Panic over the United States’ decline has become a cornerstone of the twenty-four hour news cycle and the pithy op-ed, not to mention the apocalyptic disaster movie. The sources of this alleged decline are numerous, from income inequality to trod-upon freedoms to the obsession with Kim and Kanye. In her original and timely study, Patricia Roylance argues that the anxiety over the nation’s decline is not only an old one, but one spurred by the nineteenth-century production of early modern histories of imperial eclipse. At the very moment when domestic histories would presumably be the privileged site of study and interest, nineteenth-century U.S. writers turned to global historical examples to study imperial decline and, in turn, spur “nationalist self-scrutiny” (2). Roylance’s study engages neglected texts by familiar literary authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and brings them into conversation with lesser-known histories by William Hickling Prescott and John Lothrop Motley. By linking the rise and fall of past empires with the unfolding story of the U.S., all of these writers offered a sobering corrective to the “ideology of triumphant national exceptionalism” (3).

Marked by “morbid anxiety” rather than unbridled optimism, the texts that anchor Roylance’s book presume that the United States’ trajectory differs little from that of other empires; rather than an exceptional new experiment, the U.S. shared the same vulnerabilities of past civilizations, especially intranational conflicts. For Roylance, eclipse narratives “treat international history as intranational prognosis” by identifying trends in the global past that had domestic implications in the nineteenth century (5). As writers and readers came to better understand the intricacies of global history, they became “sensitized … to the great variety of internal weaknesses undermining the soundness of the United States” (13). To broaden her readers’ understanding of how early modern global history was put to use in contemporary domestic contexts, Roylance deploys Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones” and Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of “deep time.” The history books featured in her study, both as material objects traveling across space and time and as studies of space and time, create what Roylance calls “a spatiotemporal form of the contact zone,” obscuring the borders between past and present, Europe and the U.S., the foreign and the familiar (6). For Roylance, nineteenth-century imperial eclipse narratives did not serve as purely cautionary tales nor as negative examples. Rather, they functioned to draw out the “radically dissimilar and yet eerily, uncomfortably similar” social, political, and economic situations of the antebellum U.S. and the world’s failed empires. These uncanny encounters (though not Roylance’s term, it seems appropriate here) made the eventual eclipse of the United States seem at once inevitable and avoidable. Roylance centers her compelling analysis on these points of friction.

In chapter one, Roylance examines the ascendency and eventual decay of Italy in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Water-Witch (1830) and The Bravo (1831). Roylance’s reading of The Water-Witch, set in the area around New York Harbor, highlights the cyclical view of history to which many nineteenth-century thinkers ascribed by affiliating the enterprising Americans with the once-great Italian empire. Throughout the novel, Cooper compares Italy’s “fading fortunes” with the United States’ “youthful vigor” (in Cooper’s words), particularly in commercial enterprise (26). The Bravo, on the other hand, sets up the self-scrutinizing work Roylance describes in her introduction. By setting the novel in the heyday of the Venetian republic, Cooper invites comparison with the thriving United States, though always emphasizing the crucial differences—such as geographic size—that would protect the U.S. from a similar decline. Roylance’s most compelling discussion in this set of readings relates to Cooper’s location of “American principles” outside the country’s borders and the public’s skepticism of such a dislocation. Coupling the novels with Cooper’s pamphlet, A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), Roylance points to tension between Cooper’s advocacy for a truly republican and American literary tradition and his critics’ accusations of “anti-populist elitism” (41). In the chapter’s conclusion, Roylance raises the crucial question of whether Cooper’s imperial eclipse narratives were cautionary tales of political self-destruction or gripes about his own “personal, socio-economic eclipse” (44).

Chapter two shifts toward conquest, rather than gradual decline, in a consideration of William Hickling Prescott’s 1847 History of the Conquest of Peru. Roylance’s reading of this under-studied history reveals that Prescott “identifies the United States as much with the conquered Incas as he does with the Spanish conquerors” even if, ultimately, he laments the resemblances to both cultures (48). Prescott saw the Incan decline as the natural result of their rejection of private property, although he decried the Spaniards’ enslavement of the vanquished Incas, and compared their “lust of gold” to the unbridled capitalism that characterized the antebellum U.S. In the end, Prescott’s desire to protect personal property rights exceeded his disgust for slavery, a point borne out in his description of Bartolomé de las Casas and others’ efforts to emancipate Incan slaves from Spanish captivity as “illusory schemes of benevolence” (67). Ultimately, Prescott’s specious logic points to the difficulties of maintaining a middle ground in nineteenth-century matters of property rights and laissez-faire capitalism.

In chapter three, Roylance takes up John Lothrop Motley’s 1856 Rise of the Dutch Republic, emphasizing the nation’s struggle for independence from Spain. Reading the Dutch revolt and the Glorious Revolution in England as direct ideological precursors of both the Puritan migration to New England and the American Revolution, Motley traces “an august lineage of Anglo-Saxon struggles devoted to the ideals of freedom and progress” (79). This teleology is not terribly unusual in nineteenth-century histories, but what sets Motley’s case apart is the way it was received by reviewers as a “deeply anti-Catholic text” (88). In reviews of Motley, writers focused on the resemblance between the U.S. and the oppressive Spanish, rather than the rising Dutch, fostering what Roylance describes as an “anxiety-producing type of contact zone” between early modern Europe and the antebellum U.S. (76). Thus, Motley’s text inadvertently spurred debate over religious liberties in the nineteenth century and invited criticism of the United States’ treatment of religious minorities.

