Was America Part of the Republic of Letters?

by Jonathan Wilson

There’s an interesting take on early America in the new issue of Modern Intellectual History. The article is an unusually layman-friendly essay on digital humanities, but it's also an excellent essay on the importance of a spatial imagination to those of us who work on American intellectuals. And it challenges conventional thinking about the intellectual significance of the American Revolution, so I think it merits careful reading.

In "Where Is America in the Republic of Letters," Caroline Winterer reflects on what modern digital tools can reveal about early American intellectual life. Specifically, Winterer discusses an ongoing initiative at Stanford called "Mapping the Republic of Letters." There she is the lead researcher on a project to visualize Benjamin Franklin's correspondence networks in the mid-18th century. In her new MIH article, Winterer tries to explain how digital projects like this can challenge or revise historians' thinking.

Winterer contrasts two dominant ways of conceptualizing intellectual exchange in colonial British America. "Put bluntly," she writes, "the Atlantic world has become an early Americanist's category, while the republic of letters has become an early modern Europeanist's category." She suggests that this is due to Americanists' nationalistic assumptions. European historiography, by definition, (and I'm embroidering a bit on her text here) starts from the the recognition that nations are contingent and porous, while Americanists, always conceiving of their subject teleologically as the future United States, struggle to recognize the limits of the nation at all. So for us, the British "Atlantic world" is useful as a rather grudging way frame and problematize the thing that was not yet the United States, while Europeanists are happy to follow the cosmopolitan "republic of letters" wherever it leads them, whether around the Mediterranean or into the Far East.

This may fall slightly off the mark, I think. The more important thing about the Atlantic world is that it's a sneaky way to maintain a special relationship between Britain and the United States, preserving the privileged place of English law and ideology in our studies of colonial and revolutionary America while acknowledging the existence of other empires and constituent peoples. In other words, I think the Atlantic world is actually more about U.S. historians' Anglophone nationalism than their American nationalism. Nevertheless, Winterer's observation seems important. It is true that the republic of letters gets far more play in early-modern European history than in early American history, and this almost certainly means something interesting.

According to Winterer, one thing it means is that early American intellectual history needs to take a closer look at where the letters of the republic were actually going. "The big, broad idea of an Atlantic world" is a clumsy replacement for more precise locating of nodes in transatlantic intellectual networks. Mostly, she writes, the paths taken by writers and writing reveal that British America's "Atlantic" intellectual life was really centered on England, and not just England but London (phenomena like the Edinburgh enlightenment and John Fea's rural enlightenment notwithstanding).

A second use for the concept of the republic of letters, Winterer argues, is to show that America's revolutionary "philosopher-statesmen," Benjamin Franklin in particular, weren't really as new as certain historians have claimed. Franklin, Winterer writes, should not be seen simply as a producer of Enlightenment knowledge. His real importance lay in his function as a key node in Enlightenment literary networks, a sort of "human switchboard" who relayed ideas to and from his many correspondents. This sort of figure, Winterer says, was not exactly new to Europe, but it may also have been more common in colonial America than most people realize. Winterer points to Prospero's America, Walter Woodward's recent study of John Winthrop Jr., which reveals that the 17th-century Connecticut governor maintained a similar transatlantic correspondence network one hundred years earlier. The scale of Franklin's literary output and scientific success was extraordinary, but he functioned as the literati had throughout the early modern era.

A harder problem, Winterer concedes, is what all of this means for the nature of intellectual cosmopolitanism and empire. For example, what was the relationship between centers and peripheries in the republic of letters -- and is it appropriate to view early America as intellectually peripheral? The answer is unclear. On ordinary maps of correspondence networks, American letters appear as long lines crossing the vast Atlantic ocean. But does this mean that Americans were less firmly connected to London and Paris than provincial Europeans were, or more? Similarly, does mapping intellectual networks shed any light on the role of religion in carrying ideas? In the absence of well-organized missionary-intellectual orders like the Jesuits, were British America's religious literary networks primarily a cause of empire or an effect? The concept of the republic of letters, Winterer suggests, opens these as important questions without resolving them.

