Thomas J. Brown

Review Essay

Massachusetts in Memory

Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999; xxii, 352 pp.; illustrations.

Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Knopf, 1998; xxviii, 337 pp.; illustrations, maps.

John Seelye, Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998; xv, 699 pp.; illustrations.

Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999; xvii, 262 pp.; illustrations.

THE STUDY OF "COLLECTIVE MEMORY"—the presence of the past in public realms such as landscape, ritual, and print—has been one of the liveliest topics of historical writing in the last twenty years. Conceptual frameworks for this scholarship have long been available. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs began to outline the theoretical foundations for much recent research in the 1920s when he developed the argument that the memory of an individual depends on the ways in which groups construct the past. During the 1950s, interest in American myths and symbols led to studies of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln as national icons.¹ The spark that flickered in the 1920s and 1950s has now caught fire, in large part because many historians seek to examine the development of culture through perspectives inspired by anthropology. Commemorative ceremonies and monuments, for example, offer inviting windows into the rituals and symbolic spaces of a community. The fascination with memory also reflects anxiety about the social purpose of a profession organized around the production of monographs that differ significantly from the typical sources of collective memory. Much as scholars have devoted increasing energy over the last two decades to "public history" in such outlets as museums and preservation sites, the study of memory traces the ways in which broad communities have encountered the past.

Recent books by John Seelye and Ann Uhry Abrams on the Pilgrims, Jill Lepore on King Philip's War, and Alfred Young on the Boston Tea Party illustrate the methods of the current study of memory and offer an opportunity to survey the findings about one part of the country. Although the books differ in structure, each author remains close to the widely used strategy of analyzing multiple perspectives on an event, a research design that has received thoughtful criticism. The books also frame parallel problems in the connection between the form and content of commemoration, and they express a range of positions on the relationship between collective memory and the writings of professional historians. Together, these contributions indicate that the study of memory has settled into some clear patterns, in its conclusions as well as its conceptualization, and suggest several reasons that Massachusetts will likely remain a crucial place for the exploration of American memory.

Often focused on assertions of national identity, the study of commemoration has emphasized the uses of the past in political culture. The new books on New England support Eric Hobsbawm's argument that expansions of democracy tend to spur "the invention of tradition."² Calculated appeals to shared experience long preceded the nineteenth-century advent of liberal European nation-states in which Hobsbawm found an array of new customs and spectacles designed to inspire among citizens the allegiance previously demanded from subjects. In The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore argues that memory of King Philip's War united and restrained English colonists who enjoyed relative freedom from traditional controls over conduct. John Seelye's Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock shows that popular politics contributed to the rise of the icon from Thomas Faunce's call in 1741 for preservation of the boulder when it was threatened by construction of a wharf during the Great Awakening. Lepore and Seelye note that King Philip's War and Plymouth Rock both provided grist for the democratic imaginations of Revolutionary patriots, and Memory's Nation and Alfred Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution provide converging accounts of Federalists' efforts to establish power in the democratic new nation by promoting loyalty to the Pilgrims and the Revolution.

The link between democracy and memory makes the Jacksonian period especially important to each author. Seelye most fully explores the resourcefulness with which elites sought to maintain their cultural authority.³ Daniel Webster's oration at the bicentennial celebration of Forefathers' Day in 1820—the opening of the major phase in the career of Plymouth Rock—summarized the emerging Whig ideology by using the Rock as a reference point for measuring American progress. The address also popularized the imaginative experience through which the aesthetic theories of Archibald Alison and Joseph Addison had taught privileged travelers to feel the thrill of the sublime as they stood atop the unfenced, unmarked stone and contemplated its historic associations. Webster's oration quickly became one of the most familiar of these associations, establishing a self-referential commemorative tradition that Edward Everett, Robert C. Winthrop, Rufus Choate, and other conservative orators would reinforce in different ways while apologizing for "sentiments so often uttered and welcomed on these anniversaries" (88).

