Reading early American books

In their introduction to this issue of Common-place, the editors ask why early American books have remained unread outside university English departments, even as nonfiction studies of Revolutionary and early U.S. history and biography have achieved extraordinary popular success. Scholars of early American literature sometimes gaze wistfully at best-selling biographies and award-winning miniseries and wish that some of that limelight would fall on our texts. We’d like others to share our pleasure in early American texts and to appreciate the insights they offer into American culture, or at least to know that American literature begins before The Scarlet Letter. But many early American texts are reaching audiences outside the academy—audiences of religious readers, for whom the texts remain current and spiritually compelling.

Religious presses have long been reprinting texts by early American writers, including both Puritans and Quakers. Amazon.com offers several paperback editions of Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, along with one edition for Kindle and three editions of John Woolman’s Journal (fig. 1). On January 12, 2008, three editions of Sinners were ranked around 250,000, and three editions of Woolman’s Journal were ranked in the top 100,000 items, with one at 52,845. Amazon’s sales figures suggest that these editions are reaching readers, and at least some such texts seem to be having an impact. A recent profile of New Calvinist minister Mark Driscoll in the New York Times Magazine reported that “paperback reprints of old Puritan treatises in the corner of a local bookstore piqued [Driscoll’s] interest in Reformation theology.”

Scholars of early America have long drawn on religious publications for our work; before online digital collections, religious presses’ facsimile reprints of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were the most affordable and available editions of the texts we study. But we’ve generally not viewed pious readers as indicators of early American literature’s popularity, in part because religious editions often encourage readers to emulate their authors and adopt their beliefs. For example, John H. Gerstner’s introduction to Thomas Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins exhorts:

Reader, beware! The Puritans are never “light” reading. However, Edwards is relatively easy alongside Shepard in the Parable … This work is valuable in inverse proportion to its readability. Don’t read it! Study it; a few pages at a time; decipher it. Live with it. Die with it. It may not save you, but it will leave you in no doubt if you are saved and even less if you are not …

If that’s not worth $29.95, I don’t know what is!

Gerstner offers the book as an aid to spiritual self-knowledge and perhaps even salvation. In our classrooms, we take a very different approach. I often find myself reassuring students that I have no interest in preparing them for Christ’s coming or even in advocating Puritanism, Quakerism, or Deism. And I discourage students who want to judge whose faith is truest, explaining that although we’re interested in how various religious beliefs shaped the texts we’re reading, we aren’t taking sides.

But such claims aren’t entirely honest. While I don’t ask students to assess whether Anne Bradstreet’s or Thomas Shepard’s beliefs are closer to their own, early Americanists do often have allegiances to authors and texts. Perry Miller’s essays on covenant theology and preparationist soteriology reveal impatience bordering on affront with these encroachments on pure Calvinism, perhaps surprising in a scholar who referred to himself as a “goddam atheist.” And in a 1986 lecture that influenced my approach to Puritan texts, when Janice Knight distinguished between the “Spiritual Brethren” and the “Intellectual Fathers” of Puritanism, she called the Spiritual Brethren “my guys.”

Such allegiances enliven and shape our scholarship and our teaching. My own entanglement in Puritan texts emerged from a sense of connection with Anne Hutchinson and from frustration with accounts that seemed to trivialize Hutchinson’s concerns by treating theological issues as secondary. Scholars of Quakerism seem more comfortable acknowledging links between their faith and their scholarship. In his introduction to The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman (2003), Mike Heller praises the collected essays as models of “dispassionate research” by scholars whose “lives also are touched personally and spiritually by Woolman’s writings” (xi). The collection includes a section titled “Scholars Who Became Disciples,” and biographies of several contributors refer to their membership in the Society of Friends. Of course, not all scholars who work in Quaker studies are Friends, and not all Puritanists take sides. But many readers have strong personal responses to early American texts.

Jonathan Edwards, for example, grabs hold of some readers. While most people who learn that I’m an early Americanist assume that I work on The Scarlet Letter, every so often someone says instead, “Oh, Jonathan Edwards?” and then quotes with great relish from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. My friend David even quoted Edwards at length in a lay sermon he delivered on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath before Yom Kippur. When I asked him later why he had chosen to discuss Sinners—hardly an orthodox text in our fairly traditional synagogue—he explained that he had studied Edwards with Richard Slotkin at Wesleyan University. A former music major who now works in finance, David remembered several course texts favorably, including “Indian stuff,” sermons, Franklin’s Autobiography, and Melville. But he had returned only to Edwards’s sermon, not as the Christian reader envisioned by Protestant presses, but as an observant Jew who rejects many of Edwards’s fundamental assumptions. While David’s sermon challenged Edwards’s view of repentance, reading Sinners nevertheless made a meaningful connection for him. David found Edwards’s visceral appeal and sense of immediacy relevant to his own community; they spoke to his sense “that not everything is optional, and that the synagogue is not the time to take the academic view of God and religion. Particularly, shabbat shuvah is a good time for a ‘spider over the pit of hell’ kind of speech. I was less discussing him [than] I was adopting his view of the world.” While this explanation surprised me, I suspect that many of our students make similar connections as they wrestle with early American texts and that the texts affect readers in ways we don’t anticipate.

Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple has provoked intense responses from surprisingly diverse readers since its 1791 publication. Published in more than two hundred editions, Rowson’s novel is, in Cathy Davidson’s words, “one of America’s … all-time bestsellers” (159). Rowson specifically addresses young women (“Oh my dear girls—for to such only am I writing”), but her readers have included aggressively masculine men as well (29). One such reader was Reverend C. H. Covell, a sailor-turned-minister who placed Charlotte Temple at the center of his narrative of sea adventure and spiritual transformation. Indeed, the surprising account that appeared in the March 1906 Springfield Republican claimed that Covell “really owes his life to the book.”

In 1844, having deserted a whaling ship commanded by an abusive captain, Covell found himself stranded at Port Ottoway in Patagonia. Several of his companions starved to death and another “lost his mind,” but fortunately Charlotte Temple intervened by catalyzing the conversion of another sea captain, William A. Brown, commander of the Peruvian. Captain Brown was “one of those harsh unfeeling men that were found in such large numbers in command at that time.” But finding Charlotte Temple among the “promiscuous” reading material on board, Captain Brown was transformed by it. As he read, “The two characters of Montraville and LaRue grew more and more detestable as they revealed themselves to his awakened conscience. He began to question himself: ‘What prevents me from being just as base and as treacherous as they are pictured to be? Why, there is nothing but a pardoning Savior. I am as bad as they are. I have ill-treated my crew, and driven them to suicide; lashed them in the rigging and flogged them upon their bare backs to gratify my violent temper.’” Inspired to pray, “Capt. Brown became a changed man from that time,” reforming both self and ship:

no longer profanity and abuse to be used by his officers upon the sailors, no unnecessary labor upon the Lord’s day, not even standing of mast-heads, which is considered one of the most essential duties on board a whale ship; prayer meetings in the cabin to which all the crew were invited, but none compelled (and here I want to say that the crew numbered 30 men), not a Christian aboard when they sailed from home, but before the close of the voyage 27 of that crew were living true and honest lives. This great change was begun and wrought by one man, who was led to see his condition by reading the story of “Charlotte Temple,” which turned his attention to the book of books for salvation.

Covell credits Charlotte Temple with twenty-eight sailor-converts, along with wondrous material success. For despite Brown’s resolution to do “no unnecessary work … on Sunday, … no lowering of boats even if whales were seen, … he carried into New London the largest cargo of sperm oil ever carried in the same length of time.”

Moreover, while sailing for home, the transformed Captain Brown experienced a recurring vision, seeing “men suffering” in the gulf of Penas “just as plainly as though they were standing before him.” After two days without food or sleep, Captain Brown described his visions to the worried first mate and confessed his fear that they would drive him “crazy.” First mate Howe proposed a detour to the bay, but Brown worried that the men would think he was “losing [his] mind, or … growing childish.” Howe nevertheless approached the crew and explained the captain’s predicament, and they responded “with one accord, … ‘Whatever the captain wants to do, do it. We are willing.’” At Port Ottoway, they found and rescued Covell’s party. Covell’s account concludes, “I have given the bare facts, without detail, of what took place in a man’s life, the beginning of which was reading of the story of ‘Charlotte Temple.’ Blessings on his memory. All names and descriptions are real, no fiction. I am one of the rescued.”

A century later, Rowson’s novel continues to move readers in surprising ways. One afternoon in 2005, a student entered my office and proclaimed dramatically, “Charlotte Temple saved me.” How, you may ask (as did I). My student replied that she had been shopping when an older man approached her. As she began to feel uneasy, the man asked for her phone number. And then, she explained, “I heard Susanna Rowson in my head saying, ‘be assured, it is now past the days of romance: no woman can be run away with contrary to her own inclination’” (29). She walked away, relieved and feeling that Rowson’s guidance remained timely and relevant two centuries after Charlotte Temple’s publication.

Charlotte Temple is also inscribed in the New York landscape, in the form of a grave marked “Charlotte Temple” in Trinity Churchyard (fig. 2). During the nineteenth century, the gravesite was the “Most Popular Spot in Trinity Churchyard,” with almost daily visitors “in good weather.” Who, if anyone, is actually buried there is unclear, as parish records were destroyed by fires in 1750 and 1776. Some accounts suggest that the stone marks the grave of Charlotte Stanley, a young woman seduced by Rowson’s cousin, who may have been the model for Charlotte Temple. According to this theory, “After Mrs. Rowson told her story and all the readers began to visit the grave, the arms of Stanley and the name were removed from the tomb and the name of Temple substituted.”

