On a chilly evening in early December 1795, seven members of New York City’s Friendly Club convened at William Dunlap’s lodging for their weekly meeting. Dunlap opened the proceedings with a reading from Helen Maria Williams’s recent publication, Letters from France, and for nearly five hours, the attendees discussed literary works and debated current issues. Satisfied that the meeting had generated a stimulating conversation, Elihu Hubbard Smith recorded in his diary that “[t]his evening has been better spent, than usual.”

In Men of Letters in the Early Republic, Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan examines why Smith, along with many other young men residing in the Northeast, attached great importance to intellectual labor and exchange. These aspiring literati, Kaplan observes, perceived that belletristic endeavors were necessary for maintaining a healthy and harmonious society. Their vision of a national community bound by practices of sociability, sensibility, and learning constituted a radical critique to the notion that formal political participation defined citizenship, and this vision offered a welcome alternative to the intense personal and ideological partisanship of post-Revolutionary America.

In her investigation of how “men of letters” articulated a civic role for themselves and whether there was “a place and a use in the new United States for these men and their different kind of citizenship” (12), the author focuses on three sets of individuals and their affiliated literary networks: Elihu Hubbard Smith and the Friendly Club in New York; Joseph Dennie of Walpole, New Hampshire, and later Philadelphia; and the trio of William Smith Shaw, Arthur Maynard Walter, and Joseph Stephens Buckminster, who formed the core of the Boston-based Anthology Society and founded the Boston Athenaeum. Kaplan notes that these groups exhibited several shared traits, most notably adherence to social elitism, masculine identity, and transatlantic modes of polite culture. Even so, she goes on to show that they each formulated different models for social and political improvement.

For Smith, a physician and prolific author of prose and poetry, the accumulation and dissemination of all types of knowledge in a convivial setting was the means by which individuals effected change and “created harmony and pursued justice” (7). The aptly named Friendly Club provided a space where Smith could collaborate with others on projects of self- and social reform. Here he could converse with colleagues of various vocations—the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, the jurist James Kent, and the dramatist William Dunlap—about the progress of the local manumission society to which they belonged, discuss Brown’s latest novel or Dunlap’s latest play, or go over innumerable other topics. Friendly Club meetings, however, were only one of many literary venues available to Smith. As Kaplan surmises, “Rather than a self-sustaining circle, the Friendly Club was a node in a network of linked and interdependent groups” (43). Smith’s involvement with the Medical Repository and his frequent conversation and correspondence with women literati further demonstrate that the network contained overlapping realms of oral, manuscript, and print communications.

Like Smith, Joseph Dennie, a reluctant lawyer, created an active literary network, producing three periodicals with varied success—the Tablet in Boston, the Farmer’s Weekly Museum in Walpole, and the Port Folio in Philadelphia—and participating in Philadelphia’s Tuesday Club. Kaplan attributes the longevity and popularity of Dennie’s Walpole paper to his ability to create a geographically extensive network of “all those who read, wrote for, found subscriptions for, extracted, or even quoted the Museum” (122). To solidify his readers as a distinct community, Dennie employed an editorial style based on intimacy and humor. Although he lambasted overt partisanship, his writings nonetheless imparted Federalist sympathies. Moreover, unlike Smith, Dennie favored “ephemeral wit” over “empirical information” as a means of exposing truth (9).

For Bostonians Joseph Stephens Buckminster, a Unitarian minister, Arthur Maynard Walter, a lawyer, and William Smith Shaw, the clerk of the District Court of Massachusetts, belles lettres provided a refuge from the mundane and at times maddening world of “commerce and politics” (11). In contrast to Smith and Dennie, these men did not pursue a national framework for their reforming efforts, developing in its stead “a more parochial vision of cultural community” (189). Relying on an impressive literary network that spanned Boston and Cambridge, the Anthology Society revived the Monthly Anthology, a local periodical, and formed the Athenaeum, a private reading room that served Boston’s mercantile elite.

Kaplan concludes that although Smith, Dennie, and the Anthologists established “lasting forums and institutions,” such as the Medical Repository, the Port Folio, and the Boston Athenaeum, they nonetheless failed in their quest to transform notions of American citizenship (231). Even if their literary endeavors did not reconstitute civil society throughout the fledgling United States, the evidence presented in Men of Letters suggests that these belletrists did shape emergent cultures in local and regional spaces. As Trish Loughran has recently claimed in The Republic in Print (New York, 2007), transportation and communication deficiencies precluded the possibility of a viable national public in print. Kaplan’s examination similarly forces us to move beyond a national framework and to foreground the local and regional networks at work in the post-Revolutionary era.

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

Robb K. Haberman is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation is entitled, “Periodical Publics: Magazines and Literary Networks in Post-Revolutionary America.”

Once marginalized in a male-dominated profession, insights from the study of women’s history are coming to reshape the entire discipline, even in such seemingly unlikely specialties as foreign policy and political history. Similarly, attention to race has spread beyond the study of African American social history. Historians increasingly recognize the influence of gender and race on virtually all aspects of American life, both among women and among men.

In Reforming Men and Women, historian Bruce Dorsey now draws together ideas from a wide range of recent studies in gender and racial history. He builds on the insights of such scholars as Gail Bederman, David Roediger, and Anthony Rotundo (who provide flattering blurbs on the dust jacket), and applies their ideas in an intricate reinterpretation of antebellum reform. Dorsey proposes to create “a holistic history of gender and reform by documenting and exploring the life experiences of both men and women reformers, and the contested meanings of manhood and womanhood among urban Americans, both black and white, working class and middle class, in the antebellum North. More than simply bridging the gap between two phases of the historical literature on reform, [Dorsey] offer[s] a different perspective on this history of topics–antislavery, temperance, poor relief, and nativism–that have produced a trail of historical interpretations.” In so doing, he contributes to a larger “intellectual quest to engender all of American history”(4).

The city of Philadelphia (with its early working-class suburbs) is the setting for most of the events discussed in this book, but Dorsey places greater emphasis on the national context. He begins by examining women’s activism within the public sphere of the early republic. Differing from earlier work by Linda Kerber, he suggests that early reformers did not present themselves as republican mothers whose public speech was an extension of their maternal duties. Instead, free African American women, unmarried Quaker women, and others found alternative strategies in defending their right to speak on public issues–including appropriating “a set of widely accepted masculine symbols, masculine language, and in some cases a masculine persona” (30). Like men, they defined their benevolent activity in opposition to selfish luxury, and presented themselves as fully capable of independence and civic virtue.

In his chapter on poor relief in the early nineteenth century, Dorsey examines a growing Northern contempt for the poor. “In the eyes of the middle class, a poor person had changed from a neighbor into a stranger,” partly because the classes were indeed more spatially separated (60). Male-led societies soon embraced the idea that the poor were to blame for their poverty, and sought to put them to work in a “house of industry” that was little more than a sweatshop. Women reformers were more hesitant to blame the poor. The divergent responses of male and female reformers, Dorsey suggests, may have reinforced a middle-class male perception that compassion was a sign of feminine weakness. But as reformers of both genders accepted a view that poverty was the result of sin, women retained an important niche in benevolent work based on what was believed to be their special “influence” over the souls of others.

Just as poverty was believed to be the fault of improvident males (while exploited female workers faded into invisibility), so did drunkenness come to be seen as a problem mainly of young men–a crisis of young manhood vaguely associated with the pursuit of self-interest in Jacksonian America. Drink was not seen as a problem limited to any class. In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men. It also involved, significantly, a conflict within the middle class over rival forms of masculinity”(107). Working-class white and African American reformers also used temperance to explore the meanings of manhood–respectively seeing sobriety as a marker of whiteness and of freedom from the slavery of drink.

Dorsey’s chapter on antislavery examines the centrality of masculinity in the African colonization movement. Colonizationists portrayed African American men as having been emasculated by slavery and white prejudice, and thus in need of emigration to Africa in order to regain their manly independence. White fears of black men’s social and sexual engagement with white women contributed to denunciations of abolitionism and to the notorious burning of the abolitionist Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. Blacks also drew on the language of manhood in their debates over emigration. White abolitionist women linked the plight of women to the plight of the slaves, and thus attacked both forms of oppression together.

In conflicts over Irish immigration, a tangle of ideas about white manhood shaped the discourse of natives and newcomers alike. Native white men doubted the manly independence of the supposedly priest-ridden Irish. Native women launched what the author calls “the first political newspaper in the republic operated exclusively by women,” in order to slander the Irish and promote Anglo-American women’s patriotism (213). The editors defended their entrance into the public sphere by asserting that Irish Catholic immigration threatened values dear to women, particularly the religious instruction of children in the public schools. Irish immigrants also developed a complicated, gendered discourse about their place in the United States. They divided among themselves over the manliness of drinking; their effort to claim the rights of white Americans contributed to their growing racism, even in the face of Irish nationalists’ call for racial unity.

Dorsey’s argument is far too complex to adequately summarize in a brief review. Each page introduces new insights–most of them not wholly original to Dorsey, but woven by him into a coherent whole. As the author moves methodically from topic to topic, examining the thoughts and actions of people in various social categories, historians will be impressed by the breadth of his research in primary and secondary sources. Readers outside the profession may be discouraged by the plodding prose, but those who persist will see a solid synthesis, and application, of insights from recent gender and racial history.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Peter C. Baldwin is assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and author of Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus, 1999). He is currently researching the social history of night in American cities.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Dave Neumann is director of the History Project at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), a K-16 collaborative project dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in history and social science education. A former high-school history instructor, he also teaches pre-service elementary and secondary credential students at CSULB.

Dave Neumann
The National History Education Clearinghouse
http://teachinghistory.org/

At a recent gathering of history-education advocates in California, I chaired a committee of college faculty attempting to suggest opportunities for colleges and universities to support K-12 education. I grimaced—hopefully only internally—as one committee member suggested that we create a list of Websites that would be useful for K-12 teachers. I suggested as diplomatically as I could that we consider other projects, as many such lists already exist, some far better than we could create. A recent examination of the “National History Education Clearinghouse” (NHEC) Website confirmed my suggestion. As the name implies, the site provides a clear, user-friendly clearinghouse of links to some of the best online history education resources—not only history content and lesson plans but materials on historical thinking and research as well. Indeed, though the site seems to be in the developmental stage with room for the inclusion of far more material, it nonetheless exemplifies the most fruitful results of the type of K-12/university collaboration advocated by the American Historical Association, itself a partner in the production of the Website, in its Benchmarks for Professional Development in Teaching of History as a Discipline. Given Common-place‘s mission of “embracing new scholarship, teaching, and exhibits that explore all aspects of America’s past and its many peoples,” NHEC should be of great interest to readers.

