In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America. By Konstantin Dierks. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. xviii, 358 pp. $45.00, ISBN 9780-8122-4153-2.)

Abstract

Konstantine Dierks's In My Power presents the history of early American middle-class culture through the lens of epistolary correspondence. In doing so, the book offers two robust yet sometimes competing arguments along with a third less fully developed contention. First, Dierks argues that an emergent class of professionals, merchants, craftspeople, and government workers narrated their limited sense of agency while scribbling to one another about their day-to-day affairs. The book's title, in fact, is borrowed from an oft-encountered epistolary phrase, a locution that captures people's limited sense of purview within “an increasingly mobile society where social bonds were fragile and social position was uncertain” (p. 2). Though often displaying ignorance of larger historical developments, such letters illustrate the writer's imagined purview, what seemed to lie “in her power.” Dierks thoroughly pursues this argument in the introduction and through the first three chapters, which deal with the quotidian communication of, among others: Edward Randolph, a frustrated civil servant attempting to enforce British law in the distal new world; Joseph Cruttenden, a pharmaceutical merchant peddling his wares in a developing transatlantic market; and Peter Fontaine Jr., a displaced Huguenot trying to find and maintain ties with family dispersed as far as Virginia. While detailing these people, their writing, and their particular histories, Dierks also paints a wider historical panorama featuring empire, capitalism, bureaucracy, and diaspora.