A Leadership Legacy: Happy 138th, Winston

Philip White

November 30 was Winston Churchill’s birthday. 138 years after his birth, historians, politicians and the public are still as fascinated as ever about this most iconic of British Prime Ministers. Of course, as with every major historical figure, the

Ivor Roberts-Jones statue of Churchill, Oslo, Norway

amount of one-sided deconstructionism has increased over the past few years, no more useful to the reader than one-sided hagiography. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle–a deeply flawed (aren’t we all!) larger-than-life figure who botched a lot of decisions–notably his resistance to home rule for India and well-meaning but ill-conceived support of Edward VIII during the 1936 abdication crisis–who got the big things right.

Among the latter was Churchill’s foresight over the divisions between the democratic West and the Communist East. Since the inception of Communism and its violent manifestation in the Russian Revolution, Churchill had despised the movement, calling it a “pestilence.” Certainly, his monarchial devotion was part of this, but more so, Churchill believed Communism destroyed the very principles of liberty and freedom that he would devote his career to advancing and defending. Certainly, with his love of Empire, there were some inconsistencies in his thinking, but above all, Churchill believed that the individual should be able to make choices and that systemic freedom–of the press, of religion, of the ballot, must be upheld for individuals to enact such choices. That’s why he vowed to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle,” though his plan to bolster anti-Communist forces was quickly shot down by Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George as another of “Winston’s follies.”

In this case, his plan to oppose Communism was indeed unrealistic. There were a small amount of British, Canadian, and American troops and a trickle of supporting materiel going to aid the White Russians toward the end of World War I, but once the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, the Allied leaders wanted to get their boys home, not commit more to a seemingly hopeless cause.

But over the next three decades, Churchill’s ideas on how to deal with Communism became more informed, more realistic and, arguably, more visionary. Though he reluctantly accepted Stalin as an ally when Hitler turned on Russia in the fateful summer of 1941, Churchill’s pragmatism and public admiration of the Marshal did not blind him to the ills of the Communist system. The Percentages Agreement he signed with Stalin in a late 1944 meeting has since been blamed for hastening the fall of democratic Eastern Europe, but what Churchill was actually doing there was essentially recognizing that the Communist takeover was a fait accompli, and guaranteeing Stalin’s agreement to largely leave the Greek Communists to their own devices in Greece after World War II. Though Moscow did supply arms and it took the Marshall Plan to prop up the anti-Communist side in Greece, Stalin largely honored this pledge.

He was not so good on his word with many other things, however. Among the promises he made to Churchill and FDR were to include the London Poles (exiled during the war) in a so-called representative government in Poland. In fact, the Communist puppet Lublin Poles ran the new regime after the war, and the old guard was either shunned or killed. In fact, horrifyingly, many of the leaders of the Polish Underground were taken out by Stalin’s henchmen, and others were held in former Nazi camps that the Red Army had supposedly “liberated.” At the Potsdam Conference in July 1946, Stalin showed that his vows at Yalta were mere lip service to the British and American leaders.  He made demands for bases in Turkey, threatened the vital British trade route through the Suez canal and refused to withdraw troops from oil-rich Iran.

Churchill, still putting his faith in personal diplomacy, believed he could reason with Stalin, particularly if Harry Truman backed him up. But halfway through the Potsdam meeting the British public sent the Conservative Party to its second worst defeat in one of the most surprising General Election decisions. Churchill was out as Prime Minister and Clement Attlee was in. Off Attlee went to Germany to finish the dialogue with Truman and Stalin. Churchill feared he was headed for political oblivion.

Yet, after a few weeks of moping, he realized that he still had his pen and, as arguably the most famous democratic leader of the age (only FDR came close in global renown), his voice. And so it was that he accepted an invitation to speak at a most unlikely venue in March 1946 – Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri – not least due to the postscript that Truman added to Westminster president Franc “Bullet” McCluer’s invite, offering to introduce Churchill in the President’s home state. There he described the need for a “special relationship” between the British Commonwealth and the United States, which was needed to check the spread of expansionist Communism and the encroachment of the “iron curtain” into Europe. 

As I explained

Philip White speaking at the National
Churchill Museum, Fulton, Missouri, Nov 11, 2012

when I spoke at the National Churchill Museum on, fittingly, Armistice Day, last month, this metaphor entered our lexicon and was embodied in the Berlin Wall–the enduring image of the standoff. Yet the “special relationship” outlived this symbol, as did the principles of leadership Churchill displayed in his brave “Sinews of Peace” speech (the real title of what’s now known as the “Iron Curtain” address). Churchill was willing to speak a hard truth even when he knew it would be unpopular and then, a few days later, after a police escort was needed to get him into New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel as demonstrators yelled “GI Joe is home to stay, Winnie, Winnie, go away,” to boldly declare, “I do not wish to withdraw or modify a single word.” His critics again called him an imperialist, an old Tory and, in as Stalin said, a warmonger. The same insults he had endured when sounding the alarm bell about Hitler in the mid- to late-1930s. And in 1946, just as in the 1930s, Churchill was right.

Not only did Churchill define the Communist-Democratic divide, he also had a plan for what to do about it. Though his more ambitious ideas, including shared US-UK citizenship, did not come to fruition, the broader concepts were embodied in the creation of NATO, European reconciliation, and the Marshall Plan. He also understood not just the Communist system he criticized but the democratic one it threatened, and, the day after the anniversary of Jefferson’s inaugural address, gave a memorable defense of the principles that were, he said, defined by common law and the Bill of Rights. This is something leaders of any political persuasion must be able to do–to articulate what they and we stand for, and why.

As I think of Churchill just after his birthday, that’s what I’m focusing on: vision, understanding and bravery. Such leadership principles will be just as valid 138 years from now as they were on that sunny springtime afternoon in Fulton.

A Real National Treasure: Rediscovering the Roanoke Colony

Heather Cox Richardson

Ok, I confess to loving the National Treasure movies. I know, I know, they’re stupid, and they completely twist history, and all that, but they are so much fun! Wouldn’t it be great if there really were hidden passages behind Mount Rushmore? Caches of historical treasures buried under modern cities? Old documents that held secret information, revealing the answers to ancient mysteries?

Oh, wait . . .

Perhaps there are, on that last one.

