142: Marcus & Segal's Technology in America

Alan Marcus and Howard Segal's Technology in America: A Brief History is a clear, readable, social constructivist history of technological development in the United States from the early 17th century to the late 20th.  While its scope keeps the history of any particular technological development to the length of an encyclopedia article, its investment in social construction means that technologies are contextualized within social, economic, cultural, and historical developments.  The result is a history of America told through the history of technology, with an emphasis on the ways in which American culture determines technological development.

Throughout, Marcus and Segal focus not on why things didn't happen, but on how things did happen.  What made a technology acceptable and therefore applicable was a) how it was conceptualized and b) how it was explained to and understood by the people who would use it.  Both technologies & their implementation are the products of what their inventors, investors, and potential users understand of their situation and whether they think a particular

57: Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic

In The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, Drew McCoy investigates the fierce debates among the Revolutionary generation regard the best economic structure for the new American Republic; the "elusive" republic is the one that could chart a middle stage of social development between Jeffersonian agriculture and Hamiltonian industrialization.  He situates political economy, which at that time was a combination of political science, sociology, and economics and was considered a practical subject for statecraft, within a larger Republican ideology intent on developing the American economy in line with Republican ideals.  I'm pretty sure his main innovation is to complicate the old Jefferson-Hamilton debate by suggesting that the elusive republic would have required freezing time, and, by extension, to show that Republicanism itself, if attached to these time-freezing economic policies, was also ill-fated.  Whew.

a few themes regarding colonial and revolutionary America

in no particular order:

• the search for origins is often linked to the search for what makes America America.  This holds whether you believe in American exceptionalism or whether you're intentionally setting out to break it down.
• religion and the development of American culture
• ideology, the American revolution, and the development of a unitary (or not) American culture
• conflict with Native Americans and slavery are both central to the formation of American culture, though these vary with time and place
• where, geographically, American culture can be said to have started, and what it means to locate the origin point there: New England, Virginia, the Great Lakes
• animals and property as a key difference and source of conflict between Native Americans and English settlers

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.

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.