Tapping into Revolutionary Networks

At the Junto blog, Jordan E. Taylor interviewed Framingham State professor Joseph Adelman about his new book, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789.

Many books have studied the political printing of the Revolutionary era through biography of exceptional figures like Benjamin Franklin or Isaiah Thomas, or through studies of how political essays were written and spread. But how ordinary printers did the work to put those essays into readers’ hands hasn’t gotten so much attention.

Adelman told Taylor:

To understand the materiality of these texts and how they operated in the real world, it is helpful to actually see them in physical form. In the introduction I work through how printers laid out a weekly newspaper, which is difficult to see through a view of single pages in PDF form. I also was able to see (literally!) some important developments in newspaper runs by being able to see the size and quality of the paper, for example. . . .

As for my favorite find, I’d have to say the story from the Stamp Act crisis about Boston radicals who in February 1766 tried a piece of stamped paper for treason and then ceremonially hanged and burned it. It may be my favorite story of the entire Revolution, both because it’s so Boston and because it encapsulates so much about how Americans in the 1760s viewed print and paper (it could commit crimes!).

Here’s how Adelman described the main argument of Revolutionary Networks:

Much of the book examines how printers (and their collaborators) created both formal and informal mechanisms to circulate news and information, through the post office, committees, and the networks that printers developed—with one another, with political leaders, with economic elites, and others.

A second thread that runs through the book is the changing conception of freedom of the press, and especially its relationship to the business practices of the printing trade. Dating back to the early eighteenth century and Benjamin Franklin’s “Apology for Printers,” printers portrayed themselves as mechanics who set type and pulled the press, but remained outside of the political debate. The Revolution brought that to an end. Independence also forced printers, and political leaders to reframe their thinking about the press from its position as opposition against a distant government to its standing as a constituent part of the new republics.

Finally, the thing that ties everything together is the overlap between commercial and political interests. It seems a truism to say that out loud, but for printers those concerns interacted in complicated ways, both across the group as a whole and for individuals over time.

Taylor’s review of Revolutionary Networks for the Junto is here. We can also hear Joe Adelman speaking about his book on the podcasts Ben Franklin’s World and New Books in American Studies.

“An especially clever piece” in Children of Colonial America

While preparing for a teachers’ workshop next week, I came across for the first time Judith Ridner’s review of Children in Colonial America, a volume edited by James Marten and Philip J. Greven, for the journal Pennsylvania History.

You’ll forgive me for quoting a passage:

The volume concludes with an especially clever piece by J. L. Bell about the politicization of youth in pre-Revolutionary Boston. Fifty-two percent of Boston’s population in 1765, he notes, were white youth under the age of sixteen (204). Yet, when scholars write of that city’s famous series of pre-revolutionary protests, they rarely acknowledge the unique contributions children and youths made to the crowd. Bell corrects that shortcoming. He describes the functions of Boston’s youth gangs and also analyzes the symbolic importance of eleven-year-old Christopher Seider at the Boston Massacre. For him, the actions of Boston’s youth demonstrate how the Revolution was about lived experience, not ideology.

That’s Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 76 (2009), 379-80.

Ridner is now a professor of history at Mississippi State University and author most recently of The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People. I’m grateful for her kind words.

Tracing the Life of Dr. Joseph Warren

For decades we had only two solid biographies of Dr. Joseph Warren, both well researched for their times but showing their age: Richard Frothingham’s Life and Times of Joseph Warren (1865) and John Cary’s Joseph Warren: Physician, Politician, Patriot (1964).

Then in the last decade two new biographies have come out. Both are products of years of parallel research that uncovered new evidence and proposed new understandings about Warren.

The first was Samuel Forman’s Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty from 2011. I met Sam after that book appeared, and we’ve worked together on topics like a proper site for a Dr. Warren monument in downtown Boston, how the late doctor’s mattresses ended up at Gen. George Washington’s headquarters, and the real story of Deborah Champion.

This year brought Christian Di Spigna’s Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero, a product of decades of research. I met Christian in Williamsburg a couple of years ago, became friends, and gave him feedback on his manuscript before publication.

Christian is speaking at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Wednesday, 7 November. As of now that event is sold out. He’ll be at the Museums on the Green in Falmouth on Thursday, 8 November, and the David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania on Thursday, 6 December.

Warren’s life lends itself to an exciting biography. One of the challenges of the form is that people are much better documented after they become famous, leaving relatively little contemporaneous evidence about the actions that made them famous and a lot of evidence about later, uneventful years. But the shape of Warren’s life is like the graph of rising action for a novel: it slants up with the Revolution in Boston, accelerates in 1774, and reaches a dramatic climax at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

All biographers of Dr. Warren seem to be inspired by his heroism and quick to give him the lion’s share of credit for political projects he contributed to. I’m skeptical about some such judgments, such as that Warren wrote the Mucius Scævola essays, directed the Boston Tea Party, or was posed to become a national political figure (though even contemporaries like Peter Oliver made that claim). Warren was still a young man in a society that valued seniority and deference to group actions.

