Americans, J. M. Opal argues in his wonderful new book, have often been ambivalent about the concept of ambition. Typically, they believe that they have the unique “opportunity” or “right” to fulfill their dreams for advancement under the apparently liberating canopy of republican government and capitalist political economy (vii). Yet in times of crisis such as the present, Americans earnestly wonder whether ambition has gotten out of hand in the land of the free. Many ordinary citizens, facing the prospect of bankruptcy or unemployment during the current recession, have vented their outrage both at business executives who collected substantial bonuses after their speculations put the nation at risk and at politicians who voted to bail out powerful firms with stimulus funds. Few political or economic leaders, from the perspective of Main Street, seem particularly exercised about the inability of many Americans to realize the aspirations embedded in the “American Dream.” Therein lies a conundrum: Americans believe they have the right to be ambitious—theirs is a nation conceived in liberty—and yet the buoyant ambitions of the few often drown the hopes of the many. Pundits scouring the past for precedents to this economic meltdown and its consequences have rarely ventured earlier than the depression of the 1930s, so Beyond the Farm is refreshing because it shows that Americans’ ambivalence about ambition is intertwined not only in the culture of the market but in the very founding of their nation.

Opal makes significant contributions to the literature on “sensibility” during the Enlightenment and American Revolution, and connects the ideological impulses of the founding era to the development of an antebellum culture of capitalism in exciting new ways. He judiciously leavens a history of cultural keywords with compelling biographies of six ordinary New England strivers and interesting social histories of the towns in which they resided. He uses an impressive array of manuscript and published primary sources—ranging from town and school records, to newspapers and sermons, to diaries and personal memoirs—in order to support his findings.

Between the 1780s and the 1830s, Opal contends, Americans unleashed and participated in a “motivational revolution” (122) that emerged from their political revolution against Great Britain and eventually intersected with the economic revolution that shaped the ways they participated and thought about market engagement in the Early Republic. As the authors of the nation’s new constitution envisioned an “extended republic,” so too did ministers, teachers, storekeepers, and young people embark upon a “campaign” to convince rural Americans to link the concepts of “self and success, value and virtue, public need and personal worth” with the development of the new nation (ix, 49). This cosmopolitan sensibility stretched the bounded aspirations of households beyond their traditionally provincial contexts.

The resulting transformation of the meanings of ambition, coinciding with the making of the nation, elicited optimism and anxiety among individuals and families since it offered opportunities to the motivated but also unsettled the means for (and meanings of) advancement in a burgeoning market economy. Rural Americans worried about the ethical basis of this transformation, uncertain if they could reconcile this public spirit with the private goals of their households. Many of them keenly felt what this change had cost them and their families, and spurned cosmopolitan selfhood in later life. By the 1830s, though, as household ties continued to fray, Americans more confidently adopted a modern notion of the self—made through purely individualistic means in the market—and obscured its formation through familial, communal, and national ties.

In the eighteenth century, ambition—a passion widely attributed to elite men desperate to accumulate power—was a vice because it tended to attenuate and break social bonds. During the Enlightenment, however, the words “emulation” and “enterprise” began to do the cultural work necessary to refashion ambition into a moral virtue that might rival political and religious institutions in its ability to create and maintain social “harmony” (4). In the 1780s, promoters of the public spirit and the new federal constitution justified liberal and national goals by linking them with emulation and condemned local and provincial interests by connecting them with greed. Yet for rural American men who sought “independence” and “contentment” through “industry” and “competency,” liberal and national cosmopolitanism seemed superfluous to their lives, a direct affront to their power as patriarchs and a perversion of the true meanings of the Revolution (18). “Exciting emulation” among youth evoked disturbing visions of social disorder in locales where old men expected sons to “follow” in their footsteps (26). “Industry” should support households rather than worldly projects that might deplete a community’s precious resources. Personal and political independence—the guiding object of the Revolution—retained the allegiance of most country people during the nation’s “critical period.”

The impressive rate at which advocates for the liberal public spirit were able to wear away opposition to its precepts among provincial folk is striking. In the 1790s and 1800s, more and more young, white American men were beginning to think of propertied independence as “mere independence” (ix)—a disappointing status that spoke only to the goals of rural “contentment” and “competency” that had inspired their fathers during the Revolution. Some citizens, aiming outside their communities, sought commercial opportunities that would connect them with producers, consumers, and cosmopolitan sorts. Hardly serving themselves (they said), their “enterprise did not imply competition where one gained and another lost,” but rather suggested “a generous ethic of collective betterment” (53). Shareholders of corporations funded the construction of bridges and turnpike roads, facilitating commerce and redefining the meanings of the “public” and the “People” to highlight their “civic conscience” and create a more expansive notion of liberal citizenship in the new nation (54). Villages sprouted at key intersections, and on these “prosperous and promising, civil and civic” Main Streets, citizens united around extra-local commerce rather than through exchanging work and goods with each other (66).

Just as commerce propelled villagers to seek trading partners outside the community, the new liberal spirit motivated young men to redefine a number of terms in the nation’s “cultural vocabulary” (175). Young farmboys, whom disappointed fathers judged to be “lazy,” found opportunities to work hard and excel in the classrooms of private academies that embodied new definitions of the public more clearly than local district schools (103). End-of-term academy exhibitions offered public proof of students’ achievements and opportunities to cultivate a public voice. Students could marshal “industry” to achieve personal plaudits as well as household aims (124). Cosmopolitans condemned the “envy” of narrow-minded farmers who did not recognize the benefits of a wide-ranging curriculum and the steady habits that academies honed, overturning the meaning of a word previously associated with ambitious rural people taking an interest in worldly things (74). Praise in the classroom gave young men the confidence not only to seek “independence” on their own terms outside of the household, but to cast those quests as ones of their own making (90).

According to Opal, the criticism academies provoked shows that “ambition for and in the nation was not so much a controversial idea as a practical impossibility” within small farming communities (90). The public spirit remained mostly ephemeral in these places, unconnected to the reality that “the nation” these young men “sought to embody had small use for their aspirations” (127). Ambitious sorts were turning away from the disapproval of family members who would not countenance their social climbing outside their community and seeking fellowship with men whom “they did not know” (139). Cut adrift from provincial neighborhoods that would only validate local aspirations, young strivers sometimes failed to garner acclaim in a market and nation that was much less forgiving—and more ruthlessly competitive—than cosmopolitans admitted. Young men responded by finding solace in the older cultural vocabulary, reaffirming how “honest” and “industrious” they were, describing their ambitions as “duty” to their fellow man, and even hoping that they would merely earn their “independence” (136, 152, 146). These words were pale imitations of the brave new spirit invigorating the nation; the resurgence of this vocabulary’s traditional meanings suggests that many young men were in full retreat after being buffeted by the unforgiving currents of the market economy. Ambitious sorts, undeterred, tried to incorporate the liberalism of nation and market with the republicanism of patriarchal households, but an anxious few reacted to the development of a boom-and-bust economy after 1815 by overtly rejecting the optimistic cosmopolitanism of their youth.

Yet Opal sees 1815 as a “tipping point in the wider culture . . . from the goals of the household and local independence to those of individual and national distinction” (155). Many of Opal’s main characters—aspiring ministers, educators, and men of business who did not achieve fame outside of their local areas—would have been shocked to see their Victorian-era sons call themselves “self-made men” whose primary responsibility was to ensure the wellbeing of their wives and children in private, domestic havens from the market rather than to protect the public good in the community or the nation. Ambition had truly become a “national creed” that most Americans shared by the 1830s (180), but its meaning had changed once again. The concept of individualistic self-making remains a cherished, if ultimately beguiling, aspect of our national inheritance. That legacy, as Opal demonstrates, has obscured other viable meanings for and sources of ambition in the early national period. While it is still too early to tell, perhaps the recent recession will motivate Americans to modify their personal aspirations and reassess their nation’s ambivalent stance toward ambition. Opal’s superbly written and persuasively argued book might show them how.

Brian P. Luskey is assistant professor of history at West Virginia University and author of On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (2010).

In the early 1830s, Comanches and their allies went to war with their Mexican neighbors. Over the next fifteen years, southern plains Indians launched a series of organized and coordinated attacks on Mexican communities below the Rio Grande. Ranging as far south as San Luis Potosí, Indian warriors—often in parties of several hundred—killed and captured livestock, burned homes, destroyed food stores, took a few Mexicans captive, and killed thousands more. Brian DeLay argues that these actions taken by Comanches and their allies initiated a vicious cycle of Indian raids and Mexican reprisals that profoundly shaped the process, outcome, and consequences of the U.S.-Mexican War. Thus, War of a Thousand Deserts does much more than simply restore Native Americans to the historical narrative. In this provocative and ambitious book, DeLay situates southern plains peoples at the very center of the geopolitical transformation of North America in the mid-nineteenth century.

He does so by turning the common plot line of native response, resistance, and adaptation to Europeans on its head by “exploring the efforts of Mexicans and Americans to resist, cope with, and sometimes profit from the activities of Indians” (xviii). DeLay’s primary goal, however, is to explain how and why Indians pursued the course of action they did. He convincingly demonstrates that despite the assumptions of Mexican officials that their activities determined how Indians behaved, internal politics and relations with other native peoples dictated Comanche policy.

