Human beings have five senses, but history focuses on only one. Visual sources (words, texts, the seen world) provide the raw material with which historians construct their narratives about the past. As a result, what we know about the past is really what people saw. But as Marcel Proust made clear with his madeleine, the visual is not always the most evocative of the senses. In real life, what you see is not always what you get.

Does history, as currently written, represent only one-fifth of lived experience? Mark Smith thinks so, and wants to render American history twice as rich and meaningful with his history of sound and hearing. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America offers an account of the forces leading to the Civil War, as well as two short chapters on the war itself and Reconstruction, focusing on a second sense, sound. Soundscapes, Smith argues, were crucial in constructing the sectional consciousness of antebellum Americans. “Without listening to what and how nineteenth-century Americans heard, we will remain only partially aware of the depth, texture, and nature of sectional identity and deny ourselves access to a fuller explanation of how that identity came into being with such terrible resolve” (7).

Americans in both the North and the South had preferred soundscapes, just as they had preferred landscapes. Not surprisingly, both Northern and Southern elites were generally satisfied with the sounds of their own section of the country, and disturbed by those elsewhere. What is remarkable is the extent and depth of their conviction. Southerners were horrified by the noises of the city, especially those of manufacturing and urban disorder, and celebrated the bucolic quiet of the plantation. Northerners heard the “sublime” tones of progress in even loud industrial noise, but shuddered at the “enfeebling quietude and loud cruelty” of the slave plantation (93). These potent and irreconcilable images worked to alienate Northerner from Southerner just as surely as did John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Smith does a marvelous job describing the soundscapes of antebellum America, making skilled use of diaries, personal narratives and letters, as well as novels and political tracts. Some of the Southern postbellum accounts he draws upon reflect a nostalgia about a quieter past more than the reality of rural noise, but Smith reads this nostalgia as further evidence of the significance of the Southern soundscape within the ideology of the South. His evocative descriptions of the sounds of different seasons, events, and activities turn up the volume on the entire fabric of nineteenth-century life.

While the majority of this volume focuses on the experiences of elites, Smith also describes the aural worlds of working men and women, and of slaves. Neither of these groups was completely comfortable with the reigning soundscape, and each worked to undermine the norms of the ruling class. Especially interesting is Smith’s close analysis of the ways in which masters attempted to control the aural landscape of the plantation, and the ability of the slave to control sound. Not only was slave noise potentially subversive of the carefully constructed fiction of the submissive servant, but so too was slave silence. As plantation mistress Mary Boykin Chestnut put it, “If they want to kill us, they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers” (88).

Smith’s analysis of the aural landscape reinforces current wisdom about the growing divergence of antebellum North and South, tactics of slave resistance, the experience of the common soldier in the Civil War, the dynamics of the Confederate home front, and the contested nature of freedom during Reconstruction. While the object of his investigation is novel, his conclusions will be familiar to students of nineteenth-century America. The final chapter, “Sounds of Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Reunion,” is perhaps the most provocative here. Smith considers the attractiveness of the Southern soundscape to Northerners weary of the increasingly strident sounds of democracy and capitalism, and reveals how little we know about the marketing of the South as a vacation district in the late nineteenth century. Yet, while it is true that the Northern elite escaped the excesses of industrial capitalism in the relative quiet of the South, they flocked in even greater numbers to the towns and countryside of rural New England and other emerging Northern vacation districts, and also praised the peace and quiet of these Northern escapes. Clearly these postbellum Northerners did not see all Northern soundscapes as equal.

The heard world was obviously important to nineteenth-century Americans, but most readers will probably remain unconvinced that “Sectional consciousness was sensed, and hearing and listening as much as looking and seeing were important to its creation” (7). Indeed, the very quotes Smith chooses seem to argue for the greater importance of the visual. The narrators quoted here generally present a single observation about sound within a context of visual observations. Aural observations complement and reinforce visual ones, but rarely do visual observations complement and reinforce aural ones.

Smith’s argument is problematic in other ways as well. His thesis that there were two competing soundscapes—those of the plantation and industrial city—depends on the reduction of Southern experience to that of the plantation-dwelling slave owner, and Northern experience to that of the city dweller or factory worker. But what about urban Southerners? Or rural Northerners? What about the majority of white Southerners who owned no slaves? Was their soundscape any different from that of the Northern yeoman farmer? Did the “drone of bondage” truly “muffle the sounds of modernism” (125) in the upper South? Smith does a great job showing the way in which sound and hearing contributed to sectional ideology, but it is questionable whether any given individual had an especially sectionalized understanding of his or her soundscape. If Smith is correct, and sound matters, than it follows that urban Southerners and rural Northerners would be less inclined to secession than urban Northerners and rural Southerners. There is no evidence that this was the case.

Indeed, it would be just as easy to focus on the similarities between the Northern and Southern soundscape as on the differences. True, the North was becoming increasingly urban and industrialized in the nineteenth century, but only a small percentage of Northerners lived in cities or near mills during the period. Elites in the two sections also shared common expectations about noise. Certainly elite Northern women worked as hard to silence their children as did Southern women, and Northern farmers complained just as strenuously as their upcountry Georgia brethren about the noises of the railroads, while newspapers of both sections celebrated those same noises as sounds of progress. Wealthy Northerners were as likely as Southerners to choose heavy insulating fabrics for the interiors of their homes, and to buy quietude by moving to residential neighborhoods far from the noise (and dirt, and poverty) of the city. Christmas bells, fire bells, and noises of celebration all point to a remarkable, shared aural culture.

Ultimately this study raises more questions than it answers. Smith repeatedly claims that it is “difficult to grasp how utterly meaningful and potent the heard world was to antebellum Americans” (265) but provides little convincing evidence that it actually was more meaningful and potent than the heard world is today. Nor is it clear that the traditional sources this study is based on could allow even the most subtle and creative historian to accurately contextualize, to translate, really, the social and historical meaning of nineteenth-century soundscapes to the many different listeners of the period. We can listen to nineteenth-century America, but can we believe our ears?

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

Amy S. Greenberg is associate professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University, and author of Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998).

I’ve always been a big proponent of historical fiction, for the life and imagination it brings to often dry historical documents—indeed, one could say that historical fiction (embarrassingly, novels toward the romantic side) is what kept my interest in history alive through the stultifying middle- and high-school curriculum until I could discover social, cultural, and women’s history in college. However, today as a professionally trained historian, I most enjoy historical fiction in fields not too closely aligned to my own field—and it is here that this review thankfully lies, just a bit far afield of my own knowledge, but close enough to be educational.

As with many inquiries into the past, Urquhart’s interest in the Shakers’ past stems from her own personal memories of family get-togethers in her grandfather’s big farmhouse just north of Boston. Her grandfather, also a writer (he worked, among other things, on the Gone with the Wind screenplay), purchased a farm in the 1930s. Urquhart found out later that the farmhouse had originally been a Shaker meeting house, the center of a strange but thriving religious community in the mid-nineteenth century that had died (perhaps unsurprisingly) with its last celibate devotees. In this, her first novel, Urquhart tries to raise the ghosts from a familiar space, and in so doing sheds light on nineteenth-century Shaker culture while also giving us a tragic drama of families and an engaging mystery. As a result, this genre-bending novel can be enjoyed by a range of audiences, from murder-mystery fans to highbrow literary folks, to historians looking for faithful representations of the past.

The storyline, simply put, is one of childhood trauma and familial estrangement. The Visionist focuses on four main characters whose perspectives structure each of the book’s chapters. The center of the tale is Polly, the daughter of an abusive man and a mother paralyzed by shame. Polly is spurred to a terrifying act to help the family escape his clutches, only to find that her mother guiltily indentures her and her brother to a community of Shakers several towns away. Simon Pryor is the lone male voice among the main characters. He is a sympathetic, self-described scoundrel who works for the even-more-conniving Hurlbut family, the county’s wealthy scions. Pryor finds himself morally awakened by the plight of Polly and her mother even though he has been instructed to destroy their claims to their family farm. In the Shaker world, we hear first from Sister Charity, a young woman raised entirely in “The City of Hope” (originally called Albion, Mass., just north of Boston—but this seems to be a fictional setting). Charity has internalized all of the precepts of the Shakers’ leader, Mother Ann Lee, yet she feels drawn to Polly after she spontaneously performs “spiritual gifts” in one of the first Sunday meetings. While Charity is sure of Polly’s saintliness, Elder Sister Agnes, the fourth interlocutor, is suspicious of Polly’s purported visions and eager to extract a confession from her, acting with an eye towards the religious group’s sustainability in ways both admirable and questionable.

Some historical fiction uses costume and place merely as a backdrop to modern issues; others bring to life a foreign way of thinking about the world to educate the empathic mind. Urquhart’s is the latter. Her strengths as a historical novelist are first and foremost her intensive study of the Shakers, a society of celibates whose theology pushed them to live apart from the world, yet who somehow drew on it for new converts and new sources of land and income. We learn myriad small details of Shaker worship and theology—that adherents believed in careful, rectilinear living (from cutting one’s food into squares to planning buildings and grounds on similarly severe lines). The story reveals how Albion was one of the communities to experience a cluster of extraordinary visions from young women in the generation after their founder Mother Ann’s death (the decades preceding the start of this novel, also referred to as the Era of Manifestations by Shaker historians). We learn how the Shakers took in children whose parents had fallen on hard times, binding the youngsters through an indenture contract until age 18, when they would decide whether to stay with the group and to sign over to the Shakers all their worldly belongings (including inheritances). Moreover, the Shakers demanded that these youngsters adhere to the precept that there be no more “flesh” brothers and sisters inside their communities, a point made heartbreakingly clear in the turmoil Polly feels as she and her younger brother begin their first few months in the City of Hope. We gain many small nuggets of daily life through descriptions of Charity’s training in medicinals and through her tutoring of Polly in the everyday life of the gender-separate, celibate world that was the Shakers’.

Urquhart occasionally blends in passages from Shaker theological texts, as she does quite well with The Youth’s Guide to Zion in one exchange between Polly and Elder Sister Agnes (172-77). In another great scene, she describes a pauper auction (the “New England method” for dealing with the financial constraints of poor relief). If I were a historian of the nineteenth century, I might quibble that this practice seems to have been phased out by the 1840s (when this book is set) with the rise of poorhouses—but I am not and thus I appreciated the perhaps slightly anachronistic historical tidbit. We can be sure Urquhart did her homework. A three-page bibliography closes the novel with suggestions from popular and scholarly works, including several theses. She also thanks Ted Widmer of the John Carter Brown Library and early Americanist John Demos as well as various curators and historians of Shaker life with whom she consulted. Perhaps the most evocative passage in the book for an audience of historians will be Urquhart’s ventriloquizing of the researcher’s daily routine:

Property deeds and church records of marriages, births, and deaths: Does society offer up documents of a more paradoxically dry nature? They testify to our ownership of the very earth upon which we live, our most costly oath, our grand entry, and our final bow. Still, it seems to me that they are written solely to be sorted in the wrong spot by a bespectacled clerk, pale as a grub and sporting suspenders (161).

Simon Pryor grumbles, as many of us do, of hours spent in futile search “in the bowels of the Ashland courthouse, dust and faded ink mak[ing] an enemy of me” (161).

But are the novel’s characters as convincing as its historical trappings? Although Urquhart gives ample attention to the hypnotic lure of Shaker dancing and the City of Hope’s peaceful and ordered passing of days, Polly’s almost instantaneous acceptance of industry as the key to her salvation seems an unlikely way to deal with trauma. Sister Charity’s spiritual worldview is more fleshed out—although it may not make her more sympathetic to modern secular readers. Urquhart’s is a classic tale of shame and redemption. To me, the novel felt sluggish until about a third of the way through, when we began to hear more from Simon Pryor, the most fully drawn character in the novel. In many ways, it is Pryor’s action, along with the slow unfolding of Polly’s secret, which drives the rhythm of the narrative. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that he sees her as the one to save him from his cynicism and bitterness. But we never hear from Polly what she feels about his final acts. Despite Urquhart’s attempt to tie up loose ends, I felt disturbed by the ending, which I could only see as bringing further tragedy. Perhaps it is this uneasiness that the author intended, a fluttering of feeling that defies any certainty of the meaning of past, present, or future.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Kristen Block is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she teaches courses on the colonial Americas. Some of her favorite courses (Slavery in the Atlantic World; Witchcraft and Magic in the Atlantic World) blend scholarly history and fictional representations of the past to encourage fun and critical consumption of popular culture. She is the author of Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (2012) and is working on a book-length study of religion and healing practices in the early Spanish, French, and British circum-Caribbean.

The July 19, 2010, issue of Time proclaimed the rise of the only child. The author of the featured article, Lauren Sandler, reveals that one in five American families have a single child. Still, many Americans express discomfort with this trend, identifying only children as spoiled and neurotic. According to Sandler, 46 percent of Americans believe two children is the perfect number. The fertility rate for the United States, currently 2.1, supports this ideal.

Sandler’s article illuminates an ongoing transformation in American lives, the shift from high to low birth rates, also known as the demographic transition. In 1800, American families had an average of seven children. By 1900, the average number of children was 3.5. In her fascinating book, Susan Klepp traces the origins of the demographic transition to the American Revolution. Viewing land shortages, industrialization, urbanization, lower infant mortality rates, Victorian morality, and other explanations as inadequate, Klepp points to American women, who seized on revolutionary ideas of equality, reason, and virtue to control their reproductive lives. In doing so, they irrevocably changed the status of American women.

In colonial America, settlers celebrated the fertility of their women alongside the fertility of the land. Colonists used agricultural metaphors to describe pregnant women, including “flourishing,” “breeding,” and “fruitful” (64). Klepp offers an engaging analysis of women’s pre-Revolutionary portraits, which pictured female subjects with their legs slightly parted and a basket of fruit on their laps, blatant symbols of sexuality and abundance. As Klepp notes, women were “the Sex,” “ruled at bottom, not by reason, but by their procreative physiology” (61). Women were not merely objects of male colonists’ desires; they also gloried in their reproductive abilities. American birth rates peaked from the 1740s to the 1760s, only to begin a steady decline soon after.