One of America’s great mysteries has been the fate of the Roanoke Colony, England’s first attempt to establish a permanent settlement in the “New World.” In the mid-1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh outfitted a settlement on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina, just inside the Outer Banks (but what was then Virginia, named, of course, for Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen). The first years of the colony under a military governor were disastrous as the governor fought with both local Indians and his own people. The one great success of the venture was its choice of illustrator and mapmaker: John White. His meticulous observations of the coastline and the peoples he encountered are invaluable pictures of the New World as seen by wide-eyed European adventurers.

John White illustration, 1585

The first colony failed, but in 1587, Raleigh tried again to colonize the island, this time putting John White himself in charge of the expedition. (White convinced his daughter Eleanor and her new husband to join the venture. His granddaughter, Virginia Dare, would be the first English child born in America.) White proved a far better illustrator then governor, sparking a battle with the few local Indians who remained friendly. When it appeared the colony could not survive the upcoming winter, White returned to England to plead for supplies.

But bad luck continued to plague the colony. White returned to England just in time for the 1588 attack of the Spanish Armada on England. To defend her country, Queen Elizabeth prohibited any ships from leaving it, especially those whose only goal was to aid a few far-off adventurers.
It was not until 1590 that White could get back to Roanoke. When he arrived, he found the colony long abandoned. The only sign of what had happened to the settlers was the word “CROATOAN” carved on a post.

Or so we have understood. Until now.

From the report: "Examination of patches on a map of
the E coast of America by John White."

In 2007, the North Carolina Museum of History put on an exhibit that explored the fate of the Lost Colony. To that effort, the British Museum lent a number of John White’s illustrations. Crucially, their loan included a map. Members of the First Colony Foundation—a group dedicated to finding traces of the Roanoke colonists—noticed that White’s map had two patches. While patching illustrations was the seventeenth century’s version of Wite-Out, one of the map’s patches appeared to show a faint trace of something beneath it other than an error. The First Colony scholars convinced the British Museum to explore what might lie under the patches on the White map.

In early May, the British Museum announced their findings. And what findings they were! Using modern imaging techniques, they discovered that one of the patches covered a slightly different version of the coastline, and appears simply to have been used to correct an error. Under the second, though, lay a drawing of a dramatically altered ship, as well as the markings of a fort at the confluence of two rivers.

When he was back in England, White had vaguely suggested that the colonists had been intending to move inland when he left in 1587, and Jamestown settlers had heard rumors from Indians that there were Englishmen on upper Albemarle Sound. This new discovery lends heavy weight to those hints.

Is this where the Roanoke settlers ended up? Did White hide their location when he designed the map to protect the colonists from the Spanish?

The map raises new questions, but far more focused ones than the devastatingly broad “What might have happened to the Roanoke setters?” These are questions that, with the help of archaeologists, can be answered. It’s exciting to step this much closer to an answer about one of America’s great mysteries.

Now if only someone would tell us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried . . .

Papist Patriots: Maura Jane Farrelly’s interview in Historically Speaking

Chris Beneke 

Among the gems in the latest issue of Historically Speaking is Randall Stephens’ interview(yes, we shamelessly shill for one another on this blog) with Brandeis University historian Maura Jane Farrelly.

Farrelly’s book Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity was published earlier this year with Oxford University Press. She focuses on colonial Maryland, which was home to British America’s largest concentration of Roman Catholics, including the influential Carroll family.

Anti-Catholicism in early Maryland was a complex phenomenon, Farrelly notes, not easily reducible to hostility toward Roman Catholics. Papist Patriots shows how a dual Roman Catholic identity -- distinguished by its compatibility with broader American understandings of religious liberty and its commitment to a hierarchal and communal church -- were reconciled in this largely Protestant country.

Excerpted below are a few tidbits from Stephens’ interview with Farrelly.

On her historical dissent from the Roman Catholic priest and theologian John Courtney Murray’s pivotal postwar argument that “there was a natural fit between Catholicism and a commitment to individual rights and religious pluralism”:

Farrelly: I agree with him that the Catholics living in the British colonies in the 1770s had embraced the American consensus, but I’m not sure their natural-law mindset was the reason why. I think it was their unique experiences as a politically -- but not economically -- oppressed minority in an English colony where Catholicism had been tolerated -- and then wasn’t that ‘prepared’ colonial Catholics to accept the ideology of the founding.

On the dual challenge faced by early Catholics:

Some Catholics rebelled more strongly against their government; others rebelled more strongly against their church. But most pushed against both with equal weight, telling their king that he could not have dominion over their religious consciences and telling their church that it could not determine their civil loyalties or behavior.

On the similarities between seventeenth-century Maryland and twenty first-century Iraq:

In 2006 nearly 235,000 people in Iraq fled their homes because of sectarian fighting. As staggering and disturbing as that statistic is, it still represents less than 1% of the entire Iraqi population. In contrast, 80% of the settlers in St. Mary’s County either fled or were killed in what is known as the ‘Ingle-Claiborne Rebellion’ of 1645-46.

On the formation of an American Catholic identity:

. . . Maryland’s Catholics understood after 1689 that English identity alone was not going to provide them with the liberty they sought. To claim the rights of Englishmen, they were going to have to assume the mantle not of English identity, but ‘Marylandian” identity, since religious toleration had been a fundamental component of Maryland’s founding. In 1776 that is precisely what they did.

Farrelly isn’t the first historian to offer an explanation of how early Roman Catholics became Americans (or more properly, first Marylanders, and then Americans), but she may have just provided us with the most persuasive one.

April Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The April 2012 issue of Historically Speaking should arrive in mail boxes in the next couple of weeks. Readers will find plenty to enjoy in this one. It includes essays on political and religious history, interviews with Jeremy Black and David Hempton (the latter recently named the new dean of Harvard Divinity School), and a forum on American Revolutionary Era history. I'll post excerpts with links when the issue is available on Project Muse.

Not a subscriber? Have a look at this free sample issue from last year.

