Reading history

In contrast to my school days in Danvers, when I disliked history classes and considered the subject boring and irrelevant, I'm now a voracious reader of history. Here's a photo of two books I've read recently:

These books fascinated me.  I do recommend them.  Well-written; well-documented.  

I read first David Waldstreicher's historical biography of Phillis Wheatley, the young African girl who wrote and published poems while enslaved in Boston in the 1770's. I'd already known of her name and fame, but had never before read much about her poems nor understood how she managed to get them published. I was curious to learn more about her life.

Two years ago I had heard a talk by Cornelia H. Dayton about the later years of Phillis's life, after emancipation, marriage, and a move away from Boston. Scholars had long questioned where Phillis and her husband had gone. Dayton solved that puzzle, finding evidence in court records in Middleton, MA.  (See my February 2022 blog entry about this discovery in a locale so close to Danvers.) 

Reading this 2023 biography added much to my knowledge of Phillis and the circumstances of her life. For example:

1. She was very YOUNG (about 7 yrs old) and ill when she arrived by ship to Boston in 1761.
2. She had been captured in West Africa and later wrote of longing for "Gambia's shores" [I once spent a summer in the Gambia region, and clearly recall the Gambia River and the coast.]
3. The affluent Wheatley family in Boston bought her for domestic service, but also taught her to read and write.
4. She not only learned English, but also Latin and Greek. 
5. By age 11 she was writing couplets. By age 12, she read classical works in the original languages.
6. In the winter of 1771-72 she prepared a book proposal for a 200-page volume of her poems. 
7. In 1773, while still enslaved, she crossed the Atlantic again, this time to London with a member of the Wheatley family to promote her book. She spent more than five weeks on the ship, then six weeks in or near London.
8. In London she met Benjamin Franklin and had meetings with many abolitionists. 
9. Her book was published in London in late 1773.
10. By late 1773, Phillis was back in Boston, and was emancipated. Copies of her book were shipped to Boston in early 1774.  

Coincidently, I was reading this biography in March 2024 as I travelled to and from London. I read of her London meetings while I was in London, and happened to see her book displayed in the "Entangled Pasts" exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. On my flight home I read about her experiences as she returned to Massachusetts and was figuring out how to cope as a free woman. She faced many new challenges then, just as relations between the colonies and the British empire were under strain.  

Thus, I felt ready to tackle a serious book of history about the American Revolution – to help me understand in more detail the winds of change that were blowing just as Phillis was emerging as an independent woman. Professor Joseph Ellis's 2021 book, The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents 1773-1783, was exactly what I needed.  

I learned SO much from his book!  I especially paid attention to how issues of slavery and treatment of indigenous peoples played out in the various campaigns of that tumultuous decade. The concluding paragraph of Ellis's book is meaningful and timely.

There were, then, two enduring political legacies firmly embedded in the American founding at the very start: first, any robust expression of government power, especially at the federal level, was placed on the permanent defensive; second, conspiracy theories that might otherwise have been dismissed as preposterous shouts from the lunatic fringe enjoyed a supportive environment because of their hallowed associations with The Cause. Both legacies gave American political thought a decidedly oppositional edge, much surer about what it was against than what it was for, prepared to block any hostile takeover from above by any aspiring dictator or domestic version of British tyranny, but incapable of decisive action at the national level to face or resolve the two embedded tragedies of slavery and Native American genocide in slow motion.