This paper argues that nineteenth-century American women viewed work as having a moral nature, and believed this idea extended to public advocacy. The latter is true in two senses: 1) that public advocacy also had a moral nature, and 2) that at times a relationship existed between the moral nature of their work and that of their activism. Private work could be seen as a moral duty or an evil nightmare, depending upon the context, and different women likewise saw activism as either right and proper or unethical and improper. More conservative women, for instance, did not support the shattering of traditional gender roles in the public sphere, the troubling efforts of other women to push for political and social change, no matter the justification. Abolition, women’s rights, and Native American rights, if worth pursuing at all, were the purview of men. Reformist women, on the other hand, saw their public roles as moral responsibilities that echoed those of domestic life or addressed its iniquities. While the moral connection between the two spheres is at times frustratingly tenuous and indirect, let us explore women’s divergent views on the rightness or wrongness of their domestic work and political activity, while considering why some women saw relationships between them. In this context, “work” and its synonyms can be defined as a nineteenth-century woman’s everyday tasks and demeanor — not only what she does but how she behaves in the home as well (as we will see, setting a behavioral example could be regarded as crucial a role in domestic life as household tasks).

In the 1883 memoir Life Among the Piutes, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (born Thocmentony) expressed a conviction that the household duties of Piute women and men carried moral weight.^[1] She entitled her second chapter “Domestic and Social Moralities,” domestic moralities being proper conduct regarding the home and family.^[2] “Our children are very carefully taught to be good,” the chapter begins — and upon reaching the age of marriage, interested couples are warned of the seriousness of domestic responsibilities.^[3] “The young man is summoned by the father of the girl, who asks him in her presence, if he really loves his daughter, and reminds him, if he says he does, of all the duties of a husband.”^[4] The concepts of love, marriage, and becoming a family were inseparable from everyday work. The father would then ask his daughter the same question. “These duties are not slight,” Winnemucca Hopkins writes. The woman is “to dress the game, prepare the food, clean the buckskins, make his moccasins, dress his hair, bring all the wood, — in short, do all the household work. She promises to ‘be himself,’ and she fulfils her promise.”^[5] “Be himself” may be indicative of becoming one with her husband, or even submitting to his leadership, but regardless of interpretation it is clear, with the interesting use of present tense (“fulfils”) and lack of qualifiers, that there is no question the woman will perform her proper role and duties. There is such a question for the husband, however: “if he does not do his part” when childrearing he “is considered an outcast.”^[6] Mothers in fact openly discussed whether a man was doing his duty.^[7] For Winnemucca Hopkins and other Piutes, failing to carry out one’s domestic labor was a shameful wrong. This chapter, and the book in general, attempts to demonstrate to a white American audience “how good the Indians were” — not lazy, not seeking war, and so on — and work is positioned as an activity that makes them ethical beings.^[8] And ethical beings, it implies, do not deserve subjugation and brutality. True, Winnemucca Hopkins may have emphasized domestic moralities to garner favor from whites with certain expectations of duty — but that does not mean these moralities were not in fact roots of Piute culture; more favor could have been curried by de-emphasizing aspects whites may have felt violated the social norms of work, such as men taking over household tasks, chiefs laboring while remaining poor, and so on, but the author resists, which could suggest reliability.^[9]

Like tending faithfully to private duties, for Winnemucca Hopkins advocacy for native rights was the right thing to do. A moral impetus undergirded both private and public acts. White settlers and the United States government subjected the Piutes, of modern-day Nevada, to violence, exploitation, internment, and removal; Winnemucca Hopkins took her skills as an interpreter and status as chief’s daughter to travel, write, petition, and lecture, urging the American people and state to end the suffering.^[10] She “promised my people that I would work for them while there was life in my body.”^[11] There was no ambiguity concerning the moral urgency of her public work: “For shame!” she wrote to white America, “You dare to cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts… Oh, my dear readers, talk for us, and if the white people will treat us like human beings, we will behave like a people; but if we are treated by white savages as if we are savages, we are relentless and desperate; yet no more so than any other badly treated people. Oh, dear friends, I am pleading for God and for humanity.”^[12] The crimes against the Piutes not only justified Winnemucca Hopkins raising her voice — they should spur white Americans to do the same, to uphold their own values such as faith, belief in liberty, etc. For this Piute leader, just as there existed a moral duty to never shirk domestic responsibilities, there existed a moral duty to not turn a blind eye to oppression.

Enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs understood work in a different way. The nature of her domestic labor was decidedly immoral.^[13] In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she wrote “of the half-starved wretches toiling from dawn till dark on the plantations… of mothers shrieking for their children, torn from their arms by slave traders… of young girls dragged down into moral filth… of pools of blood around the whipping post… of hounds trained to tear human flesh… of men screwed into cotton gins to die…”^[14] Jacobs, a slave in North Carolina, experienced the horrors of being sexual property, forced household work, and the spiteful sale of her children.^[15] Whereas Winnemucca Hopkins believed in the rightness of her private work and public advocacy, related moral duties to the home and to her people, Jacobs had an even more direct connection between these spheres: the immorality of her private work led straight to, and justified, her righteous battle for abolition. Even before this, she resisted the evil of her work, most powerfully by running away, but also by turning away from a slaveowner’s sexual advances, among other acts.^[16]

After her escape from bondage, Jacobs became involved in abolitionist work in New York and wrote Incidents to highlight the true terrors of slavery and push white women in the North toward the cause.^[17] Much of her story has been verified by (and we know enough of slavery from) other sources; she is not merely playing to her audience and its moral sensitivities either.^[18] One should note the significance of women of color writing books of this kind. Like Winnemucca Hopkins’ text, Jacobs’ contained assurances from white associates and editors that the story was true.^[19] Speaking out to change hearts was no easy task — prejudiced skepticism abounded. Jacobs (and her editor, Lydia Maria Child) stressed the narrative was “no fiction” and expected accusations of “indecorum” over the sexual content, anticipating criticisms that could hamper the text’s purpose.^[20] Writing could be dangerous and trying. Jacobs felt compelled to use pseudonyms to protect loved ones.^[21] She ended the work by writing it was “painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage.”^[22] Winnemucca Hopkins may have felt similarly. In a world of racism, doubt, reprisals, and trauma, producing a memoir was a brave, powerful act of advocacy.

Despite the pain (and concern her literary skills were inadequate^[23]), Jacobs saw writing Incidents as the ethical path. “It would have been more pleasant for me to have been silent about my own history,” she confesses at the start, a perhaps inadvertent reminder that what is right is not always what is easy. She then presents her “motives,” her “effort in behalf of my persecuted people.”^[24] It was right to reveal the “condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse,” to show “Free States what Slavery really is,” all its “dark…abominations.”^[25] Overall, the text is self-justifying. The evils of slavery warrant the exposé (Life Among the Piutes is similar). Jacobs’ public advocacy grew from and was justified by her experience with domestic labor and her moral values.

These things, for more conservative women, precluded public work. During the abolition and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century, less radical women saw the public roles of their sisters as violating the natural order and setting men and women against each other.^[26] Catherine Beecher, New York educator and writer, expressed dismay over women circulating (abolitionist) petitions in her 1837 “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females.”^[27] It was against a woman’s moral duty to petition male legislators to act: “…in this country, petitions to congress, in reference to the official duties of legislators, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without [outside] the sphere of female duty. Men are the proper persons to make appeals to rulers whom they appoint…”^[28] (This is an interesting use of one civil inequity to justify another: only men can vote, therefore only men should petition.) After all, “Heaven has appointed to one sex the superior, and to the other the subordinate station…”^[29] Christianity was the foundation of the gender hierarchy, which meant, for Beecher, that women entering the political sphere violated women’s divinely-decreed space and responsibilities. Women’s “influence” and “power” were to be exerted through the encouragement of love, peace, and moral rightness, as well as by professional teaching, in the “domestic and social circle.”^[30] In other words, women were to hint to men and boys the proper way to act in politics only while at home, school, and so forth.^[31] This highlights why domestic “work” must reach definitionally beyond household tasks: just as Winnemucca Hopkins and Jacobs were expected to maintain certain demeanors in addition to completing their physical labors, here women must be shining examples, moral compasses, with bearings above reproach.

Clearly, direct calls and organizing for political and social change were wrong; they threatened “the sacred protection of religion” and turned woman into a “combatant” and “partisan.”^[32] They set women against God and men. Elsewhere, reformist women were also condemned for speaking to mixed-sex audiences, attacking men instead of supporting them, and more.^[33] Beecher and other women held values that restricted women to domestic roles, to “power” no more intrusive to the gender order than housework — to adopt these roles was moral, to push beyond them immoral. The connection between the ideological spheres: one was an anchor on the other. (Limited advocacy to keep women in domestic roles, however, seemed acceptable: Beecher’s essay was public, reinforcing the expectations and sensibilities of many readers, and she was an activist for women in education, a new role yet one safely distant from politics.^[34]) Reformist women, of course, such as abolitionist Angelina Grimké, held views a bit closer to those of Jacobs and Winnemucca Hopkins: women were moral beings, and therefore had the ethical responsibility to confront wrongs just as men did, and from that responsibility came the inherent social or political rights needed for the task.^[35]

The diversity of women’s beliefs was the product of their diverse upbringings, environments, and experiences. Whether domestic labor was viewed as moral depended on its nature, its context, its participants; whether engagement in the public sphere was seen as the same varied according to how urgent, horrific, and personal social and political issues were regarded. Clearly, race impacted how women saw work. The black slave could have a rather different perspective on moral-domestic duty than a white woman (of any class). One historian posited that Jacobs saw the evils of forced labor as having a corrosive effect on her own morals, that freedom was a prerequisite to a moral life.^[36] A unique perspective born of unique experiences. Race impacted perspectives on activism, too, with voices of color facing more extreme, violent motivators like slavery and military campaigns against native nations. Factors such as religion, political ideology, lack of personal impact, race, class, and so on could build a wall of separation between the private and public spheres in the individual mind, between where women should and should not act, but they could also have a deconstructive effect, freeing other nineteenth-century American women to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior. That domestic work and public advocacy had moral natures, aligning here, diverging there, at times connecting, has rich support in the extant documents.

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^[1] Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Press, 2017), 25-27.

^[2] Ibid., 25.

^[3] Ibid. 25-26.

