“Rhetoric(s) of Freedom” Conversation, 6 Mar.

On Monday, March 6, the National Council on Public History will host a virtual conversation on “Rhetoric(s) of Freedom: A Conversation about the Conditions of Black Life in the Age of the American Revolution.”

The event description says:

Our group of public humanities scholars and practitioners will examine this theme with a care for what it means to leverage recent scholarship, while also doing this work within public history spaces. It considers the social, economic, political, and intellectual worlds of African Americans in their quest to live out the full meaning of freedom.

The program pays attention to nuances and various ways that geography and ecology shaped the idea of black freedom. In so doing, presenters also will foreground the important place that shifting methodologies play in this discussion.

“Public history” was defined as a field in the late 1970s, with the Public Historian journal launched in 1978 and the N.C.P.H. formally founded in 1980. People in the field focus on communicating historical knowledge to the public in an accurate and empowering way. Therefore, I expect this discussion won’t be about the “Conditions of Black Life” in the Revolutionary period per se but about how to interpret, communicate, and discuss those conditions with today’s public. 

The panelists in this discussion will be:

• Sylvea Hollis, Montgomery College, facilitator
• Yveline Alexis, Oberlin College
• Ista Clarke, Charleston County Parks Department
• Maya Davis, Riversdale House Museum
• Marcus Nevius, University of Missouri

This event is scheduled to run 9:00 to 10:00 P.M. To register, follow this link.

There are further conversations in this series scheduled, but it looks like they’ll be part of conferences and not livestreamed for the public.

Matthew E. Henry‘s “self-evident”

Yesterday I went to a New England Poetry Club reading at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard.

One of the poets sharing work was Matthew E. Henry, who is also a schoolteacher. He grew up in Boston and went to school in Wellesley, and in this poem he looked back on those years.

self-evident

as a kid from Boston, the Revolutionary War
was my favorite subject in fourth grade.
a Tea Party I could respect. class trips vainly
searching for musket balls in Lexington treetops.
reading of decapitation by cannonball on Breed’s Hill.
even the sights in Southie— unsafe for me to visit—
were a source of tribal pride. like rooting for the Patriots.

we were told to don our colonial imagination caps
and tell our story of emancipation from the British.
where would we be? the Old South Meeting House?
the Old North Church? what would we see as we rose
to American greatness? our teacher should hear freedom
ringing in the streets through our words. I dropped my head
to begin— oversized pencil in hand— until I remembered.

seeing my inaction, she crouched and began to re-explain.
I patiently waited for her to finish, eyes on her lips,
then asked if she wanted me to pretend to be white,
or to picture myself for sale on the steps of Faneuil Hall,
or stacked in one-half of the Harbor ships heading to
and from the West Indies, explaining my parents’ patois.

after the vocal static— the hems and haws of white noise—
she suggested Crispus Attucks: the hometown boy, the Black
hero of the Boston Massacre. my siblings had taught me
the “one-drop rule,” and when to nod my head politely,
so I pretended he was not half Wampanoag, that Framingham
was not his master’s home, and imagined myself being
the first unarmed Black man shot on these urban streets.

The specific details, from the reminder of neighborhood enmities to the mention of Asa Pollard’s head, really evoke a post-Bicentennial Boston childhood. But they also remind us that nearby childhoods could be vastly different, then and now.

“self-evident” was a published first in the Tahoma Literary Review. It’s included in Henry’s collection The Colored Page, which on its webpage has the sell line: “How it started: Only Black kid in the room. Where we are: Only Black teacher in the building.”

“The Hive” in Concord, 18–19 Feb.

On the weekend of 18–19 February, Minute Man National Historical Park, Friends of Minute Man, Revolution 250, and the Massachusetts Army National Guard will host this year’s edition of “The Hive: A Symposium for Living History Interpreters.”

The 2023 Hive will offer two straight days of presentations and workshops on the start of the American Revolution, geared toward eighteenth-century reenactors and living-history interpreters.

As in past years, these sessions are designed to improve the accuracy of people’s portrayals of that past, particularly for the commemorations of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April but beyond that as well.

That concern for accuracy in costuming, weapons, and other material culture is why the continuously improving “Battle Road Standards” are a benchmark for Revolutionary reenactments. But it’s also valuable to understand the political issues, the social milieu, and the ordinary customs of the time when interacting with the public.

This year the Hive will take place at the Massachusetts National Guard Armory in Concord. The schedule is still being filled out, but some of the planned presentations are:

• Bob Allison, “Why Did the Revolution Happen?”
• Michele Gabrielson, “A Pressing Matter: Media Literacy & 18th-Century Newspapers”
• Henry Cooke, “Introduction to Men’s Clothing”
• Ruth Hodges, “Introduction to Women’s Clothing”
• Paul O’Shaughnessy, “Basic Musket Maintenance”
• Jim Hollister, “Interpretive Skills Workshop”
• Larissa Sasgen, “Essential Stitches for Beginners”
• Niels Hobbs, “Re-fit Your Kit: Things that Bring Your Impression to the Next Level”
• Adam Hodges LeClaire, “Portraying the Lower Sort”
• Alex Cain and Joel Bohy, “Militia Equipment in 1775”

There will also be times open for practicing military drill, organizing sewing circles, displaying objects from the period, and touring the armory.

