Edward Countryman Research Articles

Contested Spaces of Early America ed. by Juliana Barr, Edward Countryman, and: Encounters in the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn

Contested Spaces of Early America ed. by Juliana Barr, Edward Countryman, and: Encounters in the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn

“As Serves our Interest best”: Political Economy and the Logic of Popular Resistance in New York City, 1765–1776

“As Serves our Interest best”: Political Economy and the Logic of Popular Resistance in New York City, 1765–1776 Michael D. Hattem (bio) During the imperial crisis of 1765 to 1776, New York acquired the reputation of a “Tory,” or loyalist, colony. This characterization arose from the colony’s apparent reticence toward independence and the continued control of the same pre-crisis elite leadership in the final years before independence. Yet, the inhabitants of the city of New York undertook actions during the Stamp Act crisis that were as “radical” as any in the other colonies. Indeed, Pauline Maier once wrote that the “worst apparent threat of anarchy” during the colonial Stamp Act resistance “occurred at New York.”1 Hence, historians of colonial New York have long been left to wonder: Why were a people so riotous in the fall of 1765 during the Stamp Act crisis unwilling to lend similar support to the radicals in 1774? How are we to understand this seemingly paradoxical shift in the behavior of colonists in New York City? When and how did New York go from a city of radical Stamp Act protestors to a city of moderate patriots and outright loyalists?2 This article argues that, in fact, colonial New Yorkers’ response to the imperial crisis remained consistent throughout. [End Page 40] Historians and contemporaries alike saw New York City as a loyalist stronghold that failed to heed “the united voice of America” and suffered from “a want of spirit in the cause of freedom.”3 Some historians, such as Roger J. Champagne, saw popular support for elite leadership throughout the imperial crisis as the product of a deferential political and social culture dominated by the elite.4 Alternatively, neo-progressive historians, including Edward Countryman and Gary B. Nash, viewed common New Yorkers in this period as radical proto-democrats engaged in a separate struggle with the colony’s elite over the “democratization” of “politics and society.”5 Neither interpretation consistently explains New Yorkers’ political behavior throughout the entirety of the imperial crisis. Surely, the people’s riotous and violent behavior during their rebellion against the Stamp Act in 1765 was anything but deferential.6 Yet, their support for the moderate, elite leadership, who were in no way committed to independence in 1775, hardly seems reconcilable with the picture of a radicalized populace seeking a “democratic revolution” ten years earlier.7 Both interpretations stem from a fundamentally ideological approach and, therefore, take for granted that New Yorkers were primarily concerned with political ideology. However, the seemingly varying popular response in New York City becomes not only reconcilable but also logical when one looks at the [End Page 41] economic circumstances surrounding the major turning points during the imperial crisis. Rather than a microhistorical focus on a single event, this article looks broadly at the entirety of the imperial crisis in New York City refracted through the lens of political economy–i.e., the intersections between politics and economy–and suggests a new perspective on the city’s popular resistance. The abstract ideas behind imperial policy and colonial resistance mattered far less to many colonists than the immediate effects such policies and resistance had on their daily lives and their immediate prospects for social mobility. Therefore, an ideological interpretation alone is simply too narrow an analytical category to fully understand the processes and events occurring in pre-revolutionary New York City. Historians have largely ignored how New York’s self-interested commercial culture influenced popular politics, especially during the imperial crisis. They seem to have understood the elite political culture of self-interest and popular political culture as distinct and isolated from each other. Indeed, the historiography of colonial New York in the last forty years has focused on the colony’s divisive features such as factionalism, class conflict, and diversity.8 These interpretations, however, have obscured underlying unifying factors, particularly the economy’s interconnectedness between classes, which meant that common New Yorkers’ own economic prosperity was directly tied to that of the city’s elite. Studies have shown that income distribution in the Middle Colonies was much more level than it is today. In 1774, the top 1% of households earned...

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman , eds. Contested Spaces of Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 444. Maps. Notes. Index. Acknowledgments. $49.95 cloth.

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman , eds. Contested Spaces of Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 444. Maps. Notes. Index. Acknowledgments. $49.95 cloth.

No More Middle Grounds?