^[4] Ibid. 26.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid., 27.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid., 27-28.

^[10] Ibid., 105-108 offers examples of Winnemucca Hopkins’ advocacy such as petitioning and letter writing. Her final sentence (page 107) references her lectures on the East coast.  

^[11] Ibid., 105.

^[12] Ibid., 106.

^[13] “Slavery is wrong,” she writes flatly. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jennifer Fleischner (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020), 95.

^[14] Ibid., 96.

^[15] Ibid., chapters 5, 16, 19.

^[16] Ibid., 51 and chapter 27.

^[17] Ibid., 7-18, 26.

^[18] Ibid., 7-9.

^[19] Ibid., 26-27, 207-209.

   Winnemucca Hopkins, Piutes, 109-119.

^[20] Jacobs, Incidents, 25-27.

^[21] Ibid., 25.

^[22] Ibid., 207.

^[23] Ibid., 25-26.

^[24] Ibid., 26.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Catherine Beecher, “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 109-110.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Ibid., 110.

^[29] Ibid., 109.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Ibid., 110.

^[32] Ibid., 109-110.

^[33] “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y.,” in ibid., 163.

“Pastoral Letter: The General Association of Massachusetts Churches Under Their Care,” in ibid., 120.

^[34] Beecher, “Duty,” 109.

^[35] Angelina Grimké, “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States,” in ibid., 103. See also Angelina Grimké, “Letter to Theodore Dwight Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier” in ibid., 132.

^[36] Kathleen Kennedy (lecture, Missouri State University, April 12, 2022).

The women’s rights movement of mid-nineteenth century America grew out of the preceding and concurrent abolitionist movement because anti-slavery women recognized greater political power could help end the nation’s “peculiar institution.” The emancipation of women, in other words, could lead to the emancipation of black slaves. This is seen, for example, in the writings of abolitionist activist Angelina Grimké. “Slavery is a political subject,” she wrote in a letter to a friend on February 4, 1837, summarizing the words of her conservative critics, “therefore women should not intermeddle. I admitted it was, but endeavored to show that women were citizens & had duties to perform to their country as well as men.”^[1] If women possessed full citizen rights, Grimké implied, they could fully engage in political issues like slavery and influence outcomes as men did. The political project of abolishing slavery necessitated political rights for the women involved in and leading it.

Other documents of the era suggest this prerequisite for abolition in similar ways. Borrowing the ideas of the Enlightenment and the national founding, abolitionists positioned the end of slavery as the acknowledgement of the inalienable rights of enslaved persons — to achieve this end, women’s rights would need to be recognized as well. In 1834, the American Anti-Slavery Society created a petition for women to sign that urged the District of Columbia to abolish slavery, calling for “the restoration of rights unjustly wrested from the innocent and defenseless.”^[2] The document offered justification for an act as bold and startling (“suffer us,” “bear with us” the authors urge) as women petitioning government, for instance the fact that the suffering of slaves meant the suffering of fellow women.^[3] Indeed, many Americans believed as teacher and writer Catherine Beecher did, that “in this country, petitions to congress, in reference to the official duties of legislators, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without [outside] the sphere of female duty. Men are the proper persons to make appeals to rulers whom they appoint…”^[4] It would not do for women to petition male legislators to act. In drafting, circulating, and signing this petition, women asserted a political right (an inalienable right of the First Amendment) for themselves, a deed viewed as necessary in the great struggle to free millions of blacks. (Many other bold deeds were witnessed in this struggle, such as women speaking before audiences.^[5]) 

Beecher’s writings reveal that opponents of women’s political activism understood abolitionists’ sentiments that moves toward gender equality were preconditions for slavery’s eradication. She condemned the “thirst for power” of abolitionists; women’s influence was to be exerted through the encouragement of love, peace, and moral rightness, as well as by professional teaching, in the “domestic and social circle.”^[6] The male sex, being “superior,” was the one to go about “exercising power” of a political nature.^[7] Here gender roles were clearly defined, to be adhered to despite noble aims. The pursuit of rights like petitioning was, to Beecher, the wrong way to end the “sin of slavery.”^[8] Yet this castigation of the pursuit of public power to free the enslaved supports the claim that such a pursuit, with such a purpose, indeed took place.

Overall, reformist women saw all public policy, all immoral laws, within their grasp if political rights were won (a troubling thought to Beecher^[9]). In September 1848, one Mrs. Sanford, a women’s rights speaker at a Cleveland gathering of the National Negro Convention Movement, summarized the goals of her fellow female activists: they wanted “to co-operate in making the laws we obey.”^[10] The same was expressed a month before at the historic Seneca Falls convention.^[11] This paralleled the words of Grimké above, as well as her 1837 demand that women have the “right to be consulted in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed…”^[12] Women saw themselves as under the heel of immoral laws. But as moral beings, Grimké frequently stressed, they had the responsibility to confront wrongs just as men did, and from that responsibility came the inherent political rights needed for such confrontations.^[13] If a law such as the right to own human beings was unjust, women would need power over lawmaking, from petitioning to the vote, to correct it.

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^[1] Angelina Grimké, “Letter to Jane Smith,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 93.

^[2] The American Anti-Slavery Society, “Petition Form for Women,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 85.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Catherine Beecher, “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 110.

^[5] “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y.,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 163.

^[6] Beecher, “Duty,” 109.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid., 111.

^[9] Ibid., 110.

^[10] “Proceedings of the Colored Convention,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 168.

^[11] “Seneca Falls,” 165.

^[12] Angelina Grimké, “Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 135.

^[13] Angelina Grimké, “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 103. See also Angelina Grimké, “Letter to Theodore Dwight Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier” in ibid., 132.

Early New England history cannot be properly understood without thorough examination of the ways in which women, or the representations of women, threatened or maintained the gender hierarchy of English society. This is a complex task. Documents written by women and men alike could weaken or strengthen the ideology and practice of male dominance, just as the acts of women, whether accurately preserved in the historical record, distorted in their representation, or lost to humankind forever, could engage with the hierarchy in different ways. (The deeds of men could as well, but that falls beyond the scope of this paper.) This is not to say that every act or writing represented a conscious decision to threaten or shore up the gender order — some likely were, others likely not — but for the historian the outcome or impact grows clear with careful study. Of course, this paper does not posit that every source only works toward one end or the other. In some ways a text might undermine a social system, in other ways bolster it. Yet typically there will be a general trend. Uncovering such an overall impact upon the hierarchy allows for a fuller understanding of any given event in the English colonies during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. (That is, from the English perspective. This paper considers how the English saw themselves and others, yet the same analysis could be used for other societies, a point we will revisit in the conclusion.)

Let us begin with a source that works to maintain the gender order, Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Rowlandson was an Englishwoman from Massachusetts held captive for three months by the Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wompanoag during King Philip’s War (1675-1676). Her text, which became popular in the colonies, carefully downplays the power of Weetamoo, the female Pocassett Wompanoag chief, whose community leadership, possession of vast land and servants, and engagement in diplomacy and war violated Rowlandson’s Puritan understanding of a woman’s proper place in society.^[1] As historian Lisa Brooks writes, “Throughout her narrative, Rowlandson never acknowledged that Weetamoo was a leader equal to a sachem [chief], although this was common knowledge in the colonies. Rather, she labored to represent Weetamoo’s authority as a pretension.”^[2] In contrast, Rowlandson had no issue writing of “Quanopin, who was a Saggamore​ [chief]” of the Narragansetts, nor of “King Philip,” Metacom, Wompanoag chief.^[3] It was appropriate for men to hold power.

That Rowlandson presented Weetamoo’s authority as an act is a plausible interpretation of the former’s lengthy depiction of Weetamoo dressing herself — this “proud Dame” who took “as much time as any of the Gentry of the land.”^[4] She was playing dress-up, playing a part, Rowlandson perhaps implied, an idea that grows stronger with the next line: “When she had dressed her self, her work was to make Girdles of Wampom…”^[5] The gentry do not work; the powerful do not labor. How can a working woman have authority? Further, Rowaldson ignored the fact that wampum “work” was a key part of tribal diplomacy, attempted to portray her servitude as unto Quinnapin rather than Weetamoo (giving possessions first to him), and later labeled the chief an arrogant, “proud gossip” — meaning, Brooks notes, “in English colonial idiom, a woman who does not adhere to her position as a wife.”^[6] Rowlandson likely felt the need, whether consciously or not, to silence discomforting realities of Native American nations. Weetamoo’s power, and a more egalitarian society, threatened the English gender order, and it would thus not do to present dangerous ideas to a wider Puritan audience.

“Likely” is used as a qualifier because it must be remembered that publication of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God had to go through male Puritan authorities like clergyman Increase Mather, who wrote the preface.^[7] It remains an open question how much of this defense of the gender hierarchy comes from Rowlandson and how much from the constraints of that hierarchy upon her: under the eyes of Mather and others, a narrative that did not toe the Puritan line would simply go unpublished. But the overall impact is clear. Rowlandson, as presented in the text, held true to the proper role of women — and thus so should readers.

Conflict with native tribes and captivity narratives held a central place in the colonial English psyche. One narrative that did more to threaten the gender order was that of Hannah Dustin’s captivity, as told by religious leader Cotton Mather, first from the pulpit and then in his 1699 Decennium Luctousum. Unlike his father Increase, Cotton Mather was in a bit of a bind. Dangerous ideas were already on the loose; his sermon and writings would attempt to contain them.^[8] Hannah Dustin of Massachusetts was captured by the Abenaki in 1697, during King William’s War. She was placed in servitude to an indigenous family of two men, three women, and seven children.^[9] Finding themselves traveling with so few captors, Dustin and two other servants seized hatchets one night and killed the men and most of the women and children.^[10] Dustin and the others scalped the ten dead and carried the flesh to Boston, earning fifty pounds, various gifts, and much acclaim. Mather’s representation of Dustin would have to confront and contextualize a seismic disturbance in the social order: women behaving like men, their use of extreme violence.

