Gordon Wood Research Articles

Should the U.S. adapt to the world? The first debate on american exceptionalism and its impact on the founding of the United States

This paper aims at putting into perspective the recent, post 9/11 debate on the United States’ alleged exceptionalism and its impact on the definition of American foreign policy. It reminds the readers that the United States was born as a result of a similar debate, at a time when a crucial choice for its future was to be made. Indeed, the Founding Fathers discarded the revolutionary idea that America was altogether different from other (European) nations and, as such, could succeed in saving republicanism and concentrate on domestic affairs. As Gordon Wood and Harvey Mansfield have shown, the 1787 version of republicanism stood as a departure from its earlier version, and such a change was necessary to the creation of a full-fledged federation, therefore paving the way to the current powerful Federal Republic. The early failure of the exceptionalist creed did not cause its disappearance, as the contemporary form of exceptionalism demonstrates, but created conditions that made an enduring and powerful influence very difficult.

The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (review)

The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. By Michael William Pfau. (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Pp. 248. Cloth, $59.95.)Reviewed by Frederick J. BlueThe controversy over the Slave Power Conspiracy divided antebellum Americans and has continued to divide historians who write about the ultimate cause of the Civil War. In this volume, a scholar of rhetoric adds his input to the ongoing controversy. The result is a study that will interest those who study the prewar years, but may receive greater attention from those in the field of rhetorical studies.It is Michael Pfau's contention that the claim of a Slave Power Conspiracy passed out of the hands of those on the fringe of sectional division to those in the mainstream during the 1840s and 1850s, in large part due to the efforts of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. The proponents of conspiracy argued that southern slaveholders and politicians conspired with northern Democrats and Whigs to control national politics and permit the expansion of slavery and the increase of their political and economic power in the process. In so doing, the conspirators threatened the basic principles of the Republic established by the Revolutionary founding fathers. Among the earliest proponents of such a claim were the Garrisonians, who argued from a fringe position in society and who were often dismissed as irrational fanatics. Richard Hofstadter and David Brion Davis described their ap- proach as the paranoid style, which used arguments that, if not false, were at least questionable.While some conspiracy theories remained the view only of extremists, others, argue Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, moved from the fringe to the mainstream in America and, as such, entered the two-party system. Such was the direction of the Slave Power Conspiracy. Looking at the opposite poles of fringe and center, Pfau contends that the process of winning minds to the theory was a rhetorical one. Critics suggest that William Lloyd Garrison used lurid and exaggerated imagery to describe a vast and sinister effort that began with a proslavery Constitution. His was a holy war, says Pfau, which not only disdained politics but degenerated into Garrison's withdrawal and the violence of John Brown.While this was taking place, political antislavery activists moved the debate first into third-party politics and then into the two-party system. Some might question Pfau's choice of the three leading Republicans, especially when he suggests that the three were leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860; Sumner did not seek the office, nor did he receive serious consideration.Yet the speeches Pfau chooses to analyze are central in the Slave Power Conspiracy evolution. Beginning with Chase, Pfau shows how the Ohioan began to move away from the periphery of Liberty party politics with his 1845 Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention in Cincinnati, distancing the party from its more reform-minded religious element in an effort to form a coalition with northern antislavery Democrats. It was a secular approach stressing civic and republican ideology, in which Chase showed how southern aristocrats had strayed from their Jeffersonian roots. By 1854, when Chase joined with five other Free Soilers in authoring the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, the issue had become the Kansas Nebraska Act, the crowning proof of Slave Power Conspiracy. …