Klepp finds the explanation for this sudden, and at the time, unnoticed, change in the letters, diaries, and other writings of American women. Both Europeans and Americans were exposed to enlightenment values of liberty and equality, but only in the United States and France did fertility decline in the late eighteenth century (the rest of western Europe did not follow until the 1870s). Klepp argues that the American Revolution made new ideas about marriage, childrearing, individualism, and happiness more tangible. American women applied this language to their own lives, abandoning “the Sex” for self-controlled, sensible, and rational womanhood. They viewed large families as a self-indulgent and aristocratic luxury. American women also saw unrestrained fertility as an obstacle to egalitarian marriages, equal treatment of their male and female children, and their ability to control their bodies. American women turned to family planning, and their husbands and children followed.

The question is how, approximately a century before the diaphragm, and two centuries before the birth control pill, American women controlled their fertility. In her first chapter, Klepp includes the quantitative data on the demographic transition, and notes the various methods that demographers have used to study birthrates, including crude birthrates, child-woman ratios, and age-specific marital fertility rates (24). The age-specific marital fertility rates indicate some of the strategies women used to limit their family size, such as delaying marriage, increasing the intervals between births (often by breastfeeding), or stopping childbearing before menopause. As Klepp points out, demographers view stopping as “the only real evidence of deliberate family planning, because it implies that couples have agreed upon an ideal family size and planned accordingly” (48).

Klepp also examines the various technologies to limit or stop childbearing. Her evidence demonstrates that women used emmenagogues, or medicines for regulating the menstrual cycle, such as savin, juniper, rue, aloe, pennyroyal, and snakeroot, as abortifacients. Klepp also finds prescriptions for vigorous physical exercise like horseback riding or jumping rope. Late eighteenth-century medicine defined amenorrhea, or absent menstruation, as a symptom of illness as well as pregnancy, so there was no social condemnation of its treatment. And, though most of these methods seem to be dubious ways to end a pregnancy, Klepp notes some success. The records of the Philadelphia Dispensary show that 80 percent of the women treated for amenorrhea were “cured” using potions made with some of the above ingredients (199).

This other American Revolution created new opportunities for middle-class women. Liberated from constant pregnancies, early nineteenth-century women expanded their involvement in churches and voluntary societies. They joined campaigns to end prostitution (prostitutes used less respectable methods like coitus interruptus or condoms to limit fertility), slavery, intemperance, and war. Instead of devoting their lives to childbearing, women emphasized their status as mothers, essential to the health, education, and welfare of their children. Finally, as Klepp writes, “family limitation and feminism were intertwined” (284). As these virtuous women and sensible mothers expanded their presence in the public sphere, they made additional demands for equality.

Klepp also considers the exceptions to this transformation in American households. The very wealthy, including slaveholders, were slower to limit their family size than middling and poorer classes. Their large families demonstrated their commitment to patriarchy as well as hierarchy. High birth rates continued among enslaved Americans. In addition to owners’ pressure on enslaved women to reproduce, Klepp argues that slaves may have found value and meaning in their families, however insecure, which countered the brutality of slavery. After emancipation, former slaves followed the practice of northern free blacks in limiting their fertility. Meanwhile, some sources, like Susanna Rowson’s bestselling seduction novel Charlotte Temple, implicitly criticized only children, who, like the female protagonist, might cast aside parental guidance and sexual virtue, run away with a rakish soldier, and die in childbirth.

Despite her mention of Charlotte Temple, Klepp does not discuss another important phenomenon in Revolutionary America: premarital pregnancy rates approaching 30 to 40 percent. Historians argue that changing sexual mores, a highly mobile population, the breakdown of community and familial controls on courtship, and new priorities of individual choice and romantic love influenced the large numbers of premarital pregnancies. Spiking premarital pregnancy rates and falling birthrates may not be incompatible, but they do suggest another way Americans may have resisted rational womanhood and limited families.

Women also lost something in the demographic transition. The passionless Victorian replaced the intensely physical experience of “the Sex.” Women increasingly ceded control over pregnancy and childbirth to male doctors. The new values associated with family planning stigmatized those who did not conform. As many Americans celebrated the virtues of small, rational families, they began to criticize large families. Unsurprisingly, enslaved women’s higher birth rates became another justification for their bondage. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans associated large families with poverty and lack of self-control. Moral reformers argued that access to abortion and contraception only encouraged the promiscuous habits of immigrants, African Americans, and the poor. As Klepp observes: “So it was that the birthrate fell at the same time that large segments of the population embraced the goal of sharply restricted fertility, and yet voters, clergymen, doctors, judges, and legislators demanded more and more restrictions on contraception and abortion” (263). Shaped in the first century of the demographic transition, the ideal of the small nuclear family continues to influence American policy on immigration, welfare, education, and health care. Unfortunately, Klepp notes, prejudice against those who do not control their fertility is a regular feature of these policy debates.

Klepp offers an exciting new interpretation of women in Revolutionary America, and she presents her quantitative and qualitative evidence in an accessible and elegant manner. Though women did not gain legal or political equality, they took control of their bodies and their families, with lasting consequences for female citizenship. Women made a conscious effort to limit their fertility, balancing childrearing with their expansive religious, intellectual, and political interests.

Carol Faulkner is associate professor of history at Syracuse University, and the author of Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (2003). Her forthcoming books include Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (spring 2011) and Women in America to 1880: A Documentary Reader (spring 2011).

When Elizabeth Palmer Peabody traveled by railcar publicizing her textbook A Chronological History of the United States (1856), she carted a fat fabric roll containing samples of her iconic historical grids. Students who studied Peabody’s textbook would translate her tables of historic events into colorful, 100-square visualizations, with each square representing one year. For every box-shaped year in a century-long history, students demarcated the countries involved in an event by color, and the event’s type by its position—wars, revolutions, or disasters, for example, would appear in a different location within each year’s square. The result, for the most diligent students, was a mosaic of multi-colored squares and triangles exploring a century’s trajectory in the abstract. For every classroom that purchased a textbook set, Peabody would make a large-scale fabric grid as accompaniment, a task she described as backbreaking labor (none of these full-scale models survive).

In Lauren Klein’s digital project The Shape of History, and in conference presentations, articles, and her current book-in-process on the topic, she asks what Peabody’s grids might contribute to the development of an embodied, affective, and feminist approach to data visualization. Klein’s most detailed explanation of the project, her 2017 Modern Language Association presentation “Feminist Data Visualization: Or, the Shape of History,” argues that Peabody saw the labor of completing her grids as a generative act:

Peabody devised her method at a moment of great national crisis—the decade leading up to the Civil War—and she recognized that the nation’s problems would be difficult to solve. Her goal was to prompt an array of possible solutions—one coming from the creator of each chart. And her hope was that, by designing new narratives of the past, her students would also imagine alternate futures.

In our own historical moment, infographics and other data visualizations are consumed as pleasing visual synopses that distill complex ideas, as exemplified by the Canva Design School’s “Topics Explained Perfectly by Infographics.” By returning to the archive to find models of data visualization, Klein has uncovered a nineteenth-century antecedent that uses the visual not merely to clarify information, but to engage audiences in the emotional possibilities of a complexly rendered historical narrative, to help them tell visual stories about history as a way to imagine new outcomes.

For scholars seeking to legitimate the digital humanities, it has been necessary to explain how labor and process can both inform scholarly production and be scholarly products in themselves. The dominant terms in this discourse, like Stephen Ramsay’s “building” or Jentery Sayers’s “tinkering,” are historically associated with masculine labor. In contradistinction, Klein situates Peabody’s grids within a feminine matrix of scholarly and artistic production. Though observers have noted the grids’ resemblance to Piet Mondrian’s art, for example, Klein finds a more likely modernist descendent in the quilts painstakingly crafted by a small community of African American women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who explored the form and function of narrative in the triangles and squares of their textiles. Like the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Peabody’s grids emphasize the embodied labor of designers and, says Klein, “affirm the role of pleasure and the senses.” In Klein’s talk, she shares the grid of a student who was daunted by the task of coloring in each event; he or she instead created a kaleidoscope of full-page triangles. A critical awareness of the process of working, and sometimes failing, to conceptualize history and its possible futures, says Klein, is what the humanities can offer data visualization. In other words, the humanities provide a means of embracing a practice that is contextualized, often emotional, and always process-oriented. Here Klein is synthesizing nineteenth-century scholarship with affective design and computing, which studies how new technologies can meaningfully elicit and respond to human emotion. Klein’s digital project attempts to bring this idea to fruition in contemporary data visualization.

Klein and her collaborators—Caroline Foster, Erica Pramer, Adam Hayward, and Shivani Negi—have designed the site with squares that invite users to meander in all directions, mimicking the multiple pathways available in Peabody’s grid. The “Explore” square offers completed grids, including renderings of Peabody’s century-long tables as well as new tables detailing women’s history since 1918 and the 100 days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The “Compare” square puts Peabody’s grid alongside a traditional timeline to consider how straight chronology simplifies history by ignoring cross currents. With the “Learn” square, users can color the grid using the provided tables, whereas “Play” provides a space to devise an original table on any topic and map it on the grid.

The team designed the project for a general audience, with the idea that a version of the site targeted at academic scholars would be launched later. Despite this caveat, the background information on Peabody delivers minimal insight into why someone would engage with this project who is not invested in the nineteenth-century or data visualization. Though the project is designed to guide readers through a thought experiment rather than provide an archive of Peabody’s grids, adding images of student grids could provide users with a more informed, contextualized entry point.

Klein expects her users to play, to dabble, to experiment with this blocked visualization of history, but she herself notes that, in terms of eliciting an emotional response, frustration may have been “the point.” Painstakingly deciding the color and placement of eighty-five historical events to complete a grid for the nineteenth century was enough to make me, like Peabody’s students, contemplate the futility of history. Yet, I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s work pressing flowers in her herbarium; she began with Linnean classifications but resorted to her own categorizations, more poetic in their placement than scientific. Dickinson created an embodied, aesthetic visualization that defied categorization just as Peabody’s grids encouraged her students to color outside of the lines in the hopes of understanding time and human history with fresh eyes. In Klein’s writing, the significance of recovering histories of feminist visualizations—like Peabody’s and Dickinson’s—is actually about unearthing previously undervalued ways of knowing to help us reframe our present and imagine those “alternate futures.” I’m eagerly awaiting her book, which will explain in greater detail how she imagines affective design from this contextualized feminist perspective.

Further Reading

Klein’s 2017 co-authored article in Feminist Media Histories titled “The Shape of History” provides additional information. See also her talk “Visualization as Argument” from the Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production conference and her accompanying blog post about that presentation, “Floor Charts on the Floor Screen.” For the 2016 Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, Klein collaborated with Catherine D’Ignazio on “Feminist Data Visualization,” an overview of best practices and helpful research for feminist data visualization. Finally, Klein and her collaborators at Georgia Tech’s Digital Humanities Lab are documenting their fabrication of an interactive floor model of Peabody’s grid.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

Jessica DeSpain is an associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is the co-director of SIUE’s IRIS Center for the Digital Humanities. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book (2014), and the lead editor of The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, an exploration of the more than 170 reprints of Susan Warner’s bestselling nineteenth-century novel. She has published several articles on the intersections of book history and digital humanities pedagogy. DeSpain is currently collaborating with scholars in English, history, education, and STEM on the NSF-funded Digital East St. Louis Project, in which middle school students in East St. Louis collaborate to build a digital project about the history and culture of their city.

Common-place asks historian Kariann Akemi Yokota about the process of researching and writing her bookUnbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation, and about the book’s contributions to discussions of American national identity.

Your book asks, “What does it mean to think of Americans of the early republic as ‘unbecoming British?’ rather than simply ‘becoming American.'” What led you to frame the question this way, and what did you learn?

My book explores the post-Revolutionary generation’s struggles with the process of “unbecoming British” in the aftermath of America’s victory. In their efforts to analyze the formation of the United States, scholars of the Revolutionary period and the early republic have tended to focus on colonials’ efforts to break free from the British Empire—in other words, they tell the story of becoming American. This is understandable considering the historic changes that occurred as a result of the war for independence. Unbecoming British looks at this period from a different perspective in that it highlights the continuing importance Americans placed on their cultural, economic, and social ties to the mother country in the “postcolonial” era.

The same individuals who would become the nation’s leaders had recently been British subjects who had dedicated a good portion of their lives striving to be recognized as equals to their counterparts in Great Britain. For instance, George Washington earnestly pursued a career in the British military but was held back to a large extent because of his American birth. To understand the early history of the United States, it is essential to explore how these types of formative colonial experiences influenced citizens of the new nation.

After the Revolution, Americans faced the difficult task of establishing equality with, as well as separation from, Great Britain. The creation of an independent national identity—which necessitated unbecoming British—was a tricky business. It entailed construing differences between the U.S. and Great Britain where there were similarities (language, religion, Anglo-Saxon heritage) and attempting to diminish important differences (economic institutions, geographic distance, cultural development) in an attempt to establish parity. Many Americans simultaneously emulated and repudiated the mother country as they undertook the complex process of creating a separate society.

Many historical accounts of this period have downplayed Americans’ desire to remain a part of existing transatlantic Anglo-American networks. Conversely, anything that can be interpreted as an indication of a separation from Great Britain is taken as proof of the development of American national identity. I do not see the nation unfolding in a linear progression away from “Britishness” and towards cultural independence. Instead, what my research shows is that in the years following the Revolution, like other postcolonial societies, Americans vacillated between emulation and repudiation of the mother country. While there was a strong desire to establish their independence, American leaders also recognized that their connections to Great Britain contributed to the strength of the United States. These ties afforded them the civility that would legitimize their republican experiment during this tumultuous period of transition.

