Statement of Poetic Research

Bronwen Tate

These poems and images are the result of a sort of excavation of my paternal grandmother’s well-worn Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (copyright 1950, and how!). I grew up in Oregon while most of my father’s family still lives much closer to Oklahoma, where he was raised. Because of the distance, I only saw my grandmother on occasional visits, and when she died unexpectedly several years ago, I found myself with her diamond ring—which I reset to make my wedding ring—and this cookbook, because I like to cook.

Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book is a fascinating portrait of a 1950s imagining of an American past, from the photos of the “Early American Dining Room,” where visitors to the Betty Crocker test kitchens could sit and enjoy a meal, to the cheerful boast that “our delicious American hot breads are the lineal descendants of the crude hearth cakes of primitive people.” The origin stories we tell during the shared activity of preparing food take on mythic status in a nation or in a family. In the cook book, we find a cherry pie with decorative pastry hatchets for Presidents’ Day and the declaration: “If I were to design a coat of arms for our country, a pie would be the main symbol.” In my own family, I’ve learned to bake cornbread with bacon crisped into the top while listening to my dad or my aunts repeat the story of how my grandmother tricked her nieces into eating okra by frying it in cornmeal and calling it “green popcorn.” And I can’t make nutmeg-scented currant cakes of my mother’s Welsh family without remembering the story of how an elderly aunt once got rid of a hungry and unwelcome visitor by telling him that making Welsh cakes was the only sure way to get her hands truly clean after gardening.

Writing these poems gave me a way to explore these stories and why they stay with us. The poems are also a record of looking for my grandmother and puzzling over the traces she left behind in her cook book: a toothpick slipping out of the binding in the cakes section or a few attempts to puzzle out the spelling of Albuquerque back in the index. Finally, the poems became an encounter between the fifties’ ideas of womanhood and American identity that the book so constantly advocates (and that my grandmother surely felt the pressure of) and my own struggles to be a woman with both aspirations outside the home and a great love of cooking and nourishing and taking care of people.

A cook book can be a source of text and thoughts and provocations, but it is also a source of deliciousness, so I decided to accompany my poems with a Butterscotch Pie.

My husband Caleb still gets a bit nervous whenever I make pie because of a Thanksgiving six years ago when he saw pie crust transform me from a rational being into a sort of fiend. The pie crust kept crumbling and cracking and refused to go nicely into the pie plate. And I got very intense and scary. For years after, when I’d ask him how he thought we could improve our relationship, he’d just bring up pie crust. But I’ve made many successful (and even some beautiful) pie crusts since then. And we both love pie of all kinds, so he doesn’t get nervous enough to try to prevent my attempts.

I don’t always sift my flour, but I was determined to follow this recipe to the letter, so I went ahead and sifted.

I used only vegetable shortening (no trans-fats though) for the same reason.

But wait, for the kind of pie I was making (a kind for which “filling is piled into the baked shell”), there was a fancy extra step that involved dotting the crust with butter and then folding it into a little package. I am a sucker for process or fancy extra steps of all kinds, so of course I went for it.

I even got Caleb to take impressive step-by-step photos of the folding process.

And you can see my wedding ring with Grandma’s diamond in this one.

The resulting pie crust was honestly not one of my more handsome attempts, but it showed signs of being deliciously flaky, which is ultimately more important.

I selected this recipe (apart from the fact that it sounded tasty) because it had been written over, which seemed to me like a clear sign that my grandmother had definitely made it, probably more than once. The residue-covered page was another encouraging sign. I called my dad and asked him about it a few days later, and he said that he could remember the taste of slightly weepy meringue mixed with butterscotch.

But there was also a bit of ambiguity to the writing on the recipe. Was the original recipe just rewritten in pen because the page had gotten stuck to another and torn? Or was there an actual modification? The 2 outside the brackets made no sense, so I ignored it. The quantity of flour seemed unchanged. Of more interest was the salt. The recipe for an 8″ pie clearly read “1/3 tsp. salt,” but the writing for a 9″ pie seemed to say “1 ¼ tsp. salt.” Clearly not a proportionate increase. I chose to see this as a sign of affinity between Grandma and me, since I reliably add extra salt to my sweets (especially chocolate chip cookies and anything involving caramel), and I added the full 1 ¼ teaspoons of salt.

I used a cast iron skillet to melt the butter.

I let it get nice and brown and nutty smelling before adding the brown sugar.

Things started boiling and got a bit crazy, but I still boldly paused in my stirring long enough to get a picture.

But then I fell down on the job, because it looks like I just poured butter and brown sugar into a saucepan, but actually there’s milk and egg yolks made into a custard in here as well. Promise.

See, there’s further evidence in the empty egg shells here. And in the fact that the pie had a pudding-type texture even though it was still steaming and needed to cool thoroughly.

I ended up sending the pie with Caleb to his dorky game night after extracting a promise that he would bring a piece home for me. I like to feed people, and the thought of the two of us finishing the pie between ourselves, while totally conceivable, was not inspiring.

I ate my slice the next day when there was decent light to photograph it. I piled it high with unsweetened whipped cream to offset the sweetness of the butterscotch. And while I ate it, I answered interview questions from my friend Kate about my writing process and my love of making objects (like pie and hats) as well as poems, which seemed rather appropriate.

When early Americans reached for a drink, it was usually alcoholic. Faced with an often chancy water supply and an English tradition of making and consuming ale, cider, whiskey, wine, brandy and beer, they drank for nourishment, for health, to socialize, to ease the pain of childbirth and to lubricate the chain of command. One militia officer promised the men who had just elected him that “what I lack in brains I will try and make up in rum” (16-17).

Sarah Hand Meacham explores the development of alcohol making and drinking in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chesapeake in Every Home a Distillery. Ubiquitous in early Americans’ lives, alcohol provides Meacham the opportunity to comment widely on culture, business, and gender.

Recent studies of consumption and goods have framed colonial lives in an Atlantic World context, with alcohol central to an expansive story of culture and commerce. General merchants in the Virginia backcountry, for example, enticed customers with imported rum as well as fabric and teapots. Imported wines, blended to the tastes of drinkers around the Atlantic rim, connected elites to a global network of suppliers, agents, and connoisseurs. Philadelphia taverns served up “rum punch and revolution” to drinkers both lowly and lofty who debated politics and forged public opinion.

Meacham’s reading of court records, planter journals, wills, and travel literature presents alcohol consumption as more isolating than expansive. Taking all kinds of intoxicating drinks as her subject, she argues that they provided Chesapeake colonists with comfort and sustenance in ways that reinforced their rural existence and dependence on local grandees. Most alcoholic beverages were produced within households or traded between neighbors. What is more, when an average free family had drunk the last of the summer’s pear cider, it was forced to seek credit at the home of a local large planter who had the money, equipment, and storage cellars to provide drink throughout the year. Taverns, too, in Meacham’s telling, were provincial, unsophisticated places run by families who had secured the backing of local elites—monuments to the status quo rather than freewheeling institutions of political commentary and revolutionary rabble-rousing.

Women’s hands directed the local world of alcohol. Meacham highlights the work that women did to mash, strain, and press peaches and persimmons into the ciders that typified Chesapeake drink. She cracks open the cookbooks that gave seventeenth- and eighteenth-century free women dozens of recipes for molasses beer and fruit cider. (She even transcribes several recipes for readers with a yen for gooseberry wine.) She stresses the fact that alcoholic beverages for most people were food, prepared in the same kitchens by the same people who cooked the spoon bread, stirred the porridge, and roasted the meat. She counters our images of Madeira-sipping gentlemen with English woodcuts of prosaic housewives baking cakes and distilling brandy. She reminds us that women, in the form of middling wives and prominent widows, dominated the tavern trade, even if men’s names were inscribed on the legal papers. This book does a real service in putting free women’s work (enslaved women receive far briefer attention) at the center of colonial experience.

A pair of important turning points—one economic, one technological—changed the local, female cast of alcohol culture in the second half of the eighteenth century. First, Scottish factors and regular markets began to appear in the Chesapeake countryside. Given options and improved access to currency in the form of tobacco notes (widespread after the 1730 Tobacco Inspection Act), ordinary free farmers abandoned older patronage networks for new commercial ones. These new networks supplied alcohol without the added charge of deference, and connected rural people ever more intimately to a wider Atlantic economy that had always directed their lives as tobacco growers. The second key development was refinement of the alembic still, making it small and inexpensive enough for many men to make their own whiskey and brandy. Both developments changed the tone of alcohol production by involving more free male farmers and replacing fruit cider with rum as drink of choice. By the time of the Revolutionary War, even the Continental Army was in on the trend, sanctioning rum rations and signing contracts with male providers.

