Book Review

Canada and the United States

This collection of essays is dedicated to Gary Nash, the much-esteemed historian who pioneered studies of race and class in early America, most notably in Red, White. and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974), The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness with Origins of the American Revolution (1979), and Race, Class, and Politics: Essays on American Colonial and Revolutionary Society (1986). These themes so close to the heart and conscience of Nash have been united by editors Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, along with gender, under the umbrella term "inequality," which became the call to arms for a conference held in Nash's honor that took place at the Huntington Library in 1997. Out of that conference came many of the pieces in the volume plus additional invited works. Contributors include peers as well as former students, and the published results have about as much coherence and completeness as the contents of a shopping basket on a late night's trip to the supermarket. Some works are cooly investigative and empirical in method; others are calls to arms aimed at the teaching of early American history.	1
Three studies in the collection focus on what one might call the "lost opportunities" of a new or reforming society to reduce injustice. Mary Beth Norton, in "'Either Married or to Bee Married': Women's Legal Inequality in Early America," concentrates on the years before 1670, when women (and Africans) were presumably freest under the still fluid conditions of a frontier society. In a valuable examination of women's participation in Maryland and New England courts, Norton finds that even single women had no separate legal identities of their own. Coverture, she argues, was simply the most prominent institutional embodiment of a much broader and deeper disfranchisement of the second sex than historians have yet recognized.	2
Two other "lost opportunities" emerge from examinations of the outcomes of religious revivals and reforms in the eighteenth century: J. Richard Olivas discovers that the breadth of the pulpits' call in Boston's version of the Great Awakening did not lead to large numbers of new admissions, nor did new members differ socially from those already admitted. Olivas' examination of church records discloses that ministers and church officers closed ranks to hinder, then squelch, the aspirations of those of the newly awakened who came from the lower orders. Sylvia Frey likewise locates a discontinuity between the rhetoricof spiritual equality of Protestant evangelists in the postrevolutionary South and the divided and unequal nature of the churches they built. The truly revolutionary promise of Christianity seems to remain forever fettered by human intransigence despite repeated cycles of enthusiasm.	3
Another pair of well-crafted essays explore the remarkable resiliency of subjugated humans in recognizing and seizing opportunities to construct more meaningful lives for themselves. Neal Salisbury describes how Indians appropriated Christianity for their own purposes in "'I Loved the Place of My Dwelling': Puritan Missionaries and Native Americans in Seventeenth-Century Southern New England." Billy G. Smith makes use of runaway advertisements in colonial newspapers to discern the means and goals of eloping slave women. He provides a brilliantly original and subtle reading that brings these elusive denizens of the colonial past more fully into our ken. Along very different lines and making use of very different materials, Sterling Stuckey speculatively links the annual African-American dance celebrations of Pinkster in Albany, New York, to West African religious traditions, on the one hand, and, more controversially, to the origins of black-faced white minstrel shows and to scenes in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), on the other. Altogether, this is a provocative effort that I hope Stuckey will develop at greater length in the future.	. . .