The 10 Best Books of 2016

     A number of great books on early American history and culture came hot of the presses in 2016, and here, in no particular order, are my choices for the ten best selections of the past year.

Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian's Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press)

     The still relatively anemic field of American Indian history gathers strength from this analysis of the life and work of the Methodist minister and activist for Native rights.  Apess gained fame as a riveting public speaker, and his use of Christian logic to shame the white-dominant society in its use and abuse of non-whites was capped by his controversial assertion that Metacomet, the "King Philip" of the 1675-76 war that continues to bear his anglicized name, was the Indian equivalent of George Washington.  Lopenzina's careful portrait of Apess is especially--if accidentally--timely, considering the doleful events at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (Liverlight Publishing Corp.)
     Too often the history of slavery in early America is focused upon the South, where the "peculiar institution" was particularly critical to those colonies'/states' economies, but it was no less a linchpin of the northern economies, as Warren's study emphasizes.  The development of white supremacist racism was not a phenomenon confined to the South, but one that grew throughout British America and sharpened during the revolutionary and early national periods, the northern states' abolition of slavery notwithstanding.  Warren brings to center stage the necessity of African, African-American, and Indian slave labor to New England's fishing and whaling, shipbuilding, and shipping industries, and how this helped to solidify Euro-American racial identities in the eighteenth century.

Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books)
     Guyatt's Bind Us Apart trees off of Warren in further explaining the construction of racial identity in British America, though from the perspective of the post-revolutionary intelligentsia.  While Thomas Jefferson was adamant that African Americans--whether through innate deficiencies or through deficiencies engendered by slavery--were unsuitable for citizenship or integration into the dominant white society, he had no doubt that the Indians were capable of "civilization" and even racial assimilation with whites.  However, as Guyatt points out, practically none of his peers felt even this degree of liberality with regard to the Indians, who were systematically deprived of nationhood, territorial sovereignty, and of their humanity.  The easy passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forms the capstone to Guyatt's analysis.  The "blessings of liberty" were reserved for white Euro-Americans alone--a belief that was very widely shared nationwide, and became almost a religious doctrine in the South.

Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press)
     This one reminds me strongly of Richard L. Bushman's The Refinement of America (1992) and C. Dallett Hemphill's Bowing to Necessities (2002), with the addition of the political aspects of early American cultural identity formation.  Bushman did not address the development of a uniquely American artistic style, focusing instead upon how a Spartan republican sensibility expressed itself in architecture, dress, and decor, while Hemphill focused on how manners and etiquette developed to better distinguish class and social status in the early national period.  Kelly's great contribution to this discussion is to show how these things influenced and reflected political identities at the time.  Pair this one with . . .

Stephen C. Bullock, Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press)
     It is well known that eighteenth-century middle- and upper-class Anglo-Americans identified themselves with the mother country through their cultivation of British mannerisms and speech, as well as in the ways they designed, furnished and decorated their houses, and accoutered themselves.  Bullock's Tea Sets and Tyranny trees off of Kelly's Republic of Taste to explain how the clothes one wore, the manners one displayed, and the ways social interactions were choreographed, were turned into overt political acts during the revolutionary period.  This aspect of American society was uniquely American, and established a foundation upon which so much of contemporary American culture stands, where strangers could reach judgments about each other by what they wear and how they present themselves.

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (W. W. Norton)
     Taylor's American Colonies (2001) marked a shift from scholarly focus upon the Atlantic World--itself a great leap forward--in favor of a continental approach, devoting more attention to New France and New Spain in telling the story of Anglo-America.  This very important follow-up takes that same approach to explain the American Revolution as a continental event that involved the French and Spanish colonies, as well as the American Indian nations.  Regarding the latter, few of the standard histories of the Revolution bother to mention Indians as anything more than military auxiliaries or doomed observers.  Colin G. Calloway's The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995) remains the best history of the Revolution from an Indian perspective, but here Taylor gives the Indians their rightful place as interested players in what was a massive geopolitical event.

Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (University of North Carolina Press)
     The Shawnee Nation usually gets frequent mention in histories of the colonial wars, particularly the Seven Years' War, as well as in the American War for Independence, but--as with most other Indian nations apart from the Iroquois League--the Shawnee otherwise tend to be ignored.  Warren corrects this oversight with a study that highlights what the Shawnee odyssey has to teach us about the hardships and anguish of "always [being] the frontier."  Richard White first described the geographical and cultural "Middle Ground" between Indian and Euro-American settlements, and Warren provides a detailed and wrenching analysis of just what living in the Middle Ground involved, from the perspective of a nation that had been a power player in the Ohio Valley before their subjugation to Iroquois dominion in the seventeenth century.  Forced to vacate their homelands to shelter uneasily with the Cherokees, the Shawnee managed to reclaim some of their lost power and their land before losing it again to the Anglo-Americans after the Revolution.  Nevertheless, they managed--as had so many others--to adapt to rapidly changing worlds.

Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press)
     Here we have an excellent synthetic history of the Dutch commercial empire that seeks to encompass the entirety of the United Provinces' holdings in the Americas and Africa, rather than focusing on New Netherland and the Dutch West Indies, as previous studies have done.  Interestingly, Klooster once argued that the Dutch cannot be said to have had an empire that compares to the Spanish, French, and British models, but here he reconsiders the definition of empire to make a powerful argument that Dutch influence in the Atlantic World was foundational to establishing a mercantilist model of imperialism eagerly taken up and perfected by the British in the 1700s.  This is a much needed volume in a field that is sorely lacking due to the pride of place given to the other aforementioned empires in Atlantic History.

Carl Berger, Broadsides and Bayonets: The Propaganda War of the American Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press)
     This is a much needed sort-of follow up to Bernard Bailyn's venerable two-volume Pamphlets of the American Revolution (1965), this time focusing upon the determined campaign to wage psychological warfare waged by both the revolutionary Americans and the British.  Both Bailyn and Berger emphasize the degrees to which the Americans started this aspect of the war in the 1760s, but while Bailyn is more interested in the loftier political arguments and counter-arguments, Berger is more interested in what really swayed the minds of the common reading public: stories of British atrocities against women and children, of kidnappings and murders committed by Britain's Indian allies on the frontier, and of the bribing of colonial officials.  The British fired back with their own lurid stories of Patriot atrocities, and this back-and-forth Berger presents in a compelling style that gives the Imperial Crisis and the War for Independence a degree of urgency that refreshes our thinking about the Revolution.

David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Harvard University Press)
     As we debate the prevalence of and increase of gun violence in the United States, this timely analysis explores how the introduction of firearms to American Indian communities totally transformed Native cultures.  It did not just change the ways that Indians hunted and made war.  It led to a disastrous shift in the ways that Indians thought about the cosmos.  However, Silverman notes that Indians--while valuing the gun's greater ability to kill--placed greater importance upon "the pyrotechnic terror" that gun's inflicted upon one's enemies.  Used as a tool of diplomacy in the increasingly volatile struggle between Britain and France, one is reminded of how the great powers trade weaponry to allies and client nations in modern geopolitical entanglements.  That client peoples may turn those weapons upon their patrons to press their own advantages should come as no surprise to those of us who know the conflicts of early North America.

     So, that's it.  Certainly there were a lot of excellent titles in early American history published in the last year, and if you have a favorite that I haven't listed, do write a comment below and tell me about it!

Historian of Religion vs. Religious Historian

     Hello, my name is John Howard Smith, and I am a Secular Humanist.  I am a specialist in the history of religion in early America, and when I introduce myself to my classes every semester, I am very careful to refer to myself as a "historian of religion," rather than as a "religious historian."  At first glance it would seem that both phrases mean exactly the same thing, but in fact they are very different things--or at least they ought to be understood to be very different things.  When I began my teaching career, I called myself a religious historian because I thought I was cleverly blending the facts that I study the religious with a tendency to think about my discipline in the way that a faithful believer thinks about his/her religion.
    However, I soon discovered that my students presumed that I meant to identify as a religious person who is a historian.  I teach at a mid-sized state university in Texas, a state where 93% of its citizens profess a belief in one deity or another, and only 2% are willing to identify as atheist.  My university is located in a semi-rural part of Northeast Texas, where evangelical Protestantism is especially dominant and Catholicism has a sizable presence.  It is safe to say that the numbers of avowed atheists are at or below 1%.  I realized that I needed to clarify my introductory statements when, after a lecture about Calvinism, a student asked me if I was a Calvinist!  I tend to explain religions and theologies in terms that adherents would use, and thus tacitly adopt the persona of an adherent.  This, I think, allows me to let particular theologies speak for themselves, but I am apparently so good at this that I can fool some of my students into thinking I am by turns a Taoist, a seventeenth-century Congregationalist, or a Mormon.