The “National History Education Clearinghouse” is a product of the federally funded Teaching American History (TAH) grant program, which has distributed more than 800 million dollars to K-12 schools and offices of education nationwide to support professional development in history education in collaboration with colleges and universities. The Website “builds on and disseminates the valuable lessons learned by more than 800 TAH projects designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge and understanding of traditional U.S. history.” (References to “traditional U.S. history” show up repeatedly in TAH programs, as they come straight from the federal grant application.) It was jointly created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the Stanford University History Education Group. This is a compelling partnership indeed. The CHNM at George Mason University is one of the pioneers in digitizing history content and is cosponsor of History Matters, an excellent source for U.S. history content on the Web. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg, executive producer and senior scholar of NHEC, has done groundbreaking work with teachers and students on learning and teaching history. Together, they represent some of the best thinking and materials available to history educators at all levels. The creators explain that they “aim to bring together the many communities involved in improving history education and professional development for history teachers, allowing practitioners, historians, administrators, and history educators to present multiple perspectives, debate current issues, and work together to improve history teaching in classrooms throughout the United States.” It is refreshing to see that the site includes testimonials from scholars like USC historian Karen Haltunnen, who acknowledge that their work with K-12 teachers has enriched their own professional work. Such testimonials help to keep K-12/university partnerships alive and healthy.

The site is organized with six tabs across the top: “History Content,” “Best Practices,” “Teaching Materials,” “Issues & Research,” “TAH Grants,” and “Professional Development.” Each tabbed area has a separate search engine to aid users. The first four tabs are most likely to be of interest to the readers of Common-place. “History Content” provides links to history Websites and online primary-source collections, national history centers like the Smithsonian, electronic fieldtrips, and Website reviews. Two hundred and fifty-four sites are evaluated (unfortunately, Common-place is not one of them). Each evaluation includes a one-paragraph description of the site, the site’s producers, and keywords for site content. As a test case of this section’s search engine, I decided to look for materials related to Lyman Beecher, who was featured in an article in the October 2008 issue of Common-place. Typing Lyman Beecher into the search engine yielded some results for sites that were really about Harriet Beecher Stowe or Henry Ward Beecher. Within the first twenty hits, however, were the following: Lincoln/NET, Northern Illinois University Library’s Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project (reviewed in the January 2008 issue of Common-place), where a one-thousand-word essay places Beecher in the context of antebellum social reform movements and provides a brief bibliography; the Cornell University Library’s Making of America site, which includes digitized facsimiles of two book reviews of Beecher’s autobiography; and a classroom activity on religion and social reform from the University of Houston’s Digital History site, which includes excerpts from ten primary sources on reform, including one by Beecher.

The most interesting link on the first tab is “Ask a Historian.” When I viewed the site, one of the top questions was, “Was there an African-American President before Barack Obama?” The anonymous reply, presumably by a historian, explains how this rumor may have developed over confusion about John Hanson, president of the Continental Congress, whose great-uncle is labeled a freedman in extant records. The thoughtful reply then continues by offering a reflection on the nature of certainty in history and concludes with a bibliography.

The second tab, “Best Practices,” is much thinner, likely reflecting the relative infancy of the field rather than oversight on the part of the site designers. This area provides links to applications of some of the most interesting work on history cognition, reflecting the best nexus of scholarly research and practical classroom implementation. Given Wineburg’s role in the development of this site, it is not surprising that his work is prominently represented. But other links are provided as well, including linguist Mary Schleppegrell’s application of functional grammar approaches to the reading of textbooks. Schleppegrell has worked extensively with the UC Davis site of the California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP), a California statewide collaborative project for K-12 history professional development, and this article reflects her work with CHSSP staff and Davis-area teachers.

The fourth tab, “Issues and Research,” seems to overlap with the “Best Practices” section, making the distinction between them unclear. Only six “Research Briefs” are provided, including articles by Peter Lee and Bob Bain, and all six involved the application of theory to classroom practice. The paucity of resources in this section is also a puzzle, as there is a substantial body of work by historians like Lee, Bain, Rosalyn Ashby, Gaea Leinhardt, Peter Seixas, Bruce VanSledright, to name a few, who might also have been included here.

“Teaching Materials” provides a gateway to online history lesson plans and a link to state history content standards. It also offers a section entitled “Ask a Master Teacher,” which parallels the “Ask a Historian” section in the first tabbed area and features questions on topics such as the use of primary sources in a classroom with second-language learners. It also provides its own review of lesson plans, though at present there are only ten reviews. The reviews include a helpful lesson-plan rubric designed by NHEC staff, which considers issues like analytic thinking and scaffolding. As a test case, I examined a review of a lesson on antislavery posters (the closest topic to Lyman Beecher included in the ten reviews) from the Gilder-Lerhman Institute’s History Now journal. The lesson receives the following comments for analytic thinking:

The Poster Inquiry Sheet provides students with a method for identifying and interpreting historical facts.

During the modeling and the group work, students [sic] learn and practice close reading of primary sources.

An evaluation of the use of scaffolding indicates that the lesson is appropriate for its stated audience because, while the “language used in the posters may be difficult for some students…teachers can choose to highlight sections of text to reduce the amount or difficulty of necessary reading.”

One might wonder whether a site generated by TAH K-12/university collaboration would provide a search engine that filters out useless results and returns useful hits on high-quality lesson plans. The answer, in general, is “yes.” While a search for “Lyman Beecher” returned hits for a book review and a College Board introduction to the Advanced Placement U.S. history course, use of more mainstream keywords antebellum reform yielded useful returns. Several hits represented effective lessons with primary sources, sponsored by groups like the Organization of American Historians or the National Center for History in the Schools.

The last two sections, “TAH Grants” and “Professional Development,” are likely to be of more limited interest to many Common-place readers. The “TAH Grants” section provides a searchable database of TAH grant awards, a listserv for TAH members, and links to twenty-one articles on “Lessons Learned” by TAH participants that might assist current and future TAH project administrators and teacher leaders. Finally, the “Professional Development” area offers a calendar of professional development opportunities nationwide as well as a search engine for locating training in or near one’s own community.

Apart from the overlap of the “Best Practices” and “Issues and Research” tabs and the thinness of some categories, the site works well. It is clearly organized, intuitive, and easily navigated. Most helpfully for a clearinghouse, it provides an informative synopsis of all major links, so that users can determine the possible usefulness of a linked site right from the NHEC, rather than constantly linking back and forth. Not only does the site provide access to a wealth of primary and secondary sources, but it also provides links to high-quality lesson plans and important scholarship on teaching and learning. All in all, this site fulfills its creators’ goals of providing an excellent clearinghouse or starting point for both K-12 educators and university faculty.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Patricia Cleary teaches in the department of history, California State University, Long Beach. She is the director of the Website, The Elizabeth Murray Project: A Resource Site for Early American History.

Patricia Cleary
Instructions for the Young: Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/n/nietz/

The April 2009 special issue of Common-place, “Who Reads an Early American Book?,” prompted a search of Websites devoted to nineteenth-century texts directed at youthful readers. Among a number of valuable sites, one that stands out as of potential interest to scholars and K-12 teachers alike is the University of Pittsburgh’s Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks, part of its Digital Research Library. Based on the “Nietz Old Texbook Collection” of sixteen thousand volumes, the online archive contains page images and searchable text for 140 schoolbooks. John Nietz, a professor of education at University of Pittsburgh and student of John Dewey at University of Chicago, began the collection by donating nine thousand volumes of early primary and secondary texts at his retirement in the late 1950s.

Although the quantity of material available online is just a small portion of the print Nietz collection, the multiple means of searching the digitized texts make this site user-friendly. Options include standard subject-title-author and publication-date searches, Boolean and proximity searches, and book browsing.

Typing Phillis Wheatley into the search engine generates just one result: a brief biography from an 1872 work, A manual of American literature: a text-book for schools and colleges. Slavery turns up 445 hits. Pursuing Crispus Attucks leads to William Holmes McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader (1879)—one of several McGuffey readers on the site—which offers a gripping take on the Boston Massacre, one that can be instructively compared with Samuel G. Goodrich’s 1843 version in A pictorial history of the United States: with notices of other portions of America. Although searching for specific topics generates interesting results, perhaps more fascinating are the insights to be found from browsing through texts, such as Thomas Kimber’s 1815 The American class book, or, A collection of instructive readings lessons: adapted to the use of schools: selected from Blair’s class book, etc. In addition to sections on natural history and religion, the text ranges across such subjects as “Of Fire and Its Application to the Preparation of Food,” the speech of Seneca, the cultivation of taste, and the “Phenomena of Winter in the Polar Regions.”

A bibliography of secondary materials on textbooks, how to read them, and how the practitioners of various disciplines have analyzed them is included. Although it contains no works published after 1999, the bibliographic coverage of twentieth-century scholarship and brief abstracts would nonetheless make it a useful starting point for working with the collection. Similarly helpful for more sustained research is the overview of library collections, microfilm, and Web resources, which directs visitors’ attention to notable collections holding tens of thousands of volumes relevant to the history of education. Also included are two comprehensive surveys by Nietz, available and searchable in full online: Old Textbooks and The Evolution of American Secondary School Textbooks, both covering the evolution of texts at both the primary and secondary levels in multiple disciplines up to 1900. As the online archive does not offer introductory remarks for each work, these two volumes provide welcome context for the evolution of subjects treated in the textbooks.

In short, this straightforward site possesses a clearly defined focus, a useful archive of nineteenth-century sources on education, a good survey of secondary and archival materials, and an effective set of search tools, rendering it helpful to scholars, teachers, and students interested in investigating how subjects from spelling, rhetoric, and penmanship to American history, geography, and art were presented in the past.

