusion of women’s history in contemporary primary and secondary school courses, students are accustomed to accounts of the past that give heed to biological sex. But most textbooks, by focusing on women’s ongoing struggle for equal civil and social rights, suggest that changes in the behavior of the sexes have been merely strategic responses to oppression or new opportunities. Reading these books, high schoolers come away with what might be called a hydraulic model of gender. Like water through a pipe, according to this concept, masculinity and femininity may stream into culture, or find their free expression blocked, but they always remains fundamentally the same.

Most high school students find the hydraulic model of gender very convincing. At a time when sociobiologists are positing with ever greater certainty the biological grounds of human behavior, the belief that gender is natural offers real seductions. In addition, teenagers still trying to figure out what it means to be men and women are understandably reluctant to acknowledge the fragility of gender categories. How, then, ought a high school history teacher offer students the opportunity for a sophisticated analysis of gender? Until recently, I had come up with few good ideas. And then I reread the vivid account of Thomas/Thomasine Hall in Mary Beth Norton’s Founding Mothers and Fathers (New York, 1996), 183-202.

Born and raised as a girl in Newcastle upon Tyne, T, as Norton calls Hall in her narrative, had emigrated to America as a male after living in England as both a man and a woman. Hall proved a gender enigma to the colonists. Most likely prompted by T’s proficiency at “female” tasks such as sewing, colonists became suspicious of T’s true identity. Yet repeated examination of T’s (probably ambiguous) genitals by groups of both men and women did little to clarify Hall’s status. Everyone who had inspected T agreed that Hall was male. But T’s genitalia were only one factor in the determination of Hall’s identity. First, T could and sometimes did live in the world as a woman. Second, Hall had claimed that “hee had not the use of the mans parte”; presumably, that is, T could not function sexually as a man and sire children. Since the ability to impregnate a woman was a crucial component of manhood in seventeenth-century America, T could be at best only a partial man by colonial standards.

Ultimately, T appeared before the General Court of Virginia in 1629 to resolve colonists’ questions about Hall’s gender. After hearing testimony, the court arrived at a most curious judgement: it concluded that T was both a man and a woman and directed Hall to dress in elements of both men’s and women’s clothing. In other words, the court created a new gender for T, one that acknowledged Hall’s dual-sexed status but foreclosed the switching between male and female that had characterized Hall’s earlier life.

The class of students with whom I read this study, all seniors in an elective entitled “Gender in American Culture,” found the story of T absolutely fascinating. No surprise there: what could be more interesting to high school kids than a tale of how seventeenth-century Americans dealt with ambiguous genitalia? But they also took from it a rich understanding of gender as a social construction.

To prepare the class for discussing the case of T, I first assigned Emily Nussbaum’s article “The Sex That Dare Not Speak Its Name” in the May/June 1999 issue of Lingua Franca (42-51) about the “third-sex” movement. Subsequently, once they’d read the Norton excerpt, I began class with a simple question: “Was T a man or a woman?” Students predictably objected by replying that Hall was neither and both, and we spent some time recapitulating how, according to Norton, Hall’s own contemporaries decided T’s status. That led me to ask students to describe “what made a woman” and “what made a man” in colonial Virginia, and I listed their answers–from genitalia to dress to skills to the ability to procreate–in two columns on the board. It was then very easy to observe that “nature” was only one component, and not necessarily the most important, to gender or sexual identity; that is, cultural expectations and not simply “equipment” were crucial to determining T’s status. The kids were particularly impressed by the General Court’s ability both to create a new gender for T, one that labeled Hall as both male and female, and the importance of clothing as a public statement of identity. Gender, they realized, is never simply “given” or “natural” but based on, and illustrated by, a shared set of social rules.

All too often, high school history teachers are caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, we want to provide our students with an account of the past that is engaging; on the other hand, we want to introduce them to the concepts that animate current historical thinking. The strange tale of Thomas/Thomasine Hall, the man who was a woman, does both. Its sheer sensationalism engages teenagers while its vivid illustration of the artificiality of gender challenges them in ways no lecture ever could.

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

Peter Laipson teaches in the History Department at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts.

In 1992, the Mashantucket Pequot Indians generated headlines with the success of their casino, Foxwoods, in the once quiet town of Ledyard, Connecticut. Few Americans understood exactly who the Pequots were, or where they came from. The tribe’s answer came six years later, with the opening of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC), an extraordinary, tribally owned-and-operated museum of New England Indian history and culture, built at a cost of $193.4 million. An antidote to museums featuring Native artifacts removed from all cultural context, or older-style dioramas depicting primitive, generic Indians, the MPMRC delivers an impassioned message: “We are Pequot. This is our land. We are still here.” What’s more, the museum raises provocative questions about the historical process–what we know about Indians and how we know it.

Building a history museum was the vision of former Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Chair Richard Hayward. Through five years of discussion and planning, which brought tribal members together with both Native and non-Native experts–archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, educators, museum professionals, and artists–Hayward and his sister, Theresa Hayward Bell, Director of the Museum, were determined to engage visitors and educate them about Pequot history. They also sought to help Pequots and other Indians recover from a lifetime of negative stereotypes about “savages” in classrooms, museums, and popular culture. In doing so, they have confronted formidable obstacles.

