On Monday, the Junto featured a Q&A I did with James Alexander Dun, who teaches history at Princeton University, about his new book: Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (UPenn Press, 2016). Make sure to go read his smart and provocative comments over there. But I thought it’d still be worthwhile to jot down some of my own thoughts on the book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Dangerous Neighbors is a history that spans Atlantic, hemispheric, and local history. While much of the focus is on newspaper coverage in Philadelphia, that context is only important insomuch as it is reacting to a much broader world. Most especially, Dun persuasively argues that early Americans collapsed the distance around them even as they sought to maintain a cultural silo; that is, they were immensely interested in events taking place outside their boundaries, but only as a way to reflect local concerns. Events like the Haitian Revolution, then, “reverberated in America because of their capacity to provoke self-reflection,” he notes. “They stimulated connections and comparisons; they raised questions about America’s own revolutionary pasts and their current realities. In crafting narratives from and about Saint Domingue, Americans fashioned and re-fashioned their own stories” (4). As a book that adds provocative nuances to traditional narratives concerning the Age of Revolution, Dun digs deep into how early Americans understood the Revolutionary Age themselves.

These categories of revolutionary belonging are important, as they were central to how Dun’s characters conceived of the world around them. Those who were most committed to the more radical revolutionary notions, like abolition, connected these transatlantic happenings into interwoven republican narratives. America was the spark for a transnational fire. Their understanding of the slave revolt in Saint Domingue took on a special hue, as many viewed it as part of the broader transformation taking place in France, which in turn was following America’s example. “Americans saw a French Revolution in Saint Domingue,” Dun explains, “not a Dominguan (let alone Haitian) Revolution” (21). Even as emancipation was declared, and the insurrection became more politicized, radical abolitionists continued to see elements of the fight as representative of a broader universalist front. Most famously, David Walker posited all revolts in the America and Europe as part of a global push for equality. Revolutionary, indeed.

But the American reactions to Haiti wen through stages, evolving as they witnessed a slave revolt that raised questions concerning republicanism and anti-slavery, Toussaint Louverture’s rise and the perils of black leadership, and the final and utter violence of black independence. This was not a predetermined trajectory. Developments at home, especially the Federalist and Jeffersonian battles, framed these new perceptions. Once Louverture came to power, the war turned deadly; and as the large-scale slave insurrection became too much to defend, many Americans divorced the conflict from its French origins. Even for those who defended the principles of the French Revolution, Haiti was too much a burden to maintain. By Jefferson’s presidency, and especially after Haiti achieved independence, most were willing to cut off the black nation as a political pariah. It was neither French nor Republican. And by disregarding Haiti’s Revolution, they in turn were redefining their own: no more was abolitionism or universalism seen as the heart of the American Revolutionary cause.

Dun argues that by shifting their understanding of Haiti’s revolution, they made a concomitant revision to their own “Revolutionary settlement” (69). Rather than being a radical push for universalism and equality, America’s founding was now seen as based more in political independence. More, their revolution was less representative of a broader global move and more an exceptionalist break-off divorced from the other nations. Americans, Dun believes, consciously chose to put an end to their Revolutionary era by capping off its radical potential. Even in the City of Brotherly Love, the hub of anti-slavery agitation, activists eventually “articulated a conception of Philadelphia that made the city an exceptional oasis rather than an auger of coming change” (142). In an age where nationalism seems once again to be blunting progressive change, this story is as relevant as ever.

Dangerous Neighbors fits a much larger literature, both concerning books on Haiti’s role in the early republic as well as the Age of Revolutions more generally. But I was especially struck by its similarities to Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics (reviewed here), another book that just came out last year. Both books embody the en-vogue hemispheric approach that re-centers historians’ focuses on the geographic neighbors to America’s south. Both books shed new light on the early republic’s debates concerning race and slavery. And both books demonstrate that the “Age of Revolution” in America was an artificial category that met its end due to conservative backlash and anti-republican retrenchment. Dun and Fitz argue for a Revolutionary moment that was surprisingly open to radical forms of universalism that was eventual squelched by those who tried to bring the age to a commanding halt.

This is one of those books where it is difficult to find a critique, so I’m just going to mention my single biggest frustration: it’s a bit too dense and thorough to assign in my undergraduate class. I periodically teach a course on the Age of Revolutions, so I’m constantly on the lookout for possible new books to assign. Dangerous Neighbors‘s topic and insight would fit perfectly, but I fear my students are not the book’s ideal audience. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the problem is rooted in Dun’s strengths: the work is exhaustively researched, meticulously argued, and powerfully written. But it will make its biggest impact with fellow scholars. To make one more comparison to Fitz’s work: Our Sister Republics was meant for the general reader and undergraduate student, while Dangerous Neighbors is destined for the graduate seminar room.

And it is there where I believe this book will help shape the field. Dangerous Neighbors adds much to an already rich historiographical arena, and demonstrates what a close analysis of texts and incisive dissection of contexts can yield. I imagine Dun’s work will spark discussion for many years to come.

The Mormon History Association community is small enough that you typically know what books are forthcoming and when. It is very rare, then, that a book captures us by surprise. However, when Mary Campbell’s Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (Chicago UP, 2016) showed up on Amazon last year, some were puzzled. The author wasn’t familiar to most in most MHA circles, and the topic seemed a bit, well provocative. However, after reading the volume, I’m happy to share that the book was a pleasant surprise. Indeed, it may be my favorite Mormon history title from 2016. (And that’s saying something!)