In chapters four and five, Roylance shifts her focus toward narratives of empires being eclipsed through cultural erasure. Rather than global histories foreshadowing national possibilities, these histories demonstrate how the U.S. attempted to secure its imperial strength through forced assimilation. Chapter four centers on Irving’s A History of New York (1809), offering a fresh analysis of Irving’s satire by focusing on the ethnic Dutch residents’ “stubborn resistance to assimilation” and their choice to remain “foreign” even after nationhood is achieved (103). Irving characterizes such resistance as not only futile but foolish, and in so doing he “contains the threat of the failed imperial past by quarantining its likeness among the ethnic Dutch” rather than expanding its application to the nation as a whole, as Cooper, Prescott, and Motley had done (115). The source of the Dutch’s cultural decline, though, has more to do with the Anglicizing of the colonies and eventually the nation rather than any corruption within Dutch culture. Likewise, Roylance asserts that Longfellow’s use of Ojibwe language and place-names in The Song of Hiawatha—the focus of chapter five—serves to keep the Ojibwe “presence in the landscape alive” rather than to criticize or romanticize their “vanishing” (120). But Roylance points to another, more unexpected, version of cultural erasure in her consideration of the poem’s reception and its affiliation with the Finnish epic poem Kalevala (first collected and published in 1835). The affiliation stems from the popular “Vinland” hypothesis that gave Viking claims to the New World priority over Native American ones and “helped validate the racial ideology of Anglo-Saxonism that fueled U.S. manifest destiny” (120). Thus, rather than romantically solemnizing the eclipse of the Ojibwe, Longfellow sought to preserve their presence amidst the cultural eclipsing of Native American history by Viking history in the nineteenth century. By creating a “complicated linguistic and territorial picture” of the Ojibwe (135) and narrating an intricate tale of inter-tribal conflict, Longfellow, Roylance contends, attempted to rescue Native American history from oversimplification and homogenization.

Though Roylance intermittently addresses the subject, especially in her first three chapters, the reader wonders to what extent these writers’ positions of privilege inform their fears of an eventual eclipse of the United States. What Roylance describes as a diffuse “anxiety” over the nation’s decline is clearly also rooted in the authors’ impulse to protect the old guard. How did other writers in less privileged positions interpret the rise and fall of empires, and how might these interpretations compare with those Roylance has identified? Stephen G. Hall’s study A Faithful Account of the Race (2009) gives some revelatory examples from writers like Hosea Easton, Henry Highland Garnet, and James W.C. Pennington, who cast Anglo-Saxon history as barbarous rather than progressive. These writers foregrounded African history from ancient times to the present to “combat the idea of alleged black inferiority caused by the supposed backwardness of Africa” (76). For the authors Roylance studies, personal hardships became harbingers of national decline, while the same were used by African American historians, in Hall’s examples, as indicators of cultural and racial fortitude and longevity. Thus, while Roylance admits in her introduction that eclipse narratives were often authored by white men of privilege, in part because of the funds and education required to conduct long-term archival research in the period, writers of diverse backgrounds also turned to world historical events to make sense of the present and predict (or warn against) the future.

Roylance concludes with a look at the role of the “present” in imperial eclipse narratives. She begins with Francis Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe, which carries readers up to Parkman’s “present” (1884), looking at the swiftness with which historical narrative collides with contemporary fears and how quickly rise turns to decline in the “relentless cyclical pattern of imperial eclipse” (150). In a somewhat awkward pairing, Roylance then discusses Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto (2006), which casts Mayan decline as inevitable in the face of Spanish conquest, while simultaneously valorizing segments of Mayan society. In discussing Apocalypto, Roylance suggests that the form of the imperial eclipse narrative has remained relatively unchanged in modern times and still performs similar political work. Roylance’s last line is sobering as she looks toward “various empires poised to eclipse us.” In this, she sounds a bit like the authors she cites. Yet, even while conceding to the “rise of the rest” (as Fareed Zakaria put it), pundits have recently suggested that the very language of rise and fall may now be defunct. For example, the title of a New Yorker review of Ian Bremmer’s 2012 book Every Nation for Itself posed, “Is the End of American Dominance the Same as American Decline?” The answer is up for debate, of course, but what Bremmer and others have begun to envisage, in the tradition of the authors Roylance studies, is not just a U.S. eclipse, but the eclipse of empires altogether.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Lindsay DiCuirci is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is working on a book about the collection, preservation, and printing of colonial books and manuscripts in the nineteenth century.

In early America, everything was empire, and empire was everything. The great European imperial powers of the eighteenth century—Britain, Spain, and France—made competing claims to the Americas, and the health of those colonial ventures figured prominently in how those empires viewed their positions in the world. To control the New World was to control the whole world, and each nation had its own reasons for establishing a presence in the Americas, from the religious to the economic. However, for both day-to-day operational value and long-term imperial planning, the most valuable commodity for these imperial powers was information. In The Elusive West, Paul W. Mapp considers how geographical information about the American West shaped imperial policy and relations between 1713 and 1763. This period, between the Treaty of Utrecht and the Peace of Paris, was marked by dramatic shifts in power. France went from dominating the fur trade and holding a significant amount of land in its possession to being effectively removed from the continent; Britain grew from a handful of small colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America to the dominant power on the continent. At the heart of Mapp’s book is a reconsideration of the origins of the Seven Years’ War. That great imperial battle has traditionally been seen as originating from British encroachments on French territory in the Ohio River Valley, but Mapp convincingly argues that scholars need to look farther west for a clearer picture of what was really happening between the imperial powers.

Mapp begins his book with the Spanish empire of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Spanish were the consummate world explorers, who in the 1500s “threaded the Straits of Magellan, circumnavigated the globe, traversed the Isthmus of Panama, crisscrossed the Andes, strode the causeway to Tenochtitlán, descended the Amazon, and ascended the Paraná. Yet Idaho remained elusive” (41). Spanish experiences in Mexico and South America, where the Incan and Aztec empires had already done much of the groundwork needed to understand the physical and human geography, were not mirrored in the western regions of North America. The landscape was often unforgiving, making exploration difficult, and when the Spanish attempted to get help from the many Native groups in the region they were often met with silence or hostility. Even when Natives were willing to help out, their own ignorance of the land and the language barrier meant that they yielded little useful information for Spanish explorers. This ignorance about the geography of the West was a continual roadblock for the Spanish, keeping them from settling the area as rapidly or completely as they did in other regions of their American empire.

