May 20, 2004

History undergraduates go toe-to-toe with leading scholars

In an unusual interdisciplinary course, Northwestern undergraduates are in essence doing high-level graduate work in preparation for thoughtful interaction with the scholars at the conference, “The Language of Rights During the Age of the American Revolution,” that will take place May 21 and 22.

This engraving, Resistance to the Stamp Act, depicts an angry Boston crowd burning a pile of stamps in resistance of the Stamp Act of 1765. It is noteworthy that the artist included women and an African-American among the protesters.

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Developing a critical vocabulary and historical understanding so that they can hold their own intellectually, the students are required to attend all sessions of the conference and to write papers appraising the papers of international scholars who include Pulitzer Prize winners.

“This course has rejuvenated me as a teacher,” said T. H. Breen, William Smith Mason Professor of American History and creator of the course and conference. “Rather than simply reading history books, the students immerse themselves in primary sources — in newspapers, pamphlets and philosophic texts from the 18th century. They continually challenge the status quo as well as each other and provide important linkages that bring home their points.”

An authority on the culture and politics of the early Atlantic world, Breen has written six major books, including “The Market-place of Revolution: How Con-sumer Politics Shaped American Independence.” Featured in a February New York Times article, that book and his forthcoming book, “The Collapse of an American Empire,” explore a question that most historians have taken for granted.

That is: how did Americans, whose separate and often competing histories seemed to have conspired against the formation of a new nation, develop over a relatively short period of time a self-conscious commitment to shared principles and strategic goals that energized resistance? The answer, as outlined in the “The Marketplace of Revo-lution,” is the “most original interpretation of how the American Revolution happened to appear in the last 50 years,” according to Joseph J. Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Founding Brothers.”

Considering the scholarship of Breen and the other eminent scholars who will gather at the conference, the students’ tasks indeed seem daunting.

"This course has rejuvenated me as a teacher." — T.H. Breen

Alan Ryan, Warden and Tutor in Political Philosophy, New College, Oxford Univer-sity, will open the conference with a lecture, titled “The Harmonizing Sentiments of the Day: Rights Talk from Jefferson to Godwin,” at 4 p.m. Friday, May 21, in Harris Hall (a reception in Harris, Room 108, will follow at 6 p.m.). On Saturday, May 22, a series of panels will commence at 9 a.m. and conclude at 5:30 p.m. (A discussion among audience and panelists will follow.)

The other scholars include Gordon Wood, Alva O. Way Professor of History, Brown University; Jack Rakove, Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Stanford University; Hermann Wellenreuther, professor of history, Georg-August University, Goettingen; James T. Kloppenberg, David Woods Kemper Professor of American History; Philip Hamburger, John P. Wilson Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School; Christopher Brown, assistant professor of history, Rutgers University; and Rosemarie Zagarri, professor of history, George Mason University.

Michael Chanin, a Weinberg College sophomore who is enrolled in the course, said “Professor Breen, who is known as one of Northwestern’s best writing professors, has raised the level of our writing and by extension our critical analysis. He has broken down the barrier between students and faculty by showing us that our ability to think about history is comparable – if certainly not as deep – as the historians everyone is reading. In the process, we are getting a fabulous sneak peak at the field and what our futures could hold.”

The scholars as well as the students are addressing central questions about the theory that the philosopher John Locke laid out in his “Second Treatise on Government.” Basically, he argued that under certain circumstances in which rulers are totally unresponsive to their constituencies, people have a right to overturn their governments and redesign new ones.

“But Locke was very vague about just what rights people had and about what situation would warrant such bold and desperate acts by the people,” said Breen. “People during revolutionary times were struggling with exactly what rights they should expect of the government and under what circumstances they should rise up and resist authority.”

Breen encouraged the scholars to return to some of the rights questions that once energized the field — to push their imaginations and even engage in risk-taking to achieve a fuller, and perhaps more satisfactory, understanding of rights discourse during that time.

Those questions include: How did ordinary men and women define rights? How did they accommodate the language of rights to fluid political conditions? How can earlier revolutionary contests over the meaning of rights refocus our own visions of American political culture at a moment when people throughout the world question U.S. commitment to the defense of human rights (a post-World War II term)?

Meanwhile, Breen is encouraging students, for example, to question the work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar about what Americans believed during revolutionary times against what they found in newspaper articles from 1775 and 1776 about rights talk.

“For that week’s class we read primary sources about issues dealing with slavery, and the questions that were raised about historians’ analyses of those issues were provocative,” said Chanin.