Can America Rock Again?

Earlier this month the Washington Post pubished Prof. Paul Ringel’s essay about Schoolhouse Rock, A.B.C.’s interstitial Saturday morning cartoon, and how it handled the nation’s history.

Ringel wrote:

“Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated Saturday morning children’s television series that ran on ABC mostly from 1973 through 1979 (though there were also new episodes in 1995-1996 and 2009), has reached millions of viewers over the past half-century. . . .

Its history-centered season, “America Rock,” ran from September 1975 through July 1976, as the United States was celebrating its bicentennial. Not surprisingly, the show adopted a celebratory rather than a critical perspective on the nation’s past, focused almost exclusively on White people’s stories and predominantly on men. . . .

These interpretations were a product of “Schoolhouse Rock’s” limited budget and cautious ideological mandate. ABC launched the program in response to criticism from grass-roots organizations like Action for Children’s Television about the excessive commercialism of Saturday morning television, and then handed the project to its advertising firm with no funding for support from educators or historians. Any hint of ideological controversy made the network executives skittish; an episode titled “Three Ring Government” was shelved due to fear that its comparison of the U.S. government to a circus would offend the FCC.

The representations that emerged from this process also exemplified “America Rock’s” less obvious shortcoming: its broader pattern of presenting historical narratives of progress without conflict. These episodes relied on an outdated model of history that honored the past without investigating it. When “No More Kings” presented an American Revolution with no actual warfare, and “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” explained that female suffragists “carried signs and marched in lines, until at long last the law was passed,” they overlooked the struggles required to bring about these transformative changes. Instead they suggested that people merely had to set their mind to the task and it was done.

The approaching 50th anniversary of “Schoolhouse Rock” offers a ripe opportunity to bring these sorts of lessons to television. The program’s three-minute format seems particularly suited to online viral culture, and to young viewers’ growing preferences for watching videos online.

As young people grow up in an era of heightened disinformation, amid a battle over the nation’s history, bringing them the best version of that history—one that teaches them to think critically—will be crucial to raising the next generation of U.S. citizens. A remixed “Schoolhouse Rock” that helped to achieve this goal could enhance the program’s already formidable legacy.

A longer version of Ringel’s article was published in The Public Historian. It also discusses Liberty’s Kids and The Time Warp Trio, two more recent attempts to explore history through television cartoons for kids.

Call for Papers for “The Meaning of Independence,” October 2021

The David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society has issued a call for papers for a conference on “The Meanings of Independence” scheduled for 21-22 October in Philadelphia.

The call says:

The conference aims to convene leading and emerging scholars of the era, museum and library professionals, leaders of cultural institutions, teachers at all levels, public intellectuals, and engaged members of the public for two days of discussion about the meaning and import of the American Revolution in the twenty-first century.

We invite proposals from scholars and professionals at all levels of their careers whose work can contribute to this conversation. Conference organizers hope to highlight new scholarship on the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution; the lived experience of the Revolution; its place within a global context; innovative plans for commemorations in 2026; and compelling digital and new media scholarship that presents the era in a new light and to a wide audience.

What Revolutionary topics fall within the purview of this conference? Nearly everything, it seems, but that’s not how calls are written. They have to include an explicitly non-exclusive list of possibilities, as in:

• Origins
• New interpretations of the cause of the American Revolution
• Examinations of overlooked events and individuals that cast new light on the Revolution’s cause
• Experiences
• The role of warfare on society and its lasting significance
• The meanings and consequences of independence, for the various peoples affected by war and political upheaval—including loyalists, enslaved men and women, Indigenous peoples, and non-combatants
• Perspectives from the top-down and bottom-up, and their interplay throughout the course of the Revolution
• Global Contexts
• Papers that place the Revolution within the Age of Atlantic Revolutions
• The effects of the American Revolution around the globe within its own time and after it, including to the present day
• Other comparative frameworks that help elucidate elements of the Revolution
• Legacies
• The changing meaning of the Revolution for those who lived through it
• Research that interrogates the idea of a founding moment or moments, including papers that provide a comparative perspective from other countries
• Legacies of independence in shaping lives, institutions, and ideals of citizenship and patriotism
• Examinations of past commemorations as well as plans for future ones
• Teaching the Revolution, past, present, and future
• Innovative digital and archival projects that provide new access to study of the era
• Approaches
• Historical
• Literary
• Religious
• Environmental
• Legal
• Political
• Material culture
• Gender
• Native American and Indigenous studies
• Public history
• Digital scholarship
• Otherwise

Now the big question for any event in 2021: How close will participants be to one another? The society says, “In order to maximize the opportunity for informal and formal discussion and collaboration, conference organizers plan to hold this gathering in-person. Should travel in October be unadvisable, the conference will be rescheduled for Spring 2022.” All presenters will receive travel subsidies and hotel accommodations.

Papers should be no longer than 15 double-spaced pages. Scholars hoping to present should submit a paper title, 250-word proposal, and curriculum vitae to the organizers by 15 April 2021 via the Interfolio website. Decisions will be announced in June. Papers will be due in September, one month before the conference, to be pre-circulated to registered attendees. Some presenters might be invited to revise their papers for publication in the A.P.S.’s Transactions, one of the longest running scholarly series in America.

For more information, see the A.P.S. website.

Two Days of the “1776 Report”

On 5 January 2021, the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission (dubbed “The 1776 Commission”) had its first meeting.

The next day, the President egged his fans into storming the Capitol building to disrupt the certification of his big election loss. One police officer and two rioters were killed in the violence, two more people died in the excitement, and two suicides have been linked to the fallout of that day. The President watched on T.V.

On 18 January, less than two weeks after the commissioners’ first meeting, they issued a 40-page document titled “The 1776 Report.” Three pages consisted of the Declaration of Independence. Other passages had been copied without credit from previous writings by a couple of commission members. Most of those members were political scientists, lawyers, and activists, not historians, and all came from the far right.

