Providence and the Invention of American History

Abstract

Providence and the Invention of American History is a beautifully written work of breadth and depth that examines the creation, dissemination, and ultimate debunking of the “Marcus Whitman Saves Oregon” tale to offer a window onto the development of professional history in the United States. Whitman's tale emerged after his death in 1847 at the hands of the Cayuse he sought to convert. Oregon boosters transformed an 1842 winter journey by Whitman to the East Coast to keep his mission from being shut down into a tale in which he rushed to Washington, D.C., to prevent President John Tyler from giving possession of Oregon to the British. The tale gained epic stature by the middle of the nineteenth century and was then debunked by professional historians in the 1890s. Sarah Koenig argues that this process of debunking catalyzed a transition in what counted as professional history—a transition from providential narratives of Protestant/nationalist triumph grounded in eye-witness testimony produced by local historians to ostensibly objective narratives produced by university-based historians and grounded in primary-source documents. While this general transition has been examined by Peter Novick (That Noble Dream, 1988) and others, Koenig's intervention is to show that “objectivity” was not the fulcrum in this shift: both local and university historians stressed objectivity. Rather, the shift turned on the nature of the objective evidence (memory or experience versus documentary evidence) and the shift from a providential narrative structure in which faithful Protestant Americans triumph over pagans, Roman Catholics, and monarchy to a progressive/positivist narrative in which scientific objectivity triumphs over primitive mythmaking. Most importantly, Koenig demonstrates that university-based professional historians actually extended the narrative structure of the earlier providential histories as a way to give their writing significance and meaning. They understood their work as scientific progress beyond the primitive myths of George Washington's cherry tree and Paul Revere's and Whitman's famous rides. In other words, far from being soberly objective, turn-of-the-century scientific history, too, was invested in creating progressive narratives of meaning.