For more information about this free event for dedicated reenactors (and those curious about being dedicated), visit the park’s webpage.

Listen in on Rex v. Wemms: The Boston Massacre Trial

On 28 Feb 2020, I attended a meeting at the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum about upcoming commemorations of the Sestercentennial. Evan O’Brien, the museum’s creative director, hosted as chair of the Revolution 250 commemorations committee.

That was one week before the Sestercentennial of the Boston Massacre. As I detailed here, Revolutionary Spaces was about to host an anniversary gathering at Old South and an expanded reenactment in and around the Old State House. Prof. Serena Zabin was coming to town to present The Boston Massacre: A Family History. Exhibits were open at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Old State House.

Our meeting on that February Friday was looking ahead to a subsequent series of events in Revolutionary Boston: the trials of Capt. Thomas Preston and eight British enlisted men for allegedly carrying out the Massacre. Those legal proceedings took place in the late fall of 1770, so we were thinking about how to commemorate them in late 2020.

A reenactment of the soldiers’ trial held promise as a public event; a series of reenactments in different Massachusetts shire towns held even more. We have an unusually full transcript of that proceeding from shorthand writer John Hodgson and printer John Fleeming. Prof. Joseph McEttrick of the Suffolk University Law School had edited that record into a script he produced with students in 1999.

McEttrick, the Suffolk alumni association, and the Bostonian Society mounted a larger production of the trial reenactment at Faneuil Hall in May 2000. That was one of the first historical events I volunteered for, helping to produce the printed program and greeting attendees. The turnout was so big that I didn’t get to see more than a few minutes.

Joe McEttrick was at the meeting in February 2020, offering his script as a basis. But we knew it needed to be adapted. He’d designed that dramatization to maximize the number of university students and alumni who could participate. A Revolution 250 touring production needed a smaller cast and a shorter run time. And even a pared-down version would need significant funding. So there was a lot of work ahead.

At the time of that meeting, we were also hearing about this new coronavirus, eventually called Covid-19. It wasn’t yet clear how that disease spread or how dangerous it would be.

(On top of the natural ignorance about an unstudied virus, there was misinformation coming from the top of our government. The President had told a reporter on 7 February, “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. . . . It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff. This is deadly stuff.” But publicly he claimed the disease was no worse than seasonal flu and complained about testing programs.)

As I recall that first meeting, we proceeded with the assumption that the epidemic would be resolved by the fall. By the time the Massacre commemorations came a week later, we were doing elbow handshakes and worrying about transmission through the air, though it was unclear what we could do about it. A week after that, I gave a lecture to four people, widely spaced, and then we largely stayed home. For months.

It turned out that my best contribution to those commemoration discussions was a casual remark that the soldiers’ trial could be made into an audio drama and distributed like a podcast. For several years I’ve listened to drama podcasts, from post-war detective shows and westerns to the B.B.C.’s new adaptation of The Dark Is Rising. It struck me that an audio production could sidestep the challenges of finding venues and rehearsing a large cast through long speeches, and it could last longer and reach more classrooms.

For reasons we know all too well, no Massacre trial reenactment came to pass in late 2020. But early the next year, Evan O’Brien shared the news that he was moving ahead with an audio production. He wanted to include female voices, so I sent the testimonies of Jane Whitehouse, a witness at Capt. Preston’s trial, for him to mix in.

Last month, the Revolution 250 podcast debuted its completed production of Rex v. Wemms: The Boston Massacre Trial, directed by Evan O’Brien. It has a full voice cast drawn from local historical interpreters and actors. Logging in at a bit under two hours, the material focuses on the question of whether Pvts. Edward (Hugh) Montgomery and Mathew Kilroy should be convicted of killing Samuel Gray, Crispus Attucks, or others. We hear actual eyewitness testimony and eighteenth-century legal arguments.

This recording debuted around the 252nd anniversary of the soldiers’ trial, not the exact Sestercentennial, but it can be a teaching resource for many years to come. It’s a testament to Evan O’Brien’s creativity and perseverance under challenging conditions. Have a listen.

“America’s typ’d by a SNAKE”

Last week the Age of Revolutions website shared its lists of the most-read postings of 2022 and the earlier postings that people had most revisited. On the second list is my 2021 article “Join, or Die: Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?”

G. Patrick O’Brien of the University of Tampa chimed in on Twitter:

We read @Boston1775’s “Join, or Die: Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?” this semester, and students loved how creative it was. One student is even researching the reappropriating of the snake by modern, far-right groups. A great piece to teach students about thinking broadly!

That’s very gratifying, of course.

I expanded on one footnote in that article back here. Here’s more material about Revolutionary snake symbolism that I didn’t have space to include beyond a brief mention.

As the North American colonists’ confrontation with the Crown government heated up in 1774, some Whig newspaper printers adopted new mastheads incorporating snakes as symbols of the resistance.