The politics of commemoration clearly reached a new level of vigor in the 1830s. Lepore reports that Edwin Forrest's portrayal of a tragic King Philip in the immensely popular play Metamora promoted white acceptance of Indian removal but also helped to fuel Indian protest movements. Abolitionists, workers, and other groups challenged conservative claims to established icons such as Plymouth Rock and revitalized other images from the past, including, as Young shows, the Boston Tea Party. Federalists and their successors had ignored the event, which Young brilliantly describes as a revolutionary carnival conducted by common people who not only destroyed valuable property but mocked genteel rituals of making tea. Like conservatives after the Civil War, conservatives after the Revolution deflected attention from the more radical ideological implications of their recent history by celebrating nationalism as symbolized by the Fourth of July or military heroes like George Washington. George Robert Twelves Hewes, a shoemaker who had taken part in many of the crucial events in Boston leading to the outbreak of the Revolution, found little public interest in his experiences until the publication of biographies about him in 1834 and 1835 that form the center of Young's study. These profiles of Hewes were the first books to be published about the Tea Party.

Similar patterns of construction and contestation are typical in studies of collective memory, and an astute critic has complained that the common trajectory results from flawed premises in the research design. Studies of conflicting interpretations of an event often assume that divisions over memory "reflect political differences constructed beforehand," notes Alon Confino, and tend to make culture "a prisoner of political reductionism and functionalism."⁴ The focus on the politics of commemoration therefore threatens to result in predictable rehashes of familiar controversies. It is hardly surprising that radicals and conservatives saw Plymouth Rock and the Tea Party differently, and their disagreements generally do not reveal many new political ideas. Moreover, unlike recent scholarship on the nineteenth-century South, the latest books on New England do not broaden understanding of political culture by showing that conservative women or other groups participated more fully in debates over collective memory than in other political forums.⁵

The two books organized around wars make strong efforts, with mixed results, to demonstrate that memory not only reflects but shapes conflicts. Ann Uhry Abrams's The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origins emphasizes that the elaboration of the Plymouth and Jamestown sagas inflamed sectional passions and sustained self-delusions, contributing to what Abrams characterizes as an artificial and avoidable Civil War: "that war, with all of its needless carnage, brought to a bloody climax two hundred years of cultural, political, and economic misunderstanding" (220). Without deeper commitments to either narrative, "a scarred and maturing nation" easily became "wary of writers quibbling about the ideological differences between Virginia and Massachusetts" and learned "from the devastations of war that excessive regional chauvinism could have deadly consequences" (259). This revisionist view of the Civil War as the result of runaway propaganda, rather than the deep-seated values and practices that constitute culture, imagines a shallowness in the sectional conflict that few historians in the past forty years have found convincing. Apart from Abrams's refusal to take ideology seriously, her sectional parallel is too rigid to illuminate the development of New England identity that Seelye explains far more fully. The emphasis on the contrast between Massachusetts and Virginia ignores formative rivalries with New York and the West, and more important, the strategy minimizes the crucial conflicts within New England that most shaped the symbolism of Plymouth Rock.

Jill Lepore offers a much more sophisticated view of the relationship between memory and group conflict in The Name of War. "It is the central claim of this book," she writes, "that wounds and words—the injuries and their interpretation—cannot be separated, that acts of war generate acts of narration, and that both types of acts are often joined in a common purpose: defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples" (x). She argues that King Philip's War resulted from English colonists' fears that they increasingly resembled Indians but intensified those anxieties by posing a "dilemma between peacefully degenerating into barbarians or fighting like savages"; colonists resolved the dilemma by winning the horrific war and then writing about it to "reclaim their Englishness" (11). Because Philip was, as one contemporary observed, "drawing his own reportt in blud not Ink" (47), the written word became the main signifier of a racialized gulf between the English and Indians. As in Abrams's account of the conflict between North and South, this approach elides some variations within the opposing groups, but Lepore brilliantly dramatizes the contingency of the fundamental division through her careful attention to the group most poignantly trapped between the new boundaries, the literate Indians.

