Documents Old and New

Last year the Paul Revere House highlighted a document from its collection, a letter from Paul Revere to his second wife, Rachel:

Shortly after the Siege of Boston began in the spring of 1775, Paul Revere took a few minutes to scrawl a hasty letter to his wife, Rachel. In it, he included details of his plan to get most of the Revere family out of occupied Boston.

The letter is datelined only “Charlestown Sunday [Morn?].” Context indicates the silversmth wrote it on 23 or, more likely, 30 Apr 1775.

In 2011, a Revere descendant brought the document to the Paul Revere House, and three years later the museum acquired it.

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia told a similar story this summer:

Discovered in a shoebox in a Northern California garage, the long-lost Revolutionary War diary of John Claypoole is now on display at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Claypoole was the third husband of Betsy Ross, the seamstress and upholsterer who has long been celebrated by many as the creator of the first American flag.

Claypoole’s handwritten diary, which includes letters and songs he transcribed, was written during the years 1781 and 1782…

At the time, Claypoole and Ross’s second husband, Joseph Ashburn, were in the Old Mill Prison in Plymouth, England, after being captured on American privateers. Ashburn died as a prisoner. Claypoole survived, brought the sad news to the widow, and then married her.

Those documents have something in common besides being connected to middling-class craftspeople who lived through the Revolution and became household names in America’s Colonial Revival. Both were transcribed and published in the nineteenth century.

Elbridge H. Goss published the Revere letter in his 1891 biography, reporting the original as still being in the family. But within a generation scholars didn’t know where it was. They had to rely on Goss’s transcription.

Likewise, the Claypoole prison diary was published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1892 but then dropped out of sight until a descendant found it among her late mother’s family papers.

For both documents, scholars already had access to the texts. So where is the value in having the originals? Of course, it’s good to be able to confirm that a transcribed document actually exists, and that the published transcription is accurate and complete. There might be additional information (Goss didn’t publish the “Charlestown Sunday” line), perhaps in non-textual form (What size of notebook could a prisoner of war keep?).

But we also have to acknowledge that the authenticity and antiquity of a historical document produces a magnetic appeal that goes beyond the information it preserves. Though they might be most useful to historians as data repositories, they’re also relics of the past.

“Fabric Arts and Social Threads” at Old South

Old South Meeting House’s series of lunchtime lectures this month focuses on “Fabric Arts and Social Threads: Women’s Work before Industrialization.” Each session takes place on a Thursday from 12:15 to 1:00 P.M. Admission costs $6, and is free for members.

The events:

6 January
The Spinning Wheel
Join us for a modern demonstration of a remarkable colonial craft with Barbara Provest, longtime member of the Weavers Guild of Boston and the Boston Area Spinners and Dyers. Learn how spinning, dyeing and weaving evolved in colonial New England through the 1850s, then watch this skilled artisan in action as she demonstrates carding and spinning on the wheel, as well as tape loom weaving.

13 January
Embroidery-Not a “Trivial Accomplishment”
More than just beautiful examples of a domestic art, embroidered samplers were a crucial tool in the education of young women and their participation in the colonial economy. A common practice in Europe, the tradition of these schoolgirl exercises came to New England with its earliest European settlers. Museum of Fine Arts Curator Pamela Parmal shares outstanding examples from the museum's current exhibition to illuminate the connections between female education, the economy, and artistic expression in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

20 January
Betsy Ross and the Making of America
National folk hero Betsy Ross, often described as a simple seamstress who rose to fame by creating our most recognizable national symbol, has long captivated the American imagination. But behind the legend is the compelling true story of an accomplished colonial artisan, a furniture upholsterer woven into a thriving colonial economy. Marla Miller, Associate Professor and Director of the Public History Program at UMass Amherst, and author of Betsy Ross and the Making of America, stitches together the incredible story of this accomplished woman and explores why we as a nation cannot reconcile her true role in our historical imagination. Booksigning to follow.

27 January
Out of Whole Cloth: Quilting in the Pre-Industrial Era
In this illustrated lecture, award-wining textile historian Lynne Bassett shares the history of quilt making before 1793 and its parallels to the social history of Massachusetts. In the intricate designs and chosen fabrics, one can read clues about the family, local, economic, and political history of its maker. America’s earliest patchwork, silk quilts imported from England, wool whole-cloth quilts, and quilted petticoats will be featured.

