Benjamin E. Park

I blogged earlier this year about the “Continental” approach to the Age of Revolutions. Amongst the most persuasive examples of this new historiographical movement is Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (Liveright, 2016). In the decade and a half after the War of 1812, Fitz argues, Americans were obsessed with the series of revolts in Latin America, as people in Brazil, Peru, and other nations overthrew their colonial oppressors and attempted to form new republics. “Historians who explore the United States’ early overseas connections have focused overwhelmingly on the North Atlantic,” she explains, “but U.S. audiences after the War of 1812 also obsessively pondered the South Atlantic, their political imaginations charting newer longitudinal axes as well as older latitudinal ones” (5). In Our Sister Republics, we find an American nation obsessed with its southern neighbors.

But this obsession is qualified at every turn. For starters, most Americans had merely superficial information, and they were mostly only interested insofar as they felt it reflected back on them. They were narcissistic observers, in other words. Fitz wisely points out that this “is less a history of early U.S. relations with Latin America than it is a U.S. history that uses Latin America to cast new lights on the United States” (12-13). Further, Americans did not view all Latin American revolutions the same. In general, those further away from U.S. border were more exciting; closer to home, activities in areas like Mexico and Florida, both locations many Americans hoped to colonize themselves, often drew consternation rather than praise. Fitz teases out a political geography in which politicians and cultural activists constructed a “South America” that was significant enough to deserve attention yet distant enough to not disrupt their way of life. In general, Americans were anxious to imagine themselves as instigators of a continental-wide republican revolution, but not eager to receive a reciprocal influence from southern nations.

How Americans responded to these revolutions frames the end of what Fitz calls “an analytically coherent period”: the fifty years following the Revolution, in which Americans remained at least circuitously committed to universalist republican principles (9). During this era politicians, elite intellectuals, and common citizens struggled with the limits of democratic freedom. For the decade following the War of 1812, there was a broad consensus that these revolutions were good—even, as I’ll discuss below, as revolutionaries pushed anti-slavery causes—because it stroked the American ego: these new republics were following in their footsteps. Revolutionaries and dignitaries who visited American cities met an eager audience, newspaper editors produced stories and opinions that were engulfed by a paying readership, and politicians appropriated these developments for their own advantages.

The scope of Fitz’s research and analysis is impressive. Our Sister Republics attempts to capture cultural tensions at both elite and common levels. For the former, she provides smart and innovative readings of Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and other prominent politicians. But she is just as interested in lesser-known citizens. Just as congressmen were debating the valor of Simon Bolivar, hundreds of parents named their children after the Latin American revolutionary; at the same moment federal executives considered providing revolutionary aide, local political gatherings toasted revolutionaries in the southern hemisphere. Fitz should be credited for scouring birth records and newspapers—and providing numerical data concerning these trends—to reconstruct local responses to international tensions. This is one of those rare books of the new political history that successfully blends cultural spheres within its analysis.

It also helps that the book is beautifully written. Rarely does a work on politics flow smooth, but Fitz is a gifted writer. As one example, consider this narrative aside amidst a chapter discussing newspaper editors and their role in this Latin American clamor:

Printers were men of elegant words and big ideas. They were also manual laborers, apron-sheathed and ink-stained workers who crawled into bed at night with aching backs and sprained shoulders. Every letter, every space, every punctuation mark that appeared in their papers had to be pulled without looking from an upright typecase and then arranged into words, sentences, and paragraphs. (80)

This is prose worthy of a trade press.

There are two cultural themes that become prominent, at least to me, in this book. The first, race, receives the most attention. How could Americans support revolutions taking place in nations with non-white populations, especially those promoting abolitionist aims, while simultaneously developing a form of trenchant racial superiority at home? At first, even slaveholders “accepted [the Latin American] anti-slavery struggle because they believed so strongly in the broader anti-colonial one that it served, and also because that struggle seemed so abstract, so distant, and, hence, so unthreatening” (90). But this changed over time. On the one hand, anti-slavery activists in the United States, like Benjamin Lundy, as well as African American authors, like David Walker, explicitly tethered abolition to these revolutionary moments. In response, United States southerners developed a pro-slavery ideology that cast the institution not as a necessary evil but as a positive good, which in turn had serious repercussions in their perspectives of Latin America. Integrating debates over South American revolutionaries is an important contribution to our understanding of American conceptions of race.

