Historytelling: Narrative and Climax in Early American Historiography
ThinkPiece #1
“History,” the accusation goes, is just “one damn thing after another.” And if historians were content merely to record strings of dated facts, we would have to plead guilty. But historians are also storytellers, and the usefulness of an historical study depends not only on its specific findings (the “facts” it uncovers), but also on the story it tells. This is true even though the traditional single narrative is less fashionable in contemporary historical writing. The reader may have to look closely to find it, but the story is there.
Although many histories are optimistic tales of the progress of human rights, democracy, or some other noble dream, today’s historians prefer sad stories, so-called declension narratives. Progress narratives tend to be cautionary in tone (women would not be voting today if not for the vigilance and courage of certain individuals). Declension narratives, on the other hand, speak longingly (or despairingly) of a “road not taken” (if southerners had not chosen the path of cash-crop capitalism, the oppression of blacks could have been avoided). In each case, it is the suggestion of “what might have been” that infuses the narrative with drama.
To engage an historical narrative, then, one must pinpoint the climax, the “what-might-have-been” moment when contingency yields to inevitability. In a story of progress, the climax is often the point at which hope is almost – but not quite – lost; in a story of declension, it may be a final hopeful period before events spin out of control. In both cases, the climax provides the key opportunity for the historian to make his point.
In early American history this climactic moment is often related to the transition between what America was (Indian, colonial, aristocratic) and what it has become (white-dominated, independent, democratic). This is the case with three award-winning books on the colonial period: Jon Butler’s Becoming America, Daniel K. Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country, and James K. Brooks' Captives and Cousins. Although widely divergent in their geographic frames, methodologies, and conclusions, the books share an attention to the creation and expansion of America as well as a delight in shifting the narrative’s fulcrum away from traditional tellings.
For Butler, the real story of American independence is not what happened in 1776 but the long century that preceded it, and in particular the modernization of colonial politics during that period. According to Richter, Indians and Europeans were not brutal antagonists from their first encounter, as we have often heard, but only after three centuries of living side by side. The crux of his story, therefore, is the Indians’ final attempt to find coexistence in the midst of looming European dominance. The climax of Brooks’ narrative, similarly, portrays an attempt at autonomous coexistence: when Indians and colonists in the southwestern borderlands tried to incorporate international capitalism on their own terms – in the face of increasing (and ultimately overwhelming) U.S. government control.
