48: Richard White's The Middle Ground

In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Richard White argues that the French and Native Americans negotiated a middle ground in the Great Lakes region; unlike in other parts of the country, colonization here created a region characterized by negotiation among groups with relatively equal power.

For White, "middle ground" has two distinct meanings:

• A productive "process of mutual and creative misunderstanding;" this includes both sides' willingness to justify their own actions in terms of their partners' perceived cultural expectations; folks who sought out similarities between their culture and their partners' culture; and the understanding that even the most tenuous cross-cultural similarity can be used in negotiations if both sides accept it.
• A "quite particular historical space that was the outcome of this process:" the Great Lakes region, aka the pays d'en haut.

Because the middle ground is a spatial metaphor, it's possible to conflate the process of creative misunderstanding and the physical space, so that the Great Lakes region becomes the product of two cultures that have roughly equivalent power, a historically-specific place where creative miscommunication between Europeans and Native Americans created new, hybrid cultural forms.

White is careful to characterize this middle ground as a place constituted not by violence and bloodshed but by adaptation, compromise, and mutual respect.  He is also careful to link it specifically to the Great Lakes region, because he derived it empirically there via oral and written histories and archival sources.  However, he does allow that the process of the middle ground might be transferable to other regions, as long as these other regions include a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability for either side to force the other to change because neither side is bigger or more powerful than the other.  The space of the middle ground might be transferable as well, so long as it includes an infrastructure that can support and expand the process.

With this study, White makes a number of important interventions.  He turns culture into a spatialized process; he considers the possibility of a frontier as a space of mutual understanding and negotiation, where hybrid cultures are created; he recognizes the agency of Native Americans in shaping the middle ground, and uses oral histories with the descendants of these tribes to understand the memory of this process; and he shifts the development of American culture from New England to the Great Lakes region.  And rather than assume rational, perfectly informed actors, he acknowledges and even appreciates that "biased and incomplete information and creative misunderstanding may be the most common basis of human actions" ever.

47: Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom

In American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, Edmund Morgan studies the social and political history of Virginia from the 1580s to about 1720, and he argues that the supposed political harmony and freedom in Virginia after 1730 was symbiotically related to the enslavement of black people - freedom and slavery didn't just co-exist; they mutually constructed one another.

Apparently the trajectory of Virginia's growth closely followed the pattern set out by Jack Greene in In Pursuit of Happiness: small and disorganized in Jamestown; then a tobacco boom starting in 1615, which creates huge disparities of wealth between planters and workers, as well as high mortality and increased individualism; then social stabilization from 1630 to 1680, when the mortality rate dropped and, despite Bacon's Rebellion in 1670, elites centralized control; and then the increased substitution of slavery after 1680, which solved the problem of freed indentured servants wanting land and, through racism, created a bond between lower and upper-class whites.  And racism, combined with 18th century ideology of the common man and a dwindling number of non-landowning whites, froze social relations and neutralized dissent in a way that allowed elites to support freedom and slavery to be the thing that held freedom up.

This thesis - that freedom and exploitation are intertwined - seems like a pretty classic Marxist argument to me.  What Morgan adds to the equation is the development of racism as a consciously applied tool of capitalist exploitation.  I'm a little confused about how, exactly, racism comes about - do the elites invent it?  Do the roving bands of unemployed former indentured servants invent it?  Is is already in the air because of experience with Native Americans?  But regardless of origins, this idea of racism as a tool of economic oppression is now pervasive in whiteness studies, so maybe he's on to something.

46: Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness

Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness is the book (according to Amy Kaplan, anyway) that started the field of American Studies.  Miller wanted to find out what was exceptional about America and to see if he could get some insight into the "American Mind" (aka culture), and he realized while loading barrels of oil in the Belgian Congo that the best way to do that would be to check out our origins.  Therefore, he returned to graduate school and started studying the Puritans.