Comanches and their Kiowa and Kiowa Apache allies maintained a tenuous peace with northern Mexicans in the early nineteenth century because the residents of la comanchería faced a “defensive crisis” (79). What had made them wealthy—access to vast herds of bison and horses—also made them targets. As a result, Comanches and their allies battled constantly with Cheyennes and Arapahos in the north, and Osages and more recent arrivals like Cherokees, Shawnees, and Delawares in the east. Mexico directly benefited from this state of affairs. Besieged by Indian enemies and cut off from alternative markets, Comanches relied on northern Mexicans for reliable access to manufactured goods and stable markets for their hides and furs. More significantly, DeLay contends, endemic warfare with other native groups left Comanches and their allies with few resources and less inclination to wage war on Mexicans simultaneously.

Everything changed once Comanches secured peace with their Indian enemies. Between 1834 and 1847, southern plains Indians attacked Mexican communities with remarkable violence, destruction, and coordination. Other scholars have attributed the striking escalation of Comanche raiding during this period as a collection of discrete acts by individuals bent on acquiring wealth and status. DeLay is unconvinced.

Neither economic imperatives nor individual acquisitiveness, he persuasively argues, explain why “Comanches spent nearly as much energy punishing Mexicans as they did stealing from them” (104). In DeLay’s telling, the answer lies in an erosion of the traditional distinction between “raiding for plunder” and “waging war for revenge” (123). The two coalesced in the nineteenth century, plunging the borderlands into a reinforcing cycle of raiding and revenge. In essence, when native warriors were killed during a raid on a Mexican settlement, Comanche and Kiowa notions of honor demanded their deaths be avenged. War leaders used appeals to vengeance to galvanize communal support for another campaign and recruit additional fighting men from members of different communities, bands, and allied groups. With armies of several hundred warriors, Comanches could safely travel farther into the Mexican interior, where raiding opportunities were grander and more lucrative. There, more men were killed and the cycle continued with disastrous consequences for Mexico.

The intensification of Indian raids in the 1830s and 1840s devastated the economy in northern Mexico and depopulated the countryside. Nevertheless, Mexican officials did not envision the Indian threat in the north as a threat to the nation. Racked with political instability and fiscal crisis, they chose to devote their limited resources elsewhere. Northern Mexicans were left to fend for themselves as their pleas for help from the newly empowered central government went unfulfilled. As DeLay demonstrates, the actions of Comanches and their allies thus distanced frontier residents from their leaders in Mexico City who were unresponsive to their needs, exacerbating tensions between centralists and federalists in the first decades of Mexican independence.

The Comanche war in northern Mexico was significant for the United States as well. In the inability of the Mexican government to halt the raids and force Indians into submission, many Americans saw further proof of Mexican inferiority and yet another indication of American destiny to take Mexican territory as its own. Anglo-Americans, many believed, would triumph where Mexicans had failed, and they cast themselves as saviors of the Mexican North. But the “War of a Thousand Deserts” between Comanches and Mexicans did more than help justify the American conquest; it also helped facilitate it. The enemy U.S. soldiers encountered in northern Mexico was too demoralized, divided, and diminished in resources to launch a coherent defense against the American occupation.

Notions of their own racial superiority prevented Anglo-Americans from understanding the role Indian raids played in Mexico’s defeat. Americans were so confident in their own ability to pacify the Comanches and their allies that they pledged in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to return Mexicans held in captivity by those tribes and promised to prevent Indians from launching further raids across the border. Like their Mexican counterparts, however, U.S. officials were unable to prevent Indians from raiding Mexican settlements—above or below the new international border. An inadequate military presence and more pressing distractions far from the frontier stymied American efforts, and Indian raids intensified in the years following the war. When Mexicans demanded that the Americans live up to their treaty obligations and threatened to sue for damages, tensions between Mexico and the United States mounted. American policymakers relieved themselves of the troublesome responsibility of preventing Indian raids when they negotiated the Gadsden Purchase five years later.

DeLay begins and ends his book with a discussion of this provision in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo because it reminds us that “indigenous polities continued to shape the international contest for North America even into the mid-nineteenth century” (303). While War of a Thousand Desertsoffers important new insights into the history of native politics, the borderlands, and violence in the American West, and will likely occupy a prominent place in our discussions of the U.S.-Mexico War for years to come, DeLay’s greatest contribution may be the mounds of data published in the appendix. There he has catalogued more than 500 episodes of Comanche-Mexican violence between 1831 and 1848. Offering dates, locations, and demographic data on participants and victims that he culled from Mexican sources, it is a veritable treasure trove for future scholars.

In Passion Is the Gale (2008) Nicole Eustace traces the changing understanding of emotions in the personal and collective lives of colonial Pennsylvanians and shows that the American Revolution was truly an emotional upheaval.Common-place asked her: how can we study emotions in past societies, and what we do we learn about our affinities with and differences from eighteenth-century Americans by exploring their emotional expressions?

Many newspaper reporters admit that the requirement to ask nosey questions is one of the chief pleasures of the job. Historians, as a group, are even worse. We claim the right to snoop about in people’s most private papers—to review their wills, peruse their letters, even peep into their diaries—all as a matter of professional prerogative. Still, even unfettered access to personal records offers little guarantee that we can ever understand the interior lives of people of past times. When it comes to trying to uncover the history of emotion, scholars face a daunting task.

In one way we are fortunate: because the papers we pilfer belong to those long gone, we can usually tell how the story ends. Pondering origins and outcomes, weighing the relative influence of various causal factors and the comparative significance of different effects, we can take a more or less omniscient view of events. But our powers of observation founder when it comes to trying to discover things that went largely unremarked. How did historical actors feel about each other? Did they express their emotions to each other directly or obliquely to anyone else? If we do chance to find, say, an exchange of letters averring enmity or affection between the writers, how can we know whether to take such declarations at face value? Might societal expectations have provoked expressions of emotion that were not truly felt? Conversely, if we find no trace of recorded emotion does this mean people felt nothing? Or might it simply be a matter of scarce paper, sparse ink, and scant time?

Resistant to quantification or even to classification, emotions are a slippery topic for any scholar at any time, and particularly so for historians. While we’d love to be able to assess our historical subjects with a battery of psychological tests, we are unable to interrogate anyone directly. To write a history of emotion, then, requires that we clearly define what constitutes relevant evidence and then devise a reasonably reliable method of analyzing that data. Taking stock of the available sources of information about emotion in past times, we might come up with the following list: abstract discussions about which emotions people ought to privilege or repress (such as the directives contained in etiquette books or the reflections of philosophers and theologians); artistic representations of emotion (contained in anything from novels, to poems, to paintings); concrete depictions of the emotions observers attributed to their contemporaries (noted in everything from personal letters, to court records, to political pamphlets, to newspaper accounts); explicit records of particular emotional utterances by individuals (again, such as might be contained in court transcriptions, correspondence, or public speeches); and finally personal descriptions of emotional experiences (such as might arise in a private letter or diary). To succeed, a history of emotion must take all of these strands of evidence and attempt to braid them together.

With this in mind, I chose to undertake a history of emotion focused on a particular place and time: eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Confining myself to these chronological and geographical boundaries brought significant advantages. For starters, the period saw a huge upsurge of cultural interest in emotion, from the moral philosophers who posited that emotions provided the basis for moral decisions to the Protestant theologians who proposed that emotional awakenings were the basis of vital faith. Artists and writers of every stripe explored the role of emotion in aesthetic productions, giving rise to what would come to be known as the culture of sensibility, while the writers of conduct books laid down careful rules for the regulation of emotion. Meanwhile, colonial Pennsylvania, seat of the largest port city in British America and home to a religiously and ethnically diverse array of people, from Europeans of varied origins to free and enslaved Africans as well as members of Indian nations, offered the opportunity to scrutinize a dynamic set of competing approaches to emotion. Because I chose to restrict my efforts in terms of time and place, I had the opportunity to extend my survey to myriad historical sources and subjects.

Still, crucial decisions about how to find and select records of emotion can only advance us so far in the quest to understand emotion’s history. We still need to find the means to analyze the evidence we amass. And although we most want to know how emotions felt, we are left mostly with evidence of how they were encoded, in one way or another, through language. Since what we are really interested to recover is the substance, not just the utterance, of past emotions, we need some way to make sense of the distance between experience and expression, between the emotions people may have perceived internally and those they voiced externally.

Faced with this difficulty, I took comfort in the fact that many of my eighteenth-century subjects were also acutely aware of the problem. In colonial Pennsylvania, people not only confronted the age-old problem of how to put feelings into words but also became newly conscious of both their choice in the matter and the social implications inherent in their decisions. For example, a rising Pennsylvania merchant, John Smith, mused in his diary one day in 1747, “How painful and grievous my reflections upon this occasion were is more pungently felt than I am either able or willing to describe.” Wracked with doubts about his ability to win the hand of Hannah Logan, daughter of one of the province’s leading men, the 25-year-old Smith depicted his emotions as both “pungently felt” and as more than he was “able or willing to describe.” Emotional life posed a two-fold problem: Smith perceived both a separation between language and subjectivity and the necessity of regulating his efforts to bridge this gap. Remarkably similar concerns were cited by another man named Israel Pemberton, Jr., who after devoting more than a page of a 1749 letter to describing the “ardency of his affection” for his brother confessed to him that “such thoughts have often afforded me pleasant reflection, but this is the first time I have ever expressed them in this manner and I am now in doubt whether I shall not yet keep them to myself.” Reflections, from the painful to the pleasant, might be more easily felt than admitted, more easily experienced than explained.