In 1897, Henry Tyler offered a more skeptical account, interpreting the empty rectangle on the stone as evidence “that a former inscription was effaced and cut out, or else that … a memorial plate of metal, [was] subsequently removed.” The fire of 1776 left Trinity Churchyard “a waste of ruins,” and gravestones were moved during the reconstruction of the church from 1839 to 1846. “Among the waifs and strays was the brownstone slab,” Tyler explained, rhetorically associating the gravestone itself with poor Charlotte. “The metal memorial tablet having been lost or stolen, … some workman, or perhaps some sentimentally inclined parishioner in charge of the work of restoration, conceived the idea of filling in the blank with the fiction-name of Charlotte Temple.” Tyler conceded that this theory was “but a conjecture,” and predicted that “‘Charlotte Temple’s grave’ [would] not cease to attract gentle footsteps along the winding path, and bid them pause for her memory’s sake.” Despite his skepticism, Tyler did not mock such pilgrims: “None need think their sympathy wasted; for alas! there were only too many Charlotte Temples in fact if there was not one who bore the name.”

When my students saw photos of the gravestone, they were fascinated and decided to visit. A New York City transit strike delayed their outing until July, when one student organized a post-graduation field trip. Without believing that this grave held poor (fictional) Charlotte’s actual remains, my students approached the grave with respect for whoever might be buried there and with a powerful sense of connection to generations of readers who have visited the site (fig. 3).

After visiting the Charlotte Temple grave, we explored the rest of the churchyard. At Alexander Hamilton’s grave, we found a woman who was taking photographs and strewing white rose petals (fig. 4). She announced that it was the anniversary of Hamilton’s 1804 duel with Aaron Burr. “Isn’t it sad?” she asked. As I had never actually grieved over the duel, I paused to consider her question. 

She became impatient. “Do you know what happened? Don’t you know who he was?” she pressed. “Yes,” I replied and then asked what she was doing. She explained that she had learned about Hamilton in high school and had found his story so compelling that she has brought flowers to Hamilton’s grave annually ever since.

After we wandered away, my students asked me, “How could she ask if you knew who he was? Didn’t she know who you are?” I was touched by their exaggerated sense of my fame. (“Who do you think I am?” I asked gently.) And when they commented on the photographer’s eccentricity, I pointed out that we were the ones visiting the fake grave of a fictional character. Of course, my students were not misled by the name carved on the gravestone; they were fascinated by the way Charlotte Temple had engaged its readers and had come to be embodied in this physical site (and others—Tyler describes “at least three places in the city where it has been ‘always’ said that Charlotte Temple lived, or died”). Hamilton’s eccentric admirer offered an opportunity to reflect on the power of early American texts (and figures) to stir unexpected fascinations. Both in her case and in ours, the impulse to visit the churchyard reflected our sense that these eighteenth-century figures (whether real or fictional) were somehow connected to us.

Students’ connections to early American texts—whether to the spiritual message of Jonathan Edwards, the character of Charlotte Temple, or the generations of readers who have read the same texts—are often powerful and thought provoking. A few years ago, a student writing her senior thesis on Abigail Adams faced both personal and technological challenges, and emailed me to request an extension. Her subject line was “I ask myself: What would Abigail Adams do?” I asked her recently about this subject line and described the questions this special issue of Common-place would raise. While she acknowledged that “early American texts aren’t traditional beach reads,” especially since many readers think of “reading anything from even before the twentieth century . . . as hard work,” she insisted on the payoff: “But once one gets through that difficult layer of establishing how the language flows” and how to interpret “all the structural stuff of period literature—I think the opinions and beliefs and experiences that can be understood from the early American texts become … some of the most unique, special, intimate content for someone like me, at my age, as an American, to be engaged with. It’s just most of us are too lazy to approach that first layer!”

My student’s use of the word “intimate” struck me as apt. The readers I’ve discussed here—Reverend Driscoll, my friend David, Captain Brown, my students, even Alexander Hamilton’s flower-strewing admirer—all experienced intimate connections with early American texts. And having connected with these texts, these readers stepped back to reflect on the implications of those connections for their lives and for their understandings of the world.

Part of me still wants to see early American literature occupying the space of David McCullough’s John Adams—the best-seller list, HBO, the Golden Globes, and the carry-on bags of American travelers. I’d like to see the books I love to read and teach more widely enjoyed, even by those to whom they have not been assigned. I want them to be read not only with pleasure but also forpleasure.

But it’s more important to me that early American texts find readers like those I’ve described. Because beyond the pleasures early American texts offer, I also believe that they offer rich and complex understandings of American culture, politics, media, and religion. I want readers to feel connected to these writers and these texts—even as I understand that their connections may be on different terms than mine. But I also hope that they will reflect on those connections, that they will be provoked to think about parallels and distinctions between early America and the present, and that they will be inspired to learn more.

In short, I’d like to receive more emails like the one sent by former student Risa Garza last fall. Risa commented on the connection she perceived between the thesis she’d submitted the previous year and the 2008 presidential election. “On a side note, Governor Palin makes my need to return to Phillis Wheatley even more urgent. Seems like Palin would break the glass ceiling while crushing women’s lib underfoot; it’s really quite an accomplishment.” I was delighted by Risa’s sense that poetry and politics, Wheatley and Palin, political frustration and scholarly work are all connected. Who needs a Golden Globe?

Further Reading:

John Gerstner’s exhortation is found in his introduction to Thomas Shepard’s The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied (1660; reprint London, 1695; reprint Boston, 1852; reprint Ligonier, Pa., 1990): 3-4. Molly Worthen describes Mark Driscoll’s reading in “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” New York Times Magazine (January 6, 2009).

The Oxford University Press edition (1986) of Charlotte Temple (first published in 1791 as Charlotte, a Tale of Truth) includes an introduction by Cathy N. Davidson. Davidson discusses Charlotte Temple’s publication history in “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple,” in Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature & Social History (Baltimore, 1989): 157-179. 

Reverend Covell’s story appeared under the title “Advertising ‘Charlotte Temple’: A True Story of Religious Conversion and Its Mysterious Leading,” in the Springfield Republican 3:13 (March 29, 1906): 13. Accounts of the Charlotte Temple gravestone were printed and reprinted in various magazines and newspapers. Henry Tyler’s investigation of the gravesite, for example, was published in Leslie’s Weekly, then reprinted in the Springfield Republican as “A Shrine of Unhappy Love: Charlotte Temple’s Grave in Trinity Churchyard, New York,” Springfield Republican (November 13, 1897): 3. Speculations about Charlotte Stanley appear in A. b. D., “Who Was Charlotte Temple?” St. Louis Republic 85:22898 (February 19, 1893): 26, and A. b. D., “Charlotte Temple,” Philadelphia Inquirer 128:50 (February 19, 1893): 13. Other examples available through Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers include the following: “Died for Love, and Now, Her Grave is Always Covered with Flowers,” Birmingham Age Herald 21:45 (December 30, 1894): 2, reprinted from the New York Herald, and “Charlotte Temple’s Grave: The Most Popular Spot in Trinity Churchyard, New York,” Grand Forks Daily Herald 14:28 (December 2, 1894): 4. C. J. Hughes describes a December 2008 investigation of the gravesite in “Buried in the Churchyard: A Good Story, at Least” New York Times, December 12, 2008.

Thanks to Risa Garza, Libby Gery, David Marinoff, and Rebecca Rosen for permission to quote them and to Alisa Powers and Rebecca Rosen for permission to include photographs of them.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Lisa M. Gordis is professor of English at Barnard College, where she teaches courses in English and American literature and American studies and directs the First-Year Seminar Program. She is the author of Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (2003) and is currently working on a study of early Quaker theories of language.

Two hundred years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark completed the first federal reconnaissance of the Far West, they have become hallowed figures in historical memory. Today they are remembered in every conceivable way: on monuments, road signs, and commemorative coins, in classrooms, museums, and online exhibits. The names Lewis and Clark grace colleges, towns, parks, trails, counties, law schools, research funds, and marathons. Even the U.S. Navy (impressed by their command of dugout canoes?) honors them with their own class of ships. So many books on Lewis and Clark have come out that new works have been forced to take up increasingly arcane aspects of the expedition. Recent titles include: Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition; Seaman: the Newfoundland Dog Who Accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition; The Food Journal of Lewis and Clark: Recipes for an Expedition; Lewis and Clark Dance Manual and Kit; and Lewis Loved Clark?: Intriguing Hints about America’s Historic Trailblazers. For those who cannot keep track of all of this, there is Lewis and Clark for Dummies. Clearly Lewis and Clark have reached the tipping point of historical investigation, a moment when the mass of printed material carries a momentum of its own, independent of the underlying merits of the story.

What are the underlying merits of the story? The Corps of Discovery was an ambitious and ultimately successful enterprise to gather intelligence about the lands and peoples west of the Mississippi. It was not the first government-funded expedition. It was not the first contact between whites and native tribes of the Far West. Nor was it the first party of Euro-Americans to cross the continent. But it did represent something new, a U.S. expedition that bundled the study of nature together with commercial and military objectives. In this, the United States took its inspiration from Europe where state-sponsored voyages of discovery had become standard practice. In their long voyages through the Pacific, James Cook (Britain) and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (France) had become famous ambassadors of science, commerce, and empire. The success of these voyages was not lost on Thomas Jefferson, who viewed the Corps of Discovery not only as a way of understanding the tribes of western America but also as a means of impressing the societies of Western Europe. As much as the Lewis and Clark expedition had practical objectives, it had symbolic ones too: namely, to show the Atlantic powers that the United States had grown out of its imperial pubescence and was coming of age as a civilized nation.

Yet it is easy to make more of these designs than we should. Jefferson had great ambitions for Lewis and Clark, true, and their expedition succeeded by all measures. Yet these facts tell us nothing about the expedition’s significance in American culture. In truth, Lewis and Clark were not much discussed by the broader public. Their expedition was not widely reported in the popular press, nor was it talked about in scientific circles. Few Americans could marvel at the natural history of the Far West because most of the expedition’s botanical collection was destroyed in transit to the east coast. They could not read the journals of Lewis and Clark because they only appeared in print in 1814 and then in curtailed form. Despite its success in the field, then, the Lewis and Clark expedition left few tracks on the wider culture of Jeffersonian America.

