Reviewed by Avihu Zakai | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Avihu Zakai | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Avihu Zakai, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. By Peter C. Messer. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 268 pages. $39.00 (cloth).
Stories of Independence is an original and erudite study aiming to deal with the complex "relationships between history, identity, and ideology in the republican tradition of eighteenth-century Anglo America" (3). More specifically, its goal is to show "how historians' efforts to craft a distinct American identity contributed to the formation of a unique vision of republican politics" (3) in eighteenth-century America. The author resists the view that sees "the writings" of these "historians as the product of the eccentricities of a few men and women" (181), arguing rather that the "evolution of history writing over the course of the eighteenth century illustrates how identities grounded in perceptions of history produce ideologies," which in turn shaped and directed "political thought and discourse" (182).	1
After reading and analyzing more than fifty American histories, the author asserts that provincial historians were accorded the crucial role of transforming American identity and furnishing ideological sources for resisting imperial rule. Their histories, he argues, "offered readers new identities as distinct peoples" within the British Empire and supplied "the crucial component for transforming resistance to unpopular imperial policies into a revolution" (3). After independence these identities "provided the context for a distinct vision of republican polity and republican politics" (3) in the new American Republic. The book thus traces "the development of American identities and then how those identities merged with republican ideology to create a uniquely American vision of republican politics" (12).	2
Messer begins with Robert Beverley's History of the Present State of Virginia (1705), "the first history to be written in that self-consciously assertive style that reacted to the creation of the Board of Trade and the more invasive empire that subsequently emerged" (12). Like Beverley, other historians attempted to "balance the empire's interests with those of the colonies," producing a "distinctively provincial vision of history," which in turn "produced identities that reflected the colonists' growing pride in their communities as distinct from the empire as a whole" (13). Given that "the distinctly American vision of republican politics had its origin in provincial identities that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century," the first chapter, "Autonomous Communities within an Empire," attempts to show how the "authors of these identities" created them in the context of their overall goal "to reconcile their own increasingly mature communities with the increasingly complex and intrusive British empire" (17). The reference is, for example, to Thomas Prince's Chronological History of New England (1736), John Callender's An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode Island (1739), William Stith's The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia (1747), and Samuel Smith's The History of the Colony of ... New Jersey (1765). Their common attempts to write the "narratives of autonomous communities" (45) resulted in various "interpretations of the past" that "laid the foundations for provincial identities" (17), thus marking "a significant moment in the development of social and political thought in America" (44).	3
Not everyone in colonial America embraced the provincial vision of history along with its provincial identities. An opposing imperial vision "portrayed colonial communities as dependent on Parliament and royal government for their long-term stability and success" (13). Where provincial historians adopted "the Scottish vision of history as a narrative of progress and improvement over time, imperial authors embraced the Whig vision of history as a struggle to overcome the dangers of self-interest, passion, and false consciousness" (47). Thomas Hutchinson's three volumes of The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1764, 1767, 1828), Messer argues, were written by an imperial historian who developed an "imperial identity that located the shared experiences and symbols around which colonists could build healthy communities in the institutions and goals of the empire" (45).	. . .

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