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Reviews of Books
dent in white uniforms, and souvenir flags to wave. The
"Glorious Fourth" meant gala picnics in the park with
sack races, free peanuts and hot dogs, and orators of
various persuasions waving their arms and sweating
mightily in the sun. It is hard to blame Dennis for
feeling that something important has drained away
from these celebrations when they become just one
more day at Disney World or the local mall.
His response is to remind readers of the urgent
issues at stake when these special times were singled
out for inclusion in the American book of days.
Thanksgiving, for example, became a national holiday
in 1863, just weeks before Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. In sanctioning a New England custom, however, the government also sanctioned a sectional view of history. Thanksgiving became the means
by which the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock edged out
the Virginia Cavaliers as America's official founding
fathers, confirming the hegemony of the Northeast in
national affairs. By the end of the century, however,
the political fervor of the war years had cooled: now
the epic contest between North and South was reenacted as the collegiate football game announcing the
beginning of the social season for Ivy Leaguers and
their admirers.
To denigrate the modern custom of snoozing in
front of the television after a big turkey dinner is to
miss the fact that this has been going on for long
enough to merit the status of a grand Thanksgiving
tradition. And lest women complain that they must
cook the bird and wash the dishes while the menfolk
merely indulge themselves, it is also worth remembering that it was a woman, Sarah Josepha Hale, crusading editor of Godey's Ladies' Book, who led the
campaign for an official Thanksgiving Day (thereby
stimulating the rise of the turkey industry, which
dominates the farm economy of several states today).
And in these times of economic stress, everybody
watches the morning-after-Thanksgiving sales as a
barometer of the nation's overall economic health.
Each of the holidays addressed has a history as
complex and fraught as the design of the American
flag. In recent years, Columbus Day has been the
occasion for vigorous protest, especially a_mong Native
Americans who regard their "discovery" by diseasebearing and often bloodthirsty Europeans as, at best, a
mixed blessing. But does this mean that Christopher
Columbus is still an important figure in the minds of
most Americans? The spectacular failure of the the
United States Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission suggests that neither contestation nor hoopla
will sustain a festival in the absence of a compelling
reason to think about a hero or an event. Perhaps the
Americans who shop or fish or wash the dog are stating
that while Columbus does not turn them on, they
would love more free time with the family, even a
European-style month of annual vacation. Holidays
without tangible anchors to the present-like cherry
pies or hot dogs or football games and green bean
casserole-maybe doomed to obsolescence.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Dennis sees hope for any patriotic holiday whose
meaning or ownership is still a matter for debate, as is
the case with the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday
observance. In the recent past, several major academic
conventions were rescheduled because some states,
including Arizona, refused to honor the day. Where
there is such acrimony, there is life, Dennis argues. An
effort to seize control of a myth or a principle worth
fighting for is what holidays ought to be about. In
King's case, there is as yet no settled meaning for this
invented tradition. Are we to ponder nonviolence, civil
rights, the life of King? His martyrdom? Is it St.
Martin's Day? The African-American national holiday? Or will most of us just sleep late and go to the
mall?
KARAL ANN MARLING
University of Minnesota
LESLIE J. LINDENAUER. Piety and Power: Gender and
Religious Culture in the American Colonies, 1630-1700.
(Studies in American Popular History and Culture.)
New York: Routledge. 2002. Pp. xxvii, 181.
This book argues that Protestant women in early
America wielded significant power in their families,
churches, and communities. Rejecting the interpretation that women were "victims of a deeply ingrained
patriarchy," Leslie J. Lindenauer argues that their
Protestant faith empowered them to engage in private
prayer, to teach their children, to speak publicly in the
church, to shape church politics, and to testify in courts
of law (p. xii). In her words, "evidence suggests that
the fundamental belief in the equality of the Protestant
soul shaped women's conceptions of themselves as
Christians, blurred distinctions between their roles in
the public and private sphere, and gave them a voice in
arenas often assumed by historians to have been closed
to them" (p. xii). In contrast to scholars such as
Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Jane Kamensky, and Cornelia
Hughes Dayton, who have argued that seventeenthcentury women faced growing restrictions on their
religious and legal authority, Lindenauer frames her
book around a triumphant narrative of progress. In her
epilogue, she claims that women's political activism
during the American Revolution was a natural outgrowth of their religious identity as "soldiers of
Christ."
The greatest strength of this book is its broad focus.
Instead of concentrating on a single region, Lindenauer examines the stories of Dutch Reformed women
in New York, Puritan women in New England, and
Anglican women in the South. Although Lindenauer
sometimes exaggerates the theological similarities
among these women, she should be commended for
her attempt to compare their stories.
