(Studies in Print Culture and The History of The Book) Pfitzer, Gregory M - Popular History and The Literary Marketplace, 1840-1920 (2008, University of Massachusetts Press)

.....................................................................
Popular History
and the Literary
Marketplace
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studies in
print culture &
the history of
the book
Editorial Advisory Board
Roger Chartier
Robert A. Gross
Joan Shelley Rubin
Michael Winship
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.......................... ............
Popular
History
and the
literary
marketplace,
–
.......................................................................
gregory m. pfitzer
University of Massachusetts Press amherst & boston
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Copyright © 2008 by
University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
LC 2007024295
ISBN 978-1-55849-625-5 (paper); 624-8 (library cloth)
Designed by Richard Hendel
Set in Monotype Bulmer, Engravers Bold,
and Madrone types by BookComp, Inc.
Printed and bound by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pfitzer, Gregory M.
Popular history and the literary marketplace, 1840–1920 / Gregory M. Pfitzer.
p. cm. — (Studies in print culture and the history of the book)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55849-625-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-55849-624-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. United States—Historiography. 2. Historiography—United States—History—19th century.
3. Historiography—United States—History—20th century. 4. Historiography—Economic
aspects—United States—History. 5. History publishing—United States—History. 6. United
States—Intellectual life—19th century. 7. United States—Intellectual life—20th century.
8. Historians—United States—Biography. 9. American literature—19th century—History and
criticism. 10. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.
E175.P478 2008
973.072—dc22 2007024295
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

are available.
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for michael & sally
—still the “two greatest kids in town”
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Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”
Defining Popular History 1
Chapter 1 When Popular History Was Popular
Washington Irving, George Lippard, John Frost,
and Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century 18
Chapter 2 The “Terrible Image Breaker”
William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and
Scribner’s Hybrid History 73
Chapter 3 The Metahistorian as Popularizer
John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of
Popular History 123
Chapter 4 “The Past Everything”
Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the
Rise of the “New” History 179
Chapter 5 “A Background of Real History”
Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as Popular History 227
Chapter 6 Writing Himself Out of Trouble
Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of
Popular History 282
Conclusion The Unpopularity of Popular History 332
Notes 349
Bibliography 433
Index 455
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Illustrations
Advertisement for Ridpath’s History of the World 2
Retrospective article in the Philadelphia Record

on the writings of George Lippard 62
Frontispiece to Part One of the subscription series

for Bryant’s Popular History 78
A “Bem Method” chart illustrating Ridpath’s

linear approach to history 140
“The Ships of Columbus” from Eggleston’s

Household History of the United States and Its People 202
Frontispiece from salesman’s dummy for Ellis’s

History of Our Country 260
Promotional brochure for Julian Hawthorne and Company 328
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Acknowledgments
The inspiration for this book came from a series of questions posed by the late
Harvard professor of history John Clive to students in his rigorous course on
the history of historical writing. As an advanced graduate student, I audited
this course—twice, in fact—without completing it; the distractions of teach-
ing and dissertation writing were simply too great to allow me to fulfill the
obligations of the syllabus, although I learned a great deal from the sections
I did finish. It was Clive’s practice to begin the course by passing out a list
of pertinent questions for students to keep in mind as they read dozens of
works by important European and American historians, from Edward Gibbon
to Henry Adams. The reading list was intimidating, to be sure—any course
that begins with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must be, I sup-
pose—but the questions treating various aspects of historical texts as literary
productions, including subject matter, style, structure, historical argument and
explanation, were especially challenging. “What is the role of human reason
in these narratives?” Clive asked students. “How does the historian depict
character?” “What is the tone of the history? Serious? Ironical? Polemical?
Matter-of-fact?” “Is description sometimes synonymous with explanation?”
and so on. I’ll never forget Professor Clive’s reaction when I went to see him
for the second time to say I would not be able to complete the course. “Mr.
Pfitzer,” he said in his quaint manner, “You’re going to have to face these ques-
tions at some point, you know.” And he was right, of course. Popular History
and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920 is my effort to offer answers to these
important matters and to fulfill my unmet obligations to Professor Clive.
Further inspiration for this book derived from recent trends in historiog-
raphy over the last two decades. Like many graduate students in the 1980s
interested in the literary underpinnings of historical works, I found my way
eventually to Hayden White, who challenged me to recognize the “deep
structure of the historical imagination” in dominant linguistic forms. White’s
“metahistorical approach” led me to works by Robert J. Berkhofer Jr., David
Harlan, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a very diverse group of scholars, to be sure,
who elaborated on or took issue with White’s controlling ideas about the liter-
ary turn in historical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their
collective writings caused me to reflect more deeply on the narrative structure
of history. In reading their works I was compelled to consider explicitly the
role of memory in the preservation of history as well as the mechanisms by
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which we construct narratives about the past and the standards by which we
determine what constitutes historical truth. I also came under the influence of
scholars interested in the history of the book, Michael Winship, in particular,
who elaborated in meaningful ways the power of texts to shape cultural mean-
ing. Finally, I was affected profoundly in my thinking by scholars and former
mentors David Donald, Alan Brinkley, Charlie Bassett, and Richard Moss, all
of whom have been productive teachers and scholars of things historical. From
the late 1980s to the present, I have had the benefit of the wisdom of my Skid-
more College colleagues in American studies, Mary Lynn, Joanna Zangrando,
Dan Nathan, Joshua Woodfork, Richard Kim, Janet Casey, and Nancy Otrem-
biak, who advised me in various capacities with respect to this book and other
matters of importance to the profession while I was writing it. Thank you also
to my friends David Baum, Neil Jumonville, and Gordon Hylton, who have
taken time over the years to discuss this project with me during lengthy phone
conversations, between pitches at baseball and softball tournaments, and dur-
ing substitutions at noontime basketball games.
In completing my work, I benefited from the helpful advice of members
of several professional organizations who were generous enough to comment
on my “popular history” presentations, including those from the Great Lakes
Association of Colleges and Universities, the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture
Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Studies
Association. Deans Chuck Joseph, Muriel Poston, and Mark Hofmann and
members of the Faculty Development Committee at Skidmore College pro-
vided various travel stipends and a Major Projects Completion Grant for two
research trips to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I have made
extensive use of the personal papers of popular historians, publishers, book
agents, and readers scattered across the country as well. Some of these materi-
als are housed in substantial archival collections, such as the Columbia Uni-
versity Libraries, the New York Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library,
the Olin Library at Cornell University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, the Princeton
University Archives, the Harvard University Archives, and the American An-
tiquarian Society. Others are in more specialized collections associated with
the Western Association of Writers at the Indiana State Library, the Indiana
State Historical Society, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and DePauw
University. Still others are available only to those with an explorer’s sense of
intellectual adventure, such as the back issues of Publishers’ Weekly that I dis-
covered in a dimly lit closet on the second floor of the reading room at the
Huntington Library. I wish to thank the staffs of all these institutions (big and
small) as well as others listed in the bibliography for their aid in research and
xii } Acknowledgments
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for permission to cite sources in their collections. Thanks as well to editors
Paul Wright and Clark Dougan, director Bruce Wilcox, managing editor Carol
Betsch, and other members of the hardworking staff of the University of Mas-
sachusetts Press who have done so much to advance an appreciation for the
history of books.
Many of the texts I analyze in Popular History and the Literary Marketplace
as well as some of the materials I cite relative to book agents, readers, and re-
viewers of popular histories were discovered through extensive Internet and
eBay searches. During the better part of the decade on which I was at work on
this book, I amassed a small library of well-worn histories and complementary
sources that have helped me to understand how these histories functioned in
the literary marketplace. I found a “salesman’s dummy” used for subscription
sales of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States and another for Ridpath’s
Popular History of the United States. I located publicity brochures for Edward
Ellis’s The People’s Standard History of the United States, complete with sam-
ple illustrations and maps. I purchased publishers’ handbooks filled with use-
ful instructions to book agents for selling volumes such as Edward Eggleston’s
Household History of the United States. And I discovered an original brochure
documenting the failed business ventures of the popular historian Julian Haw-
thorne. Using various search engines on the Internet, I even managed to track
down and interview relatives of the various nineteenth-century popular histo-
rians I study in this book, most of whom were every bit as engaging and down-
to-earth as their ancestors evidently were. The fact that I was able to purchase
these popular histories, salesman’s dummies, and publicity brochures on eBay
serves as a reminder that the fate of popular history as a genre is still very much
conditioned by the circumstances of the marketplace. Part of the purpose of
this book is to consider how the laws of supply and demand influenced our
definition of what constituted the popular in nineteenth-century America and
how those laws continue today to shape our perceptions of what is important
to remember and celebrate in our heritage.
Finally, I thank my wife, Mia, and members of my immediate and extended
families (the Pfitzers and the McCrossans) for sticking with me through the
production of this book. It scares and saddens me a bit to think how often I
may have shirked my daily responsibilities to them in my efforts to lose myself
in these nineteenth-century texts. More than once my loved ones have had
to shake me back to the present where history meets reality in startling and
disruptive ways in the form of dishes to be done, lawns to be mowed, and
mortgages to be paid. Here again, however, there is a neat consistency between
the kinds of distractions the writers of these popular histories experienced in
producing their works and those that contemporary historiographers, such
Acknowledgments { xiii
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as myself, face in writing about them. Popular historians of the nineteenth
century often lamented the fact that they were too distracted by the press of
daily concerns to give themselves over completely to the past, and so it has
been with me. But some things in the present are more precious than those in
the past and remind us of the dangers of our escapist fantasies. That is why,
most of all, I want to thank my son and daughter, Michael and Sally, who grew
up with this book. Memories of their fading childhoods, which I associate so
closely with the production of this work, have increased my appreciation for
the importance of history as a device for preserving impressions of what we
cannot have back. Michael and Sally are now at colleges in Boston themselves,
taking courses from professors who, like John Clive, are challenging them to
think about their place in the world, past, present, and future. I look forward to
seeing what questions they, too, “are going to have to face” in the years ahead
and how they will respond.This work is dedicated with love to them.
xiv } Acknowledgments
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.....................................................................
Popular History
and the Literary
Marketplace
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.............................................................
Introduction “Whatever
Popularizes Vulgarizes”
Defining Popular History
In the summer of 1908, fifteen-year-old Huey Long went door-to-

door in the parishes of central Louisiana selling books on consignment for a
Texas book dealer. Long, who later bragged to his high school friends that he
could “sell anything on earth to anybody,” made a decent living that summer
peddling a stock of volumes ranging from “trashy books to the finest literary
and scholarly works.” One can picture young Huey Long as an ambitious ju-
nior book vendor, cultivating the arts of sweet persuasion, shameless cajoling
and relentless pursuit that would become the trademarks of his later career
as a politician. A favorite tactic of his was to memorize and quote verbatim
lengthy passages from works such as Ridpath’s three-volume “popular” His-
tory of the World (1885) as a way of startling and impressing customers with
his striking ability “to photograph whole pages in his mind.”1 Noting that
Ridpath’s trilogy “stressed the role of powerful leaders” in world history, Wil-
liam Leuchtenburg has argued that this mental exercise provided Huey with
models of “unadorned power” on which he relied so heavily later in life.2 As
the biographer T. Harry Williams has added, Long knew that “an audacious
action” of this sort “could shock people into a state where they could be ma-
nipulated.” Huey was “challenged by the possible resistance of buyers” and
the “feeling of power” he experienced when he overcame it.3
Long’s success as a book peddler suggests the impact popular historical
literature had on certain kinds of readers. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, born
in 1900, was among those affected as a young boy by Ridpath’s popular his-
tories. In his autobiographical work, Look Homeward Angel, Wolfe explained
the powerful visual and emotional impact of the volumes on his alter ego, Eu-
gene Gant. Gant enjoyed nothing better than sitting by the hearth, “spitting
clean and powerful spurts of tobacco-juice over his son’s head into the hissing
fire,” and “poring insatiably over great volumes in the bookcase, exulting in
the musty odor of the leaves, and in the pungent smell of their hot hides.” The
books he enjoyed most were “three huge calf-skin volumes called Ridpath’s
History of the World,” wrote Wolfe, in whose pages “the past unrolled . . . in
separate and enormous visions.” The volumes were “illustrated with hundreds
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Advertisement for John C. Ridpath’s History of the World.

of drawings, engravings, wood-cuts” that were so narrative in their storytelling
elements that they allowed Gant, even as a child, to follow “the progression
of the centuries pictorially before he could read.” The images of battle “de-
lighted him most of all,” and his “brain swarmed” with visions of “unend-
ing legends” built “upon the pictures of kings of Egypt, charioted swiftly by
soaring horses.” Something “infinitely old and recollective seemed to awaken
in him as he looked on fabulous monsters, the twined beards and huge beast-
bodies of Assyrian kings, the walls of Babylon,” Wolfe noted.4 Ridpath had an
even more persistent hold on Huey Long’s historical imagination. Years after
he was done selling books, Long continued to quote Ridpath’s History of the
World, as he did in the 1930s during one memorable speech on the floor of the
Senate in making the case for his “Share Our Wealth” program.5 Almost fifty
years after it first had been crafted, Long, at least, felt that Ridpath’s historical
prose still had relevance.
What types of books were these “popular” texts such as Ridpath’s His-
tory of the World, and what did their large sales suggest about the ways in
which Americans like Huey Long and Thomas Wolfe absorbed lessons from
the past? To answer these two questions, which is the central purpose of this
book, we must consider these popular histories both as material and as cul-
tural artifacts.
First, the material. Reduced to their simplest components, these volumes
were works of popular literature every aspect of which was designed to increase
sales among readers. Their wide influence began with aggressive prepublica-
tion advertising campaigns of publishers intended to attract readers to widely
circulating books in a new mass-market economy with vast implications for
historical literacy and learning in America. From the point of view of publish-
ers, the key to success in this literary marketplace was to witness economies of
scale that came from selling huge numbers of works at small profit. The strat-
egy of publishing houses, therefore, was the relatively simple one of reducing
profit margins on the sale of inexpensive books in hopes of expanding mar-
ket share among a group of new and avid readers. Book agents such as Huey
Long understood that the way to achieve distribution runs of the magnitude
necessary to realize profits in the popular book market was to convince read-
ers that they could not be without such works. The target audience was the
growing American middle class. Benson J. Lossing, a historian who produced
popular histories that competed well with those of Ridpath in the literary mar-
ketplace, declared that he wanted to make history “accessible to our whole
population” by producing inexpensive books that would aid in the effort “to
scatter the seeds of knowledge” to “those in the humbler walks of society”
whose “adventitious circumstances” denied them access “to the full granary
Defining Popular History {3

of information, where the wealthy are filled.”6 Even the pedantic William H.
Prescott reminded himself in a private journal entry to “aim at wide rather than
deep views, at a popular, rather than an erudite compilation, avoiding intricate
research, particularly in antiquities, and particularly too on topics relating to
constitutions of Governments, or economy.”7 The results were dramatic. As
Paul Gutjahr notes, “[p]ublishers at the turn of the nineteenth century rarely
produced print runs over two thousand copies,” but “by mid-century, Ameri-
can publishing had so radically changed that editions of 30,000, 75,000, even
100,000 copies were common.”8
As a way of increasing product recognition, publishers also alerted would-
be readers to the fact that only the most recognized writers with established
literary reputations had been chosen to produce popular volumes. Houses
such as Scribner’s, Appleton’s, and Collier’s sought out only those authors
whose names were familiar enough to readers to sell books. These writers
rarely had formal training as historians; in most cases, in fact, they were poets
and novelists who were well known to general American readers, including
the novelists Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and George Lip-
pard, the poet-journalist William Cullen Bryant, the Indiana “poet-historian”
John Clark Ridpath, the local color and regional author Edward Eggleston,
the dime novelist Edward S. Ellis, and the realist novelist Julian Hawthorne
(son of Nathaniel Hawthorne). Privileging narration and an effusive literary
style over dispassionate prose, these writers possessed rhetorical gifts that
were valued by many middle-class readers who viewed fiction and history as
inextricably linked. In each case, the favorite literary conventions of these writ-
ers with respect to character development, narrative description, tone, point
of view, rules of evidence, tense, and plot transferred to their historical prose
with an ease that suggested the degree to which they collectively viewed his-
tory as literary art. Publishing firms advertised the popular histories of these
artists as literary accomplishments and acted on the assumption (a correct one
as it turned out) that works of history that were poorly written, no matter how
thoroughly researched and soundly argued, could not sell enough copies to
make them viable economically.
The titles of these popular books were important literary markers by which
publishers provided readers with useful clues as to their editorial intentions.
The histories that “hawkers” such as Long peddled had descriptive headings
that fell into two related categories: those that emphasized the domesticity and
collective identities of the “people” in their titles, such Eggleston’s The House-
hold History of the United States and Its People and Ridpath’s The People’s
History of the United States; and those that appealed to the masses of common
Americans through use of the descriptive term “popular,” such as Bryant’s or
4} “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

Ridpath’s Popular History of the United States. Sellers of popular books in the
former category presumed that the American home was the logical starting
place for their mass readership campaign, which explains why their door-to-
door subscription and consignment techniques worked so well. As George
Callcott has suggested, “Historians liked to say that history should be in every
home, a hearthside companion for the family.”9 Publishers of popular histories
in the latter category hoped their works would be “popular” in the sense we
understand that term today—that is, well-liked and well-supported in the mar-
ketplace. However, they also conceived of “popular” in the French sense of the
term populaire—that is, as something produced for the benefit of “le peuple.”10
Such usages had obvious nationalizing implications as well. In the Popular
History of France from the Earliest Times (1869), Francois Guizot encouraged
a sense of cultural democratization among the French by demonstrating to the
educated and working classes that they shared a distinct culture of nationalis-
tic values. He also informed readers that he intended to trace those influences
which affected most profoundly the daily experiences of French commoners
and would do so in such a way as to make them understandable to their grand-
children. Influenced by French realist novelists, popularizers of history after
Guizot sought to delineate the ordinary life of ordinary people and to study
that which was habitual in the culture.11
Prefaces and forwards were also opportunities for publishers of popular
histories to make their ideological commitments to “the people” clear. Mason
Weems, author of a much-celebrated biography of George Washington, was
said to be a “writer of the highest order of popularity” because, from the very
introductions to his works, he indicated that he desired to capture the imagina-
tions of the American people, “to catch their ear” and to say “exactly what they
wanted to hear.”12 Similarly, Joel and Esther Steele in Barnes’ Popular History
of the United States (1875) announced that their volume was not intended for
antiquarians, students, or scholars merely but for the “general reading public”
who needed guidance in the ways of patriotism and citizenship. They believed
that a noteworthy “popular history” must produce a “truer reverence for the
past, a purer patriotism for the present and a more hopeful outlook for the
future.”13 Marketers were especially adept at promoting the patriotic benefits
of popular texts that embraced a spirit of democratic, middle-class sentimen-
tality.14 Expansion of the market encouraged those active in the book trade
to believe that they were serving patriotic purposes by satisfying democratic
appetites, while booksellers did what they could to convince customers that
the consumption of popular histories was a political act of great significance
for national progress. “History could impart its delights ‘only when read by
adequate numbers,’ ” noted one astute observer of the scene, while another

added: “If the past provided entertainment for ‘the few,’ then it was a service
to extend it also to ‘the general reader.’ ”15
If appeal to good writing, patriotism, domesticity, and middle-class sensi-
bilities proved insufficient to convince would-be customers to open up their
pocketbooks to purchase these histories, traveling book salesmen could rely
on sensational packaging to charm the reluctant into purchases. Despite old
cautions against judging books by their covers, potential buyers were often eas-
ily distracted by the outward appearances of popular books, which, like the
agents such as Huey Long who sold them, were ingratiating and somewhat out-
rageous in style, folksy and hypnotic in rhetorical manner, and unforgettable in
terms of visual packaging. As Thomas Wolfe’s description of the visual impact
of Ridpath’s History of the World implies, popular histories were easy to spot
in their day because they were characterized by certain physical elements re-
lated to ease of transport and circulation. They were printed on lightweight
and cheap paper and usually sold by subscription in unbound segments or
“parts”; sometimes they were republished later in sturdier, cloth formats. The
quality of the inks used in many of the original editions was substandard as well,
although the texts were embellished frequently with lavish and eye-catching
illustrations, while their covers were embossed in accordance with the best tra-
ditions of pictorial book design.16 Color was a particular selling point after the
1870s, as publishers used three- and four-pigment chromolithography to adorn
their popular texts. These ornamented books became objects and “works of
art” to be collected, part of the intellectual bric-a-brac of the nineteenth century
that middle-class Americans displayed on their coffee tables and in their parlors
as ways of demonstrating their learnedness. So lavish were some of the covers
of these popular books that their marketers came to believe that the cosmetic
components of bookmaking were the most essential to a literary work’s success,
even more important, perhaps, than the quality of the story they embellished.
Mason Weems (who sold books before he turned popular author) argued that
the key to promoting a popular biography of even so popular a figure as George
Washington was to have “regiments upon regiments in red and gold to flash
around.” Worry not about the quality of the writing, he counseled, since “[t]he
name—the noise—the Eclate is EVERYTHING.”17
Second, with regard to popular books as cultural artifacts, these works were
highly significant for the manner in which they affected the ways Americans
absorbed lessons from the past. For one thing, they influenced the very chan-
nels of communication through which average citizens gained access to his-
tory. Prior to the revolution in print culture that encouraged the production
of such popular works, history was preserved primarily in artifact collections
and in source documents housed in athenaeums, archives, and local historical

societies to which few had access. Many people “heard” local history based
on these materials as recounted in commemorative orations by ancient town
fathers, but only a select group of highly educated patrons “read” the past
as presented in complex, multivolume works by patrician historians such as
Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and John Lothrop Motley.18 “Popular his-
tory” books of the mid-nineteenth century were different from these earlier
antiquarian efforts, however, in that their circulation-minded authors and pub-
lishers geared them toward a much wider reading public in hopes of giving
more Americans access to historical resources and insights and of profiting
from them. Sales figures tell the story of a cottage industry that exploded after
the Civil War.19 Some popular texts, such as Mary Howitt’s Popular History
of the United States of America (1860), sold tens of thousands of copies dur-
ing a short production life (one year), while others, such as Hamilton Mabie’s
Popular History of the United States (1897), sold slowly but steadily in multiple
editions over three decades.20 Jack Carter Thompson has made an exhaustive
study of the number of times publishers of histories reissued their books in the
nineteenth century and has identified dozens of historical works that qualified
as “popular” in terms of book sales.21 The proliferation of such works speaks
to the commodification of literary and historical culture that occurred as a re-
sult of mass production, since readers demonstrated their increasing historical
appetites by choosing to purchase and “own” books in impressive numbers.22
These popular works also introduced new literary strategies for treating the
past. Despite the distinctions that marked the individual styles of the novelists
and poets who wrote these histories (and these were significant at times), all
popularizers faced similar challenges with respect to how to tell the story of the
past. They confronted difficult questions, such as: What is our relationship to
the past, and how should we narrate it? Is it possible to write a spirited narrative
account of American history without allowing the storytelling function of narra-
tive to distort the facts of the American past? Not surprisingly, the responses of
popularizers to these questions were conditioned by their literary preferences
and choices. Form and function were inextricably linked in such works, and
history seemed to derive its meaning as much from the form of the narrative
conventions that popularizors employed as from the past itself.23 Consequently
these popular histories suggest a good deal about the intellectual constructs
used by nineteenth-century Americans to organize and filter historical experi-
ence. One of the important goals of Popular History and the Literary Market-
place is to consider what these forms indicate about the specific uses of historical
evidence made by popularizers of history like Irving, Lippard, Bryant, Ridpath,
Eggleston, Ellis, and Hawthorne and to understand the implications of those
uses for popular histories as historical artifacts and cultural agents.

The competitive conditions of the literary marketplace were crucial forces in
the shaping of responses to these philosophical queries as well. In considering
the intellectual underpinnings of such popular works, therefore, I have paid
special attention to their production histories, focusing not only on the literary
intentions and choices of the writers but also on the roles of publishers, editors,
and coauthors. The diverse reading habits of the purchasers of these works and
the reflections of reviewers also conditioned numerous aspects of production.
Another purpose of this study, then, is to reflect meaningfully on how rival nar-
ratives of the past did battle with one another for the attentions of readers in the
late nineteenth century and to consider what those battles reveal about chang-
ing cultural priorities. I have tried to demonstrate how each writer’s literary and
philosophical choices concerning narration and historical explanation offered
readers a range of competing “imagined histories” from which to pick.24 In its
purest sense, then, Popular History and the Literary Marketplace is a chapter in
the “history of the book,” contributing to an appreciation of the ways that the
production, dissemination, and reception of texts advance cultural agendas.25
These popular histories also suggest important things about the appetites
of American readers in the nineteenth century, although precisely what they
reveal about reader response is often difficult to determine with precision. As
scholars of book history will attest, the most difficult aspect of measuring the
impact of works in the popular book market is in evaluating why and how
readers read. There is a substantial review literature available in newspapers
and periodicals that gives us a sense of how experienced critics of literature
responded to these texts. But what of the thousands of common readers who
purchased them? We know very little about these consumers beyond what an-
ecdotal evidence in the form of book agents’ letters or subscription lists sug-
gests. There is also no way to measure adequately whether the category “books
purchased” is synonymous with that of “books read.” Popular histories were
collected and displayed in the manner of coffee-table publications today, but
they may not have been read thoroughly or at all by those who purchased them
and hence may not have influenced the popular imagination to the degree that
large sales figures would imply. And what of books that were purchased by one
owner but circulated among many readers, as with a library copy or books for
a reading club? Clearly the category “total sales” of a book is not an adequate
standard of measure for determining reading preferences. Despite the best ef-
forts of receptivity theorists, it is still difficult to ascertain how and why people
read and nearly impossible to construct a definition of popular history based
solely on demand for books as reflected in sales or circulation.
Concerning the receptivity of popular texts in the culture at large, we do
know that, while these books sold well, they were not universally liked. Almost

from the inception of the genre, in fact, scholars took issue with the fact that
many popular histories were too literary and polemical in conception. Many of
these critics associated popular history with a particular style of loose or undis-
ciplined writing, and they resented the literary concessions popularizers made
to readers which seemed to compromise the integrity of their texts. There is
no question that popularizers cut corners. Eschewing footnotes and biblio-
graphic materials that they imagined would clog up a narrative, producers of
popular history emphasized the storytelling functions of history, highlighting
character development and plot structure over the delineation of impersonal
processes. The storylines within these histories were almost always descriptive
rather than analytical, conforming to linguistic and grammatical tendencies
implicit in Western storytelling. Their authors often employed rhetorical de-
vices intended to give readers the illusion of participation in historical events.
Popularizing in this sense meant reducing history to a moral drama through
the use of various literary devices such as second-person narration or the pres-
ent tense to reflect on “our personal destiny, our ambition, our moral worth.”26
From the 1880s on, scholars objected with increasing rancor to the “ ‘intrusive’
authorial presence, the explicit moralizing, and overt partisanship” of these
works and labeled them “popular” as a way of condemning their “ideological
bias and the use of history for purposes of indoctrination.”27 They came to
believe, in short, that “whatever popularizes vulgarizes.”28
Critics of popular history were among those who gathered at the first meet-
ing of American Historical Association (AHA) in Saratoga Springs, New York,
in 1884, where scholars began to develop rigid codes of practice for the pursuit
of “professional” historical work. These historians gradually came to view the
conspicuously rhetorical quality of much writing in the field of popular history
as “something that concealed as much as it revealed” about the “truth” of his-
tory. “When science as the preferred foundation for truthfulness became the
model of scholarly discourse,” Robert Berkhofer Jr. has noted of this outlook
on the part of AHA members, the word rhetoric “took on its modern meaning
of superfluous or meretricious verbiage.”29 The centrality of literary concerns
to the study of history was challenged within the profession by scholars who
advanced radically different definitions of historical evidence and interpreta-
tion. They sought to protect history from the vagaries of literature, and, once
having done so, they guarded religiously against the “revival of narrative,” fear-
ing (as David Harlan remarked of a later period) that literature might return to
history, “unfurling her circus silks of metaphor and allegory, misprision and
aporia, trace and sign, demanding that historians accept her mocking pres-
ence right at the heart of what they . . . insisted was their own autonomous and
truly scientific discipline.”30 The process by which popular rhetorical texts

lost their place of prominence to those of scholars within the “profession” of
history reflects important shifts in the intellectual climate in America at the
turn of the twentieth century and is an important part of this study as well.
Another of my goals here is to evaluate what the loss in popularity of popu-
lar histories implied for the discipline of history at the end of the nineteenth
century. Historians are often interested primarily in the rise of intellectual
movements, and I am no exception insofar as this book is concerned with the
emergence of popular history at midcentury as a dominant strategy for under-
standing and disseminating information about the past. In Chapter 1, in fact, I
describe the rapid emergence of the genre of popular history during the 1840s
and demonstrate how promoters of popular works, such as Evert A. Duyck-
inck, used idealistic intellectual arguments to establish the place of literature
and poetry in the historical imagination. I concentrate especially on the influ-
ence of widely circulating popular texts, especially those that emphasized the
connections among fiction, romance, and history, such as the works of William
Gilmore Simms, Washington Irving, George Lippard, and John Frost. I am
also intrigued, however, by the unraveling of the genre of popular history in the
late nineteenth century and by what its “fall from grace” suggests about chang-
ing cultural priorities in those decades. In this regard I share much in common
with those historians who believe that intellectual history is richest when it
deals with periods of transition and decline; that is, when it studies how major
controlling imperatives are challenged, weakened, and then abandoned over
time. Even as I describe the triumphant emergence of popular history as a
genre in the early chapters of this book, then, I simultaneously prepare the
ground for its decline. Each of the case studies I present in subsequent chap-
ters concentrates on how popular historians dealt with formidable attacks on
their historical productions by professional historians and others. As the title
of the conclusion to this book implies, I am interested in knowing why popular
history became unpopular, and each chapter corresponds with specific meth-
odological challenges that popularizers faced in constructing, promoting, and
defending their narratives.
Chapters 2 through 6 relate in some way to the epistemological crisis that
historians experienced at the turn of the century as they experimented with new
narrative strategies in the wake of the modernist critique of nineteenth-century
romantic traditions. Central to each of the popularizers whose works are de-
scribed here was the question: “Can we really know what happened in the past,
and, if so, how can we best tell its story?” Chapter 2, for instance, explores a
compromise solution to these challenges reached by the poet-journalist, Wil-
liam Cullen Bryant and his former colleague at the New York Tribune, Sydney
Howard Gay, who produced a four-volume popular history for Scribner’s in
10 } “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

the 1870s and early 1880s. The production history of Bryant’s Popular History
of the United States was marked by moments of obvious contention as each au-
thor attempted to stamp the popular history with his own literary style. Bryant’s
poetic voice often conflicted directly with Gay’s more scientific perspective on
the past. At issue was the degree to which popular history should challenge
or tinker with the accepted mythologies of the people. Bryant and Gay were
able to reconcile their differences eventually and in ways that suggest the value
of negotiated history, but, despite these compromises, the coauthors could not
satisfy their publisher’s desire for a seamless production based on consistent
strategies of presentation. Indeed, Scribner worried aloud about the commer-
cial implications of a work that vacillated so wildly between the theatrical senti-
mentality of Bryant and the dispassionate prose of Gay. In the publisher’s mind,
their curious hybrid work raised as many practical and methodological ques-
tions about popular history as it answered, including: Does narrativity require
ordering strategies that by definition corrupt the historical record? and Is there
such a thing as a “poetics” of history? Gay was a believer in the inscrutability of
facts and argued that a direct correspondence between the past and the study
of the past could be achieved, while Bryant was an epistemological skeptic who
was inclined to view history as a branch of imaginative literature.
In Chapter 3, I extend the discussion of these methodological themes by
tracing the popular works of poet-historian John Clark Ridpath and his ef-
forts to transcend the dichotomies implicit in the subjective/objective duality
of Bryant and Gay by recourse to “metahistorical” generalizations or covering
laws that operated through history. Ridpath, one of the first college professors
of history in the country, left the academy in the 1880s to write for the popular
book market, where he felt he could indulge his poetic, philosophical impulses
more freely. Heavily influenced by the Western Association of Writers of which
he was a founding member, and in particular by the poet and fellow Hoosier
James Whitcomb Riley, Ridpath became interested in the “subjective agencies
of the human story,” emphasizing “the actors in the human drama as distin-
guished from the acts” of history. Wrestling with the question of whether his-
torical meaning inheres in facts or in universal laws derived from facts, Ridpath
tried to identify subjective processes that underlay the objective substance of
the past. In so doing, he was attacked by former colleagues who “dreaded an
entangling alliance with philosophy” and who rejected teleological systems as
the bedrock of history.31 Though Ridpath claimed that facts were prior to inter-
pretation, some believed that his metahistorical preferences were just mythic
overlays designed to distort the historical record by promoting pet theories of
causation. Charged with reductionism, Ridpath responded that history as a
discipline was meaningless unless its practitioners made some efforts to reduce
Defining Popular History { 11

the complexities of the past by reference to established philosophical prin-
ciples of selection. In this chapter I reflect on questions that haunted popular-
izers such as Ridpath in light of these accusations and counter-accusations,
including: Did the emergence of a modern sensibility, with its implicit doubts
about the stability of universal structuring laws, mean an end to the relevance
of history? Was there any order implicit in the past; was there even a past that
could be verified from an ontological point of view?
In Chapter 4, I suggest that by the turn of the twentieth century, universal
laws such as those Ridpath advocated had been discredited and had given
way to a general skepticism about the place of grand abstractions in history.
Modernism, with its rejection of orderly intellectual systems, encouraged
popular historians to study not teleological causes but random processes that
revealed the “total experience” of American life at particular cultural moments
without reference to reductionist schemes. Popular historians such as Hoo-
sier novelist Edward Eggleston, for instance, aspired to treat the “inner life”
of human beings at specific moments of time in the comprehensive manner
of realists. Having established himself in the 1870s as a local colorist and as a
realist novelist, Eggleston startled his friends with the announcement in the
1880s that he would abandon literary “causes” in pursuit of what he called
“New” History, the study of the “commonplace actualities of early American
history” central to “common folk.” A precursor to the “Social History” move-
ment of the early twentieth century, Eggleston’s New History combined the
popularizer’s desire to reach wide audiences through broad, generalizing as-
sertions about the past with the professional’s interest in the minute details of
everyday life in America. Eggleston structured history not according to some
chronological or sequential narrative of events but as an internal, psychologi-
cal drama underscoring the nonlinear sensibilities of the modernist era. The
problem with such a totalizing approach—one in which the popular historian
tried to tell “the past everything”—was that in lieu of the principles of selec-
tion implicit in a teleological treatment of the past, there was no reliable way
to prioritize what was important and what was not important in the historical
record. Eggleston’s most popular history, the Household History of the United
States and Its People (1889), raised philosophical questions about historical
relativism, about the proper scope and ambition of history, and about the ap-
propriate public audiences for popular literature. Eggleston eventually became
president of the American Historical Association, an affiliation that signaled
his commitment to professional standards but also caused him to question
the extent of his influence on the general American reading public. Eggleston
found it difficult to complete even a small portion of the multivolume popu-
lar history he envisioned because he could not shake free from the relativism

implicit in his training as a realist novelist who overvalued the multiplicity of
meanings inherent in the past to the exclusion of singular truths.
In Chapter 5, I consider how these relativistic dilemmas influenced the
strange odyssey that was the career of Edward S. Ellis, who transformed him-
self with revealing ease from one of America’s most well known writers of fic-
tion to one of its most prolific popular historians. As the author of hundreds
of dime novels, including the best-selling Seth Jones, Ellis had a reputation for
melodrama, sensationalism, and theatricality and was an unlikely candidate
for writing history in an age when verisimilitude and objectivity were highly
valued. He was accused by critics of corrupting the moral development of
young readers through an excess of interest in sensational themes and of being
a historian who “invents details” or “seizes upon the unimportant ones” in an
effort to enliven the record of the past.32 For his part, Ellis claimed that his spir-
ited narratives were based on a reality “no less thrilling than the unreal” and on
facts “no less marvelous than fiction”; but professional scholars were uncon-
vinced, finding in his popular histories “monstrously absurd exaggerations”
based on “utterly false and debasing ideas of life.”33 He discovered a recep-
tive audience, however, for popular histories that flattered readers by focusing
on contemporary circumstances above those of the distant past. Ellis’s most
popular history, The People’s Standard History of the United States (1899), re-
flected the impulsive showmanship of his dime novels and a good deal of the
inflated nationalistic rhetoric of bygone eras as well, but it mainly concentrated
on contemporary late nineteenth-century affairs and suggested the degree to
which success in the literary marketplace required concessions to the present-
mindedness of readers. Ellis also experimented openly with the concept of
eternal time in ways that disturbed professionals for what it implied about
the looseness of temporal schemes in popular historical narratives. Ellis was
accused of approaching the past almost exclusively from the delimiting per-
spective of contemporary dilemmas and concerns, thereby placing most of the
human past outside the scope of what Anne McClintock has called panoptic
time and anachronistic space.34 His widely circulating popular works beg the
question: Is history inevitably an artificial construction when it is based on
present concerns as extrapolated back onto the past?
In Chapter 6, I consider how Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel and a
novelist in his own right, tried to balance some of the philosophical concerns
with which all these popularizers were dealing. Ever in the shadow of his more
famous father, Julian Hawthorne wrestled throughout his life to reconcile the
“world of matter” with the “world of spirit” treated so sensitively in the fiction
of his parent. The author of dozens of little-noticed realist novels, he turned
from literature to journalism and finally to history, where he made his first real

mark with the publication of Hawthorne’s United States (1899). This work
demonstrated just how idiosyncratic and whimsical popular history could
be. Eschewing the “hackneyed” things “told in history books,” Hawthorne
wrote with a self-righteous moral tone, filling the pages of his popular history
with highly personalized “philosophical speculations on the nature of man, on
human destiny and free will” that he hoped would appeal to average readers
in search of “spiritual guidance.” In the end, he did not succeed. Troubled
by financial obligations throughout his career, Hawthorne exploited the one
marketable commodity he had, his family name, by taking on historical hack-
work as an additional source of income and incurring the wrath of professional
critics who equated his efforts to reach mass audiences with crude pandering.
The rank air of crass materialism clouded his reputation as it did that of the
entire field of popular history. Professionals came to view the commodification
of culture to which Hawthorne contributed as a sign of the corruption in the
popular book market and as an indictment of the culture of mass production
that had spawned it. The chapter ends with the sad story of Hawthorne’s im-
prisonment for mail fraud and the downward spiral of his career in a manner
symbolic of the general fall from grace of the field of popular history.
The conclusion makes connections among all of the popularizers studied
in Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, reminding readers of the
complexity of the relationships that existed among writers, editors, publish-
ers, book agents, and reviewers in the literary world they mutually inhabited.
It recalls for readers the common problems and challenges novelists-turned-
popular historians faced and the gradual eroding over time of the reputation
of popular history as a genre. The successful campaign of scholars to establish
evidentiary standards within the profession and to substitute an appreciation
of cold, raw facts and evaluative rigor for the cult of “narrative, narrative, nar-
rative” was responsible for some of these changes. Sean Wilentz has noted
that the “decline of popular history” was conditioned as well by a recognition
on the part of readers of history that they must “analyze and act” in the tem-
per of “critical analysis” rather than merely “observe and enjoy” in the spirit
of “sentimental appreciation.”35 To be sure, popular history as a genre never
vanished, as I demonstrate in the concluding sections of this book. If popu-
lar history is understood broadly to include general historical narratives on a
variety of topics produced by nonacademics for primarily lay audiences, then
certainly we must acknowledge that it persisted well into the twentieth century
and lives on in mutated form even today. Allan Nevins, Barbara Tuchman, and
David McCullough might all qualify as latter-day popular historians by this
definition. Defenders of the genre abound at present, arguing that indictments
of popular historians by professionals constitute nothing more than “typical

ivory-tower hand wringing that underscore[s] the academy’s inflexible attrac-
tion to narrow scholarly questions and complete tin ear for the larger market of
readers.”36 That said, in the conclusion I also assert that popular history enjoys
nothing like the popularity it had in its heyday in the late nineteenth century.
Popular History and the Literary Marketplace attempts to explain why.
While I do not pretend to have answered definitively all of the philosophi-
cal questions that I identify as central to the disagreements between popular-
izers and professionals regarding the proper type and direction of history, I
have tried to ground my discussion of these otherwise airy concerns in the
concrete details of specific literary productions by real historians working out
the implications of debate over methodology in practical contexts. There have
been a number of important efforts by historiographers to treat the complex
ontological and epistemological questions associated with the professional-
ization of history (see, for instance, the excellent works of Higham, Novick,
Harlan, Berkhofer, and others on whom I rely extensively here), but most of
these discussions occur on an elevated theoretical plane; few are anchored in
the day-to-day practical business of writing and publishing as experienced at
all levels of the production history of popular books. I am interested in the
practical challenges that popularizers faced in trying to translate their literary
and poetic skills to the historical enterprise. How did the experience of writ-
ing novels condition Eggleston, Ellis, or Hawthorne to reflect on history in
narrative forms? How did the meter and structure of poetry contribute to the
pace of histories produced by Bryant and Ridpath? And what techniques did
book agents use to convince readers of the necessity of owning popular works
produced in these ways? Since the literary marketplace was the testing ground
for the working out of the practical implications of the philosophical questions
outlined above, I have focused especially on what Alice Fahs calls the “constel-
lation of cultural and economic practices that shaped publishing,” including,
“[w]here and how books were actually produced and distributed, the conven-
tions understood to govern their production, the perceived demands of the
market, the intentions of authors, [and] the reception of texts by readers.”37
Finally, in addition to telling the stories of the production of these popular
histories from the ground up, I have tried to take popularizers more seriously
than have some historiographers whose tendency has been to dismiss popular
works out-of-hand as the shallow, commercial by-products of a feckless age
of mass production. I acknowledge the sometimes comic misrepresentations
and errors associated with these quickly produced volumes, but I also recog-
nize the almost certain genius evidenced by popular authors able to condense
and make comprehensible to vast audiences of readers large segments of the
national past in accessible forms. In the conclusion I argue that scholars have

been too quick to assume that popular books structured along novelistic or
poetic lines and committed to constructivist or narrative techniques rather
than the cult of objectivity are not worthy of study as historical artifacts. As
I argue along with Beard and Novick, the presumption of the existence of an
“objective” past by scholars has been at best a “noble dream” and at worst
a distracting delusion. Some historians still cling tenaciously to the idea that
we can know the past definitively and with precise reference to “what actually
happened.” Over the past two decades, however, the very concept of objectiv-
ity as a heuristic device for structuring and evaluating past experience has been
questioned. Given what some have argued recently about the value of narrative
as a structural and evaluative principle for understanding the past, it may be
time that we take more seriously these alternative popular histories dismissed
as verbal fictions by scholars but embraced as meaningful narratives by the
people. If, as James Wilkinson argues, history is but a “choice of fictions,” then
popular historians ought to be seen as of a kind with professionals, and their
popular works should command at least some of the attention of scholars for
what they tell us about how the past is absorbed by average readers.38
I am aware of the irony that as a professional historian interested in res-
urrecting popular histories, I employ the tools of scholarship (explanatory
devices, footnotes, bibliographies, etc.) that were developed originally by aca-
demics to condemn such “unworthy” texts. I also recognize the risks I run in
“academizing” books that were intended for non-academic audiences. As I
argue throughout, however, “popular” and “professional” are not necessarily
mutually exclusive terms; nor do I think readers favor one approach to the
past over another. Though I am a professional historian, I hope that readers
will find in my argument an appropriate compromise between appreciation
for and criticism of popular rhetorical devices in history. If they do not, then I
hope at least that they will come to appreciate why I might be simultaneously
attracted to and skeptical of these popular histories. At the very least it seems
worth asking why a popular work of the 1880s such as Ridpath’s History of the
World had such a life beyond its own time, why it was powerful and resilient
enough to have informed the complex worldviews of Thomas Wolfe and Huey
Long in the 1920s and 1930s.
Additionally, I hope readers who remain cynical about these texts will at
least come to recognize their value for the age in which they were written. If
nothing else, historians should contextualize these popular histories as a way
of understanding why they were important to nineteenth-century readers.
Lawrence Levine, a twentieth-century cultural historian accustomed to think-
ing of Shakespeare as “firmly entrenched in the pantheon of high culture,” re-
counted his initial resistance to the idea that the playwright’s works constituted

a vibrant form of popular culture in the nineteenth century. “It took a great deal
of evidence to allow me to transcend my own cultural assumptions and accept
the fact that Shakespeare actually was popular entertainment in nineteenth-
century America,” Levine noted. To avoid the contradictions implicit in such a
“cultural trap,” he argued, “it was necessary to do what historians should strive
to do, however imperfectly they succeed: to shed one’s own cultural skin suf-
ficiently to be able to perceive Shakespeare, as nineteenth-century Americans
perceived him, through the prism of the nineteenth century.” I hope in these
pages to encourage a similar shedding of cultural skin by twenty-first-century
scholars with respect to these nineteenth-century histories. These popular
works, though not quite as pervasive in the culture as Shakespeare, were also
a form of popular entertainment, sharing in the “language and eloquence, the
artistry and humor, the excitement and action, the moral sense and worldview
that Americans found in Shakespearean drama.”39 If, as Levine reports, a mid-
nineteenth-century canal boatman knew enough about Shakespeare to scream
threats at Edwin Forrest as Iago in an Albany, New York, production of Othello,
then the names of Bryant, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and Hawthorne were at
least familiar enough to American readers in the 1800s to have earned for them
the “privilege of criticism” that provided further publicity and in some cases
greater popularity for their works.

In our view, the search for historical truth
brings with it not a rejection but rather
a greater awareness of the cultural specificity and
the necessary limits of historical knowledge. A
self-conscious recognition of the fictive elements
in historical writing, we argue, strengthens—not
weakens—the search for truth.—Ann Curthoys
and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (2005)
1
.................................................................
When Popular
History Was
Popular
Washington
Irving, George
Lippard, John
Frost, and Book
Culture in the
Nineteenth
Century

Calculated to Strike the Popular Curiosity
In the early winter of 1845, the writer, editor, and literary critic Evert A.
Duyckinck was involved in a protracted discussion about the proper direction
of American literature with members of a literary circle that he had helped
found. Born in Manhattan in 1816, Duyckinck was the son of a bookseller,
publisher, and collector of the same name who had been immortalized in
Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York as the book peddler
“Ever Duckings.” The younger Duyckinck graduated from Columbia Col-
lege in 1835 and was admitted to the bar in 1837, although he never practiced
law, preferring instead to establish a literary salon in the basement of his 20
Clinton Place home near Washington Square in New York City where writers
. and artists could discuss literature and socialize.1 Committed to improving the
reputation of American literary figures both at home and abroad, he edited
and promoted the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and William
Gilmore Simms among others. Duyckinck was also active in several periodical
publications of high standing, including the Literary World, which he founded
and edited with his brother, George, between 1847 and 1853, and Arcturus: A
Journal of Books and Opinion, which Poe described as “decidedly the very
best magazine in many respects ever published in the United States . . . upon
the whole, a little too good to enjoy extensive popularity.” Apart from what
Poe’s comment suggests about popular reading tastes in the mid-nineteenth
century, it identified correctly Duyckinck’s strong association with the very
finest “national magazines, national writers and national books” of his age.2
Duyckinck is probably best known today as the co-compiler of the Cyclopae-
dia of American Literature (1855), which featured biographical portraits of
America’s most prominent writers along with selections from their most im-
portant writings.3
Between 1836 and 1855 Duyckinck met regularly in his salon with an emerg-
ing New York literati, including the editors and journalists William Alfred
Jones, Jedediah B. Auld, Russell Trevett, Cornelius Mathews, and his brother,
George Duyckinck.4 The Tetractys Club, as it was known, was described by
Poe as a serious intellectual group wholeheartedly committed to altering per-
ceptions about the value of American literature.5 Although he satirized some of
the pretentiousness of the group in a widely circulated piece, A Fable for Critics
(1848), James Russell Lowell agreed with Poe, referring to Duyckinck as “Our
Hero” of national literary projects.6 It was a “fortunate literary visitor” to New
York, indeed, who found “his way to the Duyckinck salon in the basement
at 20 Clinton Place near Washington Square [to] enjoy cigars, champagne or
punch, a good deal of literary talk, and even choice gossip,” Heyward Ehrlich
Book Culture in the Nineteenth Century { 19

has written.7 Over food and spirits the “Young Americans” as they were later
identified, “engineered for the future” by discussing strategies for the shaping
of a new literary vision for the nation.
In the winter of 1845 the special topic for consideration was a lengthy piece
Duyckinck had just published in the American Review titled “The Literary
Prospects of 1845,” in which he recommended that two principles should in-
form an emerging American literary identity: first, literature should be acces-
sible to the people, a condition that required publishers to find ways to market
texts more cheaply and widely; and second, such popular works should seek
not to imitate European models but to express uniquely American themes in
unmistakably American ways.8
With respect to the first of these principles, accessibility, Duyckinck longed
for a democratization of literature.9 As early as 1840, Duyckinck had written
club member W. A. Jones, urging that American literature “must now be prac-
tical for the masses.” One way to achieve this, Jones suggested in an article for
Arcturus titled “The Culture of the Imagination,” was to offer obtainable “cul-
ture” to Americans in the form of “people’s editions, cheap libraries without
end.”10 In response, Duyckinck began negotiations with Wiley and Putnam to
produce two compendia of popular works, the Library of Choice Reading and
the Library of American Books. The former series featured foreign works, the
latter only American, “many of which were original and all of which were paid
for on a royalties or lump sum basis.”11 Duyckinck’s extensive correspondence
with the numerous authors he consulted as potential contributors to the se-
ries—including Emerson, Whittier and Hawthorne—reveals how earnest he
was in terms of bringing American literature to the masses.12 In a circular for
the forthcoming series, the publishers announced their recognition of “the ex-
tent of the reading public in the country” and affirmed their commitment to
a “policy of supplying that public with books at low prices proportioned to
the extent.” Books in the United States “must hereafter be cheap,” they an-
nounced, adding, “To reconcile the utmost possible cheapness with a proper
attention to the literary and mechanical execution of the books published, will
be the aim of the publishers in the present series.”13 Issued in paperbound edi-
tions at twenty-five to fifty cents a piece (and sometimes later bound in cloth
for a dollar), these books provided solid literature to a much wider audience
than had had access to such authors in the past.14 As a result, the publication
and circulation of Duyckinck’s libraries represented a significant moment in
American book history, one that Ezra Greenspan has referred to as “nothing
less than the coming of age of American literary culture.”15
Duyckinck was not the first to envision a widely circulating library of popu-
lar texts, of course. Popularizers such as Mason Weems had pursued similar
20 } When Popular History Was Popular

schemes as early as the first years of the nineteenth century. Weems, author of
The Life of George Washington (1808), traveled extensively throughout New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Geor-
gia, selling his popular biography of Washington along with other “cabinet”
works by publisher Mathew Carey of Philadelphia.16 It is estimated that the
minister-turned-bookseller peddled tens of thousands of copies of his works
that appeared in dozens of editions before his death in 1825. As early as 1797,
Weems divulged to publisher Carey his strategy for achieving wide circulation
for his library. “Experience has taught me,” he wrote, “that small, i.e. quarter of
dollar books, on subjects calculated to strike the Popular Curiosity, printed in
very large numbers and properly distributed, w[ould] prove an immense rev-
enue to the prudent and industrious Undertakers.”17 In addition, Weems used
tricks of showmanship and hucksterism that would have put Huey Long to
shame. “Timing his appearances to coincide with county fairs, elections, mar-
ket days, or other local events,” Cathy Davidson notes, “Weems would enter
onto the scene crying out ‘Seduction! Revolution! Murder! as he unveiled his
wares.”18 While less flamboyant, other booksellers such as the former minister
Charles Augustus Goodrich and his brother, Samuel G. Goodrich, author of
the “Peter Parley” tales, also published and marketed collected sets and librar-
ies of popular histories in the 1820s on the assumption that “a certain revolu-
tion in the public taste” was in the offing.19
In their bid to become truly popular writers, however, Weems, the Go-
odriches and others like them labored under some substantial difficulties, not
the least of which was the price of the books they peddled. Manufacturing and
distribution costs were so prohibitive that the regular purchase of books by
the general public was simply out of the question. Manually operated presses
had not yet given way to more efficient horse- and steam-driven equipment,
and the inking process was still laboriously performed by hand, awaiting the
invention of rollers and cylinder presses. Nor was machine-made paper yet
available. Booksellers faced enormous obstacles in circulating their volumes
extensively, as well, since the geography of the United States in the first third
of the nineteenth century did not lend itself readily to mass distribution; the
population was large and scattered widely, while the urban centers were small
and their markets easily saturated.20 Poor roads, unnavigable river systems and
inadequate bridges made it difficult for book dealers to hawk their wares, and
it was not until the internal improvements of the 1820s and 1830s emerged as
well as a nascent railway system that transportation was convenient enough to
make wide circulation of books possible.
These advances in transportation, when they did finally emerge in the
1840s, led to a substantial expansion of literary opportunities in all fields. Not

surprisingly, the first works marketed by publishers were those that required
less formal education for comprehension, especially almanacs and works of
fiction. Attracting new readers was the highest priority. Canvassers trans-
ported novels from urban bookstores “with uncertain sales prospects” to the
very doors of rural readers who, for the first time, were treated to a wide array
of classic and popular literature, while new syndicated magazines serialized
works of fiction in ways that increased dramatically the familiarity of such
readers with periodical literature of all kinds. Fostering a “climate of reader-
ship” was also a big part of the marketing strategy of publishers. Exposure led
to habit and habit to addiction. As Paul Gutjahr notes, there was a “reciprocal
relationship” between “rising American literacy rates” and “multiplying mo-
tivations for the consumption of printed matter,” both of which contributed
to the advance of book culture. Writers and readers benefitted mutually from
widening American reading interests, sharing common “desires for economic
gain, social distinction, political involvement, and entertainment.”21 Once en-
gaged in any sort of reading activity, even the reading of fiction, noted one pub-
lisher, Americans who had been “destitute entirely of the wisdom” contained
in “works of solid information” would become literary creatures with literary
needs.22 In an age when reading novels became an acceptable means of gaining
access to wider social, political, and intellectual communities, the conventions
of literary discourse were important vehicles of cultural exchange. A new le-
gion of readers emerged who demanded stimulating plots, emotional intensity,
and liberating creativity in the volumes they read, all of which had significant
influences on many genres within the popular book market.23 Duyckinck’s cir-
culating libraries benefitted greatly from these trends, and friends congratu-
lated him on the foresight and commercial instinct he demonstrated in issuing
them. “You are now in a situation to do a real service to American Literature,”
wrote one admirer, “by opening certain fountains to the public taste which will
equally please and purify.”24
Many such popular works marketed by Wiley and Putnam and others were
sold by traveling book agents who pedaled these “popular” printed goods
door-to-door throughout the United States after the Civil War. Crisscrossing
the country with their “salesmen’s dummies” that featured mock-ups of “indis-
pensable” texts to be sold by subscription in “parts,” such vendors circulated
novels, self-help manuals and histories to a new constituency of middle-class
readers.25 These “cheap and compact” “popular” volumes were produced by
national publishing houses that had broken free of exclusive regional markets
(such as Harper and Brothers, J. B. Lippincott and Company, and Baker and
Scribner) and were part of a revolution in print culture created when the tools
of mass production were brought to bear on the challenges of preserving and

transmitting information.26 In the eighteenth century, oral communication
(sermons, orations and debates) had been the primary means by which Ameri-
cans received and circulated intellectual ideas The arrival of a mass-produced,
print-bound culture in the mid-nineteenth century, however, meant that more
readers gained access more quickly to common information.27 Although the
Panic of 1837 caused a temporary reduction in national book sales, by the mid-
1840s Americans were becoming dependent on reading (rather than merely
listening) for basic information of all kinds and in ways that produced a boom
in the popular book market. Duyckinck’s Library of Choice Reading and the
Library of American Books, then, were promoted at a very propitious time, at
a cultural moment when, as Duyckinck anticipated, “a taste for reading was
diffused by the cheapness of books, and books will continue to be published
at low prices.”28
With respect to the second principle outlined in “Literary Prospects of
1845,” the Americanizing of texts, Duyckinck’s ambitions and timing were
equally auspicious. “Duyckinck and his friends were champing at the bit for a
new kind of American literature,” Edward Widmer has noted. “They tried val-
iantly to describe what this writing would be like. Like America itself, the new
books they expected would be big, reckless, and throughly ‘original,’ to use
their most overworked adjective.”29 Following the lead of Emerson, Duyckinck
claimed that the mission of creating a national literature required the slough-
ing off of European models, since American verse “partakes too much of study
and imitation” and is in need of “a national song writer of true lyrical fervor;
and indeed, poets in every department, of the true passion.”30 Throughout his
literary career, Duyckinck kept extensive logbooks filled with protonational-
istic passages under the general category “Americanisms” which celebrated
the original artistic sensibilities of American writers as against the staid tradi-
tions of Europe.31 Duyckinck also collected the names of “American Authors”
whose works he compared favorably with those of European counterparts in
literature, poetry and drama.32 “America has a great and noble task before her
in literature, and we firmly believe the power and capacity to do it,” Duyckinck
proclaimed on behalf of his literary vision. Her people needed simply to seize
“the Time and the Motive” to make it happen.33
Prior to the 1840s, however, the efforts to create an original American litera-
ture were hampered not only by the aforementioned technological challenges
but by the fact that there was no international copyright law to protect writers
from acts of literary piracy. This condition affected what Americans could pub-
lish both abroad and at home. Though anxious to make a name for themselves
in Europe, American authors had a disincentive to publish in foreign markets
since they could not recover royalties for their books without significant effort

nor prevent the marketing of unauthorized versions of their texts. Conversely,
it was the preference of many American publishers to reprint pirated copies of
older, established European volumes at very low cost rather than commission
authentic new works from American writers.34 The effect of both tendencies,
especially the latter, was to discourage American authors from competing in
the literary marketplace. To overcome these limitations, members of the Tet-
ractys Club initiated a campaign against American publishers who engaged
in the “subversive practice” of “reprinting,” especially Harpers, for whom
Duyckinck had a “special disdain,” in part because the House of Harper had
issued an earlier version of the Library of Choice Reading called Harper’s
Family Library, which was “made up of reprints” largely and was therefore
“considerably greater in bulk.”35 Harpers admitted that “the present system of
publishing . . . was an exclusion of American authors, but they continued the
practice because of its obvious financial benefits.”36 Later that year Duyckinck
and others of his circle organized the American Copyright Club, enlisting the
help of eminent figures such as the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant,
who served as the organization’s first president and who worked tirelessly with
the Young Americans to promote fair practices with respect to American writ-
ers at home and abroad.37
Among those with whom Duyckinck treated on this issue of copyright was
the southern novelist, essayist, and dramatist William Gilmore Simms, whom
he invited into the sanctum sanctorum at 20 Clinton Place. Duyckinck and
Simms shared a great deal in common in terms of commitments to popular
American literature.38 Like Duyckinck, Simms insisted that American texts
were too imitative, and he was outspoken in his criticism of native writers
who “think after European models, draw their stimulus and provocation from
European books, fashion themselves to European tastes, and look chiefly to
the awards of European criticism.” The effect of these misguided allegiances,
he wrote, was “to denationalize the American mind” and “to enslave the na-
tional heart.” As an alternative, Simms suggested, Americans needed a liter-
ary “plant of our own raising,” “true to the spirit of the country” and to “its
genuine heart.” The key was to influence the popular mind with the belief
that a significant American literary presence could aid in the achieving of the
national mission. “[S]uch a condition of the popular mind is the precursor of
performance,” he argued, “The wish to do, is the forerunner of the way.” If
American authors shied away from the responsibility of providing an indig-
enous literature, he concluded, they “might as well be European,” they “might
as well have been born, dwelling and dilating in Middlesex or London.”39
Given the friendship that developed between Duyckinck and Simms on the
matter of an American popular literary tradition, it should not be surprising to

learn that Simms was among the first authors Duyckinck commissioned for a
volume in the Library of American Books. Published in two series as Views and
Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, Simms’s essays focused
on a particular aspect of literature in the United States that fascinated both
editor and author—the value of history and historical fiction in the shaping of
an American literary identity. Simms believed that historians had a crucial role
to play in the cultivation of an American literary sensibility. Episodes from the
national past, he reasoned, provided the best resources by which American
writers could popularize and legitimize American literature for average read-
ers. Although a relatively unhistoried people, Americans nevertheless had ac-
cess to a supply of dramatic historical moments that could be exploited for
nationalistic purposes. Simms argued, for instance, that American poets and
writers might tell the tale of Pocahontas by focusing especially on the crucial
moment of her intervention in the ceremonial execution of John Smith. The
sad pathos of Ponce de Leon’s quixotic search for immortality in a fountain
of youth would make a suitable topic for heroic narrative as well, he noted,
or, better still, the tragic wanderings of Hernando de Soto. The instance of
national history that Simms thought was most “susceptible of use, even at this
early day, by the novelist,” however, was the traitorous betrayal of Benedict
Arnold during the American Revolution. “No other series of events, in all that
history, seem more naturally to group themselves in the form of a story,” Simms
argued, and stories were what popular audiences demanded. The “future poet
who thus undertakes his delineation,” Simms noted, will chronicle “the bitter-
ness of a proud heart, denied! The misanthropy, the jaundiced green envy and
mortification, discolouring to his mind all the objects of his thought. . . . The
temptation follows,—and the fall!” As the title to the keystone essay in Simms’s
volumes indicated, narratives such as one chronicling Arnold’s calamitous de-
cline would bear out the crucial value of “The Epochs and Events of American
History as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction.”40
Not just any history would suffice, of course. In his essay emphasizing the
potential of fiction for teaching the lessons of the past, Simms made clear dis-
tinctions between popularizers who he thought could advance Duyckinck’s
agenda and scholars who would derail it. He rejected, for instance, those who
had perverted the literary past by questioning the interpretive value of events
as mythologized in ancient texts. Citing in particular the debunking works of
Barthold Georg Niebuhr, author of a three-volume History of Rome completed
in the 1830s, Simms condemned the German scholar as part of a “class of mod-
ern historians” who were “professed skeptics of all detail in ancient history.”
He eschewed those of Niebuhr’s colleagues who insisted on “dry, sapless his-
tory” that “tells us nothing,” while ignoring the “flesh and blood and life” of

the past. Despite his “learned ingenuity, the keen and vigilant judgment, the
great industry, the vast erudition and sleepless research,” Niebuhr was a “cold
and impertinent querist” in Simms’s estimation, a petty scholar who had made
a “wreck” of “the imposing structure of ancient history, as it comes to us from
the hands of ancient art.” Dismissing such a historian as a “dull seeker after
bald and isolated facts,” a “digger merely,” Simms insisted on an alternative
historical tradition, one that would excite “a just curiosity” and awaken “noble
affections” in perceptive students of culture. For Simms, “the chief value of
history consists in its proper employment for the purposes of art,” for it is
the artist alone who is “the true historian,” the writer “who gives shape to the
unhewn fact, who yields relation to the scattered fragments,—who writes the
parts in coherent dependency, and endows, with life and action, the otherwise
motionless automata of history.”41
For Simms, historical fiction was the highest expression of truths about the
past and the form that promised the most for the emergence of a uniquely
American style of literature. Like the fiction writer, “the historian then must be
an artist,” he noted in Views and Reviews, whose prose mirrors the “genius of
romance and poetry.” In making his case for a historically grounded literary
sensibility in the United States, Simms hoped that American readers had ad-
vanced beyond the old “puritanism” by which “it was supposed that romance
was a disparagement to history, or led to a perversion of the truth in history.”
The public should no longer feel itself “shocked” by a proposed collaborative
relationship between fiction and history, he argued, since the “tendencies of
romantic narrative to heighten the taste for history itself” were undeniable.
The historian and the novelist were engaged in the same basic activity and
aspired to the same high purposes. “If the historian is required to conceive
readily, and to supply the motive for human action where the interests of a
State or a nation, are concerned,” Simms wrote, “a like capacity must inform
the novelist, whose inquiries conduct him into the recesses of the individual
heart. Both should be possessed of clear minds, calm, deliberate judgments,
a lively fancy, a vigorous imagination, and a just sense of propriety and duty.”
In addition, both must be “endowed with large human sympathies, without
which neither of them could justly enter into the feelings and affections, the
fears and the hopes, of the person whose characters they propose to analyze.”
There were subtle distinctions, of course. “If the subject of the historian is one
of more dignity and grandeur,” Simms concluded, then “that of the romancer
is one of more delicacy and variety.” In general, however, real opportunities
existed for historians and historical novelists alike to write “truthful fictions”
about topics of the greatest “tragic interest.” In the end, “the wit of the novel-
ist enables him to conform his writings more nearly to the form and aspect of

events as they really happen” than could the analytic historian dabbling in the
dry bones of the past.42
The kinds of “truthful fictions” that Simms had in mind pushed the bound-
aries of what was acceptable in terms of historical memory, even in his own
day. In calling for the use of history for the purposes of art, Simms reversed
the traditional logic of historical investigation which implied that the further
removed historians were from the events they described the greater critical dis-
tance they could achieve in recounting those events objectively. According to
Simms, historical insight decreased over time as subtleties of perspective were
lost. Into the void must enter the historical novelist, he noted, who would have
free license to use “adroit insinuation” and a more “tractable” set of facts to de-
part from “absolute history” in ways that “will not offend the spectator some
hundred years from now.” Historical memory with respect to the villainy of
Benedict Arnold was a case in point. Simms argued that “[w]hen the grandson
of the last revolutionary soldier shall be no more,—when the huge folios which
now contain our histories and chronicles, shall have given way to works of
closer summary and more modern interest,—the artist will find a new form for
these events, shape all their features a new, and place the persons of the drama
in grouping more appropriate for scenic action.” This might include invent-
ing details in accordance with the “privileges of the prose romancer,” such as
allowing Washington to capture and execute Arnold “as, by a similar license,
Richmond slays Richard, and Macduff, the usurper of Scotland, in the pres-
ence of the audience.” Simms went so far as to suggest that future novelists of
the subject might invent the characters they needed to help move the storyline
along various subplots that would be most meaningful to the national mission.
“You have but to endow Arnold, or his wife, with a sister, who, won by the
love of Andre, shall be made the instrument for bringing about the treachery
of the hero,” Simms noted, in order to hint that Arnold acted from passion
rather than mere treachery. Simms found “no such violations of general truth
as should outrage propriety,” in these suggestions; in fact, he argued, “[t]his
could be done without coming into conflict, in the smallest degree, with the
written history.”43
As iconoclastic as Simms’s counterfactual historical fiction appears to our
contemporary eyes, most members of Duyckinck’s group accepted its basic
literary premises wholeheartedly, at least insofar as they pertained to the rise
of historical fiction. Some of the Young Americans were historical novelists
themselves, and they embraced Simms’s assertion that “truthful fictions”
could be valuable tools for instructing Americans about their collective past.44
Like many nineteenth-century idealists, they shared a basic conviction “that
fundamental truths rested in the unseen realm of ideas and spirit,” and they

believed that “great history, like great art, should entice people beyond the
facts toward an appreciation of the higher, poetic imagination.”45 Novelists and
poets, then, were described by them as literary forebears of history, “kindred
spirits” who prepared the intellectual and artistic ground for the producers of
historical narratives.46 While Duyckinck distinguished carefully between facts
and fiction, he argued that historians were essentially storytellers who relied
on narrative strategies for the articulation of transcendent themes. He noted in
his diary in 1847, for instance, that the French historian Alphonse Lamartine’s
“narrative of the flight of Louis XVI and the royal family, in his History of
the Girondins,” was of such “thrilling interest” because the historian’s “skilful
[sic] arrangement of facts do not yield to any fiction. . . . The novelists have in
fact taught the historians to understand their business. Indirectly history is
hugely indebted to the author of Waverley.”47
Duyckinck’s reference to the useful abstractions of Sir Walter Scott’s
historical novels suggests the degree to which he was willing to expand the
definition of history to accommodate the needs of an idealistic philosophy.
Members of Duyckinck’s circle were great admirers of Scott as both novelist
and historian. Indeed, in 1838, Duyckinck submitted an essay on the British
novelist to The New York Review in which he argued for a more generous in-
terpretation of the value of Scott as both historian and romance writer. Inter-
estingly, the article was rejected by the Review’s editor, Caleb Sprague Henry,
because it went too far in extolling the virtues of historical romance. “I am no
Puritan,” noted Henry, but “many, very many sensible persons, viewing the
subject in this light & putting the question in this shape, have unqualifiedly
condemned Sir Walter Scott’s career in life as, in the judgment of Reason and
Religion, a waste, or an unfaithful use, of his high talent.”48 Simms disagreed
with Henry’s decision, of course. Citing the value for history of novelizations
that sparked an interest in past events, Simms noted: “It was, for example,
only with the publication of Ivanhoe, one of the most perfect specimens of
the romance that we possess, that the general reader had any fair idea of the
long, protracted struggle for superiority between the Norman and the Saxon
people.” Scott’s novel was responsible, he argued, for “the very charming
history of the Norman conquest and sway, from the pen of Monsieur Thierry
[the nineteenth-century French historian]. In this work, the writer, borrowing
something of the attributes of the poet, has contrived to clothe his narrative
with an atmosphere which confers upon it a rich mellowness not to be found
in the works of the ordinary historian.” As with the influence of Shakespeare’s
Richard III on the historical writings of Horace Walpole, Simms believed that
ancient historical voices “could be made to ring, trumpet like, in a modern
ear, by such a lyre as Walter Scott.”49 Revealingly, Simms made this statement

with no apparent recognition of the double entendre implicit in its choice of
descriptive noun for Scott.
These interpretive trends at the heart of Duyckinck’s editorial vision and
Simms’s writing underscore the lack of distinction made by the publishers of
the Library of American Books between history and romance or fiction in the
mid-nineteenth century.50 History was considered part of the belles lettres, and
the literary strategies used by novelists and historians were thought to be very
similar in practice. Novels informed by history, such as those written by Sir
Walter Scott, were the best-read of all works of fiction; indeed, some viewed
recourse to historical topics as a way of safeguarding against the imaginative
excesses of fiction. In turn, a piece of history that was characterized as “read-
ing like a novel” received the highest praise possible. When Alexander Dumas
congratulated Lamartine for having “raised history to the status of a novel,” he
did so without the slightest sense of irony.51 The philosopher of history Max
Nordau noted that as a young boy his “real affinities” were with the historical
novel in which the “melodramatic past” reigned supreme and in which read-
ers were encouraged to indulge their “inborn” and perpetual “love of stories.”
The most important historical works of his youth were “picturesque” narra-
tives of adventure that drew inspiration from the Thousand and One Nights
rather than Bancroft, histories that were “full of tragedies, dramas, comedies
of character and intrigue.” According to Nordau, such histories differed from
fairy tales primarily in their “piquant attempt to prove that everything did ac-
tually happen as it is set down.” The only meaningful distinction between the
historian and the novelist, he argued, “is that the invention of the former is
limited in regard to the facts of which a recognized version is current”; other
than that, Nordau concluded, “there is no exaggeration in saying that history
as it is written is a kind of roman à thèse novel.”52
Part of the ease of transference between fictional and historical modes of
thinking as articulated by Simms, Duyckinck and others was conditioned by
the subdued role played by “facts” in historical narratives in the mid-nineteenth
century. With the exception of some almanac compilers and annalists, most
historians of the period did not consider themselves mere stockpilers of details
nor bound by facts; rather, they viewed these as the bare platforms on which
important narrative structures could be assembled. As David Levin has argued
persuasively with regard to mid-century historians, “whatever value facts had
for their own sake, it was the story, and the kind of story, that counted.”53 In
this sense, historical meaning was “constructed” and was presumed to inhere
not so much in the facts associated with an historical episode as in the ways
facts were organized.54 Facts were not irrelevant, of course, since historians
were restricted in their narratives to events that took place at specific times

and spaces while writers of fiction were not. Even the nonconformist Simms
would acknowledge that self-respecting historians of the nineteenth century
did not willfully invent characters, occurrences, or dialogues the way novel-
ists do. Apart from these subtle distinctions, however, the aims of historians
and fiction writers were presumed to be virtually the same. Both were story-
tellers who had to meet criteria of “correspondence and coherence in their
accounts,” and both relied heavily on the power of the imagination to struc-
ture experience. The “conventional distinction between the two realms under-
estimated the constraints on the writer of fiction and overestimated those on
the historian,” Peter Novick has noted of the period. Historical stories, like all
others narratives, were thought to be “made rather than found.”55
Given these points of convergence, it was assumed by many in Duyckinck’s
circle that the best training a historian could obtain as preparation for the pop-
ular book market was as an imaginative writer of fiction. Since both historical
and fictional meaning were understood to be “constructed” in a literary sense,
narrative, the art of storytelling, was recognized as lying at the heart of each
enterprise. This sentiment helps explain why both historians and novelists of
the mid-nineteenth century were preoccupied with the substance and style
of the stories they were telling, whether cautionary tales or prescriptions for
moral uplift.56 To the extent that there was any consistency in the subject mat-
ter of these literary works, it was in their shared interest in the Great Story
or the master narrative of history.57 Historical novelists and writers of history
organized many of their texts around the same central ideas of progress, na-
tionalism or the battle of reason over superstition.58 In addition, what novelists
and historians consistently excluded from their narratives (such as the stories
of repressed minorities) also revealed by indirection and obfuscation common
strategies of design.59
Style proved remarkably consistent with respect to both historical novels
and works of history marketed by the Young Americans and others. In fact,
so crucial to historical writing were technical matters of literary presenta-
tion—character development, descriptive strategies, tone, point of view, rules
of evidence, etc.—that Duyckinck conceived of history as essentially synony-
mous with highly personalized literary art. In criticizing Machiavelli’s History
of Florence, Duyckinck regretted that the author had not included more “per-
sonal matter” in his text. “Where public affairs are so uniform how brilliantly
he might have lit up the narrative by the detail of personal history,” the editor
noted in his diary. “His preservation of the dignity of history is absolutely pain-
ful.”60 Popular historical literature of the mid-nineteenth century must be idio-
syncratic and personal, borrowing heavily from the rhetorical devices common
to imaginative fiction if necessary. According to George Callcott, “[s]weeping

the reader up into the narrative” obligated historians to use “natural words,
simple expression, and concrete images” derived from their personal lives,
which, in turn, placed a premium on the “direct language, strong verbs, and
everyday expressions” used by novelists.61 Even the standards for “truth” in
history as established by Duyckinck were determined by rhetorical consider-
ations, as history was expected to do more than merely report; it was expected
to edify. Truth was not synonymous with fact alone, but with a combination of
fact and imagination.62 Rational thought and creative literary expression (sub-
stance and style) were viewed symbiotically by Simms, who valued them as
equal partners in the historian’s task of defining moral truth. He applied the
romantic conventions of current literature to real historical episodes in an ef-
fort to make history accountable to contemporary moral standards.63
These sentiments suggest why the “men of letters” in whom Simms and
Duyckinck placed the most faith for the creation of a unique American literary
tradition had been writers of fiction before they were historians.64 Parkman
produced a novel long before he completed work on his epic North America
series; John Lothrop Motley wrote two novels; and Prescott borrowed un-
abashedly from the romantic literary conventions of the novelists of his day,
making extensive use of standardized narrative themes (the Past, Nature, and
the Great Man in History) as well as traditional tropes of fiction (irony, tragedy,
comedy).65 Appreciation for the literary gifts of these writers was especially
strong among publishers such as Wiley and Putnam, who worked hard (and
unsuccessfully) to convince Francis Parkman to contribute a volume to the
Library of American Books. It is revealing, however, that when the two publish-
ers split their firm in the winter of 1848, Parkman was one of the first authors
signed by acquisition editors of the new concern, G. P. Putnam & Company.
The success of The Oregon Trail seemed to verify Putnam’s faith in the value
of good historical prose literature for popular readers.66 In the Cyclopaedia of
American Literature, Duyckinck later noted that another work by Parkman,
The History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), “attracted attention by its in-
dividuality of subject, respect by its evidences of thorough investigation, and
popularity by its literary merits.” Because his volumes were written “in a clear,
animated tone, giving its pages due prominence to the picturesque scenery as
well as the dramatic action of its topic,” Parkman “attained a foremost rank as
a historian.”67 By this standard, Prescott was even more a master of prose style.
His Conquest of Mexico (1843), Duychinck argued, was “effective and popular,
comprehending that series of military adventures, which read more like a cruel
romance than the results of sober history.”68
Conversely, the inability to write with the imagination of a good novelist
often doomed the careers of would-be historians in the eyes of Duyckinck.

Samuel Eliot was a sad case in point. Enrolled at Harvard at the age of thirteen,
Eliot had graduated first in an impressive class that included Edward Everett
and of which he was the youngest member, having displayed a particular ap-
titude for historical study. After a Gibbonesque epiphany while traveling in
Rome in the early 1840s, and with encouragement from his boyhood friend
and neighbor, Francis Parkman, Eliot determined to write a history of liberty
from the classical era to the present. His research was exhaustive and his argu-
ments sound, and Duyckinck acknowledged that if viewed as “critical analy-
sis” rather than as “narrative” it possessed a certain “philosophical acumen”
and bore “evidences of a diligent study of the original and later authorities.”69
A few readers even appreciated the “moral dignity” of the work, applauding
its recognition of the “religious sense of the dealings of Providence with the
history of man.”70 Eliot’s The History of Liberty was panned by most critics,
however, for showing none of the “creative power,” imagination, or stylistic
genius of the historical novelists of his day. “In undertaking the history of lib-
erty,” Harvard professor Barrett Wendell later noted, Eliot “mistook literary
ambition for capacity,” failing to recognize that popular historical writing “de-
mands special gifts which he never quite revealed.”71
If training as a novelist was considered the best kind of preparation for
the writing of history, then the study of poetry was a close second. For cen-
turies poems had been appreciated as favored vehicles for conveying histori-
cal truths.72 The imaginative and even mystical elements of the poetic were
considered meaningful devices for encouraging an appreciation for the past.73
This logic appears counterintuitive to us today, since we have come to believe
that poets work “deductively,” employing patterns that predate subject mat-
ter and are imposed on it, while historians develop narrative devices in an in-
ductive manner, derived from facts and “found” in the data.74 But as Hayden
White and others have suggested, many of the literary conventions employed
by historians are “pre-generic” and derive from archetypal and epic forms.75
That is, historians, like all those who use language in the service of explana-
tion, are conditioned by the structural properties of linguistic forms, which
are themselves poetic.76 Simms anticipated these comments when he asked
rhetorically of the kind of poetry that “furnishes the perfect history”: “Shall
we consider it less true because it is attested in the underlying measures of
verse!”77 For Duyckinck, the answer was a definitive “No!”
These assumptions about the relationship between the disciplines of his-
tory and literature explain why Duyckinck could conflate so readily all these
forms into one common statement of purpose for American ambitions with
respect to literature. In “Literary Prospects of 1845,” Duyckinck wrote: “We
would urge it for every department of literature; stimulating the historian to

profounder research, the poet to a more concentrated self-knowledge and a
more truthful pursuit of nature, the novelist to acquire that spirit of art which
is both an incentive and restraint to his powers.” The tasks of the historian,
poet and novelist might even be subsumed in the career of a single individual,
a jack-of-all literary trades who could accomplish remarkable feats of intel-
lectual consolidation. Embedded language in the correspondence between
Simms and Duyckinck as well as in the latter’s “Literary Prospects of 1845” re-
veals something undeniably messianic in their search for a new poet-novelist-
historian who could elicit the “spiritual and eternal” elements of an emerging
American literature. Such a literary savior would be a “humble man” who
would not “bray his affairs constantly before the world” like those false proph-
ets who send their “noisy nostrums through the street with trumpet and plac-
ard at all hours,” Duyckinck wrote. Instead, he would be an “invisible angel
who appears only seldom, but then in great beauty, at the life-giving sacred
Bethesda.” If the literary marketplace was a rough-and-tumble arena in which
the “children of light” suffered needless obscurity, there was still hope that the
true “man of letters,” the “One” who tirelessly “devotes his time and talents
to the improvement of society,” might emerge. Would 1845 be the year of this
Savior’s coming? Duyckinck hoped so. “There is a new year opening of the
Christian Era;” he proclaimed. “[L]et it be so indeed, and like Boniface’s ale,
savor of the Anno Domini!”78
History as Gentle, Romantic Fiction

If a populist prophet of a new American literary kingdom were to appear
in the mid-1840s, Duyckinck and Putnam expected that he (not she in their
estimation) might emerge from the already established community of popular
artists of proven reputation.79 It is true that members of the Young America
movement often looked for inspiration beyond the elders of the first school of
American literary acolytes whom they typecast as too European in outlook,
supporting instead the careers of younger authors more closely affiliated with
indigenous American styles.80 We should not lose sight of the fact, however,
that Young Americans used the standards of the old as the measure for de-
termining the worthiness of the new. Hence, Duyckinck acknowledged in the
Cyclopaedia the value of old standard works in the field of history such as Wil-
liam Cullen Bryant’s poem “Song of Marion’s Men,” which evoked a “national
and patriotic sentiment” and was “expressive of the heroic in character.”81 Na-
thaniel Hawthorne’s contributions to historical literature were also viewed as
significant, though limited largely to biographies of public figures (such as that

of his college friend Franklin Pierce) and to short stories collected in volumes
such as True Stories from History, designed simply “to give pleasure to ‘the
YOUNG.’ ”82 Importantly, Duyckinck noted, the historical works of Bryant and
Hawthorne had a wide appeal because they borrowed so deliberately and suc-
cessfully from the techniques of persuasion evident in popular poetry and fic-
tion. Putnam recruited both men for the Library of American Books because
the poet and the novelist each had developed proven strategies that recognized
“the value of reader involvement in the past, the value of the particular and the
exotic, [and] the value of local color and precise detail.” Americans demanded
as much romanticism “from their historians as they obtained from their novel-
ists,” Callcott has noted, and they found it in the “drum and trumpet” histori-
cal pieces perfected by Bryant and Hawthorne.83
James Fenimore Cooper was slightly more active than either Hawthorne or
Bryant as a historian, writing a multivolume History of the Navy that Simms cel-
ebrated as “a noble instance” of a “hearty” patriotism that revealed the novelist
to be “an equally good critic and historian.”84 Francis Parkman, a great admirer
of Natty Bumppo and other “breathing men” in Cooper’s fiction, found in
Cooper’s histories a commitment to historical portraiture not unlike that of Sir
Walter Scott. “Their conceptions of character were no mere abstract ideas, or
unsubstantial images,” Parkman wrote, “but solid embodiments in living flesh
and blood.”85 Duyckinck agreed, adding that Cooper’s novels constituted an
especially important contribution to historical understanding of Native Ameri-
cans. As the “novels of Scott set the antiquaries to work rubbing the rust off old
armor, and brushing the dust from many an old folio, and illustrating many a
well-nigh forgotten chapter of history,” Duyckinck noted, so “the productions
of Cooper have rendered a like service. He has thrown a poetic atmosphere
around the departing race of the Red men, which, if it cannot stay their destiny,
will do much to fix their place in history.”86 Yet it is revealing that Duyckinck
did not recruit Cooper for his popular libraries, in part because he did not
feel that Cooper’s Native Americans rang true, having the aura about them at
times of Shakespearean actors delivering Elizabethan soliloquies. Historical ro-
mances such as those in the Leatherstocking series did not meet the standards
of authenticity for popular history established by Duyckinck for American writ-
ers. There was a sense among the Young Americans that Cooper’s histories and
historical novels recycled tired themes with too much regularity. The first vol-
ume of Arcturus, for instance, featured a review of Cooper’s Deerslayer in which
Cooper’s historical treatments of Native Americans were characterized as “[a]n
exhausted vein of writing from which the ore has long disappeared.”87
The desire to achieve both popularity and authenticity suggested the diffi-
culties faced by writers of historical literature in the popular book market who

wished to realize Duyckinck’s “literary prospects” for an extensive reconsid-
eration of historical literature in the United States. Not everyone who aspired
to reach a wider reading audience was anxious to embrace Duyckinck’s larger
agenda of a systematic treatment of national themes in a broad-based popular
historical literature. Neither Cooper nor Hawthorne chose to write a Popular
History of the United States, for instance; they picked at its edges only, leaving
comprehensive synthetic treatments to others. Such resistance to the univer-
salizing impulses of Duyckinck suggests a good deal about the varieties of the
popular emerging in the 1840s. For reasons that relate to the complexities of
the popular book market and to the distractions of competing literary projects
in an expanding field, writers such as Cooper never acted on impulses to tell
the nation’s history in its entirety in popular formats. It is difficult to document
precisely when the genre of popular history emerged as a fixed and steady fea-
ture of the American literary scene, but prior to the 1840s bibliographic aids
indicate that Americans had not yet recognized works of the order Duyckinck
imagined as part of a distinct category of literature.88
Of all the established literary and poetic figures who dabbled in history writ-
ing in the mid-nineteenth century, Washington Irving came closest to embodying
the spirit of the wide-reaching and comprehensive popularity that Duyckinck
advocated and that defined the genre in its later nineteenth-century iterations.
Though of different generations, Duyckinck Jr. and Irving were the closest of
friends. They met regularly in social settings and agreed on most things literary.
Duyckinck admired the playfulness of Irving’s first substantial literary produc-
tion, Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff,
Esq., and Others (1807), for instance, which was written in “so agreeable a
style,” in Duyckinck’s estimation, “that it is still read with interest, what was
piquant gossip then being amusing history now.” Even more he appreciated the
patriotic purposes Irving served in telling the history of the early Republic in
literary tales and folklore. “Parallel with the ruder but more robust and athletic
writings of Cooper,” Duyckinck noted, “the volumes of Irving improved Amer-
ican society, and rendered the national name beloved and respected abroad.”89
His reverence for Irving as a cultural ambassador bordered on filiopiety. It was
Duyckinck who oversaw many of the funeral arrangements when Irving died in
1859, and Duyckinck who took responsibility for compiling a collection of “an-
ecdotes and traits,” a Festschrift of sorts entitled Irvingiana, to commemorate
the life of this American literary genius.90 So enamored of Irving was Duyck-
inck, in fact, that he was buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York, next to Irving,
where the two had selected sites together years before.91
For Duyckinck, Irving represented a complex and significant example of the
crossover value of the disciplines of history and literature. While best known for

his works of regional and historical fiction, especially short stories such as “Rip
Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving wrote many volumes
of popular history which, collectively, treated nearly all of the most significant
episodes and personages in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American
history. Some of these, such as the farcical History of New York, blurred the
distinctions between fact and fiction. Playing with the persona of historian as
“truth-giver,” Irving’s fictional narrator of Dutch and British colonists in New
York, Diedrich Knickerbocker, insisted that he was “particularly anxious that
his work should be noted for its authenticity; which is, indeed, the very life
and soul of history.” Almost in the same breath, however, Knickerbocker sug-
gested to his readers that, as a historian, he had certain “advantage[s]” over
them. “[T]hough I cannot save the life of my favorite hero, nor absolutely con-
tradict the event of the battle (both which liberties, though often taken by the
French writers of the present reign, I hold to be utterly unworthy of a scrupu-
lous historian), yet I can now and then make him bestow on his enemy a sturdy
backstroke sufficient to fell a giant; though, in honest truth, he may never have
done anything of the kind,” Irving’s narrator noted. Professing a profound
respect for the sanctity of the past and the awesome responsibilities of the his-
torian—who, as “sovereign censor,” has the power to confer “immortality” on
subjects or consign them to inglorious “neglect”—Knickerbocker nonetheless
admitted to taking liberties with the historical record for the sake of literary ef-
fect. As compensation, however, he assured readers that he had agonized over
the “direful commotions and calamities” such practices occasioned.92
Duyckinck admired Irving’s willingness to embellish historical facts as a
way of achieving a poetic feeling for seventeenth-century Dutch life in New
York. In the Cyclopaedia he noted that Irving turned to good account the “hu-
morous capabilities of the subject . . . in the happiest way, the fun being broad
enough not to be confounded with the realities.” Admittedly, occasional ques-
tions about the verisimilitude of events described in the Knickerbocker History
led to misunderstandings among readers about the intentions of its author.
One “venerable clergyman” complained that, having begun “the work in good
faith,” he was “only gradually warmed to a consciousness of the joke,” Duyck-
inck noted, while Irving’s work “was gravely held up to reprehension” in an
address before the New-York Historical Society by another deceived patron.
Irving’s popular books were of substantial enough breadth to admit of several
types of historical treatment, Duyckinck argued, both as a lofty subject handled
with vulgarity and as “a system of original investigation and historical inquiry.”
If scholars objected to Irving’s incongruous style, he added, they “should have
occupied the ground earlier, and not have given the first advantage to the hu-
morist.”93 The historian John Spencer Bassett was perhaps most accurate with

respect to contemporary assessments when he said of the Knickerbocker His-
tory: “It was confessedly a burlesque,” recognized as such even in its own day,
“but it was written with such a clear insight into the character of the Dutch
settlers that it gave its readers a fairly acceptable impression of their lives and
mental attitude. It was widely read and stimulated interest in real history.”94
This was the kind of authentically American vision that members of the Young
America movement could embrace.
Others of Irving’s popular works fell more squarely into the category of
traditional, archival history that Duyckinck also admired. In the 1820s Irving
took a trip to Spain with the intention of publishing documents related to
Columbus’s voyages uncovered by the historian Don Martin Fernandez de
Navarrete. American publishers were lukewarm to the project, however, sus-
pecting that there would be little market for a mere work of translation. Admit-
ting to himself that the “sight of disconnected papers and official documents
is apt to be repulsive to the general reader, who seeks for clear and continued
narrative,” Irving decided as an alternative to write a popular biography of
Columbus based on his extensive research in the historical records. He spent
the next twenty-one months laboring over historical materials, producing a
substantial work, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in
three volumes, that defined Columbiana studies for years to come.95 The most
enduring parts of the narrative, according to fellow historian William Prescott,
were those in which Irving used his considerable skills as a writer to elucidate
topics that were “full of sublimity,” such as the moment of the “great discov-
ery.” Irving’s treatment of the landing of Columbus was “a model topic for
investigation,” Prescott concluded, demonstrating an easy convergence of lit-
erary and historical talents that “Irving had performed with enviable skill.”96
Much to Irving’s delight, the volumes were commercially successful and well
received by general readers.97
The success of Life of Columbus has concerned some modern historiogra-
phers who have noted Irving’s tendencies to embellish or alter materials for
the sake of desired literary effects.98 There is no question that Irving violated
principles that historians view as sacred today. Claudia Bushman points out,
for instance, that Irving “manipulated the facts he found for romantic pur-
poses” as when he “jumped at [an] earlier date” than most scholars allowed
for Columbus’s birth as a way of dramatizing the midlife crisis implications
of his voyages. “I think all the actions of Columbus, his perseverance, his for-
titude, his undaunted enterprises, receive wonderful additional force from
his advanced age,” Irving reasoned. Bushman adds that when Irving found a
source he preferred, “he was willing to dismiss others that did not suit him.”99
This was especially true of Irving’s description of Columbus’s serendipitous

landfall in the Americas during his first voyage. Despite the fact that there were
few reliable sources that recorded the disposition of those who went ashore
in October 1492, Irving favored the most romantic of these. “The feelings of
the crew now burst forth in the most extravagant transport,” he wrote. “They
thronged around the admiral with overflowing zeal, some embracing him, oth-
ers kissing his hands. Those who had been most mutinous and turbulent dur-
ing the voyage, were now most devoted and enthusiastic.” Irving’s description
of Columbus’s men as supplicating advanced his larger goal of promoting Co-
lumbus as a “great man in history” in the sense that Carlyle used the phrase.
“Some begged favors of him, as if he had already wealth and honors in his gift.
Many abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now croached
at his feet, begging pardon for all the trouble they had caused him, promising
the blindest obedience in the future.”100
Similar objections have been raised to Irving’s treatment of Columbus’s
triumphant return to Barcelona after the first voyage. According to Bushman,
Irving largely invented the scene, picturing “the kind of reception Columbus
should have had” rather than the more subdued affair he did experience.101 A
contemporary reviewer for the Monthly Review picked up on these distorting
tendencies, which he attributed to Irving’s misplaced desire to sentimental-
ize Columbus, “who seemed to him more like the hero of an historical novel
than the object of a serious historical inquiry.”102 Irving responded to such
criticisms by condemning iconoclasts like those at the Monthly Review who
seemed to take pleasure in “marring and mutilating” the reputations of signifi-
cant historical figures. For Irving, the popularizing of Columbus was part of a
larger national agenda affirming the master narrative of Progress. “There is a
certain meddlesome spirit, which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying
about the traces of history, casting down monuments,” Irving noted, adding
that “care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious eru-
dition” because “it defeats one of the most salutary purposes of history, that
of furnishing examples of what human genius and laudable enterprise may ac-
complish.”103 Put differently, Irving was tolerant of slight adjustments to the
historical record of a sort made necessary in order to place “the individual at
the center of the universe.”104 At the heart of the disagreement was a debate
over what constituted proper historical technique. His critics worried about
the implications of manipulating evidence for the sake of creating a “tran-
scendent Columbus.” Reviewers at the London Weekly Review were more ac-
cepting of Irving’s literary strategies, ranking the author as “among the ablest
historians of [his] age.” The New York Mirror agreed, noting that Irving “had
turned to great advantage his movement toward serious history, although no
one could have expected that development.”105 The literary agent Alexander

Everett claimed that Irving had “brought out the full force of his genius as far
as a just regard for the principles of historical writing would admit.”106
As might be predicted, Duyckinck and his circle were more disposed to-
ward the New York Mirror’s reactions to Irving than to those of the Monthly
Review. By and large the Young Americans accepted Irving’s sense of narrativ-
ity with respect to a more politicized vision of how the past might serve as pro-
logue to the present. To understand his histories properly, Duyckinck wrote
in reference to Irving, we must “penetrate to the motives and opportunities of
the . . . grand results,” which encourage us “to increase and magnify our own
parts in the ever-acting drama.” Compounding details the way a novelist con-
structs a complicated plot, Irving “put in everything he could find and added
more besides.” He imaginatively recreated the life of Columbus by conceiv-
ing “new details to flesh out his scenes in dramatic and colorful ways and to
weave together his historical episodes,” according to Duyckinck. In addition,
he “borrowed from others, concentrating on the idealized figure of Columbus,
enhancing the humorous and picturesque details.” His readers were familiar
with the essential details of Columbus’s story, Duyckinck admitted, but Irving
“shaped and colored the events” in ways that made his “nonfiction narrative
read more like a gentle romantic fiction than a history.”107 The style was “orna-
mental and gaudy and meretricious,” to be sure, as one of Irving’s publishers
acknowledged, “but the Life was also a beautiful story, gracefully told, always
smooth, always dignified.”108 Duyckinck asserted in the Cyclopaedia that Ir-
ving’s histories were “marked by the same genial and poetic treatment” as his
novels, “the fancy of the writer evidently luxuriating in the personal freedom
of movement of his heroes, their humor of individual character, and the warm
oriental coloring of the theme.”109
Some critics in Duyckinck’s day, such as those at the Monthly Review, be-
lieved that Irving’s attempts to write popular biographies of Columbus and
Washington were “common” and “undistinguished,” but most found them
romantic and provocative and expected they would stand the test of time.
Irving’s literary portraits seemed typical of a genre that was concerned more
with recovering the pervasive spirit of an age than with accuracy of minute de-
tail. Irving was less interested in chronicle than in storytelling, less concerned
with “trivial truth than with fertile error.”110 The novel and the epic poem were
suitable prototypes for this kind of recuperative vision, according to Duyck-
inck, since Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Bryant were all interested in dis-
covering what people were thinking and doing in the past, concerns that led
them back to narrative forms.111 Operating from the assumption that history
should be didactic, Irving and other novelists-turned-historians constructed
stories that offered moral visions to a nation in need of guidance. For them,

popular history was a “moral science” whose task was not so much to re-create
the past for its own sake as to convey an appreciation for the way in which
history could be used to encourage an ethically responsible present. 112 The
narrative and poetic forms into which these visions were translated eventually
achieved cultural familiarity and approximated the status of myths. It was the
rhetorical quality of the mythic-historical constructions promoted by popu-
larizers that provided the most direct avenues to historical meaning. If you
could tell the story well, Duyckinck believed, you could awaken readers to the
true significance of history; if you could not, then no amount of reliance on
verifiable fact could salvage the inevitable wreckage of the enterprise. “One
still hears of histories ‘nearly as entertaining as a novel,’ of histories ‘almost
as interesting as fiction,’ ” the poet Edwin Markham noted in defense of such
literary approaches to the past. “But if these statements are true, how can we
account for the public’s unmistakable preference for the modern story-teller,
the novelist?”113
Popular History as Fictional Embellishment

Duyckinck’s support of writers-turned-historians, such as Irving, had a
marked influence over the entire industry of popular history, especially among
relatively unknown practitioners. At first glance it would seem incongruous,
perhaps, to argue that the promotion of an internationally recognized writer
with a reputation as a highbrow such as Irving could spark a revolution in
historiography among the masses, but Duyckinck’s influence on popular mar-
kets was considerable. Irving was not available to contribute to the Library
of American Books, but he inspired Duyckinck and others of the Tetractys
group to solicit works by other popular writers. “While the Young America
movement was always an elitist undertaking—its founding members a group
of affluent litterateurs who had formed themselves into an exclusive private
association,” Meredith McGill has noted, “their rhetoric distinguished itself
at the start by its populism.”114 Theirs was a project dedicated to exposing the
American reading public to a wide array of popular works at small expense,
not just essays and poetry as the advertisements for the Library of Choice Read-
ings indicated but “contributions to History” as well.115 Historical fiction and
popular history were among those works projected for an expanded series of
popular books called the Home Library, to be edited by Duyckinck for I. S.
Platt publishers in New York City. The popular historian J. T. Headley con-
tributed a volume on Italian history which sold for twelve and a half cents.116
In addition, the editor’s correspondence with publisher G.P. Putnam suggests

that historians who contributed to the Library of American Books were deeply
grateful to Duyckinck for rescuing “works which had been suffering under
neglect in this country” and affording “unwonted encouragement to native au-
thors by publishing their books, in good style and in good company, without
the trouble or risk to the authors themselves, and in the very teeth of the disad-
vantages arising from the want of an international copyright law.”117
In the 1840s and 1850s, dozens of histories intended for the masses ex-
ploded onto the market. The rise of “popular history” as an independent
genre began during this period with the emergence of general, comprehensive
histories of the United States that self-identified as “popular.” Produced by
writers, journalists and poets with less well-established reputations than the
aforementioned novelists-turned-historians (authors such as Benson Lossing,
David Pae, and Mary Botham Howitt), these works shared the commitment
of Irving and others to literary embellishment and rhetorical effect.118 If one
consults bibliographic sources from the nineteenth century treating historical
literature—J. N. Larned’s Literature of American History, for instance—one
finds dozens of listings for popular works that advertise themselves not merely
as “complete narrative histories” of the sort found in “historical compendi-
ums” but also as collections of “interesting tales and episodes” intended to
have an enduring impact on the historical imagination.119 Barnes’ Popular His-
tory of the United States declared unabashedly that American history consti-
tuted “a narrative so full of picturesque incident and romantic adventure” that
it must without exception “sweep the reader along as if by charm and fascina-
tion.”120 As a way of increasing its “literary quality,” Mabie’s Popular History
of the United States was organized topically around short romantic narratives
(such as the “Story of the Indian” or the “Story of the Negro”) rather than
chronologically according to more rigid sequential concerns.121 Throughout
much of the late nineteenth century, such popular histories competed with
each other in the literary marketplace in intense and meaningful ways.122
Part of the success of popular histories with American readers of the mid-
nineteenth century was related to the reasonable prices of such works. In
the 1830s, few would-be buyers, particularly in remote areas, could afford to
purchase books on popular history by subscription, not knowing how many
“parts” they might be obliged to take and what their disposable incomes
might be in a wildly fluctuating economy. The leather-bound offerings of pa-
trician historians were equally out-of-reach. Whereas a series such as George
Bancroft’s History of the United States cost nearly twenty-five dollars to pur-
chase and was released piecemeal over five decades, a multivolume work in-
tended for mass audiences such as John Frost’s expeditious Popular History
cost only five dollars, was far easier reading, and was more widely circulated

than Bancroft’s.123 In their various editions, such histories sold more than fifty
thousand copies, rivaling the works of Irving and establishing new commer-
cial opportunities for the genre of popular history.124 Publishers understood
that popular artists must submit to the laws of supply and demand and were
dependent on proven strategies for winning the largest possible audience in
the marketplace. 125 Popular histories by Joel T. Headley, John Warner Bar-
ber, and Jacob Abbott each had their own idiosyncrasies, to be sure, but they
all relied on standardized literary devices tested in the marketplace to struc-
ture highly patriotic and unifying narratives.126 They all told stories that con-
formed to agreed-upon conventions for narrating the part, including patterns
of causal sequencing, historical explanation, and character assessment. 127
The success of these popular histories was also predicated on the literary
abilities of their authors. Here again, experience as a historical novelist was
considered the best sort of training for achievement in this highly competitive
marketplace. These “historians without portfolio” understood that since his-
tory was a branch of literature, it must be readable in order to be serviceable.128
Popular writers of reputation like Benson Lossing established the “compel-
ling phrases, images, and narratives” by which Americans chose to remember
(and sometimes suppress) national experience. The historical novel provided
the literary elements by which popular historians were able to structure their
particular historical formulations, especially those associated with the grand
narrative of American exceptionalism and its subplots related to liberty and
freedom.129 In this context it is important to recognize, as Dan Nathan notes,
that “for many readers the pasts that novels construct are more vibrant, com-
pelling, and influential than those found in histories. In this way novels fre-
quently wield considerable power in shaping popular understandings of the
past.”130 If such writers relied on historical techniques at odds with established
scholarly practice, they nonetheless established the prevailing patterns of in-
terpretation by which most Americans remembered and passed judgment on
history.131 Theodore Roosevelt, a writer of history himself before he was a pub-
lic servant, put it this way: “Historians who did not write well were unlikely to
be remembered”; indeed, they “would not only be forgotten, their ideas would
be forgotten with them.”132 That was a fate that popular historians wished to
avoid at all costs.
The careers of many different nineteenth-century authors might be invoked
to demonstrate the characteristics of this emerging literary marketplace for
popular history, but the works of two such historians—George Lippard and
John Frost—should suffice to suggest its primary features. Lippard, who began
his career as a novelist, was in prime position to take advantage of the mar-
ket forces that contributed to the emergence of popular history as a distinct

genre. Though little known today, Lippard has been described as “America’s
most widely read novelist” of the period between the mid-1840s and the mid-
1850s, and “one of the most fantastic creatures in the whole American literary
menagerie.”133 In 1844 he published The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk
Hall, a popular exposé of urban life in Philadelphia which sold 60,000 copies
in its first year and went through 27 editions over the next five years.134 The
novel revealed Lippard’s slightly off-center outlook on social reform, expos-
ing the debauchery of social elites who collected money from honest citizens
for “causes” only to spend it on alcohol, drugs, and women for themselves.
Middle-class readers with concerns about the pretenses of many upper-class
writers appreciated the work’s subversive and irreverent message. One con-
temporary of Lippard’s noted: “It was his business to attack social wrongs, to
drag away purple garments, and expose to our shivering gaze the rottenness of
vice—to take tyranny by the throat and strangle it to death.”135 In part owing to
Lippard’s unusual ability to express political rage in the context of class anxi-
eties and a compelling narrative, Larzer Ziff estimates that The Quaker City
was “the most popular novel in America prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and that
Lippard outsold Hawthorne and Melville in the decade of the 1850s.136
Lippard followed this success with “historical fictions and legends” related
to war, including a Revolutionary War novel of wide circulation, Blanche of
Brandywine (1846), as well as Bel of Prairie Eden (1848), which treated the
Mexican War. He also produced Legends of Mexico: The Battles of Taylor (1847),
which, though advertised as a “faithful history” of the struggle to achieve in-
dependence for Texas, has been described more accurately as containing
“only a thin veneer of historical fact.” Among other things, Lippard borrowed
freely from the various “Gothic devices” he had used in Quaker City and other
novels, including “ghostly apparitions, seduction, murder, and so on,” which
revealed, in the estimation of one reviewer, an inability to distinguish between
“history and romance.” The distinctions were not particularly meaningful to
Lippard. He defined “legend” in this text as “history in its details and delicate
tints, with the bloom and dew yet fresh upon it, history told to us, in the lan-
guage of passion, of poetry, of home!”137 These doubts aside, Lippard’s works
sold, and their popularity suggests the ease with which he moved from fiction
to history in the popular book market. Such interchangeability also reveals the
recognition by American readers that both history and fiction shared a com-
mon entertainment purpose. In an age when more than a third of the nation’s
best-selling books were historical, Lippard managed to stay at the top of best
seller lists with almost everything he wrote, fiction and nonfiction alike.138
The symbiotic relationship between fiction writing and historical investi-
gation is best evidenced, perhaps, by an anecdote that Lippard was fond of

recounting. In 1847, Lippard liked to tell, he was visited by a discharged sol-
dier who had served recently under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War. Their
conversation centered on a work of history Lippard had published earlier that
year—Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution—in which
the author drew parallels between the heroism of the Revolutionary fathers
and the valiant soldiers fighting to preserve liberty in Mexico. “The children
of the Revolution and countrymen of Washington, are thronging the vallies
[sic], darkening the mountains of this land, bearing in their front amid a tide
of sword and bayonet the Banner of Stars,” he had written, “from the bloody
height of Bunker Hill, from the meadow of Brandywine, to the snow-clad
height of Orizaba and the golden city of Tenochtitla.” Lippard’s words had
found a receptive audience. His visitor informed him that a serialized version
of Washington and His Generals had reached soldiers fighting in Mexico and
that they had been inspired by its message.139 “Gathered round our watch-fire
before the battle of Monterey, one of our number seated on a cannon, would
read while the others listened,” the soldier told Lippard. Washington’s acts of
valor “made our hearts feel warm—they nerved our arm[s] for battle! When
we read of the old times of our Flag, we swore in our hearts, never to disgrace
it.” This battlefield report not only suggested the wide reach of Lippard’s writ-
ings, it also confirmed his belief that historians could influence the present by
narrating the lessons of the past. He promised to continue to do his part to
shed light on “the awful shadows of the Past” by introducing readers to “some
of the brightest gleams of poetry and romance, that illumine our history.”140
As was increasingly typical in the 1840s, Lippard’s Washington and His
Generals was distributed through a series of subsidiary booksellers and literary
agents throughout the South and West within a matter of weeks.141 His book
agents became more sophisticated in their techniques for penetrating hard to
reach markets as well. Manuals advising sellers about canvassing techniques
suggested that the best way to assure a circulation record of this sort was to
generate a subscription list beginning with the most influential individuals in
a community (or in this case a military company), since viewing “the array
of signatures strikes the person with a sort of mesmeric influence.” “Having
thus got started,” the Agents’ Companion noted, “the thing goes like an epi-
demic.”142 An expanded market for books and a more literate public to ap-
preciate them were advantages, obviously, for authors like Lippard desirous of
reaching more readers with their political and economic messages in a new age
of mass communications. 143 Such knowledge created obligations as well, how-
ever, since technologies of mass production not only allowed authors to reach
more people but also required them to do so. As the sheer volume of literature
available to readers increased exponentially, capturing a wide enough market

share to justify a large production run of a popular book was the only possible
protection for authors against being lost in the literary deluge. Market condi-
tions conferred power on readers as well. Writers of mass-produced popular
histories such as Lippard, for instance, had to make concessions to readers in
ways that historians writing for “prestige publishers” were not obliged to do.
Popular authors reached their audiences through media that were uniquely at-
tuned to the demands and conditions for shaping the popular imagination.144
The challenge for popular writers such as Lippard was in trying to figure
out what the preferences of mass audiences were. “Popular art assumes its own
particular kind of audience, huge, heterogeneous, bewilderingly diverse in its
combination of life styles, manners, interests, tastes, and economic and educa-
tional levels,” Russel Nye has argued, and it must be adjusted to the “median
taste.”145 Philadelphia publisher, T. B. Peterson, reprinted Lippard’s popular
histories of the Revolution and Mexican War on the strength not only of the
serialized versions of the manuscript read by soldiers in the Mexican War but
also on the basis of Lippard’s successful novelizations published by crosstown
rival, G. B. Zieber. Triumphs in the fiction book market were the best possible
endorsement for popularizers hoping to find publishers for their histories, and
publishers like Zieber who extended book contracts to literary figures with es-
tablished reputations were rewarded often with increased sales.146 The system
was a fluid one characterized by incentives and rewards, and, as with many
such systems, abuses sometimes occurred. Peterson, for instance, convinced
various Philadelphia newspapers that everything Lippard produced was con-
tracted under the T. B. Peterson name, causing difficulties for Zieber and other
distributors that marketed Lippard’s works. Toward the end of his life, even
as he lay dying of tuberculosis, in fact, Lippard sent angry letters to the edi-
tors of the Philadelphia Dispatch complaining that Peterson was a “mercenary
creature” who had “made his thousands of dollars off of me” while reducing
the market share of other publishers by confusing consumers about how to
purchase books.147 These squabbles revealed the increased financial rewards
associated with the market for popular historical literature and the sometimes
desperate measures publishers used to capture them.148
Peterson and Zieber understood intuitively what Russel Nye noted later
about the standards of comprehension and achievement in the popular book
market—that they required a work to be “received from consensus,” to be
“commonly approved, pervasive in the population, ‘popular’ in the sense that
the majority of people like and endorse it and will not accept marked devia-
tions from its standards and conventions.” Since popularizers aimed “at the
largest common denominator, they tend[ed] to standardize at the median level
of majority expectation.”149 In Lippard’s case, speculations concerning what

this common denominator culture might wish to believe about its history en-
couraged a strong mythologizing impulse. In Washington and His Generals,
for instance, Lippard advanced the infamous “Liberty Bell myth” which pro-
claimed that the signing of the Declaration of Independence was announced
to the American people on July 4, 1776, by the tolling of the bell in the tower
of the Pennsylvania State House by an old man on a signal from a little, blue-
eyed, flaxen-haired boy who yelled “Ring!” As many historians have pointed
out, none of the details of this story is correct, since there was no public cel-
ebration of the signing, which, in any event, began on August 2, 1776, and was
not completed until mid-January of 1777. Concerned but little with verifiable
fact, Lippard believed he could render service as a historian by inspiring the
nation to a celebration of its “solemn symbol[s],” and a “legend was soon in-
vented which qualified the bell historically for [a] new polemical use.” The
Liberty Bell has since been reproduced on coins, postage stamps, and govern-
ment bonds, becoming one of the “most cherished emblems of American na-
tionality, American purpose, and the American mission.” According to Daniel
Boorstin, without “Lippard’s fertile if saccharine imagination, this might never
have been possible.”150 David Reynolds has added that “Lippard’s develop-
ment of the Liberty Bell legend illustrates the poetic license [he] felt free to
take with history,” which the novelist-turned-historian justified on the grounds
that he was “performing an inestimable service to his country by adding color,
warmth, and patriotic emphasis to dry history” through a “fictional embellish-
ment” of the past.151
Lippard was also a genius in making use of such rhetorical flourishes. Be-
cause the “thing which generally passes for History, is the most impudent,
swaggering bully, the most graceless braggart, the most reckless equivocator
that ever staggered forth on the great stage of the world,” he wrote in Legends
of Mexico, “it must be infused with those heart-warm stories, which, quivering
in rude, earnest language from the lips of the spectator of a battle, or the survi-
vor of some event of olden time, fill up the cold outlines of history, and clothe
the skeleton with flesh and blood, give it eyes and tongue, force it at once to
look into our eyes and talk with us!”152 This rather causal statement of method
revealed a rather sophisticated philosophy of popular history. The accuracy of
the sources used to convey “impressions” about the past was less important
than the vividness of those sources as agents of the historical. Hence, fictional
devices could be just as appropriate as archival materials, if not more so, in
conveying what was really meaningful about the past. The literary excesses of
this passage also remind us that in the mid-nineteenth century “rhetoric,” a
term that has an empty, vacuous connotation today, was more significant than
“explanation” in conveying historical meaning.153 Popular historians were

rhetoricians first and foremost, and they recognized that their work was pri-
marily a literary (some said fiction-making) operation.154
Another Philadelphian whose works helped to define the marketplace for
popular history was John Frost, a teacher and novelist who capitalized on the
growing market for “common” histories in the mid-nineteenth century. Born
in Kennebunk, Maine, in 1800, Frost was educated at Bowdoin and Harvard,
where he was recognized for his substantial gifts as a writer and student of
history. As early as 1822, Frost’s vision was expressed in his Bowdoin-prize
winning essay at Harvard, “The Character of Washington; Its Influence and
Importance,” in which Washington’s career was treated not only in a conven-
tional political and institutional manner but also in terms of the role of litera-
ture, art, and history in the young Republic. Anticipating by a decade and a
half Emerson’s opening passages in “Nature,” Frost wrote of Americans: “We
have manners, opinions and notions, as peculiar and idiomatic as those of any
other country,” a history “whose spirit is by no means extinct, whose events
and characters possess a most powerful hold on the association of the people,
and present a rich, and almost unbroken field for literary enterprises.” The
most fertile era for the harvesting of national historical treasures, Frost argued,
was the American Revolution, which offered many “dignified subjects for the
various departments of literature.” Yet Frost lamented that American writ-
ers had “deplorably neglected” the birth of the nation as a subject for literary
study. Urging future historians to choose “the forming period of our national
existence” as their “favourite theme,” Frost led the way by promising someday
to write a “drama” that would “copy nature in our peculiar manners and senti-
ments, and borrow its dignity from the moral sublime of the Revolution.”155
These sentiments paralleled the pleas of William Gilmore Simms for an
historical literature that capitalized on the most dramatic moments in the
nation’s history, such as the interaction between Benedict Arnold and Major
John Andre. James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novel The Spy (1821) was as
close as any of Frost’s contemporaries had come to realizing this vision of a
dramatic and instructive narrative of the Revolution. Frost hoped to emulate
the work of Cooper by writing a companion piece to it. His aspirations in this
regard, however, were delayed after his graduation from Harvard by his need
to make money. He spent the majority of the 1820s and 1830s teaching and
serving as the principal of a school outside of Philadelphia. When not engaged
in the time-consuming pursuit of training young minds, Frost dabbled with his
Cooper knock-off, which was eventually published in 1841 as Enoch Crosby;
or, the Spy Unmasked. A Tale of the American Revolution.156 This novel did
not have much of a literary impact, but it was noteworthy for its portrait of
the political spirit of the revolutionary times, and it gave Frost the confidence

to believe that, like Lippard and Irving, he could make the transition from
fiction writing to popular history. Eventually he developed a plan to write a
comprehensive history of the United States, a project that preoccupied him
throughout much of the mid-1840s. The history became an obsession that did
not always endear him to his students, many of whom were made to act as “as-
sistants” in various research assignments associated with the project. Accusing
Frost of manipulating their children for personal gain, several wealthy parents
withdrew their financial support from his school, and he was forced to resign.
As an acquaintance noted, Frost’s passion for teaching proved “incongruous”
with his love of literature, and “literature triumphed.”157
In the years following his resignation from teaching, Frost produced hun-
dreds of books for the popular market. Part of his incredible productivity was
motivated by financial necessity. Like some better-known historians of his day
(Parkman and Prescott, especially), Frost was often “in severe bodily pain,”
and much of his money and time were devoted to repairing himself physically.
Unlike Parkman and Prescott, Frost had little disposable income. He was also
the father of ten children, and he was saddled with financial concerns through-
out his career. “Weighed down in his last years by business perplexities and
troubles,” he was accused of writing “potboilers” in order to generate quick
profits. Such hurried productivity came to symbolize, in the eyes of his detrac-
tors, the irresponsibility and lack of thorough research associated with popular
history.158 If Frost cut corners in order to produce books rapidly, however, such
tendencies allowed him to publish works of enormous variety and breadth. He
began by writing mainly schoolbooks on every conceivable subject—literature,
foreign language, oratory, natural history—to name a few. He then progressed
to travel accounts, captivity narratives, ancient histories, and broad and am-
bitious compendia with titles such as The Wonders of History, “comprising
remarkable battles, sieges, feats of arms, and instances of courage, ability and
magnanimity, occurring in the annals of the world, from the earliest ages to the
present.” He penned works designed to edify, such as The Book of Good Exam-
ples Drawn from Authentic History and Biography and The Book of Anecdotes;
or the Moral of History, which made moral examples out of certain “illustra-
tive” historical figures. This remarkable production of books for readers of all
ages earned Frost a reputation throughout the United States and even Europe,
where his popular works were stolen or cannibalized by publishers anxious to
capitalize on the European interest in things American.159
The promises Frost made to himself and others in his precocious college
essay were realized finally in the Popular History of the United States, which
appeared first in a pictorial format in the mid-1840s. In the preface to his vol-
umes, Frost defined the “popular” mission of his work: “to furnish, within

a reasonable compass, a complete history of the United States, suited to the
purposes of the general reader.” This goal was to be accomplished through
a “plain and intelligible story” emphasizing the harmony and unity of the
American experience. The challenge, both literary and intellectual, he under-
stood, was to develop a “compact and clear” narrative that would emphasize
the “singleness” of a unique “national consciousness” while giving recogni-
tion to the diversity of the country. “The large number of distinct communities
of which the republic is composed; the different views which actuated their
founders; and the extent of territory over which they were originally spread,
render it difficult to combine their annals into a single work,” Frost wrote,
but he felt it was his obligation to attempt such a unified vision in order to
inspire readers to act in responsibly “American” ways. In addition to this pa-
triotic purpose, Frost also understood that a consolidating perspective would
increase the marketability of his books, since readers in every regional market
could find something of themselves in such volumes. The consumer-driven
techniques of popular literature used by Frost to encourage movement from
the “pluribus” to the “unum” of the American experience increased the likeli-
hood that his popular history would achieve the wide circulation and broad
appeal he intended for it.160
Since Frost viewed clarity of vision as essential to any historical work as-
piring to popular acclaim, he took the literary challenges of writing popular
history very seriously. First and foremost he believed that his narrative must
be organized around a central, enduring principle that could serve as a literary
structuring device for conveying to readers the true genius of the American ex-
periment. For Frost, as it had been for Lippard, this principle was liberty. Lib-
erty was “the American Palladium,” Frost wrote, the sacred embodiment of an
ancient, “impalpable and inextinguishable fire of freedom, still burning in the
hearts of the people, and still destined to elude the grasp of tyranny.” Citizens
of the United States were destined to fulfill liberty’s promises, he added, as evi-
denced by the numerous instances of the hand of fate interposing itself “to save
Americans” from threats. The American people operated “under the smiles of
Heaven,” rightly “trust[ing] Providence for success,” and Providence rarely
failed them, he argued. The Pilgrims on board the Mayflower were delivered
from the “starving time” because they “were destined to figure in the world’s
history.” In the battle of Louisbourg, “the arm of Providence saved the colo-
nists” from the storms, shipwrecks, pestilence and suicide that determined
the French to abandon their siege. The colony of Georgia was able to avoid
war with the Spanish “by an event beyond human foresight or control,” by
a storm at sea that “providentially saved [it] from destruction.” When battles
during the American Revolution promised poorly for American troops, the

day was often won by sudden changes of weather conditions or the swelling of
rivers brought on by the controlling hand of fate. In all such cases, the “people
throughout the country were cheered and enlivened” by such a “direct mani-
festation of the fact that Omnipotence was enlisted in their behalf.”161
In documenting instances of the role of Providence in the American saga,
Frost appealed to the strong pride and vanity of Americans who were only too
willing to view themselves as participants in God’s master plan. He was mo-
tivated by the same impulses that had compelled Duyckinck and the Young
Americans to declare for a new and unique American literary sensibility. Frost
envisioned his volumes not only as a history of the nation’s past but as a window
onto her glorious future, and he structured the chapters of his history around
sensational moments in the growth of liberty as plotted through time. During
the 1840s, before the fissures of the Civil War were evident to everyone, it was
still possible for Frost to argue that the single-minded pursuit of liberty bound
ancestor to ancestor across generations of American experience. The threat of
slavery, with its inherent disregard for the liberty of some, presented a serious
challenge to Frost’s vision of unity, and he admitted that “the territory which
had proved a seat of liberty” to many southerners was “a grave for the freedom
of others.” Yet Frost deflected the most divisive aspects of the slave question
by universalizing the experience of slavery, reminding readers in the North
and in Europe that they, too, were participants in victimizing systems of labor.
“[S]lavery was not confined to the natives of Africa and their descendants,”
he noted, but extended to indentured servitude, the mistreatment of Indians,
and the abuse of foreign workers. Even in their lapses from liberty, Americans
remained unified in attitude and behavior in Frost’s integrated history.162
Frost made a conscious effort to employ the literary devices of the Young
Americans, including all the substantial elements of the master narrative or
Great Story. From a literary point of view, the advantage of organizing the
Popular History around a structural principle such as liberty was that it pro-
vided an easy mechanism for classifying the protagonists and antagonists in
this Great American story. Simply put, heroes were those who upheld the val-
ues of freedom and who were willing to fight and die to defend them. The
sufferings of Roger Williams “should never be forgotten by the friends of reli-
gious liberty,” Frost wrote, nor the fact that he was a “houseless wanderer in
the woods,” shunned by former friends and foes alike because of his beliefs.
Penn’s treaty was “a noble specimen of the combined mildness and firmness”
which characterized the Quaker “pursuit of liberty.” And Lafayette provided
“one of the most striking examples of heroism and disinterestedness recorded
in the pages of history,” because he left “the endearments of home, and the
brilliant destinies which awaited him as one of the first nobles of France,” in

order “to plunge in the blood and dust of our inauspicious struggle” on behalf
“of his great zeal for the cause of liberty.” That dedication to freedom sus-
tained Lafayette’s fellow soldiers during the American Revolution who drew
sustenance from his “vigorous exertions in the cause of liberty.” Destitute of
shoes and clothing and pained by “gashes inflicted upon the naked feet of the
champions of liberty,” soldiers in the final Virginia campaign nonetheless let
“no complaints” escape their lips. The patriots may have been “ill-armed, ill-
disciplined and disorderly,” Frost wrote, but they were “not deficient in cour-
age and zeal for their liberty.”163
Villains, on the other hand, were those who restricted freedoms or betrayed
those patriots working for liberty. In recounting their ignominious behaviors,
Frost demonstrated some of the sensationalism of Lippard, focusing on the
subversive nature of human depravity. The Tories, for instance, were the an-
tithesis of liberty, notorious scoundrels capable of “inhumanely massacring”
freedom-minded civilians. In Fort Kingston, Pennsylvania, Tories set a pali-
sade on fire, consuming in flames the innocent American citizens huddled
within its walls. In South Carolina, another group of Tories (resembling “a
body of plundering banditti”) stole “every kind of property they could carry
off,” yet they served as vigilante justices against violators of parole, such as
Colonel Isaac Hayne, who was executed without compassion despite the pleas
of family and friends. “His little children, who had lately lost their mother,
were introduced, and fell at the tyrant’s knees, praying him to pity their moth-
erless situation, and give them back their only remaining parent; but in vain,”
Frost noted with contempt. Finally, a traitor like Benedict Arnold was the most
abhorrent of all violators of liberty. In Frost’s estimation, Arnold deserved the
ignominious reputation he earned during his “dishonourable life” and died as
he must, an “unlamented” rogue who transmitted to his children “a name of
hateful celebrity.”164 While Frost’s treatment of Arnold’s betrayal and death did
not quite fulfill Simms’s dramatic request for a “baffled traitor (Arnold)—hell
in his heart and curse on his lips” being led “to the inglorious scaffold which
the audience does not see,” it still shared in that “tragic interest” that Simms
insisted must be a part of the Arnold story and its intriguing subplots.165
In order to verify and legitimize his point about the power of liberty in the
American experience, Frost felt obliged (more so than Simms and Lippard
did, at least) to convince readers that he was an impartial observer of American
fortunes. In his preface to the Popular History, Frost warned that he thought
it “inexpedient to dwell upon disputed points, or to enter into extended dis-
quisitions” in his history, and he went out of his way to be judicious in his
handling of partisan matters. “I am conscious of no undue bias towards any
sect or party,” he noted about his popular history, “and I have adopted no

theory respecting government or policy, which could influence my selection
or representation of facts.” Despite these assurances, however, Frost was an
avowed Federalist who did not hide well his suspicions of Jeffersonian Re-
publicans. He could not, for instance, resist remarking on the imprudence of
the anti-federalists in attacking the policies of Washington and John Adams
in the 1790s. A supporter of the controversial Jay’s Treaty, Frost condemned
the “violent opposition” of the radical Jeffersonians who maligned the treaty
as a base “act of ingratitude” on the part of the British. Frost also supported
the unpopular actions of John Adams in championing the infamous Alien and
Sedition Acts, justifying the legislation as a necessary protection against those
“French emissaries who fomented riotous expressions of popular opposition
to the measures of the government.” Some of these assessments by Frost im-
plied a suspicion of the masses for whom his popular history was intended, but
he felt obliged to remind readers that mob mentalities and rash behaviors were
as great a threat to liberty as was tyranny. Hence, Frost adopted the unpopular
position that the Boston Massacre was the fault of the reckless patriot mob led
by a few hotheads playing irresponsibly on “an inflamed state of public mind.”
Anne Hutchinson, whose stand against the Puritan clergy had earned her a
reputation as a champion of liberty, was too much of a hothead as well as a
feminist for Frost. He described Hutchinson as “neither wise nor considerate
in the style and manner she adopted,” noting indelicately that the “somewhat
unbecoming position in which, as a woman, she placed herself” added to her
“offences and indiscretions.”166
Above all, Frost strove in his popular narrative to emulate the storytelling
geniuses of Irving, Cooper, and other historical novelists whose works he ad-
mired. “[T]he principal difficulty has been to select what was important and
influential, and to present it in such a light as should render it striking and ef-
fective,” he wrote in his preface. To meet the challenge, Frost borrowed heavily
from the romantic literary conventions of his day employed by Lippard and
others, especially those associated with the theater. Melodrama and theatrical
asides were common features of Frost’s prose. His Spaniards do not merely sail
and explore; they are “fired . . . with a romantic spirit of adventure” and imbued
with “hopes of conquest and immortality.” His conquistadors do not just search
unsuccessfully for wealth; they discover tragically the “chimerical foundation”
upon which “all their golden hopes had been reared.” Frost also used romantic
tropes and conventions to emphasize the epic struggle for the continent. “The
star of the western empire had struggled through the clouds and was emerging
into the clear firmament,” he wrote in purple prose. “The century of discovery
had been a century of progress.” And organic metaphors proliferate as well.
The “seeds of fatal disease” were sown in the early colonial period, Frost noted,

while political and social systems in America were “planted in the firm soil of
independence, and flourish[ed] in the bracing air of civil and religious free-
dom.” Finally, Frost employed the sensationalizing conventions of the gothic to
increase the interest of his readers, especially the fascination with superstition
and death. Frost’s Native Americans have an apparitional quality to them, often
“[c]reeping cautiously through the woods which surrounded the scattered
towns” to “suddenly start up from their lurking places in the dead of night,” to
massacre unsuspecting citizens, and to disappear like specters to “their distant
retreats in the woods.” Soldiers fighting on the frontier were vulnerable to the
“strange sights and sounds” of mysterious war: “the singing of bullets, and the
awful passing away of drums in the air; invisible troops of horses . . . riding to
and fro; and . . . the phantoms of men, fearfully flitting by!”167
When Frost found his own literary powers insufficient, he was not above
borrowing liberally from those who had gone before him in conveying the
drama of a particular historical scene. Not surprisingly, Washington Irving was
one of his favorite sources for appropriation. Frost’s treatment of Columbus’s
landing in the New World, for instance, is taken almost verbatim from the pas-
sages in Irving’s biography of the seafarer cited earlier: “The joy and exulta-
tion of the crews were now unbounded,” Frost wrote in imitation of Irving.
“They thronged around the admiral, embraced him, and kissed his hands.
Those who had been most mutinous were now most devoted and enthusiastic.
Some begged favours of him as one who had wealth and honours in his gift,
and many who had outraged them by their insolence, offered the most implicit
obedience to his commands.”168 Lest we be too critical of Frost for nearly pla-
giarizing Irving’s ideas and language in this direct manner, we should bear
in mind that such borrowings were typical in the mid-nineteenth century. An
example of what Richard Vitzthum calls nineteenth-century “paraphrasing,”
these usages of prior texts were viewed in their day less as acts of intellectual
piracy than as flattering confirmations of the prior authority of a particular
literary presentation of historical events. The “verbal and syntactical echoes”
of Irving in Frost underscore the shared commitment of both writers to a novel-
istic literary approach to the past.169 Washington Irving returned the favor
when he incorporated perspectives and passages from works by Frost into his
multivolume biography of George Washington written in the late 1850s.170
The successes of Lippard and Frost in the literary marketplace demonstrated
the important niche that popular histories occupied in an emerging industry of
popular books in the 1840s and 1850s. As Fahs has pointed out, the prolifera-
tion of such works suggested that history was not “sacralized” in any sense of
the word; that is, it was not “beyond commerce” but was instead an acceptable
coin of the realm insofar as cultural trafficking of ideas was concerned. As the

demand for works such as Lippard’s and Frost’s increased, the subscription
and retail industries in history boomed for canvassing agents who traveled the
country pre-enrolling readers in projected literary series. To capture a suffi-
cient market share, publishers offered more lavish illustrations and cover art in
their works which increased appreciably in size and numbers of volumes. Some
firms adopted a “history-by-the-pound approach,” by which they advertised
the advantages of their popular works over those of competitors on the basis
of the number of pages and words per page.171 Others collapsed longer texts
into smaller packages to attract younger readers and those with less patience
for metahistories. Lippard and Frost employed these accordion-like tactics to
good financial success in works such as Frost’s Popular History of the United
States, a condensed version of the four-volume Pictorial History of the United
States reduced to a highly salable one-volume edition. These authors even fan-
cied that their works were substantial enough in terms of quality to meet the
standards for popularity established by Duyckinck and others. “A strong man
may make a bad style popular,” Lippard acknowledged, “since the reader does
not look at the dress, but at the form which that dress serves to clothe.” A weak
man, however, “may write ever so euphoniously; style, grammar, and words all
correct, and of the smoothest sound; and yet he can never be a popular writer.
The pretty dress of his words cannot conceal his emptiness.”172 By these defini-
tions, Lippard and Frost thought of themselves as strong and “well-clothed”
men helping to define an increasingly robust industry.
Gilded Mediocrity
There is no denying that the works of Lippard and Frost ushered in a
new era of appreciation among middle-class Americans for popular historical
literature. Their collective writings prompted an outburst of literary produc-
tion in the field of popular history that should have thrilled Duyckinck given
the preferences he outlined in “Literary Prospects of 1845” and the Cyclo-
paedia of American Literature. In fact, however, Duyckinck never acknowl-
edged the efforts made by Lippard and Frost to advance his popular scheme;
indeed, he chose not to include either in his compendia of literary progress
despite their popularity as novelists and historians, not even in a footnote in
the original 1855 edition of the Cyclopaedia or in the revised 1866 edition. In
the introduction to both editions, Duyckinck claimed that it had not been his
purpose “to sit in judgment, and admit or exclude writers according to indi-
vidual taste,” but clearly he had done so with respect to these two popular
historians.173 How else might we explain the exclusion of an author, Lippard,

whom the Godey’s Lady’s Book referred to in 1849 as “unquestionably the most
popular writer of the day”?174 What else could account for the fact that the
prolific Frost was not represented anywhere in the extensive “List of American
Authors” that Duyckinck kept among his personal papers nor in his equally
exhaustive “Index of Sources of American History”?175 Even the sometimes
maligned Samuel Eliot made both lists, and he received several paragraphs in
the 1855 edition of the Cyclopaedia as well.176 Given Duyckinck’s familiarity
with a vast array of American literary efforts, and given the desperation with
which he sought evidence of the emergence of a historical sensibility among
Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the omissions of Lippard and Frost
must be seen as deliberate.
Why, then, did Duyckinck snub them? Those skeptical of Duyckinck and
the Young America movement, such as the literary critic Rufus Griswold of the
New York Herald, thought they knew the answer. Griswold attributed the omis-
sions to Duyckinck’s ineptitude as a literary historian. In what Perry Miller has
called “the most destructive review in all American history,” Griswold wrote
a scathing assessment of the Cyclopaedia of American Literature in which he
referred to Duyckinck as a sloppy and inexpert thinker. Griswold accused
Duyckinck of having a regional bias toward New Yorkers and of dismissing
writers from Philadelphia such as Lippard and Frost in favor of those affili-
ated with a certain circle of acquaintances who gathered regularly at a salon
at 20 Clinton Place in New York City. Griswold made lists, state by state, of
authors the Duyckincks had ignored, noting the inordinately lengthy passages
devoted to minor writers and the sparse ones associated with more popular
figures. Griswold also condemned Duyckinck’s reliance on “inaccurate maga-
zines” and the proliferation of their “grammatical blunders.” He concluded
his review by asking how persons “so ignorant of the commonest and simplest
uses of language” could have been entrusted with publishing such an impor-
tant project? 177 Duyckinck admitted to some mistakes, and he was compulsive
about keeping lists of errata for future editions of the work, even preserving
notes from book peddlers such as the one who wrote to say that, as “Agent for
this county for Mr. Frederick Parker of Boston for the sale of Cyclopaedia of
American Literature,” he felt obliged to point out to his customers some of the
“inaccuracies in the work.”178 Duyckinck objected strongly, however, to Gris-
wold’s portrait of him as incompetent. He condemned Griswold’s vitriolic re-
view as payback for an earlier, negative assessment of Griswold’s Prose Writers
of America (1847) printed in the American Whig Review, a journal published
by Wiley and Putnam.179
While Duyckinck was blind partially to the activities of writers in certain
regional centers of American literary activity, a more likely and certainly more

generous explanation of his rejection of Lippard and Frost was his concern
for the “cheap” quality of the works they produced. Although Duyckinck de-
sired to make inexpensive volumes available to average American readers, he
did not wish to commodify history in such a way as to demean its message.
In his opinion, booksellers (or “dollar lords” as he sometimes called them)
were often guilty of commercializing popular literature by turning the sale of
books into a carnival event in which “gilded mediocrity” was the standard. Ac-
cording to Widmer, Duyckinck resented “the money element” that had crept
into literary matters and warned about what it had done to contribute to “the
ignorance of the American masses concerning culture.” Authors such as Lip-
pard and Frost were not the “invisible angels” he sought, Duyckinck reasoned;
they were among the “great . . . puffers and pretenders who write to-day what
to-morrow destroys.”180 What was at issue here was an important distinction
between the definition of “cheap” as inexpensive or low in cost and its alterna-
tive meaning as not worthy of respect or vulgar. Duyckinck was not alone in
his campaign against cheap literature of the latter sort, especially in association
with the excesses of subscription publishing.181 Newspaper advertisements in
the Lowell Patriot warned potential purchasers of subscription novels against
the poor quality and deceptive marketing of such works, implying that literary
agents had the power to “make you subscribe for a forthcoming work before
you know it, even while you are determined to eschew the pedler [sic] and his
works.”182 In Duyckinck’s estimation these abuses of marketing had to change
and were changing, in part because of the refusal of critics such as himself to
dignify marginal authors by including them in collections such as the Library
of American Books or the Cyclopaedia of American Literature. “The cupid-
ity of publishers had overstocked the market, and the traffic fell,” Duyckinck
noted of such overproduced popular books. “Let it perish,” he added. “We
would fain hope that the literary system which has been distinguished by the
epithet ‘cheap and nasty,’ is pretty much at an end.”183
Duyckinck rejected especially the tendencies of popular historians like Lip-
pard and Frost to draw inspiration from the cruder, sentimental fictional lit-
erature of the age. The dependency of popular historians on novels meant that
many types of fiction were represented in their works, and even the tolerant
Young Americans disapproved of some of the most sensationalized prototypes.
The nineteenth-century novelist John Neal had “impugn[ed] leading Ameri-
can writers, including Washington Irving . . . as tame and imitative”; he longed
instead for “rude, coarse m[e]n” like George Lippard, whose “[s]ubversive fic-
tion” introduced a “deliberately outrageous, inflammatory, [and] disquieting”
element into history.184 Duyckinck, who preferred Irving over Neal or Lippard,
could not tolerate such irreverence, which he associated with the excesses of

French fiction writers such as Madame de Stael, George Sand, Honoré de Bal-
zac, and Victor Hugo. Disdaining “long drawn, vapid novels of an unprofitable,
if not an injurious character,” Duyckinck vowed to include in his collections
only “works of Classic Fiction—where the moral is superior to the mere story.”185
He shared a common suspicion of historical novels that seduced readers with
“beguiling visions of the sentimental, the perverse and the unattainable.” M. M.
Backus, the author of an 1844 article in Christian Parlor Magazine titled “Novel
Writers & Publishers” agreed, arguing that a typical sensational novel in this
category borrows too much “from poetry, history, and the actual of life, which is
not its own, and borrows it only to corrupt.”186 Several decades later, Reverend
J. T. Crane of the Methodist Episcopal Church wrote a scathing indictment
of such historical novels in Popular Amusements (1869), proclaiming “novel-
reading” as “one of the great vices of our age.” Crane objected to the fact that
readers of inappropriate works of fiction, especially the young, were subjected
to “weak and washy literature” that obscured “sober history or real biography”
and left readers ignorant “of the world of fact” by too frequent “acquaintance
with the world of dreams.” Crane’s advice for the historically minded? “ABSTI-
NENCE FROM NOVEL-READING HENCEFORTH AND FOREVER.”187
If Duyckinck wished to avoid association with that which was “cheap and
nasty,” he had to find ways to separate the works he promoted in his Library
of American Books from those of mere compilers, almanac writers, and petty
popularizers. This was no easy task, as the publishers Wiley and Putnam ac-
knowledged, since their mutual goal was to issue books that were “chosen
both for their classic merit and their popular character,” traits that at times
seemed self-contradictory. The publishers were unrealistic, perhaps, in their
expectations that their works might “equally delight the scholar and the gen-
eral reader” alike.188 Nonetheless, book canvassers tried to appeal to both ends
of the market, and “respectable” agents such as Mrs. E. L. Harris filed weekly
sales reports documenting the “good class of people” she encountered whose
enrollments “symbolized important aspects of their character and standing as
a community member.” Amy Thomas is right in challenging the assumption
“that nineteenth-century subscription books were primarily targeted to people
in rural areas,” especially those supposed “literary unsophisticates” who “un-
wittingly purchased the overproduced and overpriced books hawked by wiley
agents.” As Thomas points out, many publishers and book agents, including
those associated with promoting Duyckinck’s works, tried to reach “middle-
and upper-class people” for whom book purchasing was viewed not so much
as a sign of degenerate tastes as a vehicle for cultural uplift. These were con-
sumers “influenced by the meaning inherent in the acts of buying a book from
another human being and having one’s name entered onto a list signifying

‘book buyer.’ ”189 The more elevated style of writing in these popular works
saved history from degenerating into petty materialism, Duyckinck believed.
At the very least it kept authors from indulging dangerously in the incessant
“buying and selling, sowing and reaping” that distracted readers from “par-
taking of that higher life which the poet teaches us to live.”190
Duyckinck was sensitive to accusations of commercialism in the popular
book market because his own collections of edited works had been attacked
as too commercial. The Library of American Books, in particular, had been
condemned as materialistic in a review in the North American Review by the
Harvard professor of Greek literature Cornelius Felton, who claimed that the
Wiley and Putnam series, “with the exception of a few of the volumes, is not
likely to do much honor to American literature.” Felton questioned the edito-
rial decision making that had led to the inclusion of such “poor . . . materials
for an American library,” and he found it “difficult to imagine what can have
seduced those respectable publishers into printing” some of the “indescrib-
ably stupid” works in the series unless a disdainful commercial motive were
responsible. A volume in the Library of American Books by Duyckinck’s close
friend Cornelius Mathews was especially targeted as a piece of “dismal trash”
that “cannot have been seriously chosen as a fit representative of American
originality.” Felton also rejected the hypernationalism of Simms’s articles in
Views and Reviews, which he claimed “breathe an extravagant nationality,
equally at war with good taste and generous progress in liberal culture.”191
Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a contributor to the Duyckinck Library,
criticized the threadbare parochialism of Simms and the series. “The themes
suggested by him, viewed as he views them, would produce nothing but his-
torical novels, cast in the same worn out mould that has been in use these thirty
years, and which it is time to break up and fling away,” Hawthorne lamented
in the Salem Advertiser.192
Critics such as these believed that the Library of American Books had
gone too far in the direction of lowering the standards for legitimate litera-
ture in the name of popularity, with legitimate understood to mean literature
that maintained commitments to meaningful subject matter and acceptable
methodologies. These criticisms were deeply hurtful to Duyckinck, who had
been concerned from the beginning with the potential trivializing tendencies
of popular literature. Indeed, Duyckinck’s Copyright Club met regularly in
the 1840s to complain about the “catchpenny” literature that was flooding
the American literary marketplace from Europe, and they circulated charged
public addresses on the subject. “Certain books of a noxious character being
found to hit the appetite of certain readers, others, of a broader stamp, in a
like vein, have been produced from foreign tongues, and distributed by the

thousand and ten thousand,” members complained in one such dissertation.
“The foreign supply coming short, native writers, of an easy conscience, have
been put in training, to try themselves upon whatever is coarsest and vilest.”
They worried that undiscriminating readers would not be able to distinguish
between suitable popular literature and that which must by nature corrupt.
“Every landmark and barrier separating good and bad literature has broken
down,” they feared, “and a race of the trashiest publications in style, in matter,
in type and looks, that the slime of the cities ever bred, has swarmed in every
quarter.” As if to underscore his concern for substandard popular literature,
Duyckinck displayed a quotation from this address on the front wrapper of
every copy of the Library of American Books delivered to American homes.193
Hence, although Duyckinck believed in the democratization of literature,
he did not advocate pandering to uneducated audiences for the sake of profits
merely. Quite the opposite; he wanted a “refined and cultivated taste” to per-
vade his literary efforts. His idea was to elevate the masses through exposure
to “good” literature that they could afford rather than by catering to crude
appetites. Duyckinck noted in his diary with satisfaction that the incentive of
most people who purchased works from his Library of American Books was to
better themselves. “The literary movement appears to come from the masses
themselves who are purging themselves of small vulgarities & puerilities of
thinking and are asking for something better,” he wrote.194 Duyckinck also had
a reputation inside the publishing world for guarding against overstylized pop-
ular works. Evidence in this regard can be found in an 1851 exchange between
the publisher and writer George W. Curtis and the Harvard professor Charles
Eliot Norton in which the former warned the latter that Duyckinck would tol-
erate few excesses in the works submitted to him for publication. “I see that
you have been experimenting in style,” Curtis wrote to Norton. “It’s rather
dangerous—!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel convinced that Evert will never be blown up by
any such rash experimenting.”195 In the eyes of some literary historians, these
statements suggest Duyckinck’s general cultural elitism and his “deep-seated
contempt for the popular press.”196 More to the point, they imply that even
those active in the popular book market recognized limitations with respect to
what constituted legitimate sources for historical literature. In “Literary Pros-
pects of 1845,” Duyckinck singled out for special criticism overwritten news-
paper and periodical articles in national publications, warning that such pieces
were not as “full of life and truth” as they should be if they wished to inform
the historical reputation of the nation; rather they were “constantly over-run
with falsehood and foolery.”197 Put simply, there was a significant difference in
Duyckinck’s mind between the high-minded populism of Irving and the base
offerings of Lippard and Frost.