Finally, and most importantly, Winterer argues that the concept of the republic of letters calls into question the significance of the American Revolution. "In fact," she writes, "seen in the broader context of the republic of letters, the specific influences of the American Revolution and republicanism on the deep structures of US intellectual life become more difficult to assert with confidence." In the first decades after the Revolution, the intellectual life of the new nation was not necessarily preoccupied with republican politics. Often, intellectuals in the early American republic were more concerned with the same sorts of questions that had long kept the public of letters humming -- questions of personal refinement and honor, virtue in a prepolitical sense, and appropriate sensibility. So when the ground beneath American intellectual life shifted later in the 19th century, was this because of the Revolution and democratization, or was it because of a wider evolution in the modern republic of letters? Winterer clearly favors the second thesis.

To say that I agree with Caroline Winterer about the importance of visualizing early American intellectual networks would be an understatement. That's true whether we're discussing "visualization" in a formal sense, i.e., the sense of precisely representing large data sets as comprehensible graphics, or in an informal sense -- meaning the presentation of stories about travel and communication that make it easy to imagine ideas as concrete, material, personal things rather than abstractions.

But I also worry about what Winterer's model might mean for the study of "intellectuals" as people. The great virtue of the concept of the Atlantic world is that it reminds us of the enormous importance of ships (bear with me a moment) to literally every aspect of life in early America. Not just particular ships, like, say, the Mayflower or the Arbella-- the special vectors of special people with special thoughts -- but shipping in general. It puts many different kinds of exchange at the center of what it meant to be and think in colonial America. And it makes it increasingly hard to set apart ideas as a special kind of thought, or to set apart colonial intellectuals, a priori, as special people. Early American intellectuals may be distinguishable as unusually good writers and thinkers, but they were also full participants in a culture of exchange  that encouraged written representations of all kinds. Their ideas had meaning not only in the republic of letters, but also in a much larger public of letters -- an enormous quasi-Habermasian commercial public sphere. So the concept of a watery world of exchange opens up intellectual history to new topics and new forms of relevance to other subfields, in ways that the concept of a relatively rarefied cosmopolitan republic of letters does not.

It seems to me that mapping the republic of letters will be most useful if it can help us represent that aspect of early American intellectual life. Benjamin Franklin's thousands of letters traveled overwhelmingly between London and a handful of American cities. But who were the thousands of people who sent and received them? With whom else did those people correspond about the same questions? And how closely were "ideas" bound up with their daily pursuits? If we can find better ways to visualize these dimensions of intellectual exchange, we may find ourselves in a much better position to argue for the importance of the life of the mind to the wider history of early America.


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Jonathan Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate in American intellectual history at Syracuse University, writing a dissertation on articulations of national identity in antebellum New York City. He is a member of a new early-American group blog, The Junto, which is scheduled to launch on December 10.

Writing About Emotion in USIH: Vidal, Buckley, and Tanenhaus

Sam Tanenhaus reflected yesterday, in The New York Times*, on the unexpected similarities between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. The piece caught my eye because I just finished a section in my manuscript on Mortimer J. Adler's multiple Firing Line appearances and his interactions with Buckley.

In writing about both figures a prominent theme in Tanenhaus' piece was elitism in U.S. intellectual history---the class solidarity that bound both.  He finds other parallels, which I will point out below. But I'm most interested in larger thing Tanenhaus is trying to do in the article: write about emotion in the context of U.S. intellectual history.

Before going there, let me relay the last third of Tanenhaus' article, particularly these passages on American exceptionalism in the context of the Vietnam War (YouTube link moved here from earlier in the story):


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Buckley and Mr. Vidal both subscribed, though in very different ways, to the ideal of American exceptionalism — ...[particularly its] susceptib[ility] to foreign infection. Mr. Vidal feared the evils of empire building...and warned against the decline that had overtaken other civilizations brought low by imperial hubris. 

For Buckley the threat came from global communism and “statist” domestic policies that would reduce Americans to servitude and weaken their connection to the moral values of Christianity.

It was this two-sides-of-the-same-coin idealism that led to the heated exchange in 1968. The actual topic that evening was the Vietnam War. Mr. Vidal opposed it. Buckley supported it. Again their reasons were parallel. For Mr. Vidal the war betrayed the tradition he was raised in, which sought to keep America untainted by the temptations of empire. For Buckley, supporting the war meant holding back the tide of communism. 

As their tempers rose, each seemed to be battling not so much the other as the distorted image of himself that his opponent represented. The terms they haughtily flung at each other were those other critics sometimes applied to them, only in reverse — Buckley, whose arch mannerisms were sometimes mocked as effete; Mr. Vidal, whose disdain for American vulgarity was tinged, some said, with anti-Semitism and dislike of the “lower orders.” 

