When fish walk on land: social history in a postmodern world.

I was talking with friends the other night when someone mentioned a startling fact; there is such a thing as a walking fish. Birds have wings and fly; beasts have feet and walk; and fish have fins and swim. This much I thought I knew. Nevertheless, a certain species known as Channa argus argus was lately brought to Florida from its native China and has since begun a long stroll up the eastern coast. And it also turns out that certain kinds of organisms, like fungi, can't be classified as either animals or plants and so must be consigned to a kingdom all their own. What in the world is going on?

With categories of analysis in the supposedly objective and empirical world of science rapidly coming undone, it should come as no surprise that history is suffering a similar epistemological crisis. But perhaps crisis is the wrong word. Culmination might be more apt. Could it be that in history, as in all areas of human knowledge, we are finally ready to concede that there is no single story, no total system, that will encompass and explain all we want to know? More than thirty years ago, social history embarked on the bold project of bringing science to history; I think it would not be premature to state that it has ended up bringing history to science--and to history itself. (1)

To assess the current state and future directions of social history requires first an account of its origins, of its founding aims and purposes. Of course, the exact timing of the advent of the now old "new social history" is itself debatable. Still, so many have identified the year 1970 as a remarkable turning point that it seems a most reasonable starting point. It was in that year that four books on early American history, widely hailed as path-breaking then and since, first broke on the historical scene. These four studies, John Demos's A Little Commonwealth, Philip Greven, Jr.'s Four Generations, Kenneth Lockridge's A New England Town and Michael Zuckerman's Peaceable Kingdoms each announced, with greater and lesser degrees of fanfare, that history was about to undergo an irrevocable change. Indeed, the revolutionary nature of the new social history, at least within the field of early American studies, was considerably advanced by the self-conscious nature of this activist collaboration. To begin, then, let's listen again to a few notes of those early clarion calls. (2)

Kenneth Lockridge (who thanked, among others, both Philip Greven, Jr. and Michael Zuckerman in the acknowledgements he composed in March of 1969) began his introduction modestly enough by observing that, "the past is a mixture of often contradictory events whose meaning is sometimes ambiguous." Yet he soon went on to say that "previous layers of scholarly inquiry must be laid aside" in order to overturn the "myths which have so long prevailed." Following Peter Laslett, Lockridge set out to recover the lost "world which made our world," to "sharpen our perception of the earliest sources of our national character" and to seek the roots of American democracy by describing in depth community life in a New England town. (3)

To do so, Lockridge proposed to draw on "many techniques of social-science analysis" but promised skittish readers that such techniques would not "intrude" on an otherwise "simple narrative framework." Lockridge's main concern about his own work was that in choosing to detail the textures of community in Dedham, Massachusetts, he was "running the risk of describing an untypical example." Still, he felt reasonably sure that "similar events in other towns" would "[end strength" to the main features of his arguments and that the resulting opportunity to "deal thoroughly" with his subject was well worth the potential risks of looking at a single place. (4)

A few months later, in June of 1969, Philip Greven, Jr. proclaimed in the preface to his book that, "a significant change in the way historians study the past may now be taking place" and referred interested readers to the work of Demos and Lockridge in an accompanying footnote. Greven's stated designs looked still more radical than Lockridge's. While Lockridge's methods might have been considered unorthodox, his underlying interest in democracy and his goal of understanding American national character would not have appeared entirely unreasonable to those schooled on the likes of Perry Miller's The New England Mind. Greven, on the other hand, announced more baldly that historians should favor populations over nations and "explore the basic structure and character of society through close, detailed examinations of... individuals, families, and groups in particular communities." His project traced inheritance patterns and land distribution over four generations of Andover men in order to uncover the patriarchal powers of colonial fathers. Greven's emphasis on social structure, as opposed to political ideas and institutions, was radically new. And, like Lockridge, he shared "the assumption that historians must use the techniques and questions of other disciplines, including historical demography, sociology, and psychology" since he and those of his generation had "become aware of the value and importance of quantifiable data." (5)

Still, Greven hastened to add that his generation still "believe[d] that the historian must also use imagination and intuition continuously," that the art/science distinction was not really useful in a discipline that so clearly required both. Unlike Lockridge, Greven's main bugaboo was not typicality, but rather the nature of his evidence. Considering the problem at length in an introduction devoted to "problems, sources, and methods," he began by stating confidently that if "examined with care and imagination," quantitative evidence from probate records and the like "actually reveals more about the lives and actions of ordinary individuals and families than has been ascertained from studies of literary sources alone." Yet he ended his introduction in a slightly more hesitant key, admitting that, "questions involving the innermost workings of families.., are particularly difficult to document from such records." Still, Greven did not wish to dwell on this drawback, preferring in the end to emphasize how "remarkable" it was how much could "be discovered by such a method about the lives and actions of ordinary people." (6)

