Since French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 book on economics, economic history, and political economy appeared in English translation, it has made waves among American readers. In 2014, it spent nearly three months on the New York Times best-seller list and three weeks in first place. It was a media sensation. Worldwide, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has sold more than 1.5 million copies in 39 languages. Nobelist in economics and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman judged it the most important economics book of the decade.

Other timely studies have drawn similar conclusions about enduring and indeed increasing inequality of income distribution in the West. Piketty himself and with co-authors had already published preliminary findings. Yet these appealed primarily to specialists such as professional economists, sociologists, and historians. Strikingly, too, at nearly 700 pages, Capital appears better positioned to scare away readers than to attract them. Instead, the book has reached across the globe, and its author is now a widely recognized public figure.

So why Piketty? What accounts for the exceptional success of Capital? Many reviewers have noted that the book was well timed to resonate with American political debates that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Yet it is not merely a question of timeliness, nor of furnishing data to prove a central argument. Piketty’s study in economics is also an artifact of French culture that reflects France’s Enlightenment heritage and present-day norms. Surprisingly, across the vast response from journalists, the public, and specialists alike, the treatise’s cultural foundations have received hardly any analysis. Yet the author’s pedagogical and demystifying stance, humanistic and universalizing attitude, and approachable language are essential elements that shape the book’s presentation. These elements furnish a key to understanding its popularity among American readers.

More than most recent volumes authored by specialists, Capital sets out methodically to make economics understandable to the lay person and to emphasize inseparable links among economic, political, and social spheres. Having begun his career at an American university, Piketty critiques what he calls the “childish passion” of the discipline of economics, especially as practiced in this country, for “mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation.” He comes down hard on what he terms the pretensions of economics to “scientific legitimacy” and the discipline’s tendency to disregard historical research, input from other social sciences, and fundamental questions about human society (32-33).

With such statements, Piketty draws attention to the mystique surrounding economics, encapsulated in the notion that it is far too complex for the non-specialist to understand. For his part, by rendering economic ideas, methods, and data accessible to readers, Piketty demystifies the very discipline. As a specialist, Piketty is himself a priest in the economic temple. Yet he has stated in a 2015 interview with historian Kenneth Mouré that “I want to reach normal people.” With Capital, he has stepped out of the inner sanctum, rejected the halo of the sacred, and mixed with the laity. To be sure, he is not alone in doing so. Paul Krugman, among others, regularly writes for non-specialist audiences about economics in its connections to politics and society. What is remarkable is Piketty’s persistent focus on data—tools of the quantitative economist—which he highlights even as he addresses general readers.

The data that he draws upon notably include lengthy runs from tax records from several countries, with some extending back nearly 250 years. From these emerge comparative sketches of the economic progress over time of several rich countries, including the United States and France. Stating that the data—much of it generated collaboratively—constitute the primordial contribution of his work, Piketty uses it to illustrate two consequential points. The first point is that over the long term in the wealthy countries under study, capital has accumulated at a greater rate than wealth from income has grown. As a result, the largest capital holders have accumulated wealth most quickly. This has held true of aristocratic and bourgeois elites in pre-Revolutionary France, wealthy Belle Époque French at the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1 percent in America today. Those who have already, get more, faster. The rich get richer. The poor, poorer, as popular culture has long had it.

The second essential point is that economies and markets are not natural phenomena, but rather human creations. Their workings reflect policies and laws, as well as myriad decisions that individuals make, both in private and in institutional and public contexts. As he argues, the data show that the current structures and processes function “mechanically” to accumulate capital and privilege in the hands of a few, to the social, political, and economic detriment of the many. Contrary to the notion advanced by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and whose effects Smith described in The Wealth of Nations (1776), for Piketty, no “invisible hand” exists “naturally” to distribute wealth and effect economic equilibrium (9). Rather, Piketty’s data and arguments notably undermine the dogma dear to many Americans that an unfettered market rationally distributes wealth and develops democracy. His study underlines the sober—though not innovative—conclusion that the purportedly natural relationship between democracy and free-market economics is a mirage. It is a fictive alibi that obscures the destruction of American ideals of opportunity and equality. Tearing away the blinding veil of the national economic mythology, Piketty illuminates by means of data the gross workings of the system of concentration of private and corporate wealth by reinforcement of extant privilege.

The historical irony implied here is striking. In present-day America, the market economy fosters the unequal distribution of wealth and attendant privilege. Economic structures are deepening socio-economic distinctions and separating people into castes. Modern America—now a plutocracy—recalls other oligarchies, including the absolutist, monarchic state in eighteenth-century France. To recognize the nature of current conditions is therefore to face up to a historical responsibility and an ethical choice of grandiose proportion. Despite an overall increase in global wealth, in America, wealth inequality is notoriously great, and it is continuing to increase quickly, with consequent erosion of democratic customs and social justice. The current tendencies contradict political and social ideals of democracy, justice, equality, and opportunity. Is this state of affairs acceptable? This is the question that Piketty’s book ultimately sets before readers.

Because Piketty’s conclusions are far from original, they beg the question of his book’s hungry reception by American readers. What is unusual is the way that Piketty’s book works exceptionally hard to empower readers through knowledge and to set them onto a more equal footing with the specialist author and, by extension, with other economics experts. He admonishes readers that “all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history” and intones that “[r]efusing to deal with the numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well off” (577). Since we all participate in the economic and political system that Piketty addresses, it behooves us to understand it. What is remarkable is the way that Piketty—in the manner of his Enlightenment forbears—gives readers tools to actively learn and patiently incites them along the path to discovery.

To this reader, the relatively demotic style, exemplary sharing of information, and exhortatory stance loudly echo strategies that many an eighteenth-century French writer used to share critical knowledge—including knowledge about learning itself—with readers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fictionalized treatise on teaching and learning Emile, or On Education (1762) laid down by example an influential theory of independent learning. Reading the novel, we see how the character of the knowledgeable tutor craftily leads his pupil to make discoveries and evaluate them on his own. In the collaborative multi-volume Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert published over nearly 15 years (1751-65) during the mid-eighteenth century, the system of satirical and thought-provoking cross-referencing was designed to send readers from one article to the next, and in this way to encourage them to draw subversive conclusions based on the linkages among articles.