Unlike the elites whose cultures lend themselves to object-driven museums, the Mashantucket Pequots are, as Research Director Kevin McBride puts it, “story rich and artifact poor.” To address this challenge, the museum’s creators used a combination of technologically enhanced displays and recreated three-dimensional objects to bring the past to life. The designers of the MPMRC, Design Division, Inc., took the ubiquitous diorama–a static form that, for better or worse, has captured the imagination of generations of children and adults alike–and reinterpreted it with life-sized figures and cutting-edge technology, including computer interactives, sound sculpture, aroma technology, and an infrared communications system. But they also engage visitors with no-tech exhibits such as Enduring Innovations: Prehistoric and Modern Tools, which juxtaposes old and new forms such as spears and sinkers for fishing lines (which remain virtually unchanged) and drills (which change dramatically from bone drill bits worked by hand to an electric drill).

As they work their way through such exhibits, visitors take in a wealth of information. But the MPMRC aims to offer more than that. Like a science museum, it seeks to teach new concepts as well as new facts. One concept sure to provoke debate among scholars is the notion that a tribal understanding of the past may incorporate ways of knowing that are different from western epistemologies, yet more sophisticated than mere wishful thinking. In documenting Pequot history for the museum, researchers included stories and oral tradition as a major source of information, given equal consideration with manuscript and print texts, archaeological evidence, or material culture. The “how-do-we-know-this?” thread of inquiry running throughout the museum encourages visitors to question what they see instead of passively accepting or rejecting information.

The reproductions of everyday objects used in the museum’s dioramas offer a concrete illustration of how the MPMRC reconciles written documentation and indigenous ways of knowing. Tapping into an existing crafts base, museum staff located artisans who could translate raw materials into what Kevin McBride calls “objects described but never seen.” These are not simply works of imagination, although they are certainly works of art: each reproduction is the result of extensive research, all of which is available on file in the museum’s library. Where no physical objects survived to serve as models, researchers located written descriptions and contemporary illustrations. Consider the extraordinary turkey feather mantle made by Nanticoke artist Courtney Anderson, on display in the gallery on Daily Life. Early English writers frequently remarked on the mantles worn by high-status Native men in southern New England, and described them as having been woven so tightly that no light would seep through if they were held up. The feathers, they wrote, were recognizable as turkey feathers. A textile expert found archaeological fragments and a crafts tradition of using turkey feathers to make clothing in the southeast, but the southeastern technique–stripping the veins from turkey feathers, wrapping them around a twine base, and making a kind of feather yarn from which textiles could be woven–made it unlikely that the turkey feathers would have been recognizable as such. Instead, Anderson, drawing on his skill, imagination, and experience, along with his own reading of the documents, determined how he believed the mantles must have been made: he used plant fibers to weave a backing, then attached overlapping rows of feathers. Is this an exact reproduction of the turkey feather mantles worn in southern New England in the early contact period? Maybe not, but it feels right, and it adds much to our understanding.

The MPMRC is organized chronologically, and prospective visitors should note that it takes at least four hours to go through the exhibits. The public enters Pequot history by traveling back in time, descending through a giant glacier complete with blue walls, a noticeable drop in temperature, and the sounds of rushing water and cracking ice. This journey through time, however, is interrupted by a gallery on modern-day Mashantucket Pequot life, where visitors learn what the tribe has built over the past eight years, while listening to the voices of tribal members reflect on what it means to be Pequot. This gallery and the use of audio technology here and throughout the museum represent a conscious, persistent effort to remind visitors that they are learning about a living people.

The highlight of the museum is the sequence that runs from a life-sized diorama of an ice age caribou hunt, to a recreated sixteenth-century Pequot village, to the same village after European contact (now with a palisade, trade goods, and epidemic disease), to the Pequot War of 1637. An original film, too intense for younger viewers, depicts the Pequot Massacre in graphic detail. Visitors also use computers and other interactive technology to learn more about what they see, an experience that keeps even small children engaged. Instead of viewing a bygone culture under glass, visitors learn about sixteenth-century Pequot lifeways by walking through the village, sitting in a wigwam, or eavesdropping on a conversation in an unfamiliar language (which is actually Passamaquoddy, since Pequot is no longer spoken). Using a hand-held device with prerecorded information keyed to specific sites, visitors move through the village learning about agriculture, medicine and healing, plants, animals, basket making, hunting, family and gender relations, and other aspects of Pequot lifeways. At strategic points, huge windows bring the external landscape into the museum and remind us that the people we are learning about actually lived here.

The MPMRC’s Pequot village is both like and unlike nearby Plimoth Plantation’s Hobbamock’s Homesite. There, Native interpreters in seventeenth-century dress interact with visitors and answer questions about both past and contemporary Wampanoag lifeways. At Plimoth, the public walks through an outdoor Wampanoag village staffed by actual men and women; at the Mashantucket Pequots’ museum, the public walks through an indoor Pequot village staffed, more or less, by prerecorded voices. Although both sites wrestle with the problem of reminding visitors that Indians do not exist only in the past, neither wholly succeeds. Plimoth Plantation gives visitors a chance to learn through conversations with real people, but these exchanges are not always comfortable for either the visitors or the interpreters. The Pequot village allows visitors to experience a virtual immersion in seventeenth-century Native life without ever speaking to a human being–a safer, more sanitized encounter in which technology overshadows face-to-face exchange.

