In the summer of 1999, a few months before leaving my hometown of Logan, Utah, to attend graduate school in Chicago, I took a temp job laying a faux-hardwood floor in a local toy store. On hands and knees, my little crew (me, plus two riotously profane sub-contractors from California) crept from the front entrance toward the stockroom, sticking pieces of perfectly grained plastic onto the glue-covered cement slab. Behind us, electricians from Idaho followed on rolling scaffolds, installing light fixtures and doing occult things with wires high in the ceiling—from whence would soon come the Annunciation of Big Bubba.

Big Bubba was the head electrician’s son, a large, bowling-pin shaped man of about twenty. Outfitted in trucker’s cap and Wranglers, he looked for all the world like he was about to hold someone upside-down over a junior high washroom toilet. As Big Bubba loomed above us, one of the California guys asked me a hard question: “So, what’s taking you to Chi-town?” Having long ago learned not to broadcast in public my intention to study eighteenth-century France, I ran through my catalog of lies (law school, commodities trading, professional baseball) before settling on a version of the truth. “I’m going to get a doctorate in European history,” I offered. Pausing and puzzling, the floor-layer wondered aloud, “Why would anybody want to learn about European history?” And then, with the authority of a messenger from the heavens, his face bathed in light of his own creation, Big Bubba leaned over the edge of his scaffold and proclaimed: “Cuz that way, if he goes to the bathroom next to ya, he can tell if yer a-peein’!”

As you can imagine, I’ve told the story of the Annunciation of Big Bubba a lot over the years. It gets laughs. But I’ve come to see what happened in that toy store as something that transcends bathroom humor. In fact, I’ve come to think of Big Bubba’s words as a kind of prophecy, one that became more meaningful the farther my career has taken me away from that half-finished floor in Logan.

To be sure, the foreign in general and France in particular have retained their hold over my psyche, Big Bubba’s disapproval notwithstanding. Like Mitt Romney minus the money, I spent two years in France as a Mormon missionary. Unlike Mitt, however, I’ve never had much reason to hide the acute, aching francophilia I picked up there. If my face allowed me to pull off the beret and pencil-moustache look, I’d probably do it. But as an American who wants to write about subjects that resonate with people back home, I confess that in addition to giving me reason to chuckle every time I go into a men’s room, Big Bubba also keeps me thinking about the allure of the familiar.

Once I got to Chicago, graduate study exposed me not just to the wonders of French history, but to the then new-ish vogue for Atlantic studies. Like everybody I went to school with, I read books and articles celebrating the demise of old models of scholarship rooted in the institutions of early modern empire or (tsk, tsk) the mere pre-history of the United States. There was now a more excellent way: the study of an integrated Atlantic world that embraced the internally diverse African, Native American, and European cultures thrust into contact in the years after 1492.

Cowed by the job prospects facing French historians and guided by sharp-eyed mentors, I edged away from France while positioning myself to catch the Atlantic wave. More than I should have, I smirked at the passé and exulted at the revolution this new thinking seemed to promise. While I parroted my share of fancy talk about historiography, theory, and methods, I’m pretty sure that I latched onto Atlantic history with Big Bubba’s words ringing in my ears. Here, perhaps, was a way of embracing the European without disavowing the yer-a-peein’. Pardon my French.

This personal compulsion to cling to two (or more) homelands, I think, tends to seep into scholarship, at least for some of us. We don’t just want to participate in the construction of Atlantic history as yet another sub-field. We’re not team players. Deep in our hearts, we know that the modern notion of an “Atlantic world,” built to bring some sense of order to an unruly early modern past, will in the end go the way of straight-up historical Marxism, annaliste-style “total history,” and the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s. It just happens. Ashes to ashes and all that.

In truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by “be,” I mean “be,” as in “exist or live,” or better yet, “belong.” In the course of my travels, I’ve retraced the steps of a refugee boy orphaned in the 1750s through the streets of modern Philadelphia, and I’ve looked out across Brittany’s Gulf of Morbihan toward Belle-Ile-en-Mer, imagining how the people I write about made sense of their own small niches in a world grown large. In addition, I’ve been lucky enough to ferret out and stumble upon the traces of obscure yet extraordinary men, women, and children in archives on both sides of the Atlantic. I get emotional about these little discoveries. But I’m not ashamed to admit that 250-year-old letters have nearly brought me to tears—which, being in an archive and all, I just blamed on the dust.

It wasn’t the dust. Rather, it was the breathtaking recognition of a ghostly, flickering point of connection between my own (admittedly trivial) struggles and the bona fide, life-threatening crises faced by my subjects in the eighteenth century. My colleague Craig Harline, a historian of Reformation-era Europe, describes these moments as well as anyone can: “[Y]ou sense something familiar, and your special History muscle goes into action to find it—flattening time in your head, dragging the past forward, pushing the present back, until the story from five or fifteen centuries before looks a lot like a story that happened to you just last week, and seems just as vital and personal too.”

Before taking my first research trips, I was an unlikely candidate for such an experience. No doubt spurred on by an overactive subconscious, I had fashioned a dissertation topic centered on what are now the Maritime Provinces of Canada—which, I now realize, are roughly the same distance from Utah and France. Despite knowing very little about them, I hit upon the idea of writing about Acadians. These, I gathered, were French colonists who, after living uncomfortably under British rule for forty years, were driven from their homes in the mid-eighteenth century, and whose descendants had become the Cajuns of Louisiana. It sounded like a pretty good story, but given my coddled modernity, I had no inkling that I would ever see myself in its protagonists.

As I made my way to the North American archives containing the earliest traces of the Acadians’ history, I did my best along the way to visit sites where that history actually took place. I struggled to get my bearings. The first French families to put down roots in Acadia, I discovered, did so in the mid-seventeenth century, establishing villages on the eastern shore of the Bay of Fundy while courting the good graces of the indigenous Mi’kmaq. But instead of hacking their homesteads from forests or prairies like the westward-probing English of Massachusetts or Virginia, Acadians walled out the sea. Using techniques honed along the rivers of western France, they built up a network of dikes and sluices to drain vast areas of fertile marshland. Long ago, my pioneer ancestors headed for the Utah hills; these folks clung to the coast.

In terms of productivity, it worked. By 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht abruptly transformed the French colony of Acadia into the British province of Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy seemed poised to serve as a “granary” for the market-oriented towns of New England. Even as they mulled over the idea of expelling Nova Scotia’s “neutral French” and replacing them with “good Protestant subjects,” British officials strained to make sense of the otherworldly environment the Acadians had created. The uplands, they reasoned, were so much safer—no storm surges, no freak tides, no burrowing muskrats to pierce the sod walls and flood the fields. As I surveyed the site of the Acadian village of Grand Pré and the ruins of its elaborate system of dikes on a blustery Saturday in 2001, I felt much the same confusion. I marveled at Acadian tenacity, but worried that whatever it was that made them tick, I of all people wasn’t going to get it.

Learning about their expulsion from the Maritimes and the diaspora that saw them scattered across the Atlantic world made the Acadian experience seem even less comprehensible. Beginning in 1755, Anglo-American troops began a campaign to hunt down, arrest, and deport all 15,000 Acadians living on or near the Bay of Fundy. Among the first offensives in what would become the Seven Years’ War, the deportation was also among the most successful. Within three years, some 10,000 Acadians had been captured and shipped off to exile in the port cities of British North America, Great Britain, and France, while the rest mostly hid out in the wilds of New France. By the mid-1760s, Acadians had washed up in bizarre colonies in Saint-Domingue, Guiana, the Falkland Islands, and the French countryside. The toll in lives was staggering. By the hundreds, Acadians drowned in shipwrecks off the Azores, died of malaria in Guiana, and succumbed to starvation in Normandy. The physical and psychological trauma these people had endured exceeded anything I had known, and most of the darkest things I had imagined. Trying to relate to their experience, I realized, was a little like trying to relate to that of a slave, post-Middle Passage.

As I now recall it, I drove from Grand Pré back to my hotel in Moncton, New Brunswick, that Saturday in 2001 in an intellectual funk. I had never really wanted to analyze the past; I wanted to commune with it. That prospect now seemed dim. But as I neared Moncton, a town that has long served as a center of resurgent Acadian culture in the Maritimes, the sight of a bar got me thinking. Located on Champlain Street in the nearby town of Dieppe, it was called “Le Pub 1755.” A British-style pub with a French name that made reference to the year of the Anglo-American assault on Acadians? I pulled over to think about that for a few minutes.

Back in Moncton, I parked at the hotel and walked to the center of town in search of a cheap dinner. Teenagers from the hinterlands were arriving to drag Main Street—or rue Main, in this case. Jacked-up trucks, mesh-backed baseball caps, and Metallica T-shirts abounded. Skirting past the knots of kids forming on the sidewalk, I caught bits and pieces of familiar conversations about music, sports, the opposite sex, and where beer might be had. The scene could not have been more familiar or more small-town American—except that in Moncton, it took place in chiac, a local dialect that combines archaic French and Internet-era English. How historically aware Moncton’s teens were I couldn’t tell, but it struck me that night that those Acadian kids, like the pub owner on Champlain Street, were participants in the long process of figuring out how to belong to two places at once. And that, at least, I could understand. I might even be able to commune with it.

A year later, I felt that communion even more powerfully at the Archives départementales de la Vienne in Poitiers, a middling city in France’s middle. The archive itself was bright and well-organized, far less Gothic and more Napoleonic than I had hoped. Not so for “dépôt 22,” the collection of documents I had come to see. The archivist delivered them to my station not in a cardboard box or folder, but in an ancient, elaborately latched chest. With a nod to me, he opened it, revealing a pile of several hundred letters to and from a local nobleman, the marquis de Pérusse, all penned during the mid-1770s. The chest’s interior was a riot of paper, with brown, crusty vellum sheets sticking out from a cascade of robin’s egg-blue linen stationary. It all smelled vaguely of cathedral vault.

I plowed through the letters, growing more animated as I realized what they contained: a tale of intrigue and violence linking Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Louis XVI’s famous, wealthy controller-general of finances, and Jean-Jacques Leblanc, an ordinary, impoverished Acadian refugee from the western borderlands of Nova Scotia. They made an odd couple, and they came together in odd fashion. In the 1760s and 1770s, a cadre of French thinkers and statesmen became united in their disgust with the supposedly languishing state of French agriculture. Their solution was to colonize France itself. They hoped to found colonial companies like those that had once invested in North America or the Caribbean, but who would instead pour capital into the clearing and farming of uncultivated land within the kingdom. Among the first to step forward with a proposal was the marquis de Pérusse, the forward-thinking owner of a large, bramble-ridden estate near Poitiers.

The search for loyal, hardworking, and pliable agricultural laborers for this promising enterprise led royal officials to the Acadians, about 3,000 of whom had been scraping by in French seaports since the expulsions of the 1750s. In 1773 and 1774, nearly 1,500 Acadians made their way to Pérusse’s lands, where masons were (on the royal dime) busily constructing six new villages exclusively for the colonists. Among them was Jean-Jacques Leblanc.

He was unhappy to be there. For years he had told his Acadian friends that leaving France altogether was their best bet. The Spanish, he knew, were trawling for families to populate the frontiers of Louisiana, and had even made generous offers for groups willing to settle their own internal colony in the Sierra Morena of Andalusia. Even the hated British seemed to have softened on the Acadians: as early as 1763, rumors had flown across the English Channel of plans to settle France’s Acadians on the island of Jersey, while mysterious British agents had promised to carry them back to Nova Scotia, Irish priests in tow, to recreate their lost homeland. Louisiana appealed to Leblanc; several dozen Acadians had already landed there, and the Spanish were eager for more. But there was a catch. All of the European nations angling for new settlers offered the best terms to large, coherent groups. Mere individuals—or, as Catherine the Great of Russia called them, “fugitives and passportless people”—merited no special attention. So whatever France’s Acadians did, they had to do it as a community. And so Leblanc had reluctantly followed his compatriots to Poitiers while plotting a next move.