It would take a century for America to fully discover these explorers, introduced to their expedition by the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905, an event that eulogized the closing of the American frontier and wove the explorers inexorably into the fabric of American history. Since then, Lewis and Clark have become pantheonic figures in the exploration of the West, linking the worlds of Euro-America and Native America and setting into motion the creation of an American empire. Not surprisingly, then, they have also become the symbolic progenitors of all forms of U.S. exploration in the last two hundred years: western surveys, coastal surveys, polar voyages, and missions to the moon.

Returning to the nineteenth century, then, we are left with this question: if Lewis and Clark were not yet the patres familias of American exploration, who was? Put differently, when nineteenth-century American explorers left home in pursuit of discovery, who did they see in their mind’s eye? Some other buckskin-clad figures roaming over the American West, perhaps? In fact, they saw someone decidedly different: the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt.

From 1799 to 1804, Humboldt explored South and Central America with French naturalist Aimé Bonpland. During that time, the two men surveyed everything that they could swim through or climb over, including the Orinoco and Amazon rivers and mountains from the Atlantic island of Tenerife to the Pacific range of the Cordillera Real. In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland set a record for the highest human ascent, on Mount Chimborazo, before turning back a few hundred feet from the summit (sick, vertiginous, and bleeding from nose and gums). Through it all, they recorded observations about weather, animals, ocean currents, magnetic fields, ancient ruins, indigenous peoples, and colonial administrations. Even celestial objects weren’t safe from their gaze. In 1802, Humboldt recorded the transit of Mercury as it moved across the surface of the sun. Before returning to Europe, Humboldt made a brief stopover in the United States to visit Jefferson where they discussed, among other things, Lewis and Clark. Back in Paris, Humboldt set to work on a series of scientific reports and a five-volume personal narrative. It would take twenty years to complete these tasks, a measure of his industry in the Americas, where he and Bonpland had spent their days and nights in a frenzy of calculation and observation.

In contrast to Lewis and Clark, Humboldt received immediate, international acclaim for his accomplishments. Even before he had returned to Europe, reports were circulating about his expedition. (Still in the field, Humboldt read about his progress in an American newspaper in 1804.) Interest in Humboldt’s journey only grew with time. By the 1810s, Humboldt’s voyage had become a common subject of books, newspapers, women’s magazines, and journals of every kind: medical, scientific, agricultural, and religious. As Humboldt published data from his voyage, it began appearing on maps, in atlases, and in geography textbooks. His Personal Narrative, first published in French then translated into English, became an international bestseller, cementing his reputation as the world’s greatest living explorer. Launched into the stratosphere of public attention in 1804, Humboldt did not descend to earth until his death in 1859.

At first glance, Humboldt-mania seems hard to explain. He does not seem the kind of explorer that would be the stuff of legends, especially in the United States. After all, he was not a tough, home-grown pioneer but a young Prussian aristocrat, who moved in the intellectual circles of Göttingen and Weimar. He traveled not as the leader of a national expedition like Lewis and Clark or Britain’s James Cook but as a wealthy private citizen. He did not explore the American West, the region most critical to U.S. interests, but worked in regions to the south. Moreover, Humboldt’s mission to Spanish America seems to have had modest objectives. New Spain and New Granada had already been described, mapped, and surveyed by the Spanish and Portuguese since the era of Christopher Columbus. If we take exploration to mean “the investigation of unknown regions” then Humboldt was three hundred years too late.

But discovery is a relative term. Spain and Portugal closely guarded their colonies from their rivals. As a result, the Ibero-American empires remained terra incognita for most Europeans and Anglo-Americans. So when Humboldt gained Spain’s permission to travel these regions for the purposes of study, the literate classes on both sides of the Atlantic took notice. His reports were widely read and discussed by educated men and women. What readers took away from these reports varied considerably. For some, living through one of the most violent, revolutionary periods in Western history, Humboldt offered escape. Readers took comfort in his manifold, mysterious descriptions of the Americas, a world enchanting because of its distance from war-ravaged Europe. “The ambitious and malignant passions have raged with an unparalleled intensity, throughout the civilized and Christian world, and deluged the wide field of Europe with blood,” wrote one reviewer. “It is some little relief to look away to those remote parts of the world, to which the narratives of travellers enable us to carry our imagination.”

But others seized upon Humboldt’s writings precisely because of the connections he forged between New World and Old. Humboldt did not mince words about the cruelties of colonial rule, a feature that made his works popular with social critics pushing for reform. The young Venezuelan Simon Bolivar, who would eventually lead the South American revolt against Spain, was so inspired by Humboldt that he called him “the true discoverer of South America.” When it came, the independence of the Spanish colonies only enhanced the value of Humboldt’s narratives. As the new countries opened themselves to the world, scientists, traders, and diplomats turned to Humboldt’s work to learn more. “The eyes of Europe are turned upon South America,” wrote one British journal in 1818, “and every authentic account respecting that immense continent is received with great and general interest.”

Humboldt inspired reformers outside of South America as well. Abolitionists, in particular, circled every grim passage he wrote about slavery to press for reform in the United States and Britain. In a letter to the editor of Boston’s Christian Observer, one reader reprinted Humboldt’s entire description of slavery in Venezuela because it “may tend to expose in its true colors this unprincipled and cruel traffic.” They cheered when Humboldt made these connections explicit in his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, where he praised the United States in all its aspects except—glaringly—for its toleration of slavery. Translated into English in 1811, Political Essay became a manifesto for abolitionists in the United States. Considering the extension of slavery into Missouri, the editor of Boston’s Panoplist and Missionary Herald asked how Europe’s greatest thinkers would resolve the question: “If our southern brethren object to our deciding the question, might we not appeal to the wise and philanthropic in other countries? How would a Gregoire in France, a Humboldt in Germany, a Galitzin in Russia, a Wilberforce in England, decide the controversy?”

Above all else, Humboldt became a hero to science. His omnivorous appetite for knowledge extended to all major disciplines, including natural history, archeology, ethnography, astronomy, and meteorology. The massive body of facts contained within his essays and Personal Narrative made him the definitive source on all things Spanish American. As a result, the scientific and popular presses of the United States and Europe quoted him liberally on almost every conceivable subject, from the incidence and treatment of disease, the origins of American Indians, the causes of earthquakes, to the discovery of new exotic species. All of this ensured that Humboldt would never be seen as just another itinerant naturalist, a mere cataloger of new specimens with Latin names. The Humboldt who roamed South America in the pages of American magazines in the 1820s was something new, a walking cabinet of curiosities, a collector of marvelous facts on every conceivable subject: fish-vomiting volcanoes, milk-secreting trees, diseased tonsils, and mountain-sized piles of guano.

It would be easy to go too far here, to over-inflate Humboldt’s impact on American society and to repeat, in effect, the mistakes that we have made with Lewis and Clark. So for the record, let me note that Humboldt was not the first scientist-explorer. Nor was he the first one to unleash a torrent of data on the American public. This honor belongs to James Cook, whose voyages were chronicled in American books, newspapers, and geography primers (where it was hard to miss the jagged routes of Endeavour and Resolution etched all over the Pacific Ocean). Nor was Humboldt yet celebrated as the great poet-philosopher of Nature he would later become. His work did not exactly soar in his adopted French and lost further altitude in English translation. “We have derived more instruction than we have pleasure,” wrote one reviewer of Personal Narrative, a work that did not “amuse the imagination or agitate the passions.” Another complained that Humboldt “possesses less beauty than any traveller we remember.”

For Americans sensitive to their deficiencies of culture and education, however, passion and beauty could wait. There were obvious differences between Humboldt and the ordinary American, but there were points of connection too. Like many of them, he was an ardent democrat, a lover of the republic, living all too close to a threatening wilderness. If Baron von Humboldt still had the whiff of ancien régime about him, he was not above getting his hands dirty. These qualities endeared him to his readers and made his differences palatable, perhaps even appealing. It was hard to approach Personal Narrative merely as an escape into the barbarous wild. Reading Humboldt at a time when America was eager to shake off its reputation as a republic of untutored farmers was not just a diversion, I suspect, but an act of self-improvement.

In the 1820s, the discovery narrative was still an unstable thing, not yet settled into a fixed structure of excitement and calamity, of bear attacks, mutinies, and fevers. The idea of the traveler was also in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation. As the concept of traveler lost definition in the eighteenth century, “explorer” entered the vernacular to delineate it, to distinguish the serious investigator of the unknown from more quotidian voyagers, the doe-eyed ingénues of the grand tour. Humboldt arrived upon the world stage precisely at this moment, when the connotations of explorer were taking form in the English-speaking world. He was not, of course, the only investigator of the unknown. But he quickly became the best known one. In the constellation of possible roles for “explorer,” then, Humboldt figured prominently, even archetypally. He was the thinking man’s explorer, the embodiment of travel in its highest form. He offered an adventure in erudition, a voyage beyond the frontier, it was true, but one that would also take the reader up the ladder of civilization in the process.

If Humboldt became the archetypal explorer for Americans, what form did this archetype take? He routinely found praise for his “juvenile vigor” and “good constitution.” Yet these observations always prefaced more lengthy descriptions of Humboldt’s mental faculties. In the eyes of his reviewers, Humboldt’s success as an explorer did not follow from rugged physique. He triumphed because of an “understanding duly prepared by education,” and “a faculty in speaking modern tongues.” Of Humboldt’s skills on a horse or with a rifle, the record is silent. Reviewers do tell us that he was “skilled in general physicks, and particularly attached to chymistry.”

Images of Humboldt tell a similar story. Artists portrayed the explorer as the picture of manly vitality: a broad-chested figure of solid proportions, with tussled hair and high forehead framing a ruddy, youthful face. Yet none of these artists portray Humboldt as a man of action. There are no scenes of him fording rivers, scaling mountains, or battling wild animals (though he did all of these things). Rather, the painted Humboldt is one caught in the act of observation and analysis. Rafael Jimeno y Planes’s portrait, dating from around 1803, captures Humboldt sitting outside at a table on which are placed a sextant, mineral specimens, and sheets of manuscript paper (fig. 1). Humboldt regards us contentedly with hands folded, as if he has just finished a large meal (geology perhaps?).