James Rivington, a decidedly not-Whig printer, put these lines into his New-York Gazetteer on 25 August:

For the New-York Gazetteer.
On the Snake, depicted at the Head of some American News Papers.

YE Sons of Sedition, how comes it to pass,
That America’s typ’d by a SNAKE — in the grass?
Don’t you think ’tis a scandalous, saucy reflection,
That merits the soundest, severest Correction,
NEW-ENGLAND’s the Head too; — NEW ENGLAND’s abused;
For the Head of the Serpent we know should be Bruised.

This verse pointed out the great paradox in the American Whigs’ adoption of snakes as symbols: For centuries, western culture had treated snakes as Very Bad Things. The lines brought up both Biblical and classical precedents:

• According to the King James Version of Genesis 3:15, God told the snake, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
• In his third Eclogue, Virgil wrote, “latet anguis in herba,” meaning, “a snake lurks in the grass.”

With such powerful authorities warning against snakes, why should people admire them now?

Margaret Draper and John Howe’s Boston News-Letter reprinted that item from New York on September 8. A week later, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy (which had a new masthead with a massive venomous snake on it, as shown above) responded in kind:

On reading the piece, (inserted in Draper’s last paper) relative to the Snake at the head of some of the American Papers.

YE traitors! the Snake ye with wonder behold,
Is not the deceiver so famous of old;
Nor is it the Snake in the grass that ye view,
Which would be a striking resemblance of you,
Who aiming your stings at your own country’s heel,
Its Weight and resentment to crush you — should feel.

There we see the devastating, impossible-to-refute argument of ‘I know you are, but what am I?’

“How to tell the story of chocolate and trade and enslavement”

Boston.com offers an article by Madeleine Aitken detailing an important shift in historical storytelling by the Old North Church’s historical wing, now called Old North Illuminated:

Nearly a decade ago, the church opened a Colonial-themed chocolate shop where re-enactors in traditional costumes ground cacao by hand and told tourists about the chocolate trade and its relevance to Boston. The store was called Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop, named for Captain Newark Jackson, who they believed to be a key figure in both the historic church and Boston’s 18th century chocolate trade with the British.

The church commissioned Prof. Jared Hardesty to do some deeper research into Jackson for the chocolate-shop employees to use.

This research eventually turned into “Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate,” a book Hardesty released in the fall of 2021 [review quoted here]. The book exposed Jackson as not only being a cacao trader, but a human trafficker and a slave holder — he transported, owned, and traded enslaved people. . . .

“The board made the decision to take Captain Jackson’s name off of the shop and off of the program, but there was a strong desire to still tell the story, just in an honest and comprehensive way,” said Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated, the organization that works to preserve and share the church’s story.

Maddy Rodriguez, the chair of the board of Old North Illuminated, said finding out about the true history of Jackson was a “shock.”

“I think it was really jarring because of the fact that up to that point, the chocolate program had been super successful. It was a unique opportunity for guests, especially families, to engage with the history of Old North,” Rodriguez told Boston.com. “To hear that the person that we had decided to name the exhibit after was involved in smuggling human beings in the slave trade was just completely opposite to that intent, that mission, that previous feeling that we had had.”

So they pivoted, re-envisioning how to tell the story of chocolate and trade and enslavement.

That admirable decision has resulted in several educational units for different grades, a new interpretive plan, a revamped audio tour, and a “complete redesign of the exhibit and signings inside the church,” scheduled to debut in the summer of 2023.

Maps to Explore from Your Desk

The Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library is offering an “Unrest in Boston 1765–1776” collection of digital images from its collection for educators in grades 3 through 8.

The maps to explore are:

• William Price’s 1769 update of John Bonner’s 1722 map of the town, showing just the Shawmut peninsula. (I have a print of this on my wall.)
• Lt. Richard Williams’s map of wartime Boston, the provincial siege lines, and the inner harbor.
• London publishers Robert Sayer and John Bennett’s “Seat of War, in New England” map of eastern Massachusetts, featuring a little train of figures escorting Gen. George Washington toward Boston.
• Boston native Isaac de Costa’s map of eastern Massachusetts showing locations from the Battle of Lexington and Concord, including provincial cannon in the countryside.

These maps come with geographic inquiries, supporting documents, and questions for class discussions.

I noted that the overview starts, “Colonial Boston was a flourishing city of 20,000 by the 1760s.” In fact, the 1765 census found 15,520 people in Boston. The surrounding towns, now incorporated into the city, added more people to the area, as did the short-term population of sailors and (at times) soldiers. But this essay makes clear that it counts those soldiers as separate from the town inhabitants.

That census figure is significant not just because of accuracy but also because it hadn’t changed much in decades. Boston was stuck at about 16,000 people while Philadelphia and New York grew larger. What once was Britain’s biggest and busiest port in North America became number three. A frustrating stagnation might have been one reason Bostonians were so easily worked up about imperial taxes in the 1760s.

Before leaving the Leventhal Center, I want to highlight another digitized item from the same decade: This map of the travels of the Qianlong Emperor of China in the fall of 1778.