He soon got a hand from Versailles. Turgot, who became controller-general of finances under the young Louis XVI in mid 1774, opposed the Acadian colony as well. His reasons were straightforward: it cost too much, and it was deeply unfair. Although Turgot was sympathetic to promoters of internal colonization, Pérusse’s project had been funded by a previous administration less concerned with the kingdom’s mounting debt. Worse, in their efforts to lure the Acadians to Poitiers, Turgot’s predecessors had promised them what amounted to hereditary privileges—tax exemptions, a daily allowance from the royal coffers, cheap tobacco, and so on. Turgot despised privileges, styling them a fundamental barrier to economic vitality. As his correspondence made clear, he wanted the colony near Poitiers dismantled and its Acadians off the dole.

In the fall of 1774, the possibility of conspiring with Turgot hit Leblanc like a thunderbolt. After securing a passport and letters of introduction from some of Pérusse’s local enemies, he slipped away to Versailles and talked his way into a meeting with the controller-general. Leblanc then returned to Poitiers and got to work. With some burly friends, he formed a goon squad that roamed the colony’s farms. They recommended, in no uncertain terms, that Acadian colonists agree to leave their homes, abandon their privileges, and move together to the Atlantic port of Nantes. In response to foot-dragging, they issued threats, pelted homes with rocks, and hurled logs down wells, blocking off water supplies. One Sunday after mass, Leblanc’s henchman Simon Aucoin collared a few colonists as they left their parish church, growling that he would “knock them senseless” if they refused to follow Leblanc’s lead. For his part, Turgot delayed the Acadians’ allowance and threw up every administrative roadblock he could think of. Resistance by those who wished to remain on Pérusse’s estates began to crumble.

As I neared the bottom of the chest of letters, Jean-Jacques Leblanc finally prevailed. In 1776, all but a few of the colony’s 1,500 Acadians fled together, taking great wagon convoys to Nantes. Nearly a decade later in 1785, almost exactly the same number of Acadians sailed from Nantes to Louisiana—minus Jean-Jacques Leblanc, who died in 1781. If you know Cajuns, some of their ancestors probably lived through these strange events.

As I cobbled the letters into a narrative, the story spoke to me. Big processes were reflected in it: old regime France’s little-known attempt to colonize itself, the widening eighteenth-century market for free laborers, and the mysterious processes by which people forged collective identities and loyalties.

Little things, though, stuck out even more. Jean-Jacques Leblanc, his friends, and their foes were all trying to negotiate the intricacies of belonging to two places at once. Some abandoned the old for the new. Gervais Gotrot endured Leblanc’s mistreatment in the Acadian colony near Poitiers, but instead of going to Louisiana he struck out on his own, settling in the English Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he raised sons and grandsons who sailed warships for Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire. Many, of course, never recovered from the loss of their Maritime homes. Guillaume Gallet and his deranged adult son simply gave up, dying homeless in the French town of Saint-Malo in 1787. Others, however, groped for a way to claim the best of both worlds—the rustic liberty of the Americas and the security afforded by proximity to European power and sophistication.

Leblanc’s violent push toward Louisiana was a manifestation of this double-edged desire. So too was the face of Jean-Pierre de la Roche, one of the Acadian exiles I met while rummaging through the chest containing dépôt 22. De la Roche showed up only once. His passport, which enabled him to cross provincial borders as he traveled to Pérusse’s Acadian colony, was buried near the bottom of the heap. According to the clerk who described him, he was not attractive: “Acadian, twenty five years old, five feet two thumbs [pouces, a couple of inches each] in height; gray, sunken eyes, pointy nose, a scar below his lower lip.” The clerk then added a line that caught my eye: “He wears a wig.” Like thousands of French men, de la Roche had seized on the vogue for cheap wigs as an assertion of status and respectability—a display that would have irked his North American ancestors, but which for him, having arrived in France as a thirteen-year-old boy, seemed sensible. Even as I scanned his crumbling passport, generating a less-than-flattering mental image of young Jean-Pierre, the impulse to see this short, rodentine, bewigged refugee as kin became overwhelming. Were we not connected in our confusion?

After leaving Poitiers, documents elsewhere began to look less like flat paper and more like inter-dimensional portals. Peering in wasn’t easy. I recoiled at letters from the Connecticut State Archives recounting the story of two Acadian couples who traveled from Annapolis, Maryland, to Woodbury, Connecticut, in the winter of 1756-57. I’m not sure how it happened, but during the expulsion of 1755 the two sets of parents became separated from their seven children. Sent off to Annapolis, they scoured newspapers and queried travelers for over a year before discovering that their children had landed in Woodbury. After a midwinter journey by sea and land, they arrived frostbitten, clothed in vermin-infested rags. During a reunion reluctantly organized by some of Woodbury’s town leaders, the Acadian parents realized something awful. The youngest kids had essentially forgotten them. They were terrified by their parents’ ghoulish appearance, while the older children were hardly enthusiastic about giving up friends and apprenticeships in Woodbury in favor of family with little to offer besides skin and bones.

From Philadelphia to Ottawa to Boston to Aix-en-Provence, visits to diverse archives (during which, after the Connecticut discovery, I missed my own kids all the more) produced a strange duality. On the one hand, the geographical parameters of my project kept expanding at what seemed like an absurd rate—before long, I was writing about Guiana, Mauritius, and, somehow, Antarctica. On the other, my subjects’ unsteady, deeply personal pathways through transatlantic dislocation seemed to converge with my own.

True, reconstructing the Acadians’ efforts to live in multiple worlds didn’t help me resolve my own benign identity crisis. But I do like to think that my experience as a confused wanderer between France and Utah in easy times allowed me to unlock something of their globe-trotting lives in hard times. For as integrated as their eighteenth-century Atlantic world was becoming, and as linked and networked and hybridized as ours currently is, the act of crossing boundaries always leaves its mark.

For me anyway, going back to Europe and immersing myself in musty papers always makes the old French scars ache a little; trips to archives in the United States make me wonder if I really am, or can ever be, at home. Some readers will doubtless see these reflections as self-indulgent at best, meaningless at worst—as I write these lines, I can practically hear my tough-minded dissertation adviser making irritated animal noises. But sensibilities like mine have been with Atlantic history from the start. Early on, scholars made the Atlantic turn with NATO and the Soviet threat on their minds: others did so apolitically, as an extension of their expanding vision of early Native American, African, or European history; still others, as Bernard Bailyn notes, “were simply pursuing narrow, parochial interests that proved to have wider boundaries than they had expected.”

Bailyn’s statement may well be the best face I can put on my participation in Atlantic history. But as I prepare to fly from Salt Lake to Paris again this summer, planning to split time between the massive, bureaucratic Archives nationales and a few smaller libraries, I’m mostly thinking of a higher power. For the Annunciation of Big Bubba, I suspect, will be with me always. And not just in the men’s room.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

In the spring of 2009, the New York publishing firm Doubleday sent me galleys of Sally Jenkins’s and John Stauffer’s book, The State of Jones, for review on my blog, Civil War Memory. I decided to review it, given the topic as well as the involvement of Prof. Stauffer, whose work I know and respect.

While reading through the book I accumulated a growing list of questions and problems. I also came across a thorough critique by Victoria Bynum, author of an excellent study of Jones County, The Free State of Jones (2002) at her own blog, Renegade South. Bynum reinforced my concerns, and I decided to link to it. A response to Bynum’s review by Jenkins and Stauffer received a great deal of attention from my readers, including Civil War historian Brooks Simpson, as well as Bynum herself. The heated debate between the three eventually spilled onto the pages of the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education.

I begin with this anecdote not to reopen old wounds, but to highlight the ways in which online communication, including blogs, have shaped academic discourse and its potential to bridge boundaries between different audiences. Bynum, a respected scholar, has fully embraced blogging as a way to share her scholarly interests and engage a wide range of fellow historians and Civil War enthusiasts. Without a blog, Prof. Bynum would have had to resort to writing a critical notice for an academic journal to be read by relatively few. Instead, her professional critique, as well as the inadequate responses by Stauffer and Jenkins, were made available for all to see and, in doing so, opened up a discussion that brought together participants from both inside the historical profession and far beyond.

I started Civil War Memory five years ago. In doing so, I was strongly influenced by Mark Grimsley’s award-winning Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, which remains one of the most popular military history blogs. I knew of Mark’s scholarship, specifically The Hard Hand of War (1997) but what impressed me most was the application of the blogging format by a seasoned Civil War historian as a form of outreach. Grimsley’s blog addresses complex issue in an intellectually stimulating and entertaining manner. I set out to do the same thing with Civil War Memory.

As the title suggests, Civil War Memory addresses subjects at the intersection of public history, memory, historiography, and what I call Civil War culture, which includes topics related to living history as well as ongoing controversies surrounding the display of Confederate images and the battle over public spaces. Over the past five years I’ve managed to engage readers from all walks of life, including professional historians, history educators, archivists, and National Park Service personnel as well as a wide range of Civil War enthusiasts. My regular readers come from every state and as far away as Italy, India, Australia, Japan, and Poland.

I occupy an unusual and perhaps unique position within the Civil War community. While my credentials include an M.A. in history and while I am employed as a full time high school history teacher, my interests mirror those of academic historians. I spend most of my time wrestling with questions more closely rooted within the academy and over the past few years have even managed to contribute to this growing body of scholarship. Still, since I identify myself first as a high school teacher, I tend to see myself as an outsider. It is this perspective that drives my blogging. My primary goal for my blog from the outset was, and continues to be, to introduce and discuss questions that typically find more of a home within academic circles to as wide an audience as possible. This involves introducing a wide range of studies, mainly published by university presses, to an audience whose primary interests rarely extend beyond the battlefield. In addition to historical memory, such topics include gender and cultural studies as well as new approaches to the study of battles and campaigns—the so-called “New Military History.” I do my best to direct my readers to the most talented and respected historians in the field based on the conviction that only by reading reliable secondary sources do we come to a sophisticated understanding of the past. Some of those historians, such as Prof. Peter Carmichael and John Hennessy of the National Park Service, have authored guest posts related to their own ongoing research projects. I fervently believe that Civil War enthusiasts are willing and eager to embrace non-traditional subjects if approached carefully.

After I talked to Mark Snell, director of Shepherd University’s Civil War Center and a regular reader of my blog, about the success of Civil War Memory, he decided to devote one of the institute’s summer seminars to the study of historical memory instead of focusing on more popular topics centered on local battlefields and campaigns. It was a risk given that most of the participants are interested in tours of battlefields and other military sites. For three days in June 2007, I, along with John Coski, Kurt Piehler, William Blair, and Tom Clemens, lectured on aspects of memory and toured the Antietam battlefield and Washington, D.C., with a focus on how public spaces have been used to remember the past. The response was overwhelming. Participants approached me at one point or another during the seminar to thank us for introducing these ideas or for pointing out that it was the first time they had thought about the war as a reflection of competing memories. Blogging has also put me in touch with high school history teachers from all over the country through the Teaching American History Grant Program. This has given me the opportunity to introduce history teachers to ways they can introduce the study of memory in their classrooms.

The questions and subjects that bring professional historians together at academic conferences deserve to be discussed in wider circles. After three years of blogging I no longer think only in terms of a strict dichotomy between the interests of academics and the general public. I move freely, for example, between discussing Stephen Sears’s explanation of the outcome at Antietam, to Edward Linenthal’s analysis of the distinction between sacred and secular space at our Civil War battlefields, to debates about Confederate nationalism between historians such as Gary Gallagher and William Freehling. Civil War Memory has also become an integral part of my own writing and research. The blog functions as a place where I can preview my own thoughts and interpretations about what I am reading and researching. Much of what is included in my most recent book-length manuscript on the battle of the Crater and historical memory was introduced first on the blog.

More importantly, Civil War Memory is a place where you can find information on the most popular and pervasive Lost Cause myths that continue to resonate in certain communities. No subject has received more attention on my site than the myth of the black Confederate soldier. The subject functions as the perfect case study for a blog devoted to how Americans have chosen to remember their Civil War. Much of my attention has been devoted to challenging the Lost Cause-inspired literature, the organizations that perpetuate these stories and why, as well as introducing the latest scholarship by such historians as Bruce Levine. Peter Carmichael recently shared a conference paper on the subject, which garnered an impressive number of reader comments. My approach has been not so much to dismiss these stories, but to bring to bear a sharper analytical focus for those readers who are willing to step back and proceed with care. I am convinced that the discussion which ensued in the comments section in response to this particular post is hands down the most sophisticated dialogue on the subject to be found on the Web.