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America by Lee Ward

161 LEE WARD. The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 459. $90. There are two competing stories about the ideological meaning of England ’s Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath . According to one, the ‘‘Liberal Consensus,’’ the key figure was Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government, written during the crisis although not published until many years later, defended the propositions that all people bear natural rights, that political authority comes from the consent of the governed , and that subjects have a right to revolt against their sovereign when the latter fails to uphold the terms of the social contract. On this view, the Whig side in the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in limited government and individual liberty; and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of tolerance, commerce, secularism, and the rise of ‘‘possessive individualism.’’ After Locke’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. In the alternative story, called the ‘‘Republican Synthesis,’’ the key thinker of the Exclusion Crisis was James Harrington, along with the other civic humanists of the middle- and lateseventeenth century, who defended the importance of participatory government, the separation of powers, a written constitution , and the cultivation of civic virtue over bare individual liberty. On this view, the Whig side of the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in civic virtue as expressed in collective self-rule by the gentry, and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of democracy, egalitarianism , nationalism, and the rise of ‘‘republicanism.’’ Needless to say, after Harrington’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. These two stories have dominated the study of Anglo-American politics for nearly a century. The ‘‘liberal’’ reading came on the scene in the 1920’s as a needed corrective to a narrowly economic interpretation of Anglo-American political history, but as soon as it had established its claim that ideas are a fundamental force in political history, the fight was on regarding which ideas dominated during this tumultuous period . The champions of the two camps constitute a who’s who of modern intellectual history, with the likes of Carl Becker, Louis Hartz, and Richard Hofstadter on the ‘‘liberal’’ side and Caroline Robbins, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock on the ‘‘republican.’’ Today, these interpretations have reached a kind of stalemate. Most historians would agree that people’s ideas and values play an essential role in the movement of political history, and also that both liberal and republican ideologies were at work in this period on both sides of the north Atlantic. In his new book, Mr. Ward, wishing to end the stalemate, argues that that liberalism and republicanism were two strands of a single, complex Whig political philosophy that used every means at its disposal to oppose divine right absolutism. The point of his study is: ‘‘Through detailed analysis of the major Whig Exclusion era tracts by James Tyrrell, Al- 162 gernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse.’’ For the most part, it succeeds wonderfully. Mr. Ward’s simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy—they both can be true. The intellectual forces that shaped the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution drew strength from the principles of natural liberty and individual rights as well as from the principles of civic virtue and political participation . The Whig political discourse of the period emphasized the value of liberty as well as the importance of virtue, which means that it is overly simplistic and schematic to reduce the whole conversation to a single paradigm. Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the...

Liberty and American experience in the eighteenth century

Written by some of today's premiere scholars of American history, Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century examines some of the central themes and ideologies central to the formation of the United States including: David Womersley's introduction includes a discussion of Edmund Burke's theories on property rights and government, setting the foundation for the various themes of liberty found in this volume. In 'Of Liberty and the Colonies: A Case Study of Constitutional Conflict in the Mid-Eighteenth Century British American Empire', Jack Greene examines other forms of government and uses those examples to argue that the founding was not the conservative process that many have previously supported. Robert Ferguson explores the roles of law and religion in the formation of a free and liberal society in 'The Dialectic of Liberty: Law and Religion in Revolutionary America'. In 'Religious Conscience and Original Sin: An Exploration of America's Protestant Foundations', Barry Shain supports Ferguson's contention that religion had a profound impact on the outlook of the colonists. John Danford, in 'Riches Valuable at All Times and to All Men: Hume and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Commerce and Liberty', examines the spiritual context of the Founders in regard to the Enlightenment, arguing that the Founders preferred known ways of governance and economics to untried and untested theory. 'Moral Sense Theory and the Appeal to Natural Rights in the American Founding' by R G Frey suggests that there are conflicting viewpoints between moral sense theory and the idea of natural rights in the founding period. David Wootton presents an opposing view of the Founders in 'Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: Checks and Balances and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism'. He suggests that the ideas formed in the Enlightenment were seized upon by the Founders and that the result was a much more progressive system than could have been predicted. 'In Scottish Thought and the American Revolution: Adam Ferguson's Response to Richard Price', Ronald Hamowy discusses the consequences of the colonial conflict and pays tribute to the intellectual force of American affairs. Lance Banning examines the divisions in thought among the revolutionaries regarding the nature of liberty and the manner in which liberty was to be preserved in 'Federalism, Constitutionalism, and Republican Liberty: The First Constructions of the Constitution'. In 'Is There a James Madison Problem?', Gordon Wood presents the disparity in Madison's political thought from the 1780s to the 1790s. 'Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century' provides an examination of various facets of the Founders' lives and thoughts, as well as their times, to help readers understand the events that went into their country's creation.

Marketing Middle-Class Morality

Few topics have gripped historians of early America as powerfully as the post-Revolutionary demise of patriarchal authority. From Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority (1982) to Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) to Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution (2000), scores of studies have shown how colonial America's rigidly structured social relationships softened under democratic values that challenged older notions of heredity, status, and manhood. The upshot of this decline in starchy paternalism was a widespread bourgeois embrace of affection and benevolence-rather than blunt coercion-as the proper approach to strengthening the strained ligaments of private and public power. The solidification of these kinder, gentler, more feminized bonds, moreover, ultimately helped create one of America's most influential social constructs: the middle class.