The Humboldt of Friedrich Georg Weitsch’s 1806 portrait perches on the edge of a rock in the jungle (fig. 2). He looks poised for action, except for the oversized folio book on his knee and the pink flower clasped in his hand. No animal hunt here; we have stumbled upon the baron pressing flowers.

By 1850, the vision of Humboldt as a bookish, erudite explorer had reached its zenith. Gemalde von Eduard Ender’s Urwaldlaboratorium am Orinoco (Jungle Lab on the Orinoco) places Humboldt in what was, by now, a familiar scene: a work table in the middle of the rainforest. But the dense jungle background looks spacious compared to the foreground: a crush of objects—papers, specimens, and instruments—so cover the explorer’s table that they now spill to the floor around his feet. Bathed in light, attended by Bonpland, Humboldt seems almost magisterial in his primitive “urwaldlaboratorium.” Indeed, Humboldt’s pose bears more than a passing resemblance to Ender’s 1855 painting of Emperor Rudolph II, who sits at his own table of instruments, attended by the astronomer Tycho Brahe. Ender’s Humboldt painting remained in Europe, but engravings based on it circulated widely in literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Words and images of the explorer, then, illustrate a similar point. Humboldt was idolized as the nineteenth-century’s über-explorer because of his cerebral skills and courtly cultivation, not in spite of them.

Humboldt’s ability to inspire artists, writers, and scientists has never been a secret in Europe or South America, where scholars have scrutinized Humboldt with the same feverish intensity as we have poured over Lewis and Clark. In the last few years, a small group of scholars (including Laura Walls, Katherine Manthorne, and Susan Schulten) have taken up Humboldt as a figure who loomed large in North American culture, particularly in fields of American science, art, and letters. Most recently, Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, has shown how a cadre of nineteenth-century American explorers took up the Humboldtian cause, particularly in his sensitive and holistic approach to native peoples and natural environments.

That Humboldt became an iconic figure in the nineteenth century, particularly in the eyes of his American audience, now seems clear. But it is Humboldt’s iconic status as an explorer that occupies us here. Why? Specifically, what do we gain by toppling Lewis and Clark off of their pedestal and installing Humboldt in their place?

We can begin to correct a view of nineteenth-century exploration that has been distorted by Lewis and Clark’s Pacific expedition. For most of the 1800s, the American West did not uniquely, even predominantly, occupy the nation’s imagination as a theater of discovery. During this time, the United States fielded dozens of expeditions to every region of the planet: Africa, South America, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Ocean, and the Polar Regions. These expeditions employed the broadest possible notions of the term “discovery.” For example, the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-42) pursued geographical discovery in Antarctica, while the U.S. Astronomical Expedition (1849-52) spent its nights observing planetary transits from its base in Chile. The U.S. Grinnell Expedition (1850-52) hoped to discover a specific person, Sir John Franklin, who had gone missing in the Arctic in 1845. For Lieutenant William Lynch, on the other hand, discovery was historical. Under his command, the U.S. Expedition to Jordon and the Dead Sea set out to discover, among other things, the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The American explorers who led these expeditions constituted a diverse group. Their ranks included doctors, journalists, and military officers. As public figures, however, they rarely took on the image of the western pioneer or the tough backwoodsman. More often, they displayed themselves as men of science and culture. One might argue that this reflected an appreciation for science and culture in general, rather than an appreciation of Humboldt in particular. Yet, in case after case, explorers linked themselves to Humboldt by name, dedicating their narratives to him, visiting him in Europe, and naming dozens of geographical discoveries in his honor, from Nevada’s Humboldt River (John Fremont, 1848) to Greenland’s Humboldt Glacier (Elisha Kane, 1854). Fremont showed such intellectual promise that he was eventually dubbed “the American Humboldt,” by his peers, a term of high praise also conferred upon Kane as well as explorer Bayard Taylor.

Were this just a matter of correcting the historical record, we could tuck this debate into the footnotes of Lewis and Clark: Historical Overview and Bibliography (one of eight bibliographies on Lewis and Clark published since 2000). But more is at stake. Lewis and Clark have become the symbolic touchstone for every kind of modern expedition, from NOAA to NASA. Native born, of humble origins, these two men explored lands on a critical frontier during the early years of the republic. In doing so, they established a pedigree that is almost impossible to top. In making them the fathers of national exploration, we have brought order to the weird carnival of expeditions fielded by the United States in the 1800s. When we remember to talk about them, the colorful ranks of explorers who traveled the world have become linked to Lewis and Clark in our historical memory. When seen as the inheritors of a Lewis-and-Clarkian vision of exploration, these explorers have begun to appear more similar than dissimilar, sharing the inherent curiosity, restlessness, and forward-looking attitude of the Corps of Discovery.

No wonder that policy makers and NASA administrators routinely trot out Lewis and Clark when proposing ambitious new projects. They serve not merely as the ornaments of history but as pieces of evidence in a specific argument—that expensive expeditions deserve funding because the will to explore is a part of our national character. As this line of thinking goes, exploration is something that we have to do in order to be true to our human nature. “The cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose,” stated President George W. Bush days after the destruction of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. “It is a desire written in the human heart.” Within a year, the president had followed up this address with another, a directive to begin the most ambitious multibillion dollar project in NASA’s history: the renewed exploration of the moon and the manned exploration of Mars. He began his address with Lewis and Clark.

Two centuries ago, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left St. Louis to explore the new lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. They made that journey in the spirit of discovery to learn the potential of the vast new territory and to chart the way for others to follow. America has ventured forth into space for the same reasons. We’ve undertaken space travel because the desire to explore is part of our character.

By framing exploration as “part of our character,” Bush offers an answer to a common criticism of manned space flight. Hurling living beings into space and then returning them, still breathing, to earth is expensive. Why take on such risk to life and treasure when unmanned craft can do much of the same work for a fraction of the cost? By making exploration about national character rather than science or money, proponents of manned exploration can largely ignore this question as well as the excellent work now being done by robotic orbiters, rovers, and landers.

One wonders whether Lewis and Clark, who took such pains to do their scientific work correctly, would have approved of their current roles as the poster children of American exceptionalism. And what would Humboldt have to say about his own erasure from the annals of American exploration? I expect he was too much of a gentleman to grouse publicly. Yet he would have spoken up about our current policies of exploration. Nurtured by German and French Romanticism, Humboldt saw the voyage as more than the sum of its scientific parts. It was a distinctly human event, a lesson about attaining self-knowledge as much as attaining knowledge about the world. He would have doubted, I think, the capacity of robots to appreciate the sublime, to embody the internal transformation so sought by wanderers, explorers, and pilgrims alike. And for the rest of us, would he have thought that the wonders of extraterrestrial nature could be conveyed by telemetry? Doubtful. Still, Humboldt was a humanist first, a defender of people forgotten by their rulers. The vision of humans walking upon the cold dust of Mars would have thrilled him. That Americans, his favorite people, would have to pay so much to bring this vision to life, I suspect, would have given him pause.

Further Reading:

Over the past few years, scholarship on Humboldt’s role in North American life has come to life. Aaron Sachs takes up Humboldt’s influence on American explorers in The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, 2007). How Sachs’s approach connects to current debates in environmental history is the subject of Susan Schulten’s essay “Get Lost: On the Intersection of Environmental and Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 5:1 (2008): 141-152. Just out, Laura Walls’s Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, 2009) examines Humboldt’s most famous work, Cosmos, and its influences on writers and scientists. Despite my frustrations with the celebration of all things Lewis-and-Clark, there are some excellent treatments of these explorers in American life, one of which is John Spencer’s “‘We are not entirely dealing with the past’: America Remembers Lewis and Clark,” in Kris Fresonke and Mark Spence, eds., Lewis & Clark: Legacies, Memories, and New Perspectives (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). For those eager to hear the baron speak for himself, Johns Hopkins Press recently came out with a reprint edition of Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe v. 1&2. This edition also comes with fine introductory essays by Nicholas Ruupke (v.1) and Michael Dettelbach (v.2).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

Michael Robinson is author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (2006), winner of the 2008 Book Award from the Forum for the History of Science in America. He writes Time to Eat the Dogs, a blog about science, history, and exploration. He is an assistant professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford.

The social domain invades public consciousness in moments of crisis: accidents in mines, fires in factories, outbursts of epidemics aboard ships, sanitation calamities in slums, riots, strikes, and scandals. These crises entice opinion, elicit sentiment, and often prompt new legislation, a new bureaucracy, or, in the least, a new report. Social breakdowns in the new urban centers of the nineteenth century, for instance, generated calls for new forms of knowledge and, more narrowly, for a greater number of facts. Information-gatherers of all kinds, ranging from reporters and reformers to inspectors and government commissions, consequently went into action.

The contemporary critique of knowledge has emphasized the role of science—in the guise of medicine, engineering, or the nascent and as yet unprofessionalized and undifferentiated social sciences—in mapping and controlling the social terrain. Discursive cousins such as journalism and emerging “realist” literary genres have also received considerable scholarly attention. This essay proposes a different perspective, arguing that concrete historical events were just as important as ephemeral scientific “revolutions” or instantaneous “epistemic shifts” in shaping the history of knowledge. Employing examples from American and British history, the following discussion interrogates the relationship between crisis and facts. This is not only a means for asking how crises generated social knowledge, but also for understanding how knowledge itself instigated crises. How did the discovery of social “truths” prompt dismay, outrage, an acute sense of failure, and demands for intervention?

The long history of social inquiry is especially pertinent today, as the United States and the world grapple with a severe economical failure that has taken an enormous social toll. The contemporary public sphere is suffused, even saturated, with information. Government agencies, research institutions, and the media transmit facts and figures in “real time” without the cumbersome mechanisms of lengthy investigations or mammoth reports. And yet, while we produce and consume social knowledge in unprecedented fashion, we do not share a strong sense of the social.