Of course, we have no way of knowing what the doctor might have accomplished in his forties and beyond. He shouldered more and more responsibilities in late 1774 and early 1775. In those months Boston’s older political leaders became busy with continental affairs (Samuel Adams, Thomas Cushing), left town (Dr. Thomas Young, Josiah Quincy, Jr.), died (William Molineux), or were traduced (Dr. Benjamin Church). I think the story of Warren’s political career isn’t that he was crucial to every Boston Whig effort from the mid-1760s on but that he grew into the position of being crucial in 1775.

Forman and Di Spigna disagree on some questions about Warren, emphasizing different pieces of evidence or interpreting them differently. Both books are worth reading and considering, and both add to our knowledge about a man who became vitally important to Revolutionary Boston.

Meeting George Washington’s Indispensable Men

Back when I was researching Gen. George Washington’s life and work in Cambridge for the National Park Service, one of the books I drew on heavily was Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s George Washington’s Indispensable Men.

This is a study of the commander’s military secretaries and aides de camp throughout the Revolutionary War. It starts with a useful definition of its subject because descendants and local histories seem to have named almost any officer who was ever in a council with Washington as an aide. Lefkowitz focused on the men whom Washington officially appointed in his daily orders. Then he added Caleb Gibbs of the headquarters guard and Martha Washington, both of whom can be identified as helping with the headquarters paperwork.

And that paperwork is a major theme of the book. Early on Washington learned that he didn’t need young men to dash messages around battlefields.  (See George Baylor.) Instead, he needed penmen to help keep up with a vast correspondence directing an army spread out over thirteen governments. Washington quickly came to prefer professional men: lawyers (e.g., Robert Hanson Harrison), experienced merchants (William Palfrey), and even doctors (James McHenry).

One result of that preference is that it’s a mistake to think of Washington’s most famous aide, Alexander Hamilton, as a typical staff officer. He was younger and less established than most of his colleagues. Each of those men gets a thorough biographical profile in this book as Lefkowitz moves through the war, discussing how the work at headquarters developed in response to changing needs.

And speaking of Hamilton, I got to meet Arthur Lefkowitz last year. I suggested that Hamilton’s new Broadway hotness might help the book. He took that message back to folks at the publisher, Stackpole, and I’m pleased to report that George Washington’s Indispensable Men is now coming out in paperback—with the new subtitle Alexander Hamilton, Tench Tilghman, and the Aides-De-Camp Who Helped Win American Independence. I recommend it for anyone wanting to know about how Gen. Washington learned to manage the war.

Reviewing the “Townshend Moment”

A few weeks back, I attended a talk at the Colonial Society of Massachusetts by Prof. Patrick Griffin about his new book, The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century.

Here’s a review of The Townshend Moment by William Anthony Hay for the Claremont Review of Books.

Griffin posits that the rise of power in 1767 of two brothers—George and Charles Townshend—was a crucial juncture in the late-eighteenth-century British Empire. George, who had succeeded to the title of Viscount Townshend in 1764, took the job of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Simultaneously, Charles became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the government’s principal voice in the House of Commons.

Though the Townshends consulted closely with each other, they had grown up apart and were quite different men. Hay summarizes:

The brothers were the scions of a failed aristocratic marriage. After their parents separated, the eldest, George, was raised by his father while their mother raised Charles. George, “brave, clever and not devoid of good feeling,” was intemperate in his judgements, impatient with authority, and exaggerated his superiors’ faults. Charles’s talent matched his ambition, but Griffin describes him as fickle, uncertain which political faction to join, and thereby unwilling to be pinned down. The confident and well-connected brothers relied on each other almost exclusively.

In 1767 the goal they shared was to strengthen the authority of the London government over its dependent territories, both across the Irish Sea and across the Atlantic.

The Townshend Act(s), named after Charles, not only instituted tariffs on certain goods shipped to North America but also established that the primary purpose of those funds was to pay salaries for royal appointees in North America, this insulating them from local popular pressure. Charles Townshend died suddenly in late 1767, but the British government remained committed to that model, despite widespread protest from American colonists.

George, Lord Townshend, also ran into opposition from the local legislature—in his case, the Irish parliament. He clearly felt it didn’t deserve as much deference as the Parliament in London. He lasted five years in that job, returning to Ireland in 1773 to fight a duel with an Irish peer. After that, Lord Townshend amassed additional offices, military titles, and a higher peerage but never seems to have exercised as much authority again.

Given the brothers’ short tenure, I’m not sure how influential the Townshends really were. How far ahead of other British ministers were they, and how much did the programs they instituted depend on them? Indeed, the Townshends’ biggest influence appears to have been the antithesis to their plans—the pushback from locals who felt these new rules turned them into second-class subjects.

Hay concludes his review by noting the eventual results of the “Townshend moment” in 1767:

Neither Townshend brother would have intended the ultimate outcomes of their reform projects. Instead of rationalizing empire to make it more governable, those efforts challenged the underlying assumptions that had sustained order. Their reforms unearthed frustrations that ended up pulling the periphery of empire apart. Lord Townshend, who lived until 1807, saw the colonies win their independence. Irish patriots gained fragile autonomy in 1782, but failed to resolve contradictions in their own regime that made it ungovernable. Union with Britain in 1800 traded the fragile autonomy for the benefits of full participation.

