Editor’s Note

Four hundred years after the establishment of Plymouth Colony on Wôpanâak homelands, and four years into the most destructive US presidency of my lifetime, early Americanists are not only poised to remember; perhaps more importantly, we are newly attuned to how memory can distort the pasts that make for presents and futures. Fittingly, the Society of Early Americanists conference this summer is called “What Does It Mean to Remember?” (for details, visit http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/sea2020/). It takes place in Exeter this June, coinciding with the quadri-centennial of the Mayflower’s launch. Like the conference, a forthcoming special issue of this journal called “Reframing 1620,” edited by Katherine Grandjean and Sarah Schuetze, makes clear in its title alone the exigency of coming to terms with past acts of recall, even as its gerund implies that no reframing can be the last.

As if to anticipate these events, memory as a constitutive act seeps through the pages of this issue. Two essays in particular make arguments in which they who remember figure at least as prominently as those who are remembered. As its title suggests, Carra Glatt’s “‘To Perpetuate Her Name’: Appropriation and Autobiography in Margaretta Matilda Odell’s Memoir of Phillis Wheatley” is first and foremost about Odell, who, as an unmarried woman confined to an insane asylum for decades, wrote into Wheatley’s life an extrafamilial same-sex solidarity she herself lacked and yearned for. In a similar mode, John Hay’s “The Limits of Recovery: The Failure of James Gates Percival” attends to how a poet most of us don’t remember had his five minutes of fame only to become a laughingstock and, eventually, a nonentity. Now that digital archives have made his work available again, we must ask: Why, and how, should such a career be commemorated? Both of these articles, I hope, sensitize readers to how their own complex processes of recall inform the narratives they create. (David J. Carlson’s joint review of Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War and Christine M. DeLucia’s Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast extends this discussion yet further.) What, indeed, does it mean to remember?

John Demos’s “Invention” for this issue, “Reenacting an Early American Life: Fiction as History,” could not be more apropos. At the risk of going to an extreme Demos might not, I would suggest that Adonijah Bidwell’s life is not the only one reenacted here. Cannot Demos himself, given his many influential publications on the era, be said to have led an “early American life”? (To be clear, Professor Demos, we are not talking about chronology here; we are talking about knowledge.) Demos “reenacts” that life here in two ways. First, he adds another piece to it: a “fictional history” of a little-known eighteenth-century Massachusetts pastor who “committed nothing to print,” though he did put pen to paper. Second, he frames two imagined portions of this real individual’s nonextant and possibly nonexistent diary inside a personal narrative regarding one historian’s changing beliefs about the relationship between “cold, hard realities” and narrative possibility. Discordant synonyms for the act of remembering float to the surface of the afterword: amanuensis, projection, distillation, compress, modifies, distorts—and, above all, empathy. It is my hope that throughout this fraught anniversary in our field and beyond, this single word helps make sense of all the others.

Rather than “distort” the remaining contributions to this issue into a meditation on the act of remembering, let me briefly attend to why each one deserves to be read on its own merits. In “The Sachem and the Minister: Questions, Answers, and Genre Formation in the New England Missionary Project,” Marie Balsley Taylor shows how “the spiritual question,” or postsermon Q&A between English authors and potential Indigenous converts, was informed by Indigenous treaty-making practices. Her essay focuses on the first such recorded exchange, between John Eliot and the Massachusett sachem Cutshamekin, which occurred in 1646. Nearly two hundred years later, according to Sarah Klotz in “Pictograph as...