Historically Speaking (April 2012)

"The Roots of Democratic Self Government"
James Muldoon

"The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interview with David Hempton"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Bridging the Gap between the Political and the Cultural Histories of the American Revolution: A Forum

"Rethinking the American Revolution: Politics and the Symbolic Foundations of Reality"
Michal Jan Rozbicki

"An Infatuation with Titles: Hereditary Privilege and Liberty in the Ear of the American Revolution"
Trevor Burnard

"A New History of Liberty"
Peter S. Onuf

"Scraping Rust from the Rebar of Early American History"
Alan Tully

"Conceptual Bridges and Antibodies: A Response"
Michal Jan Rozbicki

"'Responsible to God and Not to Man': Lottie Moon and Southern History"
Regina D. Sullivan

"Kennan’s Boswell? A Review Essay"
William Stueck

"Challenging Historiographical Orthodoxy Many Times Over: An Interview with Jeremy Black"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"If Not Progress, What?"
Glenn W. Olsen

"Three Muslim Empires"
Stephen Dale

Capitalism and Colonialism

Dan Allosso

When I was reading for my US History oral exams, one of the historiographical arguments that really got my attention was the long-running debate over the market transition. The question of when America made the turn from being an agrarian, egalitarian society to becoming a commercial, class society fascinated me; and so did the heated disagreements of eminent historians. As I read more, I realized that a lot of the argument really had to do with the definition and grouping of these terms (as Michael Merrill brilliantly pointed out in a 1995 article called “Putting Capitalism in its Place”). Were Joyce Appleby and Christopher Clark (not to mention Allan Kulikoff or Winifred Rothenberg!) even talking about the same thing when they used the words capitalism, market, commerce, and agrarian? Did “agrarian” naturally line up against “commerce,” and did either side really own the moral high ground?

Now I’m teaching Honors US History to undergrads. Clearly it wouldn’t be appropriate to expose them to the full glare of this debate. It would not only take too long to do, but it would be drilling too deep in even an Honors general education class for non-history majors. But I don’t want to cruise through this moment in history without mentioning it – I’m trying to challenge these students to think critically, so it’s my job to bring up the complex issues the textbook buries.

I had them read a couple of chapters of Matthew Parker’s 2011 book The Sugar Barons. Parker writes about Barbados in the early decades of its sugar revolution, the 1630s and 40s. He includes a detailed description of the introduction of slaves into the British sugar economy, through an interesting series of highly conflicted excerpts from the memoirs of English observers. A really valuable addition, from my perspective, was Parker’s extensive use of letters between several Barbados planters and merchants and John Winthrop, Governor of the City on the Hill.

The direct connection between Boston and the West Indies is useful, I think. Unlike Virginia or the New Netherlands or the Spanish colonies, which are usually presented to students as business ventures, the New England colonies are often portrayed as the seat of . . . something different. Something exceptional. The early link between Boston and Barbados, the Winthrop family’s business interests in the Caribbean, and the close connection that developed during the English Civil War, when Barbados became a principal market for New England produce, are all important challenges to the idea that there was ever a clean separation between commerce and colonies.

This is not to say that the type of agrarian anti-capitalism described by historians like Kulikoff never existed. But perhaps it suggests that when such sentiments developed, they were reactions to a colonial system built on a very problematic type of commerce rather than attempts to claim that a naïve, pre-commercial yeomanry had ever existed in America. From this perspective, even the earliest “agrarian” documents like Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia seem to share something with writings of back-to-the-land idealists of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

Pilgrim Bibliography

Randall Stephens

"In 1980, I joined the staff of the Leiden Archives," writes Jeremy Bangs, "as a historian specialized in the cultural history of Leiden before 1575. The Chief Archivist asked what I knew about the Pilgrims, to which I replied, 'Nothing.' 'Oh, well,' was the response, 'we have American tourists and you can deal with them, because your English is better than ours. But,' he said, 'don’t waste your time on any research about the Pilgrims – that’s all been done already.'"

And so it begins!

Have a look at Bangs's extensive piece over at Sail 1620 that details all sources Pilgrim related. Bangs covers the primary and secondary source material. He follows the literature up to the present, and then concludes by asking "Where do we go next?"

Boston Globe Coverage on Class Project

Randall Stephens

Early last month I posted a short piece on a class website project that my students and I did as part of a fall history readings/methods course. We created a resource website for the Moswetuset Hummock, a historic outcropping of land near our college, which played an important role in the first encounters between Indians and English settlers. If nothing else, the effort inspired students to get out of the classroom and do history.

The students and I had no idea that the website would garner the attention of our local Quincy newspaper. And we certainly didn't imagine that the project would draw the attention of the Boston Globe. But . . . it did. And we're thrilled to get that kind of attention!

Jessica Bartlett reports on our efforts and what we hoped to achieve. ("Eastern Nazarene College students create website on Quincy's Moswetuset Hummock," Boston Globe, January 25, 2012.)

Although the small section of Quincy known as Moswetuset Hummock is where Massachusetts derived its name, relatively few know the significance of the small marsh located on Quincy Bay.

Students from Eastern Nazarene College are hoping to change that.

The small, wooded area that separates Quincy Bay from the Neponset River received recent exposure with the help of six ENC students and History Professor Randall Stephens, who created a website dedicated to exploring the significance of the shore and detailing its place in history.

Part class history project, part exploratory jaunt through time, the website includes information on the Indians that lived in the area, to the relations with new settlers, to the diseases that would decimate the tribes by the time Myles Standish meet the tribe leader in 1621. >>> read on

It will be tough to trump this when we take on our next class project!

Alumination

Chris Beneke

Since you’ve paused here to gaze upon this blog, dear web traveler, I presume that you possess some interest in history, and perhaps even for the things previously appearing on this site. From that I will speculate that might enjoy this recently published Boston Globe piece by Chris Marstall on Massachusetts’ aluminum historical markers: “History, Preserved in Sturdy Aluminum: Eighty Years Ago, What Did We Want to Remember about Massachusetts?”

In 1930, Marstall notes, “[s]ome 275 markers were erected … to mark the state’s 300th birthday,” and identify “places which played a leading part in the history of the colony.’” Marstall’s interest in the subject appears to have been sparked by the work of Robert Briere, president of the Sturbridge Historical Society, who is leading an effort to preserve and restore the 81 year-old signs. Another part-time historian, Russell Bixby, is “recording GPS coordinates for the 144 or so markers remaining in place,” which are then displayed with other information at HMDB.org.