Predictably, the “1776 Report” was highly political in its analysis of U.S. history and retrograde in those politics. At its core was a pair of contradictory claims: American history education is too close-minded, and there’s only one proper way to present American history. Working historians took issue with how the report described both the national past and the process of teaching. On 20 January the American Historical Association issued a written condemnation joined by more than twenty other scholarly organizations.

At Slate, Rebecca Onion rounded up some of the professional response in an article titled “Trump’s ’1776 Report’ Would Be Funny if It Weren’t So Dangerous” and assessed the document’s argument. Here’s a taste:

The basics: The ideas the country was founded on were Good; in fact, they were, and remain, Perfect, Eternal Truths. Therefore, nobody who really believed in those ideas could do anything wrong! (No racist bones here!) Therefore, the fact that some founders said privately that they believed slavery was evil, yet continued to hold people in bondage, was not evidence of their hypocrisy, but of their inherent righteousness. Therefore, “the foundation of our Republic” (yes, this document is sure to use the word Republic, itself a dog whistle) “planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America.” If it took a few more decades for this “plan” to end slavery gradually to come to fruition, so what?

As for Native history, that’s a simple circle to square: It’s just not in here. Not a word.

The passive voice gets a workout, trying to explain away everything bad in our history. “Despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves,” the report intones, “the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery.” Which parts of the Congress wanted civil equality? Which parts of the government fought against this? Who, in the South, made it “devolve” into this terrible new “system”? These invisible actors just float around, unnamed.

The “1776 Report” basically tries to draw an unbroken, unbent, unknotted line between the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. After all, both documents talk about equality, right? This sort of analysis is insulting, both to the intelligence of Americans who study the nation’s history at any level and to the many Americans who didn’t enjoy equal treatment.

It’s true that all the talk of ”liberty” in the Revolution produced enough discomfort with slavery in New England and Pennsylvania that those states limited the practice by the end of the eighteenth century. But that certainly wasn’t the case throughout the U.S. of A. Some states actually increased their exploitation of slave labor after the split with Britain, as changes in their populations and laws show. The issue was so divisive that the national government formally shut down debates over it in several ways. And of course ending slavery in the U.S. turned out to require a great big war.

That’s not even getting into how the end of slavery didn’t produce true equality, freedom, or legal protection for all, either in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, or in most of the twentieth, or by some practical measures in the twenty-first. That level of historic factual detail would mess up the report’s tidy, reassuring, and complacent narrative.

The “1776 Report” was on the White House website for two days. With the handover to a new administration, that website is being completely revamped. The old version was removed to an archival site maintained by the National Archives alongside other administrations’ websites. All 18 January links to the “1776 Report” were therefore broken, but the document remains available through the government and numerous other sources, such as archive.org. The new President dissolved the “1776 Commission,” so there will be no second report from it.

“News Media” Institute for Teachers at A.A.S., 26-31 July

Last summer, the American Antiquarian Society had planned a weeklong National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for educators. And then the pandemic began, and by fall the government had let it get out of control.

The A.A.S. has therefore rescheduled that N.E.H. Institute for this summer and moved it online. “The News Media and the Making of America, 1730–1800” will take place 26-31 July 2021. Full information is posted here.

N.E.H. Institutes are designed principally for American educators, including teachers and other professionals. This one is limited to twenty-five participants. There’s an application process, with a stipend and development certificates for those who are accepted. The application deadline for this course is 1 March.

This weeklong colloquium and workshop will explore how media was used during the Age of the American Revolution and how news—in all its various forms—was connected to civic engagement. According to the description, it will be organized into four thematic units:

(1) The Colonial Media Milieu, which will focus on the multiplicity of news sources in early America and explore what people thought was news, what sources they used to gather and authenticate news, and what role news seems to have played in their understanding of public life in their community.

(2) The Long Revolution, which will explore the forty-year period from 1760 to 1800 to examine how people living in rural Massachusetts interacted with the urban media in Boston; how the news of the violence at Lexington and Concord was portrayed in the newspapers and broadsides; and the relationships between printers and how personal, family, and business networks impacted what information they printed.

(3) The Republican Experiment, which will cover the decade or so between the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789 and Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 by focusing on the concept of “republicanism.” The creation of the new federal union in 1887–89 in no way ended the controversies over how that union should be organized, and much of the news of those years had to do with conflict over the meaning of liberty, self-rule, federalism, and the proper structures of a government in a large and diverse republic such as the United States.

(4) The Revolution in Memory, which will act as a coda to our end date of 1800, tracing into the nineteenth century the public memory of the Revolution and the political uses of the Revolution’s events, language, and symbolism. An endless parade of bestselling biographies of the Founding Fathers and even a hit musical about Alexander Hamilton all attest to the long and significant afterlife of the Revolution.

The faculty scheduled for this institute include the expert A.A.S. staff; Prof. David Paul Nord, author of Communities of Journalism; Prof. Joseph Adelman, author of Revolutionary Networks; and Gary Gregory from the recreated Edes & Gill print shop in Faneuil Hall.

Zabin via the Gilder Lehrman Institute, 3 Jan.

On Sunday, 3 January, the Gilder Lehrman Institute will host Serena Zabin discussing and answering questions about the Boston Massacre in its online Book Breaks series.

Zabin, who hails from Lexington and is now a professor at Carleton College, will speak about her book The Boston Massacre: A Family History. This 2020 study focuses on the personal connections that British soldiers and their families forged with the locals whom they rented rooms from, worked for, and had other common interactions with—including sex and marriage.

As the book’s catalogue copy says, “When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.”

But not immediately. While Bostonians didn’t forget the people killed and wounded on King Street in 1770, the removal of the regiments from the center of town and the criminal trials at the end of the year appear to have brought some political peace. The end of most of the Townshend duties, leaving only tea to be taxed under that law, also removed much of the underlying conflict.

