Harvard University Press Blog

Core Values of American History

In his new book, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, prize-winning historian T. H. Breen provides the missing piece in the story of America’s founding, introducing us to the ordinary men and women who turned a faltering rebellion against colonial rule into an unexpectedly potent and enduring revolution. Here, he discusses the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to America and how some people are trying to excuse this dark side of American history by using the claim of historical context.

Commemoration of the 1619 arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia has sparked passionate controversy over how to weave slavery and racism into our shared history. The major objection about giving human bondage a central role in the American story seems to be that it involves presentism. Critics claim that while white settlers once enslaved black people, contemporary Americans condemn such practices, and therefore, it is a partisan misreading of the past to project our values on earlier generations who viewed human property from a different perspective. We are advised to pay attention to the specific contexts in which whites justified slavery. We know that many Founders owned slaves—Thomas Jefferson, for example—but there is no reason to condemn them since they did not regard their behavior as morally wrong. The lesson here is that if we insist on rehearsing the failures of the past we shall inevitably discount how the nation’s leaders defended noble principles such as liberty and freedom.

The problem with this interpretative strategy is that it discounts a historical narrative that suffers not in the least from presentism. Appeals for greater sensitivity to context is, in fact, an evasive move that serves to privilege the interests of the masters over those of the slaves. After all, from their initial sale in Virginia, Africans in America have adopted a consistent view of slavery. Context makes not the slightest difference. It was wrong in the seventeenth century; it was wrong at the time of the American Revolution; and it is wrong now. No slave saw bondage as preferable to freedom. On that point there can be no doubt. From their first landing in 1619, slaves resisted their status, running away, breaking laws that aimed at controlling them, and when offered the opportunity to gain freedom through a process known as “self-purchase,” they toiled hard for liberty.  

The earliest records of colonial Virginia reveal that blacks aspired to the same goals as did their white neighbors. In a deposition taken in 1645 Edwyn Conway, the clerk of the Northampton County court reported that two men—“Anthony the negro” and Captain Philip Taylor—had viewed a parcel of land which they had purchased together. The partnership apparently had not gone well. When they returned from the field, Conway asked Anthony what had transpired. The former slave responded, “Mr. Taylor and I have devided our Corne And I am very glad of it [for] now I know my owne, hee finds fault with mee that I doe not worke, but now I know myne owne ground and I will worke when I please and play when I please.” Anthony spoke the language of other Virginia settlers. He had labored hard to obtain his “owne ground,” knowing that economic self-determination was the key to personal liberty.

Anthony gained freedom. By the end of the seventeenth century that achievement became more difficult. Slave codes tightened the grip of bondage. As more and more Africans arrived in the colony, some Virginia planters comforted themselves in the belief that the newcomers could never rebel. They spoke too many different languages, making communication among conspirators impossible. Governor Alexander Spotswood warned them against foolish complacency. He reminded them “freedom Wears a Cap which can without a Tongue, Call Together all Those who long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery.”

The siren of liberty inspired slaves during the American Revolution. In 1774, Caesar Sarter, a black man living in Essex County, Massachusetts, drafted a petition for the freedom of the colony’s slaves. He observed “this is a time of great anxiety and distress among you [the whites], on account of the infringement, not only of your Charter rights, but of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men.” Could they not understand that slaves had the same goals? “Why,” Sarter asked, “will you not pity and relieve the poor distressed, enslaved Africans?—Who, though they are entitled to the same natural rights of mankind, that you are, [are] nevertheless groaning in bondage.” In June 1773, a group of blacks appealed to the governor of Massachusetts, “Your Petitioners apprehend that they have in common with other men a naturel right to be free and without molestation to injoy such property as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other means not detrimental to their fellow men.”

The archives contain many declarations of this sort. The point is black Americans countered racism and slavery in the same language of freedom and liberty that white Americans have so long celebrated. There is no need to argue that the context of slavery changed over time. From the earliest moments of settlement in Virginia, slaves appealed for liberty and freedom—for the right to determine the character of their own lives. To observe that they have given voice to the same principles that their white neighbors hold dear is not presentism. It is a fundamental truth of American history.

