Dissertationitis

A word about why I am beginning this blog:

When I wrote my undergraduate thesis, I decided to keep a companion blog (quakerroots.blogspot.com) to keep friends and family updated on my progress. Not that too many people read the blog - but some did, and it was nice for me to know that my finding/thoughts were at least *potentially* available to a virtual, imagined community that may or may not exist.

The biggest (and most exciting) surprise for me was that people I didn't know both read and contacted me about my research. I've made a handful of wonderful connections that would not have been possible without the good ole www.

Now that I've started down the path of something much more ominous than an undergraduate thesis -- namely, the dissertation -- I've decided to do the same thing all over again... with a new name.

So welcome, dear reader, to Dissertationitis! We will traverse the texts of long-dead men and women, reconstruct the lives of those who did not leave traversable texts, and consider the impossible, and kind of awful question: what was it really like to live in a slave society three hundred years ago?

"Auto-Machia"

I'm in the midst of Sacvan Bercovitch's American Studies classic, "The Puritan Origins of the American Self," and I was struck by one of Bercovitch's ideas. He suggests that the Puritans sense of self was a "self civil war," which he renames "Auto-Machia," because "it evokes both modern autonomy and medieval psychomania" (19). He then reprints a poem wrtten by George Goodwin in the early 17th century:

I sing my SELF; my Civil Warrs within;
The Victories I howrely lose and win;
The dayly Duel, the continuall Stride,
The Warr that ends not, till I end my life.
And yet, not Mine alone, not onely Mine,
But every-One's that under th' honor'd Signe
Of Christ his Standard, shal his Name enroule,
With holy Vowes of Body and of Soul.

What strikes me is the presence of what one might recognize as characteristics of modern angst (daily duel, endless strife) within a Puritan explanatory context: the coming of a final Judgement, the "signe of Christ." It makes one wonder... which comes first? The explanatory context or the state of mind that is described? Of course it's a chicken and egg question, but interesting in the context of the development of the idea of the autonomous self, which Bercovitch credits (partially) to the Humanists.

The Purpose of the Past

A review of Gordon Wood's new book, The Purpose of the Past.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's a welcome reality check for historians, written by a living master. Gordon Wood also wrote "The Creation of the American Republic," THE book on the American constitution and one of the "classics" of history writing in the 20th century.

Supersizing in the 18th Century

It's common knowledge in Europe that Americans have an obsession with size. Americans abroad are constantly pestered with questions about their "big" cars, their "big" meals and their "big" houses. And while other stereotypes are easier to contest (not ALL Americans are stupid/fat/ignorant about the state of the world), it's hard to deny that American stuff does tend to be bigger. The size of the plates, the width of televisions, the ubiquitous "super-size" option at fast food restaurants...even our oranges seem conspicuously larger than normal. Bottom line: there's something to the "size" stereotype.

But if Americans today are known as being too "big" for their own good, Americans in the 18th century faced a different problem. French philosophers had come up with a theory about the inherent degeneracy of the New World: living too long in the "wilderness" of America had the undisputed effect of decreasing ones' size. And the Europeans weren't just talking about "things." No--everything in America was smaller, degenerate and weak: the plants, the animals, even the people. They warned Europeans to stay away.

It's not surprising to learn that Americans resented this talk of smallness. Thomas Jefferson hated it. He responded by conducting a thorough investigation of the natural world in the newly-United States. Jefferson took to the tape measure and calculated the size of rocks, trees, minerals and mountains. And he didn't stop there. In neatly organized tables of comparison, he proved that animals in America were decisively bigger that their European counterparts:

Europe. lb. Cow	763.	America. lb. *2500
Horse		*1366
Ass
Hog		*1200
Sheep		*125
Goat		*80
Dog	67.6
Cat	7.	[88]

Source: Online Library of Liberty

American people (the Native Americans) were also bigger than Europeans supposed. It was undeniable: America was bigger and, implicitly, better.

Jefferson's talk of the inherent "bigness" of things in America did not fall on deaf ears. His compatriots listened and responded. In order to show support for Jefferson's presidential candidacy in 1800, a group of Baptist dairy farmers did what they knew how to do best: they made cheese. But not just a normal block of cheese. They milked 900 cows in one go and created a "mammoth" hunk of cheese that they delivered to Jefferson's doorstep in the dead of winter (it was too heavy to transport over the softer spring soil).