Betsy Ross and the Historiography of Bipolar Disorder

On Tuesday I caught Prof. Marla R. Miller at the American Antiquarian Society speaking about her biography Betsy Ross. I know Marla from the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife [now seeking papers on “New England in the Civil War”], but I hadn’t heard her lecture for a while. She’s a really good speaker, offering lots of content in a personable way.

Marla spoke in detail about the challenges of writing about Betsy Ross: cutting through the legends, and building up a portrait from family experiences to make up for lack of direct sources. Academics have largely dismissed Ross as (a) famous only because of a total myth which (b) reflects a retrograde, sentimental image of women in the 1700s. So picking her as a topic brings the risk of being perceived as a less than serious scholar. On the other hand, members of the public most eager to read about Betsy Ross might also be least interested in dispelling their illusions about her.

Toward the end of her talk, Marla mentioned that she had made a personal choice to note hints of how some of Ross’s relatives experienced mental illnesses. That topic also intrigues me—not that I’m drawn to study insanity or its treatment in history (which sounds dreary). But I keep my eyes open for evidence of psychiatric conditions, considering them part of human life in any era. And I may be a little bolder than academic historians in suggesting that modern diagnoses such as Asperger syndrome might apply.

By the U.S. Civil War, people had started to use the word “depressed” as we understand it today, so it’s not an anachronism for that period. Furthermore, psychiatrists have found that bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder and schizophrenia occur across many populations at about the same rate, suggesting they’re rooted in human biology, not particular human cultures. We don’t discuss smallpox today without drawing on modern virology, so should we rule out well established brain science in discussing episodes of insanity or eccentricity?

Nevertheless, writers coming from outside the academy seem to be most open to applying modern psychiatric labels. A couple of years ago I attended an Organization of American Historians panel that included a discussion of whether Gen. William T. Sherman was manic-depressive. Though Prof. Michael Fellman had considered that possibility while writing his biography of Sherman, he didn’t feel up to raising it explicitly. It took Mount Auburn psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi to read Fellman’s book and propose the possibility in an article.

Similarly, a National Park Service ranger, Jason Emerson, wrote the first book to suggest that Abraham Lincoln’s wife suffered from bipolar disorder: The Madness of Mary Lincoln (reviewed here on H-Net). Matthew Karp’s H-Net review of a collection of essays on John Brown titled Terrible Swift Sword says:

Probably the two most provocative and memorable essays…come from the scholars working farthest afield from history. Kenneth R. Carroll, a practicing clinical psychologist in Pennsylvania, uses a variety of remote psychological tests to “diagnose” Brown with bipolar disorder.

For Carroll, Brown’s family history of mental illness, his checkered personal life and business career, and the primary-source testimony of friends and neighbors exhibit a “remarkable consistency” that forms “a coherent picture” (p. 125). Brown’s grandiosity, mania, and “relentless drive toward self-aggrandizement” fit modern psychology’s standard diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder (p. 128).

Carroll argues that the diagnosis is clinched by his study, in which three John Brown experts completed “an objective psychological test, as if responding on behalf of John Brown.” The composite results yield a computer-generated “Interpretive Report” that suggests that “the possibility of a Bipolar Affective Disorder” should be evaluated (pp. 132-134).

Carroll’s diagnosis is hardly conclusive, of course, but he, along with [editors] Russo and Finkelman, are to be commended for their creative approach to the question of Brown’s mental state. His essay, at the very least, should provide the basis for a larger argument about the possibility of Brown being bipolar—a debate that can and should be joined by historians and psychologists alike.

There’s far less evidence about Betsy Ross’s family than about Sherman, Lincoln, or Brown. But what there is suggests that she had to worry about the mental health of certain relations, and perhaps about the possibility of becoming mentally ill herself—again, a part of life.

Betsy Ross is a big book and so far I’ve read bits, but now I’m even more eager to be able to sit and read it all the way through.

Needlework Exhibits in the Northeast

Last week the New York Times alerted me to three museum exhibits on eighteenth-century women’s needlework now open in the Northeast.

In Hartford, the Connecticut Historical Society launches “Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art and Family, 1740-1840” today. Its description:

Early American needlework is an art form created almost exclusively by women and girls. As art, these needlework pictures and useful household objects burst with color, imaginative design, and evidence of close observation. As history, these same items reveal clues to the lives and times of the girls and women who set those countless stitches into cloth. . . .