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

Digital History and Civil War Commemoration

I saw Emilie Davis’s diaries years ago—three leather-bound volumes, small enough to fit comfortably in a pocket, no bigger than a smart phone. I thought then that I would get back to them some day, when other deadlines had been met. I thought again about Emilie in 2011, after listening to an inspiring talk by Jill Lepore about Jane Franklin, a story that Lepore pieced together with small scraps of evidence—such as the diary Franklin kept of the births and deaths of (all but one of) her twelve children and the surviving letters she exchanged with her brother Ben—and a good deal of imagination. In Lepore’s hands, Jane Franklin came alive, as did her era. Audience members imagined a middle-aged woman picking up a pen and sitting down to record her own thoughts, to enjoy the life of the mind that her brother had lived for decades and that Jane was now tasting for the first time. Seeing the joyful loops that formed the “J” and the “a” in her name, I remembered that Emilie also carefully wrote her name on the blank first page of her 1863 diary in big open letters, looping each end of the “E” and dotting the “i” with a flourish (fig. 1). She wrote her name on subsequent pages, too, though not with the exuberance implied in the series of loops and the long diagonal mark over the “i.” Opening the book and writing her name in it the first time was an act of becoming.

In her diaries, Emilie—a young free black woman living in Philadelphia during the Civil War—remarks on the progress of her education and reflects on the challenges of living as a half-citizen of a slave nation. We do not have much to remind us that women like Emilie and Jane Franklin existed. But we do have their names written carefully on the inside covers of their diaries, laying claim to pen and book, and the thoughts expressed in them. Beginning in January 2012, I began transcribing and annotating the diaries with a talented and energetic group of graduate students—namely, Rebecca Capobianco, Ruby Johnson, Thomas Foley, Jessica Maiberger, and Theresa Altieri. We learned that doing so would make it possible to tell a new story about the Civil War. Emilie’s diaries, available in transcriptions and original text on the Memorable Days Website, offer fresh perspective on the arrival in Philadelphia of black refugees from south-central Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg campaign (June 27-29, 1863), jubilant celebrations in black churches accompanying the news of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (January 1-3, 1863), and the deep anxieties that free blacks like Emilie felt when Union advances nearly became reverses (April 13-15, 1865). Over the next year and a half, we explored the meetings Emilie attended, the street fights she witnessed, the anxieties and personal tragedies she experienced. We saw the Civil War through her eyes.

Digital history offers opportunities to democratize access to the past and to invite users into the research process

In building this Website we learned about the process of recovering and telling the story of women of color who left behind a deafening evidentiary silence, and the joys that can come in working collaboratively. Because it requires various levels of comfort with Wikis, blogs, html, tags, and social networking, creating an open-access research site is intensely collaborative and vastly more rewarding than the history we make alone. We were surprised and delighted to see how digital history has the potential to transform texts like a letter book or a diary, by revealing subtle contours and hidden patterns. When we began to encounter audiences and Website users, we realized that perhaps the most important thing we were doing was providing a new point of access for the creation of Civil War history.

Digital history offers opportunities to democratize access to the past and to invite users into the research process. “Digital history,” William G. Thomas III explained in a special issue of the Journal of American History, “possesses a crucial set of common components—the capacity for play, manipulation, participation, and investigation by the reader.” We saw our collaboration grow in concentric circles, beginning with me and a small group of graduate students at Villanova (“Team Emilie”); then a team of digital librarians and a web designer; students in undergraduate, middle school, and high school classes; and finally Website users and audiences at commemorative events. Instead of working for years on a project before “releasing” it to the public, much of the work was done in public, as we invited students to take a stab at transcription and to identify points at which the diary should be annotated. The collaboration continues on our site, where users participate and join in the investigation.

The site launched just after midnight on January 1, 2013, marking the day 150 years ago when Emilie began the diary, with the words, “Today has been a memorable day,” in reference to the Emancipation Proclamation. Very soon after we began receiving comments from users offering commentary and advice and sometimes suggesting leads on unidentified people in the diary. Because the site features our transcription alongside each original diary page, readers tell us what words we misidentified or offer us clues on those that we have not transcribed. “The word for the empty brackets seems to be ‘reading,'” a user explained about Emilie’s January 2, 1863, entry. Of Emilie’s entry for March 14, 1863, a reader who had done his or her own research suggested that “Lizzie” might be “Elizabeth White (born about 1840), the younger sister of Emilie’s future husband, George Bustill White.” Additionally, we have received a number of inquiries about the woman Emilie refers to as “Nel” or “Nellie” in the diary—Emilie’s closest confidante, who as yet remains unidentified. This summer, a Website user helped us to solve the mystery of what became of Emilie’s nine-year-old nephew, Frank, when his mother died while his father was serving in the U.S. Navy. Little Frank, whom we had hoped had gone to live with his uncle, turned up in the files of a Quaker orphanage (December 6-8, 1863). Welcoming Website users into the process of discovery has expanded our knowledge of Emilie’s life and her family connections.

The project’s success, therefore, relies on our ability to get the word out about the site and its subject, drawing in potential users. This approach gives us the chance to combine the tools of academic history with those of digital history to reach new publics. We turned to both social media (namely, Facebook and Twitter) and “old” media, such as radio and television interviews, public talks, and classroom lessons, to bring teachers, students, and amateur historians into the project. We found in both of these contexts opportunities for impromptu, unfiltered comments, for play and manipulation. For example, middle school students responded to the diary entries in a series of blogs; our favorites were the eighth-grader who defended Emilie’s idiosyncratic spelling (“I am not very good at spelling either, but that doesn’t mean I am not smart”) and the kid who worried that Emilie was “stalking” Vincent, her love interest. High school students “tweeted” responses to the entries—on small scraps of paper, no bigger than the diary pages. “President Lincoln is re-elected,” wrote one high school sophomore: “#EmancipationProclamation #happy” (fig. 2). “@EmilieDavis I wld be extremely scared if my dad was close to the war,” tweeted another, “#staystrong” followed by a symbol of a gun and an “x.” As we “played” on the site with students, we found new ways to think about Emilie, her classmates, and her friends.

Online discussions also took a more serious turn. In a series of early Facebook comments, two Website users engaged in a brief debate about racial identity, asking whether a white professor and a group of white graduate students could handle the job of reading and interpreting Emilie’s diaries as well as a person of color. Here was a discussion about identity politics that we might have in our college classrooms, played out in social media.

As we interacted with teachers, students, and various author audiences, we began to see that the site was bridging the gap between Civil War history and African American history. This point was brought home to us in February 2013 when we attended a daylong event celebrating the beginning of Black History Month. Depending on how you count it, we have had nearly five years of the Civil War sesquicentennial—this if you count from 2009, the year of the Lincoln bicentennial and the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry—but in many places black history remains a month. In a YMCA gym serving several black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, we crowded in with more than 300 attendees to cheer community activists, scholarship recipients, and local ministers for leadership in their communities. We took turns reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; afterwards, people stayed around to hear us introduce them to Emilie Davis and her generation. After we shared several pages of Emilie’s diary, in which she described her fears for her father’s safety when rebel slave raiders were sighted near his home in south-central Pennsylvania in June 1863 (June 23, June 29, June 30, and July 9, 1863), attendees commented on the need to remain vigilant and active in promoting and protecting civil rights, lest the progress made by one generation be lost by another. These thoughts and comments seemed as apt for understanding Emilie’s fear that her father—a free black man living in a state that had outlawed slavery—would (once again?) be a slave as they were for thinking about the context of the August 2012 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision upholding the state’s new voter identification law, a measure that aimed to restrict the voting power of immigrants, the poor, and people of color.

We learned a lot spending the day with teachers, students, and community leaders, and we have continued to talk about Emilie’s diaries with the participants in this meeting. In the summer of 2013, I received a letter from a woman wanting to lay claim to a Civil War ancestor; she had heard about our genealogical work on Emilie Davis and her family. “My paternal grandmother’s mother’s father was a ‘boy slave,'” eighty-five-year-old Lillian Loatmen Boggs wrote, “he rose to become a principal of a one-room school house.” When I told her I might have found a man named “Loatman,” who shared her maiden name (but with a different spelling) and who was drafted in Baltimore in September 1864 into the First Regiment, United States Colored Troops, Lillian wrote back to say she thought it was the right guy because, like herself and others in her family, Edward was short, or as she put it, “vertically challenged.” Edward’s draft record indicates that at age thirty-five, he stood five feet, three and a half inches tall.

The First Regiment served in the Petersburg Campaign and charged into the confusion after the explosion of the Union mine under the Confederate works on July 30, 1864—the Battle of the Crater. The following January, Loatman was with the regiment when the men helped capture Fort Fisher, North Carolina. He died in March 1865, before he could witness the surrender of Confederate forces in North Carolina and the final collapse of the Confederacy. Edward Loatman’s enlistment records indicate that his name is included on the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I am guessing that, like other African Americans of her generation, Lillian Boggs has not traveled to Civil War battlefields or other sites where she might recognize a name or identify with a description. As the historian Tiya Miles explained at a conference at Gettysburg in March 2013, her grandparents packed their car with food and blankets before going on road trips in anticipation of not finding a hotel that would take them. They would not have planned a family trip to a national park then—and those fears survived until at least the next generation. Additionally, in an era of shrinking school budgets, fewer school-aged children will visit Civil War sites today, although the National Park Service has never been more committed to telling an inclusive story of the war. Digital projects such as Memorable Days, on the other hand, have the capacity to bring Civil War history home to people like Lillian Boggs, and this is one of the things we hoped to achieve in researching Emilie Davis’s diaries.

Lillian Boggs’s typewritten letters to us highlight the distance between historians who sigh about the challenges of wrangling the “infinite archive” that digital history has produced and, well, most other folks, particularly those who see in this explosion of information new opportunities to answer questions about family history. Stricken by a case of “Roots envy,” as Henry Louis Gates has called it, African Americans have become avid genealogists in the past three decades, turning eagerly to Ancestry.com and DNA testing in an effort to fill in the gaping holes that slavery left in their family trees. I am not sure Mrs. Boggs knows that we have created and maintain a Website tracing one black family’s move from slavery to freedom, but she hoped that I might be able to help her solve some mysteries about her own family. “[D]o you know if there is a list, (or place),” she wrote, “where I could find out if I had an ancestor in the Civil War?” While no one comprehensive list exists, we now have many new digital sources, like the University of Virginia’s Geography of Slavery site that uses information from runaway slave ads to map the suspected trajectories of fugitives’ flights, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s ambitious digitization of William Still’s massive list of fugitives who passed through Philadelphia.