After his thorough description of the problems faced by the Spanish, Mapp turns to the French. While he touches on far more than could be reasonably covered in this review, one of the standout segments of the chapters on the French concerns the experiences of French cartographers in Russia and China. He uses the wealth of information obtained in these areas as a contrasting backdrop for the paucity of knowledge the French were able to acquire about the American West. He describes Jesuit missionaries who surveyed China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and French cartographers who traipsed across Russia gathering mounds of accurate geographical information. The ease with which this information was obtained was not mirrored in North America; as Mapp details in several chapters, the French blundered about in the American West, rarely acquiring useful or accurate information from the indigenous inhabitants, and their mental and physical maps remained muddied and useless for much of the eighteenth century. It is during his discussion of the challenges the French faced in North America that an organizational issue becomes apparent, as Mapp begins to retread ground from earlier in the book. Because he takes on each imperial power sequentially, some of the common problems faced by explorers, such as the difficulty of communicating accurate geographical information with Indians, are restated in detail, essentially replacing the name of one power for another. “In a manner reminiscent of Spanish scouts in the Southwest” (212), is how one sentence starts, and similar ones are peppered throughout the chapter. While his thoroughness is impressive, it makes an already long book even longer, and bogs down his argument in content he’d already covered earlier in the book.

Much of the Spanish and French sections of the book deal with the many indigenous peoples that inhabited the land the Europeans coveted. Thoughtfully analyzing indigenous historical actors has long been a serious problem for histories of early America, but Mapp’s book is a wonderful example of how that continues to change. When possible, he is careful to delineate whichindigenous group was involved with the European imperialists—Pimas, Apaches, Assinboines, and Crees, among others, are the actors throughout the book, not simply the generally unhelpful and historically inaccurate “Indians.” Furthermore, the indigenous actors in the book, like those Europeans seeking their help, were not all-knowing when it came to geographical information. The most important parts of their world were local, and “after hundreds of miles, southwestern Indians, too, would likely have been following unfamiliar trails, encountering outlandish peoples, and hearing strange tongues” (84). The Americas were peopled by myriad different groups of people—linguistically, politically, and culturally diverse—and the reader is lucky to have a researcher as skilled as Mapp to help navigate the complexities of European-Native interactions.

Much of the last third of the book is spent analyzing how British designs on Spain’s Pacific holdings and their encroachment on French territory created tension between the three imperial powers that finally boiled over in the 1750s, resulting in the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Mapp convincingly shows that there was much more to the start of the war than the French trying to expel British traders and settlers from the Ohio River Valley. The search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson’s Bay, George Anson’s actions in the Pacific, which included attacking a Spanish galleon and sacking a port town in Peru, and other British machinations worried both the Spanish and French. The French were willing to go to war over British actions throughout the continent and in the Pacific, but the Spanish pursued a policy of neutrality for as long as possible, fearful that allying with the French would be seen as an open invitation for French explorers to continue pushing westward. Given that the Spanish in the 1750s still weren’t entirely sure what the western half of North America looked like and what it contained, they were hesitant to let other empires freely poke about. This neutrality ultimately benefitted Britain, who was able to fight against only the French for most of the war. In a sense, Spain unwittingly played the anvil to Britain’s hammer, and French imperial designs for North America were effectively flattened by the time the war ended. For Mapp, uneasiness and confusion about what the potentially valuable lands in the American West held not only led to the start of the war, but also continually influenced imperial policy throughout it.

Mapp’s book is heavily argument-driven, with narrative threads being spun out briefly to illustrate points, but rarely followed for more than a paragraph or two. While it would be unlikely to captivate those looking for a good yarn, Mapp’s fluid, clear prose is a pleasure to take in and the overall organization of the book makes it compelling in a way that doesn’t depend on narrative. It is certainly a long, dense book—the first line frames it primarily as a study of the Seven Years’ War, but it takes more than 300 pages to get to that conflict. It takes nearly 200 pages before the reader gets to the Treaty of Utrecht, which ostensibly starts Mapp’s story. That being said, it’s ultimately a treat to read and his larger arguments do hinge on a particular understanding of how three very different empires operated in the New World, and the first half of the book is indeed necessary for a full understanding of the second. Thoroughly researched, clearly written, and forcefully argued, Mapp’s book is a major contribution to the history of eighteenth-century European imperialism, and a novel refiguring of the history of the Seven Years’ War.

During the summer of 1763, warriors from the Ottawa, Objibwa, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Miami, Delaware, Shawnee, and Seneca nations attacked British forts and homesteads in an arc stretching from the tip of the Michigan peninsula to the Greenbriar Valley of Virginia. Whether their attacks represented a purposeful, coordinated offensive is open to question, but their mutual grievances against the British Empire are not.

Historians have always had a hard time deciding how to describe this paroxysm of intercultural violence. Was it the epilogue of the Seven Years’ War in North America, a last ditch effort by Indians formerly allied with the French to restore the balance of power between natives and newcomers they had known in their homelands previous to 1760? Or, was it the opening act of the American Revolution, an episode of administrative and military incompetence that presaged Great Britain’s mismanagement of its North American colonies between 1765 and 1775? Was this conflict a war, similar in scale to the destruction and panic King Philip’s War unleashed in New England nearly a century earlier, or was it a brief, futile rebellion by Indians against their new British overlords? And what of the figure whose name has ever since been attached to this conflict: was Ottawa leader Pontiac the conspiratorial mastermind behind the most significant pan-Indian resistance movement of the colonial era, or was he simply the most notorious of many war chiefs who acted autonomously in venting their rage against the British?

Among historians of early America, the consensus in recent years has been to underplay Pontiac’s role as a visionary patriot chief but at the same time to elevate the conflict that bears his name from a “rebellion” to an all-out war that stopped British imperial expansion in its tracks, at least temporarily. Gregory Evans Dowd provides a thoughtful, expertly researched articulation of that consensus in his new book, which is certain to supplant Howard Peckham’s Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, 1947) as the definitive scholarly account of the conflict. While Dowd artfully dodges the juxtaposition of “Pontiac” and “War” in his title, he clearly considers this conflict much more than an ill-fated rebellion, and he accords Pontiac a central role in its making. For Dowd, Pontiac’s War created an irreparable rift between Indians and colonizers in North America that would color all subsequent encounters between these groups. It is to this conflict that we can trace both the Euro-American impulse to wipe the frontier clear of Indians and the Indians’ reliance on nativist spiritual movements to resist that effort.