I came to understand that evaluating the bare existence or final authenticity of any given emotion was more that I or anyone else could accomplish. What I could manage was to look for patterns in the expression and attribution of emotion, to note the words with which people expressed their feelings, to chart when, where, and by whom various emotions were invoked. Given the fact that emotion was a topic of enormous contemporary interest to my subjects, it seemed a fair inference that their choices about when and how to use emotion would carry with them real historic significance.

In the final analysis, the expression of emotion constitutes an exercise of power. In colonial Pennsylvania, elites generally, and men particularly, espoused the idea that genteel feelings provided the basis for civilized life, but that base passions could drive people, especially servile members of the lower orders, to despicable acts. Warnings against what one writer called devotion to the ‘‘momentary Gratification of…selfish and sordid Passions’’ were rife in colonial Pennsylvania. Exasperated masters were wont to ascribe every rebellious impulse of their servants to selfish and willful emotional excess, as in the case of the missing servant woman Elizabeth Ferrall, who was described in a runaway ad of 1762 as “red faced…very talkative, subject to Passion, and easily offended.”

Men and women alike sought to constrain their displays of angry passion and to cultivate their powers of sympathetic feeling. One Quaker leader described colonists’ emotional responsibilities in 1752 by reminding them to bear a “daily cross in opposition to sensual lust…enmity and wrath.’’ As the prominent Anglican physician Thomas Graeme counseled his daughter Elizabeth in 1762 (at a time when her emotional disturbances threatened to become physical ailments): “a cure …must be left to…the power your reason has over all your thoughts and inclinations, joined with the sympathy your friends partake with you.’’

Indians who threatened backcountry colonists were routinely castigated as furious savages driven by unbridled passions. When frontier warfare threatened in 1754, the Pennsylvania Gazette was filled with stories about extreme Indian anger. Polemicists used such descriptions to argue for military preparations in the Quaker colony, as when one writer, after laboriously recounting Indian “cruelties too shocking to be described,” asserted that the only way to “be safe from their Fury” would be to build a “Sort of Fort in every Parish.”

However, given that passions were intimately linked to the capacity for action, they could never be entirely dispensed with. As colonial British Americans endured a moment of acute imperial crisis with the coming of the Seven Years War, the motivating power of the passions to stir the will to act came to seem ever more desirable. Looking to passionate emotion as a source of strength, colonists such as 18-year-old Joseph Shippen (soon to become an officer in the Pennsylvania militia) sought justifications for their stance. “All Passions in general are planted in us for excellent Purposes in human Life,” Shippen wrote in a commonplace book in 1750. “Stoical Apathy is not a human Virtue.” Shippen then went on to quote lines from Alexander Pope: “On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail / Reason the card,[compass] but passion is the gale.”

In competition with Quakers and pietistic sects, in concert and in conflict with local Indian nations, many Pennsylvania men pivoted in their attitudes towards passionate emotions over the course of the eighteenth century. By the close of the Seven Years war in 1763, colonists could declare proudly that memory of their victory should be preserved as “a lasting monument of the Wrath of injured Britons.” Still, individual women continued to avoid direct expressions of anger as unseemly. Likewise, the emotion was seldom imputed to them. Angry emotion thus emerged as a particularly masculine source of strength, one to which Euro-American men would make increasingly exclusive claims.

Indeed, as popular embrace of angry passions evolved alongside continued communal devotion to sympathetic feelings, the polar opposite of the critiques once leveled at Indians would be aimed at enslaved Africans and their descendants. Those held in bondage were represented as naturally spiritless, so emotionally apathetic that they could never stir themselves to embrace liberty. Despite the fact that roughly one out of ten households in the province contained enslaved Africans, the master class seldom made any record of their emotions, never once depicting blacks as loving and carefully avoiding any mention of anger. If the emotions of the enslaved attracted attention at all, they were most often said to display a “down look,” a phrase suggesting that emotional dejection and legal and social subjection naturally went together.

With the onset of the American Revolution, the “spirit of liberty” would come to be claimed as the unique legacy of Euro-Americans, who attributed to themselves alone the ability to achieve an ideal balance of emotion, the better to embrace the ideals of freedom. Consisting of a heady blend that included civic love, mighty anger, and communal sympathy, the “spirit of liberty” was to mediate between the debased insensibility imputed to the enslaved and the excessive spirit ascribed to Indians while also avoiding the ineffectual effeminacy by then associated with English civility. According to the revolutionary code of feeling, love was unknown among ‘‘natural slaves,’’ mercy and sympathy were absent in ‘‘savages,’’ and anger was admirable only in men. The new emphasis on spirit at once opened a rhetorical door to equality for free white men and effectively closed it to Africans, Indians, and women.

Still, the most socially radical of the American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine, would ultimately move beyond this circumscribed notion. In place of praising Euro-American men’s unique “spirit,” Paine promoted the argument that all human beings share the same emotions. His famous call to action in the best-selling pamphlet Common Sense appealed to the “passions and feelings” of all “mankind.” This universalizing position posited that every person had the same capacity for feeling and passion alike. Paine’s invocation of emotion provided crucial support for emerging beliefs in the moral equality of all people and thus for the development of theories of natural rights. It promised to make the American Revolution truly “revolutionary.”

If John Smith, with his musings on “pungent feelings,” got me started in thinking about the power of emotion, Joseph Shippen gave me the lines from Pope that would ultimately sum up the significance of emotion in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Passion was a “gale” force blowing in fierce social and political changes that would affect every element of personal and public life in revolutionary America.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/

Each year, thousands of historical documents detailing the history of the United States are added to the wealth of material already available on the Internet, offering scholars unprecedented access to resources long sequestered in distant libraries and musty archives. And yet, even as the Internet has become an indispensable tool for teachers and researchers, the democratization of knowledge it represents can be bewildering, and even intimidating, in its breadth and complexity. Some organizations, lacking money or expertise, post documents from their collections to the Web with little or no context, collections covering related topics are often not linked together, and the methods used for organizing those collections are as varied as the materials they make available to the public. Under such circumstances, the labor required to make effective use of Web-based historical resources can be daunting. Digital History, a Website created by historian Steven Mintz and sponsored by the Department of History and the College of Education at the University of Houston, seeks to ease that burden by drawing together materials from several different sites and organizing them in a variety of ways that teachers of American history should find useful.

The list of materials available either on or through the Digital History Website is impressive. The core of the Website’s collection comprises over 400 documents secured through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. These documents cover the full range of the American past, from pre-Columbian societies to the present, and represent a wide variety of voices and experiences. Links to more than 600 images, dozens of audio files of speeches, over 150 landmark Supreme Court cases, newspaper articles from the New York Times archives, maps, and a database of annotated links to other collections on the Web are also included. All of the documents are tied together through a smoothly operating Google search engine embedded in the site. Digital History’s real strength, however, lies in the creative and varied ways in which the site’s creators have organized their materials to suit equally the varied needs of history teachers.

Digital History proceeds from the premise that the best way to spur students’ interest in the study of history is to let students actually do history. In the section of the site entitled “eXplorations, for example, the site’s creators have constructed two dozen “inquiry-based interactive modules” that link primary sources together around a set of thorny historical problems, and encourage students to work through those sources in an effort to draw their own conclusions. “John Brown: Hero or Terrorist,” for instance, links correspondence between John Brown and abolitionist luminaries, images, eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, audio files of contemporary songs, and court testimony to immerse students in John Brown’s world. Follow-up questions help them to explore both the historical significance of Brown’s life and the meaning of his legacy. All of the documents are thoroughly contextualized both through annotation and through links to an online textbook that provides a broad background for everything on the site. Each “interactive module” also includes a tab under which teachers might find lesson plans and suggestions for varied approaches. Digital History then extends the utility and richness of these documents by taking advantage of the flexibility of the Web-based environment, recycling them in focused essays on a variety of topics related to political, legal, economic, and social history. Many of the documents that appear in “John Brown,” for instance, reappear in repackaged, cross-referenced form, linked to essays, exhibits, and lesson plans on slavery, abolition, and the Civil War. Another section of the Website allows teachers and students to use the documents and images to build Web exhibits that can then be downloaded directly or e-mailed for later use. Still another page offers broader essays, again linked to Digital History’s wealth of primary sources, on Ethnic America, Film and History, Private Life, and Science and Technology. Finally, a section entitled “History Reference Room” provides users with links to an encyclopedia of American history, a glossary of historical terms, writing guides, and historical societies.