Similarly, Capital is laid out to encourage active learning on the part of readers. Within the text, the economist-author unpacks essential formulas and graphs, which he explains, lesson by lesson, to the reader. He indicates, furthermore, that his data are available for consultation. In fact, he has placed the data online, where they may be freely examined, along with, in the World Wealth and Income Database that he created with economists Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, expanded and also new sets covering additional nations. In a word, Piketty democratically shares his tool kit and techniques with the reader, to whom he further extends, as it were, the invitation to tinker as she sees fit.

Considered as an instrument of enlightenment for today, Piketty’s narrative, it appears, is meeting a need on the part of American readers to become better informed about economic matters, including achieving a deeper understanding of their social, cultural, and political dimensions. The explicit aim of the book is to “assist” readers to see dynamics at play in the economy and outline the choices that they will face in the future. This is a modest claim, but it certainly resonates with the book’s lucid, pedagogical exposition. Piketty states that his data and his own interpretations of it are mere “technicalities” and has repeated similar claims in interviews. That is, he has insisted that economic details are of contingent and provisional interest, only useful insofar as they can draw attention to and remediate injustice. To set things in perspective, he observes that, by contrast, climate change is a topic of truly pressing concern.

If this is so, we might ask why Piketty occupies so many pages with exposition of economic data, concepts, formulas, and history, and so few with direct discussion of social and political equality and environmental sustainability, beyond throwaway references? Why wrangle—at such length—big data, statistics, and mathematical formulas only to downplay, in the end, their importance relative to ultimate topics that are not even analyzed in detail?

Viewed from a different angle, the gesture is strategic. If Piketty’s ploy to draw readers evokes 250-year-old pedagogical ideals and communicative practices, he must deliver the immersion lesson in economics, but stop short of elaborate prescription. He must leave readers to draw their own conclusions and choose what to do with their new knowledge. The proceeding assumes that the reader is capable of learning about the important subject and worthy to judge its use. A fair number of individuals have stepped forward to meet Piketty’s challenge, through reading.

Beyond assuming intelligence and agency, Piketty appears to envision readers as possessing additional traits of a potentially disruptive nature to the current economic and political order. In contrast to much economic discourse and to common usage in media settings, the author does not refer to human persons as consumers, but rather as “citizens” and simply as “people.” He disdains the word “global” in favor of the planet Earth itself, referring to “planetary finance” and especially “planetary” concerns about human-induced climate change. These terms reflect lived circumstances, necessities, and ideals. While the “citizen” may be able to act at the level of the nation, her concerns, updated for current conditions of the transnational, finance-based economy, are now planetary.

In effect, the planetary agglomeration of citizens must be concerned about the same problem of rising inequality and wealth concentration. The vocabulary emphasizes the transcendent, universal nature of the predicament and the necessity for informed political participation by each person as citizen of a polity and of the human race. Against the paradigm of exploitation and division, a vision of relative equality and reciprocity comes into view, recalling typically French ideals of cosmopolitanism and appeals to a shared, if abstract, humanity. In point of fact, as Piketty reiterates, to more fairly distribute wealth, promote social mobility, and reshape the plutocracy back into a democracy, we must differently manage the market and economy. Since we have made the economy, we can also remodel it for the future, by changing policies, laws, expectations, and behaviors.

In a short period, Piketty has reached a broad audience who are now engaging in conversations about economics, reframed in terms of political economy. This is an important step—indeed, the necessary first step—to modify the current economic culture.

Further Reading

Critiques of economic discourse and practice appear in Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison, Wis., 1985) and Gavin Wright, “Economic History as a Cure for Economics” in Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, N.J., 2001): 41-51.

From literary studies, Hans Robert Jauss discusses the interplay of reader expectations and responses in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982).

Historian Arno Mayer drew conclusions about income distribution that pre-figure Piketty’s in The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981; New York, 2010), while Pierre Rosanvallon similarly addresses related issues of social and economic inequality in The Society of Equals (Paris, 2011; Cambridge, Mass., 2013).

An essential earlier publication from Thomas Piketty co-authored with Emmanuel Saez is “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118:1 (February 2003): 1-39.

For French and American attitudes toward politics, economics, and culture, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Paris, 1835/1840; New York, 2004) is indispensable.

Richard F. Kuisel’s Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1981) and The French Way: How the French Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton, N.J., 2012) illuminate the specificity of modern French political economy and culture.

From sociology, Michèle Lamont’s Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Middle Class (Chicago, 1992) compares views of money and economics in France and America.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Julia Abramson is a professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of the Literary Mystification (2005) and Food Culture in France (2007). A recent Gustave Gimon Research Fellow in the History of French Political Economy at Stanford University and recipient of a research grant from the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, she is writing a new book about finance and culture.

To start at the ending: in the conclusion to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty suggests the book had been a presentation of “the current state of our historical knowledge concerning the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income since the eighteenth century.” The documentation for this kind of historiography distinguishes Piketty’s text. The book is an interpretation of an unprecedented amount of historical numerical data, a collection “more extensive than any previous author has assembled,” but inevitably “imperfect and incomplete.”

To speak of the imperfection and incompleteness of numerical data about the life of capital in the twenty-first century is, for Piketty, a way of speaking about the work of the economist. The data have no inherent purpose, and will only do the work to which the economist puts them. Here they allow him to model a study that can disrupt the “intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth [that] has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.” Piketty wants the book to have a motivating effect, and become material for “lessons [that] can be drawn for the century ahead.” The economist uses numerical data as evidence, but it is not his job to “produce mathematical certainties” that would “substitute for democratic debate.” Economics looks like political economy again: the people are back in it.

The book insists from the very beginning that its narrative about capital is an alternative to the Marxist eschatology ruled by the “principle of infinite accumulation.” This kind of narrative would have arrogated a whole world to itself, until it did away with the world altogether. Having avoided the “Marxist apocalypse,” we find, however, that the “distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. It is of interest to everyone, and that is a good thing.” Apocalypse averted, the post-apocalypse still seems deeply fascinated with the tendency of any “market economy based on private property, if left to itself,” to create “powerful forces of divergence which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.”