Mather first turned to the bible for rationalization, writing that Dustin “took up a Resolution, to imitate the Action of Jael upon Sisera…”^[11] In Judges 4, a Kenite woman named Jael hammered a tent peg through the skull of the (male) Canaanite commander Sisera, helping the Israelites defeat the Canaanite army. Mather’s audiences would understand the meaning. Puritan women’s subservient and submissive status was rooted in the bible, yet there were extreme circumstances where female violence was justified; being likewise against the enemies of God, Dustin’s gruesome act could be tolerated. Mather then used place as justification: “[B]eing where she had not her own Life secured by any Law unto her, she thought she was not Forbidden by any Law to take away the Life of the Murderers…”^[12] In other words, Dustin was in Native American territory, a lawless space. This follows the long-established colonizer mindset of our civilization versus their wilderness and savagery, but here, interestingly, the condemned latter was used as justification for a Puritan’s act.^[13] Being unprotected by Puritan laws in enemy lands, Mather wrote, Dustin saw herself as also being free from such laws, making murder permissible. However, the clergyman’s use of “she thought” suggests a hesitation to fully approve of her deed.^[14] He nowhere claims what she did was right.

Clearly, Mather attempted to prevent erosion of the gender order through various privisos: a woman murdering others could only be agreeable before God in rare situations, she was outside Puritan civilization and law, plus this was only her view of acceptable behavior. He was also sure to present her husband as a “Courageous” hero who “manfully” saved their children from capture at risk of his own life, as if a reminder of who could normally and properly use violence.^[15] Yet Mather could not shield from the public what was already known, acts that threatened the ideology of male superiority and social dominance. The facts remained: a woman got the best of and murdered two “Stout” men.^[16] She killed women and children, typically victims of men. She then took their scalps and received a bounty, as a soldier might do. Further, she was praised by men of such status as Colonel Francis Nicholson, governor of Maryland.^[17] Mather could not fully approve of Dustin’s actions, but given the acclaim she had garnered neither could he condemn them. Both his relaying of Dustin’s deed and his tacit acceptance presented a significant deviation from social norms to Puritan communities.

Finally, let us consider the diary of Martha Ballard, written 1785-1812. Ballard, a midwife who delivered over eight hundred infants in Hallowell, Maine, left a daily record of her work, home, and social life. This document subverts the gender order by countering the contemporaneous texts positioning men as the exclusive important actors in the medical and economic spheres.^[18] It is true that this diary was never meant for public consumption, unlike other texts. However, small acts by ordinary people undermine social systems, whether wittingly or not, and are never known to others. If this is true, surely texts, by their nature, can do the same. Either way, the diary did not remain private: it was read by Ballard’s descendants, historians, and possibly librarians, meaning its impact trickled beyond its creator and into the wider society of nineteenth century New England.^[19]

Written by men, doctors’ papers and merchant ledgers of this period were silent, respectively, on midwives and women’s economic functions in towns like Hallowell, implying absence or non-involvement, whereas Ballard’s diary illuminated their importance.^[20] She wrote, for example, on November 18, 1793: “At Capt Meloys. His Lady in Labour. Her women Calld… My patient deliverd at 8 hour 5 minute Evening of a fine daughter. Her attendants Mrss Cleark, Duttum, Sewall, & myself.”^[21] This passage, and the diary as a whole, emphasized that it was common for midwives and women to safely and skilfully deliver infants, not a man or doctor present.^[22] Further, her documentations such as “I have been pulling flax,” “Dolly warpt a piece for Mrs Pollard of 39 yards,” and “Dolly warpt & drawd a piece for Check. Laid 45 yds” made clear that women had economic responsibilities that went beyond their own homes, turning flax into cloth (warping is a key step) that could be traded or sold.^[23] Women controlled their labor, earning wages: “received 6/ as a reward.”^[24] Though Ballard’s text presents everyday tasks of New England women of her social class, and had a limited readership compared to Rowlandson or Mather’s writings, it too presents dangerous ideas that might bother a reader wedded to the gender hierarchy: that women could be just as effective as male doctors, and that the agency and labor of women hinted at possibilities of self-sufficiency.

The events in this essay, the captivity of English women during war and the daily activities of many English women during peace, would look different without gender analysis, without considering how the acts of women and representations of events related to the gender order. Rowlandson would simply be ignorant, failing to understand who her actual master was, Weetamoo’s position, and so on. Dustin’s violence would be business as usual, a captive killing to escape, with all of Mather’s rationalizations odd and unnecessary. Ballard’s daily entries would just be minutiae, with no connection to or commentary on the larger society from whence they came. Indeed, that is the necessary project. Examining how the gender hierarchy was defended or confronted provides the proper context for a fuller understanding of events — from an English perspective. A future paper might examine other societies, such as Native American nations, in the same way. Clearly, the acts of indigenous women and the (English) representations of those acts influenced English minds, typically threatening their hierarchy. But how did the acts of indigenous women and men, those of English women and men, and indigenous representations of such things engage with Native American tribes’ unique gender systems? We can find hints in English representations (Weetamoo may have been dismayed Rowlandson violated indigenous gender norms^[25]), but for an earnest endeavor, primary sources by native peoples will be necessary, just as English sources enabled this writing.

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^[1] Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), chapter one.

^[2] Ibid., 264.

^[3] Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018), 81.

^[4] Ibid., 103.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 264, 270.

^[7] Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 28.

  Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 264.

^[8] “The Captivity of Hannah Dustin,” in Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018), 170-173.

^[9] Ibid., 172.

^[10] Ibid., 173.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Kirsten Fischer, “The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 3-19.

^[14] “Hannah Dustin,” 173.

^[15] Ibid., 171-172.

^[16] Ibid., 172.

^[17] Ibid., 173.

^[18] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 28-30.

^[19] Ibid., 8-9, 346-352.

^[20] Ibid., 28-30.

^[21] Ibid., 162-163.

^[22] See Ibid., 170-172 for infant mortality data.

^[23] Ibid., 36, 73, 29.

^[24] Ibid., 162. See also page 168.

^[25] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 265.

Historian John R. Gramm characterized Mary Rowlandson, an Englishwoman captured by allied Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wompanoag warriors during King Philip’s War (1675-1676), as “both a victim and colonizer.”^[1] This is correct, and observed in what is often labeled the first American bestseller. Rowlandson’s narrative of her experience, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, is written through these inseparable lenses, a union inherent to the psychology of settler colonialism (to be a colonizer is to be a “victim”) and other power systems. Reading the narrative through both lenses, rather than one, avoids both dehumanization and a colonizer mindset, allowing for a more nuanced study.

Rowlandson as victim appears on the first page, with her town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, attacked by the aforementioned tribes: “Houses were burning,” women and children clubbed to death, a man dying from “split open…Bowels.”^[2] At the final page, after she was held against her will for three months, forced to work, and ransomed for twenty pounds, she was still elaborating on the “affliction I had, full measure (I thought) pressed down and running over” — that cup of divinely ordained hardships.^[3] Between war, bondage, the loss of her infant, and the elements such as hunger and cold, Rowlandson was a woman experiencing trauma, swept up in events and horrors beyond her control. “My heart began to fail,” she wrote, signifying her pain, “and I fell a weeping…”^[4]

Rowlandson knew she was a victim. She did not know she was a colonizer, at least not in any negatively connoted fashion. Also from opening to close are expressions of racial and moral superiority. Native peoples are “dogs,” “beasts,” “merciless and cruel,” marked by “savageness and brutishness.”^[5] She saw “a vast difference between the lovely faces of Christians, and the foul looks of these Heathens,” whose land was unadulterated “wilderness.”^[6] Puritan society was civilization, native society was animalistic. That Rowlandson’s views persist despite her deeper understanding of and integration with Wompanoag society could be read as evidence of especially strong prejudices (though publication of her work may have required toeing the Puritan line). Regardless, her consciousness was thoroughly defined by religion and what historian Kristen Fischer called the “imperial gaze.”^[7] Rowlandson’s town of Lancaster was in the borderlands, meaning more conflict with Native Americans; she was a prosperous minister’s wife, making religion an even more central part of her life than the average Puritan woman. (Compare this to someone like midwife Martha Ballard, whose distance from Native Americans and lower social class built a consciousness around her labor and relationships with other working women.^[8]) Not only is the distinction between herself (civilized) and them (beastly) clear in Rowlandson’s mind, so is the religious difference — though for many European Americans Christianity and civilization were one and the same. The English victims are always described as “Christians,” which positions the native warriors as heathen Others (she of course makes this explicit as well, as noted).

These perspectives, of victim and colonizer, cannot be easily parsed apart. Setting aside Rowlandson’s kidnapping for a moment, settler colonization in some contexts requires a general attitude of victimhood. If “savages” are occupying land you believe God granted to you, as Increase Mather, who wrote Rowlandson’s preface, stated plainly, that is a wrong that can be addressed with violence.^[9] Rowlandson is then a victim twofold. First, her Puritan promised land was being occupied by native peoples. Second, she was violently captured and held. To be a colonizer is to be a victim, by having “your” land violated by societies there before you, and by experiencing the counter-violence wrought by your colonization.

To only read Rowlandson’s captivity as victimhood is to simply adopt Rowlandson’s viewpoint, ignoring the fact that she is a foreigner with attitudes of racial and religious superiority who has encroached on land belonging to native societies. To read the captivity only through a colonizer lens, focusing on her troubling presence and views, is to dehumanize Rowlandson and ignore her emotional and physical suffering. When Chief Weetamoo’s infant dies, Rowlandson “could not much condole” with the Wampanoags, due to so many “sorrowfull dayes” of her own, including losing her own baby. She sees only the “benefit…more room.”^[10] This callousness could be interpreted as a belief that Native Americans did not suffer like full human beings, mental resistance to an acknowledgement that might throw colonialism into question.^[11] That is the colonizer lens. Yet from a victim-centered reading, it is difficult to imagine many contexts wherein a kidnapped person would feel much sympathy for those responsible for her captivity and servitude, the deaths of her infant and neighbors, and so on. Victim and colonizer indeed.

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^[1] John R. Gramm (lecture, Missouri State University, February 15, 2022).

^[2] Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018), 74.

^[3] Ibid., 118.

^[4] Ibid., 88.

^[5] Ibid., 76-77, 113-114.

^[6] Ibid., 100, 76.

^[7] Kirsten Fischer, “The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 3-19.

^[8] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). Ballard and her husband, a working middle-class woman and a tax collector, faced financial hardship and ended up living in “semi-dependence on their son’s land”; see page 265. Compare this to Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 15-16: coming from and marrying into large landowning families, Rowlandson did not need to work to survive. Given her background, her consciousness goes beyond women and work, to larger collective concerns of community, civilization, and faith.