Marstall’s piece makes it clear that he’s dealing with historiography, as well as history. The renowned Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, was responsible for most of the text on the signs, and his goal was to rehabilitate the Puritan image. To this end, Morison portrayed the commonwealth’s founders as “literate community builders, industrialists, and pathmakers,” rather than dogmatic prigs. Morison may have met some modest, temporary success in this regard. But what he could not account for was our judgment on his own work, including the observation that his many commemorations of Puritan and Indian battles severely minimized Indian deaths.*

The article brought to mind the first local historical marker that I recall noticing: a small stone monument that had been erected in a corn field on a back road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I was seventeen when I caught my first glimpse of the marker from the passenger side of my buddy’s Toyota Celica. The gently undulating field in which it squatted was not unlike the dozens of others that we rocketed past on the 10-mile trek between our rural homes and the ramshackle gym we frequented. But one summer evening, on the back leg of this teenage orbit, I noticed this greyish stone protrusion. Initially, as we hurtled pass at roughly twice the posted speed limit, I was able to decipher only a word or two. But after several passes, the entire text came into view: “Last Battle of Shays Rebellion was here Feb. 27, 1787.”

I’m pretty sure that I knew almost nothing about Shay’s Rebellion, but the name was familiar enough to trigger the curiosity of someone who prematurely fancied himself to be serious about things that happened in the past. To my adolescent mind, battles were the essence of serious history—you know, Caesar, Napoleon, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower—all that. I had certainly passed markers before, but this one made an impression. The words engraved on that midget obelisk produced an intimation that my humble corner of the American continent possessed historical significance.

I’ve been an historian too long now to believe that a single sign can have any direct causal impact, like for instance, launching a seventeen-year-old on a career path. But also long enough also to appreciate the debt we owe to the resolute preservers of stone, aluminum and memory.

_______________

* Not coincidentally, Marstall’s article was passed along to me by the incomparable Eric Schultz who blogs about business, innovation, and history at The Occasional CEO and who also happens to have written an excellent book on King Philip’s War.

Digital History Roundup

.
John Markoff, "It Started Digital Wheels Turning," New York Times, November 7, 2011

Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor

lightning speed. Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card. What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?>>>

Ian Johnson, "How to uncover your family's military roots: Digitized records help Canadians leaf out family tree military history," CBC News, November 10, 2011

Researching a family's military history used to be a real challenge, but as more and more paper archives go digital and are transferred to the internet, it's becoming possible for anyone to leaf out a family tree in surprising detail by using a few tricks and knowing where to look. "The biggest thing that's changed is the ability to find digitized documents through simple things like Google and search tools specific to military family histories," says Alex Herd, lead researcher for the Historica-Dominion Institute Memory Project in Toronto that aims to increase the public's knowledge of Canadian history.>>>

Bryan Rosenblithe, "Analyzing history for today: Emerging technologies offer new challenges in the practice of historiography," Columbia Spectator, November 10, 2011

. . . . While it is now widely accepted in the historical profession that current events inform the questions we ask of the past, we are only beginning to come to terms with the profound transformation that digital information is making in every aspect of our lives. A quick comparison of the phrases “digital revolution” with “crisis of capitalism” points to the profundity of both moments and the relatively underdeveloped intellectual apparatus with which we are confronting the issues of our time relative to those of Finley’s day. It is this sense of a radical shift in our way of life coupled with the lack of a vocabulary with which to discuss it that makes the ridiculous statement from Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, “The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing,” appear meaningful.>>>

Dawn Setzer, "Dr. Livingstone's lost 1871 'massacre' diary recovered; discovery rewrites history," UCLA Newsroom, November 1, 2011

In Africa 140 years ago, David Livingstone, the Victorian explorer, met Henry M. Stanley of the New York Herald and gave him a harrowing account of a massacre he witnessed, in which slave traders slaughtered 400 innocent people. Stanley's press reports prompted the British government to close the East African slave trade, secured Livingstone's place in history and launched Stanley's own career as an imperialist in Africa. Today, an international team of scholars and scientists led by Dr. Adrian Wisnicki of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, publishes the results of an 18-month project to recover Livingstone's original account of the massacre. The story, found in a diary that was illegible until it was restored with advanced digital imaging, offers a unique insight into Livingstone's mind during the greatest crisis of his last expedition, on which he would die in 1873.>>>

Leigh Hornbeck, "Papers show daily colonial life: Old records discovered in Charlton home provide a closer look at a past era," Albany Times Union, October 30, 2011

BALLSTON SPA -- A recent donation to the Saratoga County Historian's Office gives a more intimate look than ever before at life in Colonial Charlton. The LaRue family donated 600 papers found inside a box nailed underneath floorboards of the attic floor in their house. They belonged to Joseph LaRue, an ancestor who moved to Saratoga County just before the American Revolution and served as a justice of the peace for 10 years. The collection includes a docket and written testimony from witnesses and defendants, along with records that show small details of 18th-century life often passed over by traditional historians. . . . Ned Porter, a junior from Skidmore College who worked as Roberts' intern over the summer, sorted the papers into categories and created a finding aid -- a document describing the collection -- with every legible name, which can be used by genealogists and others. The next step is to create a digital record so the fragile papers aren't handled more than necessary. Some of the documents are parchment, but most are thick rag paper. All the writing was done with quill pen.>>>

David D. Hall on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

I first read David D. Hall's work when I was a grad student at the University of Florida. David Hackett taught a wonderful course on Religion and American Culture, which familiarized students with the big themes

in religious history.

Hall's study of the religious world of 17th-century American Puritans challenged my uniformed ideas of what it meant to be a "puritan." His writing on "lived religion," especially intrigued me. He described it as "a shorthand phrase that has long been current in the French tradition of the sociology of religion (la religion veçue) but is relatively novel in the American context." It was "rooted less in sociology than in cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history that have come to the fore in recent years." It involved "the study of 'daily life,' especially among Protestant laity [and a] reflection on 'practice' as the center or focus of the Christian life." (Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice [Princeton University Press, 1997], vii.)

Hall has edited and authored a number of books and articles on American religious history, including: The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Omohundro Institute, 1972); Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990); Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2004); Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and, most recently, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2011).