For their part, Lippard and Frost viewed some sensationalizing as natural to
any writing designed explicitly for popular audiences; it was readers and not
writers, after all, who determined the value of popular literature by dictating
what sold and what did not. Lippard’s attitudes about the place of the senti-
mental in historical studies were made explicit in his publicity campaign for
an 1844 semimonthly periodical—Lippard’s Magazine of American Historical
Romance. The magazine, he expected, would advance “the cause of a distinct
and individual National Literature” by combining romantic “old-time histo-
ries, incidents and customs” with “an honest critical department.” The goal
was to combine the emotional pull of romance with the dispassionate facts of
history, all the while avoiding the “two evils of all our critical journals” such as
Duyckinck’s Literary World by “neither partaking in character of the unprin-
cipled cut-and-thrust school nor of the undiscriminating-praise school.” Every
two numbers of the periodical would feature “an original Novel, Romance or
Story, illustrative of some noted Revolutionary Battlefield [to] be published
entire,” Lippard told sponsors, followed in the next edition by “a History of a
Revolutionary Battle-field, embracing all the Fact, Tradition and Legend con-
nected with the occurrence.”198 Revealingly, Lippard wrote Cooper not Irivng
for an endorsement of the project, because Cooper, he believed, had a “ge-
nius” for combining elements of fiction and history in his novels in the best
tradition of historical romance. Equally important, however, is the fact that
Lippard’s Magazine of American Historical Romance was never published. As
with so many things that Lippard undertook, support was not forthcoming in
the 1840s, and Lippard died in 1854, at the age of thirty-two, before he could
revive the project. A 1922 article in the Philadelphia Record published on the
centenary of Lippard’s birth captured the significance of this and other failures
best when it described the novelist and historian as a “Prolific Author of Fic-
tion During His Short Life—Sensational, but of Good Intent—Now Forgot-
ten.” Such an epitaph might also have applied to Frost and other mid-century
practitioners in the field of popular history whose works exploded onto the
popular book market in the mid-1840s but did not weather the critical attacks
that came from Duyckinck and others concerning their methodologies and
editorial assumptions.
Unguided Wanderings of the Imagination

In Duyckinck’s “critique by neglect” of Lippard and Frost, we see the
nascent shadows of a more ominous cloud of critical disapproval that even-
tually obscured and nearly obliterated the work of many popular historians.

Irving achieved some measure of literary immortality through his works of
historical literature, but George Lippard and John Frost did not escape the
burden of obscurity they so much feared, in part because readability was only
one of several important criteria for long-term success in the literary market-
place. Sustainability of ideas also mattered. Just because the works of histo-
rians such as these were well read in their own day did not guarantee that
they would be remembered beyond it, especially given that the definitions of
what constituted “legitimate” historical activity were shifting. A case in point
was John S. C. Abbott, whose popular histories of the Civil War sold in ex-
cess of 300,000 copies, but whose name is little known today. Part of Abbott’s
anonymity was the result of a successful campaign by the cultural critic E. L.
Godkin to discredit Abbott and his kind. In a series of private letters to Charles
Eliot Norton, editor of the North American Review, Godkin complained that
Abbott’s histories “are fair specimens of a kind of literature of which there is
an immense quantity issued every year, and which the half-educated look on
as ‘solid reading.’ ” It was “sickening to see him treated in the newspapers with
great deference as ‘Abbott the historian,’ ” he added.199 Godkin continued his
assault in the pages of the Nation in a November 1865 article titled “History
by the Yard,” in which he dismissed Abbott as a “shoddy” writer with a “mis-
employed incapacity” and a disposition “which tosses off a book as lightly as a
child a soap-bubble, with equal amusement to itself and equal indifference to
the consequences.”200 Abbott was a sad representative of a whole phalanx of
writers who believed that a work “must be ‘popular’ ” in order to be beneficial,
he noted, a “sufficient reason, besides haste, why it cannot be first-rate.” Ac-
cording to Godkin, such popularizers were willing participants in a nefarious
business that “depends for its prosperity on the want of literary discrimina-
tion and practical knowledge of books of the people in rural districts, and on
American good-nature, which cannot withstand the appeal ad misericordiam
of a subscription agent in the guise of a one-legged soldier, a widow, a young
lady supporting her mother, or a superannuated clergyman.”201
While George Lippard and John Frost escaped Godkin’s critical notice,
they were among those who came under specific attack from a new breed of
professional historians emerging after the Civil War who demanded, like God-
kin, that historical study conform to standardized rules of operation centered
on objectivity and the scientific pursuit of factual knowledge. In nearly all
fields of intellectual endeavor, including theology and science, scholars such
as Barthold Niebuhr had been insisting on “evidence” as the measure of accu-
racy and judgment.202 Part of the larger professionalization movement sweep-
ing the nation in the 1860s and 1870s in the wake of a new scientific spirit
infusing the age, disciples of this new cult of exactitude focused their energies

Retrospective article in the Philadelphia Record (April 9, 1922)
on the writings of George Lippard.

on determining what could be directly observed and verified in Nature.203 This
posed special challenges for historians, of course, since their subject matter
was not always directly observable; indeed, the reliance of popular historians
on mythologies and mimetic narrative devices was predicated on the belief of
Simms and others that historians must deal in abstractions and innuendoes.
Led by scholars who eventually formed the American Historical Association,
these professionals condemned efforts of popularizers to make history more
attractive to readers through the use of fictional conventions, and they insisted
that historians could approach the past from a detached, impersonal point of
view.204 They had an especially deep suspicion of the corrupting influence
of narrative on history, and they rejected out of hand the romantic subjectiv-
ity and fictional contrivances of history as literary art.205 As Peter Novick has
noted, their preference was for an “austere style which would clearly distin-
guish professional historical work from the florid effusions of the amateur his-
torians whom the professionals sought to displace.”206
A keen student of trends in the publishing world, Duyckinck seems to have
understood and feared the growing power of these emerging scholars in the
field of historical literature. Indeed, part of Duyckinck’s desire to distance
himself from the excesses of Lippard and Frost was predicated on his sense
that history as a discipline was becoming more complicated and challenging
and that it required a type of training that the typical novelist-turned-historian
could not claim. In assessing Irving’s career at the time of the novelist’s death
in 1859, for instance, Duyckinck noted that Irving’s biography of George
Washington would have been a much easier undertaking had he begun it in the
1820s, when he first conceived of the project, rather than in the 1850s, when it
was eventually published. “Thirty years ago less would have been demanded
by the public in the performance of a such a work,” Duyckinck noted, since
that was prior to the emergence of a “thoroughly scientific school of histori-
ans.” In the third decade of the nineteenth century, many of the most relevant
sources were still ungathered or unexplored. By the 1850s, however, the “col-
lection of facts by the historical societies and other agencies imposed new ex-
actions in the weighing of Evidence.” As Duyckinck argued: “Each addition
to the vast Washington Library brought additional care and responsibility” of
a sort that suggested the value of professional training in archive management
and scientific argument. “Researches of this nature may, indeed, be benefited
[sic] by the judgment of age,” Duyckinck concluded, “but the labor would
seem to require the strength and enthusiasm of youth.”207
Much has been written about the conditions that led to the professional-
ization of disciplines in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth
century, especially history. The Civil War certainly figured prominently, as

its harsh realities encouraged Americans to abandon much of the overt senti-
mentality that had characterized popular writing prior to 1860. It was simply
harder to express unconditional enthusiasm for the providential mission of
the nation in light of the hundreds of thousands of war dead. The fratricidal
conflict also accelerated a movement already at work in the mid-nineteenth
century—the rise of an “age of realism”—in which positivism and scientific
verification were valued over romantic idealism and spiritual transcendence.
The 1860s and 1870s witnessed what Shi refers to as a “rage for ‘facts,’ ” in
which “carefully verified sense perceptions constituted the only admissible
basis of human knowledge” and during which idealistic philosophy was dis-
missed as “mere speculation” and “religion as superstition.”208 By the time
George Herbert published the Popular History of the Civil War in 1884, many
American readers had lost patience already with “the exciting, and sometimes
irritating narratives of bitter misunderstandings, mutual jealousies, and san-
guinary conflicts with which the records of American history abound.” His
popular history was “unbiased, or unprejudiced,” Herbert claimed, “so far
as it is possible for human nature” to be so.209 Finally, Darwinian thought also
contributed to the rise of realism in that it emphasized the role of measurable
change in the inexorable “struggle for survival” that all species faced. Chal-
lenging the place of Providence in historical narratives, Darwin’s philosophy
fed realist conceptions of a world characterized by a “long, gradual process of
intense competition and hereditary development without divine plan or pur-
pose.”210 History had a special role to play in Darwin’s developmental schema,
but not a supernatural one.
C. M. Andrews described the American Historical Association in its early
years as a repository for scholars embracing these realist and Darwinian trends;
it was “the accepted promoter of historical work, giving point and direction to
historical achievement, and acting as a clearing-house for [such new] historical
ideas and enterprises.” In search of “standards or principles to which histori-
cal writing is expected to conform,” professionals introduced “higher canons
of criticism and interpretation, better balanced judgments, and more rational
methods of presentation.” Writers of popular history like Lippard and Frost,
who had been satisfied merely “to entertain their readers with sprightly and
dramatic narrative, rich in style and glowing with color,” he remarked, were
challenged by professionals who believed that the “historical concoctions” of
amateur historians were “as injurious to the mind that absorbs them and be-
lieves in them as were injurious to the human body the old-time frauds and
adulterations with which the apothecaries of the past filled the stomachs of
their patients.” As an alternative to the excesses of “literary hacks,” Andrews
offered the profile of an academic historian whose work “corresponds to the

experiment in the laboratory, where the investigator is at all times in touch with
the problems and workers in the field and is able to make his results known to
his brother scientists through the medium of the scientific publications.” Such
scholarly rigor was essential to the integrity of historical studies in America,
Andrews argued. “The historian cannot be a free lance to write as he pleases,
for he must play the game according to the accepted rules, and it is one of the
outstanding marks of the progress which the study of history has made in this
country that there are accepted criteria accompanying historical research and
presentation and accepted standards—constituting a code not dreamed of in
older days—to which the writer of history must conform.”211 By the end of the
nineteenth century, these professionals had been so successful in their cam-
paign to discredit the literary excesses of popularizers that works by people
like Lippard and Frost became increasingly obsolete.
Duyckinck had done his part to punish through neglect the least profes-
sional of the popular historians of his day, although, ironically, his gatekeeping
did little to protect him or his works from the literary purges that swept the era.
As the permissive editor of the popular Library of American Books who had
promoted the vagaries of William Gilmore Simms, Duyckinck came under at-
tack for advancing the argument that history and fiction were interchangeable
with respect to national identity or for the imaginative purposes of art. “Mr.
Simms has a great dislike to historical investigators, like Niebuhr,” Cornelius
Felton noted, that is, for “men who employ the resources of inexhaustible
learning and the instruments of discriminating criticism in correcting errors,
misapprehensions, and falsehood.” Expressing little sympathy for those such
as Simms who seemed to “prefer ancient error to new truth,” the Harvard
professor condemned that “state of mind which leads a man to cling to the
fabulous forms of past history, merely because he thinks them romantic and
picturesque, as a pernicious sentimentality, as much at war with genuine art as
with the cause of truth.” Simms’s obsession with the “mania for fiction,” Fel-
ton noted, distracted him from the practical value of reality, rendering him an
“extravagant asserter of the preeminence of art over history, of fiction over fact,
of invention over truth.” Anticipating some of the historical positivism that
would come into vogue in the latter part of the century, Felton urged readers of
Duyckinck’s volumes to reject their perverse theories in favor of the reflections
of better informed minds—trained minds “stored with facts and dates,—the
more numerous the facts, and the more precise the dates, the better.” Popular-
izers such as Simms clung to the “vague,” “unsatisfactory,” and “unguided
wanderings of the imagination, compared with the light which a record of but
a single sentence would throw into the now impenetrable gloom of the past!”
The truth of history “is quite as interesting, and often more picturesque,”

Felton concluded in anticipation of the professional historian’s cant, “than any
romance that can be substituted for it.”212
The savage tone of the attacks of scholars on popularizers derived from the
fervency with which the former endorsed new ontological relationships with
respect to the American past. According to this new credo, the erstwhile bed-
fellows, fiction and history, must be forcibly disjoined. It became customary,
especially among professionals, “to identify truth with fact and to regard fic-
tion as the opposite of truth, hence a hindrance to the understanding of reality
rather than as a way of apprehending it.” As Hayden White notes, “History
came to be set over against fiction, and especially the novel, as the representa-
tion of the ‘actual’ to the representation of the ‘possible’ or only ‘imaginable.’ ”
The new goal of professionals was to identify “scientific facts” related to the
past and to arrange those facts in ways that eliminated the usurping authorial
presence of the compiler. “And thus was born the dream of a historical dis-
course that would consist of nothing but factually accurate statements about
a realm of events which were (or had been) observable in principle, the ar-
rangement of which in the order of their original occurrence would permit
them to figure forth their meaning or significance.” White argues that “typi-
cally [the professional historian’s] aim was to expunge every hint of the fictive,
or merely imaginable, from his discourse, to eschew the techniques of the poet
and orator, and to forego what were regarded as the intuitive procedures of
the maker of fictions in his apprehension of reality.” Professionals wished to
avoid the “excesses and failures” of mythic thinking as well as “[f ]alse readings
of history, misconceptions of the nature of the historical process, unrealistic
expectations about the ways that historical societies could be transformed.”
They wished “to rise above any impulse to interpret the historical record in
the light of party prejudices, utopian expectations, or sentimental attachments
to traditional institutions.” Such scholars believed that if “one only eschewed
ideology and remained true to the facts, history would produce a knowledge
as certain as anything offered by the physical sciences and as objective as a
mathematical exercise.”213
This distrust of the literary put professionals at distinct odds with popular-
izers of history who were wedded to the use of narrative devices borrowed from
fiction as a way of securing their readers’ interests. The writings of the literary
romantics like Frost failed to provide “the sober narration that an age of self-
restraint demanded of its historians,” Peter Novick has argued.214 Professionals
condemned Frost’s Manichean schemes for differentiating between good and
bad historical actors as antithetical to the pursuit of historical truth, derived so
clearly as they were in their didactic intentions from insights not confirmable
in Nature or the historical record. In this sense, professionals characterized

popular history as “an intellectually naive form,” one that relied too heavily
on philosophical speculation and deductive methods.215 James Harvey Robin-
son referred contemptuously to the ancient “tribe of philosophers of history”
who “flattered themselves that their penetrating intellects had been able to dis-
cover the wherefore of man’s past without the trouble of learning much about
it.”216 The goal of professional historians should be to rid historical writing
of any semblance of an “intrusive authorial presence,” “explicit moralizing,”
or “overt partisanship” that might seduce readers with false impressions,”
Novick has noted. The historian must “undertake the arduous task of purging
his consciousness of every vestige parti pris or bias; had to sufficiently polish
his perceptual apparatus or prose style, so that it accurately reflected reality.”
Scholars, therefore, came to distinguish “between the tendentious, superpa-
triotic, and propagandistic historical writing of benighted amateurs, and the
austere detachment and evenhandedness of the professional.”217
Those who alleged that “popular” history violated the principles of objectiv-
ity central to valid historical writing often pointed to the errors of presentation
evident in the large number of works of American history published during
the 1870s and 1880s. There is no question that some publishers hurried into
production many works of substandard quality that have not withstood the
test of time as far as historical argument or measures of proof are concerned,
to say nothing of balance and perspective. This was true of an updated ver-
sion of Frost’s Popular History of the United States that was issued in 1881 by
Hurst & Company in New York, which treated the Civil War in a brief sixteen
pages, the administration of Garfield in one sentence. In addition, the desire
and need to realize profits meant that such histories were subject to conditions
of publication and presentation that made it difficult for even the most consci-
entious authors to adhere to the new standards of historical practice proposed
by professionals. Editors, art departments, book designers, book agents, and
others controlled the primary features of the bookmaking process, and they
did not hesitate to manipulate historical material to suit marketing needs. Am-
ateur historians might rise above the temptation to embellish in their popular
works, but often they could not control significant aspects of the business of
production. These subjectivizing tendencies made their works special targets
of professionals who were anxious to purge historical writing of all elements of
arbitrariness, partisanship, and the distorting conventions of fiction. Accord-
ing to professionals, the “mongrel poetry” of their old-fashioned style had to
be exorcised from the literature of history.218
Specific aim was taken by professionals at writers such as Irving, Lippard,
and Frost, who were lumped together as popularizers who had failed to adhere
responsibly to the tenets of historical investigation. Of Irving’s Life and Voyages

of Columbus, J. N. Larned’s bibliographic guide noted: “it is only necessary
to remark that the progress of critical scholarship and the publication of the
sources since Irving’s time have diminished the value of Irving’s work for the
student.” Irving had not “draw[n] characters with the realistic fidelity now in
favor. He smoothed his portrait of Columbus, and defects are passed over in
silence or left obscure in the background.”219 George Lippard and John Frost
were among a group of historians J. Franklin Jameson dismissed as propagan-
dists for the “popular impulse,” writers of historical literature who acquiesced
to “the boastful confidence, the crude elation, the vociferous patriotism, and
the national arrogance” of the midcentury. A work such as Frost’s Popular
History could not measure up if judged on the basis of its “profundity and
skill of its research, nor on the correctness and completeness of its results, nor
even on its qualities of arrangement or style,” Jameson wrote, “so much as on
the acceptableness to the national mind of the general idea which it exhib-
its in regard to the nation’s development.”220 Even by this standard, however,
Frost had not passed the test of sufficient durability. Despite the fact that his
works went through twelve editions and were published in seventy-one issues,
Frost was ignored altogether by other professional bibliographers, receiving
no mention in either Charles Kendall Adams’s A Manual of Historical Lit-
erature or Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart’s Guide to the Study of
American History.221
Minutes from the earliest meetings of the American Historical Association
reveal the extent of this expurgating campaign, which ultimately rendered
the efforts of Duyckinck obsolete. At the 1890 annual meeting, for instance,
Robert H. Dabney delivered a paper titled “Is History a Science?” in which
he answered his own query with a resounding yes.222 Science offered twenti-
eth century professional historians like Dabney “a vision of a comprehensible
world: a model of certitude, of unambiguous truth; knowledge that was defi-
nite, and independent of the values or intentions of the investigator.” By con-
trast, works of “pseudo-history” by popularizers such as Lippard and Frost
were condemned as fanciful and mythological stories. Students of history must
employ “a far stricter and more critical spirit . . . into the investigation of the
mere facts of history,” he noted, than was the case with the “long cherished”
“delusions” of popularizers who allowed the “obstructing rubbish” of legend
to interfere with the honest presentation of the past.223 Association member
John William Burgess agreed with Dabney’s assertions, noting that the goal
of the educational wing of the AHA platform on history was “to teach the
student, first, to distinguish fact from fiction, how to divest it, as far as possible
of coloring or exaggeration.”224 Even John Spencer Bassett, who admitted that
there were “a few scholarly men” who at mid-century wrote “some serious

books for the small class of men who could appreciate them,” asserted that
“the mass of people demanded something far less respectable. To satisfy them
was created a class of books, widely read at the time, which to-day we throw
aside as rubbish.” Bassett spoke for most AHA members when he concluded
that popular histories like Frost’s “show us in what manner popular taste has
limited the performance of the historian.” Such works were part of “a stage of
our literary development now happily past,” he argued.225
In scholarly journals such as International Monthly and the American His-
torical Review, professional historians continued their assault against the in-
fluences of fiction on history writing. In a piece titled “Popular Histories and
their Defects,” Robinson rejected the tendency among untrained historians to
exaggerate the sensational in their histories. Writers such as Lippard, Frost,
and Irving refused to concern themselves “with the normal conduct and se-
rious achievements of mankind in the past,” he wrote, choosing instead to
“purposely select the picturesque and the lurid” as their themes. Operating
from the misguided assumption that “the more prodigious the occurrences
narrated, the better the history,” such amateurs perpetuated the “conception
of history as a chronicle of heroic persons and romantic occurrences.” This
“craving for the dramatic can be better met by confessed fiction,” Robinson
asserted,” adding “that those who see in history an epic poem give us very
imperfect and erroneous notions of the past.” The tendency to emphasize the
exception to the rule rather than the rule itself, he noted, constituted a “reck-
less disregard of perspective” and was an impulse motivated not by historical
principle of judgment but by “a consistent anxiety to startle the reader.” The
preference of popular writers for certain kinds of materials—“[r]omantic mar-
riages and tragic deaths; the doings of poisoners, adulterers, and lunatics; the
cases of those who have swallowed needles to find them coming out of unex-
pected places years after; who have taken laudanum for paregoric, or been run
over by beer wagons”—suggests that they were “guilty of gross misrepresenta-
tion within the bounds of formal accuracy,” in Robinson’s estimation. “Unvar-
nished fiction would be preferable” to some of what masquerades as popular
history, he concluded.226
What motivated professionals in these personal attacks? Marxist historians
argue that significant class issues were at play. They assert that members of the
American Historical Association were cultural elitists who desired to promote
the benefits of “high” culture by affirming the high-minded artistic expressions
of scholars and rejecting the terrifying monotony of “mass-produced objects.”227
Others such as Lawrence Levine claim that professionals demonstrated a dis-
turbing exclusivity in their efforts to “purify base democracy,” protecting his-
tory, as it were, by encouraging a “sacralization of culture.” According to this

argument, the typical professional scholar saw himself “less as a proselytizer of
the masses than as a preserver of the faith; a builder of the temple and keeper
of the flame.” History as a subject was too complex to admit of the kinds of un-
tutored and cursory treatments typical of popular historians. What was needed
were professionally trained experts who could appreciate fully the sophistica-
tion necessary to unlock history’s secrets. Levine has noted that in many areas
of cultural experience in the late nineteenth century, professionals advocated for
an “approved, sanctified, conspicuous culture” that allowed them to maintain a
critical distance from the masses. They established “rigid cultural categories,”
which, once in place, “made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand
the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.”228
No matter what the motivation, the campaign was pretty damaging to the repu-
tations not only of Lippard and Frost but also Duyckinck. By the beginning of
the twentieth century, professional historians had created the cultural condi-
tions necessary to discredit popular history in a manner that was eventually fatal
to its reputation.
As devastating as Duyckinck’s snubbing was to the estimations of the

worth of the histories of Lippard and Frost, and as damaging as the attacks of
professional historians on Irving would prove to his and Duyckinck’s long-term
reputations, it is important to remember that in the mid- to late nineteenth cen-
tury the dividing line between professional and popular historians was not yet
rigidly established. The 1880s and 1890s constituted an important transition
era in the history of historical study, and, as with most such “paradigm shifts,”
this one was characterized by fits and starts, by fluctuating priorities and alter-
ing perspectives. It took many years to work out in the literary marketplace the
subtle relationships between popularizers and professional historians, and nu-
merous important conceptual problems were decades away from resolution.
An astute observer of trends in historical study, J. Franklin Jameson, recog-
nized that while the old age of popular history was fading away of desirable
necessity, the new era of professionalism that was dawning had “some serious
drawbacks.” He worried especially about the pernicious effects of professional
histories that turned scholars into “cogs or wheels in a history-producing ma-
chine” by enlisting dozens of them in a “literary bureau” approach to the past.
With the loss of individual authorship, Jameson warned, many of the “finer
qualities of the individual mind are likely to evaporate in the process,” while
“much of what is most valuable in individual views and conceptions of history
will find no place for itself.” He believed that “the historian, like the poet, is
born, not made,” but he also recognized that the historian “is not made by
machinery.”229 Slow, deliberate change was what Jameson advocated.

In this fertile period of shifting literary and cultural priorities, there were
meaningful attempts to establish a middle ground between the literary proclivi-
ties of popularizers and the factual obsessions of scholars. The popular histo-
ries of William Cullen Bryant, John Clark Ridpath, Edward Eggleston, Edward
S. Ellis, and Julian Hawthorne were transitional works in this regard whose
production histories reveal the tensions between pre-professional and profes-
sional approaches to the past. Jameson argued that in the gradual conversion
from “historical literature” to “historical science,” historians of the popular
temperament would be needed for a time to smooth out the rough edges that
result from the fact “that the actual march of affairs is far in advance of its ex-
pression in literary theory and literary practice.” A lingering tolerance of popu-
lar history was justified, therefore, by the axiom that it is “possible to discern
in the face of things at present something which may be relied on to shape in
part the historical science of the immediate future.”230 And there were isolated
examples of popular histories retaining their audiences well into the twentieth
century despite the withering attacks of professionals, as in the case of John
Clark Ridpath’s History of the World, which demonstrated its staying power in
Huey Long’s Winnfield, Louisiana, twenty-five years after its publication. To
be sure, eventually such works gave way to those more dominant professional
forms—monographs, journal articles, and paper presentations—that subverted
nearly completely the vernacular forms specific to popular history as a literary
genre. Some of the most fertile intellectual exchanges occurred, however, in this
moment of change. The friction created by this gradual slide in reputation, this
“descent from glory,” if you will, bears study for what it can reveal about chang-
ing cultural priorities in a historical period of profound transition.

It may seem questionable to allow the spheres of
the historian and the poet to touch at any point.
But it cannot be denied that their activities are
related.—Wilhelm von Humboldt, “The Task of the
Historian” (1822)
2
.....................................................................
The “Terrible
Image Breaker”
William Cullen
Bryant, Sydney
Gay, and Scribner’s
Hybrid History

“That Noble Gray Head and Beard”
When Charles Knight submitted his eight-volume Popular History of
England to the British people in 1856, he dedicated the work to “His Royal
Highness, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.” The dedication was unusual
given Knight’s assertion in the preface that “History, as it is generally writ-
ten, deals too exclusively with . . . the acts of sovereigns and statesmen” and
should rather embrace a “new point of view”—one that “put the People in
the foreground.” It doubtless served as protection against the political risk he
took in subordinating the role of the Crown in his narrative. Knight believed
that English readers “want to find, in the history of their country, something
more than a series of annals, either policy or war”; they “want to learn the
history of the English home, as well as the history of the English State.” The
term “popular history,” in Knight’s usage, then, meant the attempt to “con-
nect domestic matters with the course of public events.” The formula worked
brilliantly for Knight, whose dedication and history not only endeared him to
the masses but also ingratiated him with Prince Albert’s mother, Queen Victo-
ria. She knighted him for his efforts, fueling endless jokes in the British press
about the “knighted Knight” or Sir Knight. Facing the tremendous challenge
of addressing a complex, class-stratified audience, Knight had developed an
“admixture of the individual and the general” suitable enough to allow history
to “find the course of its highest duty—popular instruction.”1 He also antici-
pated methodological changes that would later be labeled “social history.”
Readers in the United States who enjoyed Knight’s volumes wondered
where the American equivalent to such a balanced history could be found.
“We know of no one [American] work which can be placed by the side of
Knight’s History of England,” wrote a critic in the New York Times.” “Yet that
such a book would be gladly purchased it is impossible to question.”2 The
persuasiveness of this suggestion in the New York Times was not lost on the
most perceptive American publishers, especially Charles Scribner, who com-
missioned a “popular history” of the United States in anticipation of the Cen-
tennial Celebration in 1876.3 Ensconced originally in a shop at the corner of
Nassau Street and Park Row in the busy New York book trade district, Scrib-
ner had dedicated himself since 1846 to publishing what he called “schol-
arly, morally uplifting books with popular appeal.”4 Scribner’s definition of
the term “popular” seems clear enough in this context, relating primarily to
the kind and scope of audiences to be reached. Duyckinck’s Cyclopaedia of
American Literature was among the first of these widely circulating projects
for common readers. In the area of historical literature, the publisher noted, he
desired to contract with authors of established reputations who could produce
74 } The “Terrible Image Breaker”

works of high literary merit that would sell copies to as diverse a population
as possible. The prospectus for the proposed Centennial history of the United
States announced that the projected volumes “will be POPULAR,” both “com-
plete and compact.” Without “detracting from the dignity of the work as a
History,” Scribner’s marketers wrote, the authors “will present the narrative in
such a form that it must attract even young readers.”5 The subsequent preface
to the volumes served to elaborate the point while recognizing the challenge
for all publishers of producing and selling such popular histories. “There are
several excellent histories of the United States of North America in print, and it
will naturally be asked what occasion there is for another,” the authors noted.
They assured readers that like Knight’s Popular History, theirs was “intended
to be a popular history—a work for that large class who have not leisure for
reading those narratives which aim at setting forth, with the greatest breadth
and variety of circumstance, the annals of our nation’s life. At the same time it
is the design of the present work to treat the subject more at large than is done
in those compends, some of them able in their way, which are used as text-
books in the schools.”6 Such diverse ambitions, they hoped, would justify an
expansive publishing venture.
The key to achieving this goal for Scribner was to find a writer of sufficient
national reputation to appeal to a wide audience and to convince that writer
to work in such a way as to ensure a text that was accessible to nearly all read-
ers. In 1874, the editors at Scribner’s had just such a figure in mind when they
approached the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant about the project.
Bryant was an intriguing and curious choice for the authorship of a Centen-
nial history of the United States. On the one hand, Bryant was a logical selec-
tion, since he was America’s preeminent literary figure, and, as unofficial poet
laureate of the nation, had wide name recognition. An octogenarian by the
mid-1870s, he had been a contemporary of many of the heroes of the young
republic. “Born before the death of Washington, Mr. Bryant was in the prime
of active life while Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Daniel
Webster, and Henry Clay were exerting an active and powerful influence upon
politics and legislation,” a circular for Scribner’s history announced. “His life
seems to have been spared beyond that of those and others of his distinguished
cotemporaries, that he might give final form to this record of our history as a
nation up to the close of the first Century of our Independence.” In addition,
the circular noted, as editor of the New York Evening Post for fifty years, Bryant
had been “thrown into relations more or less intimate with all the leading men
of the time, and as a necessity of his position he has been compelled to keep the
history of events fresh in his memory and to form accurate estimates of their
relative importance.”7 No one had more of the rich practical experience in the
William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Gay, and Scribner’s Hybrid History { 75

world of affairs that many readers demanded of the authors of their popular
histories than Bryant.
On the other hand, Bryant was an unlikely candidate for the task of writing
a popular history of the United States, since he had no formal training in his-
tory, and since he was not necessarily recognized as a man of the people. The
Dictionary of American Biography notes that while Bryant was perceived as an
august, towering figure by 1876 and was “everywhere regarded for many years
as the leading citizen of New York,” he was “never in any sense popular.” An
“austere, chill, precise, and dignified” person, his “demeanor made familiarity
impossible, and even in small gatherings he was not a clubbable man.”8 His
first biographer, son-in-law Parke Godwin, characterized Bryant as a reluctant
public figure, torn between his intense desire to influence contemporary pub-
lic opinion and his more acute need for privacy.9 His more recent biographer,
Albert F. McLean Jr., has suggested that this emotional dichotomy surfaced
professionally in Bryant’s “divided voice”—his willingness to speak out reso-
lutely on public themes but in a manner sometimes oddly suited (because too
pedantic) for public consumption. To understand Bryant’s unique relationship
to his various audiences, McLean noted, one must “reconstruct the sensibil-
ity of a poet who consistently shielded himself behind the social masks of his
day [and] who treasured the privacy of his gift.”10 His “immense influence as
a public leader was almost wholly an indirect influence,” Allan Nevins agreed.
Bryant was a popularizer by association only, one who “reached the minds of
those who in turn could reach the masses.”11
Many were simply intimidated by Bryant’s awesome intellect. The normally
unflappable Mark Twain underscored this point when he reminisced with
friends about an embarrassing loss of confidence he experienced in an unex-
pected meeting with Bryant. The occasion was a lecture that the humorist was
delivering to a New York audience. By Twain’s account, the presentation was
going “with flying colors” until he spotted, near the front row, the “noble gray
head and beard” of Bryant. From that moment on, the speech went badly. Evi-
dently Twain became discombobulated, lost his place several times, mistimed
his jokes, and finished prematurely in a flurry of disconnected final remarks.
He blamed Bryant’s intimidating presence for the disaster. “I was sure he saw
the failure I was making,” Twain noted, “and all the weak points in what I was
saying, and I couldn’t do anything more—the old man just spoiled my work.”
When friends tried to console him afterward with assurances that his speech
was good, he could only say, “No, no, that fine old head spoiled all I had to say
that night.”12 The venerable poet rendered America’s greatest humorist hu-
morless. Given Bryant’s propensities for intimidating formality and aloofness,
the publishers at Scribner’s must have had some doubts about his suitability

for such a popular project, although he was unquestionably the best known
literary figure in America available for the job.
Suitability aside, there was also the question of whether or not Bryant could
be talked into such an undertaking at his advanced age. As it turned out, the
timing of Scribner’s offer could not have been better. In 1874, Bryant had
turned 80 years old, and, perhaps sensing that death must break his pen some
time soon, the poet determined to become a more accessible public figure.13
He not only made an uncharacteristic number of public appearances, he also
undertook a series of literary projects designed to make “great scholarship”
more available to “popular” readers. For instance, in the 1870s alone, Bryant
edited a new collection of Shakespeare’s plays with Duyckinck; he modernized
translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and he helped assemble a travel guide
for those interested in “seeing” scenic America.14 When the offer came from
Scribner’s to produce a popular history of the United States, Bryant expressed
concern about how such a work might affect his many other literary projects,
but he admitted to a certain fascination with the prospect of making the first
one hundred years of American national development understandable to aver-
age Americans.15 Scribner, in turn, pushed hard for the association because he
believed fervently in Bryant’s potential for creating a “poetics” of popular his-
tory. Eventually Scribner wore Bryant down, convincing the poet to participate
in the popular history under certain conditions. “I said that, at my time of life,
I would not undertake the principal labor of it myself, nor would I undertake
the work at all, unless I could have an associate whom I should name,” Bryant
wrote.16 Scribner was more than agreeable to this condition, and, by late 1875,
Bryant was under contract to produce a multivolume popular history of the
United States that would eventually bear his name.17
The production history of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States
provides an interesting example of the negotiated quality of popular historical
writing in the nineteenth century. Bryant’s first task for Scribner was to write
a prospectus for the advertising circular to be used by book agents to sell the
volumes by subscription.18 This document and the subsequent preface derived
from it suggest the poet’s philosophy of history and the model of literary pre-
sentation he intended to use in pursuing it. The Popular History of the United
States, Bryant projected, was to be a four-volume compendium of the American
past designed for “that large class in this country who seek repose and recreation
in general literary culture, but with whom literature is not the business of life.”19
His goals, above all, were to achieve an authorial presence in the text by drawing
on his long, personal experience with the events he described and by creating
the illusion of participation in those events on the part of readers by employing
a series of personalizing narrative devices. As with his poetry, he viewed it as

Frontispiece to Part One of the subscription series
for Bryant’s Popular History.

his mission as a historian to filter experience through the medium of his public
persona, selecting and arranging evidence in accordance with his private artistic
preferences.20 Making history accessible to the general reader was a challenge
for the erudite Bryant, but one he was anxious to accept. “I write somewhat
against the grain,” he admitted to his brother John of the Scribner’s project,
“though I think that I have some good thoughts to ventilate.”21
In much of his romantic poetry, Bryant had described history in sentimen-
tal and dramatic terms, envisioning the past as an “unrelenting” and “dark
domain” in which the citizens of “old empires” struggled in vain to free them-
selves from the “bolts” and “fetters” of obscurity that compelled them to sit
for eternity “in sullenness and gloom.”22 In his preface to the Scribner’s series,
Bryant remained true to this romantic spirit, employing the unembarrassed
language of Lippard’s nineteenth-century nationalism to describe the highly
epic and even mythological progress of liberty from the ancient world to its
American fulfillment. Bryant announced to his readers that he was “writing
the history of the only great nation on the globe,” a country gladly forced by
destiny to take “its place among the foremost nations of the world.” Those
who read his Popular History of the United States, he promised, “will see in
[America’s] past, with all its vicissitudes, and with all our own shortcomings,
the promise of a prosperous and honorable future, of concord at home and
peace and respect abroad” and will recognize “that the same cheerful piety
which leads the good man to put his personal trust in a kind Providence, will
prompt the good citizen to cherish an equal confidence in regard to the destiny
reserved for our beloved country.”23 With regard to the question of historical
agency, at least, Bryant’s proposed history would be consistent with the am-
bitions of the Young Americans and the American exceptionalism of Frost’s
Popular History of the United States.
To drive home his point about the dramatic and providential role of Amer-
ica in world history, Bryant developed in his prospectus and preface an elabo-
rate theatrical metaphor for organizing the past, emplotting American history
as an ongoing high drama of actors and actresses on a grand historical stage.
The theater provided a useful structural device for the conveyance of Bryant’s
potent message because it condensed sweeping segments of time into five pre-
scribed acts separated by convenient scene changes. “In the two centuries and
a half of our existence as an off-shoot of the great European stock, a mighty
drama has been put upon the stage of our continent,” Bryant wrote, and that
drama has been characterized by central “acts” which it is the historian’s re-
sponsibility to help restage. The theater as structural device gave history im-
mediacy by collapsing the distinctions between time and place. Readers of
Bryant’s Popular History of the United States could approach the past with

a suspended imagination not unlike that experienced by playgoers who lose
themselves in the temporal setting of a theatrical production. “The period of
time at which the nation inhabiting the domain of our Republic came into
being is so recent,” Bryant wrote, and the connections to its ancient past so
clear, “that we may trace its growth with as much distinctness as if we were the
contemporaries of its birth.” In a manner resembling the dramaturgical struc-
ture of a five-act play, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States promised
to chart “with a certain fulness of recital” the distinct climaxes and crises of the
episodic development of American history.24
Bryant’s use of theatrical metaphors throughout his prospectus and preface
was important for what it revealed of his conception of history as acted events.
Bryant had an almost embarrassing reverence for Shakespeare, sharing as he
did the British playwright’s sense of the reciprocal relationship between his-
tory as drama and drama as history. If we are indeed all actors and actresses
strutting and fretting on so many historical stages, as Shakespeare asserted and
Bryant affirmed, then surely Providence had scripted a special and remarkable
role for the American people. Part of the effectiveness of his popular history,
Bryant therefore knew, depended on the willingness of his readers to enter into
its Shakespearean spirit of dramaturgical engagement. This was more easily
accomplished among popular audiences in the late nineteenth century than
it might be today. Lawrence Levine has suggested that middle-class Ameri-
cans in the nineteenth century embraced the British bard because “Shake-
spearean drama featured heroes and villains who communicated directly with
the audience” and who “left little doubt about the nature of their character
or intentions.”25 American readers of “popular” histories demanded a simi-
lar transparency, and Bryant did not disappoint. His preface is dominated by
monochromatic heroes who speak in clichéd rhetorical asides referencing
single-minded principles to American readers anxious to establish their own
connections to an idealized past. European discoverers were men of “courage,
perseverance, patient endurance of hardship, and ready resources in time of
great emergency,” Bryant wrote, who stuck persistently to their divinely or-
dained missions. Old World immigrants were “courageous and adventurous”
individuals, “unapt to quail before discouragement, and prepared to encoun-
ter disaster.” And the American revolutionaries “presented so united a front
in resistance to the tyrannical pretensions of the mother country,” that their
“common danger . . . , common privations, sufferings, and expedients, [and]
common sorrow at reverses and rejoicing at victories” established the ground-
work for “a new era with new responsibilities.”26
If the “Great Story” of American history was the metaphoric equivalent of a
five-act Shakespearian drama, then Bryant conceived of its climax as the Civil

War. In constructing his broad plan for a popular history that would bear his
name, Bryant developed an elaborate rationale to explain to readers why a new
history of the United States was needed in 1876. He argued, for instance, that
the important changes, “political and social, occurring within our Republic,
which have an interest for every nation in the civilized world could not be
fully written until now” because the issue of slavery had not been adequately
resolved. In the great dramatic unraveling of Providence’s script, Americans
found themselves cast in the unhappy role of slave owners, and they were
forced to play out their parts to the painful but inevitable conclusions implicit
in them. The whole history of slavery “lies before us as on a chart,” Bryant
wrote, a chart whose final frames depicted the “fierce contentions and subtle
intrigues” of a military drama with epic implications for human development.
“Few episodes in the world’s history have been so complete in themselves as
this of American slavery,” Bryant added, and “[f ]ew have brought into activity
such mighty agencies, or occupied so vast a theater, or been closed, although
amid fearful carnage, yet in a manner so satisfactory to the sense of natural jus-
tice.” Anticipating what Robert Penn Warren later called the “Treasury of Vir-
tue,” Bryant constructed the war narratively as a redemptive struggle in which
the end of slavery provided the victors with a storehouse of self-righteousness
by which to justify their fratricidal activities. The Civil War was “a bloody ca-
tastrophe” and a climax of sorts, and “[t]o have broken off the narrative before
reaching the catastrophe,” Bryant wrote in keeping with his theatrical meta-
phor, “would have been like rising from the spectacle of a drama at the end of
the fourth act.”27
To tell the climactic story of the Civil War and the years that preceded and an-
tedated it, Bryant envisioned a form of presentation that waxed from drama into
melodrama. Bryant’s own dramatic tastes were in the direction of high drama,
but he was astutely aware that the most “popular” form of theater among the
masses in the nineteenth century was melodrama. With its standardized plots,
conventional characters, and simplistic morality, melodrama seemed ideally
suited to new and old Americans alike. Melodrama swept the nation in the
mid-nineteenth century and became one of the dominant mechanisms for the
transmission of cultural values.28 Stock figures (heroes and villains especially)
were introduced by Bryant in his preface in association with anticipated “sen-
sation scenes,” special dramas within the central narrative designed to startle
and awaken the audience to the potential dangers inherent in the action.29 The
hero strapped to a log being pushed slowly toward a buzz-saw, the heroine
lashed to the tracks as a thundering train bears down—these and other devices
became sensational conventions that compelled audiences to identify and
sympathize with their victims.30 In the projected plans for Bryant’s Popular

History of the United States, such sensation scenes were tied to the corruptive
power of money, a power that he associated with the rise of American slavery.
“The history of currency is a sad one,” Bryant wrote with a sense of pathos in
his preface, “a history of creditors defrauded, families reduced from compe-
tence to poverty, and ragged and hunger-bitten soldiers who were paid their
wages in bits of paper scarcely worth more than the coarse material on which
their nominal value was stamped.”31
In addition, Bryant’s use of such devices as the “humble home,” the senti-
mental hero, the dastardly villain, the Gothic setting and the sensation scene
was supplemented by the stylistic forms of presentation associated with melo-
dramas—exaggeration, overblown elocution, emotional distress, and bombast.
Because the effectiveness of melodrama was directly related to its ability to
convey meaning with an economy of language and staging, Bryant relied as
consistently as any melodramatist on histrionics and theatricality in his rheto-
ric. He was especially animated in his negative reactions to the restrictive qual-
ities of high protective tariffs, which he believed were enacted by the monied
interests to take advantage of American consumers. A free trade advocate, Bry-
ant argued that the Tariff of 1828 contributed significantly to the coming of the
Civil War, its most pernicious elements persisting even beyond the 1860s in
ways that continued to threaten the Union. The moral of the protective tariff-
free trade debate, Bryant noted with sardonic wit, was “that a nation does not
always profit by its own experience, even though it be of an impressive nature.”
Bryant’s theatrical posturing in this matter was supplemented by his oratori-
cal evocation of the Gods, the heavens, and celestial warnings in his protests
against restrictive trade. Fearing that “our government of nicely balanced pow-
ers should degenerate into a mere form, and the proper functions of the States
be absorbed into the central authority,” Bryant likened the nation’s fate to
“that predicted by some astronomers for our solar system, when the orbs that
revolve about the sun, describing narrower and narrower circles, shall fall into
the central luminary to be incorporated with it forever.”32
That Bryant was so outspoken in his preface on these political matters sug-
gests something important about the “popular” form of history he intended to
write. His claim in the preface, on behalf of Scribner’s Sons, was that the pub-
lishers “had endeavored to divest [themselves], while engaged in this task, of
all local prejudices, and every influence which might affect the impartiality of
the narrative.”33 The widely disseminated circular declared Bryant’s Popular
History of the United States a “well-balanced and complete narrative” and the
first work to treat “the question of slavery, and the political issues North and
South, from a really historic point of view . . . without discussion of partisan
issues or theories.”34 Bryant’s preface, however, was riddled with opinionated

political statements guaranteed to alienate readers of differing views, and he
showed little interest in demonstrating the kind of objectivity implied in the
advertising materials. The Bryant preface was full of literary trap doors and
rhetorical smokescreens intended to create in the narrative rapid transitions
from scenes of violence and pathos to those of farce and sensationalism, but
there was little evidence of respect for alternative points of view and no men-
tion of the authorities on which the dramatic story was to be based.35
Such discrepancies are evidence that Bryant and Scribner were not always
in agreement concerning even to the most basic elements of the projected vol-
umes. Bryant was hopelessly romantic and sentimental at times, and his pro-
spectus revealed troublesome idiosyncracies in his conceptualization of the
American past. Yet Scribner contracted with Bryant because the publisher be-
lieved that history was a branch of learning in which “the connection between
practical experience and contemplative study” was crucial, and because he val-
ued authors “who had spent most of their lives in politics, warfare, theology,
bureaucracy, journalism, or literature.” As Theodore Hamerow has noted,
“self-taught amateurs” such as Bryant brought to the study of history “a spon-
taneous curiosity, an instinctive interest in how the world had become what it
was, how society had changed and grown with the passage of time.” They did
not always possess “technical expertise or systematic methodology,” but they
did share “exuberance, enthusiasm, excitement, and joy in learning.” Even
more significant, “their historical writing was informed by a rich practical ex-
perience in the world of affairs,” making their works “lively and vibrant, rous-
ing and compelling.” Popular histories written by literary figures of substantial
public reputation such as Bryant promised to have “the breath of life” about
them, while the ability of their authors to tell a “good story” from personal
experience—rendered “all the more fascinating because it was true”—seemed
likely to redound in the financial favor of the press.36
Chauvinists, Sermonizers, and Gossipmongers

In making selections among potential popular historians, a publisher
such as Scribner was forced to acknowledge that their “strengths were also their
weaknesses.” As Hamerow has noted, amateurs such as Bryant “displayed in
the writing of history the same passions and prejudices, the same interests and
predispositions that they revealed in everyday life.” Bryant’s name commanded
a certain respect and shielded him a bit from criticism, but popularizers like him
were accused of being “jingoes and chauvinists celebrating the virtues of their
class, their nation, or their race,” while others were characterized as nothing

more than “moralists and sermonizers preaching that divine Providence had
decreed the eternal submission of the lower classes to the established order.”
Still others were condemned as “simply tattletales and gossipmongers special-
izing in amusing anecdotes or scandalous revelations about those in higher
places.” For their part, writers such as Bryant felt as if they were “fighting a
losing rear-guard action against what they considered dry-as-dust pedantry
that would stifle the creative spirit with footnotes and bibliographies.”37 In turn,
publishers such as Scribner’s recognized that while readers of popular histories
expected authors to lighten the burden of national problems by casting them in
sometimes trivialized “tragic/comic” forms, they also demanded that serious
attention be given to the factual underpinnings of those forms. History could
be sensationalized in the manner of novels, but it could not be contrived. The
rising authority of science in the late nineteenth century as well as a growing
literary preference for realism meant that works dependent largely on narrativ-
ity, plot and rhetorical effect were viewed with growing discontent by those who
preferred “authorial invisibility” and “rigid self-elimination.” By the 1870s,
Novick has noted, scientific realism was enough of a major selling point, even
in the popular book market, that popularizers such as Bryant—who “told” in
an era that increasingly preferred its writers to “show”—were encouraged by
publishers to find ways to provide at least some of “the sober narration that an
age of self-restraint demanded of its historians.”38
Bryant, who seems to have understood his limitations in this regard, ad-
dressed these problems by bringing to the project the more balanced schol-
arly vision of his friend and long-time editor of the New York Tribune, Sydney
Howard Gay.39 A fellow journalist, Gay was the octogenarian’s first choice for
the “associate” designated in his contract with Scribner’s Sons because Gay
had a reputation as a writer with “clear insight into the political as well as the
moral issues of his day.” Before the Civil War, Gay had served as editor of the
Anti-Slavery Standard, and he was later managing editor of the New York Tri-
bune during the Civil War, where he was responsible among other things for
curtailing the excesses of the paper’s outspoken editor, Horace Greeley. Even-
tually Gay became a coeditor with Bryant at the New York Evening Post, and it
was there that they established the groundwork for the close working relation-
ship that came to fruition in the Bryant’s Popular History of the United States.
Gay was charged with curbing the overstatements to which Bryant and his staff
were sometimes prone, especially on fiscal policies. “To the audiences whose
respect he commanded through his balanced editorials,” wrote a biographer,
Gay “presented in forceful argument the highest ideals for the advancement
and integrity of his country.”40 The advertising circular for Bryant’s Popular
History of the United States referred to Gay fairly as one who had “long been

distinguished in literary circles for careful and conscientious work, rare cul-
ture, and a style unexcelled for purity and eloquence.”41
Additionally, Gay had a reputation for getting things done. Scribner’s had
assumed initially that Bryant would be responsible for much of the writing of
the Popular History of the United States, but quickly it became evident that the
august figure was simply too busy (and too old, perhaps) to give the project his
full attention. Conversely, Gay was willing to abandon most of his journalistic
responsibilities in order to write the history if Scribner’s would compensate
him appropriately. Eventually a compromise was reached in which Gay was
given primary charge of the text of the volumes, while Bryant confined himself
to writing the preface and correcting proofs. “The real hard work of writing this
history itself is to be done by Mr. Gay,” Bryant admitted to his brother John,
“but [it] is all to pass through my hands.”42 “Everything in regard to the com-
position is done on consultation with me,” Bryant added; “every sentence that
goes to press . . . will undergo my rigid revision, and the whole will be published
under my responsibility.”43 The most truthful indicator of the popular history’s
authorship can be found in the financial compensation each received for his
part in the work. Gay was guaranteed 5 percent of the sales of the volumes,
which he took in the form of advances, roughly $400 a month for the length of
the project, while Bryant received only half that percentage.44 Scribner eventu-
ally advanced Gay over $34,000 for work as the chief writer of the volumes,
suggesting the publisher’s confidence in the journalist and his expectation that
Bryant’s Popular History of the United States would be a considerable money-
maker.45 Bryant was advertised in Scribner’s prospectus and subscription flyers
as the primary author of the volumes, although his eventual contributions to the
series proved more limited than even Scribner or Gay had imagined.46
The personal papers of Bryant and Gay (archived in the Columbia Univer-
sity Archives and the New York Public Library) provide a fascinating look at
how composite histories are constructed through a subtle process of negotia-
tion and compromise. What we find in the collaborative arrangement between
these coauthors is the origin of distinctions between ways of historical know-
ing that have characterized the debate over popular history ever since. Promo-
tional messages tucked into salesman’s dummies for Bryant’s Popular History
noted that the “journalistic experience of both these men has educated them
to speak directly, vigorously, and forcibly, so that what they say must compel
listeners,” but it was clear that it was Bryant’s poetic sensibilities to which
the advertisers referred primarily when they claimed that the volumes demon-
strated “literary skill” that “is sufficient assurance of a graphic and picturesque
narrative which shall attract readers of all classes and ages.” Bryant insisted
on forms of history that were didactic, that instructed readers, especially in

the areas of contemporary politics. It was Gay who was responsible for the
pledge “that as a History the work shall be an authority, for its chronological
correctness and its accurate statement of facts.” Scribner’s had Gay in mind
when it noted in its circulars: “It is the aim to present without partiality, with-
out passion, and with perfect candor, the story of the only great nation on the
face of the globe whose history from the beginning is unclouded with myths,
or conjectures, or uncertain traditions, but is matter of clear record.”47 Yet as
publishers at Scribner’s Sons knew, it was difficult to adjudicate between these
two forms of history, the mythic and the realist; indeed, some thought them
philosophically incompatible.
The interesting challenges that this collaborative approach posed were evi-
denced as soon as Gay received an advanced copy of a draft of Bryant’s preface.
The prospectus on which the preface was based had been circulating among
book agents since early 1875, but Gay had not seen either until he had already
begun working on the first chapters. He was concerned immediately upon re-
viewing the materials. Noting that Bryant’s introduction was written “before the
subject had taken a complete & definite shape in my own mind, or, at least, had
assumed the sharp lines of a working plan,” Gay asked his coauthor: “Would
it not now be possible, without too much trouble to you, to so modify the in-
troduction that it shall-fit-in to the plan of the work as you see it in the chapters
you have read?”48 He was especially concerned that the prospectus promised
an attention to social and cultural history that Gay did not think would be re-
flected in the finished version of the work. “The American of the present day
wants to know how his ancestor lived, how he looked, what clothes he wore, on
what he fed, what were his daily walk and conversation, and how life dealt with
him,” Bryant had written in the prospectus, adding: “This is the most difficult
part of history to reproduce accurately, but it is after all that which gives us the
clearest and most vivid insight into the spirit of the past.” Gay was anxious to
restrict the excesses of this social and cultural “spirit,” however, and to stay
focused on the “most important events in the history of the nation.”49 Bryant
and Gay met throughout the Centennial year to hammer out a middle ground
between their two positions. With regard to Bryant’s draft of the introduction,
they agreed that the preface to the first volume had circulated too widely among
book agents to be excluded from the series, so it would be signed only by Bry-
ant. The preface to the second volume was to bear both of their names to reflect
its collaborative origins. “It must have your signature—that is indispensable,”
Bryant wrote his coauthor.50
The stylistic and content area discrepancies between the two authors were
harder to work out. Gay, who wrote nearly every word of the first draft of
volume one, was clearly the primary author on the project, while Bryant was

content to make editorial suggestions after the fact. In his critiques, Bryant
sought to add dramatic scope and sentimentality to Gay’s understated prose,
while Gay tried hard to control Bryant’s poetic and melodramatic impulses.
As a lecturer on the abolitionist circuit in the 1850s, Gay had objected to the
histrionics of some of his fellow speakers and declared a lifelong aversion to
bombastic literary expressions, even if delivered on behalf of a worthy cause.51
Gay also understood the limitations inherent in the structure of melodrama
as a genre. “[I]n the act of imposing structure on the seeming randomness of
events,” George Forgie has written, melodrama “distorted the passing scene
in crucial ways.” By viewing the world as a Manichean contest between vir-
tue and vice, sentimentalizers such as Bryant had “grossly simplified complex
problems and lent support to the idea that all adverse change was ultimately
caused by the malevolence of a few individuals rather than anything grander,
less personal, or beyond the control of the will and efforts of good men.” In
characterizing “virtue as unfailingly triumphant,” in other words, they “en-
couraged an optimistic view of events that permitted people to take a passive
stance toward them, and to doubt that the crisis must be taken altogether seri-
ously.”52 According to Gay, such depictions did a disservice to the very popu-
lar audiences Bryant and other historians wished to inspire to political action.
Certainly they proved counterproductive to Bryant’s announced intentions in
the preface to equip a new generation “with what wisdom” its members might
need for entering “a new era with new responsibilities.”53
Given these constraints, Gay hoped to introduce a steadier literary voice to
the project, making concessions to Bryant’s heightened poetic style only when
the latter insisted on it. “[W]e aim not to make a dry record of mere annals, but
rather to preserve, wherever it is found, that flavor of romance and adventure in
the American past,” Gay wrote; but he added quickly that the volumes would
strive for “accuracy and comprehensiveness” in all things and would avoid
“mere novelties” and the purely “sensational” at all costs.54 These adjustments
occurred in accordance with a gradually and carefully honed editorial pro-
cedure worked out between the two authors throughout the early months of
the writing. Gay sent manuscript chapters to Bryant; Bryant then commented
on them and sent them back for corrections.55 Occasionally, difficult sections
were worked out in one- or two-day excursions to Bryant’s home in Roslyn,
Long Island.56 Then Gay forwarded chapters along to Scribner’s for further
editorial comment and, eventually, typesetting. Most of these exchanges were
cordial and businesslike. “I have looked over your first three chapters of the
History of the United States, and think it admirably well done,” Bryant wrote
Gay with reference to chapters on geological foundations of the Continent and
the Mound Builders of the Midwest. “I cannot venture to make any material

suggestions in regard to it,” he noted.57 In another instance, Bryant wrote:
“You have told the story . . . in a picturesque manner, and in such a way as to
give it an air of novelty.”58 In many of these cases, Bryant deferred to Gay on
matters of factual documentation, admitting that “only someone like you” who
“has made a previous study of the subject” could adequately address the more
theoretical aspects of the work. When it came to questions of research, Bryant
acknowledged, “you almost always get the better of me.”59 As this interchange
implies, generally Bryant was content to submit to Gay’s judgments regarding
“realistic” detail in the narrative, although he was often less willing to make
concessions in stylistic areas.
Initially this collaborative arrangement between Bryant and Gay worked
smoothly enough, although the constant need to submit and resubmit chap-
ters meant that the first volume of this hybrid history was not published until
late 1876 and the second not until 1878. This delay ensured that other works
captured the lion’s share of the centennial market for popular history, a disap-
pointment to the publisher, to be sure, although Scribner hoped that there
would be sufficient interest in a project of such obvious integrity to sustain
public demand for a slower-paced and increasingly expensive work.60 More
rather than less consultation followed, however. The annotated manuscript
pages for the early drafts of Bryant’s Popular History as well as the personal
correspondence between Bryant and Gay reveal the extraordinary degree to
which their history continued to be “constructed,” its chapters and central
themes constituting a series of distinct editorial compromises. These archi-
val materials also suggest the important philosophical questions that informed
these exchanges concerning popular and scholarly approaches to the past.
Can historical “reality” as defined by scholars ever be presented meaningfully
in the story-telling forms employed by popularizers and preferred by readers?
Does narrativity require a commitment to ordering strategies that by defini-
tion corrupt the historical record? And what are the theoretical and practical
implications of attempts to do so?
In many ways, the first volume of Bryant’s Popular History came the closest
of any to meeting Scribner’s expectations for a collaborative popular history,
although it was hardly a seamless production. The book began with sensation-
alist images of the age of discovery that bore the stamp of Bryant. In an intro-
ductory chapter on primeval America, the authors speculated imaginatively and
somewhat recklessly about the “naked savages” who inhabited the primitive
continent, ancient “troglodytes” with “small brains” but of enormous strength
who pursued “great and strange animals” for their food. They also introduced
several mythological interpretations of the pre-Columbian explorations of the
Americas, sketching imaginative literary depictions of “mythic explorers” who

ventured forth on a “Sea of Darkness,” “whose mysterious waters, they did
not doubt, in accordance with the belief of the time, were concealed in perpet-
ual night, haunted by demons, and filled with strange creatures of monstrous
shapes.” In addition, they incorporated Icelandic sagas into their text—“re-
citals of history” that were, they recognized, “exaggerated and adorned,” yet
substantially grounded in facts—as well as discussions of Welsh and Chinese
claims of discovery, which, though “legendary and romantic,” allowed readers
to “profitably and properly go further back than the ordinary starting-point
by five hundred years.” Such imaginative projections “are not history,” the
authors admitted, but they merited inclusion in the work because “it is not
impossible that in them may yet be found some aid in putting together that
unwritten story of the early human race in this continent.”61
The poet-jouranlist was the moving force behind these speculative passages
in Bryant’s Popular History, as Gay was on record at Scribner’s as preferring
more “scientific and historical proof” to such imaginative forays. The “shad-
owy form” of the people who predated Europeans is best understood not
through imaginative depictions, Gay argued, but through a scientific study of
the relics and material artifacts they left behind. Archeologists had done much
“to dispel the obscurity and mystery which . . . shrouded the New World in
darkness,” he added as a corrective, noting that “Modern science” promised
to rewrite the “story of races and of civilization that long since disappeared,
leaving no other record than those relics which till recently have been either
overlooked or misunderstood.”62 Gay’s assertions worried some at Scribner’s
who feared they might anger traditionalists, and the publisher warned Gay
that a popular history must “offend no theological prejudices or beliefs.” But
Gay countermanded that archaeological evidence “shed[s] fresh light” on
“the pre-historic character of the Western Hemisphere” and provides startling
insights that “history ought not to ignore.” In a private note to Bryant, Gay
elaborated on his thinking with reference to race origins: “At first I showed
how modern archaeology set aside the accepted Biblical chronology & how
the believers have attempted to reconcile these new facts with the old belief,”
he noted. “Then I rewrote it; leaving the reader to make his own deductions if
he chooses & to hold the facts & not the argument of the book responsible. . . .
It has cost me a great deal of labor and anxiety . . . because much study was
required to make it scientifically accurate & beyond criticism,” he noted, but
the result of such thoroughness was “a story never before told in any popular
work, & one which the general reader only knows about in a general way” and
which represents a “new departure for American History.” Although Scribner
was at first “a little anxious about the theological aspect of the first chapter,”
Gay assured Bryant that eventually he would be “eminently satisfied.”63

Gay viewed it as his special role in the editorial process to advance the
narrative from what one reader described as Bryant’s “mythical, and to some
extent visionary, prelude” to the more “solid ground of fact.”64 In introduc-
ing the “scientific element” to popular history, therefore, Gay felt obliged to
debunk those more imaginative historians who had preceded him in the field,
especially Washington Irving. Some of the highly romanticized imagery of
Irving’s portrait of Columbus made its way into the pages of Bryant’s Popular
History, as when the authors highlighted the “power of magic” that informed
Columbus’s “poetic temperament and . . . vivid imagination,” the discoverer’s
“divine mission” having been inspired by the revelations and “saving influ-
ence of the Catholic Church.”65 Such visionary interpretations seemed over-
sentimentalized even to Bryant, however, who confessed to Gay his anxieties
about borrowing too consistently from Irving’s overblown prose. “In reading
Irving’s Life of Columbus,” Bryant noted, “I have always felt that there was an
air of romantic unreality in the coloring of his narrative, or at least in some part
of it.”66 This admission encouraged Gay to add a steadier, more realistic voice
to the idealistic, Irvingesque description of the discoverer. While Columbus
was “a most diligent student of the Bible” and its “prophecies,” Gay wrote,
he was also a disciple of the “everlasting truths of science” and was devoted
to “the logic of the sphere.” Detailing the “special scientific facts” Columbus
presented before the Council of Salamanca, Gay asked readers to consider
alternatives to the supernatural preconceptions Irving and Frost had forced
upon them.67 As he explained to Bryant, Gay believed that readers of popu-
lar history were capable of making their own decisions about such matters if
presented with the proper facts.68 Bryant agreed in principle, responding to
his coauthor that “[t]he truth must be told as you have told it nakedly, in such
a manner that the readers of history will have no difficulty in making up their
minds as to the moral quality of the act.”69
Such an exchange suggested the degree to which Bryant and Gay were
inching toward a realist position with respect to objectivity and the authority
of facts. But the former author was far more reluctant to travel quickly down
that path than the latter. In choosing to debunk earlier “speculative” historians
like Irving, Bryant feared that he and Gay were challenging an implied maxim
within the genre of popular history, namely, that one should never tinker too
dramatically with the myths of the people. The result of such irreverence must
be a reduction in popularity of the volumes and of their sales, Bryant reasoned,
and excessive debunking was not satisfying from an intellectual point of view,
either. Gay’s treatment of John Smith was especially revealing in this regard,
Bryant argued, since Smith’s American “origin narrative” occupied a special
place in the American historical imagination.70 In the chapters he penned on

the founding of Jamestown, Gay admitted Smith was a “[c]ourageous, enter-
prising, and energetic” figure, but he reminded readers that the flamboyant
leader was also inclined “to make himself . . . more the hero of the early history
of Virginia than the facts seem always to warrant.” The clearest example of
Smith’s untrustworthiness as a historian of his own career was his descrip-
tion of Pocahontas’s intervention in his own execution, an episode, Gay noted,
that was mentioned in no other contemporary source except Smith’s General
History and represented a sample of the dubious “exaggeration which distin-
guishes the Smith narrative.”71
Bryant was less sure of the truth or the value of Gay’s skeptical critique of the
Virginia colonizer, and he was reluctant to give ground on a heroic Smith as the
two coauthors worked through subsequent drafts of the chapter. He claimed that
in so vigorously exploding the Smith mythology, Gay had tampered with the sa-
cred myths central to the life of a culture. “[Y]ou are a terrible image breaker,”
he told Gay; “[y]ou smashed that beautiful image of Pocahontas interposing
to save Captain Smith from the numerous savages into fragments so small that
they will never be put together again.” Noting that Gay’s research into other
contemporary sources had failed to “impugn the veracity of Smith himself,”
Bryant preferred the argument of William Gilmore Simms that the poetic Poca-
hontas fable should be accepted on Smith’s authority alone.72 For his part, Gay
was unwilling to recognize Smith’s narrative as “an established historical fact,”
even if, as Bryant had argued, historians such as Simms had embraced it “as the
best, as it is the fullest, of the contemporary narratives of the adventures of the
Jamestown colonists for the first two years.” Gay explained to Bryant: “My aim
is to make [the Popular History] an entirely new & original work, & so far it is
written on original authorities without regard to, & with the most trifling aid, if
any at all, from the standard histories. It seems to me important that it should
be clearly understood that we have not in the least followed, & do not propose
to follow, any beaten path; but that this treatment of the early period is fresh,
presenting very much [that] which methinks could only be found in special or
old books, only known to scholars.”73
This insistence on originality and scholarly rigor also prompted Gay in his
earliest drafts of the manuscript to deviate from the standard interpretations of
Dutch culture in New York. Gay admired the Dutch as a people who in Eu-
rope “had been busy for centuries in redeeming foot after foot of swamp, and
marsh, and submerged land, and surrounding the fertile territory thus gained
with dikes and defenses against the ocean.” But these industrious habits did
not carry over to the Dutch New Netherlands settlement in America, where
economic pettiness and abusive rule doomed the colony. The irresponsible
actions of an “imbecile” leader like Wouter Van Twiller were so glaring, Gay

noted, that “the gravity of the few records of the time is occasionally enlivened
by narratives which might almost seem exaggerations in the pages of Diedrich
Knickerbocker.”74 In referencing Knickerbocker, Gay distinguished once again
between his form of historical realism and Washington Irving’s sentimentality.
As he had with John Smith, Gay chose to debunk Irving’s maudlin depictions
of the Dutch, and the original drafts of the chapters on the New Netherlands
colony were highly condemnatory. Indeed, Bryant referred to them as “dep-
recatory and jeering” in tone.75 In his private correspondence with Gay, Bry-
ant urged a more compassionate portrait, agreeing in spirit with comments
articulated later by J. Franklin Jameson that Irving’s humorous portrayal of the
Dutch “made it permanently difficult for the American public to take a serious
view of these early Dutch days. Oloffe the Dreamer and Walter the Doubter,
Abraham with the ten breeches and Stuyvesant with the wooden leg, have be-
come too thoroughly domesticated among us to admit of that.”76 Americans
had certain expectations for the Dutch as historical figures, Bryant alleged,
and it wouldn’t do to challenge these myths too thoroughly, even in the name
of mature and sober scholarship.
Gay, who had found after exhaustive research in contemporary sources that
the history of New Netherlands was dull and depressing, promised Bryant that
he would introduce more of the ridiculing tone of Irving as a way of giving “some
color” to an otherwise “very base, bald & dull synopsis of well-known history.”77
He did so, however, in ways that inverted the Knickerbocker formula. Like Wash-
ington Irving, Gay presumed satire to be an appropriate trope for dealing with
the excesses of the Dutch explorers. But unlike Irving, who satirized the Dutch as
a way of increasing the comedic effect of his narrative, Gay used the device to un-
derscore the tragic realities of a misguided community. “The pages of Knicker-
bocker’s History rather reproduce than caricature . . . the early Dutch colonists,”
Gay noted, and when stripped of their farcical narrative structure tell a startlingly
realistic and disparaging story.78 “The truth is I had to restrain myself from pre-
senting an absurd picture of the Dutch rule,” Gay wrote Bryant, and “it is sur-
prising how little Irving had to parody it in his Knickerbocker.”79 Bryant, in turn,
felt that Gay had misconstrued Knickerbocker’s form of satire as tragic rather
than comic, and he urged his coauthor to alter some of his most biting comments
about New Netherlands as a concession to sensitivities of Dutch readers, espe-
cially in New York City.80 This Gay did, although he made it clear to Bryant that
he felt a more honest treatment of the subject would bear out his conclusions. In
a conciliatory note he quipped wryly: “With the changes you suggest I think it
will not be offensive to the most thin-skinned of our Dutchmen.”81
There was less disagreement between Bryant and Gay regarding the proper
assessment of other nationalities in colonial America. Both authors agreed that

the Spanish had been reprehensible in every way, and Gay took numerous op-
portunities in the manuscript to claim that colonizers from Spain were of a truly
inferior stock. In a private letter, Bryant reminded Gay that the Spanish may
have been no more bigoted than the French, although on the assumption that
two wrongs do not make a right, he acceded to the condemnatory tone of Gay’s
anti-Spanish remarks.82 The true heroes among European colonists in both
Bryant’s and Gay’s depictions were the British, whose “destiny” it was, they ar-
gued, “to possess the land.”83 In submitting a draft of a chapter on the Pilgrims
at Plymouth, for instance, Gay wrote to an agreeable Bryant that the Separatists
were worthy of high praise. “As to the Pilgrims . . . I think I am, perfectly impar-
tial. I can only see in their story those staid, earnest, religious, simple & strong
men whom I have tried to portray.”84 In The Popular History, Gay heralded
the perseverance, diligence and steady convictions of these religious dissenters,
painting a truly heroic word portrait of a people who arrived in the worst season
possible with weather that “was so cold that the sea-spray, as it fell upon those
exposed in the open shallop, encased them, as it were, in armor of ice.”85
Yet even here, at his most sentimental, Gay encouraged readers to resist
over-romanticizing the Pilgrims. In discussing the disembarkation of the Sepa-
ratists on Cape Cod, for instance, Gay focused on the rather “commonplace”
demeanor of the “[s]eventeen rough men” whose unassuming landing on
American shores had been transformed into a historical “epoch” by filiopi-
etistic citizens. The glorification of Plymouth Rock, whose symbolic mean-
ing is “commemorated by the descendants of the Pilgrims, wherever they are
found, on the anniversary of a day when the event did not occur,” Gay wrote,
distorts the truth about the landing, as does “the general supposition that on
that day the people of the Mayflower landed from the ship upon the Rock of
Plymouth—which they certainly did not do until a fortnight later.” When we
consult the “cold, bare records of ordinary facts,” Gay noted, we discover that
“[a]ll the romantic interest that tradition lends to the landing of the Pilgrims
came later,” and that this first coming ashore was a rather mundane affair. Mary
Chilton and John Alden were not the first to step upon Plymouth Rock as New
England mythology alleged, according to Gay. “Neither of those persons is
named in the list, which professes to be a full one, of those who in the shallop,
on the fifth of December, discovered the bay of Plymouth; and certainly no
woman could have been upon such an expedition,” he wrote. “Nor is it likely
that any woman went on shore in the stormy weather, after the arrival of the
Mayflower in the harbor on the 16th, till the general visit was made on the 25th
to the selected spot.”86
Gay was still less sentimental and forgiving about the Puritans at Massa-
chusetts Bay, who, in his estimation, were more intolerant than their Pilgrim

neighbors at Plymouth. “These men had come into the wilderness to build
up a theocracy, and made no pretensions of securing liberty for anybody but
themselves,” he wrote. “They were quite as intolerant of opinions that were not
their own as the most inexorable persecutor that ever ‘peppered’ a Puritan.”
The persecutions of Roger Williams and the Quakers of Boston were prime
examples of the lack of humanity in Puritan Massachusetts. The Puritans lived
to punish, Gay noted with Hawthornian determiniation, and “might there-
fore be imagined as pining while heresy was inactive”; if so, they were revived
thoroughly by dissenters, using against them with curious short-sightedness
“the pillory, the brandishing-iron, the whipping-post, and the ear-shears, from
whose expansive cruelties they had escaped beyond the sea.” Governor Endi-
cott viewed the twice-weekly whippings of imprisoned Quakers as a “private
luxury,” while the executions of female Quakers like Mary Dyer were con-
ducted with “a revolting sameness.” Gay added in a condemnatory tone that
the Puritans were unworthy of a more generous assessment. “Making every
possible allowance for the strength of religious convictions, and for the sensi-
tiveness of political relations still inchoate and experimental, it is hard to feel
any other excuse than that which may be given for any religious bigotry for
this persecution of a handful of harmless people, whose numbers were too
few to be dangerous, and whose doctrines were too abstruse, if not absolutely
too unmeaning, to admit of that number being ever seriously increased. . . . No
glimmer of merciful relenting, no ray of pitiful compassion, soften or relieve
the cruel and sombre gloom of this page in the history of Massachusetts.”87
When Bryant first read in draft form Gay’s depiction of the Puritans, he
was concerned by its pointed quality, not just in terms of its negative portrayal
of the Puritans but with regard to its attack on the more charitable treatments
of rival historians as well. In a footnote on Roger Williams, for instance, Gay
had singled out for specific criticism the recent work of Henry M. Dexter, the
author of several apologetic articles on the treatment of religious dissidents
by Puritan magistrates.88 Bryant, who had a professed aversion to scholarly
controversy, strongly recommended that this personal attack on Dexter be
dropped.89 Gay was reluctant, however, for reasons that related to his desire to
emphasize historical accuracy over sectional partisanship. “There is an histor-
ical school—so to speak—spring[ing] up in Massachusetts whose object is to
defend the Puritans as the wisest & best of men, who never did & never could
do wrong,” Gay noted to his coauthor. “Of this school Dr. Dexter is the chief
apostle & to make the defense good history must be falsified & everybody who
reads it in the light of actual facts is to be denounced as a fool.” Arguing that
“Dexter’s work on Williams is the work of a bigot,” Gay condemned it as “full
of unfairness & fabrication” as well as “a constructive argument for a definite

end, not a seamless reading of history.” Dexter was so anxious “to establish the
perfect character of the Boston Puritans,” Gay noted, that he felt compelled
to “show that Williams was a nuisance, a fanatic offensive to all that is good in
Church & State, a visionary eaten up by self-conceit, one properly punished as
dangerous to the peace of society.” Gay defended his less admiring interpreta-
tion to Bryant by insisting that “candid and truthful history can neither wink
out of sight nor palliate the intolerance and cruelty which they visited upon
those who differed from them.”90
Despite the persuasive logic of Gay’s arguments, Bryant urged him to remove
the offensive footnote. The tone of this request reflected a growing concern on
the part of Bryant that Gay’s enthusiasm for picking scholarly fights with other
historians on small matters of interpretation revealed a creeping professional-
ism that threatened the popular nature of their joint enterprise. Acknowledg-
ing that Dexter was short-sided in his view of the Puritans, Bryant nonetheless
surmised that “it does not seem to me well to go beyond that and pronounce
sentence on him,” since Gay’s proposed footnote expressed an “excessive acri-
mony” and that might “naturally provoke a controversy.” As was typical of most
popular historians, Bryant was reluctant to engage in historiographic battles,
cautioning Gay that his footnote was tantamount “to a charge of willful false-
hood, and I don’t wish to be answerable for that.” Scribner had hired them
“to write the history of the United States,” he reminded Gay, “not to show that
Dr. Dexter’s work is a falsification of history.”91 For his part, Gay defended the
footnote as a hedge against the criticism of revisionists who would undoubt-
edly review the first volume of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States. “I
want to tell the truth about the Boston Puritans & the Rhode Island people,”
Gay insisted, as a way of challenging the authority of “the new school” whose
filiopiety he disdained.92
Eventually Gay relented, eliminating from the objectionable footnote all ref-
erences to Dexter’s errors of judgment. “You are, no doubt, quite right about
the notes in the Rhode Island chapters,” Gay conceded to Bryant in a reflec-
tive moment that reveals the spirit of compromise pervading the collaborative
enterprise. “They had a large query in my own mind as to whether they were
quite wise. Not that they are untrue or too severe, but whether this was the
place for them.” Gay explained contritely: “Dexter will be sure to do all he can
to injure the book,” he warned, “& I only hoped to draw his fire and render
him harmless.”93 Bryant congratulated Gay for his more mature, even-handed
approach. “I am glad that you have delivered up your victim Dr. Dexter, with
so good a grace,” the poet wrote in response. “You have proved him to be in
the wrong without calling him a liar.” Importantly, Bryant defended his co-
author’s right to challenge falsifiers of facts: “As to the facts, you know me well

enough to be sure that I would have them related without disguise, and that if
they are unpleasant to any body, I look at the matter in this light—that the fault
is in the facts and not in him whose business it is to relate them.” But Bryant
also admitted that such a personalized attack as that proposed by Gay on Dex-
ter would have caused him “many moments of discomfort.”94
Disagreements such as these over matters of emphasis and argument be-
tween Bryant and Gay remind us of the negotiated quality of the historical
writing and cut to the heart of the competing visions of history among popu-
larizers and professionals. Sentimental in his outlook and captivated by virtues
of popular heroes, Bryant provided generous assessments of adventurers that
did not threaten the accepted myths of the American people. Less enamored
of traditional heroes and more polemical in style, Gay called for franker treat-
ments that sometimes debunked those adventurers as a way of exposing the
superficialities of national mythologies and the incompetencies of some his-
torical investigators. For his part, Charles Scribner was content to allow the
two coauthors to work out their differences of opinion, although he had a fi-
nancial stake in seeing that the history reached as wide an audience as possible
and was predisposed, therefore, toward Bryant’s more generous and popular
assessments. “In spite of its completeness the History is not weighed [down]
with useless comment,” Scribner reminded readers in a broadside advertising
the work, “and its chief aim is to tell one of the most dramatic stories in the an-
nals of the world, in the simplest, most accurate and most vivid way.”95
The distinctions between Bryant’s sentimental manner and Gay’s realist
proclivities were evidenced best in their differing treatments of Native Ameri-
cans. Gay was inclined to argue that despite certain lapses into inevitable
savagery, Native Americans were innocent, curious, confiding and largely vic-
timized by whites who “intensif[ied] the weakness which distinguished them
as savages.” Gay admitted that some Indians who fought in the Pequot War
of the late 1630s did so for the sole purpose of seeking bloody revenge against
white intruders. But most acted out of justifiable desperation provoked by a
“terrible dilemma,” namely, that they must either fight to the death these “pale-
faced strangers” or turn their backs forever “upon the beloved land where the
bones of their ancestors were buried.” It was the Puritans, in Gay’s estimation,
who exhibited the more contemptible behavior during the Pequot War, as in
the unprovoked attack on the fort of Chief Miantonomo, where the idea “that
the weaker—the very young, the very old, and the women—should escape, was
impossible” for the Puritans to accept, and where “the stronger, if not driven
back to suffocation and torture in the smoke and flames of their own homes,
could only throw themselves desperately upon the swords of the unyielding
circle of steady Englishmen, or meet beyond a still more impenetrable circle of

their own countrymen inexorable as death and more cruel than fire.” Rather
than genocidal extermination, Gay argued, the better policy would have been
to Christianize the natives; but the “work of killing was far more successful
than that of converting,” moralized Gay, “and their utter extinction, though
gradual, was certain.”96
Bryant once again objected to Gay’s harsh approach to the Puritans in this
matter of their treatment of Native Americans. In a private letter penned after
he had read Gay’s assessment of the Pequot War in draft form, Bryant de-
fended the Puritans in their actions against Miantonomo, rejecting Gay’s read-
ing that they acted wrongly out of religious fanaticism. He once again urged
his coauthor to soften his position. “If on considering what I have said you
see no cause to speak of any possible extenuation of [Puritan] conduct I hope
you will at least give them the benefit of the probable motive in a note or some
other way,” wrote Bryant.97 Gay thought over the suggestion and late in the
preparation of the manuscript did add a few mollifying remarks more concilia-
tory toward the Puritans, but he did so out of respect for Bryant the man rather
than Bryant the historian. Reminding his co-author that such changes in proof
pages were “expensive” to make, Gay added deferentially that the cost “is of
little moment if it now meets with your approbation.”98 But in this as in most
other editorial matters, Gay believed he was right, and his debunking point of
view prevailed in those segments of the book in which Puritan behavior was
examined most thoroughly. “I had rather not tell any unpleasant truths about
them if history would let me off,” Gay explained to Bryant. Citing his own
ancestral relationships to John Cotton and Increase Mather, Gay insisted that
if history justified a more charitable depiction he would be happy to appease
his relatives by narrating such. But he noted that most historians (including
Savage, Hildreth, and Bancroft) took “much the same tone” as he had. No his-
torian except Palfrey “ventures to defend the course pursued by the Puritans,”
Gay wrote, adding that “Palfrey always defends whatever they do” and “does
not hesitate to falsify evidence to that end.” By contrast, Gay proclaimed self-
righteously, “I try to write real history, not to manufacture it.”99
This last statement was not strictly true. Occasionally Gay did tolerate the
“manufacturing” of a little history, if the implications were not too profound for
the scholarly integrity of the popular volumes. During the drafting process of
the Popular History, for instance, Bryant received many notes from expectant
readers who had seen the circulars promoting the volumes and who wished
to lobby for special consideration of one sort or another for their ancestors.
Generally Bryant passed these “petitions” along to Gay with notations either
endorsing or rejecting the requests. The grandson of much-maligned General
William Hull wished to have his relative exonerated for the surrender of Detroit

in the War of 1812, noting that the most prominent historian of the case “now
fully vindicates his course.”100 Gay obliged Bryant in this more generous assess-
ment of Hull, writing that the general was caught in the “stern conflict between
the sense of soldierly duty and the feelings of a humane man and a father,” and
“the soldier yielded.”101 But Gay was not always so accommodating, especially
if he felt historical accuracy was at stake. In another instance, for example, Bry-
ant wrote Gay asking if a special mention could be made in the history on behalf
of a friend, Dr. T. Apoleon Cheney, for his role in calling the first meeting of the
Republican Party in the 1850s. “His desire is harmless,” Bryant wrote, “and I
think should be gratified if he makes out his case.”102 Evidently Gay remained
unconvinced by the argument, however, because Cheney’s role in the founding
of the Republican Party was not mentioned in Bryant’s Popular History.103 Gay
seems to have drawn the line at such efforts to lace the collaborative history with
personal tributes to friends, even when his own relationship with Bryant might
suffer in the process.
Despite Bryant’s occasional intrusions on behalf of friends and acquain-
tances, his largest contributions to the first two volumes of the history were
mainly stylistic. The poet-turned-historian took this role seriously, because for
him rhetoric was not merely a cosmetic matter of literary embellishment but an
important analytic branch of linguistics concerned with the arts of persuasion,
reasoning, and proof. In fact, the correspondence between the coauthors of the
Popular History reveals a good deal about the significant role that “rhetoric”
played in the nineteenth century despite the fact that it is trivialized today as
synonymous with exaggerated or inflated discourse. Many of Bryant’s edito-
rial notes regarding drafts of the earliest chapters of the work have to do pri-
marily with Gay’s prose style, which predictably Bryant found too restrained
at times.104 On the one hand, Bryant was apologetic about his limited role as
a mere copy-editor. “I feel . . . almost uncomfortable with the reflection that I
can do little more than supervise the semi-colons and commas and such like,”
he wrote Gay.105 On the other hand, Bryant was thorough in the work of proof-
reading, making a special point of identifying what he called the “verbal blem-
ishes” in Gay’s writing and suggesting how such imperfections reflected on
the explanatory persuasiveness of his argument.106 Often he proposed to make
just “one or two amendments of phrase” to a chapter, only to submit nearly ten
single-spaced pages of notes. In particular, Bryant disliked slang and colloquial
words like “pluck” and “cheery,” which he derided as the “favorite Cockney
terms” of his coauthor.107 He rejected Gay’s use of “newspaper phrases” as
well, like “such a fix,” or his reliance on “burlesque” words like “cantanker-
ous.”108 He warned Gay: “It does not become an historian, in translating sober
history, to use slang words.”109

Bryant also complained of Gay’s tendency to assume too scholarly a pro-
file, taking issue with his use of Latinisms, which he thought should “either be
given in English or explained in a note” for the benefit of readers of a “popular
history.”110 Most important, Bryant argued that Gay’s habit of citing authori-
ties in the manner of scholarly volumes would affect the narrative flow of their
Popular History. In January 1876, Bryant wrote his coauthor: “I send you back
the tenth chapter of the History. You say nothing about its authorship, but it
seems to me that it is from another hand than yours,” being overfilled as it was
with quotes from the “old chroniclers” in lieu of original prose. “Judiciously
interspersed,” Bryant argued, such quotations “give a certain dramatic effect
to the narrative, but I question whether in this chapter they are not too lib-
erally employed. . . . Too many quotations of this kind give a patchwork air to
history.”111 Frustrated by Gay’s scholarly habit of “sifting” through “evidence
and balancing probabilities” before making historical judgments, Bryant com-
plained that his coauthor’s style “has not the power of firing the attention that a
narrative has when told by one who had no doubts to solve as he proceeds.”112
Gay accepted most of Bryant’s criticisms with good humor, although those
concerning his scholarly detachment rankled him a bit. “Let me say,” he wrote
his senior colleague, “that I am as far as you can be from approving of writing
history by allusions & my purpose is always to have every thing I say perfectly
plain to the reader—never for rhetorical effect to refer to something in a way
that may seem erudite or brilliant but conveys no distinct ideas to the reader.”
His style was less narrative and sentimental than Bryant would have liked, Gay
recognized, but his primary goal was to reflect consciously on “how to recover
social life from the past” without excluding the more mundane political and
institutional history of the country—to search for “some glimpse of the life of
the men and women who were unconsciously building up an empire through
the uneventful detail of their daily duties and pleasures.” Gay also urged his
coauthor not to lose sight of the proverbial forest for the trees. “You have read
the chapters critically, as [so] much proof rather than as a continuous literary
work,” Gay reminded Bryant, adding that a more unified reading of the entire
project would confirm the wisdom of his stylistic choices. “I only want you
to believe that I do not work carelessly,” Gay added. “I suppose the sense I
mean to convey does not strike you because you are reading to detect errors
& imperfections, & not, as other people will, because they are interested in
the story, & see the effect of perspective & lights & shadows in the picture.”
Acknowledging the hierarchy of duties established by Scribner’s Sons with
reference to the production of Bryant’s Popular History, Gay concluded none-
theless that his own authorial voice must be the one to prevail ultimately. “If
you read in this way, I should lose the benefit of your criticisms, but while I

have that I want you to believe that a word may sometimes have a significance
in my use of it which I hope & believe the reader will see who reads—so to
speak—between the lines.”113
Despite the sometimes strained relationship between Bryant and Gay as
suggested by these conversations about style, the two generally came to agree-
ments on how such matters should be resolved in the text. The collaborative
arrangements worked out by the coauthors suggest how conspicuously su-
tured Bryant’s Popular History was, revealing the stitches of negotiation and
compromise. Bryant rewrote significant sections of the early volumes when
he found them unsatisfactory from a literary point of view, and Gay generally
adopted such suggestions with only minor complaints. The poet justified his
nit-picking by reminding Gay somewhat egotistically that the vaunted Bryant
name would appear on the title page, explaining that “the passages in which
the words occur may be quoted against me, and I shall hardly know how to
defend myself” if they are inadequate.114 Gay understood the pecking order,
generally deferring to Bryant’s reputation as a luminary and treating his coau-
thor with the respect due an unofficial poet laureate while refusing to ignore
his own important role as lead writer. “I never forget for a moment that I owe it
to you that I have the opportunity of writing this book, while you are respon-
sible, at least, for an implied approval of it,” Gay noted.115 The submission of
drafts back and forth meant that the project took longer to complete than the
publishers at Scribner’s Sons would have liked, but the end product, both au-
thors felt, would justify the process. There was good reason to be optimistic.
“We have seen some specimen sheets,” wrote one manuscript reviewer, “and
they are sufficient to show that the book will be produced in a manner which
will be worthy of the distinguished editor and the publishers.” The details of
American history “will be narrated in a style so readable and popular that old
and young alike will be charmed,” the reviewer promised.116
A Work “Made to Sell”

Bryant’s Popular History of the United States was sold by subscription
in fifty “parts” at fifty cents each, with no order received except for the entire
work. Four large royal octavo volumes were projected of nearly seven hundred
pages each, the first appearing in 1876 with three others to “follow as rapidly
as the magnitude and importance of the work will permit” at a total price of
twenty-five dollars.117 That cost was greater than John Frost’s Popular His-
tory by some measure, but initial subscribers remarked on the value of the
“elegant” illustrations and the excellent book design. “The book will be one

of those expenses which we rank among the necessities of life,” Chas. Cushing
of Cleveland, Ohio remarked, “such books—as has been said—being the only
paper currency, that is worth more than specie.”118 Readers seemed anxious
to sign on. “There can be no doubt that such a book as this is much needed,”
wrote one expectant reader, adding: “There are many histories of our coun-
try in existence—some good, some tolerable, some very bad; but we cannot
remember any one of them which deserves to be called a ‘popular’ history.”119
Early sales numbers indicated that the project would be a likely success with
over $53,000 in subscriptions received in the first months of canvassing by
book agents.120 Charles Scribner was encouraged. Reviewers of proof pages
of volume one of the manuscript indicated that “the work gives promise of
becoming the classic history of the Country, as it will unquestionably at once
become the standard.”121
Just as the first volume began to sell, however, disaster struck. On June
12, 1878, William Cullen Bryant died at the age of eighty-three. The public
outpouring of love and respect for the venerated writer was extraordinary, as
Americans from all walks of life paid tribute to him in eulogies, memorials, and
public recitations of his poetry. Work on the Scribner popular history naturally
stopped for a brief period after Bryant’s death, although the disposition of
the manuscript was never far from the minds of either Gay or Scribner. Many
subscribers who had received volume one and partial sections of volume two
by the summer of 1878 assumed that the project would be laid to rest with its
primary author. In the weeks and months after Bryant’s death, the business
manager for Scribner’s Sons received numerous inquiries from disappointed
readers of the history, some of whom canceled their orders for future install-
ments while others demanded their money back on the presumption that the
work would never be completed. Operating under the false assumption that
Bryant had been doing the majority of the writing for the history, these sub-
scribers were among the many fooled by a “merchandising device” that now
backfired on Scribner. Since the inception of the project, the publisher had
advertised the work as Bryant’s Popular History, obscuring the fact that the
volumes were being ghostwritten largely by Gay. As early as 1875 the literary
journal Owl protested against “using Mr. Bryant’s name to give [the Popular
History of the United States] a reputation and help its sale” when “somebody
else” was obviously writing the volumes.122 While Bryant was alive, Scribner
had countered the “protest against this method of putting books upon the
market” by issuing the aforementioned statement from the poet/historian reas-
suring readers that he was taking an active part in the writing of the history.123
With the poet’s death, however, Scribner was forced to admit the hyperbole
of his advertising in order to retain subscribers to the series, acknowledging

publicly that Gay’s heavy involvement in the writing of the first volumes meant
that there would be little drop off in the quality of the later volumes, despite
Bryant’s death. This reversal not only called into question the motivations of
the publishers in bringing forth a popular history, it also affected profoundly
Gay’s relationship to Scribner’s Sons, which he sought increasingly to bend to
his own realist and scholarly will.124
Despite the loss of its titular author, the publishing house had no intention
of abandoning the project. No one at the company thought it inappropriate
to capitalize on the deceased poet’s name and reputation; indeed, the feel-
ing was that the series should be seen through to completion while Bryant’s
stock remained high. The publisher’s plan was to allow Gay to proceed with
the unfinished portion of the work, roughly the history of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, while continuing to advertise the volumes as Bryant’s
Popular History of the United States. In point of fact, this represented little de-
parture from the operating procedure to date, since Gay had done most of the
researching and drafting of the early chapters. Bryant’s careful editorial com-
ments would be missing, of course, but the business managers at Scribner’s
Sons substituted their own copy editors and expressed hope that Gay might
be able to work even more expeditiously with these stand-ins who would be
far less demanding of change than Bryant. In a note outlining editorial strate-
gies in the wake of Bryant’s death, Scribner urged Gay to complete volume
two as rapidly as possible in order to convince readers “that all rumors about
the stoppage of the work have been totally false; a fact it has been difficult to
convince everyone of heretofore.”125
Bryant’s death, however, represented one of those unforeseen moments in
the production history of a book that altered irrecoverably the final product.
For Gay had no inclination or desire to step up the pace of his writing in order
to satisfy the demands of the popular book market. Even before Bryant’s death,
Gay had resented the speed at which he was expected to work by Scribner’s
Sons in order to meet deadlines. “Mr. Armstrong told me the last time I was
in town . . . that some complaints had been made to you of the delay in the
appearance of the vol. [II],” Gay had written Bryant in 1877. “I suppose this
is inevitable; everybody who reads Vol. I of any book wants Vol. II the next
week. But I am writing history—not making merchandise—not even making
a book in the market sense.” This conscious rejection of the commercial im-
pulses behind the enterprise suggested the degree to which Gay differed from
his publisher regarding profit motives and popular history. The major blame
for delays, Gay added defensively, rested with the “mistaken management” of
Scribner’s Sons who had misrepresented the scope of the project. “My under-
standing with Seymour at the outset was that it would be impossible to bring

out a volume within the time set if it exceeded 400 to 450 pages, the page to be
about 420 words. But one morning he said to me—as if we were making cloth
by the yard—we will make the page about 500 words and the volume about
600 to 650 pages, & get it out next month! The truth is the volume is at least
one third,—nearly one half—longer than first contemplated, & it makes the
labor enormous. . . . Pardon me for saying anything on these matters,” Gay had
written apologetically to his coauthor when he was alive, “but I can’t bear you
should think I am dilatory, when, in fact, I am working very hard. Moreover, we
don’t want a work ‘made to sell,’ which, if so made, won’t sell at all.”126
These complaints intensified rather than decreased after Bryant’s death.
Gay argued that the more contemporary events were, the more research was
required of him to provide a balanced account of their historical significance.
He resented the “great hurry” of the publishers at Scribner’s and elsewhere,
who seemed to have no appreciation for the complexities of historical writing.
“It is dreadful to be so pressed for time, for I feel all the while that if I had more
time I could bring out the essential character of all this early history much bet-
ter than I can pretend to do under such pressure, & make others see that my
view is entirely impartial,” Gay wrote. Refusing to compromise his standards,
he justified his frequent delays to his publisher with reference to the fastidious-
ness of his work as a historian: “Nobody knows so well as I do how hurried &
imperfect it all is, but it is at least a conscientious work.”127 The response from
Scribner was to hire additional authors to complete individual sections of the
project on topics Gay felt less qualified to deliver. In keeping with the strong
literary strain of popular histories in this period, these were authors with es-
tablished reputations as writers, such as Edward Everett Hale, who were hired
to restore some of Bryant’s literary sensibility to the enterprise. But Gay found
it hard to work with such “help,” and he spent more time critiquing and sav-
aging the chapters of his “assistants” than in the writing of his own.128 This
inability to work with others in turn provoked the wrath of Charles Scribner,
who had publication deadlines to satisfy. Eventually he insisted that Gay give
up some of his responsibilities for the volumes so that the copy editors could
do their work. “As it seems impossible for Mr. Burlingame and Mr. Marvin to
accommodate themselves to your ways, of late,” the publisher noted, “why will
you not consent to put it all in Mr. Johnson’s hands! It will be a great relief to
you and to us too—as we shall be able to make more rapid progress.”129
Despite the extra help and stern admonishments from his publisher, Gay’s
writing slowed to a trickle throughout 1879 and the early months of 1880. Still
drawing $400 a month as an advance against royalties, Gay was producing
less than twenty-five pages every five weeks, a rate that Charles Scribner com-
plained would soon bankrupt the project. The pace “presents a very ominous

appearance,” Scribner wrote Gay, and “is certainly anything but encouraging.”
In addition, Scribner accused Gay of avoiding him, refusing to answer his fre-
quent letters or to respond to his messengers. “You give me no satisfactory as-
surance, seldom answer questions contained in my letters, and I don’t think
you are doing all that you expected to do,” the publisher protested to his au-
thor. Scribner added: “Of course, I am anxious to know from time to time what
advance is being made on the work and, also, how you are coming out in the
matter of space. Is it not proper that some information be given?”130 The tone
of the publisher’s complaints intensified still more over the next few months:
“The expense is becoming such a burden that I cannot refrain from calling your
attention to it,” the publisher wrote Gay. “The price which we are paying for
a page of the Hist. is something enormous. . . . No book under heaven could
stand such payments.”131 Unrepentant, Gay argued that he would not rush
through any part of the work. “The writing of history is one of the things that
is not necessarily well done, because it is done quickly,” he argued. “Rather the
converse of that proposition is true, and our readers should thank us that we
have not been tempted into haste.” Admitting that some apologies might be
due readers for the popular history’s “many shortcomings,” Gay insisted that
“an apology for delay” or “undue haste” would not be “one of them.”132
By the summer of 1880, it was clear to Charles Scribner that Gay was com-
mitted to writing something other than a “popular” history, and the publisher
openly objected to the kidnapping of the project. The only leverage the pub-
lishers had in rectifying the situation was financial, so Scribner threatened to
renegotiate Gay’s contract in light of the slower pace of the writing. “It seems
to me that in view of the work on the History being prolonged so far beyond
the time contemplated some new arrangement should be made between us.
You can easily understand that the payment of so large an amount each month
is a matter of serious importance,” he wrote his author.133 The publisher pro-
posed reducing Gay’s advances to $300 a month beginning in April of 1880,
to which Gay responded with a sense of bitterness and betrayal, demanding
the current $400 stipend and threatening legal action if the entire sum was
not remanded.134 The publisher sent the full $400 in April, but he wrote back
testily with an additional warning: “I have been surprised at the manner in
which you received my announcement that it w’d be necessary to lessen the
am’t of monthly advances to you. If you would stop to calculate you w’d find
that for less than half the 4th volume of the History I have paid out for au-
thorship alone, between $7000 & $8000. It is unreasonable to expect me to
continue at such a rate. I cannot do it.” Scribner determined that he could pay
$400 a month only if Gay could guarantee to produce one hundred pages of
typescript during that period. If not, then he would insist on the reduction,

even if it meant losing Gay as author. “Unless this is done I shall be obliged to
lessen the advance as I have written, and much as I should regret your giving
up the work, I should prefer it to such a waste of money as has occurred under
the present system.”135 Eventually the advances were reduced to $300 a month,
although Gay warned that there would be consequences to the hurried pace
that such a reduction would require.136
Among the consequences Gay had in mind was a less balanced (because less
thoroughly researched and edited) history. From the beginning of the project,
Gay had worked hard to control the “mawkish sentimentality” associated with
much of Bryant’s historical vision, but the more studied approach he hoped to
substitute in its place collided with Charles Scribner’s ambitious publication
schedule. The result was that Gay’s preferred brand of realism gave way to
informed opinion, the rejection of melodramatic excess leading not so much
to objectivity as to polemic. Gay had always had his “causes,” of course, but
as a concession to Bryant’s alternative visions and in the interest of present-
ing a unified and unbiased front, he had suppressed the impulse to speak his
mind in the pages of the popular history. After Bryant’s death, however, Gay
came to believe (as the title of a recent book suggests) that “objectivity is not
neutrality,” and he adopted a much more political tone in his writings.137 He
knew from his work in the editorial offices of the New York Evening Post that
many of his opinions were not shared universally by Americans, and he under-
stood that an aggressive posturing on certain matters might doom an author to
obscurity. Willing to risk unpopularity in the popular book market, Gay now
challenged the agreeable tone established by Bryant in the earlier volumes.
The last two volumes of Bryant’s Popular History of the United States are
certainly very different in temper and method from the first two, and the incon-
gruities between Bryant’s preface and Gay’s text are most evident in these lat-
ter books. In volumes three and four of the work, for instance, Gay disparaged
Americans for “being aroused to an irresponsible enthusiasm on the most facti-
tious pretexts” when writing about the founding fathers, in the process “raising
the most ordinary mortals to immortality with shouts so frantic that they come
at length to be believed sincere.” By inference, then, Gay rejected the blatant
hagiography implicit in the preface to Bryant’s Popular History of the United
States. In its place, however, Gay offered an equally partisan and less heroic
depiction of politics in America, reversing the political tone of the popular his-
tory in jarring ways. Jefferson was now “conceited”; Madison’s policies were
an “absolute and unmitigated disgrace”; and Jackson was “neither a wise nor
a good man, and in many respects he was both a foolish and a bad one.” The
strong points in Jackson’s character “were precisely those engendered and de-
veloped in the mastership of a gang of negro slaves, and the education of the

plantation,” Gay added, and the “slaveholders saw in him a magnified reflection
of themselves” which “they admired and esteemed” accordingly. That Jackson
was popular even in the North was attributable to the fact that “there has been
always a singular severity in the character of a portion of the American people.
In that class the slaveholder has always found his Northern servitor.”138
These departures from the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition extolled by
Bryant in his preface reflected an alternative politics that Gay had suppressed
in the first two volumes of the series but which now spilled onto the written
page with full force. The opening surge in this tidal wave of partisanship de-
rived from Gay’s frustration with the Democratic Party’s toleration of slavery
as an institution in the prewar era. Chapters in the third and fourth volumes of
the history were filled with prose attacks on the “pernicious system” of slavery,
which Gay condemned as the “curse of every colony where it gained a perma-
nent foothold” and the responsibility of every political party that refused to
acknowledge “the fatal mistake of a reliance upon slave-labor.”139 While Bry-
ant was an outspoken critic of slavery and broke from the Democratic Party
on the issue in the 1850s, he muted his complaints in the popular history as a
concession to southern readers. In the preface to the first volume, for instance,
the poet avoided purposely several opportunities to use fanaticism in the ser-
vice of melodramatic intent, advocating instead for a more moderate position
by noting that the actions of abolitionists and slaveowners “can now, as they
and their acts pass in review before the historian, be judged with a degree of
calmness belonging to a new era of our political existence.”140 The prospec-
tus, after all, had declared that the popular history “shall be entirely free from
any sectional bias.”141 Gay, however, persisted in a form of Dixie-bashing that
made Bryant’s Popular History distinctly unpopular in parts of the South.
While Northerners demonstrated “quick intelligence and active habits” and
made “good soldier[s],” Gay noted in the popular history, the “social condi-
tion of the South, on the other hand, produced men whose lack of education,
and whose smaller intelligence, required long and severe training” and whose
political leaders were “overbearing in manners from the constant practice of
petty tyranny over their helpless slaves.” During the slavery debates of the
nineteenth century, Northerners had made “an earnest appeal to reason, to
patriotism, to humanity, and to fundamental law,” Gay argued, while those in
the South had maintained “a stern, unbroken front, impassioned, overbearing,
defiant, and threatening.” In the South, he concluded condescendingly, “cot-
ton was king and kings are not necessarily held to reason.”142
Whereas Bryant had trumpeted the valiant although failed efforts of Amer-
ica’s leading politicians (northern and southern) to withstand the pressures
of armed conflict, Gay placed the blame for the Civil War squarely at the clay

feet of pro-slavery leaders. Former president of the United States John Tyler,
for instance, was described by Gay as “a bigot” and “a person with whom
self-conceit led to arrogance, while it blinded him to considerations of a large,
national policy, even if he were capable of grasping one.” Northern politi-
cians who acquiesced to the imperatives of slavery shared equal blame for the
war. The “clumsy pretense” that slavery was a Southern problem was but a
“soothing figment,” Gay wrote, that “lulled the sluggish Northern conscience
and befogged Northern intelligence.” Leaders such as Daniel Webster, who
abandoned the abolitionist cause in an effort to secure southern approval for a
presidential run, encouraged “a people of a higher strain of blood, with centu-
ries of gentle breeding, and a high degree of moral and intellectual cultivation
behind them” to be controlled by “an ill-bred, uneducated, and brutal handful
of slaveholders.” Franklin Pierce vacillated pathetically on the issue of slavery,
“so weak and so destitute of a political conscience that he was a mere tool in
the hands of the stronger men about him.”143
The intense tone of Gay’s attack on slavery represented a distinct departure
from the more cautious approach of the earlier volumes. On the one hand, it
is not surprising that Gay became more impassioned on the contentious topic
of slavery after he assumed sole authority for the completion of the project. As
a journalist working for an abolitionist paper in New York in the 1850s, Gay
had made his printing offices a stop on the Underground Railroad, and his
diaries from those years are filled with descriptions of fugitives who came and
went and the monies he expended on them.144 On the other hand, it was the
vitriolic fervor of Gay’s enthusiasm for the cause that was so startling, particu-
larly when contrasted with the sober tone of the rest of his writing. Abolition-
ists were the only real political heroes in Gay’s later narrative, and he made
them the forebears of an emerging American personality that would have been
unrecognizable even to the sympathetic Bryant. “[W]hen contemporaneous
passions and prejudices shall have passed away,” Gay wrote, the abolitionist
movement “will be recognized as the beginning and largely the source of a
new era in American history” and “the germ of one of those revolutions that
overturn dynasties, save nations, and insure continued progress in human af-
fairs.” Abolitionists like John Brown, who emerged as saint-like martyrs in
Gay’s description, were significant not only because they challenged slavery
in the South but because they confronted those politicians in the North who
“stood in the presence of this monstrous wrong with profound indifference to
its existence, or in criminal apathy at their own moral and political responsi-
bility.” Whereas Bryant was willing to admit that abolitionists were “fearless
and ready for the martyrdom which they sometimes suffered” in their own
day, Gay was inclined to attribute to them a longer-lasting and more significant

legacy. “When a generation or two more have passed away,” Gay noted in con-
tradiction to his coauthor, “it will be easier to see and to understand how the
scattered seed of a new faith yielded a thousand-fold of fruitfulness.”145
The coming of the war was an intensely personal experience for Gay as well,
and he could not resist settling in the pages of Bryant’s Popular History of the
United States some personal vendettas he had incurred during its course, even
if that made him unpopular with readers. In volume four, for instance, Gay as-
sailed his former boss, Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune, for failing to
have come out more strongly against slavery and in support of the war effort
in the 1850s and 1860s. Ridiculing Greeley for a “conspicuous want of manli-
ness,” Gay condemned his employer’s pacifism as having given “Southerners
hope that the North was not resolved to fight.” He also criticized as treasonous
Greeley’s frequent use of anti-Lincoln cartoons and unpatriotic articles dur-
ing the war.146 It was Greeley’s reaction to the death of Lincoln, however, that
animated Gay most. On the day after Lincoln’s assassination, Gay had gone
to the offices of the Tribune to oversee the publication of a special edition of
the newspaper devoted to the slain president. In its editorial section, Gay was
horrified to find an ill-timed piece by Greeley criticizing Lincoln’s policies and
impugning his character. Gay suppressed the article, and incurred the wrath of
Greeley the next day, when the latter stormed into the Tribune offices demand-
ing to know who had censored his article. “I did,” Gay responded, and “I have
confidence enough in the people of New York to be sure that had the article
been printed, by this time, there would not be two stones of this building stand-
ing.”147 The fact that Gay saw fit to recount the episode in the pages of Bryant’s
Popular History seems startling enough—an airing of dirty laundry, as it were—
but given that Greeley had been a candidate for the presidency as recently as
1872, the account was even more striking in its political impertience.
Such strong sentiments directed at persons as respected as Horace Greeley
worried those at Scribner’s Sons who had taken on Gay as a partner in the
Popular History to stabilize rather than politicize the publication. In order to
offset the growing expenses of the volumes and to fulfill the imperatives of
a “popular” work for the widest possible circulation, the history needed to
be acceptable to readers in every section of the country, and Charles Scrib-
ner knew well the irreparable damage that could be done to the reputation of
any historical work deemed too partisan by its readers. Blaming the war un-
equivocally on the “extreme men of the South” who “knew what they wanted,
had determined upon the way by which they meant to get it, and turned with
undisguised contempt from all offers of compromise,” Gay refused to accept
any part of the counterargument that “it was the North that was arraigned as
criminal; the North that must repent of her evil ways; the North that must

clothe herself in a sackcloth, and sprinkle ashes upon her head.” As expedient
as such a nonpartisan perspective might have been for wider sales of Bryant’s
Popular History, Gay rejected the temptation to compromise his positions for
the sake of commercial benefit.148
If the highly personalized and partisan style of Gay’s treatment of aboli-
tionism and the Civil War concerned those at Scribner’s Sons, his commit-
ments to other “causes” antagonized his editors further. Gay was a devoted
worker in the temperance movement, for instance, and he used the pages of
the Popular History to rail against the evils of alcohol.149 Rum was responsible
for the “gradual deterioration” of Indian tribes, Gay argued, since it “exas-
perated courage to ferocity, and embittered every practice of savage warfare.
Rum never made the Indian good-natured. He became something appalling,
a concentration of the cruel and mocking rage of many men, as soon as liquor
filled his veins.” Gay also had distinct opinions about immigration and “alien
races,” which he interjected into the text of the Popular History at calculated
moments in the narrative. He reminisced about British colonial New York in
the eighteenth century, for instance, when there “was then no large city, no
dangerous class was hidden away in dark cellars and obscure attics, to swarm
in unexpected numbers, ready for bloodshed and plunder at the first sign of
temporary anarchy.”150 In espousing these special “causes,” Gay satisfied an
urge to put his own personal stamp on Bryant’s Popular History denied by the
publisher, although in the process he may have violated his own rules about
the intrusion of authorial voices in historical narratives.
Apart from the inconsistencies of style that these outbursts occasioned, they
also limited the opportunities Gay had to address issues identified by Bryant
as central to the story of American history. In the prospectus for the series, for
instance, the publishers had noted that Bryant’s Popular History of the United
States “differs from and is superior to any History of the United States now
published” in that “it will be COMPLETE,” and “will carry the record through the
first century of the independence of the Republic, and to the year 1876.”151 In
the preface to the first volume of the popular history, Bryant also declared that
“the historian of our Republic would perform his office but in part who should
stop short of the cycle of a hundred years from the birth of our nation” or who
would ignore the “consequences” of the Civil War, including the rise of vio-
lence, fraud and political corruption of the Gilded Age as well as the insidious
effects of paper money and protective tariffs.152 But ignore these consequences
in the later volumes Gay did, choosing to conclude the fourth and last of the
series in this abrupt manner: “With the administration of Andrew Johnson
came the beginning of the reconstruction of the Union,—a work badly begun,
unwisely carried on, and, at the end of fifteen years, still unfinished. For that

fifteen years the war may be said to have been continued on a peace basis, but
drawing, year by year, to its inevitable conclusion, as the generation of the last
slaveholders and their Northern adherents gradually disappears.”153 This was
hardly the detailed assessment of the consequences of war or the currency
debate or the tariff issue that large-minded Bryant had envisioned when he
circulated the prospectus for the history that bore his name.
According to Scribner, this truncating of the original scope of the project
was necessitated by a misappropriation of space by Gay in the early volumes of
the series. At points throughout the writing of the final volumes, the editors at
Scribner’s were forced to remind Gay that a history sold in parts could not ex-
ceed the page limits originally contracted for by subscribers without legal con-
sequences. Late in 1880, the publisher wrote Gay to alert him to the fact that
only several hundred pages of allotted space remained for telling the lengthy
story that Bryant had promised in his prospectus. “I don’t wish to interfere
with what you may consider the proper allotment of space to the different divi-
sions of the History,” Charles Scribner wrote, “but, as this is the last chance, I
want to be sure that you see clearly the situation.”154 And the situation was dire
in the publisher’s estimation. Because of a too-detailed consideration of the
colonial era that occupied more than half of the series, the last volume needed
to cover the entire period from 1780–1876, arguably the decades of greatest
interest to readers of a popular history of the United States. Gay discovered
too late that he had “less space” to devote “to the latter half of this century than
its importance now calls for.” Scribner might have addressed the problem by
adding a fifth volume to the four-volume series, as Gay would have preferred,
but the financial obligations of subscription publishing as well as the frustra-
tions of continuing to work with a recalcitrant author made that impossible.
Scribner was forced instead to issue an embarrassing apology to readers at the
completion of the series acknowledging that “material ungathered or uncodi-
fied at the time when Mr. Gay ended his work” made it impossible “to give to
that passage of the great narrative a scale equal to that of the rest.”155
These discrepancies between the announced intentions and the realized text
of Bryant’s Popular History reopened old wounds for Gay regarding author-
ship of the piece. For his part, Gay wanted it to be clear to readers at the end of
the process that although all the volumes still bore Bryant’s name and reflected
many of his priorities, they had been written almost exclusively by Gay himself,
who was not to be held accountable, therefore, for failure to meet all the condi-
tions outlined in the preface by Bryant before his death. In a note to the editors
of Scribner’s Sons, Gay asked that any lingering confusion in the matter be clari-
fied in a new preface to volume four. He proposed that such a new introduction
read as follows: “The present volume is the completion of the work which the

late Mr. Bryant consented should have the sanction of his name. The first two
volumes passed the ordeal of his careful perusal,” but “in justice to those who
began the reading of the work at the beginning of its publication, it is only proper
to say that, save in the absence of his verbal criticism for the last two volumes,
there was no change of actual authorship consequent upon his death.”156
Charles Scribner was not in agreement with Gay on the matter, and he in-
structed his editors not to print the “most unfortunate” note. He justified his
decision to Gay by insisting that the publishing house had done more than
necessary already to clarify the authorship of the volumes. “Surely enough
and more than enough has been said about Mr. Bryant in connection with
the book and what is the use of bringing the matter again before the public,”
he asked. “The preface in Vol. II, explained his relation to the authorship of
the book and everyone knows he has been dead since then and could have
written nothing.”157 Gay took issue with his publisher’s assumptions, however,
and responded with the furor worthy of a censored Horace Greeley. “Your
assumption is that a great deal has been said about the Bryant question, &
that there can be no ‘use in bringing the matter again before the public,’ ” Gay
responded angrily. “Either you do not know, or you forget that this matter has
never been brought before the public at all except on one side,” he alleged.
“A great wrong has been done me for half-a-dozen years, which Mr. Bryant
never countenanced nor intended, against which I have always earnestly pro-
tested; but all this has been in private. It is the wrong that has been made pub-
lic hushed to the utmost through the machinery of your agency.”158
Gay claimed that the title of the volumes implied that Bryant had written the
work, and he insisted that Scribner’s Sons was perpetuating a form of “literary
fraud” in failing to credit him fully. “I have sacrificed everything but my good
name to the work,” Gay argued, and “I wish to save that.” Declaring the rights
of readers and of the deceased Bryant, he added: “it is high time in justice to
his memory, & to my character, they should know the truth. I have always de-
termined that I would let the thing alone till the work was finished. Now I am
no longer bound to sit quietly under the great injustice that has been done &
which, at the same time as so impassed the sale of the work. Those who know
or guess the exact truth will not buy a work which they believe is attempted
to be sold on false pretenses, & cannot, therefore, be good for anything; those
who don’t know the truth, & believe Mr. Bryant the author of the first two vol-
umes, don’t want the last two because he couldn’t have written them.” Raising
the tone of an already animated discussion, Gay asserted: “I shall never again
submit quietly to the intimations which have been made in the newspapers in
regard to the relations between Mr. Bryant & myself unless this [paragraph]
stands as it is.” He added: “I must say frankly that you have no right to order

it out; & that to use the power would do me a very great wrong.”159 Scribner
responded with equal vigor: “I had no intention of ‘robbing you of your good
name,’ nor any desire to sell the History ‘under false pretenses.’ My reason for
changing was that the public does not think Bryant wrote the History and we
do not attempt to make them believe so. The question of the authorship of the
work is settled in everyone’s mind but your own. The clause which I wished
struck out is unfair to Mr. Bryant and to all connected with the work at the
outset. Mr. Bryant did more than ‘permit the sanction of his name’ as you well
know. The phrase is misleading and wrong.”160
These exchanges between publisher and author suggested a troubled his-
tory for Bryant’s Popular History of the United States and did not bode well
for the final sales of a series that had shown so much promise at the outset.
Whereas nearly 17,000 copies of volume one had been sold by subscription by
1884, only 10,600 copies of the fourth volume had been contracted, a 38 per-
cent drop off.161 The correspondence between Scribner and Gay also reveals
how sensitive popular histories were to conditions of the literary marketplace.
Attributing the modest sales of volumes three and four to the confusion sur-
rounding its authorship, Gay suggested that a more honest approach might
help sell additional volumes: “We have not sold the work under the false state-
ment in regard to Mr. Bryant,” he wrote his publisher; “let us see if a frank &
truthful one would help us.”162 Scribner disagreed, however, arguing that a
work entitled Gay’s Popular History simply would not have been as market-
able, even if it reflected more accurately than the actual title the authorship
of the volumes. Described by relatives and acquaintances as “an eminently
modest man and rather retiring,” Gay was uncharacteristically “irritable” in
response to this snubbing.163 In sending his final lengthy manuscript chapters
of the history to Scribner’s Sons for approval Gay looked forward to closing
the book on a noble project that he felt had been derailed by an aggressive,
profit-minded publishing house. The worthy muse of History, he concluded,
had been compromised by the monstrous force of commercialism.164 For his
part, Scribner welcomed closure, writing to Gay at the end of the protracted
and painful enterprise: “I am heartily glad this work is through with and hope
you will sometime get over your feeling of injustice and find out that you have
been treated generously and considerately.”165
No Picture on the Canvas