Still, it’s always valuable to consider America’s Revolutionary conflict from the perspective of the British government and the men, however briefly, at its head.

Launch of A Single Blow in Lexington, 15 Apr.

On Sunday, 15 April, Phillip Greenwalt and Robert Orrison will launch their new book A Single Blow: The Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Beginning of the American Revolution, April 19, 1775 at the Cary Memorial Library in Lexington.

A Single Blow is one of the first titles in a new series growing out of the Emerging Revolutionary War Era website. It aims to do what the same publisher’s Emerging Civil War guidebooks do for that later conflict, distilling the latest historical findings into a succinct narrative for readers interested in more than a surface treatment.

As Gene Procknow wrote at the Journal of the American Revolution about another volume in the same series, this book is “more comprehensive than the freely available tour guides and less detailed than a full scholarly account of the battles,…best used by historically inquisitive visitors…or by a reader new to the subject seeking a cogent overview of the battles.” Each paperback volume is short for easy portability and contains many photographs, yet each covers a lot of ground.

The authors have years of experience leading the public around battlefields. Phil Greenwalt, who holds an M.A. in American History from George Mason University, works for the National Park Service at George Washington Birthplace National Monument and Thomas Stone National Historic Site. Rob Orrison received his master’s in Public History from George Mason, and he oversees operations at a large municipal historic site in northern Virginia.

The authors’ book talk and signing is scheduled to start at 1:30 P.M. at the town library. It is co-sponsored by the Lexington Historical Society and the Lexington Visitors Center. The whole event is free and open to the public.

“A meticulously researched study unspoiled by pedantry”

The Journal of the American Revolution has just shared a very nice review of The Road to Concord from the spring 2018 issue of Army History.

J. L. Bell’s The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War tackles a familiar subject—how Thomas Gage’s attempts to prevent a revolution ended up provoking one—but makes the story feel fresh by revealing how drastically the theft of four brass guns from Boston affected the British general’s judgment. . . .

The Road to Concord is a rare treat—a meticulously researched study unspoiled by pedantry. . . . The admirable standard that he has achieved in his first book augurs well for the other Journal of the American Revolution-sponsored books set to follow in its wake.

Check out those titles here.

The reviewer is Prof. Gregory J. W. Urwin of Temple University, who has written about several American wars and is currently researching a social history of Gen. Cornwallis’s campaign in the south.

Through some economic magic, Amazon is currently selling the hardcover edition of The Road to Concord at a discount of 60%. Heck, at that price I bought four copies for myself (the maximum available to any one customer.)

“Very silly questions very foolishly answered”

At All Things Georgian, Sarah Murden has shared some amusing extracts (part 1 and part 2) from a 1759 book titled The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement: In eighty-eight questions, with their answers, on love and gallantry.

Murden likens the book’s format to “agony aunt” letters or, as we in the U.S. of A. call them, advice columns. The extracts cover such topics as unexpected pregnancy, being in love with two sisters, whether to read a spouse’s mail, and what gender the Devil is.

The snarkiness of the queries and replies got me curious enough to look for an online copy of this book to verify its existence. The postings did appear around 1 April, after all.

I failed to find one, reflecting how few copies of The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement made their way to and stayed in university libraries. (Harvard has a copy that was never digitized by Google Books. Another is at the University of Pennsylvania, donated by Prof. John C. Mendenhall.)

I did find an assessment of the book in The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, edited by Tobias Smollett. The questions and answers were printed along with a couple of equally risqué novellas called The Adventures of Sophia and The History of Frederick and Caroline. The reviewer sniffed:

The first and larger part of this curious performance is, it seems, a hachis [i.e., hash] from the Athenian oracle, consisting of very silly questions very foolishly answered. Of these we shall say nothing further than that our author does by no means seem qualified to reanimate the dead. We might observe, that the Athenian oracle is not only silent and dead, but damned likewise: for that reason, perhaps, it is deprived of rest, and walks—But, a word to the wise, de mortuis nil nisi bonum [don’t speak ill of the dead].

Another magazine, the Monthly Review, said straight out that those questions and answers were “Purloin’d, as the purloiner indeed honestly confesses from two old dull books called the Athenian Oracle and the British Apollo.” The first of those books was in print by 1703, the second by 1726. Together they came in several volumes and promised more than “two thousand answers to curious questions.”

The Monthly Review evidently thought the content of The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement came out of those earlier books, but my test samples didn’t find any overlap. So it’s possible that the later book was a parody, or hash, of the established genre with a more modern attitude.

The Critical Review’s critical review of the novellas was:

The latter part, which, if we may believe the editor, contains two genuine stories, is a heap of dull absurdities, without invention, humour, or probability. In the first dialogue, a woman of the town relates to her companion, as how she was debauched by the master of a ship, married to a Spaniard who lived at La Vera Cruz not far from Acapulco, shipwrecked upon a desolate island in the South Sea, which proved to be the seat of a powerful empire, ravished by an Indian, promoted to the rank of favourite sultana to the emperor, afterwards wedded to a nobleman of that country, and finally found by accident and brought back to England in a ship commanded by the same man who had deprived her of her virginity.

