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Reviewed by:
  • Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier by Gregory Evans Dowd, and: Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo
  • Ann Marie Plane (bio)
Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier
gregory evans dowd
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015
391 pp.
Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America
russ castronovo
New York: Oxford University Press, 2014
247 pp.

These two books tackle the problem of communication in the worlds of early North America. Each sheds light on the complexities of [End Page 274] these processes, even as it engages the historicity of such processes with less success. Such an errand into the wilderness could hardly be timelier in the post-Trump era of fake news sites, Facebook echo chambers, and a heightened awareness of media manipulation as a tool of power. It is unfortunate, therefore, that each book stumbles in its attempt to deliver on its promising conception.

Gregory Evans Dowd offers a persuasive opening chapter on the cultural importance of rumor. Reading along, I wondered how it could be that historians have so thoroughly neglected this topic. Dowd reaches back to the foundational text of many a historiography class, Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, and finds in the work of Bloch, and in that of his contemporary Georges LeFebvre, a close attention to false stories, and how, particularly in wartime contexts, such stories influence consequential actions. Dowd draws lightly on the work of sociologists, particularly Tamotsu Shibutani, remarking on their attention to how rumors gain power and credibility. After introducing these various currents, however, Dowd pulls back from advancing any particular conclusions regarding the role of rumor-cum-legend in shaping historical memory. Instead, Dowd asserts that his work "mainly seeks to investigate the power and significance that literally groundless rumors and legends held in their own day … even if some of those tales persist and distort history" (13). His work, then, relies on "examin[ing] a selection of unverified tales told by colonizers and Native Americans that punctuated eastern North American history from the sixteenth century to about 1850" (2).

Dowd focuses sometimes on the Southeast, sometimes on the eastern woodlands area of North America; he identifies two key bookends for his tale, beginning with sixteenth-century Spanish rumors of gold in the region and ending with Georgia's discovery of gold in Cherokee country in the 1820s. In between, Dowd organizes the narrative around large-scale "longitudinal" tales in parts 1, 3, and 5 (things like gold, small pox, slavery) and "episodic" tales—more particular stories of specific rumors and their fates in both frontier and metropole in parts 2, 4, and 6. Dowd eschews analysis of the precise nature of the social context in which rumors live. He notes only that "[s]ince the early twentieth century we have called this medium, variously, worldview, collective consciousness, ideology, mentality, discourse, episteme, expectation, and even hegemonic discourse," noting that he prefers to "sidestep the semantic fray, exploring the stuff of the rumors and legends themselves" (11). In some respects, he has to [End Page 275] do this, since the capacious chronological framework of his book encompasses several arguably discrete social milieux, each of which would likely have its own media, patterns, and procedures. Dowd's investigation stretches from the first Spanish entradas of the sixteenth century to the playoff systems among British, French, Spanish, and native power centers in the eighteenth, to the crushing expulsions of the Jacksonian era during the United States' early Republic period. Casting such a broad net, however, makes it very hard to offer any systematic analysis of what cultural preconceptions ground some false stories, enabling them to gain lasting traction, while others disappear on a fickle wind.

One might expect, in Dowd's narratives of the particular ("episodes"), these problems could be overcome by maintaining a much tighter focus on the origin, dissemination, and ultimate fate of the frontier's "flying tales." This does not happen in every such treatment. One of the more useful examples, however, comes in his discussion of Benjamin Franklin's hoax, circulated as useful disinformation in April 1782, through...

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