No More Middle Grounds? Andrew Lipman (bio) Jeffrey Glover. Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. xii + 312 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, eds. Contested Spaces of Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. xii + 426 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $49.95. Stephen Warren. The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xii + 308 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Richard White is a historian, not a mad scientist. Yet the career of one of his most celebrated works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991), is rather like the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. The book’s arrival was an electric moment, thanks to its lightning bolt of a thesis. Its illuminating central metaphor of a “middle ground” charged the entire field of early American history with new energy. White’s work countered tired narratives of indigenous defeat with a stunning new portrait of shared cultural spaces that were neither entirely Native nor entirely French and that flourished on inland lakeshores from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. White’s admiring readers gave his term an awkwardly lumbering life of its own. The nuanced and place-specific thesis soon became an overused “watered down idea about the mechanics of compromise in all kinds of social and political situations.”1 Fifteen years after its release, even White mused about how far his creation had wandered from him. In the very field The Middle Ground helped create—North American borderlands—historians now try to keep the concept contained. They argue that the crudely rampant version of the term has damaged our understanding of the past. The concept simply did not apply to every place where invaders and indigenes accommodated each other’s cultures. Before the nineteenth century, that happened everywhere on [End Page 24] the Americas to some degree, but the balance of Native-versus-European accommodation see-sawed wildly depending on where one looked. In more recent scholarship, “middle grounds” are hard to find. Colonists were more likely to submit to indigenous rules in Kathleen DuVal’s take on the Arkansas Valley, Juliana Barr’s study of the southern plains, and Pekka Hamalainen’s overlapping work on Comancheria. Conversely, while Natives set a lot of the initial terms of engagement on the peripheries of British colonies, they would eventually find themselves in two discrete worlds rather than a confusingly shared one in places like James H. Merrell’s Pennsylvania woods or Alan Taylor’s Iroquoia. Some new work actively challenges the concept of a “middle ground” on its home turf. Heidi Bohaker, Brett Rushforth, and Robert Morrissey each argue that White’s thesis is an incomplete characterization of French-Algonquian relations near the Great Lakes.2 Yet few things speak as much to the longevity of a thesis than the fact that new books still feel the need to debate it, while others continue to echo it. Though White is never directly cited in Jeffrey Glover’s Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664, the book is evidence of how scholars from other disciplines are still embracing The Middle Ground’s most basic point: that borderlands encounters involved compromises and reconciliations. Glover, a literary critic, prods us to see early American treaties and treaty-making not just as a process of advancing colonial rule but as dense ritual and textual moments created by both foreign and indigenous authors. He correctly points out how in the first century of English colonization, treaties were haphazard affairs that centered as much on performances and exchanges as the scratch of pens on paper. With a close reading of the colonial texts of early Virginia and New England, Glover uncovers “a broader world of political communication,” where Native actors quickly learned that “it was not always necessary to read or write in order to influence transatlantic politics” (p. 6). Not only did Indians have a keen interest in European politics, but Glover argues...

Contested Spaces of Early America ed. by Juliana Barr, Edward Countryman (review)

Contested Spaces of Early America ed. by Juliana Barr, Edward Countryman (review)

Contested Spaces of Early America ed. by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (review)