The Devil Designs a Career: Aaron Burr and the Shaping of Enterprise

The Devil Designs a Career:Aaron Burr and the Shaping of Enterprise Joseph Fichtelberg (bio) Of all the restless young men roaming the American West after the Revolution, John Shaw has perhaps the most to teach us about the meaning of enterprise. Born the son of a Yorkshire weaver in 1761, Shaw was reared to the trade, but soon he saw greater opportunity in the military and found himself sent to suppress the American rebellion. This adventurer, who would record his experiences in the heavily subscribed A Narrative of the Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw (1807), was captured in North Carolina, suffered severely in American prisons, and finally deserted. Before the war's end he reenlisted—in the Continental army—serving as a recruiting officer until he received his discharge. Thereafter, he became a farm laborer, a hod-carrier, a "gentleman beggar" (103), an indentured servant, a well-digger, a hostler, a farmer, and the operator and owner of several quarries worth over $4,000. He had fashioned an American career. But Shaw's spirited self-fashioning betrays a current of uncertainty that severely qualifies his achievement. For his dramatic break with patriarchs, both in leaving the fatherland and in deserting its service, unleashes an apparently uncontrollable social energy reflected in his almost continual travel and his unending "frolics." No sooner does he acquire money than he assembles his cronies and riots until the last shilling is gone. Indeed, when Shaw came to contemplate his "career," it was inevitably to suggest its frightening and irrational nature. To embark on a career was to engage in a blind, purposeless rejection of all restraint, to be battledored by vicious instinct. In Shaw's Narrative, the term "career" is invariably associated with such moments of fearful liberation. "We then proceeded on in search of adventures," he writes of a Pennsylvania experience, "until our mad career was terminated by my falling into a well twenty feet deep" (88). Descent is an apt metaphor for such indiscretion. After a bender in Lexington, he is "stopped in [his] career" by an attack of such severity that he lay "suspended [End Page 495] between life and death" (141). And toward the end of his text, where he is most pious, he continually refers to that "unregenerated career" (157) of folly and "vicissitudes" (156) that would have condemned him to torments were it not for a late conversion. The descent into hell is checked only when a patriarch more powerful than his abandoned father steps in to save him, and he finds new life in "the Lord Jesus Christ" (158). Many recent accounts of the post-Revolutionary era assume that the pursuit of property was as inevitable as the cadence of John Locke's resonant phrase. The restraints on self-interest imposed by an earlier generation of Revolutionary fathers, it is argued, were simply swept away in an irresistible tide of land hunger and diminished prospects at home, conditions that stimulated an authentic American liberalism. The position has been most forcefully pursued in recent work by Joyce Appleby and Gordon Wood. Maintaining that "a culture of capitalism" (Inheriting 5) was greatly stimulated by the united labors of post-Revolutionary entrepreneurs, Apple by surveys the activities of restless young risk-takers. For these individuals it was enough to see an opportunity in order to seize it, and to seize opportunity to confirm its self-fashioning power. Through a network of printed texts and innumerable private exchanges, these people helped to forge an "imagined . . . enterprise," that "bedrock" fusion of personal and national promise that remains among the culture's central traits (56). Wood is even more emphatic, claiming that the rising generation, freed from both monarchical curbs and republican austerity, became "totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money" (Radicalism 325). The "new political order" itself had produced an inescapable national verdict: "that everything had changed" (311, 306). Self-created and self-creating, the most fortunate Americans stepped boldly into this new order and claimed it as their inalienable patrimony.1 But the Jeffersonian era was characterized by far more ambivalence than this liberal reading would suggest, an ambivalence nowhere more evident than in the texts surrounding Aaron...

The Neutrality Principle: The Hidden Yet Powerful Legal Axiom at Work in Brown versus Board of Education

The authors wish to acknowledge Professors Gordon Wood, Larry Kramer and other participants in the 2003 Supreme Court Historical Society Summer Seminar for their comments and critique of this work. Further, Lawrence Baum, David Bernstein, Howard Gillman and Kermit Hall reviewed versions of this project and likewise made valuable comments.