In contrast to Abrams's view of sectional memory as mere propaganda, Lepore's conjunctions between action and remembrance establish valuable parallels across cultures and connections between English conduct and texts. The artfully constructed book introduces its multiple mirrors from the outset by beginning with Puritan minister William Hubbard's narrative of a Mohegan torture watched by a circle that includes colonial soldiers and, figuratively, Hubbard and his readers. Reading Indian torture rituals and Puritan narratives with equal facility, Lepore skillfully adapts theoretical frameworks of war developed by Elaine Scarry and Mary Douglas and stresses the convergence of personal violation and social disorder sensed when "nearly any attack could be understood metaphorically as an assault on the human body" (74). One of Lepore's many scintillating interpretations examines houses as "metaphorical bodies" (82) as well as emblems of English settlement. The same imagery conversely helps to explain the colonists' dread of swamps—"hideous and dangerous places, the most foreign and un-English land in all the New World" (87)—a terror that they expressed not merely in prose and poetry but in their ferocious attack on the Narragansetts' Great Swamp.

To be sure, the creativity and elegance with which Lepore dissolves King Philip's War into a theater of identity construction sometimes outpace the supporting evidence. The "cultural tensions that caused the war," Lepore claims, sweeping aside such matters as competition for land, were "Indians becoming Anglicized and the English becoming Indianized" (26). Although she demonstrates considerable Indian anxiety about Anglicization, her diagnosis of the English colonists' supposedly obsessive fear relies more on repeated assertion than documentation. That the colonists feared losing their English identity is a familiar argument, as she acknowledges, but she does not show that they often foresaw convergence with native culture or that fear of the prospect caused the war. Nor does she prove that wartime barbarism, in which the English had often engaged on the other side of the Atlantic, drove New Englanders to their pens to distinguish themselves from the savagery of their Indian enemies.

If Abrams and Lepore stress that memory solidifies groups against each other, Seelye and Young concentrate on the struggles over memory within a community. Seelye's title echoes the recent scholarship on nationhood as a form of "imagined community," for his Memory's Nation is a realm of imagination held together by appeals to the authority of Plymouth Rock.⁶ Seelye aims to measure the strength of this community through its language of remembrance. "Not only our oldest monument but the most flexible" (642), Plymouth Rock is the heart of a vocabulary capable of sustaining impressive depth and originality. Seelye identifies it as a stage (8), a threshold (11), a cornerstone (13), a providential wharf (44), a stepping stone (48), a pulpit (64), a gnomon (73), a pedestal (84), a fulcrum (226), an outcropping of the ideas underlying America (272), a gravestone (394), and a paperweight (439). The moment of landing symbolized by the Rock, moreover, is part of a repertory that offers alternative emphases on the embarkation from Delft, the Mayflower Compact, the first Thanksgiving, and the many facets of the related Puritan adventure in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Seelye is alert to the implications of any variation in the retelling of the saga, whether in passages selected for quotation from John Robinson's farewell sermon or the placement of Miles Standish in paintings. Institutional aspects of commemoration, such as the constituencies of groups that directed attention to the Pilgrims, receive incidental attention as the context for tracing images and rhetorical patterns mobilized by advocates and opponents of Unitarianism, abolitionism, domesticity, nativism, and other causes.