No sooner had middling and poor people gained greater access to hard liquor than their social betters began praising the superiority of tea and coffee. By the 1760s, getting drunk on rum (or even good old molasses beer) seemed, to the literate gentry, to be a willful decision rather than an inevitable commonplace. In another challenge to current scholarship, Meacham argues that tea and coffee, instead of uniting revolution-era Americans, created rank-based divisions among them, because the new stimulants were more expensive than the old intoxicants. The timing of this transition and the scope of social separation are at times unclear in the text, but Meacham’s discussion provides a fresh look at the meaning of “choice” in the age of the so-called Consumer Revolution. We often think of consumer choice as emancipatory and encouraging self-expression. Meacham shows how widespread belief in the power of choice opened up the poor to accusations that their problems with alcohol were their own fault. When everyone had to drink beer, intoxicated neighbors were a fact of life; when coffee was available, those same neighbors could be condemned—or celebrated, as wealthy bon vivants increasingly boasted about their exploits with the bottle. The book’s suggestive final chapter on the morality of drunkenness ranges widely in terms of evidence and chronology, from seventeenth-century court records to twentieth-century interviews with former slaves, mirroring the complexity of the issue and providing a starting point for future examinations of drinking culture in slave societies.

With its focus on the methods and organization of alcohol production, Every Home a Distillery will appeal to anyone interested in early business history. The book also contains an interesting, often implicit, discussion of the ideological meanings of work and goods in terms of gender. Even as free women pounded out peach cider in the seventeenth century, the precise grafting of trees to produce superior fruit had elements of “science” that men were quick to claim as their own. Cookbooks and husbandry manuals scuffled over the question of whether alcohol was a foodstuff (and therefore a woman’s domain) or a science project (properly belonging to men)—cookery or chemistry. Given the variety of types and uses of alcoholic drinks, the matter was not settled at any particular point in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Indeed, alcohol emerges as a very flexible product and cultural signifier.

Using English brewing traditions as her context, Meacham asserts that Anglo-American production of this multivalent commodity was masculinized in the late eighteenth century. Given the complexities of her evidence, this assessment of the shifting categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ work seems imprecise. As historians of early America have shown, the flexibility of free women’s work and the common practice of what we now call multitasking made a wide range of activities ideologically acceptable for them to do. It does not necessarily follow, though, that women did any particular job—whether brewing beer or serving rum in a tavern—because it was “convenient” for them to do so, as Meacham suggests. Custom, family strategy, the ability to command others’ labor, personal preference, and price structures all influenced women’s work in historically specific ways. How women of any race and rank valued their own labor is likewise a complicated question that receives brief attention here. Nonetheless, her interesting, detailed study should inspire more questions in readers who want to engage these important historical issues. As Meacham justly points out, the scarcity of women’s voices (free or enslaved) in early sources means that we will always struggle to know what work meant to them. By placing free women’s lives squarely at the heart of its business narrative, Every Home a Distillery shows us the struggle is worthwhile.

In Revolutions in the Atlantic World, historian Wim Klooster finds common ground among four political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and sets each into an Atlantic context. In a brief introductory chapter, the author lays out his objectives: “to present the most significant revolutions of this era on their own terms” (2) and explore threads connecting them. All of these revolutions, Klooster argues, followed a similar trajectory. Financial and political strains undermined the stability of the state, exposing the government’s inability to negotiate with colonial and metropolitan elites. This in turn led to the emergence of strident and impatient voices demanding action and drawing support from the middle ranks of society. As monarchs and those close to them obstructed negotiation, challenges to authority turned violent. Revolutionary leaders recruited their followers from the lower orders of society where lingering resentments over the abuse of privilege had long smoldered. The American, French, Haitian, and Spanish Revolutions, Klooster argues, all followed this path.

In an age of powerful states with extensive colonial systems, the American Revolution demonstrated that it was possible to overthrow an unpopular political structure and replace it with a sovereign nation based on broad republican principles. By 1763, the exorbitant cost of mid-eighteenth-century warfare had left Great Britain burdened with debt, and policy-makers in London saw no reason why the king’s colonial subjects should not shoulder part of the burden. After all, the most recent conflict—the Seven Years’ War—had been fought largely on their behalf. Americans did not see it that way and organized an effective resistance to taxes imposed by the British Parliament. In 1775, American resolve and the failure of the ministry in London to negotiate effectively with colonial elites led to bloodshed and a hardening of positions on both sides. The break with Great Britain (formalized by a declaration of independence in July 1776) precipitated a bloody conflict with atrocities on both sides and the features of civil war. But the scale of violence was modest compared to later revolutions in Europe, the Caribbean, and Spanish America. In Klooster’s book, the great significance of the American Revolution is that it set off a chain of events that led to revolution in France, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America and the creation of wholly new sovereign states.

Like the American Revolution, the political shakeup in France was rooted in excessive wartime debt (much of it due to French support for the new United States of America in its struggle against Great Britain). In August 1788, with France veering toward bankruptcy, Louis XVI called for a meeting of the Estates General in an effort to stave off financial collapse. The king’s summons provided members of the Third Estate the opportunity to articulate grievances and call for fundamental reforms. Delegates seized the moment and established a national assembly that sharply curtailed the power of the monarchy. Pent-up resentments in the broader population transformed the assembly’s political agenda into a sweeping mass movement against entrenched privilege. The revolution turned sharply violent and demanded the wholesale destruction of the existing social order and the extermination of the enemies of the revolution. Terror at home—seared into popular memory by images of the guillotine at work—and warfare abroad created a nightmarish revolutionary landscape. Revolution became France’s leading export in the 1790s.

The third revolution, an event closely tied to the political crisis in France, places the narrative squarely in an Atlantic World context. The bloody upheaval in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue grew out of the contentious relationship between white elites and free people of color, economic reforms following the Seven Years’ War, and the lofty rhetoric of the French Revolution. In 1789, news of revolution in France was welcomed by both whites and free-coloreds on Saint-Domingue, both of which groups chafed under remote and arbitrary French control. But revolutionary rhetoric, with its emphasis on violent action to achieve the “rights of man,” sent a very different signal to the colony’s roughly half million enslaved blacks, who rose against their masters in August 1791 in the Caribbean’s most successful slave rebellion. In the chaos that followed—protracted over a long and bloody decade—Saint-Domingue was scarred by the carnage of civil war (with dizzying shifts in alliances), ill-conceived French attempts to restore order, opportunistic British and Spanish occupations, and all-out race war. Out of this tangle emerged the nation of Haiti, a state that has yet to shake off the legacy of its catastrophic birth.

Wim Klooster’s account of revolution in early nineteenth-century Spanish America connects the collapse of Spanish authority on the American mainland to the Napoleonic Wars. He makes specific reference to the far-reaching consequences of the French occupation of Spain and the temporary removal of King Ferdinand VII from the European political stage. War in Europe set the stage for political crisis, revolution, civil war, and the fragmentation of Spanish America, but “the timing of independence depended as much on developments in the colonies themselves as on those in the mother country” (156). Civil unrest in Spain’s American viceroyalties had deep roots.

Following the Seven Years’ War, there was widespread resistance to reforms initiated by the Madrid government that were meant to tighten links between Spain and its colonies. These tensions pointed to a breakdown in the imperial relationship brought to the surface when Spain was cut off from its New World colonies in the early years of the nineteenth century. Rather than a series of military showdowns with Spain (and, as elsewhere, efforts to reconstruct society to conform to high-minded ideals), the Spanish-America revolutions depicted in Klooster’s book were basically civil wars fought by local plebeians over wealth and power accessible only by a privileged few.