The second story relates to a young gentleman who met with his own sister as a lady of pleasure, and did not recognize her until they had passed the night together. The sister drowned herself in despair: the brother lost his wits, and the author has none to lose——Judge then if this production is worth three shillings.

This item appeared in the December 1758 issue of the Critical Review. Likewise, the Monthly Review notice was in the November issue. Since The Gentleman and Lady of Pleasure’s Amusement is evidently dated 1759, the printers must either have slipped an advance copy to the magazines or had such success that they quickly issued a second edition.

Colonial Comics “make history come alive in a potent time”

For the School Library Journal website, Johanna Draper Carlson reviewed the second volume of Colonial Comics: New England, focusing on the years 1750 to 1775.

Carlson wrote:

This anthology of 18 historical comic stories aims “to focus on the people and events that tend to get ignored in American history classes.” It’s an admirable goal, and one that succeeds, opening readers’ eyes to lesser-known but involving figures and events.

Stories such as

• “The Devil and Silence Dogood”, by J.L. Bell and Braden Lamb, humorously shows Benjamin Franklin’s early days as a printer’s devil (apprentice) and writer of satire
• “A Lonely Line”, by Sarah Winifred Searle and Carey Pietsch, introduces Molly Ockett, a Native American and Maine legend known for her knowledge of medicine
• “The Newport Riots”, by James Maddox and Rob Dumo, portrays the coming changes and public protest from the scared perspective of crown officials
• “The Grand Illumination”, by Kevin Cooney and Matt Dembicki, illustrates how it’s possible to tweak authority while pretending to honor it in the light of the repeal of the Stamp Act
• “The Stranger’s Corpse”, by J.L. Bell and Jesse Lonergan, tells of the first American casualty during the Boston Massacre
• “The Spunker Club”, by Lora Innes, digresses from politics to look at the mishaps of a group of Harvard medical students trying to option a corpse for their studies
• “Join, or Die!”, by Josh O’Neill and James Comey, sheds light on the first, best-known American political cartoon

bring to life the period and make history come alive in a potent time of pending rebellion. Coincidentally, it’s a particularly timely period in analogy, as debates continue today around whose voice should count in determining the future and politics of the country.

These stories encourage empathy with a variety of viewpoints, as we see and follow lives, whether humorous or tragic. Each story has a text introduction to put them into context and explain any background needed, which aids in comprehension and understanding why the story was selected.

You may have noticed my name a couple of times in there. I scripted two of those stories for some great Massachusetts artists, and contributed research and editorial input on other stories.

A Checklist of Carrier Verses

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition at the turn of each year to share at least one carrier verse or address.

Back in eighteenth-century America, apprentice printers would make those flyers and distribute them to customers around New Year’s Day as a way of asking for tips. The flyers offered a poetic review of the past year’s news, wishes for the customers’ prosperity, and reminders of the tough life of a newspaper carrier.

In 2000, Gerald D. McDonald (who that year turned ninety-five), Stuart C. Sherman, and Mary T. Russo published A Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses, 1720-1820. I treated myself to a copy this holiday season.

This book lists 1,001 carrier verses known from broadsides or republication in newspapers or books. The earliest appeared in New York in 1720, copying an English tradition. The custom continued after 1820, at least as late as the U.S. Civil War. The German-language newspapers of Pennsylvania provided their own examples. The book also lists 61 examples from Canada in both English and French.

As a bibliographic checklist, this book gives the basic details of each carrier address, including first lines if the text survives, but no more. Illustrations show several examples in full. That doesn’t replace the Readex Early American Imprints database that I used to be able to mine for interesting addresses, but it’s given me enough leads to fill a few more years.

A fraction of the addresses name the newspaper carriers who delivered them, and may have written them as well. Seven years ago I quoted the example from the Essex Gazette’s Job Weeden and traced his subsequent career. Five years ago I explored the life of Polly Beach of the American Telegraphe. Alas, I couldn’t find out anything more about Tobias Bond and Benjamin Welch, who delivered the Maryland Journal in 1780.

In a few cases, this checklist told me, famous authors wrote the verses for the carriers. Not just printers who became well known like Benjamin Franklin (he gets credit for the early Pennsylvania Gazette verses, but of course we give him credit for everything). Rather, gentleman poets like John Trumbull and Joel Barlow tried out the form. So I’m going to share one of those examples.

TOMORROW: A New Year’s greeting from the “Poet of the Revolution.”

Receiving A Cold Welcome

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America by Sam White looks at early American history outside my usual timeframe. I picked it up looking for answers to a question that’s puzzled me for a while.

White focuses on the first decade of the seventeenth century when European powers made permanent settlements in North America. The Spanish established Santa Fe to go with their Florida outpost of St. Augustine. The French founded Québec. And the British, after failures at Roanoke and Popham, just barely created a permanent base at Jamestown. (In the following decades, the Dutch would come to Manhattan and the Swedes to Delaware, but they’re not part of this story.)