The second cultural theme, sometimes broached but rarely engaged, was the prevalence of Catholicism in Latin America. Could Catholics, bastions of an apostate antiquity and lacking Protestant commitments to freedom, establish a republic? This seems an especially pertinent question for America’s early republic, as the religious fervor of the 1810s and 1820s—the primary period of Fitz’s study—more closely aligned religious and political ideals. But if such an issue escapes the focus of Our Sister Republics, it remains to be uncovered by future historians.

Ironically, one of Our Sister Republics‘s greatest strengths is also its most frustrating weakness: Fitz is consistently quick to nuance her argument and qualify her scope. Yes, she knows, there are a plurality of reasons that parents named their kids “Bolivar”; and yes, she emphasizes, there are limits to the meanings of patriotic toasts. “Taken separately, the toasts, naming trends, and legislative ballots would be suggestive, not conclusive,” she explains. “But pieced to gather, the generalities line up,” she quickly adds (130). This is not the most adamant form of conclusion. But while such modesty can sometimes undercut her own argument, it also helps her elude accusations of over-generalization, a flaw that is common in transnational studies.

There are important questions posed by this book for historians of revolutionary America. Most prominently, Fitz argues for an extended “revolutionary age,” one that reaches all the way to 1826. In those fifty years, she argues, Americans were at least marginally committed to a universalist republican vision. (Not to mention a tacit approval of anti-slavery ideology.) The Democrat rejection of the Panama convention during John Quincy Adams’s presidency, however, marked “a movement away from the nation’s founding universalist language and toward a bold new vision of U.S. greatness” (213). The year 1826, then, could be seen as the end of the revolutionary age, as Americans forfeited their universalist republicanism.

Fitz’s exhaustive research, provocative argument, and adept writing simultaneously makes Our Sister Republics a significant contribution to scholarship on the early American republic as well as registers her as one of the most skilled young historians in the field. I recommend the book as a model of historical scholarship.

John Turner made his mark in the world of Mormon history with his well-received biography of Brigham Young, Pioneer Prophet (Harvard UP, 2012). It was with a lot of anticipation, then, that he published his most recent book, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Harvard UP, 2016). This is a different type of biography. Rather than following a particular person in Mormon history, Turner followed an idea: how Mormons have conceived of Jesus Christ from Joseph Smith all the way to the present? The result is a cultural history of belief. And besides offering an intellectual genealogy of one of Mormonism’s key tenants, Turner makes an important and sophisticated argument for Mormonism’s place within the Christian tradition, as well as the Christian tradition itself.

If Mormon Jesus is John Turner’s valiant knight, then Jan Shipps’s classic Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Illinois UP, 1985) is the dragon he is trying to slay. More specifically, Turner is taking on the notion that Joseph Smith inaugurated a novel religious tradition exterior to traditional Christianity. This was an idea that has delighted both scholars and Mormons alike. Scholars, most prominently Shipps and Rodney Stark, argued that to follow Mormonism was to watch a new religious category blossom, akin to how Christianity developed out of Judaism. Such a perspective seemingly heightened the relevancy of Mormon studies. Latter-day Saints, of course, lapped this up, as they were eager to capitalize on this inflated sense of importance.

