Taking Print from Print Culture & Leaving the Public Sphere Behind

May 23, 2014 By Al Zuercher Reichardt in Historiography, Opinion Tags: cultural history, Jürgen Habermas, Methodology, newspapers, Print Culture, Public Sphere 13 Comments

Or how to make a causal argument about print, media, and communication in the eighteenth century

This post began as a brief response to Tom’s recent piece on the public sphere and to the conversation it generated in the comments section. As it turns out, brevity is not my strong suit, and I’ve got a few bones to pick. So all cards on the table: I’m more than a little invested in the importance of communication; I have a hard time watching print be stripped of its mechanistic or causal role; and I don’t believe we can possibly ever argue that changes in media didn’t cause social and political change.[1] Continue reading →

The Public Sphere and Early American Democracy

May 12, 2014 By Tom Cutterham in Historiography, Works Reconsidered Tags: bourgeoisie, Democracy, Jürgen Habermas, political economy, Politics, property, Public Sphere 12 Comments

Das Lesekabinett (1843), Johann Peter Hasenclever How did the particular formation of democratic politics, a rambunctious public sphere, and capitalist social relations come about in the early American republic? I began to talk about this question last month when I asked, ‘how did democracy become a good thing?‘ I argued that the crucial factor was an unprecedented separation between economic and political power, which made democractic politics incapable of seriously interfering with capital accumulation. Today I want to show how Jürgen Habermas’ account of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere helps us see what went on in this crucial separation, and how his account relates to the American case in particular. Continue reading →

Notes on Thompson, Arendt, and Revolutionary Violence

May 9, 2014 By Tom Cutterham in Historiography, Opinion Tags: American Revolution, Hannah Arendt, John Adams, Peter Thompson, violence 7 Comments

In the first episode of HBO’s John Adams miniseries there’s a memorable scene (NB: it includes nudity) in which Adams is present at the tarring and feathering of a customs officer at Boston harbour. The purpose of the scene was to frame Adams as an outsider whose firm principles prevent him from ever being an organic leader of the American people—a theme that runs throughout the series. But it also does something else, which is to acknowledge early on that the American Revolution was an affair of violence. In a particularly poignant moment of the scene (2.02-2.07 in the clip), the director even chose to portray slaves in chains, looking on silently at the anger of the American mob. That is, he chose to remind us that violence in colonial and revolutionary America wasn’t just momentary and spectacular, but also pervasive and structural.[1] Continue reading →

Yes, Virginia, there was an American Enlightenment

April 17, 2014 By Michael D. Hattem in Commentary, Conferences, Historiography Tags: conferences, Enlightenment, historiography, OAH Annual Meeting, Organization of American Historians, state of the field 5 Comments

State of the Field Panel Thanks to John Fea’s live-tweeting and subsequent reflections on OAH panels this past weekend, I would like to address some of the points and comments made during the panel entitled, “State of the Field: The Trans-Atlantic Enlightenment in America.” Since Twitter is problematic in getting across complex ideas due to its 140-character limitation, I have chosen a few of the tweets in which the comments seemed to me to be common arguments or perceptions that I have previously encountered.

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Looking for “a World of Love”: Jonathan Edwards in the Big City

March 5, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Historiography, Recent Scholarship Tags: Atlantic World, colonial New York, Jonathan Edwards, New York City, Philadelphia, Puritans, urban history 6 Comments

Jonathan Edwards is so strongly identified with Connecticut and Massachusetts that it’s easy to overlook where his pastoral ministry began: near the waterfront of New York City. In 1722, Edwards took a temporary position as the minister to a small Presbyterian congregation in Manhattan. He was about nineteen years old.

Edwards’s months in New York shaped him in at least two ways. First, according to his own account, Edwards developed a stronger desire for personal holiness. In New York, he wished increasingly to be “in everything a complete Christian.” Second, he grew in missionary zeal. Holding long religious conversations with his host family (who were immigrants from England) and observing life in the Atlantic port, he came to a more global awareness of the faith. He put it this way:

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Was the American Revolution a Civil War?

