Introduction [2008] (pp. 10-11):

The more we study events and situations in the past, the more complicated and complex we find them to be. The impulse of the best historians is always to penetrate ever more deeply into the circumstances of the past and to explain the complicated context of past events. The past in the hands of expert historians becomes a different world, a complicated world that requires considerable historical imagination to recover with any degree of accuracy. The complexity that we find in that different world comes with the realization that the participants were limited by forces that they did not understand or were even aware of -- forces such as demographic movements, economic developments, or large-scale cultural paterns. The drama, indeed the tragedy, of history comes from our understanding of the tension that existed between the conscious wills and intentions of the participants in the past and the underlying conditions that constrained their actions and shaped their future.

(p. 14):

History that reveals the utter differentness and discontinuity of the past tends to undermine that crude instrumental and presentist use of the past that we Americans have been prone to. We Americans resist this kind of historical consciousness. We do not want to hear about the unusability and pastness of the past or about the limitations within which people in the past were obliged to act. We do not want to learn about the blindness of people in the past or about the inescapable boundaries of our actions. Such a history has no immediate utility and is apt to remind us of our own powerlessness, of our own inability to control events and predict the future.

"Influence" in History: Explaining America: The Federalist, by Garry Wills (New York: Doubleday, 1981) [1981] (pp. 27-28):

In 1913 Charles Beard published his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, surely the most provocative work of history ever written in America. Since then, Beard has been proven wrong on almost every count: in his simpleminded conception of motivation, in the crudity of his class division, in his use of evidence. But Beard was right in trying to strip the creation of the Constitution of its mythical and heroic character in order to make it a humanly comprehensible matter of earthly political conflict and social interests. Wills would have us forget this Beardian legacy and return to an image of high-minded demigods trying to work a miracle. Wills quite rightly stresses the immense distance of the eighteenth-century world from our own, but we make a serious mistake and unnecessarily denigrate ourselves if we think of the Founding Fathers as heroes, as something other than men like ourselves with interests and social positions to promote.

Anachronism in History: The Vineyard of Liberty. Volume 1 of The American Experiment, by James MacGregor Burns (New York: Knopf, 1982) [1982] (p. 30):

We Americans, unlike many Europeans, have tended to see our history as a product of conscious intentions and purposeful leadership. We have not usually thought of ourselves as caught up in large impersonal forces sweeping us along to destinies we have not chosen. Which is to say that we generally have not had a tragic vision of our past. But there is in our history one notable exception to this: the Civil War. Of all the great events of American history, only the Civil War has been viewed as tragic. Only such a bloody, fratricidal conflict was awesome enough to seem to be beyond traditional American political management. Yet as unaccustomed as we are to being imprisoned by circumstances, it is not surprising that some of us have been unwilling to see even the Civil War as the result of inexorable forces beyond human control. Consequently, that war has become the only major event in our history that has aroused among historians a continual debate over whether it was inevitable or avoidable. The Civil War has become a kind of test of America's ability to govern its fate.

(pp. 38-39):

This is romantic American optimism carried to extremes. Somehow from somewhere some great hero, some Lochinvar, might have ridden in and rescued Americans from their predicament. Thus for Burns the coming of the Civil War cannot be a true tragedy, the kind of tragedy that sees the inescapable boundaries within which people have to act. The "tragedy" that he perceives lies elsewhere, in the fact that neither side saw how like the other it was, that neither side linked liberty "to equality and other principles in a well-considered hierarchy of values," and that neither used government creatively and positively to cure its ills. In other words, the "tragedy" for Burns lies in the fact that those poor benighted people back then were not more like us -- or more like the citizens Burns wants us to be.

[2008] (p. 39):

Since we can never completely escape, even imaginatively, from our present, some degree of anachronism is inevitable in all history writing. But any good historian needs constantly to worry about the problem of injecting his or her contemporary consciousness back into the past. As Yogi Berra might put it, it is difficult to write history, especially about the past.

Narrative in History: The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, Volume 3 in the Oxford History of the United States, by Robert Middlekauff (New York: Oxford University Press) [1982] (p. 50):

Essentially, Middlekauff shows no real appreciation of the revolutionary character of the Revolution; he never makes sense of why an English radical like Richard Price thought it was the most important event in the history of the world since the birth of Christ. He mentions Jefferson's revolutionary achievements in Virginia -- his abolition of entail, his bill for religious freedom, and his legal reforms -- but he never succeeds in relating these to the Revolution as a whole. He sees little of the social and economic consequences of the Revolutionary paper money emissions. In the end, Middlekauff's Revolution remains pretty much a colonial war for independence, albeit an inspiring one.

