I’ve written earlier about the recent William & Mary Quarterly Forum, whose contributors proposed getting rid of the term “early America”—not least out of a desire to stop teaching American history. Everything I wrote then is true enough, but it was written in a more polemical mode. I want to return to the subject to examine the issue of historical terminology in greater depth and to attempt to consider the Forum’s contributions as charitably as possible.
My own professional background is European history, and we have our own terminology wars. Consider the emergence of the term “Late Antiquity,” not least thanks to the work of Peter Brown. The new classification has been enormously stimulating: historians no longer lose sight of everything innovative and influential in Late Antiquity, as they tended to when the classifying periods were “Roman Empire” and “Middle Ages.” The term has been particularly useful in reconceptualizing the Catholic Church as a dynamic and creative force in European history, rather than simply (as Gibbon suggested) as the handmaiden of medieval barbarism. Indeed, Late Antiquity helps eliminate the preconception that the Roman Empire collapsed tout court, without continuities into the medieval centuries.
And there is the danger of the new term. “Late Antiquity” raises new preconceptions that continuity was foremost in those centuries and encourages historians to overlook the evidence of disruption, discontinuity, and collapse—the evidence that it was indeed a Dark Age in those early medieval centuries. Then, to emphasize continuity erodes the underpinnings of Europe’s national histories—especially the histories of the states and nations of England, France, and Spain, born in the Völkerwanderung that destroyed the Roman Empire. To speak of “Late Antiquity,” although historically exciting and productive of new insight, also aligns with the attempt to destroy the memory of Europe’s nations—and therefore to destroy those nations, period.
Something similar may be said of the term “Early Modern Europe.” On the one hand, it resurrects the long seventeenth-century, which tended to get minimized or forgotten between “Renaissance/Reformation” and “Enlightenment.” But we used to say Modern Europe began with the Reformation; now we say it began with the French Revolution—and there is a very great difference between the two in our conception of what is Europe. In England and America, in particular, we lose our happily Whiggish self-confidence that the arc of history moves through our incarnations of Protestant liberty when we adopt the drab descriptor “Early Modern Europe.” Perhaps America cannot be great again if we accede to labeling our history as one Airstrip One after another.
All this is to say that “Early America” is already blandly deracinating, as “Early Modern Europe” is, too generic a label to preserve our national memory. And the attempts to get rid of even that label—well, I do wish to analyze them generously, although the contributors make it difficult. Let us grant the obvious—that a label that assumes the importance of the United States of America as a nation, republic, and inheritor of the West’s animating spirit of liberty fits imperfectly for histories that do not make that presumption. The various contributors make that case largely by reference to the American academy’s current idées fixes, such as “settler colonialism,” identity politics, gender theory—and more on that below.
Even so, some of their articles do provide interesting evidence that “early America,” ending circa 1820, offers imperfect chronology. Andrew J. Walker’s “The Struggle to End Early America in Unified Haiti,” for example, makes the interesting point that the Haitian Revolution did not end with Haitian independence in 1804, but ought to include the abolitionist conquest of Spanish Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844, what would become the Dominican Republic after it won its own independence from Haiti. Kathryn Olivarius’s “How We Died: Public and Private Health in Early America” underscores that the sustained increase in public health in America in the early nineteenth century was in the North and emphatically did not reach the South for some decades to come. Articles such as these do allow one to rethink whether the inevitable generalization that accompanies the periodization of “early America” does constrain historical insight. And, yes, that periodization framed around the histories of Boston and New York fits less well to the histories of New Orleans and Santo Domingo. And the Forum is sufficiently open-minded that it includes Ernesto Bassi’s “The 1820s as Hemispheric Pivot,” which ultimately makes the argument that the chronology of “early America” does provide a useful chronological demarcation:
During the 1820s, a world of republics bounded, in Simón Bolivar’s terms, by ties of perpetual, firm, and inviolable friendship, where slavery did not exist, and where sovereign Indigenous groups could finally be turned into obedient, law-abiding citizens, became a thinkable future. This future did not materialize immediately, but the 1820s made it for the first time realistically possible. (52)
The vast bulk of these articles, however, concern black and Indian history—“Black” and “Indigenous,” in the professors’ painfully precise jargon. More or less explicitly, the articles argue that change in historical nomenclature serves, and should serve, a contemporary political agenda. A string of quotations illuminates the underlying argument of the Forum:
