Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 133
generations of native Californians who may not have been able to withstand the
devastating impact of the dual revolutions but whose struggles against the oppressions of
Spanish rule remain noteworthy and perhaps praiseworthy. Hackel himself deserves
praise for providing us with what is now the most thoroughly-researched and
analytically-suggestive account of Indian-Spanish relations in early California.
Edmund S. Morgan, The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Pp. xi + 315. $26.95/$15.95.
Reviewed by Timothy D. Hall, Central Michigan University
Seldom does the chance come to sit down with a book like this and savor observations
and insights flowing from a lifetime of distinguished work in a field of history. This
collection of essays, first published separately in the New York Review of Books, offers
just such an opportunity. Edmund S. Morgan’s essays range across the entire field of
colonial and Revolutionary American history, deeply informed throughout by his own
work as one of the past generation’s preeminent scholars of the period. As good reviews
will do, these afford tantalizing historiographical glimpses of his engagement with other
leading historians, such as Bernard Bailyn, Gary B. Nash, and Gordon Wood. They also
whet the reader’s appetite to sample, at least, the monumental modern editions of
collected primary material such as the papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin,
and the Continental Congress, projects which, taken as a whole, Morgan terms “the major
scholarly achievement of American historical scholarship in the twentieth century” (250).
Taken together, they provide a retrospective on a period whose rich history has emerged
as one of the most exciting fields of contemporary scholarship, thanks in great measure to
the work of Morgan and the historians he trained during his long and prolific career at
Yale.
Morgan has organized the component essays into four parts, each of which reflects a
distinct method of selection and organization. The first part, “New Englanders,” includes
a review of Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle’s recent edition of John Winthrop’s Journal, five
essays reviewing several of the past quarter century’s most influential revisions of New
England history, and Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 release of The Crucible along with Arthur
Miller’s screenplay. Two of the three essays in the second part, “Southerners,” center on
the theme of slavery and slave culture that has been the subject of some of the most
innovative scholarship of the past fifteen years. The third section, “Revolutionaries,” is
the longest and most thematically unified, with ten essays carrying the reader from the
Seven Years’ War through the first decades of the early Constitutional republic.
“Questions of Culture” closes the book with two essays, one exploring the ongoing
significance of religion in American life through a review of Michael Warner’s Library