While Digital History describes itself as a resource for teachers at all levels, the site’s principle audience will be teachers and students in more advanced U.S. history classes. The emphasis throughout the site is on general knowledge, and the materials, in terms of sources, annotations, essays, and particularly the online textbook, are clearly more suited to the issues and ideas normally presented in freshman university surveys or advanced-placement high school courses than to younger students. By the same token, the emphasis on general knowledge, and on narrative, tends to crowd out deeper discussions of historiographical controversy and recent, cutting-edge scholarship. The online exhibit entitled “America’s Reconstruction,” for instance, relies heavily on, and refers those interested in further study to, a scholarly work now more than twenty years old. More recent scholarship has substantially complicated the field in the last two decades, and while a Web-based format offers an ideal environment for incorporating recent developments, Digital History’s creators have chosen to move in a different direction. In a similar vein, the online textbook, while providing helpful background, replicates the inflexibility of the traditional textbook format both in its necessarily synthetic nature and in its inevitable obsolescence.

As with most educational Websites, Digital History is a work in progress. Some promised sections are still under construction. Others have been allowed to slip into a state of disrepair. Many links, particularly those to outside Websites, are dead or lead to sites that now require registration and administrative passwords. The site’s creator, Steven Mintz, recently left the University of Houston to join the history department at Columbia University, and his departure likely explains the site’s slip in quality. Digital History is an ambitious Website with great potential. It would be a shame if it were allowed to languish.

When Philip Claiborne Gooch traveled to Paris in the late 1840s to study medicine, he likely did not expect that he would ever sit on the throne of King Louis Philippe. Yet soon after his arrival, French citizens rose up against their government. Subsequent uprisings occurred in the German and Italian states and in Hungary, spurred partly by crop failures and poor economic conditions. The last was led by Louis Kossuth, who became 1848’s most famous revolutionary. In Paris, the king was deposed, and Gooch helped storm the Tuileries Palace. Although his fellow Americans did not share his experience, many shared his ardor. Back home, populations followed the revolutions’ developments and honored their leaders by rechristening locales such as Kossuth County, Iowa; Lamartine, Arkansas; and Garibaldi, Oregon. Men grew Kossuth-esque beards. Americans learned the polka, a dance said to reject European high culture. And when Francis Bowen wrote critically of the Hungarians in theNorth American Review, his stridency cost him a professorship at Harvard.

In Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism, Timothy Mason Roberts explores the reasons why Americans’ reactions to these “distant” conflicts were so fervent. A few observers like Bowen saw them with some objectivity. But like other foreign conflicts, Americans viewed the events of 1848 thorough the lens of their own concerns, imbuing them with great importance.

In 1848, for example, many Americans likened the uprisings to their own revolution. Most were unfamiliar with Eastern Europe, and the revolutions—several in number, and each with its own dynamics—made comprehension still more difficult to attain. But as Roberts explains, Americans sought “analogies in American history to help them understand overseas events” (7). Parallels were imperfect; one could not shoehorn 1848 into 1776 without distorting European developments. (Americans’ romanticized perception of their own revolution added yet another wrinkle.) But schoolchildren learned that Kossuth was akin to George Washington, and Italians imitated the Boston Tea Party when they boycotted Austrian tobacco. Suggestions that the revolutionaries were following America’s script magnified the conflicts’ importance in American eyes, because they became indicators of the United States’ global impact. It is difficult to overstate contemporary belief in this connection. When he visited the U.S., Kossuth was presented with a lock of Washington’s hair and bullets from the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The uprisings revived the debate as to what the U.S. role should be in such cases: Should America serve solely as a model republic for others to emulate, or should it involve itself directly in their struggles? The debate was as old as the French Revolution, and there were ardent partisans on both sides. James Monroe had pledged in 1823 that the U.S. would remain apart from European quarrels, and in 1849 Zachary Taylor invoked Washington’s warning against entangling alliances. Yet many, like James Buchanan, believed that Americans could not be “indifferent spectators to the progress of liberty” (23). Some U.S. officials recognized the new European governments before receiving permission to do so. This zeal led the Austrian minister to the U.S. to muse, Why do Americans concern themselves with Hungarian sovereignty, when their own nation has slavery?

The answer, of course, was that these inconsistent stances served their interests, and overwhelmingly, self-interest determined how Americans perceived and reacted to foreign events. For this reason, although Distant Revolutions addresses foreign-relations debates, its usefulness extends well beyond them. Some Americans, for example, saw the European struggles as advancing both republicanism and Protestant Christianity. TheMethodist Quarterly Review suggested that revolutions occurred in locations where the Protestant Reformation had stalled. At a time when Know-Nothings were suggesting that Catholics could not be good republicans, the Pope himself was forced out of Rome. Others saw an even greater significance. A writer for the Louisville Baptist Banner saw the revolutions as “but preparatory to the millennial reign of Christ” (110).

The uprisings influenced the intensity and character of American reform. Many reformers believed that their goals and accomplishments paled in comparison to the work of European revolutionaries and consequently changed their approaches. In the North Star, Frederick Douglass noted that France’s new justice minister had addressed a nonwhite delegation as “Citizens, friends, brothers!” (86). Roberts makes a convincing case that the European revolutions emboldened American reformers and moved them to cooperate with each other by seeing themselves as part of a community of reform. The dry lobby began to push for complete abstinence from alcohol—rather than mere temperance—and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott added women’s suffrage to their goals. Margaret Fuller, an ardent feminist, embraced abolition, and Douglass took time from his abolitionist activities to attend Stanton and Mott’s convention in Seneca Falls.

Because Americans’ reactions to the revolutions jibed with their self-interest, their support for the agitators’ goals and policies was not constant. Many who applauded the advent of universal male suffrage in parts of Europe opposed France’s establishment of “public works” for the unemployed of Paris. Although Horace Greeley cheered the latter effort, others decried the advance of socialism and warned that its spread to America would lead to interracial marriage. The notion that foreign trends could migrate to America—for good or ill—was prevalent. Slave owners tended to be more enthusiastic about Germany’s and Hungary’s rebellions than France’s, in part because the former groups had no enslaved populations that they might emancipate. Overall, Southern support for the revolutionaries was fleeting. The instability that resulted from the revolutions was bad for the international cotton market, and many recoiled from reminders that challenges to authority could succeed, at least for a time.

Europe’s revolutionaries failed to bring about peaceful political change. This result disappointed some Americans, but others saw it as underscoring just how remarkable their own revolution had been and, therefore, as proof of American exceptionalism. George Bancroft, who was penning his History of the United States,contrasted American serenity with European chaos. William Stiles, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Austria at the time, concluded that Europeans were “unfit for the light of freedom” (36). Kossuth was the most celebrated foreign visitor to the U.S. since Lafayette, but as Roberts notes, his actual experience more closely paralleled that of Citizen Genêt. He drew large crowds, but Americans’ enthusiasm cooled as he pressed for tangible support for his cause. In 1852 the nation elected Franklin Pierce, who opposed U.S. involvement in European wars.

Problems with Roberts’ work are minor. The introduction is a bit overwhelming, as he outlines the numerous revolutions, but this is perhaps unavoidable. The title is somewhat misleading; to an extent, Americans did regard the Europeans’ actions as challenging American exceptionalism, but this is only part of the story. Distant Revolutions’ importance lies in its demonstration of how Americans absorbed—one could say “spun”—foreign events. If the revolutions went well, they demonstrated the U.S.’s growing influence. If they failed, the U.S. was exceptional. If France emancipated West Indian slaves, American emancipation became more likely. This looking-glass approach permeates the work.

Distant Revolutions is an important addition to the canon of antebellum-American history. For scholars of foreign relations, it demonstrates the depth and breadth of public interest in foreign events and the ways in which domestic concerns and culture shaped Americans’ perceptions of the world. It also provides an interesting juxtaposition to the era’s filibuster movements; as in those scenarios, many American officials found it difficult to remain neutral in thought, and sometimes in action. And the work reminds all historians of the era that American leaders often had foreign events in mind as they made decisions at home. For example, founders of the Republican Party saw the abolition of slavery as helping to make their nation a true “exemplar of liberal democracy” (185) and thus clearly distinguish it from European countries, in which aristocrats had prevented the founding of republics. Distant Revolutions is an intriguing work, well told and with an impressive use of sources. By demonstrating the degree to which domestic and foreign policies influenced each other, Roberts’ work enhances understanding of both.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Elizabeth Kelly Gray is an associate professor of history at Towson University. She is currently writing a book-length study of the use and abuse of opiates in nineteenth-century America.

American cities in the early nineteenth century were burgeoning, noisy, odorous, and often chaotic places. Dell Upton’s Another City captures the texture of city life in the new republic by exploring Americans’ attitudes toward their changing cities during that time. Throughout his study, Upton maintains that it was their actual encounter with the city that permitted American urbanites to develop their sense of themselves as individuals and as republican citizens. In doing so, they also created new kinds of urban spaces that helped to foster these new roles (1).

This is a different kind of urban history. Occasionally challenging and often complicating prevailing interpretations, Upton aims to bridge existing studies of urban life that have tended to emphasize socioeconomic structure, political ideology, physical and demographic growth, changing urban and aesthetic ideologies, or changing economic practices. Instead, he attempts to capture something of the messiness and multidimensionality of historical change by focusing on how the actual experience of inhabiting and making cities shaped people’s sense of selfhood and their notions of republican citizenship. Another City builds upon previous studies by Billy G. Smith, Gary Nash, Shane White, Mary Ryan, Thomas Doerflinger, and Sam Bass Warner, but it also aims to offer what Upton calls an intellectual history of the urban environment that is neither a linear narrative nor a comprehensive survey of urban or architectural history. Instead, Upton employs a series of case studies to reveal the ways in which the antebellum city was lived by its inhabitants.