In 1771 the Boston Whigs tried to keep up the public unity and fervor against the royal government by producing not one but two Massacre memorial orations, which I’ll discuss as their Sestercentennial anniversaries arrive. But without the thousands of soldiers and their families in the town, ordinary people just didn’t have the same reasons to be upset as they had in previous years.

When army regiments disembarked in Boston again in May 1774, the fear of people dying returned. But even then, there were relationships between soldiers and civilians that in some cases outweighed the political conflict.

This Gilder Lehrman series of discussions is designed to be a resource for history teachers and students. Along with his own questions, host William Roka will ask Zabin some queries submitted by middle- and high-school students in advance of the program.

This session will begin online on Sunday at 2:00 P.M. Eastern time. Register through this page.

Upcoming Gilder Lehrman Book Breaks will feature Marcus P. Nevius on City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856 on 10 January and Mary Beth Norton on 1774: The Long Year of Revolution on 31 January.

Call for Papers on Phillis Wheatley (Peters)

Early American Literature will publish a special issue on the poet Phillis Wheatley, later called Phillis Peters. Here is the call for papers from the editors of this issue.

The recognition that Phillis Wheatley (Peters) is a significant figure in early American literature has fueled much scholarship in the last three decades centered on her life and literary contributions, culminating most recently in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s book of poetry The Age of Phillis, which is currently the featured text for the Society of Early Americanists’s first ever common reading initiative.

As scholarship about Wheatley continues to grow, this special issue of Early American Literature, “Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley (Peters) Studies Now,“ invites essays that together consider Phillis Wheatley as a field of study. We seek essays that speak to the depth and vastness of Wheatley studies. Potential topics and approaches include but are not limited to:

• Wheatley’s aesthetics and form
• Phillis (Wheatley) Peters
• Digital work and Wheatley studies
• New archives, archival gaps, blindspots
• Methodologies
• Teaching Wheatley in early African American studies
• Teaching Wheatley beyond early African American studies
• Wheatley and the American Revolution
• Wheatley and Black Women’s Studies
• Wheatley and biography
• Letter Writing/Epistolary/Genre Studies
• Wheatley and the history of Capitalism
• Wheatley in children’s literature
• Legacies, afterlives of Wheatley
• Mythologizations of Wheatley (the stories we tell ourselves about Wheatley)
• Wheatley in 21st-century cultural memory 
• Wheatley’s networks/friends/associations

In addition, essays might address questions such as the following: What is a field of Wheatley Studies? What is the current state of that field? What does it mean to be a Wheatley scholar? How has the study of Wheatley been shaped by our current socio-political moment (however we define the current moment)? Despite the recognition of Wheatley’s literary significance, why might she still be an understudied figure of early (African) America? What aspects of Wheatley’s life and literature have been neglected? How might we address her childhood pre-enslavement? How do we wrestle with the fact that she is “Peters” for the last five years of her life? How do we study those years about which we know relatively little? How has Wheatley scholarship affected pedagogical practices? How do we teach Wheatley within the context of her moment and in ours.

Full-length essays would be up to 8,000 words. The submission deadline is 30 Apr 2021. For questions and submissions, email the editors of this special issue, Tara Bynum, Brigitte Fielder, and Cassander L. Smith.

Call for Papers on “Underrepresented Voices of the American Revolution”

The Massachusetts Historical Society and Suffolk University issued this call for papers for a July 2020 conference with the theme “Underrepresented Voices of the American Revolution”:

In recent decades, scholars have unearthed and revived stories of a diverse and wide-ranging cast of characters who lived through America’s political formation. This much-needed corrective has unraveled a traditional narrative of wealthy white male revolutionaries rebelling against a white male–dominated imperial government.

The lead-up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers an opportunity to highlight and share the latest scholarship on the topic of underrepresented voices of the American Revolution whether that be from the perspective of Native Americans, women, African Americans, loyalists, ethnic and religious minorities, children, or neutrals in a global war that put the question of representation at its core.

This conference invites scholars from various disciplines to submit papers that explore the broad themes associated with historic individuals or groups not traditionally considered in discussing the American Revolutionary Era.

As an organization that operates within academia and the public history arena, the Massachusetts Historical Society both champions important scholarship and supports vital public history initiatives like professional development for K-12 instruction. This conference will serve both constituencies—scholars and K-12 educators—by providing a platform to consider how the classroom serves as a key site of historical representation.

Teachers will be invited to attend the traditional academic sessions, and scholars in turn will be invited to participate in a concluding teacher workshop at the end of the conference. We encourage participation from scholars who are eager to engage with and learn from K-12 educators, as well as teachers who are looking to incorporate the latest scholarship into the classroom.

Presuming that health conditions allow, the conference and teacher workshop will take place at Suffolk University and the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston on 14-16 July 2022. The panels and presentations will fill the first two days with the workshop on the third.

People interested in presenting papers or panels must submit their proposals by 4 January 2021. Those applications should include a description of all papers and c.v.’s of all presenters. Paper proposals should be no more than one page and c.v.’s no more than five pages. Direct proposals and questions to research@masshist.org.

Note that the format of this conference requires all papers to be complete and submitted for circulation to commenters and conference registrants six weeks before the actual conference date, or at the start of June 2021. The sessions will consist of discussions, not readings of prepared papers.

“This political theater stokes culture wars”

Today I’m sharing statements from the country’s two largest groups of professional historians on the misuse of American history in the current Presidential campaign.

From the American Historical Association:

This hastily assembled “White House Conference on American History” took place in the Rotunda of the National Archives, although the National Archives and Records Administration had no role in organizing the program. The organizers of the event neither informed nor consulted associations of professional historians.

The American Historical Association addresses this “conference” and the president’s ill-informed observations about American history and history education reluctantly and with dismay. The event was clearly a campaign stunt, deploying the legitimating backdrop of the Rotunda, home of the nation’s founding documents, to draw distinctions between the two political parties on education policy, tie one party to civil disorder, and enable the president to explicitly attack his opponent.