Seelye's resourceful and thorough account of this serial competition makes Memory's Nation one of the best overviews of New England intellectual life from the 1790s through the 1920s, but the book does not use Plymouth Rock merely as a device for revisiting familiar controversies. The crucial issue is the underlying vitality of the medium in which contending forces meet. For all the rancor with which William Lloyd Garrison and conservative minister George Blagden exchanged opposing views of Plymouth Rock, the site of memory provided common ground to which both professed loyalty. That allegiance, Seelye observes, affected the relationship of New England to the rest of the United States. While furnishing a battlefield for local controversies, Plymouth Rock combined with Bunker Hill to assert a regional entitlement to national leadership. Efforts in New York, Virginia, and elsewhere to undercut this claim testified to its perceived provincialism but also to its success. One South Carolina newspaper grumbled in 1855 that "Plymouth Rock, however venerable and sacred from its moss grown traditions and memories, was not the only centre and radiating source of Americanism."⁷ Moreover, Seelye shows that the New England commemorative vocabulary lent itself especially well to certain themes, such as the appeal of John Brown, whom Wendell Phillips described as "Plymouth Rock grown into a grand personality" (338).

Seelye's primary interest is not in the coalescence but in the decline of Memory's Nation. "As a live, contemporary issue, Plymouth Rock is important mostly because it is dead," he notes (2). It draws many tourists but inspires few of them; Calvin Coolidge was the last presidential candidate to think the Rock might be a helpful campaign backdrop. Seelye's most straightforward explanation for the decline of Plymouth Rock points to its entanglement in nativism and its displacement by more inclusive icons of arrival in America, such as Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. This narrative reaches a moving conclusion in John Dos Passos's anguished attempt to enlist the Pilgrims' legacy in support of former Plymouth resident Bartolomeo Vanzetti. After mediating so many struggles, memory had lost its elasticity and resonance for a changing nation.

Alfred Young's study of the Tea Party similarly indicates that memory defines the groups that it divides. Although the Tea Party revealed the radical face of the Revolution, conservatives learned to claim it as well, for example as a precedent for anti-abolition mobs. At the same time, the recognition of the orderly mass action as part of the Revolutionary memory created a firewall against remembrance of more spontaneously violent uprisings, such as the Stamp Act riots. The very name of the event reflects its role in balancing rival claims to the Revolution. The biographies of the shoemaker Hewes, Young has ingeniously discovered, were not merely the first books to be published on the Tea Party but the first titles to use the term "Tea Party" for what had usually been called the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor. Young observes that the new name served both radicals and conservatives because it could be read "in two contradictory ways: as mocking a genteel custom or as a playful way of making the most revolutionary event of the era 'safe'" (163). More than a fashionable way to review the ideological tensions that shaped memory, Young's approach to remembrance illuminates both the rules of engagement and the methods of reconciliation by which contending factions achieved some collective identity.

The recent study of memory has focused on the development of commemorative forms as well as the interpretation of significant events. Some works have looked at the crosscurrents between a particular event and a particular form. Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) illuminates the ways in which Americans envisioned emancipation through public sculpture and the ways in which the challenge of representing emancipation affected the course of American art. A large body of scholarship takes up similar interactions between the annals of early New England and the genre of historical fiction.⁸ Other works have concentrated on the emergence of commemorative forms that address many different aspects of the past. The rural cemetery movement and the historic preservation movement are two cases in which Boston assumed national leadership in creating ways to express collective memory.⁹ The books by Lepore, Seelye, Abrams, and Young present the opposite approach, ransacking a delightful variety of fiction, poetry, plays, pageants, songs, sermons, paintings, sculpture, architecture, and other sources to chart the remembrance of single events. Each author, however, devotes particular attention to one vehicle of remembrance—print for Lepore, oratory for Seelye, visual arts for Abrams, and landmarks for Young—and these aspects of their books suggest a range of relationships between form and content.