(p. 54):

Most American historians did not have much appreciation for the intellectual fashions of the late twentieth century. Perhaps nothing is more revealing of this than the fumbling historians go through trying to deal with the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault seemed to be writing about the issues historians like to write about, such as changes through time in European methods of disciplining and punishing criminals. Thus historians try to hold Foucault up to their traditional understanding of change and their traditional standards of verification and evidence without ever appreciating that it is precisely these traditions of history writing that Foucault is out to smash.

Even more disconcerting to historians are the ways in which imaginative writers have been questioning the distinction between history and fiction, more or less in the spirit of "it's all made up anyhow." Thus E. L. Doctorow in his novel Ragtime claims that his fabrication of the past is no less authentic than that of the historian. "There's no fiction or nonfiction now," he has said, "there's only narrative." Facts about the past are what the writer says they are. Asked whether Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit ever really met, Doctorow replied, "They have now."

The Lessons of History: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, by Barbara W. Tuchman (New York: Knopf, 1984) [1984] (pp. 64-65):

Tuchman is now nothing if she is not scientific, at least in her claims. She begins her book with a taxonomy of misgovernment. She says there are four kinds of misgovernment, often in combination: (1) "tyranny," (2) "excessive ambition," (3) "incompetence or decadence," and finally, (4) "folly or perversity." This last is the focus of her book, which she describes as "a generalized inquiry" into the ways governments have committed folly by acting against their own best interests. Political philosophers from Plato on, she writes, have investigated the major issues of ethics, sovereignty, the social contract, freedom and order, and so on, but few of them, "except Machiavelli," have bothered with "mere folly, although folly has been a chronic and pervasive problem."

Tuchman aims to make up for this neglect. Examples of folly, she believes, are "timeless and universal" and "independent of era or locality." These constants, these scientific principles, are what she is after. All the particulars of political events, all the peculiar and specific facts, "must be sifted out in the hope that abiding principles may appear." By isolating these abiding principles of politics she hopes to become a sort of Machiavelli for the masses.

To qualify as folly for her purposes, a government's actions must meet three criteria: (1) they must have been perceived as counterproductive in their own time; (2) they must have been the actions of a group, not one individual; and (3) they had to persist in the face of alternative suggestions. In her opening chapter, Tuchman ransacks history for various examples of such folly -- everything from Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But most of her book concentrates on several major historical events that illustrate folly. After a short chapter on the Trojan horse as a classic example of political stupidity, Tuchman devotes a chapter each to the provoking of the Protestant Reformation by the Renaissance popes, the British loss of America, and America's betrayal of itself in Vietnam.

(pp. 71-72):

Unlike sociology or political science, history is a conservative discipline -- conservative, of course, not in any contemporary political sense but in the larger sense of inculcating skepticism about people's ability to manipulate and control purposefully their own destinies. By showing that the best-laid plans of people usually go awry, the study of history tends to dampen youthful enthusiasm and to restrain the can-do, the conquer-the-future spirit that many people have. Historical knowledge takes people off a roller coaster of illusions and disillusions; it levels off emotions and gives people a perspective on what is possible and, more often, what is not possible. By this definition Americans have had almost no historical sense whatsoever; indeed, such a sense seems almost un-American.

Too much of this historical sense, too much skepticism, is not, of course, very good for getting things done. Which is why Nietzsche believed that "forgetfulness is a property of all action." Too much "rumination," too much "historical sense," he wrote, "injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a system of culture." Fortunately, however, there seems to be little danger of our becoming too historically minded in America today.

Continuity in History: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) [1989] (pp. 76-77):

during the period between the early seventeenth century and the American Revolution, the British colonies were settled by at least four great waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of about twenty thousand Puritans, mostly from the eastern region of England, to Massachusetts in the period from 1629 to 1640. The second was the migration of a small group of royalist Cavaliers and large numbers of indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia between the early 1640s and the 1670s. The third was the migration of twenty-three thousand Quakers and Quaker sympathizers from the North Midlands of England to the Delaware Valley during the half century after 1675. The fourth was a massive flow of English-speaking peoples from the borders of North Britain and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry during the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century.

Although nearly all of these groups of migrants were alike in speaking English, in being Protestants, and in being jealous of their British liberties, they differed from one another in many ways: in their particular brands of Protestiantism, in their social status, in their customs, and in the British regions from whence they came. "They carried across the Atlantic," writes Fischer, "four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World." By the eve of the Revolution these four cultures were firmly established in America. The people of each group spoke different dialects of English, built their houses in different ways, cooked differently and ate different foods, treated the opposite sex and older people differently, raised and named their children differently, and ordered their society and government differently.

