Historians of newspapers and the media in colonial North America often encounter the same two general questions at the end of a presentation or talk: “But what did readers think?” and “But did the same thing happen in Britain?” For the latter query, scholars of print culture have developed a range of answers over the past two decades by examining the eighteenth century through an Atlantic lens. As for readers, the answer is in some ways the Holy Grail of journalism research. We have decent estimates for how many people may have read each copy of a newspaper (in North America, as many as four or five), but much of what readers thought as they read is lost to the air; that is, people discussed the news in taverns or coffee houses but never committed their thoughts to writing. What readers did preserve is scattered throughout the historical record, making it difficult to design a feasible research project. Most scholars have therefore elided the question or stipulated to broad readership based on indirect evidence. Understanding how readers interpreted the newspaper and what cultural work newspapers did therefore remain vital questions to explore.

Uriel Heyd offers a comparative approach to the culture surrounding the press in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world in his new study,Reading Newspapers. He employs a hybrid methodology, aiming for comprehension across space and time through the selection of representative examples. On the British side, Heyd directs the bulk of his attention to the bustling London print market, with supplemental evidence drawn largely from Edinburgh. In North America and the United States, Heyd’s evidence is necessarily more diffused across the continent, as the printing trade was far less centralized.

For both sides of the story, Heyd uses the material in newspapers themselves, especially the “manifestos” that often accompanied the first appearance of a publication and the printer’s copy of the 1752 run of the Edinburgh Evening Courant. At the same time, he also searches beyond the newspaper for sources that talk about newspaper reading, including plays, indexes, and book auction catalogues. In particular, Heyd makes significant use of the newspaper collection of Harbottle Dorr, the colonial Boston shopkeeper who annotated and saved his newspapers for the period from 1765 to 1776. Drawing on this eclectic range of sources, Heyd concludes that “the eighteenth-century newspaper was an active agent influencing in varying degrees a wide range of spheres in life: from commerce to politics, from culture to society, from the private to the public” (27).

Heyd structures his argument around two interrelated issues: how newspapers presented themselves to the world, and how the world in turn saw them. Printers and editors were often clear about what they wanted readers to take from their publications. In the first number of publications, in fact, most published brief notes—Heyd refers to them as “manifestos”—which allowed them to explain their motivations and declare their intentions for their publication. These statements of purpose, Heyd explains, show that printers and editors aimed to make their newspapers “useful and entertaining,” to circulate news and political debate, to support commerce both locally and on a broader scale, and to facilitate “community formation and interaction” (61). These noble goals notwithstanding, newspapers were also consumer goods, and their publishers paid careful attention to “branding” and other marketing strategies in a burgeoning capitalist market for news in the eighteenth century (though more true in London than in the colonies). Newspapers also covered a broad array of topics, as Heyd demonstrates graphically in the book’s third chapter. Here as elsewhere Heyd relies largely on the printer’s characterizations through the indexes compiled for bound editions of their newspapers.

If newspaper producers had aspirations to grandeur in their self-presentation, readers took a somewhat dimmer view. On stage, in fact, playwrights depicted the London press as “concerned with fiction rather than with factual truth” (163). At the same time, dramatists recognized the cultural power of news as depicted in the stock character known as Quidnunc (from the Latin for “What now?”), who “represented the avid, even addicted, newspaper consumer, completely engulfed by politics” (195). The character, Heyd writes, “displays a one-track mind that cannot deal with personal events and prefers escaping from personal crisis to faraway reported worlds, whether real or unreal” (201). In other words, if you encountered this review first as a link on Facebook or Twitter, you probably know a modern-day Quidnunc. Most importantly, the Quidnunc character reveals the leveling effect of the news. Anyone with literacy could become a follower of government decisions, military campaigns, and the like. Even after the news was no longer proximately useful, Heyd points out, readers still clamored for bound collections as a means of preserving the historical moment and providing a “medium-term” perspective on the past.

Much of Heyd’s interest appears to lay in broadening the evidence base for the history of news beyond the texts of the newspapers themselves. It is particularly heartening as a fellow traveler in journalism history to see the collection of Harbottle Dorr put into service as evidence of reader response. Dorr and his newspapers are certainly well known. The collection is held in four volumes at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and noted historians Bernard Bailyn and Thomas C. Leonard have discussed Dorr’s life and annotations. Yet few scholars have attempted to integrate Dorr’s annotations into arguments about news and media culture, both because he is simply one observer and because the task of reading not only a decade’s worth of newspapers but also copious notes is a monumental task. For this alone Heyd is to be commended. Many newspapers contain some annotation on them, usually the name of the subscriber, and occasionally a printer’s mark (especially on those in the collections at the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, two of the largest early American newspaper collectors in the United States). But there is no resource quite like Dorr’s extended marginal meditations on the ideology and mobilization behind the American Revolution, taken down as events unfolded (and years later) in the newspapers of Boston, that hotbed of radicalism.

On the other hand, Reading Newspapers leaves open several interpretive issues. Most importantly, the comparison between London and North America, while in principle a necessary corrective, often works rather awkwardly. In many respects, that is, it seems unfair to ask colonial American newspapers to stand side by side with those of London because of the vast difference in scale. Newspaper printers in colonial America and the early United States were frequently the sole operators in their towns, who struggled to cobble together enough work to survive. Eighteenth-century London, by contrast, boasted a viciously competitive marketplace for news, as Heyd shows. The area of Britain that looked more like the colonies was the provinces. Scholars of the book trade, in fact, have made significant inroads in comparing towns and cities from the British periphery, including places such as Bristol, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Philadelphia, to name just a few. Further accounts, based either on archival research or a synthesis of scholarly work, should prove helpful in more fully elucidating the nature of news culture in the British Atlantic world by bringing in a broader spectrum of that culture.

Understanding the culture of news remains an elusive pursuit. Reading Newspapers at once demonstrates that seeking answers through a comparative approach can bear fruit and that historians still have much work to do in thinking about news production, distribution, and consumption in a transatlantic context. Opening the door to these questions, even as some of Heyd’s answers frustrate, is ultimately a useful contribution.

This article was originally published in October 2012.

The above question, although asked in jest, has some serious repercussions for scholars of early American literature. For, despite the presence of a number of fully fledged Anglophone epics (most notably, perhaps, Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha) and a downright profusion of Hispanic ones (among which Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana stands out) in the field, these texts are rarely taught, seldom studied, and, it seems, almost never loved. Therefore, although few will admit to fearing these books, exactly, we nevertheless collectively shy away from them in ways that obscure their worth and real importance for imperial and national literary genealogies. Doubtless, the generic qualities of epic—lengthy narrative verse with drawn-out digressive imagery (epic similes), yawn-inducing catalogues, and elaborate divine machinery—do not help its case. Because of this, the teaching of the form in fragmented, bite-sized chunks is popular and understandable. The two books under review here do not necessarily argue against this habit. Both steer clear of stale arguments that would have us (re)read and appreciate the entire works. Instead, Phillips and Altschul encourage us to think about epic in ways that are more “meta:” examining, respectively, the work that the term “epic” accomplishes in the early national North American imagination and the existence of the genre as evidence of a supposedly higher culture in a scholarly hierarchy that systematically privileges European (Spanish) tradition over colonial (Latin American) literary production.