Hall has had a major impact on the fields of religious history and religious studies in recent decades. As such, he's a great fit for the new HS blog series "Why I Became a Historian." I caught up with him last week at the American religious history group meeting at Boston University. In the video embedded here I ask Hall why he was drawn to history and he responds by describing his early interest in the past, his reading of history at a young age, and his later college and grad school pursuits.

Hall's comments make me wonder if most historians had an early affinity for history through family, location, and a curiosity about all those things that had come before us.

New England's "Maruellous" Pine Trees

Heather Cox Richardson

How many people today have heard of the King’s Broad Arrow?

Not many, I’d wager, and yet it was once the key to settling a continent and the spark to a revolution. It’s a simple mark: three quick swings with an ax, one straight up and two in a V at the top, to make an arrow. After 1711, the King’s Mark branded old-growth New England white pines as the property of the King of England.

Those old-growth white pines were key to British interest in settling New England. In 1605, Captain George Weymouth explored the coast of what is now Maine, sailing the Archangel to Monhegan, Camden, and up the Kennebec River. He discovered vast shoals of fish and, as one of his comrades recorded, giant “firre-trees,” “out of which issueth Turpentine in so maruellous plenty, and so sweet, as our Chirurgeon and others affirmed they neuer saw so good in England. We pulled off much Gumme congealed on the outside of the barke, which smelted like Frankincense. This would be a great benefit for making Tarre and Pitch.”

The trees that so impressed Weymouth and his men were White Pines, (Pinus Strobus), still known in England as the Weymouth Pine.

These huge trees dominated the coastline where Weymouth sailed. They were the tallest trees in eastern North America, standing up to 230 feet. Their wood is soft, easy to cut, straight, and generally without knots. Unlike hardwood, it can stand for years without cracking, and it bends, rather than breaks, in a high wind. It was a perfect tree to make masts, and if there was one thing the Royal Navy needed, it was its own source of mast wood. As William R. Carlton put it in his 1939 New England Quarterly article titled “New England Masts and the King’s Navy”: “Masts, in the days of wooden ships, played a far greater part in world affairs than merely that of supporting canvas. They were of vital necessity to the lives of nations. Statesmen plotted to obtain them; ships of the line fought to procure them. . . .” They were vital to the well being of the British Navy . . . and thus to Britain itself.

The Navy had been getting its masts from the Baltic countries and Norway, but the masts they supplied had to be spliced, and the supply was always susceptible to disruption. The discovery of a new source of masts was enough to spur interest in settling New England. By 1623, entrepreneurs in Maine and New Hampshire were milling pine masts for British navy yards, a trade centered out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s “Strawberry Bank.”

After a war with the Dutch closed off British access to the Baltic in 1654, England began to rely on the Colonies to supply masts. The resulting boom in mast wood created a frenzy of cutting which threatened to decimate the old-growth trees. By 1691, the Crown had protected almost all white pines more than 24 inches in diameter at 12 inches above the ground. Surveyors marked these potential masts with the King’s Broad Arrow.

Colonists were outraged. Pine wood was valuable—very valuable—not only for masts but also for boards. Men routinely poached the pines, sawing the old-growth trunks into widths no more than 22 inches wide to get around the new laws. They also protested the restrictions, which were a real hardship in a region where wood was imperative for everything from houses to heat. They began to mutter that the Parliament had no right to intrude on their private property.

In 1772, a New Hampshire official tasked with protecting the King’s Trees charged six sawmill owners with milling trunks that had been marked with the King’s Broad Arrow. One of the owners refused to pay the resulting fine. He was arrested and then released with the promise that he would provide bail the next day. Instead, the following morning he and 30 to 40 men, their faces disguised with soot, assaulted the government officials and ran them out of town. While eight of the men were later charged with assault, the local judges who sentenced them let them off so lightly the verdict could easily be seen as support for their actions.

The Pine Tree Riot, as it came to be called, has often been cited as a precursor to the Boston Tea Party. The latter is the more famous occasion when New Englanders challenged royal authority, but it is worth noting that the first flag of the American Revolutionaries bore the image of a White Pine in the upper lefthand corner.

Revere, Revisited

Chris Beneke

Now that public interest has shifted to the contents of Sarah Palin's email account, it appears that the dust has settled on her imaginative reconstruction of Paul Revere’s Ride. It was fun while it lasted. The high point may have been Steven Colbert’s demonstration of how Revere could have rung a bell and fired multiple warning shots from a front-loading (single shot) musket, while riding on a rocking, coin-operated steed.

The editors of Revere’s once relatively sedate Wikipedia page were kept very busy with this extra attention. Palin supporters descended upon them with Palin-friendly edits. Then the gawkers, like me, stopped for a look. The page saw as many as 140,000 visitors on June 6.

At least we were all motivated to learn something about Paul Revere and the American Revolution (how many of those 140,000 were history professors and teachers making sure they had their stories straight?). The chief authority on this topic might be David Hackett Fischer, author of the magisterial book with the deceptively quaint title Paul Revere’s Ride. But Fischer appears to have (wisely) made himself scarce during this controversy.

Though the subject was one on which very few, outside of the Minute Man National History Park, are expert, Palin’s Revere comments gave some very respectable historians and pundits a chance to address the public on an early American history topic and to reflect more broadly on our commitment to education.

Here, forthwith, is a brief snapshot of the historically informed media attention:

In the New Yorker, Jill Lepore described Revere’s ride as a form of “hyperlore, which passes from one computer to the next, along a path best called hyperbolic.” Lepore provides a helpful link to Revere’s 1775 deposition for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which is held at the venerable Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to read Revere’s account, charmingly laden with contemporary expressions and the variety of spellings for which early Americans are justly known.

On Salon.com, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg were in grading mode, awarding Palin an "'F' on the Paul Revere quiz." They continue: "Okay, Sarah. Here's your guide to what you need to know about Paul Revere. He did not ring bells or fire warning shots. He did not warn the British. He did not defend ‘freedom.’ And he did not yell, ‘The British are coming!’ because he was a British subject in 1775. As Professor David Hackett Fischer explained in his book 'Paul Revere's Ride,' Revere would have shouted, ‘The regulars are coming!’ That is, the regular army. Americans in and around Boston were called ‘country people.’ Revere was not defending a nation, because the nation we became did not exist yet. Before the phrase ‘United States of America’ was born with the Declaration of Independence, those resisting British power, identifying with the Continental Congress, were collectively known as the ‘United Colonies.’"