Predictably, given its odd production history, reviews of Bryant’s Popular
History of the United States were mixed. Some reviewers of the volumes found

much to admire in them. The Magazine of American History remarked on the
perfect balancing of sensibilities in the first volume of the series that resulted
from the very “promising and satisfactory combination of talent” between Bry-
ant and Gay. “The well-known judgment and classic taste of the senior and
the scholarly, pains-taking fidelity of the junior,” the reviewer noted, resulted
in an “original, careful and exhaustive treatment.” Bryant’s literary style was
“admirable in its condensed simplicity and easy grace of narrative,” he added,
but it was Gay’s treatment of the historical record “from a scientific point of
view” that was especially “novel and of extreme interest.” This reviewer also
thanked Gay for his honest handling of the “landing of the Puritans, in which
some pretty traditions are discredited.”166 A critique of the second volume of
the series, also in the Magazine of American History, continued this line of
praise. Reminding readers that the Scribner volumes represented “a popu-
lar history,” the reviewer argued that as measured by the modest standards of
such a genre, the series “certainly conveys a vast amount of carefully digested
material in a most readable manner.” For those readers anxious to have a little
spice with their carefully digested literary meal, the reviewer added that the
“element of romance” had not been omitted from the volumes; it had simply
been “subordinated to the truth of history.”167
Readers solicited by the publishers to comment on the volumes applauded
their high literary merit, acknowledging especially as one did Bryant’s presence
in the early chapters on the Mound Builders, which were “more romantic and
interesting than the most attractive novel.”168 Another subscriber noted that the
writing of the first volume was of “the purist of English, and an elegance of style
which is an honor to our mother tongue.” “Most can afford to deny themselves
a good many incidental indulgences in order to secure it,” he concluded.169
Meanwhile, a reviewer for Harper’s Magazine pronounced Gay “an indepen-
dent thinker” who is “positive in his convictions and in his expression of them.”
Gay’s style, “though never eloquent, is simple and clear,” Harper’s noted, “free
from colloquialisms and from rhetorical blemishes.”170 The popular history’s
“pure and fascinating form,” an impressed reader concluded, made the Popu-
lar History of the United States Bryant’s “last great work.”171 Perhaps the most
thorough and least objective reviewer was from Scribner’s Monthly, whose par-
ent company published the volumes. In a critique of volume two, the Scribner’s
reviewer noted that Bryant’s death had resulted in a loss of “the romantic and
picturesque” aspects of the colonial story but added that “what is lost in ro-
mance and picturesqueness is well made up in historical accuracy.” Gay’s inter-
est “in the soberer light of authentic history” was an advantage for the series, the
reviewer noted, which, in terms of reliability of evidence, “is not surpassed, nor
even equaled, by any history of the United States that has yet appeared.”172

Scholars were more divided in their assessments. The most vocal critic of
the volumes was an anonymous writer in the British periodical, the American
Bibliopolist, whose review was so critical that competitors in the popular his-
tory market kidded about its value as an advertising tool for their rival works.173
The reviewer condemned the false claims made on behalf of Scribner’s Sons
for Bryant’s Popular History as the “standard work of its class.” The advertis-
ers “adopt a style familiar to the readers of prospectuses of new books and new
companies,” the reviewer argued, making broad assertions and “exaggerated
statements” for the work. In the first place, the American Bibliopolist noted,
Bryant was not the editor of the New York Evening Post for fifty years as the
publishers announced; for the last several decades he had been only the “titu-
lar occupant of the post, while others have performed its entire duties.” The
reviewer complained as well about having been deceived regarding Bryant’s
authorship of the volumes and remarked on the lack of credentials on the part
of both authors for writing history. Just because Bryant was a literary figure of
some renown, the reviewer noted, did not mean that the poet was as worthy
a historian as the prospectus suggested; and Gay’s experience as a journalist
hardly qualified him as an expert on the past. “Mr. Bryant has written some ex-
cellent poetry, and has made for himself not only a name, but a large fortune, as
journalist and newspaper proprietor, while Mr. Gay may be everything that his
friends suppose; yet it seems rather rash to affirm that the History which they
have produced must be a standard work, simply because their names figure on
the title-page.”174
The reviewer for the American Bibliopolist went on to question the ap-
portioning of work on the project, reaffirming Gay’s concerns in this editorial
matter: “The respective shares of Mr. Bryant and Mr. Gay in the labor of com-
position are not defined,” the reviewer noted. “No doubt Mr. Bryant’s name is
attractive on the title-page, but is its place there fully merited? He has written
and signed an interesting Preface; has he written anything else? If the actual
author be Mr. Gay, then the book ought to be described as the ‘History of the
United States, by Mr. Gay, with a Preface by Mr. Bryant’.” The prospectus
shed some light on the subject for those readers who dealt with a responsible
book agent, but not enough. “We have been informed that Mr. Bryant has re-
vised the proof-sheets, while the real labor has fallen to Mr. Gay. But this ought
to have been made clear to the public. We know that Lord Jeffrey revised the
proof-sheets of the first volume of Macaulay’s ‘History of England,’ and that
he was proud of having done so; but would this have justified an enterprising
publisher in entitling the work ‘The History of England, by Lord Jeffrey and
T.B. Macaulay?’ The matter is one about which there should be neither mis-
take nor obscurity.”175

As a scholar residing in England, the reviewer in the American Bibliopolist
felt obliged to take issue with some of the historical judgments about Britain
made by Bryant and Gay. He wrote: “Though professedly anxious to do jus-
tice to all parties, and though he expresses his satisfaction to all controversies
between his country and our own have been happily terminated by arbitration,
Mr. Bryant does not hesitate to produce a false impression upon the minds of
his readers at the expense of this country.” The reviewer condemned “as the
reverse of truth” the poet’s thesis stated in the preface that Britain secretly
desired the independence of the South during the Civil War. Bryant “forgets,
or writes as if he would have his readers think he had forgotten, that Great
Britain uniformly and emphatically refused to acknowledge the independence
of the South, even though pressed by France to do so,” the reviewer noted. “A
writer of Mr. Bryant’s position and character ought not to perpetuate blunders
in matters of this kind,” he added, since “[s]tatements like these from his pen
tend not only to foster national animosity, but to give an air of truth to a mis-
chievous and utter fiction.” The reviewer also questioned Gay’s use of histori-
cal evidence, quibbling with the employment of controversial and unverified
materials related to the voyage of Verrazano. “That voyage is either a fiction
or else is so doubtful as to be unworthy of notice in any other than the most
cursory manner; yet Mr. Gay refers to it at length, and treats it as really serious.
As a matter of fact, it matters not whether Verrazano made the voyage,” he
concluded, “its results were nil upon the history of the world.”176
The American Bibliopolist also questioned the designation “popular” as ap-
plied to the Scribner history. “What Mr. Bryant has certainly done he has done
well,” the reviewer acknowledged, but the history “signally fails . . . to reply to
the question asked in the first sentence as to the need for a new ‘History of the
United States’.” Bryant had claimed that the nation required a short, popular
history to accommodate those who did not have the “leisure” for reading lon-
ger narratives, but the reviewer noted that “a short history is not necessarily a
popular one. . . . Nor is a work in many volumes necessarily unpopular.” The
use of the epithet “popular” is another of “the mistakes on the title-page,” the
reviewer added. He admitted that the literary quality of some of the volumes
was good, acknowledging that Bryant “is distinguished above all his country-
men as a writer of genuine and idiomatic English.” While Bryant and Gay had
censured out “the rhetoric which disfigures the pages of Mr. Bancroft and Mr.
Motley,” and though “the diction is free from barbarisms to a degree very rare in
historical writings by citizens of the United States,” the British reviewer noted
patronizingly, “yet the writing is not ‘popular’ in any sense of the term.” Gay’s
sparse prose was perhaps most to blame for this loss of literary power. “Many
chapters will appear not only dry, but unintelligible to the general reader,” he

wrote. “The accounts of the first visitors to the American continent are well
worth perusal by those who have studied the subject, but to others they must
seem very wearisome.” Bryant’s old age and still older theories may also have
been responsible for some of the history’s failings, the reviewer noted. “[N]ot
withstanding his great age,” the reviewer wrote somewhat tactlessly and po-
litically, a Bryant “in full possession of his faculties” should have known better
than to advocate free trade in the late nineteenth century.”177
Finally, the reviewer for the American Bibliopolist questioned the use Scrib-
ner’s had made of illustrations in the volumes. “The frontispiece is a carefully
executed portrait of Mr. Bryant,” he noted, but “[w]e confess ourselves unable
to understand the reason for placing the poet’s likeness at the beginning of a
History of the United States.” The other illustrations in the volumes were “as
well executed and even more out of place,” he added. In volume one, for in-
stance, Bryant and Gay had centered their discussion of ancient Mound Build-
ers around an illustration of the killing of a mastodon, the authors proclaiming
their desire to paint a picture of “pre-historic man on this continent vivid
enough to appeal to the dullest imagination, and more remarkable than any
similar incident yet found anywhere else.” But the reviewer for the American
Bibliopolist wondered why such speculative forays were necessary in a history
of the United States. “What human being can be any wiser for gazing upon
such an imaginative representation of such an imaginary incident as that of a
‘Pre-historic Mammoth Hunt’?” asked the reviewer. He also had trouble with
“Columbus on Shipboard,” which he dubbed one “of these fanciful sketches
which teach nothing, and are only interesting when they proceed from the
pencil of a great artist as interpretation and product of his mind.” The illustra-
tion “Sebastian Cabot Leaving Labrador” was “a steel-plate engraving, which
has the drawback of representing what may never have occurred,” he added,
and “when Roger Williams is shown in a supposed portrait on one page, and
is represented with a totally different face on another, who can profit by the
sight? To write history is a serious matter,” the reviewer concluded, “and to
illustrate a history is to undertake a grave responsibility. Despite the assur-
ances of the prospectus, we doubt whether the importance and gravity of the
task have been fully apprehended by the publishers, authors, and artists in the
present case.”178
Such allusions to the “importance and gravity of the task” of selecting il-
lustrations suggested the seriousness with which many reviewers valued the
role of the pictorial element in the production of popular history. Casualness
of pictorial treatment was less tolerated than it had been even a decade be-
fore, and readers demanded both authenticity of depiction and consistency of
words and images in popular texts. These requirements often created tensions

between authors and publishers of such histories as to who should control
the illustrations for a pictorial project, and in the case of Gay and Scribner,
this strain jeopardized an already frail relationship. In the original contract
signed with Scribner’s Sons, Gay was supposed to have responsibility for the
selection of illustrators and illustrations.179 Judging from the wide variety of
pictorial materials preserved in Gay’s papers at Columbia University, he had
some expertise in these areas.180 But delays in producing the written text for
the history meant that Gay had even less time to devote to this end of the pro-
duction, and Scribner expressed frustration with his author’s slow pace as an
art editor. “It is certainly possible to select [illustrations] sooner than you do
in many cases,” the publisher wrote with exasperation.181 Eventually Scrib-
ner delegated the responsibility to several members of his staff, rationalizing
the arrangement to Gay by acknowledging the greater expertise in the areas
of pictorial design of the substitute consultants. “I should have liked to have
had an expression of your opinion as to the illustrations and general appear-
ance of the volume as compared to the first two,” he wrote defensively with
reference to volume three. “Your omission to mention either might make me
fear that when seen in final shape they did not meet your expectations, were it
not that there is such an unanimity of opinion in their favor.”182 Yet there were
a number of irregularities, as in the use of a nineteenth-century illustration of
Pensacola, Florida (complete with trains and smokestacks) for a discussion of
seventeenth-century colonial expansion into the panhandle or as in the depic-
tion of the Ohio River of the 1670s crowded with steamboats. Reviewers of
Bryant’s Popular History, at least, did not fail to criticize the volumes for such
irregularities of presentation with respect to visual evidence.
In addition to these challenges, there was a great discrepancy in the type
and quality of the illustrations in the history, an inconsistency that undercut
Gay’s claims regarding the compatibility of words and images in the work.
Scribner’s Sons had hired at considerable cost many of the best illustrators
in the country to elucidate the popular history—including such artists as Al-
fred and William Waud, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer,
Edwin A. Abbey, Alfred Fredericks, George Boughton, Mary Hallock, and Sol
Eytinge—“probably the most valuable collection of artists and engravers that
has ever been gotten together in this country,” according to one participant.183
The intention was to have Gay correspond with these artists about the subject
matter and tone of their illustrations, but production schedules often made
that impossible. Gay had been so slow in producing text for the later volumes
that many of these illustrators had to work independent of it. As a result, some
artists chose highly sentimental modes of pictorializing inappropriate to the
general tone of the work. Others produced images out of scale in importance

to the text, while still others missed opportunities to depict elements of the
narrative most central to Gay’s interpretation.184 In addition, some of the il-
lustrations had been created in advance of any of the text so that they could be
circulated by book agents as a means of advertising the volumes. Embarrass-
ingly, a number of these images had to be dropped from the published version
of the history because their subjects were never addressed as historical topics
by Bryant or Gay.
As with the confusion over authorship so with the choice of illustrative mat-
ter; the constraints of time and concerns over costs resulted in some rather
haphazard, inconsistent pictorial decisions. In some cases, Scribner borrowed
prior pictorializations from articles in Scribner’s Monthly that bore little or no
relationship to the themes in the popular history.185 In other cases, where origi-
nal works were needed, Charles Scribner commissioned with mixed success
artists such as Edwin Austin Abbey whose reputations as “artistes” made their
images seem superior to any written text.186 On the one hand, Abbey’s “Trial
of Mrs. Hutchinson” suggests the illustrator’s “keen sense of narrative com-
position” as a defiant Anne Hutchinson confounds the assembled magistrates
who have come to harass her. “A fanatic for historical accuracy, Abbey often
spent the bulk of his commission money on props and research materials,”
Ken Kempcke has noted; and in this illustration, costumes are meticulously
researched and presented, along with furniture and even book bindings.187
Dramatic without being sensational, the illustration prompted Henry James to
assert that Abbey’s depictions were “direct” and “immediate” and were “with-
out tricks or affectations of any sort of cheap subterfuge.”188 The reviewer for
the North American Review agreed, declaring that such pictorial illustrations
were “all that the public can desire,” and noting that the volumes of Bryant’s
Popular History were far superior to “such popular publications” as those of
the “late Mr. S. G. Goodrich,” for whom the term “popular” meant “a merely
superficial work.”189
On the other hand, revealingly, the “Trial of Mrs. Hutchinson” is incom-
patible with Gay’s text, which describes Hutchinson as wild and intemperate.
“It is probable that the agitations of the years had affected her temper and
somewhat impaired her judgment,” Gay wrote in obvious contradiction to the
illustration. Evidently Gay’s defense of the Puritans in their dealings with dis-
sidents like Anne Hutchinson was too unorthodox for Abbey to have antici-
pated or appreciated, and the unflattering depiction of the chief magistrates in
the illustration indicates that he was following conventional wisdom when he
sketched the work. Still more, this illustration appeared in the text one hun-
dred pages after the description of Mrs. Hutchinson’s murder by Indians on
the frontier, suggesting that word and image were not carefully integrated in

the editorial process. A similar incongruity was evident in Abbey’s illustration
of the “Landing of John Alden and Mary Chilton” at Plymouth Rock, a mythic
disembarkation scene Gay had denounced as impossible in the accompanying
text.190 In short, from a pictorial point of view, Scribner’s Sons’ history was a
patchwork enterprise and an awkward hybrid at that. “In the manner of gift
books,” David Tatham has noted, “the Popular History sported illustrations
by a legion of prestigious artists. The published volumes, however, show little
sign of the unifying mind of an art editor. . . . They contain pictorial incongrui-
ties of a sort that could still be found in some juveniles and lesser gift books
of poetry, but that had been increasingly avoided by major publishers in the
1870s. In a serious work of history, [Scribner’s] seemingly casual approach to
illustration provoked criticism, and rightly so.”191
Gay was angered as well by the usurping of his duties as selector of illustra-
tions, and he felt such inconsistencies reflected poorly on the volumes and on
his name. He had resisted for many months the attempt by Scribner’s Sons to
bring other art consultants onto the project, and he did not want to be pushed
in the matter of choosing images to illustrate the text until his narrative was
complete. Conversely, Scribner resented all along paying Gay as an art editor
when there were illustrations to be supplied about which he “seem[ed] to care
little or nothing.”192 The issue came to a head, figuratively and literally, when
the art editors at Scribner’s included a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Wash-
ington as the frontispiece to the third volume of the series, a controversial deci-
sion because of a recent national debate over its authenticity. In 1873, Colonal
Sherwin McRae had petitioned Congress to acknowledge the famous Houdon
“life-mask” of Washington as the “official” representation of the first president,
arguing that this realistic image should become the only standardized likeness
used in government statuary, portraiture, and advertising.193 Gay agreed.194 Such
standardization would help eliminate the confusing array of competing images
of Washington and would safeguard against misrepresentations like the senti-
mentalized Stuart head, which falsely idealized Washington in his estimation.
Years earlier, however, Bryant had endorsed in the Evening Post a rival image
derived in part from the Stuart likeness.195 Scribner’s decision to publish a Stu-
art-derived likeness of Washington raised eyebrows with critics and convinced
Gay that, once again, his opinions about visual evidence mattered not at all.196
These criticisms were symptomatic of a larger discipline-wide debate re-
garding the “scholarly” ambitions of popular historians. When plans were an-
nounced in 1874 for a new collaborative and popular history of the United
States, the Boston Daily Globe introduced Gay as a “journalist of wide experi-
ence and long standing,” whose popular work revealed “[h]ow well journal-
istic training tells in the writing of fact books, such as travels and history.”197

That same publication remarked two years later, however, that Gay should not
be considered one of those objectionable journalists who adapted the term
“popular history” as a way of “cover[ing] inferior productions.” Instead, the
Globe associated his work with “popular in the best sense of the term,” writ-
ten “as to be adapted to the comprehension of the people” yet “worthy also
[of ] the confidence of scholars.”198 To be sure, Gay shared in common with
later professional historians a faith in the “cumulative” nature of historical pur-
suits. Like Sir Geoffrey Elton, he believed that “writing a definitive history of
something, so definitive that it would never need to be written again, was an
ambition that was not only laudable . . . but also eminently achievable.” The
stockpiling of knowledge (“filling in a gap,” as scholars refer to it today) was
a worthy goal “just as important as transforming our understanding of what is
already known,” as Bryant had attempted, “if not more so.”199 Gay was doubt-
less hurt, however, by the opinion of a New York Times reviewer that his schol-
arship had crowded out narrative to such an extent as to make a “thoughtful
reader” wonder “how far this volume carries us in the study of our people at
present, and how much it amounts to.” Claiming that the term “popular” was
“contradictory” in Gay’s usage, the reviewer concluded: “There is something
in the title that arouses a certain misgiving.”200
A reviewer for Harper’s seemed to catch the tone of disappointment that
both author and publisher experienced at the end of the writing process.
He concluded with the sobering reflection that “this is not the history of the
United States which the country longs for.” Desiring for America the kind of
popular historian Hume or Macaulay or Knight provided British readers, this
critic developed a painterly metaphor to express why Bryant and Gay had not
attained such a status. “The material has been gathered, the characters have
been studied, the author has made himself familiar with the incidents,” the
reviewer wrote of Gay, “but he possesses no art of generalization and no artistic
skill in grouping. The pigments are all well mixed upon the palette, but there
is no picture on the canvas. His material embarrasses him; his history will be
almost, if not quite, as large as Bancroft’s, which it does not excel in style, and
to which it is inferior in sobriety of literary and historical judgment.” Without
a proper sense of historical perspective and with little intuitive understanding
of what the people wanted from their history, Gay was guilty of painting the
backdrop so elaborately as to leave no room or time for narrating its main story.
Bryant’s Popular History of the United States was written “as if in a biography
one should ransack the memories of parents and nurses for incidents of the
hero’s childhood, and abbreviate the story of his manhood’s achievements,”
the Harper’s reviewer concluded. He had reduced American history to the
level of the naive and juvenile.201

That no American Hume or Macaulay or Knight existed may have had
something to do with the unique features of the popular book market in the
United States in the 1870s. For one thing, the amount of history that needed to
be covered by historians of the United States continued to increase in the post-
Centennial era, and it became harder and harder for a single author to take on
an entire popular history alone. Collaborative works such as Bryant and Gay’s
became more and more the norm, and that condition increased the likelihood of
patchwork histories that betrayed the seams of an uneven editorial process. In
addition, popular histories were subject increasingly to greater accountability
on behalf of a reading public more attracted to realist forms of literary presenta-
tion. Bryant’s tendencies toward the melodramatic required Scribner’s Sons to
counterbalance his sentimentality with the more prosaic style of Gay. Without
sacrificing narrative flow, Gay was expected to establish the scholarly authority
of this polyglot work, and to do so with enough dispatch to allow Scribner’s
Sons to realize some returns from the enormous costs of production associated
with the work.202 These many responsibilities proved too much for Gay, trained
mainly as a journalist. Eventually publishers of popular histories began looking
beyond the ranks of newspapermen for the completion of these diverse tasks.
This led to the commissioning of a new breed of professionally trained histori-
ans with popular aspirations and established literary skills.
A final episode in the fallout from the publication of Bryant’s Popular His-
tory suggests the degree to which Gay’s struggles mirrored national trends. Gay
was flattered when he received an invitation from the membership committee to
join the American Historical Association at its second annual meeting in 1885.203
In a very real sense, this invitation was his badge of acceptance as a scholar
and signaled the completion of his personal odyssey from popularizer to pro-
fessional. He must have been disappointed, however, when Bryant’s Popular
History came under attack within the AHA as an example of the kind of history
on which professional historians should not rely. At the second session of the
second annual meeting of the AHA, a paper on “The Purchase of the Louisiana
Territory and its Effects upon the American System” was read on behalf of the
Reverend C. F. Robertson, who could not attend. In the paper, Robertson al-
luded to the treasonous role Alexander Hamilton had played in a “scheme on
the lower Mississippi, which was imputed to Aaron Burr” and inferred that the
duel between Burr and Hamilton which ended the latter’s life was somehow
related to a disagreement over this scheme.204 The thesis raised the ire of at least
one audience member, Rufus King, who attributed this fallacious interpreta-
tion to the fourth volume of Bryant’s Popular History, in which Gay argued
that Hamilton had been in correspondence with James Wilkinson, governor
of the Louisiana Territory, about depositing arms in Cincinnati in anticipation

of an overthrow of the United States government.205 Warning against reliance
on popularizers like Bryant and Gay, King noted that he had made a thorough
scholarly investigation of the charge and reported that “at Cincinnati the oldest
inhabitants had never heard of the ‘men and boats’ which are alleged to have
been gathered there.” Having been assured by John C. Hamilton, grandson of
the first secretary of the treasury, that “there is no such ‘unpublished correspon-
dence’ between Hamilton and Wilkinson as intimated,” King concluded that
“there is no authority for such a charge.”206 Robertson was not at the meeting
to defend himself, nor is there any record of Gay responding to the session, but
the episode was the occasion for another AHA member in attendance to call
publicly for a more “careful and diligent search” of the subject by professional
historians with a greater commitment to the facts than popularizers had dem-
onstrated to date.207
In the meantime, Bryant’s Popular History demonstrates the degree to
which historical writing in America was in flux in the 1880s. Decisions about
its structure, style, and length were made with the needs of the authors and the
marketplace in mind, and the volumes represented a series of compromises
between Bryant, Gay, and Scribner on matters of presentation and argument.
As a form of popular history, the work aspired to reach as wide an audience as
possible, and that ambition required concessions to general readers that some
found destructive to the pursuit of objectivity in history. Despite the doubts
of these detractors, however, Bryant’s Popular History satisfied many readers
who accepted the “constructed” nature of its hybrid text and who proclaimed
the virtues of its collaborative style and insights. Their endorsement reminds
us of how important popular history continued to be after the Centennial to
the formation of a historical consciousness in America. In an age when the
concept of an unalterable standard of historical verification had not yet been
embraced in full, works such as Bryant’s Popular History competed well with
those of scholars in the literary marketplace. Narrative history, with all its liter-
ary excesses and failings, was still a functional if not dominant means of histori-
cal expression. Put differently, the average American in the 1880s could still
learn more about the “popular uses of history in American life” by reviewing
the complex editorial disagreements among Bryant, Gay, and Scribner with
reference to Bryant’s Popular History of the United States than by consulting
the minutes of the American Historical Association meetings.208

The great paradox of modern empiricism is that
this philosophy begins with a great show of respect
for “fact” as the rock of intellectual salvation. On it
we are to escape from the winds of dialectic illusion.
But as science critically analyzes the “facts,” more
and more of them are seen to be the products of old
prejudices or survivals of obsolete metaphysics.
—Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature
3
.....................................................................
The
Metahistorian
as Popularizer
John Clark Ridpath
AND the Universal
Laws of Popular
History

Labor omnia vincit
Sydney Howard Gay’s disagreements with his publisher Charles Scrib-
ner and with his coauthor William Cullen Bryant often centered on the issue
of authenticity in history and the responsibilities popular historians had to
accuracy of historical presentation. Suspicious of rhetorical language and con-
cerned with its potential to seduce readers, Gay preferred to depict the past
from the “scientific point of view.”1 For their part, Bryant and Scribner chose
to characterize history as a literary art and insisted that a scientific standard
of proof must not compromise the role of the imagination. They were predis-
posed toward narrativity as a structuring device and toward elements of plot
and character as storytelling components. Bryant and Scribner were typical of
those who viewed history as a production that required the overarching autho-
rial presence of the historian to give meaning and shape to the amorphous past.
Gay took the opposite tack, arguing that the past had a reality all its own and
that the historian’s job was to convey the hard facts of history with disinterest,
guarding always against the impulse to “degenerate” into an “advocate or, even
worse, propagandist.” Gay himself did not always meet his own standard in
this regard, but, in embracing the “cult of the fact,” to use Novick’s term, he
declared his general “discontent with rhetorical and imaginative presentations
of human life.”2
This debate over the proper form of Bryant’s Popular History of the United
States raised philosophical questions about what constituted past experience
and whether historians were capable of producing narratives that corresponded
accurately to that reality. Some epistemological skeptics viewed all historical
reflections as mere reconstructions, dependent totally on the imaginative de-
signs of the historian’s mind and acceptable only on faith. For the most ardent
of such skeptics, the past did not exist except as a shadowy and unverifiable
derivative of the present moment. Few popular or professional historians of the
late nineteenth century were that cynical, however. As Berkhofer has noted,
most were willing to admit the “reality” of prior events, and they sought practi-
cal ways “to combine intuitive insights with rigorous empiricism, generaliza-
tions and abstractions with concrete and specific facts, argument and analysis
with story-telling, interpretive understanding with logical explanation, creative
organization with objective reporting, impartiality and detachment with moral
judgment and advocacy.”3 The primary points of contention among practicing
historians of the era, therefore, centered on the degree to which certain “facts”
should be trusted over others and on whether “historical meaning” inhered in
“facts” (however defined) or in the universal laws derived from facts. No better
example of the relevance of these distinctions can be found than in the life and
124 } The Metahistorian as Popularizer

work of John Clark Ridpath, who spent his entire career trying to reconcile
the objectivity and impartiality of his “scientific” studies of the past with the
subjectivity and personalized perspective inherent in the narrative forms of his
popular literary presentations. Especially significant were Ridpath’s efforts to
transcend the dichotomies implicit in objective/subjective dualities through
a “metahistorical” approach to the past and his keen insights into what pro-
motional techniques would best help sell such metahistories in the popular
marketplace.
Ridpath’s background was typical of those popular historians who trained
themselves broadly for a variety of potential careers. Born in a log cabin in Put-
nam County, Indiana, in 1840, on the edge of the frontier, and among a people
whom he described as having fought battles “in a land of woods and hills”
“without dismay or fainting,” lifting Indiana “out of savagery,” Ridpath was a
precocious student among hardworking but largely uneducated farmers. As a
young boy he amazed neighbors with “a great wooden globe” he had fashioned
from a section of a walnut tree and on which he had carved a map of the ancient
world. “His mind took up the substance of books as if by intuition,” one neigh-
bor remembered, until by “his eleventh year he had accomplished whatever
the old log school-house and its presiding geniuses could impart.” Like fellow
Hoosier Abraham Lincoln, Ridpath worked on his father’s farm and read vora-
ciously whatever books he could find, including natural philosophy, astronomy,
chemistry, and the outlines of natural history. “Most of the works thus obtained
were merely popular, and were of little use as texts of actual information and
human philosophy; but they had their value for a boy,” noted one relative.4
Among other things, these crude volumes determined the parameters of Rid-
path’s juvenile literary imagination and helped shape his beliefs about human
character, the cause-and-effect relationships of history, and the literary choices
associated with good narrative storytelling. They defined his youthful experi-
ence with respect to the culture of the book as well, and Ridpath remained com-
mitted to the simplicity, durability, and affordability of such popular works long
after he had been exposed to more refined narrative formats.
When it became clear that Ridpath’s fascination with the life of the mind
superceded his interests in farming, his family encouraged him to abandon
agriculture and to enroll in Indiana Asbury University in Greencastle (later
DePauw University). He had no preparation in classical languages and was
originally advised that it would take him six years to complete his educational
program, but because of his supple mind and his conscientious work habits
he managed to graduate with his class in only four years. “His attainments
in Latin and Greek were regarded in the college as something phenomenal,”
wrote one DePauw alumni. “He is said while a student to have read all of the
John Clark Ridpath and the Universal Laws of Popular History { 125

Agricola of Tacitus while riding horseback from his country home to the seat of
the University, eight miles distant. On arriving, he asked the professor of Latin
for the privilege of reading the whole to him on examination; but the professor
excused himself, and gave Ridpath 100 blind!” 2 Ridpath’s motto at Asbury
became: Labor omnia vincit, “labor conquers all things,” and he held himself
and his fellow classmates to very high standards when it came to class work.
Complaining about the “despicable habit” among college students of taking
a “student’s Sabbath” from school assignments on Saturdays in order to so-
cialize and indulge in “degenerating, slothful indolence,” Ridpath fraternized
only occasionally with classmates, setting aside “a goodly amount of work” for
the weekends and toiling well into the night on Saturdays when his “persecu-
tors” were “asleep.”6 His intellectual ambitions were enormous, friends noted,
and he brought a monastic attitude to bear on academic assignments.
Clearly college was more meaningful to Ridpath than it was to most students
on the Indiana frontier, although friends and family worried that he was too
serious in his academic pursuits. Some of their concerns were well founded,
as he was subject to definite mood swings. Complaining that there was “no
constancy in anything” associated with his life, he recorded in private journals
his daily transportations from the “quagmires of despondency” to the “gleams
of conviviality.”7 As a distraction from overwork and depression, he liked to
reflect on his personal history. “I love to sit down and think over the past—to
glance back into those dreamy realms of soft, pure sunlight—to ramble again in
imagination along the little sporting streams whose sunny banks are hallowed
by the sacred associations of my childhood,” he wrote sentimentally in his
diary.8 He also read popular histories, especially those of Washington Irving,
and devoured the works of William Cullen Bryant, whose poem “The Day
Dream” he adored. Ridpath admitted to a scandalous fascination with radical
literary journals as well, despite what “straight-gowned Doctors of Divinity
and wooden-headed moralizers may say” about them.9 Given to long reflec-
tions on the passage of time, Ridpath was a self-proclaimed “romanticist” of
the moody midcentury variety, and he aspired to be a bard. The margins of
his inflated journals were littered with overstylized original poems such as the
following:
Hail to the year! let what there will betide
Let it be welcome, for no wilder thought
Or deeper power can o’er my pathway glide
Than what already the past years have brought:
Life is a drama of strange pictures wrought,
Mingled and blended in a varied glow,

All in the end returneth back to nought
Save the free spirit, which though tempests flow
Mocks e’en the idle tomb when all beside lies low.
Sometimes depressed for days about his mortality and the fleeting nature of
time, the aspiring poet Ridpath walked the floors of his dorm room at night
contriving ways to avoid “the throng that moves to join the dead.”10
Lack of money was always a problem for Ridpath in school, and he re-
flected melodramatically on the effects poverty was having on his disposition
and mind. “I am in perfect destitution of even a suitable amount of raiment
wherewith to decorate and adorn my comely person,” he complained; “and
I do not deem it that any one possessed of any great amount of sensitiveness
can enjoy himself (or herself especially,) under the circumstances herein before
stated—that is, as the Latins would say semi-nudus.” When money was ad-
vanced by his father to offset expenses, Ridpath was overcome by guilt about
using it, especially in frivolous pursuits. “By the way Father was here to-day
and gave me enough of the ‘needful’ to keep me going a while. When I think
where the funds come from upon which I am floating along so easily, I feel like
hiding in the darkest corner of the earth; yet I went to the Festival to-night and
payed for it too. Oh! consistency, thou art a jewel.” Yet like many nineteenth-
century thinkers of a romantic temperament, Ridpath believed that his lack
of money might also serve as an inducement to greatness. “I am like the man
in ‘the house that Jack built’,” he wrote in a private note, “that is to say ‘all
tattered and torn’ but poverty is good for me; it awakens effort, and energizes
man’s nature, and warms up the dull listless tide of thought into something like
a general flow, and if nothing but soft sicky sentiment comes forth as the fruit
thereof, that is better than remaining a pillared column of brick and mortar.”11
Even melancholy and the pathos of misery had their benefits for Ridpath.
Sentimental in posture in most things literary, Ridpath was not as hope-
lessly disengaged as the stereotype of some nineteenth-century poets would
have one believe, however. In fact, he fought constantly against his romantic
temperament, because he also had very strong ambitions to make a practical
mark in the world. Hence, his college journals include numerous self-warnings
against too strong an indulgence in poetic reflections. At the beginning of his
sophomore year, for instance, he wrote with a tone of self-reproach: “And so
I find myself at my old tricks,—moralizing in a kind of monotonous strain of
misty melancholy which was the chief companion of my earlier days—a some-
thing which I know, in these times of dull practicality, must be abandoned, or,
all my hopes of accomplishing aught in the world will inevitably go down into
an unassuming pile of staves like a sun-dried barrel.”12 Increasingly anxious

“to be popular,” Ridpath believed that the pathway to success lay not in ro-
mantic reflection but hard-nosed practicality. Balance was the key. Ridpath’s
days were occupied by the prosaic tasks of completing the college program,
but his nights were given over to contemplating greatness and devising prac-
tical schemes for attaining popularity. “How easily some men have become
immortal—left a name and a fame to other days; the one becoming more and
more glorious as the sun that goes down in triumph; the other widening and
deepening like the channel of a river, swelling on forever to the ocean of its
search,” he wrote reflectively one night. “Step by step men mount to the pina-
cle [sic] of their greatness, which when once attained gives the bold climber a
despot’s sway and dominion overall beneath.”13
As this stately metaphor would suggest, one avenue of potential influence
contemplated by Ridpath was politics. The Midwest had come into national
political prominence in the 1850s and 1860s, and Ridpath hitched his wagon
early to the rising Republican Party led by Abraham Lincoln. He was active
at Asbury in a number of political student organizations and in the debate
club, and he gathered around him a small group of like-minded and proactive
friends: “We number eight; all Republicans, and all brave and chivalrous even
to a fault,” he wrote. They were also unabashed nationalists who shared the
patriotism of the Young Americans as well as some of the exclusionary outlook
of the Know-Nothing party in the Midwest. “I am considerable of an Ameri-
can—am opposed to ‘the insidious wiles of foreign influence’,—that is to say,
as regards politics, I am strictly orthodox,” he wrote.14 Ridpath’s college jour-
nal, however, also reflected an early and persistent pessimism with politics.
Disgusted with the inability of politicians to stave off the impending Civil War,
Ridpath wrote in March of 1861: “Abe Lincoln is President. Who cares? not
I for one nor for the whole combined jam smash of such earthly humbugs.”15
The sense of discouragement evident here followed Ridpath throughout most
of his professional career, and he rejected all but one sincere suggestion from
well-meaning neighbors that he enter politics as a form of public service and
as a way of satisfying personal ambition.
Other career paths held out more hope for an intellectual novice so easily
disillusioned with the affairs of State. By the end of his first year in college,
Ridpath had growing aspirations to be not just a poet but also a writer based
on early successes with pieces he submitted to the local papers in the spirit of
“old Billy Shakespeare.” Seduced by seeing his name in print in the Green-
castle Daily Gazette, Ridpath confided in his journal in 1862: “To-day I . . . feel
like an author—just think of it. Will have another piece out on Friday, then be
author twice, hurrah! I have to spend my afternoons in other people’s service,
if it were not for which I should soon be great—don’t know but what I will

be any how. Just bring your greatness on; I am here ready and waiting for the
last day of Feb.”16 But typical of his mood swings, such optimistic expressions
were accompanied by self-indicting reflections on his breaking of the Sabbath
in order to meet literary deadlines. “I am ambitious of distinction, and anxious
for success in my literary labors,” he wrote privately, and “these must be pros-
ecuted in the few moments which I have to spare from my regular studies [on
Sundays]. . . . but I fully intend (and I mean to put my intention into practice
immediately) to stop this same forever. I don’t relish the idea of being a hea-
then by disobeying the plain injunctions of the holy Law in any such style.”17
Ridpath’s passion for writing, then, had to be harnessed to a more manageable
and practical vocation that would not require compromises in his work sched-
ule or his faith.
To these ends, Ridpath settled on a career as an educator, a profession for
which he was instantly qualified by virtue of his college degree. After gradu-
ation from Asbury, Ridpath took a position as a teacher and later principal at
a local Greencastle school, and within a few years he was promoted to Super-
intendent of Education for his district. He did not last long in that position,
however, as he was lured away by an attractive offer to return to his alma mater.
Ridpath had delivered the valedictory speech at his graduation titled “The
Philosophy of History,” and this disquisition so impressed the dignitaries at
Asbury that they conspired to find a way to get him back to campus.18 Within
three years of his college graduation, Ridpath returned to Asbury to pursue a
master’s degree, and shortly after its completion he became a professor of Eng-
lish Literature. Eventually Ridpath was moved to the department of Belles-
Lettres and History and later he became chair of a new department in History
and Political Philosophy, where he remained for nearly fifteen years training
Asbury undergraduates in the scholarly pursuit of history.19 Although he never
earned a Ph.D. from a German university as did many of those scholars who
later assumed important academic positions within the profession, he was one
of the few professors at any American college or university in the 1880s to hold
an appointment in American history.20 It was not until the 1890s that such po-
sitions were available at prestigious universities such as Harvard, Johns Hop-
kins, and Michigan; prior to that date, history, when it was taught at all, was
associated with either Classics or the study of literature.21
In choosing to become a professor, Ridpath abandoned some of his poetic
ambitions to be popular in the most conspicuous public arenas. He devoted
himself instead to the discipline of history, the “grandest of all departments
of human inquiry,” as he defined it, and to pedagogy.22 He studied broadly
the scholarship of his field, and he took on the rewarding tasks of preparing
classes, grading assignments, and tutoring students. Ridpath’s annual reports

as chair of the history department give some insight into his work as a profes-
sor and into the kind of diverse curriculum in history available to undergradu-
ates at a place like Asbury in the 1870s and 1880s. Ridpath taught Composition
and Rhetoric to most first-year students and offered a “History of the United
States to the close of Mexican War,” which enrolled on average between eighty
and ninety students a year. Sophomores could take his three-term sequence
in world history centered on Thalheimer’s large (and somewhat ponderous)
manuals: first term, “Outlines of Ancient History”; second term, “Outlines
of Medieval History”; and the third term, “Outlines of Modern History.”23
Juniors often elected his courses in English Literature, Logic and Rhetoric,
and Constitutional Law, the latter proving a great success. “We use Bancroft’s
two volume History of the American Constitution as a text book,” Ridpath
noted in his annual report of 1878: “The work proved to be of so much inter-
est that as soon as the subject was introduced about 25 members of the Senior
Class petitioned for the privilege of taking it up as an elective study.”24 Seniors
also took political economy, international law, and the history of civilization
using Guizot’s History of Civilization (as far as the Reformation).25
By all accounts, Ridpath was a highly distinguished teacher of undergradu-
ates. Part of his success derived from his thorough and scholarly preparation
of material. “He called the roll as if he detested it—a waste of precious time,”
remembered one student. “Then with a straightening jerk at his flowing beard,
which led it back to the straight and narrow way of orthodox whiskers, a cruel
wrench at the stolid dog’s head which guarded either arm of his chair, he
would plunge at a single bound into any epoch or condition from the laws of
Ancient Egypt to the laws of modern Embargo.” He overwhelmed students
with the breadth of his knowledge. “One group of coeds, impressed with the
famous professor’s immense store of knowledge and calculating their own rate
of study, decided that it would take ‘just three hundred and eighty-seven years
to learn as much as Dr. Ridpath knew in a minute!’ ”26 Another former stu-
dent added: “Dr. Ridpath was a progressive teacher, one who was a constant
student himself, who went to art treasures and fountain heads of knowledge
where his great mind grasped and retained subject matter that he was espe-
cially endowed to impart to his pupils.”27 Beloved by his students and sensitive
to his own humble roots, Ridpath even took in undergraduates who could not
afford board in college. Asbury alums had several endearing nicknames for
their beloved mentor, including “Old Reddy” and “Old Rusty,” in recognition
of his long red beard, flowing whiskers, and captivating personality.28
Despite his awesome teaching and administrative duties, Ridpath also
kept up a rigorous writing schedule. He regarded historical scholarship as
the most meaningful way for him to demonstrate to his students the value

of his pedagogical philosophies. He harped constantly on the relevance of
objective facts for the telling of the story of the past. In his introductory sur-
vey course, for instance, Ridpath informed students that the term “history”
derived from the Greek word historia—meaning story—and that for centuries
the record of the past had been little more than the collection of the fanciful
narratives of storytellers specializing in mythological tales, “wild visions and
broken dreams.” While many of these spurious stories were dramatic and
interesting to read, he noted, they were “small, indistinct, obscure, disfigured
with prejudice,” and “streaked in every part with the taints and obliquity of
the minds by which it has been produced.” Favoring analytic over descriptive
methods, Ridpath distinguished between what he called the “facts and events
which constitute the real history” (Gay’s preferred definition) and history as
“a literary product” (as Bryant imagined it). Behind most popular historical
literature, he argued, there is “another and real history of which the book-
history is but a passing shadow,” a “reduced dead image of some great fact as
much more sublime than the transcribed images of the printed pages as the
open heavens with their galaxies and rolling worlds are more sublime than
star-maps and orreries.” True history, exciting history, he argued, is the event
itself “and not the reflection of it in some poor labored page done by the grop-
ing genius of man.” Scholars compiling historical facts were thus engaged in
a dramatic enterprise even if their narrative wings were clipped by its require-
ments of objectivity. Real history, he concluded, “is a scene so tremendous
and vital in all its parts that the most lucid narrative of the stage and the actors
is but a passing glimpse, a mere image of frost-work and evanescent shadow”
in comparison to it.29
Ridpath’s commitment to objectivity as a scholar was real, but he did not
wish to be thought a mere compiler. He was too much a teacher and lecturer
to abandon the idea of narrative as a structuring device for disseminating the
lessons of the past. What he tried to do was to control the kinds of literary effu-
sions that spilled too easily over into romanticized history. Exercising restraint
was not always easy to accomplish, he realized, given the oratorical preferences
of his age and the “dictation method” by which he composed his books. His
secretary noted that it was Ridpath’s habit to do his work “in the early morn-
ing and forenoon,” writing “rapidly and correctly, rarely having to change any-
thing with more than a touch here and there.” On occasion he made use of
friends and family, as when he asked his daughter, Mimi, to participate in the
daunting task of transcribing the History of the World longhand while he dic-
tated. The secretary he employed toward the end of his career to typewrite his
remarks noted that there were two personalities evident in Ridpath the writer:
one the sober scholar and the other the unrepentant dreamer. “His reflective

powers have had to struggle for the mastery with a lively and unconquerable
fancy,” this secretary wrote insightfully. “His is preeminently a young mind.
The habit of the man, though dignified on occasion in a high degree, is never-
theless so cheerful and at times so boyish as to range him with the young. He
devotes himself with extreme persistency and buoyancy of spirit to the longest
and most exacting tasks. On one occasion, while composing the Cyclopaedia
of Universal History, he worked for seventeen months, without a loss of a day,
and was at the end in no wise fagged.”30
This divided personality was evident in Ridpath’s choice of scholarly proj-
ects. In the mid-1870s, the professor of history decided to write A Popular
History of the United States for the Centennial book market that would ap-
peal both to students and to general readers. Adopting many of the structural
and organizational conventions of Guizot’s popular histories, Ridpath and his
publishers, Nelson and Phillips, conceived of his work as a compendium of the
great events and personages associated with the growth of America. He hoped
it would be a substantial academic contribution to the scholarship on Ameri-
can history, but it was also part travelogue, part exhibition catalogue. A major
portion of the work was devoted to a description of the Centennial Exposition
in Philadelphia whose fairgrounds Ridpath visited in the summer of 1876. Of-
fering his text as a historical guidebook of sorts for those who could not get to
the exposition, Ridpath portrayed the fair as a shrine for national self-renewal
and as the apotheosis of the first one hundred years of American development.
Marketed as a one-volume edition with illustrations, charts, and maps, Rid-
path’s book was timed exquisitely. The failure of Bryant and Gay to complete
more than a single volume of their projected multivolume work within a year of
the Centennial meant that the market was wide open.31 Additionally, Ridpath
took advantage of the strong nationalist impulse at work in the Centennial year
by using history in the service of cultural revitalization. To this end, he sought
to be as thorough and compelling as he could in his narrative, hoping to com-
bine the objectivity of facts with the subjectivity of historical assessment. For
these reasons, A Popular History of the United States represented an important
intellectual moment in the development of the genre of popular history.
In the pages of his book Ridpath also anticipated the questions with which
Bryant and Gay later wrestled and on which the future of the genre depended
increasingly, namely, Is it possible to write a spirited narrative account of Amer-
ican history without allowing the storytelling functions of narrative to distort
the facts of the American past? Can “real history” as scholars understood the
term ever be popular or serviceable to its general readers? Ridpath sought an-
swers to such questions not so much in the classroom as in the popular literary
marketplace, which increasingly became his testing ground for ideas in the

1880s and beyond. Entering the popular book market meant playing the game
on the terms of Lippard and Frost among others, and that, in turn, required
his publisher to engage in some of the hyperbole necessary for mass sales.
“Distributing agents” for the subscription book were given a lavish handbill
that declared the author “a profound thinker, a brilliant lecturer, a fascinating
writer, and one of the most successful historical educators in the country.”
Anxious to “supply the popular demand for a book which should record th[e]
marvelous story” of the United States, Nelson and Phillips publishers de-
scribed the work as the only history of its kind, both “rigorously accurate” and
characterized by a “power of vivid, forcible and picturesque description” that is
“as remarkable as it is delightful.” A Popular History of the United States was
“so rich in historical incident, so instructive in its method of presentation, and
so brilliant and fascinating in its narrative,” the advertising circular noted, that
it “ranks with the best specimens of English Literature.” Americans evidently
had found their Sir Charles Knight.32
“An Accurate and Spirited Narrative”

The challenge for Ridpath in producing a work such as A Popular His-
tory of the United States was to find ways to reach the common people without
compromising the rules of historical inquiry he had urged on his students.
Popularizers of an irresponsible sort had succeeded in the former task by cater-
ing to the superstitions and myths of “the people,” he noted, but in the latter
duty of providing a meaningful context for sober facts they had failed utterly.33
To rectify the imbalance, Ridpath began his popular history with a lengthy and
somewhat tortured introduction in which he outlined the complex intellectual
ambitions of his work: First among these goals, he argued, was to “give an ac-
curate and spirited Narrative of the principal events in our National history
from the aboriginal times to the present day.” This phrasing begged the ques-
tion that Ridpath’s preface was designed to answer, that is, can one be both
accurate and spirited in writing history? A second professed goal—“to avoid
all Partiality, Partisanship, and Prejudice, as things dangerous, baneful, and
wicked”—seemed to obviate the need for concern regarding the first. Ridpath
declared himself committed to preserving “a clear and systematic Arrange-
ment of the several subjects, giving to every fact, whether of peace or war, its
true place and importance in the narrative” and to providing “an Objective
Representation by means of charts, maps, drawings, and diagrams, of all the
most important matters in the history of the nation.” A third goal—“to se-
cure a Style and Method in the book itself which shall be in keeping with the

spirit and refinement of the times”—reintroduced the question of literary pre-
sentation and obligated Ridpath to a narrative strategy designed to make the
facts palatable to readers accustomed to drama in their histories. Such choices
made the work of writing a popular history for use by lay people and students
an arduous one, and Ridpath admitted during its production that it was the
most difficult intellectual challenge he had faced in his still young career. “I
have labored earnestly to reach the ideal of such a work,” he acknowledged,
adding that if success did not reward the effort, the failure will have been “in
the execution rather than in the plan and purpose.”34
If scholarly books can be classified by their commitment to accuracy and
balance, then Ridpath’s A Popular History of the United States fell squarely
into the category of the objective. Fair-mindedness was a central characteristic
of the volume. Ridpath’s patriotic fervor for the United States was unmatched,
but he was not afraid to indict those historical figures who had taken wrong
turnings in their pursuit of high American goals. Like Gay, Ridpath could be
a “terrible image breaker” if necessary, as he was in recounting the career of
Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene. In his description of the battle
of Guilford Court-House in North Carolina, for instance, Ridpath noted that
General Greene had superior numbers of troops to those of the British com-
mander, Charles Cornwallis, and that if these troops had “stood firm,” they
would have won the day. Instead, “the raw recruits behaved badly, broke line
and fled. Confusion ensued; the Americans fought hard but were eventually
driven from the field and forced to retreat for several miles.” As the officer
in charge of the operation, Greene must bear primary responsibility for the
breakdown of battlefield order, Ridpath claimed, even if he fought valiantly
in his own right. At the Battle of Eutaw Springs, Greene was again denied a
decisive victory “by the bad conduct of some of his men, who, before the field
was fairly won, abandoned themselves to eating and drinking in the enemy’s
camp.”35 Despite the fact that most Centennial histories described Greene as
“George Washington’s most trusted adviser” and “second only to Washington
as a commander of rebel forces,” Ridpath felt obliged to point out his short-
comings as a leader of soldiers. This attack on Greene’s competency was all
the more unusual because Greene, who was burdened with financial troubles
after the Revolution because of debts “incurred largely in obtaining supplies
for these troops,” died a martyr at the age of forty-four in 1786, one of the “un-
touchables” by virtue of this sacrifice.36
Ridpath was also committed to thoroughness and objectivity as method-
ological principles in A Popular History. He went to painstaking efforts to
provide a rounded portrait of the Puritans, for instance, despite his obvious
aversion to their lifestyle and practices. On the negative side, Ridpath believed

that the settlers of Massachusetts Bay were bigots who, in matters of religion,
were “intolerant and superstitious.” Their religious faith, he argued, “was
gloomy and foreboding,” and they viewed human life as “a sad and miserable
journey.” In such descriptions, he wrote in a spirit befitting Sydney Howard
Gay: “To be mistaken was to sin. To fail in trifling ceremonies was reckoned
a grievous crime. In the shadow of such belief the people became austere and
melancholy. Escaping from the splendid formality of the Episcopal Church,
they set up a colder and severer form of worship; and the form was made like
iron. Dissenters themselves, they could not tolerate the dissent of others. To
restrain and punish error seemed right and necessary,” he noted. On the posi-
tive side, however, Ridpath believed that Puritanism contained within itself the
power to correct its own abuses. Seeing in seventeenth-century New England-
ers the prototypes of eighteenth-century Bostonian patriots, Ridpath noted
that within “the austere and gloomy fabric dwelt the very soul and genius of
FREE THOUGHT. Under the ice-bound rigors of the faith flowed a current which
no fatalism could congeal, no superstition poison,” he added. “The heart of a
mighty, tumultuous, liberty-loving life throbbed within the cold, stiff body of
formalism. A powerful vitality, which no disaster could subdue, no persecution
quench, warmed and energized and quickened.” For every malicious Samuel
Parris or bigoted Cotton Mather among the Puritans, he noted, there was a
self-sacrificing Jonathan Winthrop or a beneficent John Harvard to balance
the scales. “The evils of the system may well be forgotten in the glory of its
achievements,” he noted, but “[w]ithout the Puritans, America would have
been a delusion and liberty only a name.” Sober scholarly judgment required
historians to admit that the original settlers of New England were “zealous,”
“frugal,” and at times justly “despised and mocked and hated,” he concluded,
but a more farsighted view of their accomplishments must include recognition
of the fact that their “affections and hopes were the coming age’s.”37
In keeping with the lessons he had imparted to his students of history at As-
bury, Ridpath embraced “reason” both as a standard by which to judge human
behavior and as a methodological device for constructing history. Throughout
A Popular History he emphasized the value of the practical over the philosoph-
ical. Americans were great, he argued, because they were pragmatists whose
utilitarian outlooks protected them from the dangers of abstract dreams. The
contrast between American realism and European idealism was nowhere more
dramatically demonstrated, in Ridpath’s estimation, than in the case of the
farfetched plan of certain British colonial leaders to turn the Carolinas into a
model community grounded in abstract principles of governance. In the late
1660s, the political philosopher, John Locke, was employed by Sir Ashley and
his associates to prepare a constitution for the region, and Ridpath concluded

derisively that the “legislation of the world furnishes no parallel for the pomp-
ous absurdity of Locke’s performance.” The treatise divided the Carolinas
into districts of 480,000 acres each, and political rights were based on heredi-
tary wealth through a descending hierarchy of dukes, earls, marquises, knights,
lords, and esquires, including “every sort of feudal nonsense that the human
imagination could conceive of.” It was an “imperial scheme which was to stand
like a colossus over the huts and pastures along the Cape Fear and Chowan
Rivers,” he mocked, where “heraldic ceremony” would rule over the affairs
of “a few colonists who lived on venison and potatoes and paid their debts
with tobacco!” According to Ridpath, the settlers of Ablemarle and Clarendon
“had been furnished with a copy of Locke’s big constitution, but they had no
more use for it than for a dead elephant. Instead of a grand model, a little gov-
ernment was organized on the principles of common sense,” he noted. The
“magnificent paper empire of Shaftesbury was swept into oblivion,” and they
“learned to govern themselves after the simple manner of pioneers.”38
A corollary to this faith in reason was Ridpath’s disdain for irrationality as
a character trait. The Salem witchcraft episode furnished the most concrete
example of such “unreason.” Characterizing witchcraft as “the darkest page in
the history of New England” and the “most fatal delusion of modern times,”
Ridpath recounted the details of how a daughter and a niece of Samuel Par-
ris, the local minister, were attacked “with a nervous disorder which rendered
them partially insane,” causing Parris to give into “his suspicions” that the two
girls were “bewitched” by Tituba, “an Indian maid-servant of the household.”
The episode might have ended there after a sound and deserved beating, Rid-
path noted, except that Parris allowed his irrational jealousies of ecclesiastical
competitors in town (such as George Burroughs, who “disbelieved” in witch-
craft) to cloud his judgments. Seeing an opportunity “to turn the confessions
of the foolish Indian servant against his enemies, to overwhelm his rival with
the superstitions of the community, and perhaps to have him put to death,”
Parris originated “the whole murderous scheme” out of “personal malice.”
The “bigoted” Cotton Mather, a ministerial accomplice in this insanity, “had
seventy-five innocent people locked up in dungeons, not a single one of whom
was a partisan of Parris by Ridpath’s accounting. Makeshift special courts with-
out sufficient legal authority were ordered into session; “convictions followed
fast, [and] the gallows stood waiting for its victims.” When George Burroughs
professed his innocence and recited correctly the Lord’s Prayer, a feat thought
impossible for a witch, reason nearly prevailed. “The people broke into sobs
and moans, and would have rescued their friend from death,” Ridpath wrote,
“but the tyrant Mather dashed among them on horseback, muttering impreca-
tions, and drove the hangman to his horrid work.” Eventually the “thralldom

of the popular mind was broken,” Ridpath concluded, and “[r]eason shook
off the terror that had oppressed it. The prison doors were opened, and the
victims of malice and superstition went forth free. . . . not another life was sac-
rificed to passion and fanaticism.”39
Commitment to objectivity also required Ridpath to challenge interpreta-
tions of past events that had taken on the patina of truth but were not corrobo-
rated fully by the historical record. In this sense he shared much in common
with the iconoclast Gay, who was hard at work debunking the scholarship of
other historians such as Henry Dexter. Ridpath took issue, for instance, with
certain historians of his day who had described the New York City “slave plot”
of 1741 as a deliberate and ultimately ill-fated violent uprising against abuses
by masters.40 Ridpath admitted that slaves had been mistreated and that a few
destructive fires had been set, but he was unwilling to conclude that the incen-
diaries were the “bonded servants” of the city. “Some degraded women came
forward and gave information that the negroes had made a plot to burn the city,
kill all who opposed them, and set up one of their own number as governor,”
Ridpath argued, noting that the “whole story was the essence of absurdity.”
The “people were alarmed, and ready to believe anything,” however, and in
this state of distress, they offered the reward of freedom to any slave who would
expose the riotous intentions of others. “Many witnesses rushed forward with
foolish and contradictory stories; the jails were filled with the accused; and
more than thirty of the miserable creatures, with hardly the form of a trial,
were convicted and then hanged or burned to death,” he noted. “Others were
transported and sold as slaves in foreign lands.” This disgusting display of
cruelty not only confirmed for Ridpath the tragedies associated with irrational
behavior, it also exposed the persistence of the racist belief that the slaves had
received what they had coming to them. Once the “excited people regained
their senses,” the most reasonable of them came to see that “the whole shock-
ing affair had been the result of terror and fanaticism,” he noted. Yet irrespon-
sible historians continued to argue for a root cause in the misbehavior of the
slaves themselves. Ridpath’s verdict was clearer and less ambiguous: “there
was no plot at all.”41
Ridpath’s Popular History was well written but not overwritten. He was
careful not to rely too much on overdramatized and glorified portraits of in-
dividuals to carry the weight of historical example, focusing instead on un-
derstated descriptions of the rise and fall of institutions and idea systems. To
supplement these scholarly aims, Ridpath provided readers with learning
aids, including synchronic charts of the sort he had used in his classroom for
teaching the transitions among historical periods. These aids had been devel-
oped originally by an early nineteenth-century Polish general, Josef Bem, who

devised elaborate diagrams “listing all the significant events in the history of
the world” as a way of teaching the lessons of the past to military students. The
strategy was to associate specific periods in history with selected colors, which,
when arranged properly, would give readers a quick visual reference scheme
for periodizing the past. Ridpath was among the first to use this idiographic
technique in a popular history, providing foldout charts in which long blocks
of color constituted significant periods in the development of the nation. Com-
parable shades implied closely aligned events, some of which overlapped into
amalgamated hues corresponding with transitional historical phases. It was
“History made Visible” as one later marketer of synchronic charts advertised
them.42 The historian William Sloane referred to these charts in contemptuous
terms when he remarked in 1895: “Middle-aged and older men will remember
with some amusement the amazing historical charts which used to adorn the
walls of schoolrooms, and resembled nothing so much as rainbow colored riv-
ers vaguely rising at the top, and wandering in viscid streams more or less ver-
tically, according to the law of gravitation or the resistance of the medium, until
absorbed one by the other, or lost in the ferule at the bottom.”43 For Ridpath,
however, these aids helped establish the credibility of his history by providing
scholarly guidelines for measuring the passage of time.
Ridpath’s use of the Bem method reflected a perspective on time that was
linear, measurable, and more scrupulously scholarly than those of some of
his predecessors in the field of popular history. Narrative historians such as
John Frost had periodized the past with reference to geographic rather than
chronological schemes, telling the complete history of a particular colony from
its moment of origin to the American Revolution before backtracking to the
early history of its neighbors.44 Even the more careful popularizers Bryant and
Gay catapulted on occasion across decades and centuries when it suited their
structural purposes.45 Ridpath was guilty of some chronological foreshorten-
ings himself, as when he wrote that the affairs of colonial Virginia between
1700 and 1750 were “not of sufficient interest and importance to require ex-
tended notice in an abridgment of American history.”46 Synchronic charts,
however, allowed Ridpath to remedy such discrepancies “between the dura-
tion of referred-to time and the duration of its representation in textual or dis-
cursive time” by providing visual indicators of the “exact proportions of time”
subsumed by successive periods “at a glance.” Accuracy in these matters was
important to Ridpath given his larger scholarly agenda and the potential con-
fusions that could arise from the fact that historic time “is both singular for
the moment of dating and continuous for measuring duration.” Since time,
as Robert Berkhofer Jr. has noted, is “sequential, external, universal, and yet
specific to the events that take place,” historians have many potential narrative

options available for depicting its passage. For Ridpath, however, the idea of
“the irreversibility of historic time” was the most sacred of these schemes since
it allowed him to make assumptions about “causality, contingency, irrelevance,
and anachronism” that other popular historians missed.47
Despite these significant efforts to increase the objectivity of his history,
Ridpath could not suppress completely those lingering romantic impulses
that had been with him since his student days. His was a “popular” history
after all, intended not primarily for students but for “the average American
. . . who has neither the time nor disposition to plod through ten or twenty
volumes of elaborate historical dissertation.”48 Readability was still a high
priority, therefore, and Ridpath was not above resorting to some of the more
imaginative narrative devices perfected by Frost and Irving in order to attract
audiences. David Levin has noted that the trope of the “vanishing, or expelled,
or doomed ‘race’ ” was a commonplace in such romantic histories, “inspiring
honorable compassion, showing the force of destiny, [and] suggesting one’s
proper attitude toward the Indian.”49 We see the same sort of conventions
at work repeatedly in Ridpath’s Popular History, especially with reference to
Native Americans. “From ocean to ocean the copper-colored children of the
woods ruled with undisputed sway,” Ridpath wrote of the pre-Columbian era;
by the nineteenth century, however, the race had “withered to a shadow,” leav-
ing only a few thousand “to rehearse the story of their ancestors.” The con-
quering Saxon subdued the natives with relentless dispatch and hastened the
dramatic expiration of a people. “The weaker race has withered from his pres-
ence and sword.” Ridpath wrote. “By the majestic rivers and in the depths of
the solitary woods the feeble sons of the Bow and Arrow will be seen no more.
Only their names remain on hill and stream and mountain.” Slipping into the
present tense as a way of increasing the dramatic sense of participation in the
events of history among his readers, Ridpath concluded: “The Red man sinks
and fails. His eyes are to the West. To the prairies and forests, the hunting-
grounds of his ancestors, he says farewell. He is gone! The cypress and the
hemlock sing his requiem.”50
Ridpath’s Popular History also included long, poetic reflections on the
character of Native Americans as representative men (women were largely ig-
nored). “To the Red man of the Western continent the chase was every thing,”
he wrote. “Without the chase he pined and languished and died. To smite with
swift arrow the deer and the bear was the sole delight and profit of the primi-
tive Americans. Such a race could live only in a country of woods and wild ani-
mals. The illimitable hunting-grounds—forest, and hill, and river—were the
Indian’s earthly paradise, and the type of his home hereafter.” Resistant to the
idea of civil authority “which should subordinate his passions, curb his will,

A “Bem Method” chart from A Popular History of the United States
illustrating Ridpath’s linear approach to history.

and thwart his purposes,” Native Americans indulged their penchants for war
and for “personal, vindictive, and bloody vengeance” on enemies. Though
noble savages with respect to combat valor, they were hopelessly flawed when
it came to military principles of justice and humanity. For battlefield strategy,
Ridpath’s Native Americans relied on “the surprise, the ambuscade, the mas-
sacre; and . . . cunning and treachery. Quarter was rarely asked, and never
granted; those who were spared from the fight were only reserved for a bar-
barous captivity, ransom. or the stake. In the torture of his victims all the dia-
bolical ferocity of the savage warrior’s nature burst forth without restraint.”
They were barbarians whose tools were never “free from the stain of blood”
and who succumbed to vices such as alcohol in appalling ways. “The use of
tobacco was universal and excessive; and after the introduction of intoxicat-
ing liquors by the Europeans the Indians fell into terrible drunkenness, only
limited in its extent by the amount of spirits which they could procure. It is
doubtful whether any other race has been so awfully degraded by drink,” he
concluded in the temperance-minded manner of Gay.51
Nor could Ridpath resist a romantic story on occasion, as his treatment of the
John Smith episode attests. As early as the 1860s, New England scholars affili-
ated with the American Antiquarian Society such as Charles Deane and Henry
Adams had begun to argue persuasively that much of what John Smith had said
about himself in the General History of Virginia was exaggerated and perhaps
untrue, especially the apocryphal Pocahontas legend.52 Gay had supported this
line of argument in Bryant’s Popular History over the objections of his coauthor
and the advice of Simms. Ridpath, the scholar, might have been expected to join
in the debunking of Smith by professionals, but instead he embraced a more
romanticized portrait of the captain, a portrayal that bordered on an unchar-
acteristic brand of hero worship. Arguing that the first settlers at Jamestown
were “idle, improvident, dissolute,” and that King James acted “with his usual
stupidity” in managing the settlement, Ridpath held Smith up as “the best and
truest man in the colony.” Smith’s “strange and wonderful career” was typified
by his actions with regard to the Indian attack that left him in captivity, Ridpath
noted. Sentenced to death by members of Powhatan’s tribe who had captured
him after an impossible defense, Pocahontas rescued the intrepid discoverer
in a manner that, as described by Ridpath, suggested how accepting he was
of Smith’s own version of events and of Simms’s plea to immortalize it: “Two
large stones were brought into the hall, Smith was dragged forth bound, and his
head put into position to be crushed with a warclub. A stalwart painted savage
was ordered out of the rank and stood ready for the bloody tragedy. The signal
was given, the grim executioner raised his bludgeon, and another moment had
decided the fate of both the illustrious captive and his colony. But the peril went

by harmless. Matoaka [Pocahontas], the eldest daughter of Powhatan, sprang
from her seat and rushed between the warrior’s uplifted club and the prostrate
prisoner.” In melodramatic fashion she “clasped his head in her arms and held
on with the resolution of despair until her father, yielding to her frantic appeals,
ordered Smith to be unbound and lifted up. Again he was rescued from a ter-
rible death.” Ridpath saw “no reason in the world” to doubt “the truth of this
affecting and romantic story,” and he declared it “one of the most marvelous
and touching in the history of any nation.”53
On a few occasions in his Popular History, Ridpath resorted to melodra-
matic devices more typical of Bryant than of the professional scholars with
whom he identified. Sensationalism as a literary convention in the nineteenth
century often degenerated into the macabre or the grotesque when popular-
izers desired to convey truly dramatic meaning.54 This was startlingly evident
in Ridpath’s gruesome narrative treatment of the Pequod War in the late 1630s.
In discussing the ambush of a village of Algonquins by vengeful New England
settlers, Ridpath could not restrain himself from describing in grizzly detail
the deaths of hundreds of inhabitants in a ring of fires set around their en-
campment. “The yelling savages found themselves begirt with fire,” Ridpath
wrote. “They ran round and round like wild beasts in a burning circus. If one
of the wretched creatures burst through the flames, it was only to meet certain
death from a broadsword or a musket-ball. The destruction was complete and
awful. Only seven warriors escaped; seven others were made prisoners. Six
hundred men, women, and children perished, nearly all of them being roasted
to death in a hideous heap. Before the rising of the sun the pride and glory of
the Pequods had passed away for ever.” Returning relatives later discovered
“nearly all of their proud tribe lying in one blackened pile of half-burnt flesh
and bones. The savage warriors stamped the earth, yelled and tore their hair in
desperate rage, and ran howling through the woods.” Even these “remaining
two hundred panting fugitives were hunted to death or captivity. . . . For many
years the other nations [Indians], when tempted to hostility, remembered the
fate of the Pequods.”55 Part of Ridpath’s purpose here was undoubtedly to sell
books, but such excesses were unusually graphic even for the popular history
marketplace and were certainly atypical of Ridpath’s early career as a writer.56
Finally, Ridpath moralized in A Popular History in ways that would not
have embarrassed Irving or Frost but rankled later scholars. He made occa-
sional use of convenient consolidating themes such as Providence and des-
tiny as a way of tying together disparate elements in his narrative. “Would
these isolated provinces in America—now so quick to take offence at each
other’s beliefs and actions, and so easily jealous of each other’s power and
fame—ever unite in a common cause? ever join to do battle for life and liberty?

ever become a Nation?” he asked. “Such were the momentous questions, the
problems of destiny, which hung above the colonies at the middle of the eigh-
teenth century—problems which the future could not be long in solving.” The
French and Indian War, Ridpath argued, occupied a central role in the answer-
ing of these questions since that conflict provided the incentive for unification
that ultimately sparked nationhood. With “this great event,” he declared, “the
separate histories of the colonies are lost in the more general history of the
nation” and destiny fulfilled its purpose of creating a democratic nation out
of “the Old Thirteen republics.” Collapsing dozens of themes and subplots
into one master narrative or “Great Story,” Ridpath employed the reduction-
ist techniques of Parkman or Prescott to treat large expanses of time. “It is
all one story—the story of the human race seeking for liberty,” he concluded
of his history.57 It was precisely such high-minded didacticism on the part of
Ridpath combined with his profound sense that he was writing at a crucial
moment in the history of mankind that encouraged his sometimes exaggerated
and self-important tone. The creators of the prospectus for A Popular History
did nothing to diminish these claims, noting that “never has there been a time,
when it was so necessary that the American citizen should look back and trace
the progress of his Country, from its early, humble beginnings, to its present
proud position among the foremost nations of the World.”58
In providing evidence both of neutral, scientific scholarship and subjective,
historical imagination, Ridpath’s History had shared much in common with
other hybrid popular works such as Bryant’s Popular History. Unlike Bryant
and Gay, however, Ridpath tried to reconcile these two impulses by distinguish-
ing between objectivity as a method and objectivity as an intellectual goal. The
distinction bore heavily on ways to draw subjective meaning out of concrete
facts. “If to be objective is to be scrupulously careful about reporting accurately
what one sees, then of course that is laudable,” Howard Zinn has noted. “But
accuracy is only a prerequisite. That a metalsmith uses reliable measuring in-
struments is a condition for doing good work, but does not answer the crucial
question: will he now forge a sword or a plowshare with his instruments? That
the metalsmith has determined in advance that he prefers a plowshare does not
require him to distort his measurements.” By the same logic, Ridpath did not
feel obliged to abjure a set of values simply because they were subjective; he
only insisted that the tools used to study the practical impact of those values
must be objective in terms of accuracy. “Our values should determine the ques-
tions we ask in scholarly inquiry,” in short, “but not the answers.”59
The important intellectual questions for Ridpath in A Popular History of the
United States related to the types of literary strategies he should employ to convey
the answers he found implicit in his research. What kind of Great Story should

be told from the many subnarratives constituting American history? Should
the American past be emplotted as a triumphant self-congratulatory narrative?
a cautionary tale? a tragedy? And what prescriptions for the future should be
drawn from this record? Ridpath addressed these issues in his conclusion with
resort to two structuring metaphors. On the one hand, he used a cyclical analogy
to suggest that American history might be spiraling back on itself in hopelessly
repetitive ways. “Is it the sad fate of humanity, after all its struggles, toils, and
sighing, to turn forever round and round in the same beaten circle, climbing the
long ascent from the degradation of savage life to the heights of national renown
only to descend again into the fenlands of despair?” he asked. Quoting Lord
Byron’s “gloomy picture of the rise and fall of nations,” Ridpath answered with
reference to some of the poet’s pessimism as conveyed in the lines:
Here is the moral of all human tales,—
’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First freedom and then glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last;
And History with all her volumes vast
Hath but one page!
On the other hand, Ridpath posed a linear alternative in which progress was
the defining characteristic of a human race that, in “breaking the bonds of its
servitude and escaping at last from its long imprisonment, [had] struck out
across the fields of sublime possibility the promised pathway leading to the
final triumph.” There were “still doubts and fears—perplexities, anxieties, and
sometimes anguish—arising in the soul of the philanthropist as he turns his
gaze to the future,” he acknowledged, but there were also “hopes, grounds of
confidence, auspicious omens, tokens of the substantial victory of truth, inspi-
rations of faith welling up in the heart of the watcher as he scans the dappled
horizon of the coming day.”60
Such optimistic expressions of the purpose of American history amid the far
less sensational catalogue of descriptions of events that characterized much of A
Popular History of the United States suggested what a mixed bag popular his-
tories could be at the time of the Centennial. The visible seams of Bryant’s and
Gay’s hybrid text could be accounted for by the conditions of its joint authorship,
but the fact that a single author displayed both objective and subjective impulses
was more difficult to explain. In one sense, such a book might be expected to
appeal to a wide range of readers, and indeed this one did, selling 100,000 cop-
ies within the first few years of release and an estimated 350,000 copies over
its publication lifetime.61 Unlike Bryant and Gay, Ridpath met the Centennial
deadline of his publisher and reaped the benefits of commemorative sales. “Sold

by subscription in farm villages and small towns throughout the country,” like
those Louisiana parishes Huey Long canvassed, A Popular History of the United
States “provided a colorful introduction to history for millions,” wrote one ad-
mirer.62 The volume also did much to secure a national reputation for a profes-
sor toiling in relative obscurity on the Indiana frontier. Ridpath “is just in his
prime, strong, vigorous, well-grounded in a wholesome faith, and ambitious to
do all in his power for truth and right, and the dissemination of knowledge,” an
Indiana neighbor noted at the height of sales. “His past augurs a brilliant and
useful future, and he assuredly deserves high honor, and challenges the broth-
erly sympathy and encouragement of good men every-where.”63
Despite the fact that it was a “fair specimen of a book made to be sold by
solicited subscriptions,” however, his Popular History proved a partial disap-
pointment to Ridpath. Some professionals, like the young historian-in-training
Woodrow Wilson, referred to its “manifest crudeness and inadequacy.”64 Still
others raised concerns about whether the work was scholarly enough. “It is, how-
ever, but just to say that while written in a style that is free from serious defects, in
point of historical accuracy and completeness of information it leaves something
to be desired,” wrote the historian Charles Kendall Adams. “By the painstaking
student, therefore, it can hardly be accepted as authority.” This same reviewer
complained: “the pages of the volume glow with the fervor of patriotism which
by some will be deemed a substantial merit, by others a somewhat undiscrimi-
nating laudation of American institutions.”65 Still worse, critics judged the vol-
ume inadequate in terms of what it could provide average readers and students.
In trying to “give leading facts in a simple manner,” J. N. Larned noted, Ridpath
failed to convey an adequate sense of the complex drama of history. The “per-
spective was bad,” since nearly sixty pages of the work were devoted to the Cen-
tennial Exposition, Larned concluded, and “social factors [were] almost wholly
omitted.”66 For Ridpath, this was the cruelest cut of all, since it implied that
despite impressive sales, A Popular History of the United States was not “useful”
in the pragmatic sense of equipping readers to face daily challenges. Such a real-
ization disappointed Ridpath greatly, since he was an author who, since college,
had striven to change the world with his writings rather than merely write about
a changing world. The recognition prompted significant alterations in his life
with respect to his career as a teacher, writer, and popularizer.
The Poet-Historian and the New History

The months and years following the publication of A Popular History
of the United States were important transitional ones for Ridpath. The most

significant moment in this period of change was the death of his father in 1877.
Ridpath’s admiration for his father was profound, especially his respect for his
simple roots and modest values. Abraham Ridpath was “a pioneer, a humble
farmer,” and his son never forgot the pledge of humility he took when his role
model passed away. “I stood beside him when he died,” Ridpath noted of his
father, “I folded his hands over his honest breast, and made a vow. . . . I said,
‘He was a toiler—I will take up the task of his hands and the purposes of his
heart. He was one of the common people. I also will be one of the common
people. I will love them, and honor them, and defend them. I will believe in
them, as he did, and will trust them. IF THEY EVER HAVE A CAUSE, THAT CAUSE
SHALL BE MIND. If they have a hope or an aspiration, I will share it. Whoever
attempts to injure them, to take away their rights, to oppress them, to enslave
them, shall be my enemy—not because I hate or would do him hurt, but be-
cause he is unjust and cruel.’ ”67 This commitment to the common people re-
mained with Ridpath for the remainder of his life and was manifested in his
subsequent writings. Expressing disdain for “the dainty offspring of our more
refined localities,” Ridpath refused to think of himself as anything other than
a rugged Indiana man defined in personality and career by his humble begin-
nings and by his ambition to write for the masses.68
Ridpath’s commitment to the masses helps explain why he was so discour-
aged by criticisms of his Popular History. Increasingly throughout the late 1870s
and early 1880s, Ridpath questioned whether as a professor of history and oc-
casional author of erudite books he was having the kind of impact he desired
on unassuming citizens such as his father had been. He spoke with growing
concern of the aloofness of his professional colleagues, “those assiduous schol-
ars” and “wrinkled sages” whose “eyes had been dimmed with years of appli-
cation,” and who sat in “the half-gloom of libraries . . . poring by daylight and
lamplight over the faint lines of the man-made pictures we call history! Out of
that they would discover the past, determine the laws of human society, and re-
organize the world!” he noted contemptuously.69 In order to satisfy his “demo-
cratic sympathy with the aspirations of the common people,” Ridpath emerged
gradually in the 1880s from the somberness of his scholar’s study into the light
of civic community.70 He went on the lecture circuit and delivered addresses on
popular themes to local and regional public audiences, including discussions
on “Radicalism,” “Poverty and Crime,” and “The Philosophy of Justice.”71 He
was especially attentive to the preferences of listeners for contemporary top-
ics. One admirer of Ridpath’s public performances on these occasions noted:
“There is nothing perhaps which reacts on his enthusiasm and earnest nature
more powerfully than the presence of an audience waiting to hear an address on
some theme of current interest. The appeals made to him for public speech and

for incidental writing on almost all manner of topics, and from all parts of the
country, would require for favorable answer the labor of several men. Not infre-
quently the appeal comes from high quarters, when congressional debate is on,
or when questions of national policy are sent to the people for decision.”72
Even in his scholarship Ridpath moved in the direction of more idiosyn-
cratic, less scholarly approaches to the past. Contemplating a history of the
Turko-Russian War of 1878, for instance, Ridpath wrote George Bancroft for
advice on how to proceed in the matter. Bancroft was widely regarded as Amer-
ica’s preeminent historian, and the familiar tone of Ridpath’s note revealed the
extent to which he believed himself entitled to membership in a community
of scholars in the 1870s. As one might predict, Bancroft instructed Ridpath
to place his primary emphasis on fact-finding and objectivity of presentation.
Bancroft admitted that it was important to occasionally step back to consider
the “big picture” and that “you must enliven your work at times by interesting
anecdotes,” since “the mind of the reader must be rested sometimes, by devia-
tion from the regular chanel [sic] of flowing facts.” In general, however, he felt
that these subjective considerations were distractions to the larger goal which
was to assemble the facts in their proper order. Bancroft also advised Ridpath
not to publish his book until the war had ended. This suggestion was intended
to ensure that the proposed history was accurate and thorough. Otherwise, the
revered historian noted, Ridpath would have to rely on contemporary journal-
istic accounts of the conflict of the sort that had compromised so many popular
histories of the Civil War, such as those by Abbott. “Do not depend too much
on newspapers, for you know the truthfulness of their statements is not always
to be relied upon,” Bancroft warned.73 This advice, though sound, would have
obligated Ridpath to a much longer research phase than he desired and might
have threatened the contemporary feel of the project.
While Ridpath never completed his history of the Turko-Russian War, it
is clear from other projects he undertook in this period that he charted a path
independent from that proposed by the exalted scholar. Despite Bancroft’s
suspicion of journalistic accounts, that is, Ridpath relied on newspapers for
both evidence and audiences, gleaning materials from numerous regional pa-
pers for his public addresses and works which were in turn advertised in those
very papers.74 In these and other matters he desired to follow his own histori-
cal instincts and took pride in his independence from established scholars. “I
am not often indebted to anybody for anything,” Ridpath wrote. “I suppose
if you should have all the men in the world in a pen and pluck out that one by
the pigtail who had had the least assistance from any human being, you would
have me by the scalp.”75 Given these proclivities, it is perhaps telling that in
1884, when invitations went out to join the American Historical Association,

Ridpath did not receive one. Nor was he likely disappointed by the snubbing.
Despite having been one of the nation’s first professors of history, he was re-
luctant to associate himself too closely with professionals, whom he grew to
distrust more and more with each passing year. The scholarly temperament of
nineteenth-century professional historians, which John Higham has described
as “impersonal, collaborative, secular, impatient of mystery, and relentlessly
concerned with the relation of things to one another instead of their relation to
a realm of ultimate meaning,” became worrisome to Ridpath.76
By 1885, Ridpath’s concerns about the limitations of scholars compelled
him finally to make an important professional decision; late in that academic
year, Ridpath announced that he would be retiring from Asbury University
to concentrate on his popular writing.77 Many of his colleagues were shocked
and discouraged. Ridpath had become vice president of Asbury and had been
instrumental in convincing Washington C. DePauw to give over $600,000 to
the college. They could not imagine him leaving the university, and they tried
to entice him back with offers of administrative promotions, possibly even the
presidency of the college. But Ridpath passed on these opportunities, explain-
ing to friends that he had reached a kind of crossroads and that he was anxious
to experiment with some new historical methodologies in the production of
several important and popular works of history to benefit larger audiences.78
His secretary speculated at the motives for his decision: “Dr. Ridpath is by no
means a recluse. His activities and words and writings are among the people.
He influences public thought, and is concerned to keep in touch with what he
considers the best movements, political and social, of the times.”79
Many of Ridpath’s scholarly friends did not sympathize with the intellec-
tual direction in which he was moving. Some objected to the larger public
profile he assumed after 1884, because they saw in it a rejection of detached,
academic standards. Others worried about the commercial overtones of the
decision. Publication in 1885 of Ridpath’s History of the World did little to
allay their concerns. Released originally by subscription and then by the Jones
Brothers in a three-volume calfskin edition, it expanded later into a lavishly
illustrated but unwieldy nine volumes marketed by the Ridpath Historical So-
ciety of Cincinnati.80 Several generations of youngsters (including Huey Long
and Thomas Wolfe) cut their historical teeth on these pictorial works whose
impact in the marketplace for popular books was significant. Money was cer-
tainly made on the project, although not primarily by Ridpath. Henry Edwin
Sever, for instance, grew up on a Missouri farm and first read Ridpath’s vol-
umes as the principal of a public school. He liked the work so well he quit his
job as an educator to take a position as a full-time salesman for the book in the
1880s. He eventually became president of the Riverside Publishing Company

and bought the rights and plates to Ridpath’s History of the World. “[A]fter a
large ad campaign to sell the book,” Sever’s biographer notes, “he retired with
a great fortune.”81 Others earned more modest remunerations from Ridpath’s
efforts. The activist Jane Addams was one of these. She was fed a steady diet
of history at home, including Plutarch, Washington Irving’s Life of Washing-
ton, and John Clark Ridpath’s “formidable history of the world,” all of which
satisfied her appetite for “the printed page.” She did not take to such works of
history immediately, however; in fact, Addams’s father had to bribe his daugh-
ter into reading them. In order to “sweeten these large doses of heavy read-
ing,” John Addams offered her a quarter-dollar a volume, payable once she
had been examined on what she had read.82 Such parental concessions to the
profit-motive in reading did little perhaps to dispel the concerns of those al-
ready suspicious about the commercialism of the popular book market.
Others of Ridpath’s associates at DePauw, some accepting of this change in
intellectual direction and others not, regretted the loss of a distinguished col-
league. Ridpath found support among a new group of friends, however, who
had reputations as popular literary figures rather than as erudite scholars. A
particular favorite was the Indiana writer Lew Wallace, whose historical novel
Ben Hur was sweeping the nation at the time.83 Wallace introduced Ridpath to
other members of an informal Indiana literati (known collectively as the “Hoo-
sier bards”), who gathered together regularly at literary teas and workshops at
which regional literary talent was fêted. They were intensely devoted to region
and worked hard to debunk the reputation of Indianians for “boorishness and
illiteracy.”84 Ridpath was one of the most devoted of these regionalists. “While
most of his contemporary writers from that region have issued from their en-
vironment and by throwing themselves into another swim have been easily
borne out oceanward to fame,” his secretary explained, “Ridpath has contin-
ued in his own place, sturdy and determined to fight it out from the home and
place of his birth. He is profoundly concerned about the literary reputation of
his State, and is perfectly willing to abide the sequel.” Though he had from
time to time been distracted by offers of literary work elsewhere—“some liter-
ary center where meritorious production and a life of study are more quickly
recognized and more immediately rewarded with praise”—Ridpath continued
“unmoved in his own place, within a few miles of the site of the low log cabin
where he was born, and in view of the cemetery where, on a beautiful hill-crest,
his father and mother lie buried. He is strongly bound by all ties of kindred af-
fection.”85 So devoted to Indiana was Ridpath, in fact, that he once apologized
to friends for publishing a book as far east as “Cincinnati!”86
Filled with exuberance for his newfound circle of friends, Ridpath was
among the moving spirits in the creation of the American Association of

Writers (later the Western Association of Writers or WAW), a group of novel-
ists, poets and short story writers from Indiana and the Midwest who formed a
union to encourage the “literary people of the West.” Originally the ambitions
of the organization were modest—simply to provide an opportunity for the
writing and reading of poetry and to crown “some beautiful young lady . . .
Queen of Poesy.” A more inclusive spirit quickly overtook organizers, how-
ever, who extended invitations of membership “to the writers of prose and
verse.”87 On June 30, 1886, sixty men and women met in the auditorium of the
Plymouth Church in Indianapolis to develop guidelines and policies for the
association, including literary figures such as James Whitcomb Riley, Sarah
Bolton, William Dudley Foulke, Meredith Nicholson, Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Booth Tarkington, Will Cumback, Mary H. Catherwood, and Benjamin Parker.
They were as high-minded in their rhetoric as were members of Duyckinck’s
Tetractys Club, announcing that they would meet annually to “discuss meth-
ods of composition, and all topics pertaining to the advancement of literature
in America” and to “produce and publish a representative volume of Western
authors from the miscellaneous poems, stories, and sketches read during this
convention or festival.” They spent hours debating interesting literary ques-
tions, such as what the four greatest American novels were, a topic that occu-
pied them for many weeks.88 Ridpath participated actively in such discussions,
and, within the first few months of its inception, he was one of the most promi-
nent figures in the association.
Ridpath and other members of the WAW gathered regularly in Chatauqua-
style conventions at Spring Fountain Park on the shores of Eagle Lake near
Warsaw, Indiana, to discuss how to facilitate their goals.89 This spot, “with its
shady groves of forest trees, it[s] profusion of gushing crystal waters, its lim-
pid lake, and withal, its ample hotel and auditorium accommodations,” WAW
member George S. Cottman noted, was as inviting as “an Arcadian setting
where poets and birds alike might sing their melodious lays.”90 There were
formal sessions in which speakers recited poetry and conducted debates on
heady topics, such as when Ridpath advanced the question: “Is History Ac-
quainted with Providence?” According to a local reporter on hand from the
Warsaw Daily News, Ridpath’s “masterly” handling of this topic as rapporteur
through “an exhaustive and logical train of argument,” led discussants to the
important conclusion that “all history is in accordance with, and is overruled
by, the decrees of Providence.”91 There were also lighter moments as well dur-
ing which WAW members interacted in less structured ways. “Not least among
the golden memories of those days is that of the purely social intercourse of
long sunny June afternoons when earth and sky and sparkling waters were at
their best, and our genial fraternity surrendered itself to sweet-do-nothing,”

recalled one convention-goer.92 Ridpath was an active participant in the play-
ful social life of the organization. He was known for reciting (loudly, as one
witness commented) stanzas from Rudyard’s Kipling’s “Vampire” early in the
morning from the conference hotel porch as a wake-up call to guests who lin-
gered too long in bed. He also lectured on less scholarly topics, such as “Why
the Pawpaw is Poetical and the Turnip is Not.”93
The commonly acknowledged leader of this dedicated group of WAW mem-
bers was the poet James Whitcomb Riley, who was the Midwest’s answer to
poet laureate William Cullen Bryant. Riley is often credited with having started
a poetry boom in the Midwest, developing a vernacular style that encouraged
regional pride in the everyday experiences of Indianians. Ridpath, who took up
verse with alacrity in the late 1880s, was one of his most devoted companions.94
The friendship of Ridpath and Riley, which began in childhood and developed
in earnest in the convivial atmosphere of WAW meetings, was sincere and life-
long, centered on poetry, philosophical rumination, and cigars.95 “Although
Riley could sometimes be cajoled into reciting verse before the assembled asso-
ciation members, his main contribution to the gathering came when the official
business for the day ended,” a mutual acquaintance, Clara Laughlin, recalled.
“Off the hotel’s main dining room there was a small room where Riley and a
small group of friends would often gather to ‘banquet splendidly on crackers
and cheese, pickles, sweet chocolate, and cold tea,’ ” and ”Mr. Riley was always
the dominating spirit, his mood the key in which our pleasure was pitched.”96
Ridpath was always there as well, and sometimes on such occasions he and
Riley challenged the women of the association to a “duel by sonnets.” The po-
etess, Mrs. [Mary H.] Catherwood, often won the day in these informal compe-
titions, but no one managed to out-duel Riley when it came to gaining national
recognition for such local color poetry.97 Despite a certain notoriety of his own,
Ridpath felt inadequate as a producer of poems when compared to Riley and
frequently dismissed the master’s invitations to critique his recitations at asso-
ciation meetings. “It is sinful for me, with my coarser and more scholastic judg-
ment, to handle anything you produce,” Ridpath complained, adding that Riley
was “one of the most exquisite artists which our country has produced.”98
For his part, Riley imagined Ridpath (whom he referred to reverently as
J. C.) as his literary equal. Both exhibited “an amazing sympathy with com-
mon people” that protected each from over-stylized or hyper-scholasticized
writing. “When he writes naturally there is no trace of bookishness in his
work,” a fellow WAW member noted of Riley. “[H]e rarely or never invokes
the mythologies, though it has sometimes pleased him to imagine Pan piping
in Hoosier orchards. He is read and quoted by many who are not habitual
readers of poetry—who would consider it a sign of weakness to be caught in

the act of reading poems of any kind, but who tolerate sentiment in him be-
cause he makes it perfectly natural and surrounds it with a familiar atmosphere
of reality.” Ridpath also shared with Riley a profound desire to win over “the
popular heart,” and neither allowed “the restraints of fixed forms to interfere
with an adequate expression of pure feeling.”99 Their professed goal was to
popularize the art of the bard to such an extent that every household in In-
diana could boast at least one “versifier.” By some accounts, they succeeded.
So prolific were Indiana poets after the formation of the WAW, in fact, that ac-
cording to one witty Indianapolis journalist travelers to the Hoosier state could
not help but encounter residents who adopted the figurative and literal poses
of poet orators. There has “appeared in the community a peculiar crooking
of the right elbow and a furtive sliding of the hand into the left inside pocket,
which was the unfailing preliminary to the reading of a poem,” he noted.100
For Ridpath and Riley, poetry was a potential mechanism for achieving pop-
ular notoriety, and they spoke endlessly of its possibilities. “I tell you, my dear
Jamsey,” Ridpath wrote Riley, “it is just delightful to reflect that you’ve got your
hand on the epiglottis of the old engine of fame, and are running her straight
into the kingdom.”101 In turn, Riley helped celebrate Ridpath’s greatness, when,
on the occasion of Ridpath’s fiftieth birthday, he penned him a congratulatory
poem (“Lines to Perfessor John Clark Ridpath”) that circulated nationally. “But
when it come to Intellect—they tell me yourn was dressed, A leetle mite super-
ber, like, than any of the rest!” wrote Riley in his homespun manner. “Til now its
FAME that writes your name, approvin’, ev’rywhare.”102 Another less colloquial
poem was offered to Ridpath at the same event—“The Poet-Historian”—that
acknowledged his gift for finding the poetic in things historical:
The first, half-conscious, rhythming rhapsodists
From vague traditions wove their dreamy thoughts,
With fact and fiction intermingling, wrought;
The Classic and the Dark-Age annalists,
Then truth was lifted up, till chroniclists
Of later times, endued with reason, caught
The spirit of philosophy, and brought,
Historic records from the realm of mist.
Yet History was in the shadows, where
Scholastic zealots only found her fair,
Till he who loved the Muse’s graceful stroke,
Along the bolder lines of truth awoke
To duty, and upon the heights of prose,
The soulful, song-inspired historian rose.103

Such musings pleased Ridpath immensely for what they implied about his
capacities for escaping the confining restraints of scholarly discourse.
Poetry served to widen Ridpath’s vision and to push him toward a more
metahistorical outlook than he had embraced as a professor. As important as
Riley and the members of the WAW were to Ridpath in terms of cultivating a
poetic sensibility, then, they had an even more profound influence on Ridpath’s
historical vision. Enamored as an undergraduate by the “dreamy thoughts” of
Bryant and other epic poets, Ridpath had rejected as a young professor any
“intermingling” of “fact and fiction” in favor of a more detached, scholarly ap-
proach to his material. At risk of becoming one of those “scholastic zealots”
who studied history “in the shadows,” he had awakened now to “the bolder
lines of truth” and had grown to appreciate “the Muse’s graceful stroke.” In
things commonplace, Ridpath discovered a much more vivid, poetic element
than he had imagined previously. One observer at the Fourth Annual Conven-
tion of the WAW noted that in reciting poetry Ridpath retained his “scholarly
manner,” his “patriarchal form and beard keep[ing] refractory moonshine poets
in check,” but as bard he convincingly “wooed the muses.” The “general merit
of his poem was such,” wrote one listener, “that we believed that he has been
exchanging furtive glances with the sisters of song for years. We may now, with
propriety, say, Dr. Ridpath, the orator, the historian, and poet.”104
As the designated “poet-historian,” Ridpath came close to fulfilling the
hopes of another emerging midwestern figure in the historical profession,
Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1883, as a junior at the University of Wiscon-
sin, Turner had won an oration prize for an address titled “The Poet of the
Future,” in which he predicted the appearance of a divine bard of the people.
In his recitation, Turner took issue with those contemporary poets who imag-
ined themselves obsolete—“idle singers of an empty day”—because they had
nothing of epic value or purpose to proclaim. Turner suggested that the age’s
“myriad of inventions, its schools, its newborn knowledge of nature,” were all
worthy of celebration. The age was magnificent, he argued, “it is the poets that
are lacking.” The solution, according to Turner, was to reimagine the “poet
of the future” not as some bearded Homer or Ovid with inflated profile but
as a more unassuming contemporary with a profound interest in the things
that matter to common people.105 At the Sixth Annual Meeting of the WAW
(at which he presided as president of the organization), Ridpath delivered an
address titled “The Democracy of Letters,” in which he echoed Turner’s sen-
timents, calling for a new, literary voice that would usher in a more relevant
philosophy of history, one that gave hope to the average citizen. “Let the man
of letters find his inspirations and hopes,” Ridpath intoned, “not in those con-
ditions and precedents which the past has entailed on the present, but rather

in his own vision and dream of the better things to come.” The enthusiastic re-
sponse to this address by members of the WAW suggested that listeners found
confirmation of the fact that in the finely turned phrases and richly nuanced
expressions of Ridpath’s historical insight he had answered his own clarion
call for a new “poetry of history.”106
At times resembling a “mutual admiration society” for underappreciated
midwestern artists, the Western Association of Writers was not as well re-
spected outside its own institutional and regional boundaries. In fact, it was
criticized roundly by critics in some literary circles who condemned it as an
“army of the unpublished” and an affront to the general reputation of Ameri-
can literature.107 New York magazines lampooned the WAW as “the Literary
Gravel Pit Association” or “The Writer’s Singing Bee,” while other periodi-
cals designated it “a literary house party” hosted by amateurs in “an effort to
get up a corner in Spring poetry and fix the price of manuscript stories at so
much a year.”108 Some of these attacks were quite personal, such as the criti-
cisms leveled by Noah J. Clodfelter, who had once been a member of the soci-
ety that met on Eagle Lake, but who had quit the organization in disgust over
the silly, self-congratulatory activities of its “doggerel” poets. Convinced that
some of the poetry he shared with members of the association had been stolen
by attendees of the conference, Clodfelter vented his rage in a pungent book,
The Gotham of Yasmar: A Satire. Punning on the story of the original Gotham,
a village in England whose citizens feigned stupidity in order to prevent the
King from establishing a residence there, he referred to WAW members as
“ephemeral dwarfs,” “cocoanut brains” and “pinheads” who wrote “trashy
rot” that future generations would feel compelled to “hold up to ridicule and
scorn.” They were simultaneously “vipers,” a “pack of curs,” and “vampires”
who had been lucky to escape “the penitentiary.” In an effort to rid the world
of their kind, Clodfelter called on “old Gorgon and her poison snake / To
drown them all out in old Eagle Lake.”109
In particular, Clodfelter detested “squint-eyed Riley” who wrote verse
“too smooth, as if inspired by grog.” He declared that Riley was dead, a “self-
destroyer” and “suicide,” whose “weapon was his ‘Child World,’ and it lay
Dead as its victim, closely by his side.” Nor did Ridpath escape Clodfelter’s
wrath; he was singled out for crimes against both poetry and history. Clod-
felter wrote:
Dear little toddlers of the W.A.W.
We’ll walk alone, and our own chance we’ll take,
And row our own boat, but not on the lake
Up near old Warsaw, where the little few

Assemble yearly to praise and review
Their own sad efforts which lie cold in death,
Where requiems sung are only wasted breath.
E’en Ridpath there may chant a sacred mass,
Or Riley woo some forty-year-old lass;
’Tis all the same—a corpse must so remain:
What corpse was ever known to live again?
Ah, such a crowd of would-be’s, by the way!110
These scandalous attacks put Riley, Ridpath, and others in a defensive mood.
“Have you seen a copy of the miserable, vulgar, open-mouthed publication
made by N. J. Clodfelter in which he attempts to lampoon a lot of us, and
yourself in particular?” Ridpath wrote Riley. “It is a little the worst specimen
of ignorant, depraved rot that I have ever seen.” Ridpath advised Riley to ig-
nore the foul production, although his detailed correspondence on the subject
revealed how hard it was for him to take his own advice seriously. “Of course
it is not worth while to care anything, much less to say anything about such a
screed, for the writer is far beyond the reach of salvation or damnation,” he
explained.111
Ridpath did care about Clodfelter’s comments because he was anxious to
convince himself and others that his retirement from teaching had not repre-
sented an abandonment of intellectual standards or high ideals. To this end,
Ridpath did his part to ensure that the Western Association of Writers was
committed to more than just playful artistic expression. As a frequent chair
of the program committee for WAW meetings, Ridpath engineered sessions
devoted to complex philosophical discussions, such as: “Is History a Sci-
ence?” Ridpath’s answer to this challenging query was that studying the past
according to strict scientific rules was an “unaccomplished but not impossible
achievement.”112 Such a response suggested that Ridpath had not given up
completely on the positivism of his professional colleagues. Like many in his
day, Ridpath “understandably wished to participate in the prestige of science,”
and he embraced the scientific method as a way “to escape the fetters of uncer-
tainty.”113 The scientific discovery of “facts” was the only means to ensure that
“romantic story-telling,” so popular in the mid-nineteenth century, would give
way to “real history,” he said. But here and elsewhere Ridpath distinguished
between applied science and theoretical science, professing that the commit-
ment of historians to the facts was not sufficient for the full realization of the
potential of history as a discipline. The time had come, Ridpath argued in a
paper later printed in the Indiana Historical Society Publications, “when the
study of mere facts and events, disconnected and regarded singly and without

respect to the laws of their sequence and evolution, no more could satisfy the
demand of reason.”114
Instead of merely stockpiling facts, the kind of activity in which he had
been engaged as a professor, Ridpath argued that historians should proceed to
broad, poetic generalizations, identifying the universal laws operating in history.
The facts and events of our human drama, “however perfectly investigated and
known,” he informed readers, “do not of themselves suffice.” Unless the “laws
of order, arrangement, and causation could be applied to the phenomena of
man-life,” he noted, “a knowledge of its aspects and partial developments was
of no avail.” Failure to understand universal laws as European historians Henry
Thomas Buckle, Auguste Comte, and Hippolyte Taine were at risk of doing, he
concluded, rendered all the “romantic episodes with which the libraries of the
world are crowded” (read popularizers) as well as “all the painstaking delinea-
tions of mere facts” (read scholars) “but inane and empty images.”115 Despite
its commercial appeal, much of his work on the three volume compendium of
world history published in 1885 had been dominated by the pursuit of facts,
Ridpath admitted, but his goal now was to study “all history in such a man-
ner as to specify some universal meaning.” This metaphysical impulse was not
shared by the majority of American historians, many of whom were suspicious
of large, organizing systems or believed that history was something “given, not
‘theorized.’ ” Facts existed prior to philosophies of history, professional histo-
rians argued, and theoretical speculation was held to be “gratuitous and intrin-
sically unnecessary.”116 Ridpath disagreed with these professionals, however,
insisting that “facts” were neutral and malleable things, dependent for context
and meaning on the overarching mind of the metahistorian.
Part of Ridpath’s cautions about mere facts came from his new poetic sen-
sitivity to a perceived lack of order in late nineteenth-century American life. As
a professor of history, Ridpath had participated actively in the accumulating
of factual information, but a fresh philosophical perspective nurtured at Eagle
Lake encouraged him to believe that scholarly facts provide only “a world of
isolations, of broken parts, of disconnections and capricious individualities.”
What he now sought was a means to weave “the threads of law and order”
implicit in these objective details into a meaningful pattern. Disassociated facts
“appeared to the thought and imagination of the age only as a chaotic flotsam
and jetsam of the seas,” Ridpath wrote in “The Man in History,” “blown up by
the lawless winds and thrown in disordered masses along the shores of time.”
It was the historian’s job to arrange such materials into “a systematic whole,”
determining the laws of sequence and causation operating in the universe. The
assumption was that the universe was at its heart an orderly place whose laws
of operation were but obscure. “The history of mankind is, in a word, one

complete and ample web” without “a single outhanging thread or broken nap
or raveled selvage in its whole time-woven fabric,” he wrote. No fact exists
without relevance to others as determined by precise causal relationships. “We
might as well attempt to find in the material universe some particles of matter
over which gravitation’s law does not extend” as to deny this truth, he argued.
With intense enough study by historians, Ridpath believed, the immutable se-
quences of time could be found along with their “beautiful concomitants of
law and order.” History, which was once given over to “chaotic fire-mist and
cloud,” could one day be revealed “in clear outline upon the vision.”117
Designating his WAW philosophy as the “New History,” Ridpath held out
hope that it could transcend the petty disagreements between popularizers and
professionals—between poetry and science—that had stifled historical investi-
gations for decades.118 In conversations with Riley and other members of the
Western Association of Writers, Ridpath worked out the details of a philosophi-
cal system that elevated historical studies to a place of prominence among all
intellectual enterprises by virtue of its concern with the developmental features
of human experience. Drawing on various evolutionary schemes popular in his
day, Ridpath hoped especially to make Darwin accessible to the masses and
the theory of evolution useful to historians. This association seemed natural to
Ridpath since in Darwin’s system “every experimental proof, each adaptation,
variation, or mutation, was also an historical demonstration.”119 “The central
principle of the New History is this law of universal causation,” Ridpath wrote.
“The bottom concept of it is that everything is caused and nothing causeless;
that every fact of our human drama, whether material or immaterial, simple or
complex, ephemeral or eternal, is linked to some antecedent fact or facts as its
cause and to ensuing facts as its results.” Because the New History substituted
the “sequence of events for the events themselves” and “the law of causation for
the law of chance,” it was process-oriented, centered on the concept of ongo-
ing change.120 It inspired Ridpath to reconsider the periodizing schemes he had
used as a professor at Asbury University to include more overarching perspec-
tives. Since “the course of terrestrial and human development, and hence his-
tory, appeared to be infinitely longer than had previously been supposed,” Bert
Loewenberg has characterized the position, “the standard formulas—ancient,
medieval, and modern—had to be understood with tempered qualifications.”121
With the encouragement of his new friends, Ridpath spent the majority of
his time after retirement from Asbury on a new epic project derived from his
WAW vision—a multivolume history of the world featuring a new philosophy of
history for the masses, the Universal History; or, The Great Races of Mankind
(1893). Clearly influenced by the evolutionary thinkers of his day, Ridpath’s
Universal History undertook to reconcile older scientific methodologies with

new speculative philosophies.122 In the introduction to the work, Ridpath ex-
posed the limitations of the scholarly principles at work in the study of history
at most universities. Traditional history focused on events, he noted, on the “ob-
jective nature of the great fact which goes by the name of History” and on the
“product or result of human activities.” “If we open the pages of any standard
historical work and begin to follow the narrative,” he added, “we shall find it
to be an account of the objectivities resulting from the action of the wills and
purposes of men.” It reflected “the residue of man’s activities on the earth. It
considered results. It delineated events. It followed the evolution of institutions
and described the tangibles of human action and achievement.” Admitting that
he, too, had been enamored of this approach while “giving historical instruction
in an institution of the higher learning,” Ridpath acknowledged that “the agency
by which all this was effected . . . haunted the inquiry more and more, to the
extent even of disturbing my studies and confusing my materials.” He revealed
to readers that a new mentality had gripped him since his retirement from teach-
ing. “At first the suggestion of the importance of the actors in the human drama,
as distinguished from the acts, came dimly and obscurely to view,” he wrote.
“Afterwards it became distinct, persistent, and imperative. I found myself sta-
tioned between the objective phenomena and the subjective agencies of human
story.” Glancing in one direction, he saw “the vast panorama of events, the ar-
chitectural remains, the monuments of passing ages, the relics of human activity,
the institutional forms of society, the governments and nationalities that have
paraded with so much pomp on our vast stage of action.” In the other direction
he observed the “races of mankind themselves. The difference between the one
class of facts and the other grew as distinct as that which discriminates a statue
from the sculptor, a written scroll from its writer, a city from its builders.”123
Noting that the standard kind of narrative (like that of his own A Popular
History of the United States or his History of the World) which relates to the
“objective facts and phenomena” of history had fulfilled itself “by repetition
and multiplicity,” Ridpath determined “to turn squarely about in the inquiry
and take another view of the history of mankind; that is, a view of the human
race itself.” By his own admission, this new epistemological vantage point
reversed his position in the human landscape, directing him to focus not so
much on the “deeds and accomplishments,” which “would be repetition of
the author’s previous essays in historical literature,” but on the bigger ques-
tions that “haunt the mind and shadow the scholar’s study,” issues that “flutter
about the poet’s dream, and cross on rapid wing the philosopher’s landscape.”
In his search for the subjective processes that underlay the objective substance
of history, Ridpath speculated on the wider, general forces of the universe at
work behind the “palpable facts and events which have hitherto constituted

the subject-matter of history.” He shared a faith in the “scientific spirit of the
age” and believed that historians could isolate the underlying principles of
human development operating at the heart of history by studying with scien-
tific rigor the broad patterns of human behavior over time. Revealing the first
expressions of what might be called a modernist impulse, Ridpath noted that
he was more interested in the process than the products of historical action.
“In the new history we might say that there is little concern about the form and
expression, but an infinity of painstaking with respect to the materials of the
narrative and an ever-increasing interest in those lines of causation by which
all events are held together in a single great event constituting the totality of
human life,” Ridpath wrote. “It is almost needless to add that the new history
is a creation of the present century, and that by its method and spirit and the
significance of its results it is destined to relegate all the previous historical
labors of mankind to the place of the materials of history rather than history
itself.”124 In the Universal History, in short, Ridpath attempted to establish his-
tory as a branch of philosophical rather than just empirical inquiry.
A good example of the pretentious sweep of Ridpath’s new WAW-inspired
vision can be seen in the opening chapters of his Universal History, in which
he attempted to recount the “Time and Place of the Beginning” of the world by
arguing backward from the distribution of races. Evolutionary theory begged
certain questions, especially those related to origins, which provoked recon-
siderations of the relationship of past to present. Discounting the creationist
argument concerning the origins of human history, Ridpath considered a wide
range of astronomical, geological, and ethnological alternatives before pro-
nouncing that it is impossible “to know more precisely the date, the locality,
and all the concomitants and conditions under which our ethnic career began.”
Noting, however, that such exact knowledge “has its discounts and defects in
the treasure-total of our mental wealth,” Ridpath eschewed the tendencies of
the “exact sciences” to “reduce all mentality to a formula and mathematical
equation.” Lost in the obsession with empirical facts was “the excursive power
of the mind,” he argued, an undesirable loss, since the “conjecture, uncertainty,
and doubt” of our impressions of the origins of the universe are crucial to “the
dream of the artist and vision of the poet,” which add so much to the “treasures
of humanity.”125 No longer working to suppress the romantic side of his person-
ality that had appeared first during his college years and resurfaced in WAW
meetings, Ridpath now embraced a broad, philosophical perspective on the
world that balanced objective fact with subjective but informed speculation.
In seeking to identify the universal laws of history, Ridpath revealed the
extent to which he had moved in the 1880s from historical scholar to meta-
historian. His goal was an ambitious one—to circumvent the debate between

scientific objectivity and the subjectivity of storytelling by identifying universal
laws of historical causation. This was risky because it challenged the perva-
sive positivism of the age, but his friends in the WAW were largely supportive.
James Whitcomb Riley felt he had achieved his goal marvelously: “The four
sumptuous volumes of your ‘Great Races’ have reached me—found me—cap-
tured and made me a life-prisoner,” he wrote Ridpath. “Simply I stand dazed
in wonderment at your accomplishment of this vast work, so thoroughly,
symmetrically, masterfully rounded and completed.”126 Others also praised
Ridpath’s expansive vision, expressing awe at the sweep of a project that took
as its subject the entire history of multiple races and purported to be “an ac-
count of the ethnic origin, primitive estate, early migrations, social evolution,
and present Conditions and promise of the principal families of men, together
with a preliminary inquiry on the time, place and manner of the beginning” of
the world.127 Still others marveled at how Ridpath had balanced history and
tradition so nicely, proving that popular and scholarly forms could be wedded
together.128 Those who knew Ridpath best understood that the achievement
was deeply personal. The philosophical dynamism implicit in Universal His-
tory was metaphoric of his own life, which, since his retirement from teaching,
had been devoted steadfastly to the consideration of the large forces of change
operating in his personal universe.
The Inductive Method and History as Politics

One of the challenges Ridpath faced in developing New History as a
functioning instrument for the purposes of studying the past was to make the
abstract principles implicit in it understandable to the masses. This was espe-
cially difficult in the field of American history, where a pervasive pragmatic,
anti-philosophical strain operated. Ridpath’s solution was to revisit some of his
earlier writings on the history of the United States with an eye toward altering
the form and story line to accommodate his new system. When the Historical
Publishing Company of Philadelphia proposed an update of the 1876 Popu-
lar History of the United States in commemoration of the quadri-centennial,
therefore, Ridpath agreed readily and spent several months transforming the
text into the People’s History of the United States (1895). Some of the changes
to the book were cosmetic and external to the narrative, such as the altera-
tion in the title from “popular” to “people’s,” which suggested greater public
ownership of the text. The work was also “updated,” carrying the story of
American history through the 1880s and into the 1890s. In addition, new illus-
trations were added to the text, reflecting advances in pictorial reproduction.

Some of these changes were hurried and did not improve the quality of the
original. Historical Publishing, for instance, appropriated images from other
texts that were inappropriate to Ridpath’s narrative. In one noteworthy case,
an image of revelers titled “Confirming a Treaty Between Whites and Indians”
was used to elucidate the improving relationships between the United States
government and Indian tribes in the Ohio Valley during Monroe’s presidency.
Curiously, the celebrants appear to be wearing seventeenth-century English
garb, an anachronism explained by the fact that the illustration was cropped
from a nineteenth-century periodical article depicting the maypole revelries of
seventeenth-century renegade Thomas Morton of Merrymount. Unwilling to
incur the expense of commissioning an original drawing for the new edition of
Ridpath’s history, the publisher made due with recycled images.129
Had these been the only changes to the work, the revision might have been
unwarranted, even despite Ridpath’s assurance in his introduction that the
“history of our country is a theme which can never be exhausted” and that
“familiarity, in this case at least, instead of breeding contempt, adds rather an
increasing charm to the story.” Beyond increased charm, however, Ridpath
sought to impose his new philosophy of history on the material and to fulfill the
promise he had made at his father’s deathbed decades earlier by reinventing
himself as a champion of the people’s causes. “I have attempted to narrate, not
in minute details but in general outline of sufficient amplitude, the adventures
and tentative movements by which the better parts of the New World were
reclaimed and brought at length under the dominion of the English-speaking
race,” he noted of his broader perspective.130 Ridpath’s strategy of making
himself over into a metahistorical populist hero was one that advertisers of his
books employed with greater frequency and effectiveness as his career length-
ened. “Other men have written histories of one nation or period—Gibbon of
Rome, Macaulay of England, Guizot of France,” noted one such promoter,
“but it remained for Dr. Ridpath to write a history of the entire World from
the earliest civilization down to the present day,” covering “every race, every
nation, every time” and in such an “absorbing” style as to hold readers “spell-
bound by his wonderful eloquence.”131 That same panoramic vision was now
directed inward at the American experience.
Among the most significant changes from A Popular History of the United
States to the People’s History of the United States was Ridpath’s obvious de-
sire to elucidate the universal laws at work in American history. “History is
departing more and more from the methods of the old annalists to depict the
movements of human thought and the adaptation of the physical means of
amelioration and progress,” he noted. The “American argument had in it a
force, a cogency, an element of truth and justice” derived from the larger forces

at work in the universe, and the success of the American experiment was due
to its synergy with these abstract principles. The American Revolution was
therefore “one of the leading incidents of a large and world-wide movement
which has not yet by any means reached its limits,” while the westward expan-
sion of the nation was in accordance with “those cosmic laws by which the
population of the earth has always been distributed.” The language of evo-
lutionary growth saturated the new text as well. Noting that the history of the
United States was controlled by “cosmic laws” operating within distinct sci-
entific phases of “attraction and repulsion,” Ridpath began his revised volume
not with a treatment of Native American cultures as he had in the earlier ver-
sion but with a discussion of antiquity and the evolution of ancient races into
their American apotheosis. In his introductory chapter, he gave frequent credit
to “modern man” for using science to reason out the difficult questions of
human and national existence in a way that “men of the ancient globe” could
not. “The fogs of fear and superstition have been tossed afar by the salubrious
wind,” he wrote in sweeping prose, “and though man does not know all, he
does know much of the sphere which he inhabits, the nature of things and the
system of universal nature.”132
The People’s History of the United States revealed a much greater sensitiv-
ity to race on the part of its author as well. In his revised text, Ridpath added
whole sections on the Aztecs and Incas that had not appeared in the original,
noting that the Native Americans of Central America were quite sophisticated
in arts and culture and displayed ample evidence of a “civilized life” that was
“scarcely inferior to the existing conditions in the best parts of the world.” Ar-
guing that the history of these aboriginal Americans had been written largely
by representatives of the “conquering races” in which the “primitive civilized
peoples of the three Americas have had no voice,” Ridpath urged a new his-
torical outlook centered on a more balanced assessment of the human race un-
derstood globally. By this comparative device, he was able to excuse even the
most universally condemned practices of Native Americans, such as human
sacrifice, by arguing that such customs were in common usage elsewhere.
“The Spaniards chose to affect great horror at the religious rites which were
practiced by the Aztecs, and particularly at human sacrifice,” Ridpath noted.
“But the world has failed to balance the account; for even in this particular
the cruelties of the Mexican priests were not equal to those of the Spanish
Inquisition. It is forgotten that many races have thought it pleasing to the gods
to offer human beings on sacrificial altars,” he wrote, including the Romans,
who, although they “did not sacrifice men on altars,” exposed them “to wild
beasts in the arena, or compelled them to meet their trained gladiators in the
bloody circus.” Suggesting that the distinctions among the physical, mental,

and moral states of peoples throughout world history have been greatly exag-
gerated, Ridpath linked ancient prejudices to a contemporary American “dis-
regard of the rights of the native races.”133 In A Popular History of the United
States Ridpath would have sensationalized these issues; in the People’s History
he contextualized them.
Ridpath was more sensitive to these matters of race because evolutionary
theory encouraged him to see the connections among all peoples and to ac-
knowledge their common obligations to inevitable, universal laws. Editorial
changes made by Ridpath to his original text reveal the extent of this new dis-
position. In the 1876 version of his history, for instance, Ridpath remarked that
“on many parts of the frontier” in the late eighteenth century “the malignant
Red men were still at war with the settlers.” In the 1895 edition, however, Rid-
path altered the sentence to convey a stronger sense of victimization on the part
of Native Americans. “On many parts of the frontier the Indians, for good rea-
son dissatisfied with their displacement from their ancient hunting-grounds,
were hostile and did not hesitate to make war on the American frontiersmen,”
he wrote. Elsewhere, in the first iteration of the work, Ridpath noted that in
a sixteenth-century conflict between the Aztecs and the Spaniards, the Euro-
peans prevailed when “[d]ismay seized the hosts of puny warriors, and they
fled in all directions.” In the People’s edition, however, Ridpath removed the
offensive insinuations of Aztec ineptitude and merely recorded: “A great battle
was fought in which the Spaniards were victorious.” In the first edition of the
work, Ridpath also discussed discovery as an impulse and a “right” among Eu-
ropeans, while in the second he questioned this sense of prerogative, noting
that the claim of “first view” by European explorers did not give the “slightest
attention” to the “rights of possession and occupancy enjoyed for unknown
generations by the native peoples of new lands.” All the claims of the aboriginal
races “were brushed aside as not of the slightest consequence or validity,” Rid-
path recorded with disgust, adding that a more balanced perspective on Span-
ish conquest marked it as one of the most usurpatious acts in human history.134
Ridpath’s New History also encouraged him to rethink the question of
human agency and free will in the story of the past. At the time of the Centen-
nial, Ridpath was not above glorifying certain individuals—John Smith, George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln—as symbols of the enormous power of human
beings to affect the course of history. By the 1890s, Ridpath had replaced “Great
Men as the decisive historical agents in favor of homme meme (the anonymous
human)” and rejected “excessive concern with individual motivation that had
led to a superficial, event-oriented history (histoire historisante).”135 Hence,
Ponce de Leon went from a “wrinkled old cavalier” engaged in a quixotic search
for a fountain of youth in A Popular History, as Simms imagined him, to a man

who was forced to succumb to the inevitable fact that the “law of nature had
prevailed over tradition” in the People’s History.136 George Washington, once
“the serene Father of his country,” was now depicted as “the son of a larger
country—the country of human liberty.” Columbus had led the “greatest secu-
lar event in the history of mankind” and had been crowned “immortal,” but it
was “History,” Ridpath insisted, that “made the Man–made him and gave him
the world.”137 Even the leaders of the vaunted Republican party, which “had
been in power continuously for twenty-four years,” during which period “great
and salutary changes had taken place in the social condition and civil polity of
the American people,” were criticized by Ridpath because they were inclined
wrongly to think that they “should claim the result as their work, when as a
matter of fact it was simply the evolution of the age.”138 Hubris breeds contempt
for universal systems, and it is here, Ridpath argued, “that the delusion begins
which makes man—the individual—to be the author of history.”139 Despite the
“puny efforts of the men who sometimes vainly imagine that they make human
history,” Ridpath concluded, it is the cosmic forces concretized in fundamental
systems of law that truly rule the day.140
These editorial changes made to successive versions of Ridpath’s popular
history are revealing for what they suggest about the alterations their author
had undergone in terms of intellectual outlook, especially with regard to his
philosophy of history. Not everyone was enamored of the revisions from the
Popular History to the People’s History, of course, least of all some professional
historians who saw in them a reversion to mid-nineteenth-century idealism.
Although acknowledging that in books such as Ridpath’s “specific statements
of fact are more numerous” than in other popularizing texts, the president of
the American Historical Association, George. B. Adams, pointed out that “one
does not need to read far” in any such works “to perceive the controlling in-
fluence of the imagination in the new history in comparison with the stricter
scientific faculties, and the constant occurrence of sweeping generalizations,
charming to the reader and attractive to the mind, until they are submitted to
cold analysis.” Adams feared historians such as Ridpath were “passing from an
age of investigation to an age of speculation.” The tendency toward abstraction
frightened Adams because he believed history was a science, and, like all true
sciences, “must rest upon proved and correlated fact.” All “premature gener-
alization, all generalization from hasty observation, from half-understood facts,
is useless and often worse than useless,” he noted.141 Ridpath’s work smacked
too much of old-fashioned speculative history and threatened to set historical
studies back half a century. “[N]ext to literature,” John Higham has suggested,
early professional historians dreaded especially teleological systems that were
too arbitrary and “preconceived.”142 The Harvard professor of history Ephraim

Emerton felt as if he was “meeting once more the ghost of our ancient enemy,
the philosophy of history” in reading such works. His students might dabble in
such literature at odd moments of dalliance, he wrote, but only after they were
firmly grounded in the scientific method; philosophy of history was a “danger-
ously speculative subject better reserved for later years in any deep way.”143
Of great concern to scholars was the presumption by philosophers of history
that they knew which higher laws were operating with the greatest relevance
for the human condition. Some critics demanded more exact standards of au-
thenticity for the identification of actual universal laws and wondered what
distinctions could be made between these covering models and the subjective,
mythological patterns of interpretation advanced by romantic storytellers. For
scholars who had worked so hard to establish objectivity as the foundation of
historical explanation, for instance, the metahistorical devices used by Ridpath
in a work such as A People’s History of the United States seemed just another
type of mythic overlay designed to distort the historical record by promoting
pet theories of causation. “A systematic science of history threatened to sub-
ordinate history again to philosophy just when it was winning independence,”
Higham has written. “In the face of this jurisdictional conflict, a fixation on the
criticism of documents and the patient accumulation of facts hardened” among
scholars. In condemning such books as Ridpath’s, professional historians res-
olutely affirmed their commitment to empiricism as a “reaction against posi-
tivistic theories,” on the one hand, and “romantic subjectivity,” on the other.
Still more maddening to critics like G. B. Adams was the fact that speculative
philosophies of history such as Ridpath’s “had usurped the name of science”
in their quest to find universal laws while eschewing scientific methods.144
Professionals distrusted universal law “with its declamatory character and its
assertion of progress without theoretical proofs” and elevated to the status of
historical truth “only statements based on direct observation.” All others “not
accessible at all to proper verification were declared meaningless.”145 For these
reasons, Charles Kendall Adams’s A Manual of Historical Literature criticized
Ridpath as a popular writer who could “hardly be accepted as authority” by
the “painstaking student.”146 William W. Carson added that “the enormous
quantity and scope of his work . . . precluded that scrupulous regard for fact
and reliance on authority that characterizes the more scholarly historian.”147
Ridpath countered such arguments by claiming that his new philosophy
of history was derived from laws of explanation inherent in the objective facts
themselves. While Lippard and Frost attempted to make historical facts con-
form to preestablished interpretive schemes, Ridpath claimed that his guiding
principles sprang from those events which were the outward expression of the
universal laws themselves. In this sense, facts were prior to interpretation and

informed its structure.148 For speculative philosophers such as Ridpath, the
artifacts of the phenomenal world were the starting point for an understanding
of larger abstractions. “Emphasis on the discovery of data and the inductive
process made it possible for the historian to perform his scientific function
with a minimum of bias or preconception” in the late nineteenth century, like-
minded Henry Adams believed. “He did not ask any questions until he had
the data of the document; he asked them only thereafter and then only in ac-
cordance with the rules of scientific procedure.” In other words, the methods
of Adams and Ridpath were not Plato’s. They “did not seek ultimate mean-
ings in a transcendental world beyond earthly experience”; rather they sought
“universal meanings in the welter of particulars.” To “avoid controlling ideas
and to permit the facts freely to testify” one must advocate “the untrammeled
search for undiluted facts. Only after as many facts relevant to the problem
were collected and arranged in proper chronological and schematic sequences
was generalization possible.”149
Skeptics were inclined to believe that philosophies of history such as Rid-
path’s raised more questions about historical meaning than they solved. How
do we even know what the facts of history are, for instance? Facts are presumed
to be tangible things with verifiable shape and unquestioned ontological sub-
stance; but, as Carl Becker later noted, on further investigation, “the simple
historical fact turns out to be not a hard, cold something with clear outline,
and measurable pressure, like a brick: but ‘only a symbol’ whose meaning is
drawn from its relationship to other ‘facts.’ ” Everything about the past is rela-
tive and relational, according to this thinking, and must be understood in its
context. Becker even advanced the radical suggestion that we can never verify
past “reality,” since “facts” are constructed from memory and are subject to
the very imaginative acts of recall we associate with fiction.150 As noted earlier,
most historians in the nineteenth century operated from a less skeptical point
of view, embracing a philosophy of ontological realism based on “the belief
that historical inquiry refers to a ‘real’ past that was once, but is no longer,
present, and that written histories are valid to the extent that they accurately
correspond to this real past” by rediscovering “the facts.”151 In this sense there
is only one past, and the best historians are the ones “who tell its story with
the most thorough reference to the discrete facts and come closer than others
to “a single ‘right’ version.” But even here challenges emerged. Provided we
could agree on what facts are, how do we distinguish among facts? Which are
the greater facts among equals? Even Ridpath understood that the principles
historians used to select which facts to employ in their stories determined the
kind of history they created from the facts. Two historians using the same ma-
terials can and have written very different histories, he recognized. He himself

had experienced that inconsistency in consecutive editions of his popular his-
tory. And what of rhetorical questions of reason and proof and persuasion?
There are many ways to make a case, after all. Professionals took seriously the
dictum that: “[a]lthough a single fact can ‘disprove’ an interpretation, no num-
ber of facts can definitively ‘prove’ one.” In this sense, “narratives thus cre-
ate their facts as much as facts create the narrative.”152 Given these conceptual
complexities, many scholars were inclined to dismiss systematic philosophi-
cal schemes such as Ridpath’s and to argue that, as Berkhofer summarizes,
“speculation about the ultimate meaning of History as a totality stands outside
the pale of professional discourse.”153
If scholars such as G. B. Adams and Emerton worried about the prospect of
personal (even partisan) opinions masquerading as universal laws infiltrating
works such as Ridpath’s, their fears were confirmed by the heightened political
tone of the last chapters of the People’s History of the United States. In original
sections covering events since the Centennial (and therefore not treated in A
Popular History of the United States, published in 1876), Ridpath was very di-
rect and opinionated in his judgments concerning various American social cri-
ses and their relationship to laws of the universe. He sided with workers in the
railroad strike of 1877, for instance, who endured a ten percent drop in wages,
but he rejected the “inflammatory” tactics of the communists and socialists at
Haymarket Affair in Chicago. He eschewed “the arrogant face of monopoly,”
but he disliked the “insurrectionary front of the working classes,” especially
the “large mass of ignorant foreign labor” who contributed “a class of ideas
utterly un-American.” Ridpath was particularly outspoken about party strife
in politics, which he blamed for the poor functioning of American political
systems. “To the calm-minded observer it appears a thing of wonder that the
people of the United States have so far permitted themselves to be cajoled,
hoodwinked brow-beaten, converted into camp-followers and slaves, by the
ignorant horde of interested adventurers who have arrogated to themselves the
right of civil and political control over the destiny of the American Republic,”
he wrote. Such seditious language suggested how far Ridpath had strayed from
the detached voice of the scholar. Like William Cullen Bryant, he railed against
protective tariffs which contributed to “all manner of jobbery and extravagant
expenditure” and allowed monopolies to work “against the common interest
of the people as a whole.” And the repeal of the Sherman Act was character-
ized by him as “a series of intrigues the history of which as hereafter written
will constitute the most terrible arraignment of American statesmanship to be
found in all our national annals.”154
For Ridpath, history as a form of discourse was tied to hegemonic issues of
social class and political power, and he did everything he could in the People’s

History of the United States to underscore the detrimental role of class con-
flict in the late nineteenth century. Interested in promoting the concerns of the
“common people,” he pointed to the unfair ways in which American laborers
were disadvantaged constantly by monied interests. This implicated him in a
radical new historiography that was changing the way historians approached
historical evidence. “When the age of masses began, somewhere in the late
1800s, historians were badly prepared for it,” Ernst Breisach has written. Peas-
ants and workers had not been represented in most historical works of this
period. “Theirs had been an anonymous presence marked by no means than
the routine cycles of birth, growth, work, marriage, reproduction, illness, and
death. Intermittently the ‘common’ people had revolted or had been victims of
catastrophes and on those occasions had received brief mention.” Such histo-
rians had been blind to the story of the “common people” because the sources
they consulted—diplomatic, political, and military records—were directed at
elites.155 Ridpath’s new outlook, however, exposed the conservative underpin-
nings of such a historical tradition by acknowledging its ideological predispo-
sitions. As the DePauw graduate Charles Beard later noted, “written history
that was cold, factual, and apparently undisturbed by the passions of the time
served best the cause of those who did not want to be disturbed.”156 There was
something vaguely Marxist in this “people’s history,” Ridpath sharing with
Marx a conception of history as an “instrument of oppression directed against
those who are struggling to change the productive relationships in accordance
with the dictates of history.” Put more simply, both thinkers believed that his-
tory is the means by which “the exploiters hold the exploited in check”157 No
wonder populists and fiscal radicals such as Huey Long were attracted to Rid-
path’s popular histories.
Given his flirtation in the People’s History with class ideologies, one might
expect that Ridpath would have succumbed to some of Marx’s fatalism as well.
He managed to avoid it, however, by clinging to a sense of nascent possibility
implicit in the laws of the universe and emerging naturally from the facts of his-
tory. In concluding his 1876 Popular History, Ridpath had asked: “What, then,
of the outlook for the American Republic?” By 1895, he was ready to advance
some partial answers. At the time of the Centennial, Ridpath had hinted at the
potentially “sad fate of humanity,” modern nations spiraling back on them-
selves, as it were, to repeat the mistakes of ancient civilizations in fulfillment of
Lord Byron’s gloomy prophecy that “History with all her volumes vast, Hath
but one page.”158 Despite his lingering concerns for the problems of govern-
ment and labor, Ridpath concluded his People’s History with an alternative and
rousing passage of assurance: “The History of Our Country has thus been re-
cited from its discovery by the adventurers at the close of the fifteenth century

down to the present time. The story is complete!” he wrote. “Our Republic
has passed through stormy times, but has come at last in full splendor and with
uplifted banners to the dawn of the great anniversary which is to commemorate
the discovery of the New World.” Noting with happy and perhaps naive confi-
dence that “Peace and tranquility are abroad” and that “Clouds of distrust and
war have sunk behind the horizon,” Ridpath concluded that “Here at least the
equality of all men in rights and privileges before the law has been written with
an iron pen in the Constitution in our country. The union of States has been
consecrated anew within our memories by the blood of patriots and the tears of
the lowly. Best of all, the temple of Freedom reared by our patriot Fathers still
stands in undiminished glory.” These successes were especially meaningful to
Ridpath because they were produced by the insights of historical reflection.
“THE PAST HAS TAUGHT ITS LESSON, THE PRESENT HISTORY HAS ITS DUTY, AND THE
FUTURE ITS HOPE,” he concluded.159
Ridpath’s outlook for the future of the United States was not always as op-
timistic as this conclusion would suggest; indeed, as we know from his college
journals, Ridpath was prone to fits of moodiness and even despair. He viewed
it as his responsibility to give some hope to the common reader, however, espe-
cially in light of the alarming threat of rapidly accelerating forces of change. The
production history of Ridpath’s popular histories, especially the transition from
the scholastic Popular History to the more abstract People’s History, reveals the
degree to which the climate of receptivity for such works was dependent on the
willingness of authors to stay current in their writings and of readers to “buy
into” the ruling social and political imperatives implicit in them. As this lan-
guage of the commercial marketplace would suggest, part of Ridpath’s incen-
tive for issuing new editions of the same work was financial, since republishing
standard popular books with slight modifications and updates was easier than
writing new ones. The extent of Ridpath’s substantial revisions would suggest,
however, that he was also motivated by the earnest desire to rethink and rede-
sign his entire intellectual approach to history, seeking ways to make his uni-
versalizing strategies accessible to the American people. In other words, it was
not sufficient for him merely to be a metahistorian reliant on abstractions or a
scholar content in the knowledge “that whatever is of historic worth is likely to
live of itself.” As a popularizer, Ridpath recognized that it was his duty to “in-
tensify an interest in historical matters in order to preserve them.” In this sense,
preservation was not a passive but an active concern. “There are certain things
more hard to kill than others are to be kept alive,” he argued, and it was the
historian’s job to distinguish among them.160 Increasingly in the years following
the publication of the People’s History, Ridpath advanced this activist ethic by
making the transition from metahistorian to political and social reformer.

