Reviewed by Richard J. Bell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Richard J. Bell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Richard J. Bell, University of Maryland

Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field. Edited by John Lauritz Larson and Michael A. Morrison. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 209 pages. $19.95 (paper).
What isn't cultural history? In a 2002 essay on this subject, European medievalist Miri Rubin warned that cultural history had spread itself too thin. Increasingly co-opted by once-insulated fields such as political and economic history, Rubin argued, cultural history could no longer lay claim to a distinctive agenda or set of tools.¹ Five years later her question about the boundaries of cultural history remains a pointed one, particularly for historians of early America. Whatever our subjects, most early Americanists now seem to take the cultural construction of historical reality and the performative dimensions of identity and action as a given.	1
The extent to which cultural questions have percolated into every subfield of early American history is evident in a new volume of essays. In this collection, which first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of the Early Republic in 2004, the journal's two retiring editors bring together fifteen essayists and five commentators to offer their visions for the future of the field. The conversation is organized around five framing questions that the editors believe will preoccupy the next generation of scholars of the early Republic: Can a continental conception of North American history coexist with a temporal subfield that takes its organizing principle from the political adolescence of thirteen coastal states? Will economic history find relevance in a scholarly landscape likely to be ever more dominated by cultural questions? How can dazzling new work in environmental history transcend that field's enduring association with Western history and integrate its insights into the mainstream? Does any life remain in the ailing distinctions once drawn between slave labor and free? And finally, where next for cultural history?	2
These careful conceptual divisions suggest that cultural history can be easily defined and bracketed; on closer inspection, however, this slim volume offers repeated testimony to the hegemony of the cultural approach. Economic history is a case in point. Studies of political economy have recently revitalized this field and, as the three economic historians included here testify, the infusion of cultural historical perspectives seems likely to continue. Stewart Davenport, for instance, encourages scholars to unravel "the paradoxical coexistence of American liberalism and American Christianity" (42) in the early Republic by historicizing individual identity. Davenport argues that contradictory impulses toward loving one's neighbor and competing with him could only be reconciled within individual psyches. The product of such embodied tension, Davenport concludes, was an ideal republican citizen, a person "hard-headed enough to appreciate the reality of competition and self-promotion in a liberal society but at the same time soft-hearted enough to love his competitor, employee, or patron as himself " (45). Similar sensitivity to questions of identity and culture informs the essay by Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker Jr. Engaged in a study of early American entrepreneurship, they argue that their subjects were deeply conditioned by the economic assumptions and cultural context of their era. They anticipate that economic historians seeking to understand the value of work, the power of paternalism, and the proper relationship between employer and employee in this period will need to recognize that businessmen "both molded and reflected the values of their communities" (68).	. . .

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