Drawing on the new, transnational, numerical historical facts, Piketty argues there are economic forces at large in the world that create the discrepancy between the rates of return on capital and the rates of growth of income and output. “The inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction,” Piketty argues. This seeming paradox allows old wealth to grow faster than output and wages: this is how “the past devours the future.” The consequences of such logic of wealth distribution are “potentially terrifying,” the more so because the financial dynamic is now impeccably documented. Perhaps we are not past the apocalypse just yet.

What are these unspeakable terrors lurking beyond the curve? Unprecedented in depth and volume, the data index the significance of new technological powers available to researchers with a new kind of work to do. They are no longer just looking at comparative information on income and taxation from disparate national markets (the somewhat unexhilarating area of Piketty’s “primary” academic expertise). Piketty aspires to refurbish earlier narratives that have treated capital and capitalism as a political and social force field intrinsically related to what Piketty calls the “ideal society.” He marks the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers about the movement of capital (Marx, Ricardo, Malthus, Smith, Locke) as the work of storytellers whose claims about the workings of capital could be read as imaginative and representative, speculative and predictive. Piketty argues that the technological powers that generate the data, and their global reach, redeem these old narratives from their speculative insecurities, and re-assert the ethical dimension of writing about money (fig. 1).

Capital offers to use numerical data to redeem the powers of prophecy by empiricism. Numbers become a kind of thick description that transforms the nature of reference: all who agree to read these statistics the right way can have a glimpse of the shared (terrifying) future. Then the data can become a synthetic and synoptic body of evidence for the existence of the global process the book plots out. We can now claim to see the future of “everyone,” and this is why “everyone” should care. Seemingly boring volumes and genealogies of numerical information lend credence to a catastrophic social and political future that will grow from our economic history and the present.

Capital is a great narrative about the cost of ambivalence about reading science as prophecy, or numerical representation as mythology, when all are understood to be social and historical discourses. If read correctly (as “terrifying”), this twenty-first-century story about capital should propel “everyone” not just to become interested in the adventures of capital, but to act on their new knowledge. But how are readers to know that this is a book about them? Even if they can see the same future from the same numbers, how will they be saved from (the fear of) becoming the victims of capital? Piketty explains that the rate of return on capital now grows irrespective of the actions of its owners. Quite frequently the owners need do nothing at all, such that it looks as if capital moved itself, an agent in its own right, seamlessly conjoined with culture, nation, and social policy. And yet this movement is generated by precisely the “society” whose institutions, labor laws, and assessments of risk and profit create its trends. Readers’ interest and actions would be meaningful in the context of the democratic society that wants to see and mitigate the “strangeness” of the logic of capital accumulation. But who can plot for a more ideal society when, in the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as society?

It is revealing then that, to correct the “logical inconsistency” of wealth inequality, Piketty recommends the implementation of a “global capital tax.” In order to treat taxation of capital socially and politically the way capital usually likes to treat itself, the global tax would disregard the borders of nation states, much like capital and its owners do in the pursuit of new markets. This tax assumes that a fundamentally different relationship between the financial and the socio-political is still possible—that there are people still in there.

But this ideal is not to be, or not just yet. Capital remains unconcerned with even wealth distribution precisely where its definitions of the social are confined to those that serve the nation state, that is, where it shows itself not to be the origin or a natural byproduct of democracy. It implements national borders, denies legal protections, restricts access to living wage, and unfurls militarized law enforcement against “economic migrants” (fig. 2).

A stark reminder of the socio-political entanglements of capital, the ongoing refugee crisis has pushed millions from regions decimated by lethal political violence. The violence followed unchecked depletion of natural resources, coordinated by global political and economic systems glad to unsee the origin of their propulsion fuel. Drifting away from these destroyed (post)colonial national economies (can it ever be only one?), the refugees negotiate administrative and physical barriers to their migration toward imagined centers of more equitable capital distribution in Europe’s North and West. As they attempt physically to approach their fantasies of a more ideal society, the migrants learn, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, that “‘there is no Norway,’ even in Norway.” It’s as though everybody is in the future already.

Then we can only start at the ending. Thick numerical description concerns “everyone” only if “everyone” had been waiting for numerical facts to issue their prophecies about what may befall “everyone” in a society that needs few people in it to make its money. We should not forget how prophecies were made from the insight and knowledge prior to the abstraction of data sets, about the way money and people have treated each other in the flesh. Saree Makdisi tells us in Romantic Imperialism that William Blake already spoke like a prophet without numbers, 200 years ago, when he versified about the power of the formal logic of global capitalism to forge the manacles of modern subjects’ experience across a “Universal Empire.” Some it enslaved, some it made into indigent children who could fit in a chimney that needed cleaning, and some into “aged men wise guardians of the poor.”

Readers of Piketty’s Capital could do worse than to learn from readers of the gothic about the frustration of reading and writing about a kind of reality nobody else can or wants to see. It is a description of an unnatural order of things that feels familiar nonetheless. Such a reality is terrifying, and reading about it is only stupid if one insists on knowing only one language and only one way to read. Forces greater than those of visible society, and greater than the observable masses of people and numbers, shape this reality and this reading. Right now, at the end, one must learn to imagine how else to know them and how to live with them.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Olivera Jokic is associate professor of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She writes and teaches about gender, colonialism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and about their relationship to histories of writing and methodologies of textual interpretation.

The Problem of Disappearing Data

Data. Before postmodernism, or environmental history, or the cultural turn, or the geographic turn, and even before Brent Spiner’s character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, historians began to gather and analyze quantitative evidence to understand the past. As computers became common during the 1970s and 1980s, scholars responded by painstakingly compiling and analyzing datasets, using that evidence to propose powerful new historical interpretations. Today, much of that information (as well as the data compiled since) is in danger of disappearing. As a profession, we are experiencing a generational shift, and much of the data created several decades ago has already been lost. More will disappear in the coming years if not preserved soon.

Disappearing data is not unique to early American historians, although some of the problems may be related to the academic culture of the humanities. In social science fields like economics, political science, psychology, and sociology, multiple factors have resulted in a scholarly culture that preserves a good deal of its data. Many projects attract funding from the federal government, often from the National Science Foundation, which requires the resulting data to be made available to the public. Researchers in the social sciences often work in teams, and so are used to collaboration. Their disciplines frequently value new research by junior scholars and graduate students using previously generated data. Most journals that publish data-driven articles in the social sciences also require the posting of datasets as a condition of publication. Furthermore, with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and other repositories, practitioners in these disciplines have access to considerable infrastructure to preserve their data.