^[9] Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 28.

  Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 11.

^[10] Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 97.

^[11] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 282.

Christians Blamed Native Americans for Witchcraft

Boston clergyman Cotton Mather saw New Englanders like Mercy Short as particularly vulnerable to attacks by the Devil in the late seventeenth century due to the presence of Christianity on Native American land (or, more in his parlance, land formerly occupied only by the indigenous). Mather’s A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning of 1693 opens with two sentences outlining how Mercy Short was captured by “cruel and Bloody Indians” in her youth.^[1] They killed her family and held her for ransom, which was eventually paid. This first paragraph may seem out of place, its only purpose seemingly being to evoke sympathy: see how much this young woman has suffered. “[S]he had then already Born the Yoke in her youth, Yett God Almighty saw it Good for her to Bear more…”^[2]

However, the paragraph serves to establish a tacit connection between indigenous people and the witchcraft plaguing Salem. This is made more explicit later in the text, when Mather writes that someone executed at Salem testified “Indian sagamores” had been present at witch meetings to organize “the methods of ruining New England,” and that Mercy Short, in a possessed state, revealed the same, adding Native Americans at such meetings held a book of “Idolatrous Devotions.”^[3] Mather, and others, believed Indigenous peoples were involved in the Devil’s work, so torturous to New Englanders. This was perceived to be a reaction to the Puritan presence. “It was a rousing alarm to the Devil,” Mather wrote in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692), “when a great company of English Protestants and Puritans came to erect evangelical churches in a corner of the world where he had reigned…”^[4] The Devil, displeased that Christianity was now “preached in this howling wilderness,” used native peoples to try to drive the Puritans out, including the sorcery of “Indian Powwows,” religious figures.^[5] Because of Christianity’s presence in the “New World,” people like Mercy Short were far more at risk of diabolical terror — Mather thought “there never was a poor plantation more pursued by the wrath of the Devil…”^[6]

The Accusers Parroted Each Other and No One Noticed

During the Salem witch trials of 1692, hysteria spread and convictions were secured due in part to near-verbatim repetition among the accusers. It seems likely that, rather than arousing suspicion, the fact that New Englanders accusing their neighbors of witchcraft used the precise same phrasing was viewed as evidence of truthtelling. Elizabeth Hubbard, testifying against a native woman named Tituba, reported: “I saw the apparition of Tituba Indian, which did immediately most grievously torment me…”^[7] This occurred until “the day of her examination, being March 1, and then also at the beginning of her examination, but as soon as she began to confess she left off hurting me and has hurt me but little since.”^[8] This is nearly identical to the testimony that occurred the same day from Ann Putnam, Jr. She said, “I saw the apparition of Tituba, Mr. Parris’s Indian woman, which did torture me most grievously…till March 1, being the day of her examination, and then also most grievously also at the beginning of her examination, but since she confessed she has hurt me but little.”^[9] Though premeditation is in the realm of the possible (in other words, Putnam and Hubbard aligning their stories beforehand), this could be the result of spontaneous mimicking, whether conscious or subconscious, in a courtroom that was rather open (the second testifier copied the first because she was present to hear it).

This was a pattern in the trials that strengthened the believability of witchcraft tales. At the trial of Dorcas Hoar, accusers testified that “I verily believe in my heart that Dorcas Hoar is a witch” (Sarah Bibber), “I verily believe that Dorcas Hoar, the prisoner at the bar, is a witch” (Elizabeth Hubbard), “I verily believe in my heart that Dorcas Hoar is a witch” (Ann Putnam, Jr.), and “I verily believe in my heart that Dorcas Hoar is a most dreadful witch” (Mary Walcott).^[10] Like the statements on Tituba, these occurred on the same day — a self-generating script that spelled destruction for the accused.

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^[1] Cotton Mather, A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning, in George Lincoln Burr, Narratives of the New England Witch Trials (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2012), 259.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid, 281-282.

^[4] Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, in Richard Godbeer, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018), 49.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] “Elizabeth Hubbard against Tituba,” in Richard Godbeer, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018), 92.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid, 93.

^[10] “Sarah Bibber against Dorcas Hoar,” “Elizabeth Hubbard against Dorcas Hoar,” “Ann Putnam Jr. against Dorcas Hoar,” and “Mary Walcott against Dorcas Hoar,” in Richard Godbeer, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018), 121-122.

The writing of history and the theories that guide it, argues historian Lynn Hunt in Writing History in the Global Era, urgently need “reinvigoration.”^[1] The old meta-narratives used to explain historical change looked progressively weaker and fell under heavier criticism as the twentieth century reached its conclusion and gave way to the twenty-first.^[2] Globalization, Hunt writes, can serve as a new paradigm. Her work offers a valuable overview of historical theories and develops an important new one, but this paper will argue Hunt implicitly undervalues older paradigms and fails to offer a comprehensive purpose for history under her theory. This essay then proposes some guardrails for history’s continuing development, not offering a new paradigm but rather a framing that gives older theories their due and a purpose that can power many different theories going forward.

We begin by reviewing Hunt’s main ideas. Hunt argues for “bottom-up” globalization as a meta-narrative for historical study, and contributes to this paradigm by offering a rationale for causality and change that places the concepts of “self” and “society” at its center. One of the most important points that Writing History in the Global Era makes is that globalization has varying meanings, with top-down and bottom-up definitions. Top-down globalization is “a process that transforms every part of the globe, creating a world system,” whereas the bottom-up view is myriad processes wherein “diverse places become connected and interdependent.”^[3] In other words, while globalization is often considered synonymous with Europe’s encroachment on the rest of the world, from a broader and, as Hunt sees it, better perspective, globalization would in fact be exemplified by increased interactions and interdependence between India and China, for example.^[4] The exploration and subjugation of the Americas was globalization, but so was the spread of Islam from the Middle East across North Africa to Spain. It is not simply the spread of more advanced technology or capitalism or what is considered to be, in eurocentrism, the most enlightened culture and value system, either: it is a reciprocal, “two-way relationship” that can be found anywhere as human populations move, meet, and start to rely on each other, through trade for example.^[5] Hunt seeks to overcome two problems here. First, the eurocentric top-down approach and its “defects”; second, the lack of a “coherent alternative,” which her work seeks to provide.^[6]

Hunt rightly and persuasively makes the case for a bottom-up perspective of globalization as opposed to top-down, then turns to the question of why this paradigm has explanatory power. What is it about bottom-up globalization, the increasing interactions and interdependence of human beings, that brings about historical change? Here Hunt is situating her historical lens alongside and succeeding previous ones, explored early in the work. Marxism, modernization, and the Annales School offered theories of causality. Cultural and political change was brought about by new modes of economic production, the growth of technology and the State, or by geography and climate, respectively.^[7] The paradigm of identity politics, Hunt notes, at times lacked such a clear “overarching narrative,” but implied that inclusion of The Other, minority or oppressed groups, in the national narrative was key to achieving genuine democracy (which more falls under purpose, to be explored later).^[8] Cultural theories rejected the idea, inherent in older paradigms, that culture was produced by economic or social relations; culture was a force unto itself, comprised of language, semiotics, discourse, which determined what an individual thought to be true and how one behaved.^[9] “Culture shaped class and politics rather than the other way around” — meaning culture brought about historical change (though many cultural theorists preferred not to focus on causation, perhaps similar to those engaged in identity politics).^[10] Bottom-up globalization, Hunt posits, is useful as a modern explanatory schema for the historical field. It brings about changes in the self (in fact in the brain) and of society, which spurs cultural and political transformations.^[11] There is explanatory power in increased connections between societies. For instance, she suggests that drugs and stimulants like coffee, brought into Europe through globalization, produced selves that sought pleasure and thrill (i.e. altered the neurochemistry of the brain) and changed society by creating central gathering places, coffeehouses, where political issues could be intensely discussed. These developments may have pushed places like France toward democratic and revolutionary action.^[12] For Hunt, it is not enough to say culture alone directs the thinkable and human action, nor is the mind simply a social construction — the biology of the brain and how it reacts and operates must be taken into account.^[13] The field must move on from cultural theories.

Globalization, a useful lens through which to view history, joins a long list, only partially outlined above. Beyond economics, advancing technology and government bureaucracy, geography and environment, subjugated groups, and culture, there is political, elite, or even “Great Men” history; social history, the story of ordinary people; the history of ideas, things, and diseases and non-human species; microhistory, biography, a close look at events and individuals; and more.^[14] Various ways of looking at history, some of which are true theories that include causes of change, together construct a more complete view of the past. They are all valuable. As historian Sarah Maza writes, “History writing does not get better and better but shifts and changes in response to the needs and curiosities of the present day. Innovations and new perspectives keep the study of the past fresh and interesting, but that does not mean we should jettison certain areas or approaches as old-fashioned or irrelevant.”^[15] This is a crucial reminder. New paradigms can reinvigorate, but historians must be cautious of seeing them as signals that preceding paradigms are dead and buried.

Hunt’s work flirts with this mistake, though perhaps unintentionally. Obviously, some paradigms grow less popular, while others, particularly new ones, see surges in adherents. Writing History in the Global Era outlines the “rise and fall” of theories over time, the changing popularities and new ways of thinking that brought them about.^[16] One implication in Hunt’s language, though such phrasing is utilized from the viewpoint of historical time or those critical of older theories, is that certain paradigms are indeed dead or of little use — “validity” and “credibility” are “questioned” or “lost,” “limitations” and “disappointments” discovered, theories “undermined” and “weakened” by “gravediggers” before they “fall,” and so forth.^[17] Again, these are not necessarily Hunt’s views, rather descriptors of changing trends and critiques, but Hunt’s work offers no nod to how older paradigms are still useful today, itself implying that different ways of writing history are now irrelevant. With prior theories worth less, a new one, globalization, is needed. Hunt’s work could have benefited from more resistance to this implication, with a serious look at how geography and climate, or changing modes of economic production, remain valuable lenses historians use to chart change and find truth — an openness to the full spectrum of approaches, for they all work cooperatively to reveal the past, despite their unique limitations. Above, Maza mentioned “certain areas” of history in addition to “approaches,” and continued: “As Lynn Hunt has pointed out, no field of history [such as ancient Rome] should be cast aside just because it is no longer ‘hot’…”^[18] Hunt should have acknowledged and demonstrated that the precise same is true of approaches to history.