The comparative structure of Revolutions in the Atlantic World encourages readers to look for commonalities and differences on the revolutionary landscapes of British North America, France, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America. Klooster emphasizes that the revolutions examined here “cannot be understood outside the realm of international politics” and “inter-imperial warfare,” and that events on a large—often Atlantic—stage exposed “enduring social, political, and ethnic inequalities” that had severe unintended consequences (2). Even so, all of these revolutions could have been avoided, and none was guaranteed success. Their precarious nature was exacerbated by divided loyalties, infighting among revolutionary elites, and powerful counter-revolutionary forces. None of the revolutions aimed at creating a democratic society: the main objective was sovereignty, and the character of post-revolutionary rule was typically authoritarian. Klooster points out that the American Revolution is an exception, perhaps because colonial society in British North America had been democratized before the revolution began. However, all of the revolutions examined here bore a common theme of hostility to privilege (at least in their dramatic early stages) and employed an angry rhetoric resentful of tyranny and oppression.

There were, of course, winners and losers. Obvious among the winners were those who survived the bloodletting and went on to secure privilege, wealth, and power in the reconstructed post-revolutionary world. More interesting to Klooster are the losers. Especially striking is the large number of men and women who sacrificed everything for the revolution yet failed to reap the rewards. It is likewise striking how little attention the indigenous peoples of British North America, the French West Indies, and Spanish America received in revolutionary movements that were awash in rhetoric enshrining human dignity and the rights of man. Only in Saint-Domingue was the destruction of slavery high on the agenda of revolutionary leaders, nearly all of whom had been slaves themselves. In post-revolutionary Haiti, however, revolution brought few advantages to the former sugar colony’s black population. And throughout the Atlantic World, the status of women—in spite of the conspicuous role they played in both the American and French revolutions—barely changed.

This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the Atlantic World as a spawning ground for revolution. Although the author has limited his discussion to revolutions associated with the formation of nation states, he is tempting us to consider failed revolutions as well. One example is the Patriot Revolution in the Dutch Republic (1786-1787). Its mobilization of citizen committees, effective exploitation of the popular press, and emphasis on democratically elected representation are legacies of the American Revolution. In Ireland’s bloody Rising of 1798—an event rooted in both the American and French revolutions—the inner circle of revolutionaries succeeded in gaining French military support in their abortive attempt to overthrow the English and establish an Irish republic. The strength of Klooster’s work lies in its potential to trigger such connections and intersections and thereby broaden our understanding of early-modern revolutionary history.

Wim Klooster’s Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History is bold in its implications yet restrained in its assertions. Klooster is careful not to succumb to the temptation of portraying the revolutions in British North America, France, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America as parallel events. Yet they are intimately connected, and Klooster does not shy away from exploring their commonalities in a broad Atlantic context. This is a balanced, well conceived, and accessible book. Wim Klooster has done a masterful job sorting out the chaotic and kaleidoscopic tumble of events that identify the half-century ending in the mid-1820s as the “Age of Revolution.”

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

Thomas M. Truxes is a clinical assistant professor of Irish Studies and history at New York University. His most recent book, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, was a finalist for the 2009 Francis Parkman Prize sponsored by the Society of American Historians.

To captivate, kill, or destroy. These were the watchwords of the Massachusetts Council’s orders to their army in the summer of 1779. For the first time since March 1776 when the British had evacuated Boston, redcoats were again on Massachusetts soil, establishing a garrison to command Penobscot Bay. The British also hoped to rally loyalists and the disaffected to this stronghold. The revolutionary government of Massachusetts chose to expel these invaders from their eastern territory as a matter of policy and pride.

In July 1779, 900 men and over forty ships sail from Boston for Majabigwaduce, a peninsula and river on the Maine coast. The expedition results in confrontation between two weak forces—neither able to dislodge the other. On paper, the Massachusetts force looks like it should make short work of the British, and had the Americans attacked immediately, they might have carried the day. Instead, their leaders’ hesitation and lack of tactical vision gives the British precious time to strengthen their position. The story ends with the Massachusetts’s ships burning along the riverside, its naval force completely destroyed. By some accounts it is the worst naval defeat in the history of the United States before Pearl Harbor.

Bernard Cornwell’sThe Fortrecreates the tragic tale with a narrative marked by vivid characters, dramatic tension, political pathos, and subtle questions about the war at the heart of the American Revolution. Cornwell’s characters drive the story and provide the historical moral and argument. He weaves together the British and Massachusetts strands of the tale, achieving an admirable narrative balance between the combatants. His chosen protagonists embody the conflicting interests at the heart of the Revolutionary War. Brigadier-General Francis McLean is an old soldier commanding a force of 750 green Scottish recruits and three small ships. In Cornwell’s telling, McLean is a man who knows his craft and his duty. He is assisted by Dr. John Calef, a loyalist refugee seething with rage against the rebels who forced him from his Boston home. Cornwell offers Brigadier-General Peleg Wadsworth, the Harvard-educated schoolmaster turned soldier, as the counterpart to both McLean and Calef. A veteran of the Continental army and George Washington’s staff, Wadsworth now serves in an army raised by his home state. Leaving his young family, the patriotic and professional Wadsworth serves under Solomon Lovell, an aging politician perhaps better suited to serving as a church deacon than general of an expeditionary force. Lovell’s command is complicated by the naval contribution of Captain Dudley Saltonstall, the commodore of a fleet of privateers, ships from the Massachusetts navy, and the Continental frigate Warren. The scion of an old Massachusetts family, Saltonstall is ill-tempered, aloof, and draws his commission and authority from the Continental Congress.

The Massachusetts expeditionary forces revel in their home field advantage, exuding the fervor and confidence that their patriot ideology and particular religious worldview instill. But military inexperience and division over tactics doom their efforts. For the British, luck and stalwart professionalism save the day. Cornwell emphasizes the vices and virtues of the respective causes in a counterpoint between patriot Paul Revere and the young British Lieutenant John Moore. Revere, the middle-aged and inexperienced lieutenant-colonel of the Massachusetts Artillery, exudes the zeal of a radical and the confidence of a military autodidact. Moore, a well-connected gentleman of only eighteen years, presents the foolhardy bravery of youth and its maturation into professional military skill. Revere’s brief military career spectacularly collapses in the Penobscot Expedition, while this minor engagement on the Maine coast marks the beginning of Moore’s rise as a transformative and heroic officer in the British army. Poetry immortalizes them both—Revere for his midnight ride and Moore for his tragically heroic death in the Napoleonic Wars as a lieutenant-general at Corunna in 1809.

Cornwell’s narrative moves briskly and he has an attentive eye for detail. No ship’s spar or canvas shroud goes unnamed. He captures the feel of fog settling over the rocky coast on a chill summer morning. His imagination recreates the sound of young kilted Scots fixing bayonets to their heavy Brown Bess muskets. In a prefatory note and bibliographic afterword, Cornwell makes clear what he has drawn from the historical record and what he has invented or altered for the sake of story. I was particularly impressed by his simple trick of announcing that most of his characters actually existed. The only fictional characters are British enlisted soldiers (save one, William Lawrence, a real diarist and artillery sergeant) and any character with a surname starting with F. The resulting forest of Frobishers, Fiskes, Filmers, Fennels, Fletchers, and Freers made the real historical actors stand out. The sound of extant muster rolls and orderly books and army reports echo behind his descriptions of camp life and movement.

Most strikingly, Cornwell captures the multivalent nature of the Revolutionary War. The hatred sown between patriots and loyalists unfolds with his narrative. Wrangling among his characters reveals the competing interests between militia, state troops, and Continental officers. He shows how allegiance to a faction in the war depended on a mix of family, location, ideology, or a sense of home. He suggests the profound disruption the war inflicted and shows how the heavy hand of war wrung allegiance from folk who would rather have been left alone to their fields and fishing.

The Fort is a good, page-turning read, but its deeper value lies with its message about the American Revolution. Even in the compact narrative of the Penobscot Expedition, which presents a definitive beginning, middle, and end, Cornwell suggests the length and uncertainty of the Revolutionary War. The War for Independence as a whole just doesn’t fit a proper and satisfying dramatic structure. By focusing on only a section of the war, Cornwell the storyteller finds himself in good company. Consider David McCullough’s 1776 or David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, both of which focus on the satisfying arc of the beginning of the war. The events of the spring of 1775 open the historical opera with a bang: Paul Revere’s midnight ride, farmers standing at Lexington and Concord, Washington’s heroic acceptance of command. Early 1776 gives the rising action. The seat of war shifts to New York. Washington prepares for the full hammer-blow of British military power. Congress debates and declares independence. But the 1776 campaign around New York City and the near-collapse of the Continental army and patriot resistance in the flight across New Jersey sing the notes of catastrophe, building dramatic tension. The resolving climax comes with Washington’s daring and miraculous Christmas victory at Trenton and then at Princeton in the first weeks of 1777. With the cause renewed, the narrative winds up, concluding with Congress recruiting a proper, professional Continental army with soldiers enlisted for three years or the duration of the war. It’s an arc both historically compact and aesthetically satisfying—McCullough and Fischer end their narratives and analysis there. Though they eschew invention, their factual accounts answer the same demands as Cornwell’s fiction.