As an object, this diagram of the imperial route unfolds into an image nearly twenty feet long. (It’s appropriate, therefore, that the interactive feature demands a screen of a certain size before it will show you anything.) The digital presentation comes with helpful explanations by Prof. Anne-Sophie Pratte.

“Underrepresented Voices” Conference in Boston, 14–16 July

The Massachusetts Historical Society has announced details of its upcoming conference on “Underrepresented Voices of the American Revolution,” to take place over three days from 14 to 16 July.

The conference introduction says:

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 will bring together scholars to explore the broad themes associated with historic individuals or groups not traditionally considered in discussing the American Revolutionary Era.

The program for Thursday, 14 July, will take place at the M.H.S., starting in the afternoon. There will be one panel with two papers, a reception, and finally keynote remarks by Profs. Colin Calloway, Kathleen DuVal, and Chernoh Sesay. This part of the conference is free to all who register.

On Friday, 15 July, the action will move to Sargent Hall at Suffolk University. This full day’s program consists of four sessions, each with two panels featuring two to four academic papers and discussion (P.D.F. download of the full schedule). Registration for both Thursday and Friday costs $30.

Finally, on 16 July, K-12 teachers can participate in a full-day workshop led by Prof. Chernoh Sesay, Prof. (and former schoolteacher) G. Patrick O’Brien, master teachers, and M.H.S. education staff. The goals will be to “identify important takeaways from the conference, reflect on the accessibility of current scholarship for the K-12 classroom, and discuss best practices for introducing the major themes of the conference to our students.” Participants will have a chance to develop their own instructional materials in collaboration with scholars and fellow educators. This day also costs $30.

Two New Artistic Depictions of Revolutionary Stories

Naden Rowe teaches history at an “American” middle school overseas. He occasionally parodies popular songs with new lyrics to explain some part of his lessons.

Last year he reworked “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo and Dan Nigro into “Act of Violence,” narrating the Boston Massacre from the perspective of a teen-aged girl in Boston.

Rowe turned to a nearby singer who goes by the name Nyah (here’s her Tiktok feed) to record the new lyrics.

Then a sixth-grader dubbed Yakuza Baby asked to make an animated video for the song, using the Paul Revere engraving combined with new art.

All in all, it’s very impressive. Rowe’s song rightly depicts the first violence of the night on King Street coming from a soldier, analyzes what feelings the propaganda print would produce, and highlights the event’s ambiguities. Nyah’s vocal performance is affecting. And Yakuza Baby’s animation effects are varied and striking.

Another creator who caught my attention this week on Twitter was Sean Dermond, who shared “Mrs. Benedict Arnold,” an online picture book. It provides his take on the story of Peggy Shippen using cutouts within paper dioramas, a technique that reminds me of the 1970s Paddington television series. Handsome draftsmanship and photography under pandemic conditions. Check it out on Dermond’s webpage.

“The young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel”

This has been a good week for fans of American Revolution historiography. In addition to the article on “The 1619 Project” that I quoted the last two days, the Boston Review published David Waldstreicher’s review of Gordon Wood’s Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution and Carol Anderson’s The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Waldstreicher is a professor of history at the City University of New York and author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997). His own review of the long controversies leading up to “The 1619 Project” appeared on the Boston Review in January 2020.

The new review assesses two very different books on American constitutionalism, which lets Waldstreicher make a long running start from Charles Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States and Warren G. Harding’s tradition-minded counterattack against it.

Eventually that brings us to Wood’s first book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, published in 1969:

That study won acclaim for highlighting the intellectual and practical dilemmas of republicanism and for seeming to split the difference between celebration and criticism of the founders. Wood argued that, ironically, the course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that sought to bury economic conflict in schemes of federalism and representation, and did it so successfully that it created an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.

In this, the young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel. At great length and sophistication, he had offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, those who criticized it, and those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced yet caught up in self-deception.

The Creation of the American Republic was and remains an important book, but in the half-century since it appeared growing numbers of historians have pointed out the limits of its approach.

One factor in that change was simply that new scholars need to develop new ideas. About Cold War-era academics, Waldstreicher writes, “Ever Oedipal, young historians began to make their name by attacking the pieties of their Progressive forebears.” The same process applied to what seemed radical in 1969.

Another is how much America changed in the following decades. When women and people of color play a larger role in society, including the top ranks of our government, economy, and culture, it’s natural to wonder how those individuals were part of the American Revolution. Wood spent little time on those people or issues concerning them. The formal politics of the time excluded them, and he continues to view those politics as most important.

As a result, Waldstreicher and other historians don’t see much new in Wood’s latest book, or in the several that preceded it. It presents the big political documents of the Revolution—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—as world-changing while waving away all the ways life didn’t change for most Americans.

In contrast, Anderson’s The Second emphasizes the continuity from colonial-era slave codes through the Second Amendment’s protection of the white male militia to the armed backlash against Reconstruction and civil rights. Wood would probably say her perspective misses the big picture. She would probably say the same of his.

“The most basic one of all: All men are created equal”

Yesterday I noted and quoted from New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein’s essay about “The 1619 Project,” originally a collection of articles in the Sunday newspaper and now a book.

