say it ain't so

A few classes ago, my favorite history prof made this quip in the middle of class: "There are two types of history books: biography and covert autobiography." I want not to believe this. But I think it is closer to the truth than a lot of us want to admit. Take, for instance, two of the most highly acclaimed recent books about the American Revolution: Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Gary Nash's The Unknown American Revolution. Both huge books. Both with lots of recommendations from the community of colonial American historians. Both have pretty artwork on the cover featuring revolutionary soldiers fighting. Both authors have lots of letters after their names and teach at prestigious programs. And Gary Nash is actually a nice guy to boot. So what's the problem? Well, aside from the meta-problem of why do we have so many books about the same friggin topic, the problem is that they say very different, perhaps mutually contradictory things. Wood says it's the ideas of republican representative rule that get the revolution rolling. But then, after 1783 and the end of the War, those ideas spiral out of control and the new US of A ends up being a chaotic democracy of the lowest-common-denominator (namely, the stupid American voting public). So for Wood, it's ideas that run the show, even if those ideas get used improperly from time to time. History is a story of unintended consequences. Nash's history is one of lost opportunities. His revolution is an amalgamation of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of separate smaller revolutions going on from poor upper New England to poor tenant farmers in New York to poor urbanites in Philadelphia to poor freed slaves in Virginia and poor indentured servants in the Carolinas. In other words, the American Revolution was the French Revolution that never lived up to its potential for radical change. The new US of A would have been a truly free, egalitarian collection of sovereign states but for the interference of the federalists--the rich, landed gentry found mostly in Virginia (e.g., Washington, Jefferson) or around Massachusetts (e.g., Franklin, Adams). Getting beyond the books themselves, and getting past the boring question "which one is right?"--boring since we can't answer it--we find that, surprise, surprise, these books find in the Revolution causes, explanations, or mechanisms that are near and dear to the authors themselves. Wood, for instance, has been quoted as saying that no one's actions really make any difference. To which we, knowing him, might say for him: because it's all about ideas: which cause events to fall like dominoes, sometimes patterned, sometimes out of control. Nash, who has written some of the best scholarship on the role of African-Americans in the Revolutionary period, is a not-so-closet Marxist. The whole show is a dialectic between the powerful and the weak, the land owners and the renters, the lords and the governed. That the American project is a "consent of the governed" government simply means that colonists didn't have a true vision of just how far they could go with the grand experiment. They settled for peace with England and amongst themselves rather than crafting a truly egalitarian society. All this is to say that the more I read, the more I think that--yeah, it's either biographical or autobiographical.