Burstein and Isenberg’s larger point is that Palin, who lacks “a basic respect for knowledge” should be, but is decidedly not, “embarrassed by her ignorance.”

Robert Allison, was more sympathetic to Palin in his New York Daily News oped, finding several nuggets of truth in her understanding of Revere’s Ride: “[S]he was, in a sense [right]. Revere, in fact, was warning the British Empire—of which Massachusetts was part—that it could not invade the rights of Americans. Revere himself did not ring bells or fire shots, but the colonists he alerted did. The British troops beginning their march westward heard the bells, and knew the alarm was out. The rest of it—the warning about being secure and being free, was metaphorical . . .”

Allison’s larger point is that historians should take responsibility for failing to educate the public and be grateful for this opportunity to share what they know. "Sarah Palin is not a historian. . . . She is a politician, and quite emphatically a representative of ‘ordinary Americans.’ If her reading of Revere is too subtle for the professoriate, and if she comes across to many as woefully misinformed after visiting these sites, whose fault is it? Hers, or ours, as tour guides and historians?"

Acknowledging how much we all could do with more learning, Pulitzer-Prize winning commentator Leonard Pitts, Jr., observes that "while it is comforting to think Palin’s gaffe speaks only to her own considerable limitations, it is also short-sighted. The evidence suggests that she is less an exception to, than a reflection of, a nation that is in the process of forgetting itself."

Which, I now editorialize, makes Congress’ recent decision to gut the Teaching American History (TAH) program especially disappointing. I just assisted with a TAH proposal and was looking forward, as part of the proposed program, to take local elementary school teachers on a tour of the battle sites at Lexington and Concord, showing them where Paul Revere was likely to have been captured—and where he warned the Regulars that colonial militia were mustering—as well as discussing Paul Revere’s Ride with them.

The alarm has rung, but getting the actual message out will now be more challenging.

After the Historical Revolutions: Or, When the Tree Falls in the Historical Paradigm Forest, Does Anyone Listen?

Paul Harvey

The following cross-post comes from my fellow blogmeister at our Religion in American History blog. Paul is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. He's the author or editor of a number of acclaimed books on American religious history, including Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (UNC, 1997); Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (UNC, 2007); and the forthcoming Jesus in Red, White, and Black, co-authored with Edward J. Blum.

A review of (and an announcement of) some challenging new works in earlier American History, and the history of the American West, got me thinking about the changing of the historical paradigm guard–or whether those guards get changed at all by scholarly revolutions. These are questions which affect the course of American religious history, but bear with me for a short detour before discussing that further.

My thoughts first came from reading Charles Mann’s review of Daniel K. Richhter’s new book Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past (Harvard University Press) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (yes, Virginia, I do read the Wall Street Journal! But I'm not sure if the link will let in non-subscribers; if it doesn't and you want to read, I'm happy to send it to you).

I know nothing about this book other than this review, but I am a big fan of Richter’s earlier work Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, a favorite of mine to use in class for its wonderful illustrations of how changing one’s angle of vision creates an entirely different historical sense of a period. Richter also engages in some deft analyses of early American documents of religious history from the European-Native encounter, including John Eliot’s bizarre but fascinating Indian Dialogues, of course the Jesuit Relations, Indian conversion narratives, and various ceremonial encounters at treaty negotiations.

In his review of Richter’s new book, Mann writes:

Every few decades, historians develop a new way of looking at the past. I am not talking about ‘revisionism’ but unifying conceptual schemes, the sort of mental framework that Frederick Jackson Turner created in his argument for the importance of the frontier to our history or that Bernard Bailyn established in his studies of the American Revolution’s ideological origins. Historians debated Turner for a long time and continue to debate Mr. Bailyn. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were arguing with Mr. Richter a decade from today.

When I become King of the World I will permanently ban the word "revisionism" and its variant "historical revisionism" (as I have already banned the words "bias" and "politically correct" in my classrooms, since they have become barriers to thought and discussion), since they have been rendered meaningless for precisely the reason Mann explains there.

But the revolution in understanding is not just in the early America of Richter. My longtime friend Anne Hyde, Professor of History at my sister institution Colorado College, is about to publish her magnum opus for the West of the first half of the nineteenth century, Empires, Nations, Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860, part of University of Nebraska’s outstanding series History of the American West series. If this this means anything to you, as it will to some of you, the immediate predecessor to Anne’s book is Colin Calloway’s monumental work One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark.

(As a brief aside, when Anne and I were in graduate school, she always made it to the library at 8:00 a.m. sharp, while I was lucky to drag myself, half hungover and ears still ringing from some too-loud jazz concert the night before, by 10:00 or 11:00 at best, which explains a lot about the great scholarly discipline it took for Anne to finish this huge work, while I was busy watching the Mavs beat the Lakers).

Anne’s work may suggests a paradigm for understanding the history of the West in that era, in a way such as Richter and Colin Calloway have done for earlier American history. Her work also features chapters fully integrating the Mormon West into the larger picture, and too much else of interest besides to even begin to summarize here.

All of this is exciting as an historian. But all of it also makes me wonder how, whether, and when any of this affects public consciousness of earlier American history. Lately historians have been riled by the amateur scholar David Barton, and of course the bookshelves at your Barnes & Noble are full of everything Founding Father related. I understand that, but considering the impact of the works above–great on historians, perhaps little on anyone else–makes me wonder about similar questions for religious history.

The older paradigm of American religious history will be familiar to a few blog readers, and some are familiar with its more recent challengers, summarized in works such as Tweed’s edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History. . . .

Much of the newer paradigm seems to come from removing religious history from the specific story of the American nation-state, and using categories that engage religious experience at its own level rather than as some proxy for political parties or current day culture wars. We've blogged at Religion in American History extensively about some recent classics that move American religious history/studies well down this path. Entries on Leigh Schmidt, Robert Orsi, Kathryn Lofton, and numerous others come to mind.