The MPMRC’s planners rejected the idea of having costumed interpreters because they wanted to make a clear distinction between past and present Indians. While they succeed in making this distinction, they could do more to help visitors understand the connections between the Indians seen in the sixteenth-century Pequot village diorama and the diverse faces that characterize the Mashantucket Pequots of today. Many exhausted and overwhelmed visitors skip or hurry through the last parts of the museum, where compelling exhibits explain what happened to the Pequots after 1637: how they were forbidden to call themselves Pequot; how they intermarried with other Indians, free blacks, and Euro-Americans; how they fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and all the wars of the twentieth century; how they survived economically and culturally; and how and why they won the federal recognition that made it possible for them to build the casino. Part of the problem is that more research is needed on the later period. Another obstacle is that isolated figures, an old trailer (no matter how important in historical terms), and lots of connecting text cannot compete with the tragically romantic history of the seventeenth century, although the museum has plans to expand the outdoor farmstead exhibit on nineteenth-century life.

But the larger problem is that the museum does not fully confront complex issues of racial and tribal identity: questions about who is or is not Indian, who gets to decide, and how. Most Native communities in southern New England today are multiracial, as that term is understood by the dominant society. There is a specific history to these intermarriages, one connected to the larger history of Euro-American colonization and to changing ideas about race from the seventeenth century to the present day. In one of the museum’s first galleries, a massive color photograph of contemporary tribal members in all their diversity of hair, eye, and skin color–features many viewers would use to classify the subjects as “white” or “black” rather than “Indian”–begs a question left unanswered: How have the Mashantucket Pequots themselves, as a people, grappled with their racial heritage?

In their museum, the Pequots offer a public affirmation of their identity as Pequots, one in which the 1637 massacre figures as the defining event, and subsequent migration, intermarriage, and racial divergence are irrelevant. If the tribe chooses to emphasize what they have in common in their exhibits, that choice, in my view, should be respected. Yet while planners made a reasonable choice to use faces that jibe with a popular sense of what “Indians” would have looked look like for the pre-1637 displays (lifecasts for the later period were made from Pequot tribal members), the overall impact is unfortunate. Visitors are never asked to think critically about the hazards of linking ethnicity or tribal membership to a particular phenotype. This omission is regrettable, particularly because the MPMRC is capable of more. While no museum can single-handedly change the way Americans think about race, the Mashantucket Pequots have put together a resource of sufficient depth and seriousness to address these difficult questions.

Early plans for the MPMRC apparently included a section grappling with the issue of race, but it was taken out after much debate. Putting these materials back would require visitors to spend even more time in the museum. But the high rate of first-time visitors who become members suggests that the public would like to learn more. The Mashantucket Pequots’ museum has already succeeded in generating tremendous interest in the Indian peoples of southern New England. Now it remains to confront the complexities of their rich history, and challenge visitors to think harder about what it means to be Indian in a world in which race matters.

The author would like to thank Kevin McBride, Steve Cook, and Elliott Caldwell of the MPMRC, and Mike Hanke of Design Division, Inc.

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

Alice Nash teaches Native American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Editors’ note: as many readers may be aware, Professor Bellesiles’s research methods and scholarly standards have become the subject of considerable debate since Common-place first published this essay. In October 2002, Bellesiles resigned his faculty position at Emory University. Both the Final Report of the independent investigative committee whose findings led to his resignation, and Bellesiles’s response are available online.

Many politicians and even some scholars look to history for quick validations of current positions. At their most useful, these evaluations fit in a single sentence, such as a “the Second Amendment was intended to protect an individual’s right to bear arms,” or “the Second Amendment was intended to enhance the militia.” Each of these two positions can find support in the historical record, which raises the troubling question of how understandings of the original intention of the author and ratifiers of the Second Amendment can be in direct contradiction. But then that is precisely the point: people attempting to use original intent for current political purposes want the Framers of the Constitution and its amendments to share current political concerns. They did not. They lived in a different world with distinctive problems and issues of their own. It is, in my estimation, an error to try and force an original meaning of the Second Amendment or any other part of the Constitution into the polarized political debates of our own times. That is not to say that history should not inform our discussions, but that it should not determine our actions.

There is a case to be made for bringing the Constitution into service of current political positions. It is politically useful to link oneself to the Framers of the Constitution as directly as possible, and even more so if it can be done in such a way so as to preclude further debate by framing a Constitutional absolute. Constructing such a constricted vision of the past generally requires the avoidance of context and is often undertaken in the style of a legal brief, in which only supportive evidence is considered and all complications eschewed. Such “law-office history” is, in the words of John Phillip Reid, little more than “rummaging through history and picking out bits and pieces to sustain an argument about current law.” Laura Kalman has nicely distinguished the differing methods: “It is the lawyers’ business to build paradigms. Too much orderliness, however, makes historians suspicious.” Edmund Morgan once wrote Felix Frankfurter that the historian rejects “the demand for symmetry,” avoiding sharp dichotomies which misrepresent the past. Historians doubt any case for which all the evidence falls consistently on one side and work on the assumption that the past is pitted with ambiguities and paradoxes.

