Novel and Old School

Since the popular literature of the Early Republic, and especially the early American novel, is a crucial source for my work on the idea of home, I can't avoid the scholarship of Cathy N. Davidson.  Nor do I want to. 

Davidson's work on the novel as a democratic genre, her explorations of how novels were read, and by whom, and to what purpose and effect -- all of her painstaking research, rendered into brilliant prose, has cut a path through the wilderness, along which I will gladly and gratefully walk for as far as it will take me in pursuit of my quarry.

At the same time, Davidson's work on learning and pedagogy -- especially writing pedagogy and the  new literacy -- is likewise unavoidable for me.  I teach rhetoric (a.k.a. "freshman comp") at my university, and our standardized syllabus requires a blog project as part of our students' portfolio of work.  This requirement is due in no small part to the influence of Davidson and other scholars who are championing the blog as a tool for teaching writing -- perhaps even as a substitute for the research paper or term paper.

A recent article in the New York Times describes Davidson's take on "Blogs vs. Term Papers," and situates her as holding "a more extreme position" among professors and writing teachers who are all alike concerned with finding the best way to teach the best practices that make for the best writing both within and beyond the academy.  The concern to teach writing practices that have some practical application beyond the ivied walls of the Ivory Tower is made explicit in Davidson's pedagogy, but, as I will argue below, I believe a concern for practicality is implicit in the commitments of those of us who continue to see pedagogical value in the research essay.

Now, as the reader may have gathered, I am fond of blogging.  It is a fantastic medium for exploring ideas and establishing connections with fellow explorers working at other institutions.  (Oh mercy -- what is it with all these metaphors of hunting, exploring, wandering in the wilderness? Clearly, I have been spending too much time with Catharine Sedgwick and James Fennimore Cooper.)  Indeed, I think blogging can at least help create the conditions for establishing a vibrant intellectual community, a virtual post-modern Republic of Letters.

There's no doubt that blogging emphasizes the sense of writing for an audience and highlights the potential for interaction with one's readers in a way that writing a traditional term paper may not.  The (in)formal conventions of blogging may help students better recognize that scholarship is not about building little (or big) monumental plinths that just stand there and gather dust -- it's not about writing essays, term papers, theses, dissertations as finished objects and final words.  Rather, scholarship is about participating in and contributing to a larger conversation.  So to the extent that blogging foregrounds this crucial aspect of scholarly work, I think it can be a valuable use of students' time and energy.

But I worry that a near-exclusive emphasis on blogging is not a very good use of students' money -- especially working-class students, first-generation students, students who are going into debt to attain that which an education confers.  As Davidson has made clear in her own research on the early American novel and its readership, education confers empowerment -- often in ways that the educators never intended and that the educated never expected.  And maybe that democratic and democratizing empowerment will be (already is?) the lasting legacy of blogging, the internet, the new literacy.  In the meantime, though, I believe that championing the blog as the primary form of scholarly writing puts students at a profound disadvantage, not merely in the job market but, more crucially, in the public square. 

In an era when most of the paths to erudition were closed to women, when a university education was not merely impermissible but also impossible because most women were not trained to read Latin or Greek, the novel democratized education and became a means by which disempowered women and men could not only gain knowledge but also produce knowledge and shape public discourse.  As a result, the doors of educational opportunity that had been closed to women, to the working-class, to minorities, have been and are being opened.  And I can see the similarities between the novel and the blog as genres that open up access to knowledge.

In some ways, though, championing the blog over the research paper as a cornerstone of a university education seems to be turning back the clock, taking back part of what has been gained.  Knowledge is power, and the knowledge of how knowledge is constructed and deployed as a tool of empowerment and disempowerment --  not just how to recognize the process, but how to do it -- is the most powerful knowledge of all.

Judging from the Times' description of how Davidson uses blogging in her pedagogy, it is clear to me that she doesn't teach blogging as a substitute for careful research, but as a means of exploring new avenues for students to articulate what they have learned in ways that excite and ignite the interest of others.  I'm sure that her students leave her class well-equipped to pursue and present a savvy, sophisticated argument across a full range of knowledge platforms.  More power to them.

Nevertheless, despite the broad democratic potential of the blogosphere, there is still enormous privilege, power and prestige in traditional academic prose.  Nobody -- not even the English department at Stanford -- is going to throw that baby out with the bathwater.  So no matter the potential of blogging as a means of (re)producing knowledge, the best educated, the most privileged and empowered among us, will continue to learn the long-form, old-school research essay.   

