It becomes apparent when one thinks of education not only as formal pedagogy but as the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations; when one is prepared to see great variations in the role of formal institutions of instruction, to see schools and universities fade into relative insignificance next to other social agencies; when one sees education in its elaborate, intricate involvements with the rest of society, and notes its shifting functions, meanings, and purposes. And it becomes evident also only when one assumes that the past was not incidentally but essentially different from the present; when one seeks as the points of greatest relevance those critical passages of history where elements of our familiar present, still part of an unfamiliar past, begin to disentangle themselves, begin to emerge amid confusion and uncertainty. For these soft, ambiguous moments where the words we use and the institutions we know are notably present but are still enmeshed in older meanings and different purposes -- these are the moments of true origination. They reveal in purest form essential features which subsequent events complicate and modify but never completely transform.

Education in the Forming of American Society. New York: Norton, 1960.

THE NATURE OF DEFIANCE

How else could it end? What reasonable social and political order could conceivably be built and maintained where authority was questioned before it was obeyed, where social differences were considered to be incidental rather than essential to community order, and where superiority, suspect in principle, was not allowed to concentrate in the hands of a few but was scattered broadly through the populace? No one could clearly say. But some, caught up in a vision of the future in which the peculiarities of American life became the marks of a chosen people, found in the defiance of traditional order the firmest of all grounds for their hope for a freer life. The details of this new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinctions ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted. It was only where there was this defiance, this refusal to truckle, this distrust of all authority, political or social, that institutions would express human aspirations, not crush them.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967.

THE ORDEAL OF HUTCHINSON

In 1760, as these changes began, Thomas Hutchinson was at the height of his powers. Forty-nine years of age, an experienced, successful, and influential public figure who prided himself on his ability to withstand the savagery of politics, he was moving toward the fulfillment of his career at the center of colonial affairs, where it was expected that his abilities would once more gain him success. And so they would have, if times had not changed -- if politics had not entered a new phase. Never having felt deep personal discontent -- never having passionately aspired- -never having longed for some ideal and total betterment -- never having found in some utopian vision a compelling and transforming cause, he had never understood the motivations of the miserable, the visionary, and the committed, and he was unprepared to grapple with the politics they shaped.

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1974.

A PASSAGE TO EPHRATA

Johann Conrad Beissel, an ignorant, mystical, tormented baker's boy from the German Palatinate, after flirting with several of the radical sects that struggled for existence in the spiritually burnt-over districts of the Rhineland, had joined the exodus to Pennsylvania; concocted, in a hermit's cabin near Germantown, his own brand of sabbatarian Dunkerism; gathered a band of followers at Conestoga; and founded the Ephrata cloister, whose monks and nuns he ruled despotically, neurotically, and cruelly. God- possessed, immersed in the writings of the mystics, entranced by the secret rites of the Rosicrucians, he was a cyclone of energy, and he pursued his dream of a pure religion, unimpeded by state, society, or church. He was bizarre but unconfined, and the fame of his strange sect of emaciated celibates spread throughout the English as well as the German population of Pennsylvania and ultimately throughout the Rhineland and in France, through Voltaire, as well. Beissel preached with his eyes shut tight, passionately, ungrammatically, in incoherent torrents. If by chance his bowed congregation indicated understanding in quiet murmurs of assent, he reversed his chaotic argument to demonstrate the incomprehensibility of God's truth. And he imposed on his half-starved followers -- clothed in rough, Capuchin-like habits designed to hide all signs of human shape -- a rule of such severe self-mortification that some went mad, while the elite enacted the secret rites of the Rosicrucians, to which neophytes sought admission by bodily ordeals that lasted forty days and forty nights. Yet . . . and yet . . . the art of book illumination was reinvented in Beissel's Ephrata, and from some spark of hidden genius the Vorsteher himself devised a form of polyphonic choral music, complete with his own system of notation, which, when sung falsetto by his followers straining to reach ever higher, more "divine" notes, created an unearthly effect that enthralled everyone who ever heard it -- and which caught the imagination, two centuries later, of another German immigrant in America, Thomas Mann, who, brooding on art and the German soul, immortalized Beissel in Doctor Faustus.

The Peopling of British North America. New York: Knopf, 1986.

THE DEATH OF A SLAVE

Then something strange happened. Dunbar's accused slave, sitting in the bottom of the boat "with his arms pinioned," managed, when the boat was in the middle of the river, "to throw himself overboard & was immediately drowned." For Dunbar there could be only one interpretation of this desperate act -- not that the slave was reacting to the hopelessness of the situation (four of the other suspects were hanged within twenty-four hours) but that he was demonstrating "evidence of his guilt." For, Dunbar reasoned, the slave must have been so "stung with the heghnousness of his guilt, ashamed perhaps to look a master in the face against whom he could urge no plea to palliate his intended diabolical plan," that his only recourse had been suicide. The whole business was disappointing and disagreeable, it "occasioned such fatigues both of body & mind, that stave making hath been discontinued." Furthermore, when it was all over, Dunbar was distressed to learn that it was impossible to enforce the colony's law providing that when Negroes were executed by a proper court their owners were entitled to compensation for their loss at the public's expense. . . .
Dunbar, the young ‚rudite, the Scottish scientist and man of letters, was no sadist. His plantation regime was, by the standards of the time, mild; he clothed and fed his slaves decently, and frequently relented in his more severe punishments. But 4,000 miles from the sources of culture, alone on the far periphery of British civilization where physical survival was a daily struggle, where ruthless exploitation was a way of life, and where disorder, violence, and human degradation were commonplace, he had triumphed by successful adaptation. Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer sensibilities dulled by the abrasions of frontier life, and feeling within himself a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world.

