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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution by Michael Hattem Shira Lurie (bio) Keywords American Revolution, American history culture, Nationalism, Cultural nationalism Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution. By Michael Hattem. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 308. Cloth, $40.00.) In recent years, battles over the past have deepened the divisions in American society. The success of The New York Times’s 1619 Project turned the year 1619 into a cultural icon found everywhere from graffiti to apparel. In response, the Trump administration created the 1776 Commission whose report claimed, almost comically and certainly erroneously, to be “a definitive chronicle of the American founding.” Whether [End Page 665] they are criticizing the racist foundations of the nation or peddling American exceptionalism, Americans see historical narratives as central in determining the fundamental truths about their country. Michael Hattem’s new book shows us that history has long been at the heart of how Americans understand themselves and their nation. In Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution, Hattem explores how Americans’ deep engagement with the past shaped their journey to independence and created the foundations of American nationhood. Hattem examines a wide variety of historical productions during this period, including literature, newspapers, poetry, textbooks, paintings, and dictionaries, to illustrate the depth of early Americans’ interest in their past. He also skillfully engages with recent and foundational work on the origins of the American Revolution, American nationalism and identity, and historical memory. He demonstrates how understanding early Americans’ treatment of history both breaks new ground within these fields and forges new connections between them. Hattem argues that the ways Americans thought about their history helped move them toward independence and create a unified national identity and that “those ideas became the basis for the national origins myth that, for better or worse, still lives today in the minds of many Americans” (17). To chart these developments, Hattem introduces “history culture” as an analytical category that reveals how “references to and uses of the past” shape politics and culture (5). Hattem notes two key transformations in early American history culture. The first took place during the imperial crisis when histories of colonial settlement increasingly replaced a focus on British history. This new historical memory simultaneously united colonists and distanced them from the British experience: “Colonists’ reconception of their colonial past began the process of shifting their imperial identity as proud subjects within an empire into a decidedly colonial identity that set them within but also somehow apart from that empire” (79–80). As the imperial crisis wore on, colonists increasingly turned to this history to understand their relationship to the British Empire and, of most significance, argue that it implied a direct relationship with the Crown, not Parliament. Hattem’s contention that the evolution from a British to distinctly colonial history culture helped set the stage for independence is a welcome addition to the tapestry of factors that historians consider when contemplating this period. Scholars should take special interest in Hattem’s observation that historical narratives were more accessible to average [End Page 666] colonists than complicated legal and constitutional arguments, and so constitute “one of the most prominent and recurring features of patriot rhetoric throughout the imperial crisis” (62). However, one is left to hesitate slightly at Hattem’s totalizing language. After all, colonists embraced independence at diff erent paces and with differing degrees of enthusiasm. Loyalists, to take the most striking example, do not appear in Hattem’s work, though they certainly shared the same history culture as their patriot neighbors. American history culture underwent its second transformation in the early republic when “cultural nationalists,” a collection of academics, politicians, and creatives, produced historical narratives that stressed the unity of the American people and the uniqueness of the American experience. In particular, they promoted accounts of the American Revolution that emphasized the deep roots of independence in colonial society. “By creating a narrative in which independence represented continuity rather than rupture,” explains Hattem, “this historical memory of the colonial past effectively deradicalized the Revolution” (201–202). Furthermore, these cultural productions helped foster a sense of national...