Beautifully decorated clothing, bedding, and accessories, school work by children as young as 6 years old, and masterpieces of needlework art depicting classical scenes, bucolic landscapes, and perfectly-rendered flora and fauna will all be featured. The final gallery will display needlework dedicated to preserving family history and highlight the work of one remarkable family – and an even more unusual young woman within that family, Prudence Punderson.

The museum also has a daylong conference on early American needlework scheduled for 30 October.
Further to the south, the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme has just opened its exhibit “With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery From the Connecticut River Valley.” The image above is one sample of that embroidery, dating from 1758, and the museum’s website explains:

The Connecticut River Valley was one of the most important centers in America for the teaching and production of embroidered pictures by girls and young women in private academies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . .

Over the course of their education, girls undertook progressively more complex and difficult needlework. Before the age of ten, they began with elementary samplers worked on linen and gradually developed a repertory of stitching techniques. During their studies, they executed canvaswork pieces, samplers, memorials, and silk pictures as evidence of the skills and accomplishments that would demonstrate their suitability as wives capable of managing a household and educating children.

Finally, in northern Delaware the Winterthur Museum is hosting a new exhibit titled “Betsy Ross: The Life Behind the Legend.” This exhibition, curated in part by Massachusetts-based biographer Marla R. Miller, presents authentic artifacts of the historical Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole (1752-1836), separate from depictions of the mythical woman. There is also a series of lunchtime lectures, including Bruce Cole speaking on the provocative topic, “The American Revolution: Who Cares”.

A.A.S. Programs in the Fall

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester is hosting several lectures for the public this season, including three on people from eighteenth-century America.

On Tuesday, 12 October, at 7:30 P.M., Prof. Marla Miller of the University of Massachusetts will speak on “Betsy Ross: The Life behind the Legend.”

Legend has it that Betsy Ross created the first American flag. The truth is far less certain and far more interesting. In this program Miller describes how she came to research and write the first scholarly biography of Ross. The story she uncovers is a richly textured study of Ross’s long and remarkable life, which included three marriages, seven children, and a successful career as a seamstress and upholsterer. The book also examines the world of Philadelphia artisans and provides new insights into the world of middle-class crafts people, women, and work during the tumultuous years of our nation’s founding.

Miller’s book on Ross is Betsy Ross and the Making of America.

On Thursday, 21 October, at 7:30 P.M., Prof. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard will speak on “Reflections on A Midwife’s Tale.”

Ulrich’s 1990 book examines the life of one Maine midwife and provides a vivid analysis of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage, sexual relations, family life, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of crime and violence. The book won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize. A Midwife’s Tale was also developed into a film of the same name which aired on The American Experience television program. In this lecture Professor Ulrich reflects on the impact this book has had on the discipline of history, the field of women’s studies, and her own life.

This is the Seventh Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture, which invites distinguished A.A.S. members who have written seminal works of history to reflect on one book and its impact.

On Tuesday, 9 November, at 7:30 P.M., Prof. Paul Finkelman of Albany Law School will discuss “John Peter Zenger and His Brief Narrative.”

Published in 1736, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger is one of the most significant publications of colonial America and represents a major turning point in the history of freedom of the press and in the political development of colonial America and the early republic. John Peter Zenger was the first colonial publisher acquitted on a charge of libeling the governor. Zenger later published his own narrative of the trial, which became the most widely read American publication before the Revolution. This talk, based on a new edition of the Zenger narrative edited by Professor Finkelman, will explain this landmark legal case and show how it affected later developments, including the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

I’m curious about the desigation of Zenger’s Narrative as “the most widely read American publication before the Revolution.” That might be measured by the number of reprintings, but of course it would be a favorite project for printers. Does “before the Revolution” mean before the 1765-1775 political movement?