Resurrecting Dead White Males

Joseph J. Ellis. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xiv + 320 pp. Notes and index. $26.95 (cloth); $15.00 (paper). In the last several decades, two countervailing tendencies have become manifest in historical scholarship. The first, perhaps best described by Jill Lepore and Richard D. Brown as microhistory, concentrates on increasingly narrow topics.1 Practitioners of this approach spurn studies of elite white males in favor of more marginalized subjects—women, slaves, poor working-class individuals and groups (both female and male), Native Americans, and a wide range of obscure figures of various ethnic backgrounds and occupations. Even when they focus on particular individuals, these historians have "nonbiographical goals in mind . . . they are keen to evoke a period, a mentalite, a problem: the origins of religious beliefs, the power of popular culture, the clash of Western and non-Western people." In their minds, "the life story . . . is merely the means to an end—and that end is always explaining the culture."2 Illustrious examples of this approach include Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990), Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (1998), and Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (2003). While a great many historians, concentrating their efforts on microhistory or the closely related fields of social and cultural history, have published stunningly insightful books dealing with the early republic in recent years, their work pales in comparison to the popularity of authors providing studies of the Founding Fathers. These "dead white males," shunned by microhistorians have undergone a remarkable resurrection. During the last few years the reading public has made David McCullough's John Adams (2001) a runaway bestseller. In this same period Richard Brookhiser's Alexander Hamilton, American (1999), Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (2004), Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996) have all enjoyed widespread popular [End Page 162] success. Others garnering considerable public attention include Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), and Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (1993), and Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation (2000). In addition, a growing number of studies devoted to George Washington have begun to appear. These include Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996), James MacGregor Burns, George Washington (2004), David H. Fischer, Washington's Crossing (2004), and Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003). Now Joseph Ellis weighs in with his own study of Washington—"the deadest, whitest male in American history" (p. xi). Fully aware of the prodigious accomplishments of Douglas Southall Freeman's seven-volume George Washington: A Biography (1948–1957) and James Thomas Flexner's four-volume George Washington (1965–1972), Ellis claims that "we do not need another epic painting, but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character" (p. xiii). This is what he has written. His acknowledged model is Marcus Cunliffe's George Washington, Man and Monument (1958). There is, however, a much more recent work that approaches Benjamin Franklin in much the same way that Ellis treats George Washington. Edmund Morgan's Benjamin Franklin (2002) is a wonderfully tight character study of Franklin quite dissimilar to Walter Isaacson's larger tome. While certainly cognizant of the wisdom of Franklin—as well as the varied talents of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and James Madison—Ellis maintains that even within such a pantheon of greats, Washington remained "primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all" (p. xiv). In Ellis's mind the explanation for this ascendancy "lies buried within the folds of the most ambitious, determined, and potent personality of an age not lacking for worthy rivals" (p. xiv...

The Elusive Benjamin Franklin

Will we ever know the real Benjamin Franklin? Despite the spate of excellent books about Franklin that have appeared in the last decade or so, we seem no closer than ever to plumbing the depths of this elusive and always fascinating founding father. Historians have characterized him as a man of his time and our own, as a quintessential American and as a citizen of the world, as patriotic and self-serving, as democratic and elitist. He was, as everyone is quick to point out, a chameleon who played his personal cards close to his chest, revealing some parts of himself, consciously concealing others, often trimming his sails to catch the latest breeze. This most popular founder, who seems so accessible on the surface, is perhaps the most consistently misunderstood. Both Gordon Wood and David Waldstreicher have given us new and intriguing ways of looking at this complicated man. Above all, both challenge us to view Franklin, not from the perspective of the man he became in subsequent generations, but in terms of what he did and what he believed in his own time.

Faith and the Founding: The Influence of Religion on the Politics of James Madison

A 22-year-old James Madison, on a jaunt through his native Vir ginia, visited a jail that held half a dozen Baptist preachers, arrested simply for publishing their religious views. It was a common scene in the Virginia of Madison's youth. State officials, under the sway of the established Anglican Church, tolerated the violent persecution of relig ious dissenters. Baptists were being driven out of one county jailed in another. The bookish Madison bristled with indignation. That dia bolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages among some, he wrote his college friend William Bradford, and to their infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business. He closed the letter with a lament: So I leave you to pity me pray for Liberty of Conscience to revive among us.1 Though well known to Madison biographers, the above tale gets little attention from students of the American Founding. As a political theorist, architect of the U.S. Constitution, America's fourth presi dent, Madison has earned intense scrutiny. Nevertheless, numerous scholars have overlooked the importance of faith to his political philos ophy. In his award-winning The Creation of the American Republic, Gordon Wood devotes generous space to Madison's views of persons property, factions federalism. Yet hardly a word on religion. Jack Rakove's James Madison allows virtually no place for religious be

The American Revolution in the Atlantic World

It is a sign of the Atlantic World paradigm's maturation that Stephen Conway and Andrew O'Shaughnessy's books-the first about Great Britain and the second about the West Indies-are being reviewed in a journal devoted, in nomenclature at least, to American history. And it is also a sign of the state of American historiography that one would be hard pressed to find a book about the revolution on the mainland to review alongside them. Indeed, these two books rest at the intersection of two historiographical traditions, one that has been on the wane for the past decade and one that has been on the ascendancy. As commentaries on the causes and/or consequences of the American Revolution, these texts enter into a field of debate that has laid largely fallow since the 1992 publication of Gordon Wood's Pulitzer-Prize winning Radicalism of the American Revolution.' As interpreters of the revolution's Atlantic dimensions, however, Conway and O'Shaughnessy join a large and growing number of scholars interested in telling stories that extend beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. It remains to be seen whether these early forays into the Atlantic history of the American Revolution can raise enough new questions to draw the attention of more American historians back to the moment of imperial separation and national beginning. Let's imagine a Rip van American Historian who fell asleep in 1990 and woke up yesterday. Probably the first thing he or she would notice is that the study of American history has gone global. To catch up on the latest developments, Rip might go to the OAH's website (that is, once he or she figured out what a world-wide website was and how one used it) where he or she would undoubtedly stumble upon the La Pietra report on internationalizing the

