Shifting Focus

Penn Arts and Sciences Magazine: Spring/Summer 2012 issue
by Peter Nichols

History looks different when you look at it from the vantage points of different peoples who are part of the historical record. "History is a story," observes Daniel K. Richter, "and it's got to be told from some point of view. For too long the default perspective has been one that looks from the top down—from the perspective of people who have emerged as the 'winners' in the story. But in recent decades, historians have developed different ways of looking at the past."

The stories historians tell, even when guided by dates and data, are powerfully affected by assumptions, emphases, interpretations and points of view the storyteller brings to the narrative. In other words, the notion that historians tell us the history of America is a claim to be doubted. But they can tell us a history that illuminates something from the past that was likely missed, or at least unappreciated, in some other telling of the tale.

Richter has made a career out of uncovering and telling some of the histories that make up the bigger story of colonial and pre-colonial North America. He is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. An expert in colonial and revolutionary North America and Native American history, he majored in history as an undergrad because he believed it was a good preparation for law school. A course on U.S. constitutional history, which required the class to write Supreme Court briefs on past cases, taught him how little he enjoyed legal research and argument. "I became a historian because I didn't want to be a lawyer," he jokes, "but my history classes introduced me to the idea that it was possible to explore the worlds of people very different from us who lived in the past."

Reconstructing chronicles of long-ago worlds involves much more than lining up and reciting the facts that scholars know about the past. Sources are often incomplete or biased or ambiguous, and historians use a prudent creativity to make connections and fill in the blanks. "The past isn't just there telling you its own story," he stresses. "It doesn't come up and knock on the door saying, 'Here is what I mean!' Part of the fascination—and the hardest part of history—is disciplining your imagination to find ways to get across the gaps."

In his most recent book, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts, Richter unravels the violently intersecting chronologies of Native Americans and Europeans from a half century before the landing of Columbus through the "gloomy and dark days" of racial hatreds and mutual massacres at the dawn of the American Revolution.

"I think there's still a narrative in people's heads that says, sometime around 1620 a group of English people came to North America to get free somehow," he suggests, "and then suddenly they had a revolution." According to this conventional way of telling the story, the colonial period is little more than a historical antechamber to the rebellion and war waged by 13 colonies against British tyranny and the achievement of independence for a
new nation.

"From the Pilgrims to George Washington—that's 150 years!" Richter exclaims. And that's not even counting everything that came before the landing at Plymouth Rock—in Europe and in North America. "Isn't there an awful lot that must have happened, and shouldn't there be a history that we can talk about?"

That's the story Richter's book gets at. "For historians," he adds, "the field has blossomed with all kinds of local histories and micro-histories. If there ever was an overarching way of putting all that together, it dropped out of the picture."

He had already flipped around the usual way of looking at history in an earlier book, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, where he imagined colonial America's western frontier from the other side. "[O]ur usual perspective on early American history faces west," he writes. "The plot lines flow from Europe across the Atlantic and thence to the Mississippi." The Facing East exercise wasn't a matter of getting inside the heads of 17th- or 18th-century Native Americans, which he thinks is presumptuous for a 21st-century white man. The scholarly task he set for himself was more a careful reportage that tried to imagine and build up, with sparse sources, a story told from a viewpoint in Native America. From the vantage of peoples looking out from the continental interior, "the process by which one particular group composed of newcomers from Europe…came to dominate the others becomes a much more complicated, much more interesting, much more revealing, if no less tragic, tale," he writes. The book was a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In Before the Revolution, Richter shifts back and forth between eastward-looking and westward-looking storytelling to construct, if not a grand narrative, then a more inclusive survey of the centuries preceding American independence.

"[T]o understand fully the society that grew up in North America after 1776," he writes, "the cultural forms that accumulated before anyone dreamed there would be a United States need to be excavated—and understood on their own dynamic terms."