Another as-yet untapped source for similar information is the potential of digitizing the hundreds of “Information Wanted” ads that appeared in black newspapers during and after the war. According to my count, nearly 1,900 such missing persons ads were printed in Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder—a newspaper published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church—between 1866 and 1890: mothers looking for children, husbands looking for wives, and children looking for parents. The ads began as early as 1863 and continued for years after many others had likely given up hope of finding families separated or lost in slavery, escape, or wartime dislocation. By digitizing these ads, we may be able to fill in some of the holes that slavery has left in the genealogical records of African Americans.

While we figure out how to make all of these new digital tools talk to one another and to us so that we can unlock the mysteries of families separated in slavery, we ought to stay alert for opportunities to engage audiences in schools, churches, and gyms and invite people like Lillian Boggs into the process, and to bring multiple experiences together. Historians have never been so keen or better equipped to integrate the fields of women’s, African American, and Civil War history. Digital history produces new points of entry for people to lay claim to—and to make—Civil War history, engaging and interacting with sources that challenge avid genealogists to look beyond their own family tree to explore the environment in which it grew.

While we were annotating Emilie’s diaries, we discovered all sorts of new ways the Civil War was experienced in Philadelphia, the city where Lillian Boggs has spent nearly her whole life (she now lives just north of downtown). In 1860, the city was home to 13,008 “free colored women” and 9,177 men, who supported a web of religious, cultural, and political institutions. Emilie’s attendance at the Institute for Colored Youth, the premier school for black youth, and her affiliation with several black churches, indicated that she was part of a politically active community in an exciting time. Reading her diary allowed us to imagine her excitement (mixed with regret) when she helped send off a regiment of young black volunteers (June 15-17, 1863) who signed up to help drive the Confederate army out of the state—before the state was ready to accept their assistance. We could also see why she might attend lectures delivered by the former slave and fiery Baptist minister, Reverend James Sella Martin (January 25, 1865), Frederick Douglass (February 16, 1865), the poet and former slave Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (February 27, 1865), but decline to go the last lecture in the series, delivered by William D. Kelley, a Pennsylvania Congressman (March 22, 1865). At the time, Kelley was enthusiastically campaigning for a bill enfranchising black men in Washington, D.C. While Emilie might have been interested in the issue, Kelley was known for giving long orations on the history of suffrage rights in the state—perhaps not an appealing way to spend the evening. Although she could not vote—nor could the black men in her life—Emilie liked to predict the outcome of elections (November 8-10, 1864). Notably, Emilie took care not to go out on Election Day, for there was always trouble in the streets (October 13-15, 1863). There was trouble on other days too, like on September 24, 1864, when Emilie noted “excitement this afternoon mr. green was molested and defended himself” (September 24-26, 1864). Green’s “molesters” surely regretted their act, for Alfred Green, Sergeant Major in the 127th USCT, fended off the men first by pistol-whipping them and then by shooting one of them in the leg.

And we learned a great deal about cultural life in Civil War Philadelphia, discovering a cast of characters who made the city and time come alive. Emilie attended concerts, learned to play the guitar, and frequented performances by celebrities who we were delighted to meet. On May 11, 1864, Emilie noted that, “Nellie did not come up as i expected this evening a Miss Greenfeilds concertcomes off to night.” Upon further investigation, we learned that Emilie attended a concert performed by Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, a former slave from Natchez, Mississippi, known as the “Black Swan.” Some time before the war, Greenfield moved from Mississippi to Philadelphia, where she was freed and raised by Quakers. Greenfield was well known for her enchanting voice and classical repertoire, and she became a favorite in particular of Frederick Douglass. Indeed, she regularly opened for Douglass, warming up the audience with her music before Douglass took the stage. If Edward Loatman had come to Philadelphia in the spring of 1864, he too might have bought a ticket to see the Black Swan.

Through Emilie we were also introduced to Blind Tom. In September 1865, Emilie attended a performance given by Thomas Wiggins, a former slave who toured concert halls performing musical numbers he learned from memory. A complicated figure, Blind Tom inspired awe with his talent—performing two different songs on different pianos, while singing a third song—but he frustrated critics with his deep loyalty to his former master, who controlled all the proceeds of Tom’s popular shows. Emilie declared herself “much Pleased with the performance excepting we had to sit up stairs wich made me furious” (September 14, 1865). To have to shuffle up to the balcony at the same venue where she had attended lectures by Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was too much for Emilie who, by late in 1865, expected more from white Philadelphians than a segregated performance venue. “The prejudice against blacks extends to every class,” an 1860 article about Philadelphia in Douglass’ Monthly explained, “and may be remarked in pleasure and in business. At theatres and concerts, lectures and churches, the negro is restricted to a remote gallery.” Emilie was well positioned to remark on the changes the war wrought on Philadelphia and its inhabitants—and what had stubbornly remained the same. Engaging in digital history opened our eyes to these lived realities of urban life in the North during the Civil War.

And then there was the ice cream. In the process of building the Website, we tagged each entry in order to populate the word cloud that appears at the bottom of the page; this process revealed things that we had not even thought to look for. Like keyword searching in period newspapers, digitizing a source like a diary can help to uncover hidden patterns, preferences, and even unspoken thoughts. Tagging Emilie’s complaints about foul weather allowed us to think about how her movement around the city became circumscribed, how outbreaks of illnesses increased in the winter, and how fighting in the eastern theater stalled in the midst of nor’easters. Had we not been tagging, we would likely never have discovered that Emilie liked ice cream. Indeed, during a time of intense worry, loss, and fear, Emilie recorded going out for ice cream on four separate occasions. Emilie enjoyed ice cream at a “saloon” with her friends after a particularly “dull day” working as a domestic (May 13, 1864), then again the next week after a children’s concert (May 19-20, 1864), on an unseasonably cool day in August (August 27, 1863), and even after a crowded church choir concert in February (February 16, 1863). Admittedly, this is a slim evidentiary basis from which to make any assumption about Emilie—and also, who doesn’t like ice cream? But Philadelphians of color did not generally take such luxuries for granted. In the summer of 1857, for example, Charlotte Forten and a friend were refused service at three Philadelphia ice cream parlors before they gave up. Emilie’s regular enjoyment of the cold treat in 1863-1864 stood as evidence of the expanding space that black Philadelphians inhabited during the Civil War. Pushed to make our academic research meet the structural requirements of digital history, we saw something new in the diary every time we looked. Working together to transcribe and annotate Emilie Davis’ three slim diaries, and to build the Memorable Days Website, allowed us to see fluctuations in morale in the Civil War North, to witness through her eyes events of enormous political significance, and to enjoy the small victories war made possible—writing your name in a diary, for instance, and going out for ice cream with a friend.

Digital tools are rapidly making possible the integration of African American and Civil War history, as they allow users to search for bits and pieces of information buried under—and preserved within—the mountains of paper produced during the Civil War. In addition to the admittedly few diaries written by African Americans during the Civil War, there are traces of lives left behind in the census, enlistment rolls, and the fugitive slave and information wanted advertisements. Through online transcription and annotation—and the dissemination of these sources—digital tools are allowing historians to write new chapters in the history of the Civil War. Freed from the restraints of institutional memory, digital history sites are particularly well equipped to commemorate the Civil War as an important period in African American history.

Further Reading:

Emilie Davis’s original diaries are located at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The online transcription with contextual annotations can be found at the Memorable Days Website:http://davisdiaries.villanova.edu. Mrs. Lillian (Loatmen) Boggs’ letters (May 23, 2013 and September 25, 2013) are in the author’s collection. The Information Wanted advertisements in The Christian Recorder are digitized as part of Accessible Preservatives’ African American Newspapers, but they do not retain their original format. The Recorder is available on microfilm at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The University of Virginia’s Geography of Slavery tracks fugitives through runaway slave ads. And the Historical Society of Pennsylvania has digitized William Still’s list of fugitives who passed through Philadelphia.

On digital history, see the essays in the special issue, “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History 95:2 (September 2008).

Edward Loatman’s enlistment records are available on Ancestry.com, U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1861-1865 (Provo, Utah, Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2007; by subscription). The 1st Regiment USCT’s history of Civil War combat is available at this National Park Service site (accessed 09/15/2013). On the history of U.S. colored troops, see William Dobak’s Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (Center for Military History, 2011). For more information on the speakers and entertainers whom Emilie saw in person, see The Black Swan at Home and Abroad; Or, a Biographical Sketch of Miss Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the American Vocalist (Philadelphia, 1855); The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York, 1988).

Henry Louis Gates describes “‘Roots’ envy” in “My Yiddishe Mama,” The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 1, 2006). Jill Lepore’s new book on Jane Franklin is Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York, 2013).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

Judith Giesberg is professor of history and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Villanova University. She is editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) and author of Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009).

Before writing these remarks I re-read The American Jeremiad for the first time in quite a while. I believe in reading, so let me start with a reader’s report. Beyond and before the special theoretical or methodological contributions Bercovitch’s book offers, in reading his classic work the first impression that arises is of an extremely rare combination unmatched among Americanists: erudition across an extraordinary range of materials, combined with intellectually scintillating prose. Ideas flash and crackle that would seem mere speculation were they not warranted by the density of citation that plumps the footnotes. The literary scholar reaches out and pulls in history and anthropology and specialized religious works, the Americanist aptly quotes an astonishing array of British and European writers.

But to go beyond the experience of reading the book, let me speak as someone who has paid close attention to patterns of academic careers, especially in the area of my passion, literary studies. The historian of American literary study observes a striking parallel, which I believe has not been remarked, between two of the most brilliant and influential figures of the 1970s, men then in their forties who happened to be colleagues at Columbia. In 1975 Edward Said, the Palestinian-American, published his dazzling Beginnings, an enduring monument of the late-twentieth-century theory boom, and Sacvan Bercovitch, the Canadian-American, published his dazzling Puritan Origins of the American Self, which culminated four decades of recovering Puritanism as the foundation of American literature. Then in 1978, Said published Orientalism, which initiated what became post-colonial studies, and Bercovitch The American Jeremiad, which initiated what became American cultural studies.