Michael Zuckerman followed close on Greven's heels, composing a preface in July of 1969 in which he thanked Lockridge among others while announcing the central thesis of his book, that "sociability and its attendant constraints have always governed the American character more than the individualism we vaunt." Perhaps because his argument itself was so iconoclastic, denying as it did, the centrality of the democratic impulse in American history, Zuckerman felt less need than either Lockridge or Greven to expound on the novelty of his topic or methods. Nevertheless, in several key respects his basic aims and attitudes reflected important attributes of the emerging field of social history. He sought to discover the "arguments and axioms which ordered the daily lives of the many ... not the ratified philosophies [of] ... a few towering figures." Concerned to capture the popular ethos of an era, he was undisturbed that his argument made "little of development and change." (7)

These concordances were further displayed in Zuckerman's introduction. Like Lockridge who railed against myth, Zuckerman regretted that the "archetypal New England town ha[d] been tied only tenuously to the actual one, its inhabitants ... reduced to caricatures." Zuckerman did not bother to proclaim the importance of the social sciences in history, but did offhandedly drop a reference to the views of "social psychologists" on "democratic character." If Zuckerman's overall tone was less explicitly evangelistic than that of the others, it may be because he had himself already so fully converted. (8)

Coming last in this quick succession of books, (he composed his forward in September of 1969) John Demos was well placed to appreciate the weight of Greven's claims of a generational historiographic shift. Tipping his hat to both Greven and Lockridge, Demos boldly declared at the outset of his study of family in Puritan Plymouth that it "seemed important to try to know average people in the everyday routine of their lives." Though respectful and appreciative of the prior work of Edmund Morgan on the Puritan family, Demos was wary of the undue weight of the "affluent and educated classes" on conclusions drawn from literary sources. Even more forcefully than Lockridge or Greven, Demos insisted on the importance of using "'quantitative' measures whenever possible," while also trying "to fit the evidence from Plymouth with appropriate theoretical models ... borrowed from various branches of behavioral science." Above all, Demos desired to "limit the impressionistic presentation so common in historical writing" based on a "small number of illustrative 'examples'" from literary sources. Instead, echoing Lockridge and Zuckerman both, he sought to "introduce a greater degree of precision into a field which heretofore has been widely influenced by popular myth." (9)

In assessing the potential drawbacks of his approach, Demos also expressed and dismissed the same kinds of concerns addressed by Lockridge. Allowing that some might deprecate his work as "one more exercise in antiquarianism," he explained that there were "broad lines of similarity [in Plymouth] to the typical case in other American colonies." Like Zuckerman, Demos mentioned, but did not dwell on, the fact that his was "a story in which elements of stability and continuity loom unusually large" and in which significant change over time was noticeably absent. Though conscious that "the kind of study [he] presented" had not "as yet won a wide following," Demos was aware, as his use of the phrase "as yet" indicated, that theirs might well prove to be a highly influential endeavor. (10)

The most important aim trumpeted by these four new social historians in 1970 was to write the history of the daily rhythms of ordinary people. To do so they relied on the scientific precision promised by quantitative data and the theoretical underpinning provided by social sciences from anthropology to psychology to demography. Some, like Greven, lamented the dearth of available literary sources, but explained that a little imagination and the advantage of quantitative precision would more than make up for the lack. Others, like Zuckerman and Demos, repudiated literary sources outright, arguing that the elite bias of such documents would undermine the social historian's most fundamental goals.

Though only Demos and Lockridge raised the matter of typicality explicitly, this concern carried over from the social-science concept of representativeness and implicitly informed the quantitative analysis of all of the authors. Of course none of the authors went so far as to subject their statistics to t-tests. Still, their desire to overturn myths and mythical figures required them to argue that their chosen subjects were so ordinary and so typical as to be truly representative of what Demos called in quotation marks the "'average man.'" (11)

They were most divided on the question of how to handle potential conflicts between their new style of analysis and the traditional narrative bent of history, with Lockridge insisting that while such perspectives would "inform" his narrative, they would not "intrude"; Greven contending that history required art and science alike; and Demos going farthest of all to assert that while "every piece of historical research is an undertaking partly of description and partly of analysis," he, for one, "wished especially to limit the element of impressionistic presentation so common in historical writing." (12)

That was 1970. The question, of course, is how many of the questions that seemed so central then matter now, and of those that grip us still, how many of 1970's answers will serve today? None of the aims and claims of the new social history elucidated by Demos, Greven, Lockridge, and Zuckerman has gone uncontested. Yet American history, and especially early American history, has never sounded the same since. History, like jazz, is an improvisational medium, its notes and beats incorporating old songs in new ways. If many of the rhythms of contemporary historical writing are rather different from those of 1970, certain key chords echo on.