Voyagers to the West. New York: Knopf, 1986.

JEFFERSON'S AMBIVALENCE

Fearing concentrations of power, and arbitrary power of any kind -- convinced that America's experimental achievements in freedom were beset by forces that would destroy them -- but endowed, himself, with an instinct for power and with exceptional political and administrative skills, and blessed with many years of active life in politics -- Jefferson, more than any of the Revolution's original leaders, explored the ambiguities of freedom. If the principles that had emerged in the great struggle with Britain before 1776 had not been so clear, so luminous and compelling, in his mind; or if he had remained on the sidelines, commenting like a Greek chorus on the great events of the day, the world would have been simpler for him, the ambiguities less painful, and his reputation less complicated. As it was, he remained throughout his long career the clear voice of America's Revolutionary ideology, its purest conscience, its most brilliant expositor, its true poet, while struggling to deal with the intractable mass of the developing nation's everyday problems. In this double role -- ideologist and practical politician, theorist and pragmatist -- he sought to realize the Revolution's glittering promise, and as he did so he learned the inner complexities of these ideals as well as their strengths. He never ceased to fear that the great experiment might fail, that the United States might be torn apart by its internal divisions or overwhelmed by the pressures of the outside world and, like so many other nations, in the end forfeit its freedom for a specious security. But he did not despair. He hoped, with increasing confidence, that the common sense of the people and their innate idealism would overcome the obstacles and somehow resolve the ambiguities, and that America would fulfill its destiny -- which was, he believed, to preserve, and to extend to other regions of the earth, "the sacred fire of freedom and self-government," and to liberate the human mind from every form of tyranny.

"Jefferson and the Ambiguities of Freedom." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137, no. 4 (1993).

A HISTORIAN'S IMPERFECTIONS

I am not concerned with anything abstract, with anything that might be called the philosophy of history, nor with such fashionable topics as history as fiction or any of the postmodern theories. I am concerned with one of the central problems in the everyday practice of history that contemporary historians -- working historians, not theorists of history -- actually face, none of whom, as far as I know, believe naively that historians can attain perfect objectivity; none of whom dream that a historian can contemplate the past from some immaculate cosmic perch, free from the prejudices, assumptions, and biases of one's own time, place, and personality; none of whom deny that facts are inert and meaningless until mobilized by an enquiring mind, and hence that, in Dorothy Ross's phrase, all knowledge of the past is interpretative knowledge; yet all of whom assume that the reality of the past can be subjected to useful enquiries, that among the responses to those enquiries some views can be shown to be more accurate depictions of what actually happened than others, and that the establishment, in some significant degree, of a realistic understanding of the past, free of myths, wish- fulfillments, and partisan delusions, is essential for social sanity. They know that history, never a science, sometimes an art, is essentially a craft, and they try to improve their craftsmanship, knowing that they will never achieve anything like perfection, that in fact the inescapable limitations in what they can do will confine their work to crude approximations of what they seek, but that to despair for want of realizing the ideal would be to forfeit the mission which they are equipped to fulfill.

Context in History (North American Studies Bernard Bailyn Lecture, number 1). Victoria, Australia: La Trobe University, 1995.

THE ENDURING QUESTION OF POWER

For all its distance from us in time and culture, for all the changes that have overtaken the world since 1788, the Federalist papers remain relevant, and acutely relevant, because they address masterfully our permanent concerns with political power -- under our Constitution and in general. The Federalist writers knew that a structure of power must exist in any stable, civilized society, but they knew too that power uncontrolled will certainly be abused. They had vividly in mind the principles of political freedom that had been formulated in the decade of pounding ideological debate before 1776 and then discussed again in the writing of the state constitutions in the years that followed. Defending the establishment of sufficient national power to sustain a stable and effective society, they sought to preserve the maximum range of personal rights consistent with it. In this fundamental concern for the balance of power and liberty- -which had been the central theme of America's earlier struggle with Britain -- the Federalist writers, conservators of radical political principles, are our contemporaries. Their constitutional idiom is ours; their political problems at the deepest level are ours; and we share their cautious optimism that personal freedom and national power can be compatible. But maintaining that balance is still a struggle, at times a bitter struggle, and so we continue to look back to what these extraordinarily thoughtful men wrote so hurriedly under such intense pressure two hundred years ago. The Federalist papers -- not a theoretical treatise on political philosophy but a practical commentary on the uses and misuses of power -- still speak to us directly.

The FEDERALIST Papers. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1997.

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Humanities, March/April 1998, Volume 19/Number 2