It testifies to the strength by which our subfields shut themselves off from each other that these two masterworks have been placed so infrequently in dialogue with one another.

In both cases, the 1975 books are marvels within the established field of literary studies, and the 1978 books break the frame. They’re very different from each other, as they would have to be, but both strongly interdisciplinary. Even more than that, both are fighting books. Perhaps not ideology-critique—since neither is exactly Marxist—but perhaps something else. I’d put it this way: Said offered a critical genealogy of “The Orient” and Bercovitch a critical genealogy of “America.” It testifies to the strength by which our subfields shut themselves off from each other that these two masterworks have been placed so infrequently in dialogue with one another.

Both Bercovitch and Said put to good use their immigrant status, their insider/outsider perspective, to make visible a structure of knowledge, belief, and practice that seemed natural to those within it but bizarre to a Palestinian encountering what was asserted of the Orient, or a Canadian encountering what he had thought to be the United States which then proved to conceive itself as “America.”

Consider the divergent histories that follow from these dramatic openings. Both Orientalism and Americanism depend on exclusion. Yet Bercovitch was already on the mark back in 1978: he recognized a crucial pattern of growing inclusion—from the Half-Way Covenant of the second-generation Puritans all the way up to the more recent claims of women and people of color to count as American. This is a huge difference: the identity of “American” may be a prize to claim as well as a strait-jacket to be struggled free from, while no one, I think, has fought to be included as “Oriental.”

Even more crucial, the ideal values of “America,” Bercovitch has argued, are most cherished by those who oppose what the American state and people are doing. This is like the condition familiar in the 1970s and 1980s in another sphere of discourse, when those on the left in many parts of the world distinguished “actually existing” Communism in the USSR or Eastern Europe from what should be the fundamental values of Socialism or Communism or Marxism. Well, that problem is gone, but it makes all the more challenging the task of assessing “The State of the Americanist Field” thirty-five years after a book that might have had the effect of persuading us to keep a wary distance from the term “America.” “What if we then dissociated America from the United States?” Bercovitch asks in the preface to the new edition. For some years the presidential addresses at the American Studies Association have asked this question in different forms, but how do we actually do it?

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

Jonathan Arac is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of five books on American and British fiction, poetry, and social criticism, as well as numerous influential edited collections, essays, and reviews.

Or, who’s afraid of the big question?

I have a friend who’s always ranting about the fact that historians can no longer handle a good scholarly fight. Mea culpa. Wimp. Coward. That’s me. I have never written anything that put a shot across another historian’s bow. My first book was about a subject historians don’t much care about: language. Insofar as it got any play, it was among the lit crit crowd. And my subsequent work has been tame to the point of cowardly solicitude. I would place most of it in a genre who’s origins lay with the very curse my friend believes to have been visited upon historians. That genre—usually referred to as microhistory—has little ambition at all when it comes to disproving another scholar’s thesis. It is, abashedly, about telling stories that, much like short stories, somehow move the reader by evoking distant experience and place. It also inclines toward the blatantly antiquarian in its relish for the small particulars of the past. Old things, long-vanished turns of phrase, antiquated behaviors, small cul-de-sacs of culture—these tend to be the stuff from which microhistorians forge their stories.

I have, of late, been greatly taken with this approach to the past. It has seemed the perfect home for the sheepish among us who’d rather putz around in an archive and toy with their prose than dethrone some betweeded historical titan. Fortunately, I’m not alone. One only has to read this journal, whose very founding and survival have depended on a similar interest, among those of us who write about the past, in just publishing well told stories.

But, in keeping with my general lack of conviction about many things, I have to confess to having had some doubts about the enterprise. I’ll spare you the autobiographical part of the story and simply say that I’ve begun to miss those good old days when big questions were all the rage and when some Harvard or Yale professor would happily trundle out a book explaining the origin of the American Revolution or the meaning of Progressivism—at the expense of whatever poor sap had previously tackled the problem.

I’ve even started to look back fondly on what has become the most absurd and laughable of all modern scholarly trends: the original American Studies movement. Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean? And yet, I’ve found myself drawn to the writings of Leo Marx, Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, and others. For all their exceptionalism and reductionism, for all their dependence on the canonical, for all their quaint idealism, there is much in what they did that I find myself admiring.

They cared about ideas, they cared about language, and they cared about writing. At the very least, in this last regard, they make less strange bedfellows for the microhistory crowd than one might suppose. These scholars wanted to write about the past in dense and redolent ways, and they wanted to do so while reaching beyond small scholarly circles. But their unabashedly bold and big questions are what really define them. How wonderfully innocent and unironic to simply ask, “What does it all mean, this thing we call America?”

The origin of the American Studies movement has to do with political ideology in the middle of the twentieth century. The scholars I mentioned above were all various shades of left. Not yet prepared to throw the communal baby out with the totalitarian bath water, they embraced a high-bred social-democratic polity, something that allowed for a sharply limited free market, collective social security, and so on. But they faced a very difficult antagonist in the postwar liberals who clung to the pre-depression idea that America was somehow different, that it didn’t need a large interventionist state to regulate the economy or take care of people. The reason for this was that Marx (Karl) was simply wrong when it came to America: here history was not born of class conflict. It was instead born of Hegelian Geist, embodied in the great, collective middle-class leviathan that carried the nation forth on its acquisitive, work-hardened shoulders.

The leaders of the American Studies movement, at bottom, sought to disprove this idea, or at least part of it. They accepted the notion that America was different—that it had no long history of class conflict, of peasant uprisings, and tyrannical rule. But that did not mean America was a nation without conflict. Those very same middle-class people who carried American history on their backs did so by fighting their way through a thicket of barriers, whether it was the natural ones of the West or the mind-numbing, human-made ones of industrialization.

This American Studies brand of conflict—conflict as ideal versus anti-ideal, as historical ego versus historical id—has come to seem profoundly disconnected from reality. Since the 1960s (the connection to campus and urban upheaval is not coincidental), historians—or at least those in the academy—have generally come to believe that in fact the old American Studies model of conflict was pretty much a fiction. America may still not quite uphold a Marxian model of class conflict, but broaden your conception of social conflict—from the narrow rubric of proletarian versus bourgeoisie—and you begin to see an American past riddled with actual, sometimes bloody social antagonism. You see agrarian revolt, from the colonial New York tenant wars to the Whiskey Rebellion; you see race and ethnic conflict, from the New York draft riots to the urban clashes of the 1960s. The list could go on.

Although pretty much every reasonable student of our past accepts the idea that American history is a history rife with conflict, it is also the rare outlier who believes that any single formula—e.g., corporate capital versus labor—explains American history. Instead, we tend to think about our past in terms of an interwoven series of conflicts and tensions, few of which alone define any single era or set of events, let alone the entirety of the American past.

If you cannot point to any historical silver bullet to explain a discreet event in the past (let alone all of American history), why not simply find satisfaction in the evocative story well told? If the past is an infinitely complex web of conflicting causes and effects, why bother with the pretense that we can actually explain something? Instead, let us rest comfortably in the realm of craft where value comes from formal properties rather than superior argument. Instead of trying to be more right than the last interpreter of, say, the election of 1800, let’s simply tell a better story, more alive with engaging prose and rich anecdote.

This, at least, explains my own tendencies over the past seven or eight years. Enter the identity crisis: So who am I? Am I simply a storyteller who writes about the past? If so, what of all that stuff that got me into this line of work in the first place? What of those debates about the meaning of the American Revolution? What of my infatuation with Tocqueville and his Democracy in America? A bigger book about America has never been written.

I have found myself drawn once again to the likes of Tocqueville, particularly the impulse—which he was the first to yield to in any serious way—to ask, “What does America mean?”

It turns out the question is not quite as out of fashion as I had thought. The Web is crawling with bloggers pontificating on the need to define America in the twenty-first century. There are high-school kids and church groups churning out page after page of discussion about what America means. And they all generally agree that the question is urgent because of the war on terror. If we are really to defeat our shadowy and ubiquitous enemy, they say, we need to know what we stand for. We need to know what we like about ourselves and what our enemies hate about us—what makes us unique. Everyone knows that you can’t fight a war unless you know what you’re fighting for.

Most of the general Web chatter on this subject advocates one of two familiar positions: melting pot and founding creed. The first is simply that age-old notion that America is diversity made workable by middle-class values—the “we’re all hard-working middle-class people, and we don’t have time to develop irrational hatreds of our various differences” theory. And that makes us special. The Islamists hate that about us because it is a tolerant attitude, and they hate tolerance. Then there’s the more pious notion that what defines us is our founding creed, our embrace of liberty, our insistence on the rule of law, our religious-like devotion to a set of founding principles enshrined in the oldest written constitution in the world. Without those founding values, we are just another ethnically divided nation, easily bullied by our corrupt leaders.

These shrill meaning-of-America-as-patriotic-mantra explanations are a depressing reminder of just how intellectually marginal the question “What does America mean?” has become. Perhaps that’s less because they come from people who spend little time thinking about the matter than because they come from Americans themselves. Tocqueville, in some ways the true father of American Studies, was of course French. So maybe it takes foreigners, judgment unclouded by patriotism, to figure out what America means. If you search the Web (I Googled “Meaning of America”), you’ll find an article in the Economist, dated November 10, 2005, entitled “The Meaning of America: Where Men are Men and Pumpkins are Nervous.” The article’s subject? Millsboro, Delaware’s nineteenth annual Pumpkin Shooting Contest. As the very English Economist sees it,

“[a]ll in all, Punkin Chunkin is a symbol of what makes America great. Only in the richest country on earth could regular guys spend tens of thousands of dollars building a pumpkin gun. Only in a nation with such a fine tradition of inventiveness, not to mention martial prowess, would so many choose to. And only in a land of wide open spaces would they be able to practise their chunkin without killing their neighbors.”

There it is. America is a nation of wasters: we have so much land, money, time, and inventiveness that we can afford the whacky pastime of Punkin Chuckin. The argument has been made before. In 1950, the Yale historian David M. Potter delivered a set of lectures (published in 1954 as People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character) arguing more or less what Punkin Chunkin suggests to the Economist: what defines America is the sheer abundance of its resources. From Potter’s vantage in the prosperous 1950s, it appeared that with so much to go around, most Americans were pretty well provided for. Like it or not, accidents of nature had given rise to a huge, dominating middle class and with its unbounded purchasing power, that middle class defined America.