These different British customs and practices have had decisive and long-lasting effects on American life. Although less than 20 percent of Americans today have any British ancestors, Fischer believes that "in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion's seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been." Strong echoes of these four British folkways, says Fischer, may still be heard today in the major dialects of American speech, in the regional peculiarities of American society, in the complex dynamics of American politics, and in the differing ideas of American liberty. The central thesis of this book, he writes, is the legacy of these four British folkways in early America, a legacy that "remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today."

History and the New Historicism: The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, by Michael Warner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) [1990]

History as Fiction: Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), by Simon Schama (New York: Knopf, 1991) [1991]

History as High Politics: The Age of Federalism, by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) [1993] (pp. 116-117):

Yet there was truth in that Republican invective, for Hamilton and other Federalist leaders were interested in more than stock markets and banks and commercial prosperity. They in fact wanted to turn the United States into a fiscal-military power that would rival the great European states and achieve the honor and glory that all such great states aspired to. This meant establishing for the United States a strong national government with an elaborate administrative bureaucracy, a standing army and navy, and the financial wherewithal to accomplish great and noble deeds. The whole structure would be held together not by republican virtue, which Hamilton thought was chimerical, but by patronage, interest, ceremony, and force -- the kind of ligaments monarchies used. So although the Federalists technically did not want to set a king upon an American throne, they were indeed seeking to infuse enough monarchical elements into American life to lend weight to the Republican fears of Federalist monarchism.

Microhistory: The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America, by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) [1994] (pp. 119-120):

Early nineteenth-century America witnessed the greatest outpouring of religious feeling in Christendom since the religious turbulence of seventeenth-century England or perhaps the Reformation. Amid all the momentous events of what came to be called the Second Great Awakening, one year, 1830, seems to stand out. (Is it just coincidental that 1830 was also the year that Americans reached a level of consumption of alcoholic spirits -- four gallons per person -- that was the highest for any year in all of American history and one of the highest in the world?) In that spirit-soaked year the great evangelical preacher Charles Grandison Finney came to Rochester, New York, the fastest-growing community in the United States, and launched a religious revival that eventually shook the nation. In that same year the celibate communitarian sect called the Shakers attained the greatest number of members than at any other time in its history.

At the same time, Alexander Campbell, a seeker of primitive Christianity, broke from the Baptists and began publication of the Millennial Harbinger in preparation for the momentous alliance of his Campbellites with Barton Stone and the creation of the Disciples of Christ, which within decades became the fifth-largest denomination in America. In 1830 a twenty-five-year-old failed farmer from Palmyra, New York, Joseph Smith, Jr., having translated some golden plates given to him by the angel Moroni, published a six-hundred-page American bible, the Book of Mormon, which began the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And in that same crucial year, 1830, a down-and-out carpenter in Albany, New York, named Robert Matthews experienced a revelation that turned him into the wandering Jewish prophet Matthias.

(p. 129):

Yet beneath all this subtle mocking of the search for significance, Johnson and Wilentz do have some ideas about what was happening in the larger society that can explain Matthias's cult and, indeed, can explain how America in the early nineteenth century experienced "one of the most extraordinary spells of sectarian invention that the nation, and world, has ever seen." The most important underlying force, they suggest, was what they and other historians have called "the market revolution," that transformation peaking in the years between the 1820s and the 1840s "that took the country from the fringe of the world economy to the brink of commercial greatness."

(pp. 130-131):

What does seem fundamental to this explosion of religiosity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the great numbers of radical changes that took place in people's personal and social relationships, relationships that compared to other early modern societies were often weak and tenuous to begin with. Whatever transformed these relationships -- whether it was the so-called market revolution, or the disestablishment of the Old World churches, or rapid population growth and movement, or the cries of equality coming out of the American Revolution -- created needs and anxieties that often found resolution in religion. The sudden emergence in the early nineteenth century of new sects like the Mormons and weird cults like that of Matthias was certainly expressive of changes in social relationships and in American religious thinking that historians have only begun to explore.

Truth in History: Telling the Truth About History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994) [1994] (p. 138):

The effects of the upheavals of the 1960s were felt everywhere in American culture, but especially in the colleges and universities. The 1960s democratized higher education in America. Never before did so many men and women from so many different social backgrounds go to college and earn higher degrees. Among the people from diverse backgrounds entering the historical profession were increasing numbers of women. The number of new female Ph.D.s in history steadily grew through the decade and the decades following. In 1970 only 13 percent (137) of new Ph.D.s were awarded to women; by 1989 that had increased to 37 percent. As the character of the history profession changed and became more diverse, so did the subjects the historians wrote about. Between 1958 and 1978 the proportion of doctoral dissertations written on social history quadrupled, and social history surpassed political history as the primary area of historical research.