In addition to convincingly executing their largely abstract, academic arguments, both books also succeed in arousing interest in the primary works that they discuss. So much so that it is worth being attuned to the possible pedagogical implications of these books: one might, taking off from Phillips, for instance, teach epics (or parts thereof) precisely for how they revise common ideas about national poetry, visual artistry, and even the great American novel: Moby Dick. My considerations below therefore consistently link both books back to pedagogy, because the connection to what goes on in the classroom helps to make the intellectual payoff of their arguments simultaneously more concrete and easier to appreciate.

At first glance, both books seem to share an interest in philology: judging by Altschul’s title and Phillips’s focus on “the changing meanings of ‘epic’ as a term as it travels from poetry to law, to art criticism, and eventually into the realm of cultural work more generally” (5). But Phillips’s study of epic is philological in the classical sense—from the Greek ϕιλολογία: the love of words and their historical meaning—whereas Altschul considers philology as the disciplines of literary and linguistic scholarship and their role within imperial and post-colonial academia. Phillips combines a natural, easy-going style of writing with considerable theoretical sophistication when discussing epic as a literary genre, a painterly style, and a rhetorical register in America from about 1700 to 1876. His command of the epic and scholarly tradition, citing examples from Homer to Whitman, and quoting John McWilliams’s 1989The American Epic alongside Wai Chee Dimock’s highly theoretical forays in Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, is impressive. More remarkable, perhaps, especially for a first book, is that he does not articulate a strong, single argument that is made by each chapter with increasing force. Instead, following Phillips feels more like taking a leisurely, guided tour through the landscapes of epic in America than participating in an adamant rhetorical debate. Although the tendency to survey sometimes obscures the stakes of his scholarship, his gentle, observant voice unexpectedly draws one in to read every single chapter, despite the best-laid plans to skip some out of the exigencies of time.

In his short, somewhat under-annotated, introduction, Phillips constructs an intellectual lineage of what he calls “my concept of how writers of epic choose their traditions— … the epic impulse— … a form of reading, with superlatively extensive annotations in the form of an ‘original’ work” (14). This impulse thus connotes writing (not necessarily epic) verse or prose in ways that continue the tradition begun by older epic works. Phillips’s choice to read for this impulse is smart and inclusive because it allows for considerations of writers like George Sandys and Phillis Wheatley, who surely contributed to the tradition of American epic in important ways, even though they never wrote one, strictly speaking. Phillips’s awareness of and honesty about the limitations of his work are also admirable: he admits to ignoring mock epic and war poetry, which may disappoint those looking forward to a contextualization of Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan(1637), Ebenezer Cook’s The Sotweed Factor (1708), or James Grainger’s Sugar Cane (1764). But his surveys compensate for such losses by incorporating Elizabeth Graeme’s commonplace book and Sarah Wentworth Morton’s poetry, works that establish more surprising vistas in the American epic tradition.

Colonial poetry is not treated as a separate category by Phillips, nor is it the area where his real interests lie. Instead, his strongest observations are on the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries—strengths dictated in part by the abundance of epic texts produced in those eras. His method and spirited defense of close reading are heartening to literary scholars, though he rarely spends more than one page discussing a single text. This habit does not facilitate in-depth readings of the (often lengthy) primary texts, but Phillips is at his best in pithy observations. His introduction is followed by a prologue, which works together with the first chapter to conduct a survey of epic in the American literary tradition up to 1800. Chapters 2 and 3, however, switch gears to provide overviews of the terms “epic” in constitutional law and landscape painting, respectively. Chapter 4 returns to literature with a consideration of epic traditions in Transcendentalism and beyond. Overall, the book seems oddly front-loaded, with large and fast reviews in the first four chapters making way for (mainly) single-author readings in chapters 5 through 8 (Cooper; Sigourney; Longfellow; Melville)—a shift that is not acknowledged or explained.

Phillips’s gift for succinct, learned remarks can be seen in his points on Wheatley, for instance. Initially, Phillips stresses her youth and desire to please and impress her male readers, writing: “it could be that the most moving thing about Patroclus’s story for Wheatley is the moment when the young hero must seek patronage, even debasing himself to get it” (29). While, later, he notes: “Wheatley more openly turned mourning into rebellion in … ‘Niobe in Her Distress’ [when she creates] a grieving, flesh-and-blood mother … This is the epic of Penelope, of Dido, of Eve, the forlorn woman whose greatness has been overshadowed by the masculine tendencies of epic narrative” (50). John C. Shields has called attention to the fact that Wheatley may have known Richard Wilson’s painting The Death of the Children of Niobe through William Woollett’sengraving of it. A close reading of this painting (or the print) would have jibed well with Phillips’s clear interest in the decorative arts.

Another talent of the author is the history of the book—a field he neither introduces nor theorizes, though he practices it particularly well. Sometimes the upshot is merely funny, as when the image of Achilles in mourning illustrates a story called “The Travelled Ant” in the 1813 A Present for Good Boys (chapter 1, p. 32). But usually it is more profound, as when a copy of the Iliad, inscribed to James Madison, establishes “Homer as a source of elite cultural capital” for the composers of the Constitution (83). Phillips also excels at helping us understand the relative cost of books or paintings, from the “extravagant” production values of Joel Barlow’sColumbiad (1808) to Benjamin West’s “epic” large-scale paintings, including Christ Healing the Sick (1811, 1817), whose price was warranted, apparently, because of their “epic” status (105).

Perhaps most surprising in Phillips’s book is the strong connection he repeatedly draws between epic, sentiment, and pre-Civil War novels. Early on, he notes “the preponderance of the elegiac in American epics … [and how] the language of mourning served to import the discourse of sentimentalism into epic” (9). This observation dramatically expands the reach and the appeal of such a difficult literary form, which Phillips traces in the The Leatherstocking Tales (chapter 5) and throughout Melville’s marginalia in others’ novels and poetry (chapter 8). Finally, I found Phillips’s take on a genre he calls “the Indian epic” (chapter 7) revelatory both for the tradition he identifies and treats as well as for how themes of death and sacrifice work toward establishing a national mythology.

Pedagogical ideas or notions on how to make maudlin poems attractive to students are hard to come by in Phillips’s work. Yet portions of the book itself, precisely because of its easygoing, surveying quality might well be taught, if only to establish some perspective on the importance and development of the genre in America. Excerpted epics might be the best way to go in the classroom, and Phillips helpfully points out the most salient bits of the works he discusses. He also makes us aware that these pedagogical dilemmas have a history of their own: “in the 1790s, many were accustomed to encountering epic poems in fragments, both in anthologies and in schoolchildren’s textbooks” (63).

Transitioning from Phillips to Altschul is easiest via the former’s fourth chapter, where he traces the philological ideas surrounding epic—that it, for instance, creates a national language as well as character—in early literary scholarship and the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle. Of particular importance are the responses of the Transcendentalist poet Jones Very to Francis Lieber’s Encyclopaedia Americana (1829-33), showing “the adoption of German academic methods within a nationalistic American culture” (143). Altschul picks up where Phillips leaves off by describing how Latin American linguistic and literary scholarship (mainly of epic poetry) were also intertwined with nationalist aims in the nineteenth century. In order to critique this association, she turns to “the particular criollo medievalism [medievalism practiced by Latin America-born scholars]… of a foundational nineteenth-century figure: the Venezuelan grammarian, editor, political, and legal scholar Andrès Bello (1781-1865)” (5).