When it comes to the United States Constitution, most historians reject the idea that its meaning can be reduced to some easy formula or series of sweeping generalizations. One important aspect of the historians’ role in attempting to fix the original meaning of the Constitution is that we are constantly exploring the subject. Even the same historian may adjust his or her opinion of that meaning over time, as is evidenced by Leonard Levy on the First Amendment and Robert Shalhope on the Second. Neither of these two fine scholars felt that their initial understandings were wrong; rather further study led them to an appreciation for the greater complexity of the topic.

It is that respect for historical complexity that makes the scholars’ participation in these debates most valuable in the long run yet most frustrating in the immediate present. We need go no further for an example of the latter than Judge Richard A. Posner, whose book on the impeachment of President William J. Clinton concludes that historians do not know history and are useless in offering guidance on public policy. Posner’s complaint is based in part on what most historians see as their primary task, attempting to bring a precise context back to life in all its intricacy. Advocates for current policy positions do not want their views complicated; they want a pedigree. As the self-proclaimed “Standard Model” of the Second Amendment evidences in its insistence that the Framers adhered unswervingly to an individual right to bear arms, the era in which the Constitution and Bill of Rights was formulated must be one of solid consensus. The deep divisions over fundamental political, social, and cultural issues in our own times offer no hints as to the nature of the past; previous ages were united and cohesive.

Anyone familiar with the history of the American Revolution and the first decades of the United States can only be baffled by such assertions of consensus. The Revolution itself divided the populace, with patriots and loyalists battling one another for control of what each saw as their country. Supporters of independence disagreed on many significant issues, including how best to respond to their opponents. Those who remained true to the British Crown found their arms and property confiscated, with many forced into confinement and exile. Even many people who attempted to remain neutral were subject to suspicion and civic disenfranchisement. And of course African Americans, about one-fifth of the population, had all their rights denied them; many fled to the British in search of freedom. Even though most loyalists reconciled themselves to independence or were removed from the political mix, post-Revolutionary American politics remained highly contentious. Shays’ Rebellion was only the most dramatic incident in a nation that was quickly unraveling. The Constitution cannot be understood outside the experiences of those who participated in its writing and ratification. Those twenty years prior to the beginning of constitutional government witnessed upheaval, uncertainty, and violence. It may be true that most of those involved in the drafting of the Constitution hoped for security and stability while preserving fundamental liberties, but they saw many different paths toward that end.

For all but the most ideologically inclined reader, Jack Rakove has effectively destroyed the idea of original intent. The Framers of the Constitution not only held that their intentions should offer no guide to future generations, they also considered such an approach inherently dangerous. Convention delegates took oaths of secrecy because they appreciated that their deliberations would include a number of necessary political and intellectual compromises. Far better, they reasoned, if no one ever knew exactly what went into producing the simple language of the Constitution.

James Madison evoked this position of irreverence for the Framers in a speech before the House of Representatives in April 1796. Madison stated flatly that the Convention’s debates should “never be regarded as the oracular guide” for understanding the Constitution. “As the instrument came from them, it was nothing more than the draught of a plan, nothing but a dead letter, until life and validity were breathed into it, by the voice of the people, speaking through the several state conventions.” It is hard to be clearer than that. At least Madison’s original intention was that his original intention should not matter.

What should matter to us if we hope to understand the origins and meanings of the Constitution is the political process by which that “dead letter” came to life. That development, from the perceived crisis of the Confederation through the first Congress, must serve as our guide. The constant negotiation of the Convention, Rakove has written, meant that “the real challenge did not involve solving theoretical dilemmas posed by Hobbes or Locke or Montesquieu; it instead required efforts to accommodate the conflicting interests of different states and regions on such matters as the apportionment of representation and taxes, the regulation of commerce, and the extension of the slave trade.”

Even with these compromises, the Constitution met strenuous opposition. The majority of those who voted for delegates to the ratification conventions probably did so in opposition to the proposed Constitution. As Saul Cornell reminds us in his marvelous book, The Other Founders, there was no consensus within that founding generation, no agreement within the camps of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists about what the Constitution meant. Almost no historian speaks any more of a uniform, cohesive American culture; there are too many strands to the fabric of early American society to maintain that just one represents the whole. To vary the metaphor, we cannot stop the reel of historical development and say that this single Framer, this particular moment, captures precisely the meaning of the Constitution.

Nor can the amendments presented by Congress to the states in 1789 (what came to be called the Bill of Rights) be said to represent adequately the political values of even those who supported the new form of government. Madison was responding to the critiques of the Anti-Federalists, his friend Thomas Jefferson, and the concerns of many Federalists. He considered a variety of different wordings for each of the amendments–including the Second–and submitted them to Congress with the expectation that people would understand each in distinctive ways. As Rakove has shown, Madison did not want the Bill of Rights to be the final word on what rights were protected by the Constitution.

Madison appreciated that the majority could easily trample on the rights of the minority, that Congress might extend its power if nothing prevented it except a weak executive and judiciary. Madison knew what he was talking about, for he was a slave owner. He showed no respect for the rights of his slaves because he did not have to. Madison was surprisingly honest in using slavery as a prime example of “the danger of oppression to the minority from unjust combinations of the majority.” For Madison, bills of rights were “parchment barriers” against human ambition and avarice. If the people did not respect rights, putting them in writing would make little difference. American history is rife with the violations of individual rights, but then in the eighteenth century rights were held collectively, not individually. If you were a white male Protestant property owner, then you enjoyed substantial liberty. In most states, however, there were gradations of rights descending from that pinnacle. To the majority of Americans in the 1790s, the Bill of Rights was an abstract and irrelevant document that only marked how far they stood below full citizenship. It was a mockery of the very idea of rights. Anyone arguing today that we should adhere to that original understanding of rights would, I hope, be dismissed as grotesquely out of touch with reality.