Take a lesson from the ancients

Alan H. Sommerstein, to whom we owe our fresh translations of the plays of Aeschylus, tells us of the lessons The Orestia holds for us today, and why we can look to Athena (pictured at left in the Loeb Classical Library® logo) for guidance in these times of peril.

100 years before President Obama

You may have noticed that in his concession speech last night, avowed history buff John McCain made a poignant reference to an event that occurred just about a hundred years ago. On October 16, 1901, President Roosevelt, freshly installed after William McKinley succumbed to an assassin's bullet, did something that to many seemed literally unthinkable -- he invited a black man to dine with him and his family at the White House. "President Roosevelt Proposes to Coddle Descendants of Ham," screamed the headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That man, of course, was Booker T. Washington.

There are a lot of things about this situation that are hard for us to understand today, and the fact that the United States has just elected its first black president drives that fact home. While the assertion that political support for Obama speaks to the achievement of a "post-racial" America is still up for debate, it's hard to deny that today we inhabit a racial landscape that our ancestors simply would not recognize.

The same notion applies in reverse -- can you imagine, for example, a newspaper using the term "descendants of Ham" today? The idea is laughable. But it was real. So were lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and simple, consuming hatred, all the more cruel for its sheer casual pervasiveness. This gap in understanding, Mark Baurlein argued in an article for the Chronicle Review in 2003, is responsible for the eclipse in our respect for a man like Washington, whose tactics look to us rather soft and complacent. "To militants such as Du Bois, and to us today," Bauerlein says, "Washington's accommodationism is an abasement." Du Bois himself had this to say of Washington after his death in 1915: "We must lay on the soul of this man, a heavy responsibility for the consummation of Negro disfranchisement, the decline of the Negro college and public school, and the firmer establishment of color caste in this land." As Bauerlein reports, the man who once commanded the respect of the luminaries of the American intellectual world now barely rates a citation in the scholarly debate on race in America.

The last major biography of Booker T. Washington came out in the 70s -- Louis Harlan's two-volume assessment of the life and times of the man is a great achievement, but it's a study that reflects the negative scholarly consensus of the time. That landscape is about to change a bit with the publication in January of a major new biography of Washington, Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Within, Norrell aims to revise our understanding of the man by re-situating Booker T. in the context of his own time, rather than holding him to the standards of an age that might have made him proud, but which he would hardly recognize. In the excerpt below, from the Prologue, Norrell chronicles the posthumous demonization of Washington by subsequent black leaders and historians, whom, he claims, "should have been alert to the fallacy of anachronism, of applying 1960s expectations of protest to a man who had lived two generations
earlier." Booker T's story, he says, "deserves to be told anew," and with the publication of Up from History in January, this forgotten man will get what Norrell believes to be his due.

Libraries embrace street lit; finger waggers wag, but readers keep reading

Today's New York Times informs us that urban libraries like the one headed by Shonda Miller in Far Rockaway, Queens, have begun to embrace what's variously known as  "urban fiction," "street lit" or "gangsta lit," a genre that sprang up during the 1990s and which chronicles the (glamorized) trials and tribulations of urban black life in America's cities. Pimps, hustlers, dealers, and madams populate the pages of these fast-moving novels -- take, for example, Angel, protagonist of the wildly popular eponymous novel set in this blogger's own hometown, is according to the Times "a Versace-clad seductress who shoots her boyfriend in the head during sex, stuffs money from his safe into her Vuitton bags and, as she fondles the cash, experiences a sexual frisson narrated in terms too graphic to reproduce here." Toni Morrison it's not, but is that the point?

The point, librarians say, is that people are reading. People who have never seen the inside of a library in their lives, they report, come in asking for Teri Woods, Kwame Teague, and other street lit luminaries, whose tales of lurid urban doings speak to phenomena with which many patrons are sadly familiar in their daily lives. Some librarians see the genre as a sort of gateway drug into further reading; Vanessa Morris, a professor at Drexel who started a book club in North Philadelphia, has seen her teenage pupils branch out from street lit into more "credible" genres like straightforward biography. At Far Rockaway, once the librarians have got their hooks into kids weaned on the drugs-and-guns glamor of street lit, they use it as an opportunity to push the hard stuff on them -- "If you want sex, dirt and murder, read Shakespeare!" says Sharon Anderson, the head librarian there.