Altschul thus immediately gives her project the kind of argument that Phillips’s book lacks. Yet in the process of stating and refining her aims, she sacrifices intelligibility—especially for those outside her direct field. My difficulty understanding her book may well stem from my ignorance of Latin American scholarship—judging by its blurbs, for instance, the book is “compelling [and] highly readable”—yet even my years-old familiarity with Walter Mignolo’s idea of the coloniality of knowledge did not adequately prepare me to follow Altschul’s reasoning. But instead of dwelling on the difficulties posed by the book, I will try to summarize and respond to her prose as best I can, merely noting how, in comparison, the meticulous and seemingly effortless clarity and sagacity of Phillips’s writing shines very brightly indeed.

At its core, Altschul’s project concerns philological scholarship, which includes literary criticism avant la lettre, and how it has sought to devalue colonial ways of knowing as opposed to European paradigms of accomplishment. This last judgment is what Mignolo has called “coloniality of knowledge,” and Altschul uses his idea alongside “Johannes Fabian’s notion of ‘the denial of coevalness'” (10). Fabian’s concept is enlightening and applies to colonial circumstances as well as later national situations in that “postcolonial lands were considered ‘stuck’ at a prior historical time, living in the never-ending past, while Europe was a historical and thus changing society that had progressed into the realm of modernity and the future” (10). Here, I immediately thought of the Smurf-blue prehistoric Picts that John White placed as contemporaries to Virginia Algonquins in his watercolors from the 1580s alongside Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow’s suggestions that Native Americans still lived in Ovid’s Golden Age. This impulse to pronounce subjugated populations as somehow earlier than European societies made the colonized seem simultaneously innocent, ignorant, and in need of imperial updating, so to speak.

These prejudices are relevant because Altschul wants to think through how postcolonial scholars set about historicizing their past. She does so by looking at so-called “Occidentalist resistances:” “a form of struggle with coloniality that is carried out from within an Occidentalist frame of mind, [meaning] the cultural self-understanding of the Americas as an extension of Europe” (13). This attitude is obviously conflicted: while it negates agency on the part of Americans (which are, after all, “stuck” Europeans-to-be), it nevertheless problematizes the wholesale valuation of European ways of knowing. Altschul investigates “post-independent criollos” who are, significantly, also “postcolonial subjects.” This emphasis is new and fills a void in Latin American scholarship, which has previously been concerned mainly with “the relationships of Europeans (or their descendants) vis-à-vis the populations of indigenous and African origins” (15).

Altschul’s book looks at creole postcolonial literary scholarship as it speaks to and positions the author(s) with regards to Spain. Her lengthy introduction provides a focused overview of theories of postcolonialism in Latin America, although I could not always discern what exactly her contribution was to concepts such as settler postcolonialism. She describes her methodology as “kaleidoscopic, which means that a key element will be turned around and observed from assorted angles in order to extract different facets of meaning” (24). I found this approach both mesmerizing and, at times, myopic, but Altschul does expand her perspective from Bello by including other scholars as well: María Rosa Lida, Ferdinand Wolf, and Gaston Paris. Although I initially sorely missed treatments of primary literary texts in this book, it should be noted that such close readings would simply not fit Altschul’s objective. She is interested in the history of medievalism and in drawing out the politics and aesthetics of that field—an entirely legitimate intellectual pursuit. It remains, however, difficult to conceptualize how her argument applies to North America because, first, medievalism was not a major scholarly preoccupation in the nineteenth century (to my knowledge); and second, because postcolonialism does not lend itself unproblematically to the study of North American history.

Altschul’s book consists of three clear parts: on the coloniality of Hispanic American philology; on metropolitan philology and the settler creole scholar; and on medievalist Occidentalism. These three parts are subdivided into two chapters each. Epic is central to three chapters (3, 4, and 5), the latter of which most immediately engages Bello’s scholarship, showing “specific instances of Occidentalist resistances … in a group of Bello’s scholarly and literary engagements … connected through epic nationalism, such as the Poem of the Cid, La Araucana, and his ‘American Silvas'” (27). Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga’s La Araucana (1569-89), which relates the start of the hostilities between the Spanish and the Mapuche in what is now Chile, is often fragmentarily included in anthologies of early American literature, which is why I turn to its treatment here.

In Altschul’s penultimate chapter, she interestingly releases her rhetorical hold, admitting that her work complements Mary Louise Pratt’s readings of Bello in Imperial Eyes and citing at length from Pedro Grases’s biography. Altschul argues that Bello’s changing ideas of epic stem (in part) from the need for differentiation between the newly independent Latin nations. Unlike his contemporaries in Argentina, Cuba, and Chile, Bello did not turn to colonial texts to invent a national literary tradition, but was instead heavily invested in a posited connection between classic epics and medieval heroic narratives which, he claims, shaped later Latin American traditions. Here, Altschul proceeds lucidly and systematically, unearthing Bello’s “surprising definitional fuzziness” (151) and helpfully contextualizing his writing on El Cid with those on La Araucana. Yet, even for someone (like myself) who has read that entire epic with great interest, the discussions of it do not come alive. Altschul’s own points, however, are convincingly presented.

Connecting Altschul’s argument to pedagogy is difficult, but not impossible. Rather than invite students to think through the intricacies of postcolonial or Occidentalist scholarship, I imagine that the idea of nationhood might prompt more discussion. The epics appear in Altschul’s work to illustrate different kinds of national affiliation, and they serve this purpose well. For more advanced students, inviting them to read and evaluate dated scholarship might provoke debates on what is acceptable in academic evidence and methodology. More directly relevant to Altschul’s work is the question of what exactly epic, as a genre, has meant for ideas of national literatures, language, and character. Despite the occasional hiccups in my comprehension of her work, she adds to our understanding of the genre’s implications, which Phillips has immeasurably enlarged.

Joanne van der Woude is the Rosalind Franklin Fellow and an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her first book, Broken Beauty: Affect and Aesthetics in Colonial America, is under consideration at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her second project focuses on heroism and sacrifice in New World poetry

As an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, I joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. While I appreciated little of the national fraternity’s history, I was always curious about the remnants of its nineteenth-century heritage that persisted in songs, stories, and symbols. As per one song, a DKE was to be a “gentleman, scholar, and jolly good-fellow,” but beyond some hearty drinking, I never quite grasped what a jolly good fellow should be . . . until now. Richard Stott’s Jolly Fellows sheds light on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jolly fellowship—”that male comportment that consisted of not just fighting but also heavy drinking, gambling and playing pranks” (1)—as well as the physical contexts in which it was performed.

Stott begins in the tavern, the eighteenth-century epicenter of jolly fellowship and, well into the 1800s, increasingly the target of critics who condemned the disorder of male culture. Stott seems to date jolly fellowship to pre-modern Europe and colonial America, but as the quote in the title of this review indicates, even Euripides grasped the relationship of jolly fellowship and alcoholic consumption. The impetus of an “American” version of jolly fellowship, however, was “service in the American army during the Revolution [which] had stimulated drinking, gambling, and unruly behavior in general” (9). Throughout the 1810s, both whites and blacks participated in this unruliness, which Stott considers the natural state of men: “Such behavior required no explanation; it was just the way men were” (63).

