University of Kentucky Professor Vanessa Holden and Columbia University Professor Michael John Witgen have organized a Forum at William and Mary Quarterly that “examines and challenges the existing periodization of the field of early American history.” They propose that the phrase “early America” underwrites a “settler colonial project masquerading as a postcolonial polity.” More largely, “questions about ongoing colonial relations, imperiled and reasserted sovereignties, slavery’s expansion, and the fraught quest for freedom impel scholars and members of descendant communities to put early America’s processes and experiences into a larger chronological arc.” Hence, “It is past time therefore for us to talk about the end of early America.”
Translated into English: we shouldn’t use the phrase “early America” because it supports the frame of mind that preserves the United States, which is simultaneously imaginary, evil, and oppressive.
Certainly, this proposal is part of the radical activist language game to delegitimize America. Such efforts are legion—witness coinages such as enslaved, indigenous, settler colonial, which already have trickled down to state social studies standards and classroom textbooks. Naturally, we must resist this latest effort by academic historians to memory-hole our nation’s history. But it’s worth pausing a moment to consider—where and when did this term “early America” come from in the first place?
The William and Mary Quarterly dates to 1892. The subtitle “A Magazine of Early American History, Institutions, and Culture” seems to have been appended ca. 1943, when William and Mary College established the Institute of Early American History & Culture as an independent administrative home for the journal. “Early America” appears to have been established at William and Mary Quarterly within living memory.
The phrase “early America” would seem to speak to the historiographical issues of the 1940s, and the generation before. Google Books Ngram Viewer shows the phrase to have been rising in popularity from the late nineteenth century and reaching a high plateau in the 1940s. Partly, “early America” served as an anodyne replacement for “colonial history” that allowed historians of the Revolution and the early Republic to contribute to William and Mary Quarterly, or take part in equivalent academic conversations, without fussing too much about the chronology implied by “colonial.” Replacing the specificity of “colonial America” with the vaguer term “early America” was, to some extent, a convenience to allow articles about Cotton Mather and the Federalist papers to appear in the same journal.
Partly, “early America” served a rising American nationalism—and 1943, a crucial year in the establishment of America’s worldwide supremacy, was an appropriate year to adopt the term. We forget how long it took for America to abandon its own colonial cringe, to think its own history mattered as much as that of Europe’s. “Colonial history” then was an object of opprobrium to American nationalists, who thought that the term signified America’s subordination to Europe, not America’s subordination of other peoples. The shift from “colonial history” to “early American history” was partly a sign of national self-confidence—an intellectual assertion that we Americans were no longer a colony, not even in our minds. The intellectual air that inspired this change similarly inspired Robert Frost’s poem the “The Gift Outright,” itself originally recited at the College of William and Mary in 1941:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Finally, the shift to the term “early America” was indeed one of intellectual annexation—of intellectual imperialism,although that term should not be regarded with the moronic hostility of the current generation of academic historians. “Early America” also allowed historians writing about Indians to submit to William and Mary Quarterly, or historians of New France and New Spain, or any of a host of subject matters imperfectly comprehended by “colonial [English] history,” but which might be subsumed by the more capacious term America. This is the America that was the intellectual counterpart of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny and the Roosevelt Corollary—the America addressed with fear and defiance by Rubén Darío in his poem “To Roosevelt”:
The United States is strong and big.
When it shakes there is a deep tremor
through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, you hear the roar of the lion.
Hugo said to Grant: “The stars are yours.”
There was a generosity to the term “early America,” of course, now sadly forgotten. It argued that the histories of Indians, French, Spanish, and everyone not in the tight box of colonial America were equally American history, equally worthy of publication, equally to be part of our national narrative. And, indeed, the descendants of these peoples now were to be regarded as Americans just as much as the descendants of the English colonies. We revived the erased history of the Indians and made it the first chapter of our textbooks in this generous spirit of empire. “Early America” resurrected a host of dead peoples in our self-confident, capacious nation.
But there is a double edge to all such welcoming empires. The grandchild of the Goth welcomed into Roman service may build a Gothic kingdom on the bones of the empire that welcomed him in; there is a short road from Lord Curzon ruling India as Viceroy to Keir Starmer fecklessly tut-tutting the rapes of Rotherham. There is an equally short road from the intellectual imperialism of the phrase “early America” to the decision by “American” historians that they will teach every history but what used to be taught in “colonial history.” The American imperialism that subsumed the history of other nations now subsumes our own.
Cruel irony. But we need not, we must not, merely lament what has gone before. The soft murderers of the academy want to remove “early America” not least because they want America to expire as soon as possible. We must teach the history of our country, the history of our nation, to preserve it in the present, to revive it for the future, to make America glorious once more. When we shake, there should be a tremor in the Himalayas and on Olympus Mons as we claim our birthright of the stars.
We should not abandon the friendly assimilation connoted by the phrase “early America”—the cheerful welcome that turned strangers into fellow Americans is a wonderful part of our national tradition. The misuse of that welcome by the Woke Imperialists does caution us, however, to place greater emphasis that the heart of early America was the English colonies. We must not annex other histories at the expense of our own: America is a house with many mansions, but the hearth is Jamestown and the foundation stone is Plymouth Rock. Whatever historiographical language we use, we must preserve that truth.
We must save American history if we want to save America. We must love the same America that our forefathers created and handed down to us, and which turned a smiling face to all the peoples of the world, with whatever language best ensures that we can hand it down in turn to our posterity. We must defeat the Woke Imperialists to do so—but when they have been repelled, we should turn to the better task of crafting new histories of our great nation, confident that we are still in America’s early days.
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
