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From Sources to Stories: Reconstructing Revolutionary Lexington in the Classroom


Mary Babson Fuhrer
University of New Hampshire

ON AN APRIL MORNING IN 1775, seventy-seven Lexington farmers took a stand on their town common and started a revolution. Generations of townspeople have honored these yeomen soldiers—the Battle of Lexington is re-enacted at dawn every April 19th—and generations of schoolchildren have learned the story of Lexington and Concord.1 Perhaps because of this heightened attention, the farm families of late colonial Lexington are well-documented in a range of primary sources: tax lists, probate inventories, account books, diaries, town meeting records, sermons, and newspapers preserve many details of daily life for ordinary people who happened to do an extraordinary thing. These primary sources offer students—from grade school to high school—an opportunity to revisit revolutionary Lexington. For younger students, these records can evoke the experience of living in revolutionary times; for more sophisticated students, the sources offer a way to ground speculation about causes and motivations in evidence. 1
      The National Heritage Museum (NHM) in Lexington probed these primary materials in preparing "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty," the museum's permanent exhibit on the events and meanings of April 19th. Research drew on the everyday records generated by living and dying, farming and trading, preaching and keeping the peace in a late colonial town.2 The story of farm and community life as seen through the reconstructed experience of ten families became the basis of the exhibit.3 The unearthed primary resources were so rich, however, that museum staff wanted to make them useful in the classroom as well as in the exhibition. In the summer of 2007, NHM hosted two teacher workshops—one for elementary and one for high school teachers —on ways to use these primary sources to recover a lost world. 2
      Workshop participants examined and layered evidence of one family's world: household composition; the structure, spaces, furnishings, and tools of their home; the layout and functioning of their farm; and the web of neighbors and kin with whom they shared—and upon whom they depended for—life's necessities. Each new piece of evidence enlarged their knowledge of family and community life and increased their understanding of daily work, the rhythms and meanings of their small-farm world. They looked at how the family might provide for the next generation, and considered what strategies they might use to obtain newly desired store-bought and imported goods. They realized the tremendous pressures bearing down on this long-settled town as land and money grew scarce while needs and wants multiplied. Finally, they considered the townsfolk's response to escalating tensions in the winter of 1775. 3
      For elementary school teachers, the goal was to turn evidence into stories that would allow their students to imagine the lives of children from the past. For the final project, each of the teachers assumed the persona of a member of their study family and presented stories in narratives of perceived good and evil, difficult choices, and dramatic consequences.4 Teachers took back to their classrooms authentic stories of thirty Lexington children from 1775, so that their students could also assume the persona of real children from the past.5 4
      High school teachers performed the same family and community reconstruction, but with a more critical emphasis on the reliability of evidence, assessing its inherent limitations and bias, acknowledging the "constructed" nature of historical interpretation, and drawing interpretations about motivation. Their goal was to gain a familiarity with their family that gave them the confidence to imagine hopes and fears in the spring of 1775, and to speculate as to why men took to the green on April 19th. That process is illustrated below using the family of John Parker, militia captain on the morning of April 19th, as a model.6 (Primary sources used in this exercise are posted on NHM's education website at <http://nationalheritagemuseum.typepad.com/learning>.) 5
      We began by reconstructing John Parker's household using vital records to establish the nuclear family and checking town clerk's records for evidence of other persons—such as apprentices, servants, or town poor—who might be living with the household in 1775.7 We determined that the Parker household in 1775 likely included John (age 46), his wife Lydia (age 45), and seven children (ranging from nineteen to four years old), representing a typical household.8 6
      What could we learn of their home and possessions? The Lexington tax assessment of 1774 revealed to us that the family was comparatively well off, ranking in the top 20% of their townsfolk for assessed wealth.9 But when we examined a memoir and sketch of the homestead, we discovered a modest abode. Their "ancient" farmstead was a typical five-room saltbox with two front rooms downstairs, a kitchen running the rear length of the house, and east and west "chambers" on the second floor.10 The structure was sturdy but not stylish; other homes built in Lexington by mid-century followed the new, more refined Georgian fashion. We examined images of these other examples and considered what that might say about the values—or financial concerns—of the Parker family. 7
      Then, using Capt. Parker's 1775 probate inventory—a listing of household possessions recorded at the time of death—we tried to imagine the interior furnishings and uses.11 By the mid-eighteenth century, many prosperous New England farmers were embellishing their homes with the latest imported textiles, ceramics, furniture, and such consumer adornments fit for an aspiring gentry.12 Yet the Parker furnishings, despite the family's economic status, were sparse. Other than a tall case clock and two mirrors (considered luxury goods), the family's possessions were nearly all utilitarian. The kitchen was stocked with pewter, stoneware, and iron, but lacked the silver, fine china, and teaware of aspiring gentry. Tools of production such as spinning wheels, cheese presses, pickle tubs, butter churns, and cider barrels far outnumbered the three tables, "old chests," great chair, and simple wooden chairs that provided, along with their three beds, the whole of their furniture. As we imagined walking room to room with the appraisers, we noted the plain, functional furnishing and the multiple uses of rooms as living and workspaces. We lingered in what would have been the "best room:" the parlor with the family's "best bed," one oval table set with pewter, the master's comfortable great chair and tall case clock, and a small writing desk, likely placed near the window where natural light helped Parker, wearing his "spectacles," keep his farm and woodworking accounts. The modest outfitting, we noted, could reflect practical, temperate tastes, or it could indicate limited family resources.13 8
      Leaving Parker's house, we turned to his farmland. We discussed how owning land gave the yeoman his sense of security and freedom.14 Parker's fields and the labor of his sons provided raw materials; the tools of the farmhouse and the labor of his wife and daughters turned those materials into essential household goods. Using the Massachusetts Valuation of 1771, which described property by usage (meadow, pasture, tillage) and livestock by type (oxen, cows, horses, sheep, swine), we recorded Parker's holdings.15 Then we compared his farm to the average needed for a "comfortable subsistence."16 We determined that Parker held enough tillage, pasture, meadow, and woodland to provide for his family's meat, grain, dairy, vegetables, clothing fiber, and fuel—all their essential consumables except salt.17 9
