David Waldstreicher. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Waldstreicher argues that 'nationalism' is more than a set of ideas, it is also a set of practices. The practice he is concerned with here are public celebrations of events and people during the Revolution and in the early Republic. These public events served to create and validate a sense of nationhood that seemed "discovered" rather than imposed or dictated. Celebrations helped create a collective "recognition" that events and institutions in fact represented what we might now call public opinion.
That is half of the argument; the other is that American nationalism was in many ways a product of print culture--these celebrations, parades, and orations existed in some ways in order to be reported in newspapers around the country. Americans in any one locale were implicitly taking part in in a national conversation.
During the Revolutionary era, Americans had a pre-existing Anglo-American tradition of public demonstrations and ritualized crowd and/or mob activity to draw on. Over the years, this tradition evolved as novel circumstances led to new conceptions of who "the people" were and what their relationship to each other and the newly-created nation would be.
Eventually, these forms of public celebration became a venue for partisan debate over the proper conception of the American nation and its people. This argument that Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans were engaged in deliberate partisan politics through the medium of celebration and print reports of same puts the politics of the early Republic in a different light, particularly for the era just prior to the War of 1812 which traditional historical accounts often portray as being less passionate than the moments just before and after.
In the end, the language of nationalism and celebration would be put to use by partisans of different sections of the country, and in the last chapter of the book by African-Americans seeking to use the language of American nationalism to claim their own place within the nation. In the end, the language of nationalism and celebration has always been contested.
Sunday, July 23, 2017
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
The Grand Idea
Joel Achenbach. The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Achenbach rightly notes that historians have generally paid little attention to the western trip George Washington took in 1784 for the purposes of visiting his own western properties and determining the viability of using the Potomac as the western highway for commerce between the Eastern seaboard and the trans-Allegheny West. The result is a very readable account that brings the flesh-and-blood George Washington to life, but largely fails to make the case that this little-remembered trip was as important as Achenbach claims.
He is correct that Washington's concerns regarding communication and commerce with the West were deeply felt and played an important role in events ultimately leading to the Constitutional Convention. For general readers, the connection between concerns about the fragile new nation in the post-Revolutionary age and what were then called internal improvements are surely interesting. And there is real poetry in Achenbach's account of how Washington's "grand idea" would eventually diminish in scale with the Louisiana Purchase and further westward expansion and exploration. Within a few short years after his death, Washington's vision would seem provincial and quaint, even as the Potomac faded from his notion of a 'national' waterway to a mere Eastern seaboard river.
However, there is very little substance underlying these insights; it may be that the reason historians had paid little attention to Washington's westward trip was simply due to the fact that it mattered not very much in the long run. Even his own book suggests that Washington's mind was already made up about the potential the Potomac had as the basis of a trans-Allegheny waterway. In fairness, as a work of popular history--one which does shed a little more light on the character and personality of our first President--this book delivers the goods.
Achenbach rightly notes that historians have generally paid little attention to the western trip George Washington took in 1784 for the purposes of visiting his own western properties and determining the viability of using the Potomac as the western highway for commerce between the Eastern seaboard and the trans-Allegheny West. The result is a very readable account that brings the flesh-and-blood George Washington to life, but largely fails to make the case that this little-remembered trip was as important as Achenbach claims.
He is correct that Washington's concerns regarding communication and commerce with the West were deeply felt and played an important role in events ultimately leading to the Constitutional Convention. For general readers, the connection between concerns about the fragile new nation in the post-Revolutionary age and what were then called internal improvements are surely interesting. And there is real poetry in Achenbach's account of how Washington's "grand idea" would eventually diminish in scale with the Louisiana Purchase and further westward expansion and exploration. Within a few short years after his death, Washington's vision would seem provincial and quaint, even as the Potomac faded from his notion of a 'national' waterway to a mere Eastern seaboard river.
However, there is very little substance underlying these insights; it may be that the reason historians had paid little attention to Washington's westward trip was simply due to the fact that it mattered not very much in the long run. Even his own book suggests that Washington's mind was already made up about the potential the Potomac had as the basis of a trans-Allegheny waterway. In fairness, as a work of popular history--one which does shed a little more light on the character and personality of our first President--this book delivers the goods.