Consider first the raison d'etre of the field: an emphasis on the lives of ordinary people. In many ways this shift was permanent and decisive; so rigorous was the new field that it helped foster the continuing development of numerous subfields emerging around the same time, from women's history, to black history, to labor history. No one now can imagine going back.

Indeed, the inauguration of social history was viewed by many as an assault on old-fashioned political and intellectual history, with their focus on great men and great ideas, the thoughts and doings of those now sometimes derided as "dead white males." As Laurence Veysey described the situation in Reviews in American History in 1979, "social historians have been the aggressors, while both political and intellectual historians have been placed increasingly on the defensive." On the other hand, the turn from politics was in some ways less deliberate and in all ways less definitive than initially assumed. Veysey himself went so far as to pronounce in 1979, "political history, it seems fair to predict, will always endure." (13)

In fact, right from the start, a driving force behind the evolution of social history has been a desire to reintegrate it with political history. Lockridge and Zuckerman, while taking distinct stances on questions of individualism, communalism, and the extent and advent of American interest in democracy, had both always sought to link their town-studies to larger questions of political philosophy. Given the chance to address the issue when a second edition of A New England Town was published in 1984, Lockridge declared that social history's supposed split from politics was the invention of its critics not the intention of its creators and argued, "the fact is that there is an eloquent line in these studies which takes us from the Dedham covenant to the struggles within the revolutionary movement to determine the degree and nature of democracy in the new America." Perceiving the same problem at around the same time, Thomas Bender urged, in 1986, that, "social history must reestablish a fruitful relation with politics." (14)

Just what was so important about linking social and political history together again? The subtitle of Bender's article, "the need for synthesis in American history" says it all. Much as people appreciated the wealth of new insights and the throngs of previously ignored/invisible people uncovered by the new social history, many simply felt overwhelmed by masses of unintegrated new information. Veysey complained that while "the inhabitants of a given nation-state are seen to form an extraordinarily complicated mosaic ... there is little incentive to try to piece these histories together into a whole." Entranced with the many brilliant colors of the tiles, social historians had, it seemed to some, entirely forgotten the grout. Indeed, debates over the need for a new post-social history synthesis, whether such a thing is desirable or even possible, and if so how it could best be achieved have dominated scholarly conversations ever since 1970. (15)

Even the leaders of the new social history charge have seemed somewhat surprised by what they have wrought. Michael Zuckerman put the matter bluntly in the introduction to his edited volume Friends and Neighbors in 1982, saying that, in the wake of the new social history's break with traditional history, "no other synthesis has arisen in its place. The town studies that seemed to herald a new history of the northern provinces have merely multiplied, without adding up to anything in their own right. If anything their multiplication has divided New England immoderately and perhaps irreparably." Lockridge was perhaps most sanguine about the splintering of the field when he commented on the issue in 1984. While he acknowledged that "the concern is that the more we have come to know about the little worlds of New England towns, the less we know about the history of colonial New England," he then professed unconcern at this development, saying, "as Walt Whitman said of himself, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.'" Still, even he felt obliged to contend that despite the appearance of disorganized variety, "a certain order does seem to have emerged," and to proceed to outline points of commonality that could be use to create a new synthesis. If the two did not precisely agree on whether and how synthesis could be achieved, neither disputed the idea that it was needed. By 1998, in the forward to the second edition of A Little Commonwealth, Demos summed the situation up by saying, that "new studies seemed to endlessly divide and subdivide the historical landscape," with the result that "historians as a whole drew back," turning away from "the specter of spreading fragmentation." (16)

If Demos is probably right in his assessment of the attitude of "historians as a whole," there was and still remains a vocal minority less certain of the desirability of synthetic history. For if social history first opened up the discipline to the theories and methods of other fields, that gate has never again been closed. On the contrary, it has admitted a whole new set of perspectives from cultural anthropology and literary theory, gathered loosely under the rubric of post-structuralism, that have radically transformed the terms of debate about synthesis. Assessing the impact of social history in 1979, Veysey remarked that, "the single most important line of division among American historians separates those who see all historical particulars in terms of the evolution of social structures and those who do not." From that divide many followed; it proved a short step from efforts to study the structures of society to attempts to study the construction of those structures, or more precisely to deconstruct the seemingly natural structures of power. Historians inspired by the likes of Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida have dedicated themselves to ripping the seams of the garments of power, shredding the illusion that history is made from whole cloth and, exposing the busy tailors beneath the shirttails. Such historians are understandably hesitant to simply stitch those seams back up. If many in the late 1970's and early 1980's thought the case for synthesis was fairly clear, post-structuralism has made matters rather more complicated. (17)

