After reading the introduction to Beyond the Founders<\/i> and discussing it in class on Tuesday, I was very interested to see how the rest of our readings would approach writing about history.\u00a0 Martha Hodes\u2019 \u201cFour Episodes in Re-creating a Life\u201d and Jeffrey L. Pasley\u2019s \u201cThe Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic\u201d both wrote about early American history effectively, but with vastly different methodologies.<\/p>\n
Martha Hodes\u2019 exploration into the vaguely narrated life of Eunice Richardson was a bold piece that attempted to fill in some historical blanks.\u00a0 While some of her pieced in evidence seemed far-fetched (such as, \u201cMiss Clara is the same madcap as ever<\/i>, Eunice wrote of her young daughter in 1864, invoking the common Caymanian manner of address.\u00a0 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?\u201d), the thought process and research that she put into the piece are interesting, creative, and thorough.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 While it\u2019s hard to say one way or another if Hodes\u2019 thesis has sufficient support, this type of historical writing and research interests me very much.\u00a0 Hodes used creativity in her piece that I have rarely seen before in a history class.\u00a0 Writing about Thomas Jefferson (who filed and recorded his prolific writing so well) would not require this sort of reconnaissance work.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As AJ says, \u201chistory doesn\u2019t come in squares and circles, it takes many different shapes and sizes, so why should we look at the early republic any differently?\u201d (AJ Pignone, Olney, MD). \u00a0\u201cFour Episodes\u201d is certainly a different shape and is critical to retelling and interpreting history in the best, most accurate way.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Pasley\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Pasley made some very interesting points about how common people worked to have a political voice.\u00a0 Whether it was through cheese, bread, newspapers, parades, toasts, or votes, Pasley discussed how American factions operated and thrived before organized political parties.\u00a0 I found Pasley\u2019s points about newspapers very remarkable as he writes, \u201cAfter 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\u201d (41).\u00a0 There was then good information and research showing how newspapers (such as The Sun<\/i>) influenced and shaped local and national politics.\u00a0 His statements on newspapers stress that they were just as influential and important to politics as Jefferson and Washington were.\u00a0 This is another example of how different shapes and pieces of the puzzle are necessary to get the full history of something.\u00a0 While certainly not as widely read as a biography about Benjamin Franklin would be, articles like Hodes\u2019 and Pasley\u2019s are crucial to the historical tale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 Martha Hodes\u2019 \u201cFour Episodes in Re-creating a Life\u201d and Jeffrey L. Pasley\u2019s \u201cThe Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy … <\/p>\n