Gambling, fighting, drinking, and pranks became symbolic of jolly fellows’ reaction to reformers’ efforts, and the gentility and middle-class values that reform represented.

In response to the excesses of manly disorderliness, some Americans attempted to reform jolly manhood into “subdued manhood” by promoting self-governance over self-expression. The rise of reform frustrated men who “were caught in the transition between an age when male revelry was customary and an age when manly respectability was the standard” (93). Pockets of jolly fellowship persisted, particularly in cities and on the frontiers where men remained undisciplined and unruly. Stott explores New York’s Bowery and the California Gold Rush as evidence of the most extreme pockets, but he also includes military action as outlets for unruly manhood: “The incentive [to escape the tedium of everyday life] may have been especially important in the Mexican-American War because the personal moral reforms of the previous thirty years had for many men robbed everyday existence of some of its zest” (131).

Gambling, fighting, drinking, and pranks became symbolic of jolly fellows’ reaction to reformers’ efforts, and the gentility and middle-class values that reform represented. Popular entertainment in the forms of southwestern literature and minstrelsy embraced the imagery of jolly fellowship and inspired a new generation of men to resurrect it in the Wild West of the 1870s. Many of this new generation of jolly fellows—sportsmen who promoted themselves as hunters, gamblers, and adventurers—made it a professional pursuit.

But in the 1880s and 1890s, reform movements that had been stalled by the Civil War and Reconstruction found new energy, and by the turn of the twentieth century, jolly fellowship was widely proclaimed dead by men like Teddy Roosevelt who mourned its loss. It found expression in vaudeville, literature, and newspaper cartoons, instilling in American culture an appreciation for the bad boy even as the bad boy disappeared. The new expressions complicated manliness by drawing upon racial comparisons; vaudeville in particular tried to preserve the remnants of white jolly manhood by mocking black manhood.

Jolly Fellows provides a solid narrative of the decline of jolly fellowship in nineteenth-century America, and Stott clearly researched deeply in the primary sources. The book is chock-full of humorous and insightful anecdotal stories. But in many ways, I find this to be a very frustrating book. Evidence of the persistence of jolly fellowship is situated in New York City and the Wild West, but evidence of rejection of reform is drawn primarily from popular culture originating in the South. The text abounds with anecdotes, but the reader is left craving analysis. And while it is a book about men, it has little new to say about masculinity.

The incongruence between jolly fellowship in the cities and on the frontiers and the critique of reform that emerged in the South may not seem significant. After all, southwestern literature and minstrelsy expanded beyond the South. Still, I found it curious that Stott spent so little time on the South, particularly given the flurry of scholarship on southern men over the past decade. And I find it even more difficult to reconcile the anxieties over southern manhood expressed in those popular entertainments with the challenges to urban and frontier manhoods. As John Mayfield demonstrated, southwestern literature specifically reflected southern anxieties over shifting economic cultures and social contexts. Such an interpretation may have been applied more broadly to the national scene, but the possibility of joining regions in a common American crisis of manhood is never explored by Stott.

This is just one example of the lack of analysis throughout the book. Over and again, I found myself saying out loud, “but why?” Many of the questions that Stott raises early for the reader should have pushed him toward more analytical insight: “Where did it [jolly fellowship] originate? Was it natural, biological? Why drinking, fighting, gambling, and pranks? And then what happened to jolly fellowship?” (2). Only the last question is truly addressed, but even this conclusion—that moral reform movements (primarily the temperance movement) and a quest for respectability ultimately did in jolly fellowship—just does not satisfy, and seems rather tepid when compared to more nuanced narratives about refinement and social change presented in the works of Bruce Dorsey, Karen Halttunen, and John F. Kasson.

The weakness of analysis must be attributed partly to this underuse of the historiography related to reform, but there are also notable historiographical gaps in masculinity studies. Men’s history has exploded over the past decade, but Stott’s citations do not indicate any works since 2003. Scholarship by John Mayfield, Lorri Glover, Jennifer Green, Diane Barnes, Robert Pace, Thomas Foster, and those who contributed to edited collections on southern manhood and southern masculinity would have directly complemented Stott’s narrative, but he employed none. Even Amy Greenberg’s excellent Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2003) is underemployed, used simply to support Stott’s interpretation of filibusters and neglecting the larger significance of Greenberg’s model of martial manhood versus restrained manhood.

Stott quite successfully teases the reader with provocative (and potentially important) ideas, but he consistently leaves the reader with few answers. For example, of California miners he writes that male camaraderie “was accompanied by brutality toward people of color” (145). He follows with some discussion of fighting and violent pranks that evidence this statement. But he does not engage why gender and race became intertwined in this manner. Indeed, early in the book, white and black men seem similarly engaged in jolly fellowship, so this shift is rather significant, particularly since near the end of the book, Stott draws a direct line to the practice of lynching: “If northern audiences could watch blacks being dismembered on stage, southern whites could enjoy the real thing” (180). Why did anxieties over the loss of (white) jolly fellowship manifest in racialized ways?

The intersection of race and gender is tantalizingly woven throughout the text, but never explored. “Miners viewed California as a land where white women were so few as to be inconsequential” (136; italics added), Stott writes, suggesting that the absence of white women equated with an absence of moral suasion. But what of Hispanic, Native American, and Asian women? Was their presence inconsequential to the performance and reinforcement of jolly fellowship? Early in Jolly Fellows, Stott makes clear that the male milieus he chose to examine were womanless or nearly womanless, but the Bowery, the Wild West, the mining camps of California, the lumber camps of the upper Midwest, the Mississippi River’s boatmen culture, and the taverns of the Revolutionary era all had women, just not necessarily white women. It seems to me this is a notable oversight because alongside drinking, fighting, gambling, and pranks, one must also recognize the critical role of sex in jolly fellowship, a topic that received less than one-half page of attention.

Most frustrating, however, is that while Jolly Fellows is a book about men, it has little new to say about masculinity. The prevailing narrative of nineteenth-century American manhood found in Rotundo, Kimmel, and Bederman among others is one in which refinement and religion revised and softened manliness. Stott attempts to impose that narrative onto his story. But, in fact, Stott successfully demonstrates a different narrative: that, despite nineteenth-century reform efforts, jolly fellowship grew stronger in places like the West and the Bowery, gained notoriety and popular support in American culture, and, according to the conclusion, persists even today (even without the emphases on fighting and gambling). Unwilling to critically challenge the prevailing narrative onto his story, Stott missed an opportunity to offer a counter-narrative to our understanding of American manhood, one in which reform fails in many ways, subdued manhood does not become hegemonic, and jolly fellowship remains a powerful form of manhood.