According to Miller, the Puritans came to America of their own accord, with the errand of forming a perfect society in America so that Europe would see it as a model and invite them to go home and rule England.  They were god's chosen people, creating Winthrop's "city on a hill" in the wilderness of America for the benefit of corrupt old Europe.  But not long after they left, conditions in England changed, and the eyes of Europe were no longer upon them; they then had to figure out what their errand was.  And they decided to build a godly community in the wilderness, for their own benefit.

For the first generation, the wilderness is less a shaping factor than a backdrop for the social shaping of the errand.  For the second and third generations, however, the wilderness, which was analogous to leaving the community and falling from grace, became more and more a part of who they were.  The jeremiads of these generations, which enumerated their sins and exhorted them to return to god, functioned as a kind of confession that allowed them to keep sinning - or, as Miller sees it, to keep integrating themselves into the wilderness, and thus to form a new kind of American culture.

Part of what was so revolutionary here was Miller's method: he combined close reading of primary sources with an attempt to situate them in the Puritans' material world; in an era of New Criticism, he was an early proponent of interdisciplinarity.  While the centrality of New England, the theory of a unitary American culture, and American exceptionalism more generally have long been discredited, this method, along with Miller's incredibly entertaining good-old-boy style, his interest in the connection between landscape and culture, his understanding of the connection between Old World and New World cultures, his understanding that culture proceeds dialectically with its environment and by generation, and even his interest in the "internal logic" of a culture all still inform American Studies today.  He was a smart guy, that one.

45: David Lovejoy's Glorious Revolution in America

In The Glorious Revolution in America, David Lovejoy compares the effects of the Glorious Revolution in three different English colonies, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York, to see how colonists reconceptualized their rights as English citizens during a time of political instability in England.

After 1660, England became aggressively involved in colonial affairs, which led settlers from Maryland and Virginia to ask what, exactly, it meant to be a colonist.  The Glorious Revolution was the 1688 overthrow of James II and the House of Stuart by English Parliamentarians, Dutch William III of Orange, and his wife, Mary II, who was the protestant daughter of James II.  James was authoritarian, and his wife was Catholic; the Glorious Revolution reduced the power of the monarch (and the threat of mandatory Catholicism) by creating a constitutional monarchy where the monarch was constrained in all decisions by Parliament.  Per Lovejoy, this political coup was emulated by colonists in America during the revolution of 1689, when they overthrew their arbitrary governments and demanded equality within the empire.

The colonists' attempts to gain equality with Englishmen ultimately failed in all of Lovejoy's three case studies, largely because of the logical impossibility of gaining equality while remaining within an inherently unequal imperial system.  Ultimately, being Englishmen was more important to them than being equal.  However, Lovejoy argues that fighting for equality with England did foster communication and cooperation among the colonies, and thus this book shows that the colonies were becoming a single, interconnected unit much earlier than scholars had thought.  (Previously, scholars thought that the Great Awakening in the 1700s was the first intercolonial experience.)  Perhaps the fight for equality within the Empire did more for colonial unity than any imperial policy could have done.

Although Lovejoy says he's not reading the American Revolution into this study, and although he relies heavily on primary sources, I'm not sure why else he would be so intent on figuring out when the colonies started to form a unified identity that was both predicated on a relationship with England and uniquely American... especially since that unified identity is based on assertions of equality, equal rights and liberty.

44: Jill Lepore's King Philip's War

Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity argues that all wars are contests for meaning, and that the peculiar characteristics of King Philip's War, especially that it was a frontier war between literate and non-literate peoples, make it a critical moment in the formation of a uniquely American identity.