Charles Ellis Johnson is a fascinating figure in his own right. The son of a polygamous union (his mother was the third wife of a famous pioneer patriarch) who married a daughter of Brigham Young (Ruth was a daughter of Emmeline Free), Ellis was a member of Mormon nobility. But he also lived at a moment of cultural transition within the Mormon region: born in 1857, he made the pioneer voyage with his mother at the age of three, but would live long enough to see Utah (and the Church) become fully American. He was of pioneer stock while also looking forward to modernity. And while his marriage to Ruth Young did not last, the cultural paradox in which he lived did. He eventually became known as one of Utah’s most prominent photographers, as his portraits of LDS leaders, Salt Lake City streets, and cultural activities became the window through which Americans viewed their most peculiar residents. During this period of Americanization, Johnson’s many photographs (see one listing here) served as a connective link in this important cultural project.

Campbell argues that Johnson worked to make Mormonism modern. He set up his own private tourist shop on a prominent corner just across from Temple Square and welcomed the city’s increasing number of guests. (See photo below.) One of his most famous productions, a tourist handbook, “can be viewed as an extended campaign to sell the Latter-day Saints and their city as civilized, cultured, and cosmopolitan” (23). He helped break Mormonism from its polygamous image by demonstrating that Salt Lake City was just like everywhere else. (His photographs of the Saltair Resort were some of his most famous.) His portraits of LDS leaders, especially during Wilford Woodruff’s presidency, “forged their own new LDS image-body during the years following the First Manifesto” (40). Johnson even captured some of the most famous images of Utah’s female suffragists, connecting them to the broader cultural and political movements they yearned to be part of. In an era when Mormonism needed a new public relations front, Johnson was ready with his camera.

But bearded prophets and theater audiences were not the only things Ellis photographed. He also supplied mail-order erotic images of women. Between around 1903 and 1907 (the historical record is fuzzy), Johnson made a profit off gentile curiosity concerning Mormon sexuality. He took many portraits of scantily-clad women—Campbell surmises that the subjects were likely visiting performers—and mailed them to subscribers out of state. He even made money off the polygamous caricature that he elsewhere sought to deconstruct, as he sold hundreds of postcards that featured Brigham Young’s many wives out of a store that was next-door to the Beehive and Lion Houses. But in general, other than a handful of images that played off of the eastern harem image prevalent in the American press, Campbell’s erotic images were still part of the Americanization process in that they centered on the lust of monogamous relationships.  “Johnson’s erotica bears a strange resemblance to his images of Mormonism’s holy men and sacred sites,” Campbell explains, because “his shots of scantily dressed women ultimately worked to knit the newly monogamous Saints back into the nation” (56). Eroticization was part of Americanization. Revealing the double-nature of her title, Campbell shows how Johnson simultaneously deconstructed the “erotic” nature of Mormonism by making it look American while also making money off the lingering “erotic” image of Mormonism’s seemingly sensual past.

There are two historiographical interventions that are noteworthy, one to a common and famous trajectory and the other to one still unexplored. First, Campbell’s tale adds more flesh—in some cases, literally—to the tale of American assimilation. Thomas Alexander’s classic Mormonism in Transition turned thirty-years-old last year, so it was time for some new perspectives. It is only appropriate, then, that both Campbell’s and Tom Simpson’s book, both of which appeared in 2016, add new nuances and challenges to that story. In both cases, Mormonism’s transition is more nuanced, dialogic, and complex, as Mormons are seen simultaneously looking backward and forward. This was not a teleological march toward modernity.

The second intervention steers us more into the social history of the era. Beyond all the fascinating arguments, ideas, and details provided in Campbell’s narrative, I am especially excited to get a better idea of Salt Lake City’s progressive culture. As I hinted at in my review of the Amasa Lyman diaries, we have this staid perception of Utah’s capital as under the thumb of the Mormon hierarchy, the pious perch of Puritan performance. But just down the street from LDS headquarters there was a vibrant community that sought to fit in within the modern world while still under the shadow of the SLC Temple. Next door to Church leaders who called for an emphasis on sexual modesty, there was a photoshop that created risqué postcards. Eventually, someone will have to pull all these divergent threads together and create a seamless tapestry of Utah’s surprisingly progressive social life.

The book is not without its problems—or rather, its frustrations, at least from the perspective of a historian. The theme of artistic tension sometimes subverts necessary contextualization and chronological development. Charles Ellis Johnson is the crucial figure of this story, but his life is mostly shrouded behind the analysis of his paintings: details concerning his youth, growth, faith crises, and especially his later life and death are mostly cast as asides. Chapters are based around themes, and so the narrative time jumps between years and even decades, sometimes becoming redundant and at other times becoming contradictory. There is a tale somewhere in there of a man who was the quasi-official photographer for the LDS Church in the 1890s, lost his faith (or money), and then turned to racy photos of women in the early 1900s before falling into irrelevancy. But that sort of trajectory is not fully realized. Further, later chapters seem a bit disjointed compared to the rest; for instance, the chapter on women suffragists fails to really connect Johnson besides the fact that he took many of their famous photos. Did he really support their cause? Readers are left to wonder. And the final chapter, an aesthetically beautifully and intellectually rich exploratory essay that interweaves Johnson’s self-portrait, Joseph Smith’s “glass-looking” reputation, and Joseph F. Smith’s attempt to force Mormonism into modernity, appears more as a stand-apart article than a book’s conclusion.

But don’t let these critiques fool you: I loved this book. Once I started it I couldn’t put it down. Not only is the research exhaustive and the writing clear and persuasive, but as a novice to photographic history I was entranced with this introduction to the world of visual culture. Mary Campbell’s book is not only a must-read treatment in the sphere of Mormon history, but it is a wonderful contribution to the literature on religion, photography, and gender. It is a model monograph, and Campbell is a triumphant scholar. Further, Chicago University Press should be commended for producing such a beautiful volumes that features 85(!) high-quality visuals. I hope the book gets the broad audience it deserves. I know of no other work in Mormon history like it.

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.