So do historians have anything to offer to this debate over the meaning of the Constitution? They enter current policy disputes at their own risk. A historian may believe that he or she is not involved in a political discourse, but will soon discover otherwise. The experience of Gary Nash and the other members of his committee to set national history standards serves as a cautionary tale. They thought that they were addressing matters of secondary education. They failed to appreciate that politicians saw advantage in attacking scholars for fostering an anti-American agenda. When senators voted by an amazing 99 to 1 to condemn the national history standards, they were in keeping with a tradition of anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter has traced back to the 1790s. It is of course ironic that a country founded by a generation obsessed with ideas should prove so uncongenial to them; but, as Tocqueville indicated, that is the nature of American conceptions of equality–the history buff equals the historian. As David Brock’s recent and highly significant book, Blinded by the Right, makes evident, the far right (and it is inaccurate to call them “conservatives”) is especially good at destroying the careers of those they perceive as threats, even if they have to make things up.

Clearly, aspects of the Constitution have outlasted their usefulness–the electoral college springs to mind–but dealing with them is a political issue, not a historical one. What the historian can do is make clear the roots of that anomaly in its precise context. In the case of the electoral college, the often baffling and excruciatingly detailed debates and compromises produced what almost everyone at the convention admitted was about the best they could hope for in balancing so many interests and demands. One cannot help but wonder what a member of that convention would think of our modern system of universal suffrage combined with the eighteenth-century expedient of the electoral college. Likewise, one wonders what they would think of using the Second Amendment to justify private arsenals equal to the firepower of the entire U.S. Army (which numbered just seven hundred men) at the time the Constitution was written.

The Second Amendment itself became part of the Constitution in a context of many different intellectual and social currents. The continuing efforts of states to control access to and use of guns once the Second Amendment was part of the Constitution seemingly indicates a lack of concern for an individual “right” to own a gun. The absence of notable opposition to such state action, even when it extended to disarming a portion of the population, reveals popular attitudes that failed to see gun ownership as a protected individual right. At the same time, the federal government came to see public indifference to firearms ownership as a major threat to national security, and responded by slowly building a standing army and beginning a program to provide guns directly to members of the militia at no cost. Popular disinterest undermined both efforts, with government censuses repeatedly revealing a surprising shortage of firearms. In brief, those responsible for its ratification never saw the Second Amendment as a hindrance to either government regulation of firearms or to efforts by the federal government to arm specific groups of citizens. The debates over how federalism would work in terms of the nation’s defense against external enemies and domestic insurrection, the federal effort to reform and strengthen the militia, the continued presence of laws regulating firearms, government support for gun production, all point to a more complicated relation to the place of firearms in private hands than can easily fit on a bumper sticker.

It may be possible to construct an understanding of the ownership of guns as an individual right, collectively defined. To be as clear as possible about how this translated into general attitudes, there is no evidence that any government official in 1800 would presume to interfere with a white male Protestant property owner who sought to purchase and possess a firearm, unless there was reason to suspect that he was linked to some sort of domestic disorder or if the militia needed the gun to resist a threatened foreign invasion (there were several invasion scares in different parts of the country between 1798 and 1815). Should any other criteria apply, the reserved sovereignty of the state would empower even local officials to prevent the purchase of or to confiscate a firearm if they deemed such action necessary for the preservation of public safety. Leonard Levy insisted on a distinction between the law as text and the law as practiced. A First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly did not mean that James Madison allowed his slaves to speak their minds and organize resistance to his tyranny.

The troubling aspect of the current debates over gun regulation in America is that many refuse to acknowledge the broad spectrum of possible alternatives between absolute libertarianism and total confiscation (prying one’s gun from cold, dead fingers). In the cover letter that Gouverneur Morris sent out with the draft constitution to the state legislatures, he drew upon Lockean notions of the social contract in writing, “[A]ll individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.” His audience, his time, understood what he meant. It is more difficult to get ideas of limited sacrifice across today. Few people can conceive giving up their convenience for the general good. But entering into a discussion of the historical origins of the Constitution requires some degree of humility. Or as Benjamin Franklin put it in his final, noblest speech at the Constitutional Convention, the person who finds fault in some part of the Constitution, should “doubt a little of his own infallibility.”

Further Reading: See David Brock, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (New York, 2002); Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski, eds., The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties (Madison, Wisc., 1992); Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1937); Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962); James H. Hutson, “The Creation of the Constitution: The Integrity of the Documentary Record,” University of Texas Law Review 65 (1986): 1-39; Laura Kalman, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (New Haven, Conn., 1996); Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997); Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) and Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1997) and Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 1998); John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 4 vols. (Madison, Wisc., 1986-93) and Patterns of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide in the North American Fur Trade (Ninth Circuit Historical Society, 1999). Antonin Scalia, et al., A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton, N.J., 1997). Bernard Schwarz, The Great Rights of Mankind: A History of the American Bill of Rights (Madison, Wisc., 1992). James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn., 1993); Robert J. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 2d ed. (New York, 1998); William J. Vizzard, Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control (Lanham, M.D., 2000); Lord Windlesham, Politics, Punishment, and Populism (New York, 1998); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969).