The real benefit, however, is the potential for long-term influence as students and Civil War enthusiasts alike spend more time gathering information through keyword searches on the many Web browsers now available. Given the popularity of the subject within the Confederate heritage community, it is not surprising to learn that a Google search for “black Confederates” will send you immediately to a list of their own Websites, many of which are hosted by individual chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who are this subject’s most vocal advocates. Just a few years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find one of my posts ranked within the top 10 Google pages, but that has gradually changed with a larger audience as well as links from other Websites and blogs. Do a Google search for “Civil War Memory” or “Civil War Sesquicentennial,” or search for a prominent historian in the field, and more than likely your list will include a post from my site. The point is that high traffic and links from external sites can turn a blog into a useful site within a ranking algorithm that does not judge content based on quality or credentials.

Attention to sensitive topics such as black Confederates does come with its share of challenges and frustrations. The decision to engage the general public in discussions about the Lost Cause and other topics is a walk on the slippery rocks. For some the simple act of asking questions or engaging in interpretation about the evolution of certain narratives is perceived as a threat to the identity and understanding of specific demographics, especially those with a regional affiliation or historical connection to the South. For a blog devoted to how Americans have chosen to remember the past and the political implications of those choices, this often leads to heated exchanges. I’ve been the target of just about every insult in the book that could be applied to a carpetbagger from New Jersey who dares to write about Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the rest of the Confederate pantheon. At the same time, blogging has helped to clarify the language and generalizations that I wielded too easily in the early life of this site. I’ve become much more sensitive to the fault lines within our Civil War community and have refrained from employing the “neo-Confederate” label, for instance, to dismiss or minimize those who approach the past from a different perspective and set of motives. As much as I would like to think that I’ve persuaded readers to question certain Lost Cause dogmas, I must admit that my readers have forced me to acknowledge my own biases and assumptions about the past as well.

Surprisingly, the most common insult hurled in my direction is to accuse me of being an academic. Regardless of how many times I remind my readers that I am a high school teacher and not a college professor, I am continually identified as a liberal-socialist-northern revisionist, who is both anti-religion and anti-South. This constant refrain, while worth a few laughs, ought to concern all of us, because it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical profession as well as the research process and the dissemination of that research through various types of publications. Many Civil War enthusiasts simply do not understand what is involved in the writing and research of critical or analytical history. Although some of this suspicion of academia is a product of the politicization of history that has taken place over the past few years, much of it can be attributed to too few professional historians engaging the general public online. This problem is especially acute within the Civil War community, where the mistrust of professional historians has been fueled by Confederate ideologues who have succeeded in mobilizing public opinion through misinformation. As long as they monopolize the Internet, they will continue to exercise a great deal of influence on how the general public conceptualizes the central issues of the war.

I am not suggesting that the solution is to start your own blog. Blogging takes time, patience, and even a certain psychological profile. What I will suggest is that it matters that Brian Dirck is blogging about Lincoln at A. Lincoln Blog, and that Mark Grimsley, Brooks Simpson, and Ethan Rafuse blog together at Civil Warriors. I like to think that as a group we are not only raising the level of public discourse and introducing the general public to subjects each of us can claim some expertise in, but that we are redefining the idea of what it means to be historians and teachers. Constructive dialogue is always desirable. With the Civil War sesquicentennial right around the corner, it is crucial that state commissions, professional organizations, and historians think critically and imaginatively about how to use the Internet to educate the general public. The numbers of Americans who will attend a conference, museum exhibit or read a book between 2011 and 2015 will pale in comparison with the reach of various Websites. I believe we have the opportunity and responsibility to contribute to and shape that content.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.1 (October, 2010).

I had no idea what I was getting into. I intended to take notes from one slender manuscript journal for a brief article or lecture. Yet somehow I’ve spent the last five years working with the thirty-year diary of Sylvia Lewis Tyler (1785-1851), an early nineteenth-century Everywoman, of Connecticut and Western Reserve Ohio. It’s a research journey that has unearthed artifacts made by, used by, or known to her, and it has taken me from Washington, D.C., to Connecticut and Ohio, stumbling down riverbanks and puttering through graveyards, using research tools and finding aids from vital records to dowsing rods.

I first learned of the diary when organizing a 2001 exhibition on childhood, for the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Museum in Washington. I’d asked the archivist what the DAR’s Americana collection had that reflected teenagers’ activities in the pre-Victorian era. She suggested Sylvia’s diary, since it was begun at the age of fifteen, and chronicled the many chores and social activities of a Federal-era girl. I scarcely got a glimpse of the pages before the diary went into its exhibition case, but I did notice many references to spinning and sewing. Years later, I thought I’d take another look, hoping for some useful raw data on textile and clothing production in early nineteenth-century New England. I was taken aback when the archivist deposited nineteen manila folders before me, each containing a small, slim, hand-made volume.

I could have abandoned the project. I could have stuck to my original plan of just noting Sylvia’s textile and costume-related activities. I did begin cautiously, focusing on the spinning and knitting that appeared in nearly every entry. I also noted the names of neighbors and nearby towns, since the title page offered the only clue to where she lived: “Sylvia Lewis of Bristol.”

Working upstairs from one of the nation’s best genealogy libraries does help. Having once lived in the town adjacent to Bristol, Connecticut, I recognized some town names as Connecticut ones, but several states have Farmingtons and Hartfords. Just a few minutes spent checking some names in the diary against the 1800 Bristol, Connecticut, census confirmed my theory, establishing Sylvia as a Connecticut girl. A few more minutes with Bristol’s bicentennial history told me that another Bristol girl, Candace Roberts, had started a diary the same year. This was preserved at the Bristol Public Library’s Bristol History Room, and in another few minutes I was on the phone with Jay Manewitz, the librarian in charge of the collection. “Did you know there’s another Bristol teenager’s diary, begun the same year as Candace’s, and that she mentions Candace on the first page?” I tantalized him. “No! Is there a transcript?” he asked eagerly. “No,” I replied, and knew I was crazy to add, “I’m working on it.”

Thus I began to transcribe Sylvia’s diary, begun at age fifteen in 1801 and ending at age forty-six in 1831. (Two years are missing, and there is a gap between 1822 and 1828; the last volume covers 1829-1831 sporadically.) I could get through about three months of the tiny, sometimes smudged, often cramped, erratically spelled entries in a two-hour spurt: that was all I could stand, between eye strain and the archive’s frigid, artifact-friendly temperatures.

Why did I leap into this project—and why did I stick to it? Having spent four happy years in the town next to Sylvia’s Bristol, I have an abiding fondness for the area and interest in its local history. Moreover, Sylvia’s records are richly informative as social history. Since she was compulsive about chronicling her daily doings, I have assembled nearly twenty years of records for spinning, knitting, sewing, quilting, and laundry, and many entries on foodways, socializing, and other aspects of life in federal-era New England (and pioneer Ohio). From these entries, I’ve compiled “activity tallies”—charts and graphs of seasonal patterns in her various chores. (Was wash day always Monday, I wondered, as common understanding has it? Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, yes.) Her mundane chronicles, over time, gave me a record of an entire community, and every bit of background and context I’ve found in my research has filled in the picture. I’ve found her entries, whether on textile production or fashion, socializing or foodways, travel or churchgoing, immensely useful in my study of the objects and people I research at the museum.

Most of all, Sylvia herself drew me in. Her occasional, restrained outbursts are endearing, from her distress at her father’s death to her raptures on reading her first Gothic novel. No surprise that she found The Children of the Abbey “the most entertaining book I ever read,” after the religious and moral tracts that formed her usual reading diet. Once I knew the cast of characters in the diary, the entries created a narrative, and I kept wanting to know what happens next. Would Sylvia marry Tracy Peck, who walked her home from a quilting? Or Abel Tyler, who nursed her through the spotted fever epidemic? Who would emigrate to Ohio next? Along the way, research became its own reward, and the challenge of finding more and more information to flesh out the spare entries of the diary became engrossing.

Five years later, I am still at it, nearing the end of the 1821 volume. I keep pausing for background research, and to take stock of Sylvia’s data. To go beyond the diary itself, however, I’ve embarked on a research journey that has drawn upon documents, artifacts, and field trips, in an effort to illuminate Sylvia’s written words and reconstruct her world and life.

My first research was biographical—to compile a “who’s who,” to understand who Sylvia was playing with, working for, and visiting. Sylvia’s father, Royce Lewis, was one of ten sons, most of whom grew to adulthood and lived near their father, Josiah, on what is still known as Lewis Street. I needed to sort out the relatives littering the diary. (Sylvia, not writing for an audience, seldom mentioned connections—but “Mrs. Hooker” would reveal herself as an aunt, for example, and Amy and Naomi as cousins as well as playmates.)

Gravestones were most helpful for my biographical summaries. I blessed New Englanders for their habit of inscribing “relict of Reuben,” “daughter of Eli,” etc., on gravestones, connecting children, parents, and spouses. I blessed Bristol’s Katherine Gaylord DAR Chapter, for having transcribed Bristol’s gravestones in the 1920s when they were still legible. Of course, some married daughters, and children who emigrated (whether to the next town or to New York or Ohio), weren’t included in the Bristol record; nonetheless, I had a pretty good Lewis family tree by the end of the first day’s digging, just in the DAR library. For other neighbors, family genealogy books at the DAR were helpful. Like the Lewises, there were often several related families of the same name, and it helped to know which branch of the Cowles or Ives family someone belonged to.

Casting my net a bit wider, I looked at vital records. Town vital records for Bristol are missing, but church records provided marriages and deaths. The Congregationalists’ baptismal habits frustrated me: only children of full members of the church were baptized, and not everyone believed in infant baptism (though Giles Hooker Cowles, Bristol’s pastor, published a treatise in favor of it). Thus, only the July 1805 death record for Sylvia’s niece Minerva, noting her age as 11 months, allows us to name the baby whose birth Sylvia reported in August of 1804.

Death records were often illuminating. Where Sylvia tended to note simply that “Mrs. Bartholomew” had died, the church clerk gave not only full names, but ages and causes of death. During the spotted fever epidemic that struck New England in 1808, Bristol fared better than some towns, but the emotional toll echoes through the clerk’s annotations: “May 3 Polly Wife of Luther Tuttle, aged 29 years Spottd fever Sick about four days very calm” reads a typical record. Sylvia, sick herself, afterwards wrote a day by day account, to the best of her recollection, of news she had heard during her illness. “I heard that Mr Luther Tuttle & his wife was very sick he says O my dear wife, she will die, what shall I do, she will go to heaven, he says—and at night she died and we trust sleep in Jesus,” she wrote for May 3. Luther died the next day. Read in tandem, the church death records and the diary portray a chilling two months in a small, interconnected community.

Despite abundant town and church records, I still found that Sylvia’s private notations were the only source for some biographical events, such as her brother Abraham’s two marriages and the death of his first wife. In October 1814, Sylvia recorded news of the death of “Abraham’s wife,” whose name she never once mentioned. No death record or gravestone survives in Trumbull County, Ohio, where Abraham and his wife had emigrated. And it’s only Sylvia who reported Abraham’s remarriage, on a trip home to Bristol in 1815, to the Widow Plumb. It takes piecing together several more entries’ clues, from 1801 to 1818, to reveal that Abraham’s first wife was Lois Lowry of Bristol and later Ohio. The Lowry family history confirms Abraham as Lois’s husband, but a newspaper obituary that recorded the death of “Mrs. Abraham Lewis” would put Lois’s death in 1837. Only Sylvia’s diary can explain that Lois died in 1814, and it is Rachel Plumb Lewis whose gravestone survives beside Abraham’s in the Vienna (Ohio) Center Cemetery.

Going beyond vital records, I hoped land records and maps would allow me to reconstruct a geography of Sylvia’s Bristol. This proved impossible. Did a single year go by without one or more Lewises buying or selling land, usually between brothers? I don’t believe so. I cursed, too, the New England metes and bounds system. Following English tradition, this method described plots of land as if the people involved were walking around its boundary, using natural and man-made landmarks, the old chains-and-rods measurements, and references to neighbors’ plots. After 200 years, not one of these landmarks or neighbors’ holdings survived, not even the location of the “highways” first laid out in the 1740s. How was I supposed to diagram land that began at a heap of stones at the southwest corner of Widow Cowles’s orchard?

Despite these obstacles, piecing clues from several sources has enabled me to pinpoint some places and people in the diary. For example, Sylvia wrote in 1812 of watching the cotton factory being “raised.” Chris Bailey, then curator of the American Clock and Watch Museum in Bristol, had told me about Sylvia’s brother-in-law’s cotton factory, a relocated church building. But where had it been sited?