      But, we noted, Parker's seventy-eight acres were not enough land to provide sustainable farms for his three sons when they came of age.18 The need to find cash for land threatened to increase the debt that Parker already carried, for he still owed his brothers for their share of the farm he had inherited from his father. This was becoming an increasingly common arrangement in land-strapped Lexington, and we discussed how the need to repay existing debt and find cash to set up children on estates might have weighed on men like Parker.19 10
      The farm economy, then, provided most but not all of the Parker family's essential needs. To procure basic goods or services that they could not produce on their own farms, families turned to the neighborhood economy. Parker, like most of his neighbors, practiced a craft in addition to farming. We examined his woodworking account book and learned that Parker traded his woodshop products for neighbors' household goods or labor. When they "reckoned" accounts, neighbors usually carried forward credit or debit balances; this neighborhood economy efficiently distributed goods and met shortfalls without resort to cash or interest-bearing debt. We considered how the neighborhood trade both eased credit and bound the Parkers and their neighbors with ties of mutual interdependence.20 11
      Together, Lexington's farm and neighborhood economies worked efficiently to provide almost everything that farm familes needed. The challenge was that they did not provide everything families wanted. The eighteenth century was a period of rising standards of living, and Lexingtonians coveted luxury imports that stocked the shelves of port city stores.21 To encounter this world of goods, we examined advertisements from Boston newspapers. We noted the vast assortment of dressgoods imported from England and India, the pewter, brass, and "cutlery and hardware of all kinds," the ornate looking glasses, fine china, wall papers, and, of course, sugar, spices, and teas from distant shores. Most especially, we noted that almost without exception, the advertisements stated, "CASH ONLY." 12
      Returning to the Parker inventory, we noted imported items that must have been purchased with cash: looking glasses, brassware, some cutlery. Were these purchases increasing over time? To answer this, we turned to a pair of father and son inventories for the neighboring Fiske family in order to compare tableware owned at mid-century and at the end of the century. Where the Fiske father made do with fourteen pewter dishes, some "earthenware," and eight knives and forks, the son could boast extensive holdings of china and "crockery," a vast assortment of pewter plates, platters and porringers, plus silver tea- and tablespoons, jugs, one coffeepot, and brass candlesticks. 13
      What had we learned about the world of John Parker and his family? Among a people who believed that owning one's farm was the key to independence and self-determination, Parker and most of his townsmen owned their land, but felt the pressure of increasing indebtedness and the need to provide for the next generation. Additionally, their farm and neighborhood economies were being stretched to meet their rising desire for store-bought goods. 14
      Given this context, we turned to the political tumult that engulfed Lexington in the years leading up to the Revolution. Our evidence drew from the sermons and town resolves authored by the town's fervently Whig minister. Rev. Jonas Clarke ardently embraced the ideology that historians have come to call Republicanism—he believed that the economic and political independence of Lexington's freehold farmers was threatened by a British conspiracy to entice them with luxury goods, then entrap them in debt and taxes.22 His sermons preached the virtues of simplicity and frugality; the official town resolves he penned protested increased duties and taxes. 15
      Finally, we turned to the incident of the Lexington Tea Party, quite likely orchestrated by Clarke, to experience the town's political environment on the eve of the Revolution. Town meeting minutes helped us recover this drama. In early December of 1773, the town met to discuss matters "relating to the tea sent out of the East India Company to be sold in America." Lexingtonians expressed their fear that this cheap but duty-laden tea was a wily ruse on the part of British trade ministers, a strategem to lure colonists into accepting Parliament's sovereign right to tax and legislate for the colonies. Wary Patriots feared that once Parliament usurped the authority of colonial legislative assemblies, a conspiracy of corrupt British officials would manipulate duties, taxes, and a gross imbalance of trade to reduce the colonists to debt and dependence. The town drafted a statement of protest, recorded in the town clerk's record book and then published in Boston newspapers, revealing their political sentiments. They declared the British Parliament to be "enemies of the Rights and Liberties of America," whose "crafty measures" schemed to "sap and destroy" Americans. Having declared their determination to resist tyranny and protect themselves from economic ruin and the loss of their property to debt, they resolved to consider "as an Enemy to the town" deserving of "neglect and contempt" anyone who purchased East India tea. The townsfolk of Lexington then unanimously resolved "against the use of Bohea tea [imported black tea] of all sorts... and to manifest the sincerity of their resolution, they brought together every ounce contained in the town and committeed it to one common bonfire."23 We noted that this Lexington "Tea Party" occurred on December 13th, three days before the more famous party in Boston Harbor. 16
      Our workshop participants had, by this point, examined and evaluated evidence to reconstruct their study family's household and home, farm and trade, faith and community; they were now asked to assign meaning to actions, motive to choices. With their enriched understanding of the world of Lexington's militia men, participants speculated on the motivations of the town's tea-burners and citizen-soldiers. Predictably, interpretations varied. Most concluded that fear played a major role for the militia men and their families: fear of losing farms, economic independence, and political rights. Some mentioned insecurity brought on by the shortage of land and the increased dependence on consumer goods, or simply by an increased pace of social change. Others focused on anger at imperial authorities for perceived abuse or resentment at being treated as lessor citizens by virtue of their colonial status.24 Most shared the view that the farm folk of Lexington prized the rights and civic roles to which they felt entitled as independent yeomen, and they were determined to protect their traditional status. 17
      That there would be a variety of interpretaions was predictable. We consistently stressed that our goal, though building upon factual evidence, was not to determine a historical truth. The shortcomings of evidence, the bias we inevitably bring to analysis, the speculative nature of much of our inquiry, all made recovery of an actual lived past impossible.25 Rather, participants were challenged to analyze critically and interpret evidence in a way that they believed offered a meaningful explanation of human action. They were encouraged to present their interpretations as a story, a narrative informed by evidence and imagination, that speaks to causal relationships, contingency, and human agency. It imbues the past with meaning.26 18
      This exercise offers one final historical insight. As students attempt to engage with their historical subject, they can better grapple with the ways in which ordinary people made history. Had John Parker and his neighbors not acted, or had they acted differently, history would have been different. Such a realization highlights both historical agency (the power inherent in choosing to act) and historical contingency (the possibility that things might have turned out otherwise.) These are transformative insights. "Grasping the contingent nature of the past can break the tyranny of the present; seeing how historical actors made and remade social life, we can gain a new vision of our own present and future. That is perhaps the most important lesson historians can help people to draw from the past."27 19


