| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Paul E. Johnson. Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper. New York: Hill and Wang. 2003. Pp. xiii, 240. $23.00
A problem for scholars who write micro-histories is linking the particular with the general. Here the particular is "the story of Sam Patch, a factory hand who, in the 1820s, became America's first daredevil" (p. ix), attaining fame as a jumper of waterfalls. The general (as always with Paul E. Johnson's writings) is the early Jacksonian conflict between the patriarchal culture of working-class men and the domestic culture of middle-class reforming evangelicals. Sam Patch's career resolves that problem wonderfully: the very feats that made him famous began as conscious if symbolic gestures of the larger conflict.	1
Patch's very first public leap was a protest that disrupted the elaborate ceremonies opening a private pleasure park at Passaic Falls in the industrial town of Paterson, New Jersey. The park was carved out of what had been a spot informally open to all, and frequently used as a gathering place for young male workers in the local mills, Patch among them. A local entrepreneur had prettified the landscape, constructed an ornate bridge across the falls, placed an ice cream parlor on the grounds, and (partly in an effort to insure respectable behavior and to exclude men like Patch) was charging admission. Patch timed his dramatic leap for the climactic moment of the ceremonies, in a mock reappropriation of the site. And he repeated the leap a year later, on July 4, 1828, just before the start of a major strike of Paterson's mill workers. To accompany his feats, Patch even devised for himself a motto that cryptically compared his own skills with those of the bourgeois entrepreneurs: "Some things may be done as well as others."	. . .

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