Such narrative choices are understandable, since the story of the Revolutionary War splinters in 1777—American defeat at Philadelphia offsets a Continental victory at Saratoga. The war moves south and grows messier politically. The Continental Congress flirts with failure and bankruptcy. Yorktown offers a conclusion in 1781, but not finality. Both historical participants and present readers have to wait until 1783 for a proper end to hostilities. It’s fair that writers have to choose their starts and stops—it’s the luxury of history to reify the narrative outline imposed by events, by participants’ memories, or the demands of art. But in the messiness of the moment, it is never so clear.

For this I commend Cornwell. Though he focuses on a single, compact event in the Revolutionary War, he hints at its nature as a military struggle and the foundations of revolutionary movement. Because he is focused on a military campaign, however, he inevitably privileges war-fighting, and the professional, effective British regulars stand as heroes for their diligence and attention to duty. Cornwell allows his Americans to claim the laurels of military honor in the character of Wadsworth—the veteran Continental officer—who combines the qualities of military skill and political virtue. Cornwell shows how fickle the gods of battle can be, but also suggests the real power and persistence of the Revolution.

The Revolution, to mix John Adams and Chairman Mao, was in the minds and hearts of the people, but it also grew from the barrel of a gun. But those guns were not always aimed at British regulars. The War for Independence continued because of the resilience of patriots’ political institutions and the cooperation they could extract or the coercion they could project. The committees and legislatures of the Revolution drafted and mustered the young, marginal, and poor for long terms of military service their betters disdained. They collected taxes and supplies to keep armies in the field. As John Shy insists, their militias, though inconsistent on the battlefield, were excellent gunmen for harrying loyalists and maintaining the authority of revolutionary governments. The Glorious Cause could suffer catastrophic defeats in battle and the occupation of seaport cities, but so long as its political apparatus survived and maintained the people’s grudging support, the war for independence could continue.

Cornwell weaves this understanding through The Fort, showing that any one event could entirely consume its participants, present a decisive military outcome, and yet have remarkably little effect on the course of the revolutionary struggle.

To captivate, kill, or destroy was not—is not—enough.

Alison LaCroix has written a well crafted, deeply textured work that argues for the necessity of placing the idea of federalism in a larger historical context. Rather than treat federalism as a transcendent ideal made manifest in Constitutional Convention debates, LaCroix illustrates the evolution of the idea from colonial dissent over British tax policy to the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 when a messy, multi-layered British imperial structure evolved into a unique constitutional and political institution.Ideological Origins identifies three critical transformative moments that explain how American federalism emerged and how it came to shape the courts and judicial review: the legitimation of divided sovereignty, the Convention’s rejection of a provision allowing Congress to veto state legislation, and the drafting of Article III and the assignment of courts the power to decide the allocation of jurisdiction between state and central governments. Until the end of the Seven Years War, the colonial legislatures and Parliament had an ambiguous understanding of their lines of authority. As a practical matter, the regulation of local affairs was left to colonial assemblies while Parliament presumed to govern the empire. Not addressed explicitly in the day-to-day operations of North America was the locus of sovereignty, of where dominion ultimately lay. Parliament never questioned its own ultimate supremacy, and in the course of its policies of benign neglect, the assemblies had been largely left to their own devices. However, as the colonists faced the burden of new taxation, they found in the work of continental legal theorists like Puffendorf and Scottish and Irish writers the basis for legitimating their dissent in their descriptions of confederations, unions of political equals charged with the pursuit of more general interests. Providing a new reading of the distinction between internal and external taxes, LaCroix points out how critical this concept was to the resistance to Parliamentary taxation because it sanctioned colonists’ view that authority over certain subjects could be divided among different layers of legislative bodies. When Franklin and Dickinson questioned internal taxes for revenue, they challenged Parliament’s view of a unitary sovereign imperial structure. Arguing in 1773 to the Massachusetts General Court that sovereignty was indivisible and that Parliament, as the supreme legislative body for the Empire, had plenary powers, Thomas Hutchinson impelled the resistance to expand its arguments to encompass the more abstract idea that the assemblies retained substantive powers outside of its reach.

While the subsequent adoption of the Articles of Confederation affirmed the principle that sovereignty could be divided, the specific allocation of powers between the layered legislative structures of states and Congress remained ambiguous. The Constitutional Convention, LaCroix says, is the moment when ideas born in dissent became the basis of a new structure for deciding the division and allocation of sovereignty. The Convention’s debates were a second order of decision-making that determined where and how the processes for resolving ambiguities and conflicts would take place. Madison’s recommendation that Congress have the power to veto state legislation smelled too much of the restoration of a unitary sovereignty like the Privy Council’s ability to invalidate colonial legislation repugnant to English law and prompted immediate opposition. Although not at the Convention, Thomas Jefferson had written to Madison to consider instead the use of judicial review in matters “where the act of Confederation controlled the question” (to Madison, June 20, 1787 q.v. 159). Jefferson’s idea had widespread currency among the delegates and, in particular, among the supporters of the New Jersey Plan. With the inclusion of the Supremacy Clause, Article III furnished the constitutional justification for an explicit division of sovereign powers and entrusted judges and courts to mediate among the different authorities. Article III and the Supremacy Clause also provided a significant intellectual transformation in the idea of federalism from issues of sovereignty to matters of process and jurisdiction, and two key pieces of legislation, the Judiciary Acts of 1789 and 1801 helped define the scope of judicial power. While most scholars dismiss the significance of the Act of 1801, which created federal court districts irrespective of state boundaries, LaCroix establishes it as part of the evolution of ideas that came to affirm the courts’ significant role in defining the relationship of state and federal jurisdictions. In the necessity to expand the national judiciary, constitutional discourse shifted from legislative sovereignty to judicial process. After the Judiciary Act of 1789, courts came to wrestle with the need to mediate between state and federal judiciaries as they operated within a single overarching polity. In LaCroix’s reading, 1801 marked a terminus, a repudiation of Federalist attempts to impose a broader, more aggressive, potentially expansive intrusion of national authority through a realignment of the federal judiciary. Following Jefferson’s election, he and the Republicans dismantled the 1801 courts, essentially repealing the Act, pulled Americans back from intimations of the restoration of the imperial paradigm and located subsequent discourse in the “Supreme Court where claims for federal jurisdiction accompanied the expansion of federal judicial power” (212).

The Ideological Origins of American Federalism is an important work that points out the necessity of seeing Revolutionary developments in a larger context. In so doing it also makes three important specific contributions. It demonstrates how the arguments supporting opposition to British tax policies evolved into ideological and constitutional innovation. Second, in assessing the ideological legacies of the American Revolution, it compels us to reconsider Federalist history—our tendency to assume that the Constitution was simply the repudiation of a set of failed structures and intellectual paradigms and was the starting point for subsequent constitutional analysis. And third, like Jack Rakove’s Original Meanings, it should give most serious pause to those who assume that the original intentions of the founders are easily discerned.

“One need not delve far into the literature of the Revolution,” Peter Dorsey aptly observes, “to find that of all words, the one that most persistently, most contentiously, and most flexibly drove the era’s rhetorical engine was slavery” (xi). While this has long made the rhetoric of slavery a staple in a wide variety of historians’ analyses of the American Revolution, this is the first book-length treatment of the metaphorical usages of slavery and their impact on the Revolutionary era and beyond. “In the revolutionary era,” Dorsey contends, “language and the discursive process was itself an ‘actor’ in shaping and driving the conflict and fostering the emergence of antislavery thought” (xii). But the language of slavery cut many ways, he illustrates, so its impact was not simply antislavery; some of the ways in which Revolutionaries and their opponents employed the slavery metaphor actually supported rather than undercut the continuance of African-American bondage.