While the cheese itself quickly attracted flies, Jefferson graciously accepted the Baptists' gift and the newly created public press went wild. Soon the mammoth cheese was joined by a "mammoth bread," a "mammoth eater" (a Washingtonian who devoured 42 eggs in 10 minutes) and "mammoth veal." Big things were a point of national pride and new Americans joined in Jefferson's rejection of the Europeans by embracing--and creating--"big" stuff.

It may have served a different purpose, but the mammoth cheese was, in many ways, the forerunner to the supersized meal and BJ's. It distinguished itself not through quality or originality, but by sheer size. And in doing so, it proved the Europeans wrong. America wasn't smaller and weaker, like the French philosophers presumed. It was not only naturally bigger: the American people were also willing to go the extra mile to make their things truly larger than life.

respecting your sources

Yesterday I attended a luncheon with Karen Kupperman, one of the "great" contemporary historians of early America and the Atlantic world. She spoke about her work, about her visions for a field that looks beyond a "national" lens in studying the 17th century, and about how she reads primary sources. She was very intent on this last point. Historians, she emphasized, must respect the sources they are reading; they must take them seriously and not brush them off for being, from our perspective at least, ridiculous, irrelevant or inane.

This is a very real danger for historians of the 17th century, because a lot of people wrote a lot of (pardon me) horrible, racist, and unforgivable shit. The English were in the process of justifying their booming slave trade with religious narrow-mindedness and then biological racism; chattel slavery was widespread; people all over the world were being sold, tortured, forced into servitude, murdered. And these practices...were philosophically supported with faulty but powerful arguments. So yes, sometimes it difficult to read these texts without having a visceral reaction of repulsion. But apparently (and this is certainly an arguable point), it's important to "respect" these authors.

I don't mean to take Kupperman's point too far; I actually agree with her. She doesn't mean "respect" in terms of actually having respect for the authors, but rather "respect" in terms of thinking of the authors as human beings who are writing for a specific purpose. We shouldn't just read what they're writing; the text needs to be taken in more fully, more honestly, for the complex conjunction of opinions, prejudices, assumptions, desires, perceptions and intentions that it is. It is a more honest way of doing history.

It really is. And right now I am seeing this method of "complex respect" in comparison to what I am going to call an "argument-based" lens of research. I fear this is what I am doing now: taking ones' own argument and superimposing it onto the past, adjusting it when the sources call for an adjustment, but primarily looking for support.

I fear I'm doing this because of the example Kupperman gave for her idea of "complex respect" of ones sources. She has been studying Richard Ligon's "True and Exact History of Barbados," published in 1657. The "True and Exact History" is one of the classic texts of 17th century travel writing. It is also crucial for anyone studying Barbadian history, like myself.

Kupperman described a scene in the text where Ligon begins to play an instrument and is soon joined by a few black slaves, who take interest in the instrument. The next day, the slaves bring their own instrument and play it. Ligon interprets this as the slaves' attempt to imitate his own instrument. But anyone acquainted with West African musical traditions would recognize the slaves' instruments as African instruments recreated in the new world. This added knowledge gives the scene new depth and tells us more about both enslaved Africans than Ligon consciously could.

So point is, this is a fascinating passage. And I...didn't even read it. Because while Ligon's text is very important, it is only tangential to my purpose, which is to investigate Quaker attempts to convert slaves to Quakerism. So there was no way I was going to do a close reading of all 180 pages. Instead, I did a word search, looking for "christian" and "religion", and miss this passage completely.

Did I not "respect" Ligon's text? The truth is that you can't respect everything you're studying; not, at least, as well as you might like. There is too much to pay attention to, you have to let some things slide if you want to make any continuous argument at all... but I suppose Kuppermans' talk was an appreciated reminder. That once i'm finished making my "argument" about Quakers and slave conversion, I can go back to Ligon, and to all of the texts I've used tangentially, and be able to investigate them on new, fresh terms. It's exciting, slightly exhausting, and rather exhilerating to know that so little says so much...