Fortunately for my quest, Bristol became a prosperous industrial town after Sylvia’s time and has been extremely well documented, starting with a church history by her old beau Tracy Peck. A 1907 history of the town stated that the cotton factory building had become part of the E. Ingraham clock factory, still in business in 1907. An 1896 map of Bristol showed me exactly where the Ingraham factory was: on a branch of the Pequabuck river that can no longer be seen, thanks to its diversion after a devastating 1955 flood. So there was the cotton factory: a half a mile or less from Sylvia’s house.

Being a curator and therefore object-oriented, I hoped to find some material culture related to Sylvia or her family. Sylvia had attended numerous balls at Uncle Abel Lewis’s tavern, and I knew that the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS) in Hartford had a large collection of tavern signs. Hundreds of towns, thousands of taverns—what were the chances Abel’s had survived? Then again—what if? I was astounded to learn that the CHS not only preserved Abel’s tavern sign, but also a flamboyant red and gold silk dress worn about 1825 by the adopted daughter of Abel’s son Miles and his wife Isabinda Peck. (Sylvia had quilted with “Binda” in 1803 and 1805.)

A few other artifacts have surfaced through my inquiries on genealogy message boards, which reached descendants eager to hear about Sylvia’s diary. Descendants of her daughter, Sylvia Tyler Bushnell, still have Sylvia’s family Bible, our source for her younger children’s names and dates of birth (born after the yearly volumes end), and for the name of her baby who died, age two days, in 1818. “Mr. Tyler held it when it Died which was about SunSet . . . my trials were new & not to be described to those who have not felt the same,” she heartbreakingly recorded in the diary, but with no mention of Susan’s name.

One descendant owns a skein of silk spun by Sylvia, a fantastic companion to a few diary entries in 1801-1802 in which Sylvia reported “pick[ing] silk balls” and spinning silk, and, more broadly, a rare artifact of Connecticut’s early attempts at sericulture. Two cousins treasure linen pillowcases possibly woven, but certainly embroidered, by Sylvia, dated 1828.

The third type of research I’ve conducted is geographical, and it’s been some of the most rewarding. Traveling to towns where Sylvia lived has allowed me to understand the layout of her communities and the distances between her and the neighbors and places she mentioned, and more subjectively, to get a “sense of place” for each locale she inhabited: Bristol before her marriage, nearby New Hartford, Connecticut, in 1809-1817, and the Western Reserve of Ohio from 1817 to her death in 1851.

Bristol was the obvious place to start. Jay Manewitz of the Bristol Public Library, who got me into this project, escorted me on my first visit, back in 2005, to Uncle Abel’s tavern (now an office). We stood in the probable ballroom, where Sylvia had danced at many a Thanksgiving and election-day ball, and then went to Cousin Miles Lewis’s house, now the Clock Museum. The current owners of Candace Roberts’s house, still a private home on the south side of town, welcomed us inside. Here, Sylvia and some other teens visited after church on March 1, 1801, and at least Sylvia and Candace decided to keep diaries, which both begin that same day. Finally, we saw the exterior of the houses of Uncles Roger and Eli, and across the street from them, the “Old North” or Lewis Street Cemetery, where so many Lewises are buried.

Cemeteries are addictive research libraries. I have returned often to both the Lewis Street and Down Street Cemeteries in Bristol. Making diagrams of the placement of Lewises in Lewis Street has shown how tightly knit this family was. In Down Street, I found the grave of Josiah’s first son, Roger, and also a small stone nearby inscribed only “d.L.”—probably David Lewis, the first of Josiah’s sons to die, aged only eight months, in 1752. I doubt anyone had thought to look for David in the tiny graveyard just south of the Pequabuck river, and I take not only a historian’s, but also a sentimental pleasure in finding Roger’s little brother, buried just “behind” him. I’m not sentimental about my own relatives’ graves—we are not a graveyard-visiting family—but locating the physical remains of these people I’ve come to “know” through the diary has been strangely compelling.

The grave I most wanted to find, of course, was Sylvia’s, in Ohio. I’d never have found it without help. The regent of the nearest DAR chapter put me in touch with an incredibly talented genealogist and DAR member, Sally Mazer, who enthusiastically embraced the Sylvia project, doing advance research and insisting I stay with her and her husband during my visit to Trumbull County. We also connected with Rebecca Rogers, a historian who’d published a history of Trumbull County’s wooden clock industry, in which Sylvia’s husband, Abel, and her brothers Abraham and Levi, all worked. Rebecca took us to the riverbank site of the old iron foundry outside of town, where Abel often went for clock parts, which Sylvia sometimes helped assemble. She also introduced us to Chris and Diane Klingemeyer, who shared their collection of Trumbull County clocks, and while none made by Sylvia’s family survive, it was a thrill to see examples made by her neighbors.

Sylvia’s grave was recorded in the Vienna Center Cemetery in the 1920s, but the gravestone had long since disappeared. Sally, however, knew of a 1900 map of the graveyard in the county’s genealogy library, and had narrowed down the area where Sylvia ought to be. As soon as I arrived in Ohio, Sally took me to Vienna (always, inexplicably, pronounced Vye-enna), to the cemetery next to the Presbyterian church in the center of town. There she opened her trunk to reveal her specialized graveyard research equipment: gallons of water, a trowel, scrub brushes, and the most unlikely finding aid I’d ever encountered: dowsing rods.

In addition to finding water, metal dowsing rods apparently will indicate the presence of a grave, by crossing into an X when you walk over one, holding the rods parallel before you. Even spookier, if you hold one rod perpendicular to the ground over a grave, it will move either clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on the sex of the body underneath. Unbelievably, this worked for me in a blind test. Having previously narrowed down the likely area, Sally dowsed for a grave where Sylvia ought to be, and in no time, her rods were magically crossing into an X. Gently using the trowel to pry aside the lawn, we found a flattened gravestone. Scrubbing off some mud and washing off the rest with the water, a name emerged: SYLVIA ….

Finding Sylvia’s final resting place was a highlight of my research journey, although the Ohio trip yielded more conventional research results as well. Back in Washington, I keep working on the diary, filling in gaps both useful and incidental. Sylvia’s life was not remarkable, in any traditional sense; she accomplished no notable feats, she has no prominent offspring. But she is nonetheless both memorable and historically informative—an Everywoman of her time and place, no longer anonymous. By recording her everyday activities and interactions with the people in her communities, she created a rich body of primary evidence that illuminates our understanding of early republican America.

Further reading:

Sylvia’s diary is unpublished, but transcripts are available to be shared with interested researchers. Sylvia’s diary informs Ann Buermann Wass’s study of Federal era clothing; see Ann Buermann Wass and Michelle Webb Fandrich, Clothing through American History: The Federal Era through Antebellum, 1786-1860 (Santa Barbara, 2010). The diary is also being used in a compilation of names of workers in the American wooden clock industry (ongoing), and by Walter Woodward in his forthcoming study of the Connecticut diaspora of the early nineteenth century. For background reading on some aspects of Sylvia’s life, Bristol’s most recent history is Bruce Clouette and Matthew Roth’s Bristol, Connecticut, a bicentennial history, 1785-1985 (Canaan, NH, 1984). Sylvia’s husband, brothers, and other clockmakers and peddlers mentioned in the diary are discussed in Rebecca M. Rogers’s comprehensive study, The Trumbull County Clock Industry, 1812-1835 (privately printed, n.d.).

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

Alden O’Brien is the curator of costume, textiles, and toys at the DAR Museum in Washington, D.C. Her exhibits have included “The Stuff of Childhood: Artifacts and Attitudes 1750-1900,” “Costume Myths and Mysteries,” and “Something Old, Something New: Inventing the American Wedding.” She is currently working on “Fashioning the New Woman,” an exhibit on women and fashions of the Progressive Era.

Bank failures bode ill. At least, that is how students of panics and depressions have generally seen it. Crisis is a whirlwind, emanating from the world of finance and spreading into the economy’s productive sectors. In other words, if a bank fails, run for it. And so historians, like most people, tend to think that bank insolvency is a particularly egregious instance of business failure: since banks link many different people and businesses they are especially likely to drag down many others when they themselves succumb to debt and become insolvent.

But what if bank failures were actually the least, rather than the most, problematic instances of bad credit? What if the demise of a bank were actually less troublesome to the economy than the failure of other kinds of businesses? I would like to pursue this admittedly provocative speculation in the context of the Panic of 1837, which, like many other panics, was characterized, and perhaps even triggered, by a chain of banking failures. I am not suggesting that bank failures are unproblematic. But a close examination of this problem can teach us some general lessons about how money was created and about the cultural resonance of credit in antebellum America.

In the wake of the Panic of 1837 anti-bank sentiment in the United States reached a fever pitch. Indeed, anti-bank polemics were perhaps one of the few industries that flourished amidst the general gloom. Banks were assailed for manipulating credit to their advantage and at the same time for allowing credit to dry up just when it was needed most. They were blamed for extracting large profits, but also for being insufficiently capitalized and thus exposed to instability, and eventually to insolvency, as a result of imprudent decisions. Nor were the ills caused by banking limited to the financial, or even the economic, sphere: banks were also seen as corrupters of morals, law, and order.

Of course, such attacks were not born of the Panic, at least not of this panic. Similar charges against banks as ruining the character of the people animate William Gouge’s 1833 work, whose title tells much: The Curse of Paper Money and Banking, or a Short History of Banking in the United States, with an Account of its Ruinous Effects on Landowners, Farmers, Traders, and on All the Industrious Classes of the Community. Gouge compared banking and paper currency to feudalism, claiming that the former “divides the community into distinct classes, and impresses its stamp on morals and manners.” He thought that the creation of the paper system 140 years earlier had “affected the very structure of society, and, in a greater or less degree, the character of every member of the community. It may require one hundred and forty years more, fully to wear out its effects on manners and morals.” But these effects on character, while deep and most troubling, were not at the heart of Gouge’s diatribe. He focused, instead, on the “multitudes,” the “many thousands of families,” who had been ruined and “reduced to poverty by various Banking processes.”

Gouge’s critique, and with it the assumption that banks may drag hundreds or thousands down with them when they fail, was a persistent feature of antebellum popular writing (demonstrating a remarkable staying power right up to the present day as well). But by what agency do banks bring ruin to thousands? Through what mechanism do actual people suffer when a bank fails? To the modern ear, the very question sounds naïve, at best. Everyone, according to modern opinion, keeps their savings in the bank. Its failure would thus mean the disappearance of those savings. The modern solution to that problem, of course, is deposit insurance, which makes it safe for regular people to place savings with the bank, which the bank then invests, lending in support of productive economic activities. But we tend to forget that this is, for the most part, a modern solution for a modern problem. Antebellum banking in America was not, in fact, based on the numerous deposits of dispersed individuals. The primary asset to be found in today’s typical bank portfolio was insignificant in the early nineteenth century. This raises the question: if bank failure did not ruin people by destroying their savings, how did it affect them?

In order to answer this question, we need to expand our focus to the question of credit more generally and, in particular, bad credit. Let us imagine a typical credit relationship. Someone wishes to expand his business by purchasing a new machine. We can presume that credit will be forthcoming, either from the manufacturer or from the seller of the machine, who might agree to a deferred payment (perhaps in installments), or from a lender who will transfer the money to the businessman who will, in turn, pass it on to the seller. In either case, the income generated by the expanded production that results from using the machine is considered to be the source that will make repayment possible. It need not be an exclusive source, but its capability to generate returns is thought to be the rationale for giving credit. What has happened, from a social perspective, in this transaction? The borrower has realized a capacity for extending production in a way that was not possible without the credit. A writer on the “Principles of Credit” in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine in 1840 described this dynamic, noting that credit is “carried on upon a presumption that some positive benefit is to accrue, and some addition is about to be made to the resources of mankind. Whatever shape commercial credit may assume, it will always be found to rest upon some basis of value, real or supposed, at present existing, or to be created out of the application of labor. The object of loans is to realize a profit both to the lender and the borrower.” From an aggregate social perspective, the ensuing profit is just a sign of what has actually happened: an “addition … made to the resources of mankind.” Credit is the enabler of this particular addition.

