The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown

Contents

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p. vii-vii

acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

I wish to thank Professor Sydney J. Krause, general editor of The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown, for introducing me in the early 1990s to Brown’s historical writing, and being a source of scholarly support for so many years. I also want to express my gratitude to Institute for Bibliography and Editing at Kent State University, Special Collections at Bowdoin College Library, the Clifton Waller-Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia, the American Antiquarian...

introduction

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pp. xi-xix

After publishing his fourth volume of the American Register on May 20, 1809, Charles Brockden Brown struggled amid exhaustion and growing illness to produce his last volume, which concentrated on the impact of the Embargo, congressional debates, the Constitution, and what he called the “motives of human conduct.” 1 It was published in December 1809. On November 10 of that year, Brown...

Chapter 1: European and Colonial Traditions

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pp. 3-27

If Brown, as his contemporaries assert, had a capacity for “fancy” and “imagination” yet “patiently enquired . . . read, reflected, examined and compared, opposing facts and arguments,” it is worth investigating what exactly such traits meant in Brown’s time and how they relate to the idea that he “seemed more to write in the style of an historian of past ages, than the recorder of those passing occurrences...

Chapter 2: “Domestic History” and the Republican Novel

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pp. 28-68

Some of Brown’s earliest reflections on history and history writing may be found in his journal or notebook entries. Loose, mutilated page manuscripts like “Sample of Liberty of Conscience 1783,” which remark on the need to “unfold the page of history” and the history of the Protestant reformation, refer specifically to “Hume” and his “History of England,” suggesting that even as a young boy, Brown...

Chapter 3: Historical Representation in the Monthly Magazine and American Review and the Literary Magazine and American Register

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pp. 69-108

In The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment, Suzanne Gearhart remarks that the relationship between history and fiction is “not peripheral but rather the central question in the philosophy of history of that age.” She argues that while differences have metamorphosed into “a modern opposition between history and literature,” it was common in the...

Chapter 4: The Historical Sketches—and “A Government, Ecclesiastical and Civil"...

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pp. 109-133

Although not published in his lifetime, Brown’s “Sketches of a History of Carsol” and “Sketches of a History of the Carrils and Ormes”—some nine, maybe ten, fragments of historical fiction over 100,000 words that detail the history of an English family from ancient times to Brown’s own—qualify, like Madison’s and Jefferson’s writings, as an exercise in secular liberalism and freethinking.1 An objective correlative to the era’s turbulent political climate, Brown’s historical sketches imaginatively...

Chapter 5: Empire and the “Annals of Europe”

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pp. 134-178

If Brown’s historical sketches and various periodical reviews, philosophical essays, and extracts prepared him for the practical aspects of history writing, his serial publication of the “Annals of Europe and America” in the American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807–09) was a natural extension of his theoretical forays into history. His coverage of the Napoleonic...

Chapter 6: American Exceptionalism and the “Annals of America”

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pp. 179-224

In his landmark study The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1993), historian Gordon S. Wood writes that Americans typically have thought of the American Revolution as a conservative, almost nonviolent affair that was concerned primarily, if not exclusively, with political inequities and constitutional rights; if the revolution is measured by the number of people killed and the level of misery and...

Chapter 7: Constitutional Limits—and “Liberalism”

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pp. 225-258

Daniel Edwards Kennedy observes that Benjamin Pollard’s review in the Boston Ordeal, was a “puzzling mixture of censure and praise probably due to the political rancour” of the day.¹ The review was of a Federalist or conservative orientation and “praised the intentions of Brown but found that when he departed from being a chronicler he drew conclusions that were not only dangerous but ‘lapses of correctness and deviations from authority,’ especially in the study of the affair of the...

Epilogue

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pp. 259-264

On January 9, 2006, the cover of Newsweek read, “How Much Power Should They Have?” and made allusion to the “imperial presidency” of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their consolidation of military, economic, and political resources after September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was destroyed by Islamic militants headed by Osama bin Laden. The resultant debates over the second Iraq war have focused on the second Bush administration’s use—or misuse—of intelligence...

Notes

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pp. 265-321

Index

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pp. 322-332