Those who question the value of synthesis have been at some pains to interrogate the motivations behind holistic history. One line of critique questions the capacity of synthesis to include all those newly written into the past by the advent of the new social history. Nell Irvin Painter objected in 1987 that "the purported syntheses of the 1950's ... claimed to encompass all the American people but spoke only of a small segment, white male elites, presenting an illusion of synthesis that was no synthesis at all." Considering the reluctance of some early American historians to embrace post-modern perspectives, Saul Cornell urged a kind of "skeptical engagement" with critical theory in 1993. His article began by celebrating "post-structuralism's primary goal: to create the potential for political liberation by decentering, dislocating, and disrupting conventional understandings." Meanwhile, as recently as 1998, Ian Steele (who himself would like to help early American historians find a way to forge a new kind of synthesis) declared that few historians "see much to lament in the passing of what was once the tidy domain of colonial American history." (18)

A second line of inquiry concerns the degree to which synthetic accounts of history are written in the service of nation states, and as such are necessarily implicated in the structure of state power. Even as he urged the profession to turn towards synthesis in 1986, Thomas Bender revealed his sensitivity to this issue, writing, "an embrace of the nation-state as a unit of analysis certainly reveals a professional conservatism. It also makes a political statement that cannot but leave one uneasy at a time when nation-states threaten to destroy the world." Still, Bender believed at the time that "with an awareness of some of the stakes, an argument can be made for history's traditional support by nation-states." In response to Bender, Eric Monkkonen took the even more emphatic stance that synthesis was fatefully tainted by its association with the nation, declaring in an article in the American Historical Review in 1986:

   I wish to argue for what is unfortunately commonly construed as
   fragmentation.... Substantive research has fragmented our sense
   of the whole; thus we conclude that research has failed. But
   perhaps our sense of the whole is at fault. If we took our sense
   of the wholeness of the national past as a hypothesis, we could
   send it on vacation for a few years or even into retirement.

Critical perspectives on the relationship of synthesis and the state in American history have only grown stronger since that exchange. (19)

Writing on "the power of history," in 1998, Joyce Appleby sought to underscore the fact that "Westerners have naturalized the nation-state, making it the container for experiences of the past." She added that, "the identity politics of our day have emerged precisely in reaction to the claims of the nation to represent a homogenized people." In other words, there is a certain sense in which any return to a national synthesis will itself inevitably provide renewed impetus for the very fragmentation it was intended to alleviate. (20)

Under the circumstances, one might well expect all members of the profession (or at the very least early Americanists concerned to explicate the origins of the nation) to throw up their hands and bid an unceremonial farewell to synthesis. But, in fact, exactly the opposite has happened. In early American history, perhaps more than in any other field, calls for a return to synthesis have been loud and unrelenting. Given the inclusive and politically progressive intentions that initially spurred the new social history, it's clear that such urges don't generally stem from a diehard wish to restore Painter's "elite white men" to their former exclusive prominence. What, then, drives such work as Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton's 1993 William and Mary Quarterly article, "The Problem of Fragmentation and the Prospects for Synthesis in Early American History"? (21)

If the first objections to social history in the late 70's and early 80's focused on the fall away from politics and the consequent fragmentation of the field, later critics have been even more concerned by the trend away from narrative forms of historical writing. Anderson and Cayton summed up the problem succinctly when they explained in 1993 that "social history has made narrative a problematic form." They asked, "should we tell stories at all, if doing so requires us to reduce an abundance of data and a multiplicity of perspectives to linear chronological form?" Despite these misgivings, their answer was a nuanced and qualified, yet passionate, "yes." (22)

This has been the position of many others as well, including John Demos himself, that most vocal opponent of the "descriptive" and the "impressionistic" back in 1970. Demos declared in the new forward to the second edition of A Little Commonwealth that he had "(re)discovered an interest in the historian's ancient practice of narrative," a claim amply confirmed by the fact that he had begun the preface of his previous book, 1994's The Unredeemed Captive, with a capitalized, italicized declaration, "MOST OF ALL, I wanted to tell a story." Many have begun to feel that storytelling, an essential traditional element of the historian's craft, has been inadvertently and unnecessarily sacrificed in the drive to open to all the doors of the cozy club that once was history. (23)

The question of just why so many feel so drawn to stories is fascinating in itself. Quoting Peter Berger's work on sociological theories of religion, Joyce Appleby has noted that, "the human craving for meaning has the force of instinct." No doubt the urge to make meaning by telling stories is nearly universal; yet the crisis over narrative in history may also have certain distinctively American elements. (24)

By the same American peculiarity that has led so many to cling to hierarchy if only to give meaning to mobility, social historians persist in wishing for stories even as they insist on the need for a history which is ever more expansive. James Goodman declared in this vein that he "knew what the theory people said. Stories impose a false sense of order on a disorderly world." Nevertheless, Goodman simply insisted that he "believed that a good story left the world as messy as it found it. What a story did was stop the world ... long enough for him to get a good look at it." No matter the philosophical and political objections to the totalizing and even brutalizing potential of narratives, many early American historians insist there must be a way to have their social history and their stories too. (25)

