“There was a great argument yesterday on female excellence”: Gender & the Newest Political history

January 29, 2013 By Roy Rogers in Commentary, Historiography, New New Political History, Opinion, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Gender, historiography, New New Political History, Political history 5 Comments

One of the most striking features of the “newest political histories” has been their careful attention to questions of gender. Four essays (for example) in Beyond the Founders, the capstone-cum-manifesto of this particular historiographical moment, deal directly with the political nature of gender identities in the early American republic.[1] The privileged place of gender in these histories makes a great deal of sense–if the goal of the “newest political histories” is to broaden cast of characters in political history and explore the intersection of “cultural” and “ordinary” and “traditional” politics then questions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality should be central. Gender, along with race, was a key way to demarcate between who was in and who was out of respectable politics in the new nation.

The most productive, and perhaps influential, use of gender as an interpretive lens has been in the political history of women. Many of the earliest works of what could be called the “newest political history,” and those which best exemplify the movement, are histories of women and politics.[2] This generation of historians has shown that women were clear actors in early national politics and print culture–through newspapers, the theater, parades, books, and the salon. Not only were women a direct participant in politics “out of doors” and in print, femininity was deeply politicized in the early national period. In the highly charged politics of the early republic, much was up for grabs–a great deal of prestige and power would be gained (or lost) depending on where the line of respectable political behavior of men and women was drawn. Continue reading →

Sanitizing History

January 22, 2013 By Ken Owen in Commentary Tags: American Revolution, Baseball, Popular History 5 Comments

For the last few years, there has been a recurring news item in early January that sets my historical rage going. The repeated refusal of the Baseball Writers Association of America to elect Mark McGwire and others suspected of steroid use in the 1990s and early 2000s was bad enough. This year tipped me over the edge; the idea that neither Barry Bonds nor Roger Clemens deserve a place in the Hall of Fame is nothing short of preposterous. For better or worse, McGwire, Sosa, Clemens, and Bonds defined an era in which baseball regained its popularity after a self-destructive strike in 1994. For the hallowed halls of Cooperstown to pretend they never really existed is willfully sticking heads in the sand.

Of course, the sanitizing of history is not limited to the game of baseball. Every year, the NCAA comes down with ‘sanctions’ on college sports programs for a series of violations, whether academic, financial, or moral. Most typically, those programs are asked to ‘vacate’ their wins – doing nothing to actually award wins to the losers. And the sorry mess of the Lance Armstrong saga reflects a similar tale – those consulting the record books will simply be told that no-one won the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005, as if the race had never been run. At least the ‘vacation’ of title or a blank space in the annals encourages the casual observer to do some further reading on the circumstances. At root, though, it is a cop-out – if the record books don’t give us the nice morality tale that we’d like to see, we just press the delete button and hope that no-one comes to notice. Continue reading →

Where Have You Gone, Gordon Wood?

January 21, 2013 By Michael D. Hattem in Academia, Commentary Tags: academia, Elites, Gordon Wood, Popular History 73 Comments

Gordon S. Wood is perhaps the most prominent of the many Bernard Bailyn-trained historians to emerge from Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s, including Richard Bushman, Michael Kammen, Michael Zuckerman, Lois Carr, James Henretta, Pauline Maier, Mary Beth Norton, and many others. In the late 1960s, Wood’s dissertation-turned-first-book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, had arguably as large an impact on the field as his mentor’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution did a few years before, both helping to usher in the heady days of the “republican synthesis.” This is all to say that Wood had earned himself a prominent spot in the field of early American history from pretty much the very start of his career. However, subsequent generations of early Americanists have grown increasingly hostile to not only Wood’s work but to the man himself. This leads to the question: Why is it acceptable (or even praiseworthy) behavior among early Americanists to treat one of the most important historians in the field in the last century disrespectfully? In this piece, I’d like to talk about Gordon Wood’s career trajectory, suggest that other historians’ reactions to him reflect not only Wood but on historians themselves, and ask whether that might give us even a fleeting insight into generational differences between early Americanists. Continue reading →

American Revolution: The Game

January 4, 2013 By Michael D. Hattem in Commentary Tags: Assassin's Creed III, Review, Video Games 24 Comments

Assassin's Creed III Warning: Please be advised that there are a few spoilers in terms of the game’s storyline in the fourth paragraph of this post.