Antebellum Philadelphia and New Orleans constitute the book’s primary geographic foci, although Upton also turns to evidence from other cities such as New York to round out the story. His sources range widely, and include architectural drawings, maps, contemporary travel accounts, diaries, trade cards, advertisements, letters, local ordinances, legal proceedings, and contemporary prints and paintings. While Upton includes architecture in his analysis, he draws from the entirety of the city environment: the buildings, the streets and infrastructure, and even the urban atmosphere. Because appropriate self-presentation was especially important to many nineteenth-century urban Americans, and appearance and action were thought to constitute accurate indexes of character, Upton also explores the experiences and responses of antebellum city dwellers to one another. “We are part of the cultural landscape,” the author reminds us, and any history of the urban landscape must also consider the bodies as well as the habits of mind of its builders and inhabitants (14).

Another City includes three main parts plus an introduction and conclusion. Part I examines the sensory encounter with early nineteenth-century cities. Part II explores the various large-scale projects for developing, embellishing, and reordering American cities. The final section analyzes the legal and political battles over the use of the public domain for private economic purposes, and the cultural conflicts over the political and social use of streets and urban open spaces. The book is well illustrated with wonderful images, some in color and most drawn from contemporary sources.

Antebellum American cities changed constantly, and were scenes of “perpetual ruin and repair” (20). As these cities mushroomed in size and population, they tended to grow in a bell or T-shape, with a more expansively developed section along the waterfront. These were “walking cities” that one could navigate easily on foot. Earlier American cities were not rigidly segregated by socioeconomic status or function, but by the end of the eighteenth century some neighborhoods in larger cities already demonstrated distinctive social characteristics. By the early 1800s, some occupational, social, and economic sorting had already begun to occur, and wealthier people started moving away from their workplaces. While developers erected hundreds of new houses, poorer people continued to endure crowded conditions in smaller dwellings, just as they always had. As cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans grew larger and more complex, urban leaders sought to regulate noise, address issues of waste, relocate cemeteries from more developed urban areas, and build new kinds of buildings set within street arrangements that would promote civilized and urbane forms of interaction. In doing so, they affected both the form of antebellum cities and the attitudes that Americans held toward them (3).

Upton highlights the ways that antebellum cities spawned complex sensory experiences. These odors, sights, and sounds constituted the often unintentional byproducts of human activity that were nonetheless part of everyday urban life: roaming animals and their excrement, rotting refuse, soot from industrial smoke, the stench from privies, and the general urban cacophony created by cries from street vendors, wooden and metal wheels rattling on stone-paved streets, and the noises from widespread small-scale shop manufacturing. The sensory intrusions that other people created were the ones that annoyed antebellum city dwellers the most. Intrusions that threatened individual comfort prompted many urban inhabitants to scrutinize their neighbors more closely; such intrusions were perceived as encroachments upon spatial order as well as disruptions of social relations (53).

This sensory overload fueled efforts by urban leaders to map, systematize, and regulate many aspects of city life. Periodic outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera, coupled with early ideas about disease such as miasma theory, which linked illness to atmospheric corruptions, prompted civic leaders to search for those environmental qualities that might foster such epidemic conditions. They eventually linked disease outbreaks with particular parts of the city where certain kinds of people were concentrated (61). Urban leaders also sought to regulate noise. Many more refined city dwellers found some urban noises to be “wicked and vulgar,” often associating them with crime, danger, and the “inept or misplaced speech” that characterized the lower rungs of society (75).

The clamor of changing American cities also made elite urban dwellers acutely conscious of the way they and others comported themselves. Social power in antebellum America depended on how one carried oneself in space as well as how well one spoke. A genteel bearing enabled elite urbanites to define their own identities while also setting themselves apart from the rest of the population. Although the fear of crime drove many to concern themselves with determining exactly who the individuals on crowded urban streets were, and categorizing where these strangers may have fit into the broader socioeconomic universe, elite urbanites were just as concerned about where they stood within the social hierarchy.

Along with the efforts to regulate noise and behavior, there also arose a powerful desire to create a regularized city, fueled by what Upton terms the republican spatial imagination—a way of thinking about the city that was undergirded by the drive toward scientific classification and systematic thinking—and that ultimately helped to reshape the American city by 1820. The republican spatial imagination was adopted most fervently by the mercantile elite, who seized on the notion of the grid as the basis for comprehending the spatial qualities of social, political, and economic order. Those who shared in this new urban vision “were impelled to reform and reorganize both cityscape and society into a single, centralized, rational order-a systematic landscape” that valued the maintenance of vistas, equal access, and open lines of sight (124, 134). Upton explores the way this republican spatial imagination played out in various realms: through the development of commercial arcades and changing business practices, in the emergence of new types of cemeteries that articulated selfhood and personhood, and with the development of new therapeutic reform institutions such as penitentiaries.

Legal battles and cultural conflicts over the use of public domain threw this republican spatial imagination into stark relief. Differing attitudes toward the use and development of the waterfront clashed in New Orleans, where a lengthy legal battle raised questions about who owned this area, what constituted public space, and who had the rights to it. Similar conflicts over the private appropriation of public space erupted in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the antebellum years. The control of public space was also contested in everyday life. While the street was the primary arena for public processions and celebrations, it was also a masculine realm. In the early 1800s, cities began to outfit some of their public squares as promenading grounds for the genteel. By the mid-nineteenth century, antebellum cities offered “a dual, gendered urban landscape. The masculinized world of the streets, the docks, and the financial district was opposed to the feminized world of the respectable home and the gentrified public space” (333).

By mid-century, a significant change had occurred, and most urban elites who had imagined a systematized republican city “had begun to abandon their project of optimistic repression. Occasionally they questioned their right even to conduct it” (336). In a brief conclusion, Upton notes that vestiges of the republican spatial imagination still resonate today, for we still debate who has the right to do what in public, and who should decide.

This is a marvelous book—imaginative, engaging, and deeply researched. Another City not only brings the antebellum American city to life with bold immediacy and thoughtful analysis, but its author’s original approach also forces us to reconsider the many ways in which individuals relate to their urban environments.

A Government Out of Sight is a very important book. Brian Balogh, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, argues that since revolutionary times Americans have had a paradoxical relationship with the national government. On the one hand, Americans developed a penchant for looking to their national government to build and maintain the social and economic pillars of society. On the other hand, Americans demanded that the structures of this national state remain as “inconspicuous” as possible (379). This “mystery of national authority in nineteenth-century America can be resolved,” he concludes, “once we recognize that although the United States did indeed govern differently than its industrialized counterparts, it did not govern less. Americans did, however, govern less visibly.” Thus, in A Government Out of SightBalogh sets three ambitious tasks for himself: to ascertain the origins of this unique configuration of national authority; to explain what this national government accomplished; and to explain the ideological and historiographical consequences of this ‘less visible’ government for American politics and society. On each of these fronts, readers will find Balogh’s arguments to be clear, deeply-researched, provocative, and ultimately successful. By elucidating the existence, contributions, and ideological ramifications of the national government in American history, Brian Balogh has written a remarkable and powerful book that will become required reading for students of American politics. That said, Balogh’s unwillingness to engage questions of agency, motives, and power will provoke much debate and reflection about the value of solving this “mystery of national authority.”

Balogh approaches the question of national authority in the nineteenth-century United States with an unabashed presentism, presumably in order to find an audience with politicians and political scientists. He views A Government Out of Sight as being in dialogue with the recent, rising tide of scholarship in the American Political Development school of thought, which seeks to understand politics by delving “into the intricacies of political conflict and governmental operations in particular historical settings,” according to leading expositors Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, in The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, cited passage at 3). Thus Balogh opens his book by declaring that, “The stories we absorb about the past help frame the way we see ourselves today and influence our vision of the future.” Indeed, he believes that “fundamental assumptions about the national government’s origins and history” have fostered an unproductive political debate about ‘big’ versus ‘small’ government in which both the left and right cling to a mythical history of a stateless past (1-2). By illustrating that the national government was, in fact, a central force in shaping the American past—that it “influenced the life chances of millions of Americans” (2)—Balogh seeks a pragmatic, historical third way, above the fray of partisan political ‘triangulation.’ Balogh’s history is intended to provide a narrative of a usable past: conservatives should appreciate that their own political heritage includes clarion calls for active government, while liberals should relinquish their tendency to deride non-bureaucratic, associational modes of governing.

Balogh’s book tells a rich, nuanced historical story about the growth and transformation of a common “vision” of government and government power in the early United States. The story begins during colonial times, when North American colonists, seized by revolutionary republicanism, came to understand politics and the polity as the foundational structural force in their society. Seen most visibly in the widespread tradition of local self-government, politics and political institutions anchored social life in eighteenth-century America. After the American Revolution, this faith in public power culminated in a “developmental vision” that was embodied in and echoed by the Constitution of 1788 (69). Drawing upon recent work by Max Edling and Robin Einhorn, Balogh contends that this vision “created the potential for a powerful central government” that could act independently of state and local governments, but one that much more often “would tread lightly in domestic policy” (57). Above all, this form of government was characterized by its hybrid nature: it was public in form but frequently private in substance, as seen through Alexander Hamilton’s financial system of government institutions conjoined with “the self-interest of wealthy individuals” (57); it was national in name but local in capacity, as national officers lived in the communities they regulated. Debates about how to construct this form of government during the 1780s (and the actual operation of the national government in the following decade) augured “the subtle evolution of national consciousness,” which cemented the bonds between the people and the young United States (91). The rise of a national consciousness reconstituted Americans’ developmental vision on a national scale, as people became accustomed to looking to government to solve social and economic problems.