Moreover, the economic and cultural inequities that characterized the colonial relationship endured throughout the early republic. In that sense, emerging victorious from the Revolutionary war was the first, rather than the last, step in gaining independence. Political change tends to outpace shifts in culture. The Declaration of Independence represented a formal break with the British Empire, but by no means did Americans immediately abandon British cultural practices and norms.Americans were dependent on transatlantic networks of intellectual, religious, and commercial exchange and they needed British support to survive. In fact, when the formal relationship with the Empire ended, Americans had to work harder to maintain relationships with their British patrons. The pursuit of British material and intellectual sustenance kept Americans dependent upon the mother country long after independence was won.

You mention the persistence of “British cultural practices.” Can you elaborate a bit, and discuss how you went about investigating these?

While the Revolutionary War was a watershed event for political history, it plays a less dramatic role in the cultural practices of the nation. That said, the political break certainly influenced how Americans viewed their continuing links to Great Britain. After independence, Americans felt it was necessary to justify their cultural preferences to their fellow countrymen and to critical observers in Europe. Thomas Jefferson characterized his “enthusiasm for the arts” (and the large quantity of European goods he purchased consequently) as an expression of his patriotism. In a 1785 letter to James Madison he explained “its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and to procure them its praise.” Foreign allies brought Americans’ love of British goods into question. A year later, in an attempt to defend himself to the Marquis de Lafayette, who had noticed his predilection for British goods, Jefferson explained: “It is not from a love of the English but a love of myself that I sometimes find myself obliged to buy their manufactures.”

Americans like Jefferson acquired cultural capital from their association with Europe, while at the same time celebrating their freedom from its corruption. Still, the extent of their borrowing fueled insecurities about the derivative nature of what was ostensibly an independent society. New citizens feared being seen by the rest of the world, not least the British, as still mired in colonial dependence. On the other hand, too much reverence for the mother country would be “unbecoming” a newly free people. My book contains several examples of how Americans grappled with what constituted the proper balance between innovation and imitation.

This leads to my use of material culture in historical research. While the writings of the Revolutionary leaders have been collected, edited, and analyzed by several generations of scholars, significantly less attention has been paid to the political significance of their material possessions. Despite the fact that the field of material culture scholarship is continuing to develop, historians tend to rely upon written texts. This strikes me as a crucial oversight considering the importance the Founders themselves placed on their possession of the latest refined, imported goods from Europe and Asia as markers of the United States’ legitimacy.

I want to encourage readers to think about how the use of material culture as historical evidence can enhance and even overturn the way we understand the early American nation.Unbecoming British analyzes the lingering effects of America’s colonial past on the formation of national identity by paying close attention to the social significance of objects. What I discovered, to my great pleasure, was that objects often revealed a very different side of America’s postcolonial relationship with Great Britain. Americans coveted and consumed British goods before, during, and long after the Revolution. People are often surprised to learn that English pottery manufacturers made a handsome profit selling goods that commemorated American Revolutionary success to patriotic customers in the U.S.

Although objects figure prominently in my research, I also draw upon textual sources when analyzing the process of unbecoming British. The writings of American statesmen document their self-conscious pursuit of the imported goods deemed necessary to establish America as a civilized nation. In these letters, the politics of objects come to the fore. For instance, discussions about the virtues of home manufactures versus imported goods of superior quality arose when the nation’s leaders debated whether America’s first president should make his debut on the international stage in the latest European styles or in rougher cloth that was produced domestically. These seemingly prosaic issues had political implications for postcolonial Americans who were aware of the eyes of the world upon them.

This issue of Common-place focuses on internationalizing American history. How does the transnational lens you used in your book change our understanding of the political processes of nation-making and the cultural creation of national identities? And how would you characterize your approach to transnational history?

Looking at early American history from a transnational perspective significantly influenced the way in which this project took shape. Due to my focus on the politics of cultural practices in this period of transition, my research followed a variety of objects as they led me across political borders and oceans. My chapter on the early China trade came about because of my desire to let the trajectories of these goods define the boundaries of the study. Tracing the “life histories” of the imported Chinese items that Americans owned helped me to understand the cross-cultural relationships that were created by the international exchange of objects. In this way I would say that my approach to transnational history is more connective than comparative.

When historians adopt geopolitical lines of demarcation for their studies, they risk missing some of the most important aspects of the process of nation building. I am fascinated by the interactions and contestations that were continually occurring along the unstable borders of the nation-state. Some of the most interesting new research is coming out of borderland studies because they capture intercultural exchange so brilliantly. Furthermore, the domestic focus in American history is at odds with the importance people in the early republic placed on international events and their own connections to the wider world.

A transnational approach also helped me see a different side of the history of racial inequality in America. Put simply, if you examine a figure like Thomas Jefferson from a solely domestic perspective, he clearly occupied the top of the social, economic, and political hierarchy. He was wealthy, he owned slaves, and he enjoyed the respect of his fellow Americans. However, if you take a transnational perspective and consider his position within the larger transatlantic world, he becomes a lesser figure on a global stage.

In my book, I place Anglo-American settlers—including those individuals otherwise known as the Founding Fathers—within a larger international framework where they do not inhabit the top echelons of the social hierarchy. Seen from an elite British perspective, New World slave owners were petty provincials toiling in a distant and uncivilized land. Although Americans worked hard to change this view after the Revolution, they still realized that it existed. The Reverend Timothy Dwight noted in the late eighteenth century that the British looked down upon Americans because they were mere “inhabitants of a new world … lately occupied by a race of savages.” He put a call out to his fellow Americans, telling them that “The time is come … to explode the European creed that we are infantine in our acquisitions, and savage in our manners.”

White settlers in America attempted to address their lower status within the transatlantic context through various strategies of internal domination. After all, without the violent exploitation of people of color whose land and labor they stole, Americans could not purchase the things they needed for a gentlemanly lifestyle, nor could they have the leisure time to pursue intellectual endeavors befitting aspiring Enlightenment scholars. Seen in this way, I argue that American racism originated from a position of insecurity as much as from notions of superiority. The awareness of their lack of international status contributed to the vehemence with which Anglo Americans oppressed people of color. The same kinds of denigrating remarks about the primitive nature of the material life of Native Americans and African Americans were used by British observers to describe the lifestyle of Anglo Americans. By recognizing that the nation’s leaders struggled with their own sense of inferiority when compared to the British, we can begin to understand racial domination as being an expression of both power and powerlessness.

Let’s talk about your discussion of China—hardly a part of the world most people would expect to see in a book on the founding era. How did examining American interactions and exchanges with China enhance your argument?

In the late eighteenth century, Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain represented the epitome of style for Europeans and Americans alike. The importation of Chinese goods was an integral part of a provincial people’s attempt to construct a “civilized” nation on the periphery of the transatlantic world. One of the first things that Americans did after winning the war was to send a ship to China. In a literal, legal sense, this was the ultimate expression of independence because mercantile laws restricted colonists from trading directly with China. It was because of the desire for refined goods that Americans found themselves in Canton facing their British counterparts as well as the Chinese. It is crucial for scholars to recognize that American national identity was often established in geographical locations outside of the U.S. and Europe.

Since I was interested in studying race relations in the early modern transatlantic world from a triangulated perspective, I looked at the relationship among Chinese, British, and “white” Americans in Canton, China. Researching and writing that chapter allowed me to interrogate issues of a burgeoning American national identity from a location that was far outside of the nation-state. I found that in some respects, merchants from the U.S. and Great Britain reenacted their unequal relations in this foreign location because Americans were new to the trade, having been legally excluded from it. Americans showed deference to their British counterparts, whom they depended on to explain to them the intricacies of the Canton trading system. In other instances, Americans celebrated their new-found freedom by flouting British business conventions and playing up their relations with French traders as a way of insulting the British. Seeing the representatives from the British East India Company in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the powerful Chinese government was useful for Americans who were working so hard at “unbecoming” British in this period.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Chinese perspective adds a key dimension to the study of Anglo-American relations in this period. When Chinese officials asked Americans and Britons to explain the differences between these people so recently at war with one other, both were hard-pressed to answer. After all, they looked the same, spoke the same language, and shared the same tastes in objects. When I read several of these encounters in the archives, I thought to myself that this was the perfect illustration of Benedict Anderson’s point about the constructed nature of national identity. Americans and Britons who had so recently fought a bitter war against one another struggled to come up with significant differences that would convince a powerful Chinese official that they were separate people.

One section is provocatively titled “Race, an American Commodity.” Can you explain a bit what you mean by that, and how your arguments about the creation of racial difference and hierarchy fit with your points about the importance of objects?

White Americans often criticized people of color for their incivility, violence, and lack of discipline. Yet those Americans who were engaged in transnational networks in person and in print were disturbingly aware that they were being maligned for the same things by some British observers who regarded them with disdain.

As I have already suggested, hierarchies based upon levels of civility often revolved around the possession and production of refined objects. The unequal nature of the relationship between Britain and the new United States was embodied in the transatlantic exchange of refined and unrefined objects. Generally speaking, throughout the early nineteenth century, Americans continued to trade raw materials for finished products manufactured in Britain. To give just one example, American settlers obtained beaver pelts from Native Americans on the Western frontier. These pelts were shipped to Britain, where they were made into top hats which were then sold back to American consumers at a profit. Analyzed symbolically, these hats were among the possessions that white Americans used to indicate their discerning sense of taste which they believed differentiated them from “savage” others who had originally procured the raw materials used to make them.

Although I cannot explore the full argument here, in the final chapter of the book I draw upon the work of scholars who have theorized about the unique role of “whiteness” in the American context as a way to understand the process of unbecoming British. Living so intimately among people of color, European Americans gave whiteness an elevated value which it did not hold in Europe. While elite white Americans continually needed to turn to Europe for their refined goods, the one thing that they no longer had to import was their whiteness. Seen in this way, whiteness was a valuable commodity that could elevate an individual’s life prospects. As with other forms of material property, Anglo Americans passed laws to protect whiteness in order to maintain its value. More than anything else, I would like my book to urge readers to consider American racism at this time at least partly as a consequence of postcolonial insecurity. Of course, this is not to excuse it, but rather to understand racism in all of its complexity.

Since you mention postcoloniality, I’d like to conclude by asking what it means to be a postcolonial nation? How does the early American republic fit within this category, and how important is such a description or designation to the book’s ultimate contributions?

Nations that emerge from colonialism must inevitably grapple with the legacy of that history. Imperial projects rely upon the establishment of asymmetrical economic, social, and cultural exchanges between colony and metropole. To a large extent, this unequal system depends upon its subjects internalizing hierarchies of distinction that privilege the mother country. These do not automatically disappear after independence is won.

I am interested in exploring how the early United States of America was influenced by its colonial past. Many Americans felt extremely proud of their membership in the British Empire, and they continued to value their historical connection to it after they had separated. Thus, the establishment of American national identity was a complex, long-term process, rather than an instantaneous transformation. This approach was inspired by the work of postcolonial scholars who for the most part focus on the Indian subcontinent, Asia, and Africa. While these societies differ temporally and geographically from the United States, the intriguing questions postcolonial scholars have raised about the lasting effects of colonialism were generative. Their scholarship helped me to be sensitive to the concurrent desire to emulate and repudiate one’s former colonizers. As Ashis Nandy has aptly observed, “colonialism never seems to end with formal political freedom.” The ideas of scholars of “white” settler societies such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa offer a closer analogy to the U.S. One of the unique challenges postcolonial settler populations faced was the dual task of establishing their right to their adoptive land while still retaining the privilege of their European inheritance.

In Unbecoming British I consider the ways in which the United States resembles later postcolonial societies. Although one must always be cognizant of how its specific history was different, seeing early America in this manner illuminates certain aspects of the nation’s history that are often overlooked. For instance, the oppression of minority groups in the U.S can be better understood if we recognize that postcolonial American elites felt marginalized within a larger transatlantic world. Viewed from this angle, their acts of oppression are both expressions of power and powerlessness vis-à-vis larger economic and cultural systems still dominated by Europe. Given what we know about the ascendency of the U.S. to the status of a dominant world power, it is easy to forget that it had such an unstable beginning. Ultimately, I hope the book reminds readers that the U.S. might not be so exceptional after all.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Common-place sat down with Denver Brunsman to ask him about his 2013 book The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World and the impact that pressing sailors into service had on Britain’s age of naval supremacy.

The book’s title, The Evil Necessity, captures the ambivalence felt by most British imperialists about naval impressment. Why was the institution and practice so fraught?

One argument of my book is that British statesmen in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made a conscious decision to pursue a particular form of maritime empire. The idea had appeal for a host of reasons, not least ideological, for it allowed Britons to square their pursuit of empire with their self-identification with liberty (a system of thought neatly traced by David Armitage in his Ideological Origins of the British Empire). The problem with a maritime empire—and any form of empire, really—is that it required (and requires) enormous amounts of labor. In other words, there is no such thing as empire “on the cheap”: it’s just a matter of who pays. Slavery was the primary form of forced labor that made economic production within the early British Empire possible. But impressment was also necessary for providing the maritime labor needed to defend and extend the imperial realm in times of war.

Into the early nineteenth century, pressing (predominantly) white sailors into naval service was far more controversial than enslaving Africans. A wide variety of pamphlets, cartoons, ballads, and other cultural mediums in the British Atlantic world attacked impressment for violating the principles of British liberty. I was surprised by how much this discourse reached and influenced the upper levels of the British state. Although there were certainly callous admirals and other government officials who simply dismissed the critiques of impressment, the majority could see the hypocrisy of building a self-proclaimed empire of liberty on the backs of impressed seamen. As an early example, in 1669 the famed diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys prepared notes for a meeting with James, Duke of York, the future King James II, who was then England’s Lord High Admiral: “Impressing of men and its management considerable, first as it is a charge to the King, secondly, as it reflects on the reputation of the service abroad.” To solve the problem, Pepys proposed ending impressment. James agreed, and the navy stopped taking men, but only briefly. By Pepys’s retirement in 1689, the English navy had started to expand impressment across space (to the Western Hemisphere) and time (for the full duration of wars, rather than the original term of a fighting season).