Like historians before him, Dowd finds the origins of this conflict in the failure of British military officers to assume the diplomatic responsibilities they inherited from the French at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War. Following the lead of commander-in-chief Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the British expressed disdain for Indian diplomatic customs and cut off the supply of presents to Indians formerly allied with the French. Dowd correctly points out that this disregard cannot be attributed to British unfamiliarity with Indian custom, for they had been engaged in such diplomacy with eastern Indians since the seventeenth century. Rather, it was a product of the hubris born from their conquest of Canada. Convinced of their superior might, the British decided they could do as they pleased. After all, with the French gone, they were now the only game in town. It was time for the Indians to bend to their rules.

That hubris pushed Pontiac and his allies to go to war against the British in 1763. While they attacked Detroit, Indians in the Ohio Country laid siege to Fort Pitt and destroyed several smaller posts west of the Allegheny Mountains. The Indians also raided some colonial homesteads in areas of disputed possession, but Dowd emphasizes that the Indians’ grievances had less to do with land grabbing by squatters than with the British officers and agents who had ceased to treat them with the respect and generosity that allies deserved. Inspired by the Delaware prophet Neolin, these Indians revived traditional methods of appealing to sacred power, such as the black drink ceremony, to spread their message of resistance to the new imperial order.

Dowd’s depiction of the British and Anglo-Americans involved in this conflict is less nuanced than his depiction of the Indians, but not without merit. He bucks a recent trend among historians to distinguish between racist colonists anxious to exterminate all Indians and British officials more inclined to incorporate Indians into the empire as subjects and trading partners. Military officers revealed their genocidal tendencies when they authorized executing Indian prisoners and using smallpox as a biological weapon. When a colonial mob known as the Paxton Boys murdered the peaceful Conestoga Indians of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, British officials condemned their lawlessness, but not out of any sympathy for their victims. In Dowd’s opinion, the line between “a sober imperial and colonial elite willing to protect Indians and a wild colonial frontier ready to kill all . . . breaks against hard facts” (211).

Much like the conflict it describes, this book’s narrative never reaches a definitive conclusion. Amherst’s successor as commander-in-chief, General Thomas Gage, declared the war over in December 1764, after a punitive expedition against the Ohio Country Indians, but intrigues and negotiations continued well into the following year, especially in the Illinois Country, where Pontiac continued to lead an anti-British resistance. The British never solved the problems that had caused the war, nor did they develop a consistent Indian policy for North America. According to Dowd, the British did not end the war so much as give up on it, their attention diverted by the growing political crisis east of the Appalachians. Likewise, the Indians’ war against the new order never really ended because their grievances went unanswered. Intercultural violence on the Ohio frontier may have ebbed after 1765, but it flared up again during the Revolutionary Era and continued until the defeat of Tecumseh’s pan-Indian movement in the War of 1812.

Francis Parkman’s Pontiac was a tragic figure, a doomed but cunning conspirator who embodied the treachery Parkman considered ingrained in the Indians’ character. Dowd’s version of the story is much more sympathetic to Pontiac, and one of this book’s strengths is the attention it pays to the Indians’ spiritual motivations for engaging in this war (readers familiar with Dowd’s earlier book, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 [Baltimore, 1992] will recognize his approach here). A case may still be made for referring to this conflict as a “rebellion,” at least from the British perspective. Reading about the British officers’ high-handedness in dealing with the Indians, their merciless approach to eliminating resistance, and their desire to replace diplomacy with intimidation calls to mind earlier English experiences with rebellions in Ireland and Scotland. Since their earliest encounters with North America, the English were fond of comparing Indians to Scottish Highlanders and the “wild Irish,” and when Indians failed to cooperate with the imperial project, they did not hesitate to treat them in the same manner as those other groups. Historians have been inclined to heap the blame for Pontiac’s War on Amherst’s shoulders, but we should not let one man’s incompetence distract us from the wider cultural context that spawned his approach to Indian relations. This fine book raises important questions about how we should situate Pontiac’s War (or Rebellion, if you like) in the larger story of Britain’s eighteenth-century imperial expansion and U.S. empire building to this day. At a time when U.S. allies are decrying the current administration’s penchant for acting unilaterally abroad, this book reminds us that “cowboy diplomacy” has a long, albeit undistinguished, heritage right here in North America.

Further Reading: Fred Anderson’s The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000) places Pontiac’s War among the events that put the British Empire on the road toward the American Revolution. Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991) emphasizes the British failure to fill French shoes in intercultural diplomacy after 1760. Dowd’s argument that the British officers’ approach to Indian relations was indistinguishable from that of American colonists challenges conclusions reached by Eric Hinderaker in Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley (New York, 1997), and J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Timothy J. Shannon is an associate professor at Gettysburg College, where he teaches early American, Native American, and British history. He is the author of Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, 2000). His current research is focused on the material culture of European-Indian diplomacy between 1750 and 1820.

In two new books about the landscape of war, some of the most memorable sources are images of people, not of places. A verbal portrait captures Ezra Buel in 1819, as he removes his shirt to show his impressive battle scar to visitors to the Saratoga battleground. A bone medallion, now filed away in university archives, testifies to David Steele’s eagerness to show off the piece of his skull that he lost at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. A Civil War-era family portrait captures likenesses not only of family members but also of the shot that took off their father’s arms. These are just a few of the sources that Thomas A. Chambers and Megan Kate Nelson use to reconsider the ways that nineteenth-century Americans gave meaning to the effects of war on the world around them. In some ways, their conclusions are familiar: they look to battlegrounds as sites of national identity formation, where Americans forged a sense of who they are by contemplating and shaping the landscape that they had torn apart in battle. Yet, as the aforementioned portraits suggest, the undercurrents of these books carry readers in an unexpected direction. A number of rich visual and written sources reveal the intimate, if sometimes understated, connections between bodies and landscapes in Chambers’ and Nelson’s works. War, both studies suggest, intermingled bodies and environments in especially provocative ways.

As Thomas A. Chambers reveals in the opening pages of Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic, he embarked on his study because of his own long-standing love of visiting battlefields. In order to understand the historical development of this compelling relationship between place and memory, he “sought evidence of the kind of highly personal, vivid responses to battlefields” that he himself possessed (xi). After gathering evidence from a variety of battlefield archives, as well as more widely accessible print culture, he offers an interesting, though sometimes meandering, look at what he calls battleground tourism in the early republic. Chambers describes battlefields as overlooked, neglected, and forgotten in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, American Revolution, and War of 1812. Only in the 1820s, he argues, did Americans begin to view battlegrounds as edifying places that could evoke worthy memories of the past.

