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After reading the introduction to Beyond the Founders and discussing it in class on Tuesday, I was very interested to see how the rest of our readings would approach writing about history. Martha Hodes’ “Four Episodes in Re-creating a Life” and Jeffrey L. Pasley’s “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic” both wrote about early American history effectively, but with vastly different methodologies.
Martha Hodes’ exploration into the vaguely narrated life of Eunice Richardson was a bold piece that attempted to fill in some historical blanks. While some of her pieced in evidence seemed far-fetched (such as, “Miss Clara is the same madcap as ever, Eunice wrote of her young daughter in 1864, invoking the common Caymanian manner of address. Had Eunice just received a letter from the sea captain, asking after the children, the unwittingly echoed that West Indian turn of phrase in a letter to her mother?”), the thought process and research that she put into the piece are interesting, creative, and thorough. She followed the story as far as she could, as she traveled throughout the country and visiting the same towns and buildings that Eunice once knew. While it’s hard to say one way or another if Hodes’ thesis has sufficient support, this type of historical writing and research interests me very much. Hodes used creativity in her piece that I have rarely seen before in a history class. Writing about Thomas Jefferson (who filed and recorded his prolific writing so well) would not require this sort of reconnaissance work. Yet, as we talked about in class and AJ Pignone wrote extensively about in his blog, the best way to get a full history of a time period is through a careful combination of the major players and those who were more silenced. As AJ says, “history doesn’t come in squares and circles, it takes many different shapes and sizes, so why should we look at the early republic any differently?” (AJ Pignone, Olney, MD). “Four Episodes” is certainly a different shape and is critical to retelling and interpreting history in the best, most accurate way.
Jeffrey Pasley’s article about the famous (or infamous, as Federalist sympathizers would say) mammoth cheese from Chesire, Massachusetts told the story of early American politics in a way that hardly mentioned the founders. Pasley made some very interesting points about how common people worked to have a political voice. Whether it was through cheese, bread, newspapers, parades, toasts, or votes, Pasley discussed how American factions operated and thrived before organized political parties. I found Pasley’s points about newspapers very remarkable as he writes, “After 1800, no serious political activist thought that anything could be accomplished without newspaper support in as many places as possible, and at times they equated the maintenance of a newspaper with the actual existence of a party, faction, or movement” (41). There was then good information and research showing how newspapers (such as The Sun) influenced and shaped local and national politics. His statements on newspapers stress that they were just as influential and important to politics as Jefferson and Washington were. This is another example of how different shapes and pieces of the puzzle are necessary to get the full history of something. While certainly not as widely read as a biography about Benjamin Franklin would be, articles like Hodes’ and Pasley’s are crucial to the historical tale.