In largely chronological fashion and drawing on a wide array of primary sources, Dorsey walks the reader through the multifarious uses of the slavery metaphor across the broad sweep of the Revolutionary era, from patriot struggles in the 1760s through the drafting and ratification of the federal Constitution. Along the way, thematic chapters attend to the gendered implications of the slave metaphor; the Loyalists’ pointed responses to the Patriots’ introduction of the loaded metaphor to their already vicious ideological contest; the practical, mostly antislavery, impact of the Patriots’ need for ideological consistency once they decided to stubbornly persist in broadcasting the metaphor despite how easy it was for Loyalists to highlight their hypocrisy; and the complicating impact of anxieties about slave insurrection on both sides of the whites’ conflict. Dorsey, a literary critic, ventures occasional excursions into literary theory—such as a chapter centering on various “leading theories of metaphor” (19). But gratefully, he does not allow the narrative to bog down in theory, making it eminently readable.

There is very little with which to disagree in Dorsey’s analysis of the impact of slavery rhetoric. He is, to be sure, too apt to talk in overly sweeping terms: there is in this book not so much North and South but a nationwide, unitary “slave-holding culture” (xviii) that intensely localist contemporaries would not have recognized. But his overall points concerning the pervasiveness and complexity of that impact are well-taken. That complexity arose, as he demonstrates well, not only from the various ways in which debaters employed the metaphor, but also from the fact that revolutionaries’ commitment to universal liberty collided with their equally passionate commitment to property rights.

The problem with the book, in fact, is the exact opposite of a dubious or controversial thesis. It is that, disappointingly enough, this sustained attention to the rhetorical employment and practical influence of the slavery metaphor has almost nothing new to say. Granted, there are occasional glimpses of insight that may strike some scholars as interesting, including the notion that the slavery metaphor may have functioned as something of a shibboleth early on for the Patriot movement (4); or the point that “a central horror” in Patriot imaginations “was the idea that the bondage that threatened white Americans, like chattel slavery itself, was hereditary” (27). But for the most part, the glimmers of insight begin with promise but their punch lines end up being delivered by Dorsey drawing on another scholar (see e.g. 49-50). Chapters that seem promising proceed with a whimper rather than a bang. At the end of chapter 2, for instance, it seems that the theories of metaphor with which he engages add nothing to our understanding of the complicated effects of the slavery metaphor. And as this reader eagerly pursued chapter 3 and its analysis of gender and the slavery metaphor, the chapter induced a shrug rather than adding to existing knowledge. Even on the macro level, the book’s point about how the slavery metaphor cut in both antislavery and proslavery directions constitutes an extension of rather than even the slightest revision of a key 2003 article by Francois Furstenberg in the Journal of American History.

General readers unacquainted with the intersections of slavery and the American Revolution may well learn quite a bit from this book, then, but scholars of the era or of questions related to slavery and abolition will not. That seems an odd choice for a university press to publish.

At least since the publication of David Hall’s influentialWorlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, historians of Puritanism in colonial New England have gradually been demolishing the notion, once dogma after the publication of Perry Miller’s influential works, of the essentially proto-modern rationalism of Puritan intellectual and religious life. By the same token, historians of early modern science have taken issue with the idea, once put forward by Keith Thomas, of a generally antagonistic relationship between early modern religion (especially Protestantism) and magic. It is more appropriate, Hall posited, to speak of an accommodation between magic and religion in the early modern period than to regard them as two separate traditions.

Just how pervasive the practice of magic was among the New England elite during the seventeenth century, and just how important its appreciation is today for an adequate understanding of colonial New England history and culture, is shown by Walter Woodward’s Prospero’s America. Neither natural magic nor the occult sciences such as alchemy and astrology (excepting only judicial astrology) were seen as incompatible with Reformed religion in the seventeenth century. In fact, Woodward suggests, Protestantism may have energized the practice of what he calls the “Christian alchemy” elaborated by such Reformers as John Winthrop, Jr., Samuel Hartlib, Johann Moraien, and Robert Child, who “viewed God as an active agent in the alchemical quest” and believed that “God intended alchemical knowledge to be the province of pious practitioners who would be dedicated to using the fruits of their quest for godly ends” (12). With regard specifically to the central figure of his account, John Winthrop, Jr., Woodward aims to disprove two traditional assumptions: one, that Winthrop’s pursuit of the occult sciences was overall a marginal aspect of his intellectual life; and two, that he practiced them so secretly that they remained largely unnoticed by his contemporaries (215). On the contrary, Woodward argues, not only did Winthrop’s practice of the occult sciences fundamentally inform his most prominent public endeavors and politics—as founder of New London, as physician of New England, as governor of Connecticut, a fellow of the Royal Society of London—but he publicly and deliberately cultivated his persona as New England’s alchemical magus.

Yet, as Woodward reflects in his introduction, despite the prominence of Winthrop’s alchemy thatProspero’s Americaaims to establish, the historian of early modern “occult philosophy” is faced by special challenges. Despite the richness of information contained in the voluminous correspondence, account books, manuscripts, images, maps, and books that Winthrop left behind and that now constitute the collection housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society collectively referred to as the Winthrop Papers, seventeenth-century alchemists such as Winthrop were committed to a tradition of alchemical secrecy that keeps specific alchemical information hidden from the modern historian behind a veil of ciphers, textual lacunas, and oblique references to information too valuable to be put in writing. As a result, the modern historian of seventeenth-century occult science is often left to “sift through the evidence he has about the evidence he doesn’t have and hopes he has correctly interpreted his clues” (11).

The opening chapter places John Winthrop, Jr., in the context of the wider European resurgence of “occult philosophy” during the Renaissance, particularly of the sixteenth-century traditions of such Italian Renaissance Neoplatonic Hermeticists as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, of such Northern Renaissance figures as Agrippa and Paracelsus, and of such English Elizabethan occult philosophers as John Dee and Thomas Tymme. It also places Winthrop in the context of the Rosicrucian movement, Francis Bacon’s prophetic “Great Instauration” of scientific reform, and the fervent millenarianism of the Puritan Revolution, which saw a flood of publications in alchemical tracts that espoused alchemy as “both a chemical and a spiritual undertaking whose practices mirrored and symbolized the spiritual objectives of the Puritan saint” (38). Chapter two places Winthrop in the more specific context of a seventeenth-century Northern European “Pansophic” movement, a trans-Atlantic “Republic of Alchemy” striving for universal wisdom and reform and including German, Dutch, English, and colonial American men of science who aimed at a “fusion of pragmatic economics and spiritual intentions” and that often bridged sectarian boundaries (45). Due to the Christian Neoplatonism that he shared with others in this circle, such as Samuel Hartlib, Jan Comenius, Edward Howes, and John and Abraham Kuffler, Winthrop kept a conspicuously low profile in the great sectarian schisms that plagued colonial New England in its early years, such as the Antinomian controversy of the 1630s, in which Winthrop appears to have been at odds (if not in open conflict) with the Puritan orthodoxy led by his father. Instead, Winthrop was busy in spearheading various pansophical projects that would put his alchemical knowledge to the public use of universal reformation through technological and scientific advancement, such as the establishment of a salt-making enterprise in New England. Winthrop was hereby greatly energized by his travels in Europe, in the course of which he met Hartlib and others, and from which he returned to New England in 1643 on an “alchemical errand into the wilderness,” filled with a sense of optimism and possibility.

One of the products of Winthrop’s pansophical program in America during the 1640s was the founding of New London as a visionary center for his alchemical undertakings, particularly the establishment of a New England ironworks and black lead mines. Woodward argues that Winthrop’s alchemical knowledge and philosophy profoundly shaped his responses to the challenges with which his fledgling settlement was faced from the outset, particularly volatile Indian relations in the aftermath of the Pequot War. For example, Winthrop carefully and deliberately cultivated a perception of himself among the Indians as not only “an English paramount sachem” [leader] but also, aided by his expertise in medicine, as a shaman. As an alchemist, Woodward suggests, Winthrop may have had an understanding of Native shamanism superior to that of most of his contemporaries, as there were certain similarities in European occult philosophy and Native shamanism (112). Yet the complications of inter-tribal and inter-colonial politics ultimately forced Winthrop to scale back his ambitions for New London, as he was unable to secure support and protection from his suspicious New English neighbors in Connecticut and New Haven against the continuous harassments by the Mohegan sachem Uncas, who saw Winthrop and his new colony as a threat to his own ascendancy after the Pequots’ defeat.