That decade of 1600-1609 was at the trough of the Little Ice Age that lasted from about 1300 to about 1850. “One of the steepest declines in Northern Hemisphere temperatures in perhaps thousands of years took place in the half century leading up to the founding of Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe,” White writes. In fact, due to volcanic eruptions, the climate was even harsher than that around 1600, with cold winters, cool summers, and droughts. “The timing of this volcanic weather could not have been worse for European expeditions in North America.”

That concatenation has been well established. It exacerbated the European explorers’ bafflement at how the North American climate didn’t conform to their expectations. Québec is well south of Paris, but its winters are colder—yet summers in North America were hotter than in Europe. On top of that mystery, White writes, the Europeans were encountering conditions that were worse than a few decades before when the Spanish first explored the Americas.

My question was, given that the Europeans arriving in North America in the 1600s encountered the most difficult conditions in decades, why did those settlements succeed? Isn’t that like finding the best time to climb a mountain is during a blizzard?

White presents several factors to explain that pattern, one of which I’d thought of and others that were new to me. First, the Little Ice Age also put enough pressure on the European powers to make those societies and the people in them a little more desperate, more willing to take chances across the ocean. “Climate-driven sustenance crises in France and England left some in those countries looking for ways to dispose of hungry, poor, and vagrant subjects.” In the same way, evolutionary leaps take place when species are under pressure to survive, not when they’re happily propagating as they are.

In particular, the harsh conditions leading up to 1600 weakened the Spanish Empire through famine and epidemics in Castile. The Spanish crown had enjoyed over a century of gold and silver from South America, but forays into North America hadn’t been so lucrative. With resources at home becoming scarcer, the Spaniards were less inclined to guard North America against their European rivals to the north.

Furthermore, the changing climate also affected the North American powers, albeit in less documented ways. The Native nations experienced droughts and harsh winters, as well as the diseases they hadn’t yet developed immunity to. So for the English and French, there were openings in the early 1600s despite the climate.

Finally, White notes the importance of chance events. We wouldn’t be talking about Jamestown as the seed of Britain’s North American empire unless a resupply fleet had arrived off the coast at just the right time in 1610. Samuel de Champlain survived calamities at two French settlements and learned from them in order to establish a third. As White points out, even in the Little Ice Age North America wasn’t inherently unlivable; the new humans from Europe needed to survive just long enough to adapt.

The Legendary Words of Penelope Barker

Several recent books and websites quote Penelope Barker (shown here, courtesy of the Edenton Historical Commission), reputed organizer of the “Edenton Tea Party,” as making this statement about the event:

Maybe it has only been men who have protested the king up to now. That only means we women have taken too long to let our voices be heard. We are signing our names to a document, not hiding ourselves behind costumes like the men in Boston did at their tea party. The British will know who we are.

I saw those words quoted on Twitter, and they sounded anachronistic to me. The phrase “tea party” wasn’t applied to Boston’s destruction of the tea until the 1820s. The emphasis on “costumes” likewise came later than the 1770s. British colonists still considered themselves to be among “The British” in 1774—they were fighting for what they saw as traditional British rights. Lastly, “like the men in Boston did” should be “as the men in Boston did,” though I can’t claim the alternative grammar wasn’t used in the eighteenth century.

So I asked about the source of the quotation and did some digital digging. Two of the sources I looked at—a master’s thesis from Liberty University and the Visit Edenton site—cited as a source this page about Penelope Barker from the National Women’s History Museum, as viewed in the spring of 2013.

However, that page was revised by Debra Michals in 2015, and it now doesn’t include the quotation in question. (The Wayback Machine was no help in finding earlier versions of the same page. Incidentally, there is no physical National Women’s History Museum; the website is part of an effort to build one in Washington, D.C.)

As far as I can tell, the words attributed to Penelope Barker first appeared in the book Heroines of the American Revolution: America’s Founding Mothers, written by Diane Silcox-Jarrett, published by the Green Angel Press of Chapel Hill in 1998. (Several webpages render the name of the press as “Green Angle Press”; that error is a clue to recognizing which pages quote previous accounts rather than going back to the book itself.) Heroines of the American Revolution is the only title that shows up on an Amazon search for “Green Angel Press,” but Worldcat also lists a 1997 book on kinesiology.

Heroines of the American Revolution is an illustrated book for children. It was reprinted by Scholastic in 2000 for the school market. On her website Silcox-Jarrett describes herself as an author of “creative nonfiction books for young readers.” What might “creative nonfiction” mean in this context? In 1998 School Library Journal’s reviewer wrote about Heroines of the American Revolution:

Unfortunately, undocumented dialogue and feelings appear in almost every chapter. . . . An attractive offering—as long as children are aware that, despite its Dewey classification, this is not truly nonfiction.

