[This coming weekend marks the 250th anniversary of one of the most significant events in Colonial America, the Boston Tea Party. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that important moment, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of the many BostonStudiers from whom I’ve learned a great deal!]
[NB. I
originally wrote this post for my 2012 Beach Reads series, but I still highly
recommend Young’s book as a key part of Boston Tea Party collective memory.]
Why you
should read about a shoemaker on the beach this summer [BEN: or this December,
with summer on your mind!].
For those
of us who are interested in writing works of AmericanStudies scholarship that
will be engaging for a broad public audience, it can be particularly difficult
to find great models of that style. There are plenty of hugely popular works on
American history, but I would argue that most of them—such as David
McCullough’s books about the
Revolutionary era, or Erik Larson’s The Devil
in the White City—are explicitly written as narratives, focused
on telling their interesting and important stories. There’s nothing at all
wrong with that, but once an author makes that choice, I would argue that it’s
very tough for him or her to also include the kinds of analytical questions and
themes with which AmericanStudies scholarship engages. So when we can find a
book that does address such questions while still creating a page-turning
narrative—well, that’s a good AmericanStudies beach read!
Near the
top of that list, for me, is Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and
the American Revolution (2000). Young’s
book definitely highlights a compelling story, that of Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes, a man
who both took part in the city’s pre-Revolutionary 1770s events (the Boston
Massacre, the Boston Tea Party) and later led some of the 1820s efforts to
commemorate those events. Yet while telling the multiple stages of Hewes’
story, Young likewise—and just as engagingly, for this reader at
least—highlights and engages with some pretty crucial American questions, of
historical and communal memory, of contested commemorations, of the origins of
the Founding Father narrative and other Revolutionary images, and of how
American stories and histories developed in the Early Republic period. Needless
to say, such questions remain pretty salient today, not only with the rise of
our 21st century Tea Party but in a moment when how we remember and
tell the stories of our past is so crucially tied to where we go in the future.
But I’m
making Young’s book sound more appropriate for the classroom than the beach. So
let me be clear—this is a great story, and Young tells it very effectively;
when he uses that story to address his AmericanStudies questions, he moves
between those levels smoothly and successfully, and never loses sight of what
makes the story engaging and meaningful for a broad American audience. Young
begins his book by asking “How does an ordinary person win a place in
history?”, and he not only answers that question (and many others) very
thoroughly, but exemplifies a parallel idea: that history can and should be
written for audiences well beyond those trained in academic historiography. Those
are key lessons for any public AmericanStudiers, but they also make for a book
that you’ll be entirely comfortable reading while sunbathing, drink in hand.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Tea Party takes you’d share?
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