Silverstein situates that project within the historiography of the American past, and specifically within the effort by some historians to highlight how the Revolutionary conflict included, excluded, and affected people of African descent.

Alongside a longer effort by other historians to ignore or downplay that aspect of the Revolution in order to make the American past look better in the present, whatever the present’s values happen to be at the time.

Here are some more extracts from Silverstein’s discussion:

[Benjamin] Quarles’s book “The Negro in the American Revolution,” published in 1961, was an important part of that decade’s historiographical reassessments. It was the first to thoroughly explore an often-overlooked feature of that war: that substantially more Black people were drawn to the British side than the Patriot cause, believing this the better path to freedom.

Quarles’s work posed profound questions about the traditional narrative of the founding era. While acknowledging that for some white people the ideals of the Revolution had “exposed the inconsistencies” of chattel slavery in a nation founded on equality, he also observed a deeply uncomfortable fact: “They were far outnumbered by those who detected no ideological inconsistency. These white Americans, not considering themselves counterrevolutionary, would never have dreamed of repudiating the theory of natural rights. Instead they skirted the dilemma by maintaining that blacks were an outgroup rather than members of the body politic.”

. . . today we find ourselves back in the midst of another battle over the teaching of American history. Though it differs in some respects from the debate over the national history standards, the two episodes have enough in common that the conclusions drawn by [Gary] Nash and [Charlotte] Crabtree in their 1997 book, “History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past,” written with Ross E. Dunn, offer some insight into our present struggles. . . . In their view, the standards’ opponents believed that “history that dwells on unsavory or even horrific episodes in our past is unpatriotic and likely to alienate young students from their own country.” Their own perspective was that “exposing students to grim chapters of our past is essential to the creation of informed, responsible citizens.” . . .

It’s a particularly American irony that the effort to do so has been deemed a “divisive concept” and banned from the classroom in 12 states. We may need, instead, legislation that requires us to study divisive concepts, beginning with the most basic one of all: All men are created equal.

As Quarles and others have explained, our founding concept of universal equality, in a country where one-fifth of the population was enslaved, led to an increase in racial prejudice by creating a cognitive dissonance — one that could be resolved only by the white citizenry’s assumption of Black inferiority and inhumanity. It’s an unsettling idea, that the most revered ideal of the Declaration of Independence might be considered our original divisive concept.

It’s a long essay, with many more interesting passages that I didn’t quote. It might also be paywalled, but I recommend reading it.

For anyone who comes away with a hunger for more about the shifting historiography of the American Revolution, check out Michael Hattem’s overview of the subject here and, less graphically, here. Hattem is an educator at Yale and author of Past as Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution.

The Short, Ongoing History of “The 1619 Project”

In connection with the publication of the revised and expanded book edition of The 1619 Project, Jake Silverstein, the New York Times Magazine editor who green-lighted Hannah Nikole-Jones’s original proposal for a special issue, wrote a long essay covering two topics:

• the genesis of the original publication and how it became a focus of political controversy.
• how the project fits into the historiography of the American Revolution.

On the first topic, Silverstein dates the “substantive” pushback against the project to a letter from five eminent American historians which the magazine published and responded to in December 2019.

The ever iconoclastic author William Hogeland noted that that framing left out how the World Socialists Web Site started to run interviews with those same historians the previous month. I quoted from the conversation with Gordon Wood back here.

The interviews were much longer than the letter, as well as more intemperate (and in some cases inaccurate) about what the original “1619 Project” said. They served but didn’t support the World Socialists’ own critique of the project, a Trotskyist approach that emphasizes economic issues over racial ones. Since socialists are one part of the political left, more powerful critics on the right were able to argue that opposition to the 1619 Project wasn’t simply reactionary.

Me, I think it’s impossible to find any activity that doesn’t have political meaning, even if it’s not easy to see at the time. Of course “The 1619 Project,” or anything about racial injustice in American society, has a political dimension. As does overheated opposition to it.

Silverstein’s essay recounts how far the political response went in a year with a Presidential election and another with an attempted coup:

By the end of the summer, 27 states had introduced strikingly similar versions of a “divisive concepts” bill, which swirled together misrepresentations of critical race theory and the 1619 Project with extreme examples of the diversity training that had proliferated since the previous summer. The list of these divisive concepts, which the laws would prohibit from being discussed in classrooms, included such ideas as “one race, ethnic group or sex is inherently morally or intellectually superior to another race, ethnic group or sex” and “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race, ethnic group or sex,” as Arizona House Bill 2898 put it.

To be clear, these notions aren’t found in the 1619 Project or in any but the most fringe writings by adherents of critical race theory, but the legislation aimed at something broader. “The clear goal of these efforts is to suppress teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States,” the A.H.A. [American Historical Association] and three other associations declared in a statement in June. “But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an educated public.”

One of the basic points of both “The 1619 Project” and “critical race theory” is that for at least three hundred years American schools and other institutions did operate on the basis that “one race, ethnic group or sex is inherently morally or intellectually superior to another.” And that the consequences of those centuries still affect us every day. These “divisive concepts” laws prohibit promulgating such ideas further, but they also stifle teaching about the history and results of those ideas.