Contested Spaces of Early America. Edited by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 444. Cloth, $49.95.)Reviewed by Carla GeronaJuliana Barr and Edward Countryman's edited volume, Contested Spaces of Early America, explores different ways of doing early American history, and more particularly, borderlands history. This field remained on the margins for many years, apart from Latin American and United States history, but as the volume's title suggests, borderlands historians are extending their influence beyond the Spanish southwest. Much credit for this historiographical shift goes to the late David J. Weber, to whom the volume is dedicated. This collection clearly illustrates Weber's ongoing influence, bringing together former colleagues, fellows, and students. More than that, the assemblage provides distinct (if fractured) picture of where the borderlands field is headed.As their central motif, editors Barr and Countryman argue that in early America people who had been total strangers met, mingled, and clashed, creating colonial societies unlike any that the world had seen to that time (2). To highlight this messy landscape, the volume's twelve essays range in time, place, and approach: from the earliest Iberian entries to later Anglo-American filibusters; from the Rio de la Plata to the Northern Plains; from environmental studies to art history. Despite this unusually wide scope, the essays hold together because each one, in its own original way, explores the spaces where indigenous American societies came into contact with European colonial ones in places where control was contested and few could claim monopoly on power.In their introductory essay, Barr and Countryman begin with the idea that a really good of the colonial situation of the early western hemisphere would show set of sometimes fluid, sometimes unbending fields of force, all of them dealing with the issue of space. But there can be no such map (2). For Europeans, cartography served as an imperialistic tool to erase Indian claims and delineate European titles. Such was the case irr Antonio Pereira's 1545 that featured Spanish, Portuguese, and French flags to proclaim America as a world of competing European nations already divvying up rights (4). Indigenous peoples had their own maps, many of which inscribed symbols on landscapes, but these no longer exist. At least initially, these maps had different purpose: Instead of separating territories, they connected groups. A Chickasaw who drew in 1723 used circles and lines to indicate boundaries in the European fashion but rather to show paths that connected Native and European peoples to one another in huge web (11). Barr and Countryman conclude that European mappers' depictions of nation-states and empires did not exist, and history should reflect this view.The second essay, Pekka Hamalainen's The Shapes of Power, also shows contested America, but seeks to make sense of the chaos-to, irr sense, create an ideal map. Claiming that today's scholarship produces so much new history that we do not quite know where to put it all, Hamalainen proceeds to contain early American stories around the theme of power (31). Using his gift for challenging presuppositions, Hamalainen shows that there is more to the concept of power than guns, germs, and steel. Kinship networks, cultural knowledge, and diplomatic capacities also empowered societies, and were readily available to Native Americans. While unipolar European societies competed with each other, exploited subjected Indians, and formed alliances with more distant Native Americans, the more prevalent unipolar Native American Confederacies became increasingly assertive, prosperous, and heterogeneous as they extended their influence. In multipolar places different peoples-European and Indian-tried to gain power, and intergroup relations became grounded in violence (60). …

Contested Spaces of Early America.Early American Studies Series. Edited by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman . (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. xi + 427 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $49.95, £32.50.)

<b><i>Contested Spaces of Early America.</i></b>Early American Studies Series. Edited by Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman . (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. xi + 427 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. $49.95, £32.50.)

Contested Spaces of Early America

Journal Article Contested Spaces of Early America Get access Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. xii, 426 pp. $49.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Pages 1252–1253, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav017 Published: 01 March 2015

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, editors. Contested Spaces of Early America

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, editors. Contested Spaces of Early America

EDWARD COUNTRYMAN. Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

This book appears in an African American history series aimed at non-specialists and dedicated to bridging popular and academic history. The meat of the book (pp. 31–124) examines black history from 1770 to 1831, emphasizing the black men and black women who resisted and criticized slavery. Documents (pp. 125–169), with the most recent, by President Barack Obama, dating from 2008, constitute examples. The thrust of Edward Countryman's argument is that while new ways of thinking shared by blacks and whites during the years of the American Revolution undermined slavery, the U.S. Constitution and the astonishing expansion of cotton cultivation in the early republic fortified the slave system. The revolution, understood as stretching to 1831, was both antislavery and proslavery, leaving a paradoxical legacy that would be faced in the Civil War. Two views of the book are necessary: one is of its likely use in college history courses and the other is of its goal, set by author and publisher, to serve as a union of popular and academic history.

Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World Edward Countryman (bio) Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World. Edited by Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 381. Cloth, $49.95.) When is a festschrift not a festschrift? The answer is when it refuses to call itself one. So beware, I will reveal the secret of Empire and Nation: In very thin disguise, this book is a thoroughly deserved festschrift for Johns Hopkins historian and long-time Doktorvater, Jack P. Greene. Edited by two of his students, Empire and Nation emerged from a conference to honor Greene and includes only a few contributions from scholars who did not work with him. The book rightly includes very recent students, as well as famous ones. Why Johns Hopkins Press (of all publishers) could not be convinced to publish a collection of essays celebrating a premier Johns Hopkins University historian is beyond me. Greene's seminar has produced wave upon wave of major historians (67, the last I heard). Any early Americanist is bound to be interested in a volume that brings together many of the best of them, writing around themes that both Greene and they have developed. As its title suggests, Empire and Nation takes an Atlantic perspective, which is very much in accord with Greene's own long trajectory. There are exceptions, especially among the six essays that make up Part II, "Society, Politics, and Culture in the New Nation," but Part I ("Reconstituting the Empire") and Part III ("The American Revolution and the Atlantic World") both span the ocean, one way or another. In Part I the Atlantic is the familiar sea that Britannia ruled. Two of the contributors, David Hendrickson and Don Higginbotham, are among the volume's three non-Greene students. Writing about "The First Union," Hendrickson challenges Richard B. Morris, Justice Joseph Story, and (implicitly) Abraham Lincoln. He attacks their nationalist notion that a sovereign, proto-unified American people emerged in 1776, making the argument that "the People" created both the states and the union, as opposed to the union being created by the separate states. Drawing upon a lifetime of studying the revolution as a military conflict, Higginbotham sidesteps Hendrickson's either/or formulation, linking the formation of the American national state to the needs of the Revolutionary War, rather than to an act of will at the moment of independence. In Hendrickson's formulation and in Higginbotham's (or for that matter in just about any treatment dealing with the creation of American state [End Page 668] power), the "Atlantic" dimension turns on the transfer of authority from the British crown. Coeditor Eliga Gould deals with Britain itself, developing Linda Colley's now-familiar argument that far from being solid and ancient, British authority and identity were fragile and new. Against that background, fearful of renewed war and imagining a Pax Britannica, ministers in London provoked a needless conflict about colonial rights and Parliamentary power that led ultimately to war. Surprisingly, Gould does not cite Theodore Draper's A Struggle for Power (New York, 1996), which develops the same theme. Richard Ryerson shows John Adams straddling the Atlantic conceptually, trying to work out the really transformative qualities of American republican thought while clinging to remnants of the idea of monarchy. Ellen Holmes Pearson's essay on republicanism and the reception of English Common Law seems to point toward a major book on legal thought and practice in the early Republic. I look forward to its appearance. Except for Maurice Bric's essay on Irish immigrants to Philadelphia, the essays in Part II abandon the Atlantic format for a strictly American point of view. Following Greene, Steven Sarson suggests that the Revolution did not bring large-scale transformation, at least in the tobacco-growing Chesapeake. Mary Schweitzer finds a paradox in the ratification in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, as its residents formed "the strongest Antifederalist coalition" (116) while Shenandoah farmers and planters became convinced Federalists. Melvin Yazawa, Marc Harris, and Robert M. Calhoon (the third non-Greene student contributor) discuss rhetoric, civil society, and religion in the early...

Clark, Heweitt, Rosenzweig, Brier, Brown, &amp; Foner, Eds., Who Built America? Working People And The Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture And Society, Vol. I; Lichtenstein, Strasser, Rosenzweig, Brier, Brown, Eds., Who Built America? Working People And T

Although not technically second editions, the volumes under review are based on the original Who Built America series sponsored by the American Social History Project and authored by Bruce Levine, Stephen Brier, David Brundage, Edward Countryman, Dorothy Fennell, and Marcus Rediker (volume one) and by Joshua Freeman, Nelson Lichtenstein, Stephen Brier, David Bensman, Susan Porter Benson, David Brundage, Bret Eynon, Bruce Levine, and Bryan Palmer (volume two), published in I 989. I have used volumes one and two of the most recent editions to teach both halves of the American history survey course offered at a small liberal arts college in the Midwestern United States. I offer here both my own and my students' experience with and reactions to the texts so that readers might decide whether to adopt them for either American history survey courses or perhaps for a working-class or labor history class.

Kevin Phillips. &lt;italic&gt;The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America&lt;/italic&gt;. New York: Basic-Books. 1999. Pp. xxviii, 707. $32.50

Kevin Phillips. The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. New York: Basic-Books. 1999. Pp. xxviii, 707. $32.50 Phillips Kevin. The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. New York: Basic-Books. 1999. Pp. xxviii, 707. $32.50. Edward Countryman Edward Countryman Southern Methodist University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 104, Issue 5, December 1999, Pages 1636–1637, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/104.5.1636 Published: 01 December 1999

Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western

Vanishing Americans - racial and ethnic issues in the interpretation and context of post-war pro-Indian westerns, Steve Neale photographing the Indian, Edward Buscombe the professional western - south of the border, Noel Carroll wider horizons, Doug Fairbanks and nostalgic primitivism, Gaylyn Studlar Our country whose country? the Americanization project of early westerns, Eichard Abel Dixie cowboys and blue yodels - the strange history of the singing cowboy, Peter Standield sixty million viewers can't be wrong - the rise and fall of the television western, William Boddy finding a new heimat in the Wild West - Karl May and the German western of the 1960s, Tassilo Schneider John Ford and Monument Valley, Jean-Louis Leutrat and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues western motifs in magazine advertising, Colin McArthur the fantasy of authenticity in western costume, Jane Marie Gaines and Charlotte Cornelia Herzog the new western American historiography and the emergence of the new American westerns, Rik Worland and Edward Countryman the twelve Custers or, video history, Roberta Pearson.