Another area that deserves more attention is purpose. In the same way that not all historical approaches emphasize causality and change, not all emphasize purpose. Identity politics had a clear use: the inclusion of subjugated groups in history helped move nations toward political equality.^[19] With other approaches, however, “What is it good for?” is more difficult to answer. This is to ask what utility a theory had for contemporary individuals and societies (and has for modern ones), beyond a more complete understanding of yesteryear or fostering new research. It may be more challenging to see a clear purpose in the study of how the elements of the longue durée, such as geography and climate, of the Annales School change human development. How was such a lens utilized as a tool, if in fact it was, in the heyday of the Annales School? How could it be utilized today? (Perhaps it could be useful in mobilizing action against climate change.) The purpose of history — of each historical paradigm — is not always obvious.

Indeed, Hunt’s paradigm “offers a new purpose for history: understanding our place in an increasingly interconnected world,” a rather vague suggestion that sees little elaboration.^[20] What does it mean to understand our place? Is this a recycling of “one cannot understand the present without understanding the past,” a mere truism? Or is it to say that a bottom-up globalization paradigm can be utilized to demonstrate the connection between all human beings, breaking down nationalism or even national borders? After all, the theory moves away from eurocentrism and the focus on single nations. Perhaps it is something else, one cannot know for certain. Of course, Hunt may have wanted to leave this question to others, developing the tool and letting others determine how to wield it. However, hesitation on Hunt’s part to more deeply and explicitly explore purpose, to adequately show how her theory is useful to the present, may be a simple desire to avoid the controversy of politics. This would be disappointing to those who believe history is inherently political or anchored to ethics, but either reason is out of step with Hunt’s introduction. History, Hunt writes on her opening page, is “in crisis” due to the “nagging question that has proved so hard to answer…‘What is it good for?’”^[21] In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she writes, the answer shifted from developing strong male leaders to building national identity and patriotism to contributing to the social movements of subjugated groups by unburying histories of oppression.^[22] All of these purposes are political. Hunt deserves credit for constructing a new paradigm, with factors of causality and much fodder for future research, but to open the work by declaring a crisis of purposelessness, framing purposes as political, and then not offering a fully developed purpose through a political lens (or through another lens, explaining why purpose need not be political) is an oversight.

Based on these criticisms, we have a clear direction for the field of history. First, historians should reject any implication of a linear progression of historical meta-narratives, which this paper argues Hunt failed to do. “Old-fashioned” paradigms in fact have great value today, which must be noted and explored. A future work on the state of history might entirely reframe, or at least dramatically add to, the discussion of theory. Hunt tracked the historical development of theories and their critics, with all the ups and downs of popularity. This is important epistemologically, but emphasizes the failures of theories rather than their contributions, and presents them as stepping stones to be left behind on the journey to find something better. Marxism had a “blindness to culture” and had to be left by the wayside, its replacement had this or that limitation and was itself replaced, and so on.^[23] Hunt writes globalization will not “hold forever” either.^[24] A future work might instead, even if it included a brief, similar tracking, focus on how each paradigm added to our understanding of history, continued to do so, and how it does so today. As an example of the second task, Anthony Reid’s 1988 Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 was written very much in the tradition of the Annales School, with a focus on geography, resources, climate, and demography, but it would be lost in a structure like Hunt’s, crowded out by the popularity of cultural studies in the last decades of the twentieth century.^[25] Simply put, the historian must break away from the idea that paradigms are replaced. They are replaced in popularity, but not in importance to the mission of more fully understanding the past. As Hunt writes, “Paradigms are problematic because by their nature they focus on only part of the picture,” which highlights the necessity of the entire paradigmic spectrum, as does her putting globalization theory into practice, suggesting that coffee from abroad spurred revolutionary movements in eighteenth-century Europe, sidelining countless other factors.^[26] Every paradigm helps us see more of the picture. It would be a shame if globalization was downplayed as implicitly irrelevant only a couple decades from now, if still a useful analytical lens. Paradigms are not stepping stones, they are columns holding up the house of history — more can be added as we go.

This aforementioned theoretical book on the field would also explore purpose, hypothesizing that history cannot be separated from ethics, and therefore from politics. Sarah Maza wrote in the final pages of Thinking About History:

Why study history? The simplest response is that history answers questions that other disciplines cannot. Why, for instance, are African-Americans in the United States today so shockingly disadvantaged in every possible respect, from income to education, health, life expectancy, and rates of incarceration, when the last vestiges of formal discrimination were done away with half a century ago? Unless one subscribes to racist beliefs, the only way to answer that question is historically, via the long and painful narrative that goes from transportation and slavery to today via Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and an accumulation, over decades, of inequities in urban policies, electoral access, and the judicial system.^[27]

This is correct, and goes far beyond the purpose of answering questions. History is framed as the counter, even the antidote, to racist beliefs. If one is not looking to history for such answers, there is nowhere left to go but biology, racial inferiority, to beliefs deemed awful. History therefore informs ethical thinking; its utility is to help us become more ethical creatures, as (subjectively) defined by our society — and the self. This purpose is usually implied but rarely explicitly stated, and a discussion on the future of history should explore it. Now, one could argue that Maza’s dichotomy is simply steering us toward truth, away from incorrect ideas rather than unethical ones. But that does not work in all contexts. When we read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, he is not demonstrating that modes of discipline are incorrect — and one is hardly confused as to whether he sees them as bad things, these “formulas of domination” and “constant coercion.”^[28] J.R. McNeill, at the end of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, writes that yellow fever’s “career as a governing factor in human history, mercifully, has come to a close” while warning of a lapse in vaccination and mosquito control programs that could aid viruses that “still lurk in the biosphere.”^[29] The English working class, wrote E.P. Thompson, faced “harsher and less personal” workplaces, “exploitation,” “unfreedom.”^[30] The implications are clear: societies without disciplines, without exploitation, with careful mosquito control would be better societies. For human beings, unearthing and reading history cannot help but create value judgements, and it is a small step from the determination of what is right to the decision to pursue it, political action. It would be difficult, after all, to justify ignoring that which was deemed ethically right.

Indeed, not only do historians implicitly suggest better paths and condemn immoral ones, the notion that history helps human beings make more ethical choices is already fundamental to how many lay people read history — what is the cliché of being doomed to repeat the unlearned past about if not avoiding tragedies and terrors deemed wrong by present individuals and society collectively? As tired and disputed as the expression is, there is truth to it. Studying how would-be authoritarians often use minority groups as scapegoats for serious economic and social problems to reach elected office in democratic systems creates pathways for modern resistance, making the unthinkable thinkable, changing characterizations of what is right or wrong, changing behavior. Globalization may alter the self and society, but the field of history itself, to a degree, does the same. This could be grounds for a new, rather self-congratulatory paradigm, but the purpose, informing ethical and thus political decision-making, can guide many different theories, from Marxism to globalization. As noted, prior purposes of history were political: forming strong leaders, creating a national narrative, challenging a national narrative. A new political purpose would be standard practice. One might argue moving away from political purposes is a positive step, but it must be noted that the field seems to move away from purpose altogether when it does so. Is purpose inherently political? This future text would make the case that it is. A purpose cannot be posited without a self-evident perceived good. Strong leaders are good, for instance — and therefore should be part of the social and political landscape.

In conclusion, Hunt’s implicit dismissal of older theories and her incomplete purpose for history deserve correction, and doing so pushes the field forward in significant ways. For example, using the full spectrum of paradigms helps us work on (never solve) history’s causes-of-causes ad infinitum problem. Changing modes of production may have caused change x, but what caused the changing modes of production? What causes globalization in the first place? Paradigms can interrelate, helping answer the thorny questions of other paradigms (perhaps modernization or globalization theory could help explain changing modes of production, before requiring their own explanations). How giving history a full purpose advances the field is obvious: it sparks new interest, new ways of thinking, new conversations, new utilizations, new theories, while, like the sciences, offering the potential — but not the guarantee — of improving the human condition.

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^[1] Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 1.

^[2] Ibid, 26, 35-43.

^[3] Ibid, 59. See also 60-71.

^[4] Ibid, 70.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid, 77.

^[7] Ibid, 14-17.

^[8] Ibid, 18.

^[9] Ibid, 18-27.

^[10] Ibid, 27, 77.

^[11] Ibid, chapters 3 and 4.

^[12] Ibid, 135-141.

^[13] Ibid, 101-118.

^[14] Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

^[15] Maza, Thinking, 236.

^[16] Hunt, Writing History, chapter 1.

^[17] Ibid, 8-9, 18, 26-27, chapter 1.

^[18] Maza, Thinking, 236.

^[19] Hunt, Writing History, 18.

^[20] Ibid, 10.

^[21] Ibid, 1.

^[22] Ibid, 1-7.

^[23] Ibid, 8.

^[24] Ibid, 40.

^[25] Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, vol. 1, The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

^[26] Hunt, Writing History, 121, 135-140.

^[27] Maza, Thinking, 237.

^[28] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 137.

^[29] J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 314.

^[30] E.P. Thompson, The Essential E.P. Thompson (New York: The New Press, 2001), 17. 

The practice of reconstructing the past, with all its difficulties and incompleteness, is aided by comparative study. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other researchers can learn a great deal about their favored society and culture by looking at others. This paper makes that basic point, but, more significantly, makes a distinction between the effectiveness of drawing meaning from cultural similarity/difference and doing the same from one’s own constructed cultural analogy, while acknowledging both are valuable methods. In other words, it is argued here that the historian who documents similarities and differences between societies stands on firmer methodological ground for drawing conclusions about human cultures than does the historian who is forced to fill in gaps in a given historical record by studying other societies in close geographic and temporal proximity. Also at a disadvantage is the historian working comparatively with gaps in early documentation that are filled in later documentation. This paper is a comparison of comparative methods — an important exercise, because such methods are often wielded due to a dearth of evidence in the archives. The historian should understand the strengths and limitations of various approaches (here reciprocal comparison, historical analogy, and historiographic comparison) to this problem.