And it’s not just children who have been caught unaware. Lured by the promise of a rare political statement from an eighteenth-century American woman, perhaps fooled by the book’s North Carolina pedigree, some writers have accepted that Penelope Barker speech from Heroines of the American Revolution as authentic. But it’s “not truly nonfiction.”

The October 1774 event that’s come to be called the Edenton Tea Party was real. Penelope Barker signed her name to that gathering’s public statement as part of a continent-wide resistance to Parliament’s Coercive Acts. She may well have been the main organizer of the event, as tradition says. But we don’t know what she individually had to say about it.

Shorto on Revolution Song in Boston, 30 Nov.

Back in 2009, Ray Raphael contributed a “guest blogger” posting here about his book Founders, which traces the history of the Revolution through seven individuals.

Ray wrote: “One of the characters is a given: George Washington. There is absolutely no way we can tell the larger story of the war and the nation’s founding without him. We know this. But who else?” That question prompted a couple of days of discussion of candidates.

Now journalist and historian Russell Shorto has taken up a similar challenge with his book Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom. It retells the Revolution through six figures:

• George Washington, of course.
• Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for North America from November 1775 to February 1782.
• Cornplanter, war chief of the Senecas starting in the French and Indian War.
• Abraham Yates, shoemaker, lawyer, and politician.
• Margaret Coghlan, daughter of British Maj. Thomas Moncrieffe.
• Venture Smith, former slave and father of a Continental soldier.

Coghlan brings some scandalous glamour to the project since she and Aaron Burr were reportedly an item early in the war and she later became a courtesan in London. In Revolutionary Ladies, Philip Young presented evidence that Coghlan died years before her Memoir was published, suggesting that at least some of its tales were fraudulent. Shorto argues instead that Coghlan faked her death and fled to Paris. So that’s interesting right there.

Shorto will present Revolution Song at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Thursday, 30 November. The event will start with a reception at 5:30 P.M., and Shorto will speak and sign books starting at 6:00. Registration costs $10.

Boles on Jefferson in Boston, 16 Nov.

Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty is a new biography of the third President by John B. Boles, a professor of history at Rice University. He was co-editor of the essay collection Seeing Jefferson Anew.

Jonathan Yardley, longtime book critic for the Washington Post, really likes this book. How much? He recently wrote in that newspaper:

“Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty” is perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president. Boles…has spent many years studying Jefferson’s native American South in all its mysteries, contradictions, follies and outrages, as well as its unique contributions to the national culture and literature. This biography is the culmination of a long, distinguished career. I admire it so passionately that, almost 2 1/2 years into a happy retirement, I had no choice except to violate my pledge never again to write another book review.

Boles will speak at the Massachusetts Historical Society this Thursday, 16 November. The event will start with a reception at 5:30, followed by the author’s remarks at 6:00 and book-signing to follow. The cost is $10 per person, free for M.H.S. members and fellows. Reserve a seat through this page.

A Presidential Plodder

Plodding Through the Presidents is Howard Dorre’s ongoing blog about reading Presidential biographies, starting with Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man and getting as far as, well, Andrew Jackson. So the important ones, really.

Dorre has a delightfully irreverent attitude toward this process, as shown in his discussion of Harlow Giles Unger’s treatment of two successive chief executives:

The Monroe Doctrine, in Unger’s words, “declared an end to foreign colonization in the New World and warned the Old World that the United States would no longer tolerate foreign incursions in the Americas.” It basically told Europe to stay out of the western hemisphere, and it still has impacts on our foreign policy today.

It’s widely known that [James] Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, had a major role in authoring the policy as part of Monroe’s annual address to Congress in 1823. But Unger didn’t see it that way. He wrote:

“Contrary to the writings of some historians, Monroe’s proclamation was entirely his own – not Adams’s. The assertion that Adams authored the “Monroe Doctrine” is not only untrue; it borders on the ludicrous by implying that President Monroe was little more than a puppet manipulated by another’s hand. Such assertions show little insight into the presidency itself and the type of man who aspires to and assumes that office; indeed, they denigrate the character, the intellect, the intensity, and the sense of power that drive American presidents.”

Not only does he make a wildly contrarian claim, but he also shits all over most historians in the process. And his main point seems to be that only a president could write the Monroe Doctrine – certainly not John Quincy Adams, even though he became president just a year later.

Three years after publishing his Monroe biography, Unger released John Quincy Adams. His thoughts on the Monroe Doctrine’s authorship seem to have magically evolved, as if he cared more about lionizing whoever his subject was than being consistent.

Unger wrote that JQA “wrote the core provision of the Monroe Doctrine” which the president included “verbatim, in his annual message.” He went on to say that “Monroe embraced John Quincy’s political philosophy and formally closed the Western Hemisphere to further colonization.”

So, according to Unger, it’s ludicrous to think John Quincy Adams “authored” the Monroe Doctrine but he did “write” it. And even though it was based on Adams’s own political philosophy that Monroe embraced, the doctrine was entirely Monroe’s and not Adams’s.

There are also postings drawn from other books, inquiries into Presidential myths and mysteries, and personal history, such as how Dorre’s interest in serial killers spurred him to investigate J. Q. Adams’s childhood reading.

