Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

134 BOOK REVIEWS
of America collection of sermons, and the final a romp through the full span of American
history (with Marie Morgan) in a review of the twenty-four volume American National
Biography.
The cumulative effect of this arrangement is to reward the reader with a reflective
historiographical tour of some of the most influential scholarship of the past thirty years.
Even historians whose works are not reviewed directly have been incorporated into the
summaries and wealth of detail which set the works reviewed into the context of early
American history and recent writing about it. Though necessarily selective, the book
includes representative samples of some of the wide range of approaches and lines of
inquiry that have emerged since the new social history of the late-1960s. Witchcraft and
folk belief, religion and popular culture, the experience of women in colonial society, the
history of sexuality in early America, the development of slavery and the creation of
African American culture within that wrenching experience, the initiative of ordinary and
marginal people in the making of the Revolution—studies representing these and other
exciting developments in the scholarship of early American history are reviewed within
these pages. The works receive the sort of critical appraisal which could come only from
a master not only of the sources of colonial history, but of historical interpretation, an art
which has made Morgan such a major contributor to this field in his own right. He is
generous in praise where that is due, though he reserves his highest applause for the
massive modern editions of papers and works of those who made the history of early
America. He does not withhold criticism where that is due. In his review of The
American Jeremiad, for instance, Morgan observes how Sacvan Bercovitch “sweeps us
along with him so persuasively that we are scarcely aware that we are not dealing with
facts at all” (38). Morgan minces no words in his declaration that Michael Warner’s
selection of sermons for the Library of America’s American Sermons does not “meet the
description of ‘America’s best and most significant writing’” (273). He exposes the
contradiction at the heart of Orlando Patterson’s social critique of slavery’s persisting
consequences in commenting that Patterson’s “long-term goal of overcoming the coolpose
culture of the ghetto can scarcely be brought closer by giving it a respectable
ancestry it does not have.…In his dismissal of [nuclear] families among slaves…he
deprives Afro-Americans of a highly usable past” (120).
Morgan possesses a sure-footed sense of what constitutes a useable past—an
interpretation faithful to the witness of the evidence and aptly employed in analysis of
contemporary issues. The Genuine Article is sprinkled with nuggets of insight drawn
from his deep knowledge of the American past. He recommends the Puritans for their
superior understanding of “their own and all men’s vulnerability in ‘the core sense of
self’” (60), Franklin for the enduring “example of what Emerson called ‘a man thinking’”
(175), and the seventeenth and eighteenth century debates over the sovereignty of the
people for their salutary reminder that when we “suspend disbelief in such useful fictions
“altogether, we are ripe for tyranny” (224). Morgan misses a step on occasion, as when
he ventures to comment on recent American evangelicalism’s “theocratic morality” and
offers a premature lament for the sermon’s decline. A historian of American religion
might hope for a more nuanced treatment of evangelicals from so sensitive an interpreter