Compared to the patriotic-mantra approach to the meaning of America, the free-market, material-abundance, Economist interpretation (via Potter) feels at least a bit more substantive. Perhaps we should be happy about its very existence; perhaps it is a symptom that foreigners—as they struggle to reconcile our militarism with our professed high-minded, democratic values—are once again trying to figure us out. And perhaps, too, a few American historians who don’t quite feel at home in their own country will be inspired to follow suit. Perhaps, once again, you won’t be laughed out of the seminar room or lecture hall if you stand up and claim to know what America means. On the other hand, maybe we’re just too much the grave liberals, too much the nuanced antitheses to the Fox News/AM radio approach to the world, to ever lay claim to such grandiose territory. How can my world be reduced to one defining trait—the West, material abundance, ethnic diversity, etc.? And yet, there is no denying the appeal of this kind of thinking, even if understood as pure intellectual exercise. What America needs are critical faculties, and critical faculties need a thesis to knock around. Maybe that great nervous scholar and monumental equivocator Moses Herzog put it best when he declared, “What this country needs is a good five-cent synthesis.”

Further Reading:

Major works from the midcentury American Studies movement include Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); Perry Miller, New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964). For the reference from Saul Bellow’s Herzog and for an insightful discussion of Potter’s Land of Plenty, see Robert M. Collins, “David Potter’s People of Plenty and the Recycling of Consensus History,” in Reviews in American History 16:2 (June, 1988): 321-35.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Edward Gray is associate professor of history at Florida State University and editor of Common-place.

This summer, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study held a five-day symposium and workshop on “Biography as History.” Common-place asked Megan Marshall, one of the facilitators of that event, “Why biography?”

I love biography. I always have. As a girl, I spent countless hours in the town library where my grandmother ran the children’s room. There I discovered a series of biographies of famous women—Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie are the ones I remember best. I thrilled to those life stories, which stressed the sense of adventure or mission these accomplished women felt inwardly, even as young girls. Back home, I took apart my roller skates and attached the wheels to the bottom of a wooden box, in an effort to build a go-cart like one the young Amelia Earhart was said to have launched down a ramp off the roof of a work shed in an early attempt to fly.

When I was in the sixth grade, my school piloted a silent-reading program that allowed our class of thirty-two eleven-year-olds, housed in a portable classroom on the sunbaked black-top of a Southern California playground in 1964, to choose and read at our own pace selections, many of which were drawn from biographies of African American women. Looking back on that year, I can see us sitting quietly at our desks, the children of parents driven west by the dust bowl disaster, of Japanese Americans interned during World War II, of immigrants from Mexico—all thrust back, imaginatively, into a different America from any we’d known or heard of as we read about Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, whose evocative, musical names provoked me to pause and mouth the syllables into the unaccustomed stillness.

My childhood fascination with biography wasn’t limited to women. I had received as gifts a biography of J. S. Bach—which recounted his boyhood pilgrimage on foot to hear the great organist Buxtehude and his nocturnal practicing at the clavier in defiance of an older brother’s requirement that he play the violin—and another of John James Audubon, the lad who loved to sketch birds in the woods and later made a profession of his boyhood hobby. The Bach biography was given as a reward for good performance at the piano, as were (each year I took lessons) small plaster busts of the great composers. These smooth, white, godlike figures of Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, and Mozart seemed almost real, frowning down on me from a trophy shelf in my bedroom, reminding me to practice. I held them about as often as I did the dolls from around the world that my U.N.-championing mother gave me each year and that stood next to the plaster busts on the shelf. Glowering geniuses, kimono-clad and kilt-wearing porcelain beauties—for better or worse, these were the icons of my childhood.

Still, I found myself wondering about Audubon’s beloved sister, a girl who appeared alongside him in the initial chapters of the book and then faded from the story. Or about J. S. Bach’s wives, the women who gave birth to his twenty children. And his daughter Anna Magdalena, for whom he had written a book of keyboard compositions—she must have played; could she also have composed or had she wanted to? Why were these musical geniuses all men? And, aside from the intended message of my U.N. dolls—we’re all the same, except for a change of clothes—why was dress so significant for women? I hated clothes. I yearned to write or compose or do something worthy. The plaster busts yellowed; the dolls collected dust. Now all of them are gone, I don’t know where.

By the time I’d graduated from college, majoring in English (which permitted study of the works, if not the lives, of favorite authors), a boom in women’s biography had erupted. Gerda Lerner led the way with her 1967 Grimke Sisters. I read Nancy Milford’s Zelda(1970), Kathryn Kish Sklar’s Catharine Beecher(1973), Paula Blanchard’s Margaret Fuller (1978), Jean Strouse’s Alice James (1980), and Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives (1983) with the same fervor I’d devoured those good-hearted children’s biographies.

These were the models I had in mind in 1984 when I started looking into the possibility of writing a biography of the Peabody sisters: books that harnessed the narrative propulsion of biography to drive their examinations of larger issues like gender roles, women’s education, trends in medical treatment, and a seemingly infinite variety of subjects that touched on the lives of particular women. As I initially conceived it, the Peabody sisters project seemed a way of getting at some of the questions that had troubled me since childhood. These were three women of obvious talent who had allied themselves, professionally or personally, with some of the greatest male “geniuses” of their time: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a handful of others. I was delighted to learn that the oldest sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was chided throughout her life for sloppy dressing.

These were superficial entry points, but deeper questions drew me as well. To name just one: the emergence of liberal religion in America. The Peabody sisters began life as orthodox Congregationalists, took up Unitarianism in its earliest days, and then migrated to the freest of all “theosophies,” Transcendentalism. How was this transition experienced from the pew as opposed to the pulpit, the more familiar story? How did women, with multiple daily obligations to family, reconcile a seemingly contradictory Transcendentalist imperative to cultivate “self-reliance”? I eventually discovered a subplot in Transcendentalism, a communitarian ideal championed by women as well as men and summarized best in Elizabeth Peabody’s assertion: “Love is spontaneous in every human being.” Love, or “sympathy,” Peabody believed, was the basis of “the social principle, engaging [man’s] feelings for others, whom he sees to have a common nature with himself.” Peabody may even have been the first American to use the term “Transcendentalism,” linking it with her notion of “the social principle,” which supported projects like the utopian experiment at Brook Farm or Bronson Alcott’s commune at Fruitlands.

Because of their alliances with famous men, the Peabody sisters’ voluminous personal papers—which equaled or bettered in extent those of the men in their circle—had been preserved. My sources were all too abundant. As I spent months and then years in the archives, however, I became aware that the boom in women’s biography, which had inspired me to take up the project, had gone bust. The movement to recover forgotten heroines or retrieve promising women from the shadows of successful brothers or husbands, gave way to studies of courtship, of women’s reading practices, of female employment patterns. This proliferation of new and path-breaking research proved useful for the book I was writing but seemed to augur badly for its reception whenever I might finish. Brandeis historian Jane Kamensky—at work now on a book about American portraitist Gilbert Stuart, which she emphasizes will not be a standard biography—has enumerated the academy’s quibbles with biography: its “tendencies to advocate for or prosecute subjects and to concentrate only on the eminent or advantaged.” George Rable, a Civil War historian at the University of Alabama, summed up the anti-biography position in a recent interview with the Boston Globe: “the individual life is not the story of history.”

Charges like these are difficult to answer, and they gave me pause. During the twenty years I was researching and writing The Peabody Sisters, I was sometimes tempted to change my focus to a more issue-driven topic or to publish a selection of letters organized around themes. Yet, while I knew it would have been simpler to limit my scope to a subject like women’s role in the emergence of Unitarianism or the work of the few women artists who exhibited in early Boston Athenaeum shows (the youngest sister, Sophia Peabody, was one such woman), it was the whole story I wanted to tell. I never seriously considered using the manuscript record I was wading through for anything other than a group biography of these three women who became increasingly vivid to me as I read their letters and journals. The diversity of their interests and attitudes—they took markedly different positions on abolition, women’s rights, and Transcendentalism itself—seemed to demand this.

Partial as biography can be, it is still the best tool for bringing a wealth of issues into play in one historical work. Biography comes as close as any genre can to capturing the sense of what it felt like to be alive, in all the complexity that word suggests, at an earlier time. Who’s to say that a study of courtship based on twelve couples is more revealing than a close accounting of two couples’ journeys to the altar, when the brides-to-be are sisters—Mary and Sophia Peabody—who wrote back and forth to each other, sometimes daily? Is a survey of the works of a handful of women artists practicing in 1830s New England sure to be more meaningful than a detailed rendering of one such artist’s struggles from childhood onward? All these approaches yield something of value to historians—but biography may also reach the general reader.

Cynthia Ozick has written of “our unslakable thirst for the rich-blooded old novel’s royal cousin”: biography. In her view, biography draws readers primarily for literary and aesthetic reasons. It offers, in our fragmented post-modern era, the “trustworthy satisfactions of a still-coherent form.” But I think biography’s attractions include much more than that. Most people read biographies to learn, to feel they are taking in history as it was being made. Biography is no cousin. It is the progenitor of historical writing, starting with Plutarch and carrying through to David McCullough and Antonia Fraser. As Lori Ginzberg has said of her reasons for choosing a biographical approach in her forthcoming book on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, biography “slows the story down to real time, when people make actual decisions without knowing what’s going to happen next.” Biography reminds us “how certain ideas that we now take utterly for granted were once dramatically new, and how the force of them hit each person one at a time.”

Readers of The Peabody Sisters sometimes tell me that they now understand Transcendentalism, or the Unitarian-Trinitarian split in New England church history, for the first time. This surprises me because I devoted relatively little space to explaining these subjects head-on. What they are saying, I think, is that they now have some sense of what it felt like to be caught up in the spiritual quest that absorbed the Peabody sisters and their circle during the era of Transcendentalism’s emergence. The search seems urgent—almost real—to these readers at last.

So, for me, the question really is—why not biography? Certainly the genre has its drawbacks for historians. In a biography there is little room, aside from endnotes, for exposing the documentary research behind the narrative, for pointing out what’s new and different. There is even less space for taking up disputes with other scholars. Perhaps this is just as well. More troubling is the loss of an opportunity to generalize from data; in most biographies, the life story holds sway.