TOMORROW: The long effort to tell the history.

Revolutionary Events on Saturday, 23 Oct.

Here are two outdoor Revolutionary events happening in New England tomorrow.

At Minute Man National Historical Park’s Hartwell Tavern site in Lincoln, two knowledgeable volunteers will lead a walking tour of a crucial corner along the Battle Road back from Concord:

Elm Brook Hill (formerly known as “Bloody Angle”) was the site of a violent ambush against the British column on the afternoon of April 19, 1775. Edmund Foster, a volunteer from Reading, Massachusetts (portrayed by Park Volunteer Ed Hurley, shown above), will lead a tour to this battle site where he fought in 1775. Learn about this action from the words of one who was there! Ed will also be accompanied by local historian and author Don Hafner of the Lincoln Minute Men.

That tour will happen twice, at noon and 1:15 P.M. The walk is less than a half mile along a hard-packed dirt surface.

It looks like Frank Coburn was the first author to apply to label “Bloody Angle” to this area and the fight that took place there. In his 1912 The Battle of April 19, 1775, he used the phrase first without capital letters, then with them. But he was borrowing the term from parts of the Gettysburg and Spotsylvania battlefields during the Civil War.

Coburn’s coinage of “Parker’s Revenge” for the skirmish at a site on the Lexington border has been vindicated by archeological evidence, so it will probably stick, even though nobody used that label before him. So he can afford to lose “Bloody Angle.”

Up in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, the Association for Rollinsford Culture & History is hosting a “Colonial Market Fair and Militia Muster” at the Col. Paul Wentworth House. This event will includes artisans in eighteenth-century attire demonstrating such crafts as joinery, coopering, lacemaking, and blacksmithing. A militia unit will perform musket firings and military drills, explain their equipment, and raise a Liberty Pole and flag.

That gathering will happen from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. with cannon firings at 11:00, 1:00, and 3:00. Admission is $5 for adults, free for children.

For folks from outside the region or staying inside, American History TV is broadcasting two lectures recorded in 2019 on C-SPAN2:

• “American Military in the Revolutionary War” by Baylor University Professor Julie Anne Sweet, looking at the equipment and capabilities of the Continental Army, militia troops, and Crown forces.
• “Continental Army” by William Woods University Professor Craig Bruce Smith, describing how the American force differed from the British in demographics, organization, and officer selection.

Those two lectures will be shown back to back starting at 8:00 A.M., 11:00 A.M., 8:00 P.M., and 11:00 P.M. And one can watch them anytime on the web.

“Two Perspectives” Debate between Wood and Holton, 23 Oct.

On Saturday, 23 October, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host an online and in-person debate between the historians Gordon Wood and Woody Holton on “The American Revolution from Two Perspectives.”

Both Wood and Holton are senior scholars—in Wood’s case, quite senior, since he won the Bancroft Prize for The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 in 1970 when Holton was a grade-school kid living in the Virginia governor’s mansion. In 1993 Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and he’s written and edited many other titles.

But Holton has written significant books, too, including Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia; Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution; and the biography Abigail Adams, which won the Bancroft Prize in 2010.

Wood was born in Concord, studied at Tufts and Harvard, and spent most of his career at Brown University, where he is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus. Holton, as I said before, grew up in Virginia, studied at the University of Virginia and Duke, and is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. So they are literally coming at the Revolution from different places.

Wood is a leading figure in the school that analyzes the Revolution through ideology, focusing on printed arguments that perforce reflect mostly elite views. Holton prefers to look at class conflict within American society pushing both the mass of people and the elite in unexpected ways.

Both authors have new books out, reflecting those contrasting approaches. Here’s how the publishers describe them:

Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution: Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism—the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions. Gordon Wood illuminates critical events in the nation’s founding and discusses slavery and constitutionalism, the emergence of the judiciary as one of the major tripartite institutions of government, the demarcation between public and private, and the formation of states’ rights.

Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution: Using eyewitness accounts, Liberty Is Sweet explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. Woody Holton looks at the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease.

Holton and Wood have made joint appearances like this before, so expect to hear well-practiced arguments.

This discussion will take place in person at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, and will also be live-streamed to people who sign up in advance to watch. Catherine Allgor, president of the M.H.S., will moderate.

The on-site event will start with a reception at 2:30 P.M. on Saturday, 23 October, and the hourlong debate is scheduled to begin at 3:00. The cost is $20, free to M.H.S. Members and Fellows and people with E.B.T. or Connectorcare cards.

Remembering the Work of Gary B. Nash

Gary B. Nash, a leading historian of the early America, died late last month just after turning eighty-eight years old.

This is from Carla Gardina Pestana’s obituary for Nash at the Omohundro Institute website:

Over the course of a very prolific career, Gary produced dozens of books: monographs both authored and co-authored, textbooks, edited collections. They were all written with flare and grace. His work ranged widely across the history of Quakers in early America; race, race relations, and African American history; and the American Revolution. . . .