By contrast, as humanists, historians tend to think of research as a more solitary enterprise. We treat our compiled data much as we do our notes: as raw materials of little value to anyone but ourselves. Because we think of data preservation as a personal rather than an institutional issue, our datasets are vulnerable to all the vagaries caused by quickly changing technologies. Physical media likewise degrade and become obsolete, making data recorded in those formats hard to decipher even if one can find the machinery to read them. Today, for example, most university Information Technology departments no longer possess apparatuses to read floppy discs or Zip drives.

Software packages have also changed dramatically during the past few decades and will continue to do so. Data in some formats favored by past generations of historians, like Statistical Analysis System (SAS) or Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), can still be transferred to newer formats, but more arcane ones can be almost impossible to decipher without a great deal of highly technical work. As Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist, wryly observed two decades ago, “It is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever—or five years, whichever comes first.” The problem has grown increasingly severe ever since.

Preserving Early American Data in MEAD: The Magazine of Early American Datasets

In an effort to combat the problem of disappearing data, we have developed MEAD: The Magazine of Early American Datasets, which has been designed to preserve and share, openly and freely, statistical data about early America. We appeal to all early American historians to take the time both to preserve and to share their statistical evidence with present and future scholars. It will not only be a legacy to the profession, but will also encourage historians to share their evidence more openly and provide a foundation on which scholars can continue to build.

We created MEAD with the generous support of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and Bepress (the open-access electronic publishing platform behind the Digital Commons software that many universities and research centers rely on for their institutional repositories). A handful of scholars—including Gary B. Nash, Robert E. Wright, and Thomas J. Humphrey, and the authors of this essay—have already loaded datasets to MEAD. Even with the minimal datasets it currently hosts, MEAD is already of interest to many people around the world: more than 1,500 people from the United States, Russia, India, and China have accessed and downloaded these datasets.

To make the initiative successful, we need more datasets. It is in this spirit that we make the following appeals for scholars of early America to share their statistical evidence. We would love to have your datasets, your huddled 1’s and 0’s (and other numbers and letters) yearning to be freely used by other scholars.  Once loaded onto the Website, the files will be enduring. Each dataset in MEAD has its own unique, permanent URL, which means that users can link to them with the assurance that they will never die or require updating. In addition, the files are available to any scholar, teacher, genealogist, or layperson who can access the Internet.

The process of submitting a dataset is (relatively) painless. Scholars may mount datasets themselves. Contributors can go to the site, click on the “submit research” link, and get started. Once data suppliers open a free account (no information required beyond name and email address, which will never be shared), they are directed to a page with fields for bibliographic information, both about the original source material and about the dataset generated from it. Users upload the dataset and any additional explanatory material, such as a codebook or relevant information about how the dataset was generated. The directors of MEAD take it from there. Alternatively, if they prefer, contributors can e-mail us the files and the associated information, and we will fill out the forms and upload the files. To download files is even easier. After setting up an account, simply click on the dataset and follow the directions to download. The entire process of submitting a file takes less than fifteen minutes, and we approve submissions within a few days to make certain they appear on the site.

MEAD and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ ScholarlyCommons

MEAD is hosted by the Penn Libraries’ ScholarlyCommons, the institutional repository of the University of Pennsylvania. The mission of the ScholarlyCommons is, in part, to support open access to innovative research and new publishing models; visibility of Penn scholarship, and sustainability of Penn’s academic endeavors

Because MEAD’s purpose coincides with the goals of the ScholarlyCommons, the two are natural partners. All relevant submissions are accepted regardless of the creators’ association with the University of Pennsylvania because MEAD furthers the mission of the McNeil Center.

ScholarlyCommons uses Bepress’ Digital Commons platform, which was developed by scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, as an alternative to the for-profit dominated academic journal publishing industry. Hundreds of institutions use Digital Commons to host publicly accessible scholarly material.

There are numerous advantages to using a repository such as ScholarlyCommons. One is search engine optimization. Scholars employ the Internet to connect with scholarly works and raw data, which creates a need for machine-readable materials, quality metadata, and the accessibility of the materials to ensure that researchers are able to discover the most useful resources available. Everything in ScholarlyCommons is fully indexed in search engines. Each dataset can be tagged with associated disciplines that, in addition, place them in Digital Commons’ subject-based repositories, thereby further increasing the visibility and discoverability of the datasets.

Another advantage is persistent URLs. Each dataset in MEAD has its own unique, permanent URL, which means that users can link to them with the assurance that they will never die or require updating. The metadata created for the series is designed to provide context for the datasets—when and how the information was gathered, coverage, publications based on the datasets, related datasets, and the like—as well as to help users find similar materials.

There is an increasing need not only to make information openly accessible but also to convey how that information can be reused. Submissions to the MEAD series are required to have a Creative Commons Attribution License. This license allows users to share and adapt the content for any purpose while maintaining the integrity and maximizing the accessibility of the original data. All users must provide a link to the license, indicate if changes were made, and avoid any suggestion that the licensor endorses the use made of the data. Furthermore, users may not apply legal terms or technologies that restrict access to the original information.

Current and Future Issues

One major struggle we have encountered, as we anticipated, is convincing historians to submit their datasets. It has not been for lack of trying. We have been advertising the project publicly, and this essay belongs to that effort. We have privately contacted dozens of scholars, each of whom spent many mind-numbing hours sweating over tax lists, census registers, merchants’ ledgers, women’s journals, men’s diaries, plantation records, or newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves. We appreciate their efforts to enter thousands of pieces of information into computer files and then analyze the evidence to help deepen our understanding of early America. We would love to have these scholars make one more pass through their data and to load it online to MEAD.