More important than the change in subjects, however, was the radical shift in perspectives. Instead of focusing on statesmen, generals, diplomats, and elite institutions, the new social historians over the past thirty years have concentrated on "America's outsiders -- the poor, the persecuted, and the foreign," and thus they have "put their research on a collision course with the conventional accounts of the American past." For the most part, the stories of these outsiders have not been celebrations of heroic achievement and patriotic glory; rather, they have been "tales of frustration and disappointment which cannot be easily assimilated to the monolithic story of American success."

History Versus Political Theory: If Men Were Angels: James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason, by Richard K. Matthews (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) [1995] (pp. 149-150):

So widely accepted is this view of Madison that Matthews makes no effort to dispute it head on. In fact, he spends an extraordinary amount of time detailing the various ways Madison, with his "brilliant liberal mind," contributed to the making of the liberal American republic. In the process he draws out starkly the pessimistic implications of Madison's liberal thinking. Madison, he tells us, was no democrat; democracy for Madison was "a fool's illusion." And since Madison's ideas stand for American culture, America is no real democracy either. Madison's dream, like any "liberal's dream," was "life without others," which, says Matthews more than once, was really a "nightmare." His politics, which are American politics, was "the politics of sin, cynicism, and suspicion." A liberal like Madison has an accountant's mentality with no place for compassion and caring. All that matters in Madison's liberalism is the individual and his property, especially his property. And so it goes. Despite his acceptance of Madison's brilliance, Matthews has written a devastating critique of Madison's political thought.

Wood's reply to a letter by Matthews [1996] (p. 161):

Historians are as interested in the ideas and ideologies of the founder as political theorists like Matthews. What is different about the two disciplines is their purpose. Historians attempt to recover a past world as accurately as possible and try to show how that different world developed into our own. Political theorists who work with the ideas of the past have a different agenda. They are primarily interested in the present or future conditions of political life and see the past ideas as merely the sources or seeds for present or future political thinking. They are, as historians like to say, very "whiggish"; they usually see the past simply as an anticipation of our present, and thus they tend to hold people in the past responsible for a future that was, in fact, inconceivable to them. So if you think modern liberalism is heartless, then go back and blame John Locke or James Madison or any to the other presumed contributors to a modern "bourgeois notion of property." Of if you want an alternative future for America, then go back and find in Jefferson's thought some idiosyncratic notions about ward democracy and the earth's belonging to the living.

History Without Ideas: A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, by Theodore Draper (New York: Times Books, 1996) [1996]

History and Heritage: American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier (New York: Knopf, 1997) [1997] (p. 182):

It turns out that the Declaration is not so extraordinary after all, that Jefferson was not as original or as important as he is sometimes pictured in drafting it, and that we don't have to know about the ideas of Jean Jacques Burlamaqui or Francis Hutcheson to comprehend it. Maier is a historian through and through, and in her expert hands the Declaration is set in its proper historical context and becomes what it was in 1776: simply "a workaday document of the Second Continental Congress" and "one of many similar documents of the time in which Americans advocated, explained, and justified Independence." Her book is contextual history at its best.

(pp. 184-185):

Her most important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Declaration is her long second chapter on "The 'Other' Declarations of Independence." In her research she uncovered at least ninety different declarations of independence that Americans in the colonies (later states) and localities adopted between April and July of 1776, most of which have been forgotten under the influence of our national obsession with the Continental Congress's Declaration of Independence. These declarations were issued by a wide variety fo groups and institutions: Massachusetts town meetings, New York mechanics, Pennsylvania militiamen, Maryland and Virginia county conventions, and South Carolina grand juries. They were very much expressions of popular feeling from the bottom up. In fact, Maier believes that these "state and local 'declarations of Independence' offer the best opportunity to hear the voice of the people from the spring of 1776 that we are likely to get."

(p. 189):

Jefferson's preamble with its ringing phrases about equality and rights is what we today most remember and care about; in fact, the preamble alone is what has made the Declaration the most sacred of all American political documents. For this reason, modern scholars have tended to ignore the charges against the king and to focus on the preamble, treating it as high philosophy and looking for its sources in every conceivable corner of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Europe. Maier knows better; she knows that the Declaration was not a philosophical but a political and constitutional document, and she finds the sources of its preamble in the writings of contemporary Americans, especially in George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. There was nothing new, says Maier, in what Jefferson said. All of the sentiments that Jefferson so eloquently expressed -- from "created equal" to "the pursuit of happiness" -- were "absolutely conventional among Americans of his time."