In a sense the whole Derridaian project of deconstructing texts flies in the face of deeply rooted elements of American culture. Puritans, as "people of the book," believed, with a naive hopefulness now difficult to recapture, in the final and definitive authority of texts, believed, indeed, that the Bible could be regarded as a complete and uncontaminated container of all celestial and earthly knowledge. They clung to this belief even in the face of the all too obvious evidence against it presented in the antagonistic arguments of Anne Hutchinson and John Winthrop. So perhaps we should not be shocked that American social historians want their stories still. Decades after the new social historians tried to put the notion of a "New England mind" to rest, Perry Miller must be laughing in his grave.

Memoir writer Ruth Reichel recently summed up the popular American view when she said of her own work, "everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual.... I learned early that the most important thing in life is a good story." To a certain extent, then, narrative synthesis and theoretical analysis will always be at odds; the fact remains that the deepest attraction of stories is their ability to create the very illusion of seamless wholeness that deconstruction seeks to subvert. (26)

So it is hardly surprising that it has proved far easier to decry the loss of narrative forms than to find ways to reclaim them. Still, there is a widespread move within early American history to do just that. Saul Cornell, quoting literary critic Barbara Johnson in a piece that appeared in the Quarterly in 1993, put a subtly but significantly different gloss on "what the theory people said," than Goodman did, one which helps to point a way forward. His excerpt explains: "deconstruction is not a form of textual vandalism designed to prove that meaning is impossible ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not meaning but the claim to unequivocal domination of one form of meaning over another." In some sense then, what we need may be more stories not fewer, braided tales woven from multiple points of view rather than the illusionary objectivity of the supposedly omniscient narrator. (27)

In other words, if no system is perfect, this does not make all efforts at conceptualization pointless. Even as we acknowledge that the simple monarchial divide between animals and plants breaks down at the appearance of fungi, we can also appreciate that the concept of biological kingdoms still does a pretty nice job of capturing the essential difference between a dog and a dogwood.

Now, more than thirty years after the arrival of the new social history, many early American historians are arriving at a kind of consensus on the need for narrative and analysis alike. Goodman, in a marvelous deliberate juxtaposition of dirt dry analysis and gushing undammed narrative, shows the force and foibles of each on its own, and concludes that "many of the interesting questions about the rhetoric of history" are questions about the "kinds," the "proportions," and the "manner in which ... narrative and analysis are combined." Meanwhile Cayton and Anderson, while mounting a forceful case that arguments can be embedded in stories as plots, ultimately conclude that, "fragmentation and synthesis present ... an intellectually rich dialectic." Indeed, the simple fact that they present the argument that "narrative ... may ... communicate arguments (functioning as plots) through the telling of stories" in straightforward analytic prose underscores the importance of not trying to rely on narrative alone. There probably is no plot that can deliver the argument that plot can deliver an argument as well as argument can. Thoughtful early American scholars are already finding creative new ways to deliver both. (28)

Take the question of the political implications and ramifications of narrative. One of the most popularly and scholarly successful narratives of recent vintage is Jill Lepore's Bancroft winning 1998 book The Name of War. In it, Lepore succeeded in writing a gripping dramatic account of the events of King Phillip's War, even as she engaged in an explicit analytic discussion of the politics of narrative. In so doing, she showed that early American historians can meet Appleby's challenge to "think through the acts of appropriation and remembrance" that all histories engage in, yet still manage to tell an excellent tale. It is a fitting achievement for a Demos student. (29)

New efforts at synthesis have proved equally innovative and varied. One important direction is toward writing synthesis around formerly marginal focal points. Even the alarmed Eric Monkkonen conceded in his article, "The Danger of Synthesis," back in 1986, that, "the accusation that the argument for synthesis is a politically reactionary, veiled attempt to return to the history of great white men is unfair. There is no inherent reason that a feminist, an Indian, or a Marxist synthesis could not appear." In fact, part of the potential of the decentering effects of deconstruction is the possibility for new forms of synthesis to emerge that do something more than detail the lives of the usual suspects. Daniel Richter's most recent work, the Pulitzer-nominated Facing East from Indian Country (which recounts the unfolding story of colonial British America from contact through the Revolution from Native American points of view) effectively demonstrates what a de-centered synthesis might look like, and does a nice job of experimenting with narrative forms besides. A fruitful alternative approach is offered in Karen Kupperman's Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, which reveals the possibilities not of a de-centered, but of a many-centered synthesis, based less on narratives of action, than on analytic accounts of interactions. (30)