But the “polity-dominated conception of society was rudely challenged from the start” by ascendant liberalism (37). Although Balogh accepts this familiar narrative about the shift from republicanism to liberalism, he adds a new and important twist. Liberalism may have destroyed republicanism, he argues, but it did so without shattering the governing institutions created by republicanism. Even after the (alleged) liberal triumph, the flexible, hybrid government that arose from the experience of the late eighteenth century remained intact. And during the early republic, the American people continued to look to the national government to solve their problems, especially through the public land system and various internal improvement projects. But American appeals for government action were framed in terms of requests by liberal, self-interested individuals, rather than the older, public logic of republicanism. By the 1820s, as the “rationale” for public action became “the self-interested payoff that such public undertakings would deliver,” the national government itself receded from most Americans’ conception of government (149). The developmental vision had lost sight of the national government, and Americans would too.

It is in tracing this paradoxical and simultaneous emergence and disappearance of the national government in American political consciousness that Balogh makes his greatest contribution. Indeed, even as Balogh suggests the waning of national government in political culture, he draws upon the work of leading historians of nineteenth-century politics—Richard John on the postal system, Daniel Feller on the General Land Office, Andrew Cayton on territorial governments, William Novak on the common law—to illustrate how federal policy consolidated the republic from a loose alliance of states into a nation-state. The federal government engineered a communications revolution. The federal government killed, dispossessed, and displaced Indians. The federal government sliced and diced the western territories and parceled out lands to white settlers. The federal government, through the judiciary, guided the rise of a national system of law and national standards for commerce. But, Balogh writes, “in all of these venues, public action reinforced private activity that promoted the general welfare but limited central administration” (276). As a result of the obscurity of the federal government, “for most Americans living in the mid-nineteenth century it was not government, but rather civil society, that forged the nation” (277). The story of the American frontier best illustrates this interplay of statecraft and ideology. Even as the federal government fought wars against Indians, surveyed land, and conducted land sales throughout the West, the federal government disappeared from the popular understanding of the frontier. Thus the story of the West became one of rugged, self-interested individuals, rather than one of an active federal government.

The surge of nationalism that accompanied the Civil War only temporarily changed things. Balogh echoes Richard Bensel’s claim that public, wartime institutions disappeared as the emergence of a national marketplace and a national belief in the inviolability of the market generated harsh criticism of governmental ‘intrusion’ into private life (299). As with the story of the frontier, Balogh’s interpretation of constitutional law in the late nineteenth century points to the dynamic of an active government constructing institutions, while those institutions are obscured by anti-statist ideology. As the national judiciary erected the foundations of a national law of corporations and transactions, the way it did so obscured the constitutive role of government.

All of this brings us within sight of “the Twentieth-Century State.” The architects of the New Deal, Great Society, and even the Reagan Counterrevolution faced certain “patterns” of government that, Balogh concludes, emerged during the long nineteenth century. First, Americans have always looked to government to solve their problems, but the government they look to is simultaneously flexible, public, private, local, and national, rather than monolithic, “visible, [and] centralized.” Second, Americans will only tolerate “bureaucracy” during times of national crisis, and especially wartime. Third, national taxes are a dangerous “third rail” of national government. Finally, political development is almost always based in legal development and the action of courts. Taken together, these patterns mean that in America, national government functions “largely out of sight” (382).

Some will find Balogh’s conclusion too schematic in tone—a stark departure from the careful, almost thick description of policy and governance that precedes it. This shift in tone occurs periodically throughout the book, almost invariably when Balogh attempts to grab the attention of policymakers and political scientists. This is one of a few minor problems that deserve mention. Balogh relies quite self-consciously on secondary sources, which in itself is not problematic. Rather, one senses that he has occasional difficulty managing the sheer number of historiographical threads from legal, business, Western, and political history that appear throughout A Government Out of Sight. The result is that subsections of chapters appear superfluous or forced, such as the discussion of lighthouses as an “uncontested national program” during the early republic (217-18). Digressions of that nature make earlier chapters look far weightier than the brief treatments of the Civil War and Progressive Era, leaving the altogether ironic impression that Balogh—a historian of the twentieth-century U.S.—has slighted more recent history for the Revolutionary and early republican past.

Scholars of the Revolutionary era may also quibble with Balogh’s reading of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 27, which supplies this volume with its cryptic title. For Balogh, Hamilton desired a state that was leviathan-like and thus preeminently visible to the citizenry. The future Secretary of the Treasury denigrated what he called “a government continually at a distance and out of sight” (3). “What Hamilton failed to anticipate,” Balogh concludes, “was a national government that was often most powerful … when it was hidden in plain sight” (4).

I’m not so sure Hamilton failed to anticipate this at all. Hamilton uses Federalist No. 27 to discuss the problem of political coercion in a large republic. He believed that governments that rule solely by force ultimately fail. Thus the federal government must, upon its formation, insert itself into localities. In this way, Hamilton’s federal government would be ‘visible,’ or ‘in sight’—at least at first. But this government, once planted, would quietly take root. As Hamilton himself wrote, “the more the operations of the national authority are intermingled in the ordinary exercise of government, the more the citizens are accustomed to meet with it in the common occurrences of their political life, the more it is familiarized in their sight and to their feelings … the greater will be the probability that it will conciliate the respect and attachment of the community.” And the more the national government was “familiarized in their sight,” “the less it will require the aid of the violent and perilous expedients of compulsion” (Alexander Hamilton, “Number XXVII,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick [New York: Penguin Classics, 1987], 203). In short, as the federal government became more naturalized, and blended or “intermingled” into people’s lives, the less it would be a source of popular discontent. Is this so different from Balogh’s federal state, “hidden in plain sight”?

Balogh’s reading of Hamilton’s Federalist essay does not change very much about his overall argument. Nor does it detract from his immense achievement in writing this book. A Government Out of Sight unequivocally establishes that there was a national state in the early United States, that the state achieved a great deal in its own right, and that it should loom much larger within the main currents of American historiography. But returning to Federalist No. 27 does raise the question of for whom this new state was to work, which “citizens” it sought to “conciliate,” and why. Balogh is not necessarily interested in this question because, in all fairness, it goes beyond his scope of inquiry. Thus among the most recurrent language in this book is discussion of what “Americans wanted,” what “Americans sought,” and what “Americans preferred.” But Balogh does not interrogate just who these “Americans” were. Balogh does not shy away from any of the federal government’s more dubious exertions of power, such as the Trail of Tears (210-11). And readers will quite correctly draw the conclusion that white settlers agitated for and benefited from this and all Indian displacement policies, and that the Indians suffered immeasurably from these same policies. But in Balogh’s project, which sets out to uncover the operations of power, there is little room for winners and losers, for the subjects and objects of power, and for the beneficiaries and victims of government action.

This would not be nearly so important if not for Balogh’s conclusion, which reads: “It is time to challenge the deeply held conviction that, historically, Americans have eschewed government intervention at the national level. That is why history matters. Americans must reclaim the national government’s critical role in enabling nineteenth-century American expansion, stimulating economic development, and managing international relations” (399). Balogh’s book proves that American citizens turned early and often to the national government. But “reclaiming” the national government’s role in settling the West, creating a national marketplace, and administering foreign policy seems a much more complicated endeavor—one that will require historians to figure out who these “Americans” were—and to sort out the historical ramifications of the national government’s achievements. It certainly is not an impossible historical project, as A Government Out of Sight teaches us precisely where and what to look for. But for those like Balogh, who seek an antidote to our own political ills, I’m not so sure they will like what they find.

Alison Games’ new book, The Web of Empire, consists of a loose-knit set of chapters about English overseas travel, long-distance trade, and colonial expansion in the early modern period. Most of the events recounted fall between the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and the Restoration. Games selects a series of case studies, in the following order: “educational travelers” on the Continent, merchants in the Mediterranean, the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe at the Mughal court, the English trade mission in early seventeenth-century Japan, the early Virginia colony, the failed English colonies in Madagascar, and events in Ireland during the Interregnum. Whenever possible, Games stresses the connections between these various spheres of commercial and colonial activity, and she follows the movements of those English and Scottish subjects who traveled between English outposts, helping to weave a “web of empire.” She focuses on those literate elites who left written records of their plans and experiences. English governors, consuls, ambassadors, and clergy are discussed in particular detail because each of these groups moved along the strands of that web and had to negotiate the complex cross-cultural relations and strategies that came with their various territories. In her survey of these overseas activities, Games draws on a variety of interesting and important archival sources—commercial and diplomatic correspondence, East India Company court minutes, Virginia Company records, promotional tracts, travel narratives (both printed and manuscript), private diaries, travel conduct manuals, and other primary documents.