Nevertheless, Winthrop’s reputation as an alchemical adept and healer did greatly enhance his social prestige throughout colonial New England to the point where he was eventually elected governor of Connecticut in 1657. Woodward argues that Winthrop’s engulfment in alchemy profoundly shaped his approach to the office, especially when it came to that colony’s handling of witchcraft prosecutions. Whereas Connecticut had previously had the highest rate of witch executions in New England, it saw a sudden and dramatic drop under Winthrop’s watch. Whereas historians of witchcraft persecutions in New England have usually attributed this drop to the emergence of a new scientific rationalism emanating from England to the colonies, Woodward argues that it is to Winthrop’s superior understanding of “the role of occult forces in the operations of nature … that Connecticut’s sudden and sustained reluctance to prosecute witches must be attributed” (211)—as well as to his wariness of the potential difficulties of disentangling folk magic, often construed as witchcraft when practiced by persons of low social rank, from the “occult philosophy” practiced by the learned such as himself.

Woodward closes the book with an investigation of Winthrop’s interactions with the Royal Society of London during the 1660s, in the geopolitical context of the newly restored monarchy’s attempt to centralize political and economic control over the colonies by rolling back some of their autonomies previously granted in their royal charters. Despite the fact that Winthrop regarded many of his fellow Fellows in the Royal Society as scientific kindred spirits, he realized that he, as governor of Connecticut, and the Royal Society of London ultimately had conflicting interests in the pursuit of natural knowledge about colonial America. He therefore skillfully resisted all requests to produce a natural history of his colony and withheld information that would be useful to the newly restored monarchy’s efforts to centralize political and economic control over the colonies and maximize its mercantilist extraction of New England’s natural resources.

Given the methodological challenges involved in chronicling the history of a “secret” science, some of Woodward’s local conclusions must remain somewhat speculative. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that by the end of this magnificently rich, wide-ranging, and suggestive book, he is able to conclude convincingly that the practice of alchemy was pervasive in colonial New England and that it had an important role to play in colonial American history. Prospero’s America hereby holds important implications for the study not only of early American history but also the history of science by putting another nail in the coffin of the argument, once put forward by Brian Vickers and others, that there were clear distinctions between “scientific” and “occult” mentalities in the early modern period, the former being on a trajectory to modern science and the latter obstructing its “progress.”

In reconstructing the history of seventeenth-century alchemy in the context of the trans-Atlantic (largely Protestant) pansophic movement, Woodward’s book joins a growing body of scholarship in the history of science by William Newman, Charles Webster, Patricia Watson, John T. Young and others. Nonetheless, we should not forget that the practice of alchemy was by no means particular to Protestant reformers. Pamela Smith has demonstrated the important role that alchemy played in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire. Similarly, historians of Spanish science such as José María López Piñero have shown that Paracelsus (who himself never converted to Protestantism) was widely known in early modern Spain; and that Spain had long been the hub for the influx of alchemical knowledge into Europe as far back as Alfonso the Wise (1221-1284), who instigated, in Toledo, the Latin translation of the seminal Arabic texts used by medieval European alchemists. Still in the sixteenth century, Philip II established one of the greatest alchemical laboratories of Europe in his monastic palace of El Escorial. By the same token, much of the Spanish quest in the New World was motivated by an “alchemical” spirit similar to that of Winthrop, fusing as it did material with spiritual considerations. Nevertheless, given Woodward’s specific focus on the New England Puritan John Winthrop, Jr., it makes good sense to emphasize the connections between the early modern resurgence of alchemy and the Protestant Reformation, in which alchemy served as a “useful counter to the Catholic universalism of the Habsburg Empire” (24). Woodward’s book will be a “must read” for all historians of early New England and for historians of early modern science.

The Bourgeois Frontier trumpets the role of French merchants, as traders in furs and builders of towns, in the making of the American West. The last sentence of Jay Gitlin’s book summarizes its author’s bold ambition: “Move over Uncle Sam and make room for Oncle Auguste” (190). With this assertion, Gitlin leaves readers to ponder how the history of the United States, especially the course of its westward expansion, looks different when French entrepreneurs are placed alongside (and maybe even put in place of) the Anglo-American adventurers who have typically dominated histories of the American frontier.

Gitlin offers a number of reasons why American historians have failed to connect these French traders to the history of national expansion in the nineteenth century. Heading Gitlin’s list is the pernicious legacy of Francis Parkman. More than a century ago, Parkman perpetrated the stereotype of French colonists in the New World as illiterate and primitive people. Few in number, French colonists, in Parkman’s depiction, were a motley crew of farmers clinging tenaciously to medieval ways and traders mingling promiscuously with Indians. The backwardness of French colonists left them unable to compete after Americans moved in. Accordingly, their impact on American development effectively ended with the defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War. Not so, retorts Gitlin. His portrayal emphasizes instead the “bourgeois” character of the French who settled in the interior of North America and set about developing the Mississippi Valley and the west beyond in the century after 1763. Putting the French in their rightful place in American history, Gitlin insists, requires “put[ting] Parkman behind us” (7).

In addition to blaming Parkman, Gitlin faults the east-to-west orientation that has long governed our historical vision for depriving the French of their rightful place. The world of the “interior French” in the middle of North America followed the flow of the Mississippi River and thus ran along a north-south axis. This region, which Gitlin dubs the “Creole Corridor,” was a crescent-shaped arc that stretched from Detroit to New Orleans. An inland archipelago of towns and villages, these amounted to a series of dots amidst a vast ocean of Indian lands. Part of the region came into the United States in the 1780s and 1790s, the rest transferred with the Louisiana Purchase. Yet many of the towns within the Creole Corridor and a good portion of the Indian countries around them retained a French twang well after Americans claimed control over the “Great West.” Gitlin acknowledges that the cultural hegemony of the French eroded during the first third of the nineteenth century. Still, he contends that this eclipse was less interesting than the “persistence” of French words and French ways “over so large a region for so many decades after the incorporation of that region into the United States” (1).

American historians have also failed to connect the French dots because the urban and cosmopolitan world of French entrepreneurs in the Creole Corridor stands at odds with the West of the American imagination. The firms, or “maisons,” that French merchants established had their base in towns and the “calculus of commerce” (27) that guided their operations and investments seemed to contradict the ideal of wide open spaces and the myth of Jeffersonian agrarianism that American historians long presumed defined the frontier. French merchants, most prominently Auguste Chouteau and his family, who hold the spotlight in Gitlin’s book, lacked the dashing qualities that Americans preferred in their pioneer heroes. That, though, should not diminish the importance of the Chouteaus of St. Louis or their like-minded French brethren in other towns within the Creole Corridor. “One might even claim,” proposes Gitlin, “that the Great West during this period was in many ways more an extension of Creole St. Louis than of Jefferson’s Virginia” (123).

No doubt, many will scoff at Gitlin’s revisionist propositions and dispute the greater importance of Creole St. Louis and Oncle Auguste. Some of Gitlin’s points do come across as overstated and others as assaults on straw men. Consider his attack on Francis Parkman, which parallels the salvoes that “new western historians” launched against Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1980s and 1990s. But where Turner remained relevant to scholarly interpretations of western history, Parkman’s shadow seems now to be a rather short one. Only specialists, and not many of them, read Parkman’s colonial epics. Focus on the Atlantic World and continental approaches to early America have dislodged Britain’s mainland colonists from the central place that Parkman assigned to them. Moreover, the French have gained new-found prominence, at least in colonial history courses. Thanks to Richard White, the middle ground, a co-creation of French and Indians, has emerged of late as the field’s most influential paradigm.

If the middle ground has made the French more critical to eighteenth-century American history, it offers little to explain their continuing activities and what Gitlin sees as their enduring achievements in the nineteenth century. For White, the middle ground survived beyond the Seven Years’ War (albeit in a bastardized form). Indians hoped for its true restoration, and some creoles wished for it too. But the French father did not return, and the middle ground, as conceived by White, suffered its final demise after the War of 1812. The disappearance of the middle ground as a political entity did not, however, end French influence in the Creole Corridor and across the Great West. To the contrary, in Gitlin’s account, French Creoles prospered precisely because they were “steeped in the process of middle-grounding, of occupying a cultural and social space of accommodation” (120). Their success rested as well on continuing creative adaptations and ongoing access to inside information. Not static enterprises, French houses profited first from the trade with Indians, then from the trade in lands made available by the dispossession of Indians, and finally from speculation in urban lots and engagement in the diverse portfolio of opportunities offered by the Great West, particularly to those who maintained the right connections.