Gary’s attention to race in early America has ranged widely but began with his path-breaking Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974). For younger scholars, it might be difficult to capture the shockwave that book generated, with its insistence that early American history can only be understood as the interaction among three groups, Natives, Europeans, and Africans. . . .

Gary’s contributions to the study of the American Revolution were varied, but his signature contribution was the 1979 The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution. Comparing three urban centers—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—in the years leading up to and during the revolution, he showed how economic crisis helped to galvanize ordinary urban dwellers to engage in revolutionary politics. A signal contribution to New Left historiography, it continued a line of inquiry associated with scholars such as Jesse Lemisch and Al Young.

In addition to his research-based scholarship, Gary was a fierce advocate for history education. His involvement in the controversies surrounding the National History Standards, which pitted him against Lynne Cheney and all those who want history taught as a simple and patriotic tale of U.S. exceptionalism, are well known. Serving as the public face for maligned history educators was only one aspect of his commitment. In his retirement from UCLA, he oversaw the Center for History in the Schools which promoted U.S. history and World history education. He participated in curricular revision at UCLA and more widely. He hosted workshops for teachers for decades, for which he became well known and much beloved among K-12 teachers.

Governance at James Madison’s Montpelier

James Madison’s estate Montpelier was a slave-labor plantation. 

In fact, Madison appears to have been comfortable with that. He didn’t wrestle with the morality of slaveholding like his friend Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t even acknowledge the contradictions as frankly as Patrick Henry (“I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct.”).

The historic site of James Madison’s Montpelier had been owned since 1983 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1998 the Montpelier Foundation was formed “with the goal of transforming James Madison's historic estate into a dynamic cultural institution.” Which of course means raising money.

More recently the Montpelier Descendants Committee formed as a “nonprofit organization devoted to restoring the narratives of enslaved Americans at plantation sites in Central Virginia, including but not limited to James Madison’s Montpelier.”

This month the Montpelier site announced a significant step in its governance, making the Descendants Committee and the Foundation co-equals in governing the historic site.

This is the latest step in a long process that included a National Summit on Teaching Slavery convened at Montpelier in 2018. One product of that gathering was the report “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites” (P.D.F. download).

Every historic site is in a different situation, but it will be interesting to see how other sites associated with slave-owning Founders approach the questions Montpelier has been talking through.

Thinking about Feel-Good History

At the Panorama, the blog of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Princeton professor Michael A. Blaakman just shared an essay titled “How Should History Make Us Feel?”

While Blaakman’s remarks were prompted by David McCullough’s book The Pioneers, which is the focus of the latest issue of S.H.E.A.R.’s journal, and by the flimsy “1776 Report” from the last Presidential administration, his concerns can apply to other history projects.

This was snowflake history—history designed to inspire, delight, or comfort, while sheltering its imagined audience from challenging questions about the past. [It] embodied an idea that is not going away anytime soon: that history’s purpose is to make people feel good. . . .

For most historians, meanwhile, the primary goal is not to make us feel one way or another, but to help us think: to understand prior worlds, to discover why events unfolded the way they did, and to explain how all of it has shaped the present. . . .

Stories [that center on the origins and character of the nation] carry a lot of baggage. They implicate a primary and deeply political category of their reader’s personal identity, in ways that do not bear as heavily on biographies, microhistories, and global histories, at least not by definition.

Is it inevitable that any nation-centered history will necessarily alienate whole constituencies, even within the nation itself? The optimist in me would like to think it’s not, because it seems more vital than ever for scholars of the early republic to help broad audiences understand themselves and the nation in historical context. As the United States’ semiquincentennial approaches, we will be called on increasingly to do so.

Blaakman sees the appeal of history books like McCullough’s lying in “drama,” and he suggests foregrounding the authors’ investigative process to produce that.

I think those books’ appeal comes from narrative, which includes moments of drama but goes beyond that one ingredient. The historian can indeed be the protagonist of a narrative, but so can the historical actors, even when the author concludes that history is shaped by larger forces and trends beyond individual actions.

“Frantic reactions to the teaching of history”

Back in February, Prof. Michael Leroy Oberg of the State University of New York at Geneseo wrote an op-ed essay for the Syracuse Republican addressing legislative pressures to limit what public school history teachers could teach.

Oberg wrote:

Frantic reactions to the teaching of history are commonplace. Teaching history is always political. Debate over what stories to include and what to exclude are fundamental to the very enterprise of history. It is impossible to include everything, so choices have to be made, and those choices can easily spark debate and discord.

There always has existed a tension between history as civic education (aimed at the production of patriotic and law-abiding citizens) and history as an academic discipline (the critical study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions and cultures).

The accurate study of history may make it harder for teachers and other adults to promote admiration for the society being studied. However, if the goal of education is improvement of that society, then studying the actual history is a necessary part of the process.

Since this essay appeared, several state legislatures have taken up and in some cases passed bills aiming to limit how history is taught in specific ways. Despite concurrent complaints from the political right about historical figures or voices being “cancelled,” that same wing is trying to define what can’t be taught in public schools and colleges.