Notes

1.  The story of the Battle of Lexington has been told many times. The earliest versions were recorded as depositions of witnesses in the Provincial Record Book of Massachusetts, 1775. The battle was retold in commemorative sermons and addresses over the next half century; see Jonas Clarke, "The Fate of the Blood thirsty Oppressors, and God's tender Care of his oppressed People: A Sermon Preached at Lexington, April 19th, 1776" in the collections of the Lexington Historical Society, also in Charles Evans, American Bibliography (Chicago, IL: by the author, 1903), 14679. In the nineteenth century, commemorative accounts were published, including Elias Phinney, History of the Battle of Lexington (Boston, MA: Phelps & Farnham, 1825); Richard Frothingham, History of Siege of Boston, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill, reprint, 4th edition, (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1873); and Rev. Artemas Muzzey, The Battle of Lexington, With Personal Recollections of the Men Engaged in It (Boston, MA: D. Clapp & Sons, Printers, 1877). Early twentieth-century accounts include Frank W. Coburn, Battle of April 19th, 1775 (Lexington, MA: by the author, 1912); Harold Murdock, The Nineteenth of April, 1775 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1923); and Allen French, Day of Concord and Lexington (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1925). Arthur B. Tourtellot's classic version, William Diamond's Drum, appeared first in 1959 and was republished by W. W. Norton in 2000 as Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution. See also David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