Indeed, connections emerge here as the key factor. These included the traders’ ties to multiple Indian groups and to government officials, often representing multiple, shifting, and sometimes competing regimes. Above all were familial connections. In contrast with their “situational” political allegiances, French merchants understood that “their ultimate loyalty was to family” (114), which represented the “cornerstone of both business and society” (187). These tended to be extensive and multi-generational. As Gitlin explains, the long-term “success of the Chouteaus” and other French houses depended on “the way in which they gathered relatives” as much as “the way in which they gathered furs” (135).

As many people as the Chouteaus and other trading families incorporated and employed, they composed only a fraction of the interior French population. French communities in the Creole Corridor, Gitlin reminds readers several times, were “not simple or homogeneous.” The interior French included transplanted Canadians along with immigrants from “a variety of provinces and colonies in the Old World and the New” (9). Every settlement also boasted numbers of men, women, and children of African descent, slave and free, the exclusion of which renders any portrait of French culture in the region incomplete. But while Gitlin references the presence of diverse francophones, he pays only passing attention to them. The expectations and experiences of those who cultivated the soil, of slaves on plantations in Lower Louisiana and habitants on small farms in the Illinois Country, are not Gitlin’s concern. His focus falls almost entirely on those whose incomes derived principally from commerce. And even within this select group, his eyes fix on those at the top of the house, not the larger number of workers below, whose economic and cultural horizons were far more limited than Auguste Chouteau’s.

It is Chouteau and those most like him who are the principal subjects of The Bourgeois Frontier. That is fitting, because these men best make Gitlin’s case. Their enterprises helped to make the West American, even if their own national affections were never so fixed or single-minded. Their ways of living stamped them as “bourgeois to the core” (9), even if their pursuit of profit was ever entangled with familial concerns. We should be careful, however, not to mistake the core for the whole or to make Auguste Chouteau into Oncle Auguste and treat him as a synecdoche for the interior French.

If not the whole story of the Creole Corridor, The Bourgeois Frontier is an essential contribution that challenges and changes the way we think, teach, and write about the French connection to American expansion. That is what books that matter do, and The Bourgeois Frontieris certainly a book that matters.

The jacket of Douglas R. Egerton’s Death or Libertypromises a narrative that “brims with compelling portraits of forgotten figures.” The people who fill this book’s pages are certainly compelling, but the “forgotten” label—so often attached to histories of early African Americans—is misleading. Egerton’s elegant synthetic history was made possible by a decades-long explosion of scholarly interest in slavery, African American history, and ordinary people’s experiences in the American Revolution. Public historians and schoolteachers have worked hard to bring these stories to broader audiences, with plentiful books, public television series, Websites, and museum exhibits now available for those interested in learning about African Americans in the Revolutionary era.

I make this point not to diminish the significance of Egerton’s contribution but rather to underscore it. There is so much material out there on African Americans and the American Revolution that a synthesis has been sorely needed. The value ofDeath or Liberty is that it offers new revelations to readers familiar with this field, even as it provides a lucid and informative introduction to those not deeply immersed in it.

The book draws on two large and complex bodies of scholarship. The first is the social and political history of African Americans: their choices about taking sides in the conflict between Britain and the United States; their formation of families, communities, churches, and social institutions; their acts of resistance, self-assertion, and revolution against slavery and racism. The second concerns the relationship between slavery and the broader politics of the American Revolution: slavery’s significance to the various colonies’ decisions whether or not to rebel against Britain; its role in framing the Articles of Confederation and Constitution; its centrality in early national debates about westward expansion. The former body of scholarship tends to be organized around agency; the latter around power. One of this book’s strengths is that it brings these two analytical frameworks together. Most of the chapters begin with a vignette concerning one man or woman whose story sets in motion the major theme of that chapter. The focus on particular lives emphasizes the agency of African Americans—how they made their own history. But (to echo Marx) they hardly did so just as they pleased. Recognizing this, Egerton constructs intricate pictures of the worlds of power that African Americans lived under, participated in, and struggled against. To do so, particularly in the later chapters, he uses not only secondary scholarship but also records of the Constitutional convention, Congressional debates, and legal proceedings.

To understand African American experience under slavery, it is imperative to consider region, and not just in northern versus southern terms. Egerton is attentive to the difference geography made in Revolutionary African Americans’ lives. In his stage-setting first chapter, the narrative moves north to south, from Canada to the Caribbean, describing the history, demography, economy, and culture of slavery in each zone of British America. Three chapters at the center of the book highlight the regional variation in African Americans’ wartime and post-war experiences by focusing on three overarching areas of the colonies that declared independence: the North, where the Revolution ushered in a gradual end to slavery, if not to racism; the Upper South, where the antislavery sympathies of influential whites never materialized into emancipationist policy; and the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, where slavery’s grip remained firm throughout the Revolutionary period and beyond.

Interwoven with these geographically focused sections is a narrative of change over time. The second and third chapters chronicle the 1770s as a time of relative opportunity, when black men and women took advantage of the swelling natural rights rhetoric and the dislocations of war to seek better lives for themselves and their families. The 1780s, by contrast, were a period of “counterrevolution” (247). Virulent racism curtailed the freedoms even of the emancipated; politicians from both North and South joined forces to protect the interests of slaveowners. In his gripping final chapter, Egerton traces how these challenges to black freedom developed until, late in 1796, “political and international realities coincided to give new hope to antislavery activists and reverse the counterrevolutionary trend under way in much of the Republic since 1783” (265). But a full turnaround was not to be. The chapter closes in April 1803 with the death of Toussaint Louverture and the Louisiana Purchase, two events signaling how African Americans would struggle to achieve the liberation symbolized by Toussaint even as slavery expanded for six decades to come.

Readers interested in learning more about Egerton’s material may find the documentation frustrating. The citations for quotations from primary sources often lead only to secondary works. A bibliographic essay would have been a welcome addition to a book likely to be many readers’ entrée into the subject. The methodology of early African American history is innovative: it has had to be, given the limitations of the sources. Saying more about the ways that scholars have gotten around the limitations and biases of the written record might have helped readers better understand possible distortions or omissions in the narrative Egerton has pieced together.

Given the depth of Egerton’s research, I wish he had offered more assessment of the major debates and problems in the relevant scholarship. Perhaps the most vexing question likely to linger in readers’ minds is this: would black men and women in the colonies that became the United States have been better off if there had never been an American Revolution? Like all counterfactuals, this question is perhaps unfair, and impossible to answer decisively, yet it rankles. Some have argued that even if the Revolution did not liberate most African Americans from slavery and racism immediately, it at least gave them the tools and language to fight for their freedom in the decades—and centuries—to follow. Egerton seems dissatisfied with this argument, or at least with the suggestion that the long-term value of Revolutionary rhetoric can somehow make up for the short-term inadequacies of the event itself. He cautions us against judging “the Revolution by what it meant to antebellum reformers, to the Civil War generation, or even to us”; he wants us instead “to judge it by what it meant to people such as William Lee, or Colonel Tye, or Elizabeth Freeman, or Richard Allen, or Gabriel,” all of whose stories appear in this book’s pages (12).

It’s hard to determine what the Revolution meant to this cast of characters, who took different sides in the military and political struggle and experienced divergent fortunes in its aftermath. What is clearer is how Egerton himself regards the Revolution. At one point, he calls it “a Revolution that spoke in bold terms but at best limped slowly down the path of human rights” (12); at another, he notes that “for most former slaves, the pursuit of happiness and freedom, ironically, was available only in British colonies…and not in the Republic that trumpeted its support of natural rights” (197); he laments “the majority of Africans and African Americans who were betrayed by the failings of the American Revolution” (221). The language of failure and irony may actually serve to soften Egerton’s critique of the Revolution. In this framework, the problems of African Americans in the nascent republic stemmed from the incompleteness of the Revolution, from its leaders’ blindness, excessive caution, hypocrisy. This is a persuasive argument, and an appealing one, for it preserves our sense that the Revolution was fundamentally about liberty and equality. But this interpretation glosses over the ways in which the hardships endured by African Americans in the new nation stemmed from less celebrated aspects of Revolutionary ideology—including what Egerton calls in passing “the darker side of Lockean theory…its emphasis on the sanctity of property” (159). If we take the alternative view seriously, we might understand the expansion of slavery in the early republic not as the ironic result of a fight for natural rights but instead as the logical outcome of a white settler rebellion.

