The Journal of American History

Issues

June 1997
Volume 84, No. 1

Articles
Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising
Did nationalism spark the American Revolution? Turning on its head the familiar story that a gradually developing American nationalism caused the Revolution, T. H. Breen suggests that instead we look to an aggressive English nationalism. Eighteenth-century colonists celebrated their British identity. But when the rising middle classes in mid-eighteenth-century England proclaimed their own exuberant nationalism, the newly marginalized colonists, like the Scots and Anglo-Irish, began to create new political identities. Fear and resentment of exclusion were expressed in a shrill commitment to Lockean natural rights. The universalism of Lockeanism made it congenial to colonial peoples who had not yet constructed a nation, such as the Anglo-Irish and the Americans. In the United States, Breen suggests, such universalism has remained important. The oppressed and excluded have often demanded justice in a Revolution-era idiom older, more cherished, and more generous than American nationalism -- universal natural rights and equality.
"Not Fade Away": The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic
Robert E. Desrochers Jr. takes a fresh look at eighteenth-century literature by black Americans. Asking new questions of an autobiography published in 1798, his article attempts to explain how Venture Smith, the author, made sense of a life spent in slavery and freedom on two continents. Locating Smith's text squarely within the context of early Federalist America, the article also traces Smith's African ancestry, considering how memories of Africa may have resonated with American ideals in the shaping of Smith's narrative persona. By connecting Smith's experiences as an entrepreneurial former slave in southern New England with his African roots, the essay speaks to the dynamic complexity of African American identity. "Not Fade Away" encourages us to rethink paradigms of African American literature; to question historical notions of race, slavery, and freedom; and above all to meet voices from the past on their own terms.
Lawyering, Husbands' Rights, and "the Unwritten Law" in Nineteenth-Century America
Sensational trials have long fascinated Americans. In a compelling depiction of "lawyering," Hendrik Hartogevokes both the drama of such trials and the way lawyers at work in them invent legal doctrines out of a need to advance clients' interests. He shows lawyers mixing old and new ideas and borrowing from ideological adversaries as they shape social visions that resonate with the public and spur social change. In a study of three mid-nineteenth-century cases in which lawyers successfully defended men who had killed their wives' lovers, Hartog shows how the defense lawyers combined appeals to an old "unwritten law" that exculpated such killers with newer themes. The lawyers played on the anxieties of male jurors as husbands, suggesting that changes in marriage law had unsettled husbandly authority. Borrowing from law reformers, the defense lawyers assumed that law was malleable. Their reactionary understanding of husband's rights defied precedent and judges' instructions. But it persuaded juries, and it led law reformers and women's rights advocates to view those rights as exemplifying an evil, antiquated legal regime and to seek further change in marriage laws.
Thinking on One's Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928-1960
In the 1920s such prominent liberal intellectuals as John Dewey had defended Catholics and their right to separate schools. But in the next decades intellectuals defined liberalism not only by opposition to fascism and Communism and by criticism of racial segregation but also by unease about Catholicism. Specific Catholic stances, such as support for Franco in the Spanish civil war, aroused distrust. But equally important was an objection to core Catholic traits -- a philosophy that affirmed unchanging first principles and a hierarchical organization. The intellectuals believed that a hierarchical religion could not prepare its adherents for democratic citizenship. Religion must be entirely private, religious loyalties must yield to national unity, and only individual autonomy -- thinking on one's own -- would sustain American democracy. John T. McGreevy shows us that long before current debates over multiculturalism, American civic life involved inescapable tensions between the nation and other collectivities Americans hold dear, between democracy and freedom of conscience, between liberalism and pluralism.
Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web
Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzwieg demystify the World Wide Web. They give definitions, advice on seeking historical information, and a tour of types of Web sites of special interest to American historians. The tour covers real-world archives and libraries placed on line, "invented archives" (which juxtapose materials that are scattered in the real world), and presentations of history by museums, businesses, and professional and amateur historians. The Web is unlike materials our readers habitually use: Because any individual or institution may post information, there is no hierarchy of sites, no standard sequence of steps for a researcher, no uniformity in the order of information from one site to another. The Web seems to offer a postmodern treasure hunt without clues. But its jumble and unpredictability make possible unexpected discoveries -- the enthusiasm for history among supposedly ahistorical Americans, the creativity of sites developed by amateurs and students eager to share knowledge on favorite topics, the surprising connections between different bodies of knowledge, and the multiple uses of the past in the present.
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Exhibition Reviews
Yorktown Victory Center, by Catherine M. Lewis "1846: Portrait of the Nation," by Elizabeth Johns "Settlement and Survival: Building Towns in the Chippewa Valley, 1850-1925," by Benjamin Filene "Making and Remaking Vermont Farmsteads," by Thomas L. Altherr "Metropolitan Lives, The Ashcan Artists and Their New York," by Sylvia Yount "Michigan in the Twentieth Century," by Craig R. Olson
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: Daniel McFarland mortally wounded Albert Richarson as Richarson worked in the offices of the New York Tribune. McFarland had shot Richarson before, after learning of Richardson's love for McFarland's wife, Abby Sage McFarland. After that first shooting, Abby divorced McFarland. Yet McFarland's defense attorneys and much of the media treated his trial as a case concerning husbands' rights. See "Lawyering, Husbands' Rights, and 'the Unwritten Law' in Nineteenth-Century America," by Hendrik Hartog. Illustration reprinted from The Richardson-McFarland Tragedy (Philadelphia, 1870), 478.