In the opening section of the book, Games poses this question: “How did this weak state [i.e., England] become an empire?” (7). Games gives much of the credit for this empire-building to the joint-stock trading companies, especially the East India Company and the Levant Company. And in giving credit where she believes it is due, Games describes these companies and the rise of English imperialism using a rhetoric that often glorifies and idealizes the acquisition of “global power and dominion” (8). In fact, this is a book that will be well received by students of economic history who wish to conceive of long-distance commerce and the early history of globalization as a heroic and beneficent “adventure.” At times, Games hearkens back to an earlier generation of historians who hailed the colonial and commercial enterprises of the Western European imperial powers as a boon to humankind, a glorious enterprise, and a high-minded sacrifice for the good of the nation. According to Games, through the pursuit of “adventure and opportunity” in global markets and in new colonial settlements, the English became “cosmopolitans” (9).

Though there are moments when Games alludes to the brutality and greed that often accompanied colonial and commercial ambition (she discusses piracy, slavery, and genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples), these actions are placed within a narrative of heroic sacrifice and triumph, a teleological progress toward empire. Neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, and libertarians will like what Games has to say about the early joint-stock companies and their role in the genesis of globalization: “Global processes knit the early modern world together, enabling people to perceive in its entirety a world once experienced only in fragments” (6), and “English investment companies were free to create their own worlds overseas” (7-8). Apparently, greed is good for the nation: “Those who invested in trading ventures may have hoped to fill their purses, but they also attached themselves to national goals; their profit was inextricable from English prestige and power” (8). According to Games, English merchants and colonizers “understood the many opportunities and adventures that awaited them in different ports, to further their ambitions, to gain honor, to save souls, to seek profit” (14). Perhaps. But Games fails to balance this praise of enterprising merchants and colonists with an acknowledgement of how the profit motive and the aggressive drive to gain colonial territory inflicted suffering on countless others.

Games does put forward an overarching argument that is meant to link the various parts of her study, and this argument is one that exhibits (either consciously or unconsciously) a neo-liberal faith in the beneficial effects of a global “free” market. She blames the intervention of the state for ending the commercial freedom that got the English empire started. At the end of her introduction, she praises an imperial vision of “a world spanned by private enterprise and defined by cosmopolitanism before the sensibility waned and was replaced and eclipsed by the state’s commitment to centralized authority and to coercive strategies” (14). This seems like a dubious historical narrative, though. It relies on the assumption that the joint-stock companies and early colonial ventures were entirely “free” of state, court, or monarchical meddling. As Robert Brenner and others have shown, an increasingly powerful new merchant class did emerge during the period after 1570 in England. But this does not imply that these new capitalists operated entirely independent of the traditional laws and powers of the land. If, as Games claims, after the 1640s the British became less accommodating, adaptive, and tolerant while interacting with other cultures, that change was due not only to state formation, but also to the increased economic power of the British in the world, and the upsurge in their ability to deploy rapidly developing technologies and commercial organizations to exploit others both through “peaceful” trade and through “coercive strategies” such as the appropriation of land, intimidation of foreign communities, forced migration, and slavery.

Games should not place all of the blame for the dark side of expansionism on what she calls “the centralized authority of the state.” Rather, she should account for the new and more effective enactment of coercive strategies by contextualizing those violent activities within the global matrix of exploitation and appropriation that many scholars call “capitalism.” Capitalism and the state were not (and are not) separate and autonomous operations, and “free trade” was sometimes combined with military aggression. The Web of Empire asserts and assumes—without much discussion of the exact nature of the relationship between monarch and merchant—that the joint-stock companies were able to operate without much state interference, and that it was the assertion of state power over commerce under Cromwell that put an end to what was a brief golden age of free-market cosmopolitanism.

Games praises English commercial behavior in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and she celebrates the struggle to build colonies in the New World, but toward the end of the book she finds an object for moral condemnation in Cromwell’s brutal military campaign in Ireland and the Commonwealth government’s effort to uproot Irish Catholics and re-plant English and Scottish Protestant colonists in their place. The chapter on Ireland is not about cosmopolitanism; rather, it describes a grim case of intolerance and violent expropriation. The example of Ireland under Cromwell is used by Games to support her assertion that state power, directly enforced, is bad, and that the profit motive, unhindered by the state, is good. This is a reductive account of a very complex, give-and-take relationship between rising bourgeois power and the traditional authority of court and state to regulate trade and territorial expansion. Because it omits both a meaningful account of capitalism as well as a truly global sense of the dynamic world system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Games’s argument fails to account for that complexity, and falls back, instead, on the old essentializing myth about the virtue of free enterprise in the service of Empire. “Enhancing a nation’s trade was a patriotic act” Games declares, with typical zeal (96).

Under the banner of “cosmopolitanism,” Games emphasizes throughout her book that “trade, travel and adventure” produced cultural openness and national benefit when the state left merchants and colonists to their own devices (127). Games glories in “new commodities [that] generated a festival for all the senses and brought distant lands into the domestic setting of English households” (82); she lauds “the impressive organizational activities” of the “enterprising merchants” who worked for the chartered companies (83); and she finds redeeming qualities in colonization, writing that, “Colonial undertakings offered creative men the opportunity to devise a new kind of society” (191). This last statement is not adequately balanced with a discussion of the deadly cost of that creativity for the displaced indigenous inhabitants of these new colonies. Finally, Games’ book exhibits a curious strain of old-fashioned Orientalism in descriptions of the Levantine Mediterranean—a place “replete with exotic, bewildering, and sometimes distasteful practices” (61)—and especially in a purple passage describing those colonists who had “traveledeast from England” before coming to Virginia: “They had traveled by caravan and caravel and camel; they had bowed before sultans and kissed the rings of sheiks…. They had seen elephants and monkeys and terrifying serpents…. Virginia was one of many adventures for them, and one for which they were well equipped” (126). While The Web of Empire is full of fascinating anecdotes and uncovers much useful information about colonial and commercial history, in many instances taken from neglected archival sources that deserve our attention, its larger historical conclusions are not convincing, and its laudatory treatment of commerce and colonization is problematic.

As a prototype for many subsequent American reactions to foreign liberation movements, Americans embraced the first, liberal phase of the French Revolution but recoiled in horror and condemnation when news of Jacobin bloodletting began to arrive in 1792. This story is familiar to historians of the early modern Atlantic world. Rachel Hope Cleves, however, takes the tale further, showing why notable Americans in the Northern states grew obsessed with French revolutionary violence, and how these obsessions surfaced in American society and politics from the 1790s through the Civil War.

Initially, Cleves observes, anti-Jacobinism circulated among Northern Federalists and Congregationalist and Presbyterian clerics who together doubted the orderly, Christian possibilities of popular sovereignty. Instead, they shared a Calvinist sense that strong rule—political authority as well as restraint of one’s own emotions and passions—was necessary to contain human depravity. We are familiar with John Adams’s fear of American Francophiles’ adoption of “the very stile and language of the French Jacobines” (67), and his administration’s adoption of the Alien and Sedition Acts as countermeasures to suppress potential red republican violence. Cleves links Adams’s opinion and policies with the preaching of such ministers as Elijah Parish, who warned against “parties and cabals” arising in America while in “the theatre of nations you see armies wallowing in their own blood” and predicted that “a shower of blood seems just ready to crimson our fields … [and] corpses will float [and] feed the wild beasts” (68, 69). Through graphic depiction of radical upheaval abroad Parish sought to shock his readers into opposing mob (that is, democratic) violence in America.

Cleves traces these sanguine sentiments across the Northern states, as inherited fear of revolutionary violence sparked literary works, social reform, and radical politics. She locates anti-Jacobinism in Gothic novels and pamphlets, which insisted that French revolutionary violence—cannibalism, infanticide, mass rape, beheadings of both the living and already dead—was “too disgusting to hear, too horrid to relate,” yet paradoxically called readers to “fix your eyes on this theatre of carnage!” (98, 97).

Reflecting how Americans’ discourse about controversial foreign events can often facilitate debate about important domestic issues, Cleves argues that this early Francophobic Gothic literature migrated towards condemnation of American slaveholding because “anti-Jacobinism and antislavery were connected by a common concern: unrestrained violence could destroy civil society” (107). The slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, was essential to abolitionists’ adoption of “the violent language of anti-Jacobinism,” once white Haitian refugees spread accounts of “Dominguan bloodshed throughout the Atlantic” (146, 147). Such accounts, Cleves writes, “should have produced revulsion” among conservative anti-Jacobins. Instead, she argues, antislavery authors excused the Haitian slaves and blamed the uprising on slaveholder violence, focusing on “graphic descriptions of bloodshed, tortures, murders and rapes” that paradoxically served to compel antislavery readers to react (146). By the turn of the nineteenth century, macabre literary descriptions appeared of American slaveholders’ use of slave corpses for crop fertilizer and of slaves’ skin for shoe leather. In this way, revolutions in France and Haiti, or at least antislavery writers’ use of them, hastened calls for immediate emancipation, the association of the South with violence and depravity, and the rise of American sectionalism.