Unfortunately, the trend continued. Rather than reform the Royal Navy’s manning system, later British statesmen and legal authorities justified it to themselves and, they hoped, the broader public by partaking in the same discourse of liberty as its critics. The basic reasoning went that impressment might temporarily violate the individual liberty of the British seaman, but it was necessary in times of emergency (or “necessity”) for safeguarding the greater liberty of Britain and its colonial territories. British statesmen further defended impressment in the name of liberty against more bureaucratic conscription schemes, especially the French inscription maritime.

I came up with the title of “Evil Necessity” having sworn that the phrase was used repeatedly by British officials. In fact, when I went back through the sources, I discovered that they used “evil” and “necessity” frequently, often in the same works, but never (as far as I can tell) together as “evil necessity.” Still, I decided that the phrase best captured how early British imperialists came to reconcile the practice of impressment with liberty in the eighteenth century.

Do you see yourself correcting or repairing the reputation, whether among historians or general readers, of impressment?

When I began the study, the topic of impressment had an extremely polarized historiography. One side featured British naval historians, most prominently N.A.M Rodger, who saw little wrong with impressment; it was a way of life for early modern British seafarers. The other side consisted largely of American social historians, led first by Jesse Lemisch and then by Marcus Rediker, who emphasized the misery and devastating toll of impressment and the seafaring life more generally. I found much to admire in the work of historians on both sides of the debate, and Lemisch and Rediker have been very generous to me. But my primary goal was to understand how impressment worked, not to settle once and for all the question of “how bad was it?” Instead, the question guiding my work has been “if impressment was so bad, why was the British navy so good?” My answer, not to give away the exciting conclusion of the book, is that impressment was that bad and the British navy was that good. Atlantic mariners despised the British press gang and did everything humanly possible to avoid capture. Hence, impressment was hardly an accepted way of life. Yet, once captured, sailors performed admirably aboard British naval vessels. Facing both the system of British naval discipline and the dangerous natural conditions of the high seas, they had little choice. But I argue there is more to it—that for reasons of professional pride and manhood, brotherhood with their crewmates, and self-interest broadly defined, impressed sailors contributed immensely to the success of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy.

This success was not by accident. I contend that mariners differed from every other large group of forced laborers in the British Atlantic in a key respect: they were not selected for their class, beliefs, ethnicity, or skin color but rather for their particular skill set—the ability to “hand, reef, and steer” sailing vessels. No doubt class contributed heavily to impressment; it is hard to imagine the same outcome befalling a more affluent or politically connected group. But class was not determinative in naval impressment as it was in, say, army impressment. The British navy sought skilled seafarers, and for this reason the majority of impressments always took place at sea.

I fear that some readers, particularly in the academy, will misinterpret my effort to understand impressment as an apology for the practice. I purposely try to conceal my personal feelings to avoid interfering with my analysis. But there should be no doubt that I consider the entire enterprise, however successful, a travesty that with some creative policymaking could and should have been avoided.

What are some of the most compelling comparisons, contrasts and/or intersections between impressment and the other, most extreme form of forced labor in the British Atlantic World, slavery?

Slavery is absolutely fundamental to understanding impressment in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. This conclusion, as much as any other, opened exciting lines of inquiry and analysis in my research. First, in terms of numbers, impressment was the second most common form of forced labor in the eighteenth-century British Empire. As I stress in the book, it was a distant second and never approached the horrors of slavery. Impressed seamen received wages (although not always on time), adequate food and clothing, and freedoms unknown to slaves. Most important, a term of naval impressment ended at the close of any given war—it was not permanent and hereditary. Yet, “slave” was the rhetorical term of choice used by impressed mariners and critics of impressment to describe the condition of being impressed. I think, as with American revolutionaries opposing British policies in the 1760s and 1770s, slavery provided the most powerful rhetorical comparison because it was the most horrible condition imaginable by whites. In my research, I discovered cases of enslaved men fleeing to the British navy to escape their masters—in essence, seeking freedom in impressment. There is no more profound evidence that impressment was a “step up” from slavery along the spectrum of freedom and unfreedom in the Atlantic world.

You confront the issue of sailors’ agency and resistance—two important concepts in historical scholarship. How is your approach novel?

I had to confront the concept of agency in trying to understand how impressment functioned and why impressed sailors seemed to work to the fullest of their abilities on British warships. In so much historical writing—good historical writing —various oppressed and subaltern peoples only have agency when committing acts of resistance. There is no consideration if and when subjects of oppressive conditions might make a conscious choice to not resist—that is, to behave in a manner that might be beneficial to their oppressors. Obviously, these are complex issues that require great sensitivity, especially for scholars living by comparison in extreme comfort. I found a way forward by reading deeply in the literature on slavery. I was especially influenced by the extraordinary work of Walter Johnson, who has argued persuasively that we deny historical actors their full humanity if we do not consider the entire range of their actions, including decisions that might surprise or even disappoint us.

For a variety of reasons, relating to gender, economics, professionalism, and self-preservation, a majority of impressed seamen made the Royal Navy the supreme fighting force—on land or sea—of its time. I did not want to deny the agency of individual sailors in that achievement; the available evidence suggests that they took considerable pride in British naval supremacy. At the same time, to a man, nearly all the same seamen would not pass up particular opportunities to desert. Both things—resistance and compliance—could be true at the same time. The novelty of my contribution lies in applying this broader concept of agency to impressed sailors, but my approach is akin to that of other scholars who attempt to recover the full humanity of historical actors facing incredibly difficult circumstances. Whether in studies of slavery, impressment, or colonization of the Americas, scholars are increasingly realizing that the categories of resistance and accommodation present a false dichotomy of human behavior.

The Evil Necessity is a history with nearly global reach within the framework of the British Empire, and you conducted research in an impressive range of collections. What was your favorite archive, archival experience or discovery?

There are so many. Historians’ lives today are generally so tame compared to the events that we study. I was able to live out some of my own wanderlust through studying early modern sailors and visiting archives throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada. I cherish those experiences and meeting with so many of my friends and family in different locations, which I recount in one of the longer Acknowledgment sections that you will ever see. As for research finds, it is hard to beat discovering notes by George III in his own hand from 1770 at the British Library (originally, his library) on the 1743 legal decision Rex v. Broadfoot. The case was the most significant legal defense of impressment ever issued in Britain, and George III expressed his agreement by copying entire passages of the decision word-for-word. Around the same time, Benjamin Franklin was also in London reading the same decision. Not surprisingly, he came to the opposite conclusion of George III, determining that impressment unfairly violated seamen’s liberties. Franklin recorded his thoughts on the margin of a pamphlet version of the legal case; the marginalia are reprinted in vol. 35 of the Franklin Papers. One of the only ways to make the practice fairer, according to Franklin, was to impress various British elites, including judges, navy officers, and the king! I love that story and use it in the Epilogue to frame the different responses to impressment by Americans and Britons in the revolutionary Atlantic.

The book’s final paragraph references several paradoxes at the heart of impressment, ones that have trans-historical resonance, and claims that “the centrality of impressment to Britain’s self-fashioned empire of liberty raised difficult questions that are still relevant.” Does your book help illuminate any contemporary (and perhaps paradoxical) issues in particular?

As any good history class teaches, historians cannot entirely escape the times and places in which they research and write. And I confess: The Evil Necessity is undoubtedly a product of the post-9/11 world (although it was first conceived as a dissertation topic prior to 9/11). It is hard not to see analogies between the eighteenth-century British Empire and the current global imperial reach of the United States. In both cases, the state/empire in question professed values (sincerely, I believe) that it violated in order to protect those very values. As the ongoing debate over the U.S. national security apparatus suggests, it is a potentially slippery slope once states begin to trade on their values for a perceived greater good.

The other obvious analogy is to the human cost of empire, both domestically and for conquered populations. One reason that impressment continued at high rates for more than a century is that it was out of sight and therefore out of mind for most of the British population. Likewise, approximately 0.45 percent of the U.S. population has carried the burden of the country’s foreign policy as military personnel since 9/11. I have great admiration for these men and women—so great that I joined the U.S. Army Reserves as an infantryman during the researching and writing of my book (I have since completed my enlistment, without being sent overseas).

It is hard to know the exact solution to these different issues. The American ideal of an all-volunteer force, for instance, was born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a reaction against European conscription systems, particularly impressment. Trading volunteers for conscripts today would violate one set of historical national values, freedom and volunteerism, for another, fairness and democracy. As historians, perhaps we cannot provide many specific answers. Yet, ideally we can raise the relevant issues and questions that contribute to more informed, historically aware policy decisions.

Further Reading

Readers interested in British notions of liberty should see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York, 2000). For Samuel Pepys’ comments on impressment, see Pepys, “Notes from My Discourse to His Royal Highness Tomorrow May 14^th, 1669 about the Practice of Impressing Men as It Is Now Managed,” in Samuel Pepys and the Second Dutch War: Pepys’s Navy White Book and Brooke House Papers, ed. Robert Latham (London, 1995).

Common-place asks author Lucia Stanton about her career at Monticello and book Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

How did your years at Monticello—work that included yet extended beyond documentary research—shape your written work/scholarship, particularly the essays in Those Who Labor for My Happiness? Do you feel it provided you with a unique perspective on Jefferson? On slavery and the lives of enslaved men and women there?

Monticello was my daily destination for virtually my whole working life. Over four decades I was engaged in both documentary research and public programming related to Jefferson and his house and plantation. The very long process of co-editing Jefferson’s memorandum books, with Monticello curator and director James A. Bear Jr., drew me into Jefferson’s wide world and served as a kind of graduate school; hundreds of footnotes are the closest thing to a dissertation I will ever produce. For sixty years, Jefferson kept an unbroken record of the Spanish bits, French sous, and American dimes he doled out as he crisscrossed Europe and the United States. I followed him as he was ferried over the ice-bound Susquehanna, or caught speckled trout in Lake George, or browsed the bookstalls along the Seine. While tracking down where he went and what he bought—from waffles and fiddle strings to books and human beings, I learned about life in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America, as well as about Jefferson’s calamitous belief that a meticulous record of daily expenditures would preserve order in his finances.

I could have happily continued as a historical dilettante and master of annotation except for the fact that 1993 was the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth. Daniel P. Jordan, then Monticello’s director, rallied the staff to develop a broad array of new programs for the commemorative year. Many staff members recognized that we needed to do much more to show visitors that Jefferson did not live alone on his mountain and that Monticello was more than an imaginary plantation. Out of our discussions came four major programs for 1993: the creation of an advisory committee on African-American interpretation; an outdoor “Plantation Community” tour focusing on the African Americans who had lived and worked at Monticello; a series of weekends when the mountaintop was enlivened by costumed interpreters demonstrating the trades practiced by enslaved workers; and an oral history project involving descendants of Monticello’s African-American families.

So in 1992, when my responsibilities for running Monticello’s Research Department allowed, I abandoned favorite research topics to turn exclusively to mining the bottomless Jefferson archive for information about the enslaved community and Jefferson’s treatment of it. I also participated in a variety of program planning meetings, including what came to be called the Line Release committee. As part of this effort to spare Monticello visitors exposure to heat and rain, I spent hours queuing for shuttle buses and for admission to the house, and listening to what visitors said to each other.

In the midst of all these preliminaries came a call for an essay on Jefferson as a slaveholder from Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of history at the University of Virginia. He was engineering a conference, called “Jeffersonian Legacies,” and editing a collection of its papers. Thus challenged to make my first appearance in print, I sought a bolt-hole far from Jefferson’s mountaintop. Generous friends offered a cabin on their sheep farm in the mountains of western Virginia. No phone, no people, and no plumbing, a border collie my only companion. I have absolutely no memory of that summer week, except for a recurrent vision of a banker’s box of file folders at my feet as I tapped away at an ancient Smith-Corona all day and much of the night. Wrestling with the contents of that file box resulted in the first of eleven essays brought together in this collection.

In the first section of the book, Jefferson is the central focus and presiding presence. How did he control behavior, work routines, and marriage choices? How did he respond to British critics of the institution of slavery? How did he incorporate humanitarian principles of the post-Revolutionary era into his management methods while still failing to recognize the full humanity of his slaves? In the central section, anchored by a long biographical essay on six Monticello families, the focus shifts to the enslaved people. The final section focuses on their descendants in the nearly two centuries since their ancestors left Monticello. Although the ordering of the essays suggests a perspective that evolved over time, the transfer of emphasis from Jefferson to his slaves began in 1993. As we developed the content of the new outdoor tour, we tried to prevent his voice from drowning out the voices of the almost four hundred men, women, and children who lived in slavery on the 5,000-acre Monticello plantation during his lifetime. His nearly 20,000 surviving letters swamp their baker’s dozen. Furthermore, in his writings Jefferson inflated his own agency, sometimes with the breezy use of the personal pronoun (“I work myself upwards of 100 spindles,” he said in connection with his textile shop). And the accounts of Monticello visitors obscured the enslaved with the passive voice (“toddy was brought” and “fires were lighted”). Jefferson’s Farm Book and letters provide names, ages, locations, and occupations but are virtually silent on emotions, values, and even talents, since most of the references to enslaved people deal with negative events like unsatisfactory work, punishment, illness, or death. The slaves’ labor, not their lives, is invariably the issue. The human dimension is almost entirely missing from the Jefferson archive.

The attempt to restore this dimension took two main paths. One led to a project to recover African-American voices through interviews with descendants (see below). The other continued the same kind of fact-gathering that Monticello researchers had done for decades. Working at a historic site rather than a college or university, we were less concerned with advancing striking new theories or engaging in historiographical debates than with developing interpretive programs and restoration projects. Whether our field was Monticello’s architecture, horticulture, decorative arts, or daily life, we went about our Baconian tasks, assembling relevant primary evidence (most of it unpublished) and giving it a forensic going-over. Jim Bear was an important model to me of careful scholarship, lively curiosity, and a humane interest in every man, woman, and child at Monticello in Jefferson’s day.