2.  This research was based on the model provided by Robert A. Gross's classic study of the neighboring town of Concord, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976). The social history methods developed by the New England town studies authors, particularly Phillip J.Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970) were also used.

3.  An overview of the National Heritage Museum's exhibit, "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty," is available online at <http://www.monh.org/Default.aspx?tabid=162>.

4.  Bruce VanSledright's research on appropriate history goals for elementary schoolchildren suggests that they are capable of understanding "story-like dimensions (e.g., heroes, plots), binary distinctions (e.g., good versus evil), and human intentionality (e.g., the act of making choices based on desire)." Bruce VanSledright and Jere Brophy, "Storytelling, Imagination, and Fanciful Elaboration in Children's Historical Reconstructions," American Educational Research Journal 29, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 840.

5.  These curriculum materials are available through the National Heritage Museum's website at the curriculum webpage at <http://nationalheritagemuseum.org>. Elementary school lessons are also available on that webpage and through NHM's education website at <http://nationalheritagemuseum.typepad.com/learning>.

6.  The primary documents that we used, along with worksheets for analysis, are available on the curriculum webpage at the National Heritage Museum's website, <http://nationalheritagemuseum.org>.

7.  Charles Hudson, History of the Town of Lexington Middlesex County Massachusetts: From Its First Settlement to 1868, Revised to 1912 by the Lexington Historical Society (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).

8.  Eighteenth-century Massachusetts farm families, in which children provided essential labor, were generally large, averaging six living children. Also considered as members of the household were apprentices, live-in servants, slaves, town charity cases, and extended family. It was not unusual for a farmhouse to shelter seven to ten or more within the household. On family and household sizes, see Evarts B. Green and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), xxiii.

9.  Lexington, Massachusetts, 1774 Tax Assessment, microfilm, Cary Memorial Library, Lexington, MA. Tax valuations and assessments, which record the value of real and personal property for each poll in town, allow historians to determine the prosperity of an individual farm family relative to its neighbors. Social historians, such as those cited in note 2 above, have made extensive use of town tax information to reconstruct social structure.

10.  Theodore Parker, Genealogy and Biographical Notes of John Parker of Lexington (Worcester, MA: Press of Charles Hamilton, 1893), 89.

11.  Inventory and Debts of John Parker, Middlesex County Probate Records, 16638 and 16639, Middlesex County Probate Court, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Archives. An inventory is a record of a person's land and household effects at the time of death to aid in the settlement of the decedent's estate. These records provide an excellent "snapshot" of household property for social historians. Their interpretation, however, presents challenges. See Alice Hanson Jones, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) and Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). See also Gloria L. Main, "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," The William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 1 (January 1975): 89–99.

12.  The consumer revolution of the mid-eighteenth century and its accompanying rise in aspirations for refinement have been the subject of numerous historical studies. See Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Peoples, Houses, and Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Philip Zea, In Pursuit of Refinement (Deerfield, MA: Historic Deerfield, 1998); and Timothy H. Breen, "An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776," The Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1986): 467–499.

13.  Descendants remembered Parker as a man of bookish, contemplative habits and temperate tastes. Parker, Genealogy, 81 and 153.

14.  Independence, most New England farmers believed, was rooted in ownership of land. The yeomen's compact, mixed-use farms were not self-sufficient, but they did produce much of the food, fuel, and clothing families needed to survive. More critically, owning land entitled farmers to vote and to participate in local governance. It was a widely held perception that a man who had to depend on a landlord, employer, clients, or patrons could not live a self-determined life; his obligations rendered him incapable of impartial, autonomous action. The independent yeoman, however, was self-supported and thus self-determined. Richard L. Bushman, "Massachusetts Farmers and the Revolution," in Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, ed. Jack P. Greene, Richard L. Bushman, and Michael Kammen (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 77–124. See also Bernard Bailyn, "Chapter 3: Power and Liberty," Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1967), 55–93; and Allan Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 1–38.