Meanwhile social reforms meant to secure nonviolent American republicanism emerged. During the War of 1812 peace societies flourished. A “Friends of Peace” political coalition emerged in New England, which was rationalized as an ethical and constitutional opposition to a war provoked by bloodthirsty Southern war hawks, and eventually culminated in the quixotic Hartford Convention. Cleves detects an undercurrent that “ran through the network of opposition” to the war, a “violent language of resistance,” which “contained tendencies toward bloodshed that nearly led to civil war” (193, 191). Given her emphasis that American anti-Jacobins were committed to nonviolence at the time, it is not clear how fear of French revolutionary violence could “nearly” pave the way to civil war. Cleves is on firmer ground, however, in showing the anti-Jacobin roots of campaigns for state-supported education. Contrary to most interpretations, which associate it with Northern reformers’ encouragement of liberal democracy, Cleves argues that support for public education was a reaction against transatlantic radicalism, or what Horace Mann described as the tendency of the young and poor to embrace “barbarism” (229).

Ultimately, the location and fervor of anti-Jacobinism, Cleves argues, helps us understand why so many radical reformers before the Civil War, including William Lloyd Garrison, Joshua Leavitt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Hildreth, William Cullen Bryant, William Cooper Nell, and Lydia Maria Child—who differed in gender, race, and political partisanship—all came from conservative backgrounds. And Cleves shows how and why they often interpreted violence in America as a foreign element, alien and therefore particularly dangerous to a putative American tendency towards nonviolence. Anti-abolitionist assaults on Garrison, the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, the gag rule adopted by Congress against antislavery petitions, proslavery violence against free soilers in “bleeding Kansas” and against Senator Charles Sumner in Congress—each was interpreted as evidence of a Jacobin “reign of terror” descending on the American republic. Through comparison of proslavery violence to Jacobinism, abolitionists “learned how violent language could become an outlet for fantasies of violent retribution,” thus “seducing readers with violent imagery” and “paving the path toward their support for the Civil War” (237, 274, 266). Surely fear of Jacobin revolutionary violence was not the only way that abolitionists could “voice violent desires” and abandon their commitment to nonviolence (275). But Cleves shows how anti-Jacobinism helped to justify support for righteous violence of the 1860s, violence committed not only by the slaves against their masters but by Northern citizens against the South and even against a federal government apparently tolerant of or even controlled by fanatical proslavery interests. (In an interesting appendix, Cleves shows that the phrase “reign of terror,” among other keywords associated with French revolutionary violence, appeared some six thousand times in American newspapers, broadsides, and books through 1865 [283].)

Cleves occasionally acknowledges that anti-Jacobinism characterized the attitudes of groups other than the conservative, reforming Northerners on whom the book focuses. She notes, for example, how Southern whites began to embrace anti-Jacobinism, especially after the Haitian slave revolution, an enduring nightmare for Southern planters. And slaveholders and even anti-abolitionist Northerners could smear abolitionists as “Jacobins” (247). Newspapers reported John Brown’s murders of proslavery men in Kansas, not surprisingly, as “A Reign of Terror in Kansas” (273). Thus, although it is not her focus, proslavery anti-Jacobinism, North and South, may have been as pervasive as northeastern reformers’ anti-Jacobinism. Anti-Jacobinism, moreover, provided useful antirevolutionary language in American politics, with which national parties sought to tar opponents. Whigs labeled Democratic presidents as “Jacobin,” meaning that they abused executive power. Democrats called Whigs, and later Republicans, “Jacobin,” meaning that they opposed local majority rule—”popular sovereignty,” in the language of the day. After the Civil War, moreover, opponents of Reconstruction attacked land reform initiatives favoring the freedmen by characterizing such radical measures as “Jacobinism.” Cleves shows how opposition to the violence of the French Revolution galvanized antebellum Northern moral reform. But anti-Jacobinism loomed larger than that in American political culture: it influenced opposing sides of national conflicts through the Civil War era.

While the Civil War stripped hundreds of thousands of American families of both material and spiritual wealth, it did provide the nation with an abundance of human remains. Death darkened both the North and South during the Civil War, and Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War explores the multifaceted ways in which death transformed American culture in the middle of the nineteenth century. Death’s influence during the American Civil War was not limited to individual households; the living ascribed meanings to the dead that influenced science, fostered the growth of new businesses and technology, pushed the development of new bureaucracies, and shifted existing philosophical and religious beliefs. Simply stated, death permeated nearly every aspect of American life during the Civil War, and Faust asks her reader to reassess what we know about the Civil War, placing the voracious carnage of war at center stage. Faust argues that, “without agendas, without politics, the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them” (269).

Faust explains, “In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history … ” (xi). The Civil War, in fact, resulted in a greater number of deaths than the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. As death reshaped the American populace, so too did it reshape American culture.

A statistical analysis of death fails to tell the whole story of human loss during the war. Death in the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century embodied numerous and varied meanings. Soldiers spent much of their time worrying that they would die a “Good Death”: an honorable death in battle, preferably at the hands of the enemy. The Good Death trope might include a dying soldier, clinging to a bible and a photograph of his wife or mother. This manner of dying was considered better than death by an accident or disease. Faust shows that soldiers spent a considerable amount of time reassuring the loved ones of recently deceased soldiers that their sons had indeed died within the parameters of Good Death. Though death worked to bind North and South together in certain ways, the two opposing sides of the conflict often engaged in different treatments of the dead. In the South, where supplies and materials were increasingly scarce as the war dragged on, cloth to create black mourning wear was hard to acquire, forcing Southern women to adjust their existing traditions in times of loss. Further, the practice of mourning a “Good Death” in a traditional manner was not always possible due to the realities of an increasingly modern battlefield. If a body had been destroyed so completely that it was rendered impossible to recognize, proper treatment and burial of the body became impossible. Faust writes, “Civilians found this outcome incomprehensible, but soldiers who had witnessed the destructiveness of battle understood all too well the reality of men instantly transformed into nothing. The implications of bodily disintegration for the immortality of both bodies and souls was troubling, and the disappearance of bodies rendered the search for names all the more important” (128-129).

Faust follows death’s impact on American civilization as it threatened long-held beliefs toward religion and philosophy. In 1864, the first national spiritualists convention took place in Chicago, and virtually all Americans believed that some form of communication with the dead was possible. Séances had been popular for some time, especially after they became popular in New York in the 1840s, but the increasing number of young men dying early as a result of war brought about an explosion of attempts to communicate with the dead. Material concerns emerged as well; the limbs lost and mutilated in battle led soldiers and their families to consider questions about how bodies would look and feel in heaven. The meaning of fighting, too, seemed less clear in light of the deaths gripping the nation. Many observers believed the meanings they attributed to the gruesome fighting came up short as the war came to a conclusion. Some—Faust offers Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as an example—lost their belief in beliefs entirely. Though the wheels of intellectual and cultural change may well have been in motion at the outset of the war, the Civil War changed much of the nature of American discourse. Faust states, “Into this environment of cultural ferment, the Civil War introduced mass death” (174).

Death changed America’s relationship with religion and philosophy, but the Civil War fatalities also created a new commodity: the dead. Undertakers and coffin builders were in high demand following each major battle. Early in the war, families that could afford to do so brought bodies home in sealed, cold coffins. Families were concerned, with reason, that the wrong body might be sent home from battlefields, and they hoped to keep the remains intact long enough to check that their deceased was indeed a family member. Eventually, the new technology of embalming created a new market for professionals who set up shop near recent battlefields. In a macabre take on advertising, undertakers in Washington, D.C., attempted to reassure families who might be suspicious of the new technology by displaying embalmed bodies in the windows of their offices.

Faust succeeds admirably in her goal of presenting a new perspective on the legacy of death in post-Civil War America. What this book lacks, however, is a full examination of how death influenced both medical and anthropological science. The Army Medical Museum (AMM), founded during the Civil War with a focus on those who died in battle, would become a center for the study of what was then called “comparative anatomy,” though it might be better explained as racial science. From the close of the Civil War to the turn of the century, the AMM collections also became central to anthropological science. Collections of Civil War dead were supplemented with collections sent to the museum from battlefields in the American West, where thousands of Native American bodies had been collected for science. The collection grew to include bodies from around the globe. The large collection of human remains from around the world intended for “comparative anatomy” was eventually transferred to the Smithsonian and became the cornerstone for a new division of physical anthropology. The AMM, which became a component of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, had switched its focus from bones, important to battlefield pathology and comparative racial science, to the collecting of soft tissues, important to the modern study of disease some years following the war. Through a notable twist that would fit with Faust’s narrative, the AMM occupied, for a brief time, Ford’s Theater, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Before the close of the century, the site of Ford’s Theater became the home of the Compiled Military Service Records Office, which attempted to create an archive tracking the fate of every soldier who fought in the war. In 1893, a portion of the theater collapsed under the shear weight of the paperwork. Though Faust might have paid more attention to the manner in which the Civil War dead influenced the development of science in the United States, her existing approach to the topic can hardly be faulted.

This Republic of Suffering, the 2009 winner of the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, is a captivating work of history. The author has a firm grip on the astonishing nature of her subject matter and delicately threads the reader through death’s various meanings during the Civil War. The work is both well documented and elegantly written, touching on subjects from the curious to the downright macabre. Those interested in Civil War history, the history of the body, and cultural attitudes toward death should find this book compelling.