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Appendix
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Textbooks Used in this
Paper
From the Loyd Family Collection at Indiana State University
Bénézet, Louis P., The World War and What Was
Behind It, or The Story of the Map of Europe (Chicago, 1918).
Guizot, François, General History of Civilization in
Europe, nt (New York, 1896).
Harding, Samuel Bannister, New Medieval and Modern History
(New York, 1913).
Kemp, Elwood, History for Graded and District Schools (Boston,
1902).
Meyers, P.V.N., A General History for Colleges and High Schools
(Boston, 1898).
Montgomery, D.H., The Leading Facts of English History,
2nd ed. (Boston, 1898).
Mowry, Arthur May, First Steps in the History of England
(New York, 1902).
Questions Adapted to the Study of Tytler's Elements of History,
4th ed. (New York, 1825).
Robinson, James Harvey, Medieval and Modern Times (Boston,
1919).
Stories About General Lafayette for the Amusement of Children
(Hartford, Conn., 1829).
Thalheimer, M.E., A History of England for the Use of Schools
(New York and Cincinnati, 1875).
Tytler, Alexander Fraser, Elements of General History, Ancient
and Modern (Concord, N.H., 1825).
Willard, Emma, Universal History in Perspective (New York,
1850).
. Last Periods of Universal History (New York, 1855).
Willson, Marcius, Outlines of History (New York, 1871).
Worcester, Joseph Emerson, Elements of History, Ancient and
Modern (Boston, 1835).
Notes
1 Lynn Hunt, review
of Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French
and American Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988), in Journal of Modern History 63 (1991), 147.
An Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship from Lilly Library at Indiana
University supported some of the research for this paper. Russell
Johnson, Nancy Rhoden, and Patricia Sides offered helpful critiques
of drafts of the paper.
2 Jacques Godechot,
France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,
1770-1799, tr. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965);
R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political
History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 Vols. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1959). Two older comparative works
are Bernard Fay, L'Esprit révolutionnaire en France
et aux Etats Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Champion, 1925) and Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution
(New York: Vintage, 1965; originally published 1938). The idea
of "sister republics" is presented most explicitly in Joseph Aron,
Les Deux Républiques soeurs, France et Etats-Unis
(Paris and New York, 1885) and Higonnet, Sister Republics.
A recent comparison is Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French
Lightening, American Light (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999).
Dunn is a professor of romance languages at Williams College,
where she offers a course on "Sister Revolutions in France and
America."
3 Cited in Palmer,
Age of the Democratic Revolution, I: 188. Adams' reference
was to the essay of the German political theorist Friedrich Gentz,
who viewed the American Revolution as a conservative defense of
traditional prerogatives and the French Revolution as a radical
assertion of unproven, universal principles. Adams' distaste with
the French Revolution continued into the following decades. In
1825, during Lafayette's famous return visit to the United States,
then President Adams greeted the visitor with a long speech in
which he referred to certain "illustrious" French, including the
kings Louis XII and Henri IV, and the nobles Bayard, Coligny,
Turenne and Fénelon, but left conspicuously unmentioned
leaders of the Enlightenment or Revolution; Mémoires,
corréspondance et manuscrits du General Lafayette,
6 vols. (Paris: H. Fournier, 1837), VI: 214,218.
4 Alexis de Tocqueville
wrote of the early response to the French Revolution that "...the
sympathies of the (American) people declared themselves with so
much violence in favor of France that nothing but the inflexible
character of Washington and the immense popularity which he enjoyed
could have prevented the Americans from declaring war against
England"; Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books,
1945), I: 244. Joyce Appleby writes of a "sentimental bond" between
Americans and French in the late eighteenth century; Liberalism
and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 232. On the influence of the
American revolutionary experience in France, see also C. Bradley
Thompson, "The American Founding and the French Revolution," in
Ralph C. Hancock and L. Gary Lambert, eds., The Legacy of the
French Revolution (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996),
109-50.
5 Wood, The Radicalism
of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 231.