Book Reviews

Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order; 1730–1840. Steven C. Bullock The Kingfish and the Constitution: Huey Long, the First Amendment, and the Emergence of Modern Press Freedom in America. Richard C. Cortner Americans: A Collision of Histories. Edward Countryman The Jiangyin Mission Station: An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1951. Lawrence D. Kessler Gender, Culture, and Christianity: American Protestant Mission Schools in China, 1880–1930. Gael Graham O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian Founding Mothers &amp; Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. Mary Beth Norton From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema. Michael Paris Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices. Alvina E. Quintana Planning the Twentieth‐Century American City. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. Jonathan D. Spence Religion and Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations. Daniel A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum, eds Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Margaret R. Miles Turning Points in Social Security: From “Cruel Hoax” to “Sacred Entitlement.” Sheryl Tynes The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Michael F. Brown The Warrior Generals: Combat Leaders in the Civil War. Thomas B. Buell We Were Each Other's Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War. Lewis Carlson Misery and Company: Sympathy in Everyday Life. Candace Clark The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict. Robert Ellwood We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eye Witness Accounts. Timothy S. Good Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s. Robert H. Haddow Forgotten Tragedy: The Sinking of HMT Rohna. Carlton Jackson Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home. Ronald C. Tobey Health Against Wealth: HMOs and the Breakdown of Medical Trust. George Anders Love, Lucy. Lucille Ball The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U. S. Cinema. Daniel Bernardi, ed Prime‐Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970. Bonnie J. Dow Lost Talent: Women in the Sciences. Sandra L. Hanson Tausend Welten: Die Aufloesung der Gesellschaft imdigitalen Zeitalter (A Thousand Worlds: The Dissolution of Society in the Digital Age). Uwe Jean Heuser The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Michael Kammen Piety and Poverty: Working‐Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870–1914. Hugh McLeod G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II. Barbara Brooks Tomblin I Was Wrong. Jim Bakker (with Ken Abraham) Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. Stephen E. Ambrose

Yorktown Victory Center

Yorktown Victory Center, P.O. Box 1976, Yorktown, VA 23690. Permanent and temporary exhibitions, opened April 11, 1995; M-Su 9-5; adults $6.75, 6-12 year olds $3.25, children under 6 free. 27,000 sq. ft. S. Edward Ayres, Lucinda P. Cockrell, Nancy Perry, Brent W. Tharpe, interpretive team; Ralph Appelbaum Associates, Inc., design firm; John D. Broadwater, Colin G. Calloway, Barbara G. Carson, Cary Carson, Edward Countryman, Emory G. Evans, Edwin S. Gaustad, Jack P. Greene, Robert A. Gross, Philip D. Morgan, William Morris, Mary Beth Norton, John E. Selby, John W. Shy, Thaddeus W. Tate, Dell Upton, Alfred F. Young, consultants.

Revolution, Region, and Culture in Multicultural History

JT never really surprises me when politicians blend iconography of liberty bells and tea parties so seamlessly with that of cowboys and overlanders. Key American cultural myths, Frontier and fit neatly together as intertwined identity narratives in which white males create order and democracy out of disorder and oppression. In realm of historiography, boundaries between and American West have had fewer occasions on which to overlap. Recently, however, these seemingly disparate bodies of scholarship have started to move toward one another, and Edward Countryman's Indians, Colonial Order, and Social Significance of American Revolution contributes to that convergence in interesting and provocative ways. New Western Historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White have recognized that study of American West cannot linger in celebratory glow of Frederick Jackson Turner's nineteenth-century thesis, so intimately connected to mythic frontier valorized in popular culture.1 Rather, field must somehow engage and incorporate social, cultural, and theoretical insights of recent scholarship. Accordingly, many historians have undertaken a fundamental rethinking of the West, one that includes a heightened awareness of multicultural, multisocial nature of earlier Americas, a focus on land and environmental change, a desire to integrate gender and sexuality as primary categories of analysis, and a concern with constitution and exercise of power. Countryman finds himself on a similar quest, considering broad, Pulitzer-affirmed wake of Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of American and recoiling from Wood's focus on white, male northeasterners much as Limerick recoils from Turner.2 Despite three decades of innovative scholarship, Countryman argues, we need a deeper rethinking of paradigms used to conceptualize American Revolution. This rethinking should include meaningful presence of both native people and transplanted Africans, and it should situate in broader geographical, social, and political contexts. What is at stake here is not only sound bite tropes

