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CHARLES ROLLIN AND UNIVERSAL HISTORY IN AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2018

MARK W. GRAHAM
MARK W. GRAHAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Grove City College E-mail: mwgraham@gcc.edu
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Abstract

Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some cool village, the large farmhouse, with its clean-swept grassy yard … In the family “keeping-room,” as it is termed, he will remember the staid, respectable old bookcase, with its glass doors, where Rollin's History, Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Scott's Family Bible, stand side by side in decorous order, with multitudes of other books, equally solemn and respectable.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston, MA, 1852), 226

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 325 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Gillis Harp, Darryl Hart, Sarina Gruver Moore, Ian MacGregor Morris, Nicholas Popper, Josephine Quinn, Rebecca Rine, and Caroline Winterer for their advice and critiques. Thanks also to Kiersten Jones and Andrew R. Smith for excellent research assistance.

References

1 See Gummere, Richard, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1963)Google Scholar; Trevor Colbourn, H., The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1965)Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar; Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969)Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar; Reinhold, Meyer, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984)Google Scholar; Richard, Carl J., The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994)Google Scholar; Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Winterer, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar; Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, 2007).

2 There exists no full-scale study of his influence in America, and index and word searches of all of the books above produce almost nothing on Rollin. Gribbin, William, “Rollin's Histories and American Republicanism,” William and Mary Quarterly 29/4 (1972), 611–22Google Scholar; and Walch, Peter S., “Charles Rollin and Early Neoclassicism,” Art Bulletin 49/2 (1967), 123–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, remain the only article-length studies on Rollin's influence in America. Note that the massive The Classical Tradition edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, 2010) mentions him only once, at 447.

3 On Rollin's American readership see Winterer, Caroline, “The Big Picture: The Ancient Mediterranean in Early America,” Common Reading: The Journal of Early American Life 8/4 (2008), at www.common-place-archives.org/vol-08/no-04/readingGoogle Scholar; Steele Commager, Henry, “The American Enlightenment and the Ancient World: A Study in Paradox,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series 83 (1971), 3–15Google Scholar, at 7; Gribbin, “Rollin's Histories,” 621. See also Lundberg, David and May, Henry F., “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28/2 (1976), 262–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, particularly 268.

4 Gribbin, “Rollin's Histories,” 621.

5 I will be using the term “classical” here in the common way it is used in modern scholarship on the ancient world to designate Greece and Rome in the periods specified above. See Hardie, Philip, “Classicism,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 2016)Google Scholar. See also Porter, James I., “What Is Classical about Classical Antiquity? Eight Propositions,” Arion 13/1 (2005), 27–61Google Scholar, particularly 28–9. On the common problem of restricting the term “classical” to “certain periods of the Greek and Roman past” see Winterer, Caroline, “Model Empire, Lost City: Ancient Carthage and the Science of Politics in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 67/1 (2010), 3–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 4–6.

6 Rollin later started a Roman history, unfinished at his death. It was published in English as The Roman History from the Foundation of Rome to the Battle of Actium: That is, The End of the Commonwealth by Mr. Rollin (Dublin, 1740). It appears in far fewer colonial and early Republic libraries than Ancient History; see Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader,” especially the graphs.

7 Witschi-Bernz, Astrid, “Main Trends in Historical-Method Literature: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” History and Theory 12 (1972), 51–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 53. See also Griggs, Tamara, “Universal History from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment,” Modern Intellectual History 4/2 (2007), 219–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Suzanne Marchand notes that “one might rightly call the eighteenth century the great age of universal history”; see her “Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research,” in Lorraine Daston, ed., Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures (Chicago, 2017), 137–58, at 140.

8 The universal-history genre focused on Near Eastern and Mediterranean polities, especially those mentioned in the Old Testament.

9 Ross, Dorothy, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 89/4 (1984), 909–28, at 910CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Most of the studies laid out in the first footnote above use the term “ancient history” more or less synonymously with classical history.

11 See Winterer, Culture of Classicism.

12 For a brief overview with bibliography see Suzanne Marchand, “Professionalization of Classics,” in Grafton, Most, and Settis, The Classical Tradition, 779–82.

13 Ibid., 780.

14 Ibid., 779.

15 See Norwood Brigance, William, ed., A History and Criticism of Public Address, 3 vols. (New York, 1943)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Herman, “Charles Rollin: Historian of Eloquence,” Western Speech 22 (1958), 88–94Google Scholar.