Insular? Really?

Needless to say, Horace Engdahl's surprise outburst on the alleged parochialism of American literature took a lot of us by surprise. Though head of a jury ostensibly bound to Alfred Nobel's dictum that his eponymous prizes be awarded with no consideration given to a recipient's particular nationality, Engdahl appeared to effectively seal off the notion that the prize could be awarded to an American until the country shapes up its literary act.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," Engdahl told the Associated Press. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."

Engdahl's unsubtle tirade naturally drew equally sharp reponses, like this one from The New Yorker's David Remnick: "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures." Ouch. But in our tradition of taking a step back from the sound bites, we thought we'd ask someone who knows the score to evaluate Engdahl's statement on the merits. And thus we turned to Werner Sollors.

Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies here at Harvard and a much-respected scholar of American literature, particularly in its role as a conduit through which African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers took part in the developments that transformed the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, lending the nation an increasingly multicultural sense of self-awareness. Sollors' treatise on Ethnic Modernism, about to be released for the first time in book form, "does more than reconnect modernism with ethnicity; it recasts modernism entirely," says the novelist Gish Jen, perhaps herself a couterweight to Engdahl's rash thesis. "This is vintage Sollors: out-of-the-box, profound, and brimming with brio." Sollors is furthermore the co-editor, with Greil Marcus, of our soon-to-come New Literary History of America, which we daresay is likely to further broaden our conception of both "American" and "literature." Below is what Professor Sollors, himself born in Germany, had to say in reponse to the accusation that American literature is somehow too parochial for sophisticated Europeans to bother with.

On humans, dinosaurs, and Sarah Palin

When we read this LA Times story on Sarah Palin's apparent belief that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together a mere 6,000 years ago, we wondered, despite acknowledging how patently awesome it would be to pet a dinosaur, where exactly such a belief comes from (hint: it's not from modern science). To that end, we asked our friend Ronald Numbers, who has made a calling out of tracking the origins and development of modern creationist thought, to fill us in on Young Earth creationism, where the idea came from, and whether or not, as its proponents claim, it can truly be called "science." Numbers is the author of the near-canonical The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, released in an expanded edition last year, and is editor of the forthcoming Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. So, a pretty good person to ask! Below is what he had to say.

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According to a recent article by Stephen Braun in the Los Angeles Times (September 28, 2008), Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, believes that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago and that humans and dinosaurs once lived together, a belief supported, she has claimed, by evidence of human footprints inside of dinosaur tracks. A conservative Christian with strong Pentecostal and Fundamentalist leanings, Palin favors teaching creationism along with evolution. "Teach both," she once urged during her race for governor of Alaska. "You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

I don’t much care, and I don’t think other voters should care, about the religious peculiarities of candidates for public office—so long as their views don’t impinge on public policy. It makes little difference to me whether Joe Biden, a Catholic, subscribes to the doctrines of transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception, or whether Mitt Romney affirms the divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon, if these doctrinal idiosyncrasies remain privately held convictions. But we have every right as voters to express concern about a Pentecostal being in charge of protecting the environment (think James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior) who believes that we are living in the Last Days before the total destruction of that environment; or, say, a Christian Scientist, who denies the efficacy of modern medicine, being appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services. In such instances, examining the religious beliefs of political candidates is not bigotry.

Figure out Al-Qaeda

Ronen Bergman writes in the New York Times of a possible evolution in Al-Qaeda's thinking regarding suicide bombing. Tracking the ideological vicissitudes of one of the world's murkiest organizations (to us here in the West, at least) is no mean task, but French scholar Gilles Kepel (pictured) is one of the best at it. His previous books (Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, and Al Qaeda in its Own Words) constituted big leaps for our understanding of how radical Islamists see the world, but his latest offering takes a somewhat different tack. Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East goes beyond the solid analysis contained in previous works to offer a more opinionated solution to the seeming impasse between Islam and the West. The main thrust of the new book is Kepel's declaration that the competing ideologies that have dominated the first years of the new century--America's "War on Terror" and jihadists' "myth of martyrdom"--are outmoded, outworn, and useless in today's geopolitical landscape. Kepel instead urges readers to seek alternate terms for the dialogue between Islam and the West, ones that could provide the basis for a more constructive engagement. Provocatively, he suggests that it may well be Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, that provides the playing field on which a new mode of interaction is tried and tested. We shall see.