Now let us turn to the unhappy case of bad credit. In this instance, the borrower uses the new machine to the same advantage, but for other reasons (say, uninsured healthcare expenses) he suffers a reversal of fortune and is unable to pay back the debt. The creditor is of course particularly unhappy. Aristotle thought that this situation—the half-completed exchange—presented the most urgent instance of intervention to assure justice. Not only had the creditor been damaged, but that damage was precisely the gain of the borrower. Each had moved from the initial status quo, but their movement was in opposite directions, resulting in a doubly wide gap that called out for remedy, for corrective justice. This is certainly the most common, intuitive response to a half-completed exchange, that is, to bad credit. But if we revisit the social perspective, we encounter a surprising result. Recall that the aggregate social perspective was interested in the addition to the resources of mankind. In the case of bad credit, as well, there is every reason to believe that such an addition was actually made. The problem is not that people did not act to use their capacities to increase production—that was the point of the credit, and that was also its result. The problem now is only one of distributing the addition, that is, the surplus derived from the increased production. The credit relationship determines a particular form of distribution which has now been upset. But since the distribution has no effect on the aggregate—on the “resources of mankind”—this only becomes a problem if we have some other reason to be concerned about the distribution, as opposed to the creation, of wealth or resources.

This dismissal of bad credit will not withstand generalization, however. For while a specific case of bad credit poses only distributive questions, the hint that bad credit is not an isolated incident but a widespread feature of interaction may hinder the advance of credit elsewhere. Returning to our “Principles” from Hunt’s we learn that “whatever the sum of capital may be, and the degree of credit which will necessarily attach to it in any community, they can never be made practically beneficial unless the general fidelity in the performance of engagements is fully complied with. This is the stimulus to all the active industry of modern society; for it creates the disposition to believe a promise of future labor equivalent to present capital, and hence promotes exchanges between the two.” It is only our trust in the principle and habit of fidelity to promises that allows people to engage in a credit system. “The disposition to perform promises is, then, as essential to the establishment of credit, as the ability. The two combine in every community to create that species of confidence which may be made the basis of action” (my emphasis).

There we have the key. What is credit but a species of confidence-inspiring action? And so, the problem with bad credit is not a particular failure to pay one’s debts. Instead, what is at issue is a type of game in which we encourage people to act without receiving any immediate gain, relying only on the solid expectation of future gain. The problem is that “credit may be most effectually destroyed, if the sense of the people can be demoralized,” which will bring them to disregard “all law, divine or human, but their own will.” If people lack confidence, if they believe that credit is too dangerous, they will stake nothing on the game, choosing to produce less than they would if they used credit.

With this general understanding of credit, then, let us return to the particular role of banks in the antebellum system of credit and production. Here again, the failure of any one particular bank—which happens when its liabilities prove to be cases of bad credit—seems much less problematic than our intuitive sense of the damage caused by bank failure. Credit was extended, borrowers engaged in production, and the resources of the community were increased. And what of the creditors? Again, recall that in antebellum banking the depositors who would be today’s paramount concern are not present in large numbers. Instead, there are two types of creditors, only one of which we are accustomed to thinking about today. First, there are the bank’s direct investors: its initial promoters (and in all probability, its directors) to the extent they contributed capital, together with stockholders if the bank “went public” at some point and sold stock on the open market. While this group technically classifies as a creditor of the bank, the bank’s successes were their successes, and so its failure is in great measure their failure. In other words, the distributive outcome has little or no meaning: the bank’s directors were in a sense their own creditors.

The second group of creditors comprises note holders. Antebellum banks issued notes that were payable in specie on demand. When a bank failed, note-holders could apply to the receiver of the bank for payment, but the bank’s assets typically did not cover even a small fraction of its liabilities. As a result, small note holders probably recovered only in rare instances. Happily, no one but those who had intimate business relations with a bank was likely to be left holding a large amount of the notes of any particular bank. And so, unlike today’s depositors whose holdings are highly concentrated in one bank, note-holders in antebellum America typically held notes from a wide array of banks, each for a small sum and for a relatively short duration. Or in modern parlance: the small note-holders were well diversified. They thus faced little risk from the demise of any particular bank.

One further twist should be borne in mind: banks, whether of the antebellum variety or those doing business today, are not simply intermediaries, despite a common belief. Banks do more than concentrate dispersed money and funnel it towards specific uses. Banks inhabit a fractional reserve system, which means that they can lend far more than they have on deposit. In fact, bank lending in a fractional reserve system creates money. Today, banks create money in the lending process because they can lend more (usually ten times more) than they must hold as reserves. Antebellum banks created money in a somewhat similar fashion, but they had a tool that today’s banks lack: they could issue their own notes, holding limited reserves in order to be able to redeem them in specie. The mechanics are different but the effects in terms of money creation are similar. The upshot here is that antebellum banks actually loaned considerably more money than they ever collected from investors or depositors. That means that for every dollar risked by a bank, there was much less than a dollar risked by a depositor. We have one more reason, then, to think that bank failures might be less of a cause for worry than other business failures. Because banks have the privilege of creating money, they actually spur the system of production beyond its existing capacity. Bank credit allows the production of something for nothing, or nearly so. More accurately, the equation is something for a nothing that will turn (everyone hopes) into a something later on. As our teacher in Hunt’s understood, credit allows people to treat the future as if it were already here.

We thus begin to see how the advantages of banking and the optimism regarding the minimal impact of any single bank failure might begin to unravel, and why the critics of banking were, at least in broad terms, barking up precisely the right tree. They understood or at least intuited three related problems about banking and the ways it might in fact ruin the lives of multitudes.

First, the critics saw that the power of banking to enhance productive capacity beyond the immediate ability to pay for it was potentially valuable, but almost certainly dangerous. Each act of advancing credit was an act of faith. But faith is like lying: it becomes easier with each additional step. In this sense, lending against fractional reserves, which was still something of a financial innovation, had a cascading effect, both on the way up and on the way down. The availability of credit, and especially the expansion of the sources of credit (that is, the appearance of new banks; or the expanded lending of existing banks once federal deposits were distributed throughout the country), helped create a bubble that would eventually burst. When on the rise, credit generates competitive pressures on surrounding banks to engage in similar acts. This dynamic has stayed with us regarding every form of financial innovation since the early nineteenth century. Confidence has its price.

Second, the critics understood that when the system came under stress, that is, when too many people demanded their money, banks would exacerbate rather than alleviate that pressure. This was because lending against fractional reserves meant that banks could not respond to actual stringency by opening their vaults. When faced with demands for cash, the banks would have to call in their loans; their customers, in turn, would have to call in any liabilities owed to them. In other words, just when the demand for money became most intense, the banks would become an active force on the demand side rather than being able to act as a source of supply. Banks would not encounter this problem if they simply acted as intermediaries. It was their money-creating function which made banks a big part of the problem rather than a means of resolving the problem when pressure for money arose. What’s more, the system of lending money that did not actually exist until the loan was made insured that more and more economic actors had their fortunes integrated. Pressure on one point in a chain of loans could easily be transferred to many other points in many other chains through the channel of a bank.

Third, critics understood that the kind of confidence required for banking created a precarious web. When confidence in one bank was shaken, confidence in surrounding banks was nearly sure to founder as well. Once creditors got edgy, there was nothing standing in the way of the downward cascade described above. And because banks owed one another, and all businesses owed banks, a crisis of confidence would (almost) never be limited to one bank. This is how the ripple effects of a banking crisis would spread directly to the production sector: banks would call in loans, and businesses strapped for cash would have to cut expenditures, fire workers, and eventually close. The banks were instrumental in propping up more businesses than could ever have existed without the banks’ support. At the same time, the banks were a central reason for why so many businesses came under pressure all at once in what Irving Fisher would eventually call the debt-deflation problem. When productive businesses close, people lose their jobs. To the extent that bad bank credit contributes to general decline, all the various observers concerned about bank failure are completely right to worry.

Perhaps the best way to understand the attacks on banking is not by focusing on the concern for the pecuniary safety of the average citizen. For Gouge and others like him, the soul rather than the body of the people was at stake. When the advocates of banking could write that “credit is a moral property as well as an economical instrument,” and that the habits of credit should “extend their influence over general conduct in all the relations of life,” critics bristled. This was not because they doubted whether there was a moral imperative to pay one’s debts. Rather, they were shocked to see the idea of bank credit, based as it was on getting something for nothing, vying for the moral high ground. Credit of this sort was a speculation. Allowing it to flourish was one thing; granting it not only legitimacy, but moral status was horrific. If people were taught to consider their relationship with their banker as analogous to their obligations toward family, community, and state, the multitudes would indeed have come to ruin.

Further reading

For competing interpretations of the role of banking in precipitating the Panic of 1837, see Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957) and Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969). A new evaluation of the evidence appears in Jane Knodell, “Rethinking the Jacksonian Economy: The Impact of the 1832 Bank Veto on Commercial Banking,” The Journal of Economic History 66, no. 3 (2006): 541-74. On the history of banking in the United States, see Howard Bodenhorn, State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History (New York, 2003) and Naomi Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New York, 1994). On the economics and culture of failure, see Edward Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2001). For an account of one particularly spectacular banking failure, see Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist (New York, 2008).

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

Roy Kreitner is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (2007). He teaches in the faculty of law at Tel Aviv University and is currently the Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow.

The American Jeremiad passes at least one test of really important work: it forces you to reconsider beliefs that you took for granted. I’d like to focus here on the particular belief of my own that Bercovitch’s book most forced me to rethink, though not without resistance.

It’s the belief that, though the United States repeatedly betrays its founding ideals of justice and fairness, it is uniquely willing to measure its betrayals against those ideals and to try to change itself accordingly. For Bercovitch, the ideological function of this belief is to provide a kind of no-fault insurance for the American dream: if America does the right thing, we demonstrate our essential goodness; but if America does the wrong thing we show we are even better because we are so willing to condemn our own crimes. The greatness of America, then, is nowhere better reaffirmed than in our negative jeremiads—including our politically radical self-critiques—a process Bercovitch describes in the book as “the Americanization of dissent.” In his preface to the new anniversary edition of the book, he urges the need to “open the possibility of contemplating injustice and conceiving democracy outside the framework of the Real/True America” (emphasis mine).

Why is it so bad to measure ourselves against an ideal America if doing so leads at times at least to correcting our evils?

It’s a brilliant demonstration of how for us all roads, however oppositional they may seem, lead inevitably back to a celebration of America’s unique greatness, from the Puritans’ confusion of godliness and Americanness on down to the present day. I admit, however, that at first I had my doubts about this argument. Why is it so bad to measure ourselves against an ideal America if doing so leads at times at least to correcting our evils?

What convinced me, however, that Bercovitch is indeed onto something important is an example he offers in the new preface, where he updates his argument by listing instances of jeremiad-like rhetoric on the current political scene. Bercovitch quotes a dissenting slogan from the 2012 Occupy Wall Street protests: “The American Dream has been stolen…” one protestor asserted. “The 1% has destroyed this nation and its values.”

On first encountering this example and Bercovitch’s critical attitude toward it, my thought was, wait a minute—what’s the matter with that? What’s wrong with accusing the one percent of hijacking the American Dream and betraying our nation’s values? I felt confirmed in this thought after the November 2012 U.S. elections, where it seemed that this sort of appeal to economic fairness had been very effective in deciding the outcome. For once, a populist critique of plutocracy had persuaded the American mainstream, and it was the appeal to American values that had helped turn the tide.

But on reflection, I saw Bercovitch’s point more clearly and felt its force: the American habit of acting as if we invented values that are not peculiar to us at all drapes a cloud of nationalist and exceptionalist mystification over our every public discussion—in this case, the swindling of the ninety-nine percent by the one percent. If that swindle is wrong, its wrongness has nothing to do with whether it is un-American or not. But here is Bercovitch’s biggest point: until the nation frees itself from this confusion, it is probably never likely to wise up to such swindles.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Gerald Graff is professor of English and education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the author of numerous works of literary and cultural criticism as well as critical histories and commentaries on higher education, including Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Beyond the Culture Wars (1992), and Clueless in Academe (2003).

Hey look, I am back. I could bemoan the insidious forces that have kept me from blogging this morning, but I seem to know so many people who have been sick, injured, or lost loved ones in recent months, it really does not seem to become me to complain. And that was even without reading the paper this morning. Anyway, it’s a new year, a new semester, a new decade, so let’s get started.

Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels in recent years, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.  Most historians like most bands still have to set up and load their own equipment, and while  it saddens me that we historians don’t usually get to perform in dive bars, the bathrooms in conference hotels are usually cleaner.

Then there is the economics of our respective types of publication. My reminder of the similarities here , admittedly not too recent at this writing, was this very informative post by Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy, critiquing his band’s royalty statement.

From Tim Quirk, I learned a new term (new to me) major record labels used to denote those never-hit-it-big back catalog bands that they authorize themselves to ignore and abuse: “unrecouped” bands whose sales, according to major label accounting, never paid back their advance and promotional costs. (According to the statement, Too Much Joy’s account with with Warner Brothers stood at $62.47 in royalties with an an unrecouped  balance of $395,277.18.)  Historians lucky enough to find teaching jobs and get tenure do enjoy some job security that bands who had a couple of songs on alt-rock radio in the early 90s might not, but we will all live in danger of remaining “unrecouped” and thus powerless when it comes to dealing with the publishers  and their self-serving accounting practices.
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Now playing: The Low Anthem – To the Ghosts Who Write History Books

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

What is curiosity? “Curiosity” shares etymological roots with “care” and “careful;” once, a curious man was a fastidious one, a curious object an object well-wrought. Now, to be curious is to seek knowledge, but that knowledge, because acquired through curiosity, can been seen as illicit. It is a virtue to be curious, but curiosity killed the cat, and left Curious George locked up at the zoo, on display for curious children and their curious parents.

Curiosity works likes this, snaking its way among people and objects and animals, attaching itself first to one thing, then to another. In early America, curious men discussed curious things and displayed curious objects in cabinets of curiosity. Curiosity links a world of ideas with the social worlds in which men, women, and ideas circulated.

Consider this episode in the life of Benjamin Franklin. A young and ambitious Franklin arrived in London in 1724, only to discover that his Philadelphia patron had failed to send letters of introduction. Fortunately, young Ben had other means of introduction: “I had brought over a few curiosities,” he later recalled, “among which the principal was a purse made of the asbestos which purifies by fire. Sir Hans Sloane heard of it, came to see me, and invited me to his house in Bloomsbury Square, where he show’d me all his curiosities, and persuaded me to let him add that to the number, for which he paid me handsomely.”

In this neat little transaction, Franklin turned his curious purse to social connection and to cash, two things he very much needed at the time. He gives us a glimpse too of the gossip among learned men, cabinet keepers, and curiosity seekers; Sir Hans Sloane just happened to have heard of Franklin’s curiosity. How exactly he had heard, Franklin does not say, but someone must have been talking to Sir Hans of the curious young man from the colonies with the collection of curious objects he was willing to show and to sell.

Shared curiosity linked the men of the Enlightenment, in European capitals and the colonies. Curious men and the occasional curious woman exchanged peculiar objects that seemed to defy the categories they had devised to sort out the world: in this case, a purse fire could not destroy. While Franklin and Sir Hans likely had a genteel or learned exchange about the purse, on city streets sometimes more rough-and-tumble seekers turned out to see people with strange features or from strange places displayed as “Great Curiosities.”

In the 1830s, another curious American traveler headed west. In 1834, Richard Henry Dana dropped out of Harvard and worked his way to California as a common sailor. He picked up plenty of “curious and useful information” about his ship, and about California and its residents, and passed it on to readers in his travel narrative, Two Years Before the Mast. In his year working with cowhides on the California coast, Dana met up with some different kinds of curiosities. He remembered one acquaintance who was “considerably over six feet, and of a frame so large that he might have been shown for a curiosity.” The sailor’s feet “were so large,” Dana writes, “that he could not find a pair of shoes in California to fit him, and was obliged to send to Oahu for a pair; and when he got them, he was compelled to wear them down at the heel. He told me once, himself, that he was wrecked in an American brig on the Goodwin Sands, and was sent up to London, to the charge of the American consul, without clothing to his back or shoes to his feet, and was obliged to go about London streets in his stocking feet three or four days, in the month of January, until the consul could have a pair of shoes made for him.“

This story lets curiosity slip off the pages and set its hooks into us. Why would a man send to Oahu for large shoes? Was this barefooted paradise actually a source of shoes for big-footed men? Why the heels on Hawaiian-made shoes? And how often did American sailors wander wintry London streets in their stocking feet? In fact, why was this shoeless man “obliged” to go about the London streets at all? Was it common for the American consul to commission shoes for shipwrecked citizens? Did the consul have a clothing allowance? A shoemaker and a tailor on call?

Dana was curious about the large man; we are curious about Dana’s story. But there is more. Dana reported that a particular Hawaiian friend of his “was very curious about Boston (as they call the United States); asking many questions about the houses, the people, etc., and always wished to have the pictures in books explained to him.” And on the ship back to Boston he encountered one of his old Harvard professors who was very curious about California’s rocks and shells. The professor’s curiosity made the man himself an oddity, an object of curiosity to the sailors. “The Pilgrim’s crew christened Mr. N. ‘Old Curious,’ from his zeal for curiosities, and some of them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse himself in this way. Why else a rich man (sailors call every man rich who does not work with his hands, and wears a long coat and cravat) should leave a Christian country, and come to such a place as California, to pick up shells and stones, they could not understand.”

For Franklin, Sir Hans, and sailor Dana, curiosity was largely a virtue, a good thing that spurred the inquiring minds of leading men. But as literary historian Barbara M. Benedict reminds us, some people were better at being curious than others. Snooping women got caught up, she writes, in “the seamy obverse of elite inquiry.” A woman’s desire to know flirted with transgression; so did a child’s curiosity to know the world of adults, a worker’s desire for information guarded by a boss, a slave’s interest in doings of his master, and every human desire to know the ways of the gods.

In Benedict’s wonderful account, Curiosity: a Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, 2001), we learn that even elite male curiosity has a checkered past. Questions that appeared to be disinterested matters of science to men of Franklin’s generation once seemed to ecclesiastical authorities to stem from a dangerous desire to know too much. “Flooded by new and curious men and women,” Benedict writes, “early modern culture characterizes curiosity as cultural ambition: the longing to know more. And this characterization, as both praise and blame, remains with us today.”

This special issue of Common-place takes up the uncommon history of curiosity. Our authors help us notice that men and women who are curious are themselves sometimes turned into curiosities. We are curious about a medical man in Worcester puzzling about the curious behavior of a sleep-walking servant and about a medical missionary displaying portraits of his patients to pique the curiosity and open the purses of would-be donors. We visit the medical museums where men and women curious about their own anatomy gazed on displays of preserved and sometimes grotesque body parts.

Body parts had no say in how they were perceived. But our authors recover stories of men and women who were displayed as curiosities but then turned the curiosity of customers to power or profit. We see explorers in a new world puzzled by strange plants and strange creatures and needing native knowledge to sort the dangerous from the benign in New World flora and fauna. We see merchants in New York, with the help of taste-making ladies, upgrading “Curiosity Shops” by calling them antique stores. We see students curious about a painter of Indians provoking the curiosity of their professor who learns that the artist’s own curiosity about his subjects distinguished his paintings from more pedestrian images that were rendered to meet contemporary tastes and expectations. We encounter a historian caught up in his own curiosity about a portrait of Emily Dickinson. We see a globe maker in rural Vermont whose curiosity about the world beyond the borders of his small state inspires the curiosity of a historian. We watch men and women speculate on the odd things that don’t fit in easy categories. Why did the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin have such a long and strange theatrical afterlife? How did mountain stones come to form the likeness of a human face? What kinds of creatures inhabited ancient America? What race of men inhabit contemporary America?

In the spirit of the old Yiddish proverb–”A man should go on living, if only to satisfy his curiosity”–we welcome readers to join the subjects and authors of this issue in exploring some of its many entangled meanings and consequences.  

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Ann Fabian teaches history and American studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her publications include Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, 1990) and The Unvarnished Truth (Berkeley, 2000). Fabian is currently working on skull collectors.

Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2002) and co-author of the CD-ROM Who Built America?: From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946 (New York, 2000).

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good . . . 

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

—Genesis 1:9-10, 2:19, King James Version

From the beginning, the relationship between naming and waters has been unsettled. The Book of Genesis begins as formless abstractions emerge out of chaos. Light comes out of darkness, and the firmament divides the waters from the waters. To these abstractions, a self-satisfied God assigns the first proper names (besides his own): “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night . . . and God called the firmament Heaven.” These names—Day, Night, Heaven—are singular, as is the name God gives the dry land—Earth. But even though the waters under Heaven are “gathered together unto one place” to let the dry land appear, the name they receive is plural, at least in the English translation offered by King James: “the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.” Later, God creates the first man and hands him the task of naming the earth’s creatures. The man’s name, Adam, is mentioned for the first time in the very act of bringing Adam those creatures “to see what he would call them.” God gave Adam dominion “over every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” so naturally it was in Adam’s gift to name them. But if Adam named the fish, it was God who named the waters. And in his infinite wisdom he thought of them as plural and called them Seas.

In these origin myths, we can identify two questions pertinent to the uneasy relationship between waters and names. First, what gives human beings the authority, or the gall, to assign names to such inaccessible and incomprehensible entities as the seas? How can limited and puny mortals name these mysterious givers of sustenance, from which even the authors of Genesis realized that life emerged? The dominion that comes with naming seems somehow inappropriate for eternal rivers and boundless seas. 

Second, even if it were appropriate for man to name the waters, what kind of name would the seas merit—one name or many, singular or plural? As the Genesis authors recognized, waters tend to “gather together unto one place,” which encourages us to think of them as singular. From earliest recorded times, some geographical theorists imagined the seas of the world to be one entity, the visible waters of the known world flowing into and surrounded by a vast ocean, a stream or river that encircled the world’s landmass.  They recognized that this aqueous body lacked the obvious boundaries that lend confidence and ease to the practice of naming—we might as well name the air that we breathe as the sea that surrounds us. 

Yet on the other hand, in the days when wind and sail provided the fastest means of travel, when continental and global circumnavigations lay far in the future, there was no obvious way to test whether widely separated seas, such as those that lay off the Arabian Peninsula and those of the Mediterranean, were in any way contiguous. Some thinkers consequently imagined them to be utterly separate entities. Ptolemy’s global geographical scheme envisioned the Indian Ocean as an enclosed sea, surrounded by Africa, Asia, and a great unknown southern land mass that connected southern Africa to Asia. From this perspective, it was quite natural to give these boundless yet separate bodies of water individual names. Even within bodies of water that the ancients could demonstrate were contiguous, different peoples gave different names to parts of the same waters—the Adriatic, Ionian, and Aegean Seas, for example.

I.

All these confusions still faced Europe’s fifteenth-century explorers who sailed westward out of the Mediterranean. Columbus drew encouragement for his voyages from his belief, one of several plausible geographical schemes of his era, that the Ocean Sea was very broad from north to south, but not very wide from west to east. He went to his grave believing that he had indeed sailed across it, and bearing the title that Ferdinand and Isabella bestowed upon him—Admiral of the Ocean Sea—for that was the name of the sea that he, before all other men, had mastered. 

Of course, the explorers who sailed westward in Columbus’s wake, most of them Iberians, quickly realized the Admiral’s error and began to think of the Americas as a continental landmass, somewhere between the western ocean of Europe and Africa and the eastern ocean of Asia. With this dawning realization, and with the dramatic increase in ocean-going traffic beyond the Pillars of Hercules, came an increased need to name and chart the seas that Columbus sailed. Before the great age of exploration, the western ocean had sometimes been called “Atlantic,” a name derived from the Atlas mountains of western Libya, from which the Ocean River could be seen, as well as from the Greek myth of a lost island civilization, Atlantis, lying somewhere vaguely to the west of the Hellenic world. But Atlantic was by no means a universal or exclusive name for the seas Columbus sailed. The coastal voyagers of northern Europe had their own names for these waters: the Baltic, the North Sea, the Irish Sea. Early maps of what we think of as the Atlantic basin extended this practice, naming the Sea of France, or Mare Gallicum, for instance. South of the equator, the waters navigated by the Portuguese as they made their way toward and then around the Cape of Good Hope were commonly called the “Ethiopian Sea,” a name that lasted well into the eighteenth century. And Columbus’s first discoveries were quickly added to the list as the Antillean Seas. In other words, although “Atlantic” was in play from the beginning, it was but one name among many for the waters that were now a highway to New World wonders.