16 Rollin's international influence awaits investigation and could prove a rewarding study. The other languages include Italian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and, later, Bengali; see Ceserani, Giovanna, “Narrative, Interpretation, and Plagiarism in Mr. Robertson's 1778 ‘History of Ancient Greece’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66/3 (2005), 413–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 419. Rollin's work shaped Neohellenic consciousness in Greece, where the work in modern Greek translation was a major reading in Greek schools; see Kitromilides, Paschalis M., Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 71–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 75, 79. It also inspired a Latin American revolutionary—see “Dr. Francia, The Dictator of Paraguay,” in Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 20 (1832), 387–93, at 388—and was commented on by Francisco de Miranda during his travels in the early United States. de Miranda, Francisco, The New Democracy in America: Travels of Francisco de Miranda in the United States, 1783–84, ed. Ezell, John S. and trans. Wood, Judson P. (Norman, 1963), 115Google Scholar.

17 Rollin, Charles, Traité des études de la manière d'enseigner et d’étudier les Belles-Lettres, par rapport à l'espirit et au coeur, 4 vols. (Paris, 1726–8)Google Scholar; translated as The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, or, An Introduction to Languages, Poetry, Rhetoric, History, Moral Philosophy, Physicks, &c (London, 1734), endorsed by Benjamin Franklin in “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania” [Oct. 1749], cited from Founders Online, at https://founders.archives.gov. This work also argued for the use of vernaculars, rather than Latin, in education. On Rollin's role in introducing the term “belles lettres” into English see Howell, Wilbur Samuel, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, 1971), 529–35Google Scholar.

18 Unless otherwise noted, I cite throughout here Charles Rollin, The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians, and Grecians, 11th edn, 8 vols. (London: W. Otridge and Son, et al., 1808). The earliest English edition of a part of the work appears to be a volume on Egypt printed in London in 1730 (“Printed and sold by A. Dodd, at the Peacock, without Temple-Bar”). Parts of the work were published thereafter in English, even ahead of the complete French edition. The earliest complete English edition appears to be that of J. and P. Knapton, 1734–6; the work ultimately went through about eighty editions and separate printings in English.

19 See Fäy, Bernard, L'espirit revolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis (Paris, 1925)Google Scholar, 26, 143, 307. Fäy notes that Rollin helped inspire the Order of Cincinnatus and the use of the term “senate” for the American legislative house. See Mumford Jones, Howard, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology 28/4 (1931), 767–83Google Scholar, at 770.

20 See Franklin, “Idea of the English School” [7 Jan. 1751] (Founders Online).

21 See the library holdings lists in Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader”; and Edgar, Walter, “Some Popular Books in Colonial South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 72/3 (1971), 174–8Google Scholar.

22 Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader.”

23 Charles Rollin Kennedy (b. 1806), Charles Rollin Gibbs (b. 1813), Charles Rollin Gorman (b. 1817), Charles Rollin Head (b. c.1820), Charles Rollin Pradt (b. 1820), Charles Rollin Buckalew (b. 1821), Charles Rollin McCulloch (b. 1825), Charles Rollin Post (b. 1826), Charles Rollin Burdick (b. 1828), Charles Rollin Miller (b. 1834), Charles Rollin Otis (b. 1835), Charles Rollin Green (b. 1836), Edward Charles Rollin Walker (listed in the Boston Public Latin School 1838), Charles Rollin McCord (b. 1841), Charles Rollin Brainerd (b. 1840), Charles Rollin Woolwine (b. 1844), Charles Rollin Seymour (b. 1845).

24 For further biographical information see Charles Gaudin, Albert, The Educational Views of Charles Rollin (New York, 1939)Google Scholar, Chapter I, “Rollin, the Man, and His Life.”

25 Charles Rollin, Oeuvres complètes, 30 vols. (Paris, 1819).

26 On the important political role of Jansenism (and Augustinianism) in eighteenth-century discussions see Van Kley, Dale K., “Religion in the Age of ‘Patriot’ Reforms,” Journal of Modern History 80/2 (2008), 252–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Turner, James, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, 2014), 201CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the influence of German Altertumswissenchaft in America see esp. 178–83.

28 Cooper, Thomas, “Origin of the Homeric Poems,” American Quarterly Review, 2/4 (1827), 307–37Google Scholar. For more on Thomas Cooper's authorship of this piece, with implication far beyond “the Homeric Question,” see below.