The Fabrication of American Literature is a long-overdue examination of the antebellum practice of “puffing” books, or shamelessly promoting them for profit, politics, and other interested motives. Cohen exposes the mechanics and machinations behind the “genuine” literature that was supposed to prove the United States’ artistic and cultural maturity to the Old World—as well as behind more marginal publications like “ersatz backwoodsman’s tales” and “false slave narratives,” which could have suggested just the opposite to cosmopolitans on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, she is careful to avoid imagining an entirely disinterested literature and literary criticism as the ideal state from which the antebellum period fell into a world of petty deceit, relentless competition, and utter confusion. Cohen does so by starting from “a paradox at the heart of American literary history: at the very moment when a national literature began to take shape, many observers worried that it amounted to nothing more than what Edgar Allan Poe described as ‘one vast perambulating humbug'” (1). She argues that this paradox disrupts not only critical narratives of the flourishing of a representative national literature after its difficult birth and awkward adolescence, but also counter-narratives of the “cultural work” done by popular and political—and not just refined and removed—literature.

Antebellum Americans looked to literature to settle the most complicated and important questions of the day—questions about nationhood, democracy, race, gender, class, and region among them.

By assembling and working from an archive of concerns about “subterfuge, impostures, and plagiarism” in print, Cohen situates mid-nineteenth-century literature within, rather than apart from, the rest of antebellum American culture. As a result, unnoticed family resemblances become more prominent. The practices of publishing and reviewing books of all kinds begin to look a lot like promotions for quack medicine, land bubbles, and worthless shares of stock. Even Poe—best known to us as a poet and gothic fiction writer, but notorious in his own time as a critic who reviewed and promoted his own writings—makes himself heard among the many voices cautioning that the “indiscriminate laudation of American books” is “a system which, more than any other one thing in the world, has tended to the depression of that ‘American Literature’ whose elevation it was designed to effect” (34).

Again, it is worth emphasizing that Cohen insists on the seamier side of the fabrication of American literature not to expose the idea of American literature itself as a fraud, but rather to show how antebellum literature did and did not work. In making her much more nuanced and responsible argument, she is careful to distinguish between fraud—cases of intentional hoaxing, forgery, and plagiarism—and fraudulence—what she defines as “the hopelessness of distinguishing impostures, forgeries, plagiarisms, and hoaxes from literature proper” (2). This impossibility of distinguishing fact from fiction, real from fake, true from false in the messy world of antebellum print made significant trouble not just for latter-day critics, but for the public at the time. As Cohen observes, antebellum Americans looked to literature to settle the most complicated and important questions of the day—questions about nationhood, democracy, race, gender, class, and region among them. “The expedients readers, writers, critics, and editors devised to fulfill these impossible tasks, the accusations of fraudulence that inevitably resulted, and the attempts some writers made to turn this fraudulence to account,” Cohen explains in her introduction, “are the subject of this book” (2).

The first chapter examines the literary nationalist movement of the 1830s and ’40s and the puffery that dominated literary criticism at the time. In the same moment that authors and critics were working to establish a mature literature they hoped would place the United States on equal footing with Europe, many of them were also writing wildly enthusiastic reviews that had less basis in the works themselves than in favoritism, financial interest, and partisan politics. As Cohen argues, these decidedly undemocratic practices significantly compromised the democratic promise that a representative American literature was supposed to hold for the young country and the rest of the world. And antebellum American readers noticed, as we see in the range of anxious responses that Cohen summons to make her case. A memorable example comes from poet and journalist Lambert Wilmer, who warned in 1841 via verse that

‘Twould seem no less than destiny’s decree
That we the victims of all frauds should be:
Our literature and currency are both
Curs’d with the evil of an overgrowth; (42)

Cohen deftly turns these shaky foundations of a national literature into solid ground on which to build the rest of the book. Following chapter one, Cohen shifts her attention to the periphery that the central literary culture established only to challenge. Doing so, she explains, allowed the center to shore up its legitimacy by making marginal writers’ works—and not their own equally vulnerable writings—the suspect examples of the kind of literature that America was capable of producing. The second, third, and fourth chapters of The Fabrication of American Literature are case studies of these dynamics in action.

Chapter 2 pairs Davy Crockett and Jim Crow, examining not just the commonalities but also the deliberate linkages of their strange careers as cultural others. They were manufactured as “our ONLY TRUE NATIONAL POETS,” as one reviewer put it, to fabricate an idea of authenticity that mainstream American literature would both borrow from and attack to establish its own. Jim Crow and Davy Crockett regularly appeared not only separately but together in numerous “songsheets, almanacs, plays, and fictitious autobiographies” circulating in the antebellum period. Fraudulence was at the center of both figures’ public personae, with “minstrelsy laugh[ing] at the trickery and pretensions of Jim Crow” and the “Crockett literary industry mak[ing] wild tall tales the frontiersman’s stock in trade” (67). At the same time, “Jim Crow’s shams were acted out by white men themselves shamming as black, while Davy Crockett and the host of semiliterate ‘backwoods’ characters he inspired were largely manufactured out of northeastern publishing centers” (67). Working from this double layering of apparent deceit, the rest of the chapter surveys the print culture of Crow and Crockett to illustrate how these figures “achieved the remarkable feat of parlaying a fake authenticity into authentic fakeness” in “a culture preoccupied with the problem of fraudulence” (67-68).

The third chapter focuses on neglected pseudo-slave narratives by white writers that circulated alongside now well-known narratives written by blacks who had actually experienced slavery. The pseudo-slave narratives allow Cohen to continue her examination of what she calls the “racialization of fraudulence”—or the transformation of “fraud from a national problem” into a characteristic specifically associated with blackness—and how it worked both to legitimize and threaten the center’s authority (102). The popular newspaper columnist and novelist Fanny Fern is at the center of the fourth chapter, in which Cohen shows how Fern both exploited and was made vulnerable by the questions raised for readers and professional critics by her pseudonymity and the deliberate artifice of her writing style. The conclusion succinctly reads Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man as the ultimate case study for the book’s overall point: “that antebellum fraudulence cannot be embodied in individual acts and persons,” and that such fraudulence and the effort to establish a national literature are impossible to distinguish from each other (22).

While The Fabrication of American Literature is one of the most innovative works to be produced in the ongoing scholarly effort to rethink what came in the twentieth century to be designated as the “American Renaissance,” it doesn’t break entirely from its critical forebears who were just as interested in the relationship between literature and nationalism as antebellum Americans were. What is in many ways a radical view of American literature is also a rather traditional one, focused on works produced in the United States from the 1830s through the 1850s. It does not take the “spatial turn” that many scholars have in recent years, looking not just nationally but transnationally, hemispherically, and beyond. Nor does it attempt to bridge the gap between early American and antebellum American studies, as other scholars have encouraged us to do. But of the work that is still to be done in American literature, surely revisiting twice-told tales to retell them in a way that analyzes, synthesizes, and adds new dimensions to those tellings—as Cohen’s book does by balancing subtlety with complexity, serious history and theory with humor—is work well worth doing.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

Marcy J. Dinius is assistant professor of English at DePaul University and the author of The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (2012).

I loved novels and short stories long before I loved the study of history. As a child, history came to me through textbooks. In contrast to my other reading, it presented two problems: I couldn’t lose myself, and I couldn’t find the author. The way I liked my history best was in fiction. Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremaine, Elizabeth George Speare’s Witch of Blackbird Pond, Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth: these were my beloved doorways to an imaginary past. I didn’t like these books better because they weren’t true. I liked them better because you could dream your way into them. As I learned to recognize the writer’s craft in setting a scene or penning a line of dialogue, I didn’t lose my connection to the fictional world. Instead, I felt another connection to the authors who had made those worlds. I wanted to be like them almost as much as I wanted to be like brave Johnny Tremaine or gentle Mercy Wood.

