Books: Yale teachers make history in new books

History is history. It's over and done with. But it gets re-examined all the time. While Yalies lounged on the beach this summer, our intrepid instructors continued to toil on behalf of their field. David Waldstreicher and Eric Papenfuse, JE '93, spent their vacations putting the finishing touches on new books, respectively In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820, and The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery. One author is the director of undergraduate studies for the American studies department; the other is, in his own words, "a lowly grad student." But each has managed, through detailed research and unique use of primary sources, to produce a text that re-examines our nation's history without revising it.

When David Waldstreicher thought about the Fourth of July in America's infancy, he didn't see political consensus and universal bliss. He saw fireworks. Not the kind that light up the sky in red, white, and blue streaks, but the kind sparked by impassioned political debate. These fireworks shine brightly in his first book, which works to dispel the widely-held thought that celebrations in the early republic involved no contention.

"A lot of people think that the fourth of July and patriotic celebrations are all non-political, that it's where politics stop and all Americans come together," he said. "But I found from the beginning that patriotic rituals were about conflict, about arguing over what the American future will be. In the early republic, people managed to be patriotic, and disagree, and fight about it all at the same time."

These findings became In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820, published by the Chapel Hill Press. According to Waldstreicher, Americans in the early republic managed to combine political practice and patriotism without feeling that the country needed to push aside political differences in order to celebrate its heritage. Waldstreicher argues that political celebration in America's early days centered on defining the newborn country's future rather than celebrating unity.

He explained that "what I did start to find in research was that there were republic, political rituals: street demonstrations, celebrations of the king's birthday, which became the celebration of the nation's birthday, that brought people into public life--even those who didn't vote. It enabled people to express their political opinions. [That] relationship between ritual demonstration of one's opinions in public space and the reproduction of those rituals in print...enabled people to think nationally and act locally, or, in other words, to practice their local politics and their nationalism simultaneously."

Due to be released in October, Waldstreicher's work is the product of meticulous research that included period diaries of ordinary citizens. "I found that they cared a lot about what happened on the Fourth of July," he said. "They even copied down passages from the newspaper about the celebration...and all of this was recorded in the diaries." Waldstreicher used these personal accounts in his attempts to offer his readers a greater understanding of political meaning in everyday life in the early republic.

Eric Papenfuse's literary career started off innocently enough: as a junior in Jonathan Edwards college, he received a call from his father, an archivist at the Maryland State Library. It seemed an elderly woman had strolled into the library clutching some papers she'd discovered in her attic, wondering if they were of any use to anyone. The elder Papenfuse, knowing his son's interest in history, sent him the documents. They weren't just "Dear John" or soldier-to-his-mother letters, but the pages of Congressman Robert Goodloe Harper's shocking eighteenth-century speech on racial equality. Reading Harper's words, Papenfuse was stirred enough to write his senior essay on Harper and his unusual political career and beliefs.

Working toward a combined bachelor's/master's degree, Papenfuse was able to write a longer senior essay than most; at 100 pages, the paper delved deeply into Harper's life and ideology. The story might have ended there, had Papenfuse quietly pocketed his degree and tossed his senior essay into a drawer. But that was not the case. Instead of gathering dust in a filing cabinet, his senior essay (bolstered with some extra biographical data he couldn't resist adding) became his first book, hitting the stands before his dissertation was even drafted. Papenfuse, a seminar instructor last term, calls his book an intellectual history, rather than a biography.

The book's focus is a politician whose career is puzzling at best. Long considered the "quintessential paranoid guy of the 1790s"--that is, a man terrified by the possibility of large-scale slave rebellion--Harper in fact began his political career a full 180 degrees away from his eventual ideology, in which he espoused colonization and the relocation of the slaves to a new country in Africa. This starkly contrasted with the speech mailed to Papenfuse in which Harper stated that there is no difference between a slave and Thomas Jefferson, save for education. With the papers in hand, Papenfuse set out to show that Harper, far from the typical pro-colonization politician, had, in fact, been a man struggling with the dilemma of race relations who eventually underwent a serious, if shocking, change of belief.

The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery, published by the American Philosophical Society, chronicles the political life of Harper, who fought in the Revolution and lived through the 1820s. A South Carolina senator, Harper nonetheless professed radical ideas of racial equality--that is, up until his change of philosophy. Possessed by new fears of a race war, Harper began advocating colonization and even gave the new country its name, Liberia. When Thomas Jefferson became President, Harper relocated to Maryland, married into a wealthy slave-owning family, and completed his personal and political rebellion through his involvement in several court scandals--most concerning the manufacture of evidence in order to prevent the freedom of slaves.

"You're not supposed to see him as a hero," explained Papenfuse, "but to see him grapple with his dilemmas--that is, the central dilemma facing all Americans who aren't abolitionists: how can you basically believe that all men are created equal and then at the same time continually compromise that belief by accepting slavery?" It's an often-asked question. The complicated issues of race and slavery in the early years of the nation color The Evils of Necessity.

Papenfuse said that reception of his book has been good, and he hopes that it will become a classroom text. The book itself can be of assistance even to undergraduates who never open its cover--that is, it is useful as an inspiration not only to write a good senior essay, but to consider publishing it. Papenfuse explained that the best way to write an history-based senior essay is to start, as he did, with a fascinating primary source that is relevant to one's own field of interest. The secondary sources, the texts, come later. Of course, not everyone can have Papenfuse's experience of having a never-before-seen document fall into his lap, or his mailbox, but his example can serve as a good one for young historians and budding academics.

Papenfuse is currently working on his dissertation, which examines how colonists determined what it meant to be American. A comparative biography which interweaves the lives of eight individuals from before the Revolution to the War of 1812, it shows how their lives mirrored the most important themes and changes in American History. "One of the great keys to history is showing the multidimensionality of intellectual development," Papenfuse said.

In their debut books, both Walstreicher and Papenfuse have painstakingly re-examined the tumultuous first decades of the nation and produced works that highlight its contradictions and personages. Rather than revising history, the works challenge it. In so doing, they bring new distinction to their field and to Yale.

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