King Philip's War was a frontier conflict between Native Americans and colonists in what is now New England between 1675 and 1678.  Also called Metacom's Rebellion, King Philip's War was the deadliest per capita battle on American soil.  Lepore reconstructs this battle by reading accounts of it from the perspectives of both colonists and Indians, and as a result the book is a much larger study of a war between two cultures, literate colonists who fight with words, and Indians, both literate and illiterate, who write in "blud not ink." The book is also an analysis of the ways in which these binaries break down in war, so that sometimes colonists take pleasure in torturing Indians instead of trying to translate pain into language, and sometimes Indians make their frustrations legible by destroying property or stripping and scalping colonists in a kind of symbolic, rather than pleasurable, "denuding," or erasure of the social meaning the colonists had given the land and themselves.  Further, in theatrical representations of this war in the 1800s, the roles switch, so that Americans are playing Indian and representing Philip as a noble savage, and Native American tribes go through American legal channels to preserve their identity.  American identity is thus intimately connected to language, to the frontier warfare early colonists fought, and to the Native Americans themselves.

Throughout The Name of War, Lepore is careful to anchor her analysis of "text" in the material world of bodies and landscape, actions and objects; the book is thus both a part of the discursive turn and a reaction to it.  It is also thoroughly interdisciplinary in both source and method, as much a work of literary analysis as a work of history.  I don't feel like this kind of sustained, thorough engagement with both texts and the material bodies and spaces and actions that produced them happens nearly as often as it should.

43: Linda Kerber's Women of the Republic

In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, Linda Kerber rewrites early American history to include women.  In doing so, she defines "Republican Motherhood," a Revolutionary era "political context in which private female virtues might comfortably co-exist with the civic virtue that was widely regarded as the cement of the Republic."  Unlike the colonial woman, who lived and worked in the context of her family and community, the Republican Mother "integrated political values into her daily life."  The ambivalent relationship between motherhood and citizenship, then, becomes one of the most complex legacies of the Revolution.

Republican Motherhood was a way for women to claim a significant political role in the New Republic without totally destroying the existing social fabric, as well as a way for them to enter public life without leaving their homes.  Republican Mothers enacted their newfound political responsibility by nurturing "public-spirited male citizens" and teaching them the virtues that make good citizens; political virtue thus became domesticated, because the mother, not the public, was in charge of civic morality.  However, this new political identity was severely circumscribed, as women were still required to remain isolated in their homes and thus had no way to collectively define themselves or act politically as a group in the public sphere.

Kerber places the figure of the Republican mother in the context of larger social change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when industrialization was increasingly pulling fathers out of the home for work and mothers were left with full childrearing responsibilities.  The new, wildly-fluctuating commercial market also allowed laws regarding women's ownership of property to relax, as it became increasingly difficult to determine how much anyone's property was worth, let alone a wife's versus a husband's.  And the new expectations for an educated public led many women to read and write more actively than before, though they often spend more time escaping into romance novels than reading political treatises.

While I would have liked more discussion on women of color and on men in conjunction with this concept, and while I'm a little fuzzy on how romance novels led to increased female empowerment, Kerber's Republican Motherhood clearly elevated the status of mothers, blurred lines between public and private spaces, linked politics and culture through the printed word, and did a host of other fascinating things for women.

42: David Hall's Worlds of Wonder

Like John Butler and Bob Abzug, David Hall sets out to decenter Parry Miller's Puritan-focused history of religion in early America.  In Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Vernacular Religion in Seventeenth Century New England, Hall argues that far from an institutional orthodoxy, religion in the New World was a fluid process in which formal Christianity and popular religious beliefs informed one another.  Unlike in the Old World, multiple belief systems didn't exist side by side; they intermingled - to the point where clergy incorporated wonder and miracles and regular people worried about sin and repentance.

Unlike Butler, Hall relies not just on formal church records but on any source that will give him information about the religious lives of ordinary people; he thus reads official manuscripts alongside popular broadsheets, ballads, chapbooks, and devotional books, all of which would have been accessible to regular people.  Hall's is not the first book to extend the "new social history" to religion (that honor belongs to Keith Thomas' 1971 study of witchcraft in Europe), but it IS the first to use this method for religion in the New World.  It also does a good job of situating American religion in its broader transatlantic context, rather than trying to keep it separate as something uniquely American. AND it contributes to the history of reading in America by expanding the definition of "literature" to include popular publications.