In this age of the soundbite, this era of intentional and celebratory ephemerality, this epoch of the quick and the slick and the flickering flash of momentary thoughts twittering  across the collective mindscape, whose knowledge will carry the day?  Whose perspective will endure to shape the present and open or close the future?  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  In the country of those who don't learn to value, much less know how to construct, a sustained, logical argument based upon careful research and a judicious treatment of evidence, David Barton and Newt Gingrich will be our greatest historians, our most influential public intellectuals.

Eran Shalev Responds to Varad Mehta

Eran Shalev is an associate professor of history at Haifa University, Israel. The following is a guest post by Shalev in response to Varah Mehta's review of Rome Reborn.

An author, as we know, has little control over a book once it reaches its audience. But an author should, I believe, attempt to rectify a gross misreading of his work. For this reason I address two of Varad Mehta’s claims in his review of Rome Reborn on Western Shores.

Mehta attributes to me unusual claims to the extreme, namely that revolutionary Americans “thought not only that they could emulate Brutus, but that the ‘American Brutus’ would actually be the Brutus, resurrected 1,800 years later”; not less bizarre is the assertion that I imply that the numerous Americans who were using classical pseudonyms wished to hoax their readers into believing that they were reading texts about America written by actual classical Romans. “Even to suggest that,” Mehta writes, “is to make fools and dupes out of the Americans, who knew perfectly well that such a possibility was nonsense…it also makes Hamilton, Madison, and Jay [who wrote the Federalist as the Roman “Publius”] look like fools for believing they could trick their readers into believing it (177).”

Mehta is of course right. But nowhere do I make such an absurd insinuation. No scholar in his senses would. Indeed, in the end of the paragraph from which Mehta quotes I explicitly write: “The Federalist Papers were thus defined by the conspicuously false pretence of having been written by the founder of the Roman republic.” Defined by their conspicuously false Roman identity, not an attempt to fool the American public. Needless to say, nowhere do I suggest that Americans expected the “real” Brutus to reemerge. Or any similar outlandish ontological claim (although contemporaries did identify numerous American Brutuses, and especially American Catos, first and foremost among them George Washington). I am truly sorry that a reader could read my book and come out with such a mistaken understanding of my position. I will only say that none of the dozens of the critical readers (among them the most esteemed historians of early America of our generation) who read my work in its different iterations understood my argument in such a manner.

Further, nowhere in the book do I claim that the classics were, in the reviewer’s words, “the primary, let alone the only, inspirations for the revolutionary generation’s understanding of them.” Indeed, I consciously steered away from participating in such an unproductive contest or comparison of perceived importance; not only would such an unqualified claim about the classics be probably wrong, but such a mode of argumentation always struck me as an unproductive way to think about history. Hence, never would I, again in the reviewer’s words, assume that there were “no other ways of looking at the past…available to Americans in this period.” An academic book dedicated to the influence of the classics on Americans’ understanding of their newly created republic cannot, alas, focus on other political languages to prove its point. That does not mean however that the book claims that other modes of intellectual operation were unavailable to, or unimportant for, historical agents.

I disagree with other claims that the reviewer makes, but those are legitimate scholarly disagreements and I will not respond to them here. It is interesting however that he conclusively asserts that revolutionaries “called their achievement a novus ordo seclorum because that is what they believed it was. There is no reconciling that conviction with the notion that they were the second coming of Rome.” Here lies the heart of our differing understandings of the Revolution. My book’s contention is that such a rigid position as Mehta’s is seriously flawed: what is fascinating about the American Revolution is the deep tension contained in the simultaneous contemporary understandings of the newly created republic as a new order of the ages and in terms of a new Rome.

Book Review: Varad Mehta on Shalev's *Rome Reborn on Western Shores*

Review of Eran Shalev's Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). ISBN 0-8139-2833-3. Pp. xiii, 311. $45.00.