History as Politics
The People’s History of the United States may not have satisfied profes-
sional critics, but it served Ridpath’s growing need to make history service-
able. He recognized that his need to feel more useful was a natural reaction
against his scholar’s “preoccupation of minutiae.” One of the “dangers of aca-
demicism,” John Higham has noted of the period, was that the obsession with
facts meant that “the larger action of the intellect clogged.”161 To remedy this
condition, Ridpath increasingly politicized his work in the 1890s, challenging
the culture of consensus that had emerged on many fronts among scholars and
those who based social policy on professional insights. Aided by the name
recognition that went along with publishing evocative popular works like the
People’s History and benefitting from their use as a platform for the circula-
tion of his political beliefs, Ridpath also began to exercise a strong political
influence in Indiana in the 1890s. He had not indulged his political ambitions
since college, but in the fall of 1896, he was nominated for Congress by the
Democrats and Populists in his state who wished to break the Republican
stronghold of his home district, and, despite his long affiliation with the party
of Lincoln, Ridpath accepted the challenge. Translating into political action
his historian’s concern for the common man, he campaigned vigorously for
William Jennings Bryan and the free silver platform as well as for greater use of
public monies for social reform.162 Although defeated in the election, Ridpath
caught the attention of Benjamin Flower, a reformer and founder of the Union
for Practical Progress, who liked the historian’s newspaper and magazine cam-
paign articles applying historical visions to the questions of social injustice.
As a consequence of this Indiana canvass, Flower invited Ridpath to become
editor of the Arena, a social reform periodical with over 100,000 subscribers.
Ridpath accepted the position in 1897 because it afforded him the most direct
mechanism for getting his political message to the people. As he explained to
friends and family, his acceptance was not a rejection of his identity as a histo-
rian but rather an attempt to expand the available audience for the expression
of his historical ideas.163 In both capacities he imagined himself a spokesper-
son for the “unemployed and powerless.”164
Because the Arena was published in Boston (and later, New York), Rid-
path’s decision to assume the editorship of the magazine was undoubtedly a
difficult one, since it required him to leave his beloved Greencastle and to im-
merse himself in the heart of urban, Eastern darkness. The move suggested the
extent to which, as editor of the Arena, Ridpath had taken to heart the journal’s
philosophy as proclaimed on its title page in a quote by Heine: “We do not
take possession of our ideas, but are possessed by them. They master us and

force us into the arena, Where like gladiators we must fight for them.” Articles
in the early editions of the Arena under Ridpath’s management reflected this
gladiatorial attitude, including hard-hitting pieces on “The Concentration of
Wealth: Its Cause and Results,” “The Multiple Standard of Money,” “Studies
in the Ultimate Society,” “General Weyler’s Campaign [in Cuba],” and one
by Ridpath himself called “The Cry of the Poor.”165 This latter piece was as
close to polemic as Ridpath had ever written, and he felt obliged to defend its
tone to those back home accustomed to a more dispassionate style. Ridpath
explained to his WAW friend James Whitcomb Riley: “This Arena magazine
which I have in charge is, you know, first of all a magazine of Public Opinion.
Strictly speaking, it is literary only in the secondary sense.” Despite the nega-
tive tone of most of the editorial features he produced, Ridpath claimed to be
energized by the fast-paced, hard-hitting realism of his task. “[A]t the present
time I am working like a tar, day, evening and night,” he added, “sleeping at
my desk and eating on the fly.”166 Such comments revealed the degree to which
the transition from popular historian to social reformer was an easy one for
Ridpath. After all, in both capacities he dealt with public opinion and in the
shaping of national ideals. The Arena was always a magazine, as reviewer W. T.
Stead noted, “with strong sympathies for the people,” a commitment Ridpath
longed to embrace and sustain.167
Those at home detected a certain reversion to idealism in Ridpath’s writing
when he turned social reformer. Ridpath, however, found nothing inconsistent
between his editorials for The Arena and his commitment to objectivity and
realism as a historian. Editor Flower recruited writers, artists and poets to his
cause in an effort at “acquainting people with the terrible facts as they exist,”
and he placed special emphasis on presenting the “squalid facts” which would
allow people to “face the exact truth in all its hideousness.” The magazine
owner was fond of saying: “Nothing is so wholesome as candor.”168 This faith
in the power of facts was in keeping with Ridpath’s philosophy of history; Rid-
path sought merely to elucidate “social facts” that could be “ascertained and
examined for those large-scale ordering forces that really matter in society.”169
Despite Flower’s call for a stark brand of social realism, however, Ridpath
found sufficient editorial leeway to indulge the latent forms of sentimental ex-
pression. His Arena article “The Cry of the Poor,” for instance, is overwritten
in many places, serving as a literary equivalent to the artist J. G. Brown’s mawk-
ish street urchins, who prompted reform through exaggerated depravity rather
than frank portrayal of destitution. “Whoever will put his ear to the earth may
hear the moan of the dying,” wrote Ridpath fervently. “Oh, it is pitiful! The
great regions of Asia are strown with the decaying carcasses of the wretched
beings that have died before their day from sheer want of the means of living

longer. . . . The teeming islands of the sea, beautiful and fertile, are little more
than pauper sepulchers that have swallowed up emaciated humanity until the
very earth is a cake of man-mold, rimy and poisonous.” And, lest anyone as-
sume that such horrors were confined to foreign shores, Ridpath added in
accusatory tone that “the portent of pauperism is already on the horizon of
America.” When he was a boy, Ridpath noted, “plenty” was the call word of
the nation as “young fathers cleared new fields, and young mothers, the angels
of the wilderness—God bless their memory!—rocked the cradles in which fat
boy babies, with the spirit of the gods upon them, slept or crowed as the swell-
ing ripple of life flowed through their healthy souls.” But now, that vision was
in jeopardy. “Unless the baneful forces that are now rampant in our civilization
can be reversed, our land also will become—aye, it is becoming—a receptacle
for millions of famished dead.”170
Ridpath’s new agenda suggested the distance he had traveled since he first
began producing popular histories in the 1870s. In A Popular History of the
United States, published at the time of the Centennial, he was loath to say
anything negative about American culture, least of all about its political lead-
ership. By the 1890s, however, he was outspoken in the pages of the Arena
about the failure of American politicians, especially Republicans, and far less
sanguine regarding the future of American enterprise. After the Civil War,
Ridpath noted in melodramatic fashion reminiscent of Bryant, “There were
men—a large group of men—who were then alert while the nation was asleep.
They began to intrigue before the smoke of battle had cleared away. They got
hold of the industrial, economic, and financial forces of this reviving nation and
deliberately turned them from the course of nature and justice to the course of
injustice and iniquity.” Condemning these gold-bugs for their usurious behav-
iors, he accused them of robbing the people of their treasures and of “draining
the blood and breath of our national life.” Whereas in the People’s History of
the United States the politicos who brokered the McKinley Tariff Bill were
declared disciples of “jobbery and extravagant expenditure,” in the Arena they
were ridiculed as the evil creators of a “debt-beast” that compelled Ameri-
can taxpayers to toil “on the apron of a treadmill—slipping back into lower
and still lower industrial, economic, and political conditions” until crushed by
“their own inert weight.”171 Ridpath’s proposed solution to such abuses was to
threaten these political beasts with a bloody revolution of the people. Address-
ing them personally in the pages of his journal, Ridpath warned menacingly
that “the future will come down on you like night, and your children’s chil-
dren, visited with a fate worse than that which you now inflict on the children
of the poor, will damn you for your sin and folly.”172 Referring elsewhere to
McKinley Republicans as part of a “malevolent agency” whose “iniquities and

devilish schemes” had brought upon the American people the “mortgage of
Shylock,” Ridpath remarked contemptuously on the “long chase of delusion
and false cry and mockery that this party of prosperity and Mephistophelian
intrigue, this party of double dealing and ambiguity, this party of fraud and
feculence has led you.”173
Such partisan expressions caught the attention of periodical-reading Re-
publican Midwesterners who supported McKinley, some of whom questioned
openly Ridpath’s abandonment of the party and his standards of editorial
judgment. The Chicago Daily Tribune noted that the suspension of the Octo-
ber 1898 issue of the Arena for financial reasons was “significant proof of the
rapid dissolution of the 16 to 1 heresy and [of the] abomination” overseen by
Ridpath’s “rabid free silver magazine.”174 Questions were raised as well about
the ease with which Ridpath switched political affiliations when partisan is-
sues required it.175 “Dear Riley,” wrote a concerned Hoosier to the Indiana
poet: “Ain’t it too awfully bad that our good friend J. C. R. has bolted off into
the Democratic party ‘foot horse and dragoon’?”176 George H. Lepper, a law-
yer from Pittsburgh with an interest in politics, was even more incredulous
about the “convenience” of Ridpath’s politics. He reassured an Indiana writer,
George W. Julian, that Ridpath’s “inappropriate” response to an article that
Julian had published in the Arena was not worth worrying about. Referring to
the “boorish and narrow manner” in which Ridpath had “answered” the piece,
Lepper claimed that Ridpath was “prone to want the policy of The Arena as
that of TRUTH, which, duly interpreted, signifieth what–Dr. Ridpath–thinks.”
Lepper noted that he had had a similar incident with Ridpath in which the
editor invited the lawyer to contribute a piece on bimetallism and then “spat”
out a deprecatory response. The “Doctor is too much given to spitting in his
polemical writings,” Lepper argued. “He spat so violently at me” that “I har-
bored the hope [to no avail] that he had run out of saliva.” Ridpath “may be
a fair historian,” Lepper conceded, “but as a progressive and comprehensive
thinker he is a rank failure.”177
Ridpath was undeterred by these criticisms, charging back in the Arena that
his midwestern friends were being deceived by “a conspiracy on the part of
international bankers to enslave the world in gold-standard chains.” “You can
accept this situation if you want to accept it,” he warned his former colleagues.
“If you have no more love of freedom, no more patriotism, no more sense than
to accept it, why, then, accept it, and be slaves forever. If nothing will arouse
you, why, then, sleep, sleep!”178 The political attacks Ridpath sustained for the
sake of his causes implied that the cost of social and political reform might be
the very popularity he craved in his histories. But the expense seemed worth
paying to Ridpath because he viewed public service and popular writing as

virtually synonymous activities. Certainly he did not imagine himself compro-
mising his reputation as a historian by pursuing his political agenda in periodi-
cal literature; rather he believed that intellectual standards and commitments
could be maintained best amid the flying of political fur. This confidence was
attributable in part to his longstanding attention as a popularizer to effective
modes of public presentation. Recognizing that books “are no longer profit-
able” to their authors, and that a writer “to-day will make more on the aver-
age out of a story published as a magazine serial than out of the same story in
book form,” Ridpath reasoned that in the future the periodical format would
exercise a still stronger influence on the American mind, requiring even more
sophisticated exchanges among readers, publishers and writers.179
Critics of the Arena included not only those who rejected its specific politi-
cal message but also those who objected to its general mixing of history and
social reform. Even in an age when Progressive historians were beginning to
find practical applications for historical learning, such blatant proselytizing
seemed inappropriate to many professional historians.180 Turning “ideas into
ideologies,” reformers such as Ridpath who pushed for “a political agenda”
were accused of “not seeking to stabilize truth but rather to argue and persuade
for a truth amidst an unstable many.”181 The philosopher of science Chauncey
Wright summarized the outlook when he noted that “knowledge becomes ob-
jective and scientific when it ceases to be associated with our fears, our respects,
our aspirations—when it ceases to prompt questions as to what relates to our
personal destiny, our ambitions, our moral worth.” Distinguishing between the
“scientific mind,” which “limits itself to the truth of things, whether good or
bad, agreeable or disagreeable, admirable or despicable,” and the “philosophi-
cal habit of mind,” which views and interprets nature “according to our dispo-
sitions,” Wright counseled professional historians to ignore those like Ridpath
who confused the latter with the former.182 The bibliographer J. N. Larned
agreed, associating Ridpath’s works with that “considerable class of popular
writings from past generations which have disappeared from the bookstores,
but which survive on the shelves of public libraries, where lingering echoes of
an old undeserved reputation help to carry them into unwary hands.”183
The most outspoken critic of Ridpath’s approach to a socially responsible
past remained George Burton Adams, who insisted that sweeping generalizers
such as Ridpath were highly threatening to the profession. “Pseudo-historians”
have been tempted by the “most alluring vision” that they can know “the mys-
tery of the life of the race, of the final outcome of men’s works and dominions,”
Adams noted of those advocating the use of universal laws in the service of
reform. Developing an elaborate military metaphor, Adams urged professionals
to rally against such attacks “upon our position, systematic and concerted, and

from various points at once.” Since the founding of the American Historical
Association, he suggested, the historian “has had possession of the field and has
deemed it his sufficient mission to determine what the fact was, including the
immediate conditions which gave it shape.” At the turn of the century, however,
the professional is now “confronted with numerous groups of aggressive and
confident workers in the same field who ask not what was the fact.” They are
“little interested in that,” Adams argued, “but their constant question is what
is the ultimate explanation of history, or, more modestly, what are the forces
which determine human events and according to what laws do they act.” He
urged historians to defend against “the threatened invasion” of those “rebel-
lious disciplines” that “assailed” “our methods, our results and our ideals” and
who made scholars feel as if they were “being thrown upon the defensive at
many points.” Historians should protect especially against traitors like Ridpath
operating within their ranks, Adams warned, betrayers who were “tempted by
their enthusiasm to make . . . sweeping statements” on behalf of a “complete
explanation of history,” and who conducted “hostile movements” against the
profession by pursuing rearguard “lines of attack” against objectivity in maga-
zines such as the Arena.184
G. B. Adams told members of the AHA that the kind of generalizing pur-
sued by men like Ridpath had been tolerated too long and at too great a cost
to historical schoalrship. Professionals have been inclined to “pooh-pooh this
movement,” Adams noted of New History, “or to underestimate it, to call it
a passing wave of thought which will soon sink to its real level and lose the
relative importance which it now assumes.” In his estimation, however, this
dismissive posture was a dangerous, “impossible attitude,” since popularizers
had the potential to control the literary marketplace by appealing to the worst
tendencies in readers. Popular historians had wild imaginations and aspira-
tions, and their political agendas were deceptive and pernicious enough to
take in the unsuspecting.185 Therefore, Adams called on all the resources of the
AHA in a general attack on the reputations of these philosophers of history. He
convened special committees to promote responsible collaborative histories of
the United States that could compete with the generalizing works of Ridpath
and others.186 He wrote pamphlets urging secondary school teachers to estab-
lish the integrity of facts (not the conjecture of universal laws) as the building
blocks for their curricula in history.187 It was thankless work, he knew, but the
stakes were high, since the reputation of the historical enterprise was in ques-
tion. “To lay such foundations, to furnish such materials for later builders, may
be a modest ambition,” Adams wrote, “but it is my firm belief that in our field
of history, for a long time to come, the man who devotes himself to such labors,
who is content with this preliminary work, will make a more useful and a more

permanent contribution to the final science, or philosophy of history, than will
he who yields to the allurements of speculation and endeavors to discover in
the present stage of our knowledge the forces that control society, or to formu-
late the laws of their action.”188
The professional attack on popularizers such as Ridpath was not confined
solely to the United States. The 1900 Paris World Exposition featured sev-
eral historical sessions of the First International Congress of Historians de-
voted to the issue of the place of universal laws in history. Henri Houssaye
opened the first of these discussions with a comment on the obsolescence of
generalizing works that purported to make sweeping sense of world history as
Ridpath’s History of the World had attempted. The nineteenth century began
with philosophers of history such as “Goethe, Lord Byron, Lamartine and
Victor Hugo, with imagination and poetry,” and it ended with “Pasteur, Taine
and Mommsen, with science and history,” Houssaye noted. In the twentieth
century, however, “[w]e want nothing more to do with the approximations of
hypotheses, useless systems, theories as brilliant as they are deceptive, super-
fluous moralities.” What we want is “[f ]acts, facts facts—which carry within
themselves their lesson and their philosophy. The truth, all the truth, noth-
ing but the truth.”189 Henry Adams, who was also in attendance at the Paris
exposition, was equally dismissive of grand schemes. Writing in the third per-
son about his “helpless” search for historical understanding at the fair, Adams
noted: “He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound
attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris.” He had sought to understand
“sequences,” to make important “cause and effect” connections among his-
torical moments, but this too had proven unsatisfying. Like Ridpath, he was a
victim of the relativism of expansive historical thought. “Satisfied that the se-
quence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead
no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of
thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force,” where he found
conventionalities breaking down again. “[A]fter ten years’ pursuit” of incon-
trovertible universal laws, therefore, Adams “found himself lying in the Gallery
of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken
by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”190
As Hayden White and others have noted, such campaigns against the meta-
historical ambitions of philosophers of history succeeded in the end, although
not, perhaps, because the arguments of scholars carried much weight with
general readers but rather because universal laws proved weak frameworks on
which to build stable political platforms for the development of future poli-
cies. Subscribers to the Arena seldom relied on Ridpath’s complex episte-
mologies for their practical politics, and those who did were forced to admit

that Flower’s periodical challenged ruling orthodoxies by offering alternative
historical accounts that suggested the variability of modes of historical expla-
nation. Insofar as no particular universal law (neither Ridpath’s, nor Marx’s,
for example) established its authority as the single, indisputable principle for
organizing events of the past or predicting those of the future, metahistorical
narratives in the nineteenth century fell victim to a “conceptual anarchy” in
which dozens of systems competed with each other for preeminence with no
adequate method for distinguishing among them on the grounds of objectivity
that historians valued so highly. “The ‘crisis of historicism’ into which histori-
cal thinking entered during the last decades of the nineteenth century,” Hayden
White has noted, “was, then, little more than the perception of the impossibil-
ity of choosing, on adequate theoretical grounds, among the different ways
of viewing history which these alternative interpretive strategies sanctioned.”
The “virulence of the nineteenth-century professional historian’s opposition
to the philosophy of history,” White added, derived from the desire of schol-
ars to escape the “value-laden” judgments inherent in these competing modes
and embedded in the political predispositions of historians such as Ridpath.
Hoping to avoid the chaos of indeterminacy, professionals retreated instead to
the safer ground of modest “facts” and emphasized “scholarly caution,” “em-
piricism,” and “moral agnosticism” as protections against “ideological impli-
cation.”191 General readers followed suit, especially as the uncertainty of early
twentieth-century life hinted at the inadequacy of panoptic schemes based on
putative laws of history. In this sense, the growing unpopularity of popular
history after 1900 was the result not only of a concerted effort on the part of
professionals to discredit popularizers but also of a general skepticism about
universalizing tendencies pervasive in the culture.
Meanwhile, Ridpath argued persistently for a practical “scientific” his-
tory based on universal law until his sudden death in 1900 of complications
of strep throat. Reactions to his passing varied according to political outlook
and historical predilection. Ridpath’s friends in the WAW were devastated.
At a special session of the association, members eulogized Ridpath and his
“life of earnest toil, high thought and lofty endeavor.”192 An acquaintance from
Indiana, Frank L. Stanton, reminisced in the Atlanta Constitution about days
spent with Riley and Ridpath back home taking “a plunge in ‘the old swim-
min’ hole’ or “Visitin’ Back to Griggsby’s Station.” The same publication re-
ferred to Ridpath as “so widely and intimately known purely as a historian
that his name is an American household word”; he was “America’s Foremost
Living Historian.”193 Several eulogizers noted the yeoman’s work Ridpath had
done on behalf of the discipline of history as well. Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of
Review of Reviews, described Ridpath as not merely a “popular historian,” but

also “a profound thinker, a man of deep convictions, and a political and so-
cial reformer of absolute courage.”194 His close friend Riley penned a poem to
commemorate Ridpath’s gifts as a poet and literary figure, writing: “In fancy,
even now we catch the glance, / Of the rapt eye and radiant countenance, / As
when his discourse, like a woodland stream, / Flowed musically on from theme
to theme!”195 To Riley and others, at least, Ridpath was a “poet-historian” who
had tried to change the lives of average readers with his popular art.
The New York Times and the Boston Daily Globe acknowledged Ridpath’s
death, but his passing went unnoticed in the professional journals of history
and in the literary magazines of the day.196 The silence spoke volumes. Despite
his prolific work and vast sales, Ridpath the metahistorian had lost ground with
readers who did not always share his penchant for grand abstractions. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, the kind of universal outlook Ridpath pro-
moted in large, multivolume sets was giving way to professional monographs,
journal articles, and specialized conference papers. Even many broad-minded
popularizers regarded Ridpath’s philosophical perspectives as too generaliz-
ing. Albert Beveridge, another DePauw graduate and later senator from Indiana
who eventually became a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of John Marshall
and Abraham Lincoln, noted a decade and a half after the death of his former
professor that Ridpath’s name had become synonymous with the speculative
excesses of evolutionary theorists such as the New England metahistorian John
Fiske. “What a felicity it must be to have the Fiske, Ridpath temperament which
allows one to skate gracefully over thin ice and disregard such a little thing as
accuracy,” Beveridge wrote.197 Beveridge’s assessment implied that Fiske and
Ridpath were among the last members of a waning fraternity of philosophers
of history who had lost the confidence of readers by the turn of the century.
Ironically, their reputations as popularizers could not save them from obscurity.
What John Scott Wilson noted perceptively of Fiske applied as well to Ridpath,
who experienced a similar descent from glory into obscurity: “He chose to ig-
nore the academic side of history.” In response, academic historians, who came
to dominate the field, chose to ignore him.198

When we consider the vast range of human interests,
our histories furnish us with a sadly inadequate and
misleading review of the past, and it might almost
seem as if historians had joined in a conspiracy to
foster a narrow and relatively unedifying conception
of the true scope and intent of historical study.
—James Harvey Robinson, The New History
4
.....................................................................
“The Past
Everything”
Edward Eggleston,
Realism, and the
Rise of the “New”
History

Partial, Contingent and Incremental Truths
Challenges to universal laws by professionals raised some unsettling
questions about the enterprise of history and the function of historians. In
Ridpath’s Newtonian intellectual universe, historians were governed by what
David Shi described as “immutable laws rather than divine commands, laws
which the scientific method could ultimately uncover and manipulate.” This
“deterministic, orderly cosmos, ticking away with the predictability of a great
clock, and looking the same to every observer,” suggested that scholars had
access to a “real and single past” whose historical meaning was implicit in the
explicit facts unearthed by historians.1 “Postulating the past as a complex but
ultimately combined or unified flow of events organized narratively,” Robert
Berkhofer Jr. has noted, allowed popular historians to presume that they could
narrate the story of history as a continuum of events organized according to the
structure inherent in the events themselves.2 By this logic, the best historians
were those who reconstructed the past with the greatest fidelity to the facts as
reflected in the pervasive principles operating through them. The comforting
thing about this system was that it gave historians an honored place in the
intellectual community, conferring special significance on students of “prece-
dent.” George Santayana’s mantra that those failing to learn from the mistakes
of the past were doomed to repeat them implied a uniformity of condition that
heightened the relevance of those who treated historical experience. Empha-
sizing continuity and developmental sequence, Ridpath’s scheme posed teleo-
logical challenges for historians, to be sure, but it also provided a convenient
and consistent literary framework for understanding and recounting the past.
Confidence in such an orderly system, however, began to break down in
the late nineteenth century in the face of modernist doubts about the possibil-
ity of an ordered universe or the likelihood of a uniform human experience.
When the Viennese physicist Ernst Mach declared that “space, time, and mass
had no objective existence,” he “ruptured conventional notions of a stable and
uniform reality.” According to Mach, “the world consists only of sensations”;
there is “no common ‘reality’ independent of human acts of perception.”3
Universalizing “cover” laws such as those posed by Ridpath were derided by
Mach as “useless abstractions” and “mere rationalizations” for a world that
seemed to be neat and systematic but was not.4 As one contemporary historian
put it, “conditions, at least in our own time, are so rapidly altering that for
the most part it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to apply past experi-
ence to the solution of current problems.” Frustrated by the vain attempts of
Ridpath and others “to squeeze the story of the universe and man into their
puny philosophic categories,” such modernist scholars argued that there were
180 } “The Past Everything”

no stable truths, no deterministic schemes for organizing the past that made
sense.5 History, they asserted, “did not unfold in linear fashion, revealing
truth in the process of development over time, but rather moved through an
arbitrary set of crises, disjunctures, and disruptions.”6 Ironically, part of this
modernist skepticism was born of the scientific method in which the young
Ridpath and others had put such faith. “[T]he contemporary scientific model
of inquiry, with its demands for ceaseless and radical doubt and for verifica-
tion of a special kind, challenged all areas of historiography,” Ernst Breisach
has noted, including “the concept of truth, how to arrive at it, and how valid it
was; the perception of the forces that moved human affairs; the aim and pur-
pose of history; the shape of historical accounts; and history’s subject matter.”7
Philosophies of history such as Ridpath’s were simply too systematic and con-
venient to be useful in a chaotic world dominated by complex, unstructured,
and anonymous forces.
In one sense these revelations presaged the “epistemological crisis” that
threatened historical studies throughout the remainder of the century. They
begged certain questions for which answers were not readily available.8 If the
past is not part of an organized continuum from which meaningful patterns or
developmental sequences can be derived, then what role can historians play
in advancing the human cause or in helping those in the present to live more
meaningful lives? Did the emergence of a modern sensibility, with its implicit
doubts about the stability of universal structuring laws, mean an end to the
relevance of history? In the face of such threatening questions, professional
historians in the twentieth century adopted one of two coping strategies for
maintaining a sense of the value of their work. Some conservative scholars ad-
hered stubbornly to positivism, that is, to the belief that the past was singular,
tangible, and knowable. As Peter Gay described the outlook, such scholars
accepted the “ontological integrity” of the past as a given and attributed con-
tradictions in the historical record to variations among the interpretations of
historians regarding the details of a single past rather than to the existence
of multiple or mutable pasts. “The tree in the woods of the past fell in only
one way, no matter how fragmentary or contradictory the reports of its fall, no
matter whether there are no historians, one historian, or several contentious
historians in its future to record and debate it,” Gay noted.9 Adherents to this
traditional position continued to believe that information of value could be
gleaned from the past, but they did not desire to speculate on the higher laws
that might inform it. The primary ambition of historians must be the modest
one of stockpiling information until enough data points in any given histori-
cal sample set could be obtained to allow for reasonable assertions. Only then
might limited generalizing be justified.
Edward Eggleston, Realism, and the Rise of the “New” History { 181

Other professional scholars, however, looked for organizing principles
more acceptable to a modernist age, especially dynamic formulas capable of
accounting for chaotic forces operating in a universe that seemed to defy order.
Henry Adams conceded that he could find no meaningful universal law or phi-
losophy of history at work in the displays at the Paris Exposition of 1900, only
a disturbing acceleration of forces that left his “historical neck” broken. For
Adams, truth resided in the contemplation of force not just as a means to an
historical end but as a historical end itself.10 Karl Lamprecht, considered “a pi-
oneer of modernity” by many historiographers, agreed, arguing that historians
could find a useful role to play amid the “vast cosmic flux” by studying the pro-
cesses of history rather than its mere by-products.11 For Lamprecht, “the void,
created by the absence of the traditional structures of meaning [at the turn of
the century], was being increasingly filled by views of the world as a well-nigh
unfathomable manifestation of an onrushing force, vaguely referred to as Life.”
Sigmund Freud called this force the “pan-erotic impulse of the ‘id’ ”; Wilhelm
Dilthey proclaimed it the ubiquitous “Leben”; while Henri Bergson declared
it the “elan vitales.” No matter what the name, however, scholars of this school
attempted to isolate “the explanatory principle of the genuine dynamic quality
of life.” For these seekers after the patterns of human consciousness, the real-
ization gradually dawned that the only consistency in human history was its
inconsistency. Understanding life, past and present, meant wrestling with the
implications of the passage of time in a fluid and irregular universe. The study
of change became the historian’s primary task in this modernist conception of
the past, but not change of the sort that interested Ridpath—confirming the
principles of an ordered universe operating sequentially through time—but
change that was its own irreducible life force and that bore study for what it
could reveal about the human condition in all its randomness. The logic of
this mandate was not only compelling, it was also inescapable, since in their
research historians were subject to the same capricious forces that influenced
the lives and events they studied. “Historical accounts became glimpses at Life
by observers” called historians, Ernst Breisach has noted, “who themselves
were immersed in and swept along by Life’s current.”12
The dynamism of this relativistic outlook served as the philosophical under-
pinning for what became known at the turn of the century as the New His-
tory.13 Ridpath had employed “New History” to characterize his universal law,
of course, but after 1900 the term was used more often to describe approaches
to the past that rejected positivistic and universalizing philosophies. James Har-
vey Robinson, one of the leading representatives of this outlook, defined New
History as a commitment to charting the psychological and sociological climate
of opinion of a given epoch. Because historians often have no direct experience

with the things they study, and because they rely so heavily on secondhand
accounts produced by those who also might not have been witnesses, Robin-
son noted, their sources are generally “nothing else than traces of psychological
operations rather than direct traces of facts.” Accordingly, he argued, historians
should study not just the facts of the past (insofar as they can be determined
at all) but the process by which historical information assumed the status of
facts. Robinson elaborated: “History is what we know of the past,” and we
must “question it as we question our memory of our own personal acts and
experiences.” The things “we recall in our own past vary continually with our
moods and preoccupations,” and “[w]e adjust our recollection to our needs
and aspirations, and ask from it light on the particular problems that face us.”
History, then, in Robinson’s depiction, was “not fixed and immutable, but ever
changing” and was grounded in the psychological conventions of memory that
adjusted themselves to change. Just as the mind selects from the “almost infinite
mass of memories” the things it needs to “overcome the natural bewilderment
of all unfamiliar situations,” he noted, so “History, from this point of view, may
be regarded as an artificial extension and broadening of our memories.”14
Robinson’s “New History” held out the promise that historians could re-
flect meaningfully on the past if they broadened the scope of their inquiries
to include insights into the human condition provided by the new social sci-
entific disciplines of anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychol-
ogy. Robinson admired practitioners in these fields because they rejected the
tendencies common to conservative scholars to “catalogue mere names and
places” and to impose a value system on the past by privileging (arbitrarily at
times) some experiences over others.15 Social scientists were engaged in the
more ambitious and prodigious task of understanding the “totality” of human
experience by studying the “inner life” of human beings at specific moments
in time. “History, in the broadest sense of the word, is all that we know about
everything that man has ever done, or thought, or hoped, or felt,” he wrote.16
It was comprehensive enough to include both “the rude flint hatchets of the
Chelles” and “this morning’s newspaper.”17 This significant expansion of the
legitimate subject matter of history represented an enormous challenge to his-
torians, of course, given what it required of them in terms of the range and
depth of their knowledge. They must be able to differentiate between the use-
ful and the frivolous in history and must find in the vast panoply of human
experiences those “facts” that justified their own inclusion in the restricted
historical record. Citing the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1891 ad-
dress “The Significance of History,” Breisach notes that Robinson and other
adherents to “an encompassing New History” declared themselves devoted
to “the self-consciousness of humanity” and its efforts “to understand itself

through the study of its past.” European historians like Jacob Burckhardt,
whose groundbreaking works such as The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy had introduced “kulturgeschichte” (cultural history) as a strategy for get-
ting at the collective cultural psyche of an age, were among those who em-
boldened Robinson, Turner, and other American New Historians to think
that they could make social history the new orthodoxy within the discipline.18
What Charles Knight had introduced to British readers of popular historical
literature in 1856 had finally taken root in the United States.
The emergence of social history as a dominant paradigm for studying the
past influenced profoundly what was treated by historians at the turn of the
century. New Historians, for instance, appreciated in ways that their predeces-
sors had not the “overwhelming importance of the inconspicuous, the com-
mon, and often obscure elements in the past,” including “the homely, everyday,
and normal as over the rare, spectacular, and romantic, which had engaged the
attention of most early writers.”19 Robinson argued that old-fashioned political
histories of kings and courtiers had become obsolete, reflecting as they did a
simpleminded approach to the past. “Political history is the easiest kind of his-
tory to write,” he suggested, because it lends itself to unsophisticated “chrono-
logical arrangement” and treats mainly “events” rather than “conditions.” It
was a methodology, he recognized, that “must, moreover, have seemed more
important to readers when kings and courts were far more conspicuous than
they now are.” Robinson recognized that “our interests are changing, and
consequently the kind of questions that we ask the past to answer,” and he
rejected as “vague and unreal” those old-fashioned political approaches to the
past in favor of what his friend John Dewey described as the “actual condition
of life, of experience . . . of what is.” Derived from a realism grounded in the
principles of observation at the heart of the scientific method, New Historians
insisted “their business is to reveal experience in its truth, its reality.”20 Some
receptive historians had begun to reduce the place of “traditional facts” in their
narratives and to bring them “into relation, here and there, with modern needs
and demands,” Robinson noted approvingly, but, he added: “I think that this
process of eliminating the old and substituting the new might be carried much
farther; that our best manuals are still crowded with facts that are not worth
while bringing to the attention of our boys and girls and that they still omit in
large measure those things that are best worth telling.”21
Social history also affected significantly how the past was presented in terms
of literary style. Because Robinson, Dewey, and others anticipated a time when
“philosophers may get into as close contact as realist novelists with the facts
of life,” they borrowed liberally from conventions of literary realism.22 First
and foremost this meant a reduction in the conventional role of “plot” in their

histories. Most political histories of the sort New Historians rejected were
heavily reliant on story lines that were linear in structure and that followed
the development of ideas or institutions through a series of stages of growth or
decay over time. The moral lessons implied by this panoptic approach to the
past were predetermined by standards related to the presumption of “absolute
truth.” Realist novelists, however, devalued these kinds of sequential narra-
tives in favor of a “climate-of-opinion” model in which the author’s primary
responsibility was to lend insight into the amorphous spirit of an age.23 The
goal was “not so much a story as a ‘moment’ in the Hegelian sense, in which
the course of history is stopped to capture its essence.”24 Less synchronic than
diachronic, such an approach attempted to capture the intellectual temper of
the times in a manner not unlike those novels of Henry James in which the plot
was subordinate to the interior, psychological drama of the protagonists’ expe-
riences. As Theodore Zeldin has argued, New Historians borrowed effectively
from the structural techniques of literary pointilists, “breaking down the phe-
nomena of history into the smallest, most elementary units—the individual ac-
tors in history—and then connecting those units by means of ‘juxtapositions’
rather than causes.”25 While New Historians were skeptical of absolute truth,
they were committed to finding “partial, contingent, incremental truths.”26
The key to effective historical writing for New Historians, then, was to find
ways to use the arts of observation and detail perfected by realist novelists to
recreate the conditions of life in bygone eras without resorting to idealizing
conventions. Robinson, for one, thought New Historians could accomplish
this task if their literary presentations “ ‘compete[d] with life,’ enticing from
the reader a nod of recognition.” In his view, historical agents were depicted
most accurately when they were “authentically human, possessed of mixed
motives, confused consciences, and changing natures.” Instead of being “gov-
erned by implacable fate,” they must “confront viable options and retain a
sense of agency” with their “own decisions and reactions giv[ing] shape to
their lives.”27 The effort to achieve authenticity of character (as opposed to
accuracy of temporal sequencing with reference to events), though difficult,
was worth it to Robinson for what it could do to break historians of bad habits.
If history could no longer be counted on to provide absolute truths, it could
still sustain historians in meaningful work if they reconceived of their primary
tasks as descriptive rather than analytical. The New Historian’s challenge, he
concluded, was “so fascinating and so comprehensive that it will doubtless
gradually absorb his whole energies and wean him in time from literature, for
no poet or dramatist ever set before himself a nobler and more inspiring ideal,
or one making more demands on the imagination and resources of expression,
than the destiny that is becoming clearer and clearer to the historian.”28

Weaning historians from the most traditional and dramatic forms of literary
and poetic expression, however, would be no easy task given the central role of
the “romantic” in nineteenth-century historiography. “It is the romance of his-
tory which attracts the half educated and secures the publisher,” Justin Winsor
warned.29 Novelist-historians like Irving or poet-historians such as Bryant and
Ridpath had established protocols for narrative presentation grounded firmly
in the imaginative and the universal. New historians who wished to challenge
the ways Americans conceptualized the past could only go so far in terms of
advocating for their positions; they had to wait for a “cultural shift” to occur
among the general population signaling the emergence of a new modernist epis-
temology before they could invest time and money into solidifying it. Historical
scholarship was perhaps less cause than effect, then, of the modernist revolution
that gradually altered the way average Americans conceived of history. Many of
those historians who migrated eventually to the realist camp first had to shed
their own preconceptions of history as “romantic art,” and the transition was
often difficult and painful. Most were reluctant to abandon the comforting as-
surances of George Bancroft that “anyone looking back into history could see
which actions had conformed to the will of Providence” and to the mandates of
universal law. The “eternal laws of the moral world were simple,” Bancroft be-
lieved, and required no special concessions to a “fluid and irregular universe.”30
Robinson and other New Historians found this a naive outlook, and their chal-
lenge was to convince the American people that history, even popular history,
was a more complex and nuanced enterprise than Bancroft had suggested.
“I Lean toward History”

A perfect example of the challenges facing New Historians who wished
to use the unsettling conventions of literary realism as the narrative standard
for historical study can be seen in the career of the Indiana novelist-turned-
historian Edward Eggleston. Eggleston had much in common with his fellow
Hoosier Ridpath, although their lives moved in opposite, while parallel direc-
tions. Born in 1837, Eggleston grew up in Vevay, Indiana, along the banks of the
Ohio River southeast of Putnam County, where Ridpath was born three years
later. Eggleston and Ridpath experienced roughly the same childhood, working
on farms and attending school sporadically when money and time away from
chores permitted.31 Both were precocious, perhaps Eggleston even more than
Ridpath. “He could not master the art of planting corn,” an employer noted
of Edward, but he “could learn to speak French without an effort.” Indeed, he
studied seven foreign languages, and was an inveterate collector of books on

all of them, especially historical works. “I had the good fortune to be born in a
family in which literary acquirement was esteemed above everything else after
religion,” Eggleston later wrote. He was especially fond of Jacob Abbott’s “red-
backed histories,” popular juvenile volumes by the brother of the author of
the best-selling Civil War history so roundly condemned by Godkin. He once
“drew a copy of the Sketch Book through a broken pane in a locked bookcase” to
discover that all his “impulses to a literary life were reawakened by the reading
of Irving.” Interested in aesthetics as well as literature and history, Eggleston
wrote an essay at the age of fourteen on “the Beautiful” for a literary contest
sponsored by the Madison, Indiana, Courier. He won the contest, later refer-
ring to the prize he took home, a volume of William Cullen Bryant poems, as
worthy of “the greatest literary success” he ever attained.32
Eggleston’s father died when Edward was still young, and that death be-
came a point of reference for the boy as he struggled with anxieties about what
to do with his life. His diaries from this period, like Ridpath’s, were filled with
the self-scrutinizing passages of a pessimist. “Pride is my great enemy. It is the
alloy in every good feeling I have,” he wrote.33 Elsewhere Eggleston chastised
himself (as had Ridpath) for violations of the Sabbath, especially for a Sunday
spent with politicians. “How have I spent this week?” he asked himself re-
proachfully after this political dalliance. “The actions the words the thoughts
of another week are irrevocably recorded against the day of judgment,” he
concluded. Such soul-searching revealed a considerable religious streak in
Eggleston, one in which he overindulged as a teenager. Displaying “some of
the most absurd behavior a lad of twelve or thirteen ever exhibited,” accord-
ing to biographer William Randel, Eggleston “set for himself a regime of the
sort . . . recommended for preachers: rising at four, praying on his knees for
a solid hour; other periods of prayer at specified times during the day; strict
silence broken only for absolutely necessary statements; and a very sparse
diet.”34 Religious faith often crowded out other competing interests. He had
literary ambitions, for instance, and as a very young man he went so far as to
collect materials for a treatise on American literature. He burned the manu-
script, however, because he thought its authorship “a worldly ambition.” This
struggle between spiritual and worldly aspirations created in him an intellec-
tual tension that resurfaced in his later work as a popular historian. “Two man-
ner of men were in me,” Eggleston recognized later, “and for the greater part
of my life there has been an enduring struggle between the lover of literary art
and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.
The duality survives even today,” he added in 1890, referring revealingly to
the ambivalence he experienced while trying to write popular history for the
masses in accordance with the higher standards of scholarly literature.35

Like Ridpath, Eggleston was also groomed for college, and his stepfather
purchased a scholarship for him to Indiana Asbury Institute, but poor health
and concerns for his durability convinced his family to give the scholarship to
his younger brother George instead.36 It is hard to know how Eggleston would
have done as a classmate of Ridpath’s, but he later expressed some disdain
for those with expensive college educations. “Schools and colleges—I do not
say universities—are primarily for those who cannot or will not study without
them,” he wrote dismissively.37 In lieu of college, Eggleston drifted restlessly
from one career to another, first as a school teacher, then as a minister, and then,
for a brief time, as a practitioner of the “Daguerran art” and the operator of a
stereopticon theater.38 In his mid-twenties he was selling books by subscrip-
tion, traveling throughout the Midwest as an agent for Putnam’s publishing
house in Cincinnati. Several years later (when the family had more money and
he had more strength to attend college) there were renewed discussions about
sending him to DePauw, but he was now too old to consider matriculation
seriously, so his stepfather, who had “influence” at the university, “purchased”
an honorary master’s degree in his name. The degree was “[a]s unexpected
as it was unearned,” his biographer noted, and Eggleston accepted it without
any illusions as to its worth. The certificate made him “the only Master of Arts
selling, from door to door, subscriptions to Headley’s History of the Great Re-
bellion, and hoping to average five dollars a day,” he noted. Later he served as a
book agent for Parson Brownlow’s Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of
Secession, an attack on the Confederacy by an East Tennessee Loyalist, which
put him in direct and unfavorable competition with agents selling books such
as Captain George B. Herbert’s well-received Popular History of the Civil War
in America.39
Here Eggleston’s life took a significant departure from Ridpath’s. While the
latter was off at a midwestern college preparing for a career as a professor of
history, the former became active in social causes, particularly the temperance
movement. Writing in his spare time for various eastern church journals on the
evils of alcohol, Eggleston moved in 1870 to New York City with his brother
George to coedit a reform paper, the Independent.40 Eggleston’s transition from
romantic to realist commenced in earnest during this period, in large measure
because of a prolonged exposure to the stern realities of urban life. Submitting
articles on grim topics such as the impoverishment of American jails and the
mistreatment of the criminally insane, he underwent a personal transformation
that prepared the ground for his later work as a political activist. Like Theodore
Dreiser, who grew up in rural Indiana where the “very soil smacked of Ameri-
can idealism and faith,” Eggleston “discarded his ‘romantic’ rural perspective”
in favor of the social realism of an urban dweller.41 Like Ridpath, whose work

on The Arena sparked a latent political sensibility, Eggleston defined himself
increasingly as a Methodist minister-turned-editor who pursued sober social
truths on behalf of reform causes. Restless since the young age of fifteen when
he first left home, he associated his personal radicalization with larger pressures
acting on society in general. “I rapidly changed from one social environment to
another,” he admitted to an interviewer for Outlook magazine, in keeping with
the turbulent, fluid world he inhabited.42
Eggleston did not abandon himself wholly to the reform impulse, however.
His magazine work provided him with an opportunity to dabble in fiction
writing which soon eclipsed nearly all of his other literary interests.43 He began
serializing humorous works of fiction for Hearth and Home family magazine
in the early 1870s, including nostalgic sketches of his boyhood on the Indiana
frontier.44 Perhaps best known for the local-color genre writing he produced
during this active period in his life, Eggleston wrote several important novels,
including the best seller Hoosier School-Master (1871), which sold ten thou-
sand copies in its first six months.45 Classified as a realist because of his atten-
tion to detail and the fidelity with which he sketched the rough edges of human
character, Eggleston admitted that he had little experience in writing or even
reading novels and claimed no allegiance to any particular literary school.46
He confessed to being as astonished as anyone that his works were as popular
as they were, since, by his own admission, he was not a gifted storyteller and
his writings lacked a sufficient plot design or narrative order to satisfy readers
of romance.47 In Eggleston’s case, however, the medium was the message. The
unsophisticated structure of his novels, that is, was dictated by the periodical
form of publication he employed, and, a biographer has noted, “he was virtu-
ally forced to continue adding installments” being “caught up in a race with
the printer, week after week, that made planning ahead barely possible.”48 De-
spite the unpolished quality of his writing, then, Eggleston earned a reputation
as a faithful depictor of the frontier West, and by the mid-1870s, and several
serialized novels later, Eggleston was acknowledged as one of the fresh voices
of a new midwestern literati, associated frequently in literary reviews with the
likes of William Dean Howells and Mark Twain.49 The membership commit-
tee of the Western Association of Writers viewed him as one of their own, and,
in perhaps the ultimate sign of acceptance in Eggleston’s regional universe, its
leadership proffered him special invitations to attend annual meetings.50
Success in the literary marketplace brought financial relief to a hardworking
journalist and permitted him time to perfect his literary craft. Most critics agree
that the key to Eggleston’s success as a novelist in this period was the realism
of his depictions. Eggleston’s brother George claimed that the Hoosier School-
Master was a triumph in the popular book market because it represented “a

genuine, honest & successful attempt to reflect a phase of the actual life of the
real American people as they are (or were) and not, as a novelist would like to
have them.” It was “realistic fiction, dealing with the common people & not
with ‘society’ apes & watering place women.”51 Rejecting the idea of a struc-
ture imposed from the outside by the dictates of conventional action in a novel,
such as Lippard practiced, Eggleston chose to describe the “inner life” of his
characters, many of whom were humble, common folk like himself. He was,
in short, a “recorder of actuality” who drew his inspiration “from real charac-
ters, real scenes, and real incidents.” Bret Harte described the style accurately
when he said: “It was concise and condensed, yet suggestive . . . delightfully
extravagant—or a miracle of understatement. It voiced not only the dialect, but
the habits of thought of a people or locality. . . . It was directly to the point.”52
Gradually Eggleston began to emulate the naturalist techniques of French nov-
elists, treating themes of marital infidelity and illegitimacy in experimental new
works of fiction such as Roxy (1873).53 “As in literature the true artist will shun
the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character,” wrote Wil-
liam Dean Howells of this realist outlook, “so the sincere observer of man will
not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his
habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such
times very precious.”54
Eggleston’s popular fiction and its attendant realism were tied closely to his
love of history. He exhibited a keen interest in social and regional history, espe-
cially in the popular folklore and dialects of the Indiana frontier, and he spoke
often of his desire to use fiction as a tool for revealing the deep undercurrents
of his region’s cultural past.55 In response to criticisms raised by the New Eng-
land Transcendentalist F. B. Sanborn about this unrefined literary technique,
Eggleston elaborated on his priorities: “I must not let your Harvard & Concord
judgment swerve me from what I have set myself to do,” he wrote Sanborn.
“Fiction, I take it, is a border land with poetry on one side & history on the
other. I lean toward history.” Acknowledging that a “history of manners is not
the highest sort of fiction,” he nonetheless proclaimed that it is “the higher
kind of history.”56 In the preface to The Mystery of Metropolisville, he elaborated
on this cultural purpose by adding grandly: “I have wished to make my stories
of value a contribution to the history of civilization in America.” History in
Eggleston’s conception was consistent with Burckhardt’s kulturgeschichte, cul-
tural history that treats all aspects of human “civilization”—social, artistic, intel-
lectual, as well as constitutional and political. He believed that every historical
moment had an integrity and importance independent of other moments, and
that every historical event, even those judged incidental to the developmental
standards of institutional historians, had historical significance.

As preparation for establishing the fidelity of his realist novels Eggleston
read widely in nonfiction prose, especially history. Almost certainly the same
impulses that compelled Eggleston to record local traditions with an ethnol-
ogist’s exactitude in his novels also influenced his desire to “get to the factual
heart” of history. Eggleston, however, had no training of any formal sort to
allow him to make confident choices about what was historically significant
and what was not among the infinite number of cultural elements he acknowl-
edged as relevant. His years as a book agent for various historical publications
doubtless aided him a bit in understanding what average readers desired from
a publication, although they could not compensate much for his lack of famil-
iarity with basic historical texts. He had read “Rollin in part, Prescott’s Mexico,
‘some’ Hume and Macaulay, and ‘some’ United States and French history,” he
noted, but admitted in the same breath that: “I hardly know how or where I
gained a general knowledge of history. I have read a great deal of stray literature
that can never be counted.”57 It was not until he chanced on a copy of Taine’s
History of Art in the Netherlands that he got his first real introduction to cul-
tural history. That work, with its detailed treatment of the realism of Dutch in-
teriors and its attention to the “the homely details of living,” provided a major
stimulus to Eggleston’s historical vision.58 Unlike Ridpath, who believed that
natural laws at work in the universe should serve as the organizational prin-
ciples used by historians for structuring past experience, Eggleston found little
cohesion in the past and embraced Taine’s cultural perspective as a way of
selecting among the richly textured if fragmentary and even arbitrary elements
of a mercurial history.
Eggleston’s increasing interest in popular history was sparked as well by a
casual conversation he had at a dinner party with the eminent historian Francis
Parkman concerning the monumental history of the United States by George
Bancroft. Long after the event, Eggleston recalled: “Nearly twenty years ago I
sat at Mr. Parkman’s table one Sunday and he remarked with that sweet candor
which was characteristic: ‘I cannot read Bancroft.’ ” Startled by the admis-
sion, Eggleston responded: “Mr. Parkman, if you had not said it, I should not
have dared to say so, but I cannot read Bancroft” either. Eggleston’s confession
encouraged a “cultivated lady” at the table to then ask: “If you gentlemen say
that, what is the ground of his great reputation?” to which they both answered
simultaneously, “His great knowledge.” Bancroft “knew nearly everything a
historian ought to know except cultural history,” Eggleston recorded, but as
a consequence of this omission in an age of intense interest in cultural mores,
“his volumes are left in undisturbed repose on those shelves where stand the
books which no gentleman’s library is complete without.” Bancroft “labored
long” and he “labored learnedly,” Eggleston concluded, but “he has repelled

more young people from the study of history than all other influences in Amer-
ica.”59 Further conversation convinced Parkman that Eggleston possessed the
kind of historical mind that could allow him to accomplish what Bancroft had
not. After all, the novelist’s extensive travel experience and his familiarity with
the habits and personalities of the common man and woman in America made
him a perfect candidate for producing cultural history. “You are the only man
in America that can write a history of the United States,” Parkman insisted,
because “you are the only man who has seen so many forms of our life.”60
If Parkman intended to convert Eggleston from novelist to the noble profes-
sion of history, a transition the New Englander himself had made successfully
several decades earlier, such high praise served his purpose well. The royalties
accruing from Hoosier School-Master and The Mystery of Metropolisville and
other works of short fiction allowed Eggleston to resign his position with the
Independent and to move to a new home in Lake George, New York, while
maintaining his residence in Madison, Indiana. Despite the lack of formal
training in history, Eggleston surprised family and friends in 1879 with the
announcement that he planned to abandon the writing of fiction altogether
to devote himself for the remainder of his days to a broad historical study of
American social life. He notified his brother that financial success had altered
irreversibly the course of his life’s work from the writing of realistic fiction to
the production of nonfiction history. “I am going to write a series of volumes
which together shall constitute a History of Life in the United States,” Egg-
leston noted, “not a history of the United States, bear in mind, but a history
of life there, the life of the people, the sources of their ideas and habits, the
course of their development from the beginning.”61 Taking up Parkman’s flat-
tering suggestion, Eggleston formulated a plan for the execution of “a grand
work” in which he would tell the story of American development throughout
its formative years from the perspective of the people. He envisioned the work
as a popular history—a decades-long project to sketch the “commonplace ac-
tualities of early American history,” including “the detail of food and drink of
the colonists, their clothing, their farm implements and household utensils,
their medical practices, their superstitions. . . . a careful preoccupation with
the ways of ordinary living of the American people.”62
That Eggleston imagined himself able to move so readily from fiction to his-
tory writing is revealing of how popular history was conceived in the late nine-
teenth century. Anyone with catholic tastes, modest experience in the world,
and a substantial literary reputation felt qualified to narrate the lessons of the
American past. Temporal barriers were not really obstacles either for those
displaying the power of empathy. To skeptics who wondered what authority
Eggleston possessed to tell the history of America’s seventeenth-century past,

for instance, he cited his exposure to encounters on the Indiana frontier as suf-
ficient background. “I have known colonial life, having been among people of
different manners and dialect. I can imagine in the colonies the same collision
and the same contact with Indian life,” he wrote. In defending his choice, Egg-
leston recognized that his credentials for writing popular history were no less
substantial than those of others such as Ridpath who were reaping the benefits
of their labors in a rich field of harvest. Fearing “that the current public interest
in history would not last,” Eggleston decided to strike while the iron was hot.63
“I am ripe for it,” he told his daughter Lillie. “Everything in my life seems to
have prepared me for it.”64
The Big “Bow-Wow” of Public Events

In the years following his decision to become a historian, Eggleston did
a good deal of thinking about his preferred methods of historical presenta-
tion. He was not enamored of classical traditions of historical writing. “For
five hundred years nearly every historical writer has found it necessary to
touch his cap in a preface to Herodotus and Thucydides,” Eggleston wrote.
While admitting that the ancients developed important military “models of
style,” Eggleston condemned them for failing to take note of the “literature,
the art or the social life” of the classical world. “History must treat military
affairs,” he admitted, and “[w]ar is essentially exciting”—how could bodies
depicted “in violent movement” and with “[l]ife and death hang[ing] upon
a hair-trigger” not be exciting? Yet depictions of military engagements were
repeated by the ancients with such predictable consistency and repetition,
he argued, that the subject had “become trite.” In addition, such historical
preferences had had a detrimental influence on human behavior. An obses-
sion with historical accounts of warfare had convinced people that they must
settle “everything by the gage of battle” rather than through “the wisdom of
diplomacy, the wisdom of avoidance, in short, the fine wisdom of arbitration,
that last fruit of human experience.” Eggleston insisted on a different stan-
dard: “We cannot always cover our pages with gore,” he wrote. Thucydides’s
History of the Peloponnesian War is “a splendid piece of literature, but it is
not a model for a modern writer.” He felt the same about the fixations of eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century historians on things political. “Never was a
falser thing said than that history is dead politics and politics living history,”
Eggleston wrote.65 “History must take account of politics, as of everything
else,” but it must be supplemented by the “equally important phases of social
activity and interest.” Until “other elements of life” besides war and politics

are treated in studies of the past, he concluded, “history will remain a poor,
inadequate, ill-understood subject.”66
Eggleston favored social and cultural history and praised those historians
who gave attention to the manners and the customs of the subjects they studied,
including dress, eating habits, work patterns, and material culture. He admired
Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, for instance, because it displayed a
“keen modern interest in the little details of life” (such as the techniques for con-
structing fishing vessels) and a “delightful particularity” with regard to habits of
speech (especially the peculiarities of Native American dialects). Eggleston also
liked the popular work of Thomas Macaulay, whose monumental five-volume
History of England impressed him with its eye for the details of life in “old Lon-
don.” It is a “wonderful piece of history” for its “faithful use of authority,” he
wrote, “so particular, so minute, so extraordinary.” Of all British popularizers,
however, Eggleston preferred J. R. Green, whose reputation for treating the daily
concerns of commoners commended him above all others. Admittedly, Green
was not always an original “authority on facts,” Eggleston recognized, but “[n]o
man can treat history for a long period, as Green did, without depending on the
authority of others.” As compensation he was a “philanthropic clergyman, lover
of his race to begin with,” who “gradually outgrew all his doctrinal predilec-
tions,” presenting religious figures, great and small, with appropriate respect.
“He greets the barefoot friar, the Lollard, the Puritan, and the Primitive Meth-
odist with the same question,” Eggleston wrote admiringly. “He treats them all
as of beneficent origin.” Through his attention to the minute particulars of life,
Green did more than most of his predecessors, in Eggleston’s estimation, to
encourage an appreciation for a “true all-round history.”67
In emulation of popular historians such as Raleigh, Macaulay, and Green,
Eggleston initiated his “grand scheme” of a vast new history of America by
studying the obscure details of life in the seventeenth-century American colo-
nies. He made several research trips abroad, where he uncovered important
documents at the British Museum and the Public Record Office in London
and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.68 He also journeyed to archival col-
lections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library of Congress, the
Boston Public Library, and the Peabody Institute as well as to scenes of histori-
cal significance for early American history, such as Jamestown and Plymouth.
Extensive travel of this sort was expensive, of course, and it limited consider-
ably the amount of time he could devote to writing.69 In addition, Eggleston
became obsessed with collecting and preserving primary documents, and he
built an extravagant scholar’s retreat at his summer home at Lake George to ac-
commodate his growing archive in the early 1880s. Called Owl’s Nest, this field-
stone library was an impressive repository for over 10,000 volumes of history

and manuscripts that Eggleston used in his work, but it also became a financial
sinkhole and a distraction.70 Some friends and family urged him in the interest
of completing his literary project not to be so scrupulous in his collecting and
research, but he rejected such suggestions. When news reached him in Europe
that popularizer John Fiske was well under way with a five-volume history of
America, Eggleston dismissed the project as not worthy of his standards. “It
will be popular, well-written, and lacking in nothing but correctness & fullness
of information,” he wrote his concerned daughter Lillie. “I know we have no
public sufficiently intellectual to justify the spending my resources on such a
work as I am doing but I am compelled by internal forces to do it.”71
High standards notwithstanding, the royalties Eggleston received from his
novels were not sufficient to sustain him in his lifestyle as a historian. As with
John Frost and Sydney Gay, money matters incapacitated Eggleston in sig-
nificant ways. “I would like to write in my own way about many things,” he
confided privately, “but I must write as the world wishes about what the world
cares for in order to win bread.”72 As a result, in the mid-1880s, Eggleston al-
lowed himself to be distracted from his grand design by several moneymaking
projects proposed by publishers anxious to associate themselves with some-
one of his established literary reputation. He worked sporadically on an illus-
trated history of the United States for use in schools that promised lucrative
rewards for little work; he went on the lecture circuit to recycle speeches on a
multitude of subjects for organizations like the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and
Sciences, the Atlantic Lyceum Bureau, and the Colonial Dames of the State
of New York.73 The prestigious Chautauqua Institute asked him for a series
of lectures on American history and a historical novel as well. With respect
to the novel, the institute requested of Eggleston, “Not a dry tale with gouty
foot notes (you could not write such an one) but a story about ninety thou-
sand words, which will give the American reader a picture of later colonial
times, the Revolutionary period, and which will make clear by concrete state-
ment the principles upon which our government was founded.” Appealing to
Eggleston’s ambition to be popular, the Chautauqua’s editor added: “This is
a chance for you to do a great educational work for the American people, and
I wish you could give this matter your immediate and thoughtful attention.”74
Eggleston excused himself from the novel, although he delivered the lectures
and wrote numerous articles for literary magazines as well.75 “My present plan
is to finish up the two installments of the history I have begun & then to write a
half-length story or edit this reader—whichever will help make the pot simmer
a little,” he disclosed to his wife. “Then I’ll write the other 1/3 of my history
which I’ll keep in hand all the time. I don’t know that there’s any need to turn
aside but I’ll feel better to have made a little monies.”76

One of the many offers Eggleston accepted to keep the pot simmering dur-
ing this period was from D. Appleton and Company to produce a popular
history for American homes. He devoted the year 1887–1888 to this single-
volume history that was eventually published as The Household History of the
United States and Its People.77 Called Eggleston’s “Popular History” in the
promotional literature, its introduction explained that a “household edition”
was one designed to be read by families around the hearth, especially by young
men and women “who have yet to make themselves familiar with the more im-
portant features of their country’s history” as well as “older people” who will
“think none the worse of [a] book that strives to make the causes and results
of public events clear.” Because the work was “popular,” Eggleston did not
hesitate to include “curious and picturesque details” in the narrative or “such
anecdotes as lend the charm of a human and personal interest to the broader
facts of the nation’s story.” He acknowledged that “history is often tiresome
to the young” and that the condition was “not so much the fault of history as
of a false method of writing by which one contrives to relate events without
sympathy or imagination, without narrative connection or animation.” Egg-
leston also argued that “[t]he attempt to master vague and general records of
kiln-dried facts is certain to beget in the ordinary reader a repulsion from the
study of history—one of the very most important of all studies for its widening
influence on general culture.”78
The structure of Eggleston’s Household History revealed his concern for
finding new methods to liberate the somewhat staid traditions of historical
interpretation. Primary among his concerns was periodizing the past in ac-
cordance not with the linear sensibilities of Ridpath’s Bem Method but of a
modernist age interested in cultural moments rather than causal chains. “I
know of no surer way of making life tedious to the reader than the method
of considering the early history of the United States as the history of thirteen
petty communities and their intestine squabbles,” he wrote. After providing a
brief history of the founding of each of the original settlements, therefore, Egg-
leston spoke of the thirteen independent colonies emerging in the seventeenth
century as a unified whole, anticipating the nationalizing impulses of the Revo-
lution in ways that some found ahistorical. He continued to emphasize unity in
an even more unlikely context—the Civil War—which he described as a strug-
gle among states with more in common than not. Eggleston was aware that his
consolidating strategy made him vulnerable to the criticism that he was over-
looking the diversity of American culture and underestimating its legacy in
the divisions that intensified rather than dissipated as the nation approached
the Civil War. He believed, however, that Americans of the nineteenth cen-
tury, “who were in some sense victims of the passions of the civil-war period,”

were “not the best judges of questions between the participants.” Anxious “to
bring about that oneness of sentiment in which lies the only hope for national
union and prosperity,” he emphasized the “conciliation and the consolidation
of our national life” over division and fragmentation. In addition, because he
was less interested in political themes than in the cultural history of the people,
he found it easier in the Household History to trace common character traits
among a homogeneous culture. “The old historians,” he wrote, “took note of
nobody but princes, courtiers, and generals,” emphasizing their petty political
squabbles and their high-profile differences. “But history, like everything else,
has become more democratic in these modern days, and the real hero of the
historian’s story to-day is the community itself.” Eggleston added: “It would
be specially unfortunate if the writer on the history of a republic like ours
should be so taken up with what Sir Walter Scott would call ‘the big bow-wow’
of public events as to neglect the story of the evolution of a great people.”79
To be sure, some of the Household History was rather traditional in its treat-
ment of standard and clichéd events in American history. The popular home
version of the work, for instance, was preceded by a school edition that in-
cluded “questions, blackboard illustrations, geographical studies, and other
apparatus for the use of teachers,” concessions made by Eggleston’s publisher,
D. Appleton, to school boards that demanded the treatment of certain canon-
ized themes and events.80 Eggleston employed the “sympathetic imagination”
he had discussed in his preface to elucidate some of the most picturesque epi-
sodes in American history. Reiterating Gay’s doubts about the authenticity of
the Pocahontas–John Smith rescue legend, for instance, Eggleston nonetheless
wrote with Bryant’s appreciation for literary effect that “the story is so pretty
and romantic that one does not like to disbelieve it.” In addition, Eggleston in-
cluded several sensational segments in his popular history on the barbarities of
Indian warfare and discussed openly the unfortunate “passion of the savages
for intoxicating drink” and for the torturing of captives. Occasionally he even
made allowances for standardized political history—in detailed discussions of
the successions of presidents, for example—but in such cases he tried to pro-
vide quaint metaphors to enliven the narrative. These choices reflected a vague
reform agenda. The effort by political leaders to prevent settlers from spilling
into the Ohio Valley was “much like making a law to regulate the tides of the
sea,” he wrote, while the Embargo of 1807 caused some “hot-headed people in
the Eastern States” to consider “dissolving the Union,” an action that “would
have been much like cutting off one’s head to cure a toothache.” The appor-
tioning of subjects in the first several hundred pages of the Household History
was rather random, but in almost all cases Eggleston made decisions about
allotment of space based on strong literary and ethical preferences.81

There were glimpses of originality, as well, in the narrative structure of the
Household History. Like many practitioners of kulturgeschichte, Eggleston re-
duced the role of plot and story line in his history in favor of textured vignettes
that emphasized the habits and customs of an age. Manuscript revisions made
to his text suggest the level of cultural detail Eggleston desired for his histories.
For instance, he remarked in a pencil notation on the draft of an early chapter
that to appreciate the story of the rigors of colonial life “one must know some-
thing of the process of soap manufacture. Few children nowadays know that
soap is made by boiling its ingredients.” He left himself the suggestion that
“the necessary information could be inserted in a sentence or two and would
inform the story, I think.” He also noted that the trade-off between traditional
narrative and new social history was worth attention. “I think fewer stories
with more detail and local color would be interesting,” he reminded himself.82
Eggleston displayed an ethnologist’s interest in the cultural preferences of Na-
tive Americans as well, charting with respectful detail their various customs,
including how they dressed, what games they played, where they farmed and
hunted, and how they decorated their bodies. Eggleston took similar care in
describing the social manners of American colonials, documenting the kinds of
houses they built, the dishes they used, how they cooked their food, and what
they drank. “The study of events is currently considered ‘history,’ ” noted one
reviewer of Eggleston’s career, “but below these events lie their cause, their
life of a people in its origin, development and growth. It is this deeper, less
tangible, because all pervading, history that Mr. Eggleston has chosen as his
field.” Eggleston “gives life to the past,” he continued, “Erudite, he is never
dry; forced, after the lapse of two centuries, to reconstitute from meagre frag-
ments one connected, whole, he never confounds testimony with evidence,
nor allows his imagination to obscure his logic. He is a scientific historian with
an artistic method—entertaining, informing, interesting, and reliable.”83
Sometimes the integration of new and old techniques proved unwieldy for
Eggleston. On many occasions throughout the Household History, the perspec-
tive of the narrator is external to the action, Eggleston choosing to describe
traditional events with reference to larger national and international develop-
ments.84 Because he was reluctant to pass personal judgment on the causes
and results of the Civil War, for instance, Eggleston’s narrative voice is nearly
devoid of descriptions of that conflict, and the story line is reduced to a rather
flat treatment of military maneuvers in various theaters of the war. Anxious to
play down the negative aspects of the fratricidal struggle, Eggleston eschewed
discussion of the bloody human toll of the war, concentrating instead on the
unified nation that emerged from its embers to play a historic part in the “ad-
vancement of civilization.” The Mexican War was removed enough historically

to allow for a franker discussion of its divisive effects, but even here Eggleston
muffled any forceful indictment of either party in the struggle. Acknowledging
the “ignorance and prejudice prevailing” in Mexico at the time but also the
“misery to innocent people” caused by the war, he concluded simply that “a
collision with the Mexicans was probably inevitable.”85 Even popular historians
such as George Lippard and Benson Lossing (who wrote during the war itself)
had scrutinized motives more directly. In other instances, however, Eggleston
penetrated “inside the culture of the community, providing wonderfully rich,
thick descriptions of the daily life and development” by insinuating his narra-
tive voice into the internal dialogue of the text as a way of enhancing the person-
alized quality of his cultural assessments.86 Describing the active social life of a
small but important American gentry in the late eighteenth century, Eggleston
reminded readers in his day that “life was less comfortable then than now.”
Using contemporary American culture as a point of reference, he wrote: “Even
the rich, with all their loaded tables and fine show, lacked some of the substan-
tial comforts of modern life. . . . There was more drinking to excess then, and
there was less refinement in speech and manners, than there is now.”87
The alternating narrative voices emanating from the Household History
gave it an uneven quality and left Eggleston with mixed feelings about its worth
when it was published in 1888. On the one hand, he was proud of the fact that
he had introduced some new themes and materials into the master narrative of
the American past. The Great Story of the nation’s history could now be said
to include straightforward, scholarly commentary on fashion, leisure activities,
commerce, functional art, and cooking in ways that the works by populariz-
ers such as Irving, Bryant, Gay, and Ridpath had not. This was a legacy of
Eggleston’s interests in literary realism as was his tendency to avoid usurping
narrative. “What had been catalogued by some critics of Eggleston’s fiction
as a flaw—his inability to invent—was now an important virtue,” according
to his biographer. “His boyhood literalness found its full outlet in his history,
although interpretation of the facts and their judicious massing to convey a
forceful picture called for his most mature judgment and cumulative skill in
writing.”88 Reviewers added that the Household History was a model of New
History insofar as it made history palpable. “A careful reading of its pages
leads to the conclusion that the author has collected, assorted, arranged, and
presented the fact of the history of our country so as to form a most interesting
narrative,” noted one reader. The “value of the volume turns on its power to
affect the mind, and make its facts real, its people real, its scenes real.”89
On the other hand, Eggleston worried that the volume was too cursory
in its handling of cultural themes, too hurried in its overall presentation to
constitute a serious contribution to scholarship. There were also challenges

posed by Eggleston’s research that he found he could not address adequately
in a popular format. In writing the Household History, Eggleston discovered
that the “historical record, unfortunately . . . , is notoriously inadequate, full of
gaps and flaws, infuriatingly lacking in the missing links we are always seek-
ing.” As Gertruade Himmelfarb notes, New Historians like Eggleston were
affected especially by these lapses because they were reliant on “subjects that,
by definition, produce few such records”; the “states of mind” of the “inarticu-
late masses” that were “too subtle and private to lend themselves to the kind of
evidence that survives the ages.”90 Eggleston was frustrated as well by aspects
of the book’s production that he could not control adequately. The required
pace of writing was not to his liking, for instance. Similarly frustrated as Gay
was in dealing with the impatient Scribner, Eggleston informed his publisher
that “1,000 words a day is all any writer can produce who has any regard to
style, even when materials are not to be sought for.” When Appleton proposed
providing a series of literary associates to help out with the projects such as
Gay had been required to accept by Scribner, Eggleston replied curtly that the
kind of history he desired to write “could hardly be turned out in that time
even with a force of assistants.”91 In terms of production history, the Household
History shared much with many of its competitors, the demands of the market-
place as recognized and attended to by publishers conflicting directly with the
desires for thoroughness and accuracy as insisted on by authors.
An example of the difficulties Eggleston faced in the book’s production is
found in its illustration program. Appleton promised Eggleston that he would
make it a priority to create a visually stimulating product, and to that end the
publisher employed a large number of talented engravers and illustrators to
give graphic character to the work. These artists were commissioned not only
to depict traditional historical scenes (such as Civil War battles) but also cos-
tumes, armor, inventions, implements, sea and river craft, vehicles, and the cul-
tural manners of the American people. In the introduction, Eggleston noted
that “the drawings have been mostly made under the supervision of the writer,
and have required no less thought and care than the text itself.”92 Among those
artists Eggleston supervised was Frederic Remington, an illustrator who had
gained a national reputation for depicting with realism the customs and man-
ners of the people of the West.93 That Appleton was able to secure the services
of Remington was a bit of a coup in its own right, since Remington was perhaps
America’s busiest illustrator, working for numerous magazines and illustrated
book publishers. “Fred has as firm grip on Harpers & The Century as any art-
ist in this country,” his wife Eva Remington wrote. “He has all he can do.” In
1888, the year the Household History was published, Remington produced 139
illustrations for periodicals alone, and his commissions for publishing houses

such as Appleton’s, which often called for original pieces of art that did not
repeat images already widely circulating in magazines, increased the work-
load substantially. Consequently, Remington’s services came at a price—literal
and figurative. At work on seven illustrated books at the same time, the artist
sketched too hurriedly for the Household History and without much evident
commitment to the project. In the end, he blamed the poor quality of his illus-
trations for Eggleston’s work on the mistranslation of images by incompetent
engravers he referred to as “blacksmiths-turned-woodchoppers.”94
Remington was not the only one critical of the pictorial representations in
the Household History. Others complained that the illustrations were inaccu-
rate and unhistorical, certainly a drawback for a book that Eggleston hoped
would be recognized for its realistic detail and accuracy. A blistering edito-
rialist in the Florida Times-Union wrote a review that devastated Eggleston:
“In the plain truth we find lots of errors of language; facts distorted, and even
at a superficial examination the illustrations are, to say the least, left-handed
abortions. In the first full page picture, while the Santa Maria of Columbus is
running dead before the wind under the mainsail and crossjack, the Pinta is
hove-to under the sprit sail—a thing she could not do; and the Nina is only an
open jolly boat sailing towards the Santa Maria right in the teeth of the wind,
as if she was a steamer without any canvas.” In addition, the reviewer argued
that illustrations of a “Scotchman” were inappropriate on several counts. First,
the reviewer noted, “there is no such word neither in the Scottish nor English
language as a Scotchman,” and second, “as for the dresses, I have seen pictures
of the Scottish people dating back hundreds of years, but I never saw any like
these.” A piper of a Highland regiment was depicted with his bagpipe under
his right arm, “when it is always played with the left,” while he carried a flag
with a St. George cross on it in ignorance of the history of that pennant. “[J]ust
think of a Highlander flying the St. George cross!” the reviewer asserted with
exasperation. “No one ever saw or heard tell of it.”95 These remarks echo the
sentiments of a writer for the Dial who asked: “Has not the time come to de-
mand that the pictures introduced into works on social and cultural conditions
be subjected to the same investigation which is given to other testimony?”96
Despite these inadequacies, the Household History did very well in the mar-
ketplace; in fact, to Eggleston’s surprise, it yielded more money than any of his
other literary projects including his best-selling fiction. Those who purchased
the book were most impressed by its literary “genius,” its commitment to real-
ism, and its timeliness. “Ten years ago such a book would have met with a cold
reception,” noted a reviewer for the Literary News, “but a new day is upon us”
when those “who understand some of the psychological laws of childhood”
will put such a volume “to good use.” The problem of “producing a book

“The Ships of Columbus” by Allegra Eggleston from Edward Eggleston’s
Household History of the United States and Its People.

on history that will attract and hold the attention, and carve its facts into the
memory . . . seems to have been fairly solved,” the reviewer offered.97 While
the financial success of the project also freed Eggleston to complete his epic
“new social history”—that “larger work yet far from ready for publication”—it
created some unexpected obligations that delayed still further his work on
the “grand design.”98 From the moment Eggleston’s popular history attained
prominence, its publisher hounded the author for updated editions. Appleton
wished to issue a special quadri-centennial edition of the work, for instance,
as a way of competing with Ridpath’s People’s History of the United States and
other texts, an assignment that required Eggleston to rethink his chapters on
Columbus and the age of exploration.99 “I am greatly demoralized just now by
the jeopardy into which this repeated schoolbook corporation puts my inter-
est in my histories,” Eggleston wrote with reference to his languishing mag-
num opus.100 The Household History garnered him dozens of other offers to
produce smaller popular histories, and the prospect of “easy money” tempted
him greatly. With considerable anxiety he posed an important question to him-
self in his personal diary for 1889: “Now whether to return to my work in
Social History or to pursue first certain more lucrative enterprises so as to win
a competence is the question.”101
These more “lucrative enterprises” won out in the short run. Some were
offers Eggleston felt he could not refuse, like Appleton’s suggestion that he
produce in conjunction with his two daughters—Lillie a writer of children’s
literature and Allegra an illustrator—a series of biographies of famous Ameri-
cans for young people. Anxious to encourage his daughters’ careers, Eggleston
accepted Appleton’s offer for biographies of Columbus, Washington, and
Pocahontas, securing a hefty “20% royalty on all copies sold and an advance
for the preliminary work required.”102 At the same time, Eggleston negotiated
a separate contract with the American Book Company on behalf of his wife,
Frances Goode, who produced a series of school readers under the title Sto-
ries of Great Americans for Little Americans. He spent the summers editing
drafts of his wife’s stories, pitched to second-grade readers, with juvenile titles
such as How Audubon Came to Know About Birds and Some Boys Who Became
Authors—Bryant, Hawthorne, Prescott, Holmes. Allegra and Frederick Rem-
ington were once again hired to illustrate these readers while Eggleston was
kept busy as general editor and consultant to the art department.103
These family projects were ideal in one sense, because they drew Eggleston
closer to the circle of loved ones he found essential to his success as a writer.
But they soon created problems and distractions for the popular historian as
well. For one thing, the art department at Appleton’s was highly scrutinizing of
Allegra Eggleston’s drawings. One member of the production staff took issue

with her depiction of a grizzly bear, which not only did not “look like a grizzly
bear,” in his estimation, but was shown climbing a tree, which he claimed such
bears could not do. “Now it was only Saturday afternoon that I read an article
in the ‘Evening Post,’ written by a grizzly bear hunter of the Pacific Coast, in
which he distinctly states that the grizzly bear cannot climb a tree,” the staff
member wrote Eggleston, adding: “Unless you are very sure of your ground,
I think it would be well to look into this point.”104 Illustrators at Appleton’s
also found it difficult to reproduce Allegra’s drawings for the Stories of Great
Americans series, since she did not tend to sketch with the engraver’s needs in
mind. “I think it would be a very great help to us in the next book on Wash-
ington, if your daughter would look over the illustrations and see which have
been the most successful from a printing point of view,” W. W. Appleton wrote
Eggleston. “If in the Washington, the illustrations were more open and the
lines more clear, with less very heavy blacks, we could print them more readily
and use a somewhat cheaper paper.”105 The need to use cheaper paper was
based on the fact that the books were also proving expense to produce. A high
price per volume meant almost certain failure in the popular book market, and
Appleton’s scrambled to find ways to reduce costs. “We have had a talk with
your father about the matter and as we have told him, it does not seem to us
that any one is to blame, as the literary and artistic portions of the work have
been highly commended, as well as the manufacturing of the book,” the pub-
lisher wrote Lillie Eggleston directly. “We think, however, that in our anxiety to
make a beautiful book, we have put altogether too much expense in the manu-
facture and hence have been obliged to ask a much higher price than the public
require.”106 Even “Reading Circles” for whom the books were intended could
not afford the series, Appleton noted, and he was forced into the embarrassing
situation of having to ask the Egglestons to take a cut in their robust 20 percent
royalty. “It is a very great disappointment to us that the books have not done
better, and we are still afraid that quite a number of them may be returned, and
we are naturally doubtful of the outlook for the present season,” Appleton
wrote apologetically in making the request.107
Other problems with illustrators delayed these historical projects further.
Frederic Remington, who had been commissioned to do spot illustrations for
a number of the popular works by Eggleston and his daughters, proved dis-
turbingly “indefinite” about when his pictorial representations would be avail-
able.108 Additionally, his fees were too expensive for publishing initiatives that
were already well over budget. “He always wants a hundred dollars apiece for
his drawings, irrespective of size,” Appleton’s editor Richard Hinman wrote
with distress to Eggleston. “I explained to him that not only was our page size
much smaller than that of the Century, but that we could seldom use more

than a very small fraction of our page for an illustration, and in consequence
we felt that a hundred dollars was a very high price to pay for a drawing that
had to be so greatly reduced.” When Remington still refused to work for any
less than a hundred dollars an image, Hinman wrote Eggleston in despair: “I
consequently told him that it was possible you had a few pictures you felt he
could do better than any one else and I would ask you to give those to him, but
any that you felt were not specifically adapted to his pencil I would have to ask
you to place elsewhere.”109 This farming out of illustrations originally intended
for Remington proved disastrous to the project, since the new pictures by less
experienced artists were clearly inadequate. “I wish we had given the ‘Boone
and Calloway’ to Remington,” Hinman wrote late in the production of the
work, “or that we could arrange in some way to do so still. The Wiles draw-
ing of Boone is certainly unsatisfactory as it stands, and I think should not be
used. As it is Wiles’ second attempt, I am afraid he cannot better it very much,
though if he says he can do so, I suppose we shall have to let him try.”110 These
efforts on the part of publisher and authors to save money in the production
phases of these popular works proved counterproductive to their chances of
success in the literary marketplace.
So frustrated was Eggleston with the whole business of trying to illustrate
popular volumes adequately that in 1893 he turned down an invitation to write
an introduction to John Clark Ridpath’s Art and Artists of all Nations, despite
the strong incentive of a $200 to $250 stipend for a short preface and a promise
from the publisher that “our projected book will have a very large sale, and
will be by far the best of all the art books published, at a moderate price, and
designed for the homes of the medium class of American people.”111 Nor did
Eggleston act on the numerous offers made by Ridpath and the Western As-
sociation of Writers to join them in their annual caucuses in Warsaw, Indiana.
Eggleston’s rejection of these offers to work closely with his fellow Hoosier
historian was not personal; it merely suggested the complex counterdirections
of the career paths of two men who wished to be popularizers and scholars
simultaneously. Having completed his highly speculative Universal History,
Ridpath was now in search of smaller projects and more restricted historical
arenas in which to demonstrate the applied potential of his grand theories.
Eggleston, however, was looking to expand his vision outward, extrapolating
from the modest, popular publishing efforts of his midcareer to his long de-
ferred plan to write a “new social history” of America. Appleton urged him
forward in this latter ambition to complete his magnum opus, dangling before
Eggleston the prospect of a contract for five volumes with an expected sale of
one hundred thousand copies per volume. “Should . . . your copyright be say
50 [cents] per copy,” the publisher wrote enticingly, “this would amount to

$250,000. Of course, we cannot absolutely promise to do as well as this, but
this is certainly the way it looks to me now.” For a popular writer as concerned
with money and reputation as Eggleston, this prospect was compelling indeed.
Finding “time,” he acknowledged, was the only real obstacle he faced in real-
izing his and his publisher’s dream.112
Neither a Plodding Gleaner nor a Merely Pleasant Narrator

Eggleston’s progress on his “grand work” was excruciatingly slow, owing
in part to personal idiosyncrasies but even more to his commitment to thor-
ough and scholarly methodologies of investigation. Working in a painstakingly
comprehensive fashion, Eggleston researched with care the origins of every
seventeenth-century colony, taking nearly four years to master the relevant
sources for the period up to 1650 alone. He was a stickler for detail and trusted
no one’s authority. “With his lack of formal training in history he felt he could
never rely on what any other historian, however trustworthy, had written,” noted
William Randel. “[I]nstead, he imposed upon himself the formidable duty of
tracing every fact back to its origin,” and this obsession for confirming every
“obscure detail” and detailing the process of substantiation in “Elucidations”
at the end of each of his chapters affected profoundly the publication schedule
for the work.113 In letters to his family, he complained of the arduous task he had
set for himself. “New Eng. history & all colonial history is a horrible labyrinth,”
he wrote Lillie in January 1881, speculating that he might not complete his re-
search on the Massachusetts Bay colony “in the course of ten or fifteen years of
work.”114 Sadly, that prediction proved just about right. Haunted by premoni-
tions of illness and even death, Eggleston worried that the more heavily he was
invested in the project, the less chance he had of finishing it. “As year after year
was consumed in the toilsome preparation,” he wrote, “the magnitude of the
task became apparent, and I began to feel the fear for my work so felicitously
expressed by Raleigh, ‘that the darkness of age and death would have covered
over both it and me before the performance.’ ”115 As a hedge against the failure
to complete his project, Eggleston released advanced drafts of many chapters
to periodicals such as The Century. Fourteen long years after he had proposed
to devote himself “exclusively” to the project, the first book in the series was
published as an independent volume by D. Appleton.116
These delays reflected personal circumstances unique to Eggleston, to be
sure, but they also signaled something about persistent conceptual problems at
the heart of New History as an enterprise. In the first place, New Historians like
Eggleston were too ambitious in their desires to be inclusive to allow for rapid

publication of their works. Crane Brinton referred contemptuously to New His-
tory as “the past everything,” and his comment underscored the hopelessly dif-
ficult task of comprehensiveness that New Historians set for themselves.117 The
commitment of literary realists like Eggleston to “all of life” excited historians,
Ernst Breisach has noted, but it also “well-nigh crushed them under the weight
of its obligation to find, explain, order, and relate a myriad of phenomena. With
the traditional guarantors of continuity and meaning declared to be illegitimate
in a scientific age, with the narrative political history of events and persons
found to be inappropriate, and the mass of data multiplying rapidly, the task of
synthesis became exceedingly complex.”118 The burden was not unlike trying to
write the Great American Novel. It took a certain Melvillian hubris on the part
of historians to assume that they could capture every aspect of “this eager and
laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads,
does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion
to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it,” the
novelist John W. De Forest wrote. The extreme mutability of American life at
the turn of the century suggested that historians “pursued an impossible task
in trying to give faithful representation to a nation whose strange medley of
humanity seemed in a state of perpetual motion.”119
In the second place, the need to place practical limits on inclusiveness
raised related concerns as to the principles of selection that should be used
to determine what to exclude as irrelevant or extraneous in the story of the
past. Given the equal footing of all historical facts in the New History scheme,
how was one to decide which were the first facts among equals? Presuming
that few historians took the philosophically absurd position that “everything”
about the past could or should be told, and keeping in mind the limitations of
space and time to which publishers and historians were forced to pay heed,
New Historians were obligated to select between things to record and things to
ignore, and these choices reflected distinct ideological points of view. In study-
ing seventeenth-century foodways in Massachusetts rather than the clothing
of slaves in Georgia, for instance, Eggleston exercised a conceptual choice that
reflected regional and perhaps even racial priorities. Sometimes, of course, a
lack of suitable sources helped direct these decisions. New Historians might
desire to write a “history of everything” associated with the material culture of
seventeenth-century commoners in Delaware, but a paucity of reliable sources
could stymie that ambition. “[N]o amount of research is likely to make our
knowledge very clear or certain regarding the condition of the people at large
during the five or six centuries following the barbarian invasions,” James Har-
vey Robinson noted of a similar dilemma in European history. “It rarely oc-
curred to a medieval chronicler to describe the familiar things about him, such

as the way in which the peasant lived and tilled his land.”120 The lack of reliable
historical materials undercut the New Historians’ mission to tell comprehen-
sive stories that went beyond traditional political and military narratives.
In the third place, New Historians shared in common with the literary real-
ists they emulated an ironic propensity for the reintroduction of subjectivity
into the historical formula. Realist novelists were committed to re-creating life
transparently, without the mediating presence of the author, and they took pride
in avoiding the idealizing general laws and usurping philosophies of history. As
Robert Berkhofer Jr. has pointed out, however, “[e]ven a denial of meaning to
the course of history is, of course, a philosophy about the meaning of history,”
and the realist approach had at its anti-philosophical core a reliance on organiz-
ing principles that suggested an implied philosophy of history.121 At the heart of
literary realism and the New History, for instance, was a belief that reality “re-
sided not so much in the thing depicted as in the thing felt.” Indeed, Eggleston
understood that the “reality” of the past is always a moving target, dependent
as it is on what the historian values at any moment in terms of the “inner life of
visible facts.”122 Realists assumed that they could chart with fidelity the “inner
world” of historical subjects by distinguishing between “life as is” and “life as
perceived,” but such a distinction required the reintroduction of a nearly omni-
scient mediator who could judge the value of amorphous attitudes and feelings
across multiple time periods. How was one to determine with exactitude the
precise manner in which a historical episode was received by a people or what
a complex “psychology of an age” might mean to all subjects of a realm? And
what about the subjectivity implicit in the role of historian as observer?
These concerns increased the likelihood that New Historians such as Egg-
leston could be guilty of the sin of “ ‘false consciousness,’ that is, the practice
of indicting historical figures for not understanding their own reality.” Instead
of “respecting the actions and professed beliefs of contemporaries,” Gertrude
Himmelfarb has written, committers of this sin presume to “expose the real
impulses that lay behind those actions and the real feelings that conditioned
those beliefs.”123 This essentially speculative enterprise constitutes an aban-
doning of the factual basis of history in favor of novelistic suppositions. “When
a novelist submitted to me a piece of history which he had been writing, and I
pointed out its errors of statement,” the historian Justin Winsor noted of the
tendency, this writer of fiction scorned what he called “the stern brutality of
facts.” Elusive and unwieldy, “facts” were, nonetheless, the mainstay of his-
torical writing, Winsor insisted. Ignoring similar advice, another historian ac-
quaintance “went for comfort to a brother philosopher, who told him to stick
to his philosophy and leave out his facts.” Winsor had little time for such “men
who hate facts.”124

The disturbing implications of these philosophical issues notwithstand-
ing, New Historians pushed forward with their realist agenda. Throughout
the 1880s, Eggleston serialized his “grand work” until it gradually gained suf-
ficient bulk to constitute a first volume in the projected series. The Beginners
of a Nation, published in 1896, was previewed in a ten-page prepublication
review by William P. Trent in Forum magazine, circulated widely by Apple-
ton’s. Trent noted with some irritability that “we have been made to wait an
unaccountably long time for the first permanent fruits” of Eggleston’s labor,
but he added quickly that the wait was worth it, as the historian had produced
a “noble” volume that augured well for the remaining works. Trent claimed
that Eggleston was “neither a plodding gleaner nor a merely pleasant narrator
of what we all know” but a “true historian” who had “not only made an excel-
lent contribution to culture-history” but who had “reached a vantage-ground
of broad and free observation which few of his predecessors have so much as
discerned, and which subsequent historians must strive to attain if they have
any consideration of their fame.”125 This observational vantage point was voy-
euristic in a sense, since, as Eggleston admitted, “it is only by ingenious eaves-
dropping and peeps through keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge
of the past.” The justification for such an approach to the past, he argued, was
the desire to emphasize “the life and character of the people” in an effort to
“make the reader feel the very spirit and manner of the time.”126
The Beginners of a Nation was not a radically new enterprise; it shared
some things with the popular histories written by other novelists-, journal-
ists, and poets-turned-historians. Like Sydney Howard Gay, for instance, Egg-
leston rejected the “diluvian piety” with which many historians had depicted
the early settlers, and he was not afraid to pass negative judgment on former
heroes where he deemed it necessary. “The founders of the little settlements
that had the unexpected fortune to expand into an empire I have not been able
to treat otherwise than unreverently,” he wrote, warning: “Here are no forefa-
thers or foremothers, but simply English men and women of the seventeenth
century, with the faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues of their age.”127
Eggleston also learned from the mistakes of his predecessors, choosing not to
engage in Gay’s or Ridpath’s polemics. In the advertising circular, for instance,
Trent applauded Eggleston’s decision not to include “a ponderous brief for
or against Captain John Smith’s veracity in the Pocahontas incident,” noting
of the Household History that some years ago the historian had been “unwary
enough to publish a plea on Smith’s behalf” whereas in the present volume he
refrained wisely from vouching “for the literal trustworthiness of each detail
of the Pocahontas story.” Eggleston now rejected this “walking backwards to
throw a mantle over the nakedness of ancestors” and refused to add “another

circlet of light to the halo fast thickening around the heads of New England’s
worthy settlers.” If at times he had to treat the colonists “unreverently” in The
Beginners of a Nation, he did so to underscore the realist position that such
historical figures were just simple people, too, and to suggest that the gap be-
tween them and his readers was less substantial than they might think.128
Some readers worried that Eggleston might prove too much of an icono-
clast and expressed concern for what his debunking book implied about the
sanctity of the national narrative. One reviewer evinced “a certain dread” of
this intellectual tendency, noting in a manner reminiscent of Bryant’s com-
ments about Gay that the “cold and rigid processes of history” characteristic
of Eggleston’s prose would “make sad work of many traditions, overturn the
most cherished figures of fancy and reduce not a few whom we had fashioned
in heroic mold to images of every common clay.”129 Another objected to his
“barren, negative, fault-finding harping on the minor points, accidents and
non-essentials of the history which no respectable historian has been guilty of
for fifty years or more, and which we hoped was now forever impossible.”130
Individual critics also lined up to defend their favorites among the historical
figures Eggleston debunked, including Richard Hakluyt, who was condemned
in The Beginners as part visionary, part “crank”; Roger Williams, who was
depicted as noble but prone to reckless behavior; Thomas Hooker, who was
“virile” but too “formal”; and, Anne Hutchinson, who was persuasive but
brash.131 Finally others condemned Eggleston for presuming to know when
leaders were acting against the best interests of their own age or even against
their own self-interests. John Endecott, the Salem leader of “rash temper and
impulsive enthusiasm,” refused to recognize when his struggle for religious
freedom had been won and “went on fighting the Lord’s battles against the
Apollyons of his fancy, regardless of the results,” Eggleston had written. “A
strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh
bigotry,” Eggleston concluded, Endecott’s misreading of his own situation
“supplied the condiment of humor to a very serious history—it is perhaps the
principal debt posterity owes him.”132
Many other readers, however, appreciated and applauded Eggleston’s ir-
reverent tone, finding in it the elements of a refreshingly new cultural critique.
Some of those raised on standardized political and institutional histories had
grown weary of what Himmelfarb refers to as the “rational, conscious, deliber-
ate” attempts by historians “to organize public life so as to promote the public
weal and the good life.” They were intrigued, instead, by the potential place
of the irrational and profane in historical accounts. Hence, students of New
History such as Eggleston favored psychoanalyzing the motives and behaviors
of colonists over chronicling the “reflection and judgment” of their political

decisions. If at times this meant demoting the role of “mundane, pragmatic
reason” in history or of minimizing the place of “laws, constitutions, and po-
litical institutions,” so be it.133 A reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle described Egg-
leston’s modernist style as “crisp, pungent, idiomatic, and withal graceful” and
observed “that subjecting the Puritans to ordinary criticism would, not many
years before, have seemed a profanation” as it had to Bryant.134 Others praised
Eggleston’s willingness to use the new social science of psychology to expose
the neuroses, psychoses, and pathological behaviors of significant historical fig-
ures. “The book is written in a brilliant, sententious style, and contains some
admirable characterizations of personalities,” he concluded admiringly.135
The literary quality of The Beginners of a Nation was consistent with the
realist tradition Eggleston had helped to define when he was a writer of fiction.
“[H]is novelist’s interest in character and motive conditioned him to view the
early settlers not as pegs on a board but as living beings responding to stimuli
and sharing normal emotional reactions,” his biographer noted.136 Hence,
early settlers in America were classified by Eggleston according to a typology
of feeling-states. Colonizers of Cape Ann, Massachusetts were “speculative”
dreamers who tried to grow maize in the summer and to operate fishing expe-
ditions in the winter only to discover that “this plausible scheme proved a case
of seeking strawberries in the sea and red herrings in the woods.” Farmers were
“but lubbers at codfishing, and salt-water fishermen were clumsy enough in
the cornfield.” Catholic settlers of Maryland were “tender” adherents to a faith
that provided a “relief to the pettiness of the debates and the irksomeness of
the bigotries of the age.” And the Virginians at Jamestown were “sorrow[ful]”
and “forlorn” adventurers who experienced “a procession of motives” in their
rationalizations for migration to the New World. No one in the colonies oper-
ated from a position of psychological disinterest in Eggleston’s work, not even
the rodents. The “delusional” King James hoped to convince settlers at James-
town to produce silk from royal worms, which they succeeded in doing after a
fashion, Eggleston wrote. “[B]efore the colony was nine years old it was able
to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a hundred times its
market value,” he noted, while “the rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs
of the silk moth, were made to bear the responsibility of the failure.”137 Such
psychological projections, as one reader characterized the tendency, consti-
tuted a style “far superior” to anything of its kind. “The author has put ances-
tor worship, sectionalism and partisanship beneath his feet,” he concluded,
making Eggleston’s “treatment of men and events realistic. He has striven to
know and to depict men as they were.”138
Readers also appreciated Eggleston’s efforts to establish the legitimacy of
New History as a historical methodology, earning him “the praise and gratitude

of all who are interested in the development of the art of historical composition,
of all who wish to see a fresh spirit and fresh methods applied to the writing of
American history.”139 Complaining of the “long list of literary crimes commit-
ted by idealistic historians,” Reuben Briggs Davenport of the York Commercial
Advertiser declared The Beginners of a Nation the perfect product of the “natu-
ralist school” where “information” ruled over “sentiment.” Eggleston was “no
idealist,” Davenport argued, since he was “not writing to set forth stirring tales
of daring men, but to tell the truth as nearly as may be, admitting faults as well as
noting virtues, sparing nothing that the whole truth be made known.”140 George
Eggleston had confirmed the aptness of this characterization when he noted in
a review of the book titled “Historians and Our Aristocrats” that his brother
had nearly realized the dream of professionals for an objective past, but he had
done so in a manner many traditional scholars found unacceptable. “If the his-
torians go on as they are now doing there is going to be trouble,” George wrote
tongue in cheek. “They have caught the pestiferous ‘scientific spirit.’ They not
only search out facts with the callous indifference of an expert accountant look-
ing for false entries in some errant cashier’s books, but they have latterly begun
to insist upon truth-telling itself as a positive virtue.” Edward Eggleston was not
merely content to “relate uncomfortable facts without gloss or disguise,” his
brother argued, he also insisted “upon interpreting the facts without romance
or patriotism, or loyalty to the ‘forefathers’ or respect for the descendants of the
forefathers, or any other of those saving perversions which have laid the secure
foundations of American aristocracy.” Should Edward “go on,” he noted play-
fully, “it must presently appear that proof of descent from any of these early
settlers, so far from being a patent of nobility, is in fact a demonstration of thor-
oughly plebeian order.”141
Another groundbreaking aspect of Eggleston’s work was its recognition
of the European roots of American colonial development. Scholars such as
George Beer were especially excited about this quality of the work, since
Eggleston was one of the first to promote Beer’s “imperial thesis” by which
American colonial development was viewed more as a derivative of Euro-
pean cultural life than as an original product of an indigenous, native envi-
ronment.142 According to this school of thought, colonial eating habits were
adaptations of European foodways, patterns that when stubbornly embraced
by the implacable first settlers came close to starving them in a land of plenty.
American slavery was not an indigenous domestic institution in the South,
but an imported one with ties to the lingering vestiges of European feudal-
ism. Such scholarly insights were enhanced by the marginalia in the volume
which provided running commentaries on interconnected ideas and also by
the “Elucidations” at the end of each chapter which referenced additional

sources in both European and American scholarship. The tone of these
scholarly notes was clearly revisionist, Eggleston using them as an instrument
to discredit those who had succumbed to the seduction of belief in home-
grown or domestic sources of colonial development. “The trouble is that
we have been wrongly educated,” recognized the Rochester Post-Express of
Eggleston’s scholarly accomplishment. “Our historical instruction has been
along the lines of idealization,” when, in fact, a more efficacious plan would
be to recruit “[m]ore men like Eggleston . . . to dispel the glamor that had
long hidden the truth.”143
Finally, The Beginners of a Nation was noteworthy for its purposeful ex-
clusion of many of the most ostentatious marketing features of the standard
popular histories in reaction to which it was written. Published in a dull,
brownish-beige veneer, the book was unillustrated and made little attempt
at visual stimulation. Eggleston’s frustrations with his earlier illustrated texts
as well as Appleton’s interest in reducing the costs of the projected multiple-
volume series doubtless contributed in part to the decision to reject a pictorial
format. “Your history in its present form is I fear out of our reach because of its
illustrations and its cost,” editor John Vincent had informed him with refer-
ence to an earlier proposal.144 Cost was not the only consideration, however.
In abandoning illustrations, Eggleston demonstrated as well just how far he
had moved in his self-identification from a popular to a professional historian.
The American Historical Association had already initiated a plan of attack
against the excessive use of pictorial material in so-called scholarly histories,
and Eggleston endorsed in practice its policy that illustrations were a distrac-
tion to the more restrained intentions of professional scholarship.145 Eggleston
knew his acquiescence in the anti-pictorial campaign would cost him some
readers outside the profession who disapproved of the decision. “There are
no illustrations,” a reviewer complained of the volumes in Eggleston’s His-
tory of American Life series, “which is surprising in this age, and it seems to
me regrettable; there ought surely to be pictures of old things and customs
which would have shed additional light upon the subject.”146 He was willing to
endure such criticism, however, because he wished to reach not only popular
readers, whom he hoped might excuse some loss of visual impact, but also
scholars, who would not tolerate its presence.
The volume was also without the breezy, generalizing tone of most popular
histories, a literary choice that caused some readers to condemn the project
out-of-hand. “To be quite frank, a first glance at the book before us gives rise
to a feeling of disappointment,” wrote the reviewer for the American Hebrew,
who complained that “Dr. Eggleston is much more conservative in mode of
treatment, and avoids the generalizations and summarizations” of his earlier

popular works. While the journal appreciated Eggleston’s efforts “to furnish
us instead with careful, closely considered studies of a much more special-
ized character,” it lamented the loss of universalizing strategies. The American
Hebrew recognized that Eggleston abandoned the more popular format of his
earlier works because he believed “broader generalizations would be apt to
be unscientific,” but its editors speculated that in altering so profoundly the
methodology of history, Eggleston might have alienated unwittingly the wider
popular audiences he had always craved.147 In an otherwise generous review,
the L.A. Herald agreed: “History that is without relation to philosophy is piti-
fully barren and unprofitable,” its reviewers noted.148 Defenders of Eggleston
reminded critics that the lack of generalizing laws in The Beginners of a Na-
tion was a calculated strategy pursued in the cause of redefining the popu-
lar by reference to an immersion principle rather than to a transcendental or
disembodied ethic. In an interview conducted with Outlook magazine shortly
after publication of the volume, Eggleston claimed that his goal was to achieve
authenticity by making the linkage between the newer methods of social his-
tory and those he had mastered in his realistic fiction. Eggleston informed the
readers of Outlook: “There is really no other way of writing [history] vividly
and familiarly except by saturating one’s self.”149
While some popularizers regretted Eggleston’s seeming abandonment of
their cause, professionals celebrated the arrival of a new convert. Eggleston,
who never attended college and was always sensitive to his lack of formal edu-
cation, coveted a relationship with credentialed professional scholars even as
he worried about his worthiness to be counted among them. “I have grown
less confident in expressing my opinions,” he explained to one correspondent
who desired him as a scholar to weigh in on a controversial historical question.
“When I see what asses most writers make of themselves in the eyes of scholars
by their confident statements of traditional pictures in American history about
which I do know something,” he confessed, “I resolve not to make a fool of
myself in the same way about other things.”150 But Eggleston underestimated
the high regard in which his judgments were held, especially by fellow scholars
who numbered him as one of their own. As evidence of this acceptance, in the
weeks and months after publication of The Beginners of a Nation, Eggleston’s
desk “was flooded with letters of congratulation from writers and editors,
from other historians, from friends he had known years before and had al-
most forgotten, from perfect strangers and from relatives. Autograph hunters
besieged him. Editors begged for articles. He was suddenly a famous man.”151
In 1884, he had been one of the several dozen writers of history invited to join
the American Historical Association, an invitation he accepted.152 The official
journal of the association, the American Historical Review, now proclaimed

him as one of the profession’s leading lights. Herbert L. Osgood noted that
Eggleston had done a marvelous service for New Historians within the profes-
sion by providing “a study of life as it actually existed,” applauding the novel-
ist-turned-historian for producing a “realistic” work of “such beauty and force
as to make the book at once a history and a contribution to literature.”153 Cur-
rent Literature paid Eggleston the highest compliment (although he may not
have appreciated it fully given his earlier conversation with Parkman) when
it called The Beginners of the Nation “the most ambitious American-history
undertaking since Bancroft.”154
The first volume of Eggleston’s “grand design” was so encouraging to many
in the profession that on the strength of its reception he was elected to the presi-
dency of the AHA. He had done yeoman’s work as a member of its supervisory
board for a number of years, and he had helped to promote the work of the
organization in the Century Club in New York City, where he wrote much of
his masterpiece, but he was nonetheless startled by the appointment.155 In fact,
there is perhaps no better indication of the overlap of amateur and professional
concerns in the first decades of the AHA than this election, since Eggleston
had none of the professional credentials we often associate with the presidency
of this association. Of course, as Peter Novick has noted, the notion that the
AHA was an exclusively “professional” organization in the first decades of its
inception is a misconception anyway. “Before 1907 the presidents were almost
all amateurs; from 1912 through 1927 only one-third had the Ph.D.; from 1928
on, almost all were, by both training and occupation, professionals.”156 That
said, Eggleston was unusual for his lack of academic pedigree, even among
amateur historians who had been elevated to the association’s highest posi-
tion. It was standard procedure for the incoming presidents of the association
to deliver addresses at the commencement of their duties, so Eggleston spent
the summer of 1900 working on his remarks. Titled, appropriately, “The New
History,” his presidential address was intended to serve as an expression of the
realist methodologies and social history techniques he had been employing in
his “grand work.” The opportunity to present his thoughts on the practice of
history he accorded “one of the honors of my life.”157
Unfortunately, Eggleston was not able to deliver his presidential address
personally before the scholars who attended the AHA annual meeting in De-
troit in December 1900 because of illness related to a stroke he had suffered
the year before. The speech was presented instead by amateur historian James
Ford Rhodes, who had trouble with its admittedly “rambling and anecdotal”
style but who did his best on behalf of its themes and modernist outlook.158
Eggleston spoke openly in the address about the need of American histori-
ans to draw lessons from those European thinkers such as Augusta Thierry

and Michelet who “told the history of the people,” since “those who speak
English have been the slowest to introduce the new history.” Turning his at-
tention to the recent work of the so-called Committee of Seven, scholars affili-
ated with the American Historical Association who investigated the teaching
of history in schools, Eggleston noted that American educational institutions
needed to promote history as a way of reaffirming civic traditions but also of
initiating responsible change.159 “The great mistake” of school textbooks, he
argued, “is the misapprehension of the purpose of history.” The object of
teaching history “is narrowly said to be to make good citizens—intelligent
voters. In this calculation, the girls are left out,” he added with an unusual
sensitivity to gender in a male-dominated profession. “The main object of
teaching is to make good men and women, cultivated and broad men and
women.” Deprecating some of the sloppy techniques of popularizers in his
own day, Eggleston expressed optimism that “History will be better written in
the ages to come.” He ventured a guess that “when the American Historical
Association shall assemble in the closing week a hundred years hence, there
will be, do not doubt it, gifted writers of the history of the people” who will
have produced “the history of culture, the real history of men and women.”160
In this he was right, of course.
With these prescient comments, Eggleston signaled the completion of his
personal odyssey from popularizer to professional. As Ellen Fitzpatrick has
noted, “Eggleston used his presidential address to portray historical study at
a crossroads and to reassure his colleagues that progress remained a power-
ful leitmotif even in a revivified modern history.”161 Proclaiming history “the
great prophylactic against pessimism,” Eggleston argued: “There never was a
bad, in the five progressive centuries, that was not preceded by a worse. Our
working people live from hand to mouth; in the eighteenth century and in
England it was from half empty hand to starving mouth. Never was the race
better suited than in this nineteenth century—this twentieth century on the
very verge of which we stand.”162 Much of this, of course, was declamatory
rhetoric that echoed the nationalistic cant of popularizers like Ridpath and
others. But as Fitzpatrick has pointed out, Eggleston had also done much in
his speech “to encourage a history that was cut free from what he viewed as
the stranglehold of traditional political history.” The next century, he hoped,
would witness a partnership between amateurs and professionals in pursuit of
a social history agenda. “Eggleston’s parting message to the historical profes-
sion was that the time had come for a ‘new history,’ ” one that would require
his colleagues “to set aside politics and explore ‘cultural history’ ” in earnest.163
It was advice that, revealingly, he himself did not always follow in the last years
of his life, as politics and culture collided in some unanticipated ways.