To begin, a look at reciprocal comparison and the meaning derived from such an effort, derived specifically from likenesses or distinctions. Historian Robert Darnton found meaning in differences in The Great Cat Massacre: and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. What knowledge, Darnton wondered in his opening chapter, could we gain of eighteenth century French culture by looking at peasant folk tales and contrasting them to versions found in other places in Europe? Whereas similarities might point to shared cultural traits or norms, differences would isolate the particular mentalités of French peasants, how they viewed the world and what occupied their thoughts, in the historical tradition of the Annales School.^[1] So while the English version of Tom Thumb was rather “genial,” with helpful fairies, attention to costume, and a titular character engaging in pranks, in the French version the Tom Thumb character, Poucet, was forced to survive in a “harsh, peasant world” against “bandits, wolves, and the village priest by using his wits.”^[2] In a tale of a doctor cheating Death, the German version saw Death immediately kill the doctor; with a French twist, the doctor got away with his treachery for some time, becoming prosperous and living to old age — cheating paid off.^[3] Indeed, French tales focused heavily on survival in a bleak and brutal world, and on this world’s particularities. Characters with magical wishes asked for food and full bellies, they got rid of children who did not work, put up with cruel step-mothers, and encountered many beggars on the road.^[4] Most folk tales mix fictional elements like ogres and magic with socio-economic realities from the place and time they are told, and therefore the above themes reflect the ordinary lives of French peasants: hunger, poverty, the early deaths of biological mothers, begging, and so on.^[5] In comparing French versions with those of the Italians, English, and Germans, Darnton noticed unique fixations in French peasant tales and then contrasted these obsessions with the findings of social historians on the material conditions of peasant life, bringing these things together to find meaning, to create a compelling case for what members of the eighteenth century French lower class thought about day to day and their attitudes towards society.

Now, compare Darnton’s work to ethno-historian Helen Rountree’s “Powhatan Indian Women: The People Captain John Smith Barely Saw.” Rountree uses ethnographic analogy, among other tools, to reconstruct the daily lives of Powhatan women in the first years of the seventeenth century. Given that interested English colonizers had limited access to Powhatan women and a “cloudy lens” of patriarchal eurocentrism through which they observed native societies, and given that the Powhatans left few records themselves, Rountree uses the evidence of daily life in nearby Eastern Woodland tribes to describe the likely experiences of Powhatan women.^[6] For example: “Powhatan women, like other Woodland Indian women, probably nurse their babies for well over a year after birth, so it would make sense to keep baby and food source together” by bringing infants into the fields with them as the women work.^[7] Elsewhere “probably” is dropped for more confident takes: “Powhatan men and women, like those in other Eastern Woodland tribes, would have valued each other as economic partners…”^[8] A lack of direct archival knowledge of Powhatan society and sentiments is shored up through archival knowledge of other native peoples living in roughly the same time and region. The meaning Rountree derives from ethnographic analogy, alongside other techniques and evidence, is that the English were wrong, looking through their cloudy lens, to believe Powhatan women suffered drudgery and domination under Powhatan men. Rather, women experienced a great deal of autonomy, as well as fellowship and variety, in their work, and were considered co-equal partners with men in the economic functioning of the village.^[9]  

Both Darnton and Rountree admit their methods have challenges where evidence is concerned. Darnton writes that his examination of folktales is “distressingly imprecise in its deployment of evidence,” the evidence is “vague,” because the tales were written down much later — exactly how they were orally transmitted at the relevant time cannot be known.^[10] In other words, what if the aspect of a story one marks as characteristic of the French peasant mentalité was not actually in the verbal telling of the tale? It is a threat to the legitimacy of the project. Rountree is careful to use “probably” and “likely” with most of her analogies; the “technique is a valid basis for making inferences if used carefully” (emphasis added), and one must watch out for the imperfections in the records of other tribes.^[11] For what if historical understanding of another Eastern Woodland tribe is incorrect, and the falsity is copied over to the narrative of the Powhatan people? Rountree and Darnton acknowledge the limitations of their methods even while firmly believing they are valuable for reconstructing the past. This paper does not dispute that — however, it would be odd if all comparative methods were created equal.

Despite its challenges, reciprocal comparison rests on safer methodological ground, for it at least boasts two actually existing elements to contrast. For instance, Darnton has in his possession folktales from France and from Germany, dug up in the archives, and with them he can notice differences and thus derive meaning about how French peasants viewed the world. Such meaning may be incorrect, but is less likely to be so with support from research on the material conditions of those who might be telling the tales, as mentioned. Rountree, on the other hand, wields a tool that works with but one existing element. Historical, cultural, or ethnographic analogy takes what is known about other peoples and applies it to a specific group suffering from a gap in the historical record. This gap, a lack of direct evidence, is filled with an assumption — which may simply be wrong, without support from other research, like Darnton enjoys, to help out (to have such research would make analogy unnecessary). Obviously, an incorrect assumption threatens to derail derived meaning. If the work of Powhatan women differed in a significant way from other Eastern Woodland tribes, unseen and undiscovered and even silenced by analogy, the case of Powhatan economic equality could weaken. Again, this is not to deny the method’s value, only to note the danger that it carries compared to reciprocal comparison. Paradoxically, the inference that Powhatan society resembled other tribes nearby seems as probable and reasonable as it is bold, risky.

Similarly, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, also found meaning with absence when examining whether Henri Christophe, monarch of Haiti after its successful revolution against the French from 1791 to 1804, was influenced by Frederick the Great of Prussia when Christophe named his new Milot palace “San Souci.” Was the palace named after Frederick’s own in Potsdam, or after Colonel San Souci, a revolutionary rival Christophe killed? Trouillot studied the historical record and found that opportunities for early observers to mention a Potsdam-Milot connection were suspiciously ignored.^[12] For example, Austro-German geographer Karl Ritter, a contemporary of Christophe, repeatedly described his palace as “European” but failed to mention it was inspired by Frederick’s.^[13] British consul Charles Mackenzie, “who visited and described San Souci less than ten years after Christophe’s death, does not connect the two palaces.”^[14] Why was a fact that was such a given for later writers not mentioned early on if it was true?^[15] These archival gaps of course co-exist with Trouillot’s positive evidence (“Christophe built San Souci, the palace, a few yards away from — if not exactly — where he killed San Souci, the man”^[16]), but are used to build a case that Christophe had Colonel San Souci in mind when naming his palace, a detail that evidences an overall erasure of the colonel from history.^[17] By contrasting the early historical record with the later one, Trouillot finds truth and silencing.

This historiographic comparison is different from Rountree’s historical analogy. Rountree fills in epistemological gaps about Powhatan women with the traits of nearby, similar cultures; Trouillot judges the gaps in early reports about Haiti’s San Souci palace to suggest later writers were in error and participating in historical silencing (he, like Darnton, is working with two existing elements and weighs the differences). Like Rountree’s, Trouillot’s method is useful and important: the historian should always seek the earliest writings from relevant sources to develop an argument, and if surprising absences exist there is cause to be suspicious that later works created falsities. However, this method too flirts with assumption. It assumes the unwritten is also the unthought, which is not always the case. It may be odd or unlikely that Mackenzie or Ritter would leave Potsdam unmentioned if they believed in its influence, but not impossible or unthinkable. It further assumes a representative sample size — Trouillot is working with very few early documents. Would the discovery of more affect his thesis? As we see with Trouillot and Rountree, and as one might expect, a dearth in the archives forces assumptions.

While Trouillot’s conclusion is probable, he is nevertheless at greater risk of refutation than Darnton or, say, historian Kenneth Pomeranz, who also engaged in reciprocal comparison when he put China beside Europe during the centuries before 1800. Unlike the opening chapter of The Great Cat Massacre, The Great Divergence finds meaning in similarities as well as differences. Pomeranz seeks to understand why Europe experienced an Industrial Revolution instead of China, and must sort through many posited causal factors. For instance, did legal and institutional structures more favorable to capitalist development give Europe an edge, contributing to greater productivity and efficiency?^[18] Finding similar regulatory mechanisms like interest rates and property rights, and a larger “world of surprising resemblances” before 1750, Pomeranz argued for other differences: Europe’s access to New World resources and trade, as well as to coal.^[19] This indicates that Europe’s industrialization occurred not due to the superior intentions, wisdom, or industriousness of Europeans but rather due to unforeseen, fortunate happenings, or “conjunctures” that “often worked to Western Europe’s advantage, but not necessarily because Europeans created or imposed them.”^[20] Reciprocal comparison can thus break down eurocentric perspectives by looking at a broader range of historical evidence. No assumptions need be made (rather, assumptions, such as those about superior industriousness, can be excised). As obvious as it is to write, a wealth of archival evidence, rather than a lack, makes for safer methodological footing, as does working with two existing evidentiary elements, no risky suppositions necessary.

A future paper might muse further on the relationship between analogy and silencing, alluded to earlier — if Trouillot is correct and a fact-based narrative is built on silences, how much more problematic is the narrative based partly on analogy?^[21] As for this work, in sum, the historian must use some caution with historical analogy, historiographic comparison, and other tools that have an empty space on one side of the equation. These methods are hugely important and often present theses of high probability. But they are by nature put at risk by archival gaps; reciprocal comparison has more power in its derived meanings and claims about other cultures of the past — by its own archival nature.

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^[1] Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, eds., The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 111.

^[2] Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 42.

^[3] Ibid, 47-48.

^[4] Ibid, 29-38.

^[5] Ibid, 23-29.

^[6] Helen C. Rountree, “Powhatan Indian Women: The People Captain John Smith Barely Saw,” Ethnohistory 45, no. 1 (winter 1998): 1-2.

^[7] Ibid, 4.

^[8] Ibid, 21.

^[9] Ibid, 22.

^[10] Darnton, Cat Massacre, 261.

^[11] Rountree, “Powhatan,” 2.

^[12] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 61-65.

^[13] Ibid, 63-64.

^[14] Ibid, 62.

^[15] Ibid, 64.

^[16] Ibid, 65.

^[17] Ibid, chapters 1 and 2.

^[18] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapters 3 and 4.

^[19] Ibid, 29, 279-283.

^[20] Ibid, 4.

^[21] Trouillot, Silencing, 26-27.

Move over, Johnny Cash and “Cocaine Blues.” Sure, “Early one mornin’ while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down… Shot her down because she made me slow / I thought I was her daddy but she had five more” are often the first lyrics one thinks of when considering the violent end of the toxic masculinity spectrum in white people music. (Is this not something you ponder? Confront more white folk who somehow only see these things in black music, you’ll get there.) But The Beatles took things to just as dark a place.