Reviewed by Varad Mehta
Independent Scholar

Scratch an American of the Revolutionary era and underneath you’ll find a Roman. That impression has been long conveyed by a robust scholarship exploring the myriad influences of classical culture on eighteenth-century British North America and the Revolution of its inhabitants against their colonial mother.[1] Especially successful in scholarly circles has been the argument that the primary ideology of the Revolution was a strand of republicanism whose genealogy can be traced back to classical Greece and Rome by way of Machiavelli.[2] Eran Shalev unites the histories of the classics and republicanism in the revolutionary era in order to argue that classical antiquity “played a crucial role in articulating the revolutionaries’ quarrel and their coming to terms with history and time” (3). While Shalev does an excellent job explicating the influence of classical conceptions of time and history in this period, he is less successful in demonstrating that these were the primary, let alone the only, inspirations for the revolutionary generation’s understanding of them. The result is a book which, typical of those in the so-called republican paradigm, must make its case by ignoring the most important aspects of the Revolution, in particular the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Shalev divides his study into six chapters, each exploring a specific aspect of his theme. The first introduces the pervasiveness of the classics and the various rhetorical uses to which each book or author was put. The second analyzes representations of Britain in the colonists’ rhetoric. Shalev shows how Britain, initially perceived as recreating the glory of republican Rome, underwent a process of “Nerofication.” Angry Americans, believing Britain was embarking upon a corrupt campaign to destroy their liberties, began to depict Britain as embodying all the worst excesses and tyranny of a decadent, imperial Rome. The third chapter was to me the most revealing and interesting. Shalev makes a provocative argument, compelling but not entirely convincing, that two conceptions of time and history prevailed in eighteenth-century America, one above and one below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern conceptions of history were dominated by the cyclical mode of history. Southern patriots saw an America imperiled by the same forces of declension and disintegration to which all previous republics had succumbed. A product of history, America could not escape history’s pattern of youth, maturity, and decline in old age. Shalev does not say so, but this Southern version of history offers an apparent exception to American exceptionalism. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, however, cycles did not factor into the historical imagination. Here a mode of historical typology (i.e., progress) triumphed, with modern American exemplars being regarded as the fulfillment of classical archetypes. This kind of historical thinking was heavily influenced by Christian millennialism, which beholds history not as cyclical but as progressing unceasingly forward to the end of time. America would “escape the cycle that had plagued human societies through recorded time” by transcending it. This Northern mode of history was “exceptional” (87).

Chapter 4 focuses on what Shalev calls Americans’ “performance” of classical antiquity. A main issue is whether Joseph Warren wore a toga when delivering the annual memorial oration on the Boston Massacre in 1775. Warren’s wife, Mercy Otis Warren, wrote several closet dramas about the imperial tensions inflaming Boston in which the setting and the characters are all given classical names, some thinly disguised ones, that indicate what she thought of them. Boston becomes “Servia” and Governor Thomas Hutchinson is renamed “Rapatio.” Shalev argues that by re-imaging the conflict as taking place on a classical stage, Warren transformed it into an episode in classical history. By “taking the toga” (the chapter’s title), revolutionary Americans collapsed the distance between classical times and their own and re-enacted their history as part of Rome’s.

In the fifth chapter, Shalev investigates the uses of classical pseudonyms during the ratification debate on the Constitution. Such pseudonyms allowed authors to adopt classical personae to indicate their views of the Constitution and to claim history for their side. Thus “Cato” once more opposed “Caesar” and “Brutus” emerged again to thwart tyranny. In chapter 6, Shalev analyzes classical themes in histories of the Revolution written in its immediate aftermath. He concludes that compared to the Roman drama of the Revolution, with its great heroes and battles, the post-revolutionary period felt like a disappointment. Being once more submerged in history, the Revolution felt as far away as Roman times, a distancing which historians such as David Ramsay, David Humphreys, and Mercy Warren perpetuated at the very moment they tried to explain the Revolution. In the epilogue, Shalev traces two classical tropes through the rest of American history, those of the Roman patriot Cincinnatus and the tyrant Caesar.