The Cold Shoulder
If professional historians had any concern about Eggleston’s scholarship,
it was that the realist novelist–turned-historian did not have a realistic sense of
the magnitude of what he had taken on. In fact, his professional life recapitu-
lated in revealing ways the central dilemma at the heart of the New Historian’s
inclusive methodology. In The Beginners of a Nation, Eggleston devoted 350
pages of text to a discussion of the brief chronological period between 1607 and
1650, a scant percentage of the projected “grand work” that was to encompass
all of American history. Paul Leicester Ford estimated that Eggleston’s project
would require fifty volumes in its present form to reach completion, adding
with concern: “We have an uncomfortable feeling that the author has in hand a
task beyond his powers—it may be beyond anyone’s powers—to achieve with
full justice to his subject.” The enormous scope of the work jeopardized its
value in Ford’s estimation, especially given the author’s commitment to ac-
curacy of detail. “Mr. Eggleston has built up a skeleton with admirable skill,
where we would rather have had a picture of that skeleton a little less accu-
rately articulated, but clothed in flesh and blood,” Ford wrote.164
Suspecting that Eggleston had not avoided successfully the false assur-
ances shared by many popular historians that they could tell the entire story
of American development on their own, Ford and others encouraged the au-
thor to leave such synthetic histories to collaborative groups like the dozens of
scholars organized by Justin Winsor, whose magisterial eight-volume Narra-
tive and Critical History of the United States had just been published.165 Even
Winsor, who had employed numerous historians in his wide-ranging work,
felt the inadequacy of his own efforts at completeness. “I may confess that I
have made history a thing of shreds and patches,” he wrote of his collabora-
tive effort in “The Perils of Historical Narrative.”166 How much less capable of
achieving a holistic vision, then, would a single author such as Eggleston be?
“The very breadth of his concept, seldom equaled by other historians, severely
limited what he could do,” noted one reviewer of Eggleston’s project, who
recognized that “one man, working alone, would have needed several lifetimes
to present the complete story of the evolving American civilization.”167 And
there was reason to believe that Eggleston’s tasks would inevitably get harder
as he completed his writing on the seventeenth century, since the “complex
relations” of French, English, and Spanish colonies in the eighteenth century
would require greater research and a wider ranging historical intellect. Wil-
liam Trent predicted: “For about a century he will probably resemble a painter
who passes on to larger and larger sheets of canvas; but with the period of the
French wars his difficulties will begin to culminate.”168

These fears for Eggleston’s project expressed by professionals suggested
their ongoing debate with popularizers regarding the proper scope and ambi-
tion for historical study. On the one hand, popularizers like Bryant, Gay, and
Ridpath had aspired to write broad, sweeping histories that reduced the en-
tirety of American history into manageable and marketable texts. On the other
hand, a growing and increasingly powerful group of professionals attacked
such reductionist efforts, declaring popularizers irresponsible in the naive as-
sumption that they could subsume all of history into digestible metanarratives.
As the lines between amateur and professional historians were drawn wider,
professionals declared themselves committed to studying smaller pieces of the
historical landscape, writing shorter monographs on limited topics that empha-
sized the accuracy of their factual research and the credibility of their histori-
cal arguments. Publishers sought selected markets for these narrower works,
and new university presses offered publishing opportunities for scholars who
had been required previously to compete in the popular marketplace.169 Be-
fore the turn of the century, John Higham has noted, “professional historians
had virtually no vehicle, except the annual reports of the American Historical
Association and its Review, capable of reaching a nationwide scholarly audi-
ence.” By the first decade of the 1900s, however, agencies such as the Yale
University Press began publishing “serious books of general intellectual inter-
est in addition to research studies.”170 Given that the “more important results
of monographic work seem readily to find publishers,” noted Albert Bushnell
Hart, professional historians were obliged to concentrate their energies on
“careful studies of special phases of American history,” leaving monumental
works of the kind Eggleston was pursuing to the “old-fashioned historians”
of metahistorical temperament.171 Popularizers, in turn, were required to work
more efficiently yet thoroughly in order to compete with these new, shorter
publications flooding an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace
for historical works.
Eggleston understood and appreciated the desire of professionals to un-
dertake specialized work. As a New Historian and literary realist, he had made
a career of producing such particularized studies. He could not free himself,
however, from the consuming desire (first experienced with the success of his
Hoosier schoolhouse series) for comprehensive literary projects intended for
wide popular audiences. Like many of his predecessors in the genre of popular
history, Eggleston “preferred the large canvas to the miniature, the rounded
treatment of the monograph,” and he desired to “interest the general public”
rather than communicate only with scholars.172 Despite election to the presi-
dency of the nation’s preeminent historical association, then, Eggleston never
embraced fully the intellectual constraints implicit in the professional mission,

with its reduced breadth of vision and limited range of ambition. He spoke
often of the democratic impulse at the heart of social history that encouraged
him to imagine New Historians like himself as beleaguered popularizers. “Cul-
ture was not the only focus of this new history, but it was an important tool in
its democratic strategy,” Dorothy Ross has noted. “Because the social histo-
rians’ subjects failed to gain major political power and because the critique of
oppression sometimes cast these subjects as the helpless and unwitting victims
of dominant elites, culture became the site of their indigenous strength.”173
Eggleston often depicted himself as an outsider looking in at the professional
organization whose endorsements he so deeply coveted even as he questioned
their value as indicators of historical worth.
Other “elitist” features of an academic approach to history disturbed Egg-
leston and suggested the degree to which he was still a popularizer at heart. He
disliked the strong scholastic bias of the organization and the stultifying regi-
mentation of its operations. The AHA “meets at times and places impossible
to me and discusses subjects I have no interest in,” he complained to a friend.
“It seems to run in the interests of college professors only to give those of us
who are not of that clan the cold shoulder.”174 Eggleston expressed concern
as well that scholars were plotting too deliberately “for the time when trained
historians would cover the country, when their standards would be the only
standards for history, and when the American Historical Association would
not only be a professional but also a truly national organization.”175 The desire
on the part of professionals to “academize” history, he believed, was danger-
ous because it threatened to ignore the needs of average readers who desired
less pedantic treatments. “The one advantage that Eggleston had, though he
recognized it only dimly, was that he was not academically-trained,” his biog-
rapher noted. “He had no formalized discipline to depart from, no depart-
mental tradition or loyalty to rebel against, no preconceived notions to shed.
Instead, he had a realist’s instinctive determination to be faithful to actualities,
and a novelist’s desire to produce an account of his findings that would be of
general interest.”176
Some professionals were frustrated with Eggleston, in turn, for what they
perceived to be a too generous (because too expansionary) definition of what
constituted useful historical evidence. For every professional historian like
James Harvey Robinson who, like Eggleston, called for a widening of the scope
of historical study, there were hardliners who refused to embrace New History
as a viable approach and who warned of its dangerous alliances with the new
social sciences. A professor of history at Columbia, William Sloane, announced
in the pages of the American Historical Review that scholars must exercise ex-
treme caution in their use of social scientific methods. “We must not go too far

in yielding to a popular clamor, nor admit that the weight of the individual in
modern life entitles his occupations and beliefs to more than a certain moder-
ate share in the story of the organism to which he belongs,” he wrote. “[K]eep
the emphasis on the state.”177 To the charge that such a reduction in scope was
exclusionary because it ignored those outside the political arena, Sloane argued
that historians were limited in what they might say about the past by the paucity
of truly reliable historical records. Though high-profile political figures don’t
“speak for the anonymous masses,” Himmelfarb has noted of such a position,
the historian “cannot afford to ignore the considered judgments” of such his-
torical actors. What Sloane and others objected to was the assumption of New
Historians that public documents and papers should be devalued because
“truth is best revealed . . . at the level of least consciousness”—that is, in pri-
vate reminiscences and psychological profiles. “There is something slanderous
about this assumption,” Himmelfarb adds. “It implies that a great contempo-
rary, precisely when he is at his greatest, expresses himself most carefully and
deliberately, is least to be trusted to tell the truth. And if the great men of the
time are thus defamed, so also are all the anonymous people who bought their
books, listened to their speeches, or otherwise accorded them the title of great-
ness.” In short, she argues, “[w]hat purports to be democratic history may well
prove to be the most insidious kind of elitist history.”178
The ardent traditionalist George Burton Adams concurred with Sloane
and initiated a campaign to purge the association of social historians like Egg-
leston who embraced too readily the mission of the social scientists. Adams
complained that political scientists had evidenced a kind of “patronizing
condescension” in their attitudes toward historians, while geographers were
“tempted by their enthusiasm to make more sweeping statements than they
intend, and to advance claims of whose exact bearing they are hardly con-
scious.” Economists and sociologists were just as bad, reviving as they did the
misguided “attempt to explain history, to get at the fundamental forces which
are at work in it, to formulate the philosophy, or the science of history.” Most of
all, psychologists represented an “aggressive and vigorous school of thought”
in pursuit of “an ultimate explanation of human history.” Adams claimed that
“the social psychologists would explain great race characteristics, Roman con-
quest, Italian art, English literature, great historic movements, advance and re-
action, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, by psychic forces whose laws
of action they would formulate.” In short, Adams viewed New History as a
perversion of the synthesizing tendencies of an earlier era.179 Rather than be
distracted by such contingencies, Adams urged professional historians to stay
focused on the primary business of marshaling facts, a task not sufficiently
broad-minded enough to satisfy Eggleston.180

Orthodox professional scholars in the American Historical Association
were also troubled by the lingering taint of fiction in Eggleston’s works. As the
standards for acceptable scholarship tightened within the profession, there was
a growing distrust of those who had practiced the novelist’s art, especially real-
ist writers. “No matter how sincere their quest for truth, no matter how brassy
their claims of objectivity,” G. B. Adams insisted, the realist writer’s rhetoric
of “taking reality simply ‘for what it is’ ” could not be trusted. Former novelists
such as Eggleston “promoted more than documentary accuracy,” he argued;
“[t]hey wanted to use realistic representations of contemporary life for a special
purpose to rein in the runaway aspect of a turbulent new society.” Many within
the profession rejected such blatant pragmatism. History should not be used
in the service of reform, Adams argued, because that would make it beholden
to political agendas and ideologies.181 Skeptics such as Carl Becker added that
“progress, too, was not a force inherent in the world but the result of an act of
will in interpretation” and was therefore subject to distortion and abuse.182
Eggleston was not philosophically inclined enough in temperament to trou-
ble himself with such matters conceptualized in quite these ways, but what
Ernst Breisach said of Charles Beard remained true for Eggleston as well: “the
science part of the social sciences, particularly the search for an affirmation of
laws, always remained less important than the social part of the phrase, under-
stood as a spur to activism.”183 Since his days as a minister, temperance leader,
and editor of the Independent, Eggleston had felt a displaced sense of respon-
sibility to social causes that was not always satisfied by writing history, even
social history. The selfless impulse to change the world occasionally reared up
and distracted him from his grand design, as it had Ridpath in a more political
way. Midway through the writing of The Beginners of a Nation, for instance,
Eggleston became a leading lobbyist in Congress for an international copyright
law still unsecured despite the fifty years that had elapsed since the creation
of Duyckinck’s Copyright Club. Eggleston succeeded, however, where the
Young Americans had failed. He became a dedicated lobbyist for the Ameri-
can Copyright League, testifying numerous times before Congress, writing
endless articles for popular literary and political journals, and helping to raise
funds for lobbying efforts.184 Some of his work for reform magazines on behalf
of the copyright law was among the best he ever produced, and he thought his
style well suited to the format. Declaring himself a “public-spirited man,” Egg-
leston admitted that his leadership role in the ACL was “not unpleasant” to
his “vanity” and that the “discovery of unsuspected ability in a new direction”
was “very gratifying.”185 He wrote proudly to Lillie of his newfound identity:
“I have cranky authors to pull into line and crankier publishers to contend
with. I am all at once a politician.”186 When a copyright law was passed finally

by Congress on March 3, 1891, Eggleston’s efforts on its behalf were acknowl-
edged by supporters who honored him by making one of his novels, The Faith
Doctor, the first work of any American author protected by the legislation.187
The publication of The Faith Doctor in 1891 reminds us that Eggleston was
still writing works of fiction even as he pursued his historical scholarship. Un-
like Eggleston’s Hoosier novels, however, this work, which was set in Manhat-
tan and treated social themes, was construed as a political statement about
urban unrest.188 It was one of several ongoing literary projects that fed in him a
reform impulse not unlike the one that had motivated Lippard to write Quaker
City or had compelled Ridpath to run for Congress and assume the editor-
ship of the Arena. In all three cases, such literary endeavors were perceived as
impediments to their authors’ reputations as historians. “An ideal scholar may
be one who can pursue his research and writing undistracted by events around
him, however raucous or alarming,” Eggleston’s biographer has written, but
he “fell short of this standard; he had too lively a conscience and too strong
a humanitarian zeal to hold aloof when good causes needed support or bad
ones needed to be condemned.”189 A few professional historians applauded
Eggleston’s pursuit of history tinctured by a sense of public responsibility no
matter what the toll on the pace of his scholarship. “We prefer to have history
written by a man who believes something, as Mr. Eggleston does,” agreed the
editors of the Messenger.190 Most others viewed his participation in political
crusades as “unprofessional,” especially those who conceived of objectivity
as not only a methodological goal but also a heuristic device. For many such
scholars, detachment meant not only critical distance in writing but physical
separation from the political arena where objectivity was sacrificed too easily
on the altar of partisanship.191 Eggleston’s commitments to the “causes of the
people” made it difficult to maintain that separation.
No cause was more important to Eggleston than the antiwar movement as-
sociated with the Spanish-American conflict of 1898. Unlike Lippard, who
had written popular histories of the War in Mexico as a way of confirming his
commitments to the national mission, Eggleston lobbied against the Spanish-
American conflict in verbal and written diatribes that called into question the
political priorities of the nation. Aligned with fellow writers such as Mark
Twain and Bret Harte of the Anti-Imperial League, Eggleston viewed the
military struggle over Cuba and the Philippines as an utterly contemptible
contradiction to democratic principles and warned the American people that
its pursuit would put the nation on a path that would ultimately destroy its
credibility and its culture. Using his pen to condemn those who would push
Americans into a war that “people can’t agree just what it is we mean to fight
about,” Eggleston wrote numerous journal articles that criticized the conflict

in startlingly anti-American, anti-government terms.192 In language far more
outspoken than he had used in his earlier, more noncommittal treatment of
the Civil War in the Household History, he urged Americans to see the immo-
rality inherent in the nation’s misdirected international behavior. Like Twain,
Eggleston risked “his reputation, his career, and his fortune taking an uncom-
promising public stand against the war,” but he was adamant that he could
not respect himself as an American historian without speaking out about the
disrespect the American people were exhibiting toward the world.193 Hoping
to lose himself in the seventeenth century during an extended research trip
to Washington, D.C., where he was researching his magnum opus, Eggleston
was forcibly thrust back into the nineteenth by the unavoidable hypocrisy of
the war. The archives gave way to the lecture circuit. “Living right at the door
of Congress in this tiresome time I don’t seem to care much for American citi-
zenship,” he told one shocked audience, adding that “the study of history with
reference to it has made half a nation of irrational jingoes.”194
That kind of frankness got Eggleston into trouble with several of his pub-
lishers, especially those at the American Book Company, who were in the pro-
cess of marketing an 1899 revision of his First Book in American History, and
who worried that such antipatriotic pronouncements would reduce sales of the
work.195 Editor Russell Hinman took special issue with Eggleston’s statements
about the role of the United States government in the overthrow of the Spanish
government in the Philippines and with the politicization of that rebellion in the
text of the First Book in American History. Eggleston’s original draft on the sub-
ject noted that Admiral Dewey had encouraged the rebellion by bringing rebel
Emilio Aquinaldo with him from Hong Kong to the Philippines in anticipation
of a coup. During the copyediting process, Hinman altered the passage by elimi-
nating mention of Dewey’s role and noting that “a rebellion against Spanish
authority was in progress” before Americans became involved in the global con-
flict. Eggleston was furious at the unauthorized revision. “I have no doubt of the
accuracy of your statement,” Hinman responded, “but I think my modifications
will be less likely to excite adverse criticism.”196 Although the historian com-
plained strenuously about such decisive reworkings of his text, his publisher
prevailed by appealing to Eggleston’s latent sense of nationalism. “We did not all
agree about going to war,” assistant editor Henry Vail wrote, “but we do all agree
that we finished the job quickly and successfully. Now we want to congratulate
ourselves and make ourselves fancy that we would have done as well or better if
the chance had come to us ward.”197 The staff at the American Book Company
understood what Eggleston did not—that a popular historian and his publisher
could not afford to alienate with anti-American rhetoric the very readers on
whose revenues they depended so substantially for their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, perhaps as a distraction from such real world issues, Eggleston
labored on with his monumental history. The Literary News optimistically in-
formed readers at the turn of the new century that the man who “has already
rendered great service to the student of our national life and its development
. . . promises to do still more, for he is in the fulness of his majority, in the best
period of man’s intellectual power—he is sixty-three.”198 In fact, he was failing
badly in health during this period and was subject to bouts of pessimism, in-
somnia, and even depression. The novelist-turned-historian had experienced
similar mood swings just before publication of The Beginners of a Nation, as
revealed in a letter to his daughter Lillie in March 1894: “Poor history!” he
lamented. “No one man’s life is long enough for it, certainly not the life of a
sickish man like myself with a dozen other irons and no wealth to come and go
on.”199 In 1899, he admitted to Lillie again that the project was moving “mor-
tally slow,” adding: “I can not go on writing long with sleep so broken.” To his
wife he confided that the second volume of the series “will probably be my last
book,” although she insisted that he did not have the temperament to “quit
work” and “live.”200 That statement proved sadly prophetic. Despite his dec-
laration that history was “the great prophylactic against pessimism,” he was so
shaken by his ailments and the lack of sufficient headway on his social history
that he despaired of publishing even another word of his multivolume work.
Like his contemporaries among historians, Frederick Jackson Turner and Lord
Acton, Eggleston began to identify himself more with the masterwork he was
unable to write than with the important scholarship he had completed. “The
deeper each got into the complications of his pursuit of truth,” Warner Ber-
thoff has noted “the more hesitant and uncertain he became,” and the “more
unencompassable” seemed “the historian’s great traditional task of explaining
what actually happened during some momentous span of the past.”201
By a heroic effort, Eggleston was able to finish the second volume of his
magnum opus, The Transit of Civilization, in late 1900. It is a work that has
grown in value over the years among professional historians. Ellen Fitzpat-
rick has declared it a “remarkable” book, characterized by “sometimes stun-
ning prose” and enlivened by Eggleston’s “impressive” explanations of the
“complex states of knowing and thinking, of feeling and passion.”202 Arthur
Schlesinger Sr. credited The Transit of Civilization as the inspiration for his
own later “History of American Life” series, and applauded its attention to
“the ‘mental furniture’ the English newcomers carried with them to America
and the modifications wrought by the wilderness conditions.” In his wide-
ranging survey of American cultural history, Schlesinger noted, “Eggleston
considers such aspects of life as the colonists’ scientific conceptions, their be-
lief in an ever-present invisible world (which tended to be as real to them as the

material world), their medical notions and practices, their religious and oral
outlook, the persistence of class distinctions in law and custom, the popular
distrust of lawyers, the neologisms and other changes in English speech, the
modes of education and the ‘literature below literature that has to do with the
hopes and fears, the beliefs and aspirations of uncritical people.’ ”203 Yet even
Fitzpatrick and Schlesinger have admitted that The Transit of Civilization
“tested the patience” of professionals and critics in its own day by ranging so
widely and failing to provide coherence to the past.204 Barrett Wendell, in the
American Historical Review, proclaimed it “confused, bewildering, and some-
times misleading”—the result of mental indigestion from too much browsing
in libraries—and lacking in “imaginative sympathy with the human spirit of the
times.”205 Charles M. Andrews, reviewing for the Political Science Quarterly,
wrote of its “poor organization,” its “unscientific approach,” and its “lamen-
tably out-dated scholarship.” It was marred, he added by “a kaleidoscopic
assortment of notes, lengthy, discursive and often bewildering.”206
These negative reviews pointed to the difficulties others faced in attempt-
ing to provide the “total history” of a complex cultural age. Some criticized
the use of “irrational and nonrational infrastructures of life”—ranging from
“the economic interests of legislators to the eating habits of ordinary folks”
rather than “the constitutions and laws that permit men to order their affairs
in a rational matter”—that seemed to undermine “the rationality inherent in
the historical enterprise”207 These skeptics feared that “if interests [became]
more real than ideas and passions more compelling than reason,” then history
would lose its moral compass. The devaluation of rationality on the part of
New Historians struck many as “speculative, subjective, and dubious.”208 Still
more troublesome from their point of view was the persistence of a conceptual
juggernaut at the heart of The Transit of Civilization related to its holistic in-
tentions. Despite his best efforts to create a rounded portrait of the social, eco-
nomic, psychological, cultural, and even political attributes of the colonial age,
they noted, Eggleston was never able to provide anything other than a partial
depiction of the colonial scene. Reductionism of some sort seemed implicit
in the narrative process. Recognition of this fact, in turn, invited criticisms
from professionals who condemned the expansive agenda of New History as
spreading the mission of history too thin. Iconoclasm in the name of thorough-
ness had its price, and that price was the loss of faith in the comprehensive
potential of facts. “Ironically,” Joyce Appleby has written, “the work of social
historians fostered the argument that history could never be objective. It is as if
the social historians with their passion for breaking apart the historical record
had dug a potentially fatal hole in which history as a discipline might disap-
pear altogether.”209

In this sense, then, Eggleston’s inability to complete his own grand work
was not just a personal failing but an indictment of the entire school of New
History as well, because it revealed just how difficult it is to produce history
as a “totality.” These challenges of scope were underscored tragically by the
death of Eggleston on September 2, 1902, of complications from a second
stroke. After more than twenty years of nearly endless research, he had but
two volumes of history to show for his trouble, and these had been offered
with excuses by Eggleston, who thought they were unready for publication.
“It seemed better . . . to redeem from the chance of . . . mishap a portion of my
work, by completing this most difficult portion of the task,” Eggleston wrote in
explanation of his decision to publish The Beginners of a Nation prematurely,
“in order that when, early or late, the inevitable night must fall, the results of
my labor, such as they are, may not be wholly covered over by darkness.”210
Now that darkness had come to Eggleston, popular history was enveloped in it
as well. At the time of his death, Eggleston felt betrayed by many in the profes-
sion, and they by him. He had done much to create linkages between profes-
sional and amateur historians, but his histories had also raised fundamental
questions about historical technique which just as readily divided them again.
New History and Old History still remained separated by conceptual chasms
that could not be bridged; popular and professional forces continued to repel.
Still worse, some believed that the very disciplines New Historians such as
Eggleston had used “to subvert the conventions of old history”—disciplines
such as sociology, economics, and psychology—now, ironically, “threatened to
subvert history itself.”211

Thus from the specious present, which always
includes more or less of the past, the future refuses
to be excluded; and the more of the past we drag
into the specious present, the more an hypothetical,
patterned future is likely to crowd into it also.
—Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian”
(1931)
5
.....................................................................
“A Background
of Real History”
Edward S. Ellis
And the Dime Novel
as History

Underclothes, Dime Novels, and Whiffletrees
As the reaction to Edward Eggleston’s popular histories suggests, the
late nineteenth century witnessed an intense debate over what constituted the
proper subject matter of history and how that subject matter should be pre-
sented to the public. The breakdown of narrative coherence implicit in the
New History program and the emergence of a modernist skepticism caused
some to fear that history could not be relied on to guide Americans in clear
and directed ways. As Alice Kessler-Harris has noted, social history of the sort
Eggleston and others practiced “was colorful and anecdotal but lacked [an]
explanatory capacity” that always had been at the heart of the historical en-
terprise. Focus on the “inner life” of a specific moment in time “might reveal
an event in depth, but it moved historians away from the conventional narra-
tive form,” distracting them from the traditional goal of telling a story causally
through an understanding of “long-term change” and substituting a concern
with “in-depth interpretation of an instructive event.” The result “was to reify
the experiences of each human being, treating each as if it reflected the experi-
ence of all; and all as though they were equally instructive.” Democratic and
popular, to be sure, such techniques nonetheless encouraged the “romantici-
zation of ordinary and folk experience,” prompting “frequent criticism of the
static nature of social history” and raising questions “about whether it helps
or inhibits an understanding of broader historical processes.” Another con-
sequence of social history, Kessler-Harris notes, was “fragmentation,” since
“the kinds of painstakingly detailed portraits that emerged resulted in our
knowing more and more about less and less.”1 With the sacrifice of teleologi-
cal perspective came a loss of integrative coherence. Popular historians who
rejected grand, synthetic themes left themselves open to accusations of trivial-
ity by those who later condemned social history as “a gathering place for the
unscholarly, for historians bereft of ideas and subtlety.”2
Knowing more and more about less and less was not the ambition of many
educators in the late nineteenth century. Much of the criticism expressed by
professionals regarding the unstructured nature of social history centered on
its negative influences on children, since young Americans were presumed to
be most susceptible to the pernicious effects of “bad” history, with bad un-
derstood as historical productions that failed to provide coherent narrative
paradigms for the shaping of model citizens. At least with the heavy-handed
popular histories of Irving and Frost the moral lessons of the past were clear
and unmistakable. In particular, there was a feeling among professional educa-
tors that New Historians were not succeeding in an implied mission to service
the nation by training children to an appreciation of moral values as revealed
228 } “A Background of Real History”

in history. In the late nineteenth century, therefore, various states implemented
statutory laws requiring the directed study of history in American public
schools as a means to that end. An 1881 law in Florida required each teacher
of history to “labor faithfully and earnestly for the advancement of pupils in
their studies, deportment and morals, and to embrace every opportunity to
inculcate precept and example, the principles of truth, honesty, patriotism, and
the practice of every Christian virtue; to require the pupils to observe personal
cleanliness, neatness, order, promptness, and gentility of manners, to avoid vul-
garity and profanity, and to cultivate in them habits of industry and economy, a
regard for the rights and feelings of others, and their own responsibilities and
duties as citizens.”3
Such civic-minded educators were troubled by the haphazard manner
in which American youth absorbed the lessons of New History, when they
learned them at all. Teachers acknowledged that social historians such as Ed-
ward Eggleston and James Harvey Robinson promoted an exciting new ex-
pansion of the materials of history beyond the “dullness and triviality of lists of
kings and battles” to the “significance of underclothes, dime novels, and whif-
fletrees.”4 Even Robinson rejected the “curious element of the sensational” in
such sources, however, attacking especially the “kind of history which does
not concern itself with the normal conduct and serious achievements of man-
kind in the past, but, like melodrama, purposely selects the picturesque and
lurid as its theme.” As with the scandalous Police Gazette, Robinson argued,
the “intrinsic interest” in such subject matter “appears to vary in direct ratio to
its gruesomeness.”5 The aforementioned dime novels, in particular, were con-
sidered dangerous for students because they defined history with reference to
the sensational escapade, employing to excess the melodramatic devices in-
herent in trapper adventures, pirate tales, and detective stories.6 “Ground out
by weary hack-writers,” Russel Nye has noted, such novels were deceptively
“simple and direct” in their style, “incredibly inflated” in their rhetoric, and
“excruciatingly bad” in their composition. Gore was an essential component
of all such writing. “Twenty deaths per novel was not unusual,” Nye has sug-
gested, “and the formula demanded at least one dangerous crisis per chapter
. . . with ‘a hero, a villain, dustbiting redskins, three Colts, thin air, and much
desperado dialogue,’ and proceeded from there.”7 Teachers worried that no
matter how diligently they worked to establish standards in classrooms for
an appreciation of the right kinds of history books, all would be lost if, once
out of school, children were exposed to less virtuous historical literature. In
particular they feared the unscrupulous vendor who lined “the news-stands
and shop-windows along the pathway of the children from home to school
and church, so that they could not go to and from these places of instruction
Edward S. Ellis and the Dime Novel as History { 229

without giving him opportunity to defile their pure minds by flaunting these
atrocities before their eyes.”8
The campaign of educators to protect the historical sensibilities of children
exposed to such “tripe” intensified in the 1880s when, in a highly publicized
court case, a fourteen-year-old murderer blamed his violent nature on reading
western dime novels.9 In an article entitled “What Our Boys Are Reading,”
the eminent sociologist William Graham Sumner argued that such sad juvenile
confessions confirmed the dangers of expanding the subject matter of history
(as New Historians sought) to include dime novels that were “either intensely
stupid, or spiced to the highest degree with sensation.” Under the influence
of such literature, family values were ignored, Sumner argued, while boys and
girls were taught to respond only to the “indescribably vulgar” impulses of
“physical pain and lack of money.”10 In Childhood in Literature and Art (1895),
Horace Scudder agreed, declaring that “[a]nyone who has been compelled to
make the acquaintance of this literature must have observed how little parents
and guardians figure in it, and how completely children are separated from
their elders. The most popular books for the young are those which repre-
sent boys and girls as seeking their fortune, working out their own schemes,
driving railway trains and steamboats it may be.”11 Western dime novels were
especially troublesome because they encouraged children to “run away from
respectable homes” and “to seek their fortune[s]” on the frontier, where they
inevitably degenerated into “boy-bandits” and “little villains.”12
The self-proclaimed moral arbiter Anthony Comstock was the most vocal
critic of the harmful influences these dime novels were ostensibly having on
the minds and historical capacities of American youth. A special agent of the
Post Office Department and founder of the New York Society for the Sup-
pression of Vice, Comstock conducted a decades-long campaign against what
he called the menace of “evil reading.” Dime novels empty the youthful mind
“of lofty aims and ambitions” and “shrivel” the soul, he proclaimed, making
them a “devil-trap to captivate the child by perverting taste and fancy.” In his
widely read jeremiad Traps for the Young (1883), Comstock warned: “This
class includes the silly, insipid tale, the coarse, slangy story in the dialect of
the barroom, the blood-and-thunder romance of the border life, and the exag-
gerated details of crimes, real and imaginary.” In such novels, the “unreal far
outstrips the real. Crimes are gilded, and lawlessness is painted to resemble
valor, making a bid for bandits, brigands, murderers, thieves, and criminals in
general.” Comstock regretted that “these stories are allowed to become asso-
ciates for the child’s mind and to shape and direct the thoughts,” since these
“products of corrupt minds are the eggs from which all kinds of villainies are
hatched.” He challenged publishers and vendors of such works “to show a

single instance where any boy or girl has been elevated in morals, or where any
noble or refined instinct has been developed by them.”13
Comstock took special aim at dime-novelists such as Edward S. Ellis, a
writer who is often credited with having initiated the genre. Born in Ashtabula
County, Ohio, in 1840, Ellis moved at a young age to New Jersey where he
lived for most of his adult life.14 As had John Frost and John Clark Ridpath
before him, Ellis got his start as a school teacher and later as a superintendent
of education, although he was a jack of many trades. His brother-in-law, Harry
Deane, was a professional baseball player for the Cincinnati Red Stockings
Club, and Ellis, who was himself the first president of the Trenton Baseball
Club, spent a good deal of time securing a patent on Deane’s behalf for im-
proved boot clamps for cleats.15 He composed music as well, especially songs
that appealed to historical and regional identity, such as “De Louisiana Cane-
brakes: Negro Song Chorus.”16 Later he wrote the lyrics to a popular political
melody, “The Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to Spain,” which advocated for
U.S. involvement in the Cuban Independence movement.17 He produced sto-
ries and edited several newspapers and magazines in the mid-1870s, including
Public Opinion, Golden Days, and Holiday, the latter two specializing “in boys’
stories, inspirational biography, and history for both children and adults.”18
One of Ellis’s other passions was writing self-help manuals, such as Health,
Wealth and Happiness: An Invaluable Friend to Parent and Child; to Man and
Woman; to Young and Old; to Rich and Poor (1892), in which he advanced
some rather bizarre and intriguing theories about life expectancy, claiming that
humans should be able to live on average to the age of one hundred years.19
Some thought him an eccentric and a hack in the tradition of Lippard, but, as
his prolific literary output and reputation suggest, he was not so easy to dis-
miss. On the strength of his remarkable career as an educator and writer, for
instance, Princeton awarded him an honorary A.M. in 1888.20
As unusually eclectic as Ellis was, he was best known for the hundreds of
dime novels he wrote over a forty-year publishing career. His most success-
ful work was also his first, Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860).
Published when Ellis was only nineteen, it sold an estimated 60,000 copies in
its first week of sales and more than 400,000 over its lifetime.21 The novel’s re-
markable reception had much to do with its fortuitous timing, since it was one
of the first and most successful experiments in the mass production of books.
Purchased by Irwin P. Beadle & Company for a mere seventy-five dollars, Seth
Jones became the centerpiece of a vast and highly effective marketing strat-
egy introduced by the company to increase sales among moderately educated,
middle-class readers.22 The key was advanced publicity. Prior to publication,
Erastus Beadle saturated the East Coast with billboards, painted barns, and

newspaper columns asking: “Who is Seth Jones?” Consequently, the “public
waited expectantly for the famous opening words of the novel, ‘How de do?
How de do? Ain’t frightened, I hope. It’s nobody but me, Seth Jones of New
Hampshire,’ and ultimately bought a half million copies.” As Comstock and
others claimed, however, Beadle’s “contribution to publishing was one of mer-
chandising, not content.” The publisher “organized production, standardized
the product, and did some shrewd guessing about the nature and extent of the
market.” And, as Russel Nye noted, he “put 30,000 to 50,000 words of wild
plot into a salmon-colored paper cover with a lurid illustration and sold it for
a minimum price. The stories had been there for a long time—since the Indian
captivity, pirate, and low-life tales of the eighteenth century—and Beadle sim-
ply applied mass production methods to them. His aim, he said, was ‘to see
how much I could give for ten cents, cash sales, not credit.’ ”23
A quick glance through the pages of Seth Jones legitimizes some of Com-
stock’s concerns about the sensationalism of Ellis’s works. The novel is set on
the western New York frontier after the American Revolution, and, like Coo-
per’s Leatherstocking Tales, it is filled with the kind of “unnerving captures,
hair-raising escapades, and gratuitous violence” critics found so objection-
able.24 Early in the narrative, Seth is captured by Mohawks and engages with
them in a series of perverse demonstrations of tolerance for physical pain. After
Seth squeezes the hand of an Indian until the bones begin “displacing, and
yielding like an apple” or a “wet glove,” he has his hair pulled out at its roots
by the warrior, his temple thus taking on “the appearance of white parchment
with innumerable bloody points in it, as the blood commenced oozing from
the wound and his neck seemed as though the skin had been scraped off !” In
retaliation, Seth tomahawks the offending Indian, whose head, we are told,
“was nearly cleft in twain (for an arm fired by consuming passion had driven
it), and the brains were spattered over numbers of those seated around.” Else-
where in the novel, Ellis described the burning of frontier homes by “dusky
beings,” “leaping and dancing, and appearing, in the ghastly light, like fiends
in a ghostly revel”; a mother and daughter killed by Indians, who were found
lying “side by side, and weltering in each other’s blood”; and a captive who
had been burned at the stake so that “[e]very vestige of flesh was burnt off to
the knees, and the bones, white and glistening, dangled to the crisp and black-
ened members above! The hands, tied behind, had passed through the fire
unscathed, but every other part of the body was literally roasted!”25
Others of Ellis’s novels introduced devices of the grotesque and absurd into
the first science fiction formats. In his controversial novel, The Huge Hunter; or
the Steam Man of the Prairies (1865), for instance, Ellis altered a prosaic earlier
story about eastern fortune seekers looking for gold out West by introducing

a cast of bizarre characters who act out unusual dramas of dubious historical
value. The central hero of the novel is a perverse Seth Jones figure named Baldy
Bicknell, whose strange appellation derives from his having survived a scalp-
ing by Plains Indians. A horribly disfigured reminder of the savagery of the
West, Baldy must wear a hat at all times lest he be exposed to the sweltering
western sun or the equally blistering taunts of relentlessly critical western min-
ers. Baldy’s sidekick is a young, hunchbacked, and fatherless boy, the ingenious
inventor Johnny Brainerd, who is incapable of participating in the hard physi-
cal work of “winning the West” because of his deformities, but who tries (with
mixed results) to lend his technological expertise to the effort. Johnny is the
creator of a still more curious traveling companion, an enormous, futuristic,
iron robot dubbed the “Steam Man of the Prairies,” who marches across the
plains intimidating Indians and expediting the work of mining. In their disturb-
ing travels, these motley adventurers witness or participate in the slaughter of
animals, the mutilation of human bodies, and mass death by scalding, all in
pursuit of pecuniary gain.”26 While the introduction of a free-moving steam-
engine robot on the western frontier encouraged some later to declare The Huge
Hunter a science fiction classic, many contemporaries viewed its threatening,
destructive prospects as inappropriate, especially for children.27
Additionally, concerns were expressed about the rapidity with which Ellis
and others wrote such historical novels, quantity being valued over quality by
profit-minded publishers. Predictably historical inaccuracies were rampant in
such hurriedly produced works. As Paul Camp has pointed out, Ellis, who
“never visited the frontier,” “committed such faux pas as having Indians and
pioneers alike propel canoes with oars (complete with muffled oarlocks).”28
Some of these errors were undoubtedly the result of the unrelenting demands
of deadline-conscious publishers and an unforgiving marketplace. This may
account, in part, for Ellis’s efforts to obscure the authorship of some of his
most hurried of his productions.29 Shortly after the publication of Seth Jones,
he contracted with Beadle to write four dime novels a year and with other
publishing houses to produce dozens of additional stories, many based on
historical themes treated with equal superficiality. Ellis was a frequent user of
pseudonyms (at various times he was Captain Bruin Adams; Colonel H. R.
Gordon; the Ex-Reporter; Lieutenant R. H. Jayne; Captain R. M. Hawthorne;
and Seward D. Lisle, an anagram of Edward S. Ellis), and it is therefore difficult
to determine exactly how many novels he wrote, but literary authorities guess
the number to be in the many hundreds, making him one of the most prolific
and widely read authors in American literary history.30 Denis R. Rogers esti-
mates that Ellis produced at least 467 major works during his career as well as
more than 500 minor works such as sketches, articles, and poems.31 Some were

volumes of mediocre historical fiction such as The Boy Patriot, A Story of Jack
the Young Friend of Washington; Trailing Geronimo; and Campaigning with
Crook.32 Others were nonfiction pieces that applied the conventions of dime-
novel sensationalism to historical events, such as King Philip’s War, Bacon’s
Rebellion, and the uprising of Tecumseh.33 Almost all drew criticism from cul-
tural arbiters like Comstock who challenged their authenticity and worth.
Professional educators had additional complaints about how Ellis’s ideas
translated into classrooms. Like John Frost, Ellis continued to teach and super-
intend even while he was writing novels of an increasingly controversial nature
on the theory that “a job in hand [was] worth two in the air.”34 Ellis’s frequent
use of a nom de plume was designed in part to obscure his identity from his stu-
dents, although, in many cases, it had the opposite effect. Having employed so
many different aliases, that is, Ellis was suspected of being the author of every
dime novel whose authorship was obscure, including some very bad ones he
did not write.35 As Ellis began to dabble in school books, including the writ-
ing of primary history texts, concerns among teachers and parents increased,
since the lines between sensationalist fiction and dramatic nonfiction often
seemed blurred in his works. The amateur historian Don Russell remembers
his mother giving him one of these histories to read, unaware that “the same
Edward S. Ellis had written the first successful dime novel and wrote more of
them under more aliases than almost anyone else.” At the time “the dime novel
was X-rated as the lowest form of entertainment, although its heroines were
as pure as the Children of the Abbey and its heroes as noble as St. Elmo,” Rus-
sell added. “But the boys of my gang were little contaminated by dime novels,
mainly because we never had a dime. Besides, the public library was free, and
there we could read Deerfoot on the Prairie and Hunters of the Ozarks by the
same Ellis.”36 Not everyone had such easy access, however. A short statement
in the New York Times in 1897 suggested that self-proclaimed censors of cul-
ture had succeeded in limiting the access of some children to the works of this
novelist-turned-historian. “A notice has been posted in the Public Library of
Boston and its branches,” the paper announced succinctly, “advising people
that the works of Edward S. Ellis . . . are ‘no longer in the library.’ ”37
For his part, Ellis defended his writings as morally grounded and historically
accurate. He bristled at postal officials and librarians who accused him of nega-
tively influencing the reading habits of children or who threatened to charge
him with “indecency” for circulating “immoral book[s]” through the mails.38
Ellis’s publishers, Beadle & Adams, maintained that such dime novels were
not corrupting of the historical imagination, but rather were clean, honest, and
accurate. To underscore this point, they issued a pamphlet of detailed “Instruc-
tions for Prospective Writers” with advice about the does and don’ts of dime

novel production. “We prohibit all things offensive to good taste in expression
and incident,” Beadle and Adams noted. “We prohibit subjects of characters
that carry an immoral taint; We prohibit the repetition of any occurrence which,
though true, is yet better untold; We require unquestioned originality; We re-
quire pronounced strength of plot and high dramatic interest of story; and Au-
thors must be familiar with characters and places which they introduce and not
attempt to write in fields of which they have no intimate knowledge.”39 Ellis
felt his novels met and exceeded these standards, and he was encouraged by
the feedback he received from the chief editor at Beadle & Adams, Orville J.
Victor, upon whose “learning,” “wide information,” “literary acumen,” “un-
varying courtesy,” “honest, outspoken candor,” “absolute conscientiousness,”
and “unswerving fidelity to the interests of his employers” Ellis relied heavily
throughout his career.40 A leading paper of Chicago agreed, noting that “when
a mother wishes to buy a book for her boy and sees the name of Mr. Ellis on the
title page she need not first read the book as a precaution, for his name is a guar-
antee that it is safe to put in the hands of her child. Hundreds of his juveniles are
found in the libraries of our leading Sunday-schools.”41 Publishers of Golden
Days, a children’s periodical “designed to act as an antidote to the cheap papers
which teach children to become runaways, thieves, and outlaws,” agreed, circu-
lating chapters of an Ellis novel in its first number.42 Even the normally under-
stated editors of the National Cyclopaedia found something to admire in Ellis’s
novels: “They are clean, wholesome and instructive, usually with a background
of real history, and while abounding in such incidents as delight young readers,
are manly and moral in their teachings.”43
Ellis bent over backwards to establish the historical authenticity of what he
was writing; he wished to be thought historically minded, if not a bona fide
historian. The distinction was important enough to him that he articulated its
subtleties in nearly every work he produced. In a chapter of a history treating
the “prowess of American seamen at successive eras in the national annals,”
for instance, Ellis made it clear that too often the “origin and growth of the
now formidable United States Navy” had been “the themes of the novelist
rather than the historian,” the people turning to Fenimore Cooper primarily
for “vivid and entertaining narratives of maritime exploits on the high seas
and the country’s naval defenders.” While Ellis had no objection to novelists
working on historical subjects (how could he, after all), and while he appreci-
ated Cooper’s efforts at “maritime romance as furnished by high-spirited and
patriotic” works such as The Pilot, The Red Rover, and The Two Admirals, he
also recognized that novelists had slightly different incentives than did naval
historians such as Maclay and Mahan. “[W]hat has to be said of contests at sea
between the United States and her enemies should be related with the gravity

as well as with the truth of history rather than with the picturesque effects but
fictional glowings of romance,” he wrote. Solemn truths were the province of
historians. The differences between seafaring novelists and maritime histori-
ans were not as vast as their oceanic subject matter might suggest, however,
since solemnity could be ennobling, even stirring in Ellis’s estimation. “The
story told as history . . . will lack little of the fascination which novelists have
thrown around the subject,” he wrote, “for the real is often no less thrilling
than the unreal, fact no less marvelous than fiction.”44
Ellis’s second major work for Beadle and Company, a historical study for
juveniles of Pontiac’s Conspiracy published in 1861, illustrates these distinc-
tions. On the one hand, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator was presented in
the dime novel format and featured the sensation scene as its primary narrative
device. On the other hand, the biography was advertised as a piece of sober
historical scholarship that would edify youth on the rigors of frontier life in the
eighteenth century. To underscore this latter point, Ellis dedicated his work to
Francis Parkman, on whose well-regarded two-volume History of the Conspir-
acy of Pontiac he relied heavily. Noting that the materials used in The Life of
Pontiac the Conspirator had been gleaned from Parkman’s scholarly research
in “the State Paper offices of London and Paris, the archives of New York,
Pennsylvania and other States; from the statements of men who had seen and
known Pontiac when living; [and from] the journals kept by men during the
siege of Detroit,” Ellis suggested to readers that his work shared substantially
in the academic merits of Parkman’s production, “which is one of the most
inestimable contributions to early American history.”45 As if to confirm the
strength of the association, Ellis published a note he received from Parkman
approving of the dime novelist’s use of his texts. “Pontiac’s war is an episode
of so much interest in our history that I am always glad to see it brought be-
fore the public—at least by one ready, like yourself, to acknowledge assistance
derived from the labor of others,” Parkman wrote Ellis. “It has, in one case,
been my experience to meet with different treatment, entire chapters having
borrowed, changed in nothing but words, & not always in these, without rec-
ognition of the original. I shall look with interest for your volume, and accept
with pleasure the dedication which you so courteously offer.”46
Ellis also made a point of publicizing his efforts to secure firsthand accounts
of historical incidents on which his dime novels and histories were based. In
a piece he authored for the New York Times titled “Stories of ‘Bad’ Indians,”
Ellis reprinted a personal interview he conducted with Col. Albert L. Mills
of the “Army of the Indian Frontier” from 1879 to 1885 that served as impor-
tant background information in later historical accounts of the western fron-
tier. Recounting in detail Mills’s reflections on the habits and superstitions

of the Cheyenne and Crow tribes, Ellis’s article also served as a piece of self-
promotion for his forthcoming “New Deerfoot” series treating Indian life on
the prairies during the same period.47 Other eminent figures, some of whom
were interviewed by Ellis and whose comments appeared in later publications,
enjoyed and endorsed his works. Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward,
reportedly once entered a cabinet meeting “waving a copy” of an Ellis novel
“in unconcealed delight.”48 William Tecumseh Sherman wrote Ellis to say that
he was taken with the authenticity of the novelist’s depiction of Kit Carson,
especially those parts that drew on Sherman’s own recollections of the man.49
Benjamin Harrison’s vice president, Levi Parsons Morton, declared that the
“juveniles of Mr. Ellis are deserving of their wonderful popularity, for not only
are they stirring, interesting and instructive, but they are clean and pure, and
teach boys true manliness, obedience, honesty, truthfulness and all the virtues
that make a youth a true and useful citizen and a blessing to the community
in which he lives.”50 And a United States senator gave Ellis’s Oonomoo, the
Huron, an “emphatic” (if slightly menacing) endorsement when he declared
that the “man who didn’t like it . . . was not fit to live.”51
Not everyone was as taken with Ellis’s veracity, however, and he received
some justified criticism for his lack of originality and for his purposeful distort-
ing of sources. In the case of his book on Pontiac, for instance, Ellis admitted
to relying perhaps too heavily on the “facts” of the conspiracy story as gleaned
from Parkman and others. He was less forthcoming, however, about his whole-
sale appropriations of Parkman’s precise language, which even by the looser
standards of the nineteenth century practiced by Frost and Irving constituted
a brand of plagiarism.52 In an appendix to the History of the Conspiracy of Pon-
tiac, for instance, Parkman had cited a “curious diary” deposited in the “His-
torical Society of Michigan” that told of an incident on the day after the failure
of Pontiac’s uprising in which a chief was “sent to the Pottawattamie village
in order to seize an Ojibwa girl whom he suspected of having betrayed him.”
She was allegedly given “a severe beating” with a lacrosse stick, although there
was considerable doubt about the reliability of the story. Parkman cautioned
readers that information about her treatment and subsequent life was taken
from an “old Indian” who “told Henry Conner, formerly United States inter-
preter at Detroit, that she survived her punishment, and lived for many years;
but at length, contracting intemperate habits, she fell, when intoxicated, into a
kettle of boiling maple sap, and was so severely scalded that she died of con-
sequence.” Without attribution, Ellis recounted the same episode in The Life
of Pontiac the Conspirator using Parkman’s precise words but mangling their
source in such a way as to give a false impression of their authority. A “curious”
document exists in the “Historical Society of Michigan” about an Ojibwa girl

who was “seized upon suspicion” of betraying the conspiracy by Pontiac and
given “a severe beating,” Ellis wrote. “An old Indian, who, for many years,
was United States interpreter at Detroit,” stated that the Ojibwa “lived many
years afterward and, getting into bad habits, in her old age, she one day fell
into a kettle of boiling sap, and was so badly scalded that she soon died.” In
promoting the “old Indian” to the position of “United States interpreter at
Detroit,” Ellis not only obscured Henry Conner’s important role as translator
in the incident, he also ignored the secondhand nature of the transmission that
had drawn cautions from Parkman about its use as a historical source in the
first place.53
In addition, Ellis disregarded Parkman’s sensible warnings against over-
speculation about the finer details of those “thrilling conflicts between the hos-
tile parties” now lost to the historical record. Ellis tried instead to fill the gaps
left by more cautious historians with an unstable compound of oral tradition,
literary mythology, and imaginative recreation, rarely missing an opportunity
to embellish where decorative flourishes might help sales. For instance, Ellis
reported in The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator that the chief’s scouts mur-
dered a Canadian settler whose body was later buried in a shallow grave on an
island. On visiting the spot the next day, friends of the murdered man found
his hands “protruding from the ground, as if in an attitude of entreaty.” They
buried him “more effectually,” Ellis noted, but upon returning a second time
“to their horror, they saw the hands again.” It was not until the settlers could
find a priest who performed “neglected rites” that the body evidently found
repose and rested in peace, Ellis wrote, the dime novelist using the sketchy
oral accounts of the incident to try to convince readers of his “well supported”
conviction that such an occurrence “could take place without any supernatu-
ral agency.”54 Parkman had also narrated the story of the supplicating hands
in his biography of Pontiac, but he included a detailed appendix in which he
attributed the account of the incident to unverifiable “tradition” and to the
“credulity” of an “aged Canadian” source who was a rather gullible seventeen-
year-old at the time of the murder.55 Ellis had reported the history of the event
accurately enough, but he failed—either out of innocent negligence or pur-
poseful obfuscation—to record Parkman’s cautions about its use in a work of
legitimate history.
For Comstock and others, it was precisely the question of what constituted
a proper “background of real history” that was at the heart of the debate over
the worthiness of such works. “The unreal far outstrips the real” in popular
books, critics noted, causing readers to substitute for true history the “most
improbable creations of fiction.” “Such publications do more to debase the
young than an endowed chair in every college in the land will or can do to

ennoble them,” Comstock argued. Untrained historians such as Ellis claimed
that their works were based on reliable facts, but their “monstrously absurd ex-
aggerations” betrayed their authors’ “utterly false and debasing ideas of life.”
Nourish a generation “on this sort of mental food, and it must be apparent to
any candid mind that it will be a generation devoid of taste for that which is
pure and noble,” Comstock added. Continuing the culinary analogy, he con-
cluded: the dime novel “begets vapid, shallow-minded sentimentalists. The
lofty thought they cannot understand. They would rate the most interesting
history as distasteful, the choicest essay or poetry as dry and uninteresting.
To capture at the threshold of life the fancies and hold them in bondage until
fiction supplants the real and study becomes irksome, is cruel and evil. Proper
ambition is stunted, and the inspiration of lofty aims is supplanted by the vain
imaginings suggested by this kind of light literature.”56
The solution, reformers argued, was to give children alternative models of
history writing and to point out the distinctions between good and bad litera-
ture. “Again, let parents spend more time reading good books to their chil-
dren,” Comstock wrote. “Gather them together during the day and read to
them some wholesome tale, history, or other work, that shall help satisfy the
cravings of the expanding heart; that shall cultivate the taste and lay a healthy
foundation upon which to build in after years.”57 Not surprisingly, in his cam-
paign to identify alternative reading lists for the study of the past Comstock
ignored the popular histories by Frost, Bryant and Gay, Ridpath, or Eggleston.
Works such as Ellis’s came under special scrutiny, however, because they were
informed by the excesses of a dime novel tradition which made even the sen-
sationalism of Bryant look tame. The casualness with which Ellis moved back
and forth between the popular book markets for fiction and history was espe-
cially irksome to his critics. “Boys may be entertained by the wrestling bouts
and other incidents,” one reviewer noted of Ellis’s novelization of Bacon’s Re-
bellion, “but as history made pleasant for the juvenile palate the book is open
to criticism.”58 James Harvey Robinson agreed, calling works such as Ellis’s
“gross misrepresentations within the bounds of formal accuracy.”59 In short,
even open-minded cultural historians disposed favorably to the study of “un-
derclothes” and “whiffletrees” seemed unsure about dime novels.
“A Means to an End”
Educators who shared Comstock’s concerns were among those who or-
ganized themselves as a “Committee of Ten” at the annual meeting of the Na-
tional Education Association at Saratoga Springs, New York, in the summer

of 1892, under the leadership of Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard Uni-
versity. A subcommittee on “History, Civil Government, and Political Society”
included important figures in the American historical profession—Woodrow
Wilson of Princeton, Charles Kendall Adams of Wisconsin, Edward Bourne
of Adelbert College, Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, and James Harvey Rob-
inson then of the University of Pennsylvania—and their charge was to draft an
“influential curriculum plan” for the teaching of history in schools with special
attention to “the proper limits of its subject, the best methods of instruction, the
most desirable allotment of time for the subject, and the best methods of test-
ing the pupils’ attainments therein.” From the outset of their work, committee
members asked very practical questions such as: What was the appropriate age
to begin instruction in history? and, What topics and methods were best suited
to what grades?60 They also desired to establish national standards for histori-
cal literature of all sorts in schools, making specific recommendations as to how
much and what kind of reading students should be expected to undertake.
These discussions were important for what they did to call attention to issues
that historians “were slow to confront as theoretical problems” but which they
were compelled to address as “unavoidable questions of pedagogy,” including:
“What to teach in history classes? How to select the material? How to organize
and synthesize it? How to use history? And how to answer these questions in a
manner relevant to Americans living at the turn of the century?”61
The subcommittee on “History, Civil Government, and Political Society”
reported that while many subjects were well established at the secondary level,
“the function of history in education is still very imperfectly apprehended.”
Therefore, committee members advocated further consideration of history as
a way of “training the judgment, and in preparing children for intellectual en-
joyments in after years, and for the exercise at maturity of a salutary influence
upon national affairs.” They recommended that the study of the past begin in
schools no later than the tenth year of age, with the first two years devoted to
“[m]ythology and to biography for the illustration of general history as well
as of American history.” The college professor, the committee noted, finds
“that his subject has never taken any serious hold on the minds of pupils fresh
from the secondary schools.” Similarly, instructors find, as had Ridpath at De-
Pauw, that students “devoted astonishingly little time to the subject; and that
they have acquired no habit of historical investigation, or of the comparative
examination of different historical narratives concerning the same periods or
events.” The solution, committee members insisted, was for specialists to rec-
ognize the value of having “the minds of young children . . . stored with some
of the elementary facts and principles of their subject,” and for teachers to
ensure “that all the mental habits, which the adult student will surely need,

begin to be formed in the child’s mind before the age of fourteen.” In addition,
they reaffirmed the close connections between history and literature, lobbying
for the use of “historical works or extracts for reading in schools,” for the writ-
ing of English compositions “on subjects drawn from the historical lessons,”
for the memorization of “historical poems and other short pieces,” and for
the “reading of historical sketches, biographies and novels, outside of class
work.” They did not advocate a return to the belles lettres tradition of the mid-
nineteenth century, but they did acknowledge the power of literary expression
in the pursuit of the historian’s craft.62
The NEA report of the Committee of Ten inspired an independent investi-
gation by the American Historical Association of the role of history in schools.
“The Study of History in Schools: Report of the American Historical Asso-
ciation by the Committee of Seven” (1900), which emerged from this work
and was championed by the likes of Edward Eggleston in his AHA presiden-
tial address, echoed the earlier inquiry.63 Both reports endorsed an eight-year
course beginning in elementary school that emphasized competencies in an
established body of facts associated with the American past, although neither
thought historical learning should be bound by facts. “In our judgment this is
in itself the most difficult and the least important outcome of historical study,”
wrote the Committee of Ten. “Facts of themselves are hard to learn, even when
supported by artificial systems of memorizing, and the value of detached his-
torical facts is small in proportion to the effort necessary to acquire and retain
them.” Facts chosen indiscriminately from school textbooks, including “lists
of lifeless dates, details of military movements, or unexplained genealogies,”
were “repellant” to committee members who had been influenced by the New
Historians’ preferences for processes over products. “To know them is hardly
better worth while than to remember, as a curious character in Ohio was able
to do some years ago, what one had for dinner every day for the last thirty
years,” the NEA report suggested. “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that
facts in history are like digits in arithmetic; they are learned only as a means
to an end.” Instead, they argued, the role of history should be to develop the
mind “by cultivating the powers of discriminating observation; by strengthen-
ing the logical faculty of following an argument from point to point; and by
improving the process of comparison, that is, the judgment.” Nor did they
shy away from patriotic motivations for study: “America needs the training [in
history] because we Americans know that our country is great, better than we
know why it is great.”64
These educational reformers focused a good deal of attention on the cor-
rupting influence of popular literature on the juvenile historical imagination.
Again, members of the NEA subcommittee on “History, Civil Government, and

Political Economy” were not opposed to expanding the range of reading mate-
rials; in fact, they advocated that teachers supplement textbooks with “distinct
historical literature” and the use of “miscellaneous literature, poems, historical
novels, and biographies.” “The sooner we can get a boy in touch with some-
thing else than a hand book, the better,” Resolution 21 of the committee report
suggested. Viewing history and literature as “kindred subjects” in the manner
of Duyckinck and others, committee members suggested that reading widely
from a list of “desirable books” would advance their educations as writers and
thinkers, since a “significant advantage of history is that, intelligently taught,
it may be a medium for the literary expression of the pupils.” The key was in
selecting appropriate books as literary models for teaching the past. Committee
members recommended Parkman, Prescott, Macaulay, Irving, Green, and Ban-
croft among others. They also agreed it was suitable for students to read those
“standard historical novels which will always be read, and which will always
leave an approximately correct picture of the times which they describe.” They
expressed a “hesitation,” however, with reference to the use of most such books
to teach the past, since “the natural tendency is to skip the history in them or
to receive a false historical impression if the history is accepted.”65 Works of
historical fiction of the sort Edward Ellis wrote were strictly out.
These purging efforts by reformers bore some immediate fruit within the
profession of history. When the Harvard historian Edward Channing pro-
posed a new history textbook for use in schools to his publisher in 1897, he
distinguished clearly between it and the productions of popular historical nov-
elists such as Edward Ellis. A New York Times book reviewer acknowledged
that Ellis’s technique of employing “the usual amount of deadly hand-to-hand
fighting” which “boys like to read” certainly sold volumes, but Channing re-
fused to resort to such tactics.66 He wished instead to market a school text
“giving ‘real history’ and not Indian fights and folklore,” and he promised
would-be publishers that he would omit the details of “military history” in
exchange for the “descriptions of colonial life” among the “ancestors of the
heroes of colonial days.”67 Anything that smacked of what Shelley Streeby has
called the “culture of sensation” was scrupulously avoided by Channing, who
gained a reputation for scholarly (if sober) prose.68 It is not surprising, either,
that Channing snubbed Ellis by failing to include any of the dime novelist’s
works in his section on historical fiction in the Guide to the Study of American
History compiled in 1896 with the help of Albert Bushnell Hart. This compre-
hensive bibliographic work itemized the most significant historical novels of
the day, but Ellis’s productions evidently did not meet the minimum standards
established by professionals for those works “widely accepted by school com-
mittees and college trustees, by teachers and by thinking people outside of

schools and colleges” who value “sound learning and accurate judgment of
cause and effect” with respect to the past. Even in the category of novels that
“may be inaccurate in themselves, especially as to details, but which, neverthe-
less, leave a permanent and reasonably correct impression on the mind of the
reader,” Ellis’s best-selling works were conspicuously absent.69
Had Ellis stuck to novels, even historical fiction, he might not have been
snubbed by professionals, but he insisted on trying to compete with the general
histories produced by Channing and others. “As ‘blood-and-thunder’ juvenile
stories fell under the proscription of the so-called custodians of culture and
their sales slipped in the 1880s,” Gary Scharnhorst has noted, “Ellis turned
increasingly to journalism and educational non-fiction,” and these proved
somewhat his undoing as far as scholars were concerned.70 Some of these
works were small productions such as The Story of South Africa, which he co-
authored with popularizer John C. Ridpath.71 Others, however, were volumes
with wider circulation that revealed how much of Ellis’s historical conscious-
ness was conditioned by his training as a novelist. Self-proclaimed “champion
of the American Historical Association,” Albert Bushnell Hart, characterized
writers such as Ellis as too imprecise in their epistemological thinking and
too loose in their use of chronology to qualify as historians. He called them
“imaginary” historians because of their “habit of writing tales that sounded
exactly like history, and history that was chiefly fiction.” While Hart acknowl-
edged that the “mysterious quality of mind” called imagination had a “place in
historiography,” he added that this “shadowy something” was dangerous if it
encouraged the irresponsible historian who “invents details” or “seizes upon
the unimportant ones.” “What we need,” he noted, is imagination tempered in
“a genuinely scientific school of history, which shall remorselessly examine the
sources and separate the wheat from the chaff; which shall critically balance
evidence; which shall dispassionately and moderately set forth results.”72
Especially troublesome from the point of view of scholars was Ellis’s ten-
dency to recycle historical materials and to transpose scenes from one histori-
cal work to another without much concern for context. We have already noted
certain similarities between novels such as Seth Jones and The Huge Hunter,
both of which exploited time-tested frontier stereotypes developed by the
novelist-historian James Fenimore Cooper and others.73 Still more profound
repetitions occurred in Ellis’s biographies of western figures such as Daniel
Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett.74 By the late nineteenth century, in
fact, so much had been written about the frontier (both authentic and not)
that it became almost impossible to say anything about the history of the back-
woods without falling into highly prescribed, formulaic modes of literary ex-
pression. Indeed, the western “motif” had become conventionalized enough

that it began to parody itself in melodramatic comic operas like Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West show and in hundreds of quickly written western dime novels in
which “endless repetitions” of plots, themes, and stock characters contrib-
uted to a perversion of form and function. Nostalgia and the perpetuation
of memory were powerful historical forces operating in Ellis as well, and his
endless pursuit of novelty in the dime novel market prompted him to become
increasingly distorted and sensational in his plot lines.75 As Joy Kasson has
suggested, “memory showmanship” established a link between “Americans’
understanding of their history and their consumption of spectacularized ver-
sions of it.” Hence, Ellis’s novels of this period existed at “the intersection of
history, drama and nostalgia” and revealed a growing dependence on sensa-
tional violence and death as well.76 Murder, the insinuation of rape, and brutal
assault had been standard plot devices in Ellis’s novels; they translated now
into his popular histories in the form of nostalgia, mythology, and a fixation
with the ubiquitous past.
In some ways, these sorts of repetitions should have been expected and
could have been forgiven in a popular book market that relied so heavily on
the exploitation of successful formulas as a guarantee of profit margins. If form
follows function, then mass-produced works such as Ellis’s blurred the lines
“between fact and fiction, history and melodrama, truth and entertainment”
as a condition of their manifesting purpose.77 The bigger problem, however,
was that this recycling of materials and styles occurred in works that were ad-
vertised as popular histories, not just volumes of historical fiction. In 1880,
for instance, Ellis published The Youth’s History of the United States, a low-
budget operation, printed on cheap, nearly transparent paper but richly il-
lustrated with wood-engravings.78 Its low price and readable style made the
Youth’s History an instant success in the popular marketplace dominated by
history books for adults. “I regret very much,” the literary historian Albert
Johannsen once wrote, “that I did not have a book like Ellis’s Youth History of
the United States when I was a boy, in place of a history that was simply a mass
of names and dates and battles, as are, I am afraid, many of the modern school
histories.”79 The fact that Johannsen did not have access to such a work in the
early twentieth century, however, is revealing of the successful efforts of profes-
sional historians like Hart to keep volumes such as Ellis’s out of the hands of
children. In particular, Hart complained that the recycling of themes and the
interchangeability of settings obscured the particulars of historical context and
encouraged sloppy temporal thinking. “Is there no penal code for those who
undertake to write history out of something other than the records, to gloss the
truth with a quality of mind which is outside the events themselves?” he asked
pointedly of such derivative texts.80

In constructing the Youth’s History, for instance, Ellis fleshed out his narra-
tive with material culled directly from his considerable stockpile of dime novels
and juvenile biographies. His chapter-long account of Pontiac’s Conspiracy in
Youth’s History was derived almost entirely from The Life of Pontiac the Con-
spirator, published twenty-five years earlier by Beadle and Company.81 To be
sure, Ellis toned down some of the more theatrical scenes and edited out many
of the most sensational passages (including that of the Canadian farmer with
hands emerging from the grave, for instance), but he retained the melodramatic
tone of the original throughout. He also repeated a number of the untidy edito-
rial practices that had embroiled him with professionals earlier. In the 1861 ju-
venile biography, for instance, Ellis had reported an exchange between Major
Gladwyn, commander of the Fort at Detroit, and Pontiac, whose ambush plans
Gladwyn had uncovered. As usual, Parkman was the original source for the
dialogue recorded by Ellis in the 1861 biography. “Why do I see so many of my
father’s men standing with their guns in the street?” Ellis’s Pontiac demanded
in The Life. “They are ordered under arms for the purpose of discipline,”
replied Major Gladwyn in response.82 In the Youth’s History, however, Ellis
altered the conversation (despite its having been presented as a direct quota-
tion in the earlier work), accordingly: “Why do I see so many of my brothers
in the streets with arms in their hands?” “They have been ordered out for
exercise,” replied Gladwyn, in the same careless manner.”83 Small changes, to
be sure, but they indicated a general lack of sanctity for precise dialogue and
attention to detail. Professional historians interested in accuracy found such
inconsistencies in cited material particularly glaring. In addition, Ellis recycled
passages from the Youth’s History in later dime novels, suggesting that his con-
ception of a reusable past was reciprocal and made few distinctions between
history as literature and literature as history.84
This unrestrained transposing of narratives from fictional settings to his-
torical contexts and back again suggested how porous was the membrane that
separated fiction from nonfiction in Ellis’s works. At times it is hard to dis-
tinguish between the genres when sampling Ellis’s popular writings. In the
Youth’s History, for instance, Ellis retained a dime novelist’s perverse interest
in sensational, particularly maudlin, death, and he rarely missed an opportu-
nity to dramatize the grim last moments of an historical figure’s life. Ellis’s
description of the massacre of white settlers at Jamestown in 1622, for instance,
borrowed liberally from well-worn frontier analogies and tropes of vulnerabil-
ity and death in dime novels. “At the appointed time, as suddenly as those
terrific cyclones sweep over the western prairies, the Indians rushed to the
massacre of the settlers,” he wrote of the murderous incident. “The dusky
warriors, gleaming with passion and hideous in their war paint, seemed to

leap by hundreds from the ground, and with circling tomahawk, whizzing ar-
rows, crack of guns, and yells, they assailed the colonists, who, till then, felt as
safe as if in the heart of London town.” Gruesome depictions of death (female
and infant death, in particular) drew extensively on well-established literary
and visual traditions as well, many bearing striking similarities to scenes in
Seth Jones. “The mother was stricken down at the door of her cabin while on
her knees, with her child clinging to her breast and begging for mercy,” Ellis
wrote in imitation of his earlier depictions of massacred mothers and daugh-
ters “weltering in each other’s blood.”85 As he had done so many times before
in his western dime novels, Ellis also described with disturbing casualness and
spectral allusion the death of Native Americans in the Youth’s History. “Some-
times in the gloom, a flickering torch revealed the warrior, creeping stealthily
among the ruins of the buildings, and a sturdy rifleman sent a ball through his
body,” he noted of a raid on a Massachusetts village during King Philip’s War.
“The savage would leap high in the air with one piercing death-shriek, and
that was the end of him.”86
The nostalgic temperament, romantic disposition, and penchant for re-
cycling narrative elements evident in Ellis’s fiction were also apparent in the
Youth’s History. On many occasions in the four-volume series, Ellis asked read-
ers to place themselves in the stream of historical events and to “imagine” what
historical actors might have been thinking and feeling at propitious moments
in history. “We can imagine with what interest the colonists [of Greenland in
the tenth century] listened to the strange story told by Bjarni,” Ellis suggested
to his young readers. These stories “must have stirred the hearts of the listen-
ers,” he intuited. “How the eyes of the boys sparkled when they heard from
the lips of their fathers and brothers the accounts of the deeds of daring, and
what pride they must have felt when they reflected that the Vikings from their
native land were masters of the ocean, and that the vessels of all nations fled at
the sight of them.”87 Of course, Ellis had no way to verify whether the hearts
of the young listeners “stirred” or if their eyes “sparkled” or whether they felt
“pride” in these tales. He did not even know for sure that young listeners were
in attendance when such tales were told. He assumed these conditions, how-
ever, as a means of encouraging an empathetic response in his juvenile readers
and, secondarily, in the parents who bought books for them.
Ellis’s marketing techniques were sound enough from the perspective of
sales, but they did not ingratiate him with critics who accused him of distorting
history. There is no doubt that these novelistic devices and imaginative projec-
tions sometimes threatened the veracity of the Youth’s History. Ellis narrated
the stories of Marco Polo’s exploits as if they were nearly indisputable, for in-
stance, even though he acknowledged that “[n]othing that is read in fairy tales

could equal those glowing pictures of some of the provinces of India.” While
he admitted that the tales of Polo’s journeys were “idle” in some respects, he
cited them as authorities because “they had, nevertheless, a basis in truth.”
Speculative forays of this sort substituted for hard evidence on a number of
other occasions as well. Ellis repeated Irving’s proverbial stories of Columbus
confounding the court mathematicians in the fifteenth century not because he
could confirm them, but because they were “certainly good enough to be true.”
And Ellis quoted extensively from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History
of New York not because he could verify all of its “purely imaginary” descrip-
tions of life in Dutch New Netherlands, but because the dime novelist believed
that “some of the pictures he drew are true to life.”88 Given these proposi-
tions, Ellis’s Youth’s History was viewed by professionals as no more useful
than the much-maligned Popular School History of the United States (1889)
by John Anderson, a textbook consisting solely of excerpts “from the writ-
ings of eminent American historians” and “other American writers of note,” as
if the two categories were interchangeable. Anderson cited all those passages
from Bancroft, Palfrey, Prescott and Motley that he believed were “required for
ordinary school purposes,” but he also supplemented them with the nonfic-
tional and fictional works of Irving, Hawthorne, and Bryant in order to make
a more “pleasant reading-book, with enough variety to give it all the interest
properly belonging” to history.89 Professionals ridiculed this indiscriminate
editorial strategy as irresponsible.
“Variety” found its way into Ellis’s texts as well through the inclusion of
quasi-historical explanations for events concerning which there was no con-
sensus among historians. Scholars agreed, for instance, that General James
Wolfe was killed on the Plains of Abraham during the Siege of Quebec in 1759,
but no historian claimed to know precisely who fired the fatal bullet that ended
the British commander’s life. Into this intellectual breach marched Ellis, who
asserted that Wolfe was actually shot by one of his own men, a New York co-
lonial, who was seeking revenge for the death of his brother by firing squad at
Wolfe’s command a few days before the battle. And the source of this unusual
assertion? Ellis argued that in the 1840s, while still a “very small boy,” he had
heard a story from his father, who had lived in upstate New York during his
childhood, about a neighbor who claimed to have been the assassin of Wolfe.
“Of course, this incident of my early life is rather vague,” Ellis admitted, “but
that it actually happened I cannot doubt, for I have always been blessed with a
retentive memory.” The soldier’s name was Smith, which, according to Ellis,
made it difficult to trace him, “since he died long before my time, and his family
was lost trace of.” That his father knew and remembered Smith well “cannot
be doubted,” however, he insisted, because his parent was “rigidly truthful”

and “accepted the venerable soldier’s statements as trustworthy.” Ellis recog-
nized that parts of this murderous tale were “extremely difficult of belief,” and
he acknowledged that “it may well be that at the sunset of his life [the story-
teller] grew morbid and came to believe a mere fancy that had grown upon his
mind.” But he placed faith in Smith’s assertion. “ ‘I don’t know whether I shot
General Wolfe or not,’ the old man was wont to say, ‘but I do know that at close
range I took deliberate aim at him and saw him fall when I pulled the trigger.’ ”
That testimony was good enough for Ellis. “I have no doubt that many will not
be willing to accept what I say about the matter of General Wolfe’s death,” the
dime novelist acknowledged of his anecdotal evidence, “but at the same time
I think that even the most skeptical must admit that my version of it may have
foundation in fact.” He would not “vouch for the truth of it,” but he thought it
“merit[ed] consideration.”90
Spurious assertions such as these about truth in history fueled concerns
among professional educators in the NEA and elsewhere that standards of ve-
racity were not being met in popular historical literature. Justin Winsor may
well have been thinking about Ellis when he recounted the following exchange
he had with a writer about the place of facts in historical narratives. “A dis-
tinguished author, who sometimes writes history, once said to me, respecting
a proposition which he had made, that, if it were not true, it ought to be,”
Winsor noted. “It was better than truth to him, and no doubt was to his read-
ers.”91 Such conditional thinking caused some educators to despair altogether
of history instruction where works such as Ellis’s superceded those by experts
who knew “what to save and what to throw away.” Members of the Commit-
tee of Ten warned against exposing students to the wrong kind of literature
in a climate in which they were already disinclined toward reading textbooks.
It is important to keep in mind that this professional attack was not directed
against New Historians who sought to expand the subject matter of history in
their works; indeed, a number of committee members, James Harvey Robin-
son among them, advocated for wider-ranging cultural approaches to the past.
What they refused to tolerate, however, were histories that did not maintain
rigorous standards with reference to “a knowledge of the necessary facts” as
well as proper “relations of cause and effect” in cultural context. “In the judg-
ment of the Conference,” committee members noted, a standard history text
“ought to be something more than the mere development of a ‘story.’ ” It ought
to provide a truthful and complete picture, including “something on the social
and economic side, as well as on the political” in accordance with the rigor-
ous standards of fidelity established within the profession.92 Ellis’s historical
works were limited enough in scope and complexity even to be rejected by the
totalizing (past everything) New Historians like Eggleston.

Finally, Ellis was found lacking in his personal life in ways that reflected
on his reputation as a popular historian. In 1887, he and his wife underwent a
very public divorce that resulted from the disclosure of an affair she was having
with a close neighbor. The Ellises were married in 1862 and had had four chil-
dren together before she was discovered having a relationship with Watson F.
Van Camp, a former deputy state insurance commissioner of New Jersey,
who for years had been one of Edward’s “bosom friends.” The descriptions
in the newspapers of the disclosure of the affair—complete with overzealous
detectives, a jilted husband, a cheating wife, and an exposed lover—were like
something out of one of Ellis’s most tawdry dime novels. “There was an excit-
ing scene when the guilty couple were discovered,” wrote a New York Times
reporter assigned to the case. The irate husband had to be restrained by the
officers investigating the scene, one of whom threw his weapon out the win-
dow “to prevent Ellis from securing it,” while his contrite wife “fell screaming
upon her knees and begged her husband’s forgiveness.”93 Later, at her trial for
adultery, Annie testified “that she was guilty of infidelity, but claimed that her
husband was aware of it, and encouraged her in leading a dissolute life to in-
crease his income.” This shocked the courtroom and prompted the vice chan-
cellor in the case to rebuke not only “the woman scathingly for her statements”
but also “her betrayer.” Edward Ellis vehemently “denied all her allegations,”
but the affair invited “universal comment” nonetheless. “Owing to the high
standing of the parties in this city,” another New York Times article reported,
“the case attracts unusual attention.”94 Generally, popularizers coveted wide,
public interest in their activities, but this kind of notoriety was not helpful to
Ellis’s reputation as a public figure, as an educator, or as a writer.
The Sacred Past and the Terror of History

The Committee of Ten did not enter into the details of the personal lives
of the popularizers they condemned, but they did raise questions about the
philosophical implications of their undisciplined historical techniques. One
consistent complaint was that popular historians trained as fiction writers did
not have a proper appreciation for how time should function in their works.
Although the Youth’s History of the United States was structured chronologi-
cally (as a serialized novelist Ellis had a special concern for sequential narra-
tive), it demonstrated a surprising lack of formal rigor with respect to time and
an unusual casualness about strict temporal sequencing. “Now, you mustn’t
forget the order of events, for, as I told you, I have not followed them in giv-
ing my account of the war with Spain,” Ellis warned readers toward the end

of one edition of the Youth’s History. “I have thought it best to complete my
account of the war in our own hemisphere before giving attention to events
in the Far East; but in order to keep this account clear in your minds, you
must remember that we are now going back to a time—May 1—which was be-
fore the destruction of Cervera’s fleet and the decisive operations in Cuba and
Porto Rico.” The Youth’s History also revealed a good deal of what might be
called temporal stretching, historical figures anticipating events in ways that
are anachronistic. “Can it be that [King James I of England] was wise enough
to foresee what burst upon his country a hundred and fifty years later?” Ellis
noted in his description of the monarch’s hesitations about creating a colonial
empire. Elsewhere he asked: Are not the “shouts and laughter” of the children
playing “among the forest arches” in Thomas Hooker’s seventeenth-century
Connecticut heard still in the “clear and joyous” ring of “the youngsters of
today, who in turn must follow them?” Did not the founding fathers under-
stand that the Constitution they developed in 1787 would “govern our country
for ages to come?” he asked.95
Such temporal loosesness, encompassing vast historical periods and chal-
lenging traditional periodizations of time, left readers of Ellis’s works with an
impression of what David Lowenthal has called a “timeless past,” that is, a
history “characterized by little change” and focused on “timeless human na-
ture.”96 Ellis’s philosophy of history suggested that the past was more cyclical
than linear in its shape and that the true value of history was grounded not
just in the specifics of a particular epoch but also in the agreement or logical
coherence among successive acts, ideas, or events that informed the record
of all human existence. He was not as concerned as Ridpath had been with
charting the precise trajectory of these generalizing laws, because establishing
directionality was not important to one who envisioned the universal lessons
of history as relatively consistent over the entire time continuum. This Aris-
totelian concept of a “changeless or cycling eternity” implied that the precise
details of a specific historical moment were significant only as they revealed
the larger, mythic, patterns that characterized the human condition.97 Fic-
tion writers such as Ellis were prone to “transhistorical” statements because
they accepted without much question the philosophy of their mentor, Walter
Scott, that the passions are “generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all
countries and ages.” The compelling flexibility of this logic allowed novelists-
turned-historians such as Edward Ellis to justify subtle manipulations of the
historical record on the grounds that their works cast light on universal trends
rather than on particular historical episodes.98 After all, for dime novelists ac-
customed to working in formulaic ways, it was the moral impact of the story
that was important in the end, not the details of the plot.

In some ways, Ellis’s conception of historical time was similar to the “sa-
cred past” described by Mircea Eliade with reference to ancient cultures. Ac-
cording to Eliade, the ancients “envisioned events not as constituting a linear,
progressive history, but simply as so many creative repetitions of primordial
archetypes” composing a story “that can be repeated indefinitely.”99 Ellis’s
tendency to draw the “big mythic picture” in his dime novels extended readily
to his historical texts for children, in which he introduced unusual forms of
historical sequencing. In the Youth’s History, for instance, Ellis argued that the
things that made the United States a great nation in the late nineteenth century
were “present at the creation,” especially “its deep, underlying love of law and
order” which could not be eviscerated. Such blind faith in the consistency
and persistence of mythological preconditions to nationhood encouraged Ellis
to downplay or skip altogether those moments of disorder and those figures
of contention that challenged the validity and felicity of the grand principle.
Consequently, dissidents such as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass did not
find their way into Ellis’s narrative, nor did women suffragists such as Susan B.
Anthony. In addition, Ellis’s description of disunifying events—those he could
not responsibly ignore, the Civil War, for instance—were tempered with refer-
ences to the spirit of reconciliation and order that followed on their heels. As
if waking up from a long national nightmare, veterans of the Civil War “won-
dered how it was that they had mutually tested their mettle on the field of bat-
tle,” Ellis noted in the Youth’s History. “They wondered how it was they had
come to fight each other at all.” If there was “one blessed truth established” by
the armed conflict, he concluded optimistically, it was “that never again could
any section of this country become arrayed in arms against another section.”
All perceived that the goal was to “make peace on a basis which would be sat-
isfactory and might be rendered perpetual.”100
We find strong evidence of Ellis’s endorsement of a perpetual, sacred past in
another of his widely circulating works within the genre, Popular History of the
World: From Dawn of Information to the Present Time (1900). In the introduc-
tion to this single-volume compendium, Ellis acknowledged that “it is conve-
nient to separate [history] into the grand divisions” of Thalmeimer (Ancient,
Mediaeval, Modern) as Ridpath had while teaching at DePauw but he added
that such periodizations should not obscure the importance of the broad, gen-
eralizing principles cutting across all eras that reveal the consistencies of the
human condition. According to Ellis, such ubiquitous themes included “the
jealousies between nations, the widespread discontent, the intolerable condi-
tions, the greed for territory, fanaticism, racial hatred, and the myriad causes of
strife [that] array men against one another,” all of which, he argued, continued
“to vex mankind as they will doubtless do for many a year before the dawn

of that reign of universal peace for which we all yearn or pray.” The logical
coherence of all ages made it as unnecessary as it was impractical for historians
to attempt to narrate every detail of the historical record as New Historians
desired. “To tell everything that has taken place since man was created would
fill many big books,” Ellis argued in the Popular History of the World. “Much
would be interesting and much dull, while hundreds of events were so similar
that you would often think you were reading the same story over again. Then,
too, you would become lost among so many incidents, just as if you were in the
depth of a vast forest and did not know how to find your way out.” The best
plan for distinguishing the proverbial forest from the trees, he offered, was “to
learn in what ways ancient history, or what men did in the early times, affected
the history that followed.”101 “Time’s cycle,” as Stephen Jay Gould defined
the outlook, “seeks immanence, a set of principles so general that they exist
outside of time and record a universal character, a common bond, among all of
nature’s rich particulars.”102
In the Popular History of the World, Ellis employed a “panoramic view of
human time” in which “ancient, medieval and modern” were depicted not
so much as distinct periods as components of a “unified narrative.”103 This
approach allowed him to emphasize the interdependency of countries and
their respective histories. “As we advance in the study of modern history in
Europe, we shall find that the records of the different nations are much in-
terwoven with one another,” Ellis wrote of his composite philosophy of his-
tory. Such a strategy also encouraged him to jump somewhat indiscriminately
across chronological periods and to draw correspondences that underscored
the substitutability of historical episodes. No analogy seemed too extrava-
gant for Ellis’s transhitorical disposition. He likened Sparta and Athens to the
North and the South in the Civil War; Peter the Great to an “Apache Indian”;
and the excesses of Louis XVI’s France to those of “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
In addition, he felt justified in pointing out how certain human impulses
(good and bad) revealed themselves consistently no matter what the temporal
context. Hence, Spanish conquistadors of the sixteenth century and Span-
ish dictators of the nineteenth displayed a common pattern of cruelty that
was culturally embedded and historically inevitable, according to Ellis. While
Anglo-Saxons of every age tend to make changes to government by means of
reform with “rarely any trouble,” he wrote in the ethnocentric language com-
mon to his age, those from southern Europe in general and Spain in particular
sought change “by revolution, in which thousands of people do all they can to
kill thousands of other people. That is the Latin style of improving matters,”
he concluded. The Ottoman Empire was “no more capable of giving good
government to her subjects than Spain,” he added, noting that Turks were

“Mohammedans who hate all Christians with such intensity that they would
be delighted to kill every one on the face of the earth.” The immutable nature
of this defect, which had made Turks “an intolerable nuisance for centuries,”
convinced Ellis that they, in turn, should be “blotted from the earth.”104 The
irony that such a murderous sentiment was expressed by an Anglo-Saxon was
evidently lost on him.
Importantly, the Popular History of the World proceeded from ancient to
modern through descriptions of a series of representative acts, one example
often sufficing to elucidate a generalized point about the human condition for
all ages. Some of this was religiously motivated. After affirming that “God made
the earth, divided it into land and water, [and] brought into being all forms of
vegetable and animal life,” Ellis noted, God then made all men “in His own
image” so that, despite wide “difference[s] in their color and looks,” the entire
species experiences life in consistent ways. In modern Egypt, as in Ancient
Egypt, he wrote, “[e]very year the river overflows the country along its banks
and leaves a thick deposit of mud, which so enriches the soil that all the people
have to do is to plant the seed, which is sure to bring plentiful crops.” Against
this backdrop of never-ending natural cycles, Egyptians proved themselves
remarkably and tragically consistent in behavior. “The most striking feature
of their civilization was its fixed character,” Ellis noted. “It did not advance,
the Egyptians of the latter days when the country became a Roman province,
knowing no more than their forefathers of the first dynasty.” Elsewhere Ellis
demonstrated a preference for universal rather than particularist philosophies
of history by arguing that the apocalyptic reactions of Europeans to the Dark
Ages were symptomatic of that “most powerful” “instinct of self preservation”
that “moves us” all in every age to recognize “that something must be done
to prevent ruin and destruction.” The consistency of human experience was
emphasized further in the resistance of Americans to the tyranny of England
at the outset of the Revolution. The pursuit of independence was something
almost primordial for Ellis, a force against which colonists were “resistless”
because it appealed to the deepest instincts of human nature.105
Sacred history pursued in this fashion was rather comforting, of course,
because it allowed Ellis to escape what Eliade refers to as the “burden of time.”
Those who embrace a sacred past tend to “revolt against concrete, historical
time” in “their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical time of the be-
ginning of things, to the ‘Great Time.’ ” History (understood as the study of
discrete moments in time) reminds us that we are mortal, that we are finite and
limited by historical perspective. We can escape the “terror of history,” how-
ever, by maintaining the illusion that we can enter the historical continuum at
any temporal point and understand the relevance for our lives of the stories

contained therein.106 That is, the consistency of past experience renders us
metaphorically immortal by allowing us to share in the universal experiences
of others not in our midst. Ellis’s expectation that readers of history could
be transported imaginatively from one age to another found a receptive audi-
ence among those in the late nineteenth century fascinated by the time-travel
themes of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and H. G. Wells’s The Time
Machine.107 For Ellis, belief in a sacred or timeless past that was knowable may
have been more than metaphoric as well. He ended his Popular History with
a curious, Mary Shelley–like reflection on mythical time as it relates to cycles
of death. In a section on the inventive genius of Americans, Ellis remarked:
“Moreover it is the faith of many that the time is at hand when the most mo-
mentous of all discoveries that can bless mankind will be made—that is the
scientific proof of immortality or a life beyond the grave.”108
Whether readers took Ellis seriously in his suggestions about the scientific
pursuit of immortality, they did accept much of the presentism that condi-
tioned his historical vision. The concept of a “sacred past” implied the im-
portance of the contemporary moment, of a present which represents all time
in distillation. If the human record has been consistent in purpose and mean-
ing, then we should be able to extrapolate from “its current order” to “infer
its past,” Stephen J. Gould has noted of this position.109 Sympathetic readers
of the Popular History of the World recognized its contemporary flavor and
marveled at how Ellis was able to convey such “immense and varied informa-
tion” about the past without losing his “perfect grasp of historical proportion
and perspective” with respect to the present.110 They also appreciated his ef-
fort to give as much attention to current events as ancient ones, a commitment
made explicit in the subtitle of the work: Including Complete Triumphs of the
Nineteenth Century. No better evidence of this presentism exists than in the
decisions Ellis made about the apportioning of space in the Popular History.
In a book of 567 pages that aspired to tell the history of the entire world from
beginning to end, Ellis devoted 301 pages to the United States, leaving only 188
pages for all other civilizations and nation-states. This compression reaffirmed
Ellis’s belief that the contemporary epoch must be the key to understanding
the past, the present providing glimpses of the past in the manner of Merlin,
who lived life backwards.111 Ellis’s search for “personal meaning and contem-
porary relevance” may have jeopardized his abilities to perceive “the ways in
which people of the past differ from us,” as Mark Carnes has noted of other
novelists-turned-historians, but they certainly appealed to those readers who
shared his consolidating views.112
Ellis, of course, did not embrace the sacred past in its purest, solipsistic
form; if he had, he could not have called himself a historian. Distilled to its

essence, the sacred or timeless past is ahistorical insofar as its cyclical struc-
ture suggests that “nothing can be distinctive because everything comes round
again—and no event, by itself, can tell us where we are, for nothing anchors
us to any particular point in time, but only (at most) to a particular stage of a
repeating cycle.” Why study in detail the distinctive elements of any specific
event when it represents but “one of a potentially endless class?” Taken to its
illogical extreme, Gould notes, such a position would require a denial of his-
tory, each event of the past appearing “so similar to its corresponding stage in
the previous cycle that no criterion of history could be established.”113 This
is one reason why Eliade associated the sacred past with archaic cultures. He
believed that its ahistorical elements were most consistent with pre-literate
conceptualizations of time as understood in such cultures. To the extent that
archaic beings focused on the immediate needs of the present, time mattered
little; “so long as our attention is concentrated on the present we tend to be
unaware of time.” The “feeling or awareness of duration” that is associated
with a “sense of time” emerges only when “the present situation is related by
us either to our past experiences or to our future expectations and desires.”
It is irrelevant to those who live in a “consistent present.” Not until beings
reflected consciously on the fact that they live and die like all creatures, not
until they were led “intuitively to try to circumvent the relentless flux of time
by seeking to perpetuate [their] own existence indefinitely,” as G. J. Whitrow
has noted, did history matter.114
Since at least antiquity, however, history has mattered, and time has come
to be understood as “an abstract conceptual framework” that has been “con-
structed” from experience as a way of preserving memory. This “discovery of
time,” to use Whitrow’s apt phrase, produced opportunities for those who
sought to give expression to their consciousness of the passage of temporal
phases through narratives structured by verbal tenses conveying a sense of
past, present and future.115 History became subsequently “a sequence of par-
ticular events in time” which, “when considered in proper [order], tell a story
of linked events moving in a direction.” Historians disagree over the precise
trajectory of “time’s arrow,” as Gould referred to such linear history, but even
Ellis recognized that duration (Bergson’s “la durée”) was at least as important
an element in historical analysis as the study of the “present instant.” As we
noted in our discussion of Eggleston and New History, by the end of the nine-
teenth century, historians gradually focused their attentions “on the historical
process rather than on an eternally valid, unchanging order of things.” Inter-
est simultaneously shifted “from the ‘thing completed’ to the genetic process,
that is, from ‘being to becoming,’ ” and truth came to be regarded by many
as no longer “eternal and changeless” but as “time-dependent” and fixed.116

Although he embraced universal, timeless themes of a sacred past, therefore,
Ellis organized his histories by distinct time-specific epochs.
Ellis’s reflections on linear time were influenced by the horological debates
in the nineteenth century over the concept of the “long chronology”—that is,
the recognition spurred on by research in the fields of geology and paleontol-
ogy that human history did not begin a mere six thousand years before the
twentieth century, as implied by the biblical or Mosaic chronology, but many
thousands of years before that. This recognition had a dramatic impact on the
way history was conceptualized by popularizers and scholars in the nineteenth
century. On the one hand, the rejection of an antediluvian view of the world for
an archaeological one expanded dramatically the scale of human time: from a
few thousand years to hundreds of thousands of years. As Thomas Trautmann
has written, “[t]ime opened out indefinitely backward” as a consequence of
this discovery of “deep time”; in one sense, “we may truly say that the bottom
dropped out of history,” demanding a recognition of the vastness of human ex-
perience.117 On the other hand, as a result of the long chronology, “ ‘[h]istory’
came to be understood, in a narrow sense, as a relatively recent and brief pe-
riod of human time, defined in opposition to its newly discovered precursor:
‘prehistory.’ ” As Daniel Segal has noted, the use of prehistory as a periodizing
device encouraged historians to view “historical time as both brief and entirely
recent,” a “ ‘surveyable’ whole integrally attached to, rather than distant from,
the present.” This construction of time caused some to believe that what had
previously been called “ancient” history was really very contemporary history,
relatively speaking. We share a great deal more in common with the ancients,
the argument went, than we do with those preliterate, prehistorical humans
who inhabited the Earth centuries before the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
Hence, the concept of the long chronology ironically encouraged the collaps-
ing of distinctions between time and place, “foreshortening . . . temporal per-
spective” and compressing the distances among periods of recorded human
history when measured against the vast expanse of unrecorded time.118
Ellis’s popular historical writings reflected the accordianlike effects of this
expanding and contracting of time. As noted previously, Ellis believed in cycli-
cal patterns of human experience and was predisposed to find commonalities
between the ancient and modern worlds. Yet as a novelist he was also accus-
tomed to charting change over time, employing the trope of progress as a device
for structuring the story of human history. The Popular History of the World, for
instance, ended with ruminations on the “triumphs” of the nineteenth century
in which the spirit of American invention reflected the apotheosis of human in-
novation as measured over time. He argued that “the increase of industrial pro-
duction by the application of machinery” and “the improvement of old technical

processes and the invention of new ones” formed “the most salient features of
the world’s progress” over the past fifty years, and he predicted that “we stand
on the edge of the most astounding discoveries and inventions ever conceived
by man.”119 The question was: how could Ellis’s conception of history be both
“eternal and changeless” on the one hand and “time-dependent” and progres-
sive on the other?120 At issue were differing conceptions of the meaning of time,
especially the dichotomy between history understood as distinct moments of
time in a temporal series with directionality, and history conceived of as non-
linear, characterized by events that have meaning not “as distinct episodes with
causal impact upon a contingent history” but as “fundamental states,” “imma-
nent in time, always present and never changing.” As Gould has noted, the dis-
tinction was the same as that between historian and novelist, between “distinct
and irreversible events” and a “timeless order and lawlike structure.”121
One way historians at the turn of the century resolved this seeming paradox
was to consider time three-dimensionally and to employ the geometric meta-
phor of a spiral to conceptualize change over time. By this logic, events cycle
through predictable stages and demonstrate patterns of repetition, but such
phases “repeat with crucial differences each time.” As Gould has noted with
reference to geological time conceived as a coil, “the material substrate does not
change (for the same stuff cycles), but resulting forms alter, often in a definite
direction so that each repetition passes with distinctive and identifiable differ-
ences.” If we “impose a vector of history upon any set of cycles,” “guarantee-
ing that no phase can repeat exactly the corresponding part of a former cycle,”
then the concept of a unidirectional approach to the past (either progressive or
regressive) can be reconciled with a belief in the universal experience of human
history. The result is that histories such as Ellis’s “weave a subtle interplay be-
tween elements of repetition (to display order and plan), and strands of differ-
ence (to permit a recognizable history).”122 Ellis, the untrained historian, never
articulated fully any scheme for the elucidation of the role of time in his nov-
els or histories that approximated the complexity of Gould’s model, but there
is evidence throughout the Popular History of the World that he did embrace
the idea of a cyclical history corkscrewing through time. The development of
France was described by Ellis as one big cycle of religious and class warfare,
for instance, culminating at each turn of the metaphoric wheel in the same dis-
turbing “series of massacres,” persecution and destruction. “France went back-
ward” at times “when “intrigues, plotting and trouble were constant for years,”
according to Ellis, and forward at others into a “new life.” But, in the end, the
results were always the same. The “excitable” residents of this “mad republic”
were “never wholly free from the danger of revolution,” he concluded, noting
that, even at the time of the writing of the Popular History, France had narrowly

averted a “new revolution” that would have left the streets once again “deluged
with blood.” “As it is,” he suggested with telling pessimism, “no one can say”
when “this catastrophe will again befall the country that has been so often torn
by civil war,” only that “it will come.”123
Ellis’s readers did not comment on the “subtle interplay” between linear
and cyclical models of time in the Popular History, nor did they care about
the patterns of temporality embedded in any of his work. Most were more in-
terested in its readability and its usefulness in terms of teaching the lessons of
the past. Ellis’s training as a novelist was his most valued asset in this context.
Ellis’s “language is clear and graphic” and his statements are “verified by the
highest authorities,” wrote one contemporary. “It has been said of his works
that they possess the fascination of a novel,” the reviewer continued, “and
when to this are added accuracy and the true dramatic instinct, it will be con-
ceded that he possesses in pre-eminent degree the full equipment of the suc-
cessful historian.”124 Others were less sure that “science-fiction writers” such
as Ellis or H. G. Wells could quality as “successful historian[s],” including
most professional scholars who adopted Duyckinck’s strategy with respect to
Lippard and Frost by choosing not to review Ellis’s works. Their professional
principles simply could not accommodate so pedestrian a production. “It may
seem that if a novelist can write the history of mankind a professor of history
might venture to pronounce upon its merits in respect to scholarship and as a
contribution to knowledge,” wrote Carl Becker. “Such is not the case” in prac-
tice, however, because scholars were constrained by rigid professional codes
regarding what qualifies as history and what does not. While the “man of let-
ters may without reproach acquire a knowledge of general history,” Becker
concluded, “the professor of history is not thus free.”125
Outside the Scope of History

After the publication of the Popular History of the World, Ellis wrestled
for the remainder of his life with the implications of the distinctions between
being a novelist and a historian and the dichotomies between time’s arrow and
time’s cycle. The tensions that resulted were evident in The People’s Standard
History of the United States (also published as The History of Our Country), a
multivolume popular narrative of the development of the United States from
the age of discovery to the late 1890s. The publishers approached Ellis with an
offer to write the volumes as part of a home-study program, the latest in a series
of efforts derived originally from Duyckinck’s Home Library to find new niches
for their works. “Home Study broadens the mind, quickens the intellect, adds

to and perfects the education, and is now very generally recognized as an invalu-
able aid to success in life,” the canvassing materials for the work proclaimed. In
a declaration of educational independence that must have frightened National
Education Association representatives, the publishers encouraged parents to
stop relying for historical knowledge on the public schools that were failing
them and to take up the “laudable work of home-education” as a responsible
alternative. “[I]t is our ambition to produce educational series of highest value,
and furnish them in such a convenient way as to place opportunity for home
study in reach of every one,” they noted, adding that Ellis’s work was the “latest
and greatest help to those seeking knowledge of their native land.” It was the
“arrangement of the subject-matter” that was most noteworthy, the publishers
argued, “it being the desire of the publishers to place the information before the
reader in such a way as to make it easy to remember.”126
Sold by subscription, The People’s Standard History of the United States
was directed at both scholarly audiences accustomed to linear views of history
and popular ones disposed toward the cyclical. With regard to the former, the
salesman’s dummy for the first 1896 edition included promotional material
portraying Ellis as a researcher who had spent “years in collecting, sifting and
verifying material for this work.” Readers were assured that “every page has
been read carefully by historical authorities and pronounced correct” and that
The People’s Standard History constituted “a complete record of the events
that have brought our country to its present commanding position.”127 To
those subscribers who suspected that the dime novel background of Ellis com-
promised his credentials as a historian, the author and publishers responded
unequivocally that his material was grounded in solid fact and personal ac-
quaintance with the material. With respect to concerns about the authenticity
of his treatment of Native Americans, for instance, Ellis wrote: “Yes, I have
seen and known a great many Indians, some good and some bad . . . I met a
great many some years ago when in the Indian Territory and knew others.”128
The author “has personally discussed many of the incidents here recorded
with statesmen and warriors,” added the publishers, “many of whom have had
a prominent part in the making of the history of this country, thus proving the
authenticity of each statement.”129 Ellis even presumed to correct the misstate-
ments of other historians whose research he found wanting, including Sydney
Howard Gay, whom he wrote personally concerning several inaccurate dates
in Bryant’s Popular History of the United States.130
Ellis also demonstrated his commitment to traditional scholarship in The
People’s Standard History by providing annotated comments at the beginning
of each chapter in the text, complete with a bibliographic list of “authorities”
consulted to establish the authority of his scholarly pronouncements. For those

Frontispiece from the salesman’s dummy for Ellis’s History of Our Country
(released originally as The People’s Standard History of the United States).

uncomfortable with the topical approach he sometimes used, Ellis included
a detailed chronological chart at the end of his last volume that established a
precise time line of events. Throughout the text he cited books by respected
professors of history at colleges and universities across the country as well as
professional articles in the American Historical Review. Whenever topics of de-
bate that scholars had not resolved presented themselves, Ellis tried to clarify
details by citing sources that he had gathered or consulted that might shed light
on the subject. In one instance in which confusion existed among the experts
regarding whom to credit with an act of bravery at sea, Ellis wrote: “Since sev-
eral persons have claimed this honor, it is well that it should be established
beyond dispute,” and then provided the texts of several letters he had solicited
from participants in the events clarifying matters. “In response to an inquiry the
following letter was written” was a frequent notation in his volumes, and Ellis
gathered evidence from as far away as Madrid, Spain, and Sydney, Australia, in
order to establish that “there can be no question of the basis” of his claims.131
That said, Ellis resorted to literary practices and philosophical dispositions
in The People’s Standard History that reminded readers he had not strayed far
from his dime novelist roots. Salesmen’s dummies advertised Ellis as a sto-
ryteller by profession who aspired in his popular histories to more than as-
sembling mere compendia of facts. Literary style and the packaging of ideas
concerned him greatly. “That the text matter is written in a most fascinating
manner, is acknowledged by all,” the promoters noted. “The reason for this
lies in the extraordinary ability of Mr. Ellis as a writer of fiction. He has a repu-
tation in this line second only to his ability as a historian, and has therefore a
decided advantage over other writers. History reading is thus made a positive
pleasure.” The publishers expected that the subscription or “magazine form”
of The People’s Standard History would appeal “to the business man, club
woman, student, child, and in fact, all who desire easy access to information on
this subject. By the nature of its contents,” they added, “it is an encyclopedia,
a geography, a treatise on political life and civil government; while its master-
ful style and composition make it a most valuable aid to speaking and writing
the English language correctly.”132 The introductory essay to the volumes also
claimed that Ellis would present a vivid “historical tableau” based on the nar-
rative successes of his earlier works, such as Stories from American History, in
which he warned readers that no attempt was made “to give a connected or
consecutive record, but rather [only] to relate a number of striking incidents
and to arouse the desire for an acquaintance with the full story. . . .”133 The
“authenticity” of Ellis’s accounts, derived from his personal association with
the personages and events of history, in other words, also contributed to their
idiosyncratic and highly personalized formats.

Throughout the volumes of The People’s Standard History, Ellis reverted to
the use of dime novel sensationalism when he felt his narrative was dragging.
“[T]he ground[s] in each of the patches of woods and the clearing were strewn
with dead bodies,” Ellis wrote in graphic detail of the Civil War battle of Bloody
Lane. “The fighters could not always step over the inanimate forms, but were
often forced to tread upon them where they lay two and three deep. Hundreds
of the latter were not dead, but dying, and their shrieks, mingling with the crash
of musketry, the roar of cannon, and the yells of the combatants made a din
beyond the power of imagination to picture.” At Gettysburg, the “dead and
dying” were everywhere, “in the wheat-field, among the rocks, in the highways,
on the open plain.” In ways that recalled the gratuitous death scenes in his west-
ern tales, Elllis noted how “[f ]riend and foe alike” were found “side by side,
with their glassy eyes staring at the blue sky, and the dusty ground steaming
with their blood. Others, mangled and torn, shrieked for water and for some
one to shoot and relieve them from their agony.” Reviving his old techniques for
increasing in his readers a sense of participation in the past, he slipped into the
present tense when describing Pickett’s charge. “With the precision of parade,
Pickett’s division now moves forward in three lines upon its great charge against
the Union intrenchments,” he narrated. “It leaves several hundred dead upon
the ground as its lines re-form, and others are so prostrated by the excessive
heat that they cannot rise to their feet.” In these and in other such descriptions
of American military conflicts, Ellis sought to produce “a quickening of the
pulse and a tingling of the blood” among readers who had grown complacent
to the stirring and disturbing realities of war.134
As he had been in the Popular History of the World, Ellis was casual and
nonscholarly in his treatment of time in The People’s Standard History, jump-
ing back and forth across centuries in ways that threatened temporal order. In
the former work, Ellis had asked readers to imagine what the reaction of George
Washington would have been to the knowledge on his deathbed that “there
would be persons then born who would live to see people whirled across the
country at a rate of seventy miles an hour.” The first president would have “pit-
ied the madmen who uttered the wild prophecies” in such an anachronistic
manner, he concluded.135 In the latter history, Ellis evoked Washington again in
the context of the popular pastime of baseball in ways that reflected more on the
ageless elements of the game than on the timelessness of the man. Washington
was “so honest,” Ellis wrote of the colonial hero, “that when the other boys got
into a dispute they appealed to him to settle it, and every one was satisfied, for
whatever he said was right. The game of base-ball was unknown in those days,”
he added, using an improbable anachronistic analogy. “[T]herefore one can-
not be quite sure that there might not have been a situation in which the youth

could be placed where his decisions would not always have given satisfaction.”
Ellis also developed historical analogies that collapsed the distinctions of time
and place in favor of the universality of human experience. “Once more it is
Greek against Greek,” Ellis wrote of the battle of Gettysburg as an epic struggle
with Olympian ramifications for the American people. On reflection, he noted,
it was more the “Waterloo of the Confederacy.” An engineering feat accom-
plished by Union forces during the Red River Expedition reminded Ellis “of
the triumph of the engineer who baffled for so long the attack of the Romans
under Marcellus, during the siege of Syracuse.” General George H. Thomas
of the North was a contemporary “Cincinnatus, the grim old commander of
the Roman legions,” while McClellan was a “modern Fabius” because of his
“do-nothing tactics.” Henry Ward Beecher’s orations were “the Philippies of
Demosthenes,” and Andrew Jackson was “as much of an autocrat . . . as is the
Czar of Russia to-day.”136
Ellis revealed as well a popularizer’s tendency to fixate on an eternal present.
Operating from the relativistic theory that the present instant represents all time
in distillation and assuming that readers were more interested in the immedi-
ate world around them than the ancient past, Ellis focused a disproportionate
amount of his narrative on current events. After cramming the entire colonial
period and the history of the Revolution in the first two volumes of the eight-
volume edition of The People’s Standard History, for instance, the popular his-
torian allotted three volumes to the telling of the story of the last seventeen years
of American history. In fact, the last two and a half volumes were given over
exclusively to the McKinley administration, barely two years old when the vol-
umes went to press. This apportioning of space in favor of the contemporary
moment reflected a general trend among popular historians of focusing on the
“here and now” of national experience as well as a particular fixation of Ellis’s,
who regretted that few historians of the United States extended their narra-
tives much beyond the Centennial Celebrations of 1876.137 George Bancroft had
written “a magnificent library” of “incalculable value to students of the history
of our country,” Ellis noted, but its primary defect was that “it stops before
reaching our modern stage of development.”138 Gay had mistimed his work and
ignored the contemporary moment entirely. Determined in response to carry
his story through to the present moment, Ellis was vulnerable to the criticism
that sufficient time had not passed for him to render balanced judgments or
to establish critical distance and objectivity. Reviewer Edwin E. Sparks argued
that the “perspective is bad” in the series, “nearly three” of the volumes “being
given to the Civil War and one to the Spanish-American War” while the “politi-
cal and social evolution of the people” was “scarcely touched.” Ellis believed,
however, that contemporary things mattered more than ancient historical ones

to the popular audiences he wished to reach, and he thus dismissed charges
such as Sparks’s that he had violated rules of “modern investigation” with re-
gard to proportionality of material.139
The effect of this telescoping of history was to emphasize the relevance of
contemporary issues for readers already predisposed to favor personal experi-
ence over disembodied facts. More than most audiences, readers of popular
literature wished to find evidence of themselves in the books they purchased,
and Ellis understood perfectly the economic value of a relativistic philosophy
that focused on the present needs of the contemporary reader. Anticipating
by several decades Carl Becker’s essay “Everyman His Own Historian,” Ellis
suggested that understanding history required no special status on the part of
observers other than a sensitivity to the world around them and an ability to
read back into the past those lessons suggested by the present. Just as each age
reinterprets the past to suit its purposes, so every individual must view history
in light of his or her own present circumstances, Becker noted. In this sense
all history is “contemporaneous” because it emerges from our “individual ex-
perience” and adapts to our personal needs.140 “It goes without saying” that
popular historians such as Ellis were not “in the conventional sense, objective,”
Becker added, since they had “a very special, even a personal, interest in the
past.” Eschewing “that cosmic point of view which reduced Henry Adams
to the cold comfort of a mechanical formula,” popular historians understood
that “the last three thousand years of human history are more worthy of our
attention than the preceding three hundred and forty-seven thousand, for the
simple reason that they are ‘more interesting to us.’ ” History for Ellis was “an
attempt to tell how our present state of affairs, this distressed and multifarious
human life about us, arose in the course of vast ages and out of the inanimate
clash of matter, and to estimate the quality and amount and range of the hopes
with which it now faces its destiny.”141
The People’s Standard History of the United States was structured and
marketed as the kind of work that would allow average readers to appreciate
the “specious present” by encouraging them, as James Harvey Robinson and
Charles Beard urged, to “catch up with [their] own times” and to “read in-
telligently the foreign news in the morning paper.”142 A large segment of the
sixth volume of the series was devoted exclusively to narrating the history of
labor strife in America in the 1880s, for instance, a subject the publisher, the
Jones Brothers of Cincinnati, believed would be of interest to the “immense
numbers of persons who naturally feel a sympathy with poor men struggling
to better their condition.”143 After reciting at length the details of the Pullman,
Homestead, and a dozen other strikes, Ellis jumped quickly to presentist as-
sumptions concerning the relevance of these descriptions for middle class

readers, many of whom, he presumed, had been affected directly by the inci-
dents. The history of labor in America is “calculated to arouse sympathy for
the workingmen, and some anxiety for the stability of the government,” Ellis
noted, because too often “men are given rank according to the amount of mate-
rial wealth they may possess without taking into consideration their moral and
mental equipment, and the means by which they have gained their wealth.”
Labor unions, therefore, “have proved of immense value to their members, and
to the general public.” Unfortunately, Ellis editorialized, “the workingmen are
frequently ill advised and misled and taken advantage of by ignorant or unscru-
pulous demagogues within and without their own ranks” who are “very apt to
engage as their leader the noisy, ignorant, blatant demagogue, who in any game
of diplomacy can be outwitted by a man of affairs.” Ellis’s conclusion was that
such leaders discredited unions with their despicable behavior, and he urged
readers to view their own circumstances as confirmation of that fact.144
Conflating the past with the present in highly personalized ways, Ellis was
not averse to presenting subjective views on contemporary matters under the
guise of general or popular history. The politics of immigration and the rise of
labor unions were two of his special concerns. “The right to strike is as clear as
the right to breathe,” Ellis argued, “but the wrong is committed when the strik-
ers, as is nearly always the case, use violence to prevent others from taking their
places. Not only that, but they pillage and destroy property, and some of the des-
perate persons among them (quite often criminals who are the worst enemies
of the strikers) commit atrocious misdeeds.” Such was true especially for the
Pullman Strike which provided Ellis with an opportunity to restate his opinions
on immigration policy first presented in the Youth’s History of the United States.
Threatened by “the thousands that flock to our shores” representing “the very
dregs of society in the Old World,” Ellis disliked especially the “Anarchists,
who scoff at religion and the most sacred of ordinances, and whose aim in life
is to destroy existing governments by means of violence and murder.” They are
the “rabble of Europe,” he noted, who “come here, not with the intention of
becoming good, law-abiding citizens of our republic, but to breed discontent
among our workingmen and to reap advantage from the dissensions that result
from their mischievous propaganda.”145 Arguing that Americans have been too
generous in conferring the “elective franchise” on such peoples, Ellis added:
“It was seen that the mobs were composed of foreigners—not those that had
spent several years in the country and had become Americans in sentiment (and
they include many of our best citizens), but ignorant, brutal aliens, the dregs
of Europe, hardly able to speak the English language. They were the tools of
demagogues, who, like the pestilent carpet-baggers of the South, were eager to
adopt any means that promised them personal advantage.”146

Such ethnocentric pronouncements revealed how fully Ellis shared in the
prevalent stereotypes of his age; they also suggested the extent to which he
practiced what he preached with respect to historical methodology. His out-
spoken comments on matters of ethnicity and race shared by so many at the
end of the nineteenth century were vivid demonstrations of his subjectivizing
philosophy in action. It was the historian’s obligation to declaim, Ellis argued,
and declaim he did. Italians encouraged the abuses of the ancient order of the
Mafia, that “atrocious band” which “includes assassins who do not hesitate
to take the lives of those whom they dislike,” he noted. The Chinese were “a
peculiar people,” “yellow Asiatics” who “began swarming across the Pacific
to California in such multitudes that the people became alarmed.” They were
“barbarians” of a primitive age, obsolete members of an “inferior race,” whose
“degraded and vicious” nature “is proved by a visit to ‘Chinatown’ in San Fran-
cisco, and the Chinese quarters in other cities.” Races such as the “Aborigines
of Peru and Mexico” or the “negro population” fared little better. They dem-
onstrated the ancient law that “an inferior civilization coming into contact with
a civilization that is superior is destroyed,” he wrote. If ontology recapitulated
phylogeny, to cite a famous dictum of the day, then these races were doomed in
Ellis’s estimation. Citing the celebrated phrase of Spencer that Ridpath had put
to good use—“the survival of the fittest”—Ellis argued that there could be no
relief from the inexorable law by which such peoples were eclipsed by time. For
these races, there were “no new lessons to be learned,” he quoted an eminent
scholar in the field, “but only confirmation of some that are very old.”147
Presentism also influenced the way Ellis treated these groups as historical
entities in his works. The binary distinction implicit in the long chronology
between prehistory and history encouraged him to assume that either peoples
met the qualifications of the standards of the present or they were outside the
scope of time. Ellis was sympathetic toward Native Americans, for instance,
and reminded readers that “much of the Indian blood spilled on this continent
was due to the coming of the white man, who was the intruder and the invader
of the homes and the hunting-grounds of the native races.” Some tribes, espe-
cially the Cherokee, had made the effort to “civilize” themselves. That said, Ellis
also recognized that many “portions of the [Indian] race” had “lapse[d] into
barbarism,” the typical Native American showing little hope of “eradicat[ing]
from his nature those dispositions and tendencies that drag him backward.”148
Ellis acknowledged that an exhibit at the Omaha Exposition of 1898 contrasted
“[r]elics of the prehistoric people” with “the printing-presses and newspapers
of the modern Indian,” but in general he portrayed Native Americans as mem-
bers of a doomed race incapable of making the full transition to civilization. Dan-
iel Segal notes that “primitive peoples” are often depicted in popular histories

such as Ellis’s as “arrested in time, frozen vestiges of prehistory operating in
history.” Native Americans like the hunter-gatherers described in The People’s
Standard History are “figured as remains of ‘prehistory,’ rather than as living
in ‘history.’ ” Such an approach, Segal notes, is “profoundly ahistorical” since
“distributing coeval human beings to different segments of a vast time line
masks the interaction between, say, twentieth-century states and twentieth-
century forms of hunting and gathering.”149
Ahistorical approaches to racial and ethnic concerns were also evident in
Ellis’s treatment of the most significant contemporary problem of his day—the
Spanish-American War. Referring to its struggle for independence in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, Ellis noted that “Cuba was making history
fast,” a phrasing that revealed how accelerated and contemporaneous his per-
spective was with regard to the passage of time.150 In 1896, when the first edition
of The People’s Standard History was published, war had not been declared of-
ficially, although the struggle for Cuban independence was waging. Ellis, who
was strongly in favor of intervention in the war, argued in opposition to other
popular historians such as Edward Eggleston of the Anti-Imperial League. In
an 1896 piece titled “Questions for the Next Administration to Consider,”
Ellis warned newly elected President McKinley that Spain would provoke a
war with America eventually, and that there could be but one result: “She will
receive the most complete and overwhelming trouncing that one nation ever
inflicted upon another, and Cuba will become independent, to be followed at
no distant day by her absorption into the great American Union.”151 Associat-
ing the Spanish with those primitive and irrelevant peoples who belonged to
prehistory, Ellis argued that “Spain has been a blight and a curse wherever she
placed her hand in the Western hemisphere; she has been rapacious, brutal to
the last degree, treacherous, and as merciless to honorable foes as she was to
the poor natives themselves. Fire, the sword, blood, and outrage followed in
her footsteps from the days of the brutal Menendez, founder of St. Augustine,
until the present hour, when she is putting forth every possible effort to sub-
due the uprising in Cuba.”152
In the 1899 edition of The People’s Standard History, published just after
the Spanish-American War had concluded, Ellis was even more outspoken
about the Spanish peoples whom he found “so wily, so adroit, and so treach-
erous.” Drawing on accounts of the war he pieced together from recent news-
papers and from his personal recollections, Ellis used the present tense in his
description of the conflict not only to give readers a sense of participation in
the struggle but also to emphasize the importance of the contemporary in
historical assessments. Sometimes this proved anachronistic, such as when
he failed to update a passage from the 1896 edition in which he spoke of the

“inevitable end in sight” to a war that had concluded months earlier. Or, on
another occasion, Ellis hinted at his special clairvoyance by claiming that the
independence of Porto Rico (secured before the publication of the 1899 edi-
tion of the work had been issued) was a “momentous” event, “which, to all
intelligent men [such as himself, presumably], was foreseen from the begin-
ning.” Ellis acknowledged that the rules of historical engagement required
some balance, although he was never willing to relinquish too many of his
subjective opinions. “It would be idle to deny that we Americans have a ten-
dency to boastfulness and that at times the spirit passes the limits of good
taste and possibly of strict taste,” he admitted; “but, on the other hand, there
is ground for the claim that we boast because the facts warrant us in doing
so.” The War was “an impressive illustration of the superiority of the Anglo-
Saxon over the Latin race, and one of the many unerring indications of the
‘manifest destiny’ of America,” he concluded in a manner that would have
made even the Young Americans blush.153
As this anti-Spain, pro-war stance suggests, Ellis was not afraid to speak out
on behalf of present initiatives when he felt the historical record bore out their
significance. He also advocated for partisan causes. Reform activities were
nothing new for popular historians, as we have seen; indeed, Irving, Frost,
Gay, Ridpath, and Eggleston all had their causes. Ellis’s campaigns were dif-
ferent from the actions of these others, however, insofar as they reconceived of
history as the handmaiden of reform. That is, Ellis favored a model of history
that employed the concerns of the present as the standard for evaluating what
was useful not just in the past but in the future. The present did not need “to
conform to the structures of the past,” Novick has written of this outlook, so
much as the past was required to meet the demands of the contemporary mo-
ment and beyond. Put more simply, “history existed for man, not man for his-
tory.”154 This inversion of the relationship between things that had transpired
and things that were yet to come represented a truly Copernican revolution in
historical consciousness and signaled the emergence of a future-mindedness
that has been central to the modernist vision ever since. The historian’s social
responsibility was to provide an account of the past appropriate to society’s
current and future needs, Ellis believed. As Hayden White put it, history’s task
is “less to remind men of their obligation to the past than to force upon them
an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible
transition from present to future.”155 There was something opportunistic in
this thinking that borrowed from the “pragmatic revolt” of the new century.156
In James Harvey Robinson’s words, “the present has hitherto been the willing
victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and
exploit it in the interest of advance.”157

The physical design of Ellis’s volumes recapitulated these presentist themes.
Though The People’s Standard History contained some pictorial reproduc-
tions of hand-drawn images, they were primarily illustrated by hundreds of
photographs of contemporary events taken on location. Ellis’s treatment of the
Spanish-American War was supplemented by dozens of camera-generated im-
ages of Cuban life before and after the conflict, for instance, including photo-
graphs of coconut plantations and Catholic cathedrals, of country villas and
crude village huts, of American soldiers embarking on battleships and Cuban
blockhouses.158 New technologies of photographic duplication allowed for
easier transfer of camera images to books and increased their documentary
capacity as eyewitness accounts of the present moment. For those who were
inclined to think that traditional visual art had done little to aid in the histori-
an’s mission of recording the past “as it had actually occurred,” photography
seemed to promise immediacy and accuracy. In the Portfolio of the World’s
Photographs, John C. Ridpath declared that wherever physical limitations had
made it difficult for citizens to experience places or events, “there the lens, with
its quick flash of light and swiftly-caught image of nature and the work of man,
has come to supply the deficiency and to transmit to humble homes in distant
lands the picture and vision of the reality.” In Ridpath’s estimation, photo-
graphs like those employed by Ellis in his volumes were useful instruments
for collapsing not only geographic distances but temporal ones. Through the
agency of photographs, he noted, “the memory is traced with indelible images,
and the imagination is lifted and borne away across continents and oceans.
With the picture before us time and space are suddenly obliterated.”159
This logic of shattering temporal boundaries encouraged Ellis to contextu-
alize the present and the future with respect to the “vastness of human time.”
Historians, he believed, must not become so fixated on the minutia of the past
as to lose sight of the glaring imperatives of the present and indicators of the
future.160 “The adjustment of the past, present, and future to each other—the
historian’s response to life’s demand for a balance between change and con-
tinuity,” Ernst Breisach has said of the position, “must no longer be accom-
plished on terms giving overwhelming weight to the past, lest the millennia of
the past immobilize life under an ‘arch of permanency.’ ” The new historiog-
raphy of popular history “had to be present-minded and future-oriented, and
reject the centuries-old habit of giving the past the key to continuity.” Ellis
found support for this contention in the works of another novelist-turned-
historian, the “English prophet of progress,” H. G. Wells, whose Outline of
History distinguished two types of mind: “The dominant and outdated one
[that] ‘interprets the things of the present, and gives value to this and denies
it to that, entirely with relations to the past,’ ” and “the other and proper one

[that] does so ‘in relation to things designed or foreseen.’ ” The British popu-
larizer “assured all historians that they no longer needed to trouble themselves
with capturing the past in complete accounts in order to inform the present or
to make the present conform to the structures of the past.” He argued that “in
historiography recent periods must get priority over earlier ones, not just for
the technical reason that the sources for them were more abundant and reli-
able, but because progress allotted them the attribute ‘better.’ ”161
All of this contributed to a new interest among popular historians in or-
ganizational schemes that focused attention on the present and future. Popu-
larizers like Ellis viewed history pragmatically, not as a series of cautionary
tales whose lessons readers were doomed to repeat, but as opportunities for
providing insights into how historians might engineer for the future. Robinson
explained such inverted thinking this way: “Could we suddenly be endowed
with a Godlike and exhaustive knowledge of the whole history of mankind, far
more complete than the combined knowledge of all the histories ever written,
we should gain forthwith a Godlike appreciation of the world in which we live,
and a Godlike insight into the evils which mankind now suffers, as well as into
the most promising methods for alleviating them, not because the past would
furnish precedents of conduct, but because our conduct would be based upon a
perfect comprehension of existing conditions founded upon a perfect knowledge
of the past,” he wrote. Recognizing that most historians “have not as yet set
themselves to furnish us with what lies behind our great contemporaneous
task of human betterment,” Robinson noted that were his professional col-
leagues “asked to furnish answers to the questions that a person au courant
with the problems of the day would most naturally put to them, they would
with one accord begin to make excuses.” The books such scholars of history
produce, he concluded, “are like very bad memories which insist upon recall-
ing facts that have no assignable relation to our needs, and this is the reason
why the practical value of history has so long been obscured.” Urging read-
ers to develop a sense of historical-mindedness about present conditions, he
recognized that the part they could play “in forwarding some phase of this
reform” was dependent upon their “understanding of existing conditions and
opinion,” which could only be explained “by following more or less carefully
the processes that produced them.”162
Even as Ellis acknowledged in the pages of The People’s Standard History
that “it is a wild venture to speculate about what shall be a hundred or even fifty
years in advance,” he could not resist putting his futuristic philosophy of his-
tory into practice. “No student of American history can fail to glance ahead and
wonder what the future has in store for us,” he wrote, making predictions about
the future of the “art of navigating in the air, the substitution of electricity as

the universal motor, the doubling and tripling of speed by railways and steam-
boats, absolute safety against fire, a specific [cure] for every disease . . . and the
consequent lengthening of human life.” Ellis suggested that in “no distant day”
there would be one hundred states and one billion people in the United States
and that fortunate American citizens would experience “the most astounding
discoveries that will affect civilization throughout the coming ages.” He was
especially taken with Edison’s plans for developing an “engine of war” capable
of shooting a fluid 600 feet through which an electrical current could be passed,
killing “with the quickness of lightening all whom a drop touched.” The per-
verse invention seemed more worthy of Johnny Brainerd in The Huge Hunter
than Edison, but its significance for the future of humankind was what recom-
mended it to Ellis. “Awful as all this seems,” he wrote, “the beneficent result
would be in the end to make war so destructive to life, that no nation or people
would dare to go to war” again. Ellis’s hope was, therefore, that Edison would
“live to perfect his stupendous inventions, and thus usher in the day of universal
arbitration and universal peace” when the “means for human destruction will
become so effective as to render war only national folly.”163
At times Ellis tortured himself and his readers with pessimistic visions
of a future that partook of some of the dark undertones of modernism. He
warned especially of the dangers of class warfare, the disregard of law, the
miscarriage of justice for which there were no foreseeable solutions. He ar-
gued that the Chicago fire of 1873 was the result not of an involuntary twitch
of the leg by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow but was deliberately set—a conflagration
which served as “a good illustration that notwithstanding our pretenses of
an advanced civilization, society is still infested with human cormorants and
hyenas lying in wait to prey upon suffering humanity.” He acknowledged
also that there was a disturbing “periodicity about ‘panics’ that suggests a
discouraging truth to those optimistic thinkers who sigh for an acceleration
of human progress.” Worse than the linear regression implied by this meta-
phoric spiraling downward was the prospect that the modern world would
submit to no laws at all. “[A]s conditions are now, nothing is constant,” Ellis
wrote in a pessimistic moment worthy of Eggleston. “The fact is, that in all
matters relating to social and industrial relations, nothing is stable. What the
public applauds to-day, it execrates to-morrow; the idol it worships now, in
a brief time it insists upon crucifying. Nature’s processes for improving the
condition of the race are slow,—exasperatingly so to the optimist,” Ellis told
readers. The promises of the future cannot be realized “if we fall short of our
duty. There have been crucial periods in the past, when our country tottered
on the verge of destruction, and doubtless such crises will confront us in the
future,” he warned.164

More often, however, Ellis was optimistic about the future as projected in
the pages of The People’s Standard History. “Standing on the threshold of the
twentieth century, looking back over the past with all its grandeur of achieve-
ment, surpassing the vision of the prophet, and casting his eye of faith toward
the future, whose sunburst reveals glimpses of the marvelous destiny of Amer-
ica in civilizing and Christianizing the world,” Ellis wrote in purple prose
worthy of Irving, “we can but imitate the naval hero in front of Santiago, and,
bowing our heads, hold our lips mute while our hearts overflow with thankful-
ness and gratitude to Almighty God.”165 The key was to prevent the past from
incapacitating the present or from restricting reform efforts in the future. “The
call for historians to be activists increased a tendency latent in the progressive
philosophy of history, using progress as the criterion, to see most problems
in history in terms of a grand moral struggle between the forces of good (the
future) and evil (the past),” Ernst Breisach has written.166 The remedy for pre-
venting the contamination of the future by the dangers of the past, Ellis noted
toward the end of his popular history, “lies in the cultivation of the minds and
hearts of our children, that they grow up with their sense of right clarified and
duty made the mainspring of all their actions.” Those were goals that even the
Committee of Ten and the NEA could endorse. Ellis’s additional suggestion
that the “history of the United States should be familiar to every boy and girl,
and not only the achievements but the mistakes of the past made clear” also
would have pleased committee members, although some might have seen in it
a shameless form of self-promotion for The People’s Standard History itself.167
Readers seemed to appreciate Ellis’s efforts to resolve the paradox of “time’s
cycle” versus “time’s arrow” in an optimistic vein. To be sure, a few thought
Ellis’s predictions for the future were more science fiction than reality-based,
and they found too many convergences between his dime novels and his histo-
ries to justify confidence in the predictions made in The People’s Standard His-
tory of the United States. The reviewer for the New York Times was more typical
in his comments, however, when he noted that “[t]his is indeed a history writ-
ten for all classes of readers.” Claiming that the author “knows exactly where to
put the emphasis,” the reviewer appreciated especially the “contemporaneous”
flavor of the history.”168 An advertisement by the Loeser History Club, which
had selected Ellis’s volumes for its list, confirmed that it was the present-mind-
edness of The People’s Standard History that attracted readers. “The opening
sale last Monday of this monumental work has been more than gratifying, and
proves that you’ve only to glance at this sumptuous set of books to appreciate
what such an offer really means,” the publisher noted. “It is the best and only
Complete Authentic History of our Country” with a narrative that “carries you
down to the very close of the Spanish-American War.” Simply written and “as

easy to read as a story,” Ellis’s popular history was billed as “an education in
itself; a building up of character and sure to add to life’s successes.” There was,
its promoters suggested with optimism, “nothing published to equal it.”169
Profane Time
Professional historians who generally ignored the pronouncements of
popular historians such as Ellis took some note of the relativism implicit in
his works. By the turn of the twentieth century, scholars within the Ameri-
can Historical Association had divided on the question of the role historians
should play in making history the handmaiden of reform. Some, such as James
Harvey Robinson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Charles Beard, were affili-
ated with a group of “progressive historians” who believed that history should
be used as a tool for the advancement of reform agendas.170 Eschewing the
detached objectivity of their elders within the profession, these civic-minded
historians scoured the past to find precedents that could justify (rather than
merely explain) progressive policies. In his 1910 presidential address before
the AHA, Turner acknowledged that younger historians were justifiably “on
the point of rebellion against the traditional interpretation of the past” because
they recognized the urgent need to convert history “into an instrument for the
transformation of society.” History is “not planted on the solid ground of fixed
condition,” Turner noted, but must be reworked again and again “from the
new points of view afforded by the present.”171 Carl Becker agreed, noting in
his essay “Detachment and the Writing of History” (1910) that “objectivists”
within the historical profession—those who insisted that the historians must
disavow any practical intentions for their work—were ignoring the subjective
components implicit in all historical memory. In making the assumption that
a historian should or even could “separate himself from the process which he
describes,” Becker argued, professionals were losing sight of the relativity of
all knowledge. He called for a new attitude toward history of which Ellis would
have approved, a philosophy that recognized the responsibility of the historian
to rewrite the past according to current social needs.172
As a result of the efforts of these “young Turks” within the profession, some
scholars were encouraged to demonstrate their commitments to the kinds of
causes that had preoccupied popularizers. Ellis, Turner, and Becker were inch-
ing their way toward the concept of a “usable past,” an idea fully articulated a
decade later by Van Wyck Brooks in a provocative essay, “On Creating a Us-
able Past” (1918). A usable past was one in which historians assumed a more
active role in current affairs and sought not detachment but deeply personal

involvement with the issues they were treating. The presentism implicit in
such an outlook came dangerously close to the “shadowy something” of the
imagination against which Albert Bushnell Hart had warned, but it was consis-
tent with the psychologizing elements at the heart of Eggleston’s New History,
which focused on the immediate needs of the historical viewer. Importantly,
Brooks, an amateur historian, wrote his essay not only to highlight the value of
such a utilitarian outlook but to make distinctions between the popular histo-
rians who embraced it commonly and the professional historians who did not
with regularity. He argued that professional historians were too dependent on
universities whose funding encouraged them to produce dull monographs on
specialized and self-serving topics, making little allowance for “clarity and pun-
gency of expression.” Popularizers were better suited to aid readers in making
history useful in their lives, he suggested, because they had no illusions about
the objectivity of a single past. Brooks even reintroduced a form of subjectivism
into the discussion, reminding readers that history was a product of the imagi-
nation and had no ontological significance outside the perceiver’s mind. For
Brooks, history was a creative act subject to constant revision depending on the
perspective of the historian. If the history “our professors offer us is too sterile
and unusable,” Brooks wrote, then the “past should be rewritten. . . . If we need
another past so badly,” he added, “is it not conceivable that we might discover
one, that we might even invent one?” Although that notion of “inventing” the
past made many professional historians nervous (what, they justifiably asked,
separated historians from writers of historical fiction?), Brooks’s radically sub-
jective vision convinced some to expand their conceptions of what qualified as
important for the study of history.173
The logic of relativism evidenced in Ellis’s fiction and histories and justi-
fied in Brooks’s essay terrified many, however. Skeptical scholars feared that
the progressive agenda was too politicized, too subjective to be compatible
with the objective, fact-finding mission of history. As Hart explained, they
believed that it is “the duty of a sober and studious body like the American
Historical Association to dwell upon the strictly scientific character of history;
to emphasize the fixed principles of research, to warn the world against the
consequences of unsound study and writing of history. The remedy is a mat-
ter of method and process and point of view.” The historian “has nothing to
do with abstract truth, or with practical politics, or with forecasts of the fu-
ture,” Hart added. “Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for
a moral, if he tells his story well, it will need none; if he tells it ill, it will deserve
none.”174 Historian H. B. Learned echoed Hart’s assessments of the dangers
of presentism in a critical review of William H. Mace’s manual Method in His-
tory for Teachers and Students (1898). Learned rejected Mace’s claim that the