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

Michael Bellesiles, who taught at Emory University, is the recipient of the Louis Pelzer and Binkley-Stephenson Awards (1986 and 1996). He is the author of Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, 1993).

As Common-place transitions to its new look on our new Website, the Web Library is adding a feature to our collection of reviews of online resources for the study of early American history and culture. The Web Library now includes a searchable list of digital projects on topics in early American studies. We encourage Common-place readers to add to this list of digital resources by contributing to the Zotero group suggestion box for Common-place Web Library or by e-mailing suggestions to Web Library editor Edward Whitley. In addition to our regular reviews of digital resources for scholarship and teaching, the Web Library will also become a forum for reflections on digital humanities practices more broadly conceived—a place where both the users and the creators of digital resources can reflect on the opportunities and challenges that digital methods present to the study of early
American history and culture.

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

In the heart of Amsterdam there is an archive. And in that archive there is a card catalog listing the records of hundreds of notaries. The card catalog in the Amsterdam Municipal Archive is a thing of legend among Dutch historians, for the notarial records are an incredibly rich source for the economic and social history of the early modern Dutch world. Notaries played a crucial role in the economic and social life of the Dutch Republic and its overseas colonies, recording the business dealings of uncounted hosts of common people struggling to make a living in the Dutch world. As the catalog has yet to be indexed, few historians have dared to wade into its unchartered seas of manuscript references, never mind the often very difficult-to-read manuscripts themselves.

One wonders what intimacy has to do with cross-cultural relations, especially in a situation like New Netherland where, unlike Dutch Indonesia, the Dutch did not control the local inhabitants to the extent that they could govern their intimate behavior.

Susanah Shaw Romney is one of the few and the brave who has successfully unlocked a portion of the notarial archive. Scholars working on New Netherland have long anticipated her work. They will not be disappointed. Romney’s window onto the world of small-scale interactions related to New Netherland is a tremendous achievement for the social history of New Netherland. Romney has not only worked through the Dutch archives, but the surviving Dutch documents in America. Although many of these have been translated at various times over the past century and a half, those translations are not always reliable, and so, wherever possible, Romney relies on her own translations (this is not always possible because a number of the sources were burned, in whole or part, when the New York State Archives caught fire early in the twentieth century). Anyone who has tried to work with seventeenth-century Dutch sources must recognize this book as an impressive achievement of research.

Scholars will be mining Romney’s footnotes for years to come, but what about her argument that the “intimate networks people constructed, rather than actions taken by formal structures or metropolitan authorities, constituted empire”? What she calls “intimate networks . . . consisted of a web of ties that developed from people’s immediate, affective, and personal associations and spanned vast geographic and cultural distances.” By combining “the study of imperial intimacies with the study of imperial networks” she wants to suggest “a new model for the exploration of immediate relationships in early modern empires” (18). The “function of intimate networks was not benign,” Romney points out (20). Instead, they implicated all sorts of ordinary people: women of all sorts, poor sailors, bakers, enslaved Africans, and even American indigenous leaders in the expansion of Dutch power overseas.

In a refreshing change from the current wave of literature that deploys words like “intimacy” and “colonialism” in their titles, this is not a study of “colonizers’ desires to regulate sexual intimacies within colonial locales” (22). Instead, Romney is interested in the social, economic, and even political consequences of intimacy. Unfortunately, intimacy, a word that in one form or another appears on most pages of this book, is never really defined, and we are left to project our own random associations with that word into her text. Different readers will have different associations with the word intimate, and it’s unclear how well our associations apply to the seventeenth century. Then people shared beds with strangers they were not having sex with, lived cheek by jowl with a multitude of transients in places like Amsterdam and otherwise operated in very close quarters on ship and ashore. What was considered “intimate” in the Dutch Golden Age? And would Africans and indigenous Americans have shared a similar sense of intimacy, as her inclusion of them in the final three chapters of the book suggests?

Romney’s intimate networks generally depend on some sort of personal tie involving a woman. Generally, these women are married to an individual through whom they gain access to a wider world of social and economic possibility, and it is those possibilities, rather than the sexual or marital relations themselves, that most intrigue Romney. Her first two chapters do a terrific job of showing the ways that Dutch women actively participated in the military, economic, and social aspects of Dutch expansion in the early seventeenth century. They arranged complex business deals that spanned the Atlantic Ocean with (or sometimes without) their intimate partners. They recruited poor, drink-loving immigrant men who happened to seek shelter in their taverns into the unrewarding service of the Dutch West India Company as soldiers and sailors. They sailed back and forth on ships to strengthen their family ties and the Dutch presence in New Netherland, sometimes settling down permanently, other times returning to compete in Amsterdam’s urban and maritime economy once again. At the very least, scholars will now have to take seriously the role of Dutch women, from the wives of sailors to those of great merchants, in the creation of the Dutch Empire: a significant contribution in its own right that challenges, with rich evidence, the idea that the shipboard world of the Atlantic was a male preserve.