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. By Gillian Brown. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 237. $49.95.) Gillian Brown's brilliant extended essay on the complexities of Locke's doctrine of informed consent and its formative influence on the character and literature of early America rekindles the debate over the intellectual roots of American thought. Locke's prominent influence on the Founders, once a commonplace in American political thought, came under assault with Gordon Wood's emphasis on a more communitarian ideology in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787(1969). Bolstered by J.G.A. Pocock's magisterial work, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), a rash of studies located the American experience more in civic republicanism than in Lockean liberalism. Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (1982), however, reasserted Locke's formative influence over late eighteenth-century thought through his sensationalist model of the human mind. He argued that Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) revolutionized the way parents and educators understood the relationships between familial relations, education, and the shaping of moral character. In turn, Locke's influence lay directly behind the developing British colonial rhetoric about proper patriarchy versus tyranny and about educating a citizenry for effective self-government. Gillian Brown, a professor of English at the University of Utah, engages the debate in much the same theoretical way as Fliegelman, and with equal brilliance. She places Locke's theories of learning, as well as his conviction of the potentiality and vulnerability of the child, squarely in the midst of revolutionary rhetoric and elaborates on how it served to provide political safeguards sought by critics of republican values. Reconfiguring the historiographical debate between Lockean liberalism and civic republicanism, Brown suggests numerous ways in which Locke's liberal vision of informed consent enforces and sustains (rather than competes with) an emerging republican synthesis. Her rereading of Locke clarifies . . . the citizen's continuous labor of crediting and discrediting ideas (8). She uses the tools of literary criticism to elucidate the ideology and reception of the literature that shaped the cultural face of the new nation: The New England Primer, children's fables, and novels. So effortlessly and articulately does Brown assert Locke's omniscient presence in the literature that she sets a high standard for the interdisciplinary work of cultural studies. The Consent of the Governed is composed of two complementary but separate arguments. The first half of the book explores the Lockean legacy as found in a variety of literatures for children, particularly The New England Primer and oft-told fables like Tom Thumb. Here she argues that Locke's principle of informed consent determined the shape and character of the didactic literature that made up the reading diet of colonial children. In addition, she effectively shows how children were expected to process and internalize the messages of this literature on their way to becoming good citizens of the new republic. The second part of the book uses early American novels to explore the difficulties and contradictions inherent in a theory of consensual politics: that is, how to deal with the possibilities of poor or destructive choices. Brown argues that John Locke's epistemology-that children's minds selected and ordered information received rather than being born knowing inherent truths-permeated the creation of most eighteenth-century literature for children. As the future citizens who would secure the success of the republican experiment, children had to be inculcated with civic virtues and be able to choose rightly from competing ideas. …

From a Revolutionary History to a History of Revolution: David Ramsay and the American Revolution

From 1785 1815 David Ramsay, a Maryland-born, Princeton-educated, Philadelphia-trained physician living in South Carolina, was one of the most prolific chroniclers of the American Revolution. He wrote three histories of the American struggle for independence and, at the time of his death, had almost completed a fourth. The South Carolinian's ambition in writing was craft a new identity for the people of the United States: one that was rooted in a common past that could pave the way for a republican future. The evolution of Ramsay's histories provides a valuable insight into the changing relationship between the Revolution and the nation it created. Although his goal did not change from the first the fourth histories, the specifics of his account and the place he accorded the new nation's struggle for independence in it certainly did. In his early histories Ramsay portrayed the Revolution as a catalyst for a larger process of social, political, and moral improvement that would create a new nation, but by his last he saw it as a vindication of a pre-existing set of values and beliefs that defined what it meant be an American.1 The evolution of Ramsay's interpretation of reflected a larger process of social and political change in the years following independence in which many in the new nation sought contain the radical impulses of the American Revolution. If the Revolution began at the moment in which politicized Americans took the streets in defense of their rights and liberties, that tradition was considered problematic from the start, and conservative critics steadily stepped up their efforts reign it in following independence. The Continental Congress slowly turned its back on crowds of women seeking control the price of food in the name of sound republican principles. The Whiskey Rebellion convinced ardent Federalists and Jeffersonians alike of the dangers of too much popular agitation in the name of liberty. Even the triumph of Thomas Jefferson over John Adams in the election of 1800 did not reverse this trend. As Alan Taylor has pointed out, the Jeffersonians championed an active citizenry involved in the political life of the nation, but they sought confine those impulses within the electoral process and direct popular political energy supporting existing political and economic institutions. Although Americans may not have abandoned the promise of a new, more democratic political order that many had identified with the Revolution, by the early nineteenth century they had made every effort regularize politics in a way that preserved rather than challenged the status quo.2 The evolution of history-writing in the early republic offers a vital starting point for understanding the changing attitudes that Americans had toward their revolution and its implications for present and future generations. Eighteenth-century Americans believed that provided a valuable guide that could, if studied closely, offer effective solutions the nation's myriad problems. As one writer in the Universal Asylum observed, history ought, in a peculiar manner, be the study of every one, who would attain a liberal education as it offered readers two sorts of examples, the one be imitated, and the other be avoided. The problem of creating a nation in the wake of the Revolution made even more important. As Gordon Wood has noted, the economic, social, and political turmoil of the years following independence had convinced the people of the United States that to be an American could not be a matter of blood; it had be a matter of common belief and behavior. And the source of that common belief and behavior was the American Revolution: it was the Revolution, and only the Revolution, that made them one people. In this context, how Americans understood the of the colonies, the struggle for independence, and the subsequent efforts establish a viable republican government took on tremendous significance. …