Like all authors of historical fiction, Bryson has to make not one kind of reality, but two.

None of that came to pass, of course. Not only am I neither particularly brave nor gentle, I’m also completely incapable of writing fiction. The latter realization arrived in college. Around the same time, I began reading really good works of history—the kind with authors. The combination sent me to graduate school in history. There I learned to think rather than to dream my way into the past, and to admire the historian’s crafts of fact-based analysis, reconstruction, and detection. But I still loved biographies—they had characters and plots, even though I knew better than to call them that. I also loved those moments in monographs when the author’s power seemed to go beyond accuracy to connection, and even to mystery, to that shock of simultaneous intimacy and difference, that sense of knowing without quite understanding, which thrilled me as fiction always had. I slowly learned to cultivate an historian’s imagination, one that steered between the Scylla of no invention (Plagiarism) and the Charybdis of too much invention (Making Things Up). I kept reading novels, but swore off historical fiction for years. I believe I was afraid that if I indulged even a little, I might throw aside my copy of Jack Greene and curl up in my office with the American Girl series. In the end, though, I couldn’t sustain my ban. I slipped first with Iain Pears’ Instance of the Fingerpost, then his Dream of Scipio, and on it went, down to Kathleen Kent’s Heretic’s Daughter. When Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky wrote their own novel, Blindspot, I purchased it head held high. And now, Common-place has decided to review historical fiction such as Ellen Bryson’s The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, set in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. Let the revels begin.

Like all authors of historical fiction, Bryson has to make not one kind of reality, but two. She must create the reality of the historical moment she has chosen as her setting, and she must create the reality of her own fictional world within that setting. That this is no easy task is clear in the first few pages. Bryson’s fact-ridden portrayal of New York in 1865—its size, its street plan, its class divisions, its mourning bunting hung for Abraham Lincoln—shines the light of historical reality so brightly that it dissipates the mist of the fictional world. You can think, but you cannot dream your way in. But then Bryson brings us inside the museum. And there, her fictional world—the real world of her characters—stirs to life. The title character is the book’s narrator, “Bartholomew Fortuno: The World’s Thinnest Man since 1855.” Living with him in the museum are Matina, sweet, calm, and immense; Ricardo the Rubber Man; Emma the Giantess; Alley the Strongman; and an African-American named Zippy (more on him later). All of them live, eat (with spectacular variability), and work in the museum, competing with each other for the approval of Barnum, his wife, and the crowds who pass through every day. Bartholomew classifies them into groups: at the top, “the highest among us,” were the True Prodigies, “men with flippers, armless girls, parasitic twins.” Below them “were the regular Prodigies,” whose “special gifts emphasized different aspects of human beings—their hunger, their strength, their purity.” Next came the Exotics, and lowest on the list were “the Gaffs, self-made Curiosities who faked what came to the rest of us naturally” (20). Barnum’s museum consists mainly of “regular Prodigies;” their constrained but peaceful existence is disrupted by the nighttime arrival of a beautiful, red-haired woman wrapped in a veil. Bartholomew is desperately curious: who is this competitor? Why is Barnum so solicitous of her? And then the World’s Thinnest Man, long devoid of desire for anything but abstinence in all its forms, is suddenly besotted. The woman, Iell Adams, is revealed to have a beautiful, flowing beard. The transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno has begun.

What follows is a coming of age story. Bartholomew, traumatized in childhood, had never accepted his man’s body or assumed a man’s role in the world. By starving himself, he had found his way to the fantastical nursery garden of Barnum’s freaks. And by imagining his self-starvation as art, he finds a way to believe that his sheltered existence transcends the mundane world of the crowds who stare and gasp. Iell, for her part, is glamorous, sorrowful, and cultured; in one of the mock advertisements Bryson cleverly inserts in the text (along with handwritten notes and museum orders for the day) Iell is described as “a woman of great beauty with a man’s beard and of figure so beautiful and comely, she was previously Mistress to kings and arbiter of high fashion” (83). Iell encourages Bartholomew’s attentions, partly due to his kindness, and partly due to his willingness to brave the streets of lower Manhattan to bring her little packages of opium from a mysterious shop in Chinatown. Once past the awkwardness of her initial pages, Bryson draws those streets deftly and subtly, so that the sights and smells of Civil War-era New York and the emotions of her characters augment rather than diminish each other’s realities. 

Inspired by his attraction to Iell, Bartholomew eventually reconsiders whether his shocking thinness expresses his true nature. As he does so, he becomes an immensely more sympathetic character. Before this transformation, Bryson risks alienating the reader by making her central character flatly uninsightful about himself and those around him. But it’s a risk that pays off. Eating his three daily lima beans and treasuring his isolation, Bartholomew at the start of the story is indeed the Thinnest Man in the World. There is almost nothing to him. And then, after a while, there is. 

Does this book specifically appeal to—or repel—readers who are also historians? Two characters resonate differently, I suspect, for historians than they would for lay people. The first is the “son of former slaves,” Zippy, whom Barnum exhibits as “the missing link,” and whom Bartholomew describes as possessing an “elongated head and simian propensities” (20). Who is this man? Is he mentally retarded, is he traumatized, is he, or Barnum, manipulating racial expectations in a dangerous marketplace? Bryson hints at each possibility, but offers no real portrait of the character. So Zippy seems unreal in Bryson’s fictional world, and unreal in 1865 New York. I couldn’t help but lament that it was Zippy who remains thus opaque and distant. Must a work of fiction, whose author can roam the archive of the imagination, fail to create the same kind of person that history so often fails to document? The second character who left me uneasy is none other than the bearded beauty herself, Iell. There is, it turns out, a very unmysterious mystery at the heart of this book: Iell is literally hiding something, and no one who’s read any cultural history in the last twenty years should fail to guess what it is. 

My slight impatience with Iell stemmed not from the lack of suspense, but from the fact that Bryson seems to limn her as the tragic mulatto, inevitably victimized by her betwixt and betweenness (although race is not, in fact, her secret). This reaction left me aware of my own nature—half historian, half novel lover. Does that make me a True Prodigy, uniquely able to resist the suspect trope, or a Gaff, a creature of “no inherent worth whatsoever” (20), desperate to conjure a complication where none exists? Neither, of course: just a reader, suddenly feeling the reality of the fictional world wear thin. As Iell blurs into an archetype, there’s less and less sense of an author’s distinctive vision, less shock of the alien melding with the familiar. Instead, the alien begins simply to feel familiar, and the specific to feel general. And that may be a failing in both history and literature.

The virtues of this book, however, far outweigh such imperfections. Iell, despite her scene-stealing beauty and oddness, is not the center of the book. Nor is the center the carefully drawn scenes from historic Manhattan or the American Museum. Instead, the center is Bartholomew, in all his prideful, self-delusional, kind, and, at last, hungry glory. I can’t say I wanted to become him, like the characters of my beloved childhood fictions. But I do want to make him dinner. And I’d love to raise a toast to his creator.

On March 3, 1853, little-known British artist Eyre Crowe entered an auction room in Richmond and saw nine slaves sitting on benches, waiting to be sold. Crowe took out his pencil and paper and began to sketch. Eight years later, he turned this sketch into a painting. As the Civil War began, viewers at the ninety-third annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of the Arts in London first gazed upon Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (1861).