What I gained from my associates fit with my love of data and a natural inclination to show, rather than tell, which the available records conspired to encourage. Aside from his letters, which were often carefully crafted with an eye toward history, Jefferson’s records are almost all of the daily detail variety. One set is, alas, the nearest thing to a diary he kept. For fifty years he recorded twice-daily thermometer readings along with occasional flashes of phenology to pin down the march of the seasons—”willow leafing,” “martins appear,” “frogs sing.” The dry entries of this weather journal and his Farm, Garden, and Memorandum Books consist of payments, lists, calculations, and measurements, occasionally embellished with a sketch (the horse Assaragoa’s brand, for instance) or an epigram or a grumbling remark about an exorbitant bill. When these minutiae are brought together, however, they begin to add color and form to an indistinct landscape.

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty. Although he never wrote any kind of tribute to George Granger, phrases such as “George says” or “George knows” or “concluded with George to” help to reveal the remarkable knowledge and character of the only enslaved man to serve him as overseer. Fragmentary references assembled in chronological order bring a towering figure out of the mist, as well as the contours of a story of life at Monticello that George Granger himself might have told. The casual remark of Jefferson’s son-in-law that tobacco was Granger’s “favorite crop” evokes a man anxiously scanning the western sky for portents of the rain needed for transplanting or stretching a tobacco leaf over his knuckles to determine if the crop was ready for stripping. In Jefferson’s request for seed of the Canada lily that “George found for me in the woods” we can see a man walking the slopes of Monticello with an observant eye and an appreciation of the natural world. Late in life, Granger was given the challenging twin commissions of making a productive crop for his master and disciplining his own community and family members. Entries in several different records show that on the first day of November 1799, Jefferson consulted his overseer about the expected cider yield of a bushel of apples, and on the second day Granger was dead at the age of sixty-nine. Also, mysteriously, a fifteen-year-old nailmaker, Ben Hix, died on the very same day.

The topic and theme of “family” runs through this book. Why is it (and, along with it, gender, generation, and genealogy) so essential to understanding slavery at Monticello?

The family focus of my work was a natural outcome of developing tours that would, as historian James O. Horton says,”put a human face on slavery.” But it was certainly magnified by the Getting Word oral history project, a life-changing experience for me. Over the last twenty years my colleague Dianne Swann-Wright and I, often with our Ohio consultant Beverly Gray, have interviewed over 180 people, most of them descendants of more than a dozen enslaved Monticello families. In post-interview discussions around Bev Gray’s kitchen table or in dingy motels with a view of the freeway, we marveled at the number of families divided by the color line and argued about what really happened between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I was drawn out of a cultural cul-de-sac and pressed to think much harder about the central issue of race.

Documentary research pursued along with the interviews revealed extraordinary families, as well as individuals. Jefferson’s records show only that Peter Fossett was born in 1815, the son of Joseph and Edith Fossett, head blacksmith and head cook at Monticello. Fossett told his own story in an interview for the largest newspaper in the country in 1898, an account that lay neglected for a century. Then a renowned Baptist minister in Ohio, he related how, at the age of eleven, he was sold on the auction block after Jefferson’s death. His parents and some of his siblings moved to Cincinnati while he was still enslaved in Virginia: “I wanted to be with them and be free, so I resolved to get free or die in the attempt.” He twice tried to run away and finally, in 1850, gained his freedom with the aid of family members. The recent explosion of online historical resources produced an extraordinary bounty of data that routed many of our assumptions but validated some of our hunches. In the case of the Fossetts, online censuses, newspapers, historic maps, and city directories made it possible to know that Joseph and Edith Fossett, who left Virginia in the late 1830s, succeeded in purchasing or otherwise freeing at least eight of their children, all of whom lived close to their parents in Cincinnati, either in the same household, or next door, or around the corner.

In generation after generation of Monticello’s African-American families we found consistent ideals and values, often expressed in ways that made headlines. The Fossetts, for example, worked in the Underground Railroad, served in the Union Army in the Civil War, confronted American presidents about segregation in the Jim Crow period (the prominent activist William Monroe Trotter was a Fossett descendant), and went to jail in the civil rights era. Learning about families over generations shed light back into the shadows of slavery at Monticello and helped to fill in the wide spaces left by Jefferson’s one-sided records.

Always at the back of my mind was what one African-American visitor said to me as we stood on Mulberry Row, lined with grass verges instead of the cabins and shops where enslaved families had lived, worked, played, and prayed: “We were just erased.” In the absence of reconstructed buildings, our hopes centered on the new tour along the empty plantation street, which quickly exposed the many challenges of telling the story of slavery at Monticello. Guides had to lead groups of up to a hundred people on broiling summer days. The African-American college students who gave some of the tours confronted inappropriate remarks like, “Are you our slave for the day?” All the visitors came armed with preconceptions. Many white people wanted to hear that Jefferson was a “good master” who would have freed his slaves if he could have. Some black visitors viewed slavery through a lens dominated by whips and rape. Many of both races said they would have run away or rebelled if they had been a slave. And the same story could elicit totally different interpretations. When a guide spoke of the garden plots where Monticello’s enslaved families raised an assortment of produce, some saw them as a sign of a kind and indulgent Jefferson allowing his slaves the time and place to supplement their diet. To others they reflected his severity in depriving them of enough food to sustain health. Both missed the point by seeing the situation in terms of Jefferson rather than of the enslaved people themselves. Over centuries, slaves throughout the South struggled to maintain one of their few customary rights, the right to cultivate their “own” garden plots in their “own” time. These provided not just a better diet but access to money, for Monticello’s families sold their surplus produce to the Jefferson household and elsewhere. Without minimizing the harshness of the institution of slavery, we wanted to tell a story not just of oppression, but of creative responses to oppression. Inside the restrictive circle of slavery, Monticello’s African Americans did more than just survive. They protected and nurtured their children, improved conditions for their families, and developed and transmitted skills and a rich culture. They resisted the institution in many more ways than just running away from it.

It’s difficult to ask about the relationship between Jefferson’s antislavery thinking and his beliefs about innate difference and inequality based on race without referencing the recent filmLincoln, which completely sidesteps the issue. You tend to see the two strains as contradictory or at least in tension, but others view them as entirely of a piece/consistent. How would you respond to that assessment?

Some readers of my work have confessed that they need to take frequent breaks from all the bad news—the slave auctions, the cruel overseers, the toiling children. I do, too. So I developed a sideline about Jefferson, American epitome of the Enlightenment. This is an optimistic, generous, and sometimes wonderfully eccentric Jefferson, “interrogating the sun, moon and stars,” watching a Hessian fly lay her eggs, or measuring the thickness of his bedding each night to assess the heat-conducting properties of fabrics and feathers. His lifetime of systematic observation was dedicated to unlocking the secrets of Nature in order to contribute to the improvement of the human condition.

These are consoling topics, but underneath them lurks the dark side of the Enlightenment. Jefferson’s belief in “the scale of beings” and his faith in the perfectibility of man placed men like himself at the top while down below were people of African descent—far behind on the route from barbarism to civilization. At the same time, he was every inch a Virginian, who chose to live by the rule of Virginia law and custom and was deeply tinged by anti-black views. The intensity of his commitment to end an institution he always considered inhumane and unjust was diluted by his Enlightenment trust in progress and his indelible racism. A single session with Jefferson’s writings can cause a present-day reader to cringe or cheer by turns. There is his casual reference to feeding “every animal on my farm except my negroes,” but on another page he tries to find a way to bring an enslaved woman nearer to her “abroad” husband. He recoiled at the sight of European women performing heavy labor and was unbothered by black women grubbing and plowing his own fields. Yet he also experimented with various (though not entirely successful) methods of introducing a measure of humanity into the slave management regime at Monticello in pursuit of a dual and perhaps dubious ideal—a plantation that was both humane and productive.

Jefferson’s actions as a slaveholder were always inflected by the double identity of a slave as human being and property. His effort to unite the couple with the “abroad” marriage was made in connection with the sale of the wife and her children. All his references to uniting couples or treating his slaves well or minimizing use of the whip were qualified by considerations of profit and productivity. Because of his remarkable skills of denial and rationalization and his faith in the “law of nature” that equated self-interest and moral duty (“providence has made our interests & our duties coincide perfectly”), he has projected an image of himself that can look like a hypocrite or a man of contradictions or a tortured soul. I’m not sure I agree. The English author Harriet Martineau captured the “hardening of mind and manner” among southern slaveholders in 1835: “A magic ring seems drawn round those who live amidst slavery [which] gives a circular character to all they think and say and do.” Jefferson’s “magic ring” was a mental Newtonian universe he created for himself, inside which he could tinker with its moving parts and strive for efficiency and “equilibrio” in the belief that all would come right in the end. He is both the man who had “scruples” about selling slaves and who sold over a hundred men, women, and children in his lifetime. He wrote with feeling about bonds of family, and separated children under twelve from their parents (by gift, not by sale). He was an eloquent advocate for equality who closed his imagination to half the people in his state.

There are obvious pitfalls in the kind of microhistory I’ve been talking about. We thank the man who hung on to every piece of paper from the draft of the Declaration to a bill for oats for his Paris stable. But the huge Jeffersonian archive can tempt us to ignore the broad social and economic context beyond the island of Monticello. We work in a rich microclimate that saps the urge to stray beyond it. And there are daily lessons in humility, as new facts keep overturning old conclusions. Even at one of the best-documented sites in the country, we can see only dimly into the distance; clairvoyance is impossible when we have access to only a fraction of the circumstances that affect actions and choices. How can I possibly claim to know why Jefferson did not educate his own enslaved children or why George Granger failed to pack his tobacco crop in 1798 or whether Edith Fossett helped her brother Thruston Hern to run away to Washington in 1817? Even a deep familiarity with a single historic site doesn’t end in any kind of absolute understanding. It leads instead to perpetual inquiry.

The final essay in Those Who Labor for My Happinessconsiders one result of carrying the quest for information far beyond the time and place of Jefferson’s Monticello. For the Getting Word project, Dianne and I interviewed eighty descendants of three daughters of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings and explored the lives of their ancestors between 1826 and the present. Each branch produced men and women who made monumental efforts to fulfill the promise of Jefferson’s Declaration. William Monroe Trotter and the cousins he probably never knew, Frederick Madison Roberts, and Coralie Franklin Cook were all prominent figures in the battle for racial justice at the very same moment in the early twentieth century. They and their Hemings kin convey the image of a family that is exceptional. There are undoubtedly others like it whose lives and achievements are still waiting to be brought to light.

Common-place asks Marla R. Miller, author of Betsy Ross and the Making of America (2010) to reflect on the challenges and rewards of writing the biography of someone who left almost no trace in the historical record:

Like most of early America’s working women, Betsy Ross (that is, Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole, 1752-1836), a Philadelphia upholsterer and flagmaker from the 1760s to the 1820s, left little in the way of papers. Her iconic status aside, almost no letters, ledgers or journal entries remain from her hand; almost no possessions or places have survived for our contemporary scrutiny. A handful of legal documents and records associated with Philadelphia’s Free Quaker meeting bear her signature, as do a smattering of receipts. A house on Arch Street stands to document the built environment she once knew, and a handful of family possessions are preserved in public and private hands, but these are only small fragments of her world. The career of the Ross legend had attracted some academic interest (in part because, as a product of the late nineteenth century, it left a more robust paper trail), but few scholarly attempts have been made to recover or understand the life behind it, mainly because we have comparatively few of the usual avenues of insight into the mind of the biographer’s subject. Put differently, the subject one would expect to find at the center of a biography was absent.

If the paucity of traditional sources goes a long way toward explaining why, at the turn of the twenty-first century, no one had yet ventured anything like a biography of the legendary flagmaker, the trajectory of women’s history as a field of academic inquiry also has something to do with it. Women’s history, as most readers of this journal know, came out of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The rising generation of historians who were drawn to the field in the 1970s and 1980s were anxious to take on hard-hitting, substantive topics like labor unrest, political influence, and the formal and informal regulation of reproduction. No one trying to launch a career in the budding field of women’s history would have taken on a project like Betsy Ross, who by the era of the bicentennial had largely been reduced to a cartoon character, a pin cushion, the salt to George Washington’s pepper. Thirty years later, as I started researching the “life behind the legend,” women’s history was solidly entrenched in our discipline and those issues were no longer in play—though even then I sometimes preferred to describe my research topic as “upholsterers in eighteenth-century Philadelphia” to avoid the whiff of condescension (sometimes verging surprisingly toward contempt) that the name “Betsy Ross” can still conjure. But by and large, studies like Alfred F. Young’s brilliant treatments of Deborah Sampson Gannett and George Robert Twelves Hughes, and Nell Painter’s pathbreaking study of Sojourner Truth, had prepared readers for a scholarly biography of Betsy Ross, despite the comparatively thin documentary record.

But the lack of traditional archival sources remained a significant challenge. Reconstructing the absent center, then, involved three main strategies: seeing familiar sources in new ways, allowing my subject to step to the side while other figures from her world occupy the reader’s attention, and engaging the material record associated with her and her family writ large.

The story of Betsy Ross and the making of the first flag was launched into the public mind in 1870, when her grandson William Canby (1825-1890, the child of Betsy’s daughter Jane Claypoole Canby) recounted to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania a narrative conveyed to him in the 1850s by his aunt, Clarissa Claypoole Wilson (1785-1864). Canby began researching the family story, and, unable to find proof in the archival record that the tale was true, he did the next best thing, and asked his relatives—including Rachel Claypoole Fletcher (1789-d.) and Margaret Boggs (1776-1876)—to record what they remembered hearing about these events in a series of affidavits and other testimonies. These narratives form the basis of the Betsy Ross legend as we know it today, and the family stories (like all family stories) all proved to involve both fact and fiction in varying ratios; but the testimonies also offered opportunities to explore a surprisingly wide range of topics in the social and cultural history of early Philadelphia.