The United States, the thirteen former colonies that severed political ties with the British Empire and formed a republic, has been a colonial power since its creation. In addition to embarking on an experiment in self-government, the United States also embarked on an ambitious project to steal a continent. This was a reimaging of the original European colonial project in North America, but it was a colonial project nonetheless. Accepting this face raises the question about the utility of dividing the history of North America chronologically. Early America, as a temporal field, also signals a divide between the colonial era in North American history and the national era. From an Indigenous perspective, this distinction seems ridiculous. The United States was born and remains a colonial power. (Michael John Witgen, “The End of an Era: The United States as a New World Colonial Power,” 122)
Only by reckoning with the histories of Native and African Americans, in all their facets and complexity, can the United States be genuinely thought of as a postcolonial country. (Manisha Sinha, “What Made Early America?”, 67)
How did Cornell dispossess Indigenous people of their land? … I contend that it [acknowledgment of dispossession] should be understood as an enlargement of our knowledge and understanding of Cornell’s history and the basis for serious conversations about meaningful and constructive institutional reconciliation with affected Indigenous nations. … I am inspired to continue to push for positive change here at Cornell through my teaching, writing, and speaking. (Jon Parmenter, “Confronting Cornell University’s Origins in Indigenous Dispossession,” 126, 134)
Where we end early America, in short, will help determine its future. (Vanessa M. Holden and Michael John Witgen, “The End of Early America?”, 42)
To translate bluntly: the debate about “early America” is really a debate about “modern America” and America’s future. In Europe, “modern Europe” was transferred from the Reformation (Protestant liberty) to the French Revolution (atheist revolution). The urge to get rid of “early America” is really a way to transfer “modern America” from “the revolutionary birth of the full American complex of republicanism and liberty” to “the woke revolution that will finally destroy ‘settler colonial’ America.”
Whether you support or oppose a new woke revolution to destroy America as it is, therefore, will inform acceptance or rejection of this historical revisionism. I love our America and thus look coldly on attempts to destroy it, by word or deed. But there are other weaknesses to this new revisionism that might incline the Martian observer with no human attachments to think that “early America” has enduring power as a historical periodization.
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Of course, this revisionist campaign is narrow. Consider that “early America” is useful not least for demarcating pre-industrial from post-industrial America and that the line circa 1820 indeed indicates the boundary line for the Industrial Revolution’s astonishing transformations of American life—indeed, of all life. Ecological historians, for example, surely note the extraordinary, sometimes cataclysmic, effect of the Industrial Revolution—the forests leveled, species driven to extinction, ecosystems transformed. Then, too, there are the demographic effects—not least the ensuing nineteenth-century rise of white Americans to their greatest historical proportion of the Americas’ population. The social changes attendant upon urbanization, all the areas of popular culture—I cite historical specializations usually associated with other revisionisms, to emphasize the narrowness of this particular would-be historical revolution.
And, of course, it does not attempt to incorporate the older histories in its new paradigm but simply ignores them. If historians are to supersede the term “early America,” the new term should be able to include and reinterpret the older histories, not just discard them. The Forum ignores rather than attempts to reinterpret the history of English America—its politics, its religion, its wars, its economy, its science and technology, its society, its culture. So too, the repeated jargon of Indian “survivance” fails to recognize the fact that up to 90-95 percent of Indians died following the Columbian Exchange, mostly of disease. The demographic replacement was not absolute, but it was sufficient that it makes sense to have “early America” start with 1492. And English America, above all, has a history of revolutionary liberty. We may argue its relative importance, but simply ignoring its existence is not an argument. Not a persuasive one, anyway. The European historiographical transformation that created “early modern Europe” at least acknowledged that the Reformation existed, even if it was dethroned from central importance in creating modern Europe. Serious historical revisionism for American history needs to do at least that much to acknowledge the existence of English America and its liberty.
On the whole, I think early American history, centered on 1492, 1607, 1776, and 1787, is an excellent historical paradigm for our nation’s historians—although I still would prefer a name less bland and deracinating than “early America.” The historical profession and our history classrooms might engage in a productive debate about whether we ought to go along with my paradigm preferences, but historians who simply want to promote a new revolution by erasing the history of America—the substance of the history, and not just the names by which we periodize it—are not taking part in such a debate. Effacing our memory is an attack, not an argument.
To be charitable, William & Mary Quarterly’s Forum should convince readers that it is possible to have an interesting debate about the usefulness of the term “early America.” But with the best will in the world, no fair-minded reader will think the Forum itself provides that debate.
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Image: Museum, Brooklyn. “Stony Ground.” World History Encyclopedia.