What was the nature of the nineteenth century’s social problem, or crisis? The Communist Manifesto (1848) poeticized about the pulverizing effects of modern capitalism. In Marx and Engels’s formulation, the “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Their famous metaphor is implausibly violent: “Everything that is solid turns into air.” But while Marx was fascinated with the creative, revolutionary aspects of capitalism, he too condemned the new system’s destructive force. Five years later, Charles Dickens, for instance, depicted the air of Coketown, the fictional modern industrial city in Hard Times (1853), as filled with ominous smoke. It is a hellacious place, a man-made jungle populated with mechanical elephants and serpentine smokestacks billowing their toxins and poisoning the public.

Nineteenth century social and economic knowledge at once functioned as an instrument of capitalism while also serving as a tool for minimizing capitalism’s most disturbing consequences, informing measures to alleviate social pain. Even more significantly, knowledge was persistently aggregated in order to address the very uncertainty woven into the fabric of modern life. Beyond the reams of facts—of maps, interviews, statistics, tables, illustrations, graphs, reports, of quantitative and qualitative information of both the hard and soft variety—the clamor to generate taxonomies of the social, to conceptualize social life by distinguishing between its various provinces and limbs and then hypothesizing about the interrelationships between these respective parts, was fueled by the promise of explanation and even predictability.

But while the countless localized crises that inspired social inquiries and sometimes reform legislation seem to exemplify the endemic instability of the industrial order, the relationship between such small-scale emergencies and the liquidity of the capitalist condition in general is more complex . Thus, for instance, particular crises often served to deflect attention from underlying sources of social strife and focused public attention on more manageable symptoms such as sanitary conditions, malfunctioning machines, and physical dangers, symptoms that the new technologies could also ameliorate.

The emerging knowledge/crisis nexus represented other aspects of the modern experience that reached beyond the specifics of industrialization. These were the rise of the liberal state and the elaboration of its other, that is, the public sphere. On the one hand, knowledge was ostensibly mustered to organize the social field, ultimately leading to expectations that society could be depoliticized and managed by objective, expertise-driven, information-laden policies that distanced themselves from the hurly-burly of emotion-driven public opinion. On the other hand, the accumulation and distribution of knowledge did not relieve anxieties. In fact, this only fueled contentious public exchanges, including an ongoing critique of the state and its actions. In this sense, knowledge and information were themselves intrinsically and consistently unstable, unruly, and hard to control.

The phenomenology of social knowledge is inseparable from the experience of crisis and from the interlacing of fact and affect, which became a hallmark of nineteenth century social inquiry. Urgent petitions, for instance, prodded the House of Commons to begin an investigation of the employment of chimneysweepers in 1802. A select committee then verified that little children were being stolen from their parents or enticed out of workhouses and then forced by the threat of sharp pins to climb up narrow, soot-filled chimneys. Another investigation of child labor, which led to the milestone Cotton Mill Act of 1819, coincided with a fire at Atkinson’s Mill, Colne Bridge, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in which seventeen girls perished. The victims were working the night shift, locked in the mill, while their overseer was busy elsewhere. The disaster stunned the British public. In the early 1830s, an intense Ten-Hours agitation in the industrial north prompted another parliamentary investigation. This movement had the character of an evangelical crusade led by several Tory sympathizers who instructed workers to “establish committees in every manufacturing town and village, to collect information and PUBLISH FACTS.” The House of Commons’ Sadler Committee consequently interviewed factory workers whose bodies were mangled and deformed by years of hard work with heavy machinery. When the committee proposed far-reaching legislation, the Whig-led cabinet countered with its own investigation. A royal commission of inquiry was instituted which sent agents to observe first hand the damage wrought by work to the health and the morality of young factory wage earners, leading to the Factory Act of 1833. Later in the decade, Poor Law Commissioner Edwin Chadwick headed another groundbreaking panel of investigation, the Sanitary Commission, in response to an outbreak of cholera in Whitechapel, London. Other examples of social investigation propelled or accelerated by a sense of public urgency abound. Official inquiries into the social ills of industrializing Britain were sometimes launched at the explicit request of distressed laborers—such as the handloom weavers and silk knitters in the 1830s—or, conversely, at the urging of employers asking the government to investigate.

By the middle decades of the century, such social investigations had become a defining feature of British political culture as well as a driving force of energetic American reform, especially in the Northeast. Animated by notions of scientific legislation, the British government dispatched commissioners and inspectors to factories and mines. Meanwhile, Parliament, as well as reform societies, philanthropists, and journalists amassed testimonies and statistical data on the condition of the impoverished. Their findings undergirded the great public debate over the nation’s social predicament, what Thomas Carlyle called the “condition of England” question. Cycles of legislation centralized poor relief and inaugurated state regulation of new industries by such means as the restriction of child and female labor and the imposition of safety and educational measures, all to be enforced by periodic inspections.

The United States had not yet experienced industrial revolution in such magnitude as Britain. Nevertheless, Boston, Philadelphia, and, especially, New York were to be counted among the fastest-growing urban centers in the world, consequently contending with tenement squalor, prostitution, crime, and abandoned children, which all became subjects of public curiosity, alarm, and the intensifying production of social knowledge that mobilized civic associations, individual reformers, and city and state governments. Thus, for example, the Pennsylvania Senate dispatched a committee in 1838 to visit the “manufacturing districts” of the commonwealth to survey the employment of children. New York’s Assembly examined the condition of tenements in New York and Brooklyn in 1857. Officials, doctors, and clergymen produced reports on the circumstances of paupers, foreign immigrants, orphans, and prisoners. In the 1850s, governments on both sides of the Atlantic began to investigate the conditions under which immigrants crossed the ocean. A Senate committee was formed “to consider the causes and the extent of the sickness and mortality prevailing on board the emigrant ships on the voyage to this country, and whether any, and what legislation is needed for the better protection of the health and lives of passengers on board such vessels.”

Traveling from one state capital to another in both North and South, the reformer Dorothea Dix, known as the “voice for the mad,” campaigned to establish asylums and hospitals for the “feeble minded.” Dix gave public testimonies to legislatures and formulated lengthy petitions that interlaced facts about the dire state of the insane poor with proposals to establish new institutions that would address the problem. In a memorial to her home state of Massachusetts Dix declared, “I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” For nineteenth-century reform entrepreneurs such as Dix, social knowledge was an essential element of advocacy. Their public campaigns were permeated with a sense of urgency embedded in the matter of hard-hitting facts.

Two immensely important efforts to produce information about distressed groups in the United States targeted subjects outside urban centers and the industrializing Northeast. Repeated attempts to collect social and ethnological data concerning indigenous peoples—for instance, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s enormous project sponsored by Congress in the 1850s on the Indian Tribes of America—were conducted under the specter of a permanent crisis: the Indian’s alleged inability—or, worse, refusal—to civilize, and the collateral prophesy of his impending demise as expressed in the trope of the “vanishing Indian.” Likewise, the antebellum dispute over slavery—and, in particular, the indefatigable endeavors by abolitionists to collect and disseminate material concerning the facts of slave life—constituted an enormous project of social investigation, and a rather innovative one at that. Barred from the South, abolitionists had to develop fresh tactics in order to garner information pertaining to circumstances south of the Mason-Dixon line. The use made of ads for runaway slaves by Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters in order to indict their masters in Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses (1839) was arguably the most ingenious empirical study of its kind to that date. In both these cases of indigenous peoples and the “peculiar institution,” the consequences of modernity were not so much put under investigation as was the alleged failure-of either Indians or slave masters—to modernize.

Reformers and government officials fixed their gaze on the social margins, on orphans, miners, poor wage earners, and racial others. The middle class was also susceptible to various forms of scrutiny, but investigation of the propertied segments of society followed distinctly different protocols. Thus, in the wake of the American economic crisis known as the Panic of 1837, financial institutions began to more carefully assess the credibility of prospective debtors, which included reports on their character and personal circumstances. The British government studied and then intervened in the manner by which factory owners managed their workforce. Some proprietors complained bitterly that their prerogatives as proprietors were being violated, but none had the misfortune of a philanthropist knocking on the door to inspect one’s dwelling and count how many persons were sleeping in a single bed. Only in the twentieth century-in the age of Gallup polls and other massive surveys—did social investigations bring middle America into focus and make the fictional “average citizen” a subject of study and comparison.

The Panic of 1837 and later economic crises provided consistent impetus to American reform. But the Civil War and its tumultuous aftermath marked a watershed in American perceptions of the social problem. Following the war, several states, again mainly in the Northeast, established boards of charity and public health, as well as bureaus of labor statistics. The American Social Science Association was founded in 1865. And the war itself was followed by one of the most ambitious social experiments in American history, Reconstruction. The history of that project to rebuild southern society was replete with congressional hearings and investigations.

The historical episodes heretofore sketched out point to an expansive notion of both social investigation and social crisis. The latter ranged from accidents and disease to destitution, war, abject physical environments, immoral behavior, mortality, and labor relations. Different emergencies entailed different strategies for collecting data. Investigations into workplace conflicts, for instance, variously featured court-like protocols, attempts to determine the facts-of-the-matter, and even whodunit elements. Major accidents further narrowed the difference between social investigation, scientific studies, and judicial procedures. For example, antebellum authorities launched inquests into those frequent steamboat disasters that claimed so many lives . In October 1844, three boilers of the Lucy Walker exploded near Albany, Indiana, on the Ohio River, sinking the vessel and killing more than a hundred passengers. The explosion of the Sultana, a Mississippi River paddleboat, in April 1865, caused the death of an estimated 1,800 persons. Explosions prompted early protective legislation in 1838 and 1852. The history of safety regulations and reform continued to be enmeshed with spectacular accidents, culminating on the eve of the First World War with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) and the sinking of the Titanic (1912), two iconic calamities. In both cases, questions of technology, the value of human life, and, significantly, disparities issuing from labor and class were at issue.

Knowledge itself was in perpetual flux. Different disciplinary strategies competed for legitimacy. Discourse and facts were often contested. Governments, for instance, embraced the language of statistics, which came into vogue in the 1830s, inspiring the founding of new associations whose members collected statistical data among the poor in their spare time. For Dickens, by contrast, such statistical thinking dissolved stable, affective human ties. Vying for a fuller, more veracious representation of industrial society, his Hard Times attacked the heartless regime of aggregated facts that characterized utilitarian Britain. In his view, hard facts were at the core of hard times, not a remedy.