Chambers contends that this appreciation did not arise solely from the convergence of the fiftieth anniversary of the War for Independence, Lafayette’s Grand Tour of the United States, and the dying off of the Revolutionary generation, as many scholars of historical memory of the Revolution have asserted. Instead, he argues, American tourists appreciated battlegrounds in the 1820s primarily as picturesque landscapes. In the late eighteenth century, “accidental tourists” remembered colonial battles when they encountered bonefields in places such as Braddock’s Field and Ticonderoga (17). But it was not until the advent of the “Northern Tour” in upstate New York, Chambers argues, that travelers “created a new form of memory dependent on interaction with place, romantic scenery, and sentiment” (35). Individual responses to the landscape and popular guidebooks promoted historical memory of the Revolution and the War of 1812 according to principles of picturesque scenery rather than overt political or nationalistic agendas. Many battlegrounds in southern states offered visitors the same opportunities to appreciate picturesque landscapes but failed to attract visitors, Chambers asserts, because the South lacked a tourist infrastructure to accommodate travelers’ needs. Though Americans proposed commemorative monuments at a number of these battle sites in northern and southern states, Chambers argues that their reluctance to actually build these memorials reveals a continued ambivalence toward marking the past in place throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century (66). Only in the 1850s, when sectional politics surpassed picturesque tourism as the impetus for visiting battlegrounds, did the “larger American public”—presumably individuals other than tourists—begin to commemorate battlefields (4).

Chambers’ attention to the ways that Americans in the early republic viewed the landscape is a valuable intervention in a field that often relies on politics to explain shifts in historical memory. By paying attention to the ways that Americans engaged transatlantic picturesque theory in new ways of traveling and looking at the landscape, he offers a new explanation about why transitions in historical memory and commemoration occurred. Still, the narrative that Chambers presents about the development of memory, place, and the American Revolution is a familiar one. Americans cared little for evidence of the past on the landscape before the 1820s. Even when they began to visit and study historic places in the second quarter of the century, few wanted to preserve or commemorate these sites with permanent memorials. The South lagged behind the North in developing both its historical consciousness and its landscape. Only in the 1850s, amid sectional crisis, did Americans turn to commemoration of historic sites as a popular, nationalist project. In all, Chambers seems to constrain his interpretations by sticking close to this narrative, set out by the very studies of historical memory that he seeks to reinterpret.

A fuller orientation toward landscape studies might have helped him to challenge the conventional narrative of early national historical memory altogether. After all, Chambers himself presents sources that seem to challenge his arguments about the primary importance of picturesque landscape over historical association. Chambers quotes Timothy Dwight, for example, pointing to two different ways of evaluating the landscape of northern New York during a trip in 1802. Dwight reported that he “had two principal objects in view. One was to examine the scenery of Lake George; the beauty of which had always been mentioned to me in strong terms of admiration: the other, to explore the grounds, on which the military events of former times had taken place, at its two extremities” (quoted on 43). In 1837, as Chambers points out, one U.S. senator emphasized history over landscape at Yorktown, Virginia, saying that “the mere lover of the picturesque” could find better landscapes to appreciate, but the battleground itself provided contemporary Americans with a direct link to the previous generation of men who had fought there (97). In this case, the original ground mattered, not picturesque scenic beauty. At one point, Chambers writes, “Most Southern battlefields lacked the physical landmarks that acted as narrative links and punctuation marks in people’s interpretation of the scene” (117). Yet throughout the same chapter he quotes many travelers saying that houses, sites, and features of the landscape linked them directly to past experiences, even though they did not find the landscape to be aesthetically pleasing. At the end of his study, Chambers is certainly right to point out that the desire for monuments grew in the 1850s, yet he also quotes travelers praising historic landscapes “unmarred by monuments” during that era (104).

Chambers might have resolved some of these seeming contradictions by exploring a question that resounded in my mind while reading the book: what exactly was a battleground in the early republic? At the beginning of his study, Chambers is careful to qualify the scope of his study by explaining that he “deliberately avoided extensive discussion of well-studied locations such as Bunker Hill or Lexington and Concord in favor of lesser known and, in some cases, more militarily significant battlefields in rural areas and especially in the South” (xiv). He later suggests that urban sites were atypical battlefields because they did not elicit “the melancholy responses tourists experienced at barren battlefield sites often situated in magnificent landscapes” (4). Yet Chambers’ sources reveal that early Americans themselves did not necessarily draw a line between urban and rural sites or even northern and southern ones. Instead, they show early Americans appraising battle sites according to distinct elements of their landscapes: scenes, grounds, and monuments. Each evoked the past in a different way. How did travelers conjure the past from scenes as opposed to grounds? Did few Americans build monuments because they felt that grounds themselves conveyed enough information about the past? Chambers would have done well to explore the relationship between these various features and the ways that early Americans used them to create historical memories, much as Kirk Savage did in his book Monument Wars (2009). In this way, Chambers might have embarked on a deeper conversation about the influence of picturesque landscape theory, and its cousin association theory, to challenge the chronological and sectional truisms of the historical memory of the Revolution.

Megan Kate Nelson offers a different view of a common feature of picturesque landscapes: ruins. In Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War, Nelson expands readers’ view of the field of battle by considering the ways that Americans enacted and understood destruction of nature, the built environment, and people during the Civil War. In so doing, Nelson offers “the first book to consider the evocative power of wartime ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change” (9). By participating in the act of ruination, Nelson argues, both northerners and southerners “created a new national narrative” grounded in the common experience of the destruction of the Union, not just its reconstruction.