(pp. 191-192):

As Americans began sanctifying Jefferson and his Declaration, they increasingly concentrated on its preamble, particularly on the phrase "all men are created equal." Workers, farmers, and women's rights advocates began using the Declaration to justify their quests for equality and their opposition to the tyranny of others. The most powerful invocations of the Declaration, however, were made by the opponents of slavery who stressed what William Lloyd Garrison called the "horrible inconsistency" between the Declaration's professions of liberty and equality and America's continuance of slavery. This in turn provoked the defenders of slavery, like John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, to claim that there was "not a word of truth" in the Declaration's notion that all men were created equal. By the 1850s antislave politicians like Abraham Lincoln had come to believe that the equality phrase in the Declaration was "the father of all moral principles" and the basic "axiom" of a free society. Maier admits that in many respects the Southern defenders of slavery often offered a more historically accurate understanding of the Declaration than did slavery's opponents. Lincoln's "version of what the founders meant," for example, "was full of wishful suppositions."

But whether it was bad history or not, Lincoln's appeal to equality in the Declaration as the moral standard for Americans was not, in Maier's convincing view, a single-handed sleight of hand foisted on the nation, as Willmoore Kendall, M. E. Bradford, and Garry Wills have argued; rather it was the natural consequence of the ways many Americans over the previous generation had used the ideal of equality to advance a variety of causes. Lincoln by himself no more gave the nation a new past than Jefferson by himself created the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, Maier says, belongs to the whole culture that continually reinterprets it; "its meaning changes as new groups and new causes claim its mantle, constantly reopening the issue of what the nation's 'founding principles' demand."

Comparative History: The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850, by Lester D. Langley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) [1997] (pp. 196-197):

Since the late 1960s this traditional belief in American exceptionalism has eroded in a variety of ways. Many intellectuals have concluded that the United States no longer has a divinely consecrated place in the vanguard of history. The country's history does not seem exceptional after all: the United States is not exempt from the constraints and contingencies of history. The conflict in Vietnam convinced many that the moral character of the United States was not different from that of other nations. Americans, it seemed, no longer had any uniquely transcendent part to play in the world in promoting liberty and democracy. At the same time, America's sense of difference from Europe, on which its exceptionalism was originally founded, has slowly disappeared as European nations have attained standards of living and degrees of freedom and democratic political stability that are equal to, if not higher than, those of the United States. Even the conservative celebrator of America Irving Kristol admits that America now is "a middle-aged nation," not all that different from the older nations of England and France. "American exceptionalism," he says, is virtually over. "We are now a world power, and a world power is not a 'city on a hill,' a 'light unto the nations' -- phrases that, with every passing year, ring more hollow." For the first time in our history, we Americans are confronting the fact that the United States may be just another nation among nations without any special messianic destiny.

(pp. 203-204):

At any rate, the Revolution set forth ideals of liberty and equality that had contagious effects in expanding political participation and in challenging traditional elite rule. In some parts of the country black slaves who fought the British were granted their freedom. Yet, Langley writes, because the Revolutionary leaders feared social disorder, they sought strenuously to limit the social forces unleashed by the Revolution and were largely successful in doing so. "The inequities in wealth that had characterized prerevolutionary British America remained." Their revolution thus became a "social revolution promised but left unfulfilled." By 1800 the Revolutionary leaders had no further need of a large professional army and could safely reduce the nation's military force to a small frontier constabulary. Because the people of the United States "had been mobilized for war, but the experience had not militarized society," they "escaped dictatorship or militarism" and the fate of the Latin American republics.

Langley next describes the Haitian Revolution, which he calls "the revolution from below." It began in 1790 on the French island colony of Saint Domingue with an uprising of free coloreds. The free coloreds, a diverse group that numbered about thirty thousand and included French-educated planters, tradesmen, artisans, and small landowners, had been infected with French revolutionary principles and now demanded equality with whites. The whites numbered about forty thousand, but they were bitterly divided between the more prosperous grands blancs and the disorderly petits blancs. Beneath the whites and the free coloreds were half a million African slaves.

Neither the whites nor the free coloreds realized the extent to which their civil war was affecting the slaves. In August 1791 the slaves on the northern plains rose up, soon becoming a force of twelve thousand that began killing whites and destroying plantations. Brutal retaliation by the whites did not stop growing numbers of slaves from deserting the plantations. Confronted with this rebellion from below, French officials sought to forge an alliance between the whites and the free coloreds and sent six thousand troops to put down the rebellion. But the whites and free coloreds were so divided by factions that the fighting became worse and eventually spilled over into the Spanish portion of Hispaniola. With the end of the French monarchy and the outbreak of war between France and England in 1793, English forces invaded the island and soon became entangled in the brutal racial wars. Although the great ex-slave leader of the revolt, François-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture, tried to preserve a multiracial society, he could not contain the chaos that spiraled into the rebellion's eventual goal of eliminating both slavery and whites.

