| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter C. Messer. Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 258. $39.00.

This is a meticulously researched and methodically organized account of how the history of America came to be written in the eighteenth century. Describing history as "the shared experiences and values uniting a people [which] sets an agenda for society" (p. 182), Peter C. Messer demonstrates how the consolidation of certain versions of historical narrative around the time of the American Revolution served to institutionalize particular versions of U.S. national history while occluding others. The first part of the book, "Colonial Precedents," focuses on the difference of emphases between what Messer calls "provincial historians" (p. 17)—Robert Beverley in Virginia, Daniel Neal in New England, and others—and apologists for empire, such as the New Yorkers Cadwallader Colden and William Smith, Jr. The former group stressed the gradual moral self-improvement and independence of America, arguing that the country's exceptional nature would prevent it from degenerating into corruption; the latter cautioned against excessive fondness among the colonists for commerce and religious enthusiasm, suggesting instead that the economic success of America was the result of its integration within the complex trading circuits of the British Empire. Messer is particularly good on the Loyalists, and his second chapter, "Dissent and the Alternative that Was Lost," highlights ways in which Loyalist perspectives on the emergence of America have now by and large fallen from view. As a consequence of the revolution, the provincial historians' account of American exceptionalism quickly turned into something like an official version of history.

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