“structures with which the historian of institutions may concern himself are
the systems or numerous organizations in the state which give to any country
its organic unity and serve by their continuous existence to bind the past to the
present.” History should exist for its own sake, Learned noted, and not for the
benefit of some Wellsian futuristic fantasy. “The true safe-guard for the teacher
who reads the volume is his or her own interest in things simply because they
were,” he wrote.175 Even Carl Becker, the holy man of relativism, “confessed
that Wells’s ‘new history’ was too new for his tastes, too insistent upon judging
the past by the standards of the present—or rather by Wells’s vision of the fu-
ture, when the ‘Great Society,’ the ‘Federal World State,’ would have ushered
in a truly democratic and universal era.”176
These criticisms anticipated Herbert Butterfield’s famous attack on pre-
sentism as a “whiggish” contrivance in the Whig Interpretation of History. In
Butterfield’s estimation, history should not be utilitarian; nor should it serve
present purposes. “The sin in historical composition . . . is to abstract events
from their context and set them up in implied comparison with the present
day, and then to pretend that by this ‘the facts’ are being allowed to ‘speak for
themselves,’ ” he wrote. “It is to imagine that history as such . . . can give judg-
ments of value—to assume that this ideal or that person can be proved to have
been wrong by the mere lapse of time.” To the extent that history is thought
to be value-laden, in other words, it reveals its fictional or contrived character.
Butterfield added that relativism constitutes “the very sum and definition of all
errors of historical inference. The study of the past with one eye, so to speak,
upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.”177 If his-
torical events are viewed solely as “the origin or precursor or anticipation of
the present,” he concluded, then they have a dependency on the present that
compromises their integrity as discrete episodes worth studying in their own
right.178 More recently David Lowenthal has spoken in rejection of “a past that
mirrors the present and that should be read back from it, reflecting eternal
and universal causes, virtues, and vices.”179 One of Ellis’s rivals in the Ameri-
can history book market, Edward Channing, had articulated a similar position
decades earlier. The “inhabitants of the historical landscape” should not be
“subject to higher, present standards,” Channing wrote. To estimate past fig-
ures “by the conditions and ideas of the present day” would not only “do them
an injustice” but would discredit those in the present as well.180
In questioning presentism, scholars advanced a concept of “profane time”
that emphasized “a scrupulous regard for the historicity, the integrity, the ac-
tuality of the past.”181 According to Eliade, such anti-relativists dismissed con-
structions of the past that encouraged “man’s refusal to accept himself as a
historical being,” that is, “his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to

the unusual events (i.e. events without an archetypal model) that in fact consti-
tute concrete duration.” They guarded simultaneously against the presentist
impulse to reduce life to a series of endlessly repeating “archetypal acts.”182
Instead professional historians focused on discrete events that demonstrated
the “irreversibility” of time. Believing that “time moves inexorably forward”
without script and “that one truly cannot step twice into the same river,” such
scholars valued uniqueness over timeless principles.”183 Their understanding
of time was Darwinian insofar as it advanced the concept of a “truly contingent
history,” envisioning the past as a “a quirky sequence of intricate, unique, unre-
peatable events linked in a unidirectional chain of complex causes (and gobs of
randomness).”184 According to this thinking, history was no more valuable for
what it revealed about universal tendencies than was the evolutionary record
of an extinct species in disclosing the ultimate plan of the universe. We analyze
the life history of a defunct species for what it tells us about the unique charac-
teristics and traits of extinct creatures, not for what it tells us about ourselves
in the present. By the same logic, scholars urged a truly historicized approach
to the past in which events are studied not with respect to their relationship to
archetypal forms but for what they can reveal about a past that is now lost to
us. History must always remain a bifurcated enterprise.
Admittedly, this “history for history’s sake” argument was stark and unnerv-
ing to many for what it suggested about the capriciousness of history. The ge-
ologist Charles Lyell noted that “[s]uch views of the immensity of past time,
like those unfolded by the Newtonian philosophy in regard to space, were too
vast to awaken ideas of sublimity unmixed with a painful sense of our incapacity
to conceive a plan of such infinite extent.”185 If history is “just history,” and if
events “cannot arise again,” then the entire metaphysical underpinning of the
discipline as practiced since the beginnings of recorded time was threatened.186
Even some professionals found this too pessimistic, although supporters argued
that the divorce of history from metaphysics meant that the past could have “an
integrity and will of its own” and that the “inviolable pastness of the past” could
be respected above the usurping habits of the present. Real scholars demon-
strate their “true love of the past, a past that is all the more [sanctified] because it
is untainted by the present and the practical,” Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted.
They reject the sacrilegious impulse to try to “recall it to life again.” The at-
tempts of popularizers such as Ellis to raise the events of the past from the dead,
Lazarus-like, and to insist that history serve the needs of the present, showed
“neither love nor respect for what is dead” in her estimation.187 The problems
of living in a present in which “the past weighs on the characters, corrupting
their lives and subverting their destinies” were of special concern to profes-
sional scholars at the turn of the twentieth century who wished to reduce their

obligations to the past by distancing themselves from its burdens in the present.
Fear of the rule of mortmain—that is, the hand of the dead controlling the liv-
ing—compelled them to characterize the past as an “alienating and destructive
force” imposed on the present in unnatural and inappropriate ways.188
Rejection of the presentist implications of history also allowed scholars to
free themselves from the deterministic grip that “progress” had held on the
imaginations of popular historians throughout the nineteenth century. Much
of the era’s faith in progressive historiography emerged as a response to the
unpredictability of the modern moment. “Whatever the deficiencies of bygone
times, they possess the supreme advantage of lacking the uncertainty of the
present, because they are over,” David Lowenthal has noted. “We can relive the
past as a more satisfactory narrative because it is one that is completed.” Given
the “chaos or imprecision” of the contemporary moment, which historians are
helpless to direct, they seek a compensatory control over the past by insisting
that it conform to a rational shape. In so doing, “they themselves are partly
responsible for confirming, if not generating, the illusion that the past has a
pattern.”189 No longer concerned with trying to “impose an artificial unity upon
either history or society,” however, professionals recognized that there was no
absolute necessity associated with progress as a theme in history, that it was but
a convenient metaphor, “a literary term to emphasize its divorce from reality.”
The historian “knows no general causes that are the necessary and sufficient
causes of war; he knows only the particular course of events which made a par-
ticular war not accidental and not inevitable but simply ‘intelligible,’ ” Himmel-
farb notes. “Nor is the historian’s attitude truly contemplative, although it may
sometimes appear to be so. For the historian, unlike the historical novelist, sees
past events as ‘facts’ rather than as mere ‘images.’ ” Fiction writers such as Ellis
had a regrettable “contempt for the specific and the concrete,” extrapolating
inappropriately from “particular events” that should “properly be explained
only in particularistic terms” to grand strategies for treating “social problems”
that should “be alleviated only by small, pragmatic, incremental reforms”—that
is, by Eggleston’s “partial, contingent, and incremental truths.”190
The effect of all this was to encourage more conservative professionals to
create an intellectual buffer in their works between the present and the past.
Since “recent history cannot be adequately written,” and since “we can never
hope to bring the past into relation with the present,” Robinson argued, the
scholar “must always leave a fitting interval between ourselves and the nearest
point to which the historian should venture to extend his researches.”191 Main-
taining a separation between the past and the present also allowed profession-
als to avoid the “relativist’s dilemma,” a philosophical conundrum that often
plagued those like Ellis who advocated for progressive history. If the present

is the only appropriate standard by which to measure what is important in the
past, then the historian is trapped in the “here and now,” since the “reality he
attributes to the past” is only “the reality he recognizes in the present.”192 Rob-
ert Berkhofer Jr. explains the dilemma in terms that underscore the complexi-
ties of the paradox that is presentism. “If the Other is a construction by the self
of another, how can a self get outside the self to know the Other as another?”193
As strict relativists we can never completely escape the contingencies of our
own worlds.194 Relativism forced scholars to wrestle with complicated ques-
tions such as popularizers rarely broached. “Is history just a subjective con-
struction? Does it always bear the impress of contemporary thought?” “Is it
always a matter of the present as extrapolated onto the past?” “If our choice
of narrative reflects only our power to impose our preferred version of reality
on a past that cannot resist us, then what is left of history?”195 Other subsidiary
questions emerged from these: “How can we judge the accuracy of the modern
representation of the past against a postulated original when it is, by definition,
past? How can we hope to re-present the past as it was when we must do so
through present-day (re)creations?”196
Perhaps the biggest concern for anti-relativist scholars was what relativism
implied for the abilities of historians to communicate with readers and each
other effectively. Critics of Ellis’s Eclectic Primary History (1884) claimed that
the school text “slandered the North and the cause of the Union,” “depreci-
ated the value of our troops,” and “represented that the South was in the right,
and that the army which saved the Union was a wicked aggressor.”197 Given his
commitments to presentism and relativism, there was little Ellis could say in
response to these condemnations other than to reject them as outside his own
presentist perspective. If every man was his own historian spinning out per-
sonalized narratives in isolation, then there was little need for writers such as
Ellis to rely on established intellectual communities to judge and evaluate the
value of his stories. Revealingly, however, there was also little hope for those
such as Ellis of finding any consensus among reviewers about the value of a
text, since the perspectives of readers were irrevocably linked to their personal
situations.198 Ironically, then, relativists were subject to the debilitating con-
straints of their own philosophy, since theoretically their works were inaccessi-
ble to readers outside the “present” circumstances of authorship, publication
and marketing that had produced them. This recognition of the evanescence
of history may explain why so many popularizers updated their works with
such frequency, Ellis’s People’s Standard History of the United States under-
going yearly revisions in multiple editions published by at least three different
companies between 1896 and 1900.199 It also suggests why professionals were
so anxious to establish more permanent and stable standards of evaluation

within the discipline of history, and why they scrutinized popular efforts such
as Ellis’s decades after their works were first issued.200
Despite its many iterations (or perhaps because of them) The People’s Stan-
dard History sold reasonably well. Eventually 114,000 sets circulated (20,000 in
the first year), confirming that Ellis’s history “was generally regarded as accu-
rate, comprehensive and scholarly, free from sectional and political bias.”201 The
salability of the volumes—“its sale continued long after his death”—seemed to
verify what the publisher claimed for their author: that Ellis was a “a writer of
prodigious industry,” who “has earned a fortune by his ability and writes be-
cause he loves the work.”202 Ellis tried later to increase the marketability of his
efforts by combining chapters from The People’s Standard History of the United
States with those of the Popular History of the World into a composite ten-vol-
ume work called The Story of the Greatest Nations and World’s Famous Events
(1906). In the preface to volume one of this series, Ellis reaffirmed his commit-
ment to telling the “Story of the Past” in “so simple a form that every one, young
and old, may understand and also enjoy it.” The value in such an exercise, he
insisted, was in reminding students of history that the past “has moments of
intense interest, situations more pathetic than those of our most brilliant novels,
climaxes more dramatic than those of our strongest plays, scenes more dramatic
than our strongest plays, scenes more poetic than any of our grandest poems.”
Finding ways to protect “these priceless jewels” from those who would ob-
scure them in their “weary plodding through all the dry and unnecessary dust
of ages,” continued to be Ellis’s mission. 203 In establishing brilliant novels, dra-
matic plays, and grand poems as the standard of measure for historical produc-
tions, Ellis proved himself ever a popularizer at heart.
Interestingly, however, the sales history of Ellis’s volumes also reveals the
volatility of the popular book market, since, within a few months of the last
printing of The People’s Standard History, Ellis was forced to declare personal
bankruptcy. The popular historian’s shaky financial status was due in part to
legal costs he had incurred in divorcing his wife and in part because he had
sold the copyrights to many of his best selling works to keep the rather ill-per-
forming magazines he edited afloat.204 Whatever the cause, Ellis was financially
insolvent and was forced to write for mail-order catalogues and a food store
magazine until he found sufficient time to return to the dime novel market.
Though his “New Deerfoot” series helped him to recover some of his losses,
Ellis seldom again returned to writing popular history after the publication of
The People’s Standard History since it failed to compensate him adequately for
the considerable time and energy it required. Professional historians had little
sympathy for Ellis’s condition or for that of other popularizers who struggled
to make ends meet by writing mass-produced histories. For them, the past was

not a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. It comes as no
surprise, therefore, to learn that scholars were equally contemptuous of Ellis’s
efforts to turn The People’s Standard History of the United States into a motion
picture. Ellis was serious about the idea and even contracted in 1915 with his
idol, Thomas Edison, to produce several scripts for a pilot movie depicting key
events in early American history. “The project floundered,” however, when
Edison concluded that “documentary film-making was unprofitable.”205 The
release of The Birth of a Nation later that year suggested how wrong Edison
had been in this decision, at least from a financial point of view, although critics
of the D. W. Griffith film did not consider it worthy of the label documentary;
instead, they condemned it as another example of the distorting impulses of
the popularization movement in history.206
In his futuristic speculations, Ellis often teased himself and his readers with
the prediction that the twentieth century would witness a dramatic increase
in the average life expectancy of humans to a hundred years and beyond. The
unwarranted optimism of this assertion was confirmed by Ellis’s own death
in 1916 at the age of seventy-six.207 Despite his hopes for the perpetuity of his
ideas, most of Ellis’s popular works of history also failed to demonstrate suffi-
cient longevity. Part of their failure had to do, ironically, with changes in the in-
tellectual climate for the receptivity of his ideas during and after World War I.
“The experiences of this century hardly dispose us to any complacency about
the present, still less about the future,” Gertrude Himmelfarb has written. “At
every point we are confronted with shattered promises, blighted hopes, ir-
reconcilable dilemmas, good intentions gone astray, a choice between evils, a
world perched on the brink of disaster—all the familiar clichés, which are all
too true and which seem to give the lie to the idea of progress.”208 Additionally,
Ellis’s popular histories failed to sustain themselves because of a self-refuting
quality specific to relativistic philosophies. Since “relativism must necessarily
be, by its proponents’ own principles, itself a relative, rather than an absolute
and timeless, truth,” Peter Novick has written, its historicity dooms it to even-
tual obsolescence. Even Ellis’s predictions for the future, some of which were
realized in the twentieth century, did not save him from the obscurity borne
of changing climates of opinion. In another sense, however, his relativism was
self-affirming, too. As Novick has suggested about Carl Becker, historians such
as Ellis found that their “confidence in the relativity of doctrines” was con-
firmed, ironically and sadly, “by the next generation’s rejection of [their] doc-
trine of relativism” and, consequently, of them.209

There is no fiction or non-fiction as we commonly
understand the distinction: there is only narrative. . . .
Why should fiction writers be denied the
composition of history?—E. L. Doctorow (1985)
6
.................................................................
Writing Himself
Out of Trouble
Julian Hawthorne
and the
Commercialism of
Popular History

Living among the Elect
While the works of Eggleston and Ellis sold fairly well in the popular
marketplace, their relativistic philosophies made it difficult for readers to find
any absolute standards in them by which to navigate safely in a chaotic, ever-
changing contemporary world. Eggleston’s desire to tell the “past everything”
and his rejection of singular explanatory devices had the disconcerting effect of
pluralizing authority with respect to the past. His use of topical, non-narrative
approaches instead of chronological, storytelling ones also threatened to trivi-
alize history by destroying its coherence.1 Ellis’s habit of privileging the here
and now, of concentrating on the immediate needs of the present, exacerbated
such concerns by implying the conditional or contingent quality of all knowl-
. edge. The volatile mixture of relativism and presentism caused others to fear
that causation was vanishing as a heuristic tool in modern historical scholar-
ship. The more arbitrary knowledge was, the greater also was the challenge of
making meaningful pronouncements about the past.2 The prospect of reviv-
ing Ridpath’s old project of defining grand, synthesizing ideas that operated
consistently across temporal realms seemed equally dim. Specialization within
the discipline of history and new interests in distinctive perspectives also “dis-
couraged the integration of particular histories into some kind of synthesis.”3
In short, the relativity of historical knowledge (with its “shallow indifference
about ultimate truth”) made it difficult for people to establish permanent stan-
dards for action and left them devoid of the propensity for reasoned conviction
or moral judgment.4
Skeptics also feared that the moral relativism of presentist methodologies
encouraged an abnormal interest among historians in the tangible artifacts of
contemporary culture, especially the economic and commercial ones, and left
the door open for historical materialism. Eschewing metaphysical or specula-
tive explanations for motivation and human behavior, historical materialists
believed that the “structure of society and its historical development are de-
termined by ‘the material conditions of life’ or ‘the mode of production of the
material means of existence.’ ”5 This philosophy had implications not only for
what historians studied about the past but how they studied it. The assumption
here, Gertrude Himmelfarb has noted of the Marxist variant of materialism, is
that ideas are not personal reflections but “instruments of production and con-
sumption,” while language is not a rhetorical device but an “instrument and
product of power.”6 Not everyone within the profession was pleased with the
commodification of history implied by historical materialism, of course, and
some rejected outright its tendencies to “tie literature, the arts and ideation
in general to social class” while turning “ideas into ideologies and texts into
Julian Hawthorne and the Commercialism of Popular History { 283

discourses.”7 The notion that history is “devoid of any reliance on metaphysi-
cal principles and cosmological generalizations” was, in philosopher Alfred
Whitehead’s estimation, an example of the unhealthy workings of “minds
steeped in provinciality—the provinciality of an epoch, of a face, of a school of
learning, of a trend of interest,—minds unable to divine their own unspoken
limitations.”8 In repudiating the most pernicious particularizing elements of
historical relativism, Whitehead called for a return to idealism and synthesis
as a way of restabilizing the role of truth within the historical enterprise. He
envisioned the past not as a myriad of disconnected contingencies but as “a
space of stable relationships, known boundaries, and a sense of place.” For
Whitehead, historical writing should provide an opportunity to engage with
“those attributes construed to be absent from contemporary life.”9
In 1913, the Dodge Foundation for Citizenship attempted to combat the de-
centralizing tendencies of relativistic, presentist, and materialistic thinking by
sponsoring a series of lectures by Stanford professor Ephraim Douglass Adams
to highlight the fact that the American people have been largely influenced in
their development by moral principles or by abstract ideals. Published as The
Power of Ideals in American History, these lectures were offered as an antidote
to the “very decided tendency to seek purely material reasons for historical de-
velopment” in a time “of undue emphasis on materialism.” With Beard’s Eco-
nomic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) in mind, Adams complained
that historians had turned the American Revolution into a wholly commercial
enterprise, ignoring the ideals of political and religious freedom that had mo-
tivated its participants. Rejecting the tendency of some historians to reduce all
history to base facts and material concerns, Adams called attention to those
things “wholly impossible to reduction to concrete terms,” such as “an emo-
tion, a sentiment, or an ideal,” which have served in the past as “all-powerful
spring[s] of conduct, and the prime cause of political action,” even though
they be “directly contrary to economic interests.” He spoke, for instance, of
“the present tendency to minimize in our history the force of the anti-slavery
ideal, or to deny its spiritual vigor” in the nineteenth century on the grounds
that it had little practical influence on the institution of slavery. “The economic
historian has said that, from 1840 to 1860, class interests ruled more than ever
before in our history, and that ‘moral consciousness’ was at its lowest ebb,”
noted Adams. Such assertions ran “directly contrary” to sensible thinking in
his estimation, ignoring the fact that “back of the sordid, tangible explanation
was an inspiring sentiment that touched men’s hearts and fired imagination.”
Historical materialists “mistook the shattering of traditions” associated with
abolitionism and “the unrest of the time . . . for decay, when it was, in fact, the
first evidence of new life.”10
284 } Writing Himself Out of Trouble

For Adams, the period between 1840 and 1860 best demonstrated the power
of idealistic rather than materialistic perspectives for narrating the past. Eco-
nomic historians such as John R. Commons and Ulrich B. Philips, who edited
a Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910–11), poked fun
at the high-mindedness of the era, which they dubbed “the ‘hot air’ period of
American history” because of its transcendental “talk-fest[s],” its loquacious
lyceums and its idealistic but failed pursuit of the “brotherhood of man.”11
Adams challenged this negative assessment, however, by reminding readers
that the decades prior to the Civil War were characterized by the admirable pa-
triotism of Duyckinck and the Young Americans whose works represented “an
outburst of intellectual and spiritual ideals of permanent force and value” and
the flowering of a “new sense of American nationality and idealism.”12 In a sub-
sequent survey textbook on American History and in collaborative research he
conducted on the pre–Civil War era with Charles Francis Adams Jr. (no rela-
tion), Ephraim reaffirmed the belief that the years 1848 to 1860 constituted a
vital period of unusual and important development for American ideals when
“a blow struck at the emblem of an ideal [nationality] had suddenly revealed to
a troubled people the place that ideal held in their hearts.”13 A glance through
the important literature of the day suggested to him the degree to which the
“higher ideals” of history almost always overshadowed the more base “asser-
tions of economic principles” and “industrial benefit.” Even in the inherently
materialistic pursuit of mineral wealth in the 1849 rush, there was “a golden
ideal in the emotion” amid “an alloy of baser metals,” he argued.14
No figure at midcentury personified the role of the idealism in American
development more for Ephraim Adams and Charles Francis Adams than Na-
thaniel Hawthorne. Novels such as The Scarlet Letter as well as historical short
stories such as “Endicott and the Red Cross” and “The Maypole of Merry
Mount,” conveyed an “idealized” sense of the essence of seventeenth-century
New England by drawing directly on documented colonial records and verifi-
able historical episodes.15 Charles Francis Adams Jr. was a lifelong admirer
of the works of Hawthorne, and he claimed to have learned more of colonial
history from them than any other sources. While still a teenager, he devoted
an entire summer to reading all of Hawthorne’s novels, and his first published
article was a critical assessment of those works for Harvard Magazine (1855).
Adams wrote that Hawthorne “has pointed out where the strength of our na-
tion lies, and he has done so unerringly” through “the peculiar nationality of
his tone, of the scenery of his books, [and] of the style of his allusion.”16 His
favorite Hawthorne novel was The House of the Seven Gables, which dealt with
themes of inherited guilt and historical determinism.17 It was an epigrammatic
novel that expressed “Hawthorne’s views about the sins of capitalist wealth

handed down from one generation to another,” a theme Adams felt had per-
sonal implications for his own family’s “descent from glory.”18 For Adams, The
House of the Seven Gables evoked not only universal truths of the sort that
spoke to nearly all readers of Hawthorne, it also appealed directly to him as a
personalized parable of crisis, renunciation, and reform.19
Even the professional scholars Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart
admitted in their Guide to the Study of American History (1896) that novels
such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables were relevant
for historical study—“inaccurate in themselves, especially as to details,” per-
haps, but still leaving “a permanent and reasonably correct impression on the
minds of the reader.” The two Harvard professors were cautious about over-
use of such works in historical instruction, however, since they viewed fiction
and history as ultimately incompatible enterprises. “Perhaps it is true that the
novel-writer or poet produces the best and truest work when he is unhampered
by the details of the real story and may aim to create only a general impression
which shall be true to the general trend of history,” they argued. Such ap-
peared to be the case in their estimation with Jane Goodwin Austin’s popular
novel Standish of Standish (1890). “Mrs. Austin carries the Mayflower’s shal-
lop into a cove in Clark’s Island, where the narrative of Bradford forbids the
idea that the shallop was,” Channing and Hart noted. “[T]he plan of the story,
the author has said, made it necessary for the boat to be at that particular place
at the precise moment, and the spirit of the explorers is not affected by the de-
viation.” Like Gay, the two Harvard historians resisted the temptation to my-
thologize the Pilgrim landing. They acknowledged as well that Longfellow’s
Miles Standish was also “painfully inaccurate and anachronistic as history;
but he adds a man to our affectionate acquaintance.” The question for these
scholars was, however, “[j]ust how far it is safe to accept a picture of which
the details are not true to the time.” Whether the “ ‘general reader’ of Mrs.
Austin’s tale or Longfellow’s poem gains a truer and more lasting impression
of the spirit of Pilgrim colonization than he or she would obtain from Doyle, or
Bancroft, or still better from Bradford’s epic itself,” was a question the authors
of the Guide felt compelled to raise in light of the distinctions between works
of fiction and nonfiction.20
A most interested party in this discussion was Jonathan Nield, an assiduous
reader of novels and histories who published in 1902 a definitive list of those
works of historical fiction he felt were useful to teachers for the study of history
in schools. In his bibliographic study Nield acknowledged that “the Romanti-
cist” often “gives us a mass of inaccuracies” which “mislead the ignorant (i.e.
the majority?)” and “are an unpardonable offence to the historically-minded
reader.” In addition, he admitted that capturing the “spirit of a period” is

nearly impossible, since, try as we may, we cannot “breathe the atmosphere of a
bygone time” and should not be “hoodwinked” by the influence “of a pseudo-
historic security” that suggests otherwise. That said, Nield reminded readers
that “History itself possesses interest for us more as the unfolding of certain
moral and mental developments than as the mere enumeration of facts.” The
“ideal of the Historian is Truth utterly regardless of prejudice and inclination,”
he argued, “but, as with all other human ideals, this one is never fully realised,
and there is ever that discrepancy between Fact and its Narration.” If readers
have a “fairly accurate knowledge as regards the general history of any period,”
and if if they be willing to make “some investigation into its special manners
and customs,” then Nield saw “no reason why a truly imaginative novelist,”
such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, “should not produce a work at once satisfying
to romantic and historical instincts” alike. The “power of imaginative mem-
ory,” which we all exercise in our daily lives and which historical novelists
like Hawthorne employ to elucidate the cultural élan of an age, he noted, “is
not dependent on accuracy of representation” or “the power of reproducing
in toto a past age,” but on the “attainment of a truer historic sense” through
“great scholarship and narrative capacity.”21
From the perspective of Channing, Hart, and other scholars, however, the
problem with drawing extensive lessons from the historical fiction of tran-
scendental writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne was that their works were
too metaphysical in disposition, too spiritual in literary sensibility to be relied
on for accuracy of historical detail. In a new “realist” age that valued concrete
facts and verisimilitude in literary productions of any kind, it was increasingly
difficult to market (especially as “histories”) those works of fiction that relied
on imaginative or speculative devices to achieve their historical effect. In a
scholarly book on the topic, Professor J. Brander Matthews dismissed virtu-
ally all such literature as ahistorical.22 To the extent that descriptive powers
such as those evidenced by Hawthorne were valued at all, they were only so
when they captured the particulars of external appearance and circumstance
rather than the “essence” of internal being, Matthews argued. The distinc-
tion was between the linguistic elements arising from idealized forms and the
“phenomenological” conditions emanating from “an existential standpoint”
and emphasizing the “everyday perceptions and experiences of historical real-
ity.”23 Attacks by scholars on the “linguistic” propensities of idealists such as
Hawthorne signaled something important about changing definitions of what
constituted truth with respect to the past. Whereas training as a writer of fic-
tion once had been considered adequate (even desirable) preparation for work
as an historian, Paul Leicester Ford noted, by the turn of the century it was
viewed as an obstacle to overcome. The literary storytelling strategies used

by novelists to reconstruct experience, that is, were less and less accepted by
practicing historians.24 The resulting fluctuations in Hawthorne’s reputation
were attributable to the widening gap between “the constricted world of actual
events” (history) and the “boundless imaginative realm of the storyteller’s art”
(poetry and literature).25
For predictable reasons, no one in the field of popular history was affected
more profoundly by these debates over the relationship of the ideal to the real
in historical studies than Julian Hawthorne, son of the gifted and controversial
novelist. Born in 1846, Julian was dubbed “the Black Prince” by his father,
ostensibly because of his dark complexion and impish personality. He grew
up under the watchful eye of an observant Nathaniel, who thought deeply and
constantly about the metaphysical consequences of having brought a “small
troglodyte” into the world.26 On the one hand, Hawthorne admitted, he found
it difficult to grasp the full corporeal meaning of his son’s existence, remarking
to Julian’s aunt that the boy’s “present life has hardly substance and tangibility
enough to be the image of eternity.” Reflecting philosophically on the spiritual
implications of parenting for the passage of time, he added, “[t]he future too
soon becomes the present, which before we can grasp it, looks back upon us as
the past. It must, I think, be only the image of an image.”27 On the other hand,
Julian’s frequent interruptions of his father’s work on The Scarlet Letter and
The House of the Seven Gables were explicit enough reminders to the novelist
that his son was a palpable, physical presence. The boy learned writing literally
at the knee of his father, the master. “[Julian] climbs into a chair at my knee,
and . . . looks curiously on the page as I write,” reflected Nathaniel. “[N]ow,
he nearly tumbles down, and is at first frightened—but, seeing that I was like-
wise startled, pretends to tumble again, and then laughs in my face.”28 By all
accounts these interruptions were welcome enough by the easily distracted
author who took pride in the promise of his son. “He has dark hair and is no
great beauty at present,” Hawthorne noted of his constant companion, “but is
said to be a particularly fine little urchin by everybody who has seen him.”29
Among those who “had seen him” in his infancy and youth were many of the
most prominent New England intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century. At a
very young age, Julian was introduced to the great pantheon of American writ-
ers who paraded through his parents’ homes in Concord, Salem, and Lenox,
Massachusetts, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Evert
Duyckinck, William Story, William Cullen Bryant, the Brownings, and the histo-
rian John Lothrop Motley. “No other person still alive shared my good fortune
or could duplicate my story,” Julian Hawthorne wrote later in life. “My father
was one of the elect, and caused me to become a sort of household intimate of
those friends of his.” Moving inconspicuously among members of an intellectual

“elect” as an “unconsidered urchin” rather that “a Peer of the Realm,” Julian
remembered that he had been privy not to “Emerson’s ‘Sphinx’ ” but to “the
squeaking of his boots during one of his lectures”; not to his “soul,” but to his
“clay”; not to the fact that “Thoreau built a hut beside Walden,” but to the re-
ality that he had “lost his temper when the Selectmen put him into Concord
jail.”30 For Julian Hawthorne, “these gracious giants of mind and character”
seemed “nothing out of the ordinary.” As he put it: “my tacit presumption was
that other children as well as I could if they would walk hand in hand with Emer-
son along the village street, seek in the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau,
watch Powers thump the brown clay of the ‘Greek Slave,’ or listen to the voice
of Charlotte Cushman . . . tell stories to the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her
knees.” It was not until he reached late adolescence that the bubble of illusion
in this matter of identity and privilege was burst for Julian. “Were human felicity
so omnipresent as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be!” he
concluded years later.”31
Julian’s favorite among his father’s friends was Herman Melville, Nathaniel
Hawthorne noting with humor tinctured perhaps by a pang of jealousy that
his son liked the author of Moby-Dick at least “as well as me.” Julian had es-
pecially fond memories of a trip to the Berkshires with his father, Melville,
and the Duyckincks in which the young boy received the special attentions
of the editor of the Library of American Books.32 Interestingly, Julian’s least
cherished memories were of another future popular historian, the poet Wil-
liam Cullen Bryant, whom he found “grey and inclement” like the weather in
New England. The reputation for aloofness that Bryant tried to overcome with
the publication of his Popular History of the United States in the 1870s was
already well established by midcentury when Julian Hawthorne first met the
august figure. Once “the Bryants came to town,” Julian recalled, “and the old
poet, old in aspect even then, called on us; but he was not a childly man, and
we youngsters stood aloof and contemplated with awe his white, Merlin beard
and tranquil but chilly eyes.” “[T]here was nothing in him or about him to
which a boy could attach himself,” Julian added, and “walking hand-in-hand
with him was unthinkable. His eyes saw children no doubt, but never seemed
to care to see into them; they were animated objects in no way related to him;
metaphorically speaking, he stepped over them and passed on his way, erect
and grave, if not stern.” Using language that reflected the distinctions between
the ideal and the real which preoccupied him throughout his adult life, Julian
noted that Bryant preferred people in the “abstract, in their significance to the
universe,” rather than “in the concrete.”33
Julian grew up a bit spoiled by parents who were determined to protect him
to the extent that they could from the hardships of life. He traveled extensively

throughout the world with them, making lengthy trips during his boyhood to
England, Switzerland, and Italy.34 He was described as “a tall handsome boy”
who was “privileged, athletic, spoiled, & happy, though always in the shadow
of brilliant, neurotic Nathaniel.” His mother, Sophia Amelia Peabody, was also
a significant influence in his development, particularly his metaphysical train-
ing. “She studied esotericism & collected volumes on occult research,” a biog-
rapher has noted, and “her love of supernatural speculation was expressed ‘not
in its grosser phases, but as a deeper insight in the realm of causes.’ Hence she
cultivated in her son his lasting belief that the most profound truths were to be
discovered by means of occult knowledge, whereas ‘Science answers its own
questions, but neither can nor will answer any others.’ ”35 Julian also credited
his mother with the advancement of his considerable artistic sensibilities. “My
aesthetic culture began with my mother in the nursery,” he wrote. Sophia had
trained as a painter with Washington Allston and “had a great gift in the fine
arts” which she passed on to her son by urging him to sketch “everything” he
saw, “from a wild flower or a carved chair to a castle or a range of mountains.”
It was Julian’s mother who brought him home “a wonderful little volume—the
Book of Ruth transcribed from the Bible in old English black-letter, with bor-
ders faithfully reproduced from missals painted in the fourteenth century by
Giulio Clevio in his monastic cell; with little miniatures, too, of figures and
scenes in the story, thanks to Owen Meredith and Noel Humphreys.” Julian
was taken with the book immediately and sought to duplicate it in various
juvenile literary and pictorial productions of his own. These efforts awakened
in him “a vehement desire to become an illuminator,” a passion he “zealously
pursued for some ten years” as a school boy. “I remember that when one of
my achievements was sold for one hundred dollars,” he wrote, “I invested the
whole sum in material for further work in the line.”36
With regard to the historical imagination, Julian was influenced dramatically
by his father’s unusual theories of education. Choosing not to send his son to
school, Nathaniel Hawthorne instead read aloud to his young charge from the
“great works” of literature, including Cervantes, Spenser, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift,
and, of course, Scott. “I beheld the knights in their shining armor, their crested
helmets, their lances and excaliburs, and pined to be one of them,” Julian wrote
later of his reaction to a lesson plan involving Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” Per-
ceiving “the moral advantage of knighthood, and the stimulus afforded to the
inward by the outward boy,” his mother encouraged Julian in these fantasies
by outfitting him “with a helmet, on the crest of which blazed the Dragon of
the great Pendragon-ship with wings outspread, and a glorious tail streaming
behind . . . made of cardboard covered with silver paper.” Julian acknowledged
later that in the “sunshine in our back garden my aspect, prancing to and fro,

was glorious,” especially when his father “contributed a real sword of tempered
steel with a gilded hilt and a scabbard of black leather.” The boy grew up be-
lieving in “fairies, in magic, in angels, in transformation,” and in “Giant De-
spair and the wicked enchanters,” all “inexhaustibly delightful” components
of his parents’ “world of imagination.”37 His older sister, Una, “helped shape
his love of the fantastic as the two of them lived daily in a world where fairies &
magical transformations were wholehearted realities.”38 Occasionally they were
given historical books to read, especially historical fiction. “Hans Christian An-
dersen, Grimm, The Black Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober
history-books,” Julian wrote of his historical curriculum, “and Robinson Crusoe
was our autobiography.”39
Julian’s “historical learning” was impacted further by instruction in the
“Bem Method” of history, popularizied by Ridpath and others. Julian re-
called squirming through his Aunt Lizzie’s demonstrations of the color-
coded strategy, endeavoring to learn “ancient history, dates and all, by colored
diagrams. . . . Here was old Plato’s Day in yellow and purple; this scarlet square
is the birthday of Julius Caesar, 102 B.C.” By his own later admission, Julian
was “always most inapt and grievous” in relation to this synchronic system,
challenging his aunt’s “inexhaustible patience many a sad hour.” He remained
a lifelong opponent of the colorized scheme, which he felt obscured rather
than elucidated the important historical insights his father had taught him.
“To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle of Marathon, or
when John signed Magna Charta,” Julian noted with embarrassment late in
life, “though the battle itself, and the scene of the barons with menacing brows
gathered about John stood clearly pictured in my imagination.” His mind was
a bit more retentive with respect to American history; not because of the Bem
Method, however, but despite it. Seeking escape from painstaking memori-
zation, Julian took long walks throughout New England with his father, who
shared with him tales of great men and mighty deeds, of heroic valor and en-
durance, of the victories of Yankee patriots over British oppressors, and of the
glories of George Washington and Paul Jones. These stories with local flavor
“were always uttered under the open sky,” Julian noted, “as we walked side by
side through the woods and meadows of Concord, or on the shores of Walden
Pond, where the remains of Thoreau’s hut still stood.” Julian and his father
both favored such a peripatetic style of learning over the rote memorization of
timetables offered by Aunt Lizzie. Julian complained: “Dates were arbitrary,
and to my memory nothing arbitrary would stick.”40
Yet some of the history to which Julian Hawthorne was exposed did stick
with him. “We children had been drilled in Roman history, from Romulus to
Caesar, and we could, and frequently did, repeat by heart the Lays of Ancient

Rome by Macaulay, which were at that period better known, perhaps, than they
are now,” he wrote in later life. “Consequently, everything in Rome had a cer-
tain degree of meaning for us, and gave us a pleasure in addition to the intrinsic
beauty or charm that belonged thereto. Our imagination thronged the Capitol
with senators; saw in the Roman Forum the contentions of the tribunes and
the patricians; heard the populus Romanus roar in the Coliseum; beheld the
splendid processions of victory wind cityward through the Arch of Titus; saw
Caesar lie bleeding at the base of Pompey’s statue; pondered over the fatal
precipice of the Tarpeian Rock; luxuriated in the hollow spaces of the Baths of
Caracalla; lost ourselves in gorgeous reveries in the palace of the Caesars, and
haunted the yellow stream of Tiber, beneath which lay hidden precious trea-
sures and forgotten secrets.” Julian and Una were “no less captivated by the
galleries and churches, which contained the preserved relics of the great old
times, and were in themselves so beautiful.” Sharing with his father an interest
in the kinds of lessons obtained off the beaten trail, Julian came to appreci-
ate the “obscure village antiquities, which had no special history attaching to
them” but “were in a way more impressive than the great ruins of England,
which had formed the scene and background of famous events.” He eschewed
“conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to inspect under the voluble
and exasperating guidance of a professional showman,” and the “hackneyed”
things “told of in history books,” which partook too much of “the unreality in-
herent in the descriptions of the writers.” Instead Julian craved “the unknown
past” and “the unrecorded things” that entered into his “most private sympa-
thies and realization.”41
As much as Julian’s parents encouraged their son in his imaginative bent,
they feared that overindulgence in it might leave him unprepared for the rigors
of life. Nathaniel wrote: “Julian has too much tenderness, love, and sensibil-
ity in his nature; he needs to be hardened and tempered. I would not take a
particle of the love out of him; but methinks it is highly desirable that some
sterner quality should be interfused throughout the softness of his heart; else,
in course of time, the hard intercourse of the world, and the many knocks and
bruises he will receive, will cause a morbid crust of callousness to grow over
his heart; so that, for at least a portion of his life, he will have less sympathy
and love for his fellow-beings than those who began life with a much smaller
portion.” Preoccupation with the ideal might make the real dangerous. “After
a lapse of years, indeed, if he have native vigor enough, there may be a second
growth of love and benevolence,” the father concluded, “but the first crop,
with its wild luxuriance, stands a good chance of being blighted.”42 Sophia
agreed, noting that Julian “is very strong and very gentle, and—you will forgive
a mother for saying this—he is entirely of the aesthetic order, and his absence

and unobservance of worldly considerations will probably not advance him in
the dusty arena of life; but he will be unspoiled in the next world, I think, and
I hope he will be able to make at least a living in this.”43 Cerebral and spiritual
in outlook, Julian struggled his entire life more or less unsuccessfully to fulfill
this latter wish on behalf of his mother.
In order to prepare him better for living in the “real world,” the Hawthornes
sent Julian at the age of fourteen to the private Concord school of Frank B.
Sanborn, a member of his father’s Transcendentalist circle.44 At first, Julian
did not take well to the idea of a formalized education with its more disciplined
intellectual methods. “On the appointed morning, I set off alone, my father
watching me off with a heartless smile, making gestures as of chastisement.
‘If I’m killed, perhaps he’ll be sorry!’ was my reflection as I strode onward.”45
Eventually Julian learned some Latin at Sanborn’s school and prepared himself
adequately enough to qualify for admission to Harvard in 1863.46 But he did
not thrive there. “His attendance was irregular, his grades were poor, and after
two years he seems to have disappeared from the college,” wrote one biogra-
pher.47 In addition, Julian was distracted by the Civil War, which he desired
earnestly to enter for idealistic reasons. “[M]y voice was all for war,” Julian
noted, lobbying hard for permission to enlist with a parent whose romanticiza-
tion of battle now came back to haunt him. “[My father] had always stimulated
my patriotism with his tales of our Revolution, so that I thirsted for the blood
of Englishmen, though I much liked those I happened to know,” Julian wrote.
“In our Civil War, I transferred my British animosities to the Southerners; but
they fortunately escaped my wrath by the Peace of Appomattox.” More to the
point, perhaps, Julian was prevented from entering the war by the sudden
death of his father in 1864 at the age of sixty. “I had become the head of the
family,” he wrote with a sense of somber responsibility that bespoke the press
of reality, “and mustn’t leave them unprotected.”50 He dropped out of Harvard
to look after his mother and sister.
Julian was back at Harvard two years later to pursue a degree in civil engi-
neering at the Lawrence Scientific School, but he did not finish that program
either. This pattern of beginning ventures that he could not complete defined
Julian’s career and was a trait he shared with Ellis, Eggleston, and others who
became popular historians after having bounced around for years in a variety of
work capacities. Following several postwar trips to Europe (where he met his
future wife, May “Minnie” Albertina Amelung), and a brief stint as a civil engi-
neer in the New York City Department of Docks, which he hated, Julian quit
the engineering field altogether. Instead he pursued a career as a writer.49 This
was a decision arrived at only after a great deal of trepidation, since Julian had
no training in any literary field and had published nothing of significance. In

addition, neither of his parents “wanted their son to be a penman, as Nathaniel,
who to support his family had had to work as a customs officer, knew it to be
well nigh impossible to make a vocation of writing.”50 Some biographers have
viewed Julian’s decision to become a writer as a form of rebellion against the
advice of his recently deceased father, while others have seen it as the fulfillment
of a family legacy from which there was little escape.51 In either case, after hav-
ing had a short story published in Harper’s Weekly, Julian began “to imagine he
might achieve a degree of independence through writing.” According to one
biographer, the expectation that he could earn a living with the pen “was a delu-
sion” that Julian “was frequently to regret in years to come.”52
“Something to Be Sentimental Over”

Julian Hawthorne began his writing career composing novels and short
stories at a furious pace. He was so prolific, in fact, that he out-wrote his highly
productive father, authoring twenty-six novels, over sixty short stories, almost
a hundred essays, and several lengthy works of biography and autobiography.53
Some of his works had a fairly wide circulation. Bressant (1873), for instance,
was translated into Turkish and, according to Max Miller of Aldine, “was being
read in the cafes & kif dens of Constantinople” throughout the decade.54 The
novel’s popularity may be attributed in part to its scandalous themes reminis-
cent of Lippard, especially infidelity and polygamy, since it dealt with a man
who falls in love with two women at the same time, demonstrating “brute-like
ferocity” with one and the “purity and tenderness of a lofty nature” with an-
other. In this as well as in many of his other novels, Julian also emulated the
psychological realism practiced by the naturalists of his day. The results were
not always satisfactory for author or audience. “ ‘Psychical analysis’ is, we be-
lieve, the name that is given to the exceedingly distasteful quality which marks
Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s novel, Bressant, and which is to be found in many
French novels of various grades, as well as in the yellow-covered literature of
other times and countries,” one critic complained. This anonymous reviewer
for The Nation argued in the manner of E. L. Godkin that the novel “lacks de-
cency,” substituting “a morbid fingering of unclean emotions” for a “genuine
study of human beings.” Society has agreed that “there are certain subjects
which shall not be talked about by its members, and which are eschewed even
by intimate friends,” he argued, and hence, for such reasons, “one cannot help
regarding with even greater dislike a book which is to have wide circulation
among inexperienced readers, who get a very great part of their knowledge
of the world—to call it knowledge—from what they read, and which will give

such persons so inaccurate and misleading an idea of what they themselves
and other people are.”55 Such reviews explain why, as Maurice Bassan has
noted, “Hawthorne’s openly professed commercialism and his exploitation of
sensual themes, alienated him from the affections of the genteel critics.”56
Despite his prodigious output (which might have entitled him to an in-
dependent standing as a man of letters), therefore, Julian never approached
the level of his father as a novelist. As the Dictionary of American Biography
notes: “Hawthorne’s attitude toward his own writing was frankly commercial.
He wrote rapidly, revised little, lost interest in his novels before he completed
them, and had few illusions regarding their worth.”57 Julian was always un-
dervalued by critics who looked for the father in the son and found the latter
wanting. He acknowledged that his father’s influence was profound in his life
and in his work. “[T]he memory of my father has always been with me, and
has doubtless influenced me more than I am myself aware,” he wrote.58 But
Julian was not always happy with the influence of this family legacy, and, like a
typical Hawthorne, he agonized over the constraints of a generational inheri-
tance. “My father is the worst enemy I have,” the son wrote in a moment of de-
spair. “It would not be so bad if I had chosen a different calling, but whatever I
write must always be compared to what he wrote.”59 As his biographer Lionel
Stevenson noted, Julian “was either condemned out of hand, on the assump-
tion that he was trying to capitalize on his relationship, or else he was mea-
sured solely by the criterion of his father’s work. Good qualities were praised
as survivals of the paternal genius, and anything which the critics disliked was
branded as a pathetic lapse from the Hawthorne tradition.”60
Among the transmitted features most often identified in the fiction of Julian
Hawthorne was the author’s interest in the distinction between the “world of
matter” and the “world of spirit.” Both Hawthornes believed in the primacy of
the mind over the body in any such Cartesian duality, but while the father fo-
cused on the gothic and supernatural elements of the spirit, the son preferred
the spiritual essence that emanated from the practical and real.61 In “The De-
sire for Truth,” Julian Hawthorne argued that the “poetic truths” sought by
his father’s generation were “based upon tradition and fancy,” a disposition
toward the ideal that put them sadly out of touch with the realities of modern
life. The majority of readers in the late nineteenth century wanted “to know
things as they really are,” he concluded. No longer satisfied with “fables and
legends, and with the irresponsible vagaries of dreamers” that had sustained
early historians of Irving’s ilk, he wrote, “we have comprehended that the truth
about ourselves, and about the universe which we inhabit, is far more wonder-
ful and absorbing than any fairy tale; and, moreover, that sound knowledge
of such truth is productive of practical good and power in the conduct of our

lives.” This was not to say that “poetry and romance are dead, or even can
die,” Julian wrote; he was too much a Hawthorne for that. But he espoused
“a new poetry and a new romance founded upon scientific truth” rather than
upon “lifeless sentiment” and whimsical fancy.62 Julian’s theory of a grounded
imagination was carefully laid out in a collection of literary essays, Confessions
and Criticisms (1887), in which he noted that writers in his father’s day had
gone too far in trusting the “inward touchstone of truth,” while those of his
own generation believed too fervently in “external experience” as the only true
source of authenticity. Julian sought to reconcile the two positions by distilling
from specific historical circumstances those essences that were the prevailing
philosophical and spiritual principles inherent in the human condition.63
Though many of Julian Hawthorne’s best novels, such as Garth (1877) and
Fortune’s Fool (1883), explored aspects of the new scientific realism of the age,
he never embraced fully “the photographic method of novel-writing” prevalent
in the late nineteenth century.64 Discouraged by the too-easy self-assurance of
naturalists and realists like Zola, who claimed to record human nature with the
neutral fidelity of a camera, Julian warned that photographic writing was as
susceptible to misstatement as photograph taking. “We think we understand
photography, even the x-ray ones,” he wrote, “but what light, and whence,
prints the record on this film? Memory is free from the fetters of time and
space, as man is not, and proves how unreal they are.”65 In a newspaper review
article titled “The Picture Show,” for example, Hawthorne condemned one
artist’s full-length portrait of a subject because the “true character” of the sitter
had been lost in the photographic realism of the presentation. “The likeness is
accurate, as if based on a photograph, which I almost suspect to be the case,”
he wrote, “but the thing has no more depth or atmosphere than a wallpaper
pattern.”66 Photographic means of reproduction also left Julian Hawthorne
cold, as he revealed in the short story “A Picturesque Transformation” about
a poor painter, who, having produced a great work of art, expended his cre-
ative energies in mass-producing the painting to the detriment of both copies
and the original. The repetition of function inherent in the process of pho-
tographic duplication as well as the materialism implicit in such reiterations
compromised badly the artist’s originality, in Julian’s framing of the issues.67
In such stories about the dangers of mass-produced images, Hawthorne
echoed the sentiments of many late nineteenth-century artists like himself
trained in the “crafts” tradition, who regretted the loss of originality and charm
occasioned by advanced technologies. Chromolithography was a case in point.
As Lawrence Levine has noted, this process, “by which original paintings were
reproduced lithographically in color and sold in the millions to all segments of
the population,” was assailed by critics such as Godkin, who claimed that it

“symbolized the packaged ‘pseudo-culture’ that ‘diffused through the commu-
nity a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge’ and gave people the false con-
fidence of being ‘cultured.’ ” Consequently, Levine argues, the term “chromo”
became synonymous with “ugly” or “offensive” by 1890.68 Julian Hawthorne
had this kind of anti-mechanical cultural criticism in mind when he jotted the
following note in his private journal in that same year: “The problem with me-
chanical forms of reproduction was that they were unthinking; their precision
was an accuracy of the body but not of the mind, and not of the obscured, hid-
den beauties of life,” he wrote. The same held true for mechanical forms of fic-
tion writing. Recognizing that the “Fanaticism of Realism” was “a reaction from
the lifeless sentiment and morbid humbug which had come down to us from an
ill-educated and artificial Past,” Hawthorne argued that “unless our modern
novelists relent a little from the severity of their Realistic prepossessions, there
seems to be some danger that they smother themselves in the albumen and yolk
[of Shakespeare’s cosmic egg].” He believed that good literature “depended
for its worth and veracity, not upon adherence to scientific exactitude or veri-
fication of literal fact, but upon ‘its perception and portrayal of the underlying
truth, of which fact is but the phenomenal and imperfect shadow.’ ”69
Some critics of Hawthorne’s novels found the author’s efforts to wrestle with
the mind/body problem intriguing, but most identified faults with the manner
in which he abstracted the ideal from the real. Often Hawthorne resorted in
his fiction to lengthy philosophical monologues uttered by obscure characters
whose sole literary purpose was to serve as the author’s mouthpiece. Over
time, Hawthorne’s novels and short stories became increasingly convoluted
in pursuit of this theoretical system, and their complexities alienated readers
who preferred such reflections to emanate more naturally from the details of
plot and character. As one critic noted, his “philosophical speculations on the
nature of man, on human destiny and free will, and on the virtues and vices
of civilization not only damned the narrative flow but appeared out of place
in stories whose settings and characters were bizarre or romantic.”70 At times
Hawthorne even seemed to violate his own principles of scientific realism, as
when he introduced in The Spectre of the Camera (1888) an improbable pho-
tographic device that recorded only the phantasmagorical shadows of figures
rather than the sitter’s themselves.71 Hawthorne’s intention in employing such
a camera was to suggest the spiritual forms that lay behind the tangible world,
but readers viewed the strategy as a misplaced effort to add fanciful elements
to an already unrealistic tale. And the consensus among critics was that Haw-
thorne elaborated continuously on the same misguided program of unrealistic
realism in nearly all his works, varying only the settings and temporal sequenc-
ing. As one reviewer put it: “his talents are inadequate, his work frequently

chaotic, often recklessly sensational, and he is perpetually playing variations of
the same tune on the same old Stradivarius.”72
From the point of view of Hawthorne’s role in the development of the genre
of popular history, these tendencies toward philosophical speculation were re-
vealing because they reflected directly on his perceptions of what constituted
historical truth. Here again Hawthorne’s reputation was not as strong as his
father’s and provided little protection from attacks. Many critics of his fiction
took issue with his shortcomings and vulnerabilities in these historical matters.
The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, ridiculed Hawthorne’s Dust (1883) for the
“historical inaccuracy” of its diction and costume, while other reviewers com-
plained of the “uncomfortable sense of allegorical intention” that permeated
books ostensibly grounded in present realities.73 The eminent realist Henry
James noted that in the novel Idolatry (1874), “Mr. Hawthorne spins his thread
out of his fancy, and at the touch of reality it would very soon snap.”74 In the
pages of his memoirs, Hawthorne admitted that he often sacrificed fidelity for
feeling in his works of fiction. “I am too certain,” he declared, “too flippant,
too indifferent to everything, the truth included. I have no reverence for any-
thing, and would sacrifice anything, truth included, for the sake of a startling
or picturesque effect.”75 It was one thing to be fanciful and irreverent in fiction,
but quite another to be so in history, and even Julian acknowledged that his
inclinations to seek the ideal beneath the real did not always sit well with pro-
fessional historians. He made little effort “to achieve the authorial invisibility”
or the “rigid self-elimination” that professional scholars demanded, choos-
ing instead to insert his own opinions whenever and wherever he chose.76
“[D]on’t be surprised at whatever these pages may tell or omit,” Hawthorne
warned scholars regarding his whimsical approach to the past. Admitting that
his mind was drawn “inadvertently” at times to “some isolated person or oc-
currence of the past” which grabbed him with “a hundred octopus-feelers,”
he begged readers to tolerate the capriciousness of his historical vision. “Like
the man at the dance-hall piano, I am doing my best,” he explained.77
A particularly revealing example of Hawthorne’s dubious conceptions of
historical truth came in a confession of sorts he made in his memoirs concern-
ing a monument erected to the Hawthornes in England. Julian had received
a letter from a committee of citizens in Rock Park, England, who wished to
memorialize the place where the Hawthornes had lived in the 1850s. Their
work had halted, however, because they were unsure which among several
houses was the appropriate one. The correspondent “enclosed photographs
of them all, and requested me to put a cross over our former habitation,” ex-
plained Julian. “Now, all the houses in Rock Park had been turned out of the
same mould, and I knew no more than my interrogator which was which. But

I reflected that the committee had been put to trouble and expense for pho-
tographs, postage-stamps, and what not, and that all that was really wanted
was something to be sentimental over. So, rather than disappoint them, I re-
sorted to a kind of sortes Virgilianae; I shut my eyes, turned round thrice, and
made a mark at hazard on the line of photographs.” Even though the chance of
identifying the correct house was only one in four, Hawthorne submitted his
randomly chosen image as the authentic location, and the committee erected
a monument confirming the spot. Justifying the ruse on the grounds that “the
pilgrims have been made happy” and that no real “harm has been done,”
nevertheless Hawthorne confessed: “the matter has weighed somewhat on my
conscience ever since, and I am glad to have thus lightened myself of it. What
would one better do in such circumstances?” he asked.78
This startling confession underscored what critics had been saying about the
variability of evidence in the hands of those not attendant to its subtleties. More
important, it called into question Hawthorne’s integrity as a seeker after truth, a
trait of increasing relevance to his writing career as he moved from fiction writ-
ing to journalism in the 1880s and 1890s.79 Part of Hawthorne’s motivation for
the change was financial. Unable to secure contracts for many of the pieces he
wished to publish and ineffective in getting companies to pay on time for the
works he did publish, Hawthorne found himself in the late 1880s slipping into
a depression, reminiscent of John Frost’s, about his inability to provide for his
growing family, now numbering nine children. “Since my family has attained
its present respectable dimensions, I have heard something of the howling of
the wolves in the forest; and more than once have been forced to stand hard
to my defence,” he wrote a relative. “This may surprise you,” he added; “for
the general impression (which I am by no means concerned to efface) seems to
be that I am . . . rolling in gold. The truth is that like many other men of tran-
scendent genius and worth, my reputation is much sounder than my bank ac-
count.”80 Hawthorne’s son, Fred, confirmed these troubles when years later
he remarked: “No matter where we lived, . . . I still have indelible memories of
tradesmen wearing out the ‘Welcome’ mats at our various residences, looking
for payment for groceries, butchers and bakers, etc.”81 At one point, Hawthorne
was accused of selling the same magazine article to competing magazines, one
in the United States and the other abroad, in order to pay bills.82 Reduced to
trading the Hawthorne family silver to make ends meet, his despair over money
pushed him closer to a fulfillment of his parents’ dire predictions that a “mor-
bid crust of callousness” would envelop him. “[L]ife has ceased being a picture
and a song to me,” he declared; “truly it is a mighty responsibility.”83
The one marketable commodity Julian had was his family name, so he con-
tinued to put the Hawthorne imprimatur before the public wherever possible,

especially in the form of newspaper bylines. He felt uniquely suited to the job
of correspondent because of his capacities for generalizing and his powers of
literary description.84 In seeking a position on the Sun, for instance, he told
his would-be employer: “I can . . . describe earthquakes and murders, or even
interview eminent persons,” a resumé of topics and talents that expanded after
he received the job to include articles on baseball, bowel trouble, plagues, and
assassinations.85 As a journalist, Hawthorne traveled around the world on
various assignments, including coverage of famine in India and war in Cuba.86
He wrote articles objecting to the “stupid and objectless” qualities of col-
lege football in which “heaped-up rushes and collisions” suggested a game
that might better “be played on the blackboard” with “every once in a while
a player . . . crushed to death under a steam hammer.”87 Race attracted him
as a “philosophical” topic, and he contributed several pieces to the Atlanta
Constitution calling for a more humane treatment of African Americans in the
South.88 One such article incurred the wrath of the editors of the Washington
Post, who complained that the idealistic journalist knew “very little of the real
conditions prevailing” in the South. Southerners “have not waited for Mr. Ju-
lian Hawthorne to tell them about their duty to the negroes,” the writer noted
smugly, nor had a leader such as Booker T. Washington troubled himself with
idle theoretical vagaries that occupied the former novelist, since, according to
the Post, he “has sense enough to know that, with the blacks as with the whites,
property and money are at the bottom of influence and recognition.”89
Other readers objected to some of the political overtones of Hawthorne’s
weekly columns. In covering the 1896 election, for instance, Hawthorne re-
ferred to Republican presidential candidate McKinley as “the little gilded,
pinchbeck Major, peeking and piping his complacent platitudes in his Canton
cottage, appearing on his little porch and retiring from it like the pith figure in
a weather box,” whereas the Democratic challenger, William Jennings Bryan,
was depicted nobly as “standing like an oak, strong, fresh, sincere, beneficent,
telling truth, and doing good to friend and foe alike.” Republicans rejected the
blatant partisanship of these descriptions—reminiscent of Ridpath’s excesses
in the Arena, for which Julian also wrote—noting that in such instances, “Mr.
Hawthorne has sacrificed fairness to literary effect.”90 Still others questioned
Hawthorne’s journalistic techniques with regard to an incident in which he was
denied access to the hearings of the Commission to Investigate the Conduct of
the Spanish-American War as a reporter for the New York Journal.91 Staging a
sit-in outside the investigating commission’s council chamber to protest his ex-
clusion, Hawthorne was ridiculed openly in the Washington Post for his stub-
bornness. “Nobody listens to Hawthorne,” a mean-spirited editorialist noted.
“Nobody has recognized the necessity of his advice and countenance. Nobody

has subscribed to the opinion that human effort must be futile without a boost
from him. He wanders here and there, a Niobe in trousers—trousers that bag
in deference to his woe—and soon a monolith will signify his once proud form
and be the sole reminder of his emotions.” Adding potential injury to insult,
the editors of the Post warned that Julian Hawthorne’s friends “should look to
him” with an awareness that if “he throws a few more fits,” Washington “will
refuse to answer for the consequences.” Within a week, the paper predicted,
readers will be able to peek “through a grating in some place of kindly refuge,
and to see a wild-eyed person with straw sticking freely in his hair, and to find
that the wickedness of the Investigating Commission has been set aside for the
triumphant anthem of the King of Siam.”92
Although he earned a reputation as a thorough researcher and gifted pre-
senter of topics, Hawthorne did not last long at the Sun or at any of the other
papers on which he worked, generally because of his disdain for the commercial
elements of journalism. Disheartened by the “new gospel of the auctioneer’s
catalogue, and the crackling of the thorns under a pot,” Hawthorne grappled
constantly with the negative implications of profit motives for the integrity of his
journalistic efforts. Most writers “starve or take up some other form of work,”
he wrote later in life, adding cynically: “I never counsel anyone to undertake
the profession of literature. In this age of competition and struggle, it might be,
during at least three hundred days out of every three hundred and sixty-five, a
trade, and not an art. And it is one of the hardest trades, when it is a trade at
all. The finest faculties of the mind must be harnessed to the lowest uses. Your
poem represents a pot of soup: your story, a month’s rent; your essay, a week’s
wash. . . . And the more authors there are, the greater must be the number of
those foredoomed to failure.” The money from writing was not sufficient even
if the commercial incentive was, he argued, since journalists on most newspaper
and magazine staffs faced “crushing odds.”93 These objections served as ratio-
nalizations for Hawthorne’s inabilities to meet his deadlines, but they did not
protect him from the unemployment that often resulted. His dismissal from The
American, for instance, was “on account of the impossibility of accomodating
[sic] my system to that of Mr. Hearst,” he explained to friends who became ac-
customed to such periodic firings.94 Like his contemporary Edward Ellis, Haw-
thorne contemplated declaring personal bankruptcy in light of his inabilities to
earn money, despite an almost frenetic output of written works commissioned
by others. “I think that, for a man of talent—certainly for a man of genius—the
worst possible school of literature is journalism,” he concluded, “because it
destroys this early enthusiasm, and checks individuality.”95
Out of despair for the commercialism of journalism, Hawthorne turned
to popular history as an outlet for his creative energies. While he maintained

loose affiliations with newspaper offices throughout his entire literary career
and continued to dabble in fiction, by the 1890s he was more and more pre-
occupied with writing history. He began modestly in 1893 by taking on “his-
torical hackwork as an additional source of income,” including a two-volume
history of the state of Oregon, for which he received a thousand dollars.96 Later
that year he produced Humors of the Fair, “a rambling, carelessly organized
book that expanded several articles on the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 writ-
ten for Lippincott’s and Cosmopolitan.”97 Many of these works proved dissatis-
fying and nonremunerative, and even the Hawthorne name was no protection
against the instability and unprincipled character of the popular book market.
In one representative instance, Hawthorne received a letter from a Mr. W. D.
Vincent asking him to autograph a book on the state of Washington that bore
Julian’s name as editor. Hawthorne wrote back the following letter of concern:
“I am sending you the ‘History’ by post, insured. It is only fair that I should
tell you that I find, upon examining it, that I did not write a line of it, or was
aware that it existed. . . . I was not consulted in its making, or knew that it was
projected . . . and the introduction on the title page of my name as Editor is, of
course, without my consent, and very unwelcome to me.” Rankled that others
were attempting to exploit the family name on which he depended more and
more for his livelihood, Hawthorne elaborated: “I wrote a history of Oregon,
at the request of a person who called upon me in New York, and was very ur-
gent on the matter. He paid me, I think, one thousand dollars for the work, in
four instalments [sic], which there was great difficulty in collecting,” and “the
style in which it is written would disgrace a schoolboy.”98
Hawthorne later collaborated with a Texan, Leonard Lemmon, on a survey
textbook of American literary history, and this work also raised concerns about
the novelist-turned-historian’s methodologies and his credibility. The New York
Tribune proclaimed the volume a “Queer Text-Book” and a “Strange Produc-
tion” because of its partisanship and literary excesses. Calling attention not
only to Lemmon’s “extreme Southern bias” but to Hawthorne’s inheritance
of his father’s “southern sympathies,” the Tribune refused to recommend the
volume to northern audiences without strong reservations about its point of
view.99 The assessment was a source of great anxiety for Lemmon, who wrote
his coauthor asking whether Hawthorne could use his influence to convince
academic scholars to defend the work against spurious attacks by “the penny-a-
liners” on the Tribune staff. The “matter has really become somewhat serious,”
Lemmon noted. “I expect to make my living—a good deal of it at any rate—by
text-books and a conviction of prejudice will be injurious to me.”100 Hawthorne
expressed less outward concern, but he, too, was affected by such characteriza-
tions and the insinuation that his “writing was frankly commercial.”101 He tried

to assert his convictions concerning objectivity in book review projects taken
on to earn a little extra money, including in his critique of Frederic Chapman’s
history of royal palaces: “At first, one might wish that the work had been in-
trusted to some writer of imaginative and even political tendencies, who would
have worked up gorgeous and moving portrayals of the scenes and persons of
splendor, intrigue, and tragedy or comedy, that are involved in the narrative,”
Hawthorne wrote. “But after finishing the volume one perceives that no such
em[bellishing] of the plain facts is required; the facts speak loudly enough for
themselves. There never was such another story as this of the English kings and
queens; never such another company of gorgeous savages.”102
Despite criticisms of his perspectives as a historian, Hawthorne persisted
with his historical work because he found it the most fertile ground for the
working out of his personal philosophies concerning the relationship between
the ideal and the real. The preface to the Oregon volumes is very revealing in
this regard, suggesting as it does the degree to which Hawthorne’s historical
thinking paralleled his approach to fiction. “History is to-day at least as much
a fine art as is the writing of imaginative fiction,” he wrote; “it is no less rich in
the interests arising from the manifestations of human nature; and it is fertile in
the problems of social and political science.”103 For Hawthorne, the past was an
intensely personalized and subjective field of study, and he tried to demonstrate
in his nonfiction prose how history could be enlivened with autobiographical
detail. “I was born at the time when General Zach Taylor was leading his little
army against Mexico; was fourteen when Sumter surrendered, and a Harvard
undergraduate when Lincoln died,” he wrote in demonstration of this person-
alized form. “Queen Victoria of England had fifty years yet to reign; the great
World War was not yet imagined; persons and events which are household
words today were unseen and unheard then; the twentieth century was a remote
Phantom of the Dawn. And when I look back over the sands of Time which
my feet have trod, I seem incredible even to myself.” Acknowledging the un-
deniable influence of subjective experience on historical outlook, Hawthorne
even flirted with a presentism that would have delighted relativists such as Ellis.
“Only today is, yesterday and tomorrow are insubstantial visions,” he noted,
adding polemically: “Einstein says today will come back to us, after making the
circuit of the light year. And perhaps it won’t matter much if it doesn’t.”104
In adopting such a relativistic stand, Hawthorne revealed some overlaps with
the new social historians of his generation whose works he read and reviewed.
In a lengthy and enthusiastic analysis of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civi-
lization, Hawthorne argued that the work was noteworthy because it aspired to
focus on the “common people” rather than on the “aristocrats” and “kingdoms”
that distracted previous historians who failed to detect the “protoplasm” of the

past where they could “learn to comprehend history in its germ.” Eggleston’s
book seemed “to get beneath even the people themselves,” he wrote, in an at-
tempt to “discover of what clay they are composed, and whence they got their
ideas.” Hawthorne admitted that “Dr. Eggleston is something of a materialist”
and that his excessive concern for material culture threatened at times to dehu-
manize the past. Eggleston managed to offset the most damaging effects of this
materialism, however, by incorporating into his work a dramatist’s appreciation
of human detail. The Transit of Civilization duplicated “the kind of life that the
historical novelist would value for his side scenes and local color,” wrote Haw-
thorne admiringly, adding that such a history as Eggleston’s requires a “powerful
constructive that from the dry bones and parchments which he dug up he could
erect a living and breathing figure.” Empathy was the key component in the his-
torian’s success. Eggleston had managed to “clothe himself in the garments and
in the limited notions and speculations of the period he treated,” Hawthorne
wrote. He had found a convincing way to “look out at the world through eyes
which had been closed for centuries,” all the while bearing in mind “the present
moment, in order to make his picture intelligible; to give it depth, perspective
and chiaroscuro, and not a mere flat and unatmosphered Chinese design.”105
Critics of Hawthorne’s (and Eggleston’s) ego-centered philosophy declared
it “not objective,” of course. How can we trust anything other than our own im-
pressions in such a relativistic scheme? How might we escape from the kind of
subjectifying fantasies that had characterized the fiction and history of Nathan-
iel Hawthorne?106 Julian imagined, however, that he had carved out a middle
ground between what Robert Berkhofer Jr. refers to as “the noble dream of sci-
entific objectivity and the nightmare of complete relativism” by defining “the
terrain of pragmatic truth, which provides us hypotheses, provisional syntheses,
imaginative but warranted interpretations,” and which points the way to “con-
tinuing inquiry and experimentation.”107 Pragmatic truth constituted a kind of
“principled opportunism” by which students of history could extrapolate from
the real to the ideal in ways that were useful to the present. It was Hawthorne
who had criticized Edward Eggleston for not including illustrations in The
Transit of Civilization, for instance, an omission which he thought was “regret-
table” in an age of mass production, but at the same time he praised the author
for his descriptive word portraits of historical figures that penetrated through
the “external surface of persons” to the “signs or expressions of inner truths.”108
In passing such judgments, Hawthorne declared his allegiance to a useful axiom
intrinsic to popular history since its inception as a genre; namely, that the sig-
nificance of historical literature inhered in its relevance to the personal needs
of its readers. From the crude vernacular of Frost to the more sophisticated
idioms of Ridpath, all bona fide popular histories evidenced this concern for

the demands of the “people.” If the words and images of history were to serve
the populace, Hawthorne recognized, they must address national problems in
forms meaningful to those responsible for developing solutions—in forms, that
is, that were accessible without being trivialized into “literary chromos.”
It was this insight that motivated Julian Hawthorne to undertake the writing
of a multivolume popular history of the United States in the late 1890s. Despite
the proliferation of such widely circulating works by Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis,
and others, Hawthorne felt he had a unique perspective to offer the American
people based on his sense of the potential for the creative tensions implicit in
the relationship between the ideal and the real. Many particular episodes “of
adventure and exploration” in the American past are “rich in picturesque char-
acters and romantic interest,” he informed would-be readers of his volumes,
“but they have little organic relation to the history of the true America—which
is tracing of the development and embodiment of an abstract idea.” Seeking
a “coherency” between “the practical and the theoretic temperaments,” he
noted that the “opposition” between real and ideal is both “organic” and “ir-
reconcilable, but nevertheless wholesome,” since “both sides possess versions
of the same truth, and the perfect state arises from the contribution made by
both to the common good—not from their amalgamation, or from a compro-
mise between them.”109 As a means for working out the implications of this
thinking, Hawthorne contracted with Peter F. Collier, the publisher of Col-
lier’s Weekly: An Illustrated Journal, for a three-volume popular history titled
Hawthorne’s United States and a one-volume history of Spanish America.110
These books were conceived as part of a larger sixty-volume set of popular his-
tories titled The Nations of the World, for which Julian served as general editor
and supplemental author. Alongside Guizot’s Popular History of France and
Green’s Short History of England, Hawthorne’s popular history was designed,
in the words of its advertisers, as part of a “general scheme of the series” to
bring the “world’s best histories” to the American people. The history of each
nation “is brought down to date by clever and competent historians and jour-
nalists,” the display advertisements noted with little sense of the ambivalence
or potential contradiction between the two vocations.111 Hawthorne hoped he
qualified in both categories, although subsequent reviewers of his volumes
were unconvinced that he had proven himself worthy in either.
The Apotheosis of History

It is ironic that an idealistic writer who turned to popular history as an
escape from the commercialism of journalism was so affected by economic

concerns in the writing of his history. Julian Hawthorne kept diaries through-
out his life, and those from the last few years of the 1890s are filled with
succinct references to his financial affairs, including the details of his arrange-
ments with Collier for the “Nations of the World” series.112 The installments
of these journals reveal a very patterned and deliberate way of working, Haw-
thorne recording with regularity that he “Wrote History” and then “picked
up $100 from Collier’s.” Week after week the entries proceed in this fashion,
interrupted only occasionally by a comment like that of Saturday, January 7,
1899: “Wrote History. Toothache.” On Thursday, July 20, 1899, however, the
tone of these entries changed dramatically with this single line: “Letter from
Collier saying my account was overdrawn and he could let me have no more
money for some time.” Like Sydney Howard Gay, Hawthorne had used up
his credit with a fiscally cautious publisher, and he was now once again in
financial trouble.113 Begging for advances from journal editors to whom he
made regular submissions and working hard to retrieve unpaid fees from oth-
ers, Hawthorne cobbled together enough money to make it through the year,
but, also like Ellis, Hawthorne seemed always on the verge of personal bank-
ruptcy.114 Obligated to Collier for the completion of an unfinished manuscript
for which he had already been paid in advance, Hawthorne accelerated the
pace of his production as a way of trying to “write himself” out of trouble.
The result was an uneven series of volumes, the last of the three in particular
revealing in its brusqueness and its passion the special conditions of urgency
under which it was written.
In many ways, Hawthorne’s United States (1900) was the most important
piece of writing he ever completed for the working out of his struggles over
spirituality and materialism. He began the history with a lengthy philosophical
essay in which he elaborated on the relationship between the ideal and the real
as he had developed it in his novels and short stories. The events of the past,
Hawthorne argued, were simply neutral occurrences. What transformed events
into “history” was the organizational schema historians brought to bear on them.
“The facts contained in our best histories bear much the same relation to the
history itself that the flesh and bones of the body bear to the person who lives in
and by them,” he wrote. “The flesh and bones, or the facts have to exist; but the
only excuse for their existence is, that the person may have being, or that the his-
tory may trace a spiritual growth or decadence.” In this sense, then, the historian
was a creator, a life-giver, a resurrector. As the historian breathes “into the dead
fact the breath of life,” Hawthorne noted, “it rises from its tomb of centuries,”
Lazarus-like, and “does its appointed work in the mighty organism of human-
ity.” Despite the enormous power this rejuvenating capacity has conferred on
the historian, Hawthorne made no special claim for his deductions. Anticipat-

ing Carl Becker by a decade, he argued that every man and every woman had a
right to interpret the facts of history in any way meaningful to them. “After all,”
he wrote, “the best use of a history is probably to stimulate readers to think for
themselves about the events portrayed; and if I have succeeded in doing that I
shall be satisfied. . . . The materials for forming your judgment are here; form it
according as your faith and hope may dictate.”115
In advancing such relativistic assertions, Hawthorne shared something with
New Historians such as Edward Eggleston, who sought to broaden the base of
history by focusing on the social behaviors of the “common people,” wherever
possible. Both men, for instance, expressed an interest in the everyday lives of
those who lived in the colonial period, and both attempted to get at the forma-
tive influences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the American
mind. Unlike Eggleston, however, Hawthorne had little faith that historians
could uncover with certainty the true essence of the daily lives of the “mass of
the population” during those centuries, especially given that commoners were
dominated by a “history of the elect” who kept precious few records about
those who “lived from day to day, busied with their private concerns.” The
“average” citizens of those eras “serve but as the side scenes and background
of the tale,” he admitted, and their interests were subordinated generally to
the needs of the privileged few. In a sense, this assertion suggests that Haw-
thorne learned the lesson Eggleston had not; namely, that the attempt to write
a “total” history of the unvoiced inhabitants of a bygone period for which there
are scant materials is unlikely to succeed. Hawthorne observed: “We can de-
pict [the people] in broad lines; we can note the changes of costume and man-
ners from generation to generation; we can brighten the scene with anecdotes
and apologues; but these do but serve, in the end, to give substance and firm-
ness to our understanding of the dominant and guiding few. To however great
a degree we extend our canvas and multiply our figures, the result is the same.”
Acknowledging a certain “resentment at the restriction, remembering how
much more agreeable or not less inthralling would be many a tale of private en-
terprise,” Hawthorne nonetheless conceded that the history of the colonial era
in America was a history of “rulers.”116 Speculations regarding the “inner life”
of common people in the colonial period, he inferred, must be left to novelists
like his father and to psychological dramas such as The Scarlet Letter.117
The nineteenth century was another matter, however, in part because its his-
tory was within the personal memory of many of the readers of Hawthorne’s
United States. In presenting assessments of his own age, Hawthorne felt better
equipped to reconstruct the social history of private citizens, and like Eggleston,
the local-color novelist, he worked hard to establish the “interior reality” of the
world around him. The challenge for “modern history,” he believed, was no

longer the scarcity of facts but the “embarrassment” of too many facts and of the
difficulty of not knowing how to make a “judicious selection” among them. His-
torians distinguished themselves primarily by the principles of selection they
used in sorting through the massive materials of the past. Hawthorne’s personal
solutions were at times challenging from a methodological perspective. Mixing
metaphors wildly, he noted that the historian “must tell a consecutive story, but
must eschew all redundancy, furnish no more supports for his bridge than its
stability requires, prune his trees so severely that it shall bear none but good
fruit, forbear to freight the memory of his reader with a cargo so unwieldy as to
sink it.” In short, the historian did not have the luxury of the novelist to amplify
and speculate. That said, Hawthorne also claimed that the historian must not
be “too terse,” since “man cannot live by bread alone, and the reader of histo-
ries needs to be told the Why as well as the What.” In this sense, historians were
obligated, as novelists were not, to raise pertinent questions, seek coherency in
their answers and bring closure to their narratives. Arguing that the “history
of the United States does mean something,” Hawthorne recycled an organic
metaphor of his father’s to challenge historians to go beyond “the enormous
mass of facts.” “Are we a decadent fruit that is rotten before it is ripe,” he asked,
“or are we the bud of the mightiest tree of time?”118
In the introduction to his popular history, Hawthorne acknowledged two
dominant schools of thought with respect to these questions bearing on the
relationship of idealistic and realistic approaches to the past. If a historian is
“imaginative,” he noted of popularizers such as Irving or Bryant, “the pictur-
esque side of things appeals to him; he dissolves the facts and recreates them to
suit his conceptions of beauty and harmony, and we have poetry and legend.”
Historians of a more analytic point of view, however, such as Gay or Ridpath,
“saw the end from the beginning of their narratives; they assigned to their facts
their relative place and importance, and merged them into a pervading atmo-
sphere of opinion, based upon the organic relation of cause and effect. Study-
ing their works, we are enabled to discern the tendencies and developments of
a race, and to note the effects of civilization, character, vice, virtue, and of that
sum of them all which we call fate.” The Bible, which Hawthorne identified
as the first great work of history, combined both these tendencies. “The facts
which [the books of the Bible] relate, often seemly trivial, and disconnected,
are really but a material veil, or symbol, concealing a spiritual body of truth,
which is neither trivial nor disconnected, but an organized, orderly and catho-
lic revelation of the nature of man, of the processes of his spiritual regeneration,
of his final reconciliation with the Divine.” Recognizing the advantages of both
picturesque and analytic approaches, Hawthorne concluded his philosophical
introduction with a hope not unlike the one advanced in Duyckinck’s “Liter-

ary Prospects of 1845,” that the time will perhaps come “when some inspired
man or men will be enabled to handle our modern history with the same eso-
teric insight which informed the Hebrew scribes, when they used the annals of
the obscure tribe to which they belonged as a cover under which to present the
relations of God with all the human race, past and to come.”119
In reading through the opening pages of Hawthorne’s United States, one
gets the sense that its author aspired to be this esoteric historian. Having de-
voted his life to the search for spiritual self-consciousness beneath the facade
of every day life, he introduced a system of philosophical idealism into his
histories to explain the nation’s steady growth toward platonic self-realization.
From its earliest days, Hawthorne noted, the nation was, in a Kierkegaardian
sense, ever in the process of becoming. The United States “is the conscious
incarnation of a sublime idea—the conception of civil and religious liberty,” he
wrote. “It is a spirit first, and a body afterward; thus following the true law of
immortal growth.” In a perfect expression of the transcendental philosophy
familiar to his father, Hawthorne added: “The spirit, for the sake of which the
body exists, more and more dominates its material basis, until at last the latter
practically vanishes ‘in the light of its meaning sublime.’ This is the apotheosis
of history, which of course has not yet been attained, and probably can never
be more than approximated.” But approximate Hawthorne tried, arguing that
his history would emphasize the spirit of American beliefs over crass obses-
sion with the nation’s physical attributes. “Some sort of recognition of the
American Idea, and of the American destiny, affords the only proper ground
for American patriotism,” he noted in his introduction. “We talk of the size of
our country, of its wealth and prosperity, of its physical power, of its enlighten-
ment, but if these things be all that we have to be proud of, we have little. They
are in truth but outward signs of a far more precious possession within. We are
the pioneers of the new Day, or we are nothing worth talking about.”120
To Hawthorne, the “spirit” of democracy was a divine one, and the history
of the United States in his own day was therefore a providential unraveling of
dramatic intent as it had been for William Cullen Bryant. “[A]t heart the voice
of democracy is the voice of God,” he wrote with messianic fervor. “It may be
silent for long, so that some will disbelieve or despair, and say in their haste
that democracy is a fraud or a failure. But at last its tone will be heard, and its
word will be irresistible and immortal: the word of the Lord, uttering itself
through the mouth of His creatures.” And, as in all matters of divine will, there
was an unabashed predestinarian quality to the history presented by Haw-
thorne. “In these volumes, I have taken the view that the American nation is
the embodiment and vehicle of a Divine purpose to emancipate and enlighten
the human race. Man is entering upon a new career of spiritual freedom,”

Hawthorne proclaimed: “he is to enjoy a hitherto unprecedented condition
of political, social and moral liberty—as distinguished from license, which in
truth is slavery. The stage for this grand evolution was fixed in the Western
Continent, and the pioneers who went thither were inspired with the desire to
escape from the thralldom of the past, and to nourish their souls with that pure
and exquisite freedom which can afford to ignore the ease of the body, and all
temporal luxuries, for the sake of that elixir of immortality. This, according
to my thinking, is the innermost core of the American Idea,” Hawthorne re-
corded. Narrating the history of America, then, was analogous to undertaking
an exegesis of the “spiritual body of truth” in the Bible. And since “good alone
has a root, connecting it with the eternal springs of life,” he concluded, “in the
end it prevails, and the movement of the race is on the whole, and in the lapse
of time, toward better conditions.”121
Ignorance of the spiritual power of a people, Hawthorne suggested, “is
the inevitable conclusion of materialistic logic.” Because he valued things of
the spirit, he argued in Hawthorne’s United States that the “most dangerous
enemy of America has been . . . our own material prosperity.” From the very
beginning of American intellectual life, base human needs had overwhelmed
the power of ideas. Hence Hawthorne’s Columbus was absorbed with “lofty
and unselfish” thoughts and emotions “as he knelt on that coral beach” in the
Caribbean on his day of discovery. “But before the man of destiny had risen
from his knees, he had ceased to act as the instrument of God, and had begun
to think of personal emoluments,” Hawthorne noted, moralizing that “adver-
sity set his name among the stars, and prosperity abased his soul to dust. The
remaining years of his life were a fruitless struggle to secure what he deemed
his rightful wages—to coin his immortal exploit into ducats; and his end was
sorrowful and dishonored.” Spanish explorers, Hawthorne maintained, who
had gold as their only passion, never perceived the greater spiritual wealth
of the emerging region. Their love of gold “derived from the ‘Dark Ages,’ ”
and as “they toiled through swamps, they cut their way through woods, they
scaled precipices, they fought savages, they starved and died,” these deluded
conquistadors “still sought the gleam of the precious metal.” The settlers of
Jamestown were likened to “the emigrants to the Klondike gold-fields in our
own day,” building a colony “designed only to better their fortunes and then
depart,” while even the devotional Pilgrims asked themselves on occasion
“whether a cold abstraction was worth adopting in lieu of the great, warm,
kindly world?” A promising abatement of this lust for money occurred dur-
ing the Revolution, Hawthorne noted, since, while the “Spirit of Liberty was
threatened from without, she was safe and triumphant.” But when the strug-
gle for independence was concluded, “a foe far more insidious began to plot

against her in her own house”—the monied interests and later trusts against
which Bryant had warned and those “noxious creatures” that “creep out” to
proclaim the “exalted maxim . . . that all Americans could be rich” and that
encouraged “the spectacle . . . of a mighty and generous nation fighting one
another for more material wealth.”122
Antimaterialism conditioned nearly every aspect of Hawthorne’s vision of
popular history. Historical figures were classified as either heroes or villains
depending on their affinities with the spiritual principles guiding the young
nation and their willingness to sacrifice material success for greater spiritual
good.123 Heroes revealed daily their divine associations with destiny and des-
tiny’s attendants. George Washington, for instance, was a man of “blameless
character, steady, courageous and observant, wise in judgment and of mature
mind,” whose actions revealed “a fortune, an inspiration, a spiritual quicken-
ing, such as come to no man by natural inheritance, but solely as a Divine
endowment for the emergency as it arises.” At the Battle of Quebec, General
Wolfe failed physically, but through his death he completed a spiritual mission,
acting with the heart of a hero “who knows that the culminating moment of his
destiny has arrived.” At such a crisis point, Hawthorne noted “the mortal part
of the man is transfigured by the towering spirit, and his eyes pierce through
the veils of things. His life lies beneath him, and he contemplates its vicissi-
tudes with the high tranquility of an immortal freedom. What is death to him
who has already triumphed over the fetters of the flesh, and tasted the drink
of immortality? He is the trustee of the purpose of God; and the guerdon his
deed deserves can be nothing less noble than to die.”124 This description of
Wolfe’s death shared far more with Benjamin West’s dramatic painting than
it did with Edward Ellis’s speculations about the base and vindictive mur-
der of Wolfe by his own soldier. Hawthorne experienced none of the doubts
that Simon Schama later expressed about the validity of the transfiguration of
Wolfe or concerns about “the irrecoverable distance between events and their
narration” with respect to the Plains of Abraham which prompted Schama to
speculate on “the death of certainty.”125 Wolfe’s death for Hawthorne was an
expression of the spirit in its purest and most unadulterated form.
Conversely, villains in Hawthorne’s United States were those out of step
with emerging American ideals or obsessed with earthly and material gains
to the exclusion of spiritual values. Revealing some of his father’s deep-seated
contempt for the Puritans as a hypocritical people, Julian condemned theo-
cratic leaders in seventeenth-century New England who “created an oligarchy
of the most insidious and unassailable type: a communion of earthly ‘saints,’
who might be, and occasionally were, satans at heart.” Unable to suppress their
inner Dimmesdales, such antiheroes were exposed to a corrupted spirit which

acted “like some subtle contagion in the remotest recesses of the forest, and
those who went to live there became affected with it.” In Hawthorne’s estima-
tion, Cotton Mather was “the sensible incarnation” of “the evil tendencies of
Puritanism” in all its “hideousness.” Had justice prevailed in the Salem witch
trials, Hawthorne concluded uncharitably, “that noose, slimy with death-sweat
of a score of innocent victims, would have settled greedily round his own guilty
neck, and strangled his life.” Governor Berkeley of Virginia was “as detestable
as any known in the annals of the American colonies,” since, in squashing the
rebellion of Bacon and his accomplices, he sought the “means to torture their
minds while destroying their bodies,” in the process focusing on “his pecuni-
ary advantage,” while “his thievish fingers grasped all the valuables that his
murderous instincts brought within his power.” Likening Berkeley’s selfish
tendencies “to those of a fiend from the Pit, permitted for a season to afflict
the earth,” he declared the governor a “base” and “wicked” man, “a thief”
who “perjured, as well as an insatiable murderer” and whose actions were “to
be attributed to the suffusion of blood to the brain which drives the Malay to
run amuck.” Benedict Arnold received none of the benefit of the doubt af-
forded him by Simms. In Hawthorne’s view, Arnold operated from “coarse
and brutal” instincts, and when he “retired to England, a stench in all men’s
nostrils,” he remained “insensible to considerations of honor or of shame,”
having “regretted his abominable treason no more than he scrupled to commit
it.” Arnold’s companion in treason, Major John Andre, fared no better. “Con-
cerning this young man, a great deal of silly sentiment has been vented during
the past century,” Hawthorne noted, adding: “it must be said that Andre was
a man of worthless character, destitute of honor or scruple, and presenting all
the characteristics of a smooth, insinuating, conscienceless scamp. He died the
death of dishonor which he richly deserved.”126
Slavery provided a still more glaring example of the corrupting influence of
materialism. Enforced servitude appeared innocuously enough in nearly all the
colonies in the early seventeenth century, Hawthorne noted, but it eventually
became like a “Frankenstein monster” which “must be fed and given room to
stretch his shackled but formidable limbs.” Forced to live with the spiritual con-
sequences of the “calamity of slavery,” the nation experienced daily the ravages
of its corrupt system. “Our ancestors had not suffered from hunger and Indi-
ans, from royal oppression, from insolent war, to have the work of their blood
and brains and hearts destroyed by the shallow and infidel impatience of a hot-
headed and arrogant minority,” Hawthorne reasoned in the manner of Gay.
“These planters were not the nation, for they were willing to destroy the nation;
their attitude was not buttressed by the august and deep-laid foundations of
history, for they cast history aside, and acted from the selfish and immediate

impulse of personal comfort and prosperity.” Motivated by the financial returns
of a corrupt system, “they would destroy the edifice of ages, in which were in-
volved the purest hopes of mankind.” The result was the American Civil War,
an epic struggle between the forces of spirituality and materialism that Julian
had once been anxious to enter but which now appeared to him in retrospect
as a “hideous work of mutual destruction” that threatened to “annihilate the
work their great fathers had made.” The outcome was terrifying but inevitable.
“The North, indeed, had physical resources not possessed by the South; but
these could not have been called forth, nor kept in action, had not a profound
spiritual conviction of right and duty animated them as soul animates body,”
Hawthorne argued. John Brown’s “body mouldered in its grave, but his soul,
militant still, marched from battlefield to battlefield, and witnessed the sacrifice
of hundreds of thousands of human lives, poured out to defend or to defeat the
cause for the sake of which he had put his head in the halter,” he added.127
Occasionally Hawthorne’s insistence on the importance of the spiritual
over the material led him to some shortsighted assessments of character. He
spoke of women in silly terms, for instance, valuing the very real diplomatic
achievements of Isabella of Castile’s reign far less than Irving’s depiction of
her “feminine imagination” that allowed her to find value in Columbus’s quix-
otic dream. “Had she known more, she would have done less,” Hawthorne
concluded in conspicuously sexist language. He was still more outspoken con-
cerning the failings of Andrew Jackson’s cabinet, whose members “were abso-
lutely impotent to convert or constrain” the “curtain-lectures” of their wives in
the matter of Peggy Eaton. “[T]hough Jackson could defeat British regulars at
New Orleans, dominate his Cabinet and overpower Congress, there was one
thing he was not strong enough to do, and that was, to make fine ladies behave
with human charity toward a woman,” argued Hawthorne. Noting the petti-
ness of women everywhere when it came to personal politics, he characterized
their malice “as impalpable as a mephitic vapor, which is nevertheless fatal,”
adding that “the white doves of rank and fashion are more bloodthirsty and
merciless than harpies when a chance offers to destroy one of their own sex.”
You may manage a man easily enough, he noted; “you can call him out and
shoot him if he is unreasonable; but woman is unassailable, and profits by that
fact.” And whenever Hawthorne intended to dismiss some group or cause for
its petty ambitions, he often did so with reference to the grasping behavior
of women. “South Carolina had prattled of secession, no doubt, as a pretty
woman threatens her husband with leaving him if he does not buy her a new
bonnet,” he wrote; “but nothing serious was meant.”128
Hawthorne was equally dismissive of Native Americans, whom he charac-
terized as primitive anachronisms out of touch with the spiritual mission of the

nineteenth century. While Hawthorne conceded that there were some Native
Americans of ability and awareness, he believed, as Ridpath had expressed in
the Popular History of the United States, that as a race they had few redeem-
ing qualities and no lasting influence on human history. “Amid the roars and
fever of these latter ages, they stand silent, useless, and apathetic.” An Indian
such as Tecumseh “was one of the most admirable figures among all Ameri-
can red men” and “we may give him the credit of being an honorable and
worthy foeman,” Hawthorne acknowledged; yet he added with Sheridan-like
ruthlessness: “probably he, too, was better dead than alive.” In Hawthorne’s
estimation, there was no redeeming quality in Native Americans sufficient
to overcome the iniquities of their natures or to close the gap between races.
“Seas are shallow and continents but a span compared with the breadths and
depths which separate him from you,” Hawthorne counseled readers. “The
sphinx will yield her mystery, but he will not unveil his; you may touch the
poles of the planet, but you can never lay your hand on him. The same God
that made you, made him also in His image; but if you try to bridge the gulf
between you, you will learn something of God’s infinitude.”129
This vitriolic attitude toward Native Americans had much to do with Haw-
thorne’s feeling that they were obsessed with physical brutality and were re-
sistant to the uplifting qualities of the pervasive democratic spirit in America.
Given his own perverse obsession with writing about gruesome death in con-
nection with tribal warfare, a trait he shared with Ellis, the criticism was ironic
at best. Hawthorne was not shy about describing in graphic detail the “blood
and mangled corpses” that desecrated the hearths of frontier homes during
King Philip’s War, for instance, nor the “pools of blood which the frost had
congealed” and which later “bubbled” in the heat of subsequent conflagrations.
Discussion of an Indian raid on Schenectady in the 1690s elicited a description
of the “vicious swish and crash of the murderous tomahawk, followed by the
dexterous twist of the scalping-knife, and the snatching of the tuft of hair from
the bleeding skull.” And, as if unconvinced that this description of the horrors
of an Indian assault was sufficient in its detail to convey the gruesomeness of
the event, he added, as an afterthought: “That is all—but, no: there still remains
a baby or two who must be caught up by the leg, and have its brains dashed
out on the door-jamb.” With reference to a winter attack on Deerfield, Massa-
chusetts, Hawthorne wondered aloud “how many motionless corpses” and “in
what ghastly attitudes, lay huddled in the darksome rooms of the little houses,
or were tossed upon the trodden snow without, the looks of mortal agony fro-
zen on their features?” Still not satisfied with the morbidity of this requiem
to the dead, he concluded with more lurid detail: “But you will hear the howl
of the wolves by-and-by; and the black bear will come shuffling and sniffing

through the broken doors; and when the feast is over, there will be, in place of
these poses of death, only disordered heaps of gnawed bones, and shreds of
garments rent asunder, and the grin of half-eaten skulls.” Given the gruesome
consequences of savage tendencies, Hawthorne urged readers not to waste any
sentiment on these vile creatures or to admit them into the spiritual community
of democratic virtue.130
These viscious attitudes toward women and Native Americans may have
alienated him from some readers, especially professional ones, although his out-
spokenness endeared him to others who shared his prejudices. In an industry
positively crowded with dry, factual texts that drew heavily on one another, Haw-
thorne’s subjective approach was attractive to many. Even those opposed to his
opinions could not ignore the literary flair with which he presented them. Only
Hawthorne among popular historians was capable of describing Peter Stuyves-
ant as “seamed and knotty, with a famous wooden leg which all New Yorkers, at
any rate, love to hear stumping down the corridors of time.” Hawthorne alone
could depict the death scene of Queen Elizabeth with the reflection that “as
Elizabeth’s last breath rattled in her throat, the mourners had one ear cocked
toward the window, to hear what sort of a voice James was speaking.” Concern-
ing the Gallic custom that required Ben Franklin to kiss Voltaire, he wrote with
characteristic humor: “One can imagine the demure amusement which Franklin
must have derived from this incident; but he performed the act with his invari-
able grave decorum; if one must kiss a man once in one’s life, perhaps it was as
well to make the essay upon Voltaire as upon any other.” And how could read-
ers resist a text that noted of the “Era of Good Feelings” that the “lamb was not
afraid of being eaten, and the lion turned out to be fond of vegetables”?131
Accused of striving too hard to achieve a “picturesque effect” in his novels,
Julian Hawthorne was guilty sometimes of the same tendency in his histories.
In narrating the Courtship of Myles Standish and John Alden’s pursuit of Pris-
cilla, for instance, Hawthorne favored the romantic treatments of Longfellow
and Jane Goodwin Austin over the more restrained handling by professional
scholars.132 “We can imagine how this situation would be handled by the ana-
lytic novelists of our day,” Hawthorne wrote; “how they would spread Alden’s
heart and conscience out on paper, and dry them, and pick them to pieces.”
Hawthorne praised the “tender allegories, sweet household rhymes, melodious
epics, [and] psalms of life” of Longfellow’s romantic poetry which “turned life
into harmony, showed the silver lining of the cloud, drew hopeful morals from
the problems of existence, made the wild or stern legends of the past blossom
with delicate flowers of fancy and rhetoric.” Lest readers assume that he was
violating his own principle of grounding the ideal in the real, Hawthorne re-
minded them that Longfellow composed poetry such as “Evangeline” about

people like the Arcadians, who experienced “naked and terrible realities” that
“gave the poet space and inspiration.” It is the romantic poet “who seizes the
inchoate and discordant affairs of mankind, and compels them to assume form
and harmony,” demonstrating the spirituality behind cold, harsh realities. In
the works of Bryant and Longfellow, Hawthorne added, the “matter-of-fact,
prosaic Nineteenth Century vanishes as we read, and the great days of classic
heroism are present with us once more. But, indeed,” he concluded, borrow-
ing language from his father’s True Stories in Biography and History, “they are
never absent, so long as human souls are brave and devoted.”133
Hawthorne also appropriated certain romantic tropes and techniques from
his father’s fiction, including elaborate organic metaphors of growth and decay,
discourses on introspection and transmitted sin, and reflections on the per-
verse. One is conscious of the critic’s warning about trying to find too much
of the father in everything the son wrote, but it is undeniable that there was a
distinct legacy with respect to anti-Puritanism that Julian did little to disavow.
Most readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne were aware that the novelist’s pater-
nal great-grandfather, Judge John Hathorne, had been one of the preliminary
hearing judges at the 1692 trials of Salem’s accused and persecuted “witches,”
and many, such as Charles Francis Adams Jr., suspected that the ignominious
distinction of this legacy was responsible for the anxiety and remorse in the
judge’s ancestors and accounted for the evocative negative portraits of Puri-
tans that appeared in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels.134 The antagonist in The
House of the Seven Gables, for instance, Judge Pyncheon, was depicted as a
“sternly-resentful,” “iron-hearted,” “strong-willed” Puritan.”135 Julian Haw-
thorne’s portrait of a typical seventeenth-century Puritan echoed this senti-
ment and language, complete with “the steeple crowned hat, the severe brow,
the steady eyes, the pointed beard, the dark cloak and sad-hued garments.”
With self-implicating candor, Julian referred to “those terrific magistrates
whose grim decrees gave New England naughty children the nightmare a cen-
tury after the stern-browed promulgators of them were dust.”136 Hezekiah But-
terworth, author of A Popular History of America in The Popular Historical
Series attempted to refute Julian’s (and Nathaniel’s) anti-Puritanism by offer-
ing a more sympathetic portrait of the Massachusetts Bay founders and the
Salem witchcraft incident, but he admitted that the Hawthorne stereotype was
difficult to overcome.137
In addition to these parental borrowings, Julian drew extensively from the
narrative conventions of popular historians, many of whose works he had read
and absorbed. He experimented with authorial point of view in ways remi-
niscent of John Frost, for instance, placing an imaginary balloonist above the
battlefield at Bunker Hill and providing a speculative bird’s-eye account of

the fighting. Theatrical conventions worthy of William Cullen Bryant were
also employed by Hawthorne, who used dramaturgical language to highlight
his points about the power of the spirit in America. Reminding readers that
“[u]pon the stage of the world, each one acts his appointed part,” Hawthorne
condemned Citizen Genet as “a grotesque, theatrical little punchinello”;
Aaron Burr was “a dramatic freak of destiny, in the most dramatic period of
history”; and John Randolph, clothed in the “stage attire of a dissolute groom,
his eyes leering with intoxication,” proved a “low-comedy actor of genius”
in his debates with Clay, “with a native wit and readiness which could sting
and amuse. By ill luck, he shambled into politics, instead of on the stage.”
These melodramatic devices, which Gay had tried so hard to exorcize from the
prose of Bryant, were introduced by Hawthorne as a way of revivifying the past
through the transforming power of the written word.138 Edward Ellis’s con-
cept of a timeless past also informed the temporal structuring of Hawthorne’s
United States, the author noting that, like Ulysses, “we are part of all that we
have met; and the memory of the things that we have known, including the
opinions we have formed of them, passes before us toward the end of the jour-
ney, not in chronological order (not by intention, but haphazard), the things
of today arm in arm with those of childhood or of age, and thereby sometimes
gaining new significance. Memory is a queer creature,” he concluded, “hard to
keep within the confines of sequence.”139
Hawthorne believed implicitly in the “empire of the pen” as a device for
conveying the spiritual content of history, and some of the most memorable
descriptive writing in any popular history of the United States appears in
Hawthorne’s United States. The ascent of Wolfe’s men up the cliffs surround-
ing Quebec during the French and Indian War, for instance, is depicted in the
present tense and with an urgency that bespoke the immediacy of battle. “With
panting lungs man after man tops the ascent and sees the darkling plain and
forms in line with his comrades, while still the stream winds up endlessly from
the depths below,” Hawthorne wrote. “The earth is giving birth to an army.”
Sensational death scenes were Hawthorne’s specialty and eclipsed even the
most gruesome pictures of war as imagined by George Lippard. As the Brit-
ish soldiers spilled out of the guardhouse during the Boston Massacre, “the
sinister intent which was manifest in their look and bearing sent a strange thrill
through the multitude,” Hawthorne wrote, adding with a gothic air of mys-
tery: “It is said that a figure was seen to come out on the balcony of the cus-
tom house, his face concealed by a veil hanging down over it, and [fled] into
the retreating throng. The open space in front of the soldiers was overhung
with smoke, which slowly dissolved away, and revealed eleven New England-
ers stretched along the trodden snow of their native town. Some tried to rise;

others lay still. Blood flowed from their wounds, smoking in the icy air, and
the tinging the white snow red. The deed had been done.” The long slope of
Breed’s Hill during the Battle of Bunker Hill was described by Hawthorne as
“a ghastly sight; red-coated bodies were lying there by scores, and within fifty
feet of the turf wall they were massed in heaps. Some of them still stirred; an
arm was lifted, a head was raised, and sank again. But most of them lay quite
motionless in the broad, pitiless sun.”140
In constructing such graphic word-paintings, Hawthorne was not above
adding speculative details to aid the imagination. In describing the first meet-
ing between the Pilgrims and the English-speaking Samoset, for instance, Haw-
thorne provided visual detail not found in any contemporary literary accounts
of the event. While Samoset spoke, noted Hawthorne, “a chipmunk flitted
along the bole of a fallen tree, a thrush chirped in the brake, a deer, passing airy-
footed across an opening in the forest, looked an instant and then turned and
plunged fleetly away amid the boughs, and a lean-bellied wolf, prospecting for
himself and his friends, stuck his sinister snout through a clump of underbrush,
and curled his lips above the long row of the white teeth in an ugly grin.” This
was pure fiction and literary embellishment. Then Hawthorne attributed the
appropriate moral meaning to the scene by adding: “This friendship boded
no good to him.” Elsewhere in describing the rebuke by Bostonians of three
royal commissioners sent from England to enforce stricter colonial control,
Hawthorne wrote that “a great crowd began to make its way toward the court
house, whose portals frowned upon the narrow street, as if the stern spirit of
justice that presided within had cast a shadow beneath them. The doors were
closed, and the massive lock which secured them gleamed in the single ray of
spring sunshine that slanted along the facade of the edifice.”141 The imputing of
emotions to buildings was not only befitting the son of the man who wrote The
House of the Seven Gables, it was revealing of Hawthorne’s thesis that behind
all material things were spiritual conditions that reflected the ideational destiny
of the American people. For sheer descriptive talent, Julian Hawthorne had few
peers in the entire history of popular historical literature, and his United States
gained a reputation for being the most spirited if not always the most controlled
treatment of American history at the turn of the century.
If on occasion Hawthorne went too far in sensationalizing historical events,
in the process violating his own insistence on a scholarship of the ideal as
grounded in the real, he did so because he had doubts about the power of
more restrained language to convey adequately the spiritual meaning of Amer-
ica. Many of Hawthorne’s paragraphs in United States begin with the phrase
“words cannot reflect the true meaning,” and he admitted throughout the text
to being frustrated constantly by the elusiveness of the spiritual essences he

was trying to capture in concrete prose. Put simply, the substantive form of
language proved inappropriate to the conveyance of ephemeral ideals. Some-
times Hawthorne attempted to deal with this obstacle by employing adverbial
descriptions such as “rightfully” or “wrongfully” in the most blatant and least
ambiguous manner. He also was a master of the use of paradox and irony as
means for conveying the complexity of spiritual ideals.142 These were tricky
literary challenges to overcome, and Hawthorne seems to have been aware that
the methods he and other popularizers used to describe the past were not al-
ways adequate to the task. Frequently they relied on the novelistic conventions
of the imagination associated with the aging works of Irving, Cooper, and Na-
thaniel Hawthorne. “Instead of maintaining the omniscient third-person view-
point necessary to equate history with the past,” therefore, Hawthorne and his
compatriots employed “a personalized, conversational, avowedly subjective
style” that had gone out of fashion by the turn of the century. To borrow from
Patrick Finney’s critique of another work, Hawthorne’s United States “is lit-
tered with first-person pronouns, literary flourishes and philosophical digres-
sions,” and “systematically draws attention to the constructed and therefore
relative and contingent nature of his account.”143
In light of the frequent failure of language, Hawthorne deferred at times
to pictorial effect, although the choice of illustrations for Hawthorne’s United
States proved equally vexing with respect to the conveyance or spiritual mean-
ing. Hawthorne recognized the need for popular histories to include illustra-
tions; he and his publisher P. F. Collier disagreed, however, about how many
and what kinds of illustrations to use in the popular history. In general, Haw-
thorne distrusted any art that attempted to objectify that which was ethereal
and ephemeral in nature, such as an illustration that purported to convey an
emotional state. For Hawthorne, the act of reflecting historically was a pure and
spiritual exercise, but the business of translating historical ideas into images
for public consumption was essentially mechanical and corrupting. A case in
point was the incongruity between text and image that occurred in illustrating
Pocahontas rescuing John Smith. In the text of his popular history, Hawthorne
informed readers that the Pocahontas story presented particular challenges to
any illustrator, since “it has been repeated all over the world for nearly three
hundred years and has formed the subject of innumerable pictures.” The effort
of illustrators to outdo one another in depicting the sentimentality of the scene,
Hawthorne noted, had encouraged a sad competition of escalating mawkish-
ness which had caused many, in turn, “to discredit or modify” the Smith story.
For Hawthorne, John Smith’s rescue was a tale that needed little visual amplifi-
cation. The Pocahontas rescue scene was “simple enough in itself, and not at all
improbable,” he argued, adding that “there is no question as to the reality of the

dramatis personae of the story, and their relations one to another render such
an episode as was alleged hardly more than might reasonably be looked for.”
In Hawthorne’s estimation, the only obligation an illustrator of the scene had
was to depict the episode as it “might reasonably” have occurred. This meant
including recognition of the fact that Pocahontas was but a “young” girl of ten at
the time of the incident. Yet despite these clearly articulated concerns for visual
accuracy, the W. L. Hudson illustration selected by Collier was one in which the
Indian maiden was presented as a full-figured woman and Smith was depicted
in a highly dramatized death struggle. Hudson’s version of the scene had more
in common with the melodramatic style of William Cullen Bryant (who dis-
dained “terrible image breakers” such as Sydney Howard Gay) than with the
“simple” and “reasonable” standard Hawthorne argued for in the text itself.144
Other images in the volumes bore out the criticism of the reviewer Edwin E.
Sparks that the visual representations in Hawthorne’s United States were little
more than “[s]tock illustrations and entirely imaginary.”145 In the case of “Arrest-
ing a Woman Charged with Witchcraft,” for instance, the art editors at Collier’s
selected a piece that depicted the Puritans as heartless zealots who victimized
defenseless elderly women in a campaign of ruthless hysteria. In this illustration
the artist’s sympathies lie completely with the accused—the victimized woman
who clings desperately to her chair, barely able to support herself in the face of
accusations by self-righteous Puritan leaders. And yet Julian Hawthorne, who
was sensitive to the fact that this sad episode involved his ancestor as a Salem
judge and who had severely condemned the Puritans for their behavior, had
warned in the text of his popular history that readers had an obligation at least
to consider why the Puritans had acted in the ways they had. “Why may they
not have believed they were in the right?” he questioned, especially in light
of Mather’s deceptive machinations. In addition, Hawthorne noted that the
witchcraft hysteria ushered in “the dawn of human sympathies, and the growth
of spiritual humility,” forces unrepresented in the drawing chosen by Collier’s
staff. The Puritan elders have none of the dignity and rectitude described by
Hawthorne as characteristic of the Puritans who committed overzealous acts
but in the name of godliness and who sought forgiveness once they discovered
the errors of their ways. No true friend of the Puritans (what nineteenth-century
Hawthorne could be?), Julian nonetheless accused their victims (especially the
Quakers) of sometimes attaching “more value to their willingness to endure ill-
usage than to the spiritual principle for avouching which they were ill-used.”146
Nothing suggested more the relativistic aspects of Hawthorne’s United
States, as well as the potential shortcomings of language and art for depicting
spiritual themes, than the presentist elements in the narrative. Because in the
case of contemporary circumstances “there has been no opportunity to collate

evidence and cancel out the incompatible features,” Julian noted, “the diffi-
culty of comprehending the meaning of events increases” while the distract-
ing power of forces like materialism intensifies. Contemporary history often
becomes “a meaningless juggle of accidents,” he argued, “which it would be
worth no man’s while to recount or disentangle.” To avoid such entangle-
ments, Hawthorne tried to elucidate the broad spiritual values of his age which
informed the petty concerns of local regions or events. A case in point was
his attitude toward American imperialism in the 1890s. An unabashed expan-
sionist like Edward Ellis, Hawthorne saw it as his duty as a historian to con-
vince Americans of their responsibilities to the world. “It was inevitable that
America should not be confined to any special area on the map of the world,”
Hawthorne noted, since “America is not a geographical expression, and arbi-
trary geographical boundaries should not be permitted to limit the area which
her principles control.” According to Hawthorne, national boundaries were
merely material obstacles to the spread of conquering ideas, and such barriers
must give way ultimately to the diffusion of spiritual values in order for history
to be vindicated. The goal, he argued, should be to “institute other Americas
in the very strongholds of oppression.” To accomplish this, Hawthorne urged
Americans to “obtain foothold in remote regions, there to disseminate their
genius and include their aims,” even if war was the inevitable outcome.147
By this last comment Hawthorne intended, of course, a defense of the recent
war in Cuba. Like Ellis, he viewed the conflict as a legitimate military action
against a corrupt Spanish government because he linked oppressors in Cuba
with their materialistic, gold-mongering predecessors, the conquistadors. It was
Hawthorne’s historical sensitivity to four centuries of depravation which made
him especially attuned to the spiritual obligations of Americans in the Caribbean
and which in his estimation allowed him to see past the shortsighted, seemingly
petty materialistic rationale for involvement. Others like Eggleston viewed Haw-
thorne’s position as anything but sensitive. Evidencing some of the most blatant
racism of any popularizer of history, Hawthorne argued that “the Spanish nature
is a kind of disease, which has long afflicted the human race, and is now happily
on the verge of final extinction.” Cuba was a nation in need of rescuing, Haw-
thorne noted, since “Cubans are not a pure race, and the admixture of negro
blood with Spanish does not promise well for strength and constancy of char-
acter.” Americans were justified in their defense of Cuba, he argued, because
the United States had long been “restive under this chronic sore, festering close
under her eyes.” Vampire-like, Spain had “evinced the strongest disinclination
to relinquishing the victim whose blood she had sucked so long,” and because
no other European nation “would come to Cuba’s rescue,” the well-meaning
citizens of the United States, “who detest outrage and injustice for their own

sakes,” were forced to support her. To the argument made by Eggleston and
others that Americans had no other motivation to be in Cuba other than greed,
Hawthorne responded that while avarice was a disturbing contemporary qual-
ity, a “more disinterested and honorable war was never undertaken; and it was
strictly in harmony with the traditions and mission of America.”148
Finally, as a latter-day transcendentalist prone to idealistic reflections, Haw-
thorne claimed a special license to speculate about the future of the Ameri-
can enterprise. As Ellis had done, Hawthorne predicted that the war of 1898
foreshadowed other international conflicts in which Americans, of necessity,
must become involved—including those of Europe, where “it seems reason-
able that England and America would be found standing side by side.” “Were
the French nation not as fickle as it is sensitive to new ideas, it would unite with
America in controlling the world to-day,” he advised. “But it is in England,
and not in France, that the principles of human liberty are really rooted; and
she, and not France, must be our final companion in the leadership of man-
kind.” Predicting that “[i]f a great world-struggle be at hand, or should it ever
come, we cannot hope to hold wholly aloof from it,” Hawthorne argued that
“the good of the human race requires that when we do take our part in it, it
shall be decisive of the objects involved.” Americans are “capable, upon occa-
sion, of fighting and dying for an abstract idea,” he noted, but they must hear
the “magnetic word that shall unite all in accomplishing such conditions” and
see “the leader whom all cannot choose but follow.” Such a leader would have
to face the harsh fact that at the turn of the century, when “the adjustments of
life are finer than they were, we are confronted by hitherto untried situations,
and we are consequently arrested in a fog of perplexities and wanton experi-
ments.” Hawthorne concluded in a speculative vein: “At the moment that this
book is finished, this nation has come to the end of one period of its growth,
and is arrived at the threshold of another. Fifty or a hundred years from now
we shall be able to look back and understand the position we occupy at this
moment; and we shall probably see, then, that not one new thing, but many,
awaited us. The next century may be expected to be not only different, but
very different from the last.”149 In this prediction of profound change he was
right, of course, but he was correct in ways that presaged the obsolescence of
the very literary genre he used to describe it so profoundly.
“The Rubbish of Things”

Though Hawthorne was almost clairvoyant in his predictions about the
First World War, he was not nearly so prescient regarding his reputation as a

historian. Faced with the irony of trying to explain the inadequacy of repre-
sentational forms by means of the very constructs he was rejecting, Hawthorne
failed to make a convincing literary case for his idealist agenda. For this reason,
some critics condemned Hawthorne’s United States as whimsical, polemical,
and inaccurate. Edwin E. Sparks, for instance, wrote that “the style is that of
a series of essays, verbose, dramatic, often lacking chronological order, and
presupposing no little familiarity with the general facts,” adding that the work
“[r]epresents the extreme ‘popular’ historical writing which aims to be read-
able rather than scholarly.”150 Another reviewer noted that Hawthorne relied
too heavily on secondary sources rather than on primary research in construct-
ing his arguments, in the process amplifying the errors of others and calling into
question once again his commitment to truth. According to this line of reason-
ing, Hawthorne’s history was original only in the way that an iconoclast’s views
are original—as impious points of departure from the established writings of
others. He is “unadvised as to dates,” which “is an important matter in his-
tory,” the critic warned of the writer who had forsaken the Bem Method, and he
gets “terribly mixed” in his statements, “some false, some true.” Among other
things, the inattentive Hawthorne had killed off General Ewell at the Battle of
Groveton Woods in the Civil War, even though “this same killed man became
a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army, succeeding to the command of
Stonewall Jackson, and survived the surrender at Appomattox.”151
In addition, reviewers pointed to the irony of Hawthorne’s designation of
himself as a historian with training in fiction rather than a fiction writer with
historical interests. In April 1900, Ada Shurmer published an article in the
Scots Magazine titled “The Reading of Historical Novels and the Study of His-
tory,” in which clear distinctions were made between historians and novelists.
By Shumer’s standards, Julian Hawthorne qualified as the latter but not the
former.152 This bifurcation represented an important departure from the long-
held conception of history and fiction as kindred spirits. In an article titled
“Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made,” a writer for the New York Times re-
minded readers that history is “generally understood to signify a compilation
of facts—events of the past, actual things, actions of men and nations.” In this
sense, “[h]istory differs from fiction in the fact that one is supposed to be true
and the other does not pretend to be other than a sham.” Hawthorne confused
the two, according to S. H. Pendleton, taking advantage of the naivete of his
middle-class audience in the process. “When an ignorant man writes so-called
history, he misleads other people and unwittingly deceives those who are
equally ignorant. When a one-sided or malignant man writes so-called history
and perverts the truth or suppresses any part of it, he is equally with the igno-
rant one an unfit teacher. It is always more difficult to rid people of error than

to teach the truth from the beginning; therefore any so-called writer of history
who is himself either ignorant or prejudiced and malignant is a malefactor, or,
in more gentle terms, a worker of evil.” These conditions, Pendleton noted,
were “suggested by a cursory glance at Nations of the World—Hawthorne’s
United States.” To Julian Hawthorne’s claim that his spiritual ruminations em-
anated in large part from real conditions, making the structure of his discourse
nearly transparent to and consistent with the events he described, Pendleton
quipped: “If it is history, why not tell the truth, the whole, and nothing else?
With so much being amiss in the few pages scanned it seems wise to regard the
whole book rather dubiously.”153
Most important, irony also shrouded the conditions of production under
which Hawthorne worked. Though in his narrative he eschewed processes
of materialism and fetishism of objects which characterized contemporary
culture—noting that the “vast, inorganic mass” of American history was like
a “body without a soul” in which competition obscured the “guiding spirit
within it”—Hawthorne’s United States was nonetheless a direct product of
these forces.154 Like the nation itself, popular history as a genre was so condi-
tioned by material concerns (publication deadlines, sales rates, profit margins,
etc.) that spiritual ends were frequently obscured in them. Books were part of
what David Shi has referred to as the “aesthetic of things” in the late nineteenth
century, with publishing houses “imprint[ing] the myriad surfaces and values of
the material world into public consciousness and artistic expression” with each
volume they marketed. In the late Victorian era, Shi notes, the “monied classes
filled their parlors and drawing-rooms with Turkish ottomans and divans, over-
stuffed upholstery, fringed carpets and curtains, picture albums, Currier and
Ives lithographs, porcelain figurines, painted plates, ceramic bud vases, mirrors,
and upright pianos,” and popular histories became an important element of
these accumulations.155 Julian Hawthorne’s nonfiction prose contributed to the
very forces of materialism that his content matter rejected, making Hawthorne’s
United States an ironic collaborator in the late nineteenth century’s “ethic of
avid consumption,” with the past, as it were, “offering one more consumerist
arena.”156 Such works “exploited and sanctified the ‘concrete, commonplace,
every-day, matter-of-fact way of thinking,’ ” a journalist from Scribner’s noted,
undercutting further the idealism Hawthorne sought to install.157
Hawthorne was stubbornly confident, however, that with the proper vigi-
lance, one could avoid the most pernicious effects of consumerism in the popu-
lar book market. The true value of our history “does not manifestly appear to
our contemporary vision,” Hawthorne pointed out, because “it is overloaded
with the rubbish of things, as a Greek statue is covered with the careless debris
of ages.” But Hawthorne reminded readers that “as the art of the sculptor is

vindicated when the debris has been removed,” so will the virtues of our ances-
tors “declare themselves” to historians, “when in the maturity of our growth we
have assimilated what is good in our accretions and disencumbered ourselves
of what is vain.” In the meantime, he noted, we must control our materialistic
excesses, we must “learn the ultimate use and value of the vast accumulation
of things which we are gathering together,” or end up “like slaves, imagining
ourselves masters of the world when we are its helpless drudges and lackeys. We
must develop a soul to animate withal this huge corporeal mass of impedimenta,
of conveniences, luxuries, curiosities, redundancies.” Hawthorne saw it as his
task to encourage readers to “lift it and rationalize it out of its present abject and
selfish sprawl, and cause it to occupy its proper office and place in our human
economy.” Noting that “[w]e cannot solve from below the problems which now
perplex us,” Hawthorne warned that “we must rise to a height where they be-
come indifferent to us, and then we shall look down upon them and understand
them.”158 Encouraging as such complex, transcendental thinking was, it did
not offset the simple, undeniable logic of Childe Hassam’s reflection that for
most artists of the period the “tangible attractions of the physical world at hand
furnish[ed] more inspirations than the spiritual glories of kingdom come.”159
In important ways, these ironies were systemic to the genre of popular his-
tory and revealed a central paradox at the heart of publishing efforts in the
popular book market. The failure of Hawthorne’s history ultimately under-
scored an ambiguity at the heart of popular culture, namely, that the mecha-
nisms constructed for the pursuit of a cause might in the structure of their own
design invalidate the cause itself. In the case of popular history, the attainment
of popularity required so many concessions to the kinds of isms (commercial-
and capital-) that Hawthorne detested, that he could not embrace finally the
market forces necessary to secure an audience for his antimaterialist rhetoric.
Hawthorne’s United States revealed him to be an intellectual elitist among pop-
ularizers, and his condition mirrored that of the genre generally. Once viewed
by Frost and others as a form of democratic protection against the usurping
powers of intellectual aristocracies, the publication of popular histories had
now become part of a vast industry of mass-produced popular books which
was itself controlling and potentially aristocratic. As Lawrence Levine has
remarked, certain cultural reformulations occurred at the turn of the century
which subjected popular forms to “many of the same forces of consolidation
and centralization that molded other businesses.” The mass production of
popular histories, which had once been hailed as a means for bringing history
“within the reach of all classes of society,” had now become a medium “for cul-
tural dilution.” As Levine noted, “a process that rendered an expressive form
relatively simple, definitely accessible to large numbers of untrained amateurs,

and almost infinitely reproducible,” came to be viewed as “a radical departure
from an ethos that judged art and culture to be the sacred, unique products
of the rare individual spirit.” Coopted by powerful, leveling forces within the
publishing industry, popular historians such as Hawthorne either forsook their
reputations as agents of the unconventional or went unread.160
The failure of Hawthorne’s United States did not rest solely with the imper-
sonal forces of market economies, however. Blame rested at least as much with
the author himself, since Hawthorne’s desire to popularize his ideas had en-
couraged him to grasp indecently for the very popular forms that betrayed him.
The writing of popular history did little, as it turned out, to relieve his anxiet-
ies and insecurities about the value of his life. Increasingly after the publication
of the Hawthorne’s United States, in fact, he became disillusioned completely
with the “business” of writing. Having tried his hand at short stories, novels,
journalism, and now popular history, Hawthorne discovered that the process
of literary production was unsatisfying in most regards. “I am often asked
whether I enjoy writing, and I generally reply that I do not,” he noted, adding
that the “mechanical act of putting words on paper is often disagreeable, not
only because hand and eye get weary, but because the act is mechanical, and
indispensable.”161 Hawthorne’s experiences with the Collier volumes painfully
confirmed for him the validity of his father’s warnings about a literary career.
“I cannot conscientiously say that I have found the literary profession—in and
for itself—entirely agreeable,” he noted in this moment of despair, adding: “Al-
most everything I have written has been written from necessity; and there is
very little of it that I shall not be glad to see forgotten.”162 In fact, his struggle
to convey the power of the spiritual “ideals” to indifferent, materialist-minded
audiences caused him to abandon hope of popularity in his own day and to
long for a certain deferred gratification. As he noted to a poet friend: “This is
not a place, nor a time, for literary success. The energy and imagination of our
country is occupied in other directions—in commerce, in the occupations by
which a mighty Continent is developed. The flower of literature must wait for
appreciation until the turmoil is over. You and such as you can find little hear-
ing now: still less can I; but if we give birth to any pure and good thing, I am
confident it will not be lost.”163
The ironic failures of Hawthorne’s United States also suggest the degree to
which Julian Hawthorne and the genre of popular history had come full circle
by the turn of the century. Having been born in the 1840s, in the shadow of
some of the most eminent writers and artists ever gathered in one nation, and
enamored at a very young age with illuminated manuscripts and illustrated
books, Hawthorne proved a willing disciple of the romantic idealism of the
earliest popular historians such as Irving and Bryant. As he aged and became

a writer of fiction in his own right, he vascillated, like Ridpath, Eggleston, and
Ellis, between a lingering attachment to the sentimental and a new interest in
scientific realism. At times he embraced the photographic verisimilitude of his
age, although, by the twentieth century, he had reverted back to an unrepentant
idealism characterized by a personalized brand of spiritual and philosophical
history. In making such a choice, Julian Hawthorne doomed himself to relative
obscurity (as obscure as a Hawthorne could be, that is), since he was out of step
with the prevailing trends in historical writing which continued to emphasize
scholarly detachment and objectivity. In the many personal reminiscences he
shared over the remaining years of his life, Hawthorne often spoke of feeling
out of place in his world, of having a greater affinity for the departed spirits of
his father’s generation than for the pervasive materialists of his own. Yet he also
recognized the undeniable advantage of a family name for one so covetous of
popularity, and he cultivated to some extent a reputation as a throwback to an
earlier age. By his own admission he had “lived long enough to understand”
the value of his boyhood memories for the “succeeding era, which had been
fed up and too spare with the heroic sort of thing.” While “academic histori-
ans may find small value in my reminiscences,” he wrote with self-reflective
good humor, “archeologists will grin over the mouldering pages.”164
Being a popular anachronism did not pay bills, however, and, like nearly
all of the popular historians described in these pages, Hawthorne struggled
the remainder of his life with financial difficulties. These fiscal problems oc-
casioned an ironic and tragic event that symbolized poignantly the decline of
popular history as a genre. In desperate need of money, in 1908, Hawthorne
agreed to become the nominal director of “Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines,
Limited,” a startup mining company with claims to nearly six thousand acres
of land in Ontario, Canada.165 In agreeing to lend his name to the enterprise
and to recruit potential stockholders, Hawthorne imagined he had achieved
some circularity in his life. “For my own part, in going into mining, I revert
to the profession for which I was educated,” he wrote with reference to his
early efforts in engineering. “While awaiting a job, I took up literature to fill
the interval. That interval, which lasted near forty years, is now over, and I am
going to make money,” he quipped. “One of the best ways of making money
without getting it away from other people is to dig it out of the ground.”166 In
letters of solicitation sent to friends and acquaintances, Hawthorne noted that
Nature had “put millions in gold and silver under foot. Right along under the
pine-needles, miles in length, eight inches wide and four hundred feet deep,
you would find, among other things, a vein of pure silver like the handle of a
spoon;—that is one of the local exhibits. The gold you will not so readily see
off-hand; but it is very much there.”167 He had not himself inspected the site,

Promotional brochure for the fraudulent mining company with which Julian
Hawthorne was associated.

Hawthorne informed his correspondents, but he felt confident that those who
had recruited him were on the level, and that a small investment at the begin-
ning of the enterprise would reap large benefits shortly for everyone involved.
Had Hawthorne remained true to the principles he had outlined in the
Hawthorne’s United States, he might have avoided the dangers of the min-
ing scheme. In his popular history he had roundly condemned the settlers of
Jamestown for seeking after gold and precious metals rather than embracing
the spirit of the ideal in the Virginia landscape; he had questioned the motives
and impugned the characters of the ’49ers who streaked across the continent
in pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes; and he had rejected the pervasive ma-
terialism of his own day, condemning those who would use literature for the
promotion of financial schemes. There were indications that he understood
the compromises entailed by the monetary scheme and the potential risks to
his reputation and principles should it fail. In August 1908, for instance, Haw-
thorne wrote Edith Garrigues, an artist whom he would marry after the death
of his first wife, warning her against investing in the project and advising her
to keep to her studio and “strive after the Ideal.” He explained to her that his
involvement in the mines was based on his repeated failure in his own pursuits
of the spirit. “I myself, though a director [of the company] only, have aban-
doned Literature, which had always treated me in a way to stimulate to the
highest pitch my craving for the Ideal” but had also “disassembled her love”
and “kicked me down stairs repeatedly.” Urging Garrigues not to defile her-
self by giving money to his mining project, he added: “In short, my dear and
endangered friend, friends of Mammon are never friends of one another, and
are always in peril of being Touched for Fives. . . . The Mine is all very well,
but you know the proverb counsels us to let well alone; and it is better to let it
remain mine than make it yours.” And then, having thus absolved himself of
responsibility for his future wife’s actions, Hawthorne added disingenuously:
“I hope what I have said may influence you; but if not, a check to the above
address will be appreciated. No subscriptions are received for less than Three
Hundred Dollars.”168
As Hawthorne anticipated, problems with the mine did develop. The al-
leged rich deposits proved chimeras, and disgruntled investors cried foul
when no dividends from their capital appeared in the first two years of op-
eration. Complaints rolled in to the attorney general’s office, and by 1911,
Hawthorne was on trial for using the U.S. mails to defraud investors. After
a hearing that lasted several months, he was found guilty of fraud as one of
the principal architects of the mining scheme and was sentenced to one year
in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.169 The prediction of his mother that
Julian’s “absence and unobservance of worldly considerations will probably

not advance him in the dusty arena of life,” seemed sadly fulfilled by this
incarceration. Efforts were made to secure his release. His sister Rose, now
Mother Alphonsa, a nun, visited President Woodrow Wilson to seek a par-
don, although Wilson ignored the request, possibly because of its political
explosiveness.170 The public was also largely unreceptive to the convicted fel-
on’s claims of innocence.171 “Julian Hawthorne has exemplified that no man
is proof against the lure of quick wealth,” noted one editorial writer, who
added that most Americans had already forgotten him. The popular historian
had become “a Jovian character, remote and unapproachable, and somewhat
shabby in the genteel tradition,” wrote the same patronizing critic. There was
“a sadness at the back of his eyes” and “little was left of the Harvard oar and
blood. Yet, he remained a noble ruin.”172 For an idealist such as Julian Haw-
thorne, anxious to cultivate a public and popular identity, no sadder descrip-
tion might be imagined.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concern that “the hard intercourse of the world,
and the many knocks and bruises” his son would receive would “cause a mor-
bid crust of callousness to grow over his heart” also came to fruition. Indeed,
Julian Hawthorne spent a year in prison and emerged with “less sympathy
and love for his fellow-beings than those who began life with a much smaller
portion.” He soured completely to the American system of jurisprudence and
to the many democratic ideals he had trumpeted so loudly in his popular his-
tories. In a reflective book written only a few months after his release, The Sub-
terranean Brotherhood (1914), he described the horrifying conditions of his
Atlanta prison life in a manner befitting one of his father’s novels.173 He called
his jail cell “a living hell” and condemned the practice rampant throughout
the penal system of “starving men in the name of economy.”174 Hawthorne
never fully recovered his faith in the government whose judicial institutions
he had once viewed as compatible with the march of destiny and the advance
of progress.175 Declaring the American body politic marked by “all manner
of goiters, carbuncles, and cancers, leprosies, and smallpox pustules,” Haw-
thorne now renounced democratic capitalism in favor of socialism. That af-
filiation placed him beyond the limits of political tolerance for the majority of
his former readers and rendered his earlier rejection of historical materialism
meaningless.176 In a very real sense, he ceased to be popular with the only
constituency that had really mattered to him, the people. Now he was content,
as he put it toward the end of his life, to please himself. At an eighty-fifth birth-
day celebration in 1931 some “veteran literateur’s well-wishers” characterized
him as “a distinguished and noteworthy link between the literary charms and
graces of the nineteenth century and the more turgid literary present.”177 Oth-
ers were less sure of his legacy, however. “No one remembers the novels of

Julian Hawthorne nowadays,” wrote a less sentimental eulogizer on the occa-
sion of his death of congestive heart failure three years later.178 The same could
be said of his nonfiction works, whose sad fate in the literary marketplace
over the following few decades seemed to confirm just how unpopular certain
types of popular history had become.