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
Common Landscape of America
John R. Stilgoe. Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845. New Haven, CT: University of Yale Press, 1982
Stilgoe's work of landscape history is based on the following premise: first, that "landscape" originally referred not to natural scenery in any way nor scenic views in general, but to man-made locales which were neither "natural" nor truly urban; and second, that until the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape in the United States was largely shaped by "common" modes based on Old World beliefs and value systems, modified by colonial and then early national experience.
Traditionally, settled, agricultural life led people to shape and order their surroundings in ways which facilitated traditional agricultural and supported a way of life which was tradition-bound, static, and fundamentally communal in orientation. These mores reinforced an agrarian mentality which was often suspicious of non-agricultural endeavors--not just trade and urban centers, but also nascent manufacturing and even pre-modern modes of "artifice" such as milling and blacksmithing.
Once Stilgoe establishes this basic worldview and tension between it and the economic, technological, and conceptual challenges that rapid geographic and economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century drove, he then moves to a thematic rather than chronological or regional schema. The book is divided into broad conceptual chapters, divided into sections on specific facets. A chapter on "National Design", for example, includes sections on lighthouses, canals, and the 'grid' with which early national surveyors at first abstractly on paper, and then concretely through land sales, neatly delineated the western expanse of the continent beyond the Appalachians long before the new nation had made much progress peopling or effectively claiming it.
In the end, Stilgoe argues that while subsequent development has largely swept away the broad common landscape of the country, many discrete elements remain--lighthouses, country farms, New England meeting houses, covered bridges, etc.--and they continue to shape American attitudes towards current landscapes and provide an idealized reference point for the collective visualization of the nation. Whether informing the stubborn American insistence on privately owned wooden homes, on manicured lawns, which can be rebuilt, enlarged, and improved easily, or providing the iconography of a pastoral, agrarian past that somehow still defines the core identity of a cosmopolitan, urbanized industrial country to many of its people, the remnants of the common landscape still shape the mental landscape of many Americans.
Stilgoe's work of landscape history is based on the following premise: first, that "landscape" originally referred not to natural scenery in any way nor scenic views in general, but to man-made locales which were neither "natural" nor truly urban; and second, that until the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape in the United States was largely shaped by "common" modes based on Old World beliefs and value systems, modified by colonial and then early national experience.
Traditionally, settled, agricultural life led people to shape and order their surroundings in ways which facilitated traditional agricultural and supported a way of life which was tradition-bound, static, and fundamentally communal in orientation. These mores reinforced an agrarian mentality which was often suspicious of non-agricultural endeavors--not just trade and urban centers, but also nascent manufacturing and even pre-modern modes of "artifice" such as milling and blacksmithing.
Once Stilgoe establishes this basic worldview and tension between it and the economic, technological, and conceptual challenges that rapid geographic and economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century drove, he then moves to a thematic rather than chronological or regional schema. The book is divided into broad conceptual chapters, divided into sections on specific facets. A chapter on "National Design", for example, includes sections on lighthouses, canals, and the 'grid' with which early national surveyors at first abstractly on paper, and then concretely through land sales, neatly delineated the western expanse of the continent beyond the Appalachians long before the new nation had made much progress peopling or effectively claiming it.
In the end, Stilgoe argues that while subsequent development has largely swept away the broad common landscape of the country, many discrete elements remain--lighthouses, country farms, New England meeting houses, covered bridges, etc.--and they continue to shape American attitudes towards current landscapes and provide an idealized reference point for the collective visualization of the nation. Whether informing the stubborn American insistence on privately owned wooden homes, on manicured lawns, which can be rebuilt, enlarged, and improved easily, or providing the iconography of a pastoral, agrarian past that somehow still defines the core identity of a cosmopolitan, urbanized industrial country to many of its people, the remnants of the common landscape still shape the mental landscape of many Americans.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)