Twitter Feed, 13-22 May 2010

• RT @unionparkpress: "Milch Cow" returns to Boston Common ht.ly/1KdRm #BostonCommon #Cows #
• RT @dancohen: Facebook's privacy policy is now longer than the U.S. Constitution, with 170 options: nyti.ms/ctwKJB (via @nickbilton) #
• From @lucyinglis, the street cries of Georgian London: bit.ly/c0vKx7 Probably far fewer in 1700s Boston. #
• Two Revolutionary War veterans in western Massachusetts turn to crime in 1783: bit.ly/a9899k #
• RT @jimhill: Time to paint a young Ben Franklin. #
• Photo tour of Philadelphia neighborhood with 18th-century roots: bit.ly/ay6wca #
• Thomas Jefferson's famous mammoth cheese, and its political significance: bit.ly/c603xt #
• NPR coverage of Jack Rakove's book REVOLUTIONARIES: n.pr/brOp4G #
• Tim Abbott traces the path of Henry Knox and ordnance from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston: bit.ly/drNHR2 #
• RT @bostonhistory: Just Added at Teach History: The Edwards Family Home Site in Boston's North End. tinyurl.com/36a94rd #
• "Handful of children's gravestones that name a mother, but no father. All of these are the gravestones of slaves": bit.ly/cbR8mL #
• Photos and link for Caitlin G D Hopkins's paper on Newport gravestone carver Pompe Stevens: bit.ly/9mqcZD #
• The PR campaign for Michael Bellesiles's new book is astonishing in its effrontery: bit.ly/dzgMUd #
• More on historian Stephen Ambrose's relationship with subject DD Eisenhower (via @ToddHouse via @sally_j): bit.ly/bcWBdC #
• Looking Backward waves to Dr John Jeffries, 1st US aeronaut: bit.ly/9f9aaf Long version of his life starts here: bit.ly/a7B4IV #
• .@publichistorian: Related: should I reread Archer's Goon for the thirtieth (fiftieth?) time? #yes // Of course. #
• RT @LizB: about to start SONS OF LIBERTY #comics: Revolutionary War, 2 runaway slaves...w/ superpowers. #
• .@chasingray Take care w/SONS OF LIBERTY comic. Two of that title. Marshall Poe's has no superpowers, mistaken history. bit.ly/cxdSDq #
• Reporter Joe Mozingo's search for family name takes him back to colonial Virginia slave (via @ToddHouse @InnerCompass): bit.ly/cO1HcX #
• Unskillfully but doggedly carved gravestone for a 5-yr-old child, Brooklyn, CT, 1754: bit.ly/cFmnzy #
• Conference on historical prints, fact and fiction, at Worcester in Nov 2010: bit.ly/9vmtrt #
• Exploring the engravings of Paul Revere at the American Antiquarian Society: bit.ly/cO42ux #
• RT @CLTcurator: irked that I can't find digitized version of a particular 18th c. legal manual. O the lofty expectations we have nowadays! #
• RT @PaulRevere1734: May 19th - 1766 saw Fireworks marking repeal of Stamp Act, 1780 Sky so dark by Noon I could hardly see my way h ome. #
• RT @history_book: Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution bit.ly/b4OMJM #
• Anti-abortion movement seizing Susan B. Anthony as their own on dubious historical grounds: bit.ly/9xeE3V #
• Coming to your TV this fall—Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de la Fayette: bit.ly/dooP6K #
• "18th-c image that suggests that sexual humiliation of detainees may have deep roots in the American psyche"? bit.ly/co84Gj #
• Recent papers on tea protests, John Q. Adams's courtship, feuding Continental Navy captains & Essex County furniture: bit.ly/csxJIF #
• RT @Jurretta: History conferences can be dishwater dull. I'm willing to bet this one will be the opposite bit.ly/9EMy3E #
• @opheliacat I don't think anyone's image of Columbia in Native dress inspired disguises at Tea Party. Men just wanted to hide their faces. #
• @opheliacat Then newspapers emphasized "Mohawks" as a way to talk about tea rioters as somehow separate from town. Image stuck and grew. #
• @opheliacat Upcoming book by @bencarp will say more about Native symbolism at Boston Tea Party, and what led to what. #
• Families invited to bike in Minute Man Park, 20 June: www.friendsofminuteman.org/blog/?p=748 #
• George Washington Book Prize winners, via @jbd1: philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/05/beeman-wins-george-washington-book.html #
• Some colonial Americans' libraries, via probate records and @jbd1: philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-lea-libraries-added.html #
• Another redcoat soldier unlucky enough to get into a fight with an officer--guess who wins every time: bit.ly/azxEmD #
• Michael Kenney reviews Marla Miller's new bio of Betsy Ross in BOSTON GLOBE: bit.ly/bMLt38 #
• "What may be America's oldest silver dollar" from 1794 reported to sell for ~$8 million: bit.ly/bXBR0n #
• In Pennsylvania today! Local news on commemoration of Oney Judge, escaped from President's mansion in 1796: bit.ly/9yhv5N #
• Report on fatal explosion at New Hampshire black powder factory: bit.ly/bvnsvE Old-fashioned gunpowder is still mighty powerful! #
• In Brandywine River valley, ran across flyer for self-published historical thriller called LAFAYETTE'S GOLD: lafayettesgold.com/ #