Early Americans were long familiar with ruins as landscape features whose material fragmentation evoked an emotional response to the passage of time. But, as Nelson explains, Civil War ruins were something new—”sudden and shocking”—because Americans had inflicted this damage on themselves (2). Commanders burned cities to destroy the commercial centers of their enemies and leveled houses in the field to clear lines of sight. Soldiers broke into homes and rifled through personal belongings to invade and destroy the most intimate spaces of their enemies. Residents sometimes destroyed their own property as a defensive measure, not wanting the enemy to profit from looting or self-satisfaction. Armies mowed down forests and troops alike, in combat and in pursuit of resources. The ruins of living beings provoked a twinned awe and horror at the transformative power of new technologies. This destruction fragmented the American landscape into a constellation of shelled cities, ransacked houses, splintered trees, and amputated bodies that stood as evidence of the ways that “the violent technologies of war,” rather than incremental decay, natural disaster, or accidental catastrophe, had ushered the United States into a new era (2). Ruins were so evocative, in fact, that even as Americans cleared them from the landscape by demolition and reconstruction, they made ruins into portable relics that preserved not simply personal mementoes of experience but also material evidence of epochal change.

Nelson’s highly original, deeply researched book exemplifies how rethinking the meaning of the physical world itself can lead to new insights in a wide array of scholarly fields. By an astute pairing of quantitative analysis of property claims with a cultural and tactical explanation of their high numbers, she makes a convincing case that military historians have underestimated Civil War destruction. She also excels in defining ruination as a multi-faceted, yet coherent, martial strategy by showing how the multiple meanings of destruction depended on each other, as acts of geophysical and emotional assault, offensive and defensive strategy, and material and symbolic expressions of identity. Nelson also shows the value of reconstructing conversations that crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Rather than falling into a familiar discussion of how northerners and southerners differed, Nelson offers a more valuable assessment of the common ways in which Americans on both sides of the conflict thought about destruction. As a result, she is able to make compelling arguments about the ways that Americans used ruination to create different narratives during the Civil War. Even more interestingly, she successfully challenges the literature about historical memory that focuses on monument building and battlefield preservation as a source of national identity. Instead, she points to ruination itself as a process of building, and reconstructing, national identity in nineteenth-century America. Finally, in her chapter on bodies, Nelson provides a counterweight to studies of masculinity that emphasize the cultural construction of gender when she reminds readers that “actual bodies mattered” (175). Battle scars could garner respect for sacrifice and the authority of eyewitness. But dismemberment threatened the ability of 45,000 surviving amputees to earn a living, reproduce, and defend themselves. In an age when Americans rooted masculinity in self-determination, evidence of bravery in war could relegate evidence of masculinity to the past.

Throughout the book, Nelson does an excellent job of explaining the very ambiguities that ruins posed to their observers rather than letting her own interpretations get mired in their multiple meanings. She explains how northerners celebrated the burning of Hampton, Virginia, for instance, as a defining act of modern war tactics while Confederate residents of the town celebrated their sacrifice of personal property to their national cause. The ambiguity of ruins could be risky as well as opportunistic. After the burning of Chambersburg, residents found themselves on the defensive when onlookers questioned their commitment to defending the Union. The ruins, residents insisted, evinced their sacrifice for that very cause. Nelson skillfully shows how the same contestations for meaning occurred over broken bodies, forests, and houses. On one hand, Nelson says, “rubble was eloquent, speaking of the tremendous and sudden violence of war, of shells fired and exploding against walls, of fires started and spread by the wind” (60). On the other, ruins were ephemeral and highly ambiguous, so the explanatory power of their visual eloquence was limited. Images of and arguments about the destruction of many sites lasted much longer than physical reminders of those acts, and Nelson frequently points out that ruin narratives “were clearly much more powerful than the ruins themselves” (59).

Nelson’s skill at grappling with the various forms and meanings that ruins embodied during the Civil War, however, makes her own definition of ruins seem too rigid at times. She bookends her study with a definition of the ruin as “a material whole that has violently broken into parts; enough of these parts must remain in situ, however, that the observer can recognize what they used to be” (2). Ruination, then, was the process of change that created these sites. Were the singed chimneys evocative ruins even though they afforded no sense of Hampton, Virginia’s, former city plan, as Nelson emphasizes, or of the size or function of the buildings they once heated? Were dead bodies and mangled limbs human ruins if warfare had “rendered [them] unidentifiable as individuals and often as humans” (169)? By tying her definition both to actual material condition and observers’ assessments, Nelson undercuts her point that ruins were compelling features during the Civil War because few people defined or interpreted them the same way. Her definition also evades the issue of intent. Did it matter to nineteenth-century Americans whether ruins signified a defiance of their enemy’s attempt to annihilate? An amputated arm often signified an escape from intended death; an intact chimney could stand as a surprising survival of an obliterating blaze. The physical characteristics of these ruins and their contexts connoted a destructive intent different from the mutilated photograph of one soldier, defaced by his enemies and then carefully replaced in the drawer of his widow’s dressing table. In this case, the perpetrators engineered the maintenance of the recognizable whole to maximize the emotional devastation of enemy onlookers. Nelson is at her best when she sticks close to ruins themselves, showing her subjects grappling directly with their presence on the landscape. Steadier attention to these firsthand assessments might have helped her to show how Civil War participants turned to material evidence of ruins themselves to parse the intent of their perpetrators in their ruin narratives.

In both books, some of the most fascinating moments are the ones that highlight the connections that nineteenth-century Americans drew between bodies and landscapes. Megan Kate Nelson draws out these relationships explicitly in many of her interpretations, using images and texts to link the invasion of homes with attacks on women’s bodies and drawing parallels between the dismemberment of soldiers and trees. In contrast, Thomas Chambers devotes much less interpretative attention to bodies in his work, which is surprising given the intriguing term “bonefields” in his title. Yet many of his sources point to the ways that Americans in the early republic looked to the body as a register of individual experience in place, celebrated by the same Romantic principles that encouraged touristic appreciation of picturesque landscapes. Ezra Buel, who proudly showed his thoracic scar during tours of the Saratoga battlefield, and David Steele, who flashed his skull medallion to visitors at Guilford Courthouse, exemplify the ways that veterans used their bodies as badges of authority when defining the contested memory of a place. Dead bodies and burial sites took on a new meaning too, as Chambers points out in his too-brief discussion of memorial architecture at rural cemeteries in the 1830s.