On the one hand, scholars whom we have approached are enthusiastic to preserve and share their records. Few of them want their hard work to disappear. On the other hand, only a handful of historians have taken up the offer. One reason, as suggested earlier, may be rooted in how we treat our datasets—as notes for ourselves alone, rather than as a community resource. As a result, most historians’ datasets are messy: they might have inconsistent spellings or capitalization, extraneous columns or rows, or other anomalies that the person who compiled it understands and accepts. Some of those reflect the source material; others are artifacts of the process of compiling or data entry. Regardless, the scholar who created the datasets assumes that she is the only one who will use the data, so she did not take the time to make it cleaner for someone less familiar with the sources or the process. Revisiting and cleaning datasets does require time and energy. Most conversations or e-mail exchanges with potential contributors result in the perfectly understandable response that their data requires some more work to be useful to others. Moreover, historians would rather spend time on their next project rather than on cleaning up data for their old one. It is all quite understandable, but it does mean that the data will continue to disappear and our profession and understanding of history may be the worse for it.

We will keep reminding scholars of the value of preserving their datasets. In the meantime, if you have created any files full of numbers, names, dates, prices, or places, or even jokes, then please consider submitting them to MEAD.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Billy G. Smith, bgs@montana.edu, professor, Montana State University
Nicholas Okrent, Research and Instructional Services, University of Pennsylvania
Andrew M. Schocket, aschock@bgsu.edu, professor, Bowling Green State University
Sarah Wipperman, Repository Services, University of Pennsylvania

We encourage Common-place readers to add to our list of digital resources for the study of early American history and culture by contributing to the Zotero group Suggestion Box for Common-place Web Library or by emailing suggestions to Web Library editor Edward Whitley (whitley@lehigh.edu).

In some ways, historians of the American Revolution took the global turn long before it was en vogue. Their subject all but required it. The American republic was forged amidst competing empires and the seminal moment of its revolution was declaring its independence from one of them. Yet, the political history of the American founding remains a largely national one. The English—and the enlightened Scots—provided pools of thought from which the colonists fished ideas, sometimes with origins outside the Anglo world. But the story is often filtered through Britain and, more importantly, almost always turns out uniquely American.

Meanwhile, prominent historians of France are recently pointing to the global roots, spurs, and influences of the French Revolution as the most promising path to new understandings of the long-studied event. A 2013 volume edited by Lynn Hunt, Suzanne Desan, and William Max Nelson—The French Revolution in Global Perspective—offers an array of essays seeking to trace the economic sinews, imperial tendencies, and, crucially, intellectual threads feeding into and streaming out of the country in the late eighteenth century. Some of the most promising essays in the collection explore the links between French and American revolutionaries and the course of these two events. The work points to one path for potentially enriching the political history of the American founding; the exchange of ideas between France and the United States is “ripe for re-exploration,” as David Bell suggested in a recent essay in French Historical Studies.

Would the political history of the American Revolution look different if scholars of the United States took up this task? Three recent books on the influence of the French Revolution in the early American republic suggest that it would. Francois Furstenberg’s When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (2014), Seth Cotlar’s Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (2011), and Philipp Ziesche’s Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (2010), treat the early republic alongside the French Revolution, revealing the perspective to be gained from integrating France into interpretations of the American founding. These books examine American politics in relation to France during the 1790s, after most historians agree the revolution had technically ended, yet in taking this approach the authors challenge the boundaries of what constitutes the revolutionary period in North America. They also suggest, perhaps unwittingly, a comparison with the French Revolution that has yet to be fully explored: the common problem of defining a revolution—both its chronology and its character.

Historians’ tendency to focus on American perceptions of France in the early national period is likely due to the chronological concurrence of events; the French stormed the Bastille only after George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States. For decades, historians have recognized the important role relations with France and perceptions of French events played in domestic political polarization. The early national press was filled with discussions of France, Congress teemed with debates over relations with the country, and political societies proliferated proclaiming support for their French brethren. More recently, historians have begun exploring the impact of the slave-led revolution that broke out in Saint Domingue, showing how it shaped American perceptions of their own revolution and that of the French. Leaving Haiti out of the story is certainly no longer a viable approach when integrating American history into the Atlantic context. And yet, the Atlantic framework still has yet to fully embrace the Franco-American sphere on an east-west axis. Furstenberg, Cotlar, and Ziesche show how bringing the French Revolution into the American story necessitates a reconsideration of the rigid distinction between the revolutionary and early republican periods. If this distinction is softened, comparative and transnational analysis of the French and American Revolutions can yield new interpretations of the political history of the American founding and the nature of the revolution.

It is the pervasive French presence in the early republic that Francois Furstenberg takes as the premise for his study of early America in When the United States Spoke French. Basing his story in Philadelphia, with the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys as ever-present imagined—and sometimes actual—destinations, Furstenberg follows the trail of French influence deep into the nascent United States. The book begins with the image of “revolutionary sparks, set off by the great explosion in France, fly[ing] upward,” some of which, Furstenberg sets out to show, fell in North America (1). These sparks, in Furstenberg’s study, were first and foremost the moderate émigrés reformers who fled the radicalizing violence of the French Revolution and the cultural and financial influences they brought to the American republic. Furstenberg traces the lives of this handful of men, who forged a vibrant French community amid the elite Federalist fever for French culture and capital in Philadelphia, only to end up fleeing their adoptive country and, for many of them, take prominent places in the Napoleonic regime (376). While most books on the early republic tend to trace American perceptions of France, Furstenberg uses French perceptions of America to try to further illuminate the country’s evolution. The approach yields new insight into the transformation of the American republic from a fragmented state into a unified country (16). Yet, being told through the journeys of French nationals, the book perhaps sheds more light on the course of French politics, the successive contested iterations of revolution, and the shifting strategic underpinnings of French involvement in North America.