(pp. 205-206):

Out of a total population of 13.5 million in Latin America in 1800, there were 3.5 million whites, most of whom were American-born (creoles); there were only about 30,000 Spanish-born (peninsulares), who were sent out by the Crown to staff the offices of the imperial bureaucracy. Although many creoles managed to secure a share of these imperial offices, their local power remained dependent on the law and institutions radiating out from the Crown in Spain. Unlike the American politicians in the British colonies, these creole leaders in Latin America never developed popular representative institutions like the North American colonial assemblies that existed outside the imperial bureaucracy and contested its authority.

Yet the Latin American revolutions originated in circumstances similar to those that precipitated resistance and revolution in British North America; they were touched off by the attempts of Spanish officials both to tighten their control over and to raise revenues from their empire during the last third of the eighteenth century. Although the Spanish creole elites were as angry at the new taxes and the arbitrariness of the imperial reforms as the British-American patriots were, they were reluctant to resist imperial authority too directly and to move toward independence in the relatively aggressive manner of the British-American leaders. Unlike the North American leaders, they were a minority amid a mass of mestizos, mulattoes, Indians, and slaves whose passions they feared exciting. Despite being inspired by the example of the successful North American revolution against imperial authority, they also knew from the experience of Haiti the dangers of arousing a revolution from below.

Yet Napoléon's invasion of Spain and his removal of the Spanish king from the throne in 1807-8 made change inevitable and aroused calls for independence. Still, the creoles hesitated. Liberators like Simón Bolivar and José de San Martin realized they could never win the struggle for independence without mobilizing the lower orders of slaves, Indians, and those of mixed descent; yet they also feared that the social consequences of such a mobilization might make the costs of independence too high. So the creole elites equivocated and took away privileges and rights even as they promised them,and repressed the lower orders even as they freed them.

By 1826 both Spain and Portugal were finally driven from the New World, with Spain retaining in America only the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Seventeen Spanish-American states and Brazil achieved independence, but their revolution, says Langley, became "the revolution denied." The initial calls for liberty ended with desperate searches for authority. [ . . . ] Order could be maintained only by force.

Postmodern History: The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, by Jill Lepore (New York: Knopf, 1998) [1998] (pp. 212-213):

One of the most important consequences of the upheaval in the writing of American history that has taken place over the past generation has been the new attention paid to the Indians. A century ago historians of early America scarcely acknowledge their existence.In the opening paragraphs of his essay in the first issue of the American Historical Review in 1895, Frederick Jackson Turner set forth his entire frontier thesis for understanding the origins of the United States, and the Indians had no place in it. For Turner, the New World the Europeans came to in the seventeenth century was "virgin soil," an "unexploited wilderness" out of which American distinctiveness was born. Indeed, wrote Turner, it was "the fact of unoccupied territory in America that sets the evolution of American and European institutions in contrast."

No historian of early America would write that way anymore. Through the efforts of a squadron of scholars, the Indians have made their presence felt in early America. During the past several decades works dealing with the native peoples of North America in the colonial period have multiplied dramatically. Since the 1960s the William and Mary Quarterly, the principal journal in the field of early American history, has increased its publication of articles on Indians fivefold. Some of the best historians in the United States have been turning to the indigenous peoples as a subject of research, and books on Indians in early America have begun winning prestigious prizes.

(pp. 214-215):

Although King Philip's War is the most bloody and destructive war in the history of all the American people, it began simply enough. In late January 1675,l John Sassamon, a Christian Indian who had recently warned the English colonists of a possible Indian uprising, died in mysterious circumstances. Three Wampanoags close to Philip, the Wampanoag ruler, were tried for the murder of Sassamon and found guilty, and in June 1675 they were executed by Plymouth Colony. The executions touched off Indian attacks on English settlements that quickly escalated into a ferocious conflict that spread throughout large parts of southern New England. By the time Philip was shot fourteen months later in August 1676, thousands of people had been killed, both English and natives.

Indeed, the war inflicted greater casualties in proportion to population than any other war in American history. By August 1676 twenty-five English towns, more than half of all the English communities in New England, had been destroyed, and the line of English settlement had been pushed back almost to the coast. English efforts tocolonize New England over half a century were nearly wiped out. The Indian losses were even greater. Not only were thousands killed by war, starvation, or disease, but thousands more were sold to the West Indies as slaves. Even Christian Indians who had been loyal to the English were not spared. Most were removed from their "praying towns" and imprisoned on barren islands, where many died of cold and hunger. King Philip's War, concludes Lepore, "proved to be not only the most fatal war in all of American history but also one of the most merciless."