Lepore's emphasis on King Philip's War as a contest over print culture makes The Name of War exceptionally sensitive to implications of form. This theme comes into sharpest focus when the book dramatizes the plight of Indians who did not fit into the hardening matrix of literacy and race. Investigating the murder that touched off the war, Lepore concludes that "in a sense, literacy killed John Sassamon" (25). A key figure in John Eliot's efforts to spread "the culture of Protestantism, the culture of literacy" (190), Sassamon became useful to Philip as "scribe, interpreter, secretary, counselor, or some combination thereof" (39). At the same time, however, his skills and English connections made him dangerously untrustworthy. Lepore notes that "his death signaled the failure of the English and native peoples to live together peaceably" (43) and that the resulting war, by dooming Eliot's linguistic and missionary program, closed the path of literacy Sassamon had followed. Similarly, Lepore's evocative reading of Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative juxtaposes it with the silence of another captive, James Printer, a Nipmuck Indian who worked at the Cambridge Press and may have set the type for Rowlandson's The Sovereignty & Goodness of God. By choosing not to die, both captives invited doubts about their loyalty, but Rowlandson achieved reconciliation with colonial precepts through her writing while Printer earned it by following an English order to bring back "som of the enemies heads" (148).

Seelye parallels Lepore in emphasizing the relationship between the meaning of a tradition and its method of transmission. In contrast with Lepore's attention to the privileging of print as a claim to racial superiority, Seelye focuses on oratory as a claim to public leadership. The heart of a commemorative culture sufficiently rich to make Memory's Nation a counterpart to Perry Miller's Nature's Nation (1967), oratory as exemplified by John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, and Wendell Phillips epitomized the efforts of intellectuals to represent the community as they articulated the ambitions of New England to represent the nation.

The decline of commemorative oratory is an important part of Seelye's explanation for the fall of Plymouth Rock. Recognizing that commercial as well as demographic upheavals relocated the capital of national culture to the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty, Seelye argues that the business and military values associated with Union victory redefined Plymouth Rock after the Civil War. James Russell Lowell's characterization of the Forefathers as "stern men with empires in their brains" (455) is the key text in this transition, but Seelye devotes less attention to the internal disintegration of New England idealism than to the external assault taking place at Forefathers' Day dinners of New England Societies in Manhattan and Brooklyn. These events not only helped to reshape the Pilgrim along the martial lines of J. Q. A. Ward's Pilgrim (1885) in Central Park; they also promoted bluff, humorous, and brief after-dinner remarks rather than the lengthy historical speeches that had served as the principal vehicle of the commemorative tradition. Seelye's point that the decline of Plymouth Rock reflected changes in cultural forms is well taken. A different aspect of this transition deserved fuller treatment, for as he notes the Civil War era also undermined Plymouth Rock by shifting attention from the Pilgrims' landing to the new national holiday of Thanksgiving. The ideology of domesticity underlying Thanksgiving and the late Victorian model of masculinity embraced by rising New York businessmen differed in important respects, but they united in rejecting the oratorical rituals of New England memory.

Uncomfortably sandwiched between Memory's Nation and Robert S. Tilton's Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (1994), The Pilgrims and Pocahontas makes its main contribution through Abrams's expertise in pictorial representations. She adds many paintings and engravings to the images of the Pilgrims ably analyzed in Seelye's book and in a recent essay by Roger B. Stein, and she suggests some of the ways in which knowledge of artists' careers and familiarity with the development of a genre can inform the study of memory.¹⁰ She might profitably have made even more use of these resources. Her fascinating account of Samuel F. B. Morse's efforts to portray the Forefathers—and address the formidable paternal legacy of Jedidiah Morse—is one of several aspects of Abrams's book that invites comparison with William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961). Unlike Taylor, however, who applied an Eriksonian model of the ties between personal and cultural identity to explain the regional images popularized by Sarah Hale, William Wirt, John Pendleton Kennedy, and other figures, Abrams treats her biographical information as mainly anecdotal. The preparation she brings to her project from The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting (1985) is equally underutilized. Abrams briefly touches on the ways in which images of the Pilgrims' landing reflected artistic conventions as well as ideological controversies, suggesting the influence of Gustave Courbet's Burial at Ornans (1849) on George Henry Boughton's popular Pilgrims Going to Church (1867), but she does not directly examine the connections between Plymouth Rock themes and the available vocabulary of representation. Trends in historical painting are the missing background for Abrams's review of Pilgrim pictures, as the fading appeal of formal oratory is the latent context of Seelye's work.

