One of the major developments in American historical study over the past half-century has been the (re)discovery of the vital influence that classicism—if not the Classics themselves—exerted on early American intellectual life. Looking back now, it can be surprising to see the extent to which the role of antiquity in the early American imagination was neglected by scholars even into the latter half of the twentieth century. Vibrant discussions continue over how best to interpret the evidence, but no serious scholar today questions the importance of Greeks and Romans to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans.Footnote 1
Surprisingly, the author from whom the widest spectrum of early Americans actually learned their ancient history qua history, French scholar Charles Rollin (1661–1741), is all but absent from this historiography.Footnote 2 Rollin's multivolume Ancient History was arguably the most widely read historical work of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America before it fell out of favor.Footnote 3 For over a century between the 1730s and 1840s, American women and men, major political figures, grade-school and college students, diarists, pastors, advice columnists, and even “mechanics at lunch break” found in it crucial messages that antiquity held for their own day.Footnote 4 The large number of copies in personal and lending libraries and references to personal sets shared widely clearly attest its popularity.
In the volumes of Ancient History, Americans of all types encountered a vision of antiquity that ranged far beyond the classical world as such, namely fifth- and early fourth-century BC Athens and late republican and early imperial Rome.Footnote 5 They found a narrative beginning with creation and prominently featuring Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, and Persians as well, rather than a straightforward binary Greco-Roman tale.Footnote 6 Rollin's interpretive model was “universal history,” which into the modern period in America and Europe, especially in the eighteenth century, was a dominant mode of historical writing.Footnote 7 Its broad importance in America well into the nineteenth century is obscured by subsequent historiographical shifts over that century which contributed to its demise. Universal history presumed to stretch across space from the “dawn of time” even if its geographical vision was never as broad as current conceptions of global history.Footnote 8 Providing a historical framework and a deep reservoir of practical moral examples, this metanarrative sought to teach and illustrate universal truths about humanity. Its purpose was in line with what Dorothy Ross has traced as America's “prehistoricism”—in other words, unlike most historical work today, its aim was never to explain how current historical phenomena were a product or result of prior events or processes.Footnote 9 Universal history never asked how the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans historically shaped later, even modern, societies or how they might have formed part of a “tradition”—other concerns lay behind its broad narrative.
Universal history assumed that all events across space and time were controlled by God's always active (if usually implicitly) providential hand. Such a basic assumption alone, however, was hardly a guide to which empires, kingdoms, and peoples to emphasize, and how. Rollin's Ancient History, like many universal histories, followed a “four-monarchies” model of history for this purpose. The four-monarchies model derived from the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Daniel; an apocalyptic vision given to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar served as a guide to knowing which polities to emphasize as well as why and how. Rollin continued the universal-history tradition of assuming a grand, cosmic system of universal time grounded in biblical history and eschatology.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw increased emphasis on the classical world, producing a rather different narrative of antiquity. Beginning in elite academic circles, a classical metanarrative would ultimately prevail, allowing fifth- and early fourth-century Greece and late republican and Augustan Rome essentially to stand in for ancient history in American minds.Footnote 10 Such emphasis on the Classics, or classicism, helped provide a shared political language for which there was no necessary recourse to religion, Judaism or Christianity.Footnote 11 Classical Greece and Rome could be safely explored by devout, deist, and agnostic alike minus the theological and cosmological implications inherent in universal history. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the study of classical antiquity was becoming, in Europe and then in America, an autonomous field (Wissenschaft