Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution by Michael D. Hattem

Abstract

Reviewed by: Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution by Michael D. Hattem Aaron Noble (bio) Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution By Michael D. Hattem. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 320 pages, 5 halftones, 6" x 9". $40.00 cloth, $40.00 ebook. Michael D. Hattem's Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution offers a valuable new resource for scholars of the Revolutionary era. In the book, Hattem seeks to answer the question: How did Americans come to see themselves not as British subjects but, rather, as American citizens in the eighteenth century? The book explores the way that the very concepts of American history itself were constructed in the throes of the Revolution and the impact that this new identity had on politics in the American colonies. These cultural nationalists, according to Hattem, defined the terms of American history and established enduring spatial and temporal boundaries for this new national past. Interestingly, he asserts that the development of American history did not come about after independence but actually emerged prior to the Revolution during the imperial crisis in the 1760s and was a "driving force" behind the Revolution. Hattem seeks to reexamine the premise espoused in seminal works such as Michael Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory that Americans were "liberated from the past" by the [End Page 424] Revolution (2). Instead, the book explores the explosion in historical works that sought to construct a shared American identity and history that redefined the colonial past. The author draws from several works and theories within memory studies in order to make the case for the importance of history culture as an analytical tool. He defines this term as encompassing "all references to and use of the past in a given society." This view of history culture includes not just published works, but also institutions and networks that "fostered 'historical cultural production'" and "includes 'all the layers and processes of social historical consciousness" (5). Through a close examination of history culture in print—newspapers, poetry, theater, and historical works—as well as the establishment of early historical societies and museums in Massachusetts, New York, and Philadelphia, Hattem has identified cultural processes and structures that engendered the transformation in American identity. The author argues that examining the transformation and construction of American history and identity through the lens of history culture affords one a fuller understanding of the relationship between the society and its history and the role that the past plays in culture and politics. The book includes six thematic chapters with a prologue and a brief epilogue. The first three chapters examine how Americans began to reconsider their relationship to the British past in light of the worsening imperial crisis following the end of the French and Indian War and how they began to construct a sense of a shared colonial American past. This constructed past, for the first time, seeks to incorporate the history of all thirteen American colonies into a single cohesive narrative. As the imperial crisis deepened, Hattem demonstrates how Americans reconsidered their understanding of the meanings of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The assertion of Parliamentary Supremacy in the eighteenth century and the lack of any recourse for redress caused many in the American colonies to decry Parliament's arbitrary authority and its usurpation of their historical liberties as British subjects. The second half of the book explores the mechanisms by which American cultural nationalists sought to construct and disseminate knowledge about this American history and to create a deep past that transcended the new nation's British origins. Hattem identifies three processes by which Americans created this shared past: first, the adoption of Christopher Columbus as the "discoverer of America," as marked by tercentennial celebrations in 1792; second, the adaptation of classical and biblical styles in historical and epic poetry about a reconceived national past to draw connections between the newly independent nation and the ancient republics in Greece and Rome; and third, coopting Indigenous histories and the nationalization of the natural history and the history of the land in order to create a deep past of "time immemorial" in order...