Yet biography seems to be ascendant again among historians—or at least it seems to be taking hold of some historians. Biography has entered a new golden age, ushered in by a parade of biographies of American presidents and founding fathers and expanding with new biographies of women: Elisabeth Gitter’s The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (2001), Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston(2003), Gillian Gill’s Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale (2004), Louise W. Knight’s Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, Catherine Allgor’s A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (2006), and four biographies of Harriet Tubman by Jean Humez (2003), Catherine Clinton (2004), Kate Larson (2004), and Beverly Lowry (2007). Coming soon are Ginzberg’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Kessler-Harris’s Lillian Hellman, Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange, Susan Ware’s Billie Jean King, and Margaret Washington’s Sojourner Truth.

The “story of history” can take many forms. Perhaps reflecting a nation-wide yearning for leadership and a longing for inspiration, ours is an era that prizes the individual’s story. This new “second wave” of women’s biographies arrives enriched by the historical work on women’s lives done in the interval and by an invigorating skepticism about the biographical form. Yet no matter how sophisticated or self-referential biography becomes, it will always retain the simplest of impulses at its core: the desire on the part of both writer and reader to estimate character and consequences. “Every living human being is a biographer from childhood, in that he perpetually studies the souls of those about him,” wrote the prolific early-twentieth-century biographer Gamaliel Bradford. “The interest is natural and human and enduring; it can never die.”

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005), which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir; during 2006-2007 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she began work on a biography of Ebe Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s reclusive older sister.

Bob Gross, the new editor of Ask the Author, asked me to write about how my recent book, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the American Revolution, was affected by the nearly ten years I spent as an environmental activist.

I had actually been a conservative when I entered the University of Virginia in 1977—the first club I joined was the College Republicans—but exposure to that right-wing student body pushed me far to the left. After graduation, I went to work for Congress Watch and the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs)—environmental and consumer groups founded by Ralph Nader—and in 1990 I founded Clean Up Congress to try to defeat anti-environmental congressmen. It is perhaps not terribly surprising that this work had unintended ideological consequences. Not that my left-wing activism sent me back toward conservatism. But it did kill off some of my liberal illusions.

One of these was the notion of a beneficent government, a natural outgrowth of my having been educated by the state until the age of twenty-one (not to mention my having spent adolescence in a state-owned mansion during my father’s governorship of Virginia!). At Congress Watch, where one of my principal duties was to monitor congressional hearings, I was astonished—go ahead and call me naïve—to discover how much less welfare the government distributed to the poor than to giant corporations. (If you think the government robs the rich and gives to the poor, a single session of the Agriculture Committee will set you straight.)

That lesson was reinforced during the much longer periods I spent with the PIRGs and Clean Up Congress, and the suspicion of government I picked up as an activist carried over into my work on Unruly Americans. Most (though not all) scholars who had previously studied the angry farmers of the 1780s (the likes of Daniel Shays) had focused on farmers’ struggles against creditors. I, on the other hand, was especially (perhaps excessively) sensitive to the farmers’ complaint that “our misfortune proceeds from the hands of government.” So I devoted less of my book to the struggle pitting debtors against creditors than to the overlapping battle between taxpayers and the primary beneficiaries of the unprecedented taxes of the 1780s, the people who had speculated in depreciated government bonds. (My discovery that those speculators included Abigail Adams was, as the expression goes, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.)

The suspicion of legislators that inevitably resulted from my years of advocating environmental legislation was not distributed evenly between the state and federal governments. I’m proud of Clean Up Congress’s accomplishments (nothing I have done since leaving activism has made me half so proud as the role I played in convincing my fellow Virginians not to elect Oliver North to the U.S. Senate), but my colleagues and I got a lot more done at the PIRGs, which focus on influencing state assemblies. To most people it is obvious that grassroots activists have an easier time passing legislation at the state rather than the federal level, but for me it was a revelation. Having been born in the South during the waning years of Jim Crow, I had an innate suspicion of anything smelling of states’ rights. But as I contrasted my brief and frustrating career with Congress Watch (where it seems in retrospect that our primary role was to be trampled by Ronald Reagan’s stampede) to the wide range of significant environmental laws that PIRG shepherded through the state legislatures during my tenure there, I developed renewed faith in governments that are close to the people. 

That preference for politics at the state level made me much more open than most other Revolution scholars to the ideas of the Anti-Federalists. I was even more intrigued by people like Hermon Husband who spent the 1780s trying to make the state governments (which of course were too democratic in the eyes of the framers of the Constitution) more responsive to the voters’ voice. And when I encountered James Madison’s claim that shifting certain key governmental responsibilities from the state to the federal level would have the effect of divide et impera (divide and conquer), I knew just what he was talking about.

Thus activism shaped my perspective on state action in general and the federal government in particular, but the biggest change it produced was in my attitude toward the voters. It is common for us elitist academics to perceive ordinary Americans as apathetic. My PIRG friends lamented ordinary citizens’ political inactivity, too, but they blamed it on despair rather than apathy—a crucial distinction that allowed them to retain respect for the people they were trying to mobilize.

For groups like PIRG and Clean Up Congress, populism is not only a philosophical disposition but a practical necessity, since citizen donations (mostly collected door-to-door in those days) are their chief funding source, and it is hard to elicit contributions from people as you talk down to them.

The PIRGs and Clean Up Congress also exposed me to a third source of populism. I do not know how to say this in a way that does not sound goofy, but I cannot not say it. Knocking on tens of thousands of doors in nearly half the states, I met a good cross-section of middle-class America, and I was pleasantly (and, in retrospect, somewhat embarrassingly) surprised by how few Archie Bunkers and Stepford wives I encountered. I treasure many of the conversations I had with my fellow citizens at their doorsteps, and I think if I had been blessed with musical talent, I could have waxed as lyrical about suburbanites as another Woody did about hoboes and Okies.

I still have strong elitist tendencies. To take a key issue from Unruly Americans, I would not support a Constitutional amendment restoring the state legislatures’ power to print paper money. But I do think the people I met as I rounded up support for PIRG’s toxic waste and acid rain proposals—and later as I talked up Clean Up Congress’s candidates—made me a little less of a snob. I can think of books that are much more populist than Unruly Americans (including two that were published in the same year as mine: Terry Bouton’s Taming Democracy and Mike McDonnell’s Politics of War). But I think there is a respect for ordinary farmers in my book that would not be there if I had not talked politics with so many of their descendants.

At a memorable OAH session in Memphis in April 2003, Terry, Mike, Marjoleine Kars, and I gave short papers about small farmers’ battles with elite Americans of the revolutionary era. The two commentators liked our papers well enough, but many, many members of the audience thought we had given far too little attention to the farmers’ sexism and racism. (A fifth paper, by Seth Cotlar, was more theoretical and escaped the audience’s ire.) It is true that none of us had focused on the farmers’ many vices in our five-minute papers, but only because we considered them too obvious to mention. It occurred to me in retrospect that I probably would not have gotten into this fix if my years at PIRG and Clean Up Congress had not caused my attitude toward ordinary white Americans to diverge so significantly from the academic norm. 

Yet I do think unusual perspectives like mine contribute to the larger project of constructing a complete picture of early America. Let me give you two examples from Unruly Americans.

By 1786, nearly every free American agreed that the economy was in terrible trouble and that the thirteen state legislatures were partly to blame. Most elite Americans believed the assemblymen had crippled the economy by going too easy on debtors and taxpayers, and the authors of the U.S. Constitution were careful to prohibit the state legislatures from granting most forms of relief. Other Americans (and their elite sympathizers) thought the assemblies had damaged the economy not by treating ordinary farmers too kindly but by being too harsh. One of the relief advocates’ oft-repeated claims was that the state assemblies had depressed the economy by depressing farmers’ spirits. When elite critics said the real source of ordinary Americans’ distress was “dissipation,” one of the farmers’ advocates admitted that they had not been working at their full potential but went on to label this failure the “natural and unfailing consequence of despair.”

Nearly every time I have related this argument to an academic audience, it has been ridiculed. Scholars who are all too familiar with writer’s block find it absurd to speak of farmer’s block. But I for one think the relief advocates had a point. As one western Massachusetts writer put it, tax relief would prompt farmers “to manly and generous exertions for the common good, by calling hope to their aid.”

Farmers’ morale is also the subject of my other example. During the mid-1780s, numerous Massachusetts and New Hampshire towns chose not to send representatives to the state assembly. Most scholars attribute this failure to a combination of parsimony (the towns, not the state government, had to pay state representatives’ salaries) and apathy. But from my years at PIRG I was sensitive to the possibility that political inactivity is often the result not of apathy but of despair. Thus I was able (building on the work of John H. Flannagan and Jack Pole) to make the case that the towns often deliberately withheld their representatives as a form of silent protest.

About once every two years as I was working on my book, I reread Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. My admiration for the book increased every time. Wood really does show (as Charles Beard, John Fiske, and a host of other Progressive and Anti-Progressive scholars had also done) just how undemocratic the United States Constitution was intended to be. In the spring of 2000 Wood came to an informal talk I gave on what would become Unruly Americans. Afterwards he told me that I seemed to be confirming his claims about the framers’ undemocratic intentions. I agreed, but I wanted him to know that my book was not going to be entirely like his. “In my opinion,” I told him, “Creation of the American Republic is the most accurate book we have on the origins of the Constitution—and also the most evil.”

I expected Professor Wood to get a kick out of the way I had defined the difference between our books. I don’t think he did—and perhaps “evil” was a bit strong! But that was the best job I’ve ever done of distinguishing my philosophy of history from his. If I read them right, Wood and his legions of scholarly followers do not simply hold that the framers of the Constitution believed that democracy had failed during the years leading to the adoption of the Constitution. The Woodites are also convinced that the framers were right: that democracy really hadfailed. In Unruly Americans I tried to resist the pressing temptation to make the opposite claim—that elite Americans like Madison and Washington understood the problems that led to the Constitution less well than ordinary farmers did. I just wanted to suggest that there were two sides to the story and that the farmers’ side deserved airing. 