The Shaping of America: U.S. History to 1877

The design of a survey course in United States history to 1877 always faces formidable challenges of thematic organization and content selection. A course delivered through film and limited to thirteen hours confronts a particularly difficult task. This ambitious video course successfully presents an accessible and cohesive historical narrative about the regions of North America that would be encompassed within the United States. Designed for distance learning, the course provides a sophisticated overview of American history and is well suited for the many students who will take no further courses in the subject. It not only offers a richly textured script, it demonstrates the kind of questions and analytical skills that historians are uniquely qualified to present to a broad student audience. Each of the twenty-six segments explores a topic in American history through a combination of narration, commentary by scholars, and readings from primary sources. The actors who read the historical documents are shown in profile and through overlapping images, effectively keeping the emphasis on the wellchosen texts. The commentaries by scholars, a large group including Joyce Appleby, Eric Foner, Linda Kerber, James McPherson, and Gordon Wood, make a substantive contribution to the narrative rather than interrupt the story. The three formats are coordinated to create a tightly organized and densely informative script.

On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History

This is not a book about Abraham Lincoln, but a collection of historiographical essays. Lincoln is, however, frequently quoted as an authoritative interpreter of the nature of American society. Those who are familiar with the previous writings of John Patrick Diggins will not be surprised to learn that the essays present a polemical defense of liberal pluralism as a paradigm for understanding the history of the United States. At the core of the author's presentation is an appreciative reconsideration of Louis Hartz, scattered across several chapters. Diggins emphasizes that Hartz recognized the limitations of the liberal tradition in America that he so brilliantly analyzed. Hartz regarded America as exceptional, a middleclass fragment of European society, constricted by a Lockean straitjacket and tragically unable to understand the nonbourgeois rest of the world. By contrast, Diggins himself repeatedly extols the blessings of liberalism. These essays range widely and offer engaging assessments of many historians, past and present. The brief critiques of Garry Wills, Gordon Wood, and Charles Sellers are telling. Of course, the author has no good word to say for multiculturalism, poststructuralism, or Marxism. But some of his verdicts are less predictable: Diggins endorses Jonathan Clark's nonliberal view of the American Revolution and denounces the famous celebrant of American democracy, George Bancroft. Many of Diggins's judgments are sound, and often his strictures on his fellow professionals are deserved. It is true that historians looking for exceptions to America's Lockean rule have overstated their cases, notably in the construction of “republicanism” as a supposed ideological alternative to liberalism, when in fact it has generally gone hand in hand with liberalism, notwithstanding their philosophical contradictions. There has indeed been too much romanticizing of oppressed outgroups. Diggins is capable of perceiving merit even among left wing historians, as he recognizes in Alexander Saxton and Ellen DuBois. And I share his reverence for our common former teacher, Henry F. M a y.

Seeing Through Language: Narrative, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver's The Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion

Seeing Through Language:Narrative, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver's The Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion Edward Larkin (bio) In recent years scholarship on revolutionary and early national American literature has devoted considerable attention to the role of representation. When reading early American novels, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, William Hill Brown's Modern Chivalry, and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, in the context of an emerging representative democracy, we have understood them at least in part as commentaries on the dangers of misrepresentation. When we read the early histories of the Revolution, however, our attention has focused elsewhere, on questions of political affiliation, personal relationships, or narrative structure instead of on the questions of representation that have occupied historians almost from the moment the 13 British colonies in North America decided to take up arms against the mother country. American historians of the early national era, such as David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren, and John Marshall, did not set out merely to record the events of the Revolution. They well understood their role in developing an understanding of the recent upheaval and shaping the nation's sense of self. To them, writing a history became an opportunity to interpret, a chance to represent and legitimate a particular view of the causes and lessons of the Revolution. That interpretive dimension is a large part of what made the American Revolution unique. It revolved emphatically around texts and the interpretation of them.1 One practical reason for this was the distance between the colonies and the mother country, but another, perhaps more compelling and suggestive, was that this was a time when most people believed in human reason and its ability to solve almost any problem, whether philosophical, scientific, or political. As Gordon Wood has so persuasively demonstrated, the late eighteenth century was also the era of [End Page 427] "conspiracy and the paranoid style." If this was a period when even the most sophisticated thinkers sought to explain important political, social, and economic events by "attributing [them] to the concerted designs of willful individuals" (Wood 411), one of the best means to identify those designs was through the printed explanations, arguments, and justifications offered in the rapidly expanding press.2 The public sphere, in other words, both reflected and expanded a fundamental belief in human reason. With the emergence of such a public came an increase in stature for the written word: texts—as the concrete extension of reason—were endowed with an increasing amount of power as they began to depend less and less on their authors' identity for their authority. The history of the American Revolution, consequently, became a crucial text since it, at least in the minds of the revolutionaries, promised to document the triumph of words and reason in politics. Just as the Encyclopedie in France would catalog all human knowledge, the history of the Revolution would serve as an instructive source on liberty and democracy, the apex of reason in the political world. Hence, the writing of the history of the Revolution was a crucial part of the Enlightenment project in the United States.3 No wonder, then, that so many histories, both for and against the Revolution, were written in the two decades after the British colonies in America declared independence. If the continuing influence of pro-independence history is more or less self-evident, the importance of those histories written by Americans who opposed independence may be more difficult to discern.4 However, they constituted a significant body of written work about the Revolution and bear discussion not only for their political import but for their literary interest as well.5 In the following pages I will argue for the significance of one such history, Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, A Tory View (1781),6 in which the former chief justice of Massachusetts constructs a highly literary and provocative counternarrative of the Revolution that raises questions both about the revolutionary leaders in his home state and about the notion of revolution itself. To Oliver, American revolutionary discourse, rather than expressing high-minded idealism, served the self-interested motives of a crafty and ambitious...

Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Edited by Anthony Molho and, Gordon Wood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. ix+490. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

<i>Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past</i>. Edited by Anthony Molho and, Gordon Wood. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. ix+490. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The Anti-Federalists: America's Other Founders

Saul Cornell has been studying Anti-Federalist thought for well over a decade. The first fruits of his efforts appeared ten years ago when he published an essay tracing the changing historical fortunes of the AntiFederalists throughout the two hundred years since their epic struggle with their Federalist opponents.' With the relatively recent appearance of work by scholars such as Jackson Turner Main, Gordon Wood, Herbert Storing, and others, Cornell concluded that the reputation of the Anti-Federalists had finally been rescued from years of ignominy during which they had been either ignored or vilified by professional historians. Indeed, he believed that even a cursory glance at modern American historiography revealed the demise of the once dominant Federalist orthodoxy; instead, scholars were finally according the Anti-Federalist critique of the Constitution its full due. At long last the Anti-Federalist cause had been rehabilitated. Tracking -the resuscitation of Anti-Federalism's historical reputation was not, however, Cornell's sole purpose in writing this essay; he wished at the same time to critique recent scholarship dealing most directly with AntiFederalist thought. In his mind the advent of the new social history as well as the emergence of post-modern and post-structural theories of meaning raised serious questions about the manner in which historians approached AntiFederalism. At a time when social historians were exposing the complexity of an American society divided by race, class and gender, those studying AntiFederalism persisted in defining the essence of that movement. Regardless of how these historians defined the Anti-Federalists, no matter what diversity they unearthed, they invariably identified the presence of one all-encompassing Anti-Federalist mind. To approach Anti-Federalists as united by a single, homogeneous ideology, or to portray individual spokesmen as the true embodiment of Anti-Federalist philosophy was, he thought, to perpetuate an anachronistic version of the past. Just as scholars were beginning to perceive

Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship

Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and Trial of American Authorship. By Nancy Ruttenberg. (Stanford University Press,1998. Pp. x, 537. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $19.95.) Writing and Postcolonialism in Early Republic. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. x, 225. $37.50.) In past decade, prompted in part by appearance of Gordon Wood's magisterial The Radicalism of American Revolution, recent historiography surrounding developing early republic has begun to reexamine efforts of a republican elite to create a distinctive American identity. While more scholarly attention has been focused on how seeds of democratization planted by Revolution would come to full fruit in years after 1800, and in process slowly create a distinctive American literary identity, most notably in Cathy Davidson's Revolution and Word (1986), Richard Brown's Knowledge is Power (1989), and Larzer Ziff s Writing in New Nation ( 1991), less attention has been paid to what Henry Adams called the literary class of United States. That class, and struggle to create a distinctive national literature, are twin subjects of Edward Watts and Nancy Ruttenberg in their recent studies of American literature and culture. Ruttenberg's work is more sophisticated and illuminating. Democratic Personality examines psychosocial realm, literary and social representation of what she terms impulse. Focusing on public speech and a developing independent American voice, Ruttenberg examines Salem Witch Trials and finds that concept of individual action not only created a crisis of credibility for ministry but had been laid by Protestant Reformation. Ruttenberg contends that democratization of American self is further in evidence during upheaval caused by George Whitefield and Great Awakening. Examining expanded sense of individuality in such writers as Charles Brockden Brown, J. Hector St. John Crevecouer, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Ruttenberg posits that personality critically influenced development and rise of a truly national literature. The connection between that emerging voice and advent of a truly democratic voice in our early national literature gradually develops in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, creating an American aesthetic of innocence, a fictional representation of that personality that sought to reconcile powerful tensions involved in struggle to create a national literature. Of course, like many other scholars, Ruttenberg finds our national literature scattered with characters who resist incorporation, figures whose expanded sense of individuality and sense of self led them into a world that can be at once both terrifying and liberating. The heroic backwoodsman Natty Bumppo, as Leslie Fiedler reminded us many years ago, is seminal figure in our early fiction, and his character is transfer point, asserts Ruttenberg, between dying republican elite culture and ascendant democratic one. …

Culture Wars Medieval and Modern in Le Moine et la sorci�re

Benson !Culture Wars Medieval and Modern in Le Moine et la sorcière Ed Benson University of Connecticut Culture Wars Medieval and Modern in Le Moine et la sorcière In Memoriam: Nancy Lyman Roelker The modem practice of history hides a contradiction between the urgency of our search for a usable past on the one hand and its irreducible alterity on the other.1 The contradiction was already apparent in Aristotle's rhetorical separation of history from fiction,2 and modern historians have deepened and intensified it even as they proclaim their scorn for classical narratives. I suggest that we must at least acknowledge the dilemma before we can hope to resolve it, and that a successful resolution will have to recognize the willful nature of any view we adopt of history.3 The problem is that such a recognition runs counter to a tenet of our Weltanschauung all the more deeply held since it is so imperfectly articulated, for instance by Gordon Wood: One can accept the view that the historical record is fragmentary and incomplete, that recovery of the past is partial and difficult, and that historians will never finally agree in their interpretations, and yet can still believe intelligibly and not naively in an objective truth that can be observed and empirically verified. Historians may never see and represent that truth wholly and finally, but some of them will come closer than others, be more nearly complete, more objective, more honest, in their written history, and we will know it, and have known it, when we see it. That knowledge is the best antidote to the destructive skepticism that is troubling us today.4 Wood situates authority in transparent referentiality even as he confesses his own inability to articulate criteria for judging it. I take such an appeal to the ineffable as prototypical modernism, and suggest that we owe it to our students to help them acknowledge both their distance from the past and their affinity with it, perhaps by helping them recognize some of the most distinctive features of the culture we share.5 56 I Film & History The Medieval Period in Film | Special In-Depth Section I propose, therefore, to suggest ways ofviewing a recent fiction film, Le Moine et la sorcière,6 that will help us see the rationalization ofstorytelling in the medieval countryside as prefiguring the birth pangs of France, and of the modern world order. I am addressing this essay not only to médiévistes but to all those who still seek to ground their interpretive practices in history, because I think a historicist view of the film raises several pressing issues in useful ways. I have included some recollections of my use of it in the classroom, notjust because I think it is particularly useful but more broadly because my students' questions have helped frame my own. Patriarchy: Medieval and Contemporary As medieval Europe began to emerge from the Carolingian world, the aristocracy discovered how far from anything it recognized were the cultural references of those who farmed their lands: indeed, one of the things Le Moine et /a sorcière shows most successfully is how superficial the Christianization of the countryside remained.7 The monk whom we see in the film was Etienne de Bourbon, one of the very first Inquisitors and the author of the account which provided the basis for the film.8 1 seek here to present the film as the enactment of the beginning of the long struggle to standardize peasant beliefs and practices into a Latin Christian culture. Acknowledging these contradictions should also help us situate our own reading historically, for Le Moine et/a sorcière shows the persistence and power of Freudian reconstruction. A few months before Freud deliberately turned his back on the accounts he was hearing ofchildhood sexual abuse,9 he wrote his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess that "his theories on the origins ofhysteria had been discovered and formulated centuries before by judges in witchcraft trials."10 Many ofus are eager to free ourselves ofthe thrall ofthe late nineteenth-century pillars ofmodernism like Freud, but the fictional village cure's prediction at the end ofthe film that...