Spain soon came to dominate both the wonders and the wealth of these new worlds, and the center of Spanish transatlantic operations lay in the maritime basin formed by the northern coast of South America and the islands of the Antillean chain, from Cuba in the northwest to Trinidad in the southeast. The northern coast of South America, stretching a thousand miles from the mouth of the Orinoco in the east to Darien in the west, the Spanish called Tierra Firme, the mainland, translated by the English as the “Spanish Main.” . The sea to its north was called, quite naturally, the “North Sea,” Mar del Norte, by its Spanish masters. Over time, the name for this central sea of the Spanish Empire became the general name for the entire basin between Old Spain and New, so that maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries commonly referred to the entire Atlantic as the North Sea—Mar del Norte. As late as the 1690s, even the southernmost regions of the Atlantic, the waters to the east of Argentina and Tierra del Fuego, were labeled as Mer de Nort in a French atlas. 

II.

As Spanish conquistadors gradually took possession of Tierra Firme, the native peoples they encountered began to inform them of another body of water, a great sea comparable to the North Sea that Spain now controlled. In 1511, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, one of several Spanish overlords competing for control of the native caciquesor chieftains of the Darien region, visited the domain of Cacique Comogre, where he heard Comogre’s eldest son Panquiaco tell of golden treasures that could be found in lands to the south, across the mountains of the Darien Isthmus and the sea that lay beyond. Based on these early reports of the riches of the Incas, Balboa organized an exploratory expedition that departed Darien on September 1, 1513. After nearly a month’s overland journey, they came to a hill overlooking the Gulf of San Miguel, whence Balboa could look out toward the Bay of Panama, large enough in its own right, but only a small coastal indentation of an ocean the vastness of which Balboa could not possibly have imagined. 

What to call it? Balboa’s journey across the isthmus had roughly gone from north to south, and the sea he left behind him was the Mar del Norte. Balboa therefore called the waters beyond the Gulf of San Miguel the “South Sea.” Balboa did not so much name this new ocean as give utterance to what it was already called by necessity of the convergence of Spanish and Native American histories. From that moment onward, as Balboa’s fellow conquistadors seized the realm of the Incas, Spain neatly divided the waters that bounded its growing empire into the Mar del Norte and the Mar del Zur, the North Sea and the South Sea. 

Balboa’s expedition made it possible for Spain to double its New World empire into symmetrical northern and southern regions, but it did nothing to indicate whether this new South Sea bore any relation to the North Sea. Nor was there yet any certainty that Balboa’s South Sea was part of the Eastern Ocean of the Indies. The navigational triumph of Fernáo de Magalháes, the Portuguese nobleman who had formerly served in India and Morocco, and who set sail for Charles I of Spain in 1519, would begin to provide such a reason. Ferdinand Magellan’s search for the southwest passage that might link the North Sea with the South Sea, the Western Ocean with the Eastern Ocean, came to fruition in the straits that he named for himself. 

The waters of these narrows were so tempestuous that when, at last, Magellan’s fleet of three vessels broke free of the straits, beat their way off the rugged coast of Chile, and entered into the calmer waters of the open ocean, the captain in his relief named the sea “Pacifico.” Or so we learn from Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian who accompanied Magellan and survived the circumnavigation to write an account. It is Pigafetta who tells us that the open sea they crossed “was well named Pacific, for during this same time we met with no storm.” The only other surviving logbook from the expedition to name these waters, that of Francisco Albo, calls it the “South sea.”

Based on contemporary maps and globes that he might have seen, Magellan may have believed that he would cross this sea and arrive in the Indies in a matter of days, or perhaps a few weeks. On this score, he was wrong. But by sailing to the northwest for the next three months, reaching first the Marianas Islands and then later the Philippines, where he was killed, Magellan proved conclusively that Jehovah and the ancient Greeks were right. The seas had been gathered together unto one place, and ocean encircled the land masses of the world. 

As a navigational achievement, Magellan’s voyage rivaled that of Columbus, and he, perhaps more than Columbus, deserved the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea. But the name he gave to the peaceful waters off the western coast of Chile did not yet become the name for the basin of the Eastern Ocean. For more than two centuries, mapmakers and navigators would continue to make the South Sea the common label for the waters west of the Americas and east of Asia. There are several reasons for this. First of all, Magellan’s name was not so apt; often the waters west of the straits were anything but peaceful. Francis Fletcher, who accompanied Francis Drake on his global circumnavigation in the 1570s, thought that “Mare furiosum” would have been a better name than “Mare pacificum.”

Another explanation lies in the fact that it took more than two centuries for explorers to chart the limits of the Pacific, and until that time, South Sea remained a plausible and useful description. For Europeans to reach these waters, ships had to sail to the south for a tremendous distance. For the Spanish fleets that maintained a dominant presence in this region through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, most of the maritime traffic connected the southern reaches of their empire, the Viceroyalty of Peru, to the central and northern regions of the Spanish Main and Mexico. Beyond this north-south Spanish axis, the rest of the coastal territories of the Pacific basin remained almost completely unconnected by any regular traffic. 

The sole exception to this rule was the annual voyage of one or two Manila galleons that struggled back and forth across the South Sea from Acapulco to the Philippines. The Manila galleons carried Peruvian and Mexican silver to the markets of Asia, and the spices and silks of the Indies back to New Spain, a journey lasting six months in each direction. But in the quarter millennium (1565-1815) that they traversed the Pacific, the crews of the Manila galleons never came upon the Hawaiian Islands, never charted the islands and coasts of the unknown Pacific reaches. Their solitary journeys created a fragile trading channel between East Asia and South America, an oceanic equivalent of the Silk Road, but they did not create a Pacific World that could readily be described, much less named. 

The discontinuity of the Pacific was maintained in part by the indifference of Asians to their far-eastern waters. Japan, perhaps the most quintessentially Pacific of the world’s modern nations, largely withdrew from international affairs during the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), and even before that time, its overseas connections were directed almost exclusively to the westward. Although heavily dependent on the surrounding waters for sustenance, the Japanese, unlike other island or coastal nations (Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal), were not great long-distance seafarers. The currents that swirled around the home islands tended to push wayward Japanese sailing ships into treacherous waters and then out into the open ocean, never to return. Early modern Japanese maps divided that ocean into the small eastern sea, the familiar waters that they fished and that linked them to the Asian continent, and the large eastern sea, a frightening, boundless, and uncharted maritime region with no people and no points of interest. Similarly, China, the Middle Kingdom of the Asian world, took a strong trading and imperial interest in southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where it encountered the tiny outpost of Spanish traders in Manila. But the Chinese played no active role in world exploration after the great fleets led by Admiral Cheng Ho in the early fifteenth century sailed west to the African coast of the Indian Ocean, but not east beyond Japan.

Finally, although Magellan’s global circumnavigation had proven that the world’s waters were one, he had not disproven the long treasured geographical theory of a great southern continent, a landmass that would be the symmetrical parallel of the Eurasia-Africa ecumene. So long as Australia remained unexplored and the southern limits of the oceans remained unknown, belief in the existence of a Terra Australis held firm. Most of the naming of the waters throughout history involved the extension of the names of land regions onto the seas. So if there was a large and as yet uncharted continent at earth’s southern extremity, then it made sense to call the waters around it the “Southern Ocean” or the “South Seas.” Maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries therefore often restricted names such as the “Indian Ocean” to the waters relatively near India, and called the waters between southern Africa and Indonesia the “Southern Ocean,” out of respect for this theory.

European exploration party after another ventured out through the Straits of Magellan in the eighteenth century, they thought of the waters they sailed into as the South Seas. In 1740, British naval officer George Anson led a four-year expedition to sail around the world. In the official account of the voyage, probably ghost-written by Anson’s chaplain, Richard Walter, the South Seas were the primary destination. “Within the limits of the southern Ocean,” Walter expected to find the “celebrated tranquility of the Pacifick Ocean” just to the west of the straits where Magellan had found them, “but these were delusions which only served to render our disappointment more terrible.” A generation later, in 1767, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, formerly an aide-de-camp to Montcalm in Quebec, commanded a major French exploratory party on a two-year mission through the Straits of Magellan and on to circumnavigate the globe, accompanied by Charles-Nicolas-Othon d’Orange, the Prince of Nassau. In their journals and accounts of the voyage, Bougainville and Nassau referred to the waters beyond the straits as “the South Sea.” Even as late as 1815, when Otto von Kotzebue led a Russian naval expedition on a voyage of discovery looking for a “north-east passage,” they thought of their destination as the South Sea. And as a literary convention, the name lasted well into the nineteenth century; Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson all used “South Seas” rather than “Pacific” in the titles of their works. 

The direction that Enlightenment geography was taking made it increasingly unlikely that “Pacific” would overtake “South Sea” as a common name for this ocean. Beginning in the 1690s and continuing through much of the eighteenth century, many European geographers took to naming the waters not by the vast ocean basins familiar to us today, but rather by what the modern geographer Martin W. Lewis calls the “ocean-arc” concept. In this scheme, oceans are thought of as the waters that wrap around the edges of integrated landmasses, rather than as the empty seas between continents. For example, the Ethiopian Ocean in this model wraps around southern Africa, and therefore includes parts of what we would call the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In similar fashion, a 1719 French atlas described the Mer Magellanique as a single sea that encircles the entire southern tip of South America. The value of this ocean-arc concept lay in the fact that these arcs often corresponded to actual maritime pathways of human activity. If this theoretical trend had continued to prevail, there might never have been a reason to construct an oceanic basin to which the label “Pacific” would plausibly apply.

What challenged this model were the remarkable voyages in the 1770s of Captain James Cook, remarkable as much for what Cook failed to discover as for what he found. Part of Cook’s purpose in making his three voyages to the South Seas was to prove, once and for all, whether the great southern landmass about which geographers had speculated for millennia actually existed. Although Cook erred in thinking that the Antarctic he explored was all ice and no landmass, his explorations around Australia and New Zealand and his circumnavigation of Antarctica proved that Australia was not the northern edge of a great southern continent. There was no such landmass and therefore no obvious need to name a great southern ocean after it. 

In his third and final voyage, Cook explored the northern reaches of the Pacific, searching for the fabled Northwest Passage that would easily link Europe with the Far East. Before that time, Spanish explorers had been inching their way up the west coast of North America, and Russians had been slowly moving east and south from Alaska, but without linking the basin together as a connected and integrated whole. Cook’s careful mapping changed all that. He did not find a Northwest Passage, but he did chart the northern reaches of the Pacific before his untimely and much debated demise at the hands of Hawaiian islanders in 1779.

Over the course of Cook’s three voyages, something seems to have changed about European perceptions of the Pacific, or at least about what westerners were willing to call it. Cook himself, in his report to the secretary of the Admiralty after his first voyage, hoped that “this Voyage will be found as Compleat as any before made to the South Seas.” Similarly, Sydney Parkinson, who accompanied Joseph Banks as a “draughtsman” aboard the Endeavor on Cook’s first voyage, published a journal that he called A Voyage to the South Seas. But when Connecticut native John Ledyard sailed on board the Discovery for Cook’s last and fatal voyage in 1776, he called his account A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. 

After Cook’s death, subsequent maps much more frequently applied the word “Pacific” to the entire basin, and “South Seas” became increasingly literary, a romantic term most often used for the regions around the islands in the central and southern latitudes of the Pacific. Where Anson and his crew had expected to find “Pacifick” waters within the great Southern Ocean, now people began to think of the South Seas as an exotic portion of the well-charted Pacific Ocean. In short, Cook’s accomplishments made it possible (if not necessary) for everyone from geographers to ordinary folks to imagine the Pacific as we now know it: as the entire basin between the Americas on the east and Asia and Australia in the west. To this singular sea they increasingly gave a single definitive name that reshuffled and replaced older habits.