I had been exposed to populism in graduate school, especially by Peter H. Wood and Larry Goodwyn. But no amount of reading was ever going to convince me that ordinary Americans might have as good a handle on the truth as those of us who have been blessed with three decades of formal education. For me the only way to open up that possibility was to knock on thousands and thousands of doors.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Woody Holton teaches at the University of Richmond and is a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Social History Award, and Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Authentic assessment in an age of standardized testing

We have a friend, Jim Nehring, a historian and longstanding critic of standardized testing, who is now on a committee to help Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick think through the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). Here is a person who once set up a little table on the sidewalk in front of the State House and offered to give a sample of the history MCAS to the members of the legislature who were to vote on education reform. If “content” was important, Jim believed, well then let’s see what these important adults remembered from their history classes. Passers-by took the test, but, we’re told, the politicians dodged it and entered the State House from the back. A few staff people were sent down to take the test; most scored in the “Needs Improvement” category.

But, as Jim says, “When you’re in the opposition, you’re on the streets; when you’re in the majority, you’re on a committee.” He’s hard at work, looking for a way to address the accountability issue honestly and fairly. What sorts of things should our high school graduates know and be able to do? And how should we find out whether they have the intellectual qualities to be responsible adults?

Whatever the answers, we’re convinced standardized tests won’t be of much help in finding them. The subject of history is particularly harmed by the tests’ emphasis on endless individualized memory work. A standardized paper and pencil test tackles content but only imperfectly. As an example, although Nancy has studied Chinese history for many years, when she looked at the MCAS history test, she was unable to select the “best” response for the question on Sung China. It seemed as if the longer one had studied a subject, the less able she would be to eliminate responses. Moreover, that is only one way in which content is mishandled by standardized tests’ format: an inherently fascinating enterprise, full of stories about heroes and villains, challenges met and squandered, is made dull by concentrating on the trees instead of the forest—let alone the ways in which the forest is changing over time.

Learning history in the most engaging way emphasizes discussions: about cause and effect, about the importance of context, about the role that human personality can play in determining events and then about their long-term consequences for human action. It involves a student’s own research, and there is no time for that in standardized testing. Furthermore, in rewarding competition and acquisition of facts (as opposed to collaboration and dialogue about ambiguous evidence), standardized tests encourage the very opposite kind of thinking to that required of critical thinkers and mature citizens. History teachers have gladly taken on the role of enabling citizenship, whether directly or indirectly. But that enterprise is undercut by standardized testing.

Thus, history teachers have a special stake in new kinds of curricula and new forms of accountability. For Jim’s first paper before the MCAS committee, he was asked to present his main thoughts in one page. One of his statements was that we should be concentrating on twenty-first-century thinking skills instead of those that may have been more suitable for earlier centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, students were exposed to a narrow canon: Greek and Latin, the Bible (to keep “that Old Deluder, Satan” at bay), and enough reading and writing to continue these classically derived studies on their own. In the twentieth century, the information base was broader, but students needed teachers to gain access to it. Nancy distinctly remembers a course on Chinese history in her sophomore year in college. She had never heard of the Opium War and was totally shocked at the way the Europeans treated the Chinese. Now we are awash in information: teenagers can watch simulations of the Opium War on television and find all kinds of articles about China on the Internet. Students still need teachers but not so much to tell them things as to help them sort out information and to motivate them to access that information.

Most of us nod agreeably when we hear that we and our students will need “twenty-first-century thinking skills,” but what are those anyway? We’d like to propose a set of criteria that constitute a substantial and demanding—for evaluated and evaluator alike—basis upon which to develop metrics for the skills students need to perform well in history, among other subjects.

Observation. Too often teachers tell their students what they are seeing: in a picture, in a paragraph, in an essay. But what students need is not prepackaged interpretations; they need the tools to interpret such texts on their own. Those tools can be cultivated by building observation exercises into the regular curriculum. We can ask our pupils to look at the colonists’ artistic renderings of the Boston Massacre and compare those images with written versions of the same event. We can ask them to look at different sources, not just to gain information but to notice the different approaches that each source reflects. Consider what a newspaper journalist writing against a daily deadline yields, as opposed to the magazine author who has had months to interpret the evidence. In what ways are each effective observers? How does that recognition help historians years later? We can advise students not to rush to judgment, not to decide which observations are more meaningful before all the data has been collected. When they are reading a biography, at what point did they begin to think less well of the main character? And why? Will they agree to read a source like Mein Kampf even though they expect to disagree with it? A student who expects to observe carefully is a student who expects to understand, which is a deeper form of knowledge, one that lasts beyond the test.

Discrimination. All too often, teachers present facts as if each is as significant as any other. For example, although the reasons for needing a written constitution and the personal stories about that long hot summer in Philadelphia are often taught, once students and their teachers face the results of that summer’s labors (the Federal Constitution), they are often so intimidated that they either tune out or, at the other extreme, begin memorizing details. Too often, tests on the subject focus on such details as where the commerce clause is located, rather than the nature and need for such a clause and how it changed an evolving economy. Why do we lose ourselves in specifics? Because they are more black and white, easier to grade. Criteria for what should be asked and answered should be subject to scrutiny, by students as well as their teachers. Is something important because it was popular? Because it survived “the test of time”? What is the “test of time” anyway, and why do historians emphasize it so much? Why not invite our students to share in deliberations on the subject?

Synthesis. Discrimination may well be at the heart of our consideration of twenty-first-century thinking skills, and it permeates the others, but there are other skills that are also worth developing. Ted and some colleagues taught a course called Synthesis while he was the headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover. The purpose of the course was to demonstrate that while analysis is crucial—and the students were asked to demonstrate it in their discussions and papers—in modern problem solving, it should not come at the expense of interdisciplinary thinking. Problems are best solved by drawing on the full array of available tools. The course was also a way for Ted, a historian by training, to learn from others whose ways of thinking and of assembling evidence were different from his own. The teachers also found authors who were able to demonstrate the kind of synthetic thinking they were trying to introduce to their students. Students in the course who had never valued history felt valued themselves as their expertise was sought and then connected to the contributions of others. Assessment was based entirely on reasoning through issues and suggesting and defending solutions; information was used only to support those solutions and was assessed only in that context. In other words, no multiple choice tests!

Creativity: The students whom we admire are those who bring more of themselves into their studies. Feeding the teacher’s own ideas—and even words—back in biweekly tests is no longer engaging or challenging enough. Instead, we try to help them develop their own varied capacities. We must know what these capacities are, and we must consider them as we devise assignments. Years ago when we were in the history department at Andover, we had a visiting teacher from Eton who told us he felt that in our American history course, our students read too much and wrote too little. He said, politely of course, that our students listed facts without tying them to ideas that seemed important to them. He accepted our philosophy that generalizations without support were mindless and derivative, but he urged us to rethink our course so that the students’ own thinking would be more readily evoked. Giving students this practice is time-consuming work, for students and teachers. Moreover, students often feel hesitant to introduce their own ideas when they think teachers know so much more than they do. Indeed, they must be persuaded that we really want to consider their distinct perspectives. There is also a fine line, especially when a student is doing original research, between coming up with an original interpretation and coming up with a feasible one. Nothing works as well, however, as a research paper—with its familiar thesis that must be formulated and then demonstrated—to help students decide the purpose of the paper, shape the topic, and make themselves understood. Furthermore, especially if there is the frequent feedback that e-mail allows, teachers can judge the degree of creativity that has gone into the work even before it is presented. In the end, the students “own” their work in a way that no history test allows. Having that experience, as Mihali Csikszentmihalyi has demonstrated, enables the students to find and then to develop their own voices and to make their own contributions even at an early age.

These are a few examples of ways in which the history classroom can become a more vibrant and interactive place, the kind best suited for the development of the particular twenty-first-century thinking skills that we—and many others—have proposed. But what of assessment? The “old” way of judging one’s speed and accuracy of recall is relatively easy, which is why we teachers—and testing companies—have relied on it for so many years. Judging a student’s skills at using her imagination will turn out to be more tricky.

We have seen good work done toward this purpose at The Parker School in Devens, Massachusetts, a small public charter school for junior high and high school students, which we helped found in 1995. When studying historical topics, Parker teachers make frequent use of role-playing. This encourages empathy and allows students to tackle such complex, factually diffuse topics as the relationships between Native Americans and colonists or the development of industry at the expense of agriculture. By introducing different roles with different viewpoints and then asking the students to discuss them, teachers encourage young people to dig more deeply into the subjects. The deeper they go, the more engaged they often become. The first round of assessments of role-playing comes when the teacher pulls the class together to discuss its performance. She highlights certain sentences that had been spoken by the actors, asking for explanation and the students’ own evaluations as to accuracy, effectiveness, or where the sentence led the discussion. This is a low-stakes way to develop the discussion and to build into the students their own ability to assess themselves. Oral and written answers can be discussed, revised, increasingly graded, and as the students grow comfortable with these new kinds of assignments, “standardized” (meaning bubble-filling) tests can be devised from this more organic model of assessment. This approach has its risks, especially for the shy or defensive. But over time, the fear in facing that kind of challenge is more easily overcome.

Historians are just as interested as anyone else in making sure their students can use their minds well and can apply these minds to purposes both familiar and unanticipated, now and in years to come. Our graduates need more than just well-stocked memories and good work habits. They need to look far and wide, with all the breadth available and demanded in our curriculum. At the same time, they need to study historical failures as well as successes and to look at problems in individuals and in communities as do-able and solvable. They need to get deep down into the details, into the murky places, and sort them out. If our classrooms provoke and engage them, they will become more capable of embracing challenge as a spur to the well-led life.

Further Reading:

We suggest Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work (New York, 2000); Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy (New York, 1996); and Grant Wiggins, Assessing Student Performance: Exploring the Purpose and Limits of Testing (San Francisco, 1993). See also The Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Ted Sizer, who wrote his doctoral thesis in 1961 under the direction of Bernard Bailyn at Harvard, is University Professor of Education emeritus at Brown University, the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and former Headmaster of Phillips Andover Academy.

Nancy Sizer, who taught history at Andover and the Wheeler School, is the author of Crossing the Stage: Redesigning Senior Year (2002). The two have taught together at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, helped to found the Francis W. Parker charter public school in Devens, Massachusetts, and authored The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (1999), among other books.