Of course, elite émigrés and their cultural and financial connections were not the only sparks that flew from France and landed in the United States. Political events and ideas were omnipresent, though in the background of Furstenberg’s study. Foregrounding the influence of French style among Federalists, émigré land speculation, personal social connections, and high diplomacy, Furstenberg shifts focus away from the popular fervor for French republicanism and how it shaped American political development. The émigrés found a Philadelphia full of “Americans seeking to live like French aristocrats,” where trade between French and American merchants was surging and the moderate enlightenment spirit of the early French Revolution continued to thrive (95, 107). At the same time, though, they confronted a popular passion for the French Revolution that they had been trying to escape (115). This is not entirely lost in Furstenberg’s book, which dedicates many passages to French envoy Edmond Charles Genêt and diplomacy out of doors. Furstenberg also reminds us that many Americans wanted to enter a war against Great Britain in the mid-1790s, viewing it as an extension of the revolution—a perspective that makes the decade itself look a little more revolutionary (51). Yet, he does not pursue this tension as much as it begs to be investigated. The strength of the study is undoubtedly that it pushes beyond the usual investigation of popular perceptions of France in the press to show another, competing version of France that was perhaps just as prominent in the early republic. American politicians were in constant conversation with French figures, but they were those who had led moderate reform efforts in the early National Assembly and found themselves at odds with the France that was increasingly celebrated in American streets. By illuminating the influence of elite French figures connected to prominent Americans, Furstenberg effectively shows how France in early America was not one country, idea, or force, but many.

In linking his study to individuals who travelled back and forth across the Atlantic, Furstenberg followed a formula common among historians seeking an exchange of ideas and experiences. The title of Seth Cotlar’s 2011 book on democratic thinking in the early republic speaks to this approach, but takes a very different methodological tack. In Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic, Cotlar attempts a history of ideas from the bottom up by examining the development of democratic thought in relation to the French Revolution (9). Focused, again, on the early national period, Cotlar uses Paine and his publications as signposts to trace a transformation in thinking about democracy and national identity from the early 1790s through the turn of the century. Cotlar argues that the outbreak of the French Revolution and its universal utopianism shaped democratic discourse in America, providing the opponents of Federalists a legitimate angle from which to critique what they saw as an abandonment of the American Revolution’s potential (67). In the process, Republican newspaper editors played a crucial role in translating local struggles into the context of global ideological battles by linking them to events in France (73). In Cotlar’s study, the ideological and political revolution is, in many respects, still being fought well into the 1790s.

The book’s arc ultimately traces a bend away from the radical infusions of French ideas into American democratic discourse and thinking. Cotlar argues that the French Revolution sparked debates about the meaning and role of democracy in the American republic, animating struggles to define the nature of the American nation and the values underpinning it. Americans experimented with radical forms of political organizing following French examples, Cotlar argues, but conceptions of democracy first forged in explicit relation to or even emulation of the French soon turned against cosmopolitan and French ideals. Early in the 1790s, Republicans adopted associational models to advance conceptions of active citizenship, which Cotlar says they perceived to be similar and related to the Jacobin movement in France (171). Yet, 1794 proved a turning point, after which political societies and associations were decried as unnecessary based on the notion that America was not like France (189). Such a shift away from cosmopolitan, radical thinking and the linking of the American with the French Revolution, left someone like Tom Paine an outcast in the country he had been instrumental in founding (211).

Both Cotlar and Furstenberg focus in some manner on the influence of the French on Americans. There remains remarkably little scholarly work on influences of American Revolutionary thinking and experience abroad, especially in France. Some historians have cast a cursory glance at potential repercussions, including Furstenberg in the first chapter of his book, but serious analysis remains sparse. Studies that attempt to trace influence from America to France are often based on French individuals who fought in the American war of independence and then played a political role in the French Revolution. Most common among these figures is the Marquis de Lafayette, who has been the subject of many biographies that seek to treat the revolution in France as a failed attempt to implement American ideas. Some historians of revolutionary America, including Joyce Appleby and Jon Butler, have made gestures toward the importance of American revolutionary thought on the French, but their perspectives are firmly rooted in the United States with too little effort devoted to tracing the travel and iteration of ideas to the European continent.

In his 2010 book, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution, Ziesche addresses this lacuna, picking up cosmopolitanism as a lens through which to examine the historical emergence of the idea of America first as a global example, then as an exception. Interested in the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the early republic, Ziesche carries out his study through individual Americans who spent time in Paris in the 1790s in order to trace the divergence between ideology and practice in regards to exporting American political thinking. In many ways Ziesche’s book takes an approach similar to that of Furstenberg, following elite individuals across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Though he concludes in the introduction that “even at the height of the Franco-American friendship, the role of Americans in French politics remained largely symbolic,” Ziesche argues that American experiences in France ultimately shaped identity and political thinking back in the Western Hemisphere (5). The nearly contemporaneous example of the French Revolution, in his telling, was constitutive of American thinking about its own founding and the formation of its ideological identity. By the late 1790s, Americans distrusted the “cosmopolitan patriots” who remained in Paris, seeing them as “examples of the corrosive influence” of the French Revolution on the American republic (115). Federalists, Ziesche argues, used the turn against the French following the 1797 XYZ Affair to begin attacking cosmopolitanism as a force that undermined domestic national ties (120). The Federalist interpretation of the French Revolution as a failed application of republican principles, contrasted with American success, remains, Ziesche concludes, a trope to this day.

Ziesche engages in some degree of comparative analysis, arguing that both countries maintained a paradoxical attachment to cosmopolitan exportation of republican ideals while practicing what he calls a “politics of exclusion” in the 1790s (12). By mid-decade, he writes, political elites in both countries were attempting to reach a stable political situation, rejecting the more utopian elements of revolutionary ideology in favor of consolidating power in the hands of the few. “The people appeared as both the source of legitimacy and an agent of disorder as political elites in America and France tenaciously clung to the ideal of a united, harmonious, and stable political domain,” he writes (91). In this vein, Ziesche compares the French Constitution of 1795 to the American Constitution and Federalist interpretation of politics as promising “stability at the price of limiting popular involvement in the decision-making process” (106). However, he argues there was a major divergence by the turn of the century between the ways each country viewed its revolution. Americans began to see their story as unique, while the French moved ahead with a conviction in the universal applicability of their revolutionary model. Americans remain, he argues, unsure of how to relate their revolution to others: as a model or an exception (169).