Crowe’s painting pictured nine of the more than two million slaves sold in the domestic slave trade in antebellum America. Over the past three decades, historians have made this vast network of human commodification central to any understanding of antebellum bondage. They have produced numerous studies that illuminate the quantitative dimensions of the trade and explore the meanings of individual sales for masters and bondspeople. Visual culture scholars have separately explored visions of slavery, paying particular attention to depictions of the southern plantation and the moment of emancipation. But the question of how artists visualized the domestic slave trade has awaited a fuller answer.

Art historian Maurie D. McInnis takes up this question in her richly textured book Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. Examining how Eyre Crowe made the domestic slave trade visible, McInnis makes an important contribution to the visual history of antebellum slavery. Crowe’s simple act of eyewitness artistry, McInnis compellingly argues, produced an “exceptional” and “unique” painting of American bondage (10). It largely eschewed the conventional uses of stock characters and stereotypes for African Americans and the characteristic emphasis on the theatrical drama of the slave market. In the spring of 1861, Crowe’s painting invited viewers in London to ponder the perspectives of individual slaves, rather than the overall action of the auction.

McInnis structures her book as an archeology of this 1861 painting. In the first six chapters, the heart of the book, McInnis assesses Crowe’s work within a longer history of slave trade imagery, connects Crowe’s artistry to his actual journey in 1850s America, and contextualizes this story of image-making within the broader social contexts of the slave trade. In the seventh and last chapter, McInnis moves from America to London to explore the display of Crowe’s image.

Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia broke in significant ways from past antislavery visions of the trade, McInnis asserts. In the late eighteenth century, British abolitionists began targeting the slave trade by widely circulating the Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship. McInnis suggests how this vision of bodies packed into a Middle Passage vessel pictured slaves as anonymous commodities rather than Crowe’s individual subjects. In the antebellum era, well after the fall of the international slave trade, American abolitionists consistently turned to the domestic auction block for propaganda. In publications such as the American Anti-Slavery Almanac, abolitionists decried the tragic separation of enslaved families. Images cast the sale as spectacle, such as an illustration in George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of America: a raised stage; an auctioneer commanding attention with his arm in the air; a group of whites hovering and measuring a slave’s body. McInnis notes how Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia also suggested that family separations had likely happened, picturing a lone man in the corner, and that they might happen again, showing women with their children. She briefly notes the distortions of the young boy’s facial features. But McInnis stresses how Crowe refrained from racial caricature in depicting most other subjects. She emphasizes the ambiguous facial expressions of many of the women, and the unusually defiant look of the crossed-armed man. For McInnis, Crowe’s painting extends certain themes of past slave trade depictions, but distances itself by largely picturing individuality and uncertainty rather than anonymity and theatricality.

How could Crowe’s painting depart so considerably from past visions? McInnis sheds light on this question with a detailed history of image production. To understand Crowe’s painting, McInnis suggests that we focus not simply on pictorial conventions but also on eyewitness documentation. She suggests, in other words, that we follow Crowe on his trip through the United States. Crowe did not initially travel to America to depict slave markets. Rather, he came to America as the secretary for the lecture tour of family friend and famous author William Makepeace Thackeray. From the fall of 1852 to the spring of 1853, they traversed the eastern seaboard. They stopped for Thackeray to speak in cities such as Boston, New York, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. En route from Boston to New York, Crowe purchased a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He later remarked that Stowe’s depiction of American bondage “properly harrowed” him (19). McInnis suggests that Stowe’s novel likely fueled Crowe’s desire to see the trade in person.

One morning in Richmond, Crowe read the newspaper over breakfast. He noticed advertisements for local slave sales, and set out to see them in action. Crowe made multiple sketches in different auction rooms, including the picture he would later turn into Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. Later that day, Crowe stumbled upon a different scene at the Petersburg-Richmond railroad depot: a group of slaves, recently sold, boarding a train. Crowe returned to Britain and soon painted that event in Going South: A Sketch from Life in America (1854). McInnis stresses how Crowe produced distinctive work precisely because of his presence in Richmond: he based many of his subjects on first-hand encounters with the slave trade. She further points to how Crowe’s on-the-ground experiences shaped his aesthetic choices, noting, for example, reportorial details in Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, such as the stove near the women and the man’s forgotten hat on the floor. McInnis reveals the particularity of Crowe’s visual work through an attention to eyewitness artistry.

McInnis situates Crowe’s actual journey and his art within a broader web of the people, practices, and places that constituted the slave trade. Using historical studies alongside her own work with slave narratives, travel accounts, and traders’ account books, McInnis discusses trade routes and business practices as well as the everyday meanings of sales for traders, masters, and slaves. Readers will benefit from her spatial analyses, which use detailed maps to show how auctions were integrated into the broader landscapes of cities such as Richmond. By encircling Crowe in the multiple contexts of the trade, McInnis demonstrates how he and other artists only conveyed certain aspects of this human tragedy. Crowe pictured auction rooms but did not visualize the Richmond slave jails of Robert Lumpkin and Solomon Davis. McInnis illuminates how Crowe’s painting showed emotional tension but not the cruel conditions of these other waiting places.

In the final chapter of the book, McInnis follows Crowe back to England. She focuses on the display and reception of Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. In doing so, McInnis advances our understanding of how outsiders experienced the domestic slave trade and shaped perceptions of it. Historians have stressed how actual encounters with the slave trade sharpened abolitionist agendas:William Lloyd Garrison, for example, increasingly assailed the trade in print after he saw it in action in Baltimore. McInnis shifts our attention. She takes us from the pages of northern print culture to the walls of a London museum, from American radicalism to British high culture, from the written to the visual. Moreover, she offers strong evidence for Crowe’s artistic breakthrough. Reviewers lauded the reportorial qualities of Crowe’s work and the different emotions expressed by the waiting slaves. One critic claimed that the painting “secures sympathy.” For this reviewer, the work offered a “literal and faithful transcript from the life it represents” (209). Meanwhile, a writer for the Art Journal praised Crowe’s painting for “successfully and discriminately representing the inward actuality and outward expression of phases of mental thought and human passion” (211). McInnis persuasively reveals how Crowe’s transatlantic image-making stoked sympathy amidst this elite crowd as the Civil War began.

While McInnis offers a welcome addition to the study of visual culture in the Civil War era, her book also raises questions about the historical significance of Crowe’s painting. Readers might wonder how Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia lingered in British (and perhaps American) politics and culture, or why it failed to do so. McInnis ends her narrative with art reviews. She turns in her epilogue to examine postbellum representations of the American slave trade. A broader analysis of “reception” would explore the question of whether antislavery proponents thought about and used Crowe’s painting during the Civil War. Did British activists discuss Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia as, McInnis notes, they had done for Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave? If not, why? As it stands, McInnis’s use of “Abolitionist Art” in the subtitle describes Crowe’s politics in the mid- to late 1850s, and the painting he created. We are left to wonder whether this image offered too radical a vision for the radicals of their time to effectively politicize in words and images.

