Catherine Allgor. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson arrived in the still embryonic capital city of the nation he sought to lead away from what he saw as the anti-Republican tendencies of Federalist rule towards a purer, more perfect Republicanism. As the first President to reside in Washington City for his entire term, he also sought to use the social life of the small but growing new city as a means to set the tone of his administration but also to funnel the political life through channels he would mediate, oversee, and control. In the end, though, the growing social life of the city--managed by the elite women married to other political figures--would take on a life of its own. And those women would become an important component of the growing Republican society of Washington, and of the United States' ruling class.
Allgor's study begins with Jefferson and ends with Jackson. Jackson's conflict with the "ladies of Washington" over the Peggy Eaton affair is revealed here as a more substantive and fundamental conflict than many bemused (or amused) historians have allowed over the years. In the end, the ladies of Washington succeeded in banishing Eaton, but at the expense of some of their power, as the role of society in political life would recede in subsequent years and administrations.
By the end, the rise of Jacksonian democracy had undone earlier Republican qualms regarding personal ambition and the possibly corrupting role of government service on public virtue. The need for wives to serve as political proxies for their ostensibly disinterested husbands through Washington City's social life receded, as did the power those women had once held. As in many other ways, Jacksonian Democracy proved to be extremely riven by gender inequities.
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Friday, November 10, 2017
The Shaping of America, Volume 2
D.W. Meinig. The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 2 Continental America, 1800-1867. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
This is the second of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 2 turns from the Atlantic focus of the first volume towards a more continental viewpoint, in line with the demographic and geographic shift in the early Republic towards westward development. A consistent theme develops--the United States expanded rapidly, at an almost feverish pace during this era. That growth outstripped whatever efforts there were to create a robust national infrastructure or even a comprehensive national plan, so that sectional divisions spread and further west even as the industrial economy of the North and the cotton economy of the Deep South created increasingly incongruent societies. Once those two societies began "running into each other" in Missouri, latent sectional divergences began to morph into increasingly strident sectional opposition.
Interestingly, Meinig closes his perioidization in 1867. With the Civil War already over and Reconstruction just beginning, he looks beyond the theater of war to the Western frontier and the broader North American region; Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. This is a appropriate for the transcontinental theme of Volume 3.
This is the second of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 2 turns from the Atlantic focus of the first volume towards a more continental viewpoint, in line with the demographic and geographic shift in the early Republic towards westward development. A consistent theme develops--the United States expanded rapidly, at an almost feverish pace during this era. That growth outstripped whatever efforts there were to create a robust national infrastructure or even a comprehensive national plan, so that sectional divisions spread and further west even as the industrial economy of the North and the cotton economy of the Deep South created increasingly incongruent societies. Once those two societies began "running into each other" in Missouri, latent sectional divergences began to morph into increasingly strident sectional opposition.
Interestingly, Meinig closes his perioidization in 1867. With the Civil War already over and Reconstruction just beginning, he looks beyond the theater of war to the Western frontier and the broader North American region; Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. This is a appropriate for the transcontinental theme of Volume 3.
Monday, August 28, 2017
The Shaping of America; Volume 1
D.W. Meinig. The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 1 Atlantic America, 1492-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
This is the first of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 1 covers the Atlantic history era over the course of four parts, the first three of which cover major phases in the development of "Atlantic America" while the shorter fourth summarizes the nature of the new Republic. Each of the three parts are organized in chapters focusing on a single region, theme, or time period. In spite of the sprawling nature of the subject and the structure, the book is fundamentally simple and straightforward. Broader themes develop organically as the narrative moves through time and space. In the end, the United States seems to coalesce from long strands of human and social development played out on stage which is plastic in scale and dynamic in scope.
This is the first of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 1 covers the Atlantic history era over the course of four parts, the first three of which cover major phases in the development of "Atlantic America" while the shorter fourth summarizes the nature of the new Republic. Each of the three parts are organized in chapters focusing on a single region, theme, or time period. In spite of the sprawling nature of the subject and the structure, the book is fundamentally simple and straightforward. Broader themes develop organically as the narrative moves through time and space. In the end, the United States seems to coalesce from long strands of human and social development played out on stage which is plastic in scale and dynamic in scope.
Sunday, July 23, 2017
In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Liberty's Exiles
Maya Jasanoff. Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
The American Revolution was also, in many ways, a civil war. This was likely especially true for the loyalist minority, who experienced the war as a betrayal of their own sense of British identity. Loyalists, Jasanoff shows, were not the conservative reactionaries of contemporary rhetoric or posthumous remembrance. Instead, they often took views on the relationship between provincial subjects and the British government which were remarkably similar to that staked out by the Patriot Whigs. What defined them, ultimately, was loyalty not conservatism.
This study of the roughly 60,000 loyalists--white, free black, and American Indian--who chose to leave the newly independent United States in the wake of the 1783 Treaty traces their exodus around the growing, changing British Empire--what became Canada, the Bahamas, East Florida, Jamaica, Britain itself, Sierra Leone, India--it was a global diaspora, and often involved multiple stops before the exiles (not a few of whom ultimately returned to a United States which by fits and starts became more welcoming to its prodigal subjects-turned-citizens).
By 1815, this process was largely over--the exiles who were still alive were largely dead. During the roughly 30 years of exile, the loyalists had played an outsized role in the creation of a new British Empire, and had also been part of a larger process of constitutional and political development. The British Empire, in contrast to the Republicanism of the United States and France on the one hand, and the despotism of so many other powers on the other, would be marked by a peculiarly British form of liberal, paternal imperialism. The loyalist exiles contributed greatly to this development.
By studying the loyalists and following them after most American histories turn away from them, the American Revolution and the development of early American Republican citizenship can be seen in a new light, in contrast to the loyalist exile experience as they struggled to find new homes in the empire they gave up so much in order to remain loyal to.
The American Revolution was also, in many ways, a civil war. This was likely especially true for the loyalist minority, who experienced the war as a betrayal of their own sense of British identity. Loyalists, Jasanoff shows, were not the conservative reactionaries of contemporary rhetoric or posthumous remembrance. Instead, they often took views on the relationship between provincial subjects and the British government which were remarkably similar to that staked out by the Patriot Whigs. What defined them, ultimately, was loyalty not conservatism.
This study of the roughly 60,000 loyalists--white, free black, and American Indian--who chose to leave the newly independent United States in the wake of the 1783 Treaty traces their exodus around the growing, changing British Empire--what became Canada, the Bahamas, East Florida, Jamaica, Britain itself, Sierra Leone, India--it was a global diaspora, and often involved multiple stops before the exiles (not a few of whom ultimately returned to a United States which by fits and starts became more welcoming to its prodigal subjects-turned-citizens).
By 1815, this process was largely over--the exiles who were still alive were largely dead. During the roughly 30 years of exile, the loyalists had played an outsized role in the creation of a new British Empire, and had also been part of a larger process of constitutional and political development. The British Empire, in contrast to the Republicanism of the United States and France on the one hand, and the despotism of so many other powers on the other, would be marked by a peculiarly British form of liberal, paternal imperialism. The loyalist exiles contributed greatly to this development.
By studying the loyalists and following them after most American histories turn away from them, the American Revolution and the development of early American Republican citizenship can be seen in a new light, in contrast to the loyalist exile experience as they struggled to find new homes in the empire they gave up so much in order to remain loyal to.
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