6 A recent analysis,
similar to the present but which focuses on the work of professional
historians is Keith M. Baker and Joseph Zizek, "The American Historiography
of the French Revolution," in Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood,
eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the
Past (Princeton, 1998).
7 Best, Introduction,
The Permanent Revolution, 4.
8 Eugene Kamenka,
"Revolutionary Ideology and 'The Great French Revolution of 1789-?,'"
in ibid., 81. See also Ferenc Féher, ed., The French
Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990), and Isser Woloch, ed., Revolution
and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5.
9 Though, as Eric
Hobsbawm notes, "...for the solid and middle class Frenchmen who
stood behind the Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic,
but first and foremost the only effective method of preserving
their country"; Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look
Back on the French Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), 68. On the historiography of the Terror,
an influential revisionist view is François Furet, Interpreting
the French Revolution, tr. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981).
See also Lynn Hunt, "Forgetting and Remembering: The French Revolution
Then and Now," American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1119-35.
10 On the social
and cultural grounding of republican values in France, see Philip
Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century
France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
11 On French influence
and emigration to Indiana, see Frances S. Childs, French Refugee
Life in the US, 1790-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1940); Aurele J. Violette, "French," in Robert M. Taylor,
Jr. and Connie A. McBirney, eds., Peopling Indiana: The Ethnic
Experience (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996);
and Les Français des Etats-Unis à aujourd'hui
(Paris, 1994). There were 13,563 francophones and 268,244 persons
of French descent in Indiana according to the 1980 census; Ronald
Creaugh, Nos Cousins d'Amérique: histoire des Français
aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Centre National des Lettres, 1988),
445,454.
12 Axtell, "Europeans,
Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American History Textbooks,"
American Historical Review 923 (1987), 621. The texts surveyed
by Axtell were published between 1983 and 1987.
13 Ibid., 623,624,627.
14 Jean Anyon, "Ideology
and United States History Textbooks," Harvard Educational Review
49 (1979), 361,379,383.
15 Dennis L. Carlson,
"Legitimation and Delegitimation: American History Textbooks and
the Cold War," Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings
on the School Textbook (London: Falmer Press, 1989). Many
instances of bias are cited in Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians
of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), which has an informative
section on views of the French and France found in American textbooks
at the elementary and secondary levels (pp. 28-43).
16 Axtell, "Europeans,
Indians and the Age of Discovery," 630.
17 Tytler, Elements
of General History: Ancient and Modern (Concord, NH: Isaac
Hill, 1825), 299.
18 Ibid., 319-21.
19 Ibid., 335.
20 Questions
Adapted to the Study of Tytler's Elements of History, 4th
ed. (New York: Samuel Wood, 1825), 155. The Battle of Waterloo
was Napoleon's only outright military defeat and the only occasion
when he faced an army commanded by Wellington. Outside of Spain,
English troops played comparatively little part in the dozens
of battles in Continental Europe during the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic eras, including the many important victories by Bonaparte
himself. Yet almost invariably it is the encounter at Waterloo
that these nineteenth-century texts required American students
to know.
21 Stories About
General Lafayette for the Amusement of Children (Hartford,
Conn.: M. & F.J. Huntington, 1829), 34.
22 Ibid., 36.
23 Ibid.
24 Joseph Emerson
Worcester, Elements of History, Ancient and Modern (Boston:
Hilliard, Gray and Co., 1835), 154.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 154,156.
27 Willard, Universal
History in Perspective (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1850),
441-42, and Last Periods of Universal History (New York:
A.S. Barnes and Co., 1855).
28 Outlines of
History (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor and Co., 1871),
455.
29 Ibid., 817.
30 Ibid., 845.
31 Ibid., 871,843.
Malthus commenced his famous Essay on the Principle of Population
with an apocalyptic allusion to the "comet" of the French Revolution.
Melville used a similar metaphor, referring to France's "red meteor
of unbridled and unbounded revolt"; "Billy Budd, Sailor," in Billy
Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 303.
32 Willson, Outlines
of History, 455.
33 D.H. Montgomery,
The Leading Facts of English History, 2nd
ed. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1898), 332-33, 335-36. This text
devotes about twice as much attention to the Battle of Waterloo
as to all of the Revolution.