It may be that another fifty years will see the end of an era in
historiography, the final extinction of a noble dream, and history,
save as an instrument of entertainment, or a social control will not
be permitted to exist. In that case, it will be time for the American
Historical Association to disband, for the intellectual assumptions
on which it is founded will have been taken away from beneath it.
—Theodore Clark Smith, 1935
.................................................................
Conclusion
The Unpopularity of
Popular History
Julian Hawthorne’s United States was the last of the multivolume

popular histories by poets- and novelists-turned-historians that had an impact
on the literary marketplace. With the possible exception of Carl Sandburg,
no other prominent literary figure of the twentieth century attempted to write
popular history as I have defined it in this book, and Sandburg published not
comprehensive history but biography.1 Histories with titles like “Steinbeck’s
Popular History of America” or “Hemingway’s History of the American Peo-
ple” never materialized in the twentieth century.2 Occasionally, nonacadem-
ics in the next generation made the successful crossover to popular history,
for instance, James Truslow Adams, Allan Nevins, Van Wyck Brooks, and
Bernard De Voto, but they were journalists not poets and novelists, and they
were more acceptable to publishers by virtue of their presumed journalistic
integrity and their commitment to at least minimal standards of objectivity and
“truth.” And, even in these cases, such journalist “popularizers” were often
scorned by scholars who accused them of writing “pseudo-history” based on
innuendo and inference.3 In a review article elucidating the shortcomings of
popular historians with respect to the Puritans, the Harvard professor of his-
tory Samuel Eliot Morison accused Van Wyck Brooks, author of The Flower-
ing of New England (1936), of working on the “ragged edge of truth” because
of his tendency to interpolate fictional scenes into the narrative and because of
his failure to include an apparatus criticus.4 “Now Van Wyck, don’t you see
the reason reviewers say things that irritate you?” Morison implored. “You
state facts which to this or that reader sound incredible, and lay your breech
bare to their kicks because you don’t protect it with quotes and footnotes.”5
Novelists and poets were even more vulnerable to such metaphoric kicks, he
implied, since they wrote history “disguised as something else under a title

such as ‘The Flowering of Florida’ ” (an obvious dig at Brooks). Professors of
history who were suspicious of “fine writing” endeavored to protect the inno-
cence of their students “from the seductive charm of Washington Irving or the
masculine glamour of Macaulay,” Morison added, and this negative campaign
did much to discredit the literary excesses of the genre and to explain why
the names of popular literary artists disappeared from those few bibliographic
sources treating popular history after the First World War.6
. What had happened to a once proud genre? Why were poets and fiction
writers no longer courted by publishers for history projects? Why had popu-
lar history as practiced by converted novelists and poets become so unpopu-
lar? Part of the answer to these questions lies in the success of the persistent
efforts by professional historians to discredit the comprehensive works of
writers such as Irving, Lippard, Frost, Bryant, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis, and
Julian Hawthorne. As the definition of what constituted history changed
toward the end of the nineteenth century, idealistic systems gave way to a
cult of objectivity that demanded adherence to uncompromising standards
of truth. Even realist novelists with a commitment to verisimilitude, such as
Edward Eggleston, could not approximate the kind of critical distance and
self-elimination that professional historians required. As C. Vann Woodward
has remarked, “American historians of the academic sort have tended to put
distance between themselves and literary folk,” and “the chill of scientific
exclusiveness has increased and the dissociation has widened” even to this
day. Some of these professional scholars were “uncomfortable with the very
expression ‘historical literature,’ or the admission that they share with literary
craftsmen the use of narrative, the employment of metaphor, or any serious
concern with the quality of their prose.”7 For them, the imaginative capacities
of the fictional or poetic narrator were at odds with the “truth-seeking” re-
sponsibilities of the historian.8 They valued the kind of historian who would
“cross the ocean to verify a comma,” and ridiculed those who would sacri-
fice assiduity of research for literary effect.9 The ideal of these professionals
was an objective narrative style that corresponded exactly with the inherent
structures of the past events they intended to describe. By this theory of cor-
respondence, historical writing was assumed to be transparent to the reality it
analyzed, constituting a perfect transcription of the past in its most complete
form. In fact, many of the most hardline scholars embraced “a very old-fash-
ioned idealization of the full and complete archival record as a kind of holy
grail,” Patrick Finney has noted, “incarnating the truth of the past if only it
can be accessed in its entirety.”10
Not all scholars shared this extreme positivist view, of course, but most
practicing historians agreed that by World War I, America had suffered long
The Unpopularity of Popular History { 333

enough from what Kerwin Lee Klein has referred to as “narrative traditions
saturated with emotion and poesy,” and they sought to replace those systems
“with rational analysis.”11 In journals on the philosophy of history, a select
group of renegade scholars admitted that a true theory of correspondence be-
tween events and descriptions is impossible to achieve and that all narratives,
histories included, have an unavoidable mimetic quality to them. In separat-
ing the process of telling from the thing described, these speculative profes-
sionals acknowledged that there is an ideological component to any historical
discourse.12 If no wholly objective account can ever be written of a past event,
Woodward recognized, then all history might be characterized either as an ef-
fort to “improve, sanitize, gentrify, idealize, or sanctify the past,” on the one
hand, or “to discredit, defame, denigrate, or even to blot out portions of it”
on the other. Sometimes there are “positive motives behind manipulations of
the past,” he noted, including “desires to enhance lineage, pedigree, national
pride, or status by means of ennobling the past.”13 Accepting these contrived
elements of historical writing did not mean, however, that professional schol-
ars were willing to abandon all the “epistemic pretensions” of their craft.14 As
a means of closing the inevitable gap between narrative and knowledge, these
professionals undertook “a series of linguistic purges” in an effort “to cast out
‘soft’ poetic and rhetorical forms,” hoping to liberate history from the most ex-
treme types of “enslavement by metaphor and rhetoric.”15 Popular historians
such as those described in this book were victims of these purges.
The attacks of professional scholars alone, however, did not account for
the decline of popular history. Scholars rarely have much influence on public
tastes, and, in their purging activities, members of the American Historical As-
sociation stood a greater chance of being ostracized themselves by the read-
ing public than they did of convincing readers to banish popularizers. Even if
we grant that the campaign of professionals was at least partially successful in
undermining the public’s faith in the credibility of popular history, we should
not assume that American readers embraced scholarly monographs as the logi-
cal alternative for the fashioning of historical sensibilities or that all forms of
popular culture treating history vanished. Quite the contrary. Historical fic-
tion such as Gone with the Wind, for instance, remained wildly popular among
readers in the first half of the twentieth century. The death of popular history
as a formal category did not mean the loss of popularizing efforts, therefore,
just the reconfiguring of historical preferences and priorities. Edwin Markham,
the poet, recognized this point when he acknowledged that readers preferred
fiction to almost any other type of historical narrative. He argued that it was
a fair question to ask whether, “with all their distortions of fact, the average
reader does not obtain a truer and more lifelike view of a given period from the
334 } Conclusion

historical novel than from the usual text-book.”16 Historians chose to “confine
their services very largely to the work of producing authentic accounts of seg-
ments of the past based on evidence that passes rigorous tests for reliability,”
he claimed, and these intellectual parameters made it impossible for them to
compete with historical novels in the public imagination.17
Markham’s commentary on historical fiction was highly relevant to the de-
bate over popular history and its forms because he was involved in the last real
effort by an American publisher to enlist a well-known literary figure in the
production of a popular history of the United States, and its failure symbol-
ized something important about the bankruptcy of the genre. This final project
evolved slowly through a series of stages that defined the downward arc of pop-
ular historical studies in America. It began with John R. Musick of Kirksville,
Missouri, a prolific nineteenth-century writer who started his career as a lawyer
but eventually turned to journalism, poetry, short stories, and historical novels
to sustain himself.18 In the early 1890s, he contracted with Funk and Wagnalls
to produce a twelve-volume series of novels (the Columbian Historical Novels)
that told the history of the United States “from the time of Columbus to the
present” in a fictional format.19 Musick died in 1901, but the property rights to
his novels were transferred to William Wise, a New York publisher who reis-
sued the Columbian series (along with a previously unpublished thirteenth
volume) as The Real America in Romance (1909–10).20 Wise convinced Edwin
Markham to edit and rewrite the series, capitalizing in the process on some of
the reputation the bard had achieved from his internationally acclaimed “The
Man with the Hoe” (1899). Inspired by the Millet painting of the same title,
the poem earned Markham “fame with the masses” by drawing attention to
the miserable conditions under which subsistence farmers—“bowed by the
weight of centuries”—labored.21 This association with the masses revealed im-
portant points of convergence between Markham and some of the populariz-
ers who proceeded him, including the poetic sensibilities of Bryant, the social
consciousness of Ridpath, and the antimaterialism of Julian Hawthorne.22 In
the words of Arena founder B. O. Flower, Markham was “democracy’s greatest
poet” and the most obvious legatee of the mass-minded, popularizing tradi-
tion initiated a half century earlier by John Frost and others.23
Like his predecessors in the field of popular history, Markham emphasized
the importance of narrative to his historical vision. In a prospectus to The
Real America in Romance titled “The Plan and Scope,” Markham reminded
would-be readers of the series that the first histories were oral narratives passed
down from generation to generation by storytellers representing “truth clad in
a living personality.” Because no “teller of tales” in the preliterate world could
gain or hold an audience without considerable “dramatic appeal,” Markham

argued, ancient practitioners of history understood that “romance” was the
most “natural and easy method of acquiring lasting impressions.” Modern
academic historians had forgotten this truism, however. “It is the common
experience of students that knowledge acquired from the study of a plain nar-
rative history is, at best, stored in the mind in a chaotic state, with no welding
together of its parts either in regard to place or time,” Markham wrote. “This
series has been prepared with the expectation that even the advanced student,
by reading these romances, will be able to obtain definite, lasting, logical, and
complete impressions, to serve as a solid foundation for information obtained
from other sources.” The logic was simple and derivative of Eggleston among
others. In essence, Markham believed that romantic conventions would be the
means to a realistic end. “Romance and history march hand in hand; and so
well are they blended that, while we are reading for mere recreation, we ac-
quire a broad and comprehensive knowledge, not only of the discovery and
colonization of America, but also of our national development,” he wrote in
his prospectus. “The result is romance and authentic history blended to their
mutual advantage.” Markham’s narrative strategy was to intersperse verifiable
historical events and figures with fictional supporting characters and settings
as a way of intensifying the realism of a romantic scene. “The reader loses
himself in the irresistible fascination of the story, and the impressions resulting
are made on the heart as well as on the intellect,” he noted. “You do not merely
read about Columbus,” he boasted of one representative instance in which he
placed a fictional protagonist on board the Santa Maria with Columbus; “you
endure with him his hardships, share with him his disappointments, rejoice
with him in his achievements.”24
Markham organized his narrative history into thirteen volumes, each corre-
sponding with the rise of a new generation of American discoverers, colonists,
and citizens. In periodizing the past generationally rather than by traditional
epochs, Markham appealed to the tendency of popular readers to absorb his-
torical knowledge according to the rhythms of their own private lives. “The
sole and constant aim has been to make the reader live through the thirteen
generations of American development, in order that his own life may become
coextensive with the life of the nation,” he wrote. This technique also allowed
Markham to chart change over time as a personal conceit, humanizing the con-
nections between past and present in a manner reminiscent of Edward Ellis. A
sense of historical continuity is maintained in The Real America in Romance
by means of a series of contrived plot devices involving relatives and descen-
dants of a single family scattered throughout the Americas. The first volume,
for instance, features Hernando Estevan, a fictional traveling companion of
Columbus’s who is the progenitor of the numerous heroes and heroines in
336 } Conclusion

the succeeding volumes. In volume four, two of Hernando’s grandchildren
from St. Augustine, Florida, are kidnapped by Sir Francis Drake and taken
to England, “where the family name is duly anglicized into Stevens.” One
of these grandchildren ends up in John Smith’s Jamestown, while the other
makes his way to William Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation. The paths of the
descendants of these northern and southern branches of the Stevens family
crisscross throughout subsequent eras of American history (most dramatically
during the Civil War), until the thirteenth volume on the Spanish-American
War, when two direct descendants of Hernando Estevan (“one with Dewey at
Manila, the other with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba”) are introduced to
each other, appropriately enough in the place where the family first took root
thirteen generations before—in the Caribbean.25
There is no denying that the organizational strategy of tracing generational
relations and legacies—a technique revived seventy years later in John Jakes’s
popular bicentennial series, The Kent Family Chronicles—made for interest-
ing reading.26 There was also no doubt, however, that in the eyes of many
scholars at the time, Markham’s series was not history but something else. As
might have been expected, professional historical journals ignored completely
The Real America in Romance. Revealingly, however, the volumes garnered
virtually no attention from readers of popular literature outside the academy
either. If we distinguish, as Jonathan Nield did, between historical fiction (in
which historical settings are “truthful” as to background and setting but in
which fictional characters are introduced to carry the plot) and fictional his-
tory (in which a real life character such as Napoleon is presented in contrived
circumstances), then Markham’s volumes could have been eligible for review
in either category; instead, they were ignored in both.27 Among the very few
readers who did trouble themselves to comment on the series, only those who
appreciated the poet’s democratizing efforts on behalf of popular readers ac-
knowledged any historical value in the works at all.28 As one supportive writer
put it, volumes such as The Real America in Romance revealed that “Edwin
Markham is people.”29 To others, however, the duplicitous editorial choices
made in the series regarding the relationship of fact to fiction suggested that
Markham was many people, too many, in fact, to be credible as a historian.
Paul Fatout described Markham as “a fusion of mortal ambiguities: sage and
charlatan, sincere believer in human regeneration and incorrigible poseur,
occasional truth-teller and whilom liar, momentarily a realist between flights
from reality, humdrum poetaster and once-in-a-while poet. In short, a bundle
of contradictions, fascinating and ridiculous, like humanity in general.”30 That
description might also have applied to the genre of popular history at the turn
of the century, since most popularizers were dismissed by critics as similarly

contradictory (more ridiculous than fascinating) in their approaches to and
uses of history.
What changed with respect to the reputation of works by popular historians
was not interest in things historical, then, but the categories by which popular
ideas about the past were defined and processed. David Glassberg has argued
that historians of the professionalization of history have misunderstood the
relevance of these subtle shifts, assuming that the restrictive specialization of
the professional mission and the erosion of popular history as a literary form
signaled a diminution in the historical-mindedness of the American public.
Rather than “attacking the public for their ignorance of history or the pro-
fessors for being out of touch,” he notes, we should recognize that popular
interest in the past remained strong in this period even as some of its most
established forms changed to make way for new versions of the past. To un-
derstand the persistence of interest in history in light of these changes we must
reconceive how we “examine the place of the past in the wider culture.” One
way to do this is to focus on the history of the production of popular works as a
way of getting at a more expansive definition of history. The meaning of a pop-
ular history, I agree with Glassberg, “is not intrinsic, determined solely by the
intention of its creator, but changes as we actively reinterpret what we see and
hear by placing it in alternative contexts derived from our diverse social back-
grounds.” By studying not only the backgrounds and authorial intentions of
writers such as Irving, Lippard, Frost, Bryant, Gay, Ridpath, Eggleston, Ellis,
and Hawthorne but also the translation of their ideas into print by publishers,
editors, and production staffs, I have tried to highlight “the interrelationships
between different versions of the past in the public arena.”31 The need for pop-
ularizers to appeal to larger and larger audiences makes the marketplace an
important instrument for measuring changing popular expectations about the
past, and I have maintained that we can learn as much from the losers in this
competition for control of the public imagination as we can from the winners.
In this light, the demise of popular history as a going literary concern
dominated by novelists and poets should not obscure the fact that some of
its most salient features lived on long after the formal genre disappeared.
Certainly appreciation for the role of narration has persisted, even among
those most guarded about its uses. Recognition of the power and durabil-
ity of historical novels as a popular genre among readers, for instance, en-
couraged some professionals to reevaluate the role of storytelling elements
in scholarly historical writing and contributed to a “revival of narrative” in
the middle of the twentieth century. Narrative, it would seem, had earned an
undeserved reputation as an impediment to historical understanding. Those
philosophers of history who had come to accept (even embrace) the outlook
338 } Conclusion

that all historical narratives are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as
much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with
their counterparts in literature than they have with those in sciences” gained
new adherents within the profession.32 The debate over the role of texts and
contexts among literary structuralists also revived interest in narrative strate-
gies. Reinhold Niebuhr argued in The Irony of American History (1946), for
instance, that the historical patterns and configurations discerned by histori-
ans to be “objectively” true in a historical account are instead “imposed upon
the vast stuff of history by [the] imagination.” Urging scholars to recognize
that all history is a subjective production—something created rather than
found—Niebuhr likened history to “the confusion of spots on the cards used
by psychiatrists in a Rorschach test.” The patient “is asked to report what
he sees in these spots; and he may claim to find the outlines of an elephant,
butterfly or frog,” he wrote. “The psychiatrist draws conclusions from these
judgments about the state of the patient’s imagination rather than about the
actual configuration of spots on the card.”33 Postmodernists elaborated on
this point by arguing that historical narratives do not derive from historical
events but from forms that predate those episodes, that is, “pre-existing em-
plotment strategies imposed on the past by the historian.”34
For some traditional professional scholars, this kind of revivalist thinking
about narrative portended an epistemological crisis for the discipline and
presented a supreme challenge to the “noble” goal of achieving objectivity. If
users of narrative conventions in history were not constrained by standards of
objectivity in regard to the events they described, and if the archetypal literary
forms they used always predated events, then how could historians ever hope
to escape the determinism of the a priori and analytic, on the one hand, or the a
posteriori and synthetic, on the other? The most pessimistic of such postmod-
ern historians saw no way to extricate themselves from this Gordian knot of
confusion and predicted an “end of history” as a discipline.35 For others, how-
ever, the return of narrative was liberating because it reduced the pressures
of absolutes within the discipline (that is, of having to define and execute the
one and only narrative strategy appropriate to describing a particular histori-
cal event) and reaffirmed the original mission of the profession to understand
the historicity of the past. Certainly the revival gave incentive to scholars to
look back at historical narratives afresh and to appreciate them for what they
were, not deviations from some preemptory master narrative but competing
dialogues grounded in the particulars of the times in which they were written.
The effect of this thinking of late has been to resuscitate interest in popular
as well as scholarly narrative forms and to encourage reconsiderations of the
linguistic and ideological components of history as discourse.36

These changes have encouraged some scholars to resist passing absolute
value judgments on the accuracy of popular narratives with respect to the
historical record—indeed, it prompts them to question the very concept of
accuracy in the first place—and to make important distinctions between the
discursive form and the semantic content of historical writing. According to
Andrew Norman, “historical narratives have wrongly been assumed to be
making truth claims, and consequently judged by the wrong standard.” Popu-
lar historians sought something other than “referential” legitimacy. “The fact
that a true historical account has a plot structure does not imply that the past
it articulates has a plot structure, any more than the fact that ‘the sky is blue’
has a grammatical structure implies that the sky has a grammatical structure,”
Norman reasons. “The past need not have a narrative structure for a story
about it to be true.”37 By this standard, histories written by professional his-
torians in the twentieth century shared more with those of popularizers than
their authors were willing to admit. It is important to note, however, that the
“revival of narrative” movement with which these trends are associated was
not (except in rare cases) synonymous with radical historical relativism or un-
conditional subjectivism. That is, its proponents did not suggest that all narra-
tives are equally valid in terms of their historical worth, and no one (of whom I
am aware) has advocated for the republication of popular works such as those
studied here on the grounds that they provide the most acceptable presenta-
tions of the past. Popular historians of the late nineteenth century narrativized
in distinct ways that compromised their abilities to write durable history: Bry-
ant oversentimentalized, while Gay was a slave to scientism; Ridpath thought
too grandly, and Eggleston reached too aggressively for a totality of vision; Ellis
succumbed too readily to the effects of presentism, while Hawthorne was too
consumed by the seduction of materialism.
Most narrative revivalists still adhere to some operational principles de-
fining valid historical writing, therefore, and their disregard for popularizers
suggests the persistence of objectivity as an operational principle within the
profession. These philosophers of history, however, do point to the potential
value of understanding why some narratives achieve popularity at given times
while others do not. Studies of the changing fortunes of popular histories in
the literary marketplace reveal important things about the cultural preferences
of readers unwilling or unable to justify their choices to scholarly arbiters. My
own approach to these popular histories is similar to Emily Rosenberg’s to-
ward the multiplicity of narratives emanating from accounts of events at Pearl
Harbor in December 1941. “This book attempts not to stabilize some truth
about this iconic event but to investigate its instability and to see what can be
learned from the terms of contestation,” she has written.38 Similarly, I have not
340 } Conclusion

tried to pass judgment on which of the popular histories studied in this book
is more “right” than others. Nor am I prepared to say that professional histori-
ans have developed an unimpeachable standard for truth by which to evaluate
and presumably to condemn popular history. I have been interested simply in
how the production histories of these popular works reveal changing attitudes
among those who engaged most actively in their day in the debate over how the
past should look and be remembered.
Lest we think that this exchange between popularizers and professionals
was itself a quaint, isolated historical debate confined to the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when definitions of what constituted history
were more fluid, we should consider that versions of the same debate rage
today.39 A case in point is the recent controversy over David McCullough’s Pu-
litzer Prize–winning biography, John Adams. The “popular” author of notable
works on the Johnstown Flood, the Panama Canal, and the Brooklyn Bridge,
McCullough has served as the host/narrator of many public history projects
such as Smithsonian World, The American Experience, and Ken Burns’s The
Civil War.40 His special claim to fame has been his ability to reach wide au-
diences through prose as vivid as Bryant’s, “paint[ing] with words, giving
us pictures of the American people that live, breath, and above all, confront
the fundamental issues of courage, achievement, and moral character.”41 Mc-
Cullough is not a popular historian in the metahistorical sense of Ridpath, nor
does he write with the pretentious presentism of Ellis. McCullough does not
identify with the “people” the way Eggelston did, either; only Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States has revived that ambition in the late
twentieth century.42 McCullough is “popular,” however, insofar as he has been
successful in bringing the past to readers in a manner more direct and dramatic
than is typical of professional historians. 43 He also takes seriously the idea of
history as literary art. “I want readers to gain an appreciation of this singular,
colorful, and important man who affected how we all live,” McCullough noted
of his treatment of Adams.44 The goal of John Adams and other comparable
popular books, one approving student adds, is “to transform history into a
narrative and thus wake the dead by bringing select historical characters back
to life within the confines of a well-told story about America’s past.”45
Despite his considerable gifts as a popular storyteller, McCullough faced a
special challenge in waking Adams from the dead, since the second president
had a reputation as a stubborn, self-righteous, insufferable curmudgeon.46 In
place of this uncharitable characterization, McCullough substituted a “more
fully developed, three-dimensional, warm-blooded and compelling” portrait
of an “extraordinary and important American” who deserved “to be brought
out of the shadows.” Acknowledging that Adams was “vivid, irritable, vain,

[and] stubborn to an extreme,” McCullough also insisted that he was “brave,
warmhearted, outspoken, humorous, affectionate and quite lovable.”47 Eventu-
ally, many readers enthusiastically embraced this portrait of a more endearing
Adams, thanking McCullough for the literary flair with which he rescued this
underappreciated founding father from the scrap heap of obscurity. “David
McCullough’s John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel,” wrote
one reviewer, who added: “It is both a riveting portrait of an abundantly human
man and a vivid evocation of his time. . . . This is history on a grand scale.”48
The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was even more effusive, call-
ing McCullough “the citizen chronicler of the American story for our time.”
He attributed the success of John Adams to the fact that as an independent
scholar, McCullough was free to rethink conventional wisdom regarding the
second president and was “not beholden to any of the ideological causes or
methodological fads that often take possession of otherwise good historians
in bureaucratized academia—and cause them to end up writing more for each
other than for a general audience.”49
In these latter remarks Billington anticipated the criticisms of some pro-
fessional reviewers who used the term “popular” to condemn mythologizing
tendencies in McCullough’s work. Indeed, as celebrated as John Adams was
in the popular book market, it was attacked by many academic scholars for
its filiopietistic tendencies. In a review for the New Republic titled “America
Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of Popular History,” the
Princeton professor of history Sean Wilentz ridiculed McCullough’s overem-
phasis on the essential “goodness of John Adams,” especially the prominence
of “his plainspokenness, his political courage, his statesmanly virtue [and] his
connubial ardor.” According to Wilentz, Adams was “one of the most suspi-
cious, pugnacious, and at times pig-headed conservatives of the early Ameri-
can republic,” whose “pettiness” and “disabling pessimism” justified the
rough treatment he has received at the hands of historians. Expressing dis-
dain for the “new golden age of historical popularization” that encouraged
fawning portraits of lackluster presidents, Wilentz was especially disturbed
by McCullough’s tendency to fill his book with “page after page of detailed
anecdote,” exaggerating the relative importance of small, even trivial, aspects
of Adams’s character while ignoring the president’s more glaring defects. For
Wilentz, McCullough’s skewed portrait of Adams resulted from more than
mere literary failure; it was the product of a calculated, conservative, political
strategy not unlike that employed by nineteenth-century popularizers. Read-
ing John Adams made Wilentz long for a time when “[c]ritical analysis was in
the saddle,” when “American history was meant to rattle its readers, not to
confirm them in their received myths and platitudes about America.” Writing
342 } Conclusion

in an age when most Americans were afraid to criticize their government or to
see failings in their leaders, Wilentz reasoned, McCullough had abandoned the
proper restraint and ideological balance necessary for responsible history.50
What accounts for the vitriolic tone of Wilentz’s comments and for his
radically different usage of the term popular in evaluating the merits of John
Adams? By now the argument should be clear to us, anticipated as it was so
completely by debates between popularizers and professionals in the nine-
teenth century. For one thing, a distrust of McCullough’s basic facts incurred
Wilentz’s wrath in ways reminiscent of the frustrations scholars expressed
with the works of Bryant or Ellis at the annual meetings of the American His-
torical Association in the 1880s and 1890s. An unfortunate misquote of Jef-
ferson (later acknowledged with regret by McCullough) raised some initial
suspicions among critics.51 From there it was an easy jump to the assertion
that McCullough had distorted other aspects of Adams’s career in order to
promote a more respectable portrait of the president than facts warranted. Still
more insidious was the suggestion that McCullough had twisted the historical
record for the sake of profits. The same insinuations of commercialism lev-
eled against Lippard and Hawthorne were also raised with increased vigor
against this biographer who stood to make a lot of money if he could rehabili-
tate Adams as an endearing figure about whom readers were anxious to know
more. Reminding us that McCullough got his start as an editor for the highly
commercialized, “pseudo-historical” magazine American Heritage, Wilentz
shares John Higham’s assessment of the publication as having always had “a
great appeal, high technical finish, and no intellectual challenge at all.”52 By
association, Wilentz notes, McCullough’s John Adams also favors shallow an-
ecdote and superfluous prose over penetrating “or even reliable evaluation of
Adams’s ideas and politics.”53
In turn, defenders of McCullough disparage “guild historians” such as
Wilentz who fail to appreciate fully the crucial significance of popularizing
impulses to the national historical memory.54 Professional historians are too
restrictive in their approaches to the past, they aver, sucking the life out of
the past by insisting on detached and dehumanizing methodologies. “It is
inevitable that such a popular historian should be subjected to a variety of
challenges and criticisms by academic historians,” James Billington noted
of McCullough’s treatment at the hands of scholars. “A frequent professo-
rial complaint is that there is too much storytelling and not enough social
and psychological analysis” in such works, Billington acknowledged, in ways
reminiscent of the debate over New History, but he added that McCullough’s
“accuracy and eye for illustrative detail have been widely recognized—as have
the frequent insights embedded in his narratives.”55 James McWilliams agreed,

arguing that “anyone who writes for a wider market, according to the conven-
tional faculty-club wisdom, is deemed a quaint sellout to the noble cause of
‘serious’ scholarship,” a narrow-minded critique that does a great disservice
to popular history. “[F]or better or worse, it just so happens that the great un-
washed, Barnes and Noble–going masses would rather curl up with a compel-
ling narrative than even the best written intellectual biography,” McWilliams
concluded. “What Wilentz and most academic historians who turn up their
noses [at] narrative history completely fail to grasp, is that non-historians who
didn’t spend ten years of their life earning a doctorate simply don’t care to
read a systematic delineation of the fine points of a president’s evolving politi-
cal ideology. In fact, they don’t care about the vast majority of what historians
write.” Wilentz’s “intellectual snobbery,” he argued, “is the academic’s way of
howling at the moon.”56
Other supporters of McCullough have added that Wilentz’s criticisms of
the political tone of John Adams were themselves politically motivated, gener-
ated to support Princeton University’s brand of “liberal debasement.” In a
facetious rebuttal to “America Made Easy” titled “Heroes, Who Needs ’Em?”
conservative columnist Paul Greenberg took direct issue with the “clichéd lib-
eralism” employed by Wilentz to attack McCullough’s book. Noting with con-
tempt that the Princeton professor was among those who defended President
Bill Clinton in the press during his impeachment hearings, Greenberg ranted
against such “ideologues in historians’ clothing” who employed their favorite
political doctrines in hypocritical campaigns against the use of political doc-
trines in history. “Sean Wilentz is unhappy,” Greenberg wrote, because “like
every court historian, the professor resents it when people are reading some
unauthorized chronicle, and, worse, enjoying it. We’re no longer settling for
the kind of ideological concerns that the professor would put at the center of
his vague, class-centric history,” he claimed, adding that a “revolution is going
on in our reading habits, and Sean Wilentz is pretty darn disgusted about it”
because he senses that “[he] and his kind could be dethroned.” Condemning
Wilentz as a “bypassed historian” who “hates to see the amateurs take over,”
Greenberg noted with tongue in cheek that readers of popular histories such
as McCullough’s John Adams must be “dangerous” creatures indeed, since
they “are not intimidated by the textbooks so laboriously turned out by the
bin pensant with tenure. How impertinent of us,” he concluded sarcastically.
“Don’t we realize that some questions are forever closed? Imagine anyone tak-
ing John Adams seriously at this late date!”57
Wilentz’s caustic critique of McCullough and Greenberg’s equally acerbic
reply suggest how sharply historians are still divided on the definition and value
of the “popular” in popular history. Disputes over John Adams’s reputation cut
344 } Conclusion

directly to the heart of the historical enterprise itself, throwing into high relief
profound philosophical issues related to the proper techniques for preserving
memory. The debate over whether Adams was an unlikable ideologue or a com-
passionate genius, for instance, compels historians to think about what values
to privilege over others in reconstructing historical character. Should historians
emphasize (as McCullough does) a Dickinsonian treatment of John Adams’s
inner world or should critics question (following Wilentz) the validity of liter-
ary strategies that depend so heavily on subjective storytelling elements? And
the “great divide” that presumably continues to separate the work of populariz-
ers and professionals suggests that there is as yet no mutually agreed upon stan-
dard by which one group can claim superiority over others when it comes to
questions of historical truth. Indeed, the wide range of responses to works such
as John Adams reveals that historians continue to debate the very foundations
of “truth” in the first place. In arguing over the merits of McCullough’s depic-
tion of what life was like for John Adams in the eighteenth century, historians,
in short, have been pushed (somewhat against their will) back into the shadowy
realms of epistemology and ontology, where they have had to face frightening
specters in the form of questions such as “What is reality?” and “How do we
come to know what we know about reality with reference to the past?”
In Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, I have attempted to pro-
vide some answers to these questions in the context of a detailed discussion of
the relevance of popular history as a genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. I hope I have made it clear, however, that popularizers and profes-
sionals share important traits, and that representative historians of both dispo-
sitions continue to influence how readers of history absorb its lessons today.
While it is true that scholars generally reject those forms of narration and ex-
planation that would seem to violate internal codes of the profession (historians
do not knowingly lie, for instance) and while popularizers dismiss those modes
of scholarly discourse whose specialized vocabularies obscure meaning, there
is nothing per se that prohibits members of either group from employing the
literary devices of the other in the telling of their historical tales. Hayden White
has suggested that one or more of the tropes of romance, irony, tragedy, and
comedy are specific to all historical narratives, implying that one can find evi-
dence of common strategies of literary development in the works of amateurs
and professionals alike.58 The conventions of literature are essentially neutral
and available to authors of all persuasions. The old distinctions between “elite”
and “popular,” which derived from a belief in “transcendent or universal prin-
ciples or values in the evaluation of literature, art and music” and which made
it easy to distinguish between “high” and “low” culture, have given way to a
postmodern recognition of the value of multiple forms of cultural expression.

The result is that the designation popular no longer necessarily implies a com-
mitment to a particular kind of less sophisticated narrative strategy any more
than the term professional is an absolute guarantee against the use of certain
belletristic rhetorical devices.59 The categories have become more fluid and the
debate over the value of narrative subsequently more complex. One might also
hope that with increasing complexity comes the benefit of further philosophical
reflection and, dare we say it, even some partial understandings.
Perhaps the last word on this matter should go to Robert Penn Warren, a
poet and novelist with a demonstrated interest in the philosophy of history.
Author of All the King’s Men, a thinly veiled portrait of Huey Long, Warren
told the story of an aggressive southern governor with presidential aspirations
from the vantage point of a historian narrator—Jack Burden, who is working
on his Ph.D. in history but who gives up graduate school when he recognizes
that he comprehends the facts of the past but not their meanings. Eschewing
history and its annoying complexities, Jack places faith only in what he calls the
Great Twitch, that is, the present moment, which serves as an escape mecha-
nism from the implications of his past. History makes sense only after much
distanced reflection, Jack realizes, and he is unwilling to take on the “burden”
of that reflection.60 For Warren, only poets were capable truly of that reflective
gift, and even they were forced to operate within certain rules. “I am trying to
write a poem, not a history,” he noted in his foreword to Brothers to Dragons,
but “a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer
takes to be the spirit of history than it is at liberty to violate what he takes to
be the nature of the human heart.” Warren observed that, in the end, histori-
cal sense and poetic sense were not mutually exclusive; rather, he argued, “if
poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our
living, constantly remake.’ ”61 Jack Burden was no bard, however, and, because
he did not have a poet’s sense of the inherent narrativity of the past, he was not
an adequate historian either. The “burden of the past” for those like Burden
without a poetic soul, Warren implied, was to remain forever constrained by its
facts without access to its liberating feelings.
And how would Huey Long, the teenaged book peddler turned populist
politician, have reacted to Warren’s thoughts about the poetic and historical
underpinnings of the popular book market had his death not been the occa-
sion for Warren’s reflections in the first place? The answer may well be found
in the ad campaigns for the popular histories he sold back in the summer of
1908, which shaped so graphically the “big myths” by which he and many
others lived their lives. Ridpath’s Popular History of the World, for instance,
was advertised by the Ridpath Historical Society of Cincinnati as the work
of “America’s greatest historian.” Combining the “absorbing interest” of the
346 } Conclusion

poet with the “supreme reliability” of the historian, Ridpath’s volumes pic-
tured “the great historical events as though they were happening before your
eyes,” according to promoters. If so, then the illustration that appeared just
above these pronouncements in the ad, titled “Christian Martyrs Given To
the Lions,” made for an especially gruesome perspective on the poetic and
historical past. The highly sensationalized image represented the “inevitable
doom of the Empire” by depicting the “blood of the Martyrs” and the furor
of the “87,000 people who had assembled in the Coliseum at Rome to wit-
ness the Christians given to the lions.” Even the unabashed Huey Long would
have found this marketing strategy excessive, perhaps, but that would not have
prevented him from profiting financially and later politically from its startling
and powerful message. Long’s willingness to capitalize commercially on works
featuring maudlin illustrations such “Christian Martyrs,” suggested that he
believed that history was a commodity that could and should be bought and
sold for profit. Popular history as a genre had experienced its heyday in the
nineteenth century, when distinctions between history and fiction (and their
hybrids historical fiction and fictional history) were less rigidly defined and
when sentimental illustrations were more acceptable as serviceable representa-
tions of visual reality. Well into the twentieth century, however, these tendencies
persisted and continued to fuel a popular book market. Despite the best regu-
latory efforts of cynical scholars, popular history still had an appeal to certain
types of audiences in Long’s Winn’s Parish, Louisiana, and beyond. If nothing
else, the proliferation of sensational works of popular historical literature that
appeared after the assassination of Huey Long—including All the King’s Men
itself—proved that the genre was as resilient as it was controversial.

Notes
Introduction: “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes”

1. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Vintage, 1969), 21, 32, 33–34, 47.
2. William E. Leuchtenburg, “FDR and the Kingfish,” American Heritage (Oct/
Nov 1985): 59–60.
3. Williams, Huey Long, 34, 36–37, 48.
4. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1929), 50.
5. Huey Long, “Sharing Our Wealth,” Senate Record, Session 1 of the 74th Con-
gress, 410–12.
6. Benson John Lossing, Biographical Sketches of the Signers of the Declaration of
Independence (New York, 1854), iv. For more on Lossing’s career as a popular-
izer, see Harold Mahan, Benson J. Lossing and Historical Writing in the United
States, 1830–1890 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 20.
7. William H. Prescott, Notebook IV, 80–81; Notebook V, 45, Prescott Papers, Mas-
sachusetts Historical Society, cited in David Levin, History as Romantic Art:
Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
1959), 10. See also Richard L. Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical
Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101 (April
1996): 423–46.
8. Paul C. Gutjahr, “Preface,” in Popular American Literature of the 19th Century,
ed. Paul C. Gutjahr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xv–xvi.
9. George Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Pur-
pose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 197–98.
10. To avoid some of the confusion regarding the definition of popular history, I have
employed the term “popular” in this book in a manner consistent with its usage
in the late nineteenth century. That is, I have defined “popular” as it was under-
stood and aspired to by those nineteenth-century historians, publishers, and bib-
liographers who used the designation in their works. If a publication identified
itself in its title, description, or advertisements as “popular” or “for the people,”
then I have taken it at its word and have included it in the category of popular
history. This strategy substitutes a supply-side for a demand-side model of deno-
tation. In this sense, the genre as I determine it is self-selecting and grounded in
the nomenclature of its time. By defining the genre of popular history according
to the designations imposed on it by its practitioners, we can include under its

rubric works of history that did not fare well in the literary marketplace but that
aspired to wide public appeal nonetheless. I am aware that such a classification
system permits the inclusion of volumes that might misrepresent themselves to
the public, either willfully (as in the case of false advertising) or unintentionally
(as when publishers misjudge their audiences). Just because a book declares itself
“popular,” in other words, does not make it so. But what is important to me is
the culture of production surrounding these mass-circulating histories and the
complex philosophical questions emanating from the intricate processes of ne-
gotiation among the publishers, writers, and agents who created and marketed
them. In each case I have asked: What were the authors of these works intending?
What power struggles led to the privileging of some popular texts over others?
And who were the winners and losers in this process?
11. Francois Guizot, A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, trans. Rob-
ert Black (Boston: D. Estes and C. E. Lauriat [187?]). For examples of popular
histories in other nations, see Charles Knight, The Popular History of England:
An Illustrated History of Society and Government from the Earliest Period to Our
Own Time (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856).
12. Sydney G. Fisher, “The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of
the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 51
(1912): 64–65. James Gilreath, “Mason Weems, Mathew Carey, and the Southern
Booktrade, 1794–1820,” Publishing History 10 (1981): 27–49.
13. [Joel Dorman Steele and Esther B. Steele], Barnes’ Popular History of the United
States of America (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1875), 5–6.
14. Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860, vii. See also David D. Van Tas-
sel, “Teaching Patriotism: Emphasis on Popular History, 1815–50,” in Record-
ing America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in
America, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 43.
15. Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1824), 1:iii, cited
in Callcott, History in the United States, 26.
16. For an extensive treatment of the pictorial element in popular histories, see Greg-
ory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagi-
nation, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).
17. Harold Kellock, Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree (facsimile reprint of the 1928
edition; Ann Arbor: Gryphon Books, 1971), 134, cited in Handbook of American
Popular Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988),
199–200.
18. For more on these patrician historians, see Levin, History as Romantic Art.
19. “Popular history” as defined in terms of sales of texts raises some issues, however.
For instance, it is often difficult to determine just how many copies of a book have
been sold, since good records were not kept by many publishing houses in the nine-
350 } Notes to Pages 5–7

teenth century, and publishers were sometimes reluctant to disclose such figures
even when they did maintain adequate files. In addition, one might well ask how
many copies of a book must be sold before it can be designated as “popular.” Is a
book that sold 30,000 copies in 1876 “popular” whereas one that sold 20,000 is
not? And what audience? Mary Howitt’s popular history circulated widely in Eu-
rope (Howitt was British), but not in America, where the distraction of the Civil War
and concerns about British sympathies for the South limited sales dramatically.
20. Mary Botham Howitt, A Popular History of the United States of America from
the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time, 2 vols. (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1860); Hamilton W. Mabie, Popular History of the United
States (Philadelphia: Fidelity Publishing, 1897).
21. Jack Carter Thompson, “Images for Americans in Popular Survey Histories,
1820–1912,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1976); see esp. Appendix C, “An
Ordinal Ranking of Authors According to the Number of Times Publishers Is-
sued Their Books,” 450–72.
22. On the “commodification of literary culture,” see Nancy Glazener, Reading for
Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1997), 19, 132–33.
23. Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2005), 3.
24. See Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, Imagined Histories: American Histo-
rians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
25. Michael Winship, “Foreword,” in Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and
Literature in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), vii.
26. Levin, History as Romantic Art, 19. There is a useful discussion of these Western
storytelling elements in popular narratives in Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Sto-
ries That Hide Our Patriotic Past (New York: New Press, 2004), 266–69.
27. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46.
28. Sir Edward Fry, cited in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence
of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1988), 218.
29. Robert Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 91. The term
“professional,” which is commonly used to refer to scholars affiliated with the
American Historical Association or those who are employed by colleges and uni-
versities, is somewhat unfortunate, since, as my colleague Dan Nathan reminds
me, anyone who earns a living writing and then selling historical works is a profes-
sional. Nonetheless, here, as in most other works treating historiographic themes,
I will use the term “professionals” to connote those with academic affiliations or
Notes to Pages 7–9 { 351

connections to formal organizations of history. Those referred to as “amateurs”
will be presumed to be outside academe.
30. David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), 3.
31. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1965), 98.
32. Albert Bushnell Hart, “Imagination in History,” The American Historical Review
15 (January 1910): 229, 241, 232, 250.
33. Edward S. Ellis, The People’s Standard History of the United States (Cincin-
nati: Jones Brothers, 1900 [1896]), 530; Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 24–25.
34. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
35. Sean Wilentz, “American Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of
Popular History,” New Republic, 2 July 2001, 39.
36. James E. McWilliams, “Historians of the World Unite?” The American Enterprise
Online, www.facmag.com (accessed 6/28/03). See also Hillel Itale, “Controversy
Hounds Popular History Writers,” Domestic News, Associated Press, http://web
.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed 10/31/02).
37. Alice Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the North-
ern Literary Marketplace, 1861–1868,” Book History 1.1 (1998): 107–39.
38. James Wilkinson, “A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and Evidence,” in
“The Status of Evidence,” special issue, PMLA 111, no. 1 (January 1996): 80–92.
39. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 5–7, 45.
Chapter 1. When Popular History Was Popular

1. Heyward Ehrlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” in American Literary Critics
and Scholars, 1850–1880, vol. 64, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. John W.
Rathburn and Monica M. Green (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984), 49; Donald Yan-
nella, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck” in Antebellum Writers in New York and the
South, vol. 3, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale
Research, 1979), 103.
2. Edgar Allan Poe, The Literati of New York (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850), 63.
On the Literary World, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Maga-
zines: 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton, 1930), 766–68; and Daniel Arthur
Wells, “Evert Duyckinck’s Literary World, 1847–1853: Its Views and Reviews
of American Literature” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1972). See also George E.
Mize, “The Contributions of Evert A. Duyckinck to the Cultural Development
of Nineteenth Century America” (PhD diss., New York University, 1953), esp.
108–79.

3. Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Litera-
ture, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1855; revised and enlarged, 1866). See also
Ezra Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Li-
brary of American Books, 1845–1847,” American Literature 64 (December 1992):
677–93.
4. For more on this group, see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of
Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1956), 69–220, and Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of
Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–124.
5. Poe, The Literati of New York, 63.
6. James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1848).
7. Ehrlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” 53.
8. E[vert] A[ugustus] D[uyckinck], “Literary Prospects of 1845,” The American
Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science 1 (February 1845):
146–51.
9. Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence (New
York: Viking, 1981).
10. Arcturus 1 (March 1841): 236–43; and 3 (January 1842): 160, cited in Widmer,
Young America, 100.
11. Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s Library,”
682–83. For more on these libraries, see George T. Goodspeed, “The Home Li-
brary,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 42 (1948): 110–18.
12. Letterbook, 29 November 1844; 24 April 1846, vol. 13: Volumes and Slipcases,
and Literary Correspondence, boxes 1–17, and Index to Literary Correspon-
dence, Duyckinck Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York (hereafter cited
as Duyckinck Family Papers).
13. “New Literary Announcements,” New York Morning News, 18 March 1845, cited
in Greenspan, 692–93 n. 18.
14. C. Hugh Holman, “Introduction” to William Gilmore Simms, Views and Re-
views in American Literature, History, and Fiction (New York: Wiley and Put-
nam, 1846; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962),
xxvii; also see The First One Hundred Fifty Years: A History of John Wiley and
Sons (New York, 1957), 16–19.
678.
16. Cathy H. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 24.
17. Emily E. Ford Skeel, ed., Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways, 3 vols.
(Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1929) 2:72, cited in The Life of Washington

by Mason L. Weems, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1962), xiii–xiv.
18. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 24.
19. Samuel G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime; or, Men and Things I Have Seen,
2 vols. (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1856), 2:256–58, cited in Gregory
M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagina-
tion, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 14.
20. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 24, 21.
21. Paul C. Gutjahr, “Preface,” in Popular American Literature of the 19th Century,
ed. Paul C. Gutjahr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xv–xvi, 5.
22. Lynne Farrington, “Introduction” to Exhibition Notes, “ ‘Agents Wanted’: Sub-
scription Publishing in America,” special exhibit, Annenberg Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., 2006. The
comments about “wisdom” come from “ ‘Agents Wanted:’ Subscription Publish-
ing in America: How to Sell.”
23. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 42, 10, 45, 79.
24. Simms to Duyckinck, 25 June 1845, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms,
ed. Mary C. Simmons Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 2:77, cited in Greenspan,
687.
25. Gutjahr, Popular American Literature, xv–xvi, 5. For more on subscription pub-
lishing, see Michael Hackenberg, “The Subscription Publishing Network in
Nineteenth-Century America,” in Getting the Books Out: Papers on the Chicago
Conference on the Book in 19th-Century America, ed. Michael Hackenberg (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1987), 45–75.
26. David D. Van Tassel, “Teaching Patriotism: Emphasis on Popular History,
1815–50,” in Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of
Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960), 43.
27. Gutjahr, Popular American Literature, xv–xvi.
28. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 150.
29. Widmer, Young America, 97.
31. See “Americanisms” in “Words, Words, Words,” box 28, Notebooks on Ameri-
can Literature, Authors, Anecdotes, History, American Notes & Queries, Ety-
mology, Frankliniana, Jeffersoniana, in Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck
Family Papers.
32. Catalogue of American Authors, box 29, Notebooks on Shakespeare, English
Drama, Classics, in Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers.

34. For more on this see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture
of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003),
76–108.
35. Harper’s represented competition for Duyckinck’s home library as well, having
put out a few years earlier Harper’s Family Library, which “was for the most part
made up of reprints.” See Goodspeed, “The Home Library,” 110. Appleton’s
had a similar library titled “Appleton’s Popular Library of the Best Authors.”
For more on this venture, see the advertisement in box 30, Notebook 1, Papers of
Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers.
36. Diary entry, 5 January 1843, Duyckinck Collection, New York Public Library,
cited in Greenspan, “Evert Duyckinck and the History of Wiley and Putnam’s
Library,” 680.
37. See “Copyright Club, Proceedings, 1843–44,” box 36, Miscellaneous Papers,
Duyckinck Family Papers.
38. See the extensive correspondence between Duyckinck and Simms in Literary
Correspondence, box 15, Duyckinck Family Papers. On Simms’s views with re-
spect to the copyright issue, see his articles in the Southern Literary Messenger 10
(January, March, June, and August 1844): 7–17, 137–51, 340–49, and 449–69.
39. Simms, “Article 1: Americanism in Literature,” in Views and Reviews, 7, 11–12.
40. Simms, “The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes
of Art in Fiction,” in Views and Reviews, 64, 69–70.
41. Ibid., 34–36.
42. Ibid., 40–42, 44–45, 74–75.
43. Ibid., 68–75.
44. See, for instance, the historical novel by Cornelius Mathews, Behemoth: A Legend
of the Mound-Builders (New York: J and H. G. Langley, 1839) in which Mathews
tried to re-create the story of prehistoric life.
45. See David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–
1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 16.
46. George Lippard to Robert Morris, 3 August 1844, Historical Society of Pennsyl-
vania, cited in David S. Reynolds, George Lippard (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 9–10.
Simms’s Views and Reviews included a lengthy essay on Cooper’s novels as his-
torical pieces in which he referred to Cooper’s The Spy as “the boldest and best
attempt at historical romance which had ever been made in America” (260).
47. Donald Yannella and Kathleen Malone Yannella, “Evert A. Duyckinck’s Diary:
May 29–November 8, 1847,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, ed.
Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 238.
48. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 78.
49. Simms, “Epochs and Events,” 46–47; “Indian Literature and Art,” in Views and
Review, 146.

50. Both genres were represented in the Library of Choice Reading. For a complete
inventory of works published in the series and those projected but never pub-
lished, see Book Lists, box 30, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family
Papers. Evert also produced several works of history, including Evert A. Duyck-
inck, National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans, 2 vols. (New York: John-
son, Fry, 1862), and History of the World: From the Earliest Period to the Present
Time, 4 vols., compiled by Duyckinck (New York: Johnson, Fry, 1869).
51. Alexander Dumas to Alphonse Lamartine, as paraphrased in Simon Schama,
“Clio Has a Problem,” New York Times Magazine, 1 September 1991, 32.
52. Max Nordau, The Interpretation of History (New York: Wiley, 1910), 7, 35–36.
53. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), 22.
54. For more on the “constructive imagination,” see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of
History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 231–49.
55. This notion of history as “made” rather than “found” is adopted from Peter
Novick’s discussion of the philosopher of history Hayden White; see Peter
Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Histor-
ical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 600. For White’s
articulation of these same concepts, see White, Metahistory, 427–28, and “The
Fictions of Factual Representation” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 124.
56. For more on the relationship of literary style to historical narrative, see Allan
Megill and Donald [Deirdre] N. McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of History,” in The
Rhetoric of Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public
Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 221–38. See also Allan Megill, “Recounting
the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography,” American
Historical Review 94 (1989): 627–53.
57. On the Great Story, see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History
as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995).
58. As Dorothy Ross notes, the grand narrative of the nineteenth century “was
composed of two closely intertwined strands. One was the story of Western
progress, a liberal story of growing commercial development, representative po-
litical institutions based on democratic consent, and the advance and diffusion of
knowledge—processes that were projected to remake the entire world. The sec-
ond was the liberal/republican story of American exceptionalism, which seated
world progress in the American nation.” See Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in
American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Histori-
cal Review (June 1995): 652. See also Allan Megill, “ ‘Grand Narrative’ and the

Discipline of History,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and
Hans Kellner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 151–73, 263–71.
59. White, Tropics of Discourse, 90–91. On Levi-Strauss’s conceptualization of these
matters, see Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Trafalgar Square,
1966) and “Overture to Le Cru et le cuit,” in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann
(New York: Doubleday, 1966).
60. Yannella and Yannella, “Evert A. Duyckinck’s Diary,” 238.
61. Callcott, History in the United States, 142. See also Hayden White, The Content
of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987) and Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study
of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
62. White, “Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse, 123.
63. Levin, History as Romantic Art, 230.
64. For more on Duyckinck’s relationships with these historians, see Literary Cor-
respondence, box 13, Duyckinck Family Papers. See also Duyckinck, “Literary
Prospects,” 150.
65. Levin, History as Romantic Art, 230.
688–89.
67. “Francis Parkman,” Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:709. For his part,
Parkman acknowledged that he took “great pains” to “secure fullness and ac-
curacy of historical detail” in Pontiac, but he also added that the work was “de-
signed as a tableau of forest life and Indian character” and was chosen “with this
view” and “not on account of any peculiar historic importance attaching to it.”
See Francis Parkman to Charles Scribner, Esq., 8 May 1854, box 13, Literary Cor-
respondence, Evert A. Duyckinck Papers, Duyckinck Family Papers.
68. “William H. Prescott,” Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:236.
69. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:699.
70. Review of Passages from the History of Liberty, North American Review 64 (April
1847): 511–12.
71. For more on Eliot and his brief career as a historian, see Gregory M. Pfitzer, Sam-
uel Eliot Morison’s Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: North-
eastern University Press, 1991), 4–8; see also Francis Parkman to Samuel Eliot,
8 November 1856, Samuel Eliot Papers, Boston Athenaeum. For information re-
lating to Barrett Wendell’s assessment of Eliot as historian, see Barrett Wendell,
“Samuel Eliot,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 34
(Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1899): 646.
72. American Antiquarian Society Seminar precis, “Poetry and History: Approaches
to the Study of Nineteenth-Century American Poets, Poems, and Poetic Culture,”
13 February 2004.

73. Nordau, The Interpretation of History, 43.
74. Northrop Frye, “New Directions from Old,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Po-
etic Mythology (New York: Harvest Books, 1963), 54–55.
75. White, “Interpretation of History,” in Tropics of Discourse, 58.
76. G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longmans,
Green, 1949).
77. Simms, “Epochs and Events,” 41.
78. Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects,” 150, 146–47.
79. Ibid., 150.
82. Nathaniel Hawthorne, True Stories from History and Biography (Boston, 1851).
According to Callcott, Hawthorne felt True Stories was “one of the most pur-
poseful books he had ever written.” See Callcott, History in the United States,
198. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston, 1852).
83. Callcott, History in the United States, 12. See also Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift
in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988). Contributions by Bryant and Hawthorne to
the Library of American Books series include Bryant’s The White-Footed Deer
and Other Poems (1844) and Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, 2 vols.
(1846).
84. Simms, “The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper,” in Views and Reviews, 291.
85. James Fenimore Cooper, History of the Navy of the United States of America (Lon-
don: R. Bentley, 1839). See also Francis Parkman, “James Fenimore Cooper”
(Jan. 1852) in Essays from the North American Review, 358–62, cited in Levin,
History as Romantic Art, 1–12.
87. Arcturus 1 (January 1841): 90, cited in Widmer, Young America, 241 n. 15.
88. Alice Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the North-
ern Literary Marketplace, 1861–1868,” Book History 1.1 (1998): 109–10.
89. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:47, 51.
90. Evert A. Duyckinck, Irvingiana: A Memorial of Washington Irving (New York:
Richardson, 1860).
91. Ehrlich, “Evert Augustus Duyckinck,” 56–57, and Samuel Osgood, Evert Duyck-
inck, His Life, Writings, and Influence: A Memoir (Boston: David Clapp, 1879).
92. Washington Irving, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, 2 vols. (New York: The
Knickerbocker Press, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894 [1809]), 1:19; 2:213–14.
93. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literaure, 2:48.
94. John Spencer Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians (New York:
Macmillan, 1917), 22.

95. Washington Irving, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 3
vols. (New York: T. Y. Crowell, [1828]). See Washington Irving. Bibliography, vol.
30 of Complete Works of Washington Irving, comp. Edwin T. Bowden (Boston:
Twayne, 1989), 221, cited in Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus:
How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England, 1992), 108.
96. Harry Thurston Peck, William Hickling Prescott (New York, 1926), 134, cited in
Bert James Loewenberg, American History in American Thought: Christopher
Columbus to Henry Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 291. Prescott
went on to say that Irving’s history displayed some tedium and “barren repeti-
tion” in its descriptions of the period after discovery. The latter part of the quote
here is Loewenberg’s summation of Prescott’s views.
97. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 124.
98. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy
in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 89–90. Levine
uses this phrase with reference to popular culture (specifically opera) in the nine-
teenth century.
99. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 110. Irving’s quote comes from Ralph M.
Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks, eds., Letters of Washington
Irving, 2: 1823–1838, vol. 24 of Complete Works of Washington Irving (Boston:
Twayne, 1979), 325–26.
100. Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1:194.
101. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 113.
102. Monthly Review, n.s., 7 (April 1828): 419–34, cited in Bushman, America Dis-
covers Columbus, 124. See also Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 341–45.
103. Irving, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1:55 as quoted in Bushman,
America Discovers Columbus, 107.
104. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 40.
105. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 127. For reviews of Irving’s works see
Haskell Springer, Washington Irving: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall,
1976), 21–23. The specific reviews referenced here come from London Weekly Re-
view, 16 February 1828, 97–99; 23 February 1828, 115–17; and New York Mirror, 22
March 1828, 295, cited in Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 124.
106. The Everett quote is from Charles Adams, Memoir of Washington Irving (Free-
port, N.Y.: Carlton and Lanahan, 1870), 157–58, cited in Bushman, America Dis-
covers America, 124.
107. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:49–51.
108. The quote “ornamented and gaudy” is from Stanley T. Williams, The Life of
Washington Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 323–24.

109. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:49–51.
110. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Pre-
conceptions,” in Memory and American History, ed. David Thelan (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989), 148.
111. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,”
in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (London: Routledge,
2001), 289.
112. Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 125, 132,
cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 599.
113. Edwin Markham, The Real America in Romance, 13 vols. (New York: William H.
Wise, 1909–1910), 1:vii.
114. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 200.
115. Advertisement for Wiley and Putnam’s Library of Choice Readings, box 30,
Notebook 1845, and Letterbook, November 29, 1844; April 24, 1846, vol. 13:
Volumes and Slipcases, and Literary Correspondence, boxes 1–17, and Index to
Literary Correspondence, Duyckinck Family Papers.
116. For more on Headley and the Home Library, see Goodspeed, “The Home Li-
brary,” 116–18. Headley’s volume eventually appeared in expanded form in
Duyckinck’s Library of American Books, as Letters from Italy.
117. Edgar Allan Poe, The Literati of New York, 63. See also G. P. Putnam Archive,
C0685, box I, folder 75, I: Correspondence, George Palmer Putnam Collection,
with permission of the Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.
118. See, for instance, Benson Lossing, Harper’s Popular Cyclopaedia of United States
History, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893); David Pae, A Popular
History of the Discovery, Progress and Present State of America (Edinburgh:
T. Grant, 1852), and Mary Botham Howitt, A Popular History of the United States
from the Discovery of the American Continent, to the Present Time, 2 vols. (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1860).
119. J. N. Larned, ed., The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902). This particular quotation is included in the
assessment of James Johonnot’s Stories of Our Country (1887) on page 283 of
Larned’s bibliography.
120. [ Joel Dorman Steele and Esther B. Steele], Barnes’ Popular History of the United
States of America (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1875), 6.
121. Hamilton W. Mabie, Mabie’s Popular History of the United States (Philadelphia:
Fidelity Publishing, 1897).
122. See, for instance, comments in The Literary News concerning the publication
of Edward Eggleston’s United States History and its value as measured against
other popular histories: The Literary News 9 (October 1888): 302.

123. For complete price lists for these and other works of history, see F. Leypoldt, ed.,
The American Catalogue: Author and Title Entries of Books in Print and For Sale
(Industry Reports and Importations), July 1, 1876, comp. Lynds E. Jones (New
York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1880), vol. 1, pt. 1, 271.
124. For sales figures on Frost’s history, see S. Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary
of English Literature and British and American Authors (Philadelphia: J. B. Lip-
pincott, 1908), 1:639–40.
125. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York:
Dial Press, 1970), 5.
126. See, for instance, Joel T. Headley, The Great Rebellion, A History of the Civil War
in the United States, 2 vols. (Chicago: R. C. Treat, 1866); John Warner Barber,
Historical Scenes in the United States; or, A Selection of Important and Interesting
Events in the History of the United States (New Haven: Monsin, 1827 and later edi-
tions); and Jacob Abbott, American History (New York: Sheldon, [1860–1865]).
127. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative,” 411.
128. For further discussion of the category “historians without portfolio,” see Loewen-
berg, American History in American Thought, 490–519.
129. For more on this notion of “constructed memory,” see Emily S. Rosenberg, A
Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2003), 3, 18, 33.
130. Daniel A. Nathan, Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 153.
131. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past,” 135.
132. Theodore Roosevelt, “History as Literature,” cited in Loewenberg, American
History in American Thought, 519.
133. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American
Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 198.
134. Anon. [George Lippard], The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. A
Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber,
1844). The statistics on copies sold come from Johannsen, To the Halls of the
Montezumas, 198.
135. [John Bell Bouton], The Life and Choice Writings of George Lippard (New York:
H. H. Randall, 1855), 96, cited in David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renais-
sance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 206. For more on Lippard’s popularity with middle-class
readers, see Paul Buhle, “George Lippard and Popular Literary Traditions,” in
Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, no. 2 (San Francisco: City
Lights, 1983); and Carl Bode, ed., Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840–
1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

136. Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in
America (New York: Viking, 1981), 91.
137. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 199.
138. Callcott, History in the United States, 195 and front flap of book jacket.
139. Interestingly, Benson Lossing, who also wrote a history of the Revolution during
the Mexican War, found that his work had the opposite effect. This may be due
in part to the fact that Lossing was less optimistic about the Mexican War than
was Lippard, suggesting that the soldiers returning from the front bore few of the
signs of “military glory” that “the recollections of the recent past” might have
brought them under other circumstances. See Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial
Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History,
Biography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence, 2 vols.
(1850–52; reprint, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 1:35.
140. George Lippard, Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution . . .
With a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by Rev. C. Chauncey Burr (Philadelphia:
G. B. Zieber, 1847), 522–25, cited in Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas,
61, 199–200. For more on Lippard and his significance to the publishing world
during this period, see George Lippard Papers, 1843–1853, folder 1, Mss. Dept.,
Misc. Mss. boxes L, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (hereafter
cited as Lippard Papers).
141. Lippard’s Washington and His Generals was published in serialized form in the
Saturday Courier: A Family Newspaper Neutral in Politics and Religion, pub-
lished weekly in Philadelphia by Andrew M’Makin. See also “New Series” of
“Legends of the American Revolution” (4 July 1846 to 23 December 1848).
142. Agents’ Companion (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers, 1866–1869[?]), 2, cited in
Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory,” 117–18. For more on the activities of book
agents, see J. Walter Stoops, The Art of Canvassing; or, The Experience of a Prac-
ticed Canvasser (New York: Printed for the Author, 1857); The Book Agent: A
Manual of Confidential Instructions [n.p., n.d.], collected in “ ‘Agents Wanted:’
Subscription Publishing in America.”
143. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 265–66.
144. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 2–3, 5.
145. Ibid., 4, 3.
146. For more on Philadelphia publishers and their relationship to the history book
trade, see Rosalind Remer, Printers and the Men of Capital: The Philadelphia Book
Trade in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966).
147. George Lippard to Lawlor, Hinken & Everett, Editors of the Dispatch, 2 June
1853, Lippard Papers, folder 1. See also “Transcript of 1845 Contract with Zieber”
in the same collection.

148. Reynolds, George Lippard, 71.
149. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 3, 4, 6–7.
150. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vintage,
1965), 380–81.
151. Reynolds, George Lippard, 64–65. For a contemporary view on this issue, see
M’Makin, “Mr. Lippard and His Legends,” Saturday Courier, 26 December
1846.
152. George Lippard, Legends of Mexico (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1847), 55–56,
cited in Reynolds, George Lippard, 66.
153. White, “Historicism, History, and the Imagination,” in Tropics of Discourse,
106. For more on Lippard’s views concerning these matters, see “American
Literature,” Citizen Soldier: A Weekly Newspaper, Devoted to the Interests of the
Volunteers and Militia of the United States, 21 June 1843. Citizen Soldier was a
Philadelphia newspaper edited by Isaac R. and Adam H. Diller; the Bucks
County Historical Society, Pennsylvania, has a run of this paper. See also “Na-
tional Literature,” Quaker City, 10 February 1849; this Philadelphia newspaper is
available at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
154. White, “Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse, 85.
155. Philos [John Frost], “The Character of Washington; Its Influence and Impor-
tance,” 11–12, 13–14, HU 89 165.50-71, Bowdoin Prize Dissertations, Harvard
University Archives.
156. John Frost, Enoch Crosby; or, The Spy Unmasked. A Tale of the American Revolu-
tion (Cincinnati: U. P. James [c. 1841]).
157. John Langdon Sibley, Collectanea Biographica Harvardiana: Being Obituary
and Other Printed Notices of Harvardians Collected During the Preparation of
the Last Twelve Triennial Catalogues of Harvard University, 1842–1875, vol. 2,
n.p., as found in HUG 1791.14.10, Reel 1, Harvard University Archives, Pusey
Library, Harvard University.
158. “John Frost, 1822. A.M. 1825,” Class Publications and Records, HUG 300 and
HUD 222.00, Harvard University Archives, as cited in Pfitzer, Picturing the Past,
21–22.
159. For a full citation to these works by Frost, see O. A. Roorbach, comp. and arr.,
Bibliotheca Americana: Catalogue of American Publications Including Reprints
and Original Works from 1820 to 1852, ed. John D. Morse (New York: Peter
Smith, 1939), 207–8. For more on Frost as a popular historian, see Pfitzer, Pictur-
ing the Past, 21–24.
160. John Frost, The Pictorial History of the United States of America, 4 vols. (Phila-
delphia: Benjamin Walker, 1844). This work was condensed and renamed Popu-
lar History of the United States and appeared in many editions under both titles.
The quotations I have chosen here are from The Pictorial History of the United

States of America, since that is the most comprehensive edition and the one most
readily available. Frost, Pictorial History of the United States of America, v–vi.
161. Frost, Pictorial History, 2:239, 97, 213; 1:148; 2:39, 102, 127.
162. Ibid., 1:104.
163. Ibid., 1:154; 2:72; 3:13, 128.
164. Ibid., 3:71, 77, 140–41, 119.
165. Simms, “Epochs and Events,” 73–75.
166. Frost, Pictorial History, 1:vii; 3:214–15, 228; 2:150; 2:189.
167. Ibid., 1:vi, 52, 53, 55, 85, 153, 160; 2:16.
168. Ibid., 1:39.
169. Richard Vitzthum, The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histo-
ries of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1974), 9–10. Not all historians accepted these practices without question. For an
alternative point of view, see George Lippard’s attacks on plagiarists of his Leg-
ends of the American Revolution, Quaker City, 5 May 1849.
170. For the exchange of ideas between Frost and Irving, especially as they relate to
the creation of a more humanized image of Washington, see Barbara J. Mitnick,
“Parallel Visions: The Literary and Visual Image of George Washington,” in
George Washington: American Symbol, ed. Barbara Mitnick (New York: Hudson
Hills Press, 1999), 64–66.
171. Fahs, “The Market Value of Memory:,” 109, 123.
172. Ziff, Literary Democracy, 91.
173. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 1:v.
174. Boorstin, The Americans, 381.
175. “Index of Sources of American History” and “Lists of American Authors,” box
28, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers.
176. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 2:699. For the correspondence
between Eliot and Duyckinck regarding his inclusion in the Cyclopaedia of Amer-
ican Literature, see Samuel Eliot to Charles Scribner, Esq., 12 May 1854, box 5,
Literary Correspondence, Duyckinck Family Papers.
177. New York Herald, 13 February 1856. For a lengthy discussion of the contentious
relationship between Duyckinck and Griswold, see Miller, The Raven and the
Whale, 329–31.
178. Charles Ste[vens?] to Charles Scribner, Esq., 24 March 1856, “Blotter, 1855–
1857,” box 30, Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. Duyck-
inck kept a notebook that included over twenty single-spaced pages of errata for
the Cyclopaedia. See “Errata—Encyclopedia of American Literature,” box 30,
Papers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers.
179. Review of Prose Writers of America . . . , The American Whig Review 5, no. 4
(April 1847): 430–31; see also William McCrillis Griswold, Passages from the

Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass.,
1898).
180. Widmer, Young America, 97; see also the 5 December 1842 entry from “Diary,
1833–56—Loose Sheets,” vol. 5, Volumes & Slipcases, Evert A. Duyckinck,
Duyckinck Collection, Mss. Division, New York Public Library.
181. For more on criticisms of Lippard in his day, see: “George Lippard: His Oppo-
nents and the Public,” Saturday Courier, 29 August 1846.
182. “The Book Agent,” Lowell [Mass.] Patriot, 10 June 1836, and “The Book Pedler,”
Lowell [Mass.] Daily Courier, 12 March 1847, collected in “ ‘Agents Wanted:’
Subscription Publishing in America: How to Sell,” University of Pennsylvania.
See also later books warning against the tactics of book agents, including Bates
Harrington, How ’Tis Done: A Thorough Ventilation of the Numerous Schemes
Conducted by Wandering Canvassers, Together with the Various Advertising
Dodges for the Swindling of the Public (Chicago: Fidelity Publishing, 1879).
184. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 199–200. Reynolds notes in George
Lippard that Lippard defended French novels in an attack on Rev. Alonzo Potter
in the December 30, 1848, edition of Quaker City.
185. Book Lists, and Notebook: Books of the Library of Choice Reading, box 30, Pa-
pers of Evert A. Duyckinck, Duyckinck Family Papers. For more on Duyckinck’s
outlook on French fiction, see Evert A. Duyckinck, “Recent French Novelists,”
American Review (March 1846): 233–40, and Evert A. Duyckinck, Literary
World, 18 September 1852, 185, cited in Sheila Post-Lauria, “Genre and Ideology:
The French Sensational Romance and Melville’s Pierre,” Journal of American
Culture 15, no. 3 (Sept 1992): 1–3.
186. M. M. Backus, “Novel Writers & Publishers,” Christian Parlor Magazine, May
1844, 20. See also “Novels: Their Meaning and Mission,” Putnam’s Monthly,
October 1854, 389–96.
187. Reverend J. T. Crane, “Novels and Novel-Reading,” in Popular Amusements
(Cincinnati: Walden and Stowe, 1869), 122–23, 152.
188. Evert A. Duyckinck, Advertisement wrapper, The Home Library, cited in Good-
speed, 113. See also Advertisement for Wiley and Putnam’s Library of Choice
Readings, box 30, Notebook 1845, Evert A. Duyckinck Papers, Duyckinck Family
Papers.
189. Amy M. Thomas, “ ‘There Is Nothing So Effective as a Personal Canvass’: Reval-
uing Nineteenth-Century American Subscription Books,” Book History 1 (1998):
146–47, 141–42. One of the most popular of Duyckinck’s subscription histories
was National History of the War for the Union, Civil, Military and Naval (New
York: Johnson, Fry, 1861).
190. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 76.

191. Cornelius C. Felton, “Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, Nos. IV.,
IX., and XII.,” North American Review 63 (October 1846): 359. For more on Fel-
ton, see Cornelius C. Felton Papers, 1839–1879, Harvard University Corporation
Records, 1636–Ongoing. Duyckinck defended his friend in a letter to Dear Sir, 29
April 1845, box 18, General Correspondence, 1830–53, The Literary Correspon-
dence, Duyckinck Family Papers. The particular novel by Mathews under attack
in this review was Big Abel and Little Manhattan (1845).
192. Hawthorne, Salem Advertiser, 2 May 2 1846, as discussed in Holman, “Introduc-
tion,” xxxii
193. “Address,” October 18, 1843, The Copyright Club, cited in Goodspeed, “The
Home Library,” 112.
195. George W. Curtis to Charles Eliot Norton, 9 April 1851, cited in Erhlich, “Evert
Augustus Duyckinck,” 55.
196. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 201–7.
198. George Lippard to J. Fenimore Cooper, 21 May 1844, and George Lippard to
Robert Morris, Esq., 2 August 1844, Lippard Papers, folder 1.
199. Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, ed. Rollo
Ogden (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 2:33–34, cited in Fahs, “The Market Value
of Memory,” 128–29. For his part, Duyckinck also disapproved of some of Ab-
bott’s work, noting that while it “is written in a popularly attractive style, with
much success as a narrative,” it has “provoked considerable opposition by its
highly eulogistic view.” See Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature,
2:354–55.
200. Edward Lawrence Godkin, Nation, 23 November 1865, 661, cited in Fahs, “The
Market Value of Memory,” 129.
201. Edward Lawrence Godkin, Nation, 19 May 1870, 319–20, cited in Fahs, “The
Market Value of Memory,” 130.
202. For more on the cult of objectivity in theology and science, see E. Brooks Holi-
field, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of Puritans to the
Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Charles D. Cashdollar, The
Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in
Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and The-
odore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal
and Ante-Bellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1977).
203. See Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The Ameri-
can Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

204. For more on the rise of the American Historical Association, see John Higham,
History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1965), 6–25; and Novick, That Noble Dream, 47–60.
205. For more on such symbolic designs, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History
and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1987), 7–21.
206. Novick, That Noble Dream, 21.
207. Memoranda of the Literary Career of Washington Irving by E.A.D., vol. 17: Vol-
umes & Slipcases, Evert A. Duyckinck Papers, Duyckinck Family Papers.
208. Shi, Facing Facts, 66.
209. George B. Herbert, The Popular History of the Civil War in America (1861–1865)
(New York: F. M. Lupton, 1884), xii.
211. C. M. Andrews, “These Forty Years,” American Historical Review 30 (January
1925): 225, 22, 228, 230, 237, 238.
212. Felton, “Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books,” 378–79, 381.
213. White, “Fictions of Factual Representation,” 123–25.
215. Glenn Kaye, “A Certain Simon Schama,” Harvard Magazine, November–
December 1991, 48.
216. James Harvey Robinson, “The New Allies of History” (1910), reprinted in Rob-
inson, The New History (New York, 1912), 99, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream,
91.
217. Novick, That Noble Dream, 46, 101, 111.
218. Nordau, The Interpretation of History, 394.
219. Larned, The Literature of American History, 62.
220. J. Franklin Jameson, History of Historical Writing in America (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1891), 91.
221. Charles Kendall Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1889) and Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to
the Study of American History (Boston: Ginn, 1897). The numbers regarding the
editions and issues of Frost’s works are cited in Jack Carter Thompson, “Images
for Americans in Popular Survey Histories, 1820–1912” (PhD diss., University of
Michigan, 1976), 390.
222. Robert H. Dabney, “Is History a Science?” American Historical Association Pa-
pers, 5: 263–64. See also W. Stull Holt, “The Idea of Scientific History in Amer-
ica,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 252–62; and Edward N. Saveth,
“Scientific History in America: The Eclipse of an Idea,” in Essays in American
Historiography, ed. Donald A. Sheehan and Harold C. Syrett (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1960), 1–19.

224. John William Burgess, “On Methods of Historical Study,” as quoted in Methods
of Teaching and Studying History, ed. G. Stanley Hall (Boston, 1886), 219.
225. Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians, 19, 22–24.
226. James Harvey Robinson, “Popular Histories and their Defects,” International
Monthly, July 1900, 47–73.
227. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Es-
says (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 297.
228. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 126, 232.
229. Jameson, History of Historical Writing in America, 154–55.
230. Ibid., 144.
Chapter 2. The “Terrible Image Breaker”

1. Charles Knight, The Popular History of England (New York: Richard Worthing-
ton, [n.d.]; originally London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856), preface, i–v.
2. “A New History of the United States,” New York Times, 19 March 1874, 4.
3. William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the
United States, 4 vols. (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876–1881).
4. Margaret Becket, “Charles Scribner’s Sons,” in American Literary Publishing
Houses, 1638–1899, Part 2: N–Z, ed. Peter Dzwonkoski, vol. 49 of Dictionary of
Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986), 412.
5. “Characteristics of the Work” in the “Prospectus” for Bryant’s Popular History
of the United States, Salesman’s Dummy for book agent Ralph Coxhead (1875),
in possession of the author.
6. “Preface” to Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, vii. The version of the
preface cited here is the first to appear in print, Part I of the “subscription-only”
version of the history, published in 1876 (republished in 1878 and in possession
of the author).
7. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 2. The only other poet of sufficient
national reputation who might have been suitable for the job was Oliver Wendell
Holmes Sr., who was under contract with the publishing firm of Jones Osgood in
Boston to produce popular children’s histories based on poetic retellings of im-
portant events in the American past. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Grandmother’s
Story of Bunker Hill Battle (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875).
8. A[llan] N[evins], “William Cullen Bryant,” in Dictionary of American Biogra-
phy, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 19:204.
9. Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His
Private Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 1:334.
10. Albert F. McLean, Jr., William Cullen Bryant, Twayne’s United States Authors
Series (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964), 108–31. A similar argument is pre-

sented in slightly different form in Harry Houston Peckham, Gotham Yankee: A
Biography of William Cullen Bryant (New York: Vantage, 1950), 180.
11. Nevins, “William Cullen Bryant,” 204.
12. For a description of some of these responses to Bryant’s death and his legacy, see
William Cullen Bryant II, “William Cullen Bryant after 100 Years,” in William
Cullen Bryant and His America: Centennial Conference Proceedings, 1878–1978,
ed. Stanley Brodwin and Michael D’Innocenzo (New York: AMS, 1983). The
Twain anecdote appears on page 1 of this volume.
13. On Bryant’s struggle to become a more accessible public figure, see Charles H.
Brown, William Cullen Bryant (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 509–
24.
14. William Cullen Bryant, ed., assisted by Evert A. Duyckinck, The Complete Works
of William Shakespeare: The Stratford Edition (New York: Amies, 1888); The
Iliad of Homer, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1870); The Odyssey of Homer,
2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871); with Oliver Bell Bunce, Picturesque
America (New York: D. Appleton, 1872–74). For a thorough bibliography of
Bryant’s literary works in this period, see Donald Ringe, “William Cullen Bry-
ant,” in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, supp. 1, part 1,
ed. Leonard Unger (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), 150–73.
15. For more on Bryant’s interests in history, see Donald A. Ringe, “Bryant’s Use of
the American Past,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters
41 (1956): 323–31.
16. William Cullen Bryant, October 1875, “Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons,”
Author Files I, box 23, folder: “Bryant, William Cullen,” Special Collections,
Princeton University Archives, Princeton University (hereafter cited as Bryant
Folder, Scribner’s Archives). Published with permission of the Princeton Univer-
sity Library, Princeton, N.J.
17. For details of the contract which netted Bryant in excess of $40,000, see “Records
of Sales,” 1 May 1879 and 1 February 1884, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives.
18. The prospectus included the following statement: “Admirable histories of Amer-
ica, of the United States of different portions of both, and of many distinguished
men whose lives at one time or another have helped to make those histories, have
been written and are familiar to scholars. Some of them cover one period and
some another; and some are more, some less, full and exhaustive. But a popular
history, in the true sense of that term, one that shall be instructive through the
sense of sight as well as through the labor of perusal; one which is sought for by
that immense number of readers with whom literature is not a profession, but
who choose to be well informed in the history of their own and other countries,
however much their lives may be absorbed in other pursuits—a popular history
of this sort, compendious, and not appalling from its size, accurate without being

tedious, and one that at the same time shall be attractive by its appeal to the love of
the picturesque and the artistic, has as yet no existence. Such it is meant bryant’s
History shall be, and the name of that distinguished author is an assurance of its
success.” See “A New History of the United States,” New York Times, 19 March
1874, 4.
19. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:vii.
20. Edward Cheyney, “What Is History?” an address delivered to the Graduate
School of the University of Pennsylvania, 3 October 1907, cited in Peter Novick,
That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Pro-
fession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46.
21. William Cullen Bryant to John Bryant, May 1874, cited in Brown, William Cullen
Bryant, 502.
22. “The Past,” in The Poems of William Cullen Bryant, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New
York: Heritage Press, 1947), 112–13.
23. “Preface,” Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 1:xxiii–xxiv. The origi-
nal draft of this preface can be found in [Preface], October 1875, Bryant Folder,
Scribner’s Archives.
24. Ibid., 1:vii–viii. For more on the use of the conventions of the theater in nineteenth-
century historical writing, see David Levin, History as Romantic Art (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1959), 19–21.
25. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 38.
26. Bryant, “Preface,” Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xxi, xxiii, xx.
27. Ibid., vii, viii, xiii, x, xi.
28. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 1–9.
29. The surge of melodrama in the United States owed much to “the inspirational
value of contemporary American history, far more epic and colourful than Eng-
lish history of the same period. The westward drive of the pioneer, the conflict
with Indians, the frenzied rush for gold, the grimness of slavery, the fury of the
Civil War—these themes lent themselves admirably to melodrama,” Michael
Booth has noted. “Life lived on the frontier or in a gold camp was melodramatic.”
Michael Booth, Hiss the Villain: Six English and American Melodramas (New
York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 36, 31.
30. George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation
of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 269. See also Shelley
Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Cul-
ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
31. Bryant, “Preface,” Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xvi–xvii.
32. Ibid., xvi–xvii.
33. Ibid., xxiii.

34. Circular advertising Bryant’s Popular History, pasted in Salesman’s Dummy for
Ralph Coxhead (1875), 8.
35. Booth, “Introduction,” in Hiss the Villain, 21.
36. Theodore S. Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” in “AHR Forum:
The Old History and the New,” American Historical Review 94 ( June 1989):
656–57.
37. Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” 657.
39. For Bryant’s self-assessment of his work as an historian, see William Cullen Bry-
ant to John Bryant, 11 May 1874, cited in Brown, William Cullen Bryant, 502. See
also Ringe, “Bryant’s Use of the American Past,” 323–31.
40. Mary Otis Gay Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,”
typescript, Special Manuscript Collections, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. (hereafter
cited as Gay Papers), 13. For more on Gay’s life and work, see “Sydney Howard
Gay,” in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 7, 195, and “Sydney Howard
Gay,” The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 2 (New York: James T.
White, 1921), 494.
41. “Prospectus” to Bryant’s Popular History, 2.
42. William Cullen Bryant to John Bryant, 11 May 1874, cited in Brown, William Cul-
len Bryant, 502.
43. W. C. Bryant, [Handwritten Note on Authorship], October 1875, in Bryant
Folder, Scribner’s Archives.
44. William Cullen Bryant to Sydney Howard Gay, n.d., box 4, Gay Papers. For fur-
ther information on the financial aspects of the production of Bryant’s, see J. Blair
Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 31 August 1878 and 11 November 1878, box 60,
Gay Papers, and Martin Gay to Charles Scribner’s Sons, 12 April 1889, and the
“Copyright Notices,” from 14 May 1878, 1 June 1878, 14 August 1878, 1 May 1879,
and 1 February 1889, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives.
45. “Advanced to Authors of Bryant’s History,” Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives.
46. Originally Gay received 30 cents per volume sold and Bryant 15 cents. Those
numbers were later adjusted to 24 cents per volume for Gay and 12 cents per vol-
ume for Bryant. See “Memo on Copyright on Bryant’s History of the U.S., March
9, 1874,” and “By agreement dated May 27, 1875,” in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s
Archives.
48. Sydney Howard Gay to William Cullen Bryant, 5 November 1875, box 7, Bry-
ant–Godwin Papers, New York Public Library, Manuscript and Archives Divi-
sion, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (hereafter cited as Bryant–Godwin
Papers).

50. Bryant to Gay, 26 March 1878, box 4, Gay Papers.
51. Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,” typescript, box
4, Gay Papers, 5–7.
52. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided, 270, 11.
53. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xxii.
54. Ibid., 1:vi.
55. For more on these exchanges, see “Miscellaneous Manuscripts, MS. and Notes
for History of the U.S.,” box 74, Gay Papers.
56. Bryant to Gay, 11 November 1875, box 4, Gay Papers.
57. Bryant to Gay, 23 July 1875, box 4, Gay Papers.
59. Bryant to Gay, 24 September 1877, box 4, Gay Papers.
60. By May of 1878, Scribner’s had already spent $89,525.88 on Bryant’s Popular
History, while sales of the first volume had reached only 7300. At a retail price of
$6.00 a volume, total revenues were only $43,800. See “Bryant Copyright,” 14
May 1878, and Scribner’s to Bryant, 14 August 1878, in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s
Archives.
61. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:2, 7, 2, 13, 65, 52, 88, 13.
62. Ibid., 1:20, 34, 88.
63. This entire exchange is recounted in Gay to Bryant, 5 November 1875, box 7,
Bryant–Godwin Papers.
64. “New Publications,” New York Times, 15 May 1876, 2.
65. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:112, 105, 101–2.
66. Bryant to Gay, 21 October 1875, box 4, Gay Papers.
67. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:112, 105, 101–2.
68. Gay to Bryant, 25 July 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
70. For more on Smith and myths of American origins as they relate to William Cul-
len Bryant, see Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of
American Origin (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 45.
71. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:273, 287. For more on the nine-
teenth-century historiography with reference to the Smith–Pocahontas episode,
see Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2005), 64, 65–66, 72.
72. Bryant to Gay, 28 January 1876, box 4, Gay Papers.
73. Gay to Bryant, 15 November 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. At least one
reviewer agreed with Bryant’s concerns, asking, “Have the authors in the first vol-
ume . . . done justice to Captain John Smith?” See “Contemporary Literature,”
North American Review 127 (November–December 1878): 511.

74. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:340, 443.
76. J. Franklin Jameson, The History of Historical Writing in America (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 97–98.
77. Gay to Bryant, 17 March [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
78. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 2:343.
81. Gay to Bryant, 17 March 17 [1876], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
82. Bryant to Gay, 23 December 1875, box 4, Gay Papers.
86. Ibid., 1:391, 393, 396–97. For more on Bryant’s conception of the Plymouth land-
ing, see John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 97.
87. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:311, 537, 2:187, 2:84.
88. Gay’s note was in reference to Henry Martyn Dexter (1821–1890), who was edi-
tor of the Congregationalist from 1851 to 1890 and wrote and preached widely on
seventeenth-century New England.
90. Gay to Bryant, [8?] September 1877, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
92. Gay to Bryant, [8?] September 1877, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
93. Ibid.
94. Bryant to Gay, 11 September 1877, Gay Papers.
95. Circular advertising Bryant’s Popular History, pasted in Salesman’s Dummy
(1875), 8.
96. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:19, 2:1, 12–13, 17–18.
98. Gay to Bryant, 5 October [1877], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
99. Gay to Bryant, September 1877, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. Palfrey refers to
John Gorham Palfrey, who wrote A Compendious History of New England from
the Discovery by Europeans to the First General Congress of the Anglo-American
Colonies, 4 vols. (Boston, 1858–1864).
100. Bryant to Gay, 21 December 1875, box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers. The “most
prominent historian of the case” mentioned here is probably Benson J. Lossing,
who exonerated Hull in The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1868).

103. For Gay’s discussion of the formation of the Party, see Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s
Popular History, 2:421. Bryant showed some restraint in the matter of obliging
friends and correspondents, declining to buy an eighteenth-century letter from
George Harvey Hamilton on the grounds that it did not provide any new infor-
mation for the history. See Bryant to George Harvey Hamilton, 18 March 1875,
Group 436, Item F-4, Yale Collection of American Literature Manuscript Miscel-
lany, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut.
104. For other notes on Bryant’s stylistic suggestions, see 8 January 1876, 11 February
1876, 17 March 1876, 6 April 1876, 10 April 1876, and 14 April 1876, box 4, Gay
Papers. The reviewer for the North American Review also declared Gay’s style
marked by too many “obscurities of expression” that Bryant’s “trained critical
eye” could not tolerate. “Contemporary Literature” 510.
108. Bryant to Gay, 15 March 1876 and 5 May 1877 box 4, Gay Papers.
109. Bryant to Gay, 15 March 1876 box 4, Gay Papers.
113. Gay to Bryant, 4 July [1877?], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
115. Gay to Bryant, September [1877], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
116. “Mr. Bryant’s History of the United States,” New York Times, 9 December 1875,
4.
117. “Characteristics of the Work” in the “Prospectus” for Bryant’s Popular History,
Salesman’s Dummy and Ledger.
118. “[Endorsement by Chas. W. Cushing]” box 76, Gay Papers.
119. “A New History of the United States,” New York Times, 19 March 1874, 4.
120. For sales figures, see 14 May 1[8]78, Subscription Department, Archives of
Charles Scribner’s Sons, Author Files I, box 23, folder 1: “Bryant, William Cul-
len,” Princeton University.
121. “[Endorsement by Chas. W. Cushing]” box 76, Gay Papers.
122. Owl 1 (October 1875): 1, cited in David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Illus-
trated Book (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 115.
123. “Everything in regard to the composition of the Illustrated History of the United
States is done on consultation with me; every sentence that goes to press, has
undergone and will undergo my rigid revision and the whole will be published

under my responsibility,” Bryant assured readers. See Salesman’s Dummy, Bry-
ant’s Popular History (1875), 1.
124. For a complete recounting of the history of the authorship of Bryant’s Popular
History from the perspective of Scribner’s Sons, see “Publishers’ Introduction”
to the 1896 edition, revealingly retitled Scribner’s Popular History of the United
States (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1896), vii–vii.
125. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 9 October 1879, box 60, Gay Papers.
126. Gay to Bryant, 22 June 187[7?], box 7, Bryant–Godwin Papers.
128. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 18 September 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
See also Bryant to Gay, 13 December 1875, in which Bryant asks Gay “to point out
in what respects” a proposed chapter by another of these additional authors, Dr.
Weiss, “does not suit the purposes of the History.” For comments on Gay’s rejec-
tion of the Weiss chapter, see 20 December 1875, in the same collection.
129. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 18 February 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
130. Ibid.
131. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 14 July 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
132. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 2:vi.
133. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 23 March 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
134. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 23 March 1880 and 14 July 1880, box
60, Gay Papers.
135. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 16 August 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
An undated note from Scribner’s to Gay in the Charles Scribner’s Sons File at
Princeton indicates that at one point Scribner’s estimated it would need to sell
27,066 additional copies of each volume (or 108,264 volumes altogether) to re-
cover the costs of its advances to Gay. See Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives.
136. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 18 September 1880, box 60, Gay Pa-
pers. For Gay’s testy response to these reductions, see 13 December 1880.
137. I have borrowed this phrase from Thomas Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutral-
ity: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2000).
138. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 4:294, 175, 218,
292–93.
139. Ibid., 3:65 n. 2, 65.
140. Ibid., 1:x.
142. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 3:544, 4:91, 265, 291.
143. Ibid., 4:359, 263, 393.
144. “Records of Fugitive Slaves Aided, 1855–59, 2 volumes (and money spent),” box
72, Gay Papers.

145. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:359, 263, 393, 415, 316, 324, 1:x,
4:332.
146. Ibid., 4:440 n. 1. While Gay worked for the Tribune, he wrote many pieces for
Horace Greeley, some of which, his family claimed, secured Greeley political po-
sitions. Later he became sensitive to this issue of authorship: in September 1864,
Gay ended a letter to his wife; “Public affairs never looked so hopeful. Didst thou
read my article in last Tuesday’s paper ‘Where We Are.’ It has made a great deal
of sensation and on the strength of it, I hear Mr. Greeley was chosen Elector at
large for this state. Of course it was attributed to him and was his precisely in
so far that he assented to its going into the paper.” For more on Gay’s negative
feelings toward Greeley as a political candidate, see “Why We Should Vote for
Grant—and Not For Greeley,” box 73, Gay Papers. For more on Bryant’s atti-
tudes regarding these same issues, see Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century
of Journalism (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
147. Mary Otis Gay Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,”
typescript, Gay Papers, 12. See also “Stories of the Gay Family by Mother,” in the
same collection.
148. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:335, 438, 444.
149. For more on Gay’s involvement in the temperance movement, see newspaper ar-
ticles by Gay in the Hingham Partriot, box 73, Gay Papers.
150. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:330, 2:349.
152. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 1:xx.
153. Ibid., 4:600.
154. Charles Scribner to Gay, 22 October 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
155. Eventually Charles Scribner’s Sons did update the series to include coverage of
the period from 1865 until 1893 in an 1897 edition of five volumes. The revised
text was provided by Noah Brooks. William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Howard Gay,
and Noah Brooks, Scribner’s Popular History of the United States, 5 vols. (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). The above quote comes from the “Publish-
er’s Introduction” to this edition, vii–viii.
156. Gay’s proposed preface is cited in Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 15
December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
157. Scribner to Gay, 13 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
158. Gay to Scribner, n.d., box 60, Gay Papers. Gay’s response is folded into the letter
cited.
159. Gay to Scribner, n.d., box 60, Gay Papers. Gay’s response is folded into the letter
cited.
160. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 15 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
161. “Record of Sales, 1 February 1884,” in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Archives.

162. Gay’s response is included in 13 December 1880 in Bryant Folder, Scribner’s
Archives.
163. Willcox, “ ‘A Gay Life’: The Biography of Sydney Howard Gay,” 6. See also
Willcox, “Stories of the Gay Family by Mother,” 10.
164. Sydney Howard Gay to Charles Scribner, a letter folded into Scribner to Gay, 13
December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
165. Charles Scribner to Sydney Howard Gay, 15 December 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
166. The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries, vol. 1, part 2 (New
York: A. S. Barnes, 1877), 455.
167. The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 2:2 (1878), 70.
168. “[Endorsement by Chas. W. Cushing],” “History of the United States,” box 76,
Gay Papers.
169. “[Endorsement by Rev. H. C. Haydn],” “History of the United States,” box 76,
Gay Papers.
170. “Editor’s Literary Record,” Harper’s Review 57 (June–November 1878): 786.
171. “[Endorsement by Jared Kirkland],” “History of the United States,” box 76, Gay
Papers.
172. “Culture and Progress,” Scribner’s Monthly 16 (May–October 1878): 749.
173. Benson J. Lossing to Henry Johnson, 22 March 1877, Addenda I, box 17, Lossing
Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
174. American Bibliopolist (February 1877): 14–15.
175. Ibid.
176. Ibid., 15.
177. Ibid., 15–16.
178. Ibid., 17.
179. On Gay’s original responsibilities to “furnish designs for its history,” see Bryant
to Gay, 23 March 1874, box 4, Gay Papers. For what appear to be Gay’s notes
on possible illustrations for Bryant’s Popular History, see box 73 in the same
collection.
180. For more on Gay’s pictorial preferences, see his collection of visual materials in
box 75, Gay Papers. His collection included photo albums with pictures of Civil
War scenes (Ruins of Mrs. Henry House, Bull Run; Soldiers Graves at Bull Run;
Slave Pens in Alexandria, Virginia, etc.). He also collected colorized cards show-
ing romantic Nature scenes and owned an F. O. C. Darley lithograph entitled
“Emigrants attacked by Indians.”
181. Scribner to Gay, 14 July 1880, box 60, Gay Papers.
182. Scribner to Gay, 19 October 1879, box 60, Gay Papers.
183. E. V. Lucas, Life and Work of Edwin Austin Abbey, R. A., 2 vols. (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 34–35. The comment belongs to illustrator J. E.
Kelly.

184. See, for instance, Winslow Homer’s “March Against the Indians in Connecti-
cut,” which depicts the expedition of Dutch and English settlers against the In-
dians under John Underhill in 1644, of which Gay had written: “A night march
through the February snows brought the little army of a hundred and fifty men
to the outskirts of the Indian town. . . . The moonlight was so clear and strong
that ‘many winter’s days were not brighter.’ ” Homer’s illustration of the scene
is highly effective but inconsistent with the written text, since the artist has this
“little army” inappropriately “outfitted uniformly in helmeted military dress.”
For a discussion of this and other “historical inaccuracies” in illustrations repro-
duced in Bryant’s Popular History see David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the
Illustrated Book (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 116–17.
185. See, for instance, the illustration “Mrs. Murray Entertaining the British Officers,”
by Edwin A. Abbey in Scribner’s Monthly (January 1876).
186. Ken Kempcke, “Edwin Austin Abbey,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol.
188, ed. Steve E. Smith, Catherine A. Hastedt, and Donald H. Dyal (Detroit:
Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998) 4–5, 7.
187. Ibid., 6–8.
188. Henry James, “Edwin A. Abbey,” Harper’s Weekly 30 (4 December 1886): 786–
87. See also Henry James, Picture and Text (New York: Harper, 1893), 44–60.
189. “Contemporary Literature,” 509
190. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 1:555, 396–97.
191. Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book, 115.
192. Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 2:vi.
193. McRae’s petition was published in pamphlet form as Col. Sherwin McRae,
Washington: His Person as Represented by the Artists: Houdon Statue, Its History
and Value (Richmond, Va.: R. F. Walker, 1873).
194. See also Scribner to Gay, 9 October 1879, box 60, Gay Papers.
195. This rival image of Washington was advanced by James Grant Wilson, who
hoped to capitalize on the new popular interest in history by mass marketing
‘“an heroic size bust” of Washington through the Washington Bust and Statu-
ette Company. Wilson’s statue was a composite production, modeled after both
the Houdon mask and the Stuart portrait, both artists having realized effectively
in his estimation “the popular sentiment and opinion of Washington.” See “The
Washington Bust and Statuette Company,” Miscellaneous Papers, box 28, Loss-
ing Addenda 1, Lossing Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Bryant’s endorsement can be found in Bryant to Wilson MacDonald, 25 May
1876, as excerpted in this circular and in “A New George Washington,” New York
Evening Post, 20 March 1877.
196. For a discussion of the critical response to pictorial images generated from Stu-
art likenesses by Scribner’s and other publishers, see esp. “Houdon’s Cast of

Washington: Letter from Benson Lossing,” 23 March 1877, Miscellaneous Pa-
pers, box 28, Lossing Addenda 1, Lossing Papers, Huntington Library. See also
“Houdon’s Washington: Benson J. Lossing Reviews the Testimony and Closes
the Controversy,” 17 May 1877, New York Evening Post.
197. “Books: Literary News and Notes from New York,” Boston Daily Globe, 8 April
1874, 3.
198. “New Literature: The Latest Work of the Venerated Poet,” Boston Daily Globe, 3
June 1876, 11.
199. This discussion of “cumulative” approaches to history is adapted from Richard
J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999 [1997]), 41–42.
200. “Bryant’s History of the United States,” New York Times, 8 September 1878, 10.
201. “Editor’s Literary Record,” Harper’s Monthly 57 (June–November 1878): 786.
202. In 1889, total sales of each volume were as follows: vol. 1: 18,195; vol. 2: 17,654;
vol. 3: 16,475; vol. 4: 15,761. Such total sales (68,085 for all four volumes) were
well under the 108,264 volumes Scribner’s projected it needed to break even
on the project. See “Account,” 1 February 1889, Bryant Folder, Scribner’s Ar-
chives.
203. Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Organization and Proceedings, Saratoga, Sep-
tember 9–10, 1884,” in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 1, no. 1
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), ii.
204. Right Reverend C. F. Robertson, “The Louisiana Purchase in its Influence Upon
the American System,” in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 1,
no. 4 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), 24–25.
205. This episode is recounted in Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History, 4:136,
140, 142, and “Note.”
206. For a synopsis of this exchange, see Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Proceed-
ings, Second Annual Meeting, Saratoga, September 8–10, 1885,” in Papers of the
American Historical Association, vol. 1, no. 6 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1886), 33–34.
207. “Judge Campbell’s Remarks,” in ibid., 30–32.
208. This phrase is borrowed from the subtitle of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thel-
an’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Chapter 3. The Metahistorian as Popularizer

1. The Magazine of American History, vol. 1, part 2 (1877): 455.
Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43–46.
3. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 11–12.

4. Jeanne Chattin, “Grandfather Ridpath and His Friends,” folder 1, Ridpath Papers,
courtesy of DePauw University Archives and Special Collections, Greencastle,
Indiana (hereafter cited as Ridpath Papers). For more on Ridpath’s childhood,
see “Thorntown 100 Years Old: Boone County, Indiana, Town Celebrates Cen-
tury of Progress,” 25 October 1930, folder 10; “Semi-Centennial Reception in
Honor of Dr. John Clark Ridpath”; and “Journal of Walking Trip, 1862,” Diary
of T. B. Wood, vol. 1, pp. 4–5. For secondary sources on the details of Ridpath’s
life and career, see William W. Carson, “John Clark Ridpath,” in Dictionary of
American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1943), 15:559, and “John Clark Ridpath,” in The National Cyclopaedia of Ameri-
can Biography (New York: James T. White, 1929), 6:485; see also “John Clark
Ridpath,” The Review of Reviews Magazine (March 1895): 294–96.
5. Tucker Woodson Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” (Cincinnati,
1894), 6.
6. “1861 Ridpath Diary,” 17 January and 19 January 1861, Ridpath Papers.
7. Ibid., 7 January 1861.
8. Ibid., 28 February 1861.
9. Ibid., 5 January 1861. Ridpath cites The [New York] Ledger as an example of
such a radical literary journal. For more on this publication and its reputation,
see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865, vol. 2 of A
History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1938), 356–63.
10. “1861 Ridpath Diary,” 1 January 1861, Ridpath Papers.
15. Ibid., 4 March 1861.
17. Ibid., 17 March 1861.
18. For more on this valedictory speech, see “Register, Typed pages from the John
Clark Ridpath Semi-Centennial Celebration Volumes,” DC-37, Ridpath Papers.
19. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 7.
20. For more on these “herren doktoren,” see John Higham, History: Professional
Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 92–
103.
21. For a discussion of the rise of history as an independent discipline at Harvard, see
Gregory M. Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World: In Quest of a New
Parkman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 15–21.

22. John Clark Ridpath, “The Man in History,” Indiana Historical Society Publica-
tions, vol. 2, no. 7 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1893), 271.
23. M[ary] E[lsie] Thalheimer, A Manual of Mediaeval and Modern History (Cincin-
nati: Wilson Hinkle, 1874).
24. “Annual Report to the President of Indiana Asbury University,” [1878], folder
4, Ridpath Papers. See also John C. Ridpath to President Alexander Martin,”
[1884–85], in the same collection.
25. Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe,
from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution (New York: D. Apple-
ton, 1867).
26. Clifton J. Phillips, “John C. Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian,” DePauw
Alumnus, December 1957, 2.
27. “Dr. Parr” as cited in “John Clark Ridpath: Memorial Services Held in His
Honor,” DePauw Palladium, 28 January 1901, 9. See also Thomas Arnold to
Doctor Ridpath, 31 March 1891, in “Register, Typed pages from the John Clark
Ridpath Semi-Centennial Celebration Volumes.”
28. Phillips, “John Clark Ridpath,” 2.
29. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 273–75, 277–79.
31. There were, of course, other Centennial popular histories on the market, espe-
cially Benson Lossing’s Our Country: A Household History for All Readers, 3 vols.
(New York: Henry J. Johnson, 1875–1878). For a discussion of this and other
Centennial works, see “A String for the Pearls: The Centennial Celebration and
Humanizing History,” in Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated His-
tories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithson-
ian Institution Press, 2002), 127–58.
32. [Advertisement for Distributing Agents], John Clark Ridpath, A Popular History
of the United States, from the Aboriginal Times to the Present Day (New York:
Nelson and Phillips, 1877), in possession of the author.
33. Salesman’s Dummy/Advertisement, A Popular History of the United States, folder
12-DC 37, Ridpath Papers. See also the salesman’s dummy for this volume, in-
cluding the publisher’s descriptive announcement, in Z780 R547 P876; Zinman
1363, Publishers’ Sample and Canvassing Books, American Antiquarian Society,
Worcester, Mass.
34. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, iv.
35. Ibid., 349–51.
36. See, for instance, the heroic portrait of General Greene in William Cullen Bryant
and Sydney Howard Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 4 vols.
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882), 4:40–48. The quoted material here

comes from The Reader’s Digest Family Encyclopedia of American History (Pleas-
antville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association, 1975), 475–76.
37. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 160.
38. Ibid., 225–26; 230, 234.
39. Ibid., 150–53.
40. See, for instance, the historian William Dunlap’s treatment of the 1741 New York
slave riots in History of the New Netherlands, Province of New York and State
of New York to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (New York: Carter and
Thorp, 1839–40), 1:320–50. For a discussion of the historiographic treatment of
this incident, see T. Wood Clarke, “The Negro Plot of 1741,” New York History
25, no. 1 (April 1944): 167–81.
42. George E. Croscup, History Made Visible: Croscup’s United States History with
Synchronic Charts, Maps and Statistical Diagrams (New York: Windsor, 1911),
3. For a more detailed description of the Bern method, see Pfitzer, Picturing the
Past, 163.
43. William M. Sloane, “History and Democracy,” American Historical Review 1
(October 1895): 4.
44. See, for instance, John Frost’s Popular History of the United States (New York:
Hurst, 1881 [1845]) in which he devotes separate chapters to the development of
individual colonies.
45. See Bryant and Gay, Bryant’s Popular History of the United States, 1:457 and
2:41–45.
47. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 114, 109.
48. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, preface.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 141.
50. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, xxxvii, 43, 50.
51. Ibid., 42, 45, 47, 50.
52. See Edward Maria Wingfield, A Discourse of Virginia, ed. Charles Deane, in
Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 4 (Worces-
ter, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1860), 67–103, and Henry Adams,
“Captain John Smith,” North American Review 104 (January 1867): 1–30. See
also Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
53. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 95–101.
54. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popu-
lar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 30.

56. See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the
(In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda
Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 125.
58. Prospectus for John C. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States of America
(New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), collected in “ ‘Agents Wanted:’ Subscrip-
tion Publishing in America: The World—Past & Present, Near & Far,” Special
On-line Exhibit, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of
Pennsylvania. 2006.
59. Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 10.
61. For sales figures, see American Biographical History of Eminent and Self-Made
Men of the State of Indiana, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: Western Biographical Publishing,
1880), 1:36–37.
62. Phillips, “John C. Ridpath, DePauw Teacher and Historian,” 3.
63. American Biographical History of Eminent and Self-Made Men, 1:36–37.
64. Woodrow Wilson to Henry Mills Alden, 22 January 1900, Papers of Woodrow Wil-
son, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 12:82–83.
65. Charles Kendall Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1882), 572–73.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 289.
67. “Obituary of Abraham Ridpath,” by John Clark Ridpath, n.d., folder 10, Ridpath
Papers. See also “To the Memory of a Workingman—Abraham Ridpath” (New
York, 1896), folder 2, in the same collection.
68. See Ridpath’s comments in his student diary, 13 February 1861, Ridpath Papers.
69. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 275.
70. Phillips, “John C. Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian,” 3. For a description
of some of Ridpath’s public lectures, see “Lecture Series Programs,” Bushnell
Scrapbook, vol. 319, 228, DePauw University. See also “The Relation of Wealth
to Knowledge,” by John Clark Ridpath, 1868, Papers of Guy Morrison Walker,
DC 487, folder 24, in the same collection.
71. “Annual Report to the President of Indiana Asbury University,” [1878], folder 4,
Ridpath Papers. See also John C. Ridpath to President Alexander Martin, [1884–
85], in the same collection.
73. George Bancroft to John Clark Ridpath, [n.d.], folder 5, Ridpath Papers. The
war itself took place in 1878, so the letter probably dates from that year.
74. See, for instance, Ridpath’s use of materials from the Greencastle Daily Sun as
chronicled in folder 3 and folder 12, Ridpath Papers.

75. Ridpath to James Whitcomb Riley, 18 September 1890, Riley MSS., Lilly Library,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (hereafter cited as Riley MSS.)
76. Higham, History, 94.
77. Ridpath to Hon. Board of Trustees and Visitors, 17 June 1884, folder 5, Ridpath
Papers.
78. Ridpath to James C. John, Secretary of the Board of Trustees and Visitors,” 1 July
1885, folder 5, Ridpath Papers.
79. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 14. In this transition, Ridpath
shared much in common with another historian, Henry Adams, who had left his
position as an assistant professor of history at Harvard in 1877 to pursue work as
an independent philosopher of history. Adams quit teaching because he felt he had
been a distinct “failure” as an educator, having “succumbed to the weight of a sys-
tem” that he regarded as “wrong” because it approached history as a “catalogue”
and a “record” that stifled creativity. He had tried at Harvard to impose “Ger-
many on his scholars with a heavy hand,” but he felt his methods were “a hundred
years behind the experimental sciences” and “less instructive than Walter Scott
and Alexander Dumas.” See Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed.
Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973 [1918]), 304, 300–301; William
H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952), esp. 291–317; and Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 87–103.
80. John C. Ridpath, History of the World (Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1885; The
Ridpath Historical Society, 1925).
81. For more on Sever, see “Henry Edwin Sever Memorial Hall,” Washington Uni-
versity in St. Louis Web site, www.ustl.edu/tour/hilltop/sever.html.
82. Marshall W. Fishwick, Illustrious American: Jane Addams (Morristown, N.J.: Sil-
ver Burdett, 1968), 9–20.
83. Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1880). Wallace shared much in common with Ridpath concerning the role of his-
tory in the popular imagination.
84. Meredith Nicholson, The Hoosiers (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 2.
85. Taylor, “John C. Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 13.
86. Ridpath to Riley, 2 November 1895, Collection of James Whitcomb Riley, Indi-
ana University. See also Ridpath’s comments about the need for Western Writers
to demonstrate “the stamp of originality,” in “ ‘Publishers and Authors’: A Paper
Delivered at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the WAW,” IPQ 810.6 W 527m
(1891–97), vol. 2, Indiana State Library.
87. The Current, 29 January 1887, vol. 7, no. 163, folder 11, “Miscellaneous Pamphlets,
1887–1890, n.d.s,” L217, box 1, Western Association of Writers Collection, Indi-

ana State Library, Indianapolis, Indiana (hereafter cited as WAW Collection). For
membership lists of the WAW, see S 3194.
88. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was the unanimous first-place choice, while there was
no consensus on places two through four, some arguing for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lew
Wallace’s Ben Hur (of course), Eggleston’s Hoosier Schoolmaster, Irving’s Sketch-
book, or Bret Harte’s “Stories of the Golden West.” Cooper was rejected from the
list because of the “filler” used to pad out his narratives. See IPQ 810.6, no. 1, West-
ern Association of Writers, “Clippings and Programs,” WAW Collection.
89. Ray Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy: The Western Association of Writers,”
http://www.indianahistory.org/heritage/writers.html (accessed 6/18/02). See also
James L. Weygand, Winona Holiday: The Story of the Western Association of Writ-
ers (Nappanee, Ind.: Private Press of the author, 1948). The Indiana State Library
has the Minute Books of the WAW, from 1891–1904; a Scrapbook of Newspaper
Clippings [about WAW], compiled by Amos Butler; Invitations, 1886–1904; and
Programs and Printed Pieces. See L217, box 1, 1887–1910, WAW Collection.
90. George S. Cottman, cited in Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [4–5].
91. John Clark Ridpath, “Is History Acquainted with Providence?” “Program for
the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Writers, June 28, 29,
30 and July 1 and 2, 1897,” in folder 9, “Programs, 1892–1897, 1902,” L217, WAW
Collection. See also “The Western Writers,” Warsaw Daily Times, 2 July 1897,
IPQ 810.6 no. 1, Clippings and Programs, in the same collection.
92. George S. Cottman, cited in Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [3]. For more
on Ridpath’s affiliation with the Western Association of Writers, see Material
concerning the Western Association of Writers; programs, 1887–1901; and News
Articles about WAW, box 1, folder 7, Cory Family Papers, 1828–1943, Collection
# M 0459, BV 2206-2210, BV 2423–2427, OM 0177, Indiana Historical Society,
Indianapolis, Ind. (hereafter cited as Cory Family Papers).
93. John Clark Ridpath, “Why the Pawpaw Is Poetical and the Turnip Is Not,” de-
scribed as a “semihumorous, philosophical dissertation,” published in W.A.W.
Souvenir no. 2, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Convention of Eagle Lake, Indi-
ana, July 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1890, ed. Mary E. Carwill (New Castle, Ind.: Courier,
for the Western Association of Writers, 1891), 110–21.
94. For more on Riley’s role in the WAW and Ridpath’s relationship with him in
that capacity, see Ridpath to “My Dear and Sky-Blue Riley,” 22 September 1890,
Riley MSS. See also Ridpath to Riley, 9 January 1892 and 1 March 1897, in the
same collection.
95. Riley and Ridpath wrote frequent “love letters” and poems to each other, Rid-
path, for instance, asking Riley: “Why don’t you send me a love letter?” Riley
responding: “the ‘climate of your favor’ bears down upon the hothouse of my

heart. Why don’t you come home here oftener?” Elsewhere, Riley congratulated
Ridpath on his “sonnet to his late co-yodeler [poet], Mr. Dante, who in all truth
was a hell of a Poet—though, I doubt not, his perfunctory views on hell seem
tame enough to him now.” See Ridpath to Riley, 11 October 1890, 25 October
1893, 1 March 1897, Riley MSS. For a sample of Riley’s responses, see James
Whitcomb Riley to John C. Ridpath, 7 September 1897, folder 5, Ridpath Papers,
and “Lines to Perfesser James Clark Ridpath,” Riley MSS, “Writings.”
96. Clara Laughlin, cited in Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [4].
97. Ridpath to Riley, Correspondence 3 September 1890–Jan. 1891, box 4, Riley
MSS.
98. Ridpath to Riley, Sept 8, 1890, box 4, Riley MSS.
99. Nicholson, The Hoosiers, 158, 167, 171–72.
100. As cited in Nicholson, The Hoosiers, 28, 233. See also Boomhower, “A Gathering
of Poesy,” [2].
101. Ridpath to Riley, 10 September 1891, Riley MSS.
102. “Lines to Perfessor John Clark Ridpath,” Writings, Greenbox, Riley MSS. For
Riley’s annotated comments about the poem, see L235, Tucker W. Taylor Papers,
box 2, folder 2, Manuscript Section, Indiana State Library.
103. “The Poet-Historian,” in folder 10: “Miscellaneous poems; Semi-Centennial
Reception in honor of JCR, April 27, 1891,” Ridpath Papers; also in John C.
Ridpath, microfilm 128, in the same collection.
104. Nora Marks, “Scrapbook, no. 5,” 69, 76, BV 2210, Cory Family Papers. See also
“With the Writers: The Western Association of Writers Meeting at Warsaw, July
3, 1897,” Daily Reporter in IPQ 810.6 no. 1, Clippings and Programs, WAW Col-
lection, and “The Western Writers,” Warsaw Daily Times, 2 July 1897.
105. For a discussion of Turner’s address, “The Poet of the Future,” see Ernst A. Brei-
sach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 100.
106. Sayings and Doings of the Sixth General Meeting Held at Eagle Lake, Warsaw,
Ind., July 6 to 10, 1891 (Cincinnati: Jones Publishing for the Western Association
of Writers, 1892), 24–25.
107. “Choice Literary Ramblings,” The Pen, folder 11, L217, box I, Miscellaneous
Pamphlets, Indiana State Library. Ridpath noted: “I have never been able to un-
derstand why it is that the Western Association of Writers was not from the first
regarded with prime favor and applause by the public. We may not conceal from
ourselves the unpleasant truth that the society was for several years disparaged
and held to no reputation.” See Sayings and Doings of the Sixth General Meeting,
31–32.
108. Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,” [1]. Certain members of the WAW objected
to the politicization of the organization. See Cyrus F. McNutt, “The A.A.W.,”

14 May 1887, Scrapbook 1, 34, BV 2206, 5 Scrapbooks of Newspaper Clippings
about Politics and Writing Kept by the Cory Family Members, Indiana Historical
Society.
109. N[oah] J. Clodfelter, The Gotham of Yasmire: A Satire (Buffalo, N.Y.: Peter Paul,
1897), 37, 36, 5, 16, 17, 87, 21, 16–17.
110. Clodfelter, The Gotham of Yasmire, 6, 37.
111. Ridpath to Riley, 27 April 1889, Ridpath Papers.
112. John Clark Ridpath, “Is History a Science?” “Program for the Eleventh Annual
Meeting of the Western Association of Writers to be held at Winona Park (Spring
Fountain Park), Warsaw, IN, June 29 and 30, and July 1, 2, and 3, 1896,” Cory
Family Papers, box I, folder 7, M0459. For a brief summary of Ridpath’s paper,
see The Northern Indianian 41, no. 3 (9 July 1896).
113. Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 389.
114. “The Man in History,” “Program of the Eighth Annual Convention (Ninth) Meet-
ing of the Western Association of Writers Ridpath,” Cory Family Papers, box 1,
folder 7, M0459; reprinted in Ridpath, “The Man in History,” Indiana Histori-
cal Society Publications, 281. See also folder 9, Programs, 1892–1897, 1902, L217,
box 1, Indiana State Library.
116. Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The
Hague: Mouton, 1959), 19, 21, 20.
117. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 282–83.
118. For a discussion of the etymology of the term “New History,” see Ellen Fitzpat-
rick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–6, 10–11, 256. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb,
The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). For more on Riley’s
influence on popularizers of history, see Edward L. Tucker, “The Association of
Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley: Further Documents,” American Literary
Study 26, no. 2 (2000): 223–35. Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye) was a humorist who
wrote Bill Nye’s History of the United States (Philadelphia, 1894) and who joined
Riley on the lecture circuit in the 1890s.
120. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 284–86, 272–73.
122. John Clark Ridpath, Ridpath’s Universal History, 4 vols. (New York: Hall and
Locke, 1893). The work was also published in an eight-volume deluxe edition
called The Great Races of Mankind.
123. Ridpath, Ridpath’s Universal History, 1:v–vi.
124. Ibid., 1:vii, 128, vii, 128.

125. Ibid., 1:182.
126. Riley to Ridpath, 14 October 1895, Riley MSS.
127. See the poetic tribute to Ridpath’s sweeping tome in James Newton Matthews,
“The Great Races of Mankind,” 28 October 1892, in folder 10, Ridpath Papers.
128. Taylor, “John Clark Ridpath: A Brief Biography,” 11–12.
129. For more on this incident of pictorial misappropriation, see Pfitzer, Picturing the
Past, 172–73.
130. John Clark Ridpath, People’s History of the United States (Philadelphia: Histori-
cal Publishing, 1895), 19.
131. “Ridpath’s History of the World,” The Frisco Employees’ Magazine, 49.
132. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 470, 183, 179, 377, 178, 33–34.
133. Ibid., 42–45.
134. For references to these paired texts, see A Popular History of the United States,
364, and People’s History of the United States, 265; A Popular History, 61, and
People’s History, 62; A Popular History, 78, and People’s History, 70.
135. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1983), 278.
136. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States, 57; People’s History of the United
States, 57.
137. Ridpath, “The Man in History,” 315–16.
138. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 483.
140. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 370.
141. Here Adams is referring to the threat of social science with reference to earlier
problems presented “by poets, philosophers, or theologians.” See G. B. Adams,
“History and the Philosophy of History,” American Historical Review 14 (1909):
228–30, 235–36, 228–30.
143. Ephraim Emerton’s comments from Charles H. Haskins, “Report of the Pro-
ceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the AHA,” Annual Report of the
AHA for the Year 1903, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904), 8, cited in Novick, That
Noble Dream, 90. The second Emerton quote is cited in Higham, History, 98.
144. Higham, History, 99, 98.
145. Breisach, Historiography, 310.
146. Charles Kendall Adams, A Manual of Historical Literature, 572–73.
147. Carson, “John C. Ridpath,” 599. See, for instance, Wayne Guthrie, “ ‘Old Reddy’
Is a DePauw Tradition,” folder 10, Ridpath Papers. Guthrie credits the People’s
History with “giving a homespun insight into and understanding of history.”
148. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 71.
149. Loewenberg, American History in American Thought, 83–387; 391.

150. Carl Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?” Western Political Quarterly 7 (Sept.
1955): 327–40.
151. Harry Ritter, quoted in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 47.
152. William Cronon, cited in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Society, 51.
153. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Society, 73, 40.
154. Ridpath, People’s History of the United States, 459, 494–95, 482, 509, 551.
156. Charles Beard, cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 254.
159. Ibid., 557–58.
160. John Clark Ridpath, “The Best Methods of Preserving Local History,” excerpted
in in “Literary Symposium: The Third Gathering of the American Association
of Writers in this City,” an unattributed newsclipping pasted in Scrapbook 5,
[p. 22], BV 2210, Cory Family Papers.
162. “Perhaps a stronger presentation of the money question was never made than that
which comes from the pen of John Clark Ridpath, the great historian,” wrote the
Atlanta Constitution. “Mr Ridpath makes a declaration in words so clear as to be at
once understood by the most simple mind.” See “A Strong Presentation,” Atlanta
Constitution, 12 June 1896, 4, and “Ridpath on Silver,” Atlanta Constitution, 6 Au-
gust 1896, 3. The Chicago Daily Tribune was far more critical of Ridpath’s bi-metal
positions. See “A Fool Challenge,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 June 1896, 14.
163. For more on Ridpath and his acceptance of the Arena editorship, see Frank Lu-
ther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1885–1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1957), 412–13.
164. David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–
1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 202–3.
165. “Table of Contents,” The Arena 18 (September 1897).
166. Ridpath to Riley, 1 March 1897, Riley MSS.
167. W. T. Stead, “The Arena,” in Review of Reviews 4 (July 1891): 51–52.
168. Shi, Facing Facts, 202–3.
170. John Clark Ridpath, “The Cry of the Poor,” The Arena 18 (September 1897):
407–8.
171. Ridpath, “The Cry of the Poor,” 410–11. See also Ridpath, People’s History of the
United States, 509.
172. Ridpath, “The Cry of the Poor,” 418.
173. John Clark Ridpath, “Prosperity: The Sham and the Reality,” The Arena 18 (Oc-
tober 1897): 487–88, 493.

174. “One Flag, One Cause, One Country,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 September
1898, 6. See also “Ceases Publication: October Number of The Arena Will Not
Be Issued,” Boston Daily Globe, 24 September 1898, 2.
175. “Ridpath for the People,” Atlanta Constitution, 11 June 1896, 1.
176. Eugene Fitch Ware to James Whitcomb Riley, 15 April 1899, Riley MSS.
177. George H. Lepper to George W. Julian, 19 February 1898, L-81, George W. Julian
Papers, Indiana State Library.
178. John Clark Ridpath, “[The Gold-Standard Conspiracy],” The Arena 19 ( June
1898): 840.
179. John Clark Ridpath, “Our Best Literature, Is it Read?” 7, 11–12, box 1, folder 2,
Ridpath Papers. See also Ridpath, “Literature: The Historic View,” in “Tenth
Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Writers, July 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12,
1895,” folder 9, L217, WAW Collection.
180. For more on Progressive Historians, see Breisach, American Progressive History,
esp. 14–20.
182. Chauncey Wright, “The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer,” and “Evolution by
Natural Selection,” in Philosophical Discussions (New York, 1877), 49, 196, cited
in Novick, That Noble Dream, 36.
183. Larned, The Literature of American History, iv.
184. G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” 235, 225, 224.
185. Ibid., 230.
186. For more on the work of Adams and others on such special committees of the
American Historical Association, see “Queries as to a Cooperative History of the
United States under the Auspices of the American Historical Association,” in
Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901: As Revealed in the Corre-
spondence of Herbert Baxter Adams, ed. W. Stull Holt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1938), 282–86.
187. For more on the campaigns by professionals to influence school histories, see
Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks
from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2003), 175–218.
188. G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” 229, 222, 236, 223.
189. Annales Internationales d’Historie, Congres de Paris 1900, Premiere Section,
Histoire Generale et Diplomatique (Paris 1901), 5–6, cited in Novick, That Noble
Dream, 37–38.
190. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 379–82.
191. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 430–33, 278.

192. “Rev. Hilary A. Gobin, President of DePauw University,” IF*810.6 W527m, vol. 1,
Western Association of Writers, Minute Books, 1891–1904, [p. 8], WAW Collection.
193. “Frank Stanton Writes of John Ridpath, the Noted Historian, Who Died Tues-
day,” Atlanta Constitution, 2 August 1900, 3. For more on Stanton and his re-
lationship to members of the WAW, see Boomhower, “A Gathering of Poesy,”
[6]. See also “Last Work of Ridpath Tells of All Races of Mankind Since First
Evidences of Civilization,” Atlanta Constitution, 15 April 1917, 10K, and “John
Ridpath Died Last Night: He Was America’s Foremost Living Historian,” At-
lanta Constitution, 1 August 1900, 3.
194. Dr. Albert Shaw, “John C. Ridpath,” 1 August 1900, cited in Phillips, “John C.
Ridpath: DePauw Teacher and Historian,” 3.
195. Poem Composed by James Whitcomb Riley, in Memorial Services of JCR, ac-
count from DePauw Palladium (28 January 1901), folder 11, DePauw University
Archives. For a prose tribute by Riley see “John Clark Ridpath,” Indianapolis
Sun, 1 August 1900.
196. See “Death of John C. Ridpath: Historian Passes Away After a Long Illness in the
Presbyterian Hospital,” New York Times, 1 August 1900, and “Maker of Books:
John Clark Ridpath Dies in New York,” Boston Daily Globe, 1 August 1900, 8.
197. Albert J. Beveridge to Worthington Ford, 19 January 1916, The Papers of Albert
J. Beveridge, General Correspondence, 1890–1927, file M, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C. For more on Beveridge as historian, see Claude Bowers, Bev-
eridge and the Progressive Era (New York: The Literary Guild, 1932).
198. John Scott Wilson, “Popular History and Biography,” The Handbook of Ameri-
can Popular Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1988), 201–2. See also Milton Berman, John Fiske, the Evolution of a Popu-
larizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961).
Chapter 4. “The Past Everything”

1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 275.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 37.
4. Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Moderniza-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 84.
5. James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern His-
torical Outlook (New York: The Free Press, 1965 [1912]), 38.
6. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 211.

7. Breisach, American Progressive History, 15.
9. Peter Gay, Style in History (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 210, cited in Berk-
hofer, Beyond the Great Story, 48.
10. See Henry Adams, A Letter to American Teachers of History (Baltimore: privately
printed, J. H. Hurst, 1910) and “The Tendency of History,” American Historical
Association, Annual Report for 1894 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1895).
11. Earle W. Dow, “Features of the New History: Apropos of Lamprecht’s ‘Deutsche
Geschichte,’ ” American Historical Review 3 (April 1898): 441.
13. For more on the definition of “New History,” see Harry Elmer Barnes, The New
History and the Social Studies (New York: Appleton-Century, 1925). See also Ed-
ward Eggleston, “How a ‘New’ History Was Made,” The Critic 15 (August 17,
1899): 80
14. Robinson, The New History, 45, 134, 19.
15. For background information on Robinson, see Luther V. Hendricks, James Har-
vey Robinson: Teacher of History (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946); Crane
Brinton, “James Harvey Robinson,” in Dictionary of American Biography, supp.
2, part 2, ed. Robert Livingston Schuyler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1958), 562–66; and Harry Elmer Barnes, “James Harvey Robinson,” in American
Masters of Social Science, ed. Howard Odum (New York: Holt, 1927), 321–408.
16. James Harvey Robinson, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (Bos-
ton: Ginn, 1902), preface.
17. Robinson, The New History, 1.
18. Breisach, American Progressive History, 15, 33, 35, 74. On Turner, see “The Sig-
nificance of History,” (1891) in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Pres-
ent, ed. Fritz Stern (New York: Random House, 1956), 198–208. See also Karl
Lamprecht, “Historical Development and Present Character of the Science of
History,” in Congress of Arts and Science: Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904,
ed. Howard J. Rogers (Boston, 1906), 2:149. “Social history” is a designation that
has undergone many iterations throughout the last century. For a discussion of its
many uses among historians, see Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” in The
New American History, edited for the American Historical Association by Eric
Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1900), 163–84.

23. Robert Allen Skotheim, ed., The Historian and the Climate of Opinion (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969).
24. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reap-
praisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 97.
25. See Theodore Zeldin, “Social History and Total History,” Journal of Social His-
tory 10, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 242–43, summarized in Himmelfarb, The New His-
tory and the Old, 123.
26. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture
and Society (New York: Random House, 1994), 133.
27. Shi, Facing Facts, 118–19.
29. Justin Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” Atlantic Monthly 66 (Sep-
tember 1890): 291.
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), 29.
31. William Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” in American Realists and Naturalists, ed.
Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert, vol. 12 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography
(Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), 166.
32. William Randel, Edward Eggleston (New York, Twayne, 1963), 35. For further
biographical information, see “Edward Eggleston: An Interview,” The Outlook
55 (6 February 1897): 431–37.
33. Edward Eggleston, “Private Diary,” 4 February 1855, cited in Randel, Edward
Eggleston, 34.
34. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 27.
35. Edward Eggleston, “Formative Influences,” The Forum 10 (November 1890):
279–90, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 30. Also see “Autobiographical
Article,” #110B, box 15–16, folder 5, Edward Eggleston Papers, Courtesy of the
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell
University, Ithaca, N.Y. (hereafter cited as Eggleston Papers).
36. For more on the relationship between Edward Eggleston and his brother George,
see George Cary Eggleston, The First of Hoosiers: Reminiscences of Edward Egg-
leston (Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1903). For details regarding Edward Egg-
leston’s health, which was fragile most of his life, see “A Careful Examination,”
#110B, box 15–16, folder 6, Eggleston Papers.
37. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 31. See also “Writers Who Lack College Training,”
The Critic 9 (11 December 1886): 296–97.
38. For more on Eggleston’s career as a minister see “Sermons,” #110D, Eggleston
Papers.
39. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 64, 63. See Capt. George B. Herbert, The Popular
History of the Civil War in America, 1861–1865 (New York: F. M. Lupton, 1884).