Confusion typified discussion over the proper way of measuring social phenomena. How, for instance, should factory workers be observed? There were few experts and little expertise for addressing the problems of large cities, factories, and mills, let alone slavery or the future of native peoples. Contests ensued among various poor-watchers, reformers, government officials, missionaries, Indian agents, prison wardens, and philanthropists, each group claiming better (that is, “disinterested”) access to knowledge. In Britain, the aggregation of facts concerning social life became a national pursuit. Nevertheless, the constant, nearly compulsive, thirst for more empirical evidence betrayed deep doubts about the usability of information and about the boundaries of what could actually be known.

Facts proved elusive and controversy-prone. The 1840 U.S. Census, for example, provoked public dispute when it purported to show that the percentage of “colored insane” increased the further north they resided (especially in Massachusetts and Maine), ostensibly proving that persons of African descent fared better under slavery than in freedom. This became yet another skirmish in the antebellum sectional debate in which slavery was increasingly being defended on scientific-racist grounds. In Britain, the publication of a royal commission of inquiry report on the employment of children in the mines in 1842 triggered a scandal, for the official document featured illustrations of half naked working boys and girls which violated basic norms of decency in public communication. At times, the investigation itself rather than the concluding report prompted opposition. Witnesses would refuse to testify, or they would engage in various other forms of resistance. The Iroquois in western New York refused to collaborate with a census conducted on their reservations in the 1840s because they suspected it would lead to their taxation. In the case of the early 1830s Factory Commission, members of the Short-Time movement followed government agents wherever they went and staged demonstrations against the inquiry which they feared would undermine their reform campaign.

The causal relationship between crisis and knowledge thus moved in both directions. Social surveys did not merely respond to alarm bells. Their purpose was often to bring social phenomena otherwise deemed latent or hidden to the surface of public consciousness. The social realm was conceived to be a subterranean stratum in need of exploration and the kind of shock and awe associated with acts of discovery. Crisis resided in the interface between social reality and public rhetoric and sentiment. Shaped by language, imagery, moral discourse, and politics, crisis was a discursively and affectively constructed cultural phenomenon as much as it was a reflection of concrete social events.

In the period prior to the advent of modern expert culture which developed late in the nineteenth century, citizens were expected to read and opine on social and other policy matters of the day. Several investigatory reports thus received a wide circulation and became popular reading material. The factual texture of public discourse also rested on a humanitarian sensibility and the responses it elicited to detailed descriptions of human suffering. Conversely, social (or racial) curiosity increased the public’s appetite for titillating, sometimes sexualized, narratives of destitution and transgression. The popularity of investigation, that is, also fed off the voyeuristic possibilities contained in the exposure of concealed and potentially dangerous worlds.

Facts did not always provoke such intense reactions. The opposite was also true. Numerous studies and surveys went largely unnoticed. Nevertheless, social knowledge as a whole was oriented toward public consumption. Reform culture in both countries created arenas specifically for the exchange of information and the consequent debates. These specialized spheres—or sometimes counter-publics, such as the abolitionist movement or labor unions—supported large systems for dispensing printed matter. Thus, for example, numerous battles over the competing prison systems in New York and Pennsylvania—the “separate” versus “silent” experimental methods of incarceration were carried out in the pages of annual reports published by penal reform associations such as the Boston Prison Discipline Society. America penal reform drew international attention and numerous foreign visitors, including Dickens. Neither experiment seems remotely acceptable today. The fierce debate was carried in the language of republican citizenship, the reforms being designed to rehabilitate wayward individuals and transform them into autonomous, self-disciplined subjects. But this exchange was far from inclusive. It rarely paid any attention to the inmates’ point of view, for instance. Indeed, the central place of factual matter in such debates privileged groups and institutions that could assume empirical authority over other participants. At the same time, facticity also made novel forms of contestation addressing the veracity and challenging the interpretations of fact collectors possible in the first place. The rules of public exchange rendered such discourse open to anyone with access to information, thus giving new participants an opportunity to enter the public stage. This was evident in the Short-Time Movement’s own efforts to collect facts. Similarly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels employed the prolific fruits of British social research for purposes inimical to those of the institutions and individuals who had generated them, the British state and bourgeois reformers. The accumulation of social knowledge, in other words, while enhancing and reifying social distinctions, also contributed to the struggle to subvert the emerging class system.

While social knowledge is often studied through the optic of science (sociology, anthropology, and economics) or the contributions of famous social cartographers (Henry Mayhew, Jacob Riis, and Charles Booth), the nineteenth-century knowledge apparatus consisted of a mammoth record of increasingly bureaucratized information in which the state figured prominently. Together with special investigations responding to occasional exigencies, governments established permanent tools for measuring society. These included the ever-more detailed national census, statistical bureaus, or the annual reports submitted by governmental departments. Reform organizations also unleashed an immense volume of periodic literature to the reading public.

Like crises themselves, these studies and the publication of their findings constituted historical events. What’s more, they were highly cognizant of their own temporal nature. Social knowledge, therefore, comprised an archive already arranged as history—the history of economic crisis, for instance, or the history of reform legislation—or it was produced on a strict calendrical basis, issued in regular intervals and featuring the periodic findings of bureaucratic agencies and reform associations that also had a regular, cumulative effect. Large-scale social reports were often framed as mini-historiographies. These self-referential accounts alluded to prior strings of investigations, often couching the particular crisis under examination as a case history.

This archive could be mined to produce stories of progress that led, in the British Whiggish tradition, from one reform victory to another. At the same time, social knowledge as history alerted its readers to the recurrence of crises and the cycles of boom and bust characteristic of the modern marketplace. In the American historical imagination, the narrative is also often circular or looped, as reform is perceived as restoring fundamental American values. Moreover, the history of government growth and social legislation in the United States cannot easily conform to a linear plot.

In addition, records of social knowledge form the backbone of the history (and, arguably, the identity) of the state. Regardless of this or that specific policy, amassing evidence on the condition of the nation typifies the modern governing process. Crises allowed governments to interject themselves into the social scene. These moments cemented the bonding, or the mutual constitution, of state and society. Beyond the (sometimes doubtful) utility of specific studies, social reportage in general fulfilled other tasks, managing a public exchange in which government was only one actor, (and not always the most powerful), allowing weaker, disenfranchised populations some form of representation, and responding to the pressures of popular social movements. Social investigations opened for the British state a space of negotiations between itself and different segments of society. When Samuel H. G. Kydd (under the pseudonym Alfred) wrote The History of the Factory Movement in 1857 he largely focused on the interactions between the movement and investigatory proceedings and legislation, using parliamentary papers (“blue books”) as a primary source.

While society and knowledge were in perennial crisis, the public procedures devised to address emergencies remained relatively stable. Governments often responded to periods of endemic crises by engaging in a vigorous exploration of the nation, especially of vulnerable social groups. This was evident in nineteenth century Britain as well as in depression-stricken America of the 1930s. Indeed, the New Deal was a watershed in reinforcing the affinity between the federal government and ordinary citizens. The rituals of social investigations may thus help us understand the process through which the modern state became a receptacle for ordinary people’s expectations of social remedy. This development cannot be taken for granted since governments typically served the interests of commerce and industrial capital. But beyond this or that policy or piece of legislation, the practices of social inquiry and the circulation of information allowed the Victorian state to develop the means to communicate with its subjects and to acknowledge them as citizens.

The archive of social knowledge also testifies to the long, somewhat convoluted history of liberalism. The formative inquiry carried out in Britain in the 1830s—the Royal Commission of Inquiry on the Poor Laws—epitomized the ascent of classical liberal thought to power. The New Poor Law that followed the Inquiry in 1834 replaced an older, more generous public relief system with parsimonious arrangements based on Jeremy Bentham’s principle of “less eligibility,” employing the workhouse as a whip to funnel paupers into the workforce. Nevertheless, the administration of the Victorian poor laws was taken away from local parishes and centralized under state supervision. Half a century and numerous reforms later, a shift became apparent in Britain and the United States (and elsewhere too) from orthodox laissez-faire to “new liberalism” or “social liberalism.” Emergent ideas about the interventionist role of government in society and the economy gave birth to increasingly professionalized and scientific forms of social investigation. By the middle of the twentieth century, with Labour’s “democratic socialism” in the United Kingdom and a “modern liberal” Fair Deal consensus in the United States, both countries were busy building welfare states.

What, then, is the status of the crisis/knowledge nexus today, especially in light of an ascendant neo-liberalism that criticizes the earlier notions of social justice and obligation? Crisis continues to be capitalism’s mode of operation. According to Naomi Klein’s recent “disaster capitalism” argument, emergencies around the globe, including natural catastrophes, are now used to impose radical free-market policies. As for knowledge, government- and business-produced information is omnipresent and effortlessly accessible. Expert culture is thriving. The popular media pepper this flow of official data with “human interest” accounts of individual plight or of difficulties suffered by entire communities. This blend of hard and soft “news” is certainly reminiscent of an older culture of the social fact. But it is to be distinguished from those precedents by the absence of a public sphere willing to address the social, a strong public wishing to discover society, and social movements speaking for the disaffected. The only grass root organization to emerge so far from the current crisis reenacts a different moment in the American past, the Boston Tea Party, and partakes in the grand old effort to ignore society and downgrade the state.

Admittedly, the social has also been subject to attacks from the Left, especially its academic wing, cast as a domain of modern technologies of power deployed by the state and the middle class to mold populations in their own image, or to simply discipline the masses. The nineteenth century preoccupation with knowing society was indeed motivated, at least in part, by the ambition to domesticate the lower classes and alien populations. Nevertheless, the public rituals of social investigation and the reading materials they generated also buttressed notions of social affinity, solidarity, and collective responsibility-all rather diminished today.