15.  Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, ed., The Massachusetts Tax Valuation List of 1771 (Camden, ME: Picton Press, 1998).

16.  The ecological foundations of New England's sustainable, mixed-use, yeomanry farms are fully explained by Brian Donahue in The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (Yale Agrarian Studies Series) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), Chapters 3, 7, and 8. For minimum subsistence requirements in colonial New England, see Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), Chapter 5: "Farm Ecology: Subsistence versus Market." In general, a minimum sustainable freehold farm in Massachusetts required about sixty acres. The keyword here is sustainable; a farmer could get by on much less land if he were willing to exhaust the soil. But yeoman farmers needed fertile land to pass down to their sons. To keep their land productive for the long term, they followed a carefully balanced ecological plan. The average family needed about two acres for the homestead—house, barn, outbuildings, and vegetable garden—and another two acres for the orchard that would provide the essential two barrels per person of cider. In addition, the average family burned about twenty cords of wood—or one acre's worth of hardwood—a year; since it took that acre twenty years to regrow, the farmer needed about twenty acres of woodlot to have a continuous fuel supply. For the staff of life—the corn, oats, barley, and rye that would make their bread—not to mention the flax that would be spun in linen for their clothing, they needed approximately six acres of tillage. But that tillage needed to be fertilized to be kept productive, and it generally required the manure of five to six cows (along with a few sheep) to fertilize six acres of tillage. The cows, however, had to eat; to graze six cows required about fifteen acres of pasture. Cows could not graze during the winter months; to winter six cows required the mown hay from about fifteen acres of meadow. Meadow was frequently the natural grasslands that lay near streams, rivers, and swamps. Each spring when the waters rose and flooded the low-lying meadowland, the nutrient rich sediment left behind renewed the soil. In short, the floods fed the meadow, the meadow and the pasture fed the cows, the cows fed the tillage, the tillage fed the people, and the land remained ecologically healthy and fertile for generations.

17.  To confirm this finding, we consulted the will of one of Parker's townsmen. In 1783, Deacon Joseph Loring specified what should be provided annually for his widow's diet and household consumption. With these measures as a guide, we determined that Parker's land and livestock were sufficient to provide essential support. A study of probate data on widow's portion for the period 1620 to 1840 indicates that eighteenth-century New Englanders saw their diet improve in quantity and variety, and they gained better control over seasonal scarcity. Sarah F. McMahon, "A Comfortable Subsistence: The Changing Composition of Diet in Rural New England, 1620–1840," William and Mary Quarterly 42, no. 1 (January 1985): 26–65.

18.  To this approximation, one would also add an estimate of acres for the orchard and house lot.

19.  Detailed data on Lexington population, land use, and debt can be found in an unpublished paper by Mary Fuhrer, "The Battle for Freehold Farms: Lexington, Massachusetts, 1700–1800: A Quantitative Study," University of New Hampshire, 2006.

20.  On interpreting farm account books, see Winifred B. Rothenberg, "Farm Account Books: Problems and Possibilities," Agricultural History 58, no. 2 (April 1984): 106–112. These webs of rural interdependence are well-documented in the long-standing debate on rural New England's transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist farm behavior. See James Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalite in Preindustrial America," William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1978): 3–32; Bettye Pruit, "Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1984): 333–64; Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Formation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a woman's account book, see Laurel T. Ulrich, The Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

21.  On the growing demand for imported continental luxury goods, see especially T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

22.  On Whig thought and Republican ideology, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); J. G. A. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); or Robert Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 49–80.

23. Massachusetts Spy, Thursday, December 16, 1773, page 3, available on the NHM website.

24.  For discussion of such a hypothesis see T. H. Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising," Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 13–39.

25.  On the critical role that the historian plays in selecting which evidence to use—and the ideological part he or she plays in that process—see Eric Gable, Richard Handler, and Anna Lawson, "On the Uses of Relativism, Fact, Conjecture, and Black and White Histories at Colonial Williamsburg," American Ethnologist 19, no. 4 (November 1992): 791–805.

26.  "[H]istorians... configure the events of the past into causal sequences—stories—that order and simplify those events to give them new meanings. We do so because narrative is the chief literary form that tries to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality. When we choose a plot to order our... histories, we give them a unity that neither nature nor the past possesses so clearly. In doing so, we move... into the intensely human realm of value." William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1349.

27.  Roy Rosenzweig, Susan Porter Benson, and Stephen Brier, eds., Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), xxiii–xxiv.

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