Again, however, for religious history as for the studies of earlier American history mentioned above, one wonders whether and how this affects any sort of public consciousness or discussion, and whether it’s the job of religious historians to evangelize for these perspectives that challenge or disrupt how we perceive the American religious past (and present). Or maybe scholars should just do their work, let popularizers who are good at popularizing disseminate this stuff to the general public (like what happens in science all the time–neuroscientists do their thing, and then someone like Oliver Sacks explains a little bit of it to us), and trust that over a generation or two it will find its way into the more general understandings. That's a comforting and easy role to take, but it leaves not much excuse for complaining about why some pseudo-historians advise presidential candidates while the rest of us get to advise freshmen how to raise their grade from a D to a C.

As usual, I have no answers, only questions.

Chris Beneke on The First Prejudice

Randall Stephens

[From Religion in American History]

About a week ago over at Religion in American History Paul Harvey posted on Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda's, The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The edited volume, "presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics." I recently caught up with Beneke, a Historical Society board member, by email and asked him some questions about the project and the work being down on tolerance/intolerance.

Randall Stephens: What is the unifying theme of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America?

Chris Beneke: Our title, The First Prejudice, plays on the popular understanding of religious liberty as the nation’s “First Freedom.” It also draws on the proposition that religion was initially the source of the deepest prejudice to afflict early Americans and the object of the first large-scale efforts to mitigate prejudice. We asked our contributors to be attentive to the distinguished and extensive historiography on church and state, but not beholden to it. The idea was to create a history of religious tolerance and intolerance that took into account a broader range of religious and cultural interaction than histories of religious liberty have traditionally done. For us, it presented an opportunity both to build a compelling new narrative of early American religious history-where religious differences are at center stage-and to develop a common set of reference points and questions that would frame more useful conversations about tolerance and intolerance in America.

Stephens: Why did religious tolerance develop in the West when and where it did?

Beneke: In a sense, it depends on what you mean by tolerance (I know it’s annoying when historians say that, but there, I’ve gone and done it). If you mean what Willem Frijhoff calls “everyday ecumenism,” or at least everyday cooperation and non-violence, then it’s very old indeed. Historians have been hard at work in the archives over the past two-plus decades, discovering that sort of tolerance in surprising places across medieval and early modern Europe. But as a commonly accepted ideal, as a stated commitment to some form of equality, and a legal practice that guaranteed a modicum of protection, tolerance is something that developed in the intellectual capitals of northern Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And though I risk irritating my intrepid co-editor and some contributors by saying this, I think that it took hold in a much more fundamental and irrevocable way in the early national United States.

Stephens: When it comes to religious tolerance did the early United States differ all that much from Great Britain and western Europe?

Beneke: Here's the very short answer: official church establishments persisted across most of Europe into and beyond the twentieth century. In the United States, they did not. The U.S. may have maintained an unofficial Protestant establishment for many decades (via instruments such as the common law, public education, state religious tests.), but the fact that it was un-official and the fact that it was accompanied by substantive protections for free exercise, was critically important. For all the disingenuity involved, an un-official establishment was surely more hospitable toward religious minorities than almost any official establishment might have been. Maybe just as importantly, the commitment to disestablishment and religious liberty meant that the religiously intolerant had to explain themselves and find ways to wrap bigotry in the mantle of tolerance.

These factors have always kept American religious intolerance in check.>>>

The Generalist

Chris Beneke

Gordon Wood’s favorable review (“The Real Washington at Last”) of Ron Chernow’s massive new biography of George Washington appears in the latest New York Review of Books.* For a man who said so little and wrote so economically, Washington has inspired an avalanche of words. As Wood notes:

[W]e now have assessments of Washington’s political philosophy, his constitutionalism, his religion, his private life, his portraits, his leadership, his physical appearance, his interest in the Virginia backcountry, his concern for the decorative arts, his enlightenment, his place in popular culture, his view of the Union, and his relations with his wife Martha, Lafayette, James Madison, Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, Benedict Arnold, his other generals, and various other revolutionaries. There are studies of Washington as a president, as a slaveholder, as a man of the West, as a general, as a partisan fighter, as an American symbol, as the modern Cincinnatus, as a Freemason, as a young man, as a patriarch, as a visionary, as a spymaster, as the architect and owner of Mount Vernon, as the designer of the nation’s capital, as the French saw him, and as the master manipulator of public opinion.

Wood’s title isn’t ironic. He contends that Chernow gets us closer to the “real Washington” than any of the legions of earlier biographers. Chernow is the beneficiary of a series of herculean archival efforts, including the ongoing project at the University of Virginia to publish all of Washington’s papers, which will eventually consist of ninety volumes.

Chernow benefits from another fortuitous circumstance, according to Wood—he’s not an academic. It isn’t that academic historians write especially bad. By comparison with other fields, our prose is not wholly dull, nor completely impenetrable. The problem lies, says Wood, in our tendency to write for one another and to publish books on “specialized problems” that few readers outside of History Departments will ever comprehend, never mind enjoy at the beach.

As Wood notes, we share this internal orientation with chemists and literary theorists alike. Like theirs, ours is an “accumulative science.” We are sunk in its immensity. “[T]he monographs have become so numerous and so refined and so specialized that most academic historians have tended to throw up their hands at the possibility of synthesizing all these studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus the academics have generally left narrative history-writing to the nonacademic historians and independent scholars who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists.”

Not Chernow. Wood says that he writes well and knows the secondary literature. The result is a very big and illuminating portrait of our national icon of sincerity, the general who always managed to elude his pursuers.**

******

* Barnet Schecter’s book, George Washington’s America: A Biography Through His Maps is also reviewed here. But the focus is on Chernow.

** For a sharp and less reverent account of both Chernow’s book and Washington’s life, see Jill Lepore’s “His Highness” in The New Yorker (September 27). Lepore isn’t persuaded that Chernow has made Washington more comprehensible.

Jill Lepore to Lecture Tonight at 7:00pm, Eastern Nazarene College

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The Eastern Nazarene College History Department will present a lecture by Harvard University historian Jill Lepore at 7 p.m., Thursday, November 18, in Shrader Lecture Hall (23 East Elm Ave, Quincy, Mass). The lecture is free and the public is invited to attend.

Titled “Poor Richard’s Poor Jane,” Lepore’s talk will be based on her forthcoming biography of Benjamin Franklin and his sister, Jane Mecom.