Like the other authors, Young uses many different kinds of sources in The Shoemaker and the Tea Party. The first half of the book, which reprints a classic essay first published in 1981, is a life of Hewes and an analysis of his reminiscences that returns to Maurice Halbwachs's initial inquiry into the social frameworks of individual memory. But where Halbwachs argued that individuals maintain memories only when supported by groups, implying that Hewes would recall the Revolution through the lens of the 1830s, Young draws on recent psychological findings to defend Hewes's recollections as an example of enduring "flashbulb" memories expressed in a "life review" (12, 105). More than mere narrative details, Young emphasizes, the ideological essence of Hewes's Revolution emerges from his recollections, revealing an inner experience so powerful that it could overcome Hewes's reliability on matters of fact. For example, in insisting that John Hancock joined him in throwing tea into Boston Harbor, which Young finds "very unlikely," Hewes recalled the Tea Party as "a moment of equality" that epitomized the meaning of the Revolution (57).¹¹

In the new half of the book, Young parallels Halbwachs again by emphasizing place as a medium of collective memory. This wonderful essay draws on sensitivity to the political nuances of the different episodes in the Revolution and recognition of the social implications in the topographical transformation of Boston. As Halbwachs traced the identification of the sites of the Holy Land, Young maps the remembrance of the Revolution on the landscape of Boston. Young points out the conservative uses of memory in the development of Beacon Hill, topped by Charles Bulfinch's column commemorating the main events of the Revolutionary era from "Stamp Act Passed 1765" to "Public Debts funded Aug. 4, 1790." He also describes the lost places of potentially radical memory. The site of the Liberty Tree, "from 1765 to 1775 the single most important symbol of the Revolution in Boston" (199), fell victim both to Federalist neglect and changes on the Boston Neck. The Green Dragon, the public house that hosted many patriot meetings, disappeared in street construction.

Analysis of the civic landscape as a form of remembrance invites attention to economic pressures that are more apparent in urban real estate than in some other forms of memory. For Lepore and Seelye, the conjunction of place and memory leads to the hucksterism of shops and hotels named for King Philip or William Bradford. Michael Holleran has also contributed recently to this discussion, arguing that historic preservation in Boston quickly came to center on aesthetic desires to restrain development and vary the visual environment rather than civic efforts to preserve a symbolic continuity with the past.¹² Young sees more political significance in the cityscape than do these authors. Profit motives in the use of place, he implies, are not necessarily inconsistent with meaningful constructions of the past; the Boston Tea Party lent its name to a venue for rock music in the 1960s that updated some of the subversive parody of the Revolutionary protest. At times, however, Young's essay would have benefited from fuller discussion of the relationship between commerce and commemoration. He notes that the Liberty Tree II Adult Entertainment Complex, located in the "Combat Zone" of sexual enterprise, "appropriates the symbol on behalf of freedom of expression" (200). But in addition to juxtaposing rebellious and official memories of the Revolution, the few blocks that separate the purveyor of pornography from the tourist-clogged Freedom Trail raise important questions about the meaning of traditions filtered through the marketplace.

Young's most convincing example of living Revolutionary remembrance in the Boston landscape suggests a different model of the connection between place and memory. As J. Anthony Lukas details in Common Ground (1985), the Bunker Hill Monument established powerful community bonds in Charlestown and invigorated local claims to represent American principles of government during the Boston busing controversy. Memory informed identity indirectly, through a neighborhood landmark that happened to involve the Revolution. Unlike the tourists on the Freedom Trail—but like the Indians who came to use the fictitious name Metamora for the sachem known in his lifetime as Metacom, or the celebrants of Forefathers' Day who looked out on the sandy shore of Plymouth while reciting Felicia Hemans's account of the Pilgrims' landing on the "stern and rock-bound coast"—Charlestown residents who invoked Bunker Hill were remembering a remembrance. Collective memory often reaches the past in stages, drawing strength from earlier commemorations. As a result, the tendencies of the forms in which memory of an event has been codified may account as much for its continuing resonance as the social themes that the event suggests.