But this has always been an awkward fit for the Mormon faith, and Turner persuasively argues that it has been overstated. Mormonism can only be understood, Turner argues, within a Christian framework. Rather than a distinct religious tradition that outgrew its Christian origins, it is better understood as “one new, distinctive set of answers” to traditional Christian questions (5). Joseph Smith’s set of answers were indeed radical, of course, but the parameters of Christianity have been radically broad as well. “The prominence of Jesus Christ in Mormon scriptures, thought, and culture,” he argues, “place the Latter-day saints with than most common and common sense definitions of Christianity” (18). Even the Book of Mormon, an extra-canonical scriptural text, is “a thoroughly Christian scripture” (48), what he creatively calls “a Christian Trinitatianism with a twist” (35). Early Mormon converts didn’t so much seek “a new and different Jesus” as much as they “were seeking Jesus himself” (59). The Mormon conception of Priesthood was understood as “direct access to Jesus Christ” (72). The evolution of Mormonism’s revelatory approach to a more routinized authority—from “living oracles” who produced Christ’s words to prophets dependent on their position—embodies the Christian anxiety over hearing and following Christ’s words. And after the innovative experiments of the nineteenth century, “the LDS Chruch has firmly retethered itself to the Christian savior” through the work of James Talmage (180), a trend that only intensified in the 1980s.

This history is not just an attempt to show the Christianity of Mormonism, but also the elasticity of Christianity itself. Joseph Smith was not the first radical within the Christian tradition to test religious boundaries, and to see the LDS Church as unique hides the fact that much of Christian thought has always been, and will always be, contested. Every chapter begins with a question or issue that has plagued Christianity since its inception, and then demonstrates how Mormon ideas fit into that trajectory. Thus, even Brigham Young’s flirtation with the Adam-God doctrine and the confusion of “Jesus” and “Jehovah” figures mirrors a hardly-solved question of those two identities in Christology (203-205). Therefore, the arguments of this book are as relevant to scholars of Christianity as those of Mormon studies.

The book is arranged around themes rather than a chronology. Each chapter focuses on a particular issue like the Book of Mormon, priesthood, millenarianism, or divine anthropology. There is typically a lengthy section on Joseph Smith’s era, another on Brigham Young (which is typically the most primary source-rich, given Turner’s background on the topic), a quick foray into the systemization process of the progressive era, and then a fast (and often homogenized) overview of the twentieth century. Sometimes the focus on Christ gets lost, like in chapters 6 and 7, but overall a coherent focus on historical Christology is maintained. Besides a very exhaustive overview of Christological ideas throughout the decades, there are moments of genuine brilliance, like when Turner argues that “temple Mormonism” is “a different sort of religious culture” than Sunday Mormonism, as “there are two separate species of Mormonism within the same church” (185). And for my money, the final three chapters—on the temple, polygamy and monogamy, and race—are the most novel and important contributions of the monograph. What did it mean that Mormons imagined Jesus as, variously, a ritual priest, a polygamist, a monogamist, or an Anglo-Saxon? These theological musings reveal significant cultural tensions.

I have two primary quibbles with how the book defines “Christianity.” First, when Turner refers the Christian tradition, he almost always means “Protestant.” However, as Matthew Bowman has recently emphasized, Catholicism provides a revealing comparative context for the Mormon tradition, and it would help make sense of their insistence on things like ritual. And second, Turner primarily refers to Christianity in a purely theological, rather than cultural, sense. For Americans in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Christianity” was more likely associated with indicators like class, race, and power, and not always merely on one’s opinion of the trinity. In the contemporary world, to argue that Mormonism should be defined as “Christian” would outrage Evangelicals more on cultural than theological grounds, though they often use language of the latter to justify the former. I doubt the sophisticated and nuanced arguments concerning historical theology in this book will convince many of Turner’s Evangelical friends.

But within the boundaries established by Turner, the book succeeds exceptionally well. The Mormon Jesus is a model monograph: concise, efficient, provocative, and thoughtful. It is the result of both an exhaustive researcher as well as a rigorous thinker. Scholars of both Mormonism and American religions who engage the book will be richly rewarded.