That approach led him to put together a layered story, a "geology" of periods tied to six sequential cultural strata defined by people he calls progenitors, conquistadores, traders, planters, imperialists and Atlanteans.

"What I was searching for was a way to think about chronology and development," he explains. "The idea is that these cultural forms structure everything that's laid down on top of them. Understanding the sequence in which these forms come into being and build upon and sometimes destroy parts of what was lying underneath is maybe a useful way of seeing historical change."

Richter's story begins in Indian Country with two examples of great Native American cultures flourishing around the year A.D. 1000: the ancestral Puebloans of the Southwest and the peoples of Cahokia, a political, cultural and trading center in the Mississippi Valley. Using largely archeological evidence, he discusses patterns of politics, warfare, kinship, trade, religion and land use in the civilizations of these North American progenitors. He also points to a period of medieval global warming that fostered new forms of agriculture—including the cultivation of corn, beans and squash—that spread across the continent.

By starting the story on this side of the Atlantic and a half-century prior to the "discovery" of the "New" World, Richter establishes a trajectory of North American history that has nothing to do with Europe. "Stuff was happening," he insists. "People weren't just sitting around in paradise waiting for Columbus to show up and ruin everything."

He then shifts his sights to medieval Europe and traces out similar patterns, differently contoured, that shaped feudalism. By the time Columbus set sail, he says, "both societies were in this enormous chaos of decline, and they met each other in their various forms of chaos."

Richter lifts up layer after layer of buried pasts to explore the events and structures and cross-connections that arose in earlier eras and gave form to succeeding periods. Columbus sailed on a wave of European conquistadores determined to spread the Christian faith on behalf of monarchs intent on consolidating proto–nation-states and colonial empires. Their dedication to brutality and enslavement of native peoples laid the foundation for what was to come, including the massacre of one-quarter of Jamestown's settlers in 1622 and the decade-long, scorched-earth war that followed.

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, European and Native American traders exchanged material goods, religious ideas and much more, including the microbes that ignited epidemic conflagrations that, together with intertribal warfare over trade routes and resources, consumed hundreds of thousands of native North Americans. English planters established prosperous agricultural colonies that imported African slaves to plant and harvest crops, which were sold on what was becoming a global market.

Soon, English, French, Dutch and Spanish imperial states were competing and conniving for expansion in Europe and North America. Some Native American nations were adept at playing one power against another to their own advantage, maintaining their independence while advancing their prosperity. But Richter maintains that the wars and revolts that flared up in the struggle for dominance among the imperialists were a "blood-drenched disaster" for Native Americans and colonists.

As things cooled in the latter part of the 18th century, North America, Europe and Africa were bound together across the Atlantic on vigorous imperial and economic networks. The planters imported slaves and exported agricultural goods, which reinvigorated the transatlantic seaborne commerce that had served the earlier traders. Native Americans were integral partners along with colonists in the exchanges that crisscrossed the ocean in a British-dominated culture that Richter calls "Atlantean."

Along with sugar, tobacco and slaves, ideas moved freely along the Atlantic trade routes—ideas about liberty and independence, the tearing down of old institutions and establishment of constitutions that articulate individual rights. "They're not American things," Richter contends. "They're Atlantic things. It's all these connections of that Atlantic world that come together to create this thing called the American Revolution. It's part of this great global phenomenon of the 18th century."

All of the strata in Richter's layered story of early America would be covered over by the revolution, "but those ancient worlds remain beneath the surface to mold the nation's current contours," he writes.

The suggestion is troubling because Before the Revolution tells a dark and brutal tale of continuous violence: Europeans against Europeans; Europeans against enslaved Africans; Europeans and settlers against Native Americans; Native Americans against colonists; and Native Americans against other Native Americans. It's a way of telling America's history that Richter would like people to think about more.

"It's not always a comforting and affirming story," he says, "but I think one of the jobs of a historian is to make readers uncomfortable. If I'm right that these layers of our past are what structure our society, then maybe we haven't looked into them very much because we don't want to see what's there."

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