The rise of interest in collective memory partly reflects apprehensions about the tendencies of one particular form of remembrance, scholarly research in history. Pierre Nora has sketched in sweeping terms the "fundamental opposition" between memory and history. "Memory is life," he declares. It is "a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present." History, in contrast, is "the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer." The concepts are not merely different but unable to co-exist, for "at the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it." Nora reports that history has largely succeeded in this goal, and he identifies the collapse of memory as the tragedy of disconnected modern society. Although "vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation," memory is "magical and affective"; it "installs remembrance within the sacred." History is merely "prosaic." Memory may be "blind to all but the group it binds," but history "belongs to everyone and to no one."¹³ As exemplars of the intellectual currents that have toppled tradition, historians must ask if their approach to the past can serve an equally constructive social purpose.

The Pilgrims and Pocahontas avoids this challenge by celebrating what Nora laments. Wary of dangerous myths, Abrams stresses that "somewhere beneath the bravado and swagger lies a knot of verifiable fact" (14). She expresses relief that "recent scholars have begun to scrape away the layers of mythologizing in Massachusetts in an attempt to separate fact from fantasy" (279). If few historians would agree with her claims about the artificiality of the sectional conflict (or her suggestion that critical research on early New England only began recently), Abrams is surely right that collective memory has often been pernicious. This reminder is an important corrective to Nora's nostalgia for communities bound by the past. In many instances, history performs a useful social role by puncturing memory, if it is in fact the stronger force.¹⁴

Closer to Nora's position is the shadow cast by Henry Adams in Memory's Nation. Seelye ties the impact of historical scholarship to his other two major explanations for the decline of Plymouth Rock—its nativist isolation and the rise of the ceremonial styles favored by the business world—in a neat convergence on Henry Cabot Lodge, a Ph.D. in history trained by Adams, a biographer of Daniel Webster, and the principal orator at the Tercentenary celebration in 1920 of the Pilgrims' landing. Lodge's address echoed the relativism of his mentor by stepping outside the commemorative tradition to pronounce it a construction of the previous century and repudiating the law of progress that Webster had described as the fundamental connection between past and present. Seelye also sometimes adopts the voice of Adams, most extensively in a third-person account of two visits to Plymouth to research the book and deliver a talk about it. Noting that the decline of New England is "the kind of dry comedy in which Adams cast himself" (5), Memory's Nation is a rare academic work in its systematic use of humor as a literary strategy. Seelye's many puns and quips underscore the author's detachment from a subject that he identifies as "a joke" (2). As in Adams's writing, the self-mocking wit is often wistful; through it Seelye acknowledges the complicity of the historical profession in the destruction of a rich commemorative tradition.

Young substitutes frustration for Seelye's resignation. Rejecting Nora's premise that history must be at war with memory, Young hopes to invigorate the American Revolution as an ideological inheritance comparable to what Nora describes as the lost popular legacy of the French Revolution. That ambition founders, however, on Young's sense of the distance between scholars and the community. Well aware that he is working in a form of memory that usually lacks much influence, Young asks in closing whether the progressive tradition embodied by George Robert Twelves Hewes would most effectively be presented in "a museum exhibit, a classroom play, a dramatization for television, a movie" (205). The academic reader must sigh that a book as accessible and insightful as The Shoemaker and the Tea Party—a book that deserves a wide general audience—should conclude by looking to other media to reach the public.