Enter “Run For Your Life” from their 1965 album Rubber Soul, a song as catchy as it is chilling: “You better run for your life if you can, little girl / Hide your head in the sand, little girl / Catch you with another man / That’s the end.” Jesus. It’s jarring, the cuddly “All You Need Is Love” boy band singing “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man” and “Let this be a sermon / I mean everything I’ve said / Baby, I’m determined / And I’d rather see you dead.” But jealous male violence in fact showed up in other Beatles songs as well, and in the real world, with the self-admitted abusive acts and attitudes of John Lennon, later regretted but no less horrific for it.

This awfulness ensured The Beatles would be viewed by many of posterity as a contradictory element, with proto-feminist themes and ideas of the 1960s taking root in their music alongside possessive, murderous sexism. That is, if these things are noticed at all.

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The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in the early 1930s while imprisoned by the Mussolini government, theorized that ruling classes grew entrenched through a process called cultural hegemony, the successful propagation of values and norms, which when accepted by the lower classes produced passivity and thus the continuation of domination and exploitation from above. An ideology became hegemonic when it found support from historical blocs, alliances of social groups (classes, religions, families, and so on) — meaning broad, diverse acceptance of ideas that served the interests of the bourgeoisie in a capitalist society and freed the ruling class from some of the burden of using outright force. This paper argues that Gramsci’s theory is useful for historians because its conception of “divided consciousness” offers a framework for understanding why individuals failed to act in ways that aligned with their own material interests or acted for the benefit of oppressive forces. Note this offering characterizes cultural hegemony as a whole, but it is divided consciousness that permits hegemony to function. Rather than a terminus a quo, however, divided consciousness can be seen as created, at least partially, by hegemony andas responsible for ultimate hegemonic success — a mutually reinforcing system. The individual mind and what occurs within it is the necessary starting point for understanding how domineering culture spreads and why members of social groups act in ways that puzzle later historians.

Divided (or contradictory) consciousness, according to Gramsci, was a phenomenon in which individuals believed both hegemonic ideology and contrary ideas based on their own lived experiences. Cultural hegemony pushed such ideas out of the bounds of rational discussion concerning what a decent society should look like. Historian T.J. Jackson Lears, summarizing sociologist Michael Mann, wrote that hegemony ensured “values rooted in the workers’ everyday experience lacked legitimacy… [W]orking class people tend to embrace dominant values as abstract propositions but often grow skeptical as the values are applied to their everyday lives. They endorse the idea that everyone has an equal chance of success in America but deny it when asked to compare themselves with the lawyer or businessman down the street.”^[1] In other words, what individuals knew to be true from simply functioning in society was not readily applied to the nature of the overall society; some barrier, created at least in part by the process of hegemony, existed. Lears further noted the evidence from sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathon Cobb, whose subaltern interviewees “could not escape the effect of dominant values” despite also holding contradictory ones, as “they deemed their class inferiority a sign of personal failure, even as many realized they had been constrained by class origins that they could not control.”^[2] A garbage collector knew the fact that he was not taught to read properly was not his fault, yet blamed himself for his position in society.^[3] The result of this contradiction, Gramsci observed, was often passivity, consent to oppressive systems.^[4] If one could not translate and contrast personal truths to the operation of social systems, political action was less likely.

To understand how divided consciousness, for Gramsci, was achieved, it is necessary to consider the breadth of the instruments that propagated dominant culture. Historian Robert Gray, studying how the bourgeoisie achieved hegemony in Victorian Britain, wrote that hegemonic culture could spread not only through the state — hegemonic groups were not necessarily governing groups, though there was often overlap^[5] — but through any human institutions and interactions: “the political and ideological are present in all social relations.”^[6] Everything in Karl Marx’s “superstructure” could imbue individuals and historical blocs with domineering ideas: art, media, politics, religion, education, and so on. Gray wrote that British workers in the era of industrialization of course had to be pushed into “habituation” of the new and brutal wage-labor system by the workplace itself, but also through “poor law reform, the beginnings of elementary education, religious evangelism, propaganda against dangerous ‘economic heresies,’ the fostering of more acceptable expressions of working-class self help (friendly societies, co-ops, etc.), and of safe forms of ‘rational recreation.’”^[7] The bourgeoisie, then, used many social avenues to manufacture consent, including legal reform that could placate workers. Some activities were acceptable under the new system (joining friendly societies or trade unions) to keep more radical activities out of bounds.^[8] It was also valuable to create an abstract enemy, a “social danger” for the masses to fear.^[9] So without an embrace of the dominant values and norms of industrial capitalism, there would be economic disaster, scarcity, loosening morals, the ruination of family, and more.^[10] The consciousness was therefore under assault by the dominant culture from all directions, heavy competition for values derived from lived experience, despite the latter’s tangibility. In macro, Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, to quote historian David Arnold, “held that popular ideas had as much historical weight or energy as purely material forces” or even “greater prominence.”^[11] In micro, it can be derived, things work the same in the individual mind, with popular ideas as powerful as personal experience, and thus the presence of divided consciousness.

The concept of contradictory consciousness helps historians answer compelling questions and solve problems. Arnold notes Gramsci’s questions: “What historically had kept the peasants [of Italy] in subordination to the dominant classes? Why had they failed to overthrow their rulers and to establish a hegemony of their own?”^[12] Contextually, why wasn’t the peasantry more like the industrial proletariat — the more rebellious, presumed leader of the revolution against capitalism?^[13] The passivity wrought from divided consciousness provided an answer. While there were “glimmers” of class consciousness — that is, the application of lived experience to what social systems should be, and the growth of class-centered ideas aimed at ending exploitation — the Italian peasants “largely participated in their own subordination by subscribing to hegemonic values, by accepting, admiring, and even seeking to emulate many of the attributes of the superordinate classes.”^[14] Their desires, having “little internal consistency or cohesion,” even allowed the ruling class to make soldiers of peasants,^[15] meaning active participation in maintaining oppressive power structures. Likewise, Lears commented on the work of political theorist Lawrence Goodwyn and the question of why the Populist movement in the late nineteenth century United States largely failed. While not claiming hegemony as the only cause, Lears argued that the democratic movement was most successful in parts of the nation with democratic traditions, where such norms were already within the bounds of acceptable discussion.^[16] Where they were not, where elites had more decision-making control, the “received culture” was more popular, with domination seeming more natural and inevitable.^[17] Similarly, Arnold’s historiographical review of the Indian peasantry found that greater autonomy (self-organization to pursue vital interests) of subaltern groups meant hegemony was much harder to establish, with “Gandhi [coming] closest to securing the ‘consent’ of the peasantry for middle-class ideological and political leadership,” but the bourgeoisie failing to do the same.^[18] Traditions and cultural realities could limit hegemonic possibilities; it’s just as important to historians to understand why something does not work out as it is to comprehend why something does. As a final example, historian Eugene Genovese found that American slaves demonstrated both resistance to and appropriation of the culture of masters, both in the interest of survival, with appropriation inadvertently reinforcing hegemony and the dominant views and norms.^[19] This can help answer questions regarding why slave rebellions took place in some contexts but not others, or even why more did not occur — though, again, acceptance of Gramscian theory does not require ruling out all causal explanations beyond cultural hegemony and divided consciousness. After all, Gramsci himself favored nuance, with coexisting consent and coercion, consciousness of class or lived experience mixing with beliefs of oppressors coming from above, and so on.

The challenge of hegemonic theory and contradictory consciousness relates to parsing out aforementioned causes. Gray almost summed it up when he wrote, “[N]or should behavior that apparently corresponds to dominant ideology be read at face value as a direct product of ruling class influence.”^[20] Here he was arguing that dominant culture was often imparted in indirect ways, not through intentionality of the ruling class or programs of social control.^[21] But one could argue: “Behavior that apparently corresponds to dominant ideology cannot be read at face value as a product of divided consciousness and hegemony.” It is a problem of interpretation, and it can be difficult for historians to parse out divided consciousness or cultural hegemony from other historical causes and show which has more explanatory value. When commenting on the failure of the Populist movement, Lears mentioned “stolen elections, race-baiting demagogues,” and other events and actors with causal value.^[22] How much weight should be given to dominant ideology and how much to stolen elections? This interpretive nature can appear to weaken the usefulness of Gramsci’s model. Historians have developed potential solutions. For instance, as Lears wrote, “[O]ne way to falsify the hypothesis of hegemony is to demonstrate the existence of genuinely pluralistic debate; one way to substantiate it is to discover what was left out of public debate and to account historically for those silences.”^[23] If there was public discussion of a wide range of ideas, many running counter to the interests of dominant groups, the case for hegemony is weaker; if public discussion centered around a narrow slate of ideas that served obvious interests, the case is stronger. A stolen election may be assigned less casual value, and cultural hegemony more, if there existed restricted public debate. However, the best evidence for hegemony may remain the psychoanalysis of individuals, as seen above, that demonstrate some level of divided consciousness. Even in demonstrability, contradictory consciousness is key to Gramsci’s overall theory. A stolen election may earn less casual value if such insightful individual interviews can be submitted as evidence.  

In sum, for Gramscian thinkers divided consciousness is a demonstrable phenomenon that powers (and is powered by) hegemony and the acceptance of ruling class norms and beliefs. While likely not the only cause of passivity to subjugation, it offers historians an explanation as to why individuals do not act in their own best interests that can be explored, given causal weight, falsified, or verified (to degrees) in various contexts. Indeed, Gramsci’s theory is powerful in that it has much utility for historians whether true or misguided.

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^[1] T.J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 577.

^[2] Ibid, 577-578.

^[3] Ibid, 578.

^[4] Ibid, 569.

^[5] Robert Gray, “Bourgeois Hegemony in Victorian Britain,” in Tony Bennet, ed., Culture, Ideology and Social Process: A Reader (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1981), 240.

^[6] Ibid, 244.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid, 246.

^[9] Ibid, 245.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] David Arnold, “Gramsci and the Peasant Subalternity in India,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 11, no. 4 (1984):158.

^[12] Ibid, 157.

^[13] Ibid, 157.

^[14] Ibid, 159.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Lears, “Hegemony,” 576-577.