This is a strange topic for me to be writing on, i.e., a video game. After all, I am not what some younger Juntoists might call “a gamer.” But when I saw the trailers for Assassin’s Creed III last summer I found my anticipation for the game growing. Assassin’s Creed III is a historical fiction-based game in which the main character—a half-English, half-Mohawk warrior called Connor—finds himself at the center of many of the most important events of the American Revolution. Let me start with a little background on the game.

Continue reading →

Then, Thenceforward, and Forever Free

January 1, 2013 By Jonathan Wilson in Commentary Tags: Abraham Lincoln, antislavery, Civil War, emancipation, Emancipation Proclamation, memory, museums, Slavery Leave a comment

emancipationproclamation We can’t let 2013 begin without marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863.

Harold Holzer describes the anxiety many Americans felt on that day as they waited for confirmation of the act. Allen Guelzo weighs Lincoln’s legal options. Annette Gordon-Reed discusses the document’s significance. Eric Foner discusses what it did–and did not do. Continue reading →

Narrative History and the Collapsing of Historical Distance

December 28, 2012 By Christopher Jones in Commentary, Methodology Tags: Methodology, Narrative History, religion 11 Comments

Among the highlights of my Christmas was receiving Catherine Brekus’s recently-released volume, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America, a fascinating account of an eighteenth-century evangelical woman whose life experiences intersected with, and speak to, several importance events and themes from the period. At the time of writing, I’m about half-way through and can’t recommend it enough. At a future date, I’ll try and post a more formal review (or at least lengthier thoughts) of the book, but wanted to briefly reflect here on something Brekus briefly discusses in her preface. “Reading Sarah’s reflections on her life,” Brekus explains, “reminds us of how far away the past is—but also how close.” Solidly grounding her subject’s experiences in its eighteenth-century context, she continues: Continue reading →

National Identity and the American Revolution

December 27, 2012 By Ken Owen in Commentary, Historiography Tags: American Revolution, historiography, Jack Rakove, Kevin Phillips, National Identity, Politics 16 Comments

In his recent review of Kevin Phillips’s 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, Jack Rakove argues that in tackling the causes of independence, “Phillips deals with political loyalties more fundamental than the mere matter of party allegiance.” The inference is clear—deciding to be a member or an activist for a political party is one thing; but your nationality is something that defines you in perpetuity. Once revolutionaries chose to take on the label ‘American’, there was no turning back. It was who they were; while that American identity might be complex and multifaceted, there is something about “national character” that stands above the rough and tumble of party politics. Continue reading →

The Founders, the Tea Party, and the Historical Wing of the “Conservative Entertainment Complex”

December 18, 2012 By Michael D. Hattem in Commentary Tags: David Barton, Founders, Politics, Popular History, Presentism, Tea Party 23 Comments

Following the recent election, much has been made of the alternative reality created by the “conservative entertainment complex.” However, conservative media has not only created its own contemporary reality; it has also created its own historical reality, through what one might call the historical wing of the conservative entertainment complex.

In recent years, men like David Barton, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, among numerous others, have written a number of books on eighteenth-century figures and events. But though they claim to be getting their principles directly from “the founders,” what they are really doing is giving their principles to the founders and the eighteenth century, more generally. This revisionism, promoted by conservative think tanks, was lapped up by hardcore conservatives and perhaps no group of people has been a more receptive audience than those who identify themselves as supporters of the Tea Party. Continue reading →

Jeffersongate: The Case of Henry Wiencek

December 11, 2012 By Michael D. Hattem in Book Review, Commentary Tags: academia, Annette Gordon-Reed, book review, Henry Wiencek, historiography, Master of the Mountain, Slavery, Thomas Jefferson 33 Comments

On October 16, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Henry Wiencek’s third book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. His previous works both dealt with slavery, most notably his well-received An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. By contrast, his latest work has come under fire from leading Jefferson scholars around the country. Within days of the book’s release, highly critical reviews by academics appeared in online magazines. These reviews started online exchanges that have played out over the last two months and continue to do so.

Historians much more up to the task than myself—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Jan Lewis, and Lucia (Cinder) Stanton—have called into question Wiencek’s use of sources (both primary and secondary), his overall interpretation, and his motives. Therefore, I will not recapitulate all of them here. I have included a chronology with links to all the relevant articles below, with J.L. Bell’s posts at Boston 1775 providing excellent summaries of the most contentious points. Instead, I want to touch on two things: the main part of Wiencek’s argument and how it reflects his broader approach to history and the effects of Wiencek’s treatment of the historiography, both having to do with the larger relationship between popular and academic history. Continue reading →