34 Thalheimer, A
History of England for the Use of Schools (New York: Wilson,
Hinkle, and Co., 1875), 236.
35 Mowry, First
Steps in the History of England (New York: Silver, Burdett
and Co., 1902), 242.
36 François
Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe, nt (New
York: Appleton and Co., 1896).
37 Myers, A General
History for Colleges and High Schools (Boston: Ginn and Co.,
1898), 647.
38 On Lamartine's
Histoire des Girondins, see William Fortescue, Alphonse
de Lamartine: A Political Biography (London: Croom Helm, 1983),
126ff. Victor Hugo, another sympathizer of the Revolution (though
something of a latecomer to this idea, who, in any event, believed
it had gone astray), is also quoted by Myers.
39 Myers, A General
History, 658.
40 Ibid., 659.
41 Ibid., 667.
42 Ibid., 668,688.
43 Harding, New
Medieval and Modern History (New York: American Book Co.,
1913), 491.
44 Ibid., 506.
45 On Paine's ambiguous
legacy in the United States, see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and
Revolutionary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976),
263-70. On the special treatment accorded by school texts to Lafayette,
see Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 129.
46 Tocqueville,
who saw the two revolutions as alike in many important ways, could
not help but note the strikingly different circumstances under
which the two events took place: "Separated from their enemies
by three thousand miles of ocean, and backed by a powerful ally,
the United States owed their victory much more to their geographical
position than to the valor of their armies or the patriotism of
their citizens. It would be ridiculous to compare the American
war to the wars of the French Revolution, or the efforts of the
Americans to those of the French when France, attacked by the
whole of Europe, without money, without credit, without allies,
threw forward a twentieth part of her population to meet her enemies
and with one hand carried the torch of revolution beyond the frontiers,
while she stifled with the other a flame that was devouring the
country within"; Democracy in America, I: 117.
47 Hobsbawm, Echoes
of the Marseillaise, 12ff.
48 The narrative
history of the French Revolution was reprised in recent years
with Simon Schama's bestselling bicentennial account, Citizens:
A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989).
Susan Dunn's recent book also focuses on individual successes
and tragedies, with the first chapter devoted entirely to Lafayette's
role in the American and French Revolutions; Sister Revolutions.
For perceptive comments on the narrative approach to the history
of the French Revolution, see Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise,
97, and Alan B. Spitzer, "Narrative's Problems: The Case of Simon
Schama," Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), 176-92.
49 Richard C. Rohrs,
"American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848," Journal
of the Early Republic 14 (Fall 1994), 362-63; Philip M. Katz,
from Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 191,193.
50 Charles Augustus
Goodrich, A History of the United States of America (Hartford,
Conn.: H.F. Summer and Co., 1833), quoted in Elson, Guardians
of Tradition, 186. The scholarly literature on nineteenth-century
history curriculum is not extensive. See Clifton Johnson, Old-Time
Schools and School-Books (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
1963), Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, History of the School
Curriculum (New York: Macmillan, 1990), as well as two works
by John A. Nietz: The Evolution of American Secondary School
Textbooks (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1966) and Old
Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961).
51 James H. Madison,
The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 108-15; Howard H. Peckham, Indiana:
A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1978), 97-99; and
Tanner and Tanner, History of the School Curriculum, 37-8.
A brief account of the history curriculum in Indiana schools is
Benjamin F. Walker, Curriculum Evolution as Portrayed through
Old Textbooks (Terre Haute, IN: School of Education, ISU,
1976), 2-3.
52 Kennedy, Orders
from France, 103,117, 311,314. In the several diplomatic and
military encounters between the United States and France described
in survey texts, the former is invariably cast as innocent and
heroic, the latter (France) as conniving; Elson, Guardians
of Tradition, 130.
53 Appleby, Liberalism
and Republicanism, 204.
54 Higonnet, Sister
Republics, 274. See also Biancamaria Fontana, "Introduction,"
in Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge,
1994), 3.