This diagnosis is borne out in the historiography. While Ziesche engages in some degree of comparative analysis, the relationship between the French and American Revolutions remains a largely untapped field, in need of serious scholarly consideration. The comparative framework, however, is by no means entirely new. At the height of the Cold War, Robert R. Palmer presented a two-volume interpretation of what he called the “Age of Democratic Revolution,” linking American independence to the French Revolution and a host of others in Western Europe. Identifying a common set of struggles against entrenched elites, Palmer made the case that the last four decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a “single revolutionary movement” across what he identified as “Atlantic civilization.” This movement was essentially democratic in that there was a rising sentiment against rigid social hierarchy in favor of equality and the limited delegation of governmental authority. In 1965, French historian Jacques Godechot also argued that there was one “age of Atlantic Revolution,” based on the conviction that the causes and objectives of each national movement were fundamentally the same. At the height of the Cold War and amid efforts to construct a common Western identity, the conception of a singular, unified “age of revolution” was undoubtedly alluring.

Since then, however, historians have tended to emphasize national particularity and caution against placing too much stock in comparison, much less commonality. As history continues a disciplinary turn away from the social sciences, where it had been firmly nestled in the era of Palmer and Godechot, comparative analysis seems to pose the threat of flattening context and contingency by encouraging the identification of patterns across time and space. Perhaps because of this, historians of the American founding largely continue to ignore this approach. Since Palmer’s mid-century analysis, and Patrice Higonnet’s 1988 Sister Republics, few projects have put the revolutions in conversation. Some historians of France have recently fruitfully integrated comparative analysis into their work, using the counter-example of the American Revolution to help explain, for example, why the French descended into the period known as the Terror. There has also been a proliferation of volumes riding a wave of Atlantic histories and embracing the now ubiquitous global history trend. The bulk of these books contain essays each dedicated to one revolution, with an introduction and conclusion hinting at the possibility of deeper comparative and transnational analysis. One notable exception to this, which suggests the possibility for reviving comparative historical analysis, is the recently released volume Scripting Revolution: A historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions (2015), edited by Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein. Still, aside from the genre of Lafayette biography, Susan Dunn’s Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (1999) is the only recent monograph-length study to treat the French and American Revolutions together, and her analysis is not too difficult to guess from the title.

But comparative studies of the French and American Revolutions need not merely reinforce an American success story nearly as old as the United States itself. Part of what makes the political history of the American revolutionary period exciting are the evolving meanings attached to the ideas and values espoused by revolutionaries. The development of these ideas in different contexts opened possibilities for reimagining not only politics, but also social, economic, and cultural paradigms. Contrary to its reputation, comparison can throw contingency into sharp relief and help illuminate the context contributing to the formation of ideas and sociopolitical structures. Focused comparative histories could break open the field of early American political history, allowing for new chronologies and interpretations of the relationship between political thinking and experience.

As Furstenberg, Cotlar, and Ziesche’s studies show, if American political thinking and practice are considered alongside developments in France, the very chronology of the revolution comes into question. And if the revolution does not end in 1783, or even 1787, its political history can look quite different. Looking at the exchange of ideas and experiences among French and American figures helps illuminate this potential; comparison should be adopted as a tool to better understand both similar and unique evolutions of political thinking and culture in both national contexts. Both of these revolutions fundamentally redefined the foundations of political legitimacy, basing the validity of government on its accountability to the population over which it ruled. Though Palmer and Godechot wrote in the context of the Cold War struggle, their observation that the late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of representative democracy as a new idea should not be dismissed. Examining the evolution of these political maxims and institutions through a comparative lens could illuminate the nature of political principles that have come to serve as foundations of modern Western societies.

The birth of a nation is not only or always a national story. Perhaps because the founding is an ongoing component in the formation of national community it tends to be told as one. But it is time to start thinking about the American Revolution outside the thirteen colonies, the English-speaking Atlantic, or even continental North America. Exploring intellectual, political, and cultural connections and comparisons with the French Revolution has the potential to offer a fresh perspective on the causes, course, and outcomes of the creation of the American republic.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Katlyn Carter is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and she will be a pre-doctoral fellow at the American Philosophical Society for the 2016-2017 academic year. Her research focuses on political culture in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. She is currently writing a dissertation that explores how debates about state secrecy during the Age of Revolutions shaped both the conceptual evolution and practical implementation of representative democracy. You can reach her at kmcarter@princeton.edu.

Sympathetic Puritans is a refreshingly ambitious book. Van Engen writes in lucid prose what might best be described as a corrective prequel to the foundational work of Ann Douglas, whose Feminization of American Culture remains essential reading for students of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Although Van Engen grounds his social history of Calvinist theology firmly in the soil of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, his discussion of sympathy and sentiment often veers further afield; he seems equally comfortable reading the Amicitia of Desiderius Erasmus, the Narrative of Mary Rowlandson, and The Scarlet Letter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. A wide-ranging and polished study of colonial life and letters, Sympathetic Puritans sheds new light on the all too human motives of men and women alternately revered and demonized in popular history.

John Winthrop’s call for the inhabitants of Puritan Boston to be more charitable, becoming as a “Citty vpon a Hill,” continues to shape the rhetoric of American politics, but his banishment of Anne Hutchinson has also led some to brand him the intolerant leader of an oppressive patriarchal government. Notwithstanding this apparently unfeeling treatment of Hutchinson, Van Engen insists that Winthrop’s emphasis on mutual affections was sincere, because “being intolerant is not necessarily the same as lacking sympathy. In fact, valuing sympathy and valuing tolerance might bear little relation to one another—a point worth emphasizing since a good deal of modern pluralism seems to conflate them” (23). The sympathy and Christian charity extolled by Winthrop was grounded in the ancient principle “like rejoices in like” (simile gaudet simili), and so the key question for members of Massachusetts Bay congregations was, “With whom do I fellow feel?” or “With whom do I sympathize?” Love for Jesus Christ and for the godly members of his visible church might have provided colonists with a comforting assurance of their own spiritual rectitude; on the other hand, sympathy for a heretic like Hutchinson or for the “merciless Heathen” of Rowlandson’s Narrative might have suggested that an individual is unrepentant and flirting with damnation. The Calvinist fellow feeling of Puritan Massachusetts was a double-edged sword that encouraged—but also circumscribed—compassion.

The meaning of a sympathetic identification with other church members, Van Engen argues, was at the heart of the antinomian or free grace controversy. Winthrop and Thomas Shepard characterized a love of the brethren as a sign of conversion, while John Cotton, Henry Vane, and Hutchinson contended that only a personal experience of Christ’s grace could assure one of salvation. “In other words,” Van Engen writes, the dispute “was not, as many scholars have asserted, a battle between the moral and the spiritual, between disciplined obedience and religious experience. Instead, the Antinomian Controversy divided Puritans over the meaning and value of sympathy itself” (59-60). Because Winthrop and Shepard prevailed in this theological power struggle, the Calvinists of Massachusetts Bay increasingly prioritized sympathy, and its signs, as a leading indicator of the colony’s collective standing before God.