The earliest histories of blacks and the Revolution were written to root African Americans in the nation’s primary historical narrative, thereby securing their claims to equal citizenship with whites. Egerton makes this point with respect to Benjamin Quarles, whose influential The Negro in the American Revolution (1961) coincided with the integrationist phase of the twentieth-century black liberation struggle. A similar observation could be made of black historian-activists a century earlier, notably William Cooper Nell, author of The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). In putting before skeptical white audiences figures such as Crispus Attucks, Elizabeth Freeman (“Mum Bett”), and Prince Whipple (all of whom appear in Death or Liberty), one of Nell’s principal goals was to change the way his readers thought about people of color. But the synthesis of Revolutionary and African American historiography also has the potential to change how we think about the Revolution itself. Today, with Revolutionary-era African Americans making their way into school curricula, popular histories, and public commemorations, the challenge is to ensure that these representations do not simply reinforce triumphant narratives of heroic progress but instead invite people to think about how revolutionary the Revolution really was. Death or Liberty doesn’t resolve that persistent question, but this learned, textured, and sobering narrative provides ample fodder for debating it in new and nuanced ways.

Insightful and lucid, Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Importance of Feeling English addresses the clean division of English and American literary traditions reflected in the structure of English departments at many American universities and perpetuated by the field’s major anthologies. Tennenhouse begins this project by asking an important question: when did anglophone literature begin to “divide internally into recognizable British and American traditions?” (1).

Looking for a model that “acknowledge[s] a perplexed but continuing relationship between nation-state and national culture,” Tennenhouse draws on what he calls a “culturalist view of diaspora” (3). Where the classic concept of diaspora maintains the connection between home and migrant community and expresses that community’s desire to eventually return home, Tennenhouse’s adoption of a “looser concept” of diaspora displaces the homeland—which, in the case of British North Americans after the Revolution, had “disappear[ed] as a geopolitical site to which the diasporic group can entertain the possibility of actually returning”—with a set of cultural practices that effectively reproduce the mother culture outside of the homeland (5). The Importance of Feeling English explores the fascinating reproducibility of English culture in North America; asks how it achieved hegemony over other diasporic cultures; and asks how, and under what conditions, its literary output became a national literature.

The focus throughout the book is largely on literary form—from captivity narratives to sentimental novels to gothic fiction—and the models of nation building each form presents in both its British and American incarnations. For example, Tennenhouse takes up the ideological divergence between the English and American versions of Samuel Richardson’s seduction novels and asks how the American Richardson addresses American interests. Americans dispensed with the British focus on letter writing and literary cultures. In the process, they shifted readers’ attention from heroines’ inner lives to their bodies. American-authored seduction stories, like the American redaction of Clarissa, Tennenhouse argues, “used the European libertine to think about the new nation as an aggregate of individuals capable of resolving differences of rank, status, and region through marriage,” through the exchange of women between households (71). Contrary to the captivity narrative, which typically insists on the captive daughter’s sexual purity and, therefore, “insists on preserving the group’s purity in the face of potential pollution” (119-20), these stories suggest that diasporic communities, replete with “fractured and makeshift families,” were not so much interested in the “loss of purity as [in] one’s fidelity to an idea of a home one imagined to be English” (63).

Americans reworked the gothic, just as they reworked the sentimental. Tennenhouse convincingly demonstrates how Americans replaced the Europeans’ signature convention—the castle or ruins—with a “secret history.” This plot device renders characters fundamentally unknowable to others (or to themselves) and inhibits them from forming an affective community. Where American sentimental novels imagined affective communities based on sympathetic identification, gothic fiction created communities based on contagion, coalesced by paranoia (115). Along these lines, Tennenhouse displaces Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” as the consummate American gothic tale in favor of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Tennenhouse reads Hawthorne’s short story as a revision of Adam Smith’s widely read theory of moral sentiments and concludes, “According to Hawthorne, Smith’s model fails brilliantly in a community of dispersed individuals cut off from a place of origin and a collective history, because the coherence of such a community will depend on whom that group excludes rather than on how far it can extend its capacity for sympathetic identification” (115). In these terms, Tennenhouse views the gothic as a model for nation building that rethinks the terms of the originary community and patriarchal family in diaspora.

In a chapter that he claims will give us “a sense of what a literary history might look like were its goal to reveal how the two different national traditions developed in relation to each other rather than each in its own terms from different points of origin” (74), Tennenhouse traces the transatlantic origins of America’s unique brand of masculinity. To tell this story, he turns to the publication history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Clara Howard (1801). A reworking of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), Brown’s epistolary novel revised its European prototype’s depiction of the relationship between masculinity, sensibility, and literacy. Instead of fashioning a protagonist so burdened with sensibility that he is incapable of action and unable to acquire social position, Brown’s “man of feeling” is “empower[ed] … to act on behalf of ‘moral causes.'” Indeed, it is precisely this capacity for action, rather than his exalted prose, that enables him to marry a woman of superior birth and navigate a complicated social hierarchy (79). This idealized masculinity moved back and forth across the Atlantic: Tennenhouse reconstructs the publication history of Clara Howard to suggest that it prompted Jane Austen to transform her presentation of masculinity. The men who finally win the hands of Austen’s heroines “demonstrate that intense feelings unknown to the heroine lurk behind an exterior of paternal concern, extreme reserve, lukewarm affection, and even dislike” (85). Austen’s version of Brown’s “man of feeling”—the quintessentially American strong, silent type—then makes its way back across the Atlantic and into the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. This compelling literary genealogy, which Tennenhouse traces through to Twain and Hemingway, suggests that American masculinity owed less to the frontier than to transatlantic exchange.

Perhaps the most valuable question this book raises is how English culture achieved hegemony over other diasporic cultures in North America and whether, as Tennenhouse puts it, it is “reasonable to call the English in America a ‘diasporic’ group,” given that the English (along with their American literature) become the basis of a new, more powerful nation (127). His answer is yes and no. On the one hand, the group that establishes the legal language and the terms of citizenship surely cannot be considered subordinate—the status usually associated with diaspora. On the other, as Tennenhouse argues throughout, in America, the English were but one transplanted group among many. They were in no way preordained to dominate the cultural field.

Despite Tennenhouse’s modest claims that “we stand to learn something new about American literature and its curious relation to English culture by thinking of it in terms of a diasporic literature,” his book helps revise the way we construct literary histories and challenges critics who attempt to locate something distinctly “American” in the literary output of the United States well before the 1850s (8). There is, obviously, much at stake in recognizing the diasporic relationships in North America. English departments at American universities and the leading anthologies in the field have been organized around a clean division of British and American literary traditions more or less coeval with America’s political independence. Tennenhouse urges us to look beyond the political schism of the Revolution toward a generic English culture that was reproduced and adapted in colonial North America and that ironically became even more English after the colonists won political independence.

This important book has implications for a far wider account of cultural exchange than Tennenhouse himself focuses on here. He uses a focused exploration of literary genealogy to ask questions about the development of American culture in the United States as a particular brand of Englishness. But there are limits to the kinds of things that literary history narrowly defined (the history of books and their publication in America and abroad) can tell us about culture more generally. Tennenhouse mentions the “rise in consumption of English goods” and the “re-Anglicization” of America after the Revolution but does not describe how these goods and processes influenced and functioned in the everyday lives of Americans (8). What else, for example, contributed to American masculinity and Cooper’s particular definition of manhood other than Jane Austen’s novels? Tennenhouse’s literary genealogies are compelling in their own right, but they cannot represent the totality of cultural development in the United States over the course of one hundred years, especially when we remember that the United States was a rapidly expanding nation that brought disparate diasporic cultures into contact with one another. In short, the transformation from diasporic to hegemonic was not accomplished by British Americans alone. The Importance of Feeling English encourages additional consideration about the relationships among diasporic cultures, including Spanish and African, in frontiers far away from the Northeast, which might be more sensitive to spatial and regional differences in an expanding United States.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Spencer Snow is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation is entitled, “Reading the Map: The Nationalization of Geographic Space, Reading Publics, and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century American Identity.”