In this lively little book, Steven Wilf, the Joel Barlow Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, encourages Americans to re-imagine a time when legal discourse was not just confined to the courts. Since the nineteenth century, most ideas about the legal legacy of the American Revolution have put the Constitution front and center, privileged the story of the rise of court-based jurisprudence, and especially the importance of constitutional interpretation through judicial review. The Revolution, the story goes, created a nation dedicated to the rule of law. Yet in a provocative cultural and literary analysis, Wilf compels us to look closely at the proliferation of “law talk” across the colonies in the era of the American Revolution—a legal language that was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of expression from words to rituals, and drew on fictive and real ideas of law. And, because this law talk emerged simultaneously with the imperial crisis, a “revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined with politics” and transformed America’s legal institutions. While we may now remember a less contentious outcome, Wilf makes a compelling case that we would do well to recall the “untidy” origins of American law in an era when the Constitution is America’s “most important export” (195).

To make his case, Wilf zeroes in on the intersection of criminal law, politics, and language and takes a refreshingly creative approach in thinking about the law as an act of storytelling as much as it is about constitutionalism, statutes, and sociohistorical understandings of compliance with laws and legal norms. In an entertaining, rich, and wide-ranging chapter named after Tocqueville’s later assertion that “the language of law is a vulgar tongue” (56), for example, Wilf explores popular commentaries on criminal cases found in hanging ballads, bits and pieces of iconography, pardon petitions, diaries, and accounts of punishments, mock punishments, and execution narratives and juxtaposes them against court documents and legal treatises. These criminal legal narratives could and did create new forms of law, and such stories were created by non-professionals as much as professionals as they engaged in contested imaginings of what the law ought to be. Wilf does an admirable job in teasing out and showing how ordinary people imagined how the laws might work or should work as they staged mock executions, dreamed up punishments, proposed reforms, read execution narratives, created their own real and fictive criminal narratives, and hanged and burned effigies.

In their law talk, Americans had to grapple with difficult questions such as the purpose of punishment, the right to judge, and the authority of lawgivers. When, in turn, colonists began to question political authority, this law talk laid the basis for a much more radical re-imagining of what the law could be. Indeed, as colonial protests grew over imperial reforms after 1763, Americans drew upon this repertoire of legal language in their political protests. The two mutually reinforced each other as both argued for what today we would call greater transparency, and the participation of common people in deciding right and wrong. Law talk energised Revolutionary resistance. As Wilf concludes, in a Revolutionary moment, suddenly “interpreting doctrine, judging cases and controversies, and inflicting punishment must be seen as a radical assertion of sovereign powers” (8). In making this argument, Wilf is keen to close the gap between constitutional scholars, who focus on constitutional issues and (elite) patriot theories of rights in the lead-up to independence, and those who emphasize extralegal actions on the street. The two were intimately related.

Wilf then fast-forwards to the 1780s and 1790s. Here, he switches tack and focuses less on popular law talk and more on the efforts of different states to reform their criminal codes. Wounded by British publicists’ taunts that slaveholders were hardly in a position to claim the mantle of liberty, many Americans pointed to English reliance on capital punishment to delegitimize English authority and claims to liberty. Yet if legal reformers sought to curb capital punishment and reform the penal system in the new republic, they did so in tension with more popular calls for public participation in the implementation of criminal justice. Reformers and legislators brushed aside popular execution rituals and ensured interpretive power lay increasingly in the hands of the legislatures and courts. In part, Wilf argues, this was in reaction to stories of popular violence emanating from the French Revolution: “Images of the guillotine from the French Revolution … underscored the dangers of involving the common people in questions of criminal justice” (11). Wilf thus describes a waning of vernacular law talk, participatory justice, and the mingling of law and politics in the 1790s—and the rise of court-based jurisprudence with which we are now more familiar. Yet curiously, he hesitates to describe this “waning” as a conscious repression of the radicalism of the 1760s and 1770s; rather, it is a “recasting” in light of events in France (10-11).

Such is the main argument advanced over chapters two and four. The other chapters zoom in to moments when particular communities wrestled with these broad issues. Indeed, chapters one, three, and five are micro-histories designed to capture the richness, complexity, and immediacy of legal imagining—and how particular cases and controversies were coupled with politics. These are delightful case studies. The first juxtaposes popular uproar in Boston over the freeing of Ebenezer Richardson, a customs officer who accidentally shot a rioter in 1770, with that over the execution of career criminal Levi Ames for burglary in 1773. Imagining and inventing a new and more criminal biography of Richardson, Bostonians critiqued English justice and contrasted Richardson’s pardon for the more serious crime of murder with the execution of Ames for burglary, and turned official law upside down. The second micro-history looks at the execution narratives of two post-Revolutionary Connecticut felons, a rapist and a murderer, and shows how local communities could turn self-justifying explanations of crimes against their authors to create alternate readings and demand punishment. The final story looks at the creation of a reform statute in New York that mandated post-mortem dissection of executed felons.

Though this short review cannot do justice to the details of these micro-histories, they are in fact wonderful stand-alone pieces that tell us much about the particular stories that Americans told themselves about the law. They also show us in rich detail the way that different kinds of narratives about the law might and did come together in changing the way that the law worked. At the same time, though, they also point to one of the major weaknesses of the book. These are very specific—but separate—case studies. They give us suggestive glimpses into the local worlds of law talk in different communities at different times. Yet they are too episodic and disconnected to make a compelling and convincing argument about change over time, particularly across Revolutionary America. Nor does Wilf help us connect the dots in the more wide-ranging chapters on pre- and post-Revolutionary law talk. Wilf jumps from the early 1770s to the late 1780s and we are suddenly confronted with a different set of sources, a different approach, and perhaps not surprisingly, a changed view of the political and legal landscape.

Equally importantly, perhaps, Wilf wants to make a case about revolutionary change, yet the Revolution—and especially the long and formative years of the war—is conspicuously absent in this account. Perhaps it was too messy to include, but in some sense that’s what his story and initial methodology are driven by. The absence is more curious since closer attention to the Revolution, and more recent historiography on the Revolution, would have bolstered Wilf’s case. The premise of the book, though Wilf might not phrase it as such, is a kind of lament that the unruly imagined republic, born in the political upheaval of the 1760s and 1770s, was contained in the post-Revolutionary settlement. Wilf attributes this to the violence of the French Revolution. Yet elite legislators and lawmakers throughout the states could more easily point to the violence of their own Revolution to justify new exclusionary legal forms. And they did so—they complained about popular resistance to conscription laws, militia laws, impressment laws, and new taxes imposed by the states. They were horrified at extra-judicial action taken against loyalists, or suspected loyalists. They complained vociferously when extra-legal action of the kind Wilf finds in the pre-Revolutionary period was turned upon them in the dramatic lead-up to Shays’ Rebellion. Many looked to the new Constitution to solve the problem of popular participation in the legal and political process. And it worked. As Wilf notes, it was only after the passage of the Constitution that law talk was confined to the courts: “Americans stepped back from the mingling of law and politics,” he concludes. Though Wilf uses the French Revolution as the terror that made America pause, not all Americans agreed about the “dangers of involving the common people in questions of criminal justice” (11). Some continued to imagine a role for themselves in a real—if perhaps increasingly distantly imagined—democracy.

Still, if Wilf’s provocative book does not convince, it does suggest a great deal. And we would do well to talk less and perhaps listen more to the vulgar tongue of the language of law in eighteenth-century America.

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.