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Inventive Localism in the Seventeenth Century
Peter Thompson
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SOME sixty years ago, Carl Bridenbaugh, director of what was then the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, lamented the "partial eclipse" of the "colonial" period—as distinct from the "Revolutionary" period—in college lecture courses, textbooks, and published research. In respect of college teaching, he found that setting the terminal date for a first-semester survey course at 1865 had provoked hard-pressed lecturers into "racing through events from 1492 or 1607 to the outbreak of the Revolution, and then slowing down until a steady pace is attained with the beginning of the national government in 1789." Textbooks increasingly began their coverage in 1763 and "often tend[ed] to view American history in terms of the problems of today." In regard to research, Bridenbaugh cited publication statistics from the American Historical Review and quoted a report by its editor, Guy Stanton Ford. "Almost as unrepresented [as ancient history] by any significant article is the field of American colonial history," Ford informed the American Historical Association in 1945. Ford, a historian of Prussia, speculated (fifty years too soon) that historians of the American colonial period might be "pausing to reassess their own research not as local history but as part of the history of the Atlantic community of an earlier day." This judgment explained the neglect Bridenbaugh lamented by reference to an uncertainty among practitioners about what was, or ought to be, encompassed in concepts such as "colonial history" or "seventeenth-century America." Bridenbaugh, however, was confident that a sufficient explanation of the value of early American history rested in the "perspective" it supplied to the larger narrative of American development. In this spirit and given what he took to be "the growing realization on all sides that democracy is not necessarily the terminal stage of historical evolution," Bridenbaugh applauded the commitment made by a group of leading professors at a conference sponsored by the Institute and held at Princeton in 1947 to strengthen the "cause" of early American history and thereby lessen the danger of an "excessively chauvinistic interpretation of our past."1 |
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Progress toward this agenda became apparent ten years later at a symposium, sponsored once again by the Institute and held in Williamsburg as a contribution to the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of Jamestown's founding. Its published proceedings trailed two areas of research—the social origins of white settlers and their influence on political development and the influence of European settlement on Native American societies—that foreshadowed the impending boom in social history and continue to engage historians. Equally, during the past fifty years, the Institute and the William and Mary Quarterly have played their part in publishing foundational new research on the Caribbean, southeastern America, New France, Native Americans, and the Atlantic world that has greatly expanded the definition of early America with which the contemporary historical audience engages. Still, some or all elements of Bridenbaugh's "partial eclipse" may be visible today. It remains difficult to do justice to the seventeenth century in a textbook or survey course. Submission rates, and therefore publication rates, for articles grounded in the seventeenth century lag behind those for work focused on the revolutionary period. Though quality work on the seventeenth century has been published in the Quarterly, during the past ten years the Quarterly has published on average three times as many pieces emphasizing the eighteenth century versus the seventeenth century; other journals are subject to the same trend.2 If historians were pausing to reassess the seventeenth century in 1945, they are arguably still doing so today. |
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