The Name of War is unusual among works on memory in the energy with which it affirms the constructive power of scholarship. Eager to stress the vitality of Indian remembrance, Lepore reports that stories of King Philip's War "were handed down from one generation to the next and survive today in rich oral traditions" (184), but her sources do not enable her to establish much continuity in this folklore. To the contrary, she sympathetically depicts yearnings among contemporary Indians for a stronger sense of collective memory. The final lines of the book compare the opening image of a torture circle of Mohegans, perhaps initiating their captive into the embattled community, with a circle of members of the Narragansett Nation gathered in mourning and defiance at the Great Swamp Monument in South Kingston, Rhode Island. "Indians in New England in the later part of the twentieth century are attempting, in effect, to preserve their Indianness...," Lepore observes. "They want to stand in a circle" (240). Although she depicts herself standing outside the circle, Lepore's stance is the antithesis of Seelye's pose of bemused, powerless detachment. The fast-moving pace, crystalline structure, and informative yet disarmingly relaxed, candid, and passionate authorial voice of The Name of War make the book not only an important example of contemporary historical literature but a valuable contribution to the ongoing politics of commemoration. As their predecessors found inspiration in Metamora, proponents of the renaming of the Great Swamp site or the preservation of Deer Island will surely find that Lepore's scholarly goals do not prevent her from renewing as well as analyzing Indian memory of King Philip's War.

The prominence of Massachusetts in recent studies of memory is not a coincidence. This attention results in part from the nature of events that took place in the state: the nation legitimates itself by celebrating the episodes of the Revolutionary era and other founding events. To a greater extent, however, the interest in Massachusetts memory reflects the powerful culture of remembrance that developed in the state. Grounded in the seventeenth century, the cultural style achieved remarkable force with the nineteenth-century expansion of historical consciousness. "During the 1820s," Seelye notes, "Boston became the spiritual capital of Memory's Nation" (438), a leadership marked by innovations in the forms of commemoration as well as by the importance attributed to New England images like Plymouth Rock and the Tea Party.¹⁵ That influence could easily be exaggerated, and it did not maintain its high levels. But scholars plotting the trajectory of American memory will continue to find the state a fertile field for research, and students of remembrance in any society will benefit from the example of the scholarship focused on Massachusetts.

THOMAS, J. BROWN is assistant professor of American history at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Dorothea Dix, New England Reformer (1998) and co-editor of Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (2001).

NOTES

^1. Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington, Man and Monument (Boston, 1958); David Herbert Donald, "The Folklore Lincoln," in his Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York, 1956), 144–166; Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960). On Halbwachs (1877–1945), see Susan A. Crane, "Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory," American Historical Review 102(Dec. 1997):1372–1385; and Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993), 73–90.

^2. Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983).

^3. On this point Seelye parallels the analysis of political appeals to history in Harlow Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815–1836 (Boston, 1998), 118–147.

^4. Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," American Historical Review 102(Dec. 1997):395.

^5. See, for example, Jane Turner Censer, "Reimagining the North-South Reunion: Southern Women Novelists and the Intersectional Romance, 1876–1900," Southern Cultures 5 (Summer 1999):64–91; Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 88–93, 124–136; and LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens, Ga., 1995).

^6. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

^7.Charleston Courier, June 30, 1855.

^8. Philip Gould, Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (New York, 1996), cites many of the important studies since Lawrence Buell's seminal New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (New York, 1986).

^9. See Michael Holleran, Boston's "Changeful Times": Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore, 1998); Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus, 1989).

^10. Roger B. Stein, "Gilded Age Pilgrims," in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, Conn, 1999), 42–51.

^11. Robert E. McGlone, "Deciphering Memory: John Adams and the Authorship of the Declaration of the Independence," Journal of American History 85(Sept. 1998):411–438, similarly examines the Revolution as remembered by a Massachusetts patriot.

^12. Holleran, Boston's "Changeful Times," 123.

^13. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26(Spring 1989):8–9. This essay is the introduction to one of the most influential works on memory: Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1984–1992), available in English as Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1996–1998).

^14. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York, 1987), 180–191, describes the limited success of a scholarly challenge to collective memory.

^15. Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, Mass., 1997), presents a valuable comparative study of commemorative cultures in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina.

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