Shalev’s study makes several valuable contributions to the scholarship on the classics’ influence on the American Revolution, and his colleagues will likely be answering his contention that they shaped Americans’ conceptions of time and history for some time to come. It is intriguing and provocative. But it is not persuasive. It is unpersuasive not because it claims Americans had a particular historical consciousness, which is undoubtedly true.[3] It is unpersuasive because we must believe that it was mostly an ahistorical one, that literate Americans of this age thought not only that they could emulate Brutus, but that the “American Brutus” would actually be the Brutus, resurrected 1,800 years later. Moreover, this ahistorical consciousness requires the Americans to have no sense of their own place in time, and to be utterly unaware of “[t]he inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation, and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity,” which John Adams, in the prologue of Defence of the Constitutions of the United States (1787), posits have completely changed the world since ancient times.[4] We might number among these such epochal transformations as the rise of Christianity, the Reformation, the discovery of the Americas, and the invention of printing, events of which the Americans were surely cognizant. Shalev also ignores basic philosophical issues about how and why people think about and use the past as they do.[5] The lack of a theoretical perspective is a significant shortcoming, one which if rectified would have placed the book on a more solid foundation. The numerous typos (“Canae” becomes “Cane” [95], Benedict Arnold crosses “Canadia’s Alpnie hills” [101], etc.) are also quite irritating, but do not compromise Shalev’s interpretive framework.

Shalev operates according to the rules of what John Pocock, in defending his controversial work on republicanism, described as “tunnel history.” Shalev, that is, tunnels through one particular issue or problem to the ignorance of all others.[6] In other words, for us to believe him we must assume that no other ways of looking at the past were available to Americans in this period. It is true that classical pseudonyms were plentiful in the ratification debate. To make that claim and stop, however, is to ignore the fact that the debate was about ratifying a Constitution whose authors had spent their four months in Philadelphia deciding that history had very little to tell them and that if they were going to get anywhere the first thing they’d have to do was go their own way. The most famous classical pseudonym of them all deals a severe blow to Shalev. So we find “Publius” (aka James Madison) declaring in The Federalist No. 14 that the source of the American people’s greatness is their not having “suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.” Indeed, if they had taken no steps for which no precedent could be found, they would still be stuck in the miserable situation from which they had spilled so much blood and treasure to escape. Classical pseudonyms abounded, but they did so in a debate about a Constitution antithetical to the wisdom of the ancients. There is no turning this into a fulfillment of antiquity however hard one tries.

Shalev’s scheme has no place in it for Thomas Jefferson, that great optimist and evangelist of America. Jefferson can never be considered a pessimistic Southerner fearful of America’s eventual decline.[7] Not the Jefferson who avowed that the Earth belongs to the living, or that laws should be rewritten every nineteen years,[8] or that he preferred the dreams of the future to the history of the past,[9] or that his epoch was a new one.[10] No classical historical paradigm can make room for such anomalies. Shalev, therefore, mostly ignores Jefferson.[11] Just as he ignores the other historical sources to which the revolutionaries could turn, not least the history of their mother country, Britain.[12]

What Shalev really misses, then, is any real sense of the Americans’ understanding of themselves. That they looked to the past is indubitable. But they looked to it not to recreate or relive it, but to understand their present and, especially, to shape their future. No reader would have believed, as Shalev implies, that the essays issued over the name of “Publius” had actually “been written by the founder of the Roman republic.” Even to suggest that is to make fools and dupes out of the Americans, who knew perfectly well that such a possibility was nonsense. Of course that prospect was a “false pretense,” and it also makes Hamilton, Madison, and Jay look like fools for believing they could trick their readers into believing it (177). The Americans knew perfectly well what they were, and that was not neo-Romans. This reality was expressed by John Stephens. In taking the name “Americanus” for his essays, he adopted the classical form to convey a substance beyond the ancients’ imagination. His message was one that ultimately all his countrymen heeded: “it is principally from our own experience that we can derive just notions” of the foundations of liberty.[13] Their own experience, and none other.

The Americans called their achievement a novus ordo seclorum because that is what they believed it was. There is no reconciling that conviction with the notion that they were the second coming of Rome. Rome was not reborn on Western shores. What was born there was something new under the sun.

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[1] The classic study remains Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984). More recent works include Carl J. Richard The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); idem, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002).

[2] Fittingly, the republican interpretation is dominated by a triumvirate: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; Cambridge, Mass, 1992); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969; Chapel Hill, 1998); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975; Princeton, 2003). All three discuss the influence of the classics on republican thought. A recent overview of the debate about the place of classical republicanism in the American Revolution is Alan Gibson, Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (Lawrence, KS, 2007), 130-64.

[3] The subject has not received all the attention it warrants, but those who have noticed its importance include Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1965; Indianapolis, 1998); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge, 1988); Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton, 1988). For the nineteenth century see Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 909-28; Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2007).