Further reading

For a classical analysis of the modern state and its relationship to capitalism and society, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York, 1944). On nineteenth century statistical imagination, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), chap. 7; Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, 1986); Ian Hacking,The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990). On new liberalism and social investigation, see The State and Social Investigation, ed. Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner (Washington, D.C., 1993). For an account of the rise of sociology to replace disrupted social ties, see Bruce Mazlish, A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology (New York, 1989). Also see Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914 ed. David Englander and Rosemary O’Day (London, 1995); Robert C. Davis, “Social Research in America Before the Civil War,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science, 8 (1972). James Vernon’s Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, 2007) follows the changing relationship between the British state and its subjects through the process that redefined malnutrition and the combat to eliminate it. On the establishment of boards of charities, public health, and labor statistics in American states after the Civil War, see William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865-1990 (Cambridge, 1984). On the U.S. Census, see Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, 1988). For neo-liberalism and crisis, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, 2007). On descriptions of bodies in pain and the humanitarian sensibility, see Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 176-204. For Dorothea Dix’s reform crusades, see David L. Gollaher, Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix (New York, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Oz Frankel is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Committee on Historical Studies, New School for Social Research. He is the author of States of Inquiry: Social Investigation and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States (2006).

I want to begin by thanking Common-place and the organizers of “The American Revolution Reborn.” I thank them for giving me not just this opportunity to share my work with you—to run with the big dogs—but also for giving me their validation that environmental history can help us understand the American Revolution. My paper for the conference looked at the science behind making saltpeter and forms part of a larger book project that brings together environmental history and the War of Independence. The project has been progressing at a glacially slow pace, but the conference has already sparked lots of ideas that will get things moving along. I’d like to mention a few of them here, and I’d like to dwell on one of them in particular.

The first session of the conference focused on global perspectives, and one member of the audience asked about connecting the Revolution to places other than the Americas and the Atlantic. Environmental history can help here. My paper examines how Americans made saltpeter for gunpowder, which naturally leads to the question, how did the British get their saltpeter? Well, almost all of it came from northeastern India, so what effects did wartime demand have on that environment? Deforestation for sure, and many others that I am starting to investigate. Similarly, what happened to the forests of northern Europe and western Russia, which supplied fir trees through the port of Riga? The Royal Navy used these huge trees as masts for ships of the line.

The second session of the conference brought to our attention the disaffected. One paper suggested that a person’s position was shaped, in part, by pre-existing conflicts. It also noted how some of the disaffected could tack back and forth from one side to the other, or how they could keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. Environmental history offers additional ways to think about these issues. For example, particular natural features of the land may have been the basis for some of those pre-existing conflicts. Control over a valuable resource may have given a person the power to approach first one side, and then the other. Alternatively, a livelihood involving work such as off-shore fishing or whaling may have enabled some to escape the conflict altogether.

The interactions between Loyalists, the disaffected, and rebels also prompted me to think about an environmental analogy on which I want to focus for the rest of this brief essay. Landscape ecologists study, among other things, the edges between two types of habitats. Think of a clearing in a forest, or a field next to a forest. At the edges of these habitats, you will find a transition zone where sunlight, wind speed, temperature, moisture, and other variables differ from what you find in the heart of either the forest or the field.

Now, what if we thought of communities of Loyalists, the disaffected, and rebels as separate habitats? One paper talked about how rebel communities put pressure on their inhabitants—to take this oath or join that militia. What happens if a Loyalist community, no matter what the size, appears and creates an edge? Can we come up with analogies to the natural variations in sunlight, wind speed, and moisture? Perhaps we see new variables at work, such as economic opportunities, cultural appeals, and social ties. Does this then change the rebel community’s pressure?

The edge between a forest and a field, with its mixture of habitats, can also host a rich diversity of species. Some are drawn to and thrive on the edge—generalists such as raccoons and coyotes—while other species cannot survive in or even enter the edge. Can the same be said for certain Loyalists, disaffected, and rebels? What would a generalist disaffected person look like, someone who can tack back and forth from one side to the other? What kind of rebel would not be able to come into contact with Loyalists? Furthermore, surprising relationships can develop in the edge. In north-central Florida, certain forest-dwelling birds will not go into the edge unless they see the tufted titmouse there; that bird’s presence may signal that the area is safe. The reliance of one species on another might get us to think in different ways about what another paper told us about Newport, Rhode Island. Did the “intimate connections” identified there facilitate the movement and survival of others in that edge environment?

I bring up edges because they make a particularly apt analogy for “The American Revolution Reborn.” Think of the meeting place of the conference, Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society, as an edge zone. The academic “forests” of Penn and Drexel were located just to the west of us; the public history “meadow” of Independence National Historical Park sat right next door; and we were drawn to this edge zone, joined by school teachers, retirees, lawyers, independent scholars, librarians, tour guides, consultants, docents, and many others. We all had specific knowledge of particular places and times, and by sharing that knowledge we made that edge zone especially rich during the days of the conference. Might Common-place be another such forum, another edge zone, where diverse students of the Revolution enrich one another’s experience and thinking?

There is one more feature of edges that may be appropriate here. Once an edge develops, certain conditions lead to the creation of more edge. Once some fallen trees create a clearing in a forest, other trees are now exposed to higher wind speeds, which can produce more blow-downs and more edge. This could be useful for thinking about how people interacted during the Revolution, but for now I want to keep the focus on us. Now that “The American Revolution Reborn” and Common-place have created this edge zone, I think the conditions are ripe for us to go out and create more edge in our home habitats. May this vibrant diversity of participants and ideas spread and flourish.

Further reading:

J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge, U.K., 2010), an exemplary work of environmental history, contains one chapter that examines malaria in the southern campaigns of the War of Independence. Accessible general works on edge habitats include Jodi A. Hilty, William Z. Lidicker Jr., and Adina M. Merenlender, Corridor Ecology: The Science and Practice of Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation (Washington, D.C., 2006) and Mark A. Bush, Ecology of a Changing Planet (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997). Two articles that go into greater detail are Leslie R. Ries, Robert J. Fletcher Jr., James Battin, and Thomas D. Sisk, “Ecological Responses to Habitat Edges: Mechanisms, Models, and Variability Explained,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 35 (2004): 491-522, and Kathryn E. Sieving, Thomas A. Contreras and Kimberly L. Maute, “Heterospecific Facilitation of Forest-Boundary Crossing by Mobbing Understory Birds in North-Central Florida,” Auk, 121:3 (July 2004): 738-751.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

David C. Hsiung is the Charles and Shirley Knox Professor of History at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.

While studying the mail habits of nineteenth-century Americans, I became a sounding board of sorts for a familiar refrain in current discussions of modern life: that e-mail is burying the personal letter. Sympathetic strangers, at an initial loss to make sense of my interest in the postal service of yesteryear, would venture the guess that I was nobly seeking to retrieve some recently lost art of correspondence. Isn’t it a shame, I kept hearing, that no one writes letters anymore. Some members of this chorus dramatized the tragedy in archival terms, speculating that the kind of research I was conducting will be unavailable to historians studying our own era, since computer-bound Americans at the dawn of the twenty-first century no longer generate the holographic documents that comprise manuscript collections in libraries and historical societies.

But as often as the case against e-mail was presented, it never ceased to surprise me. For starters, nothing in my own experience suggests that electronic mail is replacing handwritten personal correspondence. It has been several decades since large numbers of Americans used the U.S. mail for the majority of their long-distance communications or for casual daily contact with nearby friends and family. Telephones were introduced in the United States over one hundred and thirty years ago, only a generation after postage reform made regular mail use affordable for a majority of Americans. As service became more common and more affordable, the phone began to compete in important and interesting ways with the culture of the post.

By the time of my own childhood in the 1970s, habitual dependence on letter writing for forging and maintaining relationships across distances was increasingly uncommon, the distinctive province of marginal groups notable in part for their impeded access to phones—the poor, prison inmates, kids at summer camp. Only a negligible proportion of the electronic messages I have sent and received over the past fifteen years would have been inscribed on paper and mailed during the previous fifteen-year period. Many of them, it seems clear to me, would have passed electronically (and ephemerally) over telephone wires. A smaller but significant fraction might have been communicated face-to-face or through broadcast advertising (radio, television, print, or outdoor). The vast majority would undoubtedly have gone uncommunicated. A future historian wishing to study the lives of people like me will thus have far more material to work with after 1990 than before. Moreover, the life that such a historian would be studying is a life significantly shaped by daily acts of writing, receiving, and expecting mail. If e-mail has indeed changed our habits of communication, it has always appeared to me, we should interpret the shift as a revival of epistolarity rather than its death knell. And of course part of my motivation for writing a book on postal culture in the nineteenth century lay in the expectation that I would discover an analogous historical moment to the one I now inhabit.

From the early days of widespread computer-mediated correspondence, commentators have debated the textual status of e-mail and its place in the history of communications technology and media. Typed messages conveyed through e-mail accounts, cellular phones, or networking Websites both resemble and differ from the contents of older postal systems. For starters, these new media typically (though not in the case of instant messaging) store and forward their messages much like snail mail, though at a different pace, of course. And in profoundly transformative ways, computer-mediated correspondence tends to implicate both the sender and the recipient in other networks and media of information exchange (such as the Internet) that unsettle the boundaries of the message itself. But whether one is more interested in the way e-mail has dematerialized, accelerated, and deformed the traditional letter or more impressed (as I am) by the way it has textualized interactions that used to be conducted orally and has staggered interactions that used to take place simultaneously, the relationship between old and new mail cannot be reduced to such structural, technological criteria. A British sociolinguist recently proclaimed e-mail “the first major upheaval in written English since the invention of the printing press,” but e-mail is not itself a writing system that might constitute such an upheaval nor is it an innovation in inscription or reproduction that warrants a comparison to printing. Assessing the cultural significance of a massive popular shift to electronic message sending requires tabling conventional schemas of orality and literacy, writing and print. Nothing about the technology of e-mail predetermines even whether we employ it synchronously or asynchronously, to broadcast to mass audiences or to conduct personal interactions. The meaning of e-mail depends on how we use new media and how we talk about them.