Twitter Feed, 5-12 May 2010

• RT @history_book: Lafayette: Hero of the American Revolution - by Gonzague Saint Bris - Pegasus. amzn.to/bcrThx #
• RT @SecondVirginia: Tips on hand stitching for reproduction clothing bit.ly/cUjLGI #
• Review of INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY: bit.ly/9hVRVy #
• RT @CivicEducation: Today on the podcast: whether a president should be eligible for reelection. ow.ly/1GZdA #USHistory #civics #
• Arlington, Mass., citizen wants town to promote itself as birthplace of Samuel (Uncle Sam) Wilson in 1766: bit.ly/aue1yh #
• RT @history_book: The Story of Historic Fort Steuben (OH) (Landmarks) - by John R. Holmes et al. amzn.to/9DaZDw #
• RT @history_book: World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town [SC] on the Eve of the American Revolution—William R. Ryan amzn.to/cdb1bh #
• From @RagLinen, clippings from the start of the American tea crisis in 1773: bit.ly/bfCbrt #
• RT @Thos_Jefferson: RT @elecray7k: An open letter to the gentleman who gave us a tour of Monticello - bit.ly/cInyVH #
• Dispute between teenage lieutenant & fortysomething corporal in British army, 1779 — rank wins: bit.ly/9Wlqss #
• Hard to interpret gravestone from 1749 Providence: bit.ly/bmHxD3 #
• NY TIMES review of UMass professor's biography of Betsy Ross by Pulitzer-winning Harvard professor: nyti.ms/9DAkVs #
• Oregon's Tea Party Bookstore to change name: bit.ly/ccPwhL Would sympathize more if store gave right date for Boston Tea Party. #
• Joseph Ellis on why the notion of the US founders' "original meaning" is a historical fallacy: bit.ly/cqmOCV #
• @jmadelman We know from examples of Marshall, Chase, Story &al. that Jefferson preferred justices who supported HIM. As do all Presidents. #
• @jmadelman Knowing what the Founders thought has been Joe Ellis's schtick for several books now. #
• RT @footnote: The Second Continental Congress met today in 1775. See the actual transcript here fnote.it/22 #history #ushistory #
• RT @rjseaver: posted transcription of RevWar Pension affidavit of Mary Row for Amenuensis Monday - see tinyurl.com/RSAMrwp #genealogy #
• RT @magpie: J. Q. Adams had lovely penmanship. // His parents chided him about neatness in his early letters. #
• RT @PaulRevereHouse: Though we don't "celebrate" it, 10th is the anniversary of Paul Revere's death in 1818. bit.ly/9dxQuC #
• RT @gordonbelt: Tim Talbott asks "How Much History is Lost to Bad Handwriting?" bit.ly/dzjo5V #
• RT @gordonbelt: Finding Franklin: A Resource Guide from the @librarycongress bit.ly/azsk6U #
• RT @SecondVirginia: Examination of Washington's life through paintings in the Virginia Historical Society exhibition bit.ly/amvTqX #
• RT @PaulRevere1734: This day 1761 in court charged w assault on Thos. Fosdick-I plead not guilty. A fine of 6/8 and expenses. #