Both authors leave readers to connect these moments, when the meanings of bodies and landscapes became inextricable. But once again, their sources suggest a way of spinning out the broader significance of these intriguing scenes. Nineteenth-century Americans most often made sense of the places where bodies and battles collided by using the language of the sacred. Chambers and Nelson often take this vocabulary for granted, relying uncritically on John Sears’ Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (1989), Pierre Nora’s essay, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire” (trans. 1989), and Edward Linenthal’s Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991) to do their interpretive work. However, in casting light on places where war collided bodies and earth, both authors have offered up new and important evidence for reconsidering the very meaning of sacred places themselves. By giving a new view of the relationship between bodies, battle sites, and the built environment, Thomas Chambers and Megan Kate Nelson have composed insightful studies of the landscape of war that also illuminate a new path for studies of the sacred in nineteenth-century America.

Further reading

Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley, Calif., 2009); Louis Nelson, ed., American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces (Bloomington, Ind., 2006); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven, Conn., 1999); Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, eds., A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2008).

View this review in the format as originally published: http://www.common-place-archives.org/interim/reviews/martinko.shtml

In 1788, the poet, Congregationalist minister, and educator Timothy Dwight instigated a war of words against the Universalist minister Charles Chauncy. In this book, Colin Wells examines this campaign by placing Dwight’s writings—particularly his satiric poem The Triumph of Infidelity—in their theological and political contexts. Wells undertakes a literary recovery by excavating meanings probably lost on today’s readers and making Triumph of Infidelity available in a modernized, annotated edition in an appendix.

But Wells has also assembled an important argument: the controversy, he claims, was far more complicated than may seem at first glance, and the object of Dwight’s attacks was not only Chauncy’s doctrine of universal salvation but also a number of other “infidelities,” including Enlightenment progressivism, Jeffersonian democracy, and deism. In this way, Wells argues, Dwight’s work must be read in relation to debates over popular rebellion, the Constitution, interstate conflicts, and eventually the French Revolution and Jefferson’s election in 1800.

Some readers might be surprised that Dwight spent such an inordinate amount of literary and intellectual energy intervening in a local doctrinal dispute, but Wells emphasizes that much more was actually at stake. Under siege, in Dwight’s eyes, was an orthodox view of human morality, the dismantling of which could pose a serious threat to the social and political systems of the new nation. Dwight understood Universalism, as well as other progressivist religious and political movements, to be based on the ideas of Pelagius, the fifth-century divine who denied Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and deemed humans essentially innocent and perfectible through will. According to Wells, the clash between Calvinist orthodoxy and the new doctrines of Chauncy and others was a continuation of the conflict between Pelagius and Augustine. The common denominator of all that Dwight condemned as infidelity was what he termed Pelagian pride—the worship of human will in the place of God. In Dwight’s estimation, Pelagian ideas offered an easy morality for the weak.

Intellects on both sides of this Pelagian-Augustinian divide often positioned themselves as defenders of orthodoxy. Chauncy hoped Universalism could return covenant theology to a more proper course and appeal to those who had rejected all of Christianity as irrational and superstitious. He argued for a benevolent God and defended Universalism on moral grounds; however, in an attempt to distinguish his Universalism from that of discredited itinerant ministers like John Murray, he did not discard the notion of original sin and punishment. Rather, he saw hell as a temporary state that would bring about the sinner’s reform under the auspices of a benevolent deity. (One of Chauncy’s Universalist successors, Hosea Ballou, would later argue that the only punishment humans experience for sin is guilt; another, William Pitt Smith, would argue that human redemption might occur within one’s lifetime, rather than at the end of history or one’s own life.)

Dwight, on the other hand, believed Chauncy and other Universalists had reduced God to a doting parent bound by willful children. Chauncy charged that Calvinism was irrational and superstitious, but Dwight claimed instead that epistemological confidence and human-centered theology were the primary superstitions of the modern age. Dwight welcomed the scientific, material, and political progress of his age, but he denied that they could be invested with divine significance or understood as anything other than the fleeting moments of human history.

Wells makes his most intriguing claims when explaining the role that Augustan satiric tradition played in Dwight’s theological attack. While Dwight’s writings were undoubtedly shaped by Calvinist defenses of original sin (including that of his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards), he was also influenced by Alexander Pope’s mockery of the third earl of Shaftesbury in The Dunciad and Edward Young’s attack on latitudinarian and Universalist theology in England. With these models in mind, Dwight and other poets of an American-Augustan tradition would have understood satire as a vehicle fit to mediate a “grand struggle of historical forces” (24), and they would have looked to satire as an intervention that could defend tradition against the onslaught of modern values.

Dwight was particularly drawn to Augustan satire’s commitment to exposing as fallacy the reliance on human reason. While Augustan satires were primarily concerned with defending the civic virtues enshrined by classical republican ideology, rather than the doctrines of Calvinist orthodoxy, both belief systems were based on an Augustinian understanding of human nature as tending toward corruption. Thus, Dwight’s allusions to the satires of Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Dryden place Triumph of Infidelity and other works squarely in a satiric tradition that looked skeptically on the celebration of human progress (and feared as well that satire’s own potency would diminish with time).

Although Dwight believed the function of satire was to expose illusory self-satisfactions, Wells shows that the process of exposure was complicated. At the heart of Dwight’s orthodoxy was a belief in the nunc stans—an eternal present, decidedly beyond human consciousness, from which the divine could view humanity. By locating human redemption within secular human history, the Universalists, in Dwight’s opinion, had blasphemously denied the divine nunc stans perspective; and, yet, Dwight himself suggests that a partial nunc stans perspective could be available to humans through the self-examination of satire itself.

For Dwight, then, satire seems to have raised the same dilemma that Calvinist doctrine posed: namely, that self-scrutiny was essential to redemption even if epistemological confidence was ultimately an illusion. While the connections between Dwight’s vision of redemption and the logic of Augustan satire are not explicit, Wells writes, they are implicit in the genre form. Augustan satire shared Dwight’s Augustinian emphasis on self-examination and moral struggle; therefore, it accommodated his paradoxical explanation of redemption by which humans are redeemed “as a result of their own inward struggle against the very tendency of the will that causes them to believe they are deserving of regeneration” (89).