29 Marchand, “Professionalization of Classics,” 780.

30 On which see Kuklick, Bruce, Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880–1930 (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar.

31 See Turner, Philology, 192–7.

32 Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 22. I have found only a single example of this sort of reading before the 1820s—see Chapone, Hester, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (Philadelphia, 1786), 131Google Scholar, 140–41. Chapone considers the details of “Grecian and Roman History” more important than Assyrian and Egyptian. Yet there are abundant references to readers starting with vol. 1, as noted throughout.

33 John Quincy Adams, 18 Feb. 1822 (Founders Online).

34 John Quincy Adams, 21 March 1813 (Founders Online).

35 Giovanna Ceserani suggests that while Rollin's work “paid homage to the tradition of universal history,” the bulk of the volumes are dedicated to “ancient Greece”; see her “Narrative, Interpretation, and Plagiarism,” 417. In terms of coverage, though, the “Grecian” sections address the Hellenistic—not classical—worlds.

36 See Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar, chap. 5. Before this time, Athenian democracy, like all democracy, was generally viewed negatively. See also Winterer, Culture of Classicism, chap. 2; and Turner, Philology, 200.

37 Ian MacGregor Morris, “Navigating the Grotesque; or, Rethinking Greek Historiography,” in James Moore, Ian MacGregor Morris, and Andrew J. Bayliss, eds., Reinventing History: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History (London, 2008), 247–90, at 247.

38 Ibid., 287.

39 See Ross, “Historical Consciousness,” 913; and Nathan Hatch, Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, 1977), chaps. 2, 3.

40 Commager, “The American Enlightenment,” 7.

41 Peter Gay, Gerald J. Cavanaugh, and Victor G. Wexler, Historians at Work, vol. 2 (New York, 1972), 221.

42 Bradstreet, Anne, “The Four Monarchies,” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, Jeannine (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 73–178Google Scholar.

43 One can trace it earlier to Polybius, himself very popular among America's Founders. The specific genre I am treating here develops in late antique and medieval discourse.

44 See Augustine's On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, 22 (“Of the Six Ages of the World”) : (1) Creation to Flood, (2) to Abraham, (3) to David, (4) to the Babylonian (Captivity, (5) to Christ, and (6) to the Apocalypse.

45 See Theodor Ernst Mommsen, “Petrarch's Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’,” in Eugene F. Rice Jr, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Ithaca, 1959), 106–29, at 124; see also his “Orosius and Augustine,” in ibid., 325–48.

46 Hill, Christopher, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford, 1997), 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 See Popper, Nicholas, Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago, 2012), 26Google Scholar.

48 Here citing Charles Rollin, The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres; an Introduction to Languages, Poetry, Rhetorick, History, Moral Philosophy, Physicks, &c., 7th edn, vol. 4 (London: W. Strahan, 1770), 469.

49 Flanagan, Thomas, “Machiavelli and History: A Note on the Proemium to Discourses II,” Renaissance and Reformation 8/2 (1971), 79–81Google Scholar, at 80.

50 Scholder, Klaus, The Birth of Modern Critical Theory: Origins and Problems of Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1990), 70Google Scholar, 73. See also Stanford Reid, W., “The Four Monarchies of Daniel in Reformation Historiography,” Historical Reflections 8/1 (1981), 115–23Google Scholar.

51 Cited in Marchand, “Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research,” 140.

52 Benjamin Franklin, “The Colonists Advocate” (Jan. 1770) (Founders Online), 1, 4.

53 To John Adams from William Tudor Sr, 9 July 1789; see also Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 17 June 1812 (Founders Online).

54 Rollin, Ancient History, 2: 229.

55 Ibid., 8: 229. Although he would deal with the fourth, Rome, specifically in his massive work on Rome, the final chapters of Ancient History trace the rise of Rome within the Hellenistic East.

56 Ibid., 5: 114. The precise identification of these four monarchies could vary among authors, and even in Rollin's own telling. Rollin identifies them as Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman (ibid., 2: 94), but then at 2: 230 he writes, “it is also agreed, that these four monarchies were those of the Babylonians, of the Persians and Medes united, of the Macedonians, and of the Romans.” In one footnote he says that some interpreters put the “kings of Syria and Egypt, Alexander's successors,” in the place of Rome (ibid.). Note that Orosius himself proposed Carthage in the place of Persia; this identification did not catch on widely, but Rollin nonetheless dedicates a large section specifically to Carthage. Marginal notes for the Book of Daniel in the Geneva Bible, the most common in Bradstreet's America, identified the Four Monarchies as Chaldean, Persian, Macedonian, Roman. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World had Assyrian for Chaldean, as it was common to interchange the terms Assyrian, Babylonian, and Chaldean. Popper notes that Joseph Scaliger had “disentangled Babylonia and Assyria and pronounced that these two appellatives referred to two distinct kingdoms” (Popper, Walter Ralegh's History of the World, 114), but some conflation persisted.

