Rumor Has It

Rumors are the red-headed stepchildren of the historian’s profession. As Gregory Evans Dowd notes in the opening pages of this fascinating book, historians take pride in their fact-checking, documentation, and triangulation of evidence. Rumors belong to less responsible forms of reporting, like partisan political web sites, supermarket tabloids, and celebrity gossip magazines. But rumors are also a fundamental means by which humans collect and disseminate information along their social networks (say, for example, your garden-variety history department in a college or university) and therefore offer important lessons about how we construct group identities and determine who is included and excluded from them.

Dowd’s inspiration for taking rumors seriously comes from two giants among early twentieth-century historians. From Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft (1932), he borrows the notion that rumors develop on “a bruiting ground” (p. 3), where individuals join in a common task of trying to construct a plausible reality from incomplete information. (Bloch’s own inspiration in this regard came from his experiences on the front during World War I.) Like Georges Lefebvre in The Great Fear: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1932), Dowd is interested in uncovering the ideological assumptions that inspire and sustain rumors during times fraught with political and physical insecurity. Dowd also returns frequently to the insights of sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, whose experiences in a Japanese internment camp during World War II influenced his study of rumors as projections of one group’s perceptions of its own vulnerabilities and weaknesses onto an enemy other. Dowd and his scholarly predecessors all agree that rumors are far more than false or spurious information shared irresponsibly. Rather they emerge from “the thick loam of history, social structure, and experience” (p. 8) and are fruitful subjects of historical inquiry.

Dowd does his rumor-mongering along the early American frontier, over a period stretching from the early sixteenth century to the Jacksonian era. Covering such a broad geographic and chronological spectrum requires selectivity, and so Dowd alternates sections of “Longitudes” and “Episodes”—the former examining certain types of rumors over time and the latter offering case studies that illustrate the power of rumor in a specific time and place. The longitudinal themes concern the search for mineral wealth, sexual and racial violence, and disease transmission. The “Episodes” reconstruct the origins and reappearance of rumors related to these themes: alleged gold mines in southern Appalachia, sexual enslavement and deportation of Native Americans, tales of scalp-taking and scalp-purchasing during wartime, and the use of smallpox as a genocidal weapon. Some of these rumors are well-known enough to have already achieved folkloric status in American culture. Others are more obscure, and Dowd’s recovery of them allows us to see their place in broader patterns that have repeated themselves in U.S. history.

Dowd provides a taxonomy that is helpful but also slippery. Much of the book is spent in analyzing what Dowd’s subjects called “flying reports” (p. 1), the sort of inflammatory news that circulated in frontier regions without a clear source or official approval; this kind of incomplete and unsourced news had the potential to incite “rumor-panics” (p. 292) that could disrupt peace and lead to interracial violence. Dowd’s longitudinal approach also allows him to examine rumors that resurfaced in different generations or places yet shared a common narrative. These more universal and enduring rumors became “legends” that shaped historical consciousness (p. 11). A hoax was another type of rumor that used deliberate misinformation spread by an identifiable source to denigrate or incite violence toward an enemy. Dowd is less concerned with hoaxes, but he does devote a chapter to one from the Revolutionary era concerning the role of scalping in Patriot propaganda.

Some rumors seem inherently more intriguing than others, and that difference may account for why some get repeated in enough permutations to become legends. In this regard, Dowd does a fine job of reconstructing the centuries-long...