Puritan colonists and Native peoples seeking to join their congregations both demonstrated and elicited appropriate forms of sympathy through the performance of affection. The sincere conversion of Praying Indians taught by John Eliot was manifest in tears shed privately; thus, as Van Engen explains,

Eliot’s brother informed John Wilson that “he had purposefully sometimes in the darke walked the Round, as it were alone, and found [Indians] in their severall Families as devout in prayer, etc. as if there had been any present to observe.” Such modes of surveillance validated public expressions of affection by tracking them back to private lives (156).

Just as Algonquin converts wept to demonstrate the sincerity of their sympathy with Puritan colonists, so too the colonists wept to demonstrate their participation in a transatlantic communion of the saints. In a 1640 sermon titled New Englands Teares, for Old Englands Feares, Taunton minister William Hooke pled with his congregants to identify with and weep for the afflictions of Puritans suffering in the English Civil War. Lachrymose cheeks were important signs of Puritan piety and ecclesiastical solidarity.

Of course, as Van Engen notes, tears also signified true religion in the sentimental novels of nineteenth-century American literature, and he repeatedly draws connections between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to suggest that the distance between Calvinism and sentimentalism is narrower than Douglas would have us believe. For instance, in his discussion of Hooke, Van Engen writes that the minister’s plea “does not seem all that different from the rhetorical use of sympathy in later American sentimental fiction. As Glenn Hendler explains, the nineteenth-century reader was called not just to feel like certain characters, but to feel with them” (127). Van Engen is right to draw these connections between the fellow feeling cultivated in both Calvinist sermons and sentimental novels. Sympathetic Puritans “helps us reimagine seventeenth-century New England,” and after reading Van Engen’s iconoclastic work, it is difficult to remember why New England Calvinists are so often caricatured as cold and unfeeling (221). Turning that entrenched stereotype on its head may, in the end, be Van Engen’s greatest accomplishment.

The parallels between Puritan letters and sentimental literature are clearly delineated, compelling, and provocative, but the nature of the relationship between these two literary movements remains frustratingly vague. Van Engen’s language is that of anticipation: “Long before sentimental literature, [Edward] Johnson’s departure scene exemplifies what Marianne Noble calls ‘the classic paradox of sentimentalism’” (140); “The process of stirring up sympathy, moreover, could lead Puritans to literary strategies that look in many ways like precursors of sentimentalism” (143); and “Part of what [Rowlandson’s narrative] anticipated, I argue, was sentimental literature” (176). The closest he comes to asserting a direct, causal relation between Calvinist theology and sentimental literature is a reminder that Puritans “used literary forms that would later be found at the heart of sentimental novels. Any one of these techniques by itself would suggest little, but taken together they reveal how Calvinist notions of sympathy—and its rhetorical and theological consequences—could lay groundwork for sentimental techniques” (169). What is missing from Sympathetic Puritans is an elaboration on that word could, a sense of precisely how to move from Van Engen’s foundational work on seventeenth-century Calvinism to a nineteenth-century sentimental superstructure.

Van Engen’s work is groundbreaking, a must-read for scholars of New England Puritanism and sentimental novels alike. But it also cautiously skirts ground yet unbroken, particularly in the eighteenth century and the pivotal transition from literary forms anticipating sentimentalism to sentimentalism itself. At the end of Sympathetic Puritans, I found myself wanting to ask Van Engen what he made of Jonathan Edwards on Religious Affections (1754) and the transatlantic sympathies stirred by the Great Awakening, whether he saw traces of a specifically Calvinist sympathy in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791) or in the responses of Rowson’s North American readers. But that, I suppose, is the highest compliment to be paid any book—that it leaves you eager for a sequel.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Zach Hutchins is assistant professor of English at Colorado State University and the author of Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England (2014). He is also the editor of Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act (2016) and Transcribing Early American Manuscript Sermons, a searchable database of transcribed manuscript sermons.

Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you. —John Keats in a letter to his brother George living in Louisville, Kentucky, 1819

Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you,
a covered bridge for sale, a little three-card monte.
A can-do folk, those Americans will please you

till you’re back around your fire and all the increase you
had counted on (a penny saved) amounts to…
(check your wallet…). One flees, you

think, to a farther shore. The breeze you
dreamed of tumbles from its purple mountain.
But disembark and there’s no one to police you

but yourself, the prairies you
gaze on wider than the ocean. Their shaggy monsters
turn their swollen heads away; the fleas you

thought too small to bite you bite you. Grease your
squeaky wheel moaning to
your shoulder, the grindstone polishing your

nose. Their music almost overwhelmed the pleas you
muttered once. Your letters: With felicity, yours—
Pay your money to
the boatman. An expert, soon his pole will ease you.

Statement of Poetic Research

John Keats’s admonition to his brother George in an 1819 letter seems warranted: “Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you.” He continued, “I cannot help thinking Mr Audubon has deceived you.” He meant John James Audubon, the great American naturalist and painter of birds. George Keats and Mr. Audubon were to buy a steamboat together, but George, ignorant of Audubon’s insolvency, lost his investment. As Nicholas Roe notes in his fine biography, John Keats, “Audubon was already being pursued by five creditors….” George would lose money in another steamboat debacle a few years later.

George had sailed from London to Philadelphia with his wife, Georgiana, in July 1818, settling finally in Louisville, Kentucky. The Keatses moved up in Louisville society via much hard work, not all of it their own. Adopting, too well, the customs of the American South, George paid for slave labor in his sawmill and later purchased three slaves. Older brother John—whose sonnet “To Kusciusko” praised the Polish revolutionary and was published in the abolition-supporting The Examiner—would have, had he lived, denounced the cruel expediencies of his much-loved brother. But George had come, after all, to America, where Manifest Destiny would soon become a national autoimmune disease, and whose citizens, said de Tocqueville, would ask only, “how much money will it bring in?”