57 Tobias Lear, Address at Harvard, Houghton Library Collections, MS AM 1776, Harvard.

58 Whelpley, Samuel, Lectures on Ancient History (New York, 1816), 23Google Scholar.

59 Samuel Whelpley, Compend of History from the Earliest Times, vol. 1 (Boston, 1821), 105.

60 Momigliano, Arnaldo, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990), 50–51Google Scholar.

61 Cited from Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theory, 71; see also 69.

62 Quoted in Grafton, Anthony, “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History and Theory 14/2 (1975), 79–81, at 159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Smail, Dan, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110/5 (2005), 1337–61, at 1343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Popper, Walter Ralegh's History of the World, 119.

65 See Rollin, Ancient History, 1: xxvi, 2: 58, 3: 112, 8: 236.

66 Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 135.

67 See Numbers, Ronald L., “‘The Most Important Biblical Discovery of Our Time’: William Henry Green and the Demise of Ussher's Chronology, Church History 69/2 (2000), 257–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Turner, Philology, 300–1.

68 Augustine, City of God, II.xix.9–10. See also Popper, Walter Ralegh's History of the World, 74, on Raleigh's Augustinian understanding of God's providence.

69 See Mommsen, “Augustine and Orosius,” 343; and Theodor Ernst Mommsen, “Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress,” in Rice, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 265–98, especially 280–82, on Augustine's rejection of the do ut des principle.

70 Rollin, Ancient History, 1: viii. The words in brackets do not appear in the edition cited here, but do so in many important editions of the work; e.g. Charles Rollin, The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians, and Grecians, fifth edn, vol. 1 (London: J. and F. Rivington, R. Baldwin, et al., 1768), iii.

71 Rollin, Ancient History, 8: 230.

72 Ibid., 4: 269, 271.

73 Ibid., 5: 114.

74 “St Austin” is the name Rollin's English translator often uses for St Augustine.

75 Ibid., 2: 473.

76 Ibid., 3: 210.

77 John Adams to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 1807 (Founders Online).

78 Miranda, The New Democracy in America, 115.

79 See Morgan, Edmund S., The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (Chapel Hill, 1962), 393Google Scholar; and Gribbin, “Rollin's Histories,” 613.

80 Gross, Robert A. and Kelley, Mary, eds., History of the Book in America, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill, 2010), 620Google Scholar. Rollin was in the Harvard Library by at least 1774. See Robson, David W., Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution (Westport, 1985), 74Google Scholar. Note that vols. 1 through 3 would have included decidedly non-classical elements.

81 Cowles, Julia, The Diaries of Julia Cowles: A Connecticut Record, 1797–1803 (New Haven, 1931)Google Scholar.

82 Callender Sansom, Hannah, The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Klepp, Susan E. and Wulf, Karin (Ithaca, 2010), 145–7Google Scholar.

83 Sedgwick, Catharine M., The Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. Dewey, Mary E. (New York, 1872), 45Google Scholar.

84 See Montgomery, Travis, “The Near East,” in Hayes, Kevin J., ed., Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge, 2013), 53–62, at 53Google Scholar.

85 Bray, Robert, Reading with Lincoln (Carbondale, 2010), 50–51Google Scholar.

86 Rollin, Ancient History, 4: 366, 2: 267, 368.

87 Ibid., 5: 395–6.

88 Ibid., 1: 109.

89 Ibid., 4: 66.

90 Ibid., 4: 67.

91 Ibid., 6: 115.

92 Ibid., 5: 335, 6: 511, 1: clxi.

93 Ibid., 6: 155.

94 Ibid., 3: 211.

95 See Ross, “Historical Consciousness.”

96 Rollin, Ancient History, 1: 31, 55; 7: 306, 2: 358, 371. See Orrells, Daniel, Bhambra, Gurminder K., and Roynon, Tessa, eds., African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford, 2011), 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 86, for Rollin's appearance in the “Black Athena” debate.