The first two chapters of the book, treating, respectively, the engagement of Amsterdammers with the overseas world and women’s direct participation in colonizing enterprises, are the best and most convincing. The subsequent three are somewhat less so. Rather than stick to the thematic exploration of intimate networks, Romney tries to turn her book into a history of the New Netherland colony that includes the experience of the enslaved Africans and Native Americans as well as the Europeans, and which in some way can be grafted onto the standard chronological narrative of the colony’s development. Chapter three, drawing on the work of Daniel Usner, argues for a frontier exchange economy in early New Netherland, where Dutch colonists and indigenous people engaged in a range of everyday economic exchanges, from trading furs and liquor to food and firewood. Her sources for this are primarily court records produced when such interpersonal interactions went wrong. And, in the end, she finds intimacy between individuals to be elusive, concluding, “participation in daily exchange did not lead to more peaceful cross-cultural relationships” (143).

One wonders what intimacy has to do with cross-cultural relations, especially in a situation like New Netherland where, unlike Dutch Indonesia, the Dutch did not control the local inhabitants to the extent that they could govern their intimate behavior. This question is even stronger in the final chapter, which essentially discusses diplomatic relations between various indigenous leaders (male and female) and Dutch authorities, and relations between the Dutch and their English conquerors. Yes, Native American diplomacy involved the language of close kinship: fathers, brothers, etc., and it depended on face-to-face meetings in diplomatic councils, but is this really intimacy? Networks of alliance and trade are certainly at stake here, but what makes them intimate? Early modern European history has other concepts, like patron-client relations, or simply networks of various sorts (kin, business, religious), that might be employed in these cases with equal if not more force.

The desire to bring the analysis down to the level of an intimate, interpersonal connection leads to a new account of slavery in New Netherland that is intriguing, but not always compelling. Focusing on the unusual grant of “half-freedom” to a number of West India Company slaves, whereby they gained a degree of personal liberty but were held to certain serf-like conditions of continuing service to the company, Romney wants to see this as an achievement for the enslaved Africans. Despite the traumatic disruption of the slave trade, they managed to create a community through marriage and family formation and hard work, demonstrating their value as members of the New Netherland community. A more comparative perspective that took into account contemporary Dutch slave societies in Brazil and the Caribbean might conclude that half-freedom was a way for the West India Company to enjoy some of the benefits of slave labor without having to pay for it. For Romney, “Intimate relationships among Africans made possible the situation in which half freedom appealed to the whites who had the power to grant it” (242). Romney also traces out who sponsored the baptisms of New Netherland’s children of African parents, suggesting the parents were hoping to enroll prominent European colonists as potential benefactors of their children. Again, more comparative work on the roll of prominent godparents in such baptisms might put this phenomenon in a different light.

This significant contribution to the history of New Netherland would have been strengthened by a tighter focus (the text feels at times overlong and repetitive, like other Omohundro Institute productions) and more direct engagement with the historiography in order to clarify Romney’s points. The first two chapters have many substantial footnotes discussing Dutch and Atlantic world scholarship, while the footnotes in the later chapters are much thinner, again suggesting where the real strength of her contribution lies. Her efforts to include a wide range of New Netherland society in her analysis are admirable, but a leaner, meaner, Dutch-centered text might have made a bigger impact.

This article originally appeared in issue 15:4.5 (November, 2015).

Evan Haefeli, most recently author of New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty, is an associate professor of Atlantic world history at Texas A&M University.

Not long ago, in a class discussion of the Federalist Papers, my students and I found ourselves debating James Madison’s ideas about minority rights. When I asked who constituted the minority that Madison was most concerned with protecting, my students, with some surprise, recognized that the Constitution’s chief framer was worried about the rights of the country’s well-heeled citizens. As Madison wrote in Federalist 10, majoritarian democracies were invariably “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property,” making such states “spectacles of turbulence and contention.” The multitude of people with limited means threatened to eclipse the power of that small group who held the most. Madison’s balanced constitution ensured that the American republic would avoid the early and violent demise that had afflicted the pure democracies of the past.

My students were surprised by Madison’s argument because in the early twenty-first century, “minority rights” connotes something quite different from the rights of a cadre of the most advantaged (the “one percent”?). The minorities whose rights matter most in more recent American history are those who stand apart from the mainstream by virtue of some deeply held value or identity—be it related to race, religion, or sexuality—and who have been the targets of discrimination and disfranchisement as a result. The movement for African American civil rights in the last century fits this framework of minority rights, as does the push for same-sex marriage more recently.

Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy expertly bridges the gap between James Madison and my twenty-first-century students. This excellent book chronicles the rise of what Kyle G. Volk calls “a new, popular minority-rights politics” in the mid-nineteenth century that laid the groundwork for minority mobilization in the century and a half to follow (2). In six compelling chapters, the book tracks transformations in who were the most vocal minorities arguing for a place in American democracy and how those minorities made the case for protecting themselves from majoritarian demands. Though this story is set in the antebellum period, it illuminates a problem that resonates throughout American history: what is the ideal relationship between democracy and majority rule?