Through a Glass Darkly: Countryman's Radical American Revolution

I N the last years of Edward Countryman's bad old days of American Revolutionary historiography-sometime in the early i960s-I fell in love with the Alain Resnais movie Last Year at Marienbad. Or perhaps I just fell in love with the way Delphine Seyrig's hair fell across her forehead and the way the narrator's voice intoned les tongues couloirs. I reveled in the riveting images, the seductive voices, and the irresistible intimations of meaning, though I didn't understand a thing. I couldn't piece together a story. I couldn't reassemble the disordered chronology. I had to go back to see it again before I thought I could make it make sense in any conventional way. I read Countryman's paper in much the way I saw Marienbad. I am enthralled by its tantalizing sonorities, its promises of interpretive power, its marvelous mystifications. And even on going back to read it again, I cannot make it make sense in any conventional way. It still seems to me portentous and opaque, full of striking effects and of ideas that finally fail to come together. It still leaves me with the floating sensation of delicious disorientation that Marienbad did. I do not say this disparagingly. I like that floating feeling. I like portentous intimations and suggestive effects, though I grant that these may be personal, even perverse, tastes. Let me lay out the largest outlines of Countryman's enterprise as I see them. And let me begin by comparing it with the work of the historian whom Countryman invokes more often than any other, Gordon S. Wood. Despite their ideological differences, Countryman shares some elemental premises with Wood. He too homogenizes America in the voice of its eminent men, and he too vindicates a transforming radicalism in the American Revolution. But ultimately, Countryman's informing ambition and his praxis alike are far from Wood's. Where Wood seeks a synthesis all his own, oblique if not obtuse to recent research, Countryman aims to find his essential problematic precisely in the preeminent scholarly accomplishments of the last generation. Where Wood proceeds in cavalier unconcern for the truly transformative achievements of recent historians of race and gender, Countryman insists that a credible and coherent account of the Revolutionary era will ultimately have to encompass them consequentially. Where Wood espouses an unabashed American exceptionalism, Countryman essays an ingenious appropriation of some new understandings of early modern Europe and an intriguing application of them to colonial and postcolonial America.

Ideology and the Origins of Liberal America

T THE current fashions of deconstruction and reception theory remind us that books or texts do not belong to their authors but to their readers. (Of course, we know from experience that they actually belong to the publishers.) It is true that readers do with books what they will and that no author can foresee how a book will be interpreted. I have been pleased, amused, and surprised by these different reactions to my book. I have to like Edward Countryman's best, for he has said what no one else has ever thought of saying: "The book could not have been one word shorter."1 Naturally, by this one remark Countryman has destroyed whatever credibility he had in the profession. We tend to read books in different ways because we have different presuppositions about what we will find in them. As John Murrin shrewdly notes, I have lots of ammunition for a "conflict" interpretation of the Constitution. But I'll never be able to convince the "Wisconsin school" of that. Merrill Jensen reviewed the book and in his blunt, honest way was puzzled by "some remarkable generalizations" in it with which he found "no difficulty in agreeing. "2 He had expected something other than what it was, and to satisfy his perplexity he later confronted me directly. "Just tell me," he asked, "are you with me or against me?" Such is the nature sometimes of our historiographical debates. Of course, I assured him that I was with him all the way, but I am sure that he never believed me. It would be clumsy and difficult to deal one by one with all the numerous points raised by these commentators. Perhaps many of these points can be gathered together and subsumed under two major issues: (i) the relation between ideology and behavior, and (2) the relation between what have been called "classical republicanism" and "liberalism." (i) The relation between ideology and behavior. Many of these essayists assume-some more flagrantly than others-that there is a sharp separation between beliefs and behavior, between ideas and actions, between culture and society. Such a presumed separation is perfectly comprehensible, for the division between mind and body, reason and the passions,

Witnesses at the Creation: Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and the Constitution

Journal Article Witnesses at the Creation: Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and the Constitution. By Richard B. Morris. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. viii + 279 pp. $16.95.) and Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution. By Forrest McDonald. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985. xiii + 359 pp. $25.00.) Get access Edward Countryman Edward Countryman University of Warwick Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 2, September 1986, Pages 455–456, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908248 Published: 01 September 1986