Twitter Feed, 17-24 Apr 2010

• RT @OldManseConcord: The Revolutionary War as a Civil War?? bit.ly/d40qff #
• RT @history_geek: Reading: BETSY ROSS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA by Marla R. Miller. #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1790, Benjamin Franklin dies. See what he left George Washington in his will: ow.ly/1yzQ5 #
• RT @Gothamist George Washington Stole Library Books! bit.ly/bLH1Ug // Or NY Society Library keeps imperfect records. #
• Spent all day in a (mostly) warm academic conference center. These volunteers at Minute Man Park braved the weather: bit.ly/bud9 0v #
• N. C. Wyeth's four murals for the First National Bank of Boston: bit.ly/bBaFcV #
• RT @universalhub: Weren't the Sox supposed to be a defensive team this year? // Well, they have a lot to be defensive about. #
• RT @jmadelman: Franklin also gave his printing materials to grandson B.F. Bache, and created a fund for young artisans. bit.ly/b8VUKY #
• @Willambeau: Gordon Wood won Pulitzer for "Radicalism of the American Revolution", right? // Yes, in 1993. Also Ralph W. Emerson Prize. #
• RT @PaulRevere1734: April 18, 1775: Spent the day w/Paul, Jr. in our Shop, not thinking 'twould be nigh on 11 mo's ere I saw either again. #
• Gravestone of Samuel Tarbell of Groton, Mar 1776: bit.ly/biBzjs Why did his son become a Loyalist officer, then return to Groton? #
• Historian Richard Archer suggests British soldiers picked their targets at the Boston Massacre. Was that murder? bit.ly/cGY5QS #
• Connecticut town tax collector arrested in 1786 for…not paying taxes: bit.ly/92jN4a #
• RT @RagLinen: 235 years later we can watch the animated Battle of Lexington and Concord online: tinyurl.com/y3wsh95 // Interesting! #
• HistoryAnimated.com puts Revere, Dawes, and Prescott together too early. (They met at Lexington.) And Dawes didn't return to Boston. #
• I saw a few other timing issues with HistoryAnimated.com's Concord march, but overall it's very impressive. tinyurl.com/y3wsh95 #
• RT @universalhub: Battle re-enactment photos from Lexington and Concord: bit.ly/cJtMxM #
• RT @HistoryNet: Daily History Q: Which country would you most like to visit to explore its history? bit.ly/99bUZh #
• The Massachusetts troops' battle of the 19th of April—in 1861: bit.ly/bx5qj2 #
• Thorough review by @JBD1 of thorough study of Bermuda trade in 18th century: bit.ly/c1UPZD #
• Poems on the Battle at Concord from Emerson and Lowell: bit.ly/bvoT4c #
• RT @BatGirlBabs: "Alexander Hamilton is my homeboy" #
• Marker for British soldiers who died in Menotomy (Arlington), Mass., on 19 Apr 1775: bit.ly/9omFW9 #
• RT @franceshunter: Jefferson, Hamilton, and the sex scandal that rocked early America: ow.ly/1AJvT #
• RT @Harvard_Press: Watch Alison LaCroix discuss the origins of federalism: bit.ly/arlW3a #
• RT @gordonbelt: An economic historian's take on Citizens United v. FEC: What Founding Fathers Thought of Corporations bit.ly/9LCJPh #
• RT @MilestoneDocs: One of our most popular DocNotes analyses: F. Douglass "What to the Slave Is Fourth of July?" bit.ly/9hiLLf #
• New book on an old story, Boston debate over smallpox inoculation in early 1700s: bit.ly/8ZLRbq #
• Smallpox debate notable for Cotton Mather being on side of experimental science, Ben Franklin on side of religious traditionalists. #
• Heard fresh take on smallpox history from @AndyWehrman at NEHA: by late 1700s Americans believed inoculation method was their discovery. #
• Member of Bedford Minuteman Company dies doing ritual he loved, marching to Patriots' Day commemoration: bit.ly/aRh0lq #
• Heard Bill Poole talk of ancestor: bit.ly/b5UyFM But no, Ebenezer Locke didn't fire first shot at Lexington. He REACTED to shots. #
• NEW YORKER questions Stephen Ambrose's claims about interviewing Eisenhower, basis of his initial rep as historian: bit.ly/criZmU #
• H-Net review of book about Atlantic Slave Trade Census, now expanded and refined: bit.ly/boN1wr #
• RT @history_book: Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600-1914 - Anthony Fletcher - Yale UP. j.mp/d6tQlf #
• RT @dancohen: Slate's @jcbeam writes about "How Future Historians Will Use the Twitter Archive": bit.ly/d8Beua #
• @Willambeau HBO made JOHN ADAMS because Tom Hanks liked the book and pushed. Adams letters personalize him unlike most other founders. #
• RT @gordonbelt: I suspect that our most colorful Founding Father would approve of this colorful C-note makeover: bit.ly/brqnYU #
• Remarks and video from OAH panel about paper on "Liberty and Discipline in the Continental Navy": bit.ly/dmssU2 #
• City of Quincy finds letter by John Quincy Adams: bit.ly/aLXDE1 As if we didn't have enough JQA to read. #
• Archivists stump for US bill to provide more funds for…archiving: bit.ly /ct2bFu #
• SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN podcast with John Nagy about spy technology in the Revolutionary War: bit.ly/boeQMJ #
• From C-SPAN, full video of John Nagy's talk on spycraft in America's Revolutionary War: bit.ly/dCZ6Zh #
• Helped NEW YORKER fact-check an article this week—scratch one more thing off the lifetime to-do list. #
• RT @universalhub: Problems at Waltham dam mean large parts of the Charles in Newton could become a fetid mud flat bit.ly/da4HPS #
• CHAINS, Revolutionary War novel by @halseanderson, on short list for Carnegie Medal in UK: bit.ly/9Zoykq #
• RT @gordonbelt: A late Founding Father in the Cherokee campaigns? John Sevier and the Battle of Etowah: bit.ly/cM17Ui #
• From @lucyinglis, something rarely seen in Puritan Boston: cockfighting spurs – bit.ly/aUFYmI #
• Blog listed as resource for college course on Boston history. Some students search it. Some just email me for answers. So I make stuff up. #
• RT @dancohen: @nytimes needs big survey to figure out demographics of Tea Party. @dbamman uses text-mining: bit.ly/94RmzF #
• RT @Boy_Monday: New blog post >> Transatlantic History: Top Ten Books on Eighteenth-Century America bit.ly/d8oEVn #
• RT @gordonbelt: "The Crazy Imaginings of the Texas Board of Education" by Geoffrey R. Stone huff.to/duWA9n #
• RT @Historyday: On this day in 1800 the U.S. Library of Congress was established as John Adams signed legislation to spend $5,000 on books. #