97 Rollin, Ancient History, 2: 358.

98 Ibid., 2: 326, 5: 255.

99 Ibid., 2: 316.

100 To John Adams from William Cunningham, 9 Dec. 1809 (Founders Online).

101 John Adams, 29 March 1823 (Founders Online).

102 To John Adams from Benjamin Rush, 24 Feb. 1790 (Founders Online).

103 Burstein, Stanley M., “The Classics and the American Republic,” History Teacher 30/1 (1996), 29–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 35.

104 Rollin, Ancient History, 1: viii.

105 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, parts 2 and 3.

106 Ross, “Historical Consciousness,” 912.

107 To James Madison from John Madison, 18 Nov. 1803 (Founders Online).

108 John Quincy Adams, 7 and 21 March 1813 (Founders Online).

109 John Quincy Adams, 21 March, 1813 (Founders Online).

110 Abigail Adams to John Adams, 19 Aug. 1774 (Founders Online).

111 Rollin, Ancient History, 2: 337.

112 Ibid., 5: 200, 3: 163, 7: 307, etc.

113 Ibid., 2: 448. Rollin fairly often weighs in on the famous “ancients-versus-moderns” debate, but his views resist easy categorization.

114 Ibid., 2: 473.

115 Ibid., 3: 159–60.

116 Quoted in Lawson, Russell M., Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap and the American Revolution (New York, 2015), 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

117 Ibid., 204.

118 Rollin, Ancient History, 5: 102.

119 Ibid., 2: 134.

120 Ibid., 2: 221.

121 Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, 26 Dec. 1783 (Founders Online).

122 See also Lear, Address at Harvard, for further praise of the simplicity of the Persians.

123 Rollin, Ancient History, 2: 236–41.

124 II Chronicles 36:23, Ezra 1:2.

125 To John Adams from William Cunningham, 18 April 1811 (Founders Online).

126 On the popularity of Xenophon's Cyropaedia see Ray, John, “Was George Washington an American Cyrus? The Founder in Xenophon's ‘Education of Cyrus’ in American Practice,” Mediterranean Studies, 15 (2006), 151–77Google Scholar, esp. 152.

127 Broome, Edwin Cornelius, A Historical and Critical Discussion of College Admission Requirements (New York, 1903)Google Scholar, 41, 43, 46, 63.

128 McGroarty, William Buckner, “The Oration of the Honorable Robert Goodloe Harper, February 22, 1810,” in McGroarty, ed., Washington, First in the Hearts of His Countrymen: Orations by Men Who Had Known Washington (Richmond, 1932), 155–72, at 159Google Scholar.

129 Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody, 23 Feb. 1800 (Founders Online), original emphasis.

130 Lear, Address at Harvard.

131 To John Adams from William Cunningham, 18 April 1811 (Founders Online).

132 Sedgwick, The Life and Letters, 45.

133 John Adams, 8 March 1754 (Founders Online).

134 American Lady's Preceptor (Baltimore, 1811), 293.

135 Van Dyke, Rachel, To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810–1811, ed. McMahon, Lucia and Schriver, Deborah (Philadelphia, 2000)Google Scholar, 45, 246.

136 On the relative value ascribed to reading novels versus history at this time see Baym, Nina, “Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Toward a Narrative of American Women Writers Writing History,” Critical Inquiry 18/1 (1991), 22–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 26.

137 Van Dyke, To Read My Heart, 7.

138 Ibid., 44. On reading this and similar passages in context see Lucia McMahon, “‘We Should Share Equally’: Gender, Education, and Romance in the Journal of Rachel Van Dyke,” in Van Dyke, To Read My Heart, 309–39, at 312.

139 Van Dyke, To Read My Heart, 44; see also 246.

140 Forrester, Francis, Dick Duncan: The Story of a Boy Who Loved Mischief and How He Was Cured of His Evil Habit (New York, 1860)Google Scholar. See the analysis of this work in Parille, Ken, Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and “The Boy-Problem” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Knoxville, 2009), 88–91Google Scholar.

141 Forrester, Dick Duncan, front matter, n.p.

142 Ibid., 92.

143 Ibid., 97.

144 Alger, Horatio, Bound to Rise; or, Harry Walton's Motto (Chicago, 1873), 121–3Google Scholar.

145 Ibid., 121–3.

146 See Ross, “Historical Consciousness,” 913; and Hatch, Sacred Cause of Liberty, chaps. 2 and 3.

147 Quoted in Gay, Cavanaugh, and Wexler, Historians at Work, 220; this story also appears in Ceserani, “Narrative, Interpretation, and Plagiarism,” 413.