The particular bogeymen held up by sponsors of those bills are the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” and “critical race theory,” which the laws rarely define (and if they do, never as the concept’s actual originators did). Obviously the tender spot is the undeniable history of racial discrimination in America.

Oberg saw the initiatives coming this year as the latest manifestation of a long pattern:

The [modern] Republican Party’s positions have been consistent. Republicans argued against “multiculturalism” in the 1980s, against the National History Standards in the 1990s, and current efforts to write and teach a more inclusive history. Always, they stand opposed to discussions of slavery, violence and dispossession. . . .

As a result, if you argue, as nearly every historian does, that enslavement was central to the growth and development of the United States, that the Constitution as an instrument of governance protected the institution of slavery and hard-wired its governing institutions for control by slavers, you are anathema to today’s Republican Party. If you assert that this country could not have developed in the way that it did without a systematic program of Native American dispossession, your loyalty is suspect.

In fact, if people are truly loyal to the idea that, as Abraham Lincoln said, the U.S. of A. is “dedicated to the proposition that all men [and women] are created equal,” then they should accept the meaning of the word “proposition.” That is a hypothesis to be proven, a challenge to be met, an ongoing responsibility to fix problems.

Limiting how teachers discuss the history of race discrimination in America would be simply giving up on that proposition. It would confirm that American society is inherently, irreparably racist—exactly the idea that the people pushing these new laws ostensibly object to.

The Right Way to Study the Founders

A few days ago Lindsay Chervinsky, author of The Cabinet, shared some thoughts on continuing to include the most famous Founders in the teaching of U.S. history even as we include more people in our study of the past:

We can and should teach the Founding Generation in all of its glorious complexity. Done correctly, this history is actually remarkably inclusive and helpful. Allow me to explain:

The Founding Generation has received a lot of heat during the last year, and rightly so. Previous approaches often glorified the Founders in ways that are incompatible with the flawed humanity we all experience. By focusing only on the rhetoric, military exploits, or political ideals of the Founders, these histories obscured the lives of women, people of color, and men in the lower economic classes.

But the Founders lived colorful, messy lives and they left records of those lives, in ways that others weren’t able to do or their records weren’t preserved because they weren’t the first president. George Washington didn’t just fight a war or serve as president. He loved to munch on nuts, spent hours foxhunting and cared little about actually catching a fox, he just wanted to be outside, and enjoyed the theater with more enthusiasm than many of his contemporaries thought appropriate.

He both included provisions in his will to emancipate the enslaved individuals he owned and spent years trying to track down self-emancipated enslaved individuals that ran away from the President’s House in Philadelphia in the 1790s. By using Washington’s records as an entry point to history, we have access to all of these stories.

Approached holistically, the Founders are very powerful symbols and offer an incredible opportunity to open conversations. Think about the life I just described. Of course, we can use Washington’s experiences to examine the military battles and strategy of the Revolutionary War. But Washington’s war experience also includes interactions with ardent abolitionist voices and Black soldiers for the first time; which played a pivotal role in forcing Washington to rethink his stance on slavery.

As commander-in-chief, Washington regularly hosted congressional delegations, visiting dignitaries, and foreign diplomats. So, his war service also tells us a lot about diplomacy, social customs, and dining practices. And of course, women were regular participants at these events, especially during the winter when officers’ wives joined them at headquarters. Just the war, therefore, offers an excellent window through which to examine American society more broadly.

I think most Americans would welcome that all-inclusive approach. Indeed, I think the best history educators and public historians use it, moving from the best known and best documented names to a fuller picture.

That said, I’m not sure that approach would resolve the tensions of the “history wars,” Chervinsky’s starting-point. Some people equate any level of criticism of the Founders with disrespect, hostility, and, in the latest overblown buzzword, “cancellation.” Some people complain after hearing about slavery while touring Monticello, a slave-labor plantation.

Bahne on “Cradle of Liberty,” 5 May

For folks intrigued by Ens. Henry DeBerniere’s map of the Massachusetts countryside in early 1775, I hope you caught the comments from Charles Bahne about it—particularly sites I couldn’t identify.

In addition to being a practiced tour guide and teacher, Charlie has a degree from M.I.T. in Urban Planning and an interest in transportation routes and maps, so he’s just the guy to tackle mysteries like the “Nineteen Mile Tavern.”

Next week, Charles Bahne will teach an online class on the topic “Cradle of Liberty: How Boston Started the American Revolution” through the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

This is a single two-hour webinar, and the description says:

The first shots of the American Revolution, fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, were the culmination of a decade and a half of political unrest in and around Boston. Why was Massachusetts such a fertile ground for the seeds of rebellion? This class will explore how events and issues such as the Writs of Assistance, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party set the stage for the War for Independence. The roles of James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Thomas Hutchinson will all be discussed.

This online event will take place on Wednesday, 5 May, from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. Registration costs $50. Space is limited.

The Cambridge Center for Adult Education is the present owner of the house from which William Brattle launched Gov. Thomas Gage’s move against the provincial gunpowder storehouse on 1 Sept 1774 and, inadvertently, the “Powder Alarm” of the following day.