Consider, for instance, Lieutenant William Reynolds, a young naval officer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who took part in the U.S. exploring expedition of 1838-42 under Captain Charles Wilkes, the first international maritime survey conducted by the United States. Wilkes and his fleet of six sailing ships followed in Cook’s wake and charted for the first time large portions of the Antarctic coast and the islands of Polynesia. Lieutenant Reynolds wrote frequent letters home to his family in Pennsylvania, letters with real dramatic flair and style. His literary aspirations were aided by the fact that on ship, the crew had access to “the Histories of all the French and English expeditions to the Seas we are to visit.” Most of these histories of course labeled the ocean to which Reynolds was heading as “the South Seas.” But Reynolds had a different sensibility from many of his ocean-going forebears, formed in part by his reaction to their writings. Less than a month into his voyage, Reynolds described the inspirational beauty of these volumes, “published by the respective Governments in superb style, full of plates, colored and plain. I have been looking over them and only wish that we were now among the Islands: ah! we shall have a glorious time, wilder than the romance of imagination.” 

As the ships neared Cape Horn, the weather worsened but Reynolds’s excitement mounted as “those indefinable sensations that set one’s heart a throbbing while viewing new and striking scenes were dancing through my veins.” At long last, they rounded the Cape: “We had fairly doubled it!” In his ecstasy, Lieutenant Reynolds had no doubts about what name to call the waters he now entered, but his comments about the ocean’s appearance suggest a tinge of disappointment, a vague unease that cycles us back to the beginning of our story, to the fundamental ambiguities surrounding the naming of the seas. Quoth Reynolds, “[F]or the first time I found myself in the Pacific Ocean—it looked very like the Atlantic!” 

Further Reading:

This essay would not have been possible without the insightful work of Martin W. Lewis in “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” The Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 188-214. Lewis’s essay appears in a valuable special issue of The Geographical Review entitled “Oceans Connect,” which also includes Marcia Yonemoto’s “Maps and Metaphors of the ‘Small Eastern Sea’ in Tokugawa Japan,” 169-187, the source for information on Japanese and Chinese understandings of the Pacific in this article. J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (Berkeley, 1981), offers an introductory discussion of the evolving problem of knowledge of the seas. On the Spanish Main and the naming of the Atlantic, see Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley, 1966), and for a general overview of Spanish expansion into the Pacific, including a discussion of the Manila galleons, see Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 (New York, 2003). 

Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea is described in Charles L. G. Anderson, Life and Letters of Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1941; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970). For Magellan’s voyage and Pigafetta’s commentaries, see The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, translated from the Accounts of Pigafetta, trans. by Lord Stanley of Alderley (London, 1874), 65; as well as a recent popular narrative, Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York, 2003). Francis Fletcher’s critique of Magellan’s “Pacific” is found in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628), ed. by W. S. W. Vaux (London, 1854), 82. Several recent accounts deal with the fleets led by the Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho, including the fanciful Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York, 2003). On George Anson’s circumnavigation, see Richard Walter and Benjamin Robins, A Voyage round the World . . . by George Anson (London, 1974). Bougainville’s expedition is described in John Dunmore, ed., The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, 1767-1768 (London, 2002), and details on the Russian expedition of 1815-18 can be found in Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering’s Straits, 3 vols. (1821; reprint, New York, 1967). 

The literature on Cook’s voyages is voluminous, but see the handsome and lavishly illustrated J. C. Beaglehole, ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, 5 vols. (Rochester, N.Y., 1999). For the most recent analytical biography of Cook, see Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York, 2003). Finally, William Reynolds’s charming letters and his profound description of the resemblance between the Atlantic and Pacific are found in Voyage to the Southern Ocean: The Letters of Lieutenant William Reynolds from the US Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, ed. by Anne Hoffman Cleaver and E. Jeffrey Stann (Annapolis, 1988), 11-12, 55. For a general account of the U.S. exploratory expedition of 1838-42, see Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U. S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York, 2003).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Mark Peterson teaches history at the University of Iowa and is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997) and “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 58 (April 2001): 307-46. He is working on a history of Boston in the Atlantic world that spills over into other oceans as well.

On the trail of China traders in Africa and Asia

“In Persuance of an Act of this Commonwealth . . . Pasckal Nelson Smith Esqr. of Boston in the Countij of Suffolk and the Common-wealth Massachusetts maketh oath that the Sloop Harriett where of Allen Hallet is at present Master . . . of the Burthen of Thirty-five Tons or there about was built at piscataqua in the Year of Our Lord one Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Three.” Having copied this as best he could, the Dutch clerk added John Hancock’s John Hancock into the margin; Hancock had been governor of Massachusetts when the Harriett set sail.

The Harriett was the first American vessel to sail for China, and there were its papers copied and tucked away in The Hague, in the Nationaal Archief, part of the Dutch East India Company records, an enclosure to the daybook sent from Cape Town. And there, improbably, was I. It was a long way to come for just one ship.

Fortunately, there were others. The Cape Colony dagregisters, daybooks, opened up bit by bit: a few ship’s papers here, a quarterly list of shipping there; after a month I had put together a surprisingly complete record of American ships in Cape Town sailing to and from China in the 1780s and 1790s.

But the shipping lists told more. American merchants weren’t just sailing to China; they were sailing to Mauritius, to India, to Batavia, and to points in between. So I started to follow the ships.

The Dutch national archives are well organized, well run, and thoroughly digitized. It is a stereotype of national efficiency. Everything is catalogued. Documents are brought out within fifteen minutes, order numbers appearing all the while on an illuminated display overhead. I’ve stood longer at delis.

Other archives are less well endowed, but even the most unlikely of them had more American history than one historian could cover.

The tropical sun made the seat burn. There I was half lost, driving on the left on a moped in a country with French road signs, trying to find a national archive, which, unlike everything else, had no sign. I circled around the industrial park where the archive was improbably said to be located, past the Billabong factory, past the gutter running red with dye, until, next to a warehouse, over a door, I saw a small sign I couldn’t quite read from the road: Mauritius National Archives.

Mauritius is an Indian Ocean island about five hundred miles east of Madagascar. It was a French colony until 1810 and British until its independence in the second half of the twentieth century. It remains a developing African success story.

Home in Mauritius was the seaside town of Flic-en-Flac, which boasted a beach popular with European vacationers; numerous holiday villas were going up around town. Most Mauritians lived elsewhere, in settlements near the sugar plantations, which employ a large segment of the population, or in larger, industrial towns upland in the interior, near the archive.

The bus from town—for the moped was impractical for a laptop-paranoid graduate student—made its way up from the beach through the sugar fields, stopping here and there to take on passengers in the cane or to drop folks off at the next market town. I could get off at one such town, make my way down a back road, cross a couple of abandoned soccer fields and catch the back entrance to the industrial park (occasionally guarded by a wayward goat), which I did in an oxford button-down and khakis out of the very graduate-student fear that the archivist would look at me funny if I didn’t.

The afternoon bus home was full of schoolchildren and their books, and no matter how many times I saw it, the prospect of a high schooler walking back through the cane with an accounting textbook always made me smile—so too with the government-run clinics in every village. They conjured the sense of a nation going someplace. Mauritius may be poor, but it is a young democracy with low crime, high literacy, and a government doing its level best to educate its children and improve their lot. When you see government money being spent on clinics and schoolbooks, it’s hard to begrudge those rupees not being spent on archives.

The reading room was upstairs past the main desk: a room within the main storage area, lights low and slatted windows open, four wood tables and as many electrical outlets. A woman dressed in a sari came round from the record cage, which in the open floor plan receded back beyond sight. She pointed me to a small bookcase of finding aids, which I spent the next three months going through.

Unlike the Netherlands, Mauritius has limited funds for its archives. Electricity must be bought; plugging in your laptop costs until you get to know the archivist. There are no LED displays for document orders. There is no online catalog. The archive is small but so is the country, and because of that it remains manageable.

The entire archive is housed on a converted factory floor. Most of the other businesses in the building are warehousing firms; pallets and loading docks flank the front. Textile dust occasionally whips up into the air, a respirable fire hazard. Over the course of my stay there I spoke with several readers whose greatest fear was an industrial accident that might combine the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy with cultural disaster.

Both humidity and bugs were doing their best to make cultural disaster before fire could. To provide some protection to their three-centuries-old volumes, the archivists had boxed the oldest and most loosely bound. While boxing shields books from light or page loss, it also shields them from view and, hence, casual inspection.

Some hadn’t been seen since they were boxed, and in the interval worms or insects had made their way in and in their own happy time consumed entire volumes. Some volumes turned out to be little more than cover and binding, others a maddening Swiss cheese of fragmentary layers, the shreds of one page intertwined with the remnants of the next, too fragile to disentangle, too jumbled to read.

Rust was just as bad; the iron in the ink—the gallnut-and-iron-salt blend was as common in colonial Mauritius as in colonial America—had eaten through page after page as it oxidized in the wet air. Not only would it cut through pages, it adhered each page to the next. For a researcher looking for long runs of data, this was troubling.

Perhaps just as maddening was how French officials had recorded their documents. Dutch, British, and American administrators drew up carefully proportioned tables of shipping to show the flow of vessels and to permit voyages to be tallied or thought of as part of a larger trade, often with tax revenues already counted out. Gallic administrators, on the other hand, recorded each vessel on its own sheet of paper (and subsequently lost many of them). They made little or no attempt to facilitate an accounting of overall trade. There was no printed form for ship arrivals, no one to go to the dockside and count the ships, no single body in charge of tracking trade and ensuring all the forms were saved (there were two, the police and admiralty keeping separate, incomplete compilations of captains’ declarations d’arrivées, when and if the captain bothered to report to their offices). Only after the British conquest were such records kept with an eye to a long-term, complete, and more-numerate record of trade.

Yet there were always glimmers of hope whenever these prospects made me glum, when the declarations—each written out just differently enough to forestall skimming—grew monotonous or when I grew fed up with the whole half-eaten, half-rusted mess.

For one, there was an ice-cream truck. The driver careened through the industrial park in the afternoon heat with a tinny version of “Jingle Bells” coming in and out of range with a sublime torture that made visions of sugar cones dance in our heads. Out we came—archivists, historians and workers—chasing, reverting, happy for sure.

“It’s one of the best archives in the Western Indian Ocean,” my professor had told me. Standing there in the shade with my cone, I wondered if he meant the ice cream.

Fortunately for my research, the gaps in the records were not insurmountable. Other scholars had already mined the French-era data but without comparing them to later, British-era records. So I reviewed my predecessors’ methodology, verified their findings as best I could with what French data survived, and began work in the more fulsome British sources. I felt as though I had pulled original research from the jaws of defeat.

I followed the Americans to other archives as well. The Cape Town Archives Repository in Cape Town, South Africa, is housed in a former prison at the foot of Table Mountain—and with stunningly unimprisoned views of the peak from the old prison courtyard. It held a cache of wonderfully preserved (and meticulously organized) shipping tables from the late—Dutch and early British periods. Between the Cape Town and Mauritius records, it became apparent that China traders were not the only Americans to round Africa. Slave ships from East Africa stopped on the long, middle passage to the Caribbean and the United States. The Dutch authorities at the Cape noted, “304 slaven,” of the Horizon on its voyage from Mozambique to “America” in 1804.

Whaling and sealing vessels called at the Cape and Mauritius too. American debtors began appearing in South African court records, and American shipping made its way into official Mauritian debates on commercial policy. In each port, American ships proved the most important link to the wider world while it remained in Napoleonic hands. U.S. merchants enmeshed themselves in sundry local trading ventures: buying ostrich feathers at the Cape (plumage to Europe’s fashionable set) in exchange for great wheels of Edam.

But, as every historian has experienced, not every archive yielded treasure. In Macau, the ex-Portuguese port on the China coast through which every China trader passed and the hub to all the trade I was catching at the spokes and rims, I fumbled through every finding aid the good-natured archivists could dredge up. The port may have been central to my research, but precious little shipping data survived.

On another trip, this one to Jakarta, I found data in the Dutch records but had to dig them out without knowing a word of Bahasa Indonesia. Communication was reduced, once I had found the finding aids (which were partly in Dutch), to writing call numbers on a slip of paper and smiling at the archivist until the record appeared.

Such troubles were mild compared to the rewards. But who rightly can claim to be the first to use some new archive? Certainly, I was no “first.” Yet digging away for American history in the Indonesian heat or the African winter, surrounded by scholars of local national histories, I felt as though I were still making discoveries. I was perhaps the first early Americanist to cross their threshold; I was certainly committing the oddity of looking for another country’s history in their national archive. Sometimes I thought I might be able to contribute to two countries’ histories at once. But even that might be a bar too high; if I could make the history of early America just a little more capacious, that would be reward enough.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

James Fichter is an assistant professor of U.S. and international economic history at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.