Reviews of Books

"History from the bottom up," once a rallying cry, is now an established field in early American history. Brilliant studies of the experiences of African-American slaves, colonial women, and Native Americans have emerged in the past three decades, and, more telling, so have workman-like volumes. But with few exceptions, the individual lives of ordinary women and men have not been successfully translated into biographies. We have come to know these non-elites as collective entities, not as people from the past.	1
The editors of these two volumes clearly hope to rectify this situation. Acknowledging that few ordinary folk leave richly descriptive diaries or correspondence, if they leave any at all, Ian K. Steele and Nancy L. Rhoden nevertheless insist that the voices of the common sort must be heard and that they must be allowed to tell their stories. Yet the table of contents immediately suggests the difficulties in locating these stories: of sixteen historical figures in the colonial volume, for example, few will strike the reader as ordinary or unfamiliar. Among them are Cabeza de Vaca, Anne Hutchinson, Squanto, George Whitefield, Lewis Morris, Jr., and Olaudah Equiano. In their introduction to the first volume, Steele and Rhoden find it necessary to defend the inclusion of wealthy landowners and political leaders, leading religious figures, and conquistadores, arguing that it would be "biased to exclude all the prominent figures" (p. xiv) from this gathering of early Americans.	2
More troubling than the inclusion of twice-told tales of Massachusetts's most famous exile or the architect of the Great Awakening are the criteria set for the ordinary people included in the volumes. While most historians of women, African Americans, and the urban and rural poor stress the agency of their subjects in shaping their world despite the constraints of race, gender, or class, Steele and Rhoden laud the subjects of the colonial volume as men and women who "rather than making history . . . simply endured it" (p. xiv). They are the "humble, the tolerant, and the peaceable" (p. xiv) tossed about, it would seem, on the waves of the history being made by kings, prosperous merchants, colonial political leaders, planters, masters, and husbands. This is a misguided premise: as a genre, biography does not lend itself well to the passive, nor does social history justify itself as the study of those who merely endure.	3
When the editors seek a unifying theme for the many disparate tales contained in the colonial volume, they abandon the glorification of endurance and imbue these slaves, soldiers, Indian sachems, and modest landowners with the power to create what Richard White called the "middle ground" between races and cultures. Characterizing these men and women as "cultural brokers" (p. xv), the editors urge us to see them as active rather than passive historical figures after all.	. . .