In the concluding pages of his study, Wells argues briefly that the legacy of Dwight’s skepticism is evident in works of antebellum American literature, including the abolitionist rhetoric of William Lloyd Garrison, the protest writings of Henry David Thoreau, and satiric works of fiction such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” The book’s primary objective, though, is to provide a detailed account of a literary and intellectual battle in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The story Wells tells is lucid, provocative, and thoroughly researched, and he offers a blend of intellectual history and literary criticism that will be accessible across the disciplines.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Jennifer Baker is an assistant professor of English at Yale.

“We hold this truth to be self-evident, that God created all men equal.” For some American Founders, these words stopped at color, class, or creed. For others, the words held out limitless possibilities for the American nation—if made real. Though originally set down by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, on this occasion they were paraphrased by James Forten, one of early national America’s leading black reformers. In 1813, protesting against a proposed Pennsylvania law limiting black migration in the Quaker State, Forten penned a pamphlet that called on Americans to live up to their founding language. The Declaration, Forten argued, “embraces the Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint . . . the White man and the African,” and anyone who violated that sacred notion of equality should be “subject to the animadversion of all.”

Although an inspiration to celebrated antebellum figures such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, James Forten (like many of his cohorts in the black founding generation) has suffered in semiobscurity in recent years. For a long time, no major biography of him even existed. That has now changed with Julie Winch’s important and compelling new work, A Gentleman of Color. Winch’s book is indeed a milestone. At five hundred pages, it is probably the longest biography of an antebellum African American (William McFeely’s Frederick Douglass is just a bit shorter), and it is certainly the most extensively researched monograph on an early national black figure. It also makes a case for defining Forten into the hallowed founding generation. Not only was he a community leader and black institution builder, Winch makes clear, he was also a key part of the new nation’s cultural and political fabric—a black man who defied racial categorization and stereotypes to try to expand the meaning of liberty and justice for all.

In Winch’s capable hands, Forten’s rags-to-riches life-story comes alive. Born in 1766 to a free black family of “modest” status, Forten became perhaps the richest black man of the early republic. Indeed, at his passing in 1842, Forten was favored with one of Philadelphia’s largest public funerals. He fought in the American Revolution as a mere lad, became a respected businessman (one who employed white as well as black workers), and assumed a place as race leader and abolitionist as if born to these roles. In fact, Forten’s life was constantly framed by racial injustice. “Although he knew he was the descendant of one of the first people to settle in Philadelphia,” Winch observes, “he was painfully aware that his great-grandfather had arrived in [slave] shackles” (27). Born almost exactly a century before W.E.B. Dubois, Forten grappled early and often with Dubois’ famous conundrum—he was an African and an American, his two identities often sparring.

Winch treats Forten’s life with as much attention to detail as is possible for an early “gentleman of color.” “Regrettably, for a man who lived so long and achieved so much,” Winch writes, “there is no James Forten archive” (7). And unlike Frederick Douglass or even Harriet Jacobs, Forten left no autobiography for later writers to examine. Winch exhaustively searched records in America and England, piecing together everything from stray business receipts to Forten’s anonymous newspaper writings. She also learned Forten’s sailmaking trade, for “James Forten’s life was also written in canvas” (7). In 1785, Forten apprenticed himself to a white sailmaker named Robert Bridges. In little over a decade, he would become a master sailmaker himself, taking over Bridge’s business and acquiring enough wealth to assume a leadership position in Philadelphia’s black community. Forten’s shop “was a showplace of his industry and values” (84). Winch reprints an 1834 newspaper article on Forten’s business, where “his workman, twenty or thirty in number, were industriously at work . . . Here was one who had been in his employ for twenty years . . . Here was another who had been rescued from ruin. These were WHITE men, but not so all.” Everyone from white politicians to fellow black leaders would visit Forten’s shop to get what Winch calls “an all-too-rare sight of an integrated workplace” in antebellum America (84).

As the best biography does, Winch’s portrait of Forten illuminates not only the man’s life but his times. This is critically important in the case of the founding generation of black leaders. There are simply many more biographies of antebellum black men and women (from the likes of Frederick Douglass to important but lesser-known people such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary and T. Morris Chester). Antebellum black life is therefore much more richly detailed than the Revolutionary era or early republic. Readers interested in how a black man like Forten was educated in the 1770s, how he assumed a prominent status in black reform circles, how he viewed the battle against slavery and racial prejudice before 1830, and a host of other matters, will find much in Winch’s book.

One thing readers may find surprising is the skepticism of early black leaders. Forten’s most enduring role was as a racial reformer but he was not always sure that racial reform could succeed in America. Forten tried everything: he signed a congressional petition against racial injustice, wrote an important pamphlet attacking prejudicial laws, and became a leading critic of the American Colonization Society. But Forten also flirted briefly with colonization’s flip side: black emigration. Forten believed that white colonizationists viewed blacks as inherently unequal—and that blacks could have no place in American society. Black emigrationists, on the other hand, told blacks to better their condition wherever they could, even beyond American shores. For a few years, then, he “promoted” emigration to the black republic of Haiti and joined the board of managers of the Haitian Emigration Society. Although he dropped active support of Haitian emigration during the 1820s, Forten remained critical of colonization. “The rising tide of intolerance he saw all about him could not help but make James Forten anxious about the future,” Winch comments. “What kind of world would his children inherit?” (233). Faith in American ideals—”liberty, equality, brotherhood”—had stirred Forten’s soul for years but a worsening racial climate “made him question those ideals” (233).

The advent of radical abolitionism in the 1830s reinvigorated Forten, and it is no surprise that he was a critical part of its formation. Forten helped William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery young Massachusetts printer and soon-to-be publisher of the antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, gain monetary support for his journal from the black community and abolitionist content from black writers. “What created a bond between the two was a passionate commitment to antislavery and equally passionate hatred of the American Colonization Society” (239). Forten remained an important abolitionist voice until his very death.

Despite her exhaustive treatment of Forten, Winch cannot surmount the problem facing all biographers of early black figures. She must resort to conditional phraseology when the documentary trail dries up, as it too often does. Forten “might have” done this; he certainly “could have been” at that meeting. No matter, for Forten has found a biographer who treats his life with all the rigor and celebration it deserves. Forten deserves to be viewed as part of the founding generation of American leaders, and Winch’s book of this gentleman of color certainly deserves a wide readership.

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

Richard Newman teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), and is currently writing a biography of Richard Allen.

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.