Satirical History: The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times, by Charles Royster (New York: Knopf, 1999) [2000] (pp. 230-231):

Maybe this was the way most people then, as now, lived their lives, paying little attention to the headline events that dominate most history books. Certainly reading Royster one would scarcely realize that this aristocracy ever much cared about the political principles of liberty, virtue, and independence that they so often talked about. All that mattered to these aristocrats, Royster implies, was acquiring land, making a fortune, consuming conspicuously, and establishing dynasties. So the House of Burgesses' disagreement with the royal governor in 1769 over Parliament's power to tax the colonists, in which Washington took the lead, did not prevent Washington from trying at the same time to persuade the governor to give to the French and Indian War veterans two hundred thousand acres along the Ohio River. As Royster mischievously points out, Washington had a "scheme" in which he hoped to buy, at the cheapest possible rate, many of the veterans' grants without the veterans' knowing who was actually making the purchase.

This Virginia aristocratic world that Royster describes should be appalling. It is, after all, a world of corruption and cronyism, a world of shady deals and unscrupulous bargains in which everyone had his price -- a world, in the words of a visiting English clergyman, of "extravagance, ostentation, and a disregard of economy." The "maxims so generally embraced" in Virginia, declared Robert Beverly in 1761, were "being in Debt & making great Promises for the future.

Multicultural History: Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776, by Jon Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) [2000] (pp. 237-238):

Early modern Europe was a society in motion, and many Europeans were used to people of all sorts coming and going everywhere. But no European country, not even the Netherlands, which contained a wide variety of peoples, experienced the movement and diversity that transformed Britain's mainland colonies between 1680 and 1760. During the first half dozen decades or so of colonization in the seventeenth century, England's North American settlements had remained relatively simple and primitive societies. There was little ethnic diversity. Nearly 90 percent of the tens of thousands of European immigrants to these early colonies were English. Their hold on the continent was far from secure, and they often struggled in orgies of blood and violence to maintain themselves against the natives, who originally outnumbered the early European settlers, in some areas by as many as ten to one.

In the eight or nine decades after 1680, however, all this changed. The Indians saw their numbers drastically reduced, and many of the remaining natives were pushed westward. In the southern colonies, the Indian population declined from about two hundred thousand to fewer than sixty thousand. Not only were the numbers of separate tribal groups east of the Mississippi reduced by half in the course of the eighteenth century, but in all the mainland colonies, writes Butler, "whole Indian cultures disappeared." At the same time, the European population expanded by leaps and bounds, from fewer than two hundred thousand people in 1690 to over two million by 1770.

(p. 241):

In his final chapter, "1776," Butler is at pains to deny that all of the dynamic developments of the eighteenth-century colonies caused the American Revolution or made it inevitable. The Revolution, he says, was essentially a product of political events in 1763-76. Still, he cannot help but believe that all the social, political, and cultural transformations that he has described had a decisive influence on the character of the Revolution. Indeed, he says that all those transformations had made American society "the first modern society," and the Revolution thus became "the first modern revolution, the model for the French Revolution of 1789 and subsequently for so many nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions."

(pp. 247-248):

What ultimately made the American Revolution modern was not simply that it created a republic but that it changed the way people related one to another. Americans became modern not because they were diverse in origins and religions, but because they came to believe that all citizens were equal and independent and that all authority had to be earned by achievement and based on consent. Butler in his rich and readable book never quite explains why they should have come to believe in these ideals.

History and Myth: Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, by Joyce Appleby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) [2000] (p. 258):

From the beginning of the twentieth century "dissenting historians," as Appleby pointed out in an earlier work written with two colleagues, have always opposed "the conflation of democracy and free enterprise." But she herself has never been reluctant to link capitalism with ordinary people, with democracy, and with its spokesman Jefferson -- even in the face of a historical profession not all that eager to accept that linkage. Many historians want to believe that capitalism was created and sustained by narrow elites and profit-seeking capitalists -- Hamilton and his moneyed men, for example. They do not like to see any connection between democracy, which is a good thing, and capitalism, which presumably is not such a good thing. Although Appleby is not necessarily celebrating this linkage, she has been committed to it for decades; and as a good historian she cannot help describing it in the same exultant terms that many of her characters in her period used. Of course, she often prefaces her many anecdotes and success stories with reminders about the harm done and the people left behind. She pauses to tell us of the plight of the Indians, of women, and of African Americans. She points out that many people went bankrupt and many were hurt by the rapid growth of commerce. But her general thrust is celebratory.

Afterword [2008] (pp. 262-263):

It is fascinating that Tocqueville's account of America of the early 1830s should have had such resonance for Americans through the subsequent decades and still have resonance for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If historians are correct in their belief that theories of government cannot really transcend particular times and circumstances, why do Tocqueville's idea of American democracy created in the 1830s continue to seem so meaningful nearly two centuries later? The answer lies in the point of Appleby's book: that the generation of Americans that Tocqueville observed has had an inordinate influence on American identity and American values.