Young’s treatments of Sampson and Hughes have illuminated the ways that stories about the Revolution as they unfolded over the course of the nineteenth century can tell us as much or more about the decades of the telling as they do about the American past. And scholars have used the Ross legend productively to probe their implications for the post-Civil War, Centennial era in which they emerged. Readers have long looked at the family oral histories largely as documents of Victorian sentimentality and centennial wistfulness, as expressions of nationalism and artifacts of gendered cultural tensions—but they remain, too, productive points of entry into the world of the Griscom family itself as well as the historical age their lives and experiences reflected. To be sure, these affidavits concerning the alleged making of the first flag are steeped in patriotic nostalgia, but they also reflect the actual lived experience of women from a large, multi-generational artisanal family. Margaret Boggs, born in 1776, became a celebrated centenarian at an opportune moment, but she also lived and worked in the upholstery trades alongside the flagmaker for many years, joining Betsy’s household after she herself was widowed very young; she was the first of several nieces and daughters to return to the bustling Claypoole house in adulthood, and contributed to the various family enterprises housed there. Rachel lived to recount a version of events that transpired long before her birth, but she also spent a lifetime living and working alongside sisters, cousins, and aunts in upholstery, flagmaking, and other trades. The question is not whether these documents should be accepted or rejected as written: if we read carefully enough, we can have both baby and bathwater, too.

Consider, for instance, Rachel’s testimony. When she made her contribution to the family mythology, she described how young Betsy Griscom walked from her family’s Arch Street home to the workshop of Philadelphia upholsterer John Webster “to visit her sister.” “While there,” the story continues, “a piece of difficult work was given to one of the girls who failed in it and Betsy said she could do it, and surprised Mr. Webster by the neatness and beauty of her work. He at once went to her mother’s and asked her to let him have Betsy [who] was unwilling at first to let her go. Mr. Webster offered to pay grandmother (Griscom) the wages of a woman in the kitchen & give Betsy a thorough knowledge of the business. So her mother yielded.” This anecdote is obviously meant to preserve the image of an intelligent, quick-witted young Betsy, the needlework prodigy, to foreshadow the heroic contribution her stitchery would later make to the fledgling war effort. But it also offers an intriguing glimpse of artisanal work in early Philadelphia, as well as an earlier moment in her family history, worlds Rachel knew. In this telling, one of Betsy’s older sisters—Susanna, Sarah, Rebecca or Mary (the eldest, Deborah, being already married and out of the house)—was already working in Webster’s shop when Betsy visited her there, and, since “one of the girls” was struggling with an assignment, then at least three girls, and perhaps more, were employed by the London-trained upholsterer and laboring under the supervision of Ann King, who “had the care of women’s work” in Webster’s enterprise. The upholsterer is remembered to have approached Rebecca Griscom rather than Samuel to inquire about the girl’s availability, and he was willing to pay a kitchen servant’s wages in exchange for the novice’s labor. Though it wasn’t her objective, Rachel’s account can’t help but shed light on the upholstery workshops that figured so largely in her family history and in her own life experience.

Second, reconstructing the life of my subject also demanded that I skirt, if not altogether violate, the conventions of traditional biography. Betsy Ross is rarely able to hold her place at the center of these chapters—the archival record is simply too slight. Making a virtue of necessity, instead we see her parents, aunts, and uncles, we meet her sisters and brothers, we consider her co-workers, children, and nieces. And in truth, we all know, from our own lives, that the things that happen to our sisters, our brothers, our parents or our children are things that happen to us as well. The eighteenth century is so very different from today in so many ways, but not, I think, in this one. Embracing that reality transformed the project from a conventional biography to a more encompassing look at the world of this large artisanal family over, in the end, some six generations.

Elizabeth Griscom a.k.a Betsy Ross grew up in a large household as one of seventeen children, and it became clear fairly early on that there were stories to tell about her several sisters—Deborah’s marriage to cloth dyer and scourer Everard Bolton, her sisters’ encounters with discipline and disownment after their marriages outside the unity of the Quaker community, Mary’s child born out of wedlock, Rachel’s own work in the upholstery trades, the death of Hannah’s husband and subsequent effort to salvage some of the family’s goods in the face of insolvency, and Rebecca’s sorrowful death in the almshouse. If the project began, in some ways, as an effort to rescue the “real” Betsy Ross from obscurity (or, worse, from misunderstanding cloaked in familiarity), it became an opportunity to tell stories about this ordinary artisanal family in early Philadelphia, and through them to understand better the world of the iconic flagmaker. From start to finish, Betsy Ross remained elusive to me as an individual. What I could see far more clearly was the several generations of a Pennsylvania family whose fortunes fluctuated over time and space, for whom the Revolution was arguably more bane than boon, their patriotic family storytelling notwithstanding.

With my subject so elusive in the archive, material culture offered a compellingly direct link to her world, though this proved another genre of sources that illuminated Betsy’s world obliquely at best. The Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia does own Betsy’s spectacles as well as a silver snuff box engraved “EC,” Betsy’s initials after her marriage to her third husband, John Claypoole, and a petticoat, remade in the early 1800s from an older silk dress. But here again, objects associated with others proved enlightening, in more ways than one. In the course of researching the book (as well as co-curating a museum exhibition based on the project mounted in 2010 by the Winterthur Museum), I had the great good fortune to become acquainted with several descendants, who (I report with no small amount of gratitude) greeted our hesitant inquiries with generosity rather than suspicion. One led us—literally led us, that is—through a basement piled high with the detritus we all accumulate through life to a far corner, where, beneath stacks of sewing and quilting supplies, sat the sea chest John Claypoole packed for his 1792 voyage to Demerara; another drove to a Baltimore bakery with a spectacular pieced silk signature quilt made in the 1841 for Betsy’s grand-daughter Catherine (and so documenting the family’s social circle), while another shared a stunning appliqué cotton quilt made by Betsy’s daughter Clarissa Claypoole. The latter bore a striking resemblance to another quilt, owned by a collector, made by Clarissa’s cousin and Betsy’s niece (and co-worker) Margaret Boggs, and the two quilts together—both moving examples of beautiful needlework produced by women who otherwise sewed for a living—offered insight, if indirect, into their own skill (one flag attributed to Clarissa survives in the collections of the Betsy Ross house, but otherwise, none of the sewing that they did in the course of their trade is at present known to survive). But more importantly, they served as a reminder that these women embraced outlets of aesthetic expression broader than that offered by flags and chair covers. More interestingly, the stylistic tradition with which both quilts are associated—the polychrome floral motifs cut from polished cotton chintz, their arrangement on a neutral cotton background, the inclusion of inscriptions—underscored the significance that new religious communities came to assume later in the family’s history.

Certainly the most emotionally compelling artifact I encountered in the course of the work is the cane carried by Betsy’s third husband, John Claypoole. I had known, from archival research, that Claypoole suffered from some disability late in life that impaired his mobility; in the early nineteenth century, with John unable to work, the Claypoole household depended on the charity of the Free Quaker community. The cause of John’s disability is unknown, but some sources gestured toward injuries he received during the Revolution, while others hinted that he had had some sort of stroke. Some documents said he was paralyzed. I didn’t know what to make of it all. And then on one extraordinary day in Maryland a descendant reached into the back of her kitchen closet and pulled out John Claypoole’s cane. The artifact—a gift from his son-in-law, the ship captain Isaac Silliman (who had married Betsy’s daughter Eliza Ashburn, the only surviving child from her marriage to mariner Joseph Ashburn), probably crafted at sea—confirmed that he was not in fact paralyzed, at least not at this date. The head of the cane was carved in the shape of a dog’s head, and it carried a Masonic symbol. The shaft was marked “I.S. to J.C, 1811.” The most obvious conclusion is that Claypoole was still ambulatory even in 1811. But it was another inscription—”John E. Claypoole, 74 So Front Street”—that made me sit up straight; it was an “if lost, please return to” note for the finder, should the elderly Claypoole leave it behind on some ramble through the neighborhood. The whole package—long days at sea bodied forth in a gift thoughtfully carved by a son-in-law for the adoptive father of his own beloved wife, and the image of old John Claypoole making his way down the street to the beehive that was the house on Front Street—made this family real to me in ways that the documentary record perhaps never could.

Perhaps that Maryland kitchen could even be called an artifact in my search for the absent center. I was writing about an American icon, but Betsy Ross was not only a mother, a sister, an aunt, and a grandmother—she is also an ancestor to living people who welcomed me into their homes and into their families. Getting to know so many of Betsy’s descendants as I was writing kept me honest in a way that I came very much to appreciate. If ever the temptation came to make a flip or glib remark or easy joke at the expense of my subject, I quickly recalled that she was not, for one set of readers, an abstract figure. While I never pulled any analytical punch for the sake of her descendants (who are, I should say, well-read, sophisticated students of history who did not need me to point out places where family stories broke down), the past was made much more immediate to me by these connections. I have often joked with students about how much easier it is to write about the eighteenth century than the twentieth, as my long-dead subjects are far less likely to contradict me. But my acquaintance with the grandchildren of Betsy’s grandchildren helped me remember that we are not, in truth, always so very distant from our subjects.

Perhaps this brings us full circle—the present-day family of Betsy Ross reminds us that behind the legend there are and have always been very real people. The community of family members who told these stories in the last quarter of the nineteenth century embraced the story of the “first flag” for reasons ranging from tension over women’s suffrage to patriotic longing, and the story of Betsy Ross, to be sure, sheds light on that moment in time. But those narratives also help us understand the lives of laboring women of the Revolutionary era, an enterprise fragile enough. The storytelling of Clarissa Wilson and William Canby, of Rachel Fletcher and Margaret Boggs, and of the present-day descendents of Betsy Ross each offer opportunities to push past the romance, to peer through the haze of nostalgia, and find vibrant communities of artisanal women in the American past.

Engaging the stories of the dozens of men and women whose lives crossed Betsy’s horizon at various points in her life necessarily dislodges the subject from the center of her own story. But perhaps she would have found this position a familiar one, enmeshed as she was in thick ties that were simultaneously familial and commercial, political and spiritual. Here I only partially mean to cue the sorts of narratives Barbara Taylor contemplates in her thoughtful contribution to the June 2009 American Historical Review roundtable on “Historians and Biography,” in which some sort of pre-modern “self” “rooted in communal life, lacking any sense of unique individuality,” gives way to “the modern Western self, a ‘bounded, unique’ individual possessing innate character and psychological interiority.” But in the end, I do suspect that de-centering my subject produced a more truthful telling of her life—a closer approximation of the lived experience of working women in eighteenth-century America, whose lives were inextricably connected to their families (past, present, and future), and embedded in neighborhoods, women whose experience was shaped by both the fellowship of faith and communities of artisanal practice. Departing from convention allowed me to show readers something about the lived experience of the eighteenth century that is certainly truer than I would have been able to achieve had the documentary record been more cooperative.

Though many readers come to the book primarily to learn whether the “first flag” story they learned in childhood is true, that question was the least interesting to me while writing, and the book leaves the “did she or didn’t she” question wide open (in the end, I suggest that there are probably some grains of truth at the bottom of the family legend, but just which those grains might be—and their relative weight—is very much left up to the reader). I have remained, on the whole, far less interested in Betsy Ross than I am in “Aunt Claypoole,” the woman whose crowded Front Street home sheltered a substantial flagmaking enterprise at least in the early nineteenth century, whatever went before. I perhaps possess some romantic attachment to Ross, but it’s not the young widow of the Revolution who captures my historical affection: it’s the aging artisan whose spectacles today document her failing vision, the mature sister, aunt, mother, and grandmother on whom so many others came to depend—the woman at the center of one lively artisanal world.

Further reading:

Readers interested in the legend as the family reported it should consult the several transcriptions made by James M. Duffin, in the collections of the Betsy Ross House. To read more about the making of the Betsy Ross legend, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s essay in this journal, “How Betsy Ross Became Famous” (Common-Place, Vol. 8 No. 1).

For other biographies that examine the lives of subjects not well represented in the archival record, see Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York, 2004), and The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 2000); also Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (New York, 1996). The thoughtful roundtable on “Historians and Biography,” which includes Barbara Taylor’s essay, can be found in the June 2009 American Historical Review. See also Nick Salvatore, “Biography and Social History: An Intimate Relationship,” Labour History 87 (November 2004). An earlier contribution to this ongoing conversation is another roundtable, “Self and Subject” in The Journal of American History 89: 1 (June 2002).

In This Violent Empire (2010) Carroll Smith-Rosenberg fuses cultural and political history to analyze the violence at the core of U.S. national identity.Common-place asked her: how can we better understand the United States’ long history of racist, sexist and xenophobic violence, and what tools can cultural history offer us as we explore this part of our past?

“Violence,” James Baldwin tells us, (and who would know better than he?) “has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence is not merely literal and actual,” Baldwin continues, “but appears to be admired and lusted after and is key to the American imagination.” History supports Baldwin’s vision. From the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s, through the Civil War Draft Riots, frontier and Klan violence, the Red Scare, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Joseph McCarthy’s war on domestic radicals to our current war on terrorism, fear of all who differ from an idealized vision of the “True American” has driven our public policies and colored our popular culture.

But why? Why did a nation of immigrants, a people who see themselves as a model for democracies around the world, embrace a culture of violence? InThis Violent Empire I traced the history of this violence to the origins of the United States, to the very processes by which the founding generation struggled to create a coherent national identity in the face of deep-seated ethnic, racial, religious, and regional divisions. Their efforts, I argue, have left us with a national identity riven with uncertainty, contradiction and conflicts. America’s paranoia, racism and violence lie in the instability of our national sense of self.

That our sense of national cohesion was hard come by and unstable should not surprise us. The new United States was born of a violent and sudden revolution. For decades after that revolution, the states, far from united, were an uncertain amalgam of diverse peoples, religions, and languages. No common history, no government infrastructures bound them together. Nor did any single, unquestioned system of values and beliefs help unify the founding generation. Rather a host of conflicting political discourses, religious beliefs, and social values destabilized the new nation’s self-image.