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Arnold, “India,” 172.

^[19] Lears, “Hegemony,” 574.

^[20] Gray, “Britain,” 246.

^[21] Ibid, 245-246.

^[22] Ibid, 276.

^[23] Lears, “Hegemony,” 586.

Debate currently rages over how to teach history in American public schools. Should the abyss of racism receive full attention? Should we teach our children that the United States is benevolent in its wars and use of military power — did we not bring down Nazi Germany? Is the nation fundamentally good based on its history, worthy of flying the flag, or is it responsible for so many horrors that an ethical person would keep the flag in the closet or burn it in the streets? Left and Right and everyone in between have different, contradictory perspectives, but to ban and censor is not ideal. Examining the full spectrum of views will help students understand the world they inhabit and the field of history itself.

While there was once an imagining of objectivity, historians now typically understand the true nature of their work. “Through the end of the twentieth century,” Sarah Maza writes in Thinking About History, “the ideal of historical objectivity was undermined from within the historical community… The more different perspectives on history accumulated, the harder it became to believe that any historian, however honest and well-intentioned, could tell the story of the past from a position of Olympian detachment, untainted by class, gender, racial, national, and other biases.” Selecting and rejecting sources involves interpretation and subconsciously bent decisions. Historians looking at the same sources will have different interpretations of meaning, which leads to fierce debates in scholarly journals. Teachers are not value-neutral either. All this is taken for granted. “It is impossible to imagine,” Maza writes, “going back to a time when historians imagined that their task involved bowing down before ‘the sovereignty of sources.'” They understand it’s more complex than that: “The history of the American Great Plains in the nineteenth century has been told as a tale of progress, tragedy, or triumph over adversity,” depending on the sources one is looking at and how meaning is derived from them.

But this is a positive thing. It gives us a fuller picture of the past, understanding the experiences of all actors. “History is always someone’s story, layered over and likely at odds with someone else’s: to recognize this does not make our chronicles of the past less reliable, but more varied, deeper, and more truthful.” It also makes us think critically — what interpretation makes the most sense to us, given the evidence offered? Why is the evidence reliable?

If historians understand this, why shouldn’t students? Young people should be taught that while historical truth exists, any presentation of historical truth — a history book, say — was affected by human action and sentiment. This is a reality that those on the Left and Right should be able to acknowledge. Given this fact, and that both sides are after the same goal, to teach students the truth, the only sensible path forward is to offer students multiple interpretations. Read A Patriot’s History of the United States (Schweikart, Allen) and A People’s History of the United States (Zinn). There are equivalent versions of these types of texts for elementary and middle schoolers. Read about why World War II was “The Good War” in your typical textbook, alongside Horrible Histories: Woeful Second World War. Have students read history by conservatives in awe of a greatest country in the whole wide world, as well as by liberals fiercely critical of the nation and many of its people for keeping liberty and democracy exclusively for some for far longer than many other countries. They can study top-down history (great rulers, generals, and leaders drive change) and bottom-up social history (ordinary people coming together drives change). Or compare primary sources from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth demanding or opposing women’s rights. Read the perspectives of both Native Americans and American settlers in the plains. Why not? This gives students a broader view of the past, shows them why arguments and debates over history exist, and helps them understand modern political ideologies.

Most importantly, as noted, it helps students think critically. Many a teacher has said, “I don’t want to teach students what to think, but rather how to think.” Apart from exploring the logical fallacies, which is also important, this doesn’t seem possible without exploring varying perspectives and asking which one a young person finds most convincing and why. One can’t truly practice the art of thinking without one’s views being challenged, being forced to justify the maintenance of a perspective or a deviation based on newly acquired knowledge. Further, older students can go beyond different analyses of history and play around with source theories: what standard should there be to determine if a primary source is trustworthy? Can you take your standard, apply it to the sources of these two views, and determine which is more solid by your metric? There is much critical thinking to be done, and it makes for a more interesting time for young people.

Not only does teaching history in this way reflect the professional discipline, and greatly expand student knowledge and thought, it aligns with the nature of public schools, or with what the general philosophy of public schools should be. The bent of a history classroom, or the history segment of the day in the youngest grades, is determined by the teacher, but also by the books, curricula, and standards approved or required by the district, the regulations of the state, and so forth. So liberal teachers, districts, and states go their way and conservative teachers, districts, and states go theirs. But who is the public school classroom for, exactly? It’s for everyone — which necessitates some kind of openness to a broad range of perspectives (public universities are the same way, as I’ve written elsewhere).

This may be upsetting and sensible at the same time. On the one hand, “I don’t want my kid, or other kids, hearing false, dangerous ideas from the other side.” On the other, “It would be great for my kid, and other kids, to be exposed to this perspective when it so often is excluded from the classroom.” Everyone is happy, no one is happy. Likely more the latter. First, how can anyone favor bringing materials full of falsities into a history class? Again, anyone who favors critical thinking. Make that part of the study — look at the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report together, and explore why either side finds the other in error. Second, how far do you go? What extreme views will be dignified with attention? Is one to bring in Holocaust deniers and square their arguments up against the evidence for the genocide? Personally, this writer would support that: what an incredible exercise in evaluating and comparing the quantity and quality of evidence (and “evidence”). Perhaps others will disagree. But none of this means there can’t be reasonable limits to presented views. If an interpretation or idea is too fringe, it may be a waste of time to explore it. There is finite time in a class period and in a school year. The teacher, district, and so on will have to make the (subjective) choice (no one said this was a perfect system) to leave some things out and focus on bigger divides. If Holocaust denial is still relatively rare, controversy over whether the Civil War occurred due to slavery is not.

Who, exactly, is afraid of pitting their lens of history against that of another? Probably he who is afraid his sacred interpretation will be severely undermined, she who knows her position is not strong. If you’re confident your interpretation is truthful, backed by solid evidence, you welcome all challengers. Even if another viewpoint makes students think in new ways, even pulling them away from your lens, you know the latter imparted important knowledge and made an impression. As the author of a book on racism used in high schools and colleges, what do I have to fear when some conservative writes a book about how things really weren’t so bad for black Kansas Citians over the past two centuries? By all means, read both books, think for yourself, decide which thesis makes the most sense to you based on the sources — or create a synthesis of your own. The imaginary conservative author should likewise have no qualms about such an arrangement.

I have thus far remained fairly even-handed, because Leftists and right-wingers can become equally outraged over very different things. But here I will wonder whether the Right would have more anxiety over a multiple-interpretation study specifically. Once a student has learned of the darkness of American history, it is often more difficult to be a full-throated, flag-worshiping patriot. This risk will drive some conservatives berserk. Is the Leftist parent equally concerned that a positive, patriotic perspective on our past alongside a Zinnian version will turn her child into someone less critical, more favorable to the State, even downplaying the darkness? I’m not sure if the Leftist is as worried about that. My intuition, having personally been on both sides of the aisle, is that the risk would be more disturbing for conservatives — the horrors still horrify despite unrelated positive happenings, but the view of the U.S. as the unequivocal good guy is quickly eroded forever. Hopefully I am wrong and that is the mere bias of a current mindset talking. Either way, this pedagogy, the great compromise, is the right thing to do, for the reasons outlined above.

In conclusion, we must teach students the truth — and Americans will never fully agree on what that is, but the closest one could hope for is that this nation and its people have done horrific things as well as positive things. Teaching both is honest and important, and that’s what students will see when they examine different authors and documents. In my recent review of a history text, I wrote that the Left “shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging, for instance, that the U.S. Constitution was a strong step forward for representative democracy, secular government, and personal rights, despite the obvious exclusivity, compared to Europe’s systems.” Nor should one deny the genuine American interest in rescuing Europe and Asia from totalitarianism during World War II. And then there’s inventions, art, scientific discoveries, music, and many other things. The truth rests in nuance, as one might expect. James Baldwin said that American history is “more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” (What nation does not have both horrors and wonderful things in its history? Where would philosophy be without the German greats?) I’ve at times envisioned writing a history of the U.S. through a “hypocrisy” interpretation, but it works the same under a “mixed bag” framing: religious dissenters coming to the New World for more freedom and immediately crushing religious dissenters, the men who spoke of liberty and equality who owned slaves, fighting the Nazi master race with a segregated army, supporting democracy in some cases but destroying it in others, and so on. All countries have done good and bad things.

That is a concept the youngest children — and the oldest adults — can understand.

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One’s city pride quickly swells upon perusing Spotify for songs about Kansas City. There’s much to hear, from the gems of local talent (“Get Out – The KC Streetcar Song,” Kemet the Phantom) to the fantastic artists from afar (“Train From Kansas City,” Neko Case) to the biggest names in music history:

The Beatles sang of Kansas City beginning in 1961 with “Kansas City / Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey,” which they took from Little Richard’s work of the late 1950s, itself a version of the 1952 classic “Kansas City” by Leiber and Stoller (“I’m going to Kansas City / Kansas City here I come…”). Other famous musicians to record Leiber and Stoller’s song include Willie Nelson, James Brown, and Sammie Davis Jr.

Frank Zappa performed the “Kansas City Shuffle.” Van Morrison had “The Eternal Kansas City”: “Dig your Charlie Parker / Basie and Young.” Yusuf (Cat Stevens) sang “18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare).” Clearly, and sadly, he did not have a pleasant stay.

Jefferson Airplane was “gonna move to Kansas City”; for Rogers and Hammerstein, in their 1943 musical Oklahoma!, everything was “up to date in Kansas City.” More recently, The New Basement Tapes, The Mowgli’s, and of course Tech N9ne have joined in.

I have created a public playlist on Spotify of four hours of songs about KC. It has a bit of everything, from the jazz and blues of yesteryear to the folk and Americana and hip hop of today. It includes famous artists and the obscure, and everyone in between, with some repeats so one can hear different artists tackle the same song. “Kansas City Hornpipe” by Fred Morrison and “Kansas City, Missouri” by Humbird are particularly enjoyable. Some songs, naturally, are better than others, but the most subpar or campy of Spotify’s selection have been excluded (many local artists go nowhere for a reason). Finally, and unfortunately, one of the best hip hop songs about the city, Center of Attention’s “Straight Outta Kauffman,” is not available on Spotify, so it must be listened to elsewhere.

Find some of that “Kansas City wine” (Leiber and Stoller) and enjoy.

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