Another new kind of synthetic effort aims at avoiding the nationalist slant of traditional syntheses, by deliberately looking at units of analysis far smaller or far larger than the nation state. One important example of this is so-called microhistory, in which details of the varied dimensions of a single person's life are used to inform the concerns of a wide array of historical sub-fields. In his most recent reflections on synthesis, Thomas Bender remarked that "whether microhistory qualifies as a synthesis ... may be debated," but ultimately couldn't resist arguing for a few worthy books that do. Probably the best and best-known example of this phenomenon in early American history is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning book A Midwive's Tale. This book, as Anderson and Cayton eloquently argued, succeeds in large measure because it is a kind of "participatory narrative that allows the reader to join the author in the process of synthesizing information and interpreting evidence." Further fine examples of the form can be found in the contributions to the 1997 volume of essays Through a Glass Darkly, edited by Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel and Fredrika J. Teute, several of which have since appeared as full-length books. One of microhistory's achievements is to show that social history can treat historical subjects more specific than structures or groups, without either descending into the once much dreaded error of antiquarianism or conceding defeat and retreating to the lonely heights of "great man" history. (31)

A second major alternative for achieving synthesis while dodging the demands of nation-states comes from histories located at cultural boundary crossings and focused on still liminal--but no longer marginal--social actors. Ian K. Steele urged just this kind of effort in his 1998 piece on new perspectives in colonial American history, saying, "perhaps it is time to focus more attention on those who could see across the boundaries of tribe and nation, and particularly on those Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans who risked their lives to cross those boundaries." James Merrell's 1999 effort, Into the American Woods, which details the stories of cultural go-betweens on the colonial Pennsylvania frontier, is one stand-out new offering in this mode. Another offering from the editors at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the 1998 volume Contact Points, also hints at the growing potential of this approach. (32)

A third, and especially promising trend away from state-dominated history and towards a novel kind of synthesis is the recent turn toward conceptualizing colonial history not as early American, but as early Atlantic, eschewing the boundaries of nineteenth-century nationalism in favor of the more open and fluid actual contours of the early modern world. This is the place where Thomas Bender's many musings about synthesis have recently come to rest. He explained in a 2002 review essay in the American Historical Review that "it seems plausible to propose that a wider canvas, a supranational context" is needed so that "national histories will be not so firmly bounded and the assumption of their autarky will be softened by the recognition that national histories are embedded in yet larger histories." Bender's comment echoed Gordon Wood's 1995 remark that "the colonies are now seen as an outgrowth not just of Europe but of Africa as well; they have become parts of a greater pan-Atlantic World." It also reinforced Steele's statement lauding the emergence of Atlantic history as "an alternative integration model, which ... promises to compare the separate, connected, and blended histories of Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians." There can be no doubt that the Atlantic perspective is a key new trend in early American history. (33)

By informal count, at least forty-five new titles on early modern Atlantic topics have appeared in the last five years alone. Of particular importance are offerings like Philip Curtin's 2001 Migration and Mortality in Africa and the Atlantic World and Sylvia Fry and Betty Wood's 1999 edited volume of essays, From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World. These books begin to make good the claim that the Atlantic approach will incorporate African as well as European and American history. The appearance of Richard Dunn's much anticipated study The Peoples of Mesopotamia and Mount Airy: Slave Life in Jamaica and Virginia, 1762-1865 would be another excellent step in that direction and would also be a nice cap to the contributions he has made in urging early Americanists to consider oceanic connections ever since the publication of his 1972 book Sugar and Slaves. In any case, this crucial area is rapidly becoming one of the most vital in the field; the July 2002 publication of a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly on "Slaveries in the Atlantic World" provides further evidence of the number of new projects on the African Atlantic now in production. (34)

Another major trend in synthesis, besides "de-centered" or re-centered syntheses and the various intra and extra national models of synthesis, is the movement toward rehabilitating intellectual and political history under the rubric of political culture. To be sure, this idea is not a new one. Bender, of course, had called for such a move back in 1986. But the full potential of this idea awaited social history's fuller engagement with theory in all its many guises. In 1986 few could draw on Habermas, whose work on the public sphere was not widely available in English until 1989. By 1999, by contrast, a book like Peter Thompson's Rum Punch and Revolution is able to show the ways in which a study of popular culture forms such as taverngoing can simultaneously address questions of gender and social order while also probing political consciousness across social spectrums. In the process, the book sets out insights gleaned not only from such now "traditional" new social history sources as tax lists and material culture, but also from such once scorned literary sources as diaries and letters. (35)

Indeed, the erstwhile "antagonism" between the new social history and political history ultimately generated the positive creative tensions that have become the driving force behind history's most striking current trend: the shift to a new cultural history. James McMillan's observations on directions in French history hold true for early America: "the new cultural history is ultimately social history's way back into politics." Whether one applauds or deplores what Joyce Appleby half admiringly, half mockingly described as post-modernism's "confrontational oxymorons and ear-shattering neologisms," one must concede that the theoretical underpinnings provided by post-structuralist theory are allowing historians of early America to reengage with questions of power in important new ways, to reassess once rejected sources, and to reimagine the very idea of synthesis. (36)