Daen on Van Horn’s The Power of Objects

Laurel Daen recently reviewed Jennifer Van Horn’s The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America for H-Net. Here’s an interesting extract from that review:

Van Horn uses portraits of young women in Charleston that feature masks and dresses worn to masquerade balls to consider women’s contested relationship with civility and changing imperial identity in the 1760s. Although no masked galas were ever held in America, colonists knew about them due to their popularity in London. Charlestonian women wore masquerade garb in their portraits, Van Horn suggests, not only to display their awareness of British trends, but also to assert a degree of sexual power that was otherwise prohibited in polite society.

Masquerades were associated with licentiousness. By adopting the style in their portraits, young women celebrated the phase of their lives in which they engaged in courtships and thus retained some control over the future social networks of their families. Elite men argued that women’s masked likenesses exposed the passions that threatened their civility, but they nevertheless tolerated the trend, knowing that women’s urges would soon be contained within marriage.

Van Horn also notes how the masquerade served as a symbol of the impending imperial conflict. While patriots used masks to signify British duplicity and represented America as a courting woman who held power over her suitor, British military officers literally employed masks to transmit secret information and loyalists depicted America as a bride to Britain.

Daen also highlights Van Horn’s discussion of the wooden legs that Gouverneur Morris used—different styles in Europe and in America.

Exploring Fault Lines in the Constitution

In the coming weeks, Cynthia and Sanford Levinson will speak in various Massachusetts venues about their new book, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today.

This book is an exploration of the U.S. Constitution designed for readers aged ten to eighteen. School Library Journal said:

The book functions differently than a straightforward explanatory text on the U.S. Constitution. Rather, the authors examine the fissures and issues that arise when it comes to the actual application of the Constitution: Why does a small state have the same power in the Senate as a state with exponentially higher population? How can certain stipulations in the Constitution deter otherwise popular legislation? The text discusses current conflicts, such as the irony of “Taxation Without Representation” in regard to Washington, DC, and Senate filibusters that kill potentially popular legislation before it can even be voted on. 

Cynthia Levinson is an author of many nonfiction books for children, including We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March and Watch Out for Flying Kids! Sanford Levinson is Professor of Government and holds the Garwood Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin. They are married, and this is their first book together.

The Levinsons’ local appearances include:

• Saturday, 9 September, 3:00 P.M., at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
• Sunday, 1 October, 3:00 P.M. at the Concord Bookshop in Concord.
• Wednesday, 25 October, 11:30 A.M. at the Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge; this panel discussion also includes Jennifer Hochschild, Amy Shine Jones, and Dan Covino.

“Colonial hijinks, high political drama, and Revolutionary War heroes”

Daniel Ford, author of the upcoming novel Sid Sanford Lives!, wrote a very nice review of my book on the website for the Writers’ Bone podcast. It’s part of a roundup headlined “Books That Should Be on Your Radar”:

J.L. Bell is a Massachusetts writer who runs the terrific history blog, “Boston 1775.” His book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, features everything that makes Bell’s site great: accessible writing style, innovative historical storytelling, and a fresh perspective on events that occurred nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago. The Road to Concord focuses on how four stolen cannons (that British general Thomas Gage was desperately, and perhaps foolishly, trying to recover) may have helped spark the American Revolution. The narrative features colonial hijinks, high political drama, and Revolutionary War heroes not often discussed alongside Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. The Road to Concord is refreshingly original and structured like a thriller. Learning about what led the British and the colonies to war has never been this much fun.

I was particularly gratified by the “structured like a thriller” line. I really did borrow all the tricks I could from fiction without deviating from the historical record, such as ending chapters with cliffhangers. Of course, it helps when the narrative is actually about stealing cannon from an armory under guard inside an occupied town and about spies hunting for those cannon in an unfriendly countryside.

Looking at Ben’s Revolution

This spring brought us a new book from Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Bunker Hill and Valiant Ambition, and Wendell Minor, jacket designer for John Adams and 1776. Unlike those books, Ben’s Revolution is written for young readers.

In its format, Ben’s Revolution is a rarity among recent children’s books, almost a unicorn. It’s a “picture storybook.” At sixty-four pages it’s twice the length of a typical picture book today (through a lot of picture books used to be that length). That means the publisher invested in about twice as many illustrations, and paid twice the printing and paper costs. The book’s word count is similarly supersized, far above the 500 words aspiring picture-book authors are told to limit themselves to.

Penguin was no doubt willing to go beyond the normal parameters of a modern picture book because of the names involved: Philbrick, a bestselling author; Minor, a highly respected artist; and the Revolutionary War, a staple of American school curricula. In fact, that probably wasn’t a difficult calculation at all. But picture-book authors without such a track record shouldn’t take Ben’s Revolution as a model.

In content, Philbrick built this book around the experiences of Benjamin Russell, subject of several Boston 1775 postings. Young Ben starts the book as a schoolboy in Boston, serves time as an off-the-books clerk for a provincial military company in the first months of the war, and finishes as an apprentice to printer Isaiah Thomas. Russell actually witnessed some of the fighting on 19 April and 17 June 1775, and those stories provide the backbone of the book.