While it would be nice not to have to infer what people were thinking based on the few popular written sources we have left from them, and while it would be even nicer if this book didn't extrapolate from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to speak for all of New England, Hall does bring in new, interesting sources, like the Wonder Books and Samuel Sewell's journals, and I, for one, am entertained by the idea of Puritan ministers incorporating the language of witchcraft into their sermons in hopes of reaching more of the people.

41: Jack Greene's Pursuits of Happiness

In Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, Jack Green situates the American colonies within the larger British colonial empire and determines that they all followed a normative pattern of cultural and social development.

The usual interpretation of American cultural development is the "declension" model.  This model argues that all of American culture followed the pattern seen in New England, where a highly organized, religious, communal culture declined into individualism, liberalism, and entrepreneurial priorities.  While Greene agrees that the declension model makes sense for New England, he argues that the rest of the English colonies in America, the Caribbean, and Ireland followed a "developmental" model, which had three phases:

• social simplification: most colonies started out as pure business ventures in a difficult, undeveloped world; this raw environment and more permissive, materialistic, and secular culture took only the basics of English culture (probably because people were more interested in surviving)
• social elaboration: slowly, economies improved, living conditions and thus life expectancies improved, and the early egalitarianism settled into a relaxed but hierarchical form in most of the non-New England colonies by the mid 18th century
• social replication: economies and populations expanded, people built towns and trading centers, occupational and social structures became more differentiated, culture became more secular, and colonists started to look to England for models of colonial behavior

In America, this process was best modelled by the Chesapeake colonies.  Also in America, the developmental process occurred within an ideology that set up America as 'a place in which free people could pursue their own individual happiness in safety and with a fair prospect that they might be successful in their several quests.'  Eventually, all the colonies, even New England, got on board with this idea, though New England was careful to couch the quest for individual wealth and personal happiness in the pursuit of safety and community consensus.

And why the development of a relatively uniform worldview in the colonies, which in turn derived from a increasingly uniform (and increasingly British) infrastructure and culture, matter?  Greene argues that the convergence of colonial cultures - each with their own twists on British culture, but still - was critical for the formation of an American cultural order, which in turn was necessary if America was going to revolt against England.

Maybe (probably) I'm missing something here, but Pursuits of Happiness kind of feels like Jack Greene is shooting a dead horse: yes, New England was different from the rest of the country; yes, Puritans were an anomaly in their home country as well as in the New World; yes, the colonists on the eastern seaboard came from England, so American culture had close ties to English culture; no, American culture didn't all start in New England.  More importantly, the theory of a unitary American culture was debunked in the 1960s, and the notion that New England was the genesis of American culture came under attack around the same time.  Also, do cultures really progress in a linear fashion?  This is likely a strong synthesis of work on the American Revolutionary period, but it feels more akin to Bernard Bailyn than to, say, Amy Kaplan or Bill Cronon.

40: Bill Cronon - Changes in the Land

Bill Cronon’s Changes in the Land is an ecological history arguing that “the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes…in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations… in the region’s plant and animal communities.” (xv)  By extension, history and ecology cannot be separated; further, biological and ecological changes were just as active in shaping history as were the intentional actions of human beings toward each other.  Cronon builds his argument for interdisciplinarity/ interconnection/ ecological history using a variety of sources, including geography (of course), historical descriptions of landscape and environment, anthropology, and, when sources from these disciplines proved too general or inconsistent, “modern ecological literature.”  The result sometimes feels like a smaller Nature’s Metropolis or a more academic Guns, Germs, and Steel: English attempts to make New England more like Europe economically and politically were intimately connected to ecological changes.  (Indians were not passive in this transformation, either.) 