It has been forty years since the publication of Henry May’s influential The Enlightenment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976), which has (mostly) remained the standard in the field ever since–if by “standard,” one means the punching bag that cultural, social, and intellectual historians alike can unite in tearing apart, anyway. The book has been a favorite of scholars to both cite and dismiss, praise and to scorn. For many, it was the climax of an older discipline: its unrepentant reliance upon elite(, white, male) sources, its careful taxonomy of different enlightenment categories, its insistence on a Europe-to-America progression, as well as its avoidance of cultural contexts. It is the book that many PhD students put on their comprehensive reading lists, but mostly out of ritual.[1] It seems time, then, for a replacement.

Caroline Winterer’s new offering, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale University Press, 2016), both resembles and diverges from her predecessor. First, it is important to note the similarities: Winterer, like May, mostly relies on elite, white males; like Enlightenment in America, American Enlightenments climaxes with the republicanism of the Revolution; both authors argue that how one understood the past to be crucial to the enlightenment project; and, for the most part, Winterer follows May’s lead by not becoming too entrenched in particular cultural contexts. These consistencies between the two works, separated by four decades, might frustrate some readers who expected more lessons from social history and the cultural turn to infiltrate the narrative, but the continuities also keep the book and its arguments more relevant to scholars of politics and philosophy. The “enlightenment” belongs to many disciplines.

But there are plenty of new developments in this book, and in many ways it is framed so as to refute a number of May’s governing mechanisms. First, Winterer rejects what she calls the “diffusion theory,” where Europe invented the enlightenment and the ideas merely traveled to America in a purely east-to-west fashion. Instead, American Enlightenments argues that there were “correspondence chains” that connected Europe to America since 1500 through the exchange of ideas and goods. Just as the American continent became central to European economy, so too did the people and their products that made up the colonial experience play a major role in the development of European thinking. They were not mere passengers along for the ride.

Second, Winterer refuses to use the categories of enlightenment made popular by May and others–radical, conservative, etc.–because such a taxonomy forces modern classifications upon those of the past. The concept of an “American Enlightenment,” with capital letters and singular expression, for instance, is a product of later centuries when citizens tried to reassure themselves that they had created a new intellectual tradition. Conversely, Winterer is more interested in the divergent, competing, and often unsure versions present in the eighteenth century. “Nowhere was enlightenment a formal political program, nor were the enlightened a sharply defined group,” she explains. “Rather, enlightenment was a process of becoming, a way of imagining the relationship of the present to the past” (2). Hence the plural “s” in the book’s title and the un-capitalized “enlightenment” throughout the text.

And third, Winterer rightly notes that early American appeals to and claims of being “enlightened”–the term most common during the era–were primarily political in nature. That is, to say something was “enlightened” was more a partisan tool than a disinterested description. “The enlightenment of the American Revolution,” argues the final chapter on politics, “was thus both a reality and a fable that the people of the new United States told about themselves” (251). The first step to dissecting this period and its meanings, Winterer implies, is that we need to stop taking the participants’ words for granted.

American Enlightenments is broken up into eight thematic chapters that cover topics ranging from the American landscape to anti-monarchism. Winterer is at her best when demonstrating how the people, goods, and even landscapes of the Americas challenged European knowledge, like how the seashells found at the top of the Appalachian Mountains led scientists to envision non-biblical origins for their environment. These discoveries were not seen as merely “American” lessons–such nationalist frameworks wouldn’t come until the nineteenth century–but as universal revelations. Debates over these seashells thus integrated the American landscape into international debates while simultaneously upending traditional understandings of the earth and its development. Similarly, intellectuals throughout the Atlantic world were fascinated with both the past civilizations of the continent, like the Aztecs, as well as the current inhabitants, like the indigenous tribes, in formulating theories of human progress and populations. And just as slavery drove the European market, so too did slave bodies provide challenges to and vindications of evolving theories concerning human origins. In each of these cases, Americans had a lot to contributed to these enlightened dialogues, as they were far from merely witnesses to an intellectual pageant taking place in Europe.

