Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Frederick E. Hoxie, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Death should be familiar to historians, and so long as our subjects have entered that familiar sphere we call "history" we can spend our days with them comfortably; they become "historical," and we know what to do with them. The recently dead are a problem. Are they "historical," or are they just, well, gone? My departed colleague Francis Jennings, who died in the fall of 2000, belongs to this liminal group, the recently dead but historically homeless. (Lest anyone think this line of thought is disrespectful, be assured that "Fritz" would have enjoyed it. First of all, he had a huge ego, and more important, he was unfailingly irreverent. Once he learned he was dying of cancer he enjoyed a last grand lunch at the Newberry Library, and he found time to tape record his eulogy on his deathbed. Those who attended his memorial service were braced for one last self-serving monologue. He had embarrassed most of us so many times over the years that we assumed a familiar crouch and studied our shoes. But Fritz surprised us. He offered up a hilarious commentary on pious funerals and extended gracious thank you's to all who had attended him at the end. It also became clear that by preempting the eulogy he had blocked local clergymen from taking over the ceremony. He closed by directing our attention to the serving table at the far end of the room where, if things were proceeding as he had ordered, champagne would be poured for the assembled. Happily, all was in order.)	1
Yet Fritz's good humor through his own death doesn't help us decide what to do with him. The author of six books on the encounters of Native Americans and Europeans in the colonial era, plus a number of memorable essays on ethnohistory, Francis Parkman, early Pennsylvania, and other topics, Jennings is usually described as "iconoclastic" or "controversial."1 Jennings's intemperate tone and frequent assaults on the historical establishment did not help. In the preface to his first book, The Invasion of America, for example, he went out of his way to argue that by writing colonial history with the Indians in rather than out he was unmasking the duplicity and racism of previous scholars. He singled out Alden Vaughan in that volume, quoting the Columbia professor's assertion in The New England Frontier that the Puritans "had no reason to conceal their attitudes or actions towards the Indians." Jennings struck back: "I have found plenty of reasons."2 Authors of first books rarely work so hard to irritate potential reviewers.	2
Unfortunately, for many Jennings was just an irritating wise guy. His over-the-top language could be off-putting, and his nontraditional academic career may also have disadvantaged him. He served in World War II and worked through his young adulthood as a high school teacher and political activist. Blacklisted by the Philadelphia public schools in 1951, he went to graduate school on the G. I. Bill while trying to make ends meet and (with his wife Joan) raise a large family. He taught at a succession of undergraduate institutions before coming to the Newberry Library in 1976 at age fifty-eight. He published his first book only six years before his 1981 retirement, and he never had a doctoral student. He never had the opportunity to see his ideas revised and refined by his students, nor, generally, did he have many protégés.	. . .