Divided by so much, Mr. Vidal and Buckley were united in their iconoclasm, however uneasily.

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Again, I love the Vidal-Buckley parallels in relation to iconoclasm, elitism, American exceptionalism, cavils from critics (e.g. effete), and fears of distorted images. For me this says that the so-called conservative-liberal divide of the post-war period is more, among intellectuals anyway, of an intramural contest within liberalism.  That contest was about shades of American liberalism, not a rejection of the larger project of liberalism.

As a professional historian (but not as a person with feelings of disgust) I very much appreciated (loved?) the visceral dislike and passion in the YouTube clip. It's rare to see that kind of open emotion, on air or otherwise. But it's not surprising given the period. To paraphrase today's cool kids, "That's what Vietnam do."

It's hard to top the source when one is writing about events like that---hence the link to the clip in the NYT article. How are you, dear reader, capturing emotions in your USIH work? How does one write about emotions effectively, and concisely, in age of multimedia? How can a traditional media article (journal, newspaper), with its two-dimensional limitations, convey the essence of an event best remembered for the passion conveyed in three dimensions? It seems that a YouTube clip is worth a thousand words. - TL

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* Since it's only August 2, I'm going to assume that you can read the piece because you haven't used up your ten free online NYT viewings.

The Utopianism of the Digital Humanities

Alongside my blogmates, I attended my first THATCamp at last week's AHA meeting in Chicago. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. I think we especially gained valuable feedback during the session that Ben proposed on E-publishing. That said, I came away somewhat skeptical of what I sensed was a utopianism among many of the digital humanists and historians at THATCamp. In one session that I attended--on the question, "What Are the Digital Humanities?" (still debated, not surprisingly, since the much older question, "What Are the Humanities?" has yet to be resolved either)--some of the participants made claims that digitalization has created a fundamental, even epistemological shift in how we think about history. I am underwhelmed.

I'm no Luddite or technophobe. I see the merits of the digital world for historians. Research can be made easier, or at least, more efficient. How historians deliver content is changing, obviously, evident in this blog post. But these are examples of how digitalization serves as an important new tool. It does not change the way we conceptualize the past. Or does it? I am genuinely curious about this question, so if you, dear reader, have answers, I would like you to share them.

There's another element of digitalization that worries me, beyond misconceptions of utopia. Some of the THATCamp participants have changed the types of work they have their students do. One professor told of having his students produce collaborative, digital media projects, like short digital films, in place of traditional essays. When it comes to teaching history and the humanities, the level of my distrust for technophiles rises. Call me crazy, but I think reading and writing remain essential, and I don't think digital filmmaking is a replacement in a humanities course, even though it is a valuable skill in and of itself. But what think you?

Historians, Academic Publishers, and the Ongoing Digital Publishing (R)evolution

But does it have a Reading Room?

During the last two weeks, two major national events exploring the frontiers of e-publishing took place on opposite coasts of the U.S.  On October 21, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) held its first Plenary Meeting at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. And on October 26-28, the Books in Browsers conference took place at the headquarters of the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

The DPLA event was built around the six winners of the DPLA's beta sprint competition to identify "ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc. . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content."* The DPLA also announced a $5 million grant from the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund to promote "an intense two-year grassroots process to build a realistic and detailed workplan for a national digital library, the development of a functional technical prototype, and targeted content digitization efforts." Jill Cousins, of Europeana, the European Union's digital library project, announced a partnership with DPLA focused on coordination between European and US libraries, museums and archives. The agenda of the plenary meeting can be found here. A video of the entire event, as well as a variety of reports about it and documents from it, are available here.  The speakers at the event were, not surprisingly given the origins and scope of the DPLA process, largely from the worlds of libraries, archives (analog and digital), and academia.

The Books in Browsers conference, in contrast, was much less academic and much more geared toward the digital publishing industry.  A complete agenda can be found here. The common participant in both events was the Internet Archive itself, represented at both events by its founder, Brewster Kahle. Notably absent, at least from the agenda, were academic publishers.

What is--and what should be--the relationship of historians to these events...and to the greater digital publishing revolution in the midst of which we find ourselves?



A number of those presenting at the DPLA plenary meeting are historians--or at least history-affiliated scholars: Peter Baldwin, Professor of History at UCLA; Bob Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library; and Amanda French, THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) Coordinator at the Center for History and New Media.

