Christopher Grasso and Karin Wulf

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Christopher Grasso and Karin Wulf | Nothing Says "Democracy" Like a Visit from the Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Nothing Says "Democracy" Like a Visit from the Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories

Early plans for commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the English founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 involved much discussion of the effort to brand Jamestown as "the birthplace of American democracy." As it turned out, the slogan printed on souvenir T-shirts, caps, mugs, and tote bags was "America's 400th Anniversary," though the theme of democracy remained central and was emphasized by a yearlong series of conferences titled "The Future of Democracy."¹ The official Web site explained the connection: "Representative government in America began at Jamestown, and many of our nation's democratic ideals and institutions—including the rule of law, free enterprise, and cultural diversity—trace their roots to that remarkable beginning." Kicking off the "anniversary week" was a visit from Queen Elizabeth II on May 4, 2007. Crowds flocked to applaud and photograph the monarch as she toured the Jamestown fort, was saluted by cannon fired from the replica of the Susan Constant, one of the ships that brought English settlers to Jamestown, and then dined with four hundred on rockfish and Virginia ham at the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. A sarcastic local teen was heard to remark, "Yeah, nothing says 'democracy' like a visit from the Queen."²	1
Scholars might wince at the Jamestown commemoration's strained attempt to link the British Crown to an uplifting national narrative. Early American historians are especially sensitive to the toocomfortable move from English empire to American nation—and with good reason. Bookstore shelves are littered with popular accounts of the colonial American past that simply tie the period to a later, national story. By the same token some scholarly invocations of empire and nation can appear flat and reductive. Scholars, too, struggle with the relationship of empire and nation, two concepts compelling and important in their own right and complicated by their mutual emergence in the early modern period. Empire and nation are traditional subjects in early American scholarship, in part because of assumptions about the birth of nations as the central story of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. As early Americanists have tried to link small places and particular lives to broad processes and epochal transformations, empire and nation sometimes appear as unexamined backdrop, sometimes as explicit framework for political stories, and sometimes as subjects of scrutiny.	2
This essay is neither a historiographical review nor a singular assertion about the state of the early American field. For one thing, the field is too vast to allow for brief summary. "Early America" was once casually assumed to refer to the territory of the British colonies of North America before and after independence, just as "America" was often assumed to mean the United States. No more. The "thirteen original colonies" now form only a fractional part of early American studies. Joyce E. Chaplin speculated in the pages of this journal several years ago that a reissue of a 1989 guide to monographs, Books about Early America: 2001 Titles, might now have to be subtitled "10,001 Titles." Historians in the field labeled "early America" in job descriptions and course offerings have been geographically expansive when considering what is relevant to "America," creatively imprecise about the end of the "early" period, and readily energized by ideas and methods developed outside history departments. Like their colleagues who write and teach the histories of other times and places, they have shaped and been shaped by critical developments in the study of race and gender; they have also done groundbreaking work in the history of slavery and Native American studies.³	. . .

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