Like the president’s claim at Mount Rushmore two months ago that “our children are taught in school to hate their own country,” this political theater stokes culture wars that are meant to distract Americans from other, more pressing current issues. The AHA only reluctantly gives air to such distraction; we are not interested in inflating a brouhaha that is a mere sideshow to the many perils facing our nation at this moment.

Past generations of historians participated in promoting a mythical view of the United States. Missing from this conventional narrative were essential themes that we now recognize as central to a complete understanding of our nation’s past. As scholars, we locate and evaluate evidence, which we use to craft stories about the past that are inclusive and able to withstand critical scrutiny. In the process, we engage in lively and at times heated conversations with each other about the meaning of evidence and ways to interpret it. As teachers, we encourage our students to question conventional wisdom as well as their own assumptions, but always with an emphasis on evidence.

It is not appropriate for us to censor ourselves or our students when it comes to discussing past events and developments. To purge history of its unsavory elements and full complexity would be a disservice to history as a discipline and the nation, and in the process would render a rich, fascinating story dull and uninspiring.

The AHA deplores the use of history and history education at all grade levels and other contexts to divide the American people, rather than use our discipline to heal the divisions that are central to our heritage. Healing those divisions requires an understanding of history and an appreciation for the persistent struggles of Americans to hold the nation accountable for falling short of its lofty ideals. To learn from our history we must confront it, understand it in all its messy complexity, and take responsibility as much for our failures as our accomplishments.

That statement was co-signed by a long list of other historical organizations.

From the Organization of American Historians:

In his September 17, 2020, speech at the National Archives on history education, President Trump railed against “Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history,” which he characterized as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.” Coming at the end of the White House Conference on American History—a hastily-arranged gathering, organized without input or participation from historical associations and including panelists who are not experts in the field—the remarks are only the most recent example of the Trump administration’s misguided and dangerous attempts to politicize the teaching and writing of United States history.

As the largest professional organization in the country representing historians of U.S. history, the Organization of American Historians opposes the biased views and mischaracterizations of historical inquiry and education expressed in these statements. Further, the OAH rejects the narrow and celebratory “1776 Project” put forward in this speech as a partisan ploy meant to restrict historical pedagogy, stifle deliberative discussion, and take us back to an earlier era characterized by a limited vision of the U.S. past.

History is not and cannot be simply celebratory. Vibrant democratic societies are not built upon a foundation of selective depictions of the past, but rather demand critical examination of and grappling with the historical record. The best historical inquiry acknowledges and interrogates systems of oppression—racial, ethnic, gender, class—and openly addresses the myriad injustices that these systems have perpetuated through the past and into the present. We ignore such history at our peril.

The history we teach must investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion. The 1619 Project’s approach to understanding the American past and connecting it to newly urgent movements for racial justice and systemic reform point to this conflict, and to the ways in which slavery and racial injustice have and continue to profoundly shape our nation. Critical race theory provides a lens through which we can examine and understand systemic racism and its many consequences. It does not introduce the “twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms” of the President’s telling, but rather illustrates the wide gap between the ideal and reality of opportunity in our shared past, as well as long-unfulfilled promises and possibilities.

The Organization of American Historians remains dedicated to promoting excellence in the scholarship, teaching and presentation of American history, and to encouraging informed public discussion of and engagement with historical questions that are critical to understanding both the triumphs and tragedies of our nation’s past. It is only through purposeful interrogations of our national story that we can appreciate the history of the United States in its full complexity and utilize our knowledge of it to inform our present and build a better future.

As Donald Trump’s lack of previous public service, suspicious tax schemes, exploitation of charities, comments on fellow citizens, and depraved indifference in face of an epidemic show, he’s not actually patriotic. Likewise, his invention of a Civil War battle and his error-riddled descriptions of the past show that he’s not actually interested in American history.

Trump wants only what benefits himself and his ego (not necessarily in that order). He tried to gin up this controversy over teaching U.S. history merely for his political advantage, in hopes of once again eking out a majority in the Electoral College.

(Shown above: The portion of Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that states, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”)

Online Schoolwork from the Gilder Lehrman Institute

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has announced a series of free online courses for elementary, middle, and high school students.

The institute has a teacher-training program and a big collection of documents, and these classes draw on both those resources. The website explains:

Master Teachers will present lessons anchored in primary source documents, many from the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s collection of more than 70,000 American history artifacts. The goal is to engage students and excite them about history so that they leave each lesson more knowledgeable about a new idea, theme, document, or pivotal moment in history.

The institute also has a close connection with the Broadway musical Hamilton and its educational outreach program. Which explains the heavy Hamilton theme in the course titles.

For instance, there’s “Spotlight on Hamilton’s World: Documents from the Founding Era.” It proposes to look each week at ”an important document from the Founding Era that has influenced our government, culture, and economy,” starting Tuesday, 6 October. The events in the spotlight are:

• “Who Tells Your Story? The Boston Massacre and Bostonians Paying the Excise Man”
• “The Shot Heard ’round the World: Lexington and Concord”
• “Washington Crosses the Delaware: The Battle of Trenton”
• “The World Turned Upside Down: Cornwallis’s Surrender”

Alexander Hamilton himself was involved in only one of those events, of course. Near as I can tell, he spent only a few days in Massachusetts in his lifetime.

The course “Spotlight on Hamilton’s World: People from the Founding Era,” starting Tuesday, 3 November, gets a little more into Hamilton’s world by looking at:

• Phillis Wheatley
• John and Abigail Adams
• Peter Kitteredge (presumably based on this document)
• Henry and Lucy Knox

Hamilton did know the Adamses and the Knoxes, and got along with at least one of them.

As you see, there’s a heavy Massachusetts tilt to these particular courses, Hamilton or not, so families that follow Boston 1775 might find them interesting.

Other free Gilder Lehrman courses this fall will cover woman suffrage, voting rights, and preparing for the A.P. United States History exam.