But most historians and other academic humanists have not been much involved in these conversations about the future of digital publishing.  And academic presses--the institutions on which we largely depend for the dissemination of our work--seem to be even further removed from these developments.**

In my experience, historians and other academics in humanities disciplines tend to be rather conservative when it comes to considering structural changes in the conditions of our research or our employment. There are good reasons for this. For at least the last quarter century, most of the pressure for change has come from economic and political forces which are at best indifferent to our interests and often quite hostile to them.  But the changes that might be brought about by digital publishing might potentially be to our enormous benefit.  

Historians are, of course, very dependent on publishing.  It is a central means for circulating our work.  It is also among the most important ways that we credential ourselves professionally. And for many of us, especially in intellectual history, it also provides us with much of our data. More than scholars in any other field, historians focus on the production of books. And it is books--especially academic books--that have been put most at risk by the changing economics of the publishing industry.

Finding a publisher for an academic book has become more and more difficult...though we in U.S. history haven't seen the worst effects of the cutbacks in university press lists (talk to someone in, e.g., German or Russian Studies!).  And as the conditions of employment in the academy worsen, the imperative to publish or perish if anything grows.

The digital publishing revolution does present some dangers. To the extent that the traditional book is threatened with extinction, we ought to be defending it.  There are still things that it offers that other reading technologies don't.

But the upsides of the digital publishing revolution are potentially greater.  We are living in a moment in which the forms of academic communication--which have in the past usually changed fairly slowly and organically--seem open to experimentation and rapid innovation.  Digital technologies offer new means of disseminating work (traditionally conceived) that solve some of the economic problems associated with traditional publishing.  And they also offer the possibilities of entirely new kinds of academic work (including, of course, blogs).

The perceived crisis in traditional academic publishing--as well as the creativity that has begun to emerge in these new forms--has also led more and more departmental and university review committees to treat non-traditional forms--and non-traditionally disseminated forms--of academic work seriously.  Our central technology of quality control--peer review--cuts across the digital divide; it can be used to bolster any of these new forms.

But it is essential that historians and other humanities scholars involve ourselves more actively in the process of creating this new world of digital publishing.  There are, of course, far bigger players in this game, most of whom are at best unaware of our professional needs.  If, when the dust settles, we are stuck with digital forms that do not suit us--or face a market dominated by a few huge corporate players who have no interest in our distributional needs--we may find that these changes don't serve our purposes at all.

As the first Publications Chair of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, I find myself having to think about these issues very concretely. In the past, a new professional organization like ours would have been faced with one big question: do we publish a journal?  Now, instead, we are faced with a more exciting, open-ended, and complicated one: what does our publication program look like? 

I would love to answer that question in ways that will put S-USIH on the cutting edge of academic publishing (taking into account our very small scale, of course).  As an organization that started as blog, we perhaps have the right pedigree to do this. But I need to further educate myself about what others are doing and what we might conceivably take on. Blogs, after all, are so 1999.

Along with a number of other S-USIH bloggers, I look forward to participating, this coming January, in THATCamp AHA.*** And Tim Lacy and I are still on the lookout for anyone interested in becoming the third member of S-USIH's Publications Committee (prospective members need to join S-USIH, of course).  Those with a knowledge of, or interest in, the changing world of digital publishing are very much encouraged to offer their services to the PubComm (though I should add that we have not by any means ruled out trying to start a journal). 

But I hope that even those who are not tempted to sign up for the S-USIH PubComm will educate themselves about the changes--good and bad for historians--taking place in the world of digital publishing. I'm convinced that we can make those changes better for us than they'd otherwise be...and quite possibly create a publishing landscape that is a marked improvement over the one we have faced in recent years, both in the quality and availability of scholarship and in the opportunities it offers us for professional advancement. 
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* This blog has discussed DPLA a number of times in the past.  The most recent video update (dated September 14) from DPLA chair John Palfrey can be viewed here.  The forty final submissions to the beta spring can be seen here.

** Among the several dozen Co-Chairs and Conveners of the six "workstreams" that will define the shape of the DPLA project going forward, only one comes from a university press:  Margeurite Avery, Senior Acquisitions Editor in Science, Technology, & Society (STS), Communications, Library and Information Science, Internet Studies, and Information Policy at MIT Press.

*** Those unfamiliar with the THATCamp concept are encouraged to listen to this episode of the Making History podcast, featuring THATCamp coordinator Amanda French.

X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"

Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.

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This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:

1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.

2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.

3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.

4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?

5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.

X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"

Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.

-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:

1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.

2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.

3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.

4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?

5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.