55 The literature
on American republicanism is extensive. For introductions to the
topic, see Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis:
The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American
Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly, 29 (1972),
49-80; Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican
Vision of the 1790s (NY: NYU Press, 1984); Sean Wilentz, Chants
Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working
Class, 1788-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),
especially ch. I; and Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career
of a Concept," Journal of American History 79 (June 1992),
11-38. On the racial and ethnocentric underpinnings of the belief
that republics could flourish only in certain geographic areas,
see Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, ch. 3.
56 Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967), 282-84, and Paul A. Gilje, The
Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
57 Ian Tyrrell,
"American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,"
American Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031.
58 Elson, Guardians
of Tradition, 134-35,143.
59 Patrick Thierry,
"De la Révolution americaine à la Révolution
française,' Critique (juin-juillet 1987), 62-5.
60 Pascal Dupuy,
"La Diffusion des stéréotypes révolutionnaires
dans la littérature et le cinéma anglo-saxons (1789-1989),"
Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française
3 (1996), 512. See also Thierry, "De la Révolution américaine,"
in Elise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation americaine
(Paris: Maspero, 1977) and Michel Vovelle, La Révolution
française. Images et récit (Paris: Messidor,
1986). On the Counter-Revolution, see Jean-Clement Martin, Contre-Révolution,
Révolution et nation en France, 1789-1799 (Paris: Seuil,
1998) and Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine
and Action, 1789-1804, tr. Salvador Attanasio (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), especially ch. 4 for the influence
of Burke.
61 Dupuy, "La Diffusion
des stéréotypes," 519. Carlyle's and Dickens' images
of the Revolution were reproduced repeatedly in film and print;
ibid., 522 ff. By the early twentieth-century, a fanciful view
of the French Revolution was also familiar to Anglo-American audiences
through stage plays and films based upon Baroness' Orczy's character
"The Scarlett Pimpernel"; ibid., 526-27, and Hobsbawm, Echoes
of the Marseillaise, 5.
62 The "near-unanimous
judgement of (English-language) literature since the early nineteenth
century has been to condemn the French Revolution as a disaster"
write Susan Sontag and Vasily Aksyonov, "The Literary Impact of
the American and French Revolutions," Partisan Review 4
(Fall 1992), 628.
63 Dupuy, "La Diffusion
des stéréotypes," 520.
64 Revisionist interpretations
beginning with the work of François Furet in the 1970s
and 1980s, which cast the Terror as integral to any understanding
of the French Revolution, have partly contributed to the practice
of disengaging it from the American Revolution. Keith Michael
Baker, for instance, emphasizes the differences between the two,
noting that "Unlike the American Revolution, which effectively
translated the assertion of revolutionary will into the establishment
of a stable constitutional order, the French Revolution opened
a progressively widening gap between revolution and constitution...";
Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 252.
65 Dupuy, "La Diffusion
des stéréotypes," 527-28.
66 Norman Hampson,
"The French Revolution and Its Historians," in Best, ed., The
Permanent Revolution, 230.
67 Davis, Revolutions:
Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3.
68 Palmer, "The
Fading Dream: How Europeans Have Seen the American Revolution,"
in Stanley Palmer, et al., Essays on Modern European Revolutionary
History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 91,99.
Critic Susan Sontag states the point more bluntly. Describing
the "literary impact" of the two revolutions, she writes that
the perceived "polarity" between the two "became an important
topos in the discourse of the repudiation of Communism
in Europe (in the late 1980s). To repudiate the Bolshevik Revolution
was also to repudiate the French Revolution, of which it was seen
as a successor and fulfillment, and to acclaim the American Revolution
as a positive model;" Sontag and Aksyonov, "The Literary Impact
of the American and French Revolutions," 627.
69 Where from the
start there existed a "consciously ecumenical dimension"; Hobsbawm,
Echoes of the Marseillaise, 34.
70 Gilbert Allardyce,
"The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," American
Historical Review 87 (June 1982), 706.
71 Bénézet,
The World War and What Was Behind It, or The Story of the Map
of Europe (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1918), 108,109.