The two decades at the heart of this study—the 1840s and 1850s—matter to this question because they follow the moment when, under the influence of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren (and in a marked turn away from Madisonian republicanism), Americans embraced majority rule as the essence of democracy. Or at least, a lot of them did. The other transformation that sets this study in motion is the rise of evangelical Protestant reform, a counterpoint to the rough-and-tumble of Jacksonian democracy. Volk labels Sabbatarians, temperance advocates, and other moral reformers as the vanguard of a “Christian moral majority.” These pious reformers, who included many erstwhile supporters of the defunct Federalist Party, both capitalized upon and tamed the majoritarianism of the new democracy in order to advance their own agendas. They argued that since most Americans were Christian, and most Christians worshipped on Sunday, American legislatures could and should criminalize working on Sunday. In the mid-nineteenth century, the temperance cause also had enough traction that popular sovereignty was a viable means to render a community dry. Christian temperance reformers pushed for “local option” laws, which allowed a simple majority of voters to ban liquor licensing in their communities.

The central figures of Volk’s book are a motley collection of Americans who questioned the power granted to majorities in the realms both of democratic politics and moral reform. They include “immigrants, entrepreneurs, drinkers, Jews, Catholics, Seventh Day Baptists, freethinkers, abolitionists, blacks, and others” (2). As this list suggests, those who called majoritarianism into question hardly constituted a singular front, and one of the challenges (and delights) of reading this book is trying to map out the relationships of the different sub-groups that, in various contexts, either embraced or opposed majority rule. Abolitionists, for instance, railed against majority rule when it was used to justify segregating schools and prohibiting interracial marriage, but they also tended to support the local option legislation that brought temperance to the ballot box. Liquor dealers in the 1850s insisted that prohibition was a majoritarian assault on their rights to property—an argument that put them at odds with abolitionists, since it strikingly echoed the complaints of Southern slaveowners who saw abolitionism as a popular affront to their own rights to (human) property.

How do the minority’s arguments change when public opinion is its ally rather than its enemy?

These disagreements among the various parties who asserted minority rights on behalf of their own causes raise questions about the sincerity of their anti-majoritarian arguments. Did these groups take up the minority rights argument primarily out of political expediency, or did they wholeheartedly embrace the representation of all minorities (including those with beliefs or commitments oppositional to their own)? Addressing this question more directly would have helped Volk to clarify whether “popular minority-rights politics” should be understood as a political strategy or political philosophy. He is quite clear that his “is not a story of ideological consistency or of a coherent movement for minority rights over majority rule” (4). Nor does he suggest that minority rights advocates, whatever their primary cause, were simply being capricious or strategic in their critiques of majoritarianism. Instead, he sees his myriad subjects as collectively, but not cooperatively, opening up new ways of thinking and talking about how limiting majority rule could permit Americans to fulfill their democratic dreams. In Volk’s account, whatever their driving cause, the moral minorities of the nineteenth century were looking forward rather than back: they “did not seek to oppose democracy or return to the elitist Federalist-style deferential politics. Instead, they saw a debate over different types of popular self-rule in which they favored its representative over its direct form. To them, it better ensured freedom within governments of popular sovereignty” (100).

As important as the who and the what in Volk’s story is the how. To protect their interests, minority groups forged new kinds of associations, ranging from civil rights organizations (such as the Legal Rights Association, formed by black New Yorkers to fight segregation) to industry interest groups (such as the various state and local liquor dealers’ associations that contested prohibition). These organizations encouraged their membership in active resistance, including African Americans attempting to board whites-only train cars and barkeepers maintaining their establishments in open defiance of anti-licensing laws. Recognizing the courts as the primary institution charged to protect the minority from the majority, moral minorities brought, and sometimes won, test cases. Building on the “moral suasion” tactics of nineteenth-century reform, they also appealed to public opinion via print culture and public gatherings.

Indeed, the role of public opinion is one topic that Volk might have explored in greater depth. In the course of the book, it serves as both the greatest obstacle for minorities and one of the most promising avenues for advancing their causes. Public opinion could be at the root of majoritarian oppression. Volk quotes Jacob Leeser, a German Jewish immigrant and vocal critic of Sunday laws, calling public opinion “a tyrant greater in power over the mind of men in a free country, than is the will of the Czar in his dominions” (58). Abolitionists decried popular racism, in the guise of public opinion, as the force that blocked the African American minority’s access to equal education and freedom of movement on trains and ferries. Yet anti-Sabbatarians, anti-prohibitionists, and abolitionists nonetheless continued to seek broader public support for their causes. As a political strategy, appealing to the public makes a lot of sense. But the question it raises for Volk’s study is: what does it mean for a “moral minority” when the majority comes to support its cause? How do the minority’s arguments change when public opinion is its ally rather than its enemy? At a moment when polls indicate that the American majority has tipped in support of same-sex marriage rights, this is a timely concern.

That Volk’s book stirs up questions like these is one of its many strengths. This is the rare book that is both deeply historical and strikingly urgent. Volk’s meticulous research in a wide range of primary sources provides a strong evidentiary basis for his claims while also offering vivid pictures of nineteenth-century political culture and social experience. Without forcing the past into a present-day frame, Volk points to antebellum dilemmas that resonate today regarding the nature of rights and representation in a heterogeneous democracy. This book is clever in its conception, rich in its research, wise in its argumentation, and eloquent in its writing. It deserves to be read by American historians of all stripes—and by anyone who has a stake in American democracy.

This article originally appeared in issue 15:4.5 (November, 2015).

Margot Minardi is associate professor of History and Humanities at Reed College. The author of Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (2010), she is currently working on a study of nineteenth-century peace reform.

Go To Ithaca: Part Two

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