[4] John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3 vols. (London, 1787), vol. 1., Preface. Online here.

[5] Issues like those David Lowenthal plumbs in The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)

[6] J. G. A. Pocock, “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 53.

[7] “It is this rejection of the past as a repository of wisdom that constitutes the most important element in the ideology of the victorious Jeffersonian Republicans.” Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York and London, 1984), 79. See also eadem, “What is Still American in Jefferson’s Political Philosophy?,” in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 291-319.

[8] He makes both assertions in a letter to James Madison dated 6 September 1789, which can be found in Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York, 1984), 959-64.

[9] Jefferson to John Adams, 1 August 1816, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill, 1959), 485.

[10] Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 12 March 1801, in Writings, 1086.

[11] What is true of this book is not necessarily true of Shalev himself. In an essay published only this month (and which I consequently have yet to read), Shalev perhaps fills this lacuna. See “Jefferson’s Classical Silence, 1774-76: Historical Consciousness and Roman History in the Revolutionary South,” in Peter Onuf and Nicholas Cole, eds., Thomas Jefferson and the Classics (Charlottesville, 2011). Jefferson always evinced a pronounced skepticism about the (mis)application of classical exempla to America, notably in Query XIII of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), where he lambastes attempts by the Virginia legislature to institue a Roman-style dictatorship during the Revolution.

[12] This dimension of the Americans’ historical outlook is discussed in Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 3-68.

[13] [John Stephens, Jr.], “Americanus” VI, Daily Advertiser (New York), 12 January 1788, in Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution, 2 vols. (New York, 1993), 1:788.

What document bears the signatures of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison?

It's Friday, time for some light trivia with which to impress your friends over the weekend.



The manuscript pictured (from the archives of the American Philosophical Society) here is the only document known to contain the signatures of the first four presidents of the U.S. It is a subscription list for an expedition by André Michaux to explore "the interior of North America from the Mississippi along the Missouri, and Westwardly to the Pacific ocean." Michaux, whose globetrotting life was full of excitements and disappointments, was a French botanist who came to United States to examine the North America flora. Today he is well remembered (at least in some circles) and his best know work is the Histoire des chenes de l'Amerique septentrionale (1801) illustrated by the famed Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Of course, Michaux scientific exploration was motivated and supported by more practical reasons than increasing the store of philosophical knowledge. He collected and shipped plants with commercial uses and which could be acclimated to grow in France or its possession. He also supplied beautiful exotic species, such as magnolias, to the empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison.

Michaux expedition to the interior America never took place. However, ten years later Jefferson sent out another expedition (headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) to obtain the geological and botanical knowledge he desired. This information provided Jefferson as much knowledge about the political situation and economic potential of the land west as much as it did about scientific matters.

It seems symbolic that the only document to bear the signatures of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison (and others) represents scientific, political, economic and imperial ambitions of the new country. It reminds us that since its founding, the United States, its political, economic, intellectual and scientific histories were intertwined.

What document bears the signatures of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison?

It's Friday, time for some light trivia with which to impress your friends over the weekend.



The manuscript pictured (from the archives of the American Philosophical Society) here is the only document known to contain the signatures of the first four presidents of the U.S. It is a subscription list for an expedition by André Michaux to explore "the interior of North America from the Mississippi along the Missouri, and Westwardly to the Pacific ocean." Michaux, whose globetrotting life was full of excitements and disappointments, was a French botanist who came to United States to examine the North America flora. Today he is well remembered (at least in some circles) and his best know work is the Histoire des chenes de l'Amerique septentrionale (1801) illustrated by the famed Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Of course, Michaux scientific exploration was motivated and supported by more practical reasons than increasing the store of philosophical knowledge. He collected and shipped plants with commercial uses and which could be acclimated to grow in France or its possession. He also supplied beautiful exotic species, such as magnolias, to the empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison.

Michaux expedition to the interior America never took place. However, ten years later Jefferson sent out another expedition (headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) to obtain the geological and botanical knowledge he desired. This information provided Jefferson as much knowledge about the political situation and economic potential of the land west as much as it did about scientific matters.

It seems symbolic that the only document to bear the signatures of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison (and others) represents scientific, political, economic and imperial ambitions of the new country. It reminds us that since its founding, the United States, its political, economic, intellectual and scientific histories were intertwined.