148 Alderman, Ralph M., “Contributors to the American Quarterly Review, 1827–1833,” Studies in Bibliography, 14 (1961), 163–4Google Scholar.

149 “Origin of the Homeric Poems,” American Quarterly Review 2/4 (1827), 307–37.

150 “Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, 1 March 1819,” in Cabell, Nathaniel, Early History of the University of Virginia, as Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell (Richmond, 1856)Google Scholar, 169.

151 Thomas Cooper, 15 Sept. 1814 (Founders Online).

152 The Latin reads, “Old women's tales, and all the lies Greeks tell as history.” From the comma to the end this is a quotation from Juvenal, Satire, 10.174–75. The first two words could come from multiple sources, including the Vulgate New Testament (I Timothy 4:7).

153 Thomas Cooper, 17 March 1824 (Founders Online).

154 See Thomas Cooper, M.D., On the Connection between Geology and the Pentateuch, in a Letter to Professor Silliman (Boston, 1837), 79. In passing, Cooper identified himself as the author of the American Quarterly Review article: “For the utter uncertainty of all history previous to 500 years before Christ, see a Dissertation on the Homeric poems in a review of Wolf's Prolegomena by Dr. Cooper in Walsh's American Quarterly Review for Dec. 1827. V. 2. p. 307.”

155 “Origin of the Homeric Poems,” 313, original emphasis.

156 Although he claims to only be talking about “profane history,” Cooper's skepticism toward generally accepted views of Scripture—particularly the Old Testament—at his time were well known. On this, including his trial for heresy, see Malone, Dumas, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper (New Haven, 1926), 353–7Google Scholar.

157 “Origin of the Homeric Poems,” 316. He likewise dismisses “Hindoo” and Chinese history.

158 Albert Picket, “Ancient History, Condensed from Shepherd,” in John W. Picket, ed., Western Academician and Journal of Education and Science (Cincinnati, 1837–8), 178–9.

159 Coxe, Margaret, The Young Lady's Companion, and Token of Affection: In a Series of Letters by Margaret Coxe (Columbus, 1846)Google Scholar, 122.

160 James Bell's introduction “Memoir of Rollin,” cited from Charles Rollin, The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians, and Macedonians (Cincinnati: Applegate and Co., 1854), 13–18, at 16.

161 William Milligan Sloan, “The Science of History in the Nineteenth Century,” in Howard J. Rogers, ed., Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, vol. 2 (Boston, 1906), 23–68, at 26.

162 For example, Coxe, Young Lady's Companion, 343; Alger, Bound to Rise, 123; Erastus Otis Haven, Autobiography (New York, 1883), 50 (Rollin's “Universal History”); Rowe Schoolcraft, Henry, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Conditions and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia, 1851)Google Scholar, 36; Sloane, “Science of History,” 26.

163 King Lord, John, Atlas of the Geography and History of the Ancient World (Boston, 1902)Google Scholar.

164 Schulten, Susan, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 22.

165 The original title was A System of Universal History in Perspective (Hartford, 1835). By the next decade, the book had acquired the title it would hold into the 1880s, with various publishers.

166 Emma Willard, Universal History in Perspective, 12th edn (New York, 1854), iii.

167 Baym, Nina, “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard's Rhetoric of History,” American Quarterly 43/1 (1991), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 6.

168 Ibid., 4. On Willard's millennialism see also Hall, Mark David, “Beyond Self-Interest: The Political Theory and Practice of Evangelical Women in Antebellum America,” Journal of Church and State 44/3 (2002), 477–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 491–2.

169 Writing shortly after Willard's death, Lord, John, The Life of Emma Willard (New York, 1873)Google Scholar, 318, says of the work, “I have no data, from letters, of the amount of sales of the ‘Universal History.’ Of course, there would be less demand for such a work, whatever be its merits, than for a history of the United States.”

170 Willard, Universal History, 494.

171 The only possible rival would be Edward Gibbon, but Gibbon's readership was always far less broad and diverse.

172 Christian, David, “The Return of Universal History,” History and Theory 49/4 (2010), 6–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 7, 9.

173 The best sellers I have in mind include Morris, Ian, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; and Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

174 Griggs, “Universal History,” 247.