|
A Is for American
|
|
The Name of War
|
|
|
- Jill Lepore is an editor of the online journal Common-place. In
the words of the website, "Common-place is a common place for exploring
and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit
friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular
magazine, Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum
curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in
American history before 1900."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: While
researching my first book, The Name of War, I read a good deal
about Sequoyah, the illiterate Cherokee silversmith who invented a
writing system for his people. I was struck, at the time, by just how
similar Sequoyah's project was to the work of Noah Webster, the spelling
book writer and dictionary compiler. Webster advocated "American
spelling" to promote American nationalism; Sequoyah invented a
syllabary to promote Cherokee nationalism. Why hadn't historians ever
considered Webster and Sequoyah together, I wondered? They were nearly
exact contemporaries (they had even died the same year, 1843), and
surely their work was related. But no one had considered them together,
probably because intellectual historians don't usually think about
Indians as intellectuals. I decided it was worth a try, that putting
Webster and Sequoyah together on the same page would help us understand
both men a whole lot better.
Q: How did you decide who else to
study?
A: I began with Webster and Sequoyah, and with
the question of how early Americans understood the relationship between
writing and nationalism. Very quickly I decided I needed to write about
the deaf, since Americans first began using a national sign language in
the early part of the nineteenth century. Soon I became fascinated by
the nineteenth-century fantasy of a "universal language,"
which led me to William Thornton and also to Alexander Melville Bell,
Alexander Graham Bell's father. Thinking about Bell and the telephone
made me think harder about telegraphy, and Samuel Morse and his code.
Finally, I came across Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima through Thomas Hopkins
Gallaudet, who accompanied him on his northern lecture tour. What I
found so wonderful, as I looked at this cast of characters, was the kind
of insight that can be gained by juxtaposing such unlikely figures.
What does it mean to hold up Morse next to Webster, or Gallaudet next to
Abd al-Rahman? To me, these juxtapositions were a kind of historical
excavation, recovering relationships that had been lost to
history.
Q: How do these stories bear on what you call the
"paradox of American nationalism"?
A: The
United States was founded on a set of professedly universal principles:
that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator with
certain inalienable rights. Since Americans, at the time of the
nation's founding, shared little by way of language, religion, or
heritage, these principles were essentially all that tied the nation
together (and, to a large degree, they're all that ties us together
today). But to found a nation on universal principles is an inherently
messy proposition: the nation's boundaries will always become blurred.
All of the men in A is for American wrestle with this problem, in one
way or another, using writing as a tool for building national
boundaries, or tearing them down.
Q: What are the implications
of an "American language"?
A: When Noah
Webster coined the term, an "American language," he meant both
to emphasize differences that already existed between American and
British English, and to invent them. The idea is profoundly nativist,
that is, it embraces all things native to this country. Webster's
politics were just as nativist as his ideas about language-he despised
immigrants, and, in 1800, he wanted the country to be entirely closed to
foreign immigration. Part of Webster's legacy has been this close
association between ideas about language and immigration. In recent
decades, so-called "English Firsters," advocates of making
English the official national language, and opponents of
"Ebonics," "Spanglish," and bilingual education have
generally shared Webster's conservative politics.
Q: Some of
the ideas these guys had were surprisingly silly. What were some of the
more harebrained?
A: What struck me about all of the
men I write about is how passionately they advocated ideas that now seem
utterly fanciful: Gallaudet's notion that all of God's people naturally
know sign language, without needing any instruction; Melville Bell's
idea that the world's poor could be taught to read, in minutes, using
his system of Visible Speech. Harebrained, even silly, to us now, these
ideas were, at the very least, plausible in the nineteenth century, and
I love trying to come to terms with that Plausibility Gap.
Q: Americans are universally scorned for their lack of
historical knowledge. As a successful writer and historian, how would
you propose making history more enticing, more relevant to contemporary
lives? A: Most historians consider themselves
historians first and writers only incidentally. I think that's a
mistake. If readers don't read the history historians write, it can't
be only the readers' fault. The last decade has witnessed a tremendous
surge in popular interest in American history, largely spurred by
developments outside the academy: the rise of heritage tourism, the
History Channel, and renewed interest in antiques and genealogy.
Historians have got to ride this wave and try to take advantage of
Americans' powerful curiosity about the past by writing compelling
essays and books. One way I've tried to do this is by founding
Common-place (www.common-place.org), a web magazine that seeks to bridge
the gap between scholarly and popular history. A bit friendlier than a
scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine,
Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators,
teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American
history before 1900. Common-place is a common place for all sorts of
people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American
life--from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners.
And it's a place to find insightful analysis of early American history
as it is discussed not only in scholarly literature but also on the
evening news; in museums, big and small; in documentary and dramatic
films; and in popular culture.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|