So, like, do you guys do a lot of reading?

Given that you're reading this and are thus presumably interested in some way in some aspect or other of what goes on here at Harvard University Press (ever wonder what the building looks like? Click here! See all those window ACs? That's because this is Boston, we don't do central air! Also since the building was constructed around the time of the First World War, we'd have to gut the place to pieces in order to actually install it), some of you might be wondering what Harvard University Press employees actually read when we're not hard at work freaking out about page counts, typos, orphan lines (that's when a single line of a paragraph appears all by its lonesome at the bottom of a page--it looks hideous, and if you should ever find one in a book you've purchased you should drown it in red ink, mail it back to the publisher, and demand a refund of five to six times the purchase price in order to pay for the therapy you'll need to recover), or any number of matters that sadly to most will appear pedantic to a degree that borders on the offensive (no apologies here--to people like us, kerning really does matter).

Anyway, we read the books we publish, of course (someone's got to, not to mention the fact that YES THEY ARE AWESOME), but in order to get a break from "academic non-fiction," sometimes we read other stuff, like magazines! And not just The New Yorker! And although it's easy for us to forget what the word "fiction" means, sometimes we read that too. With that in mind, a representative sample of our ultra-cool and sophisticated employee base was consulted in order that we might ascertain what non-HUP material they are reading right now, i.e. no cheating or cherry-picking something you read six months ago because you think will make you seem cooler. This is HUP unvarnished and (somewhat) free of vanity, plus it gives us a chance to link to other publishers who are putting out cool stuff, and for once, to stop talking about ourselves. So, after the break please find our humble suggestions for your fall reading list (like anyone has time for one of those)--enjoy.

Disappointment city

Population: Chinese national soccer team.

Or so it would seem from a New York Times article that appears today, upon the team's exit from the Olympic tournament with an 0-3 record.

The jokes have already begun to circulate among Chinese soccer fans bemoaning another underwhelming performance from the men's national team: "The Chinese team just won two red medals" (referring to the two red cards received for unsportsmanlike play); "Our soccer team won the gold medal in martial arts"; and "China has had a weird year, with a freak snowstorm, the Tibetan riots and an earthquake, but the performance of our soccer team shows that some things never change" (funnier, we're guessing, when delivered in the original language).

The article quotes Xu Guoqi, author of Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, explaining how corrupt management has hobbled the team's efforts to rise to the top tier. Xu wrote an op-ed last month in the Washington Post on the state of Chinese soccer, comparing its long-suffering fans to those of the Chicago Cubs (ouch). Professor Xu is the authority on the intimate ties between athletic achievement and Chinese national self-image, and his thoughts on the soccer team are illuminating for those not familiar with the backstory. Xu also shared his thoughts on the Olympics more generally on an episode of NPR's "Only a Game" that aired last Saturday--listen here.

Still there, even if you can't see him

The character chai ("demolish"), now often found on the side of older Beijing buildings. Detail of a collage by Wang Jinsong.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, noted China scholar Geremie Barmé detects the hand of Chairman Mao in the Olympic opening ceremonies, even if us Westerners can't see him through the smog and the (digitally enhanced) fireworks. Avoiding the temptation, all too common in today's journalism, to view modern China as somehow sui generis, scholars like Barmé, author of a book on the Forbidden City, and Michael Dutton, author of Beijing Time, remind us of the continuity that exists even in a city that seems to have demolished and rebuilt itself before our very eyes. Watching the fireworks explode over the old north-south imperial axis, designed, as Dutton notes, to maintain the balance of qi in the city, it's hard not to marvel at how seamlessly the old insinuates itself into what appears to be wholly, terrifyingly new.