Unfortunately, however, Lindenauer's sweeping
conclusions about women's power in early America are
not supported by her evidence. For example, to support her argument that Dutch Reformed women were
not "entirely excluded from public debates," she points
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Canada and the United States
out that they were "among the mourners" at a "politically charged" funeral in 1698 (p. 143). Although it
would be interesting to know how women behaved at
this funeral, the mere fact of their presence should not
be construed as evidence of their "power." Similarly,
Lindenauer argues that "women spoke out in church
on a great many occasions," but she cites only a few
scattered pieces of evidence to support her point:
Protestant women were expected to sing hymns and to
say "Amen"; a small number of Puritan women were
allowed to make public confessions in their churches;
and, on one occasion, a Dutch Reformed minister
allowed a five-year-old girl to read a prayer aloud.
Taken together, this slender evidence hardly adds up
to a picture of female power. On the contrary, it
suggests that there were significant restrictions placed
on women's public religious speech.
One of the most puzzling parts of this book is
Lindenauer's interpretation of the witchcraft trials.
Since the majority of suspected "witches" were female,
other historians, including Carol Karlsen and Elizabeth Reis, have suggested that Puritans saw women as
particularly prone to satanic temptation. In contrast,
Lindenauer insists that the trials reveal women's
power, not their oppression. Emboldened by their faith
in God, many ordinary women came forward to testify
against "witches" who threatened communal harmony.
Missing in Lindenauer's analysis is any recognition of
the deeply gendered language that characterized the
witchcraft accusations.
Despite her book's title, Lindenauer offers very little
gender analysis. She never examines the assumptions
about "femininity" and "masculinity" that shaped early
American culture. Because of her insistence on the
essentially egalitarian nature of Reformed Protestantism, she also does not explore the gendering of power
in early American churches. In an odd omission, she
only briefly mentions Anne Hutchinson, whose church
trial in 1637 revealed the Puritans' suspicion of female
religious authority.
Lindenauer's book raises important questions about
women's authority in colonial America. Although her
argument is not convincing, she has made an ambitious
attempt to present a comparative portrait of Anglican,
Dutch Reformed, and Puritan women.
A. BREKUS
University of Chicago
CATHERINE
GARY B. NASH. First City: Philadelphia and the Forging
of Historical Memory. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. Pp.
383. $34.95.
Gary B. Nash has undertaken an ambitious effort to
trace the founding and growth of the United States'
"first city" through the evolving "ideological, cultural,
and politically informed agendas" (p. 8) of such keepers of historical memory as the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania (HSP) and the Library Company of
Philadelphia. This book, an outgrowth of Nash's work
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
on the "Visions and Revisions: Finding Philadelphia's
Past" exhibition at the HSP in 1989, blends historical
research and artifactual analysis to emerge as something both more and less than a synthetic history of
what is arguably the nation's most historically conscious city. In that limbolike status, it represents well
the tensions and opportunities that await writers seeking to push the craft of history to a new level of
self-awareness and creativity.
Working from the city's establishment in 1681
through the Constitution Centennial of 1887, Nash
keeps his (and the reader's) eyes fixed through a
stereoscopic viewer in an effort to capture both "what
really happened" and what we remember of it. The two
points of focus blend, in the best of cases, to produce
a sharpened, three-dimensional view of Philadelphia;
at some times, however, they converge closely enough
to cause eyestrain, while at others one subject drifts
from the field of view altogether.
Given the complexity of this dual field of vision,
Nash holds a remarkably steady course. While his chief
interest rests, as the title frankly foretells, in the
"forging of historical memory," he is understandably
unwilling to exercise that interest apart from the actual
substance of events from which that memory is forged.
How far, then, to go in telling the actual story of the
city itself? At what point to draw back and ask, "How
was this portion of the story reflected or elided in the
institutional repositories of civic memory?" When,
finally, to say, "There's a larger point to be made here,
as we consider what was venerated and what forgotten"?
Given the essentially unanswerable nature of such
questions, the balance here may be as right as it can be.
Although the reader is unlikely to forget that two balls
are constantly being tossed in the air, Nash's research
and writing are good enough that one can relax and
enjoy the book in either of its two intertwined dimensions: as a historical survey of the city, or as a
chronological/topical guide through Philadelphia's
rich archival and artifactual collections. In the former
incarnation, Nash guides his readers with enthusiasm
and clarity through a familiar story of Quaker ideals,
republican self-consciousness, mercantile opportunism, class and racial antagonism, and centennial-era
reflection. Detailed, primary research is left primarily
in the hands of Susan Davis, Bruce Laurie, Sam Bass
Warner, and the many other historians whose work,
judiciously footnoted here, has made Philadelphia one
of the nation's most-studied cities. Nash might have
done a greater service-had he chosen to expand his
scope accordingly-by treating this textual historiography as critically as he does the history of collecting.
Surely there is a story, and one not at all incidental to
the story of collecting and preservation, waiting to be
told in the progression of texts from James Mease's
Picture of Philadelphia (1811), which is absent here, as
far as I can tell, either as source or subject, to Warner's
"private city" thesis and beyond. The focus on institutional memory, as seen through collections, seems
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