It may still be early to discuss the place of e-mail in the history of American culture, but the recent publication of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (New York, 2007) probably signals a starting point. Written by two young, successful figures working at the center of contemporary print culture (David Shipley edits the op-ed page of The New York Times; Will Schwalbe was, until very recently, editor in chief at a major New York publishing house), Sendhas spent time on the bestseller lists and enjoyed lavish critical praise in prominent cultural venues. In part a practical guide to the technical workings of the system, in part a self-help manual for avoiding electronic miscommunication (especially at the workplace), and in part an entertaining analysis of the social implications of e-mail, Send has been welcomed by reviewers as the book they’ve long needed. Elegant and readable, Shipley and Schwalbe’s book has succeeded in large measure because it speaks effectively to a range of readers and e-mail users. But even a less skillfully conceived project would interest current readers—and future historians—insofar as it captures (and documents) our awkward social adjustment to the ubiquity of new communications practices.

Send is very much a book of its moment, but those who have read epistolary manuals from earlier eras will find themselves on generally familiar ground. Popular guides to writing letters, an established genre in Europe and North America by the eighteenth century, flourished in the United States in the antebellum era, offering readers some sort of guidance to a mode of communication that was becoming increasingly indispensable for ordinary people. That readers purchased or used these guides for practical help with composition seems doubtful, especially given how many nineteenth-century “American Letter Writers” entertained their readers with lengthy examples of recycled correspondence between wise adults and impetuous youths. Presumably, an admonishing letter by an uncle to his spendthrift nephew and the exchange between a parent and a child over spouse selection—both letters straight from the pen of the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson—were valued as entertainment or moral instruction. Even those texts that presented more original letter samples than the typical Richardsonian rehash catered to the same concerns and appetites. One 1830 text included a correspondence between Thomas Tradelove and Charlotte Easy as well as a series of exercises, one of which asked its young readers to “write to your uncle, that since the death of your father, you had been frequently engaged in considering on what profession it would be most adviseable for you to follow so as to be most useful to the world. Tell him that your heart was most bent on the study of divinity, and pray that as soon as you may be found properly qualified, you may be sent to some theological seminary.”

Elsewhere, entries entitled “Letter from a Gentleman to a Lady, disclosing his Passion” or “From a young Lady to a Gentleman, complaining of Indifference” (in both cases followed by a reply) blur the lines between letter-writing guides and epistolary fiction, while the claims of some guides that their rivals “mislead the rising generation, and pervert their taste, [causing] serious evil” mark the overlap with other kinds of conduct literature. Yet despite these fuzzy borders, titles such as The Fashionable Letter Writer; Or, Art of Polite Correspondence (numerous early nineteenth-century editions); The New Universal Letter-Writer; or, Complete Art of Polite Correspondence (1854); The Parlour Letter-Writer, and Secretary’s Assistant (1845); The Ladies’ and Gentlemens’ [sic] Letter-writer, and Guide to Polite Behavior, containing also, moral and instructive aphorisms for daily use (1859); Martine’s Sensible Letter-Writer (1866); Carrie Carlton’s popular letter-writer: A valuable assistant to those engaged in epistolary correspondence, and peculiarly adapted to the requirements of California (1868) formed a clearly identifiable genre of popular literature.

Pervasive anxiety among nineteenth-century letter-writing guides concerning the conduct of young people was telling. Discussions of epistolary and postal practices in periods of expanding postal service often dramatized scenes of secrecy and surveillance within family life, while inevitably raising the concerns about sincerity and influence that lay at the heart of the larger project of conduct literature. Letter-writing guides weren’t composition how-to books; they were maps and manuals for social relations.

Like those predecessors, a twenty-first century book on e-mail etiquette is at core a guide to etiquette more generally. Much of the advice in Send on what not to do in electronic correspondence stresses reciprocity, courtesy, and consideration, extending familiar applications of the Golden Rule to the electronic frontier. And much of the advice for navigating the everyday epistolary demands of the workplace applies more broadly to other kinds of writing. “Email has vastly increased the amount of writing expected of us all,” the authors observe, “including people whose jobs never used to require writing skills.” Not surprisingly, then, an “essential guide to email” turns out to be the place for supplying proper definitions for commonly misused words or discussing grammar. E-mail is, after all, where many of us produce most of our prose (and our poetry too).

But the timely appeal of a book like Send lies less in its sensible reminders to behave considerately, to proofread, and to strike the right balance between polite and friendly salutations. What the book really offers is a window into a set of habits that are partially invisible to us in everyday life. E-mail is one of those interesting practices that straddle the border between public and private conduct. Exchanging e-mail is never, by definition, a solitary activity (however often we compose and read in solitude), but it frequently invokes or produces an experience of intimacy between correspondents. We know that countless others are exchanging electronic messages, and we may imagine them to be similar to our own, but we rarely get to see those messages. And yet unlike many other modes of interpersonal contact, e-mail seems particularly vulnerable to spilling over the walls of one-to-one intimacy and into public view. The ease with which messages can be archived and inspected by others, instantaneously broadcast to multiple readers, misdirected to unintended recipients, or forwarded virally over time to a mass audience powerfully shapes the experience and meaning of e-mail.

Shipley and Schwalbe offer readers numerous opportunities to admire the handiwork or (more often) to laugh at the awkward mistakes of other private users of the medium. And they underscore the potentially unsettling publicity of e-mail by exposing numerous examples of a particular brand of faux pas: the publicity agent who inadvertently alienates a newspaper editor when he forgets to edit the “cc” line on a letter to his client; a contract salesman who lost his job when a Justice Department investigation uncovered a potentially incriminating note to his competitors; a corporate executive forced to resign after an outrageously imperious note to a subordinate gets circulated throughout the company and in the press; or a London lawyer who becomes an object of public ridicule when he repeatedly and shamelessly duns a secretary to pay for spilling ketchup on his trousers. Narrating all of these cases in the pages of a bestselling book doubly dramatizes the susceptibility of e-mails to unwanted circulation, providing voyeuristic satisfaction as it conveys a friendly warning. We are drawn to reading e-mails that were composed by strangers and not intended for our eyes, even (or maybe especially) when they are painful to look at. And the reminder that e-mail easily eludes the control of its senders speaks directly to a profound sense of what might be new about this medium.

But even here, parallels with snail mail in nineteenth-century America bubble to the surface. Purportedly intimate letters frequently found their way into court records, newspapers, and books, not always with the consent of their authors. (During the scandalous Beecher-Tilton affair, when the prominent minister of one of the wealthiest churches in America was accused of adultery, letters between Elizabeth and Theodore Tilton published in the Chicago Tribune became something of a literary sensation.) Ordinary users of the post frequently worried about who would read their letters and routinely asked the addressee to “burn this letter.” An etiquette guide from the 1850s advised young women to avoid corresponding with men they did not know well, lest the intended recipient show the letters to his friends for unflattering effect. The same guide also described a class of women who entice men into correspondence and then profit “by selling the letters for publication.” As practices of daily communication shifted from conversation to written correspondence, new postal users contemplated the pleasures and dangers of concealment and exposure that seemed to come with the new territory. Our electronic missives certainly leave different sorts of unintended traces in everyday life and on the historical record than the paper letters currently living in drawers, attics, and archives, but are we certain that the anxieties and discussions they provoke are novel?

Further Reading:

Simeon J. Yates, “Computer-Mediated Communication: The Future of the Letter,” in David Barton and Nigel Hall, eds., Letter Writing as Social Practice (Philadelphia and Amsterdam, 2000); Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York, 2004): William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunication (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Christopher Woodall (Princeton, 1997); Katherine Gee Hornbeak, “The Complete Letter-Writer in English 1568-1800,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages XV (1934).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

David Henkin lives in San Francisco, teaches in Berkeley, maintains family relationships in New York, and spends way too much time engaged in electronic correspondence. His most recent book, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006), probably reflects all of those circumstances.

Designing an Atlantic world course, which I first taught in 2006-2007, was an intellectual experiment for me, as I imagine it is for most who teach Atlantic world history. As a graduate student, I specialized in early American history and did my supporting coursework in early modern European history; I never opened a book on colonial Latin America, and although the Caribbean figured regularly in seminar discussions, I didn’t study it in a systematic way. When, around 2005, I searched the Web for sample syllabi, it struck me that other historians were suffering from similar limitations. Most of the “Atlantic World” syllabi I found were really syllabi of the British Atlantic; others were essentially syllabi of the French Atlantic. Few crossed national lines in more than a token manner.

In the intervening eight years, the trickle of publishing on Atlantic world history has turned into a cascade. Today, teachers of Atlantic world history can turn to Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History: Concept and Contours for an introduction to the Atlantic world as an intellectual concept, to Karen Kupperman’s The Atlantic in World History for an introduction to the basic storyline, to textbooks such as Thomas Benjamin’s for models of a comprehensive, transnational approach, and to a host of essay collections that illuminate specific aspects of Atlantic world history. Teachers of Atlantic world history can also look to the rich literature on the history of Atlantic slavery, which includes many works that model trans-Atlantic and trans-regional thinking; John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World and Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America are two personal favorites that have shaped how I present this material to my students. And yet, despite the abundance of resources, it remains difficult to design a coherent course on the Atlantic world.

The first dilemma is: How should the course move forward, and what should the storyline be? Atlantic world courses tend to be web-like rather than linear. There is no central political narrative, because there was no single political power; in fact, it’s impossible to reckon up exactly how many different governments participated in the creation and development of the Atlantic world. Textbook authors have responded to this by deemphasizing political themes in favor of economic and social ones. Kupperman’s overview of the field intertwines economic and intellectual themes. The Atlantic World, by Douglas R. Egerton, et al., focuses mainly on social history and favors diplomatic themes such as “European Rivalries and Atlantic Repercussions” or “War, Reform, and Resistance” over political ones; there is little treatment of the internal organization of any of the European empires or, for that matter, of the Aztec and Inca empires. Thomas Benjamin’s textbook, which is the most politically oriented of those currently available, balances discussion of imperial strategies and organization with broad social themes such as Native American-European interactions, slavery, and gender.