The Power of Preserved Iconoclasm

Back in December 2015 I wrote several postings on incorporating the power of iconoclasm—the destruction of images—into historical monuments and commemorations.

Those thoughts were provoked by a talk by Wendy Bellion, author of Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment, who started with New Yorkers pulling down a statue of King George III after their first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Then, she noted, the city kept that plinth empty for decades, reenacted the destruction in ceremonies (which entailed creating new statues of George III), and collected and displayed the surviving bits of statuary. The remnants and recreations kept that destructive act and its meaning fresh in people’s eyes.

Incorporating the power of such iconoclasm is more than the one-time, permanent destruction of a statue or monument. It means finding a way to preserve the act of iconoclasm itself, thus recognizing the original object, the popular objections to it, and how society changed.

One of my favorite examples of this approach is in the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, where updated cloth panels now hang over the original stone panels on a memorial to the 1704 raid on the town. Visitors can thus learn about that event, about how it was understood in the late 1800s, and about how we can view it today with added knowledge and multiple perspectives.

There are spontaneous examples of such iconoclasm, as when college students feathered a statue of Thomas Jefferson with Post-It notes registering their distaste with some aspects of his life. The result recognizes both Jefferson’s lasting importance and how he exploited other people. This year the plinth of the giant statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond was likewise turned into an expression of community rejection of what Confederate general fought for.

Lasting iconoclasm can even be built into a monument from the start, as in the Saratoga Battle Monument, which has niches for four statues of American commanders but only three statues (of Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, and Daniel Morgan). Nearby is the Boot Monument, erected in 1887 in honor of an American general wounded in the Battle of Saratoga but never named on the stone. The missing man is Benedict Arnold, and the way he’s erased shows the national distaste for how he betrayed the Continental Army.

Vulture just highlighted another example of monumental iconoclasm from Australia, an outdoor exhibit that ends this weekend. This year is the Sestercentennial of Capt. James Cook’s first landfall on Australia. Statues of him have become controversial not so much for what he himself did on that continent but for the imperial conquest that his arrival launched and the idea that he “discovered” and “claimed” an already populated continent.

As a response to that 250th anniversary, Nicholas Galanin, an Alaskan artist, dug a hole in a field on Cockatoo Island (shown above) that matches the prominent statue of Capt. Cook elsewhere in Sydney. The work is called “Shadow on the Land.” It’s also a symbolic grave for the monument. This work certainly doesn’t celebrate Cook, of course, but it can’t help but acknowledge his historic significance. Imagine it dug permanently at the foot of the actual statue.

Closer to home, the city of Charleston removed its large statue of slavery advocate John C. Calhoun and more recently pulled down the towering pillar it rested on. Segments of the granite column buried themselves in the ground. I believe the city has already started moving those stones away, but I think for a moment the spontaneous ruin formed a more powerful monument to historical change than anything the city could build in that spot.

COMING UP: What do we do with a problem like Faneuil?

Prepping for Patriots’ Day 2020 Online

The anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord is coming up on 19 April, so I’ll shift topics (mostly) from the Sestercentennial of the reaction to the Boston Massacre to the opening of the Revolutionary War.

Of course, right now we’re all quarantining like smallpox patients with red flags hung outside our homes. The traditional ceremonies along Battle Road have been canceled for this spring.

But local historical organizations are using technology to fill the gap a bit. For example:

• The Lexington Historical Society is offering a Virtual Patriots’ Day collection of virtual tours of its historic sites, footage of past events, new videos, and online activities.
• Minute Man National Historical Park is offering “Ask a Ranger” sessions on Facebook Live on 17 and 24 April at 10:00 A.M. Check out the park’s Facebook page for video interviews with veteran reenactors and historians, spotlights on archeological finds, and more. 
• Old North Church launched a video series called “99% Sure” with a discussion of who hung the lanterns for Paul Revere. (See the Boston1775 discussions of John Pulling, Robert Newman, and Thomas Barnard.)

There may well be other online events out there that slipped my mind tonight.

This year’s History Camp Boston also had to be postponed, from last month to, we hope, 11 July. So History Camp organizers Lee Wright and Carrie Lund are trying out a series of virtual events through the organization’s Facebook page, and I’ll be their first guest.

Lee, Carrie, and I will talk about some of the myths and realities of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in a Facebook Live conversation scheduled to start on Thursday, 16 April, at 8:00 P.M. Here’s a teaser video we made last week as we tested our technology.

This is a chance for you to ask questions, too! Are you wondering about common myths, or particular realities, of the start of the Revolutionary War? Carrie and Lee are compiling a list of queries from the comments of those Facebook postings. And I can collect them here.

We hope people will also be able to send in questions in real time during the conversation. Of course, I won’t be able to dig into those topics beforehand and appear as if I had an answer all along.

Becoming Most Wanted

This month brings a new picture book about Samuel Adams and John Hancock: Most Wanted, written by Sarah Jane Marsh and illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham.

That same team previously created Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word. Fotheringham also illustrated Those Rebels, John and Tom, written by Barbara Kerley.

All these books are in the genre called “picture book biography,” which introduces kids in the early elementary-school grades to notable figures. The mode emphasizes lively storytelling and historical accuracy—which can be at odds, especially when subjects’ lives were not well detailed. (There’s ongoing debate in the field about just how accurate every detail must be.)

I’m highlighting Most Wanted: The Revolutionary Partnership of John Hancock and Samuel Adams because back in 2018 I had the pleasure of fact-checking the manuscript for the publisher. I’ve worked in publishing and even written for kids myself, so I can mix my nitpicky remarks about interpreting historical sources with some some realism about what’s feasible in a children’s book.

For instance, how to explain the Stamp Act in a picture book when it took me years to grasp it myself? And when a picture-book page contains one small paragraph of text? Most Wanted takes the editorial-cartoon approach, with Marsh explaining (in 35 words!) the purpose and scope of the law and Fotheringham sketching a giant sheet of stamped paper falling onto the colonists’ heads. Hancock’s comments on the law appear in italics to underscore how those words are documented to be his.