39: John Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith

John Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith is a welcome revisionist history of American religion before 1865.  Against a long-standing narrative of American religious decline, (the Puritans were the high point of American religion, apparently), Butler argues that religious beliefs have had an impact on American culture from the get-go, but to see them, we have to broaden our definition of religion to include multiple Christianities and multiple belief systems, including magic, the occult, astrology, that helped Americans make sense of their world.  He also broadens the scope of his investigation beyond New England to include religious history in the mid-Atlantic and slave and African religions, and he replaces narratives of linear development with patterns of religious diffusion and struggles among competing Christianities and between Christianities and various occult practices, particularly in slave communities.  And he carefully examines formal records, like church registers, parish and parishioner counts, and new church starts, to show that formal religious institutions have historically housed but a small fraction of Americans - and uses these numbers to spatially expand his study of religion beyond the confines of the church as well.

38: Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone

Ira Berlin's argument in Many Thousands Gone is a simple one: the slave experience in America varied over time and from place to place, and as the institution of slavery matured from 1619 to 1861, racism and slavery fed on one another to increasingly exploit and degrade African Americans.  Although this book was published in 1998, it is the first major synthetic work to argue that slavery was not a monolithic, unchanging enterprise from such a long view.

Berlin divides the history of American slavery into four regions (the North, the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry, and the lower Mississippi Valley) and compares them across three chronological eras.  The first or 'charter generation' of slaves were cosmopolitan Atlantic creoles, many of whom came from West Africa or the West Indies, had interacted with the Spanish or Portuguese, and had worked as translators or interpreters.  Slavery was relatively fluid in all four regions, and some slaves bought their freedom, baptized children, had children with whites, and owned property.  Beginning in the late 17th century, three revolutions then transformed slavery.  The Plantation Revolution, which began in Barbados and spread to the Chesapeake and the Carolinas in the late 17th/ early 18th centuries, consolidated planter power and shifted from wage to slave labor.  The Democratic Revolution produced the first sustained intellectual opposition to slavery in the New World, but had contradictory effects on slavery: it became more entrenched in the South, began to disappear in the North and Old Northwest, and was accompanied in all regions by virulent racism.  The Cotton Revolution undercut the illusion that slavery was a dying institution by expanding slavery, despite decreasing production, soil exhaustion, and shift to grain.

While this is largely a synthetic work, Berlin does employ a number of innovations.  First, he focuses on two unique overarching developments: the shift from "societies with slaves" to "slave societies," and the historical development of race as a generational phenomenon.  His focus on the generational development of race is particularly important because the generations up with the three chronological periods under study.  But even more important is his insistent preservation of dual points of view - both the history of slavery and the diverse histories of the people who were enslaved.  He thus combines two very different ways of doing history: as a narrative of domination, and as an exploration of the cultures and agency of the oppressed.

If you would like more info, there is a much more in-depth summary here.

37: Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (round 2)

Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution argues that the ideology of the American Revolution was based on the usual combination of Enlightenment thought, religion, English common law, classical literature, but also on the "peculiar strain of anti-authoritarianism bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War."  Bailyn's critical intervention was that the Revolutionary generation were not a cabal of philosophical intelligentsia using Enlightenment principles to construct the ideal society; they were a bunch of real-world people operating within an ideology that had both British and American roots, and they overthrew British rule because this ideology led them to suspect a British conspiracy against liberty.

Bailyn comes to this conclusion by closely reading the pre-1776 pamphlets produced in the colonies regarding the "Anglo-American struggle" - political theory, history, polemics, sermons, correspondence, and poems - for the "assumptions, beliefs, and ideas - the articulated world view - that lay behind the manifest events at the time."  Rather than focus on "Enlightenment platitudes," he looks for what the leaders of the Revolution were "actually saying," and where their words and ideas had come from.  He calls his method "deeply contextualist," but it feels more like the myth and symbol approach of Henry Nash Smith or Leo Marx, where a popular text is read as though it contains clues to what the people were really thinking at the time.  And he comes up with a picture of pre-1776 ideology that mixes British and American ideas with American real-world experience: a growing consciousness that Americans could and should be free, a suspicion that the corrupt and despotic British Empire (especially the church of England) was plotting to take liberty away from all English-speaking people, and a Revolution designed to save America from corruption and tyranny and preserve the rights of liberty.