In fact, what makes much of current approaches to history both possible and palatable, from the revitalization of narrative to the invention of microhistory, from the renewed interest in literary sources to the revamped field of political culture, is the post-modern concept of the subject position. So thoroughly has post-structuralist theory undermined the totalizing authority of texts (understood to mean any form of cultural production) that the concept of typicality, one of the new social history's proudest early achievements, no longer even seems tenable. Rather than trying to argue that any one person can ever be statistically or substantially representative of any other, many have begun to adopt a social model that assumes that any and every social actor is embedded in a matrix of relationships based on myriad categories of identity and power, of which the three most commonly cited--race, class, and gender--are but the beginning. No two subject positions are ever identical; yet each and every one that can be plotted tells us something more about the matrix with in which all are situated. Whether we are reading Martha Ballard's birthing records or Philadelphia tavern records we are amassing information about myriad threads in the social web. (37)

One of the most intriguing outcomes of this newfound interest in the "situative" over the "representative" is that it creates a forceful new way of integrating disparate elements of the historical record. A scholar like Kathleen M. Brown can not only link questions of gender, race, and power into a single study, she can take a simple story about the shaping of Lucy Byrd's eyebrows (a deliciously pointed domestic tidbit) and show us how it illuminates the anxiety underlying an entire patriarchal culture. Few would claim that the elite and rather eccentric Byrds of Virginia were "representative" of many colonial people. Yet, by showing how their concerns relate to the larger culture, by mapping their place in the social matrix, Brown is able to tell a telling story. To talk about "gender" rather than women or "race" rather than blacks or Indians is far more than an exercise in political correctness; it is a political act that insists on uncovering the interconnectedness of all constructions of identity and power. (38)

Indeed, perhaps the most lasting legacy of the new social history has been the slow but sure collapse between the boundaries of public and private, from the town halls of Dedham to Lucy Byrd's toilet table. In that sense, residual cries concerning fragmentation protest too much, insisting on the very analytic divides they supposedly deplore. The latest and most exciting work on social and cultural history transcends the ghettoization of various fields and groups to explore their interconnections. Thus, a book like Jane Kamensky's 1996 Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England can use a "narrow" cultural topic like speech norms to explore the broad mechanisms that make possible the social communication of subject positions. In the process, the book investigates everything from how and why a family conflict between father and son would come to be played out in public, to how Puritan notions of sin and repentance drove everything from the confessions of Salem witches to the public apology of Samuel Sewell. We could isolate Kamensky's various chapters and call them "women's history," "family history," religious history," "intellectual history," etc. etc. Or, we could take them together and recognize this startling and innovative new brand of synthesis for what it is. (39)

In short, since 1970 social history has morphed into so many creative incarnations, it can probably never again be contained within the bounds of a single sturdy synthesis. In that sense, the new social history did forever end the old. But neither does this mean that, as a result, history has simply shattered into hopeless fragments that can never be connected. On the contrary, the energy and dynamism of contemporary social and cultural history require us to reconsider the reductive either/or dilemma of fragmentation vs. synthesis along with so many other simultaneously comforting and confining conceptual binaries. In an age when fish walk on land, we need to redefine the very concept of synthesis in order to recognize the exciting integrative import of many of the newest initiatives of emerging and established scholars alike.

Department of History

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ENDNOTES

I wish to thank members of the McNeil Center for Early American studies who commented on aspects of this article, and especially Kathleen M. Brown for her generous criticisms. I also wish to thank my colleague Karen Kupperman for her comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

(1.) Of course social history was not the first methodological movement intended to bring scientific methods to bear on history; still early practitioners of the "new social history" saw themselves as the inaugurators of renewed and reinvigorated efforts in that direction (see below). Joyce Appleby also touches on the notion of "epistemological crises" and the philosophy of science in her article "The Power of History." See Appleby, "The Power of History," The American Historical Review 103 (Feb. 1998), 1-14: 2.

(2.) John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town--The First Hundred Years: Dedham Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York, 1970); and Michael Zuckerman, Peacable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970). My central interest in this piece is to consider the methods, theories, and perspectives of these authors, along with ensuing and evolving reactions to their vision for social history. Little attempt is made to recount their specific historical arguments and findings. Though it seems unlikely that anyone will read this who is not already familiar with these works, should a fuller synopsis be desired, I recommend one of the first of the many review articles to consider these works in tandem: Richard S. Dunn, "The Social History of Early New England," American Quarterly 24 (Dec., 1972), 661-679.

