The Shift: Notes and Sources for A Resistance History

Everyone knows the 1 a.m. conversations you have with yourself, the ones that start when the five-year-old comes in to use you as a pillow. I had one of those last night, and I want to tell you what came out of it, because it changes the plan around here.

I can’t keep putting off putting the notes and sources for A Resistance History of the United States online.

There are weaknesses in my writing of that book — plenty. There are very, very few in the production. It’s a lovely book. But the one weakness in the production, and it’s not small, is the absence of notes and sources. There was a reason for that. Including them meant adding pages and, more to the point, adding time, so we made a decision to trade the apparatus for the schedule. The work lies in the engagement, with a hefty presumption that the work is reliable — all those letters after my name and the years of research and thinking have to mean something. The book was meant for reading, and for thinking about, not for researching. And I put discussions of the historiography into most of the chapters, so many of the sources are in the text itself.

We thought that would be enough for now. It doesn’t seem to be. Too many people I know and respect have asked about the decision. None of them question the work, just the production choice. Many of you haven’t asked, because that book was written out in the open, chapter by chapter, with real-time discussions of the sources, primary and secondary, that I relied on and even the ones I dismissed. Out of a few thousand of you, I can count on one hand the number who mentioned it on the book tour. You got it all in the writing of the book, and I talk about a lot of it in the audiobook. Still, I’m hearing it from others, and it’s bugging me. So it’s about time — especially before I get so far into writing the next book, which I’ve begun, that I can’t recover my particular thinking on the first one.

So that’s what’s next. I’ll keep working on A Public History of the American Revolution — right now we’re taking apart the Lost Colony of Roanoke as part of the prologue and framing — but it’s going to take a passenger seat to reconstructing the apparatus of A Resistance History and putting it online. I have no web skills, so this is going to be clunky at first: I’m going to use my existing website and create a page for the notes and sources. And we can use it as an opportunity to launch my podcast as we go chapter by chapter again, with more essays and videos coming out of all that. We’ll start with Chapter One, on Bacon’s Rebellion and Metacomet and “Beware False Prophets,” and move forward. I expect a robust conversation about Edmund Morgan, so we can include, as we go, the revisions I wasn’t able to include in the final print version but managed to smuggle, some of them, into the audiobook.

Two other projects stay on the board.

The first is on white voting patterns and the living history of the first republic in our electoral politics. That republic is still there, alive and well, doing what it always did. Seeing it can help us see beyond what gets excluded when we rely too much on party labels — Democrat, Republican — and position descriptions — centrist, moderate, conservative, progressive.

The second is on what I’m calling “American determinism”: a way to describe the work that nationalism, on the right and on the left, has done in our political culture — selecting parts of our history in order to manipulate them into an ongoing case for one necessary outcome in our national story, one that legitimates our particular constitutional and political order, as it exists right now, beyond even the consideration of structural change. Minor substantive reform? Possibly. Major structural overhaul? Not just no, but never.

What sparked that was a July post by Alexis Coe — whom I like very much, as a historian and as a person — about the interpretive panels at the President’s House in Philadelphia presenting George Washington’s views on slavery, softening them, making him, in her words, a “civic-minded enslaver.”

What it made me think about won't surprise anyone who has been part of this community: that repositioning of Washington can happen because of the quiet complicity of historians of the Revolution and the Early Republic. Why? Because they agree with the administration's interpretation of Washington. Or at least they agree to agree with it. Read what the new panels say, that Washington was “caught between his private doubts about slavery and his public responsibilities as president.” Where did that sentence come from? Nobody in the administration had to invent it. It’s my profession’s own sentence, the paradox, the contradiction, the complicated man.

What work does that do? That’s the question the determinism idea exists to answer, and we might be able to unpack it properly when the Notes and Sources project gets us to our chapter on Ona (Chapter 5) — although it’s already there when we get to Nancy (Chapter 3).

What goes overboard is almost everything else, especially since I’m teaching two classes this semester. No more resistance history movie reviews, not for a while. No more travel. I was supposed to go to a few book festivals this fall, including the one in my home town, the Baltimore Book Festival, but this new schedule, and my bank account, won’t allow it. You know how much I hate pushing the book anyway, so no great loss there. And I have to leave some room for the election foolishness — we’re only two and a half months out.

That’s the plan. Thank you for your support.