The Philadelphia Connection

Yesterday I reproduced much of the account of the creation of the so-called “Grand Union Flag” from Robert A. Campbell’s Our Flag, published in 1890. That book credited the design to an eccentric, unnamed professor meeting in Cambridge with Gen. George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and two other delegates to the Continental Congress.

Campbell acknowledged, “There is no record of any congressional action upon the report of this committee; nor, indeed, any record of any report made by the committee.” But remember the wife of the meeting’s host, who became secretary of their committee? Campbell wrote that he based his account “upon her notes made at the time, and upon her subsequent correspondence.”

And he claimed to have other papers from her as well:

The following memoranda is in the handwriting of the lady who made the notes of the Franklin Committee-meeting in Cambridge, and in the same hand bears this endorsement:

“By direction of Dr. Franklin, now in Paris, I made this copy of the Professor’s memoranda; and today I delivered the original of the same, and also a sealed letter (marked ‘private’ and tied up with it), into the hands of General Washington May 13, 1777.”

The following scrap in the same handwriting and evidently from a letter—but not showing either date, address nor signature—is full suggestion:

“You know how much interest I have taken in the new flag. It seems that there has been considerable attention given to the matter, in a quiet way, by some of our prominent men; and that the Professor’s design is almost universally pleasing to them. Last Friday afternoon I was invited to be present at a little gathering where the subject would be considered; and you may be sure I was greatly surprised, and not a little confused, to find myself the only woman there, while there was men around a dozen. They read the Professor’s memoranda and discussed the design. That is they one and all approved it. I explained to them how I came to be the custodian of the papers, and why they had not been sooner delivered to General Washington. The matter is finally settled, however, for the very next day the Congress here adopted the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the thirteen Colonies. And now that the matter is brought to such a satisfactory issue, you can not, I am sure, at all imagine how pleased I am with the result, and how proud I am with the accidental and humble part I have had in its consummation.”

This letter evidently refers to a meeting held on the afternoon of Friday, June 13, 1777, the day before congressional action upon the adoption of the Stars and Stripes.

Campbell never stated the name of this woman or her husband, and of course no one has produced those historical documents.

Because they never existed.

Our Flag was reprinted by a small Utah press in 1976. Its editor, in an attempt to correlate all American legends about the creation of the flag, suggested that the woman who wrote those papers, who carried the Professor’s design from Cambridge to Philadelphia, was none other than...Betsy Ross!

In late 1775, she did still have a husband, John Ross. But he was an upholsterer in Philadelphia, not the owner of a large house in Cambridge. Details, details.

“A Startling Historical Paradox”

Boston 1775 celebrates this Independence Day with another peek at comic-book depictions of the Revolutionary period. In this installment, Captain America enters into the nagging controversy over how the first American flag was designed.

Jack Kirby created Captain America with with Joe Simon in 1941, as the U.S. of A. was preparing to enter World War 2. Their comic book redefined the visual language of superhero storytelling. Though Cap wasn’t the first all-American costumed hero, he was the most popular and the longest-lived.