Yet in each arena of enlightened science, Americans could never come to a definitive answer. There was no singular “Enlightenment” conclusion. On slavery, the inability to either definitively reconcile or refute coerced labor with enlightened principles perpetuated the practice. The deep division over political economy bred competing factions over whether America should be an agricultural or manufacturing nation. Even in republicanism, where Winterer persuasively shows that anti-monarchy was far from the pre-determined outcome of enlightened politics during the era, modes of governance and rituals of belonging only became more contested at the end of the era. Part of becoming “enlightened,” Winterer emphasizes, was becoming more aware of competing modes of thought. Though she doesn’t specifically say it, pluralism is one of the primary fruits of this intellectual development. Hence, again, the plural “s” in the title.

But the topics Winterer chooses, and the cast of characters through which she tells the story, can often be limited. Perhaps this narrow focus is most apparent in the book’s treatment of religion. Recent scholarship on the enlightenment in Europe has emphasized that it mostly operated within, rather than without, religious frameworks.[2] That is, the enlightenment was a part of, rather than in opposition to, Christian belief. This has been echoed in American scholarship, which has demonstrated that most individuals associated with the American enlightenment highlighted its religious dimensions.[3] Yet in American Enlightenments, Winterer relegates religion to its own (and comparatively small) chapter, compartmentalized from the other topics. More, the chapter devoted to religion spends most of its time on Thomas Paine, the European skeptics who energized him, and finally on the Thomas Jefferson and John Adams correspondence. And the thematic focus for the chapter is on the destruction of ancient “mythologies,” both sacred and profane. Both these individuals and this topic are not overly representative of a majority of Americans who filled the pews during this period. Winterer hints to the unrepresentative nature of these figures, but then identifies this tradition’s later inheritors as the Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and even William James. “Reason took a backseat to morality” in the American intellectual narrative, she explains (193). But this does little to engage the recent works on, say, the many Evangelicals in America who appropriated enlightened ideas of natural religion in order to construct substantial yet democratic messages.[4] Those segments are mostly left out of the story.

So while I can buy into Winterer’s overall arc of increased pluralism, scientific experimentation, and optimistic renderings of America’s future (the “pursuing happiness” in the book’s subtitle[5]), the implied secularization seems a tad too neat. “The major innovation in the new political meaning of enlightenment,” she argues, “was that it was secular, human-centered, and historical” (224). I’d argue that the circle of intellectuals for whom this statement was completely true, who would agree with the “secular” qualification in the way it is used by Winterer, was remarkably narrow. Interestingly, Henry May was more insistent about the role of Protestantism in the American Enlightenment than is Caroline Winterer. We are still waiting for a treatment on the American enlightenment that more completely captures its religious dimensions.[6]

But this critique concerns itself with just one, albeit a significant part of Winterer’s story. Overall, American Enlightenments is the new standard for tracing the American participation in and contributions to the Atlantic world’s enlightenment project. It should replace May’s classic text on comprehensive exam lists, serve as a repository text for intellectual historians of the eighteenth century, and provide a touchstone for a new generation of scholarship. One can only hope that it will pave the way for another forty years of enlightened debates.

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[1] See the thoughtful reassessment in John M. Dixon, “Henry F. May and the Revival of the American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” William and Mary 71, no. 2 (April 2014): 255-280.

[2] See David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestant, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton University Press, 2008), for an overview.

[3] For example, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2002); John Fea, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (Yale University Press, 2012).

[4] See Christopher Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (June 2008): 43-68; Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

[5] From the text: The “pursuit of happiness was one of the principal quests of enlightened people.” But this was a different happiness than today. “Happiness first of all had expansive, public meanings…A society was happy when its people enjoyed the security, stability, and peace that allowed them to prosper. The purpose of government was to create public or social happiness by shielding the state from foreign enemies and internal threats. The opposite of public happiness was not sorrow but anarchy or tear any.” (3)

[6] For more on secularism during this period, see Christopher Grasso’s recent essay, “The Religious and the Secular in the Early American Republic,” which I outlined here.