This worldview, and the Revolution and Constitution that came out of it, came out of English thought and developed in reaction to British policies, so the Revolution was not a radical break.  It was, however, the beginning of a country that was fundamentally different from England: English government had developed out of the accretions of history; America's would develop out of ideology, an amalgam of real-world experiences, ideas, philosophy, politics that both drew on its English heritage and was unique unto itself.

You can check out round 1 here.

36: Virginia Anderson's Creatures of Empire

In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia Anderson argues that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England, domestic animals put English settlers and Native Americans into close contact and thus actively shaped the history of early America and settler/ native relations.  By putting livestock at the center of early American history, Anderson contributes to a growing body of literature in animal studies, which, like environmental history, decenters human historical agency by elevating the broader environmental context.  Because colonists and Indians related to animals very differently and because these relationships had a huge impact on the landscape, focusing on animals also allows Anderson to investigate the imposition of one worldview over another in a holistic way.

Anderson divides her book into three sections: a discussion of the many ways Algonquians and English settlers thought about different kinds of animals at the beginning of the 17th century; a history of the introduction of livestock into the Chesapeake colonies and New England and the development of regional husbandry practices; and a comparison of two near-simultaneous conflicts in the 1670s, Bacon's rebellion and King Philip's War, with an emphasis on the relationship between disputes over livestock and the outbreak of violence in both regions.  Building on Bill Cronon's Changes in the Land, she argues that the English settlers sought to turn the New World into England, which included imposing their view of animals as property on the landscape and on Native Americans.  There were regional differences: Chesapeake farmers, with tobacco as their cash crop, let pigs and other animal run free and go semi-feral; New England farmers, who had to deal with colder climates and rocky soils, ran family farms rather than large plantations, and kept a closer eye on their herds.  However, in both regions, Native American responses to new animals and practices ranged from cautious acceptance of pigs (which seemed like deer or dogs) to outright rejection of environmental destruction by animals.

In some ways, this book is a continuation of the spatial turn in American Studies: English attitudes toward animals were closely linked to their attitudes about property, and Algonquian attitudes toward animals were linked to their more holistic view of humans, animals, and the environment, so disputes over animals spatialize and materialize conflicting worldviews.  By broadening the concept of agency to include environmental and non-human actors, it also presents a more contextual (and thus possibly more complete and less biased, or at least differently biased) history of early America.

35: Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest

A Westerner studying at Harvard, Patricia Limerick wrote The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West with three main goals: to knit together the Old West of frontiers, cowboys, and conquest and the complex, 20th century west into a coherent history; to warn against the dangers of the narrative of Progress for the West, environmentally and culturally; and to finally overturn the Turner thesis and shift the focus of Western history from the frontier-as-process to the West-as-place.  She achieves these goals by synthesizing existing scholarship in a variety of historical subdisciplines, including urban, social, business, labor, Chicano/a, Indian, and environmental, and by taking the West's many regions and perspectives into account.

Much of the book, then, involves dispelling myths of the Old West by retelling the history of the West from a variety of perspectives.  Limerick investigates the ideology of Western independence, which can only exist in a national and international context; real estate and property as the emotional center of Western history; and writing mining as labor history.  Most importantly - she spends the second half of the book writing a history of the West from Native Americans' perspective.  While she pulls from Native sources somewhat, her main strategy is to read Anglo sources from a Native American perspective; the result is a portrayal of resentful  people reduced to dependency on a single centralized agency, choosing rationally from among a dwindling number of opportunities.

With this new, synthetic history of the West as a place instead of a mobile frontier or a cowboys-and-indians fantasyland, Limerick argues that the West is a "place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences," and that "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy - for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western  resources."  In other words, the West has long been shaped by a competition between different ethnic groups for property rights, even as the Western frontier functions as a kind of creation myth for white America.  This book thus complicates American narratives of Progress and manifest destiny even as it reclaims the West for historical study.

doing this chronologically

should be very entertaining...