As did three deeply incompatible ideological positions that form the core of our national self image. First and foremost is our commitment to the Declaration of Independence’s celebration of the freedom and equality of all men, the universality of unalienable rights. This commitment constitutes the bedrock of our claims to national legitimacy and moral standing. It makes us “the land of the free,” a model for democracies around the world. But two other deeply held beliefs dramatically contradict this self image. Having committed themselves to a universal vision of equality, the founding generation simultaneously envisioned their infant republic as “the greatest empire the hand of time had ever raised up to view,” in the words of patriot and Congregationalist minister Timothy Dwight. Such a vision justified European Americans’ determined march across the American continent, a vision their new Constitution upheld by declaring Native Americans “wards” of a white American state and depriving them of political agency, equality and unalienable rights. But of course the Constitution does far more. Through its Three-fifths and Fugitive Slave clauses, it made the United States the land, not of the free, but of slaves and slave owners. What ideological disconnects and contradictions! What an unstable bedrock upon which to construct a new national identity!

Seeking to efface these discordant discourses as well as constitute a sense of national collectivity for the motley array of European settlers who had gathered on the nether side of the North Atlantic, the new nation’s founding generation had to imagine a New American whom citizens as diverse as Georgia planters (who owned slaves and wanted Cherokee lands), Vermont hard-scrabble farmers (who were committed to the abolition of slavery), and Quaker merchants (who were ardent defenders of Native American rights) could identify with, wish to become, boast that they were.

On the pages of the new republic’s rapidly expanding popular print culture—the newspapers, political magazines and tracts, novels, plays, poetry, sermons, press that proliferated in the 1780s and ’90s—the image of a New American gradually took form. How was he initially envisioned? First and foremost, he was a virile and manly republican citizen, endowed with unalienable rights and devoted to liberty and the independence of his country. Secondly, descended from European stock, he was white; no trace of racial mixture darkened his skin. Lastly, he was educated, propertied, industrious and respectable—in short, bourgeois, or at the very least, of the middling classes. Of course, the majority of those residing in the new republic failed to meet these criteria.

How then did the new republic’s print culture go about convincing its readers—and eventually a broad swath of the American people—to embrace their projected New America and the national identity they sought to construct around him?

In support of their newly imagined American, the popular press presented a series of constituting Others, abject and threatening figures, whose differences from the settlers overshadowed the divisions that distinguished the settlers from one another. Their abject qualities, it was hoped, would convince readers to embrace the figure of the New American, to desire to be him or, perhaps even more critically, to be governed by him. Together, the imagined New American and his constituting negative Others were designed to give European Americans a sense of national homogeneity and thus coherence that the reality of their lives did not support. As a result, the new nation’s real ethnic and ideological heterogeneity was denied. Rather than as source of hybrid vitality, it was presented as a source of danger. Difference, diversity became suspect, disdained as polluting, as un-American.

Eventually four principal Others emerged on the pages of the popular press, figures who, only slightly refigured, remain with us today: the disorderly and destructive poor (initially embodied as Shay and Whiskey rebels—later as genetically deformed Jukes and Kallikaks and today as inner city gangs, “welfare mothers,” and illegal immigrants); foolish and dependent women; savage Native Americans; and initially enslaved and always inferior African Americans.

But these Others would not stay other. Time and again on the pages of political magazines and tracts, plays and novels, the New American’s Others fused with him, problematizing his manliness, his claims to republican virtue. Distinctions between European and Native Americans, free and slave labor, collapsed. Masculinity appeared more performed than real. With each collapse of difference, the stability of the new national identity grew more uncertain. The republican press turned upon the Others with rage born of frustration and fear. On its pages the New American and his Others merged in a violent, at times deadly dance of sameness and difference—a dance that enmeshes us to this day. In This Violent Empire, I carefully trace the collapse of difference and the rhetorical rage that collapse engendered.

In my efforts to trace the processes by which our national identity took form, I found traditional historical narrative structures and forms of evidence insufficient to the task. Increasingly I turned to literary critical practices (rhetorical analyses; close readings not only of political texts, but of novels, plays, poems, boldly intermixing genres) and to poststructural and postcolonial theory, seeking ways to penetrate the maze of contradictions and instabilities that enveloped the founding generation’s efforts to create a national sense of self. In the process I came to think of national identities not as the products of literal experiences (the exigencies of the revolutionary struggle; the decades of resistance to British commercial and political regulations) but as rhetorical constructions, composites of conflicting discourses, multiple, layered, fluid, often contradictory. National identities are designed, British cultural theorist Stuart Hall tells us, to “stabilize, fix … guarantee an unchanging oneness or cultural belongingness.” They provide citizens with a sense of “history and ancestry held in common … [a sense of] some common origin or shared characteristics,” no matter how artificial, how fictional that sense of commonality. At the same time, they depend on patterns of systematic exclusion. Again Stuart Hall: “Identities can function as points of identification and attachment onlybecause of their capacity to exclude … The unity, the internal homogeneity, which the term identity treats as fundamental is not a natural but a constructed form of closure … constantly destabilized by what it leaves out.” Those left out constitute the boundaries of our natural belonging.

But boundaries are porous and deceptive. Within their confines, we bond with other national subjects, confirming our similarities, no matter how imaginary those similarities may be. Outside these boundaries, our Others hover, threatening to penetrate and pollute our sense of national unity. Seen thus, boundaries and Others are oppositional forces. But boundaries not only divide but connect us to our Others. They are those points where self and Other are in closest contact. If we think of actual national boundaries, those excluded stand just on the other side of what is often a thin, imaginary line, at times literally a line in the sand. On either side of these boundaries, borderlands stretch, liminal spaces of fluidity, hybridity—and transgression. Within these borderlands, our Others beckon to us. Emblems of the proscribed, they point to forbidden possibilities, tempt us down prohibited paths. Consciously or unconsciously, we seek to incorporate our Others, at times in response to deep-rooted fears of isolation and loss, at other times, for qualities we imagine they have and long to make our own. At still other times we turn from them in disgust, for, as often as not, they are imaginative projections of our own worst qualities, our dark mirror images. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met our Other, and he is us. National identities, dependent on distinctions between our selves and our Others, are illusory and unstable.

All this may seem terribly abstract and theoretical. Let me attempt to make the abstract concrete by examining an incident that occurred at the beginning of George Washington’s presidency. A puzzling but telling example of the complex relation that tied European and Native Americans to one another, it will, I hope, illustrate the layered and uncertain nature of national identities, the contradictory relation between the national subject and his Others. This example will also, I trust, demonstrate the ways cultural historians can contribute to our understanding of political processes of nation building.

On July 21, 1790, a flotilla of ships dotted New York harbor (then the nation’s capital), eminent citizens gathered and a delegation of Creek warriors stepped ashore to sign a treaty of peace and friendship with the new republic. Prominent among those greeting the Creek delegates were officers and members of New York City’s Tammany Society. Proudly proclaiming themselves “sachems” and “braves,” carrying bows, arrows and tomahawks and bedecked in “Indian” costumes, they had marched from their “Great Wigwam” (as they called their clubhouse in the old Exchange Building on Broad Street) to Coffee House Slip to welcome the Creek delegation. From there, they escorted the Creek warriors first to the home of the Secretary of War and then to President Washington’s residence, where they were joined by the governor of New York, senators and representatives from Georgia, army and militia officers. The day ended with a state dinner, attended by the Secretary of War, the Governor of New York, the Creek delegation, and the Tammany “braves.” The historian of the event reported that the Creek delegates were “very much pleased” to see the Tammany members in full “Indian” costume.

Why would hardworking European American shopkeepers and artisans (the Society drew its members primarily from the city’s middling and laboring classes, and included a number of newly arrived and politically radical Irish immigrants) parade down crowded streets in feathers and war paint? (Nor were Tammany “braves” and “sachems” the only European Americans to publicly play at being Indians. From the 1720s on, elite Philadelphia merchants and southern planters had celebrated May 1 as St. Tammany’s Day, dancing around May poles festooned with native American flowers, drinking and feasting long into nights that ended with the burning of St. Tammany in effigy.) Repeatedly during the eighteenth century and at no time more intensely than during the century’s last three decades as the new republic took form, European Americans had engaged in savage, often genocidal, warfare with Native Americans. Captivity narratives and tales of Indian warfare (the new nation’s first best sellers) repeatedly represented Native Americans as savage murderers, sadistic torturers, heathens who lacked any sense of God or, almost as telling, of private property. If any figure stood in the popular press as the European American’s dark and dangerous Other, it was the Native American warrior. How can we begin to understand what led European Americans to playfully don the garb of their savage enemies, to play the surrogate, the counterfeit Indian?

I sought the answer to this question in the nature of surrogacy itself. Surrogates are officially appointed successors, deputies with authority to represent an absent one, to act in his place. Since their first settlements, European Americans had represented themselves as God’s appointed successors to America’s indigenous peoples with jurisdiction over their estates, that is, the North American continent. Because European Americans would use native lands far more productively, native lands were rightly theirs—along with the name “American.” But European Americans did not need to stick feathers in their hair or coat their faces with war paint. They acquired the rights to land, name and authority through war and diplomacy, not charades and masquerades.

And Tammany performances were just that, charades, masquerades, performances. Performances assume audiences and convey social and political messages. Tammany’s most obvious audience was of course the Creek delegation. One can only imagine what the Creek warriors thought of New York artisans in ersatz “Indian” garb. Tammany’s message, however, was far from obscure. In parodying native practices, Tammany members declared that Manhattan was no longer an Indian island, that European Americans had indeed replaced Native Americans as rulers of America. Even more, Tammany braves’ mimicry proclaimed European Americans’ power to misrepresent and recast those they claimed they were replacing in ways that served their own social and political needs.

The Creek warriors, however, were not the Tammany’s only audience; their fellow Americans constituted a second, perhaps even more important audience. Mimicking Native Americans, Tammany’s middling and immigrant members mimicked earlier elite European Americans (merchants/planters) mimicking Native Americans with their May Day festivities. Tammany artisans thus enacted a form of social democracy. Not only did they insist on their equivalence with earlier colonial elites, they declared their active citizenship by publicly participating in affairs of state, standing shoulder to shoulder with President Washington and his cabinet. For middling artisans and radical Irish refugees, that was a very important political assertion.

But we have to consider still more complex aspects of surrogacy. Performance theorist Joseph Roach argues that societies use surrogacy to imaginatively mediate their experiences of radical social change and loss. Certainly, the new Americans needed cultural instruments through which to articulate and ameliorate the radical social, demographic, and political transformations that had marked their lives: their loss of their centuries-old British identity, their sense of being a solitary republic in a sea of monarchies, their fears of being isolated white settlements on the lip of a red continent. Few relations were more traumatic than those between European Americans and Native Americans. The figures of both the savage, terrifying Native American and the savage, terrifying European American who had relentlessly battled him had to be domesticated, incorporated into the ongoing civil and orderly world European Americans worked to create. Chanting make-believe Indian songs, stitching beads and feathers onto their costumes, middling New Yorkers stitched carefully re-formed and tamed memories of their nation’s conflicts into the ongoing psychic and cultural fabric of their new Republic.

But the July event on Coffee House slip points to even more complex forms of Othering and its destabilizing potential. Tammany’s mimicking was not simply a determined assertion of white power. It was also an anxious admission of need. As Philip Deloria has pointed out, European Americans needed to feel connected to the American continent, to become one with the land—and with its indigenous peoples. While condemning them as sadistic savages, European Americans believed Native Americans garnered true nobility from their association with the land: the love of freedom that only the land’s vast expanses could give; a sense of honor, uncorrupted by the niceties of refined culture; and, above all, a fierce, wild courage in defense of liberty and honor. It was these qualities European Americans felt they desperately needed if they were to prove themselves different from, more virtuous, more liberty-loving, than Europeans. To maintain their uniqueness from Europe, they had to embrace their Other, the Native American, reimagined as the Noble Savage. Put another way, as European Americans romantically imagined Native Americans merging with the land, so they romantically imagined themselves merging with Native Americans. The Native Other was no other after all.

However, their difference from Europeans rested on no more stable ground than their difference from Native Americans. Incorporating the image of the Noble Savage, European Americans incorporated a European literary trope, an image born of European reformers’ desires to use an idealized, imaginary Other to critique the corrupt practices of Enlightenment Europe. How ironic: the figure of the Native American as scripted by elite European philosophes and performed by European Americans, initially for elite audiences during the colonial period but ultimately by Irish political refugees in Jeffersonian America—this was how the whitening of America’s national identity was staged.

But still confusions mount. In many ways, European Americans desired just that: to position themselves as Europeans were positioned—heirs of the Enlightenment, bearers of civilization, polished gentlemen. Although needing to perform the virile American, they felt an equally strong need to perform the enlightened and cultured (European) gentleman. For them, both roles were deeply entwined. It was as if the new Republic’s national identity were played out on a revolving stage. At one time the erudite gentleman claimed the spotlight, at other times, the noble warrior did. Ultimately they fused, for European Americans could not disentangle their two roles. The urban gentleman without the noble warrior would have appeared too effete, too European, to build an American national identity around. The noble savage without the urban gentleman would have seemed too brutal. Combined, they strengthened European Americans’ self-presentation. But they also confused that presentation, revealing the European American to be a deeply divided and contradictory figure, unable to escape fusion with his constituting Others. Needing to consolidate a national identity, the new republican press turned upon its recalcitrant Others with rage. They were indeed dangerous, seductive, deceptive enemies. They must be expelled from the nation body politic—with violence if necessary.

In This Violent Empire I sought to trace the United States’ long history of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and paranoia to the very origins of the new nation and the struggles of the founding generation to create a sense of national coherence and unity. But rather than celebrating the true diversity that is the United States, the founders (and we to this day) celebrate a fictionalized vision of ourselves as a homogenous people, a people who, again in Timothy Dwight’s words, “shared the same religion, the same manners, the same interests, the same languages … and principles.” All who differed must be excluded. We see this operating from the nation’s opening decade with the passage in the 1790s of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Naturalization Act, the Enemy Friends Act, legislation that aimed at the arrest and deportation of feared aliens, “terrorists” in the words of President John Adams, whose support of the French Revolution his administration read as undermining national security and cohesion. Many of us still think of ourselves as a people made cohesive by our sameness, not our hybridity, united behind our picket fences, “as American as apple pie.” We thus render our diversity suspect, see difference as the parent “of endless contests, slaughter and desolation.” Even more significantly, rather than facing the deep-seated ideological and moral quandaries embedded in “the United States’ dilemma,” we turn our fury on those who disturb our imaginary homogeneity, see our polyglot and multicultural cities not as emblems of an empowered hybrid culture (a culture admired around the world) but as sites of pollution and national danger. The most powerful nation on earth, we seek security in increasingly fortified borders—in higher walls, klieg lights, border guards, body scanning and constitutionally questionable domestic surveillance. Displacing our feared diversity on to imagined Others, we turn upon them with violence.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, Women’s Studies and American Culture, University of Michigan, Emerita. The author of several books and more than 40 essays on American history and culture and women’s history, she has twice received the Binkley-Stephenson Award for best article in the Journal of American History. Her most recent book is This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (2010).