40. For more on The Independent, see Frank L. Mott, A History of American Maga-
zines, 1850–1865, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938–
1968): 3:367–79, and William Hayes Ward, “Sixty Years of The Independent,” in
The Independent 65 (10 December 1908): 1345–51.
42. “Edward Eggleston: An Interview.”
43. For more on this period of Eggleston’s life as a fiction writer, see Edward Stone,
Voices of Despair: Four Motifs in American Literature (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1966), 137–78.
44. Robert E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1957), 870.
45. Clarence Gohdes, “Exploitation of the Provinces,” in The Literature of the
American People: An Historical and Critical Survey, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn
(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 647. See Edward Eggleston, The
Hoosier School-Master. A Novel (New York: Orange Judd, 1871) and The Mys-
tery of Metropolisville (New York: Orange Judd, 1873). For information on the
production history of these novels, including manuscript drafts with correc-
tions and revisions, see “Manuscript (Book and Article),” Eggleston Papers,
#110B, The Hoosier Schoolmatser, box 1–2, and The Mystery of Metropolisville,
box 11–12.
46. Eggleston was also subject to periods of high sentimentality in which he pro-
duced portraits of caricatured figures and plots without much grounding in
reality. Hoosier School-Master was not a work of uncompromising realism, for in-
stance. “Perhaps because of the example set by romantic fictionists,” Walter Blair
has noted, or “because of the nostalgia which most writers felt for the past,” local
colorists tended “to write not of the scene of the day but of a day that was ended.”
For writers such as Eggleston, the “mists of time blurred the mirrors somewhat,”
and allowed him to “avoid the sordid and the tragic in favor of geniality, senti-
ment, and pathos.” See Walter Blair et al., The Literature of the United States: An
Anthology and a History (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1957), 746.
47. Edward Eggleston, “Books That Have Helped Me,” The Forum 3 (August 1887):
584.
48. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 168–69.
49. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 91–97.
50. “Notes of an Executive Committee Meeting of the WAW, 26 December 1901,”
IF*810.6 W527m, Western Association of Writers, Minute Books, 1891–1904,
WAW Collection.
51. George Cary Eggleston to William H. Ridering, 27 November 1886, Edward Egg-
leston Letters, S 410, folder 1, 1868–1902, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis,
Indiana.

52. Blair et al., The Literature of the United States, 746.
53. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 172.
54. Blair et al., The Literature of the United States, 749.
55. See for instance, Eggleston, “Books That Have Helped Me,” 578–86.
56. Edward Eggleston to Mr. Sanborn, 5 September 1872, MS. #7187: Papers of Ed-
ward Eggleston, University of Virginia Special Collections, Charlottesville, Va.
57. “Plan of Study,” 30 April 1860, MS. Journal, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston,
125, 59.
58. Spiller, ed., Literary History of the United States, 870.
59. Edward Eggleston, “The New History,” American Historical Association An-
nual Report, I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 46–47.
“Honors were heaped on George Bancroft” in 1891 when he finished his monu-
mental History, “but scorn on his historical work. Once the latter had taught rev-
erence for the American past, elucidated the Manifest Destiny, and assured the
nation that it was the instrument of Divine Providence for bringing liberty and
democracy to all of humanity. Now Bancroft’s books . . . were considered ‘mere’
literature, lacking the reliable access to past reality that only a properly scientific
method offered.” Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History, 17.
60. “Edward Eggleston: An Interview,” cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 137.
61. Eggleston to Brother George, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,”
#110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers.
62. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 30 March 1883, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre-
spondence,” #110A, folder 25, paraphrased in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 129.
63. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 30 March 1883, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre-
spondence,” #110A, folder 25, paraphrased in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 129.
McMaster was a professor in the history department at the University of Pennsyl-
vania. See John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States from
the Revolution to the Civil War (8 vols., 1883–1913).
64. Eggleston to Lillie, June 1880, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,”
#110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers. See Lillie’s responses in folder 22 (1880)
#110A. Lillie’s full married name was Elizabeth (Mrs. Elwin Seelye).
65. Eggleston, “The New History,” 38–40. For more on this rejection of political
and military history in this period, see William A. Dunning, “A Generation of
American Historiography,” in Truth in History and Other Essays by William A.
Dunning, with an introduction by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (Port Washington,
New York: Kennikat Press, 1965, [1937]): 159.
66. James Harvey Robinson, “Popular Histories, Their Defects and their Possibili-
ties,” International Monthly, July 1900, 55.
67. Eggleston, “The New History,” 43–46; J[ohn] R[ichard] Green, A Short History
of the English People (London: Crown, 1875).

68. See letters from Europe 1885–86, in #110H 3 (1884–1888), folders XVIII–XIX in
Eggleston Papers. See also an account of this trip in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.,
“Introduction,” in The Transit of Civilization: From England to America in the
Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1959), xiii.
69. For detailed notes on Eggleston’s financial status throughout his career, see
“Property and Investments” and “Household Accounts,” in #110K, Eggleston
Papers.
70. See “Letters from Owl’s Nest,” Eggleston Papers, #110G, folder V (1883–84),
Eggleston Papers.
71. Eggleston to Lillie, 1885–1886, #110A, folder 29 (1884–1888), folders XVIII–XIX,
Eggleston Papers.
72. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 5 July 1880, #110A, folder 23, Eggleston Papers.
73. D. Appleton to Edward Eggleston, 4 June 1890; W. W. Appleton to Dr. Eggleston,
6 November 1890; and Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 February 1890, “Incoming
and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers.
74. John H. Vincent to Edward Eggleston, 20 September 1890, “Incoming and Out-
going Correspondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers.
75. Eggleston to John H. Vincent, [1890], “Incoming and Outgoing Correspon-
dence,” #110A, folder 33, Eggleston Papers.
76. Eggleston to “Dear Wife,” 12 October 1883, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre-
spondence,” #110A, folder 25, Eggleston Papers.
77. “Circulars, Announcements, Etc.,” #110F, folder 2, Eggleston Papers.
78. Edward Eggleston, The Household History of the United States and Its People
(New York: D. Appleton, 1890), v, iii–iv.
79. Eggleston The Household History, iv, viii, iv–v.
80. See Edward Eggleston, A History of the United States and Its People, For the Use
of Schools (New York: American Book, 1888), iv–v. See also Eggleston to William
Appleton, 15 February 1890, #110A, folder 33, Eggleston Papers.
81. Eggleston, The Household History, 25, 77–78, 93, 232, 244.
82. “Some Women in the Indian Wars,” in “School Book Material,” #110B, boxes
7–8, 9–10, folder II, Eggleston Papers.
83. “Edward Eggleston,” The Literary News 22, no. 2 (February 1901): 42.
84. This discussion borrows from Thomas Bender’s critique of Linda Gordon; see
Thomas Bender, “Review Essay: Strategies of Narrative Synthesis,” American
Historical Review, February 2002, 145. The Linda Gordon book being reviewed
is The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
85. Eggleston, The Household History, 353, 292.
86. Bender, “Review Essay,” 145.
87. Eggleston, The Household History, 212.

89. “Eggleston’s United States History,” The Literary News 9, no. 10 (October 1888):
302.
90. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 100.
91. Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 February 1890, #110A, Personal Letters, folder 33,
Eggleston Papers.
92. Eggleston, Household History, v–vi.
93. For more on Remington as illustrator, see Melissa J. Webster, “Frederic Reming-
ton,” in American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920, ed. Steven E. Smith,
Catherine A. Hastedt and Donald H. Dya, vol. 188 of Dictionary of Literary
Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998), 286–98. Original copies of several il-
lustrations in Eggleston’s volume can be found at the Remington Art Museum,
Ogdensburg, N.Y.
94. Peggy and Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1982), 121–22, 78–79.
95. “Incorrect School Books,” Florida Times-Union, 21 October 1893, in box I, Pub-
lications and Accounts, Eggleston Papers. For a discussion of the illustrations in
Eggelston’s book, see Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories
and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian In-
stitution Press, 2002), 178–79.
96. C. F. Tucker Brooke, Dial, 51, cited in Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual
History: The Half-Tone Effect,” in New Directions in American Intellectual His-
tory, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1979), 203.
97. “Eggleston’s United States History,” The Literary News, 302.
98. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 131–33.
99. W. W. Appleton to Dr. Eggleston, 6 November 1890, “Incoming and Outgoing
Corrrespondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers.
100. Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 February 1890, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre-
spondence,” #110A, #110 A, folder 33, Eggleston Papers.
101. “The Owl’s Nest Family Book,” October 1889, cited in Randel, Edward Egg-
leston, 134.
102. The best selling of these biographies was Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, The Story
of Columbus, ed. Dr. Edward Eggleston (D. Appleton, 1892). For details of the
contract, see Russell Hinman to Lillie Eggleston, 20 March 1895, #110I, box I:2,
folder XIV, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
103. Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans (American Book, 1895). For de-
tails concerning the final form and content of this work, see correspondence (4
pieces) from the American Book Company in folder 1, #110B, box 9–10, Egg-
leston Papers.

104. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, [n.d.], #110I, box I:2, folder XIV, Publica-
tions and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
105. W. W. Appleton to Edward Eggleston, [n.d.], #110I, box I:2, folder XIV, Publica-
106. Russell Hinman to Lillie Eggleston, 20 March 1895, #110I, box I:2, folder XIV,
Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
107. D. Appleton to Edward Eggleston, 7 September 1893, #110I, folder XII, Publica-
108. Eva Remington to Edward Eggleston, [n.d.], box I—Publications and Book Ac-
counts, Eggleston Papers.
109. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, 14 November 1894, box I—Publications
and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
110. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, 10 January 1895, box I—Publications and
Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
111. Bryan, Taylor & Co. to Edward Eggleston, 12 October 1893, #110I, folder XII,
Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
112. W. W. Eggleston to Dr. Eggleston, 6 November 1890, #110A, folder 33, Publica-
113. Randel, Edward Eggleston, 128–29. Difficulties in negotiating a contract with Ap-
pleton’s for the series also slowed the progress. In 1889 Appleton’s proposed a
two-volume work to be published in two years, in time for the quadri-centennial,
but Eggleston had a much bigger project in mind. “At present I will only remark
that a two-volume history of the United States of 800,000 words would neither
be creditable to me nor to you if written in two years even with the advantages I
have to begin with,” Eggleston wrote. See Eggleston to Mr. Appleton, 15 Febru-
ary 1890, #110A, Publications and Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
114. Eggleston to Lillie, Jan 1881, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A,
folder 23, Eggleston Papers.
115. Edward Eggleston “Preface,” The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source
and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America with Special Reference to
the Life and Character of the People (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), viii.
116. Eggleston had published partial installments of the history in The Century Il-
lustrated Monthly Magazine throughout the 1880s, beginning with vol. 26, n.s.
vol. 3 (November 1882–April 1883): 61–83. Also see the galley for portions of The
Beginners of a Nation with revisions in #110B, box 13–14, Eggleston Papers.
117. Crane Brinton, “The ‘New History’ and ‘Past Everything,’ ” American Scholar 8
(1939): 144–57.
119. Shi, Facing Facts, 108. The De Forest quote cited in Shi comes from James W. De
Forest, “The Great American Novel,” Nation, 9 January 1868, 27–29.

120. Robinson, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe, 233.
122. Shi, Facing Facts, 271, 149–50.
124. Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” 290.
125. William P. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” The Forum 22 (1896–
97): 590–92.
126. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, vii–viii.
127. Ibid., vii.
128. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” 592.
129. The Brooklyn Citizen, 13 December 1896, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston,
140. The “certain dread” portion of the quote is from Randel’s synopsis of the
review.
130. The Independent 44 (21 January 1897), cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 141.
131. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” 592, 595–97.
132. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, 200–201.
133. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old History, 18–19, 20–21.
134. [Review of The Beginners of a Nation] in the Brooklyn Eagle, cited in Randel,
Edward Eggleston, 139–40.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, for the American Library Association, 1902), 70.
136. Randel, Edward Eggleston, p. 137. See also “Notices for Beginners of a Nation,”
(1896–97), #110E, “Papers and Clippings,” box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston
Papers.
137. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, 189–90, 245, 73–74, 76.
138. Herbert L. Osgood, [review of ] “The Beginners of a Nation,” American Histori-
cal Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (April 1897): 530.
139. [Review of Beginners of a Nation] from Harrisburg Patriot, in #110E, box I, fold-
ers 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers.
140. Reuben Briggs Davenport, [Review of The Beginners of a Nation], York Commer-
cial Advertiser, 20 February 1897, box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers.
141. G[eorge] C[ary] E[ggleston], “Historians and Our Aristocrats,” undated, unat-
tributed newspaper review in box I, folders 1 and 2, Eggleston Papers.
142. For more on George Louis Beer and his contributions to colonial historiogra-
phy in relation to Eggleston, see Bert James Loewenberg, American History in
American Thought: Christopher Columbus to Henry Adams (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1972), 438–40.
143. Rochester Post-Express, 2 January 1897, cited in Randel, Edward Eggleston, 141.
144. John H. Vincent to Edward Eggleston, 20 September 1890, “Incoming and Out-
going Correspondence,” #110A, folders 34 and 35, Eggleston Papers.

145. For more on this anti-pictorial campaign conducted by the American Historical
Association, see Pfitzer, Picturing the Past, 180–85.
146. J[ulian] H[awthorne], “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civiliza-
tion from England to America in the Seventeenth Century,” in Scrapbook 2, Banc
MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers.
147. M. J. K., “The Beginners of a Nation,” American Hebrew, 12 March 1897, #110E,
Papers and Clippings, Eggleston Papers.
148. [Review of Beginners of a Nation], Los Angeles Herald, #110E, Papers and Clip-
pings, Eggleston Papers.
149. Edward Eggleston, “An Interview,” The Outlook 55 (February 6, 1897), cited in
Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 185n.
150. Eggleston to Wilkinson, 2 January 1888, MSS 7187: Papers of Edward Eggleston,
University of Virginia Special Collections, Charlottesville.
152. Herbert B. Adams, “Report of the Proceedings, Second Annual Meeting, Sara-
toga, September 8–10, 1885,” in Papers of the American Historical Association I,
no. 6 (Washington, D.C., 1886): 33–34.
153. Herbert L. Osgood, [review of ] “The Beginners of a Nation,” 528–30.
154. Current Literature (May 1897), #110: E, Eggleston Papers.
155. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 171. For more on Eggleston’s election to the presi-
dency of the AHA, see Annual Report of the American Studies Association for the
Year 1900 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901). With regard to
Eggleston’s work on behalf of the AHA, see “The Annual Meeting of the Ameri-
can Historical Association,” American Historical Review 3 (April 1898): 416. See
also J. F. Jameson, “The American Historical Association, 1884–1909,” American
Historical Review 15 (October 1909): 11.
157. Edward Eggleston, “The New History,” American Historical Association Annual
Report, I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900): 35–47.
158. Randel, “Edward Eggleston,” 171.
159. American Historical Association, The Study of History in Schools: Report to the
American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1900). For more on the Committee of Seven, see Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook
Nation: Conflicts Over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Pres-
ent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
160. Eggleston, “The New History,” 41–42; 47.
161. Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 42–43.

162. Eggleston, “The New History,” 47.
163. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 42–43.
164. Paul Leicester Ford, [“Review of The Beginners of a Nation”], London Daily
Chronicle, #110E, Papers and Clippings, Eggleston Papers.
165. Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America, 8 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, 1886–1889). See also Justin Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narra-
tive,” Atlantic Monthly 66 (1890): 296. On other so-called co-operative histories,
see Michael Kraus, A History of American History (New York: Farrar and Rine-
hart, 1937), 573–96.
166. Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” 297.
167. Messenger, 1 April 1897, box E, #110, Eggleston Papers.
168. Trent, “Dr. Eggleston on American Origins,” 598–99.
169. Nelson A. Crawford, “American University Presses,” American Mercury 18
(1929): 210–14.
170. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1965), 33.
171. Albert Bushnell Hart, “The Historical Opportunity in America,” American His-
torical Review 4, no. 1 (October 1898): 12–13.
172. Schlesinger, “Introduction,” The Transit of Civilization, vii.
173. Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance
to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 665.
174. Eggleston to C. W. Bower, 2 January 1889, American Historical Association Papers,
series A, box 4, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
175. For a further discussion of this struggle between amateurs and university scholars
within the AHA, see David D. Van Tassel, “From Learned Society to Profes-
sional Organization,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 954.
177. William M. Sloane, “History and Democracy,” American Historical Review 1
(October 1895–July 1896): 8.
179. George Burton Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” American His-
torical Review 14, no. 2 (January 1909): 221, 224–27, 229–30.
180. Robinson took issue with G. B. Adams on these matters. “It is the aim of the
present essay to put the whole situation in a different light from that in which
Professor Adams presents it.” Robinson, The New History, 82n.
181. G. B. Adams, “History and the Philosophy of History,” American Historical Re-
view 14, no. 2 (January 1909): 224–25.
183. Ibid., 76. Breisach uses this phrase in connection with his discussion of Robin-
son’s colleague at Columbia, Charles Beard.

184. For more on Eggleston’s efforts on behalf of the Copyright Law, see Eggleston,
“Anglo-American Copyright,” The North American Review 146 ( January 1888):
78–79, and “Why the Copyright Bill Should Pass,” American Copyright League
(1890). Also see “To the American Copyright League,” and “3 Articles on Copy-
right” in #110B, boxes 15–16, folder 5, 9, as well as “Personal Letters to Egg-
leston,” #110G:5, folders XXXVI–XLIII, Eggleston Papers.
185. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 21 February 1888 and 29 April 1888, “Incoming
and Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 31, Eggleston Papers.
186. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 7 January 1888, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre-
187. Edward Eggleston, The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York (New York: D. Apple-
ton, 1891). For more on this episode, see Randel, Edward Eggleston, 157–58.
188. For more on the themes and reception of The Faith Doctor, see Berthoff, The Fer-
ment of Realism, 92–93. See also “Notes and comments concerning some of his
published works,” in Two Notebooks, #110B, box 17, folder 3, Eggleston Papers.
190. “Current Literature,” Messenger, March 1897, #110E, Eggleston Papers.
191. George Burton Adams attacked Eggleston’s New History directly in his presi-
dential address to the American Historical Association. Eggleston anticipated
historians like James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard who called for a sub-
ordination of the past to the present and who argued for a progressive, public
service component to historical study. See Higham, History, 107, 111.
192. For more on Eggleston’s campaign against the war with Spain, see Randel, Ed-
ward Eggleston, 145–47.
193. Andrew S. Rogers, “Review of Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist
Writings on the Philippine-American War,” http://www.amazon.com (accessed
June 27, 2005).
194. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 17 April 1898, “Incoming and Outgoing Corre-
195. Edward Eggleston, First Book in American History (New York: American Book,
1899).
196. Russell Hinman to Edward Eggleston, 10 July 1900, in #110I, Publications and
Book Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
197. Henry Vail to Edward Eggleston, 13 Januray 1899, #110I, Publications and Book
Accounts, Eggleston Papers.
198. “Edward Eggleston,” The Literary News 22, no. 2 (February 1901): 42.
199. Eggleston to Lillie, March 1894, “Incoming and Outgoing Correspondence,”
#110A, folder 43, Eggleston Papers.
200. Eggleston to Lillie Eggleston, 9 January 1899, #110A, folder 55 in “Incoming and
Outgoing Correspondence,” #110A, folder 43, Eggleston Papers.

201. Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism, 189–90.
202. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 40–41.
203. Schlesinger, “Introduction to The Transit of Civilization,” xvii.
204. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 41.
205. Barrett Wendell, [Review of The Transit of Civilization], American Historical
Review 6, no. 4 (1901): 802.
206. Charles M. Andrews, [Review of The Transit of Civilization], Political Science
Quarterly 17 (March 1902): 802–5.
207. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth About History, 199.
209. Appleby et al, Telling the Truth About History, 200.
210. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, viii.
Chapter 5. “A Background of Real History”

1. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” in The New American History, edited for
the American Historical Association by Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1900), 164, 169.
2. Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” History
Workshop 7 (Spring 1979): 66–94, cited in Kessler-Harris, “Social History,” 164.
3. Acts of Florida, 1889, ch. 3872, sec. 31, p. 82, cited in Bessie Louise Pierce, Public
Opinion and the Teaching of History in the United States (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1926), 17.
4. Crane Brinton, “The New History, Twenty-Five Years After,” Journal of Social
Philosophy 1 (1936): 134–47.
5. James Harvey Robinson, “The New History,” in The New History: Essays Illus-
trating the Modern Historical Outlook (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 10.
6. “Biographical and Historical Note,” 2, Manuscript Collection # 354, “Beadle
and Adams Archives, 1848–1920,” Special Collections, University of Delaware
Library, Newark, Delaware (hereafter cited as Beadle and Adams Archives).
7. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York:
Dial Press, 1970), 202–5.
8. Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1967 [1883]), 20.
9. J. N. Makris, Boston Murders (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1948), 8–9,
cited in Albert Stone Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagina-
tion (North Haven, Conn.: Archon, 1970), 101. See also Comstock, Traps for the
Young, 37.
10. William Graham Sumner, “What Our Boys Are Reading,” Scribner’s Monthly
(March 1878), cited in Stone, The Innocent Eye, 103–4. For more on the context

for this discussion, see Gregory M. Pfitzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages in
Camelot: The Influence of Dime-Novel Sensationalism on Twain’s A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 27, no. 1
(Fall 1994): 44.
11. Horace Elisha Scudder, Childhood in Literature and Art (1895), cited in Stone,
The Innocent Eye, 105–8.
12. Comstock, Traps for the Young, 32–33. For more on Comstock and his role in
the campaign against dime novels, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime
Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 50–52.
13. Comstock, Traps for the Young, jacket flap, 21.
14. Little is known of Ellis’s childhood, but his Tales Told Out of School is thought
to be autobiographical and suggests, according to one biographer, a “normal,
healthy and mischievous boyhood.” Edward S. Ellis, Tales Told Out of School
(Syracuse, N.Y.: C. W. Bardeen, 1899). See also Denis R. Rogers, “Literary Life
of Edward S. Ellis,” Dime Novel Roundup 54 (October 1985): 74–76.
15. Denis Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” 74. Ellis’s invention is patent
#122,587, Class 36/62 (9 January 1872), “Improvement in Boot-Clamps for Base-
ball Players, Edward S. Ellis of Trenton, New Jersey, U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.”
16. Edward S. Ellis, lyricist and composer, “De Louisiana Canebrakes: Negro Song
and Chorus,” Sheet Music Collection, box A, John Hay Library, Brown Univer-
sity Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
17. Edward S. Ellis, “The Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to Spain” (1898), The
Historical American Sheet Music Collection, Music A-6687, Rare Book, Manu-
script, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
18. “Lost Classics,” http://www.lcbcbooks.com/bios/ellis.htm (accessed 3/15/05).
19. Edward S. Ellis, Health, Wealth, and Happiness: An Invaluable Friend to Parent
and Child; to Man and Woman; to Young and Old; to Rich and Poor (Philadel-
phia: Historical Publishing, 1892), 701–3.
20. “News,” Mercer County Community College Newsletter,” April 12, 1970, 2, “Hon-
orary Degree File—Edward S. Ellis,” box 6, Honorary Degree Index, Seeley G.
Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
21. Edward S. Ellis, Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1978; reprint of
the 1860 edition, which was issued as no. 8 of Beadle’s dime novels [New York:
Beadle, 1860]), vol. 77 of The Garland Library of Narratives of North American
Indian Captivities, ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn. For sales figures, see “Queries and
Answers from Readers,” New York Times, 12 November 1910, BR12, in which the
author recounts the following exchange: “Some years after its publication Ellis
asked the elder Beadle how many copies of [Seth Jones] had been sold, and the
answer was ‘about 400,000,’ exclusive of the copies sold and printed in Europe.”

Others have estimated as many as “600,000 copies in half a dozen languages.” See
Kenneth W. Scott, “Letters to the Editor,” New York Times, 8 May 1949, BR16.
22. For more on Beadle, see Frank Luther Mott, “The Beadles and Their Novels,”
Palimpsest 30 (1949): 173–89. For more on Ellis and the dime-novel tradition, see
Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” 74–76. See also Charles M. Harvey,
“The Dime Novel in American Life,” Atlantic Monthly 100 (July 1907): 37–45.
23. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 201.
24. Paul Eugene Camp, “Edward S. Ellis,” in American Writers for Children Before
1900, vol. 42 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research,
1985), 166.
25. Ellis, Seth Jones, 35, 36, 46, 21, 43, 67–68.
26. Edward S. Ellis, The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies (New York:
Beadle and Adams, 1865; 1882 half-dime edition). Although first published in
the late 1860s, the work did not become nationally popular until mass-produced
in the tens of thousands by Beadle and Adams in the “half-dime” edition of 1882
cited here. For more on this text, see Pfitzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages in
Camelot,” 44.
27. Not coincidentally, it has been argued that Ellis’s dime novel served as an inspira-
tion for time travel literature such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court, which also violated strict chronology as a way of underscoring
the relationship of the past to the present. When Twain’s hero, the disoriented
nineteenth-century factory worker Hank Morgan, wakes up in sixth-century Ar-
thurian England, the only vocabulary he has available to him for the descrip-
tion of the unusual and bizarre world he has entered is the dime novel lexicon
of Ellis’s American West. As T. Jackson Lears and others have noted, Twain was
“anti-modernist” in philosophical outlook and was therefore obsessed with the
medieval world as a setting for literary speculations about human development.
The Middle Ages served as a historical point of reference, a lodestone for consid-
eration by disenchanted Victorians of “where it had all gone wrong.” For Twain,
as for the wizard Merlin, traveling backward in time helped clarify America’s
place on the historical continuum; it highlighted the causal relations between a
“golden” past and a jaded present. Significantly, both novels end badly, with the
violent destruction of the technologies that have propelled their protagonists into
unlikely temporal settings. While such spectacular endings helped sell many cop-
ies of their respective novels for Twain and Ellis, the moral inadequacies of Ellis’s
Johnny Brainerd and Twain’s Hank Morgan suggested the potential dangers of
transposing figures out of their contemporary contexts. For more on the relation-
ship between Ellis’s The Huge Hunter and Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court, see Pfitzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages,” esp. 50–57.
28. Camp, “Edward S. Ellis,” 168.

29. Ellis’s use of a nom de plume resulted in a New York Supreme Court case in
which Ellis brought a suit against a publisher, Hurst & Co., for issuing two nov-
els under his real name without permission. “As the books were unprotected
by any valid copyright no question was raised as to the right of Hurst & Co. to
issue them, but the injunction was sought under the civil rights law . . . against
the use of Mr. Ellis’s own name.” The injunction sought by Ellis was denied.
See “Publishers May Use Author’s True Name,” New York Times, 25 December
1910, 3.
30. For more on Ellis’s productivity, see Camp, “Edward S. Ellis,” 161–72. His obitu-
ary in the New York Times records: “He wrote so many books that he often said
he had forgotten the number of them.” New York Times, Obit., June 22, 1916.
31. On Ellis’s pen names, see Denis R. Rogers, Dime Novel Round Up 266 (Novem-
ber 1954), 267 (December 1954), 268 (January 1955), 315 (December 1958), 307
(April 1958), 318 (March 1958), 318 (March 1959). 319 (April 1959), 320 (May
1959), 330 (March 1960), 334 (July 1960), and 336 (September 1960). See also
Gustav Davidson, “Little Known Pseudonyms of 19th Century American Au-
thors,” Publisher’s Weekly, 15 June 1940, 292–95.
32. Edward S. Ellis, The Boy Patriot: A Story of Jack the Young Friend of Washington
(New York: A. L. Burt, 1900); The Three Arrows, Alamo Series No. 2 (Philadel-
phia: John C. Winston, 1904); Trailing Geronimo; or, Campaigning with Crook
(Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1908).
33. Edward S. Ellis, An American King: A Story of King Philip’s War (Philadelphia:
Henry T. Coates, 1903); Edward S. Ellis, The Cromwell of Virginia: A Tale of
Bacon’s Rebellion (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1904); Edward S. Ellis, Scouts
and Comrades; or, Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees: A Tale of the War of 1812
(London: Cassell, 1898). Ellis even lived long enough to write a series of books
about aviation; see Edward S. Ellis, The Flying Boys in the Sky, Flying Boys Series
No. 1 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1911); The Dragon of the Skies (London:
Cassell, 1915). For more on these and other detective series, see Denis R. Rogers,
“The Detective Stories of Edward S. Ellis,” Dime Novel Roundup 51 (December
1982): 94–101, and 52 (February 1983): 2–24.
34. [Albert Johannsen], “Ellis, Edward Sylvester,” http://www.niulib.niu.edu/
badnp/ellis edward.html (accessed 5/31/05).
35. For a list of those sources generally agreed upon as having been written by Ellis,
see “Edward S. Ellis,” http://www.buriedantiques.com. (accessed 9/6/04).
36. Don Russell, “How I Got This Way,” Western Historical Quarterly 4, no. 3 (July
1973): 254.
37. “Current Notes,” New York Times, 7 August 1897, 6.
38. Erastus Beadle to William Benson, [draft], folder 3, Delaware Archives, p. 6;
original Series II, Beadle and Adams Archives.

39. “Instructions for Prospective Writers,” in Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle
and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature,
2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 1:4–5. I am grateful to my
Skidmore College colleague Mason Stokes for this source.
40. Edward S. Ellis to Orville J. Victor, 13 April 1897, Series II, “Tribute Letters to
Orville J. Victor, 1897,” box I, folder 7, MS #354 Beadle and Adams Archives.
On Victor as a popular historian, see Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illus-
trated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 106, 113, 115.
41. L. P. M. [Levi Parsons Morton?], “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” in Edward S. Ellis, Pop-
ular History of the World: From Dawn of Information to Present Time: Including
Complete Triumphs of the 19th Century (Chicago: George Spiel, 1900), vii–viii.
42. See “New Publications,” New York Times, 14 April 1880, 8. Regarding the serial-
ization of Ellis’s “Norman the Locksmith” in Golden Days, see Edward S. Ellis to
Robert Bonner, 12 July 1881, Group 140-F1, Manuscript Miscellany, Yale Collec-
tion of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, New Haven, Connecitcut.
43. “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography,
vol. 19 (New York: James T. White, 1926), 204.
44. Edward S. Ellis, The People’s Standard History of the United States (Cincinnati:
Jones Brothers, 1900 [1896]), 530. See Edgar S. Maclay, History of the United
States Navy, from 1775 to 1893 (New York: D. Appleton, 1894) and Alfred T.
Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1897). Elsewhere in the volumes Ellis noted that Cooper’s “Indians and
‘Leatherstocking’ himself are idealized, but they are none the less fascinating on
that account, while his admirable style and purity of sentiment give his works a
place in American literature which they will hold for generations to come.” Ellis,
The People’s Standard History of the United States, 1748.
45. “Introductory,” in Edward S. Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, Chief of
the Ottawas: Together with a Full Account of the Celebrated Siege of Detroit (New
York: Beadle, 1861), [8].
46. Francis Parkman to Edward S. Ellis, 5 April 1861, “The Papers of Francis Park-
man,” 7062-e, Box Barrett-Parkman, University of Virginia Library, Albert and
Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, Virginia.
47. “Stories of ‘Bad’ Indians,” New York Times, 29 October 1899, 19. Titles in the
Deerfoot Series include Deerfoot on the Prairies (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston,
1905) and Deerfoot in the Mountains (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1905).
48. Gary Scharnhorst, “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” in American National Biography,
ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, vol. 7 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 443–44.

49. William T. Sherman to Edward S. Ellis, 25 January 1884, “Western Americana
Collection,” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
50. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” vii–viii.
51. Edmund Pearson, Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), http://gaslight.mroyal.ab.ca/dimexol.htm. The
quote here is from Pearson’s paraphrase of Senator Chandler’s words. See Ed-
ward S. Ellis, Oonomoo, the Huron (New York: Irwin P. Beadle, Beadle’s Dime
Novels, #48, 1863).
52. For more on how plagiarism was defined in the nineteenth century, see Richard
C. Vitzthum, The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of
Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974),
8–10.
53. To chart these uses and misuses of texts by Ellis, see Francis Parkman, The
Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada, 2 vols.
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1910 [1851]), 357–58, and Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the
Conspirator, 35n.
54. Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, [10], 38.
55. Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 1:241–44; 2:363.
56. Comstock, Traps for the Young, 21, 24–25.
57. Ibid., 244, 10–11.
58. “Bacon’s Rebellion,” New York Times, 21 January 1905, BR42. The juvenile his-
tory referred to in this review is Edward S. Ellis, The Cromwell of Virginia: A
Story of Bacon’s Rebellion (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1905).
59. Robinson, “The New History,” 12.
60. N. A. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies,
with the Reports of the Conference Arranged by Committee” (New York: Ameri-
can Book Company for the National Educational Association, 1893), 3, 6–7.
For a discussion of this report see Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts
over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), 47–49, 183. See also National Education
Association, Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, United
States Office of Education Bulletin No. 35 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1918), cited in Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: What His-
tory Textbooks Have Taught Our Children about Their Country and How and
Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades (New York: Random
House, 1979), 169.
61. Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Moderniza-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 31.
62. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten,” 15–16, 28–29, 164.

63. American Historical Association, “The Study of History in Schools: Report of
the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven” (New York:
Macmillan, 1900).
64. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten,” 168–69.
65. Ibid., 192, 170, 186, 193, 189, 194.
66. This comment relates to a review of Ellis’s Footprints in the Forest (Philadelphia:
Porter and Coates, 1886), New York Times, 24 October 1886, 12.
67. Edward Channing to George Brett, 2 July 1897, Macmillan Company Papers, Au-
thor Files, box 64, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library,
New York, cited in Moreau, Schoolbook Nation, 49.
68. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popu-
lar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27.
69. Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to the Study of American His-
tory (Boston: Ginn, 1897), 3, 135–36, 138. Eggleston’s novels did not make the list
either, although one of George Cary Eggleston’s did (A Man of Honor).
70. Scharnhorst, “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” 443. For more on the relationship between
dime novels and history, see Helen C. Nelson, “Navigating Nineteenth-Century
Novels: Linking Historical and Literary Perspectives to Explore the Influence
of Dime Novels in Nineteenth Century America” (MA thesis, Humboldt State
University, 2005).
71. John Clark Ridpath and Edward S. Ellis, The Story of South Africa: An Account of
the Historical Transformation of the Dark Continent by the European Powers and
the Culminating Contest between Great Britain and the South African Republic
in the Transvaal War (Springfield, Mass.: King-Richardson, [c. 1899]).
72. Albert Bushnell Hart, “Imagination in History,” The American Historical Review
15, no. 2 (January 1910): 229, 241, 232, 250.
73. For more on Cooper’s treatment of these themes, see Richard Slotkin, Regen-
eration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
74. Edward S. Ellis, The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone, Hunter, Soldier, and
Pioneer. With Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel and Other Leaders in the
Settlement of the West (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates [c. 1884]); The Life of
Kit Carson, Hunter, Trapper, Guide, Indian Agent, and Colonel U.S.A. (New
York: New York Publishing, [c. 1899]); The Life and Adventures of Colonel David
Crockett (New York: Beadle, [c. 1862]).
75. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 92. This quote comes from
Pfitzer, “Iron Dudes and White Savages in Camelot,” 43.
76. Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 8, 85.

77. Ibid., 269.
78. Edward S. Ellis, The Youth’s History of the United States from the Discovery of
America by the Northmen to the Present Time, 4 vols. (New York: Cassell, 1886–
1887).
79. Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels, 1:31–
37, 2:93–100.
80. Hart, “Imagination in History,” 229.
81. For instance, Ellis’s lengthy description of Pontiac on pages 316–26 and 351 of
The Youth’s History is lifted almost wholesale from his 1861 dime novel biogra-
phy, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, 35–44.
82. Ellis, The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, 36.
83. Ellis, The Youth’s History, 1:36. Even here Ellis took liberties with Parkman. Park-
man wrote: “ ‘Why,’ demanded Pontiac, ‘do I see so many of my father’s young
men standing in the street with their guns?’ Gladwyn replied through his in-
terpreter, La Butte, that he had ordered the soldiers under arms for the sake of
exercise and discipline” (Parkman, 1:235).
84. For instance, Ellis appropriated passages from the Youth’s History describing the
“Messiah Movement” among the Sioux Indians of the 1890s for use in his novel
Wolf Ear, the Indian, a juvenile featuring a fierce Ogalalla Sioux who befriends
two children. In both texts, Ellis wrote of the mesmerizing Ghost Dance, in
which Native American “dancers took hold of hands and leaped and shouted and
circled round and round until they dropped to the ground, senseless and almost
dead.” The narrative structures of these accounts also match. See and compare
this passage from Edward S. Ellis, Wolf Ear the Indian (New York: McLoughlin
Brothers, n.d.), 6, with the account of the Ghost Dance in Youth’s History, 316,
where only a few words are changed.
85. Ellis, The Youth’s History, 1:173.
86. Ibid., 1:81.
87. Ibid., 1:2–3.
88. Ibid., 1: 7, 10.
89. See John J. Anderson, A Popular School History of the United States, in Which Are
Inserted as Part of the Narrative Selections from the Writings of Eminent Ameri-
can Historians, and Other American Writers of Note (New York: Effingham May-
nard, 1889), i–ii, viii.
90. This story was reported in an article titled “Some Inaccuracies of History,” in
which an unknown author used Ellis as an example of a “profound student of his-
tory” who “furnishes probably the most accurate account of the killing of Wolfe
that is to be found outside the histories.” The author might have been better
served to associate Ellis with those popularizers whom he or she distrusted be-
cause they “dropped in” “bits of fiction” into their narratives or “glossed over”

“unpleasant truths” “simply to save the popular fancy from a shock.” See “Some
Inaccuracies of History,” Washington Post, 5 July 1908, M4.
91. Justin Winsor, “The Perils of Historical Narrative,” Atlantic Monthly 66 (Sep-
tember 1890): 290.
92. Calkins, “Report of the Committee of Ten,” 185–90.
93. See “A Faithless Wife,” New York Times, 11 February 1887, 2.
94. “A Divorce Quickly Granted,” New York Times, 14 June 1887, 1. See also “Sued
For Heavy Damages,” New York Times, 22 February 1887, 1, and “Not a Star Cham-
ber,” New York Times, 12 June 1887, 1, regarding Ellis’s suit for damages against Van
Camp.
95. Ellis, The Youth’s History [rev. ed., 1899], 4:438, 436; 4:448, 446; 1:81; 1:117;
2:195.
96. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Precon-
ceptions,” in Memory and American History, ed. David Thelan (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989), 134, 138. See also David Lowenthal, The Heritage
Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
97. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Dis-
covery of Geologic Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 42.
98. Mark C. Carnes, Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past
(and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 215, 21.
99. Theodore H. Gaster, “Review of Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return:
Or, Cosmos and History,” Review of Religion, cited on the back cover of the book
(trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974]) and Mir-
cea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (New York:
Bollingen Foundation, 1954), xiv, 46.
100. Ellis, The Youth’s History, 3:381–82, 3:349.
101. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 9–10.
102. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 58.
103. Daniel A. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher
Education,” http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~dsegal/ahr%20article.htm, 24–26 (ac-
cessed 8/20/04).
104. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 163, 48, 150, 138, 168, 166–67.
105. Ibid., 9, 34, 38, 95, 273.
106. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ix.
107. See Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888), and H. G. Wells, The Time Ma-
chine (1895). Indeed, it is telling that, as T. Jackson Lears suggests, many of those
who enrolled in Nationalist Clubs created to implement Bellamy’s futuristic vi-
sion failed to distinguish adequately between its fictional and factual elements. See
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 164–66, 168.

108. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 567.
109. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 123. For more on presentism as a philosophical position,
see David Hull, “In Defense of Presentism,” History and Theory 18 (1979): 1–15;
Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centered His-
tory,” Historical Journal 31 (March 1988): 1–16; Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ash-
plant, “Present-Centered History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge,”
Historical Journal 31 (June 1988): 253–74;
110. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” viii.
111. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 105. Ellis saw the relationship between present and past as
reciprocal. In The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events, he
wrote: “Our every action in the present is formed upon our knowledge of the past.
Hence, the fuller our understanding of that Past, which is History, the wiser will
be our actions in the Present, and the keener our judgments of the Future.” See
Edward S. Ellis and Charles F. Horne, The Story of the Greatest Nations and the
World’s Famous Events, 10 vols. (New York: Francis R. Niglutsch, 1906), 1: preface.
112. Carnes, Novel History, 24.
113. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 80, 151.
114. G. J. Whitrow, Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day
(New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988), 5–6, 23.
115. Ibid., vii–viii. See also Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History
as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995), 107.
116. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 151, 11. See also Whitrow, Time in History, 170.
117. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History,” 2–3.
118. Ibid., 2–3. For his thoughts on how conceptions of history have changed, Segal
relies heavily on two works: George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New
York: Free Press, 1987), and Thomas Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the
Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). See also
Whitrow, Time in History, 183.
119. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 527–28. Here Ellis notes the influence on his
thinking of Professor Huxley’s 1887 History of Civilization.
120. Whitrow, Time in History, 172.
121. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 10–11, 15–16.
122. Ibid., 49–50.
123. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 119, 121, 127, 132, 141.
124. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis, A.M.,” viii.
125. Carl Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History,” in Everyman His Own Historian,
176.
126. Salesman’s dummy, The Story of Our Country (Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, [1895,
1918]), [n. p.], in possession of the author.

127. Ibid.
128. Edward S. Ellis to Helen F. Levy, 23 February 1899, #MA 2206, Pierpont Morgan
Library, Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, NYPR126753-A,
New York, New York.
129. Salesman’s dummy, The Story of Our Country, [n. p.].
130. Edward S. Ellis to Sidney Howard Gay, 29 July [18–], box 12, Correspondence,
Sidney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University.
131. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1238, 1930, 1955.
132. Salesman’s dummy, The Story of Our Country, [n. p.].
133. “Introduction,” The People’s Standard History, 1. See also E. S. Ellis, Stories from
American History (Chicago: A. Flanagan, 1896), [ 3].
134. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1046–47, 1177, 1181, 1964.
135. Ellis, Popular History of the World, 528.
136. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 315, 1153, 1201, 1073, 1104, 1349, 701.
1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 31.
138. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 7:1742.
139. Edwin E. Sparks, “History of the United States, by Edward Sylvester Ellis,” in
Larned, Literature of American History, 279.
140. Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” 242–43.
141. Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History,” 181, 172. Here Becker is writing a re-
view of Wells’s Outline of History (London, 1920), although speaking generally of
the presentism of non-academic history, which he admires.
142. James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, Development of Modern Europe, 1:iii,
cited in Breisach, American Progressive History, 62.
143. For more on the Jones Brothers Publishing Company, see “Sketch on the Life of
J. R. Jones,” in Pictorial History of the World, by James D. McCabe (Philadel-
phia: National Publishing, 1877), [1263].
144. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1588–89.
145. Ibid., 1472.
146. Ibid., 1589, 1484, 1625.
147. Captain Burrows, R.N., Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, cited
in ibid., 2127.
148. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 186, 2122.
149. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History,” 40.
150. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1994.
151. Edward S. Ellis, “Questions for the Next Administration to Consider,” [1896],
Non-Partisan Bureau of Political Information, 55, Rare Books, Huntington Li-
brary, San Marino, California. This anti-Spain sentiment had been with Ellis at
least since the writing of the Youth’s History, in which he says, “For a nation that

pretends to be Christian, Spain has been for centuries one of the most horrible of
all hypocrites. The Spaniard is by nature cruel and treacherous, and has always
been so. If you will recall the accounts of the Spanish explorers who visited this
country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you will admit that no greater
miscreants ever lived. . . . Wherever the Spaniards planted their feet they became
a blight, and the happiest day for the South American republics and for Mexico
was when they rebelled and drove the invaders from their soil.” (4:379–80).
152. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1712, 1945, 1721–22.
153. Ibid., 2097, 2069, 1964, 1994.
Historical Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255.
155. Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 486.
156. Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and
Charles Beard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).
157. Robinson, New History, 24, cited in Breisach, American Progressive History, 62.
158. For a more detailed discussion of photographic imagery in Ellis’s volumes, see
Pfitzer, Picturing the Past, 213–30.
159. John C. Ridpath, Portfolio of the World’s Photographs: Royal Photograph Gallery
(Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1893), [3–4].
160. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History,” 2, 14.
161. Breisach, American Progressive History, 61–62. See also Becker, “Mr. Wells and
the New History,” in Everyman His Own Historian, 173.
162. Robinson, The New History, 20–21, 21–22, 23–24.
163. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1822–23, 1548, 976, 1762, 1822–23.
164. Ibid., 1829–30; 1374, 760, 1416, 1828.
165. Ibid., 2194.
167. Ellis, The People’s Standard History, 1829–30.
168. “Mr. Ellis’s History of the United States,” New York Times, 18 December 1897,
BR5.
169. “Our Startling Book Offer,” New York Times, 30 November 1899, 4.
170. See Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington
(New York: Vintage, 1968).
171. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Social Forces in American History,” in Frederick
Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1920), 328.
172. Carl Becker “Detachment and the Writing of History,” Atlantic Monthly 106 (Oc-
tober 1910): 525–36, cited in Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, 56.
173. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial 64 (11 April 1918): 337–41.

174. Hart, “Imagination in History,” 233, 229, 235.
175. Henry Barrett Learned, “Review of William H. Mace, Method in History for Teachers
and Students,” The American Historical Review 4, no. 1 (October 1898): 133–34.
176. Carl L. Becker, “Mr. Wells and the New History” (1921), reprinted in Becker,
Everyman His Own Historian, 169–90, cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New
History and the Old (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1987), 2.
177. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931),
105–6, 31.
178. Adrian Wilson, T. G. Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centered History,” 3.
179. Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past,” 134.
180. Edward Channing, A History of the United States, 6 vols. (New York: Macmillan,
1905–25), 1:vii, cited in Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, 37.
and Society (New York: Vintage, 1994), 134–35.
182. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 46, 85–86.
183. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 58–59.
184. Ibid., 58–59.
185. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former
Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (London:
John Murray, 1830–1833), 63, cited in Gould, Time’s Arrow, 2.
186. On this phenomenon, see Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study
in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991) and Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical
Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
187. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 35, 167, 174–75, 178.
188. Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nine-
teenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3, 5.
189. Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past,” 150, 136.
190. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old, 168, 173. Here Himmelfarb is citing
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962), 166.
192. Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 134.
195. W. Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” in The History
and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 427.
196. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 3–4.

197. Journal of the Twenty-Sixth National Encampment Grand Army of the Repub-
lic. . . . 1892, 207; Journal of the Twenty-Ninth National Encampment Grand
Army of the Republic. . . . 1895, 230, cited in Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teach-
ing of History, 166. Barnes’ Popular History was also singled out for criticism in
this regard. Edward S. Ellis, Eclectic Primary History of the United States (New
York: American Book, [c. 1884]).
199. Sparks notes: “Several editions seem to be published under the same date, but
bearing different imprints.” Sparks, “History of the United States, by Edward Syl-
vester Ellis,” 279.
200. See, for instance, the review of some of Ellis’s historical works four decades after
its first publication, in Review of Reviews and World’s Work: An International
Magazine (1937): 512.
201. “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” The National Cyclopaedia of American History, 204.
For sales figures, see: “News,” Mercer County Community College Newsletter,”
April 12, 1970, 2, in “Honorary Degree File—Edward S. Ellis,” box 6, Princeton
University.
202. Morton, “Edward S. Ellis,” viii.
203. Ellis and Horne, The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events,
1: preface.
204. Rogers, “Literary Life of Edward S. Ellis,” 75. See also “Bankruptcy Notices,”
New York Times, 20 April 1899, 9, and 20 May 1899, 13.
205. Scharnhorst, “Edward Sylvester Ellis,” 443.
206. For more on D. W. Griffith’s film and complaints about its distortions of the past,
see Pfitzer, Picturing the Past, 241.
207. Obituary, New York Times, 22 June 1916.
Chapter 6. Writing Himself Out of Trouble

and Society (New York: Vintage, 1994), 154.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 256.
3. Thomas Bender, “Strategies of Narrative Synthesis,” The American Historical
Review 107, no. 1 (February 2002): 131.
4. Arthur Murphy, “Ideals and Ideologies, 1917–1947,” Philosophical Review 56
(1947): 386–87, cited in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Ques-
tion” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 283.

5. H. B. Acton, “Historical Materialism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), 4:12.
6. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reap-
praisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 9;
and Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 132.
8. Alfred Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 4, cited in
Roland Van Zandt, The Metaphysical Foundations of American History (The
Hague: Mouton, 1959), 21.
9. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New
York: Routledge, 1995), cited in Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl
Harbor in American Memory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 117.
10. Ephraim Douglass Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History (Port Wash-
ington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969 [1913]), ix–xiii, 34, 59–60.
11. Ephraim Douglass Adams and John C. Almack, A History of the United States
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931); See also John R. Commons, Ulrich B.
Phillips, Eugene A. Gilmore, Helen L. Sumner, and John B. Andrews, eds., A
Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland: A. H. Clark,
1910–11); and “The Report of the Committee of Five on American History Text-
books Now in Use in California High Schools” (Sacramento: California State
Printing Office, 1923).
12. Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History, 138.
13. The collaborative project, a biography of Charles Francis Adams Sr., was never
completed because of the untimely death of Charles Francis Adams Jr. in 1914.
Ephraim Adams incorporated much of the information from that collaboration,
however, in his later work on the Civil War era. See Ephraim Douglass Adams,
Great Britain and the American Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1925).
14. Adams, The Power of Ideals in American History, 20, 93.
15. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Endicott and the Red Cross” and “The Maypole of
Merry Mount,” in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Garden
City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1959), 204–9, 40–47. Nathaniel Hawthorne, True Stories
from History and Biography, vol. 6 of The Centenary Edition of the Collected
Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972).
16. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “Hawthorne,” The Harvard Magazine (Cambridge,
Mass.: John Bartlett, 1855), 330–33.
17. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “Hawthorne’s Place in Literature,” The Hawthorne
Centenary Celebration at the Wayside, Concord, Massachusetts, July 4–7, 1904
18. James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin, 1980), 377. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, vol. 2 of The

Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1965).
19. Gregory M. Pfitzer, “When Life Imitates Art: Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s Curi-
ous Reader-Response to Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables,” American
Transcendental Quarterly, n.s. 8:2 (June 1994): 78. Adams’s point of view was
corroborated by other New England scholars who also benefited from Haw-
thorne’s historical insights. See Rufus Choate, “The Importance of Illustrating
New England History by a Series of Romances,” The New England Magazine,
November 1897.
20. Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to the Study of American His-
tory (Boston: Ginn, 1896), 136–38. See also Jane Goodwin Austin, Standish of
Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890). For other
discussions of the use of historical novels in classrooms, see R. F. Charles, “The
Use of Historical Romances in the Teaching of History,” The Educational Times,
November 1897.
21. Jonathan Nield, A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 1–4. Nield drew on a previous study for his preliminary
research: A Descriptive Catalogue of Historical Novels and Tales, for Use of School
Libraries and Teachers of History, compiled and described by H. Courthope
Bowen (London: Edward Stanford, 1882).
22. J. Brander Matthews, “The Historical Novel,” in The Historical Novel and Other
Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901). Matthews’s essay appeared
originally in the September 1897 edition of The Forum.
23. Geoffrey Roberts, “Introduction,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed.
Geoffrey Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2001), 8.
24. Paul Leicester Ford, “The American Historical Novel,” Atlantic Monthly 80 (De-
cember 1897): 721–28. Among other things, Ford argues that “the colonial laws of
Massachusetts decreed a totally different story from that Hawthorne tells in The
Scarlet Letter” (721).
25. Mark C. Carnes, ed., Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s
Past (and Each Other) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 14.
26. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 273.
27. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1897), 197, cited in Maurice Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son: The Life and Literary Ca-
reer of Julian Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970), 9.
29. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Twenty days with Julian and little Bunny, a diary,” Haw-
thorne Papers, AC8 H3188 904t, Houghton Library, Harvard University, cited in
Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 273. For more on the relationship
of father to son, including the essay “Nathaniel Hawthorne Described by His

Son,” see Autograph Notebook, n.d., #103765, MA 1375, Literary and Historical
Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
30. Edith Garrigues Hawthorne, ed., The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne (New York:
Macmillan, 1938), 3, 298.
31. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1903), xvi.
32. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: James
R. Osgood, 1885), 1:422, 419–20.
33. Julian Hawthorne, “Literary Lights of Old Concord,” typescript, box I, Julian
Hawthorne Papers [ca. 1896–1939], Banc MSS 87/23 c, Bancroft Library, Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California (hereafter cited as Julian Haw-
thorne Papers), 290–91.
34. For more on this sojourn to Italy, see Pocket Diary, 1858, box 1, Hawthorne Family
Papers. S 72/236z, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Berkeley, California (hereafter cited
as Hawthorne Family Papers). Also see Julian Hawthorne, Autograph Diary, 1857
May to 1859 October, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, #103180, MA 1377,
Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
35. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son: Julian Hawthorne’s
Beginnings & Beliefs,” http://www.violetbooks.com/julianhawthrone.html, ac-
cessed 7/16/2005), [1–2]. For more on the relationship between Sophia and Julian,
see “Correspondence,” and “Journals, 1829–1869,” in the Sophia Peabody Haw-
thorne Collection of Papers, 1775–1949, MSS Hawthorne S., Berg Collection,
New York Public Library, New York City.
36. [Julian Hawthorne], “The Art of Illuminating: A Boy’s Adventure in Books,”
[1929], box 6, BANC MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. For samples of
Hawthorne’s juvenile illustrations, see “Sketchbook, ca. 1858–1860, containing
drawings by both Mrs. Hawthorne and her son, Julian,” Papers of Sophia Ame-
lia (Peabody) Hawthorne, box 2, and “Sketches,” box 6, folder 3, in the same
collection.
37. E. G. Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, 17.
38. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [3]. For more on Una and her rela-
tionship with her brother, see “Correspondence [1851] to 1867,” Una Hawthorne
Collection of Papers, [1851]–1874, Berg Collection, MSS Hawthorne U., New
York Public Library, New York.
39. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 7. In Julian’s personal boyhood
library were works of history by Herodotus and Motley as well as Rollins’s An-
cient History and Tacitus. See “A Catalogue of Books in [Julian Hawthorne’s]
Library, 1875,” carton 2, folder 10, Notebooks, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne
Family Papers. See also [Julian Hawthorne], “The Art of Illuminating: A Boy’s
Adventure in Books, [1929],” box 6, in the same collection.

40. J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 7, 1–2.
41. Ibid., 292–93, 103–4.
42. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 10.
43. Horatio Bridge, Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1893), 191–92.
44. For more on Hawthorne’s relationship with Sanborn, see Julian Hawthorne to
F. B. Sanborn, 10 January 1883, MSS 7694-c, Special Collections, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.
45. J. Hawthorne, “Literary Lights of Old Concord,” 7.
46. For more on Julian’s academic career at Harvard, see “Julian Hawthorne—
Academic Transcript,” HUG 300, Biography—General and Collected, Harvard
University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Mass.
47. Harold P. Miller, “Julian Hawthorne,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed.
Harris E. Starr, vol. 21, supp.1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), 386.
49. Julian Hawthorne, “Hawthorne’s Last Years,” in The Hawthorne Centenary Cel-
ebration at the Wayside, 117.
50. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [3–4].
51. See H. C. Heywood, “A Son Who Would Emulate His Father,” in How They
Strike Me, These Authors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877), and Mabel Collins,
“The Son of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Dublin University Magazine 90 (August
1877): 236–39.
52. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [5]. The first story Julian had pub-
lished was “Love & Counter Love; or, Masquerading,” for which he was paid
$50.00.
53. “Charles Honce’s A Julian Hawthorne Collection,” (New York: Privately printed,
1939), #66-978, Houghton Library, Harvard University, provides a thorough bib-
liography of his works. See also Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 259–74.
54. Salmonson, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Son,” [6].
55. Review of Bressant, Nation, 10 July 1873, 27.
56. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, x.
57. Miller, “Julian Hawthorne,” 386.
58. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, xxi.
60. Lionel Stevenson, “Dean of American Letters: Julian Hawthorne,” Bookman 73
(April 1931): 166.
61. For more on the mind/body split in the novels of Julian and Nathaniel Haw-
thorne, see “About Novels,” [1890s?], carton 2, folder 12, Notebooks, and “How
to Write Novels,” 1879, carton 2, folder 4, Journals, both in Banc MSS 72/236z,
Hawthorne Family Papers.

62. Julian Hawthorne, “The Desire for Truth,” The Booklover’s Weekly, 25 November
1901, “Miscellany,” box 6, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers.
63. Julian Hawthorne, Confessions and Criticisms (Boston: Ticknor, 1887), 111–12.
64. See Julian Hawthorne, Garth: A Novel, 3 vols. (New York: Appleton’s, 1877) and
Fortune’s Fool, 3 vols. (Boston: Osgood, 1883).
65. Julian Hawthorne, “Thinking Things Over,” (Chapter IX), box 2, Banc MSS
87/23c, Julian Hawthorne Papers, vol. 1, p. 80.
66. Julian Hawthorne, “The Picture Show,” p. 21, Scrapbook 2, Banc MSS 72/236z,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley.
67. For a thematic analysis of “A Picturesque Transformation,” see Bassan, Haw-
thorne’s Son, 79.
68. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 160.
69. Julian Hawthorne, “Notebook [1890s],” carton 2, folder 12, Banc MSS, 72/236z,
Julian Hawthorne Papers.
71. Julian Hawthorne, The Spectre of the Camera; or, The Professor’s Sister: A Ro-
mance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888).
72. John Nichol, “American Novelist, 1850–1880,” in American Literature: An His-
torical Sketch, 1620–1880 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1882), 388.
73. [Review of Dust], Atlantic Monthly 51 (May 1883): 706. See Dust: A Novel, 3 vols.
(New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1883).
74. Henry James, [Review of Idolatry], Atlantic Monthly 34 (December 1874): 746–
48. See also David W. Pancost, “Henry James and Julian Hawthorne,” American
Literature 50 (November 1978): 461–65.
75. George Knox, “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian of California,” in The Historical
Society of Southern California Quarterly 39 (March 1957): 19–20.
76. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 45.
78. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 122–23.
79. In 1886 Julian published remarks from a private conversation he had had with
James Russell Lowell, to which the poet and family friend objected on the
grounds of violation of privacy. This was “particularly damaging to Hawthorne
since it led to questions concerning his professional ethics, and he was thereafter
considered a journalistic malefactor by many.” See “Julian Hawthorne, 1846–
1934,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, ed. Dennis Poupard (Detroit:
Gale Research, 1988), vol. 25, 228. See also a letter that Lowell wrote to the editor
of the Herald registering “a strong complaint against a Julian Hawthorne article
in the ‘Herald’s’ morning edition.” James Russell Lowell to the Editor of the Her-
ald, 30 October 1886, MSS 6219-aa, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of

Virginia. See also Margaret Fuller, “Testimonials of James F. Clarke, etc., against
the Statements . . . in . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne & His Wife” (Boston, 1885).
81. Fred Hawthorne to Charles E. Honce, 17 January 1939, box 3, Banc MSS 89/201z,
Julian Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910.
82. Hawthorne defended himself against the accusation in a letter, “To the Editor of
The New Metropolitan, T.L.S., 1903 June 30,” Banc MSS 89/201z, Julian Haw-
thorne Papers, 1878–1910.
83. 17 February 1873, cited in Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 87–88.
84. See Julian Hawthorne to Lorenz Reich, 1 May 1895, concerning a position Haw-
thorne was offered by the New York Herald, in #104278, MA 3400, Literary and
Historical Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library.
85. Julian Hawthorne to Mayo W. Hazeltine, 1908 March 28, anc MSS 89/201z, Julian
Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910. For a sample of Hawthorne’s newspaper articles,
see “Clippings of stories and articles by Hawthorne,” box 6, and Scrapbook 2,
carton 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, in the same collection.
86. The many locations to which Hawthorne traveled can be pieced together by fol-
lowing the itinerary associated with his articles written over a lengthy career. See
“Clippings Written by Julian Hawthorne,” box 3, Banc MSS 87/23c and MSS
72/236z, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Also see Hawthorne’s “India Journal of
1897,” Yale University Archives, Sterling Library, New Haven, Connecticut.
87. Julian Hawthorne, “Objections to Football,” New York Times, 5 December 1897,
22.
88. “Julian Hawthorne Talks of the Negro,” Atlanta Constitution, 22 April 1901, 7.
89. “Mr. Hawthorne and the Race Question,” Washington Post, 29 May 1899, 6.
90. “Abusing Mr. McKinley,” Washington Post, 31 October 1896, 6.
91. “Julian Hawthorne and Others,” Washington Post, 7 October 1898, 6.
92. “Hawthorne and His Fits,” Washington Post, 12 October 1898, 6.
93. Julian Hawthorne, “Pleasures of Authorship,” box 6, Banc MSS 87/23c, Bancroft
Library, Berkeley. See also Julian Hawthorne, “Journalism the Destroyer of Lit-
erature,” Critic 48 (February 1906): 166–71.
94. Julian Hawthorne to Mayo W. Hazeltine, 1908 March 28, Banc MSS 89/201z, B
Julian Hawthorne Papers, 1878–1910.
95. Hawthorne, “Pleasures of Authorship,” 195.
96. Julian Hawthorne, The Story of Oregon: A History with Portraits and Biogra-
phies, 2 vols. (New York: American Historical Publishing, 1892).
97. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 190, 194–95. See Julian Hawthorne, Humors of the Fair
(Chicago: Weeks, 1893).
98. Julian Hawthorne to W. D. Vincent, 14 November 1926, box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z,
Miscellaneous Hawthorne Papers, Hawthorne Family Papers.

99. “A Queer Text-Book, Strange Production of a Texan and Julian Hawthorne,”
New York Tribune, box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers.
See Julian Hawthorne and Leonard Lemmon, American Literature: A Text Book
for Use of Schools and Colleges (Boston: Heath, 1896). See also “Hawthorne-
Lemmon on American Literature,” Conservator 7 (December 1896): 151–53.
100. W. Leonard Lemmon to Justin Hawthorne, 20 October 1896, box 5, He–Z, Banc
101. Harold P. Miller, “Julian Hawthorne,” 387. See also “ ‘Hawthorne’s Text Book’:
The Tempest Raised in the Flushing Teapot and Its Absurdity,” 17 October
1896, Scrapbook 3, p. 15, Banc MSS, 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers.
102. Julian Hawthorne, “Frederic Chapman’s Fascinating Story of the Royal Palaces
in and Near London,” The Washington Post, 16 February 1902, 28. Chapman’s
book was Royal Palaces In and Near London (London: John Lane, 1901).
103. Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son, 190. For more on Hawthorne’s philosophy of history,
see “Hawthorne’s Philosophy,” [1884], Holo. MS. S., Bixby HM 12215, Hunting-
ton Library, San Marino, California.
105. J[ulian] H[awthorne], “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civiliza-
tion from England to America in the Seventeenth Century,” Scrapbook 2, Banc
106. For more on this relativistic philosophy and the historical profession, see Novick,
That Noble Dream, 133–67.
108. Hawthorne, “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civilization,” Scrap-
book 2, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. Alan Trachtenberg, Read-
ing American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 27.
109. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s History of the United States, 3 vols. (New York:
P. F. Collier, 1898; revised edition, 1900), 7, 82. All subsequent references will be
to the 1898 edition unless otherwise indicated. Although published in three vol-
umes, the pages are numbered consecutively and therefore are listed here without
reference to a specific volume.
110. For more on Collier’s, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines,
5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938–1968), 4:453–79.
Hawthorne contracted simultaneously for another volume in the Nations of the
World series: Julian Hawthorne, Spanish America, from the Earliest Period to the
Present Time (New York: P. F. Collier, 1899).
111. Display Ad 5–No Title, New York Times, 10 April 1909, 4. I have included Haw-
thorne’s United States in the category of “popular history” because it was part
of a larger series of books that anthologized “popular histories” of the world,

including Guizot’s and Green’s. For sales information, see R. R. Bowker, ed., The
American Catalogue, 1895–1900 (New York, Peter Smith, 1941), 210. The three-
volume set of Hawthorne’s United States sold for $8. See England, by J. R. Green,
with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by Julian Hawthorne, 4 vols.
(New York: Cooperative Publication Society, 1898) and T. C. Gratton, Holland:
The History of the Netherlands, with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events
by Julian Hawthorne (New York: Collier, 1899).
112. For a sampling of Julian Hawthorne’s diaries, see “Journal, 1868 and 1869,”
Julian Hawthorne Collection of Papers, 1852–1908, Berg Collection, MSS
Hawthorne, J., New York Public Library.
113. Julian Hawthorne, “Diary, 1899,” carton 2, folder 7, Banc MSS 72/236z, Bancroft
Library, Berkeley.
114. At one point Julian Hawthorne was reduced to endorsing clothing for W. C. Lof-
tus & Co. in New York City. The following display ad appeared in the New York
Times in April of 1900: “Dear Sirs—I have been wearing the suit of clothes you
made for me ever since I got them. They are good clothes, well cut and made,
buttons on tight, and in all ways satisfactory. In appearance they are as good as a
suit of three times the price. I shall come to you again. Meanwhile I remain, Julian
Hawthorne.” Display Ad 5–No Title, New York Times, 8 April 1900, 6.
115. Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s History of the United States, vii, v–vi, xii. Carl Becker,
“Everyman His Own Historian,” in Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on
History and Politics (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935).
116. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 826–27.
117. For Julian’s take on his father’s psychologizing in The Scarlet Letter, see Julian
Hawthorne, “Problems of The Scarlet Letter,” Atlantic Monthly 57 (April 1886):
471–85, and “The Making of The Scarlet Letter,” Bookman 74 (December 1931):
401–11.
118. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, viii–ix.
119. Ibid., vii, vi, vii.
120. Ibid., ix, 2, x.
121. Ibid., 6, ix, 292.
122. Ibid., 118–19, 9, 17, 4, 123, 50, 9, 1045, 9.
123. For more on Hawthorne’s attitudes toward spiritualism, see Julian Hawthorne,
“Is Spiritualism Worth While?” Arena 3 (May 1891): 674–79.
124. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 307, 428, 333.
125. For more on Schama’s treatment of Wolfe and its relationship to the narration of
history, see Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
126. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 74, 104, 253, 175, 165–66, 175,
165–66, 582, 600, 582, 583.

127. Ibid., 935, 735, 937–38, 934, 937–38, 923.
128. Ibid., 14, 788, 886.
129. Ibid., 9, 723, 138–39.
130. Ibid., 205, 275, 280.
131. Ibid., 111, 46, 552, 741.
132. For more on Julian Hawthorne’s relationship to Longfellow as poet, see Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow to “Dear Sir,” 23 February 1871, and Samuel Longfellow
to Julian Hawthorne, 7 February 1883, in Letters of Henry and Samuel Long-
fellow, MSS 6221-m, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
133. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 58, 433–34, 1108.
134. Charles Francis Adams Jr., Autobiography (Boston, 1916), 204–7.
135. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, vol. 3 of The Centenary
Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1965, 1972), 15.
136. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 210, 56. In a section of Haw-
thorne’s United States on the rise of American literature in the nineteenth century,
Julian acknowledged playfully the important role his father had played in shaping
the contemporary literary scene. “Cooper was our only great novelist so far,” he
wrote, “though a young man named Nathaniel Hawthorne had become known to
a few as showing promise in some short tales and sketches. . . . In short, the gate
of modern times was swinging ajar” (819).
137. For Butterworth’s perspective on Puritanism, see Hezekiah Butterworth, ed.,
Popular History of America, in the Popular Historical Series (Boston: Estes and
Lauriat Publishers, 1898). Butterworth was an assistant editor at the “Youth’s
Companion,” and published a series of popular “Zig-Zag Journeys” from 1876
to 1886.
138. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 406, 655, 686, 773.
140. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 334, 366–67, 419.
141. Ibid., 53, 214–15.
143. Patrick Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War
II,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 399. Here I am employing the
language of Finney’s critique of Robert Young’s France and the Origins of the
Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1996).
145. Edwin E. Sparks, [Review of Julian Hawthorne, History of the United States], in
The Literature of American History: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. J. N. Larned

147. Ibid., 1081, 864, 11, x–xi.
148. Ibid., 840, 1148, 1060, 1061, 1057–58, 1071–72.
149. Ibid., 1074, 553, 1047, 1052–53.
150. Edwin E. Sparks, [Review of Julian Hawthorne, History of the United States],
281. There were those who admired greatly Julian’s style, including his friend
William Morton, who, upon receiving copies of Hawthorne’s United States,
wrote: “There are limits to expression, unless one has Hysteria, and my limit of
expression was, ‘Now that is written exactly as I would like to have it written. I
could not nor would not add one word to it, nor change a word.’ ” See William
James Morton to Julian Hawthorne, 21 March 1899, box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS
72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers.
151. See, for instance, S. H. Pendleton’s complaints about in “Errors Julian Haw-
thorne Has Made,” New York Times, 13 May 1899, BR314.
152. Ada Shurmer, “The Reading of Historical Novels and the Study of History,” The
Scots Magazine, April 1900. See also C. S. Fearenside, “Historical Novels and
Their Uses in Teaching,” The School World, November 1900.
153. Pendleton, “Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made,” BR314.
154. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 1054–55.
155. David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88, 93.
156. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 118. Here Rosenberg applies the same argu-
ment to the baby boom generation of the mid-twentieth century.
157. “Old Things,” Scribner’s 41 (1907): 636, cited in Shi, Facing Facts, 93. Here the
writer is complaining primarily about the materialism implicit in photography
and moving pictures.
158. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s United States, 92, 1055–56, 1054–55.
160. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 78, 160–61, 164.
161. Julian Hawthorne, “Pleasures of Authorship,” box 6, Banc MSS 87/23c, Bancroft
Library, Berkeley.
162. Julian Hawthorne, Confessions and Criticisms, 9.
163. Julian Hawthorne to Paul Hamilton Hayne, 24 December 1885, cited in Bassan,
Hawthorne’s Son, 173–74.
165. For more on this mining episode, see William James Morton to Julian Hawthorne,
10 July 1908, “Letters to Julian Hawthorne,” box 5, He–Z, Banc MSS 72/236z,
Hawthorne Family Papers. Hawthorne was rumored as well to be involved in a
similar plan to offer shares in “Temagami,” an African mining operation. See
Julian Hawthorne to F. W. Freeman, 30 September 1908, #195190, MA 4628 (4),
Literary and Historical Manuscripts, Pierpont Morgan Library.

166. Julian Hawthorne to W. H. Miller, 12 August 1908, “Hawthorne Family Papers,”
box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. See also Julian Hawthorne
to James Benners, 20 May 1910, “Julian Hawthorne Papers,” Banc MSS 89/201
z, in the same collection. This letter includes a Prospectus for the “Hawthorne
Silver and Iron Mines, Limited.”
167. This “gold” and “silver” remark came back to haunt Hawthorne in his trial.
Among others, it convinced Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (a man
who knew something himself about gold and silver standards) not to bring a pe-
tition for pardon to President Wilson on Hawthorne’s behalf. See Julian Haw-
thorne to W. J. Bryan, 24 March 1913, box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne
Family Papers.
168. Julian Hawthorne to Edith Garrigues, 6 August 1908, box 4, folder 1900–1919,
box 4, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers.
169. For more on Hawthorne’s conviction and subsequent jail term, see “Papers Relat-
ing to Hawthorne’s Term in Atlanta Federal Prison, 1912–13,” box 6, Banc MSS
72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers. See also a series of articles on Julian Haw-
thorne’s charges against the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, “Julian Hawthorne,”
box I, HUG–300, Biography—General and Collected, Pusey Library, Harvard
University Archives.
170. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Time, 388.
171. See, for instance, the letters between Julian Hawthorne and Dr. Theodore F.
Wolfe, 1 October 1908 and 6 February 1912, regarding the mine and Hawthorne’s
subsequent indictment in “Letters, 1908 & 1912,” MSS 7694-f, Clifton Waller
Library, University of Virginia.
172. Logan Wilshire, cited in George Knox, “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian in Cali-
fornia,” 14–36.
173. Julian Hawthorne, The Subterranean Brotherhood (New York: McBride, Nast,
1914). For a not very favorable review of this work, see F. Emory Lyon, “Sub-
terranean Brotherhood,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and
Criminology 6, no. 1 (May 1915): 154–56.
174. “Hawthorne Out of Prison: Freed with Dr. Morton, Novelist Declares Prisoners
Are Starved,” New York Times, 16 October 1913.
175. For more on this period of Julian Hawthorne’s life, see Lon F. Chapin, “Looking
Backward,” Pasadena Star News, 15 December 1928, n.p.; “Writer Paid Tribute at
Banquet: Julian Hawthorne Honor Guest on Birthday,” Pasadena Star News, 23
June 1931, n. p.; and “Famed Dean of Letters Passes On,” Pasadena Star News, 4
July 1934, n.p., Pasadena Public Library Newpaper Files, Pasadena, California.
176. Wilshire, cited in George Knox, “Julian Hawthorne: Concordian in California,”
in The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 39, no. 1 (March 1957):
14–36, Pasadena Public Library Newpaper Files.

177. “Famed Dean of Letters Passes On,” Pasadena Star News, 4 July 1934, n.p. See
also “Biographical Information re: Julian Hawthorne,” The American Biographi-
cal Encyclopedia, box 4, “Papers of Julian Hawthorne,” Hawthorne Family
Papers. See also “Letters and Telegrams re: Hawthorne’s 85th Birthday Celebra-
tion, 1931,” box 6, in the same collection.
178. “J. Hawthorne, Novelist’s Son, Dies, Aged 88: Julian, Himself an Author, Had
Written Little Since 1900,” Boston Transcript, 14 July 1934, n.p., and “Julian
Hawthorne, Dead on Coast, 88: Only Son of Famous Novelist Had Long Been
Ill—Prolific Author of 60 Years,” “Newspaper Articles,” Julian Hawthorne—
Biography, HUG 300 Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library.
Conclusion: The Unpopularity of Popular History

1. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The
War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926, 1939).
2. A reviewer of a draft of this manuscript once tried to convince me that John Dos
Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (3 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1938]) qualified as
a work of popular history by a twentieth-century novelist, but it is clearly not
intended as a comprehensive survey history of the United States.
3. For more on these journalists-turned-historians, see John Higham, History: Pro-
fessional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1965), 75–77, and Gregory M. Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World:
In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 76,
138–39, 140–44. See also Samuel Eliot Morison, “Faith of an Historian,” in By
Land and By Sea: Essays and Addresses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 347–
48, 356; see also Morison, “History through a Beard,” 345.
4. Morison’s review of Brooks’s work can be found in Samuel Eliot Morison, “Re-
view of The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865, by Van Wyck Brooks,” Ameri-
can Historical Review 42 (1937): 564. Morison was the grandson and namesake
of the failed historian Samuel Eliot.
5. Samuel Eliot Morison to Van Wyck Brooks, 5 February 1937, The Samuel Eliot
Morison Collection, HUG(FP)–33.15, box 2, Harvard University Archives, Pusey
Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as Morison Collection), as cited
in Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, 140–44. For Brooks’s thoughts
on these matters, see Van Wyck Brooks to Samuel Eliot Morison, 8 October 1936, 2
February 1937, 27 April 1937, SEMC HUG(FP)–33.15, box 2, Morison Collection.
6. For more on this debate, see Samuel Eliot Morison, “History as Literary Art,” in
By Land and By Sea, 290–91. In this article Morison urges professional historians
to pay more attention to their writing and not to abandon literary style even as
they pursue the facts.

7. C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 201.
8. Andrew P. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own
Terms,” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (New York:
Routledge, 2001), 181.
10. Patrick Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War II,”
in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 400–401.
11. Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European
Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1997), 10.
12. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was,” 182. Here Norman cites Roland Barthes, “In-
troduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” Communications 8 (1966).
13. Woodward, The Future of the Past, viii.
14. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986), 11, cited in Norman, “Telling It Like It Was,” 182.
15. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 2.
16. Markham, “The Plan and Scope,” xiv.
17. Woodward, The Future of the Past, xi.
18. John R. Musick’s papers are held in Special Collections, Ms Collection #M4,
Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. They
include a scrapbook with articles, stories, poems, and letters to the editor. There
is also a brief biography: P. O. Selby, “John R. Musick,” Bits of Adair County His-
tory 6 (January 1972–November 1974).
19. John R. Musick, Columbian Historical Novels: Being a Complete History of
the United States from the Time of Columbus to the Present Day, with Reading
Courses, 13 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1893–94).
20. Edwin Markham, ed., The Real America In Romance, 13 vols. (New York: Wil-
liam H. Wise, 1909–1910).
21. For more on this poem and poet, see Charles Duncan, “Edwin Markham,”
Nineteenth-Century American Western Writers, ed. Robert L. Gale, vol. 186 of the
Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1997), 229. For a listing
of Markham’s works, see Sophie K. Shields, Edwin Markham: A Bibliography,
3 vols. (Staten Island, N.Y.: Wagner College, 1952–1955). There are also some
papers in the Cornelius Greenway Collection of the Edwin Markham Papers at
Wichita State University; see also Markham’s correspondence with another popu-
larizer, Hamilton Wright Mabie, esp. Mabie to Mr. Markham, 13 March 1899, The
Edwin Markham Papers, Edwin Markham Library and Manuscripts Collection,

Horrmann Library, Wagner College, Staten Island, New York (hereafter cited as
Markham Papers).
22. In a 1902 interview, Markham acknowledged his affinities with the interests of
these popularizers, especially the concerns about materialism shared in common
with Hawthorne. “There is a deep need for something to temper the hard mate-
rialism of the hour,” he noted. “The poet—the revealer of Beauty—is a precious
possession for any people. For he comes with power to open paths for our feet
into the lofty places of the ideal—paths of escape from the hard monotone of our
daily lives, from the iron despotism of the actual. And the ideal is not a vapor, a
house of cloud; it is the most vital reality known to man.” See “A Conversation
with Edwin Markham, on The Poet as a Teacher,” The Arena, December 1902.
23. B. O. Flower, “Edwin Markham: Poet of Democracy,” in Progressive Men,
Women, and Movements of the Past Twenty-Five Years (Boston: The New Arena,
1914). The original was published as “Edwin Markham: The Poet-Prophet of De-
mocracy,” The Arena 35 (February 1906): 143–46. For correspondence between
Markham and editors at The Arena, see B. O. Flower to Mr. Markham, 25 Octo-
ber 1899, “Markham letter Flower B No. 7 ”; 9 September 1899; 12 August 1899,
7 October 1899, Markham Papers.
24. Edwin Markham, “The Plan and Scope,” in The Real America in Romance, 1:
vii–ix. See also William Wise to Mr. Markham, 27 April 1912, “Markham letter
Wise W. No. 1,” Markham Papers.
25. Markham, “The Plan and Scope,” x–xv.
26. John Jakes, The Kent Family Chronicles (New York: Jove Publications; Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1974–1978).
27. On the distinctions between historical fiction and fictional history, see Jonathan
Nield, A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales, for Use of School Libraries
and Teachers of History, compiled and described by H. Courthope Bowen (Ed-
ward Stanford, 1882). See also C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989), vii.
28. “Testimonials, ca. 1920, about a set of Books, The Real American in Romance,” in
Miscellaneous, Roland Jones, Family Papers, 1840–1969, M-072, folder 2, Special
Collections, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, Louisiana.
29. Louis Filler, The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Significance
(Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1966).
30. Paul Fatout, Review of “The Unknown Edwin Markham,” Journal of American
History 53, no. 4 (March 1967): 836–37.
31. David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Am-
herst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 6, 8, 9.
32. Geoffrey Roberts, “Introduction,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 10.

33. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1952), 151.
34. Geoffrey Roberts, “Introduction,” in Roberts, History and Narrative Reader, 10.
35. On the “end of history,” see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last
Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
36. Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War II,” 398.
37. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was,” 183, 188.
38. Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 6.
39. See Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fiction, Fraud—American His-
tory from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New
York: Public Affairs, 2004).
40. David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1968); The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); The Path Between the Seas: The Creation
of the Panama Canal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).
41. These words appear in the citation accompanying the honorary degree Mc-
Cullough received from Yale in 1998. “David McCullough,” www.simonsays.
com (accessed 5/28/03).
42. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and
Row, 1980).
43. For useful discussions of the distinctions between “popular” and “professional”
approaches to the past, see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of
the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1998) and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
44. “A Conversation with David McCullough, author of John Adams,” in the Au-
thor Interview section of “David McCullough,” www.simonsays.com (accessed
5/28/03).
45. Gary R. Edgerton, “Chalk, Talk, and Videotape: Utilizing Ken Burns’ Television
Histories in the Classroom,” Organization of American Historians: Magazine of
History 16, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 18.
46. For more on John Adams’s reputation among historians over time, see Paul C.
Nagel, Descent From Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983). In polls conducted between 1982 and 1994
by the Siena Research Institute, John Adams has been ranked no higher than
tenth among presidents but no lower than fourteenth.
47. “A Conversation with David McCullough,” www.simonsays.com (accessed
5/28/03).

48. “John Adams by David McCullough Book Review,” www.webdesk.com/john-
adams (accessed 5/28/03).
49. James H. Billington, “David McCullough, Chronicler of America: An Apprecia-
tion,” www.neh.fed.us (accessed 5/28/03).
50. Sean Wilentz, “America Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of
Popular History,” New Republic, 2 July 2001.
51. Hillel Itale, “Controversy Hounds Popular History Writers,” Domestic News,
Associated Press, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed 10/31/02).
53. Wilentz, “American Made Easy,” 39.
54. The term “guild historians” is used by Leo Marx in “Believing in America: An
Intellectual Project and a National Ideal,” Boston Review: A Political and Liter-
ary Forum (online edition), http://bostonreview.net/BR28.6/marx.html.
55. Billington, “David McCullough, Chronicler of America: An Appreciation,” n.p.
56. James E. McWilliams, “Historians of the World Unite?” The American Enter-
prise Online, www.facmag.com (accessed 6/28/03).
57. Paul Greenberg, “Heroes, Who Needs ’Em?” (6 July 2001) Tribune Media Ser-
vices www.townhall.com (accessed 6/27/03).
58. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 7–11.
59. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 6. A revealing demonstration of the blurring
of these distinctions can be seen in a recent online exchange in a chat room in
which one frustrated graduate student asked for advice about how to become a
popular historian. The student did not couch this request in terms of narrative
strategies or methods of emplotment or modes of voicing and viewpoint; instead
the writer asked: “Is there a professional organization? And if so, how much are
the dues?” Ironically misguided and deeply insightful all at the same time, such
questions suggest why the term “popular history” is so elusive and difficult to pin
down. See jgawne, “History vs. Popular History,” comment about “How the Am-
brose Story Developed,” 8 April 2002, History News Network, Center for His-
tory and New Media, George Mason University, http://hnn.us/board.php?id’504
(accessed 10/16/02).
60. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946),
383–84. Warren himself denied that the portrait of Stark was a strict biography of
Long. See Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men: The Matrix of Experience,”
The Yale Review 8 (1963): 163–64. See also Ladell Payne, “Willie Stark and Huey
Long: Atmosphere, Myth, or Suggestion?” in Twentieth Century Interpretations
of All the King’s Men: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert H. Chambers
(New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977): 98.
61. Robert Penn Warren, cited in Woodward, The Future of the Past, 233–34.

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Archival Materials
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Works by Popular Historians

Anderson, John J. A Popular School History of the United States, in Which Are Inserted as
Part of the Narrative Selections from the Writings of Eminent American Historians,
and Other American Writers of Note. New York: Effingham Maynard, 1889.
Butterworth, Hezekiah, ed. Popular History of America. The Popular Historical
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Bryant, William Cullen, and Sydney Howard Gay. Bryant’s Popular History of the
United States. 4 vols. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1876–1881.
———, and Noah Brooks. Scribner’s Popular History of the United States. 5 vols. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The History of the Navy of the United States of America.
New York and London: R. Bentley. 1839.
Duyckinck, Evert Augustus. History of the World: From the Earliest Period to the
Present Time. 4 vols. Compiled by Duyckinck. New York: Johnson, Fry, 1869.
———. Irvingiana: A Memorial of Washington Irving. New York: Richardson, 1860.
———. “Literary Prospects of 1845.” The American Review: A Whig Journal of
Politics, Literature, Art and Science 1 (February 1845): 146–51.
———. National History of the War for the Union, Civil, Military and Naval. New
York: Johnson, Fry, 1861.
———. National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans. 2 vols. New York: Johnson,
Fry, 1862.
———, and George L. Duyckinck. Cyclopaedia of American Literature. 2 vols. New
York: Scribner’s, 1855; revised and enlarged, 1866.
Eggleston, Edward. “Autobiographical Article.” #110B, box 15–16, folder 5, Edward
Eggleston Papers, Rare and Manuscript Collections. Carl A. Kroch Library,
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
———. The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest
English Settlements in America with Reference to the Life and Character of the
People. New York: D. Appleton, 1896.
———. “Books That Have Helped Me.” The Forum 3 (August 1887): 584.
———. The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York. New York: D. Appleton, 1891.
———. First Book in American History. New York: American Book, 1899.
———. “Formative Influences.” The Forum 10 (November 1890): 279–90.
———. A History of the United States and Its People, For the Use of Schools. New York:
American Book, 1888.
———. The Household History of the United States and Its People. New York: D.
Appleton, 1890.
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———. “The New History.” American Historical Association Annual Report, vol. 1,
35–47. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900.
———. Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans. New York: American Book,
1895.
———. The Story of Columbus, by Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye, edited by Dr. Edward
Eggleston. New York: D. Appleton, 1892.
Ellis, Edward S. Eclectic Primary History of the United States. New York: American
Book, [c. 1884].
———. Health, Wealth, and Happiness: An Invaluable Friend to Parent and Child;
to Man and Woman; to Young and Old; to Rich and Poor. Philadelphia: Historical
Publishing, 1892.
———. The Huge Hunter; or the Steam Man of the Prairies. New York: Beadle and
Adams, 1865; 1882 half-dime edition.
———. The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett. New York: Beadle, [1862].
———. The Life of Kit Carson, Hunter, Trapper, Guide, Indian Agent, and Colonel
U.S.A. New York: New York Publishing, [c1899].
———. The Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, Chief of the Ottawas: Together with a Full
Account of the Celebrated Siege of Detroit. New York: Beadle, 1861.
———. The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone, Hunter, Soldier, and Pioneer. With
Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel and Other Leaders in the Settlement of the
West. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates [c. 1884].
———. The People’s Standard History of the United States. Cincinnati: Jones
Brothers, 1900 [1896].
———. Popular History of the World: From Dawn of Information to Present Time:
Including Complete Triumphs of the 19th Century. Chicago: George Spiel, 1900.
———. “Questions for the Next Administration to Consider” [1896]. Non-Partisan
Bureau of Political Information 55. Rare Books, Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
———. Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier. New York: Beadle, 1860.
———. Stories from American History. Chicago: A. Flanagan, 1896.
———. Tales Told Out of School. Syracuse, N.Y.: C. W. Bardeen, 1899.
———. The Youth’s History of the United States from the Discovery of America by the
Northmen to the Present Time. 4 vols. New York: Cassell, 1886–1887.
Frost, John. Enoch Crosby; or, The Spy Unmasked. A Tale of the American Revolution.
Cincinnati, U. P. James [1841?].
———. The Pictorial History of the United States of America. 4 vols. Philadelphia:
Benjamin Walker, 1844.
———. The Popular History of the United States. New York: Hurst, 1881 [1845].
Green, J[ohn] R[ichard]. A Short History of the English People. London: Crown,
1875.
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Guizot, Francois. A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times. Translated by
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. True Stories from History and Biography. Vol. 6 of The
Centenary Edition of the Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1972 [1851].
Hawthorne, Julian. Confessions and Criticisms. Boston: Ticknor, 1887.
———. ”The Desire for Truth.” The Booklover’s Weekly, 25 November 1901, in
“Miscellany,” Box 6, Banc MSS 72/236z, Hawthorne Family Papers, Bancroft
Library, University of California at Berkeley.
———. England, by J. R. Green, with a Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by
Julian Hawthorne. 4 vols. New York: Cooperative Publication Society, 1898.
———. Fortune’s Fool. 3 vols. Boston: Osgood, 1883.
———. Garth: A Novel. 3 vols. New York: Appleton’s, 1877.
———. Hawthorne and His Circle. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903.
———. Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography. 2 vols. Boston: James R. Osgood 1885.
———. Hawthorne’s History of the United States. 3 vols. New York: P. F. Collier, 1898;
revised edition, 1900.
———. “Hawthorne’s Philosophy [1884].” Holo. MS.S., Bixby HM 12215,
Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
———. Holland: The History of the Netherlands, by T. C. Gratton, with a
Supplementary Chapter of Recent Events by Julian Hawthorne. New York:
Collier, 1899.
———. “Is Spiritualism Worth While?” Arena 3 (May 1891): 674–79.
———. “Literary Lights of Old Concord.” Typescript, box I, Julian Hawthorne
Papers [ca. 1896–1939]. Banc MSS 87/23 c. Bancroft Library, University of
California at Berkeley.
———. “The Picture Show.” Scrapbook 2, Banc MSS 72/236z. Bancroft Library,
University of California at Berkeley.
———. “Review of Edward Eggleston’s The Transit of Civilization from England to
America in the Seventeenth Century.” Scrapbook 2, Hawthorne Family Papers,
Banc MSS 72/236z. Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
———. Spanish America, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. New York: P. F.
Collier, 1899.
———. The Spectre of the Camera; or, The Professor’s Sister: A Romance. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1888.
———. The Story of Oregon: A History with Portraits and Biographies. 2 vols. New
York: American Historical Publishing, 1892.
———. The Subterranean Brotherhood. New York: McBride, Nast and Company, 1914.
———. “Thinking Things Over.” Julian Hawthorne Papers, Banc MSS 87/23c,
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———, and Leonard Lemmon. American Literature: A Text Book for Use of Schools
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———. “The Man in History.” Indiana Historical Society Publications 2, no. 7.
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———. People’s History of the United States. Philadelphia: Historical Publishing, 1895.
———. A Popular History of the United States, from the Aboriginal Times to the
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———. Ridpath’s History of the World. 3 vols. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1885; New
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Index
Abbey, Edwin A., 117–18 presidency, 12, 213–18, 241; found-

Abbott, Jacob, 42, 187 ing, 9, 64; Ridpath’s rejection by, 147;
Abbott, John S. C., 61 scholarly approaches, 274–75, 334
Acton, Lord ( John Dalberg), 224 American Historical Review, 70, 218,
Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 285 225, 262
Adams, Charles Kendall, 69, 145, 165, American Whig Review, 55
240 Andersen, Hans Christian, 291
Adams, Ephraim Douglass, 284 Anderson, John J., 247
Adams, George Burton, 164–67, Andre, John, 47–48, 312
174–76, 220–21 Andrews, Charles M., 65–66, 225
Adams, Henry, 166, 176, 265 Anti-Imperial League, 222, 268
Adams, James Truslow, 332 Anti-Slavery Standard, 84
Addams, Jane, 149 Appleby, Joyce, 225
Agents’ Companion, 44 Appleton, W. W., 204
Aldine, 294 Arcturus: A Journal of Books and
All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Opinion, 19–20
Warren), 346–47 Arena, 170–75, 189, 300
Allston, Washington, 290 Arnold, Benedict, 25–27, 47–48, 51, 312
Amelung, May “Minnie” Albertina, 293 Art and Artists of All Nations ( John
“America Made Easy: McCullough, Clark Ridpath), 205–6
Adams, and the Decline of Popular Asbury University (Greencastle,
History” (Sean Wilentz), 342–45 Indiana; later DePauw University),
American (newspaper), 301 125–30, 188
American Association of Writers, 149. Atlanta Constitution, 177, 300
See also Western Association of Writers Atlantic Monthly, 298
American Bibliopolist, 114–19 Auld, Jedediah B., 19
American Book Company, 203, 223 Austin, Jane Goodwin, 286, 315
American Copyright Club, 24
American Experience, The (David Mc- Backus, M. M., 57
Cullough), 339 Baltimore Sun, 301
American Hebrew, 213–14 Balzac, Honoré de, 57
American Heritage, 343 Bancroft, George, 7, 41; philosophy of
American Historical Association (AHA): history, 186; as scholarly authority,
complaints about pseudo-history, 147, 242, 247; as unread historian,
69–70, 121, 164, 175; Eggleston’s 29, 191–92, 264

Barber, John Warner, 42 Book of Anecdotes, or the Moral of His-
Barnes’s Popular History of the United tory, The ( John Frost), 48
States ( Joel Steele and Esther Steele), Book of Good Examples Drawn from
5, 41 Authentic History and Biography, The
Bassan, Maurice, 245 ( John Frost), 48
Bassett, John Spencer, 36, 69–70 Book of Ruth, The, 290
Battle of Bunker Hill, 317–18 Boorstin, Daniel, 46
Beadle, Erastus, 231–32 Boston Daily Globe, 119–20, 178
Beadle and Adams, 234–35, 245 Boughton, George, 117
Beard, Charles, 168, 221, 265, 284 Bourne, Edward, 240
Becker, Carl, 166, 221, 227, 258, 265, Boy Patriot, A Story of Jack the Young
274–76, 281, 307 Friend of Washington, The (Edward S.
Beer, George, 212 Ellis), 234
Beginners of a Nation, The (Edward Breisach, Ernst, 168, 181–83, 221, 270,
Eggleston), 209–21; modernist style 273
in, 211; observational point of view, Bressant ( Julian Hawthorne), 294
209; place of irrational and profane Brinton, Crane, 207
in, 210–11; psychology in, 210–11; Brooklyn Eagle, 211
saturation method of history writing Brooks, Van Wyck, 274–75, 332
in, 214; the scope of history, 218–20; Brothers to Dragons (Robert Penn
success of among professional histori- Warren), 346
ans, 214–15; unillustrated format, 213 Brownlow, Parson, 188
Bel of Prairie Eden (George Lippard), 43 Bryan, William Jennings, 170, 300
Bellamy, Edward, 254 Bryant, John, 79
belles lettres, 29, 129, 241 Bryant, William Cullen, 75–102, 186,
Bem, General Josef, 137–38 288; conception of history as acted
Bem Method, 137–39, 196, 291, 323 events, 80–81; contract with Scrib-
Ben Hur (Lew Wallace), 149, 385n. 88 ner’s, 77–79; death of, 101–3; divided
Bergson, Henri, 182 voice, 76; as epistemological skeptic,
Berkhofer, Robert J., Jr., 9, 124, 138–39, 124; Julian Hawthorne’s boyhood
167, 180, 208, 279, 304 memories of, 288–90; philosophy of
Beveridge, Albert, 178 history of, 80; as public vs. private fig-
Bierstadt, Albert, 117 ure, 75–77; sentimentality in, 79–83;
Billington, James, 342–43 use of theatrical metaphors, 80–82
Birth of a Nation, The, 281 Bryant’s Popular History of the United
Black Aunt, The, 291 States (William Cullen Bryant and
Blanche of Bradywine (George Lippard), Sydney Gay), 83–120; changes in tone
43 in vols. 3 and 4, 105–10; Gay’s re-
Bolton, Sarah, 150 strained prose in, 98–100; debunking
book agents, 1–2, 22, 56–58, 68 of Washington Irving, 90; treatment
456 } Index

of Dutch, 91–92; treatment of Native Clevio, Giulio, 290
Americans, 96–97; treatment of the Clodfelter, Noah, 154–55
Pilgrims, 93; treatment of the Puritans, collaborative histories, 217
93–96 Collier, Peter F., 305–6, 319
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 156 Collier’s Weekly, 305
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 244 Columbian Historical Novels, 335
Burckhardt, Jacob, 184, 190 Columbus, Christopher, 37–40, 53, 90,
Burgess, John William, 69 336
Bushman, Claudia, 37–38 commodification of history, 7, 14, 53, 56
Butterfield, Herbert, 276 Commons, John R., 285
Butterworth, Hezekiah, 316 Comstock, Anthony, 230–39
Comte, Auguste, 156
Callcott, George H., 5, 30–31, 34 Confessions and Criticisms ( Julian Haw-
Camp, Paul, 233 thorne), 296
“Campaigning with Crook” (Edward S. Conner, Henry, 237–38
Ellis), 234 Conquest of Mexico, The (William
Carey, Matthew, 21 Prescott), 31
Carnes, Mark, 254 constructed history, 29, 88
Carson, Kit, 231, 243 Cooper, James Fenimore, as historical
Carson, William W., 165 novelist, 34–35, 232, 235, 243
Catherwood, Mary H., 150–51 Copyright Club, 58–59, 221
Century, 200, 204–6 Cottman, George S., 150
Century Club, 215 “Courtship of Miles Standish, The”
Channing, Edward, 69, 242, 276, 286 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), 286
“Character of Washington, Its Influence Crane, Rev. J. T., 57
and Importance, The” ( John Frost), “Cry of the Poor, The” ( John C. Rid-
47 path), 171
Chautauqua Institute, 195 cult of the fact, 124
Cheney, T. Apoleon, Dr., 98 cultural democratization, 5
Chicago Daily Tribune, 173 “Culture of the Imagination, The”
Childhood in Literature and Art (Horace (W. A. Jones), 20
Scudder), 230 Cumback, Will, 150
“Christian Martyrs Given to the Lions,” Current Literature, 215
347 Curthoys, Ann, 18
Christian Parlor Magazine, 57 Curtis, George W., 59
chromolithography, 296–97 Cushman, Charlotte, 289
Civil War, 64–65; in Bryant and Gay, Cyclopedia of American Literature
81–82; in Ellis, 251 Literature (Evert A. Duyckinck and
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, George Duyckinck), 19, 31, 36,
The ( Jacob Burckhardt), 184 54–55, 74
Index { 457

Cyclopedia of Universal History ( John C. Dodge Foundation for Citizenship, 284
Ridpath), 132 Dreiser, Theodore, 188
Dumas, Alexander, 29
D. Appleton and Company, 196–206 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 150
Dabney, Robert H., 69 Dust (Julian Hawthorne), 296
Daily Gazette (Greencastle, Ind.), 128 Duyckinck, Evert A., 10, 19–72, 288;
Davenport, Reuben Biggs, 212 biography of 19–20; originality and
Davidson, Cathy, 21 American literature, 23–24; and Scott,
De Forest, John W., 207 28–29; and Tetractys Club, 19–20
“De Louisiana Cane Brakes: Negro Song Duyckinck, George, 19
Chorus” (Edward S. Ellis), 231
De Navarrete, Don Martin Fernandez, 37 Eclectic Primary History (Edward S.
De Stael, Madame, 57 Ellis), 279
De Voto, Bernard, 332 Economic Interpretation of the Constitu-
Deane, Harry, 231 tion, The (Charles Beard), 284
decline of popular history, 10, 14 Edison, Thomas, 272, 281
Deerfoot on the Prairie (Edward S. Ellis), Eggleston, Allegra, 203–4
234 Eggleston, Edward, 12–13, 186–226;
Deerslayer, The ( James Fenimore abandons fiction in favor of history,
Cooper), 34 192–93; and American Copyright
“Democracy of Letters, The” ( John C. League, 221–22; American Histori-
Ridpath), 153 cal Association presidency, 215–16;
democratization of literature, 58–59 biography of, 186–89; co-editor of
DePauw University, 125–30, 188 The Independent, 188–89; collabora-
DePauw, Washington C., 148 tions with his children, 203–4; col-
“Desire for Truth, The” ( Julian Haw- laborations with his wife, 203; false
thorne), 295 consciousness, 208; “History of Life
“Detachment and the Writing of His- in the United States,” 192; illness and
tory” (Becker), 274 death, 206, 226; obsession with re-
Dewey, John, 184 search, 194–95; Owl’s Nest, 194–95;
Dexter, Henry M., 94–95, 137 as realist writer, 189–91, 211; as
Dial, 201 reformer, 188–89; rejection of military
Dictionary of American Biography, 76, 295 history, 193; resistance to “academiz-
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 182 ing” history, 219
discovery of time, 255 Eggleston, George, 188–89
Docker, John, 18 Eggleston, Lillie, 193, 195, 203–4, 206,
Doctorow, E. L., 282 221, 224
Documentary History of American Ehrlich, Heyward, 19–20
Industrial Society ( John R. Commons Einstein, Albert, 303
and Ulrich B. Philips), 285 Eliade, Mircea, 251–55, 276
458 } Index

Eliot, Charles W., 240 fictional history, 25–27, 337
Eliot, Samuel, 32, 55 Finney, Patrick, 333
Ellis, Annie (wife of Edward S. Ellis), First Book in American History (Edward
249 Eggleston), 222
Ellis, Edward S., 13, 231–81; adultery First International Congress of Histori-
case and divorce, 249; biography of, ans, 176
231; as composer and songwriter, Fiske, John, 178, 195
231; death of, 281; interest in movie- Fitzpatrick, Ellen, 216, 224–25
making, 281; nostalgia and memory Florida Times-Union, 201
in works of, 243–44; use of pseud- Flower, Benjamin O., 170–71, 177, 335
onyms, 234; presentism in works Flowering of New England, The (Van
of, 265–68; personal bankruptcy, Wyck Brooks), 332
280; quest for historical authenticity, Ford, Paul Leicester, 217, 287
235–36; recycling literary materials, Fortune’s Fool ( Julian Hawthorne), 296
243–44; sensation scenes in works of, Forum, 209, 217
232–33 Foulke, William Dudley, 150
Elton, Sir Geoffrey, 120 Fredericks, Alfred, 117
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20, 23, 288–89 Freud, Sigmund, 182
Emerton, Ephraim, 164–67 Frost, John, 10, 41–42, 47–54; biogra-
“Endicott and the Red Cross” (Nathan- phy of, 47–48; financial troubles, 48
iel Hawthorne), 285 Funk and Wagnalls, 335
Enoch, Crosby; or, The Spy Unmasked
( John Frost), 47 G. P. Putnam and Company, 31–34,
epistemological crisis in history, 181, 339 40–41
“Errors Julian Hawthorne Has Made” Garrigues, Edith, 329
(S. H. Pendleton), 323–24 Garth ( Julian Hawthorne), 296
“Evangeline” (Henry Wadsworth Long- Gay, Peter, 181
fellow), 315–16 Gay, Sydney Howard, 10–11, 84–122,
Everett, Alexander, 38–39 259; and American Historical Asso-
Everett, Edward, 32 ciation, 125; aversion to bombastic lit-
“Everyman His Own Historian” (Carl erary expressions, 86–87; biography
Becker), 265 of, 84–85; contract, 84–85, 103–5;
Eytinge, Sol, 117 problems with Scribner’s Sons,
102–12; relationship with Horace
Fable for Critics, A ( James Russell Greeley, 108; scientific approaches to
Lowell), 19 history, 89
Fahs, Alice, 15, 53–54 Gibbon, Edward, 161
Faith Doctor, The (Edward Eggleston), Glassberg, David, 338
222 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 55
Felton, Cornelius, 58, 66–67 Godkin, E. L., 61, 294–96
Index { 459

Godwin, Parke, 76 Hassam, Childe, 235
Golden Days, 231, 235 Hawthorne, Elizabeth (Aunt Lizzie), 291
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell), Hawthorne, Fred, 299
334 Hawthorne, Julian, 13–14, 288–331;
Goode, Frances, 203 boyhood, 287–93; commercial quali-
Goodrich, Charles Augustus, 21 ties of writing, 301; death of, 330; fi-
Goodrich, Samuel G., 21 nancial concerns, 299; imprisonment
Gotham of Yasman (Noah Clodfelter), for mail fraud, 327–30; irreverence for
154–55 truth, 298–99; as journalist, 299–302;
Gould, Stephen Jay, 252–57 the mind/body problem, 295; as nov-
Great Rebellion, A History of the Civil elist, 294–99; photographic method
War and the United States ( J. T. of novel-writing, 296; relationship
Headley), 188 with father, 288–94; relationship with
Great Story, the, 30, 50, 80, 143–44, mother, 289–90; relativistic stand,
189 303–4; interest in socialism, 330
Greeley, Horace, 108 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 20, 58, 285, 287
Green, J. R., 194, 242 Hawthorne, Rose (Mother Alphonse),
Greenberg, Paul, 344 330
Greenspan, Ezra, 20 Hawthorne, Una, 291
Griffith, D. W., 281 Hawthorne’s United States ( Julian
Griswold, Rufus, 55 Hawthorne), 305–27; anti-material-
Guide to the Study of American History ism in, 310–13; assessment of women
(Edward Channing and Albert Bush- in, 313; attitude toward Native
nell Hart), 69, 242, 286 Americans in, 313–15; illustrations
Guizot, Francois, 5, 161 in, 319–20; picturesque effects in,
Gutjahr, Paul, 4, 22, 305 315–16; philosophical idealism in,
309, 318; romantic tropes in, 316
Hale, Edward Everett, 103 Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines,
Hallock, Mary, 117 Limited, 327–31
Hamerow, Theodore, 83–84 Headley, J. T., 40, 42, 188
Harlan, David, 9 Health, Wealth and Happiness
Harper and Brothers, 22 (Edward S. Ellis), 231
Harper’s Family Library, 24 Hearst, William Randolph, 301
Harper’s Magazine, 113, 120, 200 Hearth and Home, 189
Harper’s Weekly, 294 Henry, Caleb Sprague, 28
Harris, E. L., Mrs., 57 Herbert, George (Capt.), 65, 188
Hart, Albert Bushnell, 69, 218, 240–43, Herodotus, 193
275, 286 “Heroes, Who Needs ’Em?” (Paul
Harte, Bret, 190, 222 Greenberg), 314
Harvard Magazine, 285 Higham, John, 164, 170, 218, 343
460 } Index

Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 200, 208, History of the World ( John C. Ridpath),
210–11, 220, 277–78, 281, 283 1–3, 6, 16, 72, 131
Hinman, Richard, 204–5, 223 Holiday, 231
“Historians and Our Aristocrats” Home Library series, 40, 258
(George Eggleston), 212 Homer, Winslow, 117
historical materialism, 284 Hoosier School-Master (Edward Egg-
Historical Publishing Company of Phila- leston), 189, 192, 385n. 88
delphia, 160 House of the Seven Gables, The (Natha-
historical relativism, 283–84 nial Hawthorne), 285–86, 288, 316,
“History by the Yard” (E. L. Godkin), 318
61 Household History of the United States
history for history’s sake, 277 and Its People, The (Edward Egg-
History Made Visible (George Crossup), leston), 4, 12, 196–206; inadequacy
138 of illustrations in, 200–201; and the
“History of American Life” (Arthur Mexican War, 198–99; narrator as
Schlesinger, Sr.), 224 external to action, 198–99; thick
History of Art in the Netherlands (Hip- descriptions of daily life, 198; uneven
polyte Taine), 191 quality of, 199
History of Liberty, The (Samuel Eliot), Houssaye, Henri, 176
32 Howells, William Dean, 189–90
History of Our Country, The (Edward S. Howitt, Mary Botham, 7, 41
Ellis), 258, 260–61. See also People’s Hudson, W. L., 320
Standard History of the United States Huge Hunter; or Steam Man of the Prai-
History of Rome (Barthold Georg ries, The (Edward S. Ellis), 232–33,
Niebuhr), 25 243, 272
History of the American Constitution Hugo, Victor, 57, 176
(George Bancroft), 130 Hull, William, 97–98
History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac Hume, David, 191
(Francis Parkman), 31, 236–37 Humors of the Fair ( Julian Hawthorne),
History of the Life and Voyages of Chris- 302
topher Columbus (Washington Irving), Hunters of the Ozarks (Edward S. Ellis),
37–40 234
History of the Navy ( James Fenimore Hurst and Company, 68
Cooper), 34 Hutchinson, Anne, 52
History of the Peloponnesian War
(Thucydides), 193 Idolatry ( Julian Hawthorne), 298
History of the United States (George I. S. Platt, Publishers, 40
Bancroft), 41 Independent, 188, 192, 221
History of the World (Sir Walter Raleigh), “Instructions for Prospective Writers,”
194 234–35
Index { 461

International Monthly, 70 Lawrence Scientific School, 293
Irony of American History, The (Rein- Lays of Ancient Rome (Thomas B.
hold Niebuhr), 339 Macaulay), 291–92
Irving, Washington, 10, 35–40, 56, 186, Learned, H. B., 275
242, 333; as biographer, 37–40; rela- “Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The” (Wash-
tionship with Evert Duykinck, 35 ington Irving), 36
Irwin P. Beadle and Company, 231 Legends of Mexico: The Battles of Taylor
“Is History Acquainted with Provi- (George Lippard), 43–46
dence?” ( John C. Ridpath), 150 Lemmon, Leonard, 302
“Is History a Science?” (Robert H. Lepper, George H., 173
Dabney), 69 Leuchtenburg, William, 1
“Is History a Science?” ( John C. Rid- Levin, David, 29, 139
path), 155–56 Levine, Lawrence, 16–17, 70–71, 80,
296, 97, 325
Jakes, John, 337 Library of American Books series,
James, Henry, 185 20–34, 40–41, 56–59, 66, 289
Jameson, J. Franklin, 69, 71–72, 92 Library of Choice Reading series,
Johannsen, Albert, 244 20–24, 40, 56
John Adams (David McCullough), Life and Voyages of Christopher Colum-
341–45 bus, The (Washington Irving), 37–40,
Jones Brothers Publishers, 148, 265 68–69, 90, 247
Jones, William Alfred, 19–20 Life of George Washington, The (Wash-
Julian, George W., 173 ington Irving), 149
Life of Pontiac the Conspirator, The
Kasson, Joy, 244 (Edward S. Ellis), 236–37, 245
Kent Family Chronicles, The, 337 Life of Washington, The (Mason
Kessler-Harris, Alice, 228 Weems), 21
King, Rufus, 121–22 “Lines to Professor John Clark Ridpath”
Klein, Kerwin Lee, 334 ( James Whitcomb Riley), 152
Knickerbocker History of New York Lippard, George, 10, 42–48, 54–56
(Washington Irving), 19, 92, 247; Lippard’s Magazine of American Histori-
distinctions between fact and fiction cal Romance, 60
in, 36–37 Lippincott and Company, J. B., 22
Knight, Sir Charles, 74, 184 Lippincott’s, 302
kulturgeschichte, 184, 190, 198 Literary News, 201, 224
literary pointillism, 185
Lamartine, Alphonse, 28–29, 176 “Literary Prospects of 1845” (Evert
Lamprecht, Karl, 182 Duyckinck), 20–33, 59, 308–9
Larned, J. N., 41, 145, 174 Literary World, 19, 60
Laughlin, Clara, 151 Loeser History Club, 273
462 } Index

Loewenberg, Bert, 157 McGill, Meredith L., 40
Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe), McLean, Albert J., Jr., 76
1–3 McRae, Col. Sherwin, 119
Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), McWilliams, James, 343–44
254 Melville, Herman, 289
London Weekly Review, 38 memory showmanship, 244
long chronology, 256 Messenger, 222
Long, Huey, 1–3, 346–47 Method in History for Teachers and Stu-
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 286, dents (William H. Mace), 275
315–16 Michelet, Jules, 216
Los Angeles Herald, 214 Miller, Max, 294
Lossing, Benson John, 3–4, 41–42 Miller, Perry, 55
Lowell, James Russell, 19 Mills, Col. Albert L., 236
Lowenthal, David, 250, 276, 278 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), 289
Lyell, Charles, 217 Mommsen, Theodor, 176
Monthly Review, 38–39
Mabie, Hamilton W., 7, 41 Moran, Thomas, 117
Macaulay, Thomas B., 161, 191, 194, Morison, Samuel Eliot, 332–33
242, 333 Morton, Levi Parsons, 237
Mace, William H., 275 Motley, John Lothrop, 7, 31, 247, 288
Mach, Ernst, 180–81 Musick, John R., 335
Magazine of American History, 13 Mystery of Metropolisville, The (Edward
“Man in History, The” ( John C. Rid- Eggleston), 190
path), 156–57
“Man with the Hoe, The” (Edwin Narrative and Critical History of the
Markham), 335 United States ( Justin Winsor), 217
Manual of Historical Literature, A Nathan, Daniel, 42
(Charles Kendall Adams), 69, 165 Nation, 61, 294
Markham, Edwin, 40, 334–38; associa- National Education Association, 241,
tion with the masses, 335; peri- 248, 259, 273
odization schemes, 336–38; use of Nations of the World, The, 305, 324
romantic conventions, 335–36 Neal, John, 56
Marx, Karl, 176–77 Nelson and Phillips, 132–33
Marxist history, 70, 168, 283–84 Nevins, Allan, 14, 76, 332
Mather, Cotton, 312, 320 New Deerfoot Series (Edward S. Ellis),
Mathews, Cornelius, 19, 58 280
Matthews, J. Brander, 287 New History (Edward Eggleston), 182,
“Maypole at Merry Mount, The” 200–209, 211–12, 220, 228–55, 275
(Nathanial Hawthorne), 285 New History ( John C. Ridpath), 157,
McCullough, David, 14, 341–45 175
Index { 463

New Republic, 342 Pendleton, S. H., 323–24
New York Evening Post, 75, 84 People’s History of the United States,
New York Journal, 300 A ( John C. Ridpath), 4, 160–70,
New York Mirror, 38–39 203; human agency and free will in,
New York Times, 74, 178, 234–36, 242 163–64; language of evolutionary
249 growth in, 163; misappropriation of
New York Tribune, 84, 108, 302 images in, 160–61; political tone of,
Nicholson, Meredith, 150 167–68; sensitivity to races, 162–63;
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 25–26, 61–64, universal laws of explanation in,
66 161–62, 164–68
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 339 People’s History of the United States, A
Nield, Jonathan, 286–87, 337 (Howard Zinn), 341
Nordau, Max, 29 People’s Standard History of the United
Norman, Andrew, 340 States, The (Edward S. Ellis), 13,
North American Review, 58, 61 258–74, 279–81; dime novel sensa-
Norton, Charles Eliot, 59 tionalism in, 262–63; the eternal pres-
“Novel Writers and Publishers” (M. M. ent in, 264–65; future-mindedness
Backus), 57 in, 270–73; home study of, 258–59;
Novick, Peter, 16, 30, 64, 67–68, 84, scholarly techniques in, 259–60;
215, 264, 281 sense of participation in the past,
Nye, Russel, 45, 229, 232 263–64; subjectivizing philosophy of
history in, 265–67; treatment of Na-
objectivity and history, 16, 134–35 tive Americans in, 259
“On Creating a Usable Past” (Van Wyck “Perils of Historical Narrative, The”
Brooks), 274 ( Justin Winsor), 217
Oonomoo, the Huron (Edward S. Ellis), Peterson, T. B., Publisher, 45
237 Philadelphia Dispatch, 45
Oregon Trail, The (Francis Parkman), 31 Philadelphia Record, 60
Osgood, Herbert L., 215 Philips, Ulrich B., 285
Outline of History (H. G. Wells), 270–71 “Philosophy of History, The” ( John C.
Outlook, 189, 214 Ridpath), 129
Owl (magazine), 101–2 “Philosophy of Justice, The” ( John C.
Ridpath), 146
Pae, David, 41 “Picture Show, The” ( Julian Haw-
Palfrey, John Gorham, 247 thorne), 296
Parker, Benjamin, 150 “Picturesque Transformation, A”
Parkman, Francis, 7, 31, 191–92, 236, ( J. Hawthorne), 296
242, 245 Pilot, The ( James Fenimore Cooper),
Peabody, Sophia Amelia (Julian 235
Hawthorne’s mother), 290 plagiarism, 53, 237
464 } Index

Pocahontas, 25; in Bryant and Gay, metaphors in, 144; intellectual goals
90–91; in Eggleston, 197, 319–20; in of, 132; irreversibility of time in, 138;
Ridpath, 141–42 linearity in, 144; use of melodrama in,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 19 142; Native Americans as “doomed
“Poet of the Future, The” (Frederick race” in, 139–40; prose style in,
Jackson Turner), 153–54 137–38; Puritans in, 134–35; the role
“Poet-Historian, The” ( James Whit- of reason in history, 135–36; romantic
comb Riley), 152 impulses in, 139–40; Salem Witch-
Political Science Quarterly, 225 craft Trial in, 136–37
Popular Amusements (Rev. J. T. Crane), 57 Popular History of the World (Edward S.
Popular Historical Series, 316 Ellis), 251–58, 280; contemporary
“Popular Histories and their Defects” flavor of, 254; cyclical history in,
( James Harvey Robinson), 70 256–58; panoramic view of history in,
popular history, definition of, 3–17, 252; praise for, 258; use of the sacred
41–42 past in, 250–51; universal philoso-
Popular History of America, A (Hezekiah phies of history, 253
Butterworth), 316 Popular School History of the United
Popular History of the Civil War States ( John J. Anderson), 247
(George Herbert), 65, 188 Portfolio of the World’s Photographs
Popular History of the Discovery, Prog- ( John C. Ridpath), 270
ress and Present State of America, A Post-Express (Rochester, N.Y), 213
(David Pae), 41 post-modernism and history, 339
Popular History of England, The (Sir “Poverty and Crime” ( John C. Ridpath),
Charles Knight), 74–75 146
Popular History of France from the Earli- Powers, Hiram, 289
est Times, A (Francois Guizot), 5, 305 Power of Ideals in American History, The
Popular History of the United States (Ephraim Douglass Adams), 284
of America from the Discovery of the prehistory, 256, 268
American Continent to the Present Prescott, William H., 4, 31, 37, 191,
Time (Mary Botham Howitt), 7, 41 242, 247
Popular History of the United States profane time, 276–77
( John Frost), 41–42, 48–54; Colum- professionalization of history, 9–10,
bus in, 53; narrative approaches in, 61–64, 67–72
49–53; Native Americans in, 53; role progressive historians, 274
of Providence in, 49–50 Prose Writers of America (Rufus Gris-
Popular History of the United States wold), 55
(Hamilton W. Mabie), 41 Public Opinion, 231
Popular History of the United States, A
( John C. Ridpath), 132–46; chrono- Quaker City; or, Monks of Monk Hall,
logical foreshortening in, 138; cyclical The (George Lippard), 43
Index { 465

“Questions for the Next Administration Robinson, James Harvey: challenges of
to Consider” (Edward S. Ellis), 268 New History, 182–86, 207–8, 265,
269, 271, 278; rejection of sensation-
“Radicalism” ( John C. Ridpath), 146 alism, 68, 70, 239–40; the scope of
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 194, 206 history, 179, 219, 229, 248; the spe-
Randel, William, 187, 206 cious present, 265, 269, 271, 278
reading circles, 204 Rogers, Denis R., 233
“Reading of Historical Novels and Rollin, Charles, 191
the Study of History, The” (Ada Roosevelt, Theodore, 42
Shurmer), 323 Rosenberg, Emily, 340
Real America in Romance, The (Edwin Ross, Dorothy, 219
Markham), 335–38 Roxy (Edward Eggleston), 190
Red Rover, The ( James Fenimore rule of mortmain, 278
Cooper), 235 Russell, Don, 234
relativist’s dilemma, 278–79
Remington, Eva, 200 sacred past, 251–52
Remington, Frederic, 200–204 salesmen’s dummies, 22, 259–62
“Report of the Committee of Ten on Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and
Secondary School Studies,” 239, Opinions of Launcelot Langstuff,
241, 248–49, 273 Esq., and others (Washington Irving),
reprinting of texts, 24 35
revival of narrative, 338–39 Sanborn, Francis B., 190, 293
Reynolds, David, 40 Sand, George, 57
Rhodes, James Ford, 215 Sandburg, Carl, 332
Ridpath, Abraham, 146 Santayana, George, 180
Ridpath Historical Society, 148 Scarlet Letter, The (Nathaniel Haw-
Ridpath, John Clark, 11–12, 124–78, thorne), 285, 288, 307, 385n. 88
243; boyhood, 125; as a college Scharnhorst, Gary, 243
student, 125–29; death of, 177–78; Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr.,224–25
death of father, 145–46; dictation Scots Magazine, 323
method of writing history, 131–32; on Scott, Sir Walter, 28–29, 250
Abraham Lincoln, 128; nomination Scribner, Charles, 74–122; disagree-
to Congress, 170; as poet, 151–55; ments with Gay over illustrations,
as professor, 129–49; sentimental 116–19; disagreements over the pace
posturing, 127; as social reformer, of writing, 102–5; threats to renegoti-
171–73 ate Gay’s contract, 104–5
Riley, James Whitcomb, 151–60 Scribner’s Sons, Publishers, 74–76, 82
“Rip Van Winkle” (Washington Irving), Scudder, Horace, 230
36 Segal, Daniel, 256
Robertson, Rev. C. F., 121 “sensation scenes,” 81–82
466 } Index

Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Fron- Stories of Great American for Little
tier (Edward S. Ellis), 13, 231–32, Americans (Francis Goode), 203
243 Story, William, 288
Sever, Henry Edwin, 148 Story of South Africa, The (Edward S.
Seward, William, 237 Ellis and John C. Ridpath), 243
Shaw, Dr. Albert, 177 Streeby, Shelley, 242
Shi, David, 180, 324 “Study of History in Schools, The”
Shurmer, Ada, 323 (Committee of Seven), 216, 241. See
“Significance of History, The” (Freder- also National Education Association
ick Jackson Turner), 183 subscription publishing, 6, 44, 56, 100,
Simms, William Gilmore, 10, 24–33, 66 145, 188, 259
Sketchbook, The (Washington Irving), Subterranean Brotherhood, The ( Julian
187 Hawthorne), 330
Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and De- Sumner, William Graham, 230
cline of Secession (Parson Brownlow),
188 Taine, Hippolyte, 156, 176, 191
slavery: in Bryant and Gay, 106–8; in Tarkington, Booth, 150
Hawthorne, 312–13 Tatham, David, 119
Sloane, William, 138, 219 Tetractys Club, 19, 150
Smith, Theodore Clark, 332 Thalheimer, Mary Elsie, 130
Smithsonian World, 339 Thierry, Augusta, 28, 215–16
social history, 12, 183–85, 228 Thomas, Amy, 57–58
“Song of Marion’s Men” (William Cul- Thompson, Jack Carter, 7
len Bryant), 33 Thoreau, Henry David, 288–89
Spanish-American War: in Eggleston, Thucydides, 193
222–23; in Ellis, 268–69; in Haw- Time Machine, The (H. G. Wells), 254
thorne, 321–22 time’s cycle/time’s arrow, 273, 252–57
Sparks, Edwin E., 264–65, 323 Trailing Geronimo (Edward S. Ellis),
Spectre of the Camera, The ( Julian Haw- 234
thorne), 297 Transit of Civilization, The (Edward
Spencer, Herbert, 267 Eggleston), 224–25, 303–4
Spy, The ( James Fenimore Cooper), 47 Traps for the Young (Anthony Com-
Standish of Standish ( Jane Goodwin stock), 230
Austin), 286 Trautmann, Thomas, 256
Stanton, Frank L., 177 Trent, William P., 209
Steele, Joel and Esther, 5, 41 Trevett, Russell, 19
Stories from American History True Stories in Biography and History
(Edward S. Ellis), 262 (Nathaniel Hawthorne), 33–34
“Stories of ‘Bad’ Indians” (Edward S. truthful fictions, 26–28
Ellis), 236 Tuchman, Barbara, 14
Index { 467

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 183, 224, “What Our Boys Are Reading” (William
274 Graham Sumner), 230
Twain, Mark, 76, 189, 222–23 Whig Interpretation of History, The
Two Admirals, The ( James Fenimore (Herbert Butterfield), 276
Cooper), 235 White, Hayden, 32, 67, 176–77, 269,
345
Union for Practical Progress, 170 Whitehead, Alfred, 284
Universal History; or, The Great Races Whitrow, G. J., 255
of Mankind ( John C. Ridpath), Whittier, John Greenleaf, 20
157–60 Widmer, Edward T., 23, 56
usable past, 274 Wilentz, Sean, 14, 342–45
Wilkinson, James, 16
Vail, Henry, 223 Williams, T. Harry, 1
Van Camp, Watson F., 249 Wilson, James Grant, 378n.195
Victor, Orville J., 235 Wilson, John Scott, 178
Views and Reviews in American Litera- Wilson, Woodrow, 145, 240, 330
ture, History and Fiction (William Winsor, Justin, 186, 208, 217, 248
Gilmore Simms), 25–27 Wise, William, 335
Vincent, John, 213 Wiley and Putnam, Publishers, 20–22,
Vincent, W. D., 302 31
Vitzthum, Richard, 53 Wolfe, General James: Edward Ellis on,
247–48; Justin Hawthorne on, 317
Wallace, Lew, 149, 385n. 88 Wolfe, Thomas, 1, 6
Walpole, Horace, 28 Wonders of History, The ( John Frost),
Warren, Robert Penn, 81, 346 48
Warsaw Daily News, 150 Woodward, C. Vann, 333–34
Washington and His Generals; or, Wright, Chauncey, 174
Legends of the Revolution (George
Lippard), 44–46 Yale University Press, 218
Washington Bust and Statuette Com- “Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to
pany, 378n. 195 Spain, The” (Edward S. Ellis), 231
Washington, Booker T., 300 York Commercial Advertiser, 212
Waud, Alfred, 117 Young Americans, 20–33
Waud, William, 117 Youth’s History of the United States,
Weems, Mason, 5–6, 20–21 The (Edward S. Ellis), 244–51; ac-
Wells, H. G., 254, 258, 270–71, 276 cusations of distortions in, 246–48;
Wendell, Barrett, 31, 225 altering historical quotations in, 245;
Western Association of Writers (WAW), casual use of time in, 249–50; use of
149–60, 189, 205. See also American dime novel materials in, 245; nostal-
Association of Writers gic temperament in, 246; sensational-
468 } Index

ism in, 245–46; temporal stretching Ziff, Larzer, 43
in, 250; the “timeless past” in, 250 Zinn, Howard, 143, 341
Zola, Emile, 296
Zeldin, Theodore, 185
Zieber, G. B., Publishers, 45
Index { 469

Gregory M. Pfitzer was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in various midwestern
towns, primarily Cincinnati. He attended Colby College, where he earned a BA
in American studies and history, and Harvard University, where as a Danforth
Fellow he earned an MA in history and a PhD in the history of American civi-
lization. He began teaching at Skidmore College in 1989 and is currently chair
of the American Studies Department. Pfitzer is the recipient of the Harvard
University CUE Guide Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Knox College
Philip Green Wright-Lombard Prize for College Teaching, and the Skidmore
College Ralph A. Cianco Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is the author
of two previous books, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World and Pictur-
ing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900,
as well as journal articles on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James,
Charles Francis Adams Jr., Mark Twain, and Winslow Homer and a piece on
science fiction literature. Greg Pftizer lives in Wilton, New York, with his wife,
Mia, an X ray technician, and his two children, Michael and Sally.

(Studies in Print Culture and The History of The Book) Pfitzer, Gregory M - Popular History and The Literary Marketplace, 1840-1920 (2008, University of Massachusetts Press)

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(Studies in Print Culture and The History of The Book) Pfitzer, Gregory M - Popular History and The Literary Marketplace, 1840-1920 (2008, University of Massachusetts Press)

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and the Literary

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University of Massachusetts Press amherst & boston

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

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Advertisement for Ridpath’s History of the World 2

Retrospective article in the Philadelphia Record

Frontispiece to Part One of the subscription series

A “Bem Method” chart illustrating Ridpath’s

“The Ships of Columbus” from Eggleston’s

Frontispiece from salesman’s dummy for Ellis’s

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and the Literary

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In the summer of 1908, fifteen-year-old Huey Long went door-to-

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Defining Popular History { 17

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Frost, and Book

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History as Gentle, Romantic Fiction

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