In fact, we checked all the quotes in the book. Marsh provided detailed source notes, and I dug further. Then a few months later I reviewed Fotheringham’s sketches and queries because he was just as concerned about depicting Hancock’s coach, wardrobe, natural hair, and other details correctly.

Most Wanted covers Adams and Hancock from the formation of their political partnership in the mid-1760s to their arrival at the Second Continental Congress ten years later. It describes the Stamp Act, the Liberty riot, the Massacre, and the Tea Party. But the climax of the book, taking up about a quarter of its 80 pages, is the drama of April 1775, as Hancock and Adams hole up in the parsonage at Lexington only to learn about redcoats marching their way. It’s therefore quite an appropriate book to share with young readers this month.

Big News for Boston History Fans

The Atlas of Boston History is a big book. I just got my copy, and it’s 14 inches tall and 11 inches wide, 224 full-color pages of maps, charts, and other illustrations of Boston history.

I got a copy because I worked with editor Nancy S. Seasholes on the page spread about Revolutionary Boston. You can see the whole list of topics and contributors, and several sample spreads, at the website for the book. Needless to say, a project this big has been several years in the making.

The Atlas of Boston History will be officially launched at the Boston Public Library’s central building on Thursday, 24 October, at 6:30 P.M. Nancy will speak about the project, and there will be a question-and-answer session with her and contributors. (I hope to participate, but I’ll have to come from another event in Cambridge.)

Other Atlas events include:

• Wednesday, 30 October, 7:00 P.M.: Porter Square Books, Cambridge, author talk
• Thursday, 14 November, 5:30 P.M.: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, author talk and panel

“Battle of Daniels Farm” in Blackstone, 5-6 Oct.

This weekend, 5-6 October, there will be a Revolutionary War encampment and battle reenactment at the Daniels Farmstead in Blackstone (originally part of Mendon), Massachusetts.

This event won’t recreate an actual battle. In fact, the scenario is based on an imaginary contingency: the British army holding Newport has driven the New England forces out of Rhode Island. The redcoats are trying to inflict further damage on American and French units in the Blackstone River Valley to relieve pressure on the port back in Crown hands.

This event also includes demonstrations of such crafts as blacksmithing, joinery, tinsmithing, spinning, and gunsmithing. There will be fencing demonstrations and artillery units showing how men worked together to fire their cannon. Battle re-enactments are scheduled for both Saturday and Sunday, quite possibly with different outcomes.

There’s also an educational component of this reenactment, which is partly sponsored by a grant through the Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School. On Friday students will view the crafts demonstrations after I brief them about how apprenticeships worked in the eighteenth century.

On Saturday, 5 October, I’ll speak in the high school on the topic “Beyond Battle Road: The Massachusetts Militia’s Other Marches in 1774 and 1775.” That session will be first and foremost for the reenactors themselves, but anyone can attend as long as seats are available. Blackstone Valley Tech High is at 65 Pleasant Street in Upton, and that talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M.

But of course the primary attraction of this weekend is the battle reenactment out at the farmstead. The camp will be open from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. on both days. Food will be sold on the site. Vendors will have period wares. Admission to the reenactment will be $8.00 per day or $10.00 for a two-day pass, with children under twelve admitted free. There will be free parking at the J.F.K. Elementary School at 200 Lincoln Street in Blackstone and buses shuttling visitors to the farmstead continuously while the camp is open.

The weather report for this weekend predicts that both Saturday and Sunday will be dry and 60°F or above, so fine weather for fall in New England.

Laying Out Roxbury’s History in the Dillaway-Thomas House

On the corporate blog of Content•Design Collaborative LLC, which is in the business of “effective visitor experiences for public and private institutions,” there’s an interesting discussion of how the firm helped to redesign the Dillaway-Thomas House in Roxbury Heritage State Park for the Roxbury Historical Society and the city of Boston.

The park is a single acre between the First Church and the Timilty Middle School, and the house contains 2,200 square feet of exhibit space or, as the organization says, “a mere 600 square-feet per century” of town history.

The solution was to use each room for a different historical era:

Visitors enter the House from the accessible annex, the first thing you encounter is a cavernous ten-foot wide cooking hearth, so we deemed this space the Parsons Kitchen, and it covered the pre-revolutionary war era. This gallery was followed by the Revolutionary War gallery, or the Thomas Gallery, for General [John] Thomas who took residence there during the Siege of Boston. Next comes the Dillaway Room, named after Charles K. Dillaway, a scholar and early headmaster of Boston Latin. The next exhibit area is the Historic Hallway and the 20th Century Roxbury Room. Upstairs the House featured a gallery loosely dedicated to 21st Century Roxbury accompanied the multi-purpose changeable art gallery and community meeting space.

In the eighteenth century Roxbury was the large rural town right outside of Boston by land. It was enmeshed in Boston’s politics and social issues. In 1768, for example, town minister Amos Adams and his wife Elizabeth hosted a spinning meeting. There’s no evidence about slavery at that site, but in 1771 Roxbury’s population included 21 “servants for life.” The museum therefore includes displays about slavery in the town.

As for the Revolutionary War:

With all hell breaking loose in the spring of 1775, the leaders of the colonial rebels appointed veteran John Thomas as a leader of the militia tasked with keeping the British troops in Boston. Roxbury stood on one side of the only ground route called Boston Neck. Our exhibit features a letter from the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society where General Benjamin Lincoln informs Amos Adams that “It would be quite agreeable for General Thomas to remove into your house…”. Other experiences are a recreation of General Thomas’s field desk where you can hear a dramatic reading of one of his many letters to his wife and an interactive map placing the House in context of the siege of 1775-76.

(Lincoln wasn’t yet a general when he wrote that letter to Thomas; he was clerk of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. As for Thomas’s letters home, they’re terrific.)