(3.) Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred years, Expanded Edition (New York, 1985), xi & xii. Note: all quotations are from this edition and will be hereafter cited as Lockridge, A New England Town.

(4.) Lockridge, A New England Town, xiv & xii.

(5.) Greven, Four Generations, fottnote #1, vii & vi-vii.

(6.) Greven, Four Generations, ix, 3, 18.

(7.) Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms, vii & viii.

(8.) Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms, 3 & 7.

(9.) John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, 2nd Ed. (New York, 2000), xvi, xviii, xix, xx (emphasis original), & xix. Note: all quotations are from this edition and will be hereafter cited as Demos, A Little Commonwealth.

(10.) Demos, A Little Commonwealth, xvi, xxi, xv.

(11.) Demos, A Little Commonwealth, xix.

(12.) Demos, A Little Commonwealth, xix.

(13.) Laurence Veysey, "The 'New' Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing," Reviews in American History 7 (March 1979), 1-12: 2 & 3.

(14.) Lockridge, A New England Town, 190 and Thomas Bender, 'Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History," The Journal of American History 73 (June 1986), 120-136: 125.

(15.) Bender, "Wholes and Parts;" Veysey, "The New Social History," 5.

(16.) Zuckerman, Friends and Neighbors, 10; Lockridge, A New England Town, 182; and Demos, A Little Commonwealth, x.

(17.) Veysey, "The New Social History," 2.

(18.) Nell Irvin Painter,"Bias and Synthesis in HIstory," The Journal of American History 74 (Jun. 1987), 109-112: 110; Saul Cornell, "Early American History in a Postmodern Age," William and Mary Quarterly 50 (Apr. 1993), 329-341: 329 and Ian Steele, "Exploding Colonial American History," Reviews in American History 26 (Jan 1998), 70-95: 85.

(19.) Bender, "Wholes and Parts," 125 and Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Dangers of Synthesis," 91 (Dec. 1986), 1146-1157: 1149 & 1154, emphasis added.

(20.) Appleby, "The Power of History," 10 & 11.

(21.) Eric Monkkonen makes a similar point on the question of whether synthesis is reactionary; see Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Dangers of Synthesis," and endnote #30 below. Fred Anderson and Andrew R. L. Cayton, "The Problem of Fragmentation and the Prospects for Synthesis in Early American Social History," William and Mary Quarterly 50 (Apr 1993), 299-310.

(22.) Anderson and Cayton, "The Problem of Fragmentation," 300.

(23.) Demos, A Little Commonwealth, xi; and Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994), xi, emphasis original.

(24.) Appleby, "The Power of History," 7.

(25.) James Goodman, "For the Love of Stories," Reviews in American History 26 (Jan 1998), 255-274: 269.

(26.) Ruth Reichel, Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table (New York, 1999), x.

(27.) Cornell, "Early American History in a Postmodern Age," 332.

(28.) Goodman, "For the Love of Stories," 261; Anderson and Cayton, "Fragmentation and Synthesis," 304 & 310.

(29.) Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Phillip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998); and Appleby, "The Power of History," 14.

(30.) Monkkonen, "The Dangers of Synthesis," 1154 and Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, 2001); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000).

(31.) Thomas Bender, "Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History," American Historical Review 107 (Feb 2002), 129-153: 145; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwive's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990); Anderson and Cayton, "The Problem of Fragmentation," 309; Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel and, Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1997).

(32.) Steele, "Exploding American History," 84; James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, 1999); Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998).

(33.) Bender, "Strategies of Narrative Synthesis," 152-153; Gordon Wood, "A Century of Writing Early American History: Then and Now Compared; Or How Henry Adams Got it Wrong," The American Historical Review 100 (Jun. 1995), 678-696: 693; Steele, "Exploding Colonial American History," 83.

(34.) Philip D. Curtin, Migration and mortality in Africa and the Atlantic world, 1700-1900 (Burlington, VT, 2001); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, eds., From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Portland, OR, 1999); the unpublished The Peoples of Mesopotamia and Mount Airy is cited in Richard S. Dunn, "From Minnesota to Barbados, Jamaica, Virginia, and Alabama," Commonplace 1 (4) 2001 http:// www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-04/

(35.) Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1999).

(36.) James F. McMillan, "Social History, 'New Cultural History,' and the Rediscovery of Politics: Some Recent Work on Modern France," The Journal of Modern History 4 (Dec. 1994), 755-772: 761; Appleby, "The Power of History," 9.

(37.) A recent brief and clear commentary the concept of "subject position" is provided in Dominick LaCapra, 'History, Language, and Reading Waiting for Crillon," American Historical Review 100 (Jun. 1995), 799-828: 805, footnote 16.

(38.) See Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), especially chapter ten, "Anxious Patriarchs."

(39.) Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1997).

By Nicole Eustace

New York University