Lepore is the author of New York Burning: Liberty and Slavery in an Eighteenth-Century City, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, which won the Bancroft Prize, A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States and, most recently, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Lepore has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times.

The ENC History Department Public Lecture Series is made possible by the support of ENC alumni.

King George II & III, Colonial News, and a Royal Autopsy

Randall Stephens

On October 25, 1760 George III became King of Great Britain. News traveled slow, of course, and New Englanders didn't know about George II's (b. 1683) death or their new monarch for weeks.

Just how slow did people and information cross the Atlantic? In 1750 the school master and organist Gottlieb Mittelberger made the voyage from England to Philadelphia. He later wrote: "When the ships have for the last time weighed their anchors near the city of Kaupp [Cowes] in Old England, the real misery begins with the long voyage. For from there the ships, unless they have good wind, must often sail 8, 9, 10 to 12 weeks before they reach Philadelphia. But even with the best wind the voyage lasts 7 weeks."* Sailing technology had greatly improved in the 18th century. Still, slow transatlantic journeys and poor roads hindered the speed of information for decades. (See the map showing travel times circa. 1800.)

So, finally, in late December Bostonians read of the King's demise in the Boston Post: "Saturday arrived here Capt Partridge in about 6 weeks from London by whom we have the melancholly News of the Death of the most high, most mighty, and most excellent Monarch, GEORGE the Second, King of Great Britain . . . Defender of the Faith . . . . GEORGE the Third was proclaimed KING. . ." ("Partridge; Weeks; London; News; Death; Monarch; George," Boston Post-Boy, December 29, 1760, 2.)

The British American loyalty to King and Country sometimes gets lost in our popular view of colonials as patriots in the making. But as Brendan McConville writes in his The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776, "British North Americans championed their British king with emotional intensity in print, during public political rites, and in private conversation" (9).

Yet, before Americans pulled out the bunting and uncorked bottles to celebrate their new King, they had a bit of morbid curiosity to satisfy. How did George II die?

Fortunately, newspaper editors, keen to print what the people wanted, had the scoop on the Royal Autopsy. The Boston Post relayed the news from London: "In obedience to the order transmitted to us by the Right Hon. Vice-Chamberlain, We the under-signed have this day opened and examined the body of his Majesty . . ." They found "all parts contained in a natural and healthy state, except only the surface of each kidney there were some hydrides, or watery bladders, which however, we determined could not have been at this time of any material consequence." The regal heart, though, did not look so well. Among other abnormalities, they observed "a rupture in the right venticle." ("London, November 4," Boston Post-Boy, December 29, 1760, 2.) (For what passed as medicine in that day, see the amusing film The Madness of King George. The physicians in the movie are a hoot!)

Certainly, the 18th century is culturally distant from us today. This past is definitely a foreign country. Today, we travel at breakneck speeds and communicate across space and time with ease. Still, reading newspaper accounts like the above, makes the celebrity mongering of today and news as infotainment seem not entirely new.

Some Films I Use for My Colonial American History Course

Randall Stephens

I've mentioned on the blog before that I like to use short film clips (10-15 minutes) for many of the classes I teach. I suppose it works better for some courses--America in the 1960s--than others--History Methodology. But thanks to long-running programs like American Experience, Nova, POV, History Detectives, etc, there's much, much out there.

You just have to be willing to do some hunting, inter-library loaning, and some screening. Below are documentaries and features I've found useful for my Colonial America course. Browse the list and I'm sure you'll think of others that could be included. (In the future, I'll post a list from my class on The West in the World since 1500.)

Films for the Colonial American History Course

The Mystery of Chaco Canyon (1999) (Narrated by Robert Redford. Though a more interesting, up-to-date take on Chaco is in the 2010 nat geo adaptation of Jared Diamond's Collapse.)

Native Land: Nomads of the Dawn (1996)

We Shall Remain, Episode 1 (WGBH, 2009) (Contains great material on the first contact between English settlers and Indians. Also includes a good overview of King Philip's War. I combined it with a reading from Jill Lepore's Name of War. Watch the full program on-line.)

The Magnificent Voyage of Christopher Columbus (WGBH, 2007)

Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People (KNME, 1992)

Luther (2003) (A good feature film to teach students a bit about the Reformation.)

The New World (2006) (I can think of no other film that more beautifully, graphically presents the Jamestown story. One reviewer called it a visual poem. Good description.)

Nova: Pocahontas Revealed (WGBH, 2007)

Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower (2006)

The Story of English: Muse of Fire (WGBH, 1986) (One of my favorite documentaries from PBS. Excellent summary of the development of the southern accent [West Country] and the Boston, dropped-r accent [East Anglia].)

American Visions: The Republic of Virtue and The Promised Land (1996) (This is the crusty Aussie art critic Robert Hughes's epic series on American art. Contains a discussion with David Hackett Fischer on Old Ship Church in Hingham and an examination of 17th-century decorative art and architecture. Goes along very well with Fischer's Albion's Seed.)

Colonial House (2004) (How well would the typical college student fare in a 17th-century setting? One word, bathroom.)

God in America, Episodes 1 and 2 (WGBH, 2010) (Will be using this when it comes out. Have seen the pre-release version of the first two episodes. Tremendous. Includes accounts of the Pueblo Revolt, the trial of Anne Hutchinson, George Whitefield and the GA, and more. When this airs on PBS Oct 11-13 the full program will be available on-line.)

500 Nations: Cauldron of War (1994)

Slavery and the Making of America (WNET, 2004) (I use episodes 1 and 2: The Downward Spiral and Liberty in the Air for the colonial course.)

Tom Standage interview on his History of the World in Six Glasses: CBS Sunday Morning (2005)

The War that Made America (WQED, 2006) (French and Indian War series.)

Scientific American Frontiers: Unearthing Secret America (Alan Alda's tour of Jamestown and Jefferson's Monticello. Great perspective on how archeology informs history.)

New York: The Country and the City, Episode 1, 1609-1825 (1999)

Benjamin Franklin (2002)

Thomas Jefferson (1997) (Ken Burns's doc.)

John Adams (HBO, 2008)

Liberty! The American Revolution (KTCA, 2004)

Founding Brothers (2002)