In the early 1960s, as part of its explosive rebirth, Marvel brought Captain America back to life. Kirby was once again the illustrator, and Stan Lee wrote the dialogue. (Lee had started in comics by penning a Captain America story in prose.) In 1970, Kirby left Marvel for its cross-town rival, DC Comics, but five years later he came back. He was thus able to write and illustrate Captain America during America’s Bicentennial, creating stories about the 20th-century icon visiting his country’s past.

Such as when the country was looking for a national flag...
For the rest of the story, I’m passing you over to Bully, who says Comics Oughta Be Fun! On Flag Day last year, Bully offered this peek at Cap’s mind-blowing encounter with Benjamin Franklin. It was published in 1976 and collected by Marvel in Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles.

Hit and Myth in Common-place

Continuing to clean out my “nifty links” file at the end of the year, I realized I never got around to discussing the latest issue of Common-place, the online magazine of early American history.

Leading off this installment is Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s analysis of how the Betsy Ross legend became so popular, prompting such art as the picture on the right, offered by the Library of Congress’s wonderful American Memory super-website. Ulrich reminds us government decisions aren’t that simple:

The stars and stripes that we know today had multiple parents and dozens of siblings. True, on June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress passed a cryptic resolution specifying that “the flag of the thirteen united States be 13 stripes alternate red and white, that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation,” but nobody specified the shape of the flag, the arrangement of the stars, or the ratio of the canton to the field.

In October 1778, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams actually told the Neapolitan ambassador that “the flag of the United States of America consists of thirteen stripes, alternately red, white and blue.” Flag sheets from the 1780s and 1790s do in fact show flags with three-colored stripes. As for Betsy's nifty five-pointed star, a Smithsonian study showed that four-, six-, and eight-pointed stars were far more common.

Ulrich concludes that, “Ironically, Betsy’s story may have survived because there was no actual flag to confirm or undermine it.” (Though there is a suspicious five-pointed paper star, fortuitously “discovered” in Philadelphia years after Betsy Ross had already become a brand name.) I believe Ulrich’s essay may also be found in her latest book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

Also in this Common-place issue is Edward Larkin’s discussion of Loyalists. Unfortunately, Larkin makes the common mistake of misreading John Adams’s 1815 letter to James Lloyd, in which he said one-third of Americans were “averse to the revolution” and another one-third neutral. Careless authors have often taken that comment as referring popular opinion of the American Revolution. However, phrases like “The depredations of France upon our commerce, and her insolence to our ambassadors” make it clear that Adams was writing about American attitudes toward the French Revolution, and the U.S. of A.’s friction with Revolutionary France during his Presidency. That error calls into question some of Larkin’s enterprise, trying to resituate the Loyalists in American culture. Looking back, I see that I raised similar questions last year, too.

Betsy Ross & other storytelling grandmothers

In February 2006 I delivered a paper at the "Heroism, Nationalism & Human Rights" conference at the University of Connecticut. My paper was "Listening to the Old Lady in the Kitchen: How Grandmothers' Tales Became Legends for a Nation." It looked at several examples of episodes in the American Revolution that we can trace back to a grandmother telling stories to children, but no further.

I proposed that the storytelling grandmothers, with a couple of exceptions, were not trying to shape the nation's history in their families' favor. They were trying to entertain, inspire, and, yes, shape the children they helped care for. Yet those children grew up believing fervently in the stories they'd heard, and in the mid- to late 1800s got them into print and into the history books. Drawing on my interest in children's books, I pointed out how many surviving grandmothers' tales match the qualities of good fiction for kids. (That paper was available for downloading through the U. of Conn., but no more.)

Seeking an uncontested example of a Revolutionary story that every American knows yet every American historian knows is poorly supported, I used the legend of Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag. After all, even the American National Biography entry on Ross concedes that she's included because of her latter-day fame, not her documented accomplishments. The Independence Hall Association's USHistory.org website still argues for the Ross legend, but its logic is less reliable than its transcriptions of the family accounts.

Shortly before the conference, and too late for me to do anything about it, Al Young alerted me to the discussion of the Betsy Ross story in David Hackett Fischer's tome Liberty and Freedom. (I say "tome" because of the book's weight and cost, not because of its style; it's hard to afford but not hard to read.) Fischer argues that Ross did sew a flag for George Washington, as her descendants said she'd told them—but not the flag she's credited with. Instead, Fischer posits that she sewed Washington's headquarters flag. I find some parts of that argument persuasive, others weak. In any event, I now see enough reason for not doubting the Betsy Ross legend that it can't be my uncontested example anymore. Proposals for alternatives are welcome!