This book was especially intended for children in the upper grades,
but could also be read by adults. Bénézet, an 1899
graduate of Dartmouth College, was superintendent of schools in
Evansville, Indiana in 1916-1924; see James E. Morlock, The
Evansville Story: A Cultural Interpretation (Nc, np, 1956),
186. On the Franco-American rapprochement during the era
of the Great War, see Albert Guérard, Beyond Hatred:
The Democratic Ideal in France and America (New York, 1925).
72 Peter Novick,
That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), chs. 1,2, and Baker and Zisek, "The American Historiography
of the French Revolution."
73 Lynn Hunt writes
that "The French Revolution looms large in the American Historical
Review at its beginnings because Americans considered the
French Revolution especially significant to their own history";
"Forgetting and Remembering," 1120,1124. See also Baker and Zisek,
"The American Historiography of the French Revolution," 354. Robinson
also served as president of the AHA in 1929; Daniel A. Segal,
"'Western Civ' and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,"
American Historical Review (June 2000), 771-72,775.
74 Robinson, Medieval
and Modern Times (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1919), 473. On Robinson,
see Luther V. Hendricks, James Harvey Robinson: Teacher of
History (1946).
75 Baker and Zizek,
"American Historiography of the French Revolution," 355.
76 For representative
observations near the midpoint and end of the twentieth century,
see, respectively, L.S. Stavrianos, "The Teaching of World History,"
Journal of Modern History 31 (June 1959), 110-17, and Michael
Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in A Global Age," American
Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995), 1034-60.
77 Howard Spodek,
The World's History, Volume II: Since 1100, 2nd
ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001).
78 Ibid., 495.
79 Katz, From
Appomattox to Montmartre, 1, and Tyrrell, "American Exception-alism,
1031-1055.
80 Harvard University
hosts an annual "International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic
World, 1500-1800" headed by Bernard Bailyn.
81 Higonnet, Sister
Republics, 280. Likewise, the Haitian Revolution of 1790-1804,
which lately has been more and more been integrated into the story
of the Atlantic Revolution; see AHR Forum: "Revolutions in the
AmericasThe Haitian Revolution," American Historical
Review 105) (2000), 103, and John D. Garrigus, "White Jacobins/Black
Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions Together
in the Classroom," French Historical Studies 23 (Spring
2000), 259-76. At the same time, writes Eric Hobsbawm: "...the
comparatively modest international influence of the American Revolutionexcept,
of course, on the French Revolution itselfmust strike the
observer"; Echoes of the Marseillaise, 34, 113.
82 National Standards
for World History: Exploring Paths to the Present (Los Angeles:
National Center for History in the Schools, UCLA, 1994), 203.
83 Ibid., 206.
84 Ibid., 207.
85 The texts are
Marvin Perry, et al., A History of the World (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1985), ch. 20, and Ross E. Dunn, et al., Links
Across Time and Place: A World History (Evanston, IL: McDougal,
Littell and Company, 1990), 510-15. The former text gives the
Revolution a central setting in its discussion; the latter does
not.
86 Perry, A History
of the World, 445,447.
87 National Standards
for United States History, 75.
88 As recently as
1991, a scholar has written that "In an era of unprecedented internationalization
in historiography, the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism
still haunt the study of American historiography"; Tyrrell, "American
Exceptionalism," 1031. Baker and Zisek write that American historians
have by-and-large left the comparative study of the American and
French Revolutions to political scientists and sociologists, a
tendency which "has left a gap" in our understanding of the revolutionary
era; "The American Historiography of the French Revolution," 360.
89 "The Scarlett
Pimpernel" was produced as a mini-series for the "A&E" television
network and broadcast in spring 2000. The point about "Les Miz"
should not be overstated, since the rebellion depicted in the
novel and the play occurred not during the French Revolution of
1789 but in 1832, and in fact was defeated by government forces.
The fact that revolution was stifled in this case made it arguably
more palatable to the audience at which Hugo's Les Misérables
was directed.
90 Fontana, "The
Thermidorean Republic and its Principles," in Fontana, The
Invention of the Modern Republic, 119.
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