Karin Wulf writes:

Nations need history; it is a key genre for explaining the status quo. Modern nations and modern historical practices in the West developed over the same centuries, so the effort to harness the latter to the former is no surprise. Yet whether about the removal of statues, the veracity of journalism and public history projects, or the appropriateness of school curricula and course materials, questions about just how history serves the national interest have been fodder for perpetual controversy.

What’s more, in the past few decades, historians seem to be a poor match for such public and political uses of history. The rubbery framing of what history is, of how to assess it, and who it serves is frustratingly suitable to the stretching and even distortions that politics requires of the past. At the same time, it is regularly asserted that the public wants simple, consistent, even unchanging narratives of the past. Working in primary source materials and reading deeply in the existing scholarship, research historians emphasise the complexity and subtlety of historical processes that are often assumed to be ill-suited to the soundbites and pithy pronouncements of media and politics, and thus unlikely to find a public audience. The development of new sources, new methods and new perspectives that revise our understanding of the past constantly challenge fixed narratives.

However, the reframing of early America – a field and a period with an outsized claim on the history of democracy – suggests that complex and newly understood histories are meeting the moment for both the nation and its publics. Decades of research, reflected in close studies and synthetic histories, and the public writing of scholars alongside museum exhibits, are illustrating a wider appetite for nuanced history even as we hear more strident calls for the old ‘patriot’ narratives. A more capacious geography for early America, and deeper research in both slavery studies and Native American history, are showing not only a more complex era but much more connection among seemingly remote people, places and phenomena.

Conceptualised as the prehistory of the United States, originating in British colonies on the central east coast of mainland North America, early American history often and for centuries flattened out distinctive circumstances within a diverse population in favour of a unified portrait and a message of collective national ambitions. Including the eras of colonisation, the American Revolution and the early republic, early America has been the platform on which so much of the American national origins story rests. Whether it be the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which in 2019 set out to place slavery at the centre of the national narrative, or subsequent draft legislation to prohibit federal funds for such teaching, in favour of ‘the self-evident truths set forth by [the] Declaration [of Independence of 1776, which] are the fundamental principles upon which America was founded’, characterising early America is always resonant. It has always mattered as a way to explain what came next, be it a progressive narrative or the effects of racism and settler colonialism. Throughout US history, ordinary people and their communities, powerful economic and political interests, educational or reform efforts have all characterised early America, because it is both a starting point and a vantage point from which to understand the nation’s trajectory. [Continue reading…]