Philbrick also uses two anecdotes of unnamed boys from this time, casting Ben Russell as the protagonist. He becomes one of the boys who demanded that Gen. Frederick Haldimand preserve their coasting run down School Street. He’s the boy who hears Col. Percy’s musicians playing “Yankee Doodle” and tells the earl that he’ll dance to that tune by sundown. In addition, the book gives us a look at such events as the Tea Party, the shots on Lexington common, and the British evacuation of Boston without straining to put Ben on the scene.

All those moments are handsomely painted by Minor, who in addition to designing iconic jackets has also illustrated many children’s books, specializing in Americana and nature. A few years back Minor illustrated a biography of Henry Knox which I found beautiful but riddled with errors. This time my only big quibble about the art is that Minor depicts Ben and his young friends with the haircuts of today’s boys—a fairly common approach to portraying the period, whenever an artist works. As I’ve noted, the fashion for boys in the 1770s was suspiciously close to a mullet.

The nature of Ben Russell’s actions, and of how he and others through Philbrick and Minor chose to tell his story, means there are no female characters in the story. Even Ben’s mother is mentioned only from afar. And there are very few females visible in the art. Likewise, Russell didn’t say anything about the black or Native soldiers in the provincial camp, and I spotted only two darker faces in the pictures’ backgrounds, one in the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

I should note that Nat Philbrick and I have shared conversations and manuscripts about Revolutionary Boston for a while. Ben’s Revolution therefore reflects the argument I made in The Road to Concord that Gen. Thomas Gage triggered the war by sending troops “on a secret mission to seize the cannon that the patriots had hidden in Concord.” I now have hopes that the next generation of Americans will grow up with that story instead of the assumption that the British were hunting John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

Bergman on Zilberstein’s A Temperate Empire

Last month James Bergman reviewed Anya Zilberstein’s A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, for the H-Net.

European settlers found the climate of North America to be more extreme than what they had known at home (often while sticking to a smaller range of latitudes). Winters were colder, summers hotter. But, many declared, the New World was becoming more healthy by the decade!

Here are some extracts from the review:

Zilberstein’s book comes amid what she calls a “spate” of efforts to situate the early modern colonial project in the climate of the Little Ice Age, and indeed, such studies as Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis and work by Dagomar Degroot and Sam White have taken climate from a historical backdrop, a condition merely to be overcome, to a historical actor in its own right. The atmosphere, these works effectively argue, should not just be used for atmosphere.

Zilberstein’s contribution to this literature is to situate these efforts in the scientific debates among elites about natural history. She finds that these debates were inextricable from the colonial project. Boundaries between biogeographic regions were often conflated with political boundaries. Networks of correspondence about natural history were often bound up in political and cultural connections between elites on both sides of the Atlantic. And settler colonialism was often “naturalized” by describing the way different racial bodies were suited to different climatic regions (p. 95).

Zilberstein focuses on the American Northeast, an area that would now encompass New England and Nova Scotia, but whose boundaries were much more fluid and contested in the eighteenth century. This focus permits a rich treatment of the archival material she has amassed, which includes promotional material, government documents, correspondence between elites, and treatises on the environments of the different colonies. From these texts emerge an extremely open-ended and heavily debated understanding of the climate of different regions. This revolved around several different questions: Where was the “temperate” zone? Who could settle there? And were the climates of the American colonies becoming more “temperate”?

Zilberstein traces the substantial instability of the basis for these questions, beginning with the question: what did it mean for a climate to be “temperate,” anyway? Before the seventeenth century, this zone tended to center around the Mediterranean. With the northward movement of political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came a northward movement of that zone to center around England and France. With the settlement of New England and the endurance of its harsh winters came a new valuation of a temperate climate among the colonial elites. The cold climates of Vermont and New Hampshire were not “stupefying,” as some commentators believed. They provided “vigor,” according to local colonial elites writing to skeptics across the Atlantic (pp. 34, 38).

Likewise, John Wentworth, the governor of Nova Scotia, countered attacks by abolitionists that relocating escaped Jamaican slaves (maroons) in Nova Scotia was cruel—prevailing views on race held that African bodies were suited to different climates than white bodies—by stating that, in fact, the climate was temperate enough for all bodies. This was, in fact, part of Wentworth’s campaign to convert his colony from one of English garrisons and absentee landowners to one of “useful and loyal settlers” (p. 117). . . .

Climate change was part of discussions about agricultural improvement and settlement, but the reverse was also true: the perception of climate change depended on the ambitions of the settlers. . . . Studies by twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical geographers, for instance, have found that the climate was, in fact, not getting “more temperate,” but getting colder (p. 2). This is especially important to note, as it allows her to point out that the perception of climate, and climate change, has historically been bound up in the logic of “improvement.” To understand current perceptions of climate change, Zilberstein argues, we need to recognize this, as it has become that much more urgent, with the current consensus on climate change, that those sensibilities be reversed.

“Improvement” in this case meant not (just?) creating better conditions but getting use out of resources.