This first generation to come of age following the Revolution created a myth of American identity -- the America of enterprising, innovative and equality-loving Americans -- a myth of identity that, as Appleby shows, was so powerful that succeeding generations could scarcely question it. Indeed, Jacksonian America has always seemed to be the most American of all eras. It seems to be the central point in the trajectory of American history, the point toward which all previous American history was developing and the point from which all subsequent American history seems to be receding. The Jacksonian era was the period that defined the basic elements of America's individualistic and egalitarian get-up-and-go materialistic culture. Tocqueville came to America at the very moment when Americans were constructing their sense of nationhood -- a sense of America as the land of enterprise and opportunity, as the place where anybody who works hard can make it, as the nation of free and scrambling money-making individuals pursuing their happiness. This conception of the liberal American dream is alive and well even today, if not for many academics, then at least for many other Americans, including most recent immigrants. This is why Tocqueville's great work of political theory, even though it grew out of the peculiar circumstances of Jacksonian America, still retains its power for us today.

History as Cultural Criticism: On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, by John Patrick Diggins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) [2000] (pp. 265-266):

America, Diggins wants us to understand, is liberal through and through. After all the masks, all the isms, are peeled away, there remains liberalism and only liberalism at the core of American culture. And any attempt to deny this elementary fact of American life is only a snare and a delusion. America's liberalism "cannot imagine a possibility beyond itself." It "has no second act in history because it cannot liberate itself from itself."

By liberalism, Diggins means "a body of ideas that regards matter and property, comprehended by mind and conscience, as elementary and irreducible realities and views liberty and natural rights as the means by which happiness is pursued and freedom protected." This body of liberal ideas, he says, can be traced largely to the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, who first included in the meaning of property the value of the labor that went into creating that property. Locke is everywhere in Diggins' book, usually as a metonym for liberalism, but often as an authentic historical figure personally influencing American thought. (Since Locke attacked patriarchy, he calls him "the first male feminist.") Diggins suggests that the seventeenth-century Locke spoke more directly to Abraham Lincoln and the nineteenth century than did Thomas Jefferson.

Race, Class, Gender and History Writing: The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America, by Gary B. Nash (New York: Viking, 2005) [2005]

Presentism in History: Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution, by Lawrence Goldstone (New York: Walker, 2005); American Taxation, American Slavery, by Robin L. Einhorn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) [2007] (pp. 294-296):

No one can deny the importance of slavery to the development of early America. Of the total American population of two and a half million on the even of independence, one fifth -- a half million men, women, and children -- was enslaved. The most populous colony, Virginia, had the most slaves -- two hundred thousand, or 40 percent of its population. Although most slaves lived in the southern colonies, slavery was not inconsequential in the North. Fourteen percent of New York's population was enslaved. New Jersey held 8 percent and Rhode Island held 6 percent of their population in lifetime hereditary bondage. Northerners, especially Rhode Islanders, were also deeply involved in the international slave trade. Slavery existed throughout the colonies, and nearly every white American colonist directly or indirectly benefited from it.

It is also important, however, to provide some historical context for understanding the omnipresence of slavery in colonial America. We need to know just how cruel and brutal the eighteenth-century ancien régime was in the years before the Revolution -- cruel and brutal in a multitude of ways. Not only was there black slavery, but many whites were denied freedom and kept in various degrees of dependency. Indeed, the ubiquity of servitude in that patriarchal age tended to blur the conspicuousness of black slavery, especially in the North. Many masters regarded their white servants as "filth and scum," "miserable wretches," "insolent young Scoundrels," and sometimes treated them as harshly as masters treated their African slaves. A drunken and abusive servant being transported by ship to Virginia in the 1770s, for example, was horse-whipped, put in irons and thumbscrewed, and then gagged for a night and handcuffed for nine days.

Of course, such harsh treatment of white servants was rare compared to the ferocity with which some eighteenth-century masters treated their slaves. Regarding the African slaves as little more than animals, the slaveholders bought them at market, branded them, sometimes gave them names ordinarily reserved for dogs and horses, and bridled, haltered, and punished them as if they were domesticated livestock. Still, "the similarities in the treatment of slaves and servants, and in attitudes toward slaves and the poor," writes Philip D. Morgan, the distinguished historian of early American slavery, "help explain how the overwhelming majority of Anglo-Americans took slavery for granted."

Afterword [2008] (p. 308):

I suppose the most flagrant examples of present-mindedness in history writing come from trying to inject politics into history books. I am reminded of Rebecca West's wise observation that when politics comes in the door, truth flies out the window. Historians who want to influence politics with their history writing have missed the point of the craft; they ought to run for office.