With the publication of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840(Chapel Hill, 2010), Mary Kelley and Robert Gross have brought to completion the American Antiquarian Society’s five-volume A History of the Book in America. In a project that has involved historians, bibliographers, literary critics, and sociologists on the editorial board, this is the only volume to have been edited exclusively by historians. Common-place asked Kelley and Gross to reflect on the larger historiographical implications of their work. How does the history of the book in the early republic illuminate and alter our understanding of the formative decades of the new American nation?

Was the early republic “an Age of Print” made glorious by a “reading generation”? So proclaimed a rising chorus of voices during the 1820s and 1830s in celebration of the progress of letters in a new republic upholding the ideal of an informed citizenry and applauding the advance of civilization across the continent book by book. And so, too, in a more sober vein have subsequent historians taken the extension of communications and the proliferation of printed media to be central and positive developments in the making of the American nation in its first half-century of existence. What could be more indispensable to representative government than a vital free press? What better spur to economic development than the rapid circulation of information through growing markets? What more essential service to national unity than the forging of a common American identity through the creation of a unique native literature?

Those claims are not merely rhetorical. They do identify important features of the vibrant print culture of the new republic. Yet the familiar narrative also oversimplifies, for it charts a linear and uniform course for a society still bound by colonial precedents and pulled in different directions at once. As co-editors of volume 2 of A History of the Book in America, we were faced with a challenge not unlike what the founders of the new nation confronted: establishing an effective organizing framework for a decentralized people rapidly gaining in numbers, diversifying in character, multiple in loyalties, and spreading across space. And how to do so with thirty-two contributors, experts in every aspect of a multifarious print culture, who were commissioned to write about publishing and printing at a time of economic and technological change, about politics and journalism, schools, colleges, libraries, religion, benevolent associations, learned societies, reform groups, ethnic and racial communities, and authors and booksellers in an ever-growing list of genres? One out of many: to that ideal the new nation was dedicated. But can a survey of the period 1790 to 1840 find sufficient commonality among its heterogeneous parts to carve out an identity distinct from “the colonial book in the Atlantic world,” which precedes it in the series, and from “the industrial book” that succeeds it?

Our answer is crystallized in the notion of An Extensive Republic—not just a title for the volume but a clue to the nature of “print, culture, and society in the new nation.” “An extensive republic” evokes both the immense geographical terrain over which Americans sprawled in this era and the fundamental economic, political, and intellectual challenges of organizing new communities, markets, and governments across this far-flung space. It had once been a commonplace of political philosophy that republics could survive only in small city-states, where the rulers were close to the people. The framers of the Constitution broke with this premise and brought forth a federal government distant from its citizens and dependent on its constituent parts. Would such an extensive regime last? Decentralization represented a necessary adaptation to the “tyranny of distance” holding a scattered people in its grasp. But it also suited popular preferences and guided the crafting of public policy. The extensive republic was a deliberate creation in the realm of print: an expansive world of communications driven by the choices of a heterogeneous people enjoying unprecedented freedom from state control but still subject to constraints by religious and cultural traditions, economic privations, and egregious inequalities and disparities of power in everyday existence. Seen through the lens of print culture, the early republic marked a distinct epoch in American life.

Consider the singular path taken by the new nation in the world of print. Law and public policy promoted open communications. In contrast to Britain and France, the new republic forswore the state powers customarily employed to police opinion. State and federal constitutions guaranteed liberty of the press, and after the Federalists fell from power, prosecution for seditious libel waned as a threat. No stamp taxes restricted the availability of newspapers to an economic elite. No public authorities inspected the mail to hunt out dissent. No customs officers barred dangerous books from crossing American borders. Congress opened the way to the unrestricted reprinting of foreign titles, since only books produced by U.S. citizens (and resident aliens) qualified for protection under the 1790 Copyright Act. Such policies set the terms by which Americans gained access to information and entertainment from the wider world, unlike Canadians, who remained a cultural colony of Great Britain down to the twentieth century, and unlike the subjects of the United Kingdom themselves, most of whom were closed out of the market for new books by a publishing industry catering to the social and economic elite. The American reading public enjoyed a wider selection of current books, both foreign and domestic, at lower prices than anywhere else in the Atlantic world.

The federal government did not simply keep its hands off the press. It also fostered communications by building a postal system to knit the country together. Under the Post Office Acts of 1792 and 1794, newspapers and magazines circulated through the mail at subsidized rates, while newspaper editors exchanged issues and reprinted from one another at no cost. Other public favors were bestowed by politicians at all levels, who dispensed contracts to print the laws, official advertisements to newspapers, and appointments to patronage posts. Politics—the rise of organized parties and the furious fight for power among them—drove the expansion of the press, with numerous printers and editors earning their pay as editorial voices for partisan causes. Did this print culture sustain the critical public sphere of the eighteenth century? Not in the terms set by Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of “the bourgeois public sphere,” attuned as it is to the ancien regime of European monarchies, no longer suits a republican polity, where the great majority of officials were chosen at the polls by an ever-wider electorate of white males. The ideal of an impartial press, acting for the common good, faltered; politics took on the competitive spirit of the marketplace. Yet, “the public sphere of civil society” remained crucial to those groups—notably, women and African Americans—excluded from formal participation in the affairs of state. Obliged to see themselves represented—and often caricatured—in the press through a white male gaze, they created independent forums in voluntary associations and in print to engage with the events and debates of the day, fashion their own identities, and contribute to the making of public opinion.

Distinct from British models of hierarchy and power, the extensive republic of print nonetheless owed substantial debts to the former mother country. Nothing surprised us more in assembling this volume than the continuing dependence of the new nation on the texts, practices, and institutions of British print culture. Before the Revolution, the colonial bookshelf was stocked with publications shipped from London; after Independence, British titles continued to dominate but now in editions “made in America,” as booksellers from Boston to Charleston reprinted with abandon. American publishing was built on piracy, following a strategy pioneered in Edinburgh and Dublin and transplanted to our leading port cities. The entrepreneurs of the book trade often spoke with Scottish and Irish accents; so did the workmen at the press and the case. The business model of book-selling derived from British experience. Small-scale firms constantly struggled to stay afloat, publishing houses banded together to cut costs, limit risks, and reduce competition. Far from welcoming the brave new world of laissez-faire capitalism, they clung to conservative ways. No “market revolution” propelled their pursuit of profit. Congregating in Northeastern cities, book publishers could not keep up with the westward growth of the country. Well into the 1830s they relied on a technology of printing that would have been familiar to Gutenberg. It was nonprofit voluntary societies—the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society—and not commercial enterprises that took the lead in adopting steam-powered presses and stereotype plates. Even then the leading inventions originated across the Atlantic. Slow to innovate, cautious about risk, the book trade could not sell directly to a nationwide market until the coming of the railroad. In an extensive republic the implacable realities of geography favored reliance on the tried-and-true.

Whether they got their print from commercial publishers or voluntary societies, readers were well supplied. We were struck by the initiative shown by those evangelical Protestants who sought a national conversion and a global millennium. Determined to disseminate tracts and Bibles “with cheapness, security, and expedition to the most distant places,” as the American Bible Society put it, they flooded the market. Between 1825 and 1835, its first decade of existence, the interdenominational American Tract Society issued more than thirty million tracts. In the three years between 1829 and 1831 alone, its pamphlets reached five million Americans annually. Religious works, sold for a pittance or given away for free, competed for readers’ attention with newspapers and magazines of all sorts, including the new urban penny papers, and a proliferation of genres from almanacs, dictionaries, and schoolbooks to geographies, histories, and novels. The works that readers acquired, that they read in local libraries, in post offices, in literary societies, and in taverns, and that they got from itinerant evangelicals, served widely varying purposes. Readers “poached,” as Michel de Certeau has described the agency readers exercise as they engage texts and write them anew.

Nowhere is the appropriation of literacy and print more apparent than in two of the new reading and writing publics on which we focus. Between 1790 and 1840, African Americans and Native Americans, faced with relentless discrimination, looked to reading and writing as political and cultural resources in their push for liberty and sovereignty, respectively.

African Americans deployed literacy and print in the sustained and sustaining challenges they mounted against slavery and discrimination. The meanings attached to these technologies depended upon specific and highly localized contexts. We found Ellen Butler’s exposure to literacy particularly instructive. In recalling life on a plantation in Louisiana, she described an opportunity that had a double edge: “When the white folks go off they writes on the meal and flour with they fingers. Then they know if us steals meal… That the way us larn how to write.” Free-born abolitionist Sarah Mapps Douglass became conscious of the power of literacy and print in strikingly different circumstances. Initially, she had identified herself as an African American in the context of membership in Philadelphia’s black elite. As Douglass told members of the Female Literary Association, she had “formed a little world of my own, and cared not to move beyond its precincts.” Threats from whites who were seizing northern free blacks and sending them South and increased contact with southern blacks who sought refuge from slavery in the North widened her horizons, generating racial solidarity with all African Americans. “The cause of the slave [is now] my own,” Douglass declared at one of the literary society’s meetings. “Has not this been your experience, my sisters?” Many responded in the affirmative. Not only did the members engage in practices of reading and writing, but they also followed Douglass’s advice and chose texts that were “altogether directed to the subject of slavery.” Those readings were taken directly from William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, and they inspired conversations that led, in turn, to published essays in that abolitionist organ.

For Native Americans, the specificity of context governing African Americans’ experiences was equally important. Consider the Cherokee, who continued to struggle for basic rights newly independent white Americans called their own. For them, too, literacy and print carried multiple meanings and possibilities. In the wake of the Revolution, which brought military and political defeat and the loss of millions of acres of ancestral lands, the Cherokee found themselves on the defensive as they engaged in yet another battle for survival as an autonomous and sovereign nation. In this struggle the Cherokee embarked on an ambitious cultural renovation. The effort followed two trajectories: the spread of English-language literacy among an influential but relatively small number of Cherokees and the invention by the Cherokee Sequoyah of a written system of language, which was rapidly adopted by many of his countrymen. English-language literacy enabled the creation of a national political structure with a written constitution and a written body of laws, both of which were designed to validate assertions of sovereignty. Equally important, English-language fluency empowered Cherokee leaders in the negotiation of treaties with state and federal officials, who remained relentless in demands for land.

These innovations entailed cultural costs. Representations of Cherokees as a separate and self-sustaining people were elided, and properly “civilized” and “Christianized” exemplars took their place. Perhaps the most famous of these icons, the native Christian convert Catharine Brown, appeared in a series of portrayals compiled by Congregationalists affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, one of the most expansive of the voluntary societies bent on putting the “heathen” on the path to salvation. The Memoir of Catharine Brown: A Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation was widely distributed as a separate imprint and excerpted as well in the Congregational Panoplist and Missionary Magazine United. Sequoyah chose an alternative path in the battle for political sovereignty and cultural autonomy. He eschewed white religion and literacy and invented a Cherokee writing system (in the form of a syllabary) entirely separate from English. The syllabary’s appeal was immediate. It was also lasting. By 1835, 16,500 people remained on Cherokee land in Georgia. In one of every two households, one member read Cherokee. By contrast, only one of six families claimed a member literate in English. “Language,” observed one Presbyterian missionary only four years after Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears, “stands closely identified with habits and prejudices, cherishes them and keeps them alive.” What appeared to an evangelical minister bent on converting Indians as “habits and prejudices” represented in the eyes of the Cherokee the cultural identity they were so fiercely determined to preserve.

Advancing technology, expanding genres, proliferating publications, new communities of readers and writers: in such signs of the times contemporaries discerned an ascendant “Age of Print.” Many hailed the progress of civilization; some feared the degradation of learning in the literary marketplace. Whether enthusiasts or critics, these self-appointed custodians of the word exaggerated the significance of print in everyday life. An Extensive Republic documents the perpetuation of older modes of expression and communication in the small-scale, face-to-face settings of everyday life and their alteration in tandem with print by the gathering forces of social and economic change. Americans of the early republic lived in a world of mixed media, with printed words and images commingling with word of mouth, oral performances of all kinds, the composition and circulation of manuscripts, and the display of signs and symbols in public spaces. Far from challenging or supplanting these older forms, print amplified their influence. Merchants’ letters became “public intelligence” in the press; the pages of newspapers were inscribed with private, handwritten messages, even proposals of marriage, and dispatched through the mail. Farmers marked up almanacs with laconic notes on weather and crops; readers in town and country recorded passionate responses to novels on margins and endpapers.

Print was, then, multiform in its possibilities, and it did not move in a single direction of change. “Extensiveness,” in the end, connotes more than a rapidly increasing geography and population; it captures the rich variety of a novel print culture, whose effects we came to see in the distinctive republic it helped to forge. Print heightened both national attachments and sectional resentments. It undercut local economies and facilitated inter-regional exchange. It pursued inclusive audiences across social divides and carved them up into segments according to class, region, religion, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and race. It defined lines between the sexes, then challenged and transgressed them. It fostered rationality and faith, instruction and entertainment, virtue and vice. It contained the multitudes and contradictions of the sprawling nation it served.

Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. After starting out as a social historian of the Revolutionary era, he now looks broadly at culture, politics, and society in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular focus on Transcendentalism and reform in New England during the antebellum era.
Mary Kelley is Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has written widely on women’s and gender history, and especially on the impact of women’s access to learning, formal and informal, on their self-definitions and their entry into public life. Her current project focuses on reading and writing practices in early America.