     I learned during graduate school that my chosen subfield is largely dominated by religious historians--historians who are nominal or professed Christians.  The vast majority of the greats in the historiography of religion in early America, men and women who have essentially defined interpretations of the role and importance of religion in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, include Sydney Ahlstrom, David D. Hall, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George Marsden, Amanda Porterfield, and Catherine Brekus.  Along with others whose specialties were in political history or other aspects of social or cultural history, such as Perry Miller, Edmund S. Morgan, Bernard Bailyn, Richard Bushman, and Pauline Maier, while never explicitly stating it, nevertheless presume two basic premises:

       1. Religion in and of itself is a beneficial element of civilization, and Christianity is a critical, defining pillar of Western civilization; and

           2. Christianity is fundamentally correct in its singular truth claims.

These two concepts suffuse practically all of twentieth-century Western historiography to such a degree that it can be difficult to realize that they are there if you have never questioned them.

     However, since the rise of the "New Left" in the 1960s, more scholars have begun to doubt these presumptions, but in the realm of early American historiography of religion they remain stubbornly pervasive.  As I explained in the introduction to my The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725-1775 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), the treatment of non-Christian religions practiced by Indians, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans brings the pro-Christian bias into bold relief (7).  The Christianization of these groups is detailed in a quietly triumphalist fashion (cf. Mechal Sobel's Trabelin' On and Linford D. Fisher's The Indian Great Awakening), as a great achievement for all concerned, whereas individuals who proved immune to the religion of their conquerors and oppressors are treated with the same disappointed disdain felt by the likes of David Brainerd in the middle-colony backcountry and Samuel Davies in Virginia.  I have characterized the use of Christianity to spark a revival of traditional Indian religions, and the use of Christianity by African Americans to create a kind of faith that proved capable of eroding the institution of slavery, in a way that acknowledges the corrosive influence of colonial religion upon non-white peoples, rather than tacitly thanking God for Christianity and praising the syncretists for their ingenuity.  The rediscovery of elder beliefs and practices sustained the Indians and African Americans, not the acceptance of Christianity or elements of it.

     A testament to the influence of professing Christianity upon American historiography is presented by Darren Dochuk,  Thomas S. Kidd, and Kurt W. Peterson in American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History (Notre Dame University Press, 2014).  An early festschrift dedicated to Marsden, they assert in the introduction that "the rise of religion in America's new historical consciousness and the attempt by some scholars to write history from a faith-friendly perspective" represents a positive turn away from "scientific hegemony" and "postmodern perspectivalism" (7, 9),  The ultimate goal, they are brazen enough to claim, is that the celebration of the influence of evangelical Christianity upon American history will lead to a reassertion of fundamentalist Christian principles in American political life, epitomized by the rise of the "'Tea Party' movement that has countered President Barack Obama at every turn" (4).

     Activist scholarship is nothing new, and nothing necessarily to disparage, but contrary to religious historians' claims, the influence of secularism in early American historiography has been practically nonexistent.  Nobody had ever written an article or book asserting that religion had no significant influence upon the development of American society and culture.  The closest that one can get to such an assertion is Bernard Bailyn's and Gordon S. Wood's interpretations of the American Revolution as being, as Jon Butler summarized it in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990), "a profoundly secular event" (192).  Butler had earlier declared the First Great Awakening to have been a non-event, but his claim was difficult for him to support, and roundly rejected by the early Americanist community--both secular and religious (myself included).  The debate is not over whether or not religion shaped American identity, but over the degrees to which it has during specific periods of history.

     So, I am a historian of religion, and I think that my nonbelief gives me a far more objective, clear-eyed view of the past than those who cannot see beyond their various religious and denominational filters.  My own scholarship is activist in opposing the agenda beginning to be advanced by Kidd and his compatriots, who seek to out-Marsden Marsden and tear down what little there ever was of the wall of separation between Church and State, and put forward a distorted vision of early America to bring that about.  I realize that I have much in common with Don Quixote, but just as one eats an elephant one bite at a time, I shall tear down as many windmills as I can, one lance-blow at a time.