February 18, 2014 By Tom Cutterham in Historiography, Opinion Tags: American Revolution, authority, Civil War, David Armitage, John Locke, sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes, violence 50 Comments

“Every great revolution is a civil war,” as David Armitage has recently remarked. That insight could change the way we think about the American Revolution. Contemporaries understood it that way—or at least, they did at first. David Ramsay, the first patriot historian of the war, held that the Revolution was “originally a civil war in the estimation of both parties.” Mercy Otis Warren wrote that the fires of civil war were kindled as early as the Boston massacre. But in the narratives of these historians, the moment the United States declared independence was the moment the conflict stopped being a civil war. It was no longer being fought within a single imperial polity. Now it was a war between two nations.[1] Continue reading →

Looking Less Backward: Ten (Relatively) Recent Books That Anyone Interested In Early American History Should Read

January 6, 2014 By Michael D. Hattem in Historiography, Lists Tags: historiography, lists 22 Comments

The day after Christmas, The New Republic published a piece by Senior Editor, John J. Judis, entitled “Looking Backward: Ten Books Any Student of American History Must Read.” The piece began promisingly (flatteringly, even): “I woke up on Christmas morning thinking about American historians.” [Editor’s Note: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if more people did that?] Judis closed the opening paragraph with the following caveat: “They’re my favorites; they’re not the best books.” Each book was followed by a paragraph with some combination of a brief synopsis and Judis’s own reactions. I have linked to the article but, just for reference, I’ll list his ten picks here: Continue reading →

American Enlightenment! Which American Enlightenment?

December 19, 2013 By eherschthal in Book Review, Historiography Tags: American Enlightenment, American Revolution, book review, early americanists, eric herschthal, fire and light, gertrude himmelfarb, james macgregor burns, Journal of American History, roads to modernity 9 Comments

**James MacGregor Burns, Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2013.**

Earlier this year, the Journal of American History published an essay bemoaning the lack of attention Americanists give to the idea of an American Enlightenment. The authors suggested some provocative reasons, like a latent exceptionalism that has made American scholars reluctant to pick up a topic still seen as rooted in Europe. Equally problematic was America’s religious character, which has left Americanists wary of a movement still viewed as secular. Despite noteworthy scholarship on an American Enlightenment being produced “at the margins of university research” (though I hesitate to call scholars like James Delbourgo, one such scholar, “marginal”), I sympathize with the authors’ case. There just isn’t that much good recent scholarship that American historians can readily incorporate into their work. Continue reading →

Rethinking the Early American Map

December 18, 2013 By Al Zuercher Reichardt in Historiography, Methodology Tags: colonial history, early American West, Geography, maps, Native Americans, Ohio Valley, spatial history 10 Comments

It’s time we remake the North American map.

Open up most any early American history book and flip to the list of tables and figures. Chances are you’ll find—if provided—maps devoid of almost any indigenous peoples. If the book is more recent, perhaps instead you’ll find that the author included two maps: one of European settlements, and one of Native American peoples. Or, just maybe, you happen to have on hand one of the few books to merge all of these together. But look closely and see if you can find the usual tension—an unbalance resulting from the projection of European empire on one hand, and the illustration of limited, isolated, scattered indigenous nations on the other.

How can so many maps of colonial North America display European power and political influence, but not do the same for American Indian polities and groups?

Maybe the better question is, how can we overcome our own historiographical strictures and the limitations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century maps to better portray the American landscape?

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Whither the 18th Century?

December 9, 2013 By Ken Owen in Opinion, Pedagogy, Whither Tags: pedagogy, survey course, teaching 20 Comments

American Colonies Teaching the first half of the American history survey has become a more complicated job over the last few decades. The reason is quite simple—the purview of early American historians has broadened significantly in the same period. A narrative from Jamestown to Independence to Civil War is now a narrative that begins with (or even before) the Columbian Exchange. A geographical focus that formerly considered the “thirteen colonies” almost in isolation now extends northwards to Canada, westwards to the Mississippi, southwards to the Caribbean, and across the ocean to Europe and Africa. A predominantly white, male, Protestant cast of characters has welcomed women, people of color, Native Americans, and others to its merry band.

All of this is a good thing. But it runs up against a critical problem—the amount of time in a semester has not extended at all. To take account of newer historical approaches therefore requires critical editing of syllabi and a rethinking of approaches. That means there will be, for want of a better term, “winners” and “losers” in terms of the material covered in the survey course. My contention is that the 18th century is the main loser from these changes—and I wonder, at times, what the implication is for our students’ understanding of key currents of American history. Continue reading →