One interesting requirement from the Roxbury Historical Society was that the maps inside the house “show the 1868 borders when Roxbury was annexed to Boston.” That area is larger than the Boston neighborhood now designated as Roxbury—it includes the Fenway, the Longwood Medical District, and Mission Hill. But it’s much smaller than the Roxbury of the eighteenth century, which also included Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, and the modern Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park—part of the big town’s farmland.

Joanne Freeman on “Hamilton: The Exhibition”

The Yale News recently interviewed Prof. Joanne Freeman about her work on Alexander Hamilton. The article explains:

For a long time Freeman, professor of history and of American studies, was the only person she knew of who had much of an interest in Hamilton. “I spent many decades lecturing about Hamilton and essentially saying, ‘I know you’ve never heard of this person but you should, because he actually played an important role in the founding of our country,’” says Freeman.

“Now, with everyone adoring Hamilton due to the play, I spend a lot of time saying: ‘You know, he’s not as great as you think he is. He was a flawed figure with problematic politics.’ In my work, I want to show Hamilton in all of his complexity.”

Of course, Freeman shares some of the blame, or credit, for Hamilton’s newfound heroic status. She was one of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sources for the Hamilton musical. She’s a more formal advisor for “Hamilton: The Exhibition,” a multimedia display in Chicago that’s popped up in conjunction with the performances of the musical there.

The exhibit comes from the same team that created the show, and Freeman says one of their goals was to fill in some holes—and correct some historical misconceptions—that the play leaves its excited audiences with. In the interview, Freeman says:

One major lapse in the show concerns the institution of slavery. It isn’t discussed for more than a line or two in “Hamilton” — yet the United States and the early modern world were grounded on the institution of slavery, so that had to be in the foreground of the exhibition. When you enter the first room of the exhibition (after the introductory film), you see shackles; the institution of slavery is the first thing you confront. It was at the center of Hamilton’s world.

The exhibit adds a lot of context along those lines — concerning slavery and any number of other topics: the role of women, the contributions of non-elite folk, and more. There are also more specific corrections that are almost like Easter eggs in the exhibit, such as a plaque that explains that [Thomas] Jefferson didn’t win the election of 1800 “in a landslide,” as the play suggests, or another one that notes (in a more comical vein) that Martha Washington did not name her feral tomcat Hamilton.

(I discussed that feline myth back here.)

Some topics were difficult to figure out how to put into physical form. One of them was Hamilton’s financial plan, which – to be honest — doesn’t sound inherently interesting to most people. We spent quite a long time trying to figure out how to make it compelling to the average person walking through the exhibit.

At one point, I said: ‘Here’s the thing. The entire government was an experiment, no one knew if it was going to function, and certainly no one knew if Hamilton’s financial plan was going to work. His plan proposed some radical ideas that a lot of people disagreed with, so there was a lot of uncertainty.’

And then there was a pause – and then David Korins [set designer for “Hamilton” the play] said, “What if when you enter the financial plan section, the floor is uneven so people feel a bit thrown off?” A fascinating suggestion — something that never would have occurred to me in a thousand years; making a historical concept concrete through set design. . . .

The day that the exhibition opened to the public, I watched people walk through the part of the exhibit that deals with Hamilton’s financial plan and sure enough when people crossed over into that room they immediately paused, and looked down at the floor.

Freeman is also a cohost of the Backstory podcast and author most recently of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. The portrait of her above is by Justin Greenwood, from his and Jonathan Hennessey’s Alexander Hamilton: The Graphic History of an American Founding Father.

S.H.E.A.R. Comes to Cambridge, 18-21 July

On 18-21 July, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic will have its annual meeting in Cambridge.

S.H.E.A.R. was founded in 1977 as “an association of scholars dedicated to exploring events and meanings of United States history between 1776 and 1861.” Or, as one of the founders put it, “the group between the William and Mary Quarterly and Civil War History.”

Anyone who studies “the long eighteenth century” knows the natural pressure to stretch chronological boundaries. Furthermore, while the Omohundro Institute’s conferences and journal cover colonial and Revolutionary America, it doesn’t function as an academic society affiliated with the American Historical Association. The only such society covering the period that includes the Revolution is the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and that emphasizes the interdisciplinary study of the culture of the “long eighteenth.”

As a result, the S.H.E.A.R. conference now tends to extend over the Revolutionary period. The titles of papers at this conference show they span the period of 1750 to 1874 at least. Look through the conference program (P.D.F. download) booklet for information about all the paper sessions, panel discussions, and keynote talks.

Here are some of the paper and session titles that caught my eye:

• “Angelica Church and Caesar’s Daughter: Family and Faction in Federalist New York,” Tom Cutterham
• “’Independence within Independence’: The Vermont Republic in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Jacqueline Reynoso
• “Death, Resistance, and Public Order: State Reactions to Slave Suicide in Eighteenth-Century New York,” Sarah Pearlman Shapiro
• “The Rise and Fall of the American Fop: From John Adams to Washington [Irving?],” Irving Eran Zelnik
• “The Modernity and Morality of the American Revolution and Early Republic as Displayed by Gouverneur Morris in France,” Emilie Mitran
• “‘Government of the Slaves’: Recaptured Black Loyalists and the Birth of the Virginian State at the Chiswell Lead Mines, 1775-1785,” Sean Gallagher
• “‘Out of the Jawbones of Scotch Grampius’: Scottish Merchants and Personal Identities and Personal Identities in Revolutionary North Carolina, c. 1770-1780,” Kimberly Sherman
• “North American Quiet, West Indian Storm: The Constitutional Politics and Legacy of the Somerset Decision,” Matthew Mason
• ”Tenacious American Indian Women: Thwarting Federal Treaty Policies and Dispossession Along the Wabash in the 1790s,” Susan Sleeper-Smith
• “The Mother Of: Memorializing Mary Washington in Antebellum Virginia,” Kate Haulman
• “Servants of General Washington?: Free Blacks and the Power of Imagined Social Capital,” Cassandra Good
• “Jefferson Matters: Situating and Eighteenth-Century Founder in Twenty-First-Century America,” Annette Gordon-Reed
• “Benjamin Rush and the Enlightenment Critique of Habit,” Joseph M. Gabriel
• “Benjamin Banneker: Avid Astronomer, Ambivalent Abolitionist,” Eric Herschthal

Plus, there are roundtable discussions on “New Directions of Military History in the Early Republic,” “Telling the Republic’s Founding Story in Its Moment of Peril,” and “The Culture of Confederation: How Did the 1780s Make America?” Not to mention a whole three-paper session on “Vampirism, Healing, and Consumption in the Early National Era.”

Registration for the four-day conference costs $78 for members of professorial rank, $114 for non-members, and $52 for graduate students, independent scholars, and the like.

“If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers…”?

In his 1864 address West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, Samuel Abbott Smith told the story of six regulars surrendering to “Mother Batherick” after the supply wagon they were rolling west was attacked.

Smith added:

The squib went the rounds of the English opposition papers, “If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?”

Within ten years, that story and that line were appearing in an American school textbook, The Franklin Fourth Reader by G. S. Hillard:

16. The drivers are said to have surrendered themselves to an old woman whom they met, whose protection they begged. Whereupon there went the rounds of the English papers belonging to the opposition this interesting sum in the Rule of Three: “If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?”

The line has been quoted in many histories of the battle, from Colonial Society of Massachusetts publications to Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride to popular compendiums published in the last few years.

But all the citations for the statements about that gibe in British newspapers appear to go back to Smith, writing almost ninety years after the event on a different continent. No author points to an actual newspaper or politician in Britain saying such a thing.

I don’t have access to a British newspaper database, but I’ve looked for such a statement quoted in American newspapers during the war and in the books and magazines scanned on Google Books. And I’m still looking.

“History Is on Hold at National Parks”

Earlier in the month I passed on news that the Newport Historical Society had had to postpone a talk by Emily Murphy because she works for the National Park Service and that agency was shut down.

The talk was rescheduled for last night, but of course much of the federal the government was still shut down, and it had to be canceled. Maybe it will be rescheduled, but we’ll have to see the full government operating first.

Here’s an article by Glenn David Brasher providing a deeper look at how the shutdown is affecting the people who research, preserve, and interpret American history through our national parks. It’s called “Government Shutdown Means History Is on Hold at National Parks.”

A sample:

Their passion stems from a conviction that the work matters. “Learning about our shared humanity is crucial to our existence,” claimed one public historian. Yet, as another noted, “many people never study history beyond high school or a basic survey course in college, so when individuals and families take time to visit historic sites and museums, it's a valuable opportunity for them to learn about the importance of history in our daily experiences.”

As things stand now, springtime field trips with school groups are being cancelled, and many “people visiting from out of town have been greeted with locked gates and signs stating we're closed, and that depresses me.” Other visitors have encountered parks available for them to drive through, but there are no historians on site to engage them about the past and how it has shaped the present.

Ordinarily, one ranger noted, “those of us working at historic sites [get to] have these conversations at the places where the past events happened.” But, during the shutdown, another pointed out, “without rangers… the discussion of the historical relevancy [of a site is] not possible. The human connection we make with the public is not there if we are not there.”

These federal employees are also worried about the impact the shutdown might have on their park’s resources. “My concern,” one park service historian explained, “is about our archeological sites throughout the NPS being looted or damaged.”

Amateur relic hunters with metal detectors are legally forbidden in the National Parks, but with few rangers onsite, another ranger said, “I'm concerned about damage to the resources if relic hunters start running wild, and I'm concerned about the historic structures we manage—one tree coming down in the wrong place might not get the attention it needs for weeks.”

Beyond long-term damage to their parks, however, almost every ranger I contacted expressed fears that the shutdown may deter the next generation of public historians away from jobs interpreting history in the National Parks. “My concern,” one ranger explained, “is that new blood that might have wanted to serve Americans [as public historians] will look at this shutdown and the previous ones and think, ‘Never mind. This isn’t stable. Leaders don’t seem to value the employees and the work they do.’”

And here’s the National Parks Conservation Association’s article on “6 Ways to Help During the Shutdown.”

A Master Teachers Seminar in Washington, July 2019

The American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati will offer a weeklong Master Teachers Seminar in Washington, D.C., on 8-12 July 2019. The theme is “The American Revolution and the Cause of Independence: ‘Between Submission and the Sword.’” Independence is, the seminar description says, “one of the four major achievements of the American Revolution and a central concept of the American Revolution Institute Curriculum.”

This Master Teachers Seminar is a week-long residential program for middle- and high-school teachers focusing on the American Revolution. It is held each summer at Anderson House, the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati near Dupont Circle. The seminar includes morning lectures and discussions about teaching the Revolution and afternoon sessions working with the resources of the Institute’s library and museum. The best lesson plans that participating teachers develop during the session are published on the Institute website with credit to their authors.

Teachers chosen to participate in the seminar will receive a stipend for travel to and from Washington, D.C., and be treated to meals and lodging at Anderson House. Since Anderson House is a Gilded Age mansion, those quarters are not spartan. (The photo above of one of my talks there reveals the difficult conditions under which I sometimes have to work.) Each participant will also receive a letter documenting sixty hours of professional development.

The institute will be accepting applications for the 2019 Master Teachers Seminar until 22 February.
The application must include a cover letter describing how students will benefit from one’s participation in the program, a résumé, and a draft Revolutionary War lesson plan dealing with the idea of independence and spanning two class periods. For more detail, see this webpage. Applications will be judged on the potential of the lesson plans with preference given to those that include a preliminary bibliography on the chosen topic that uses the Institute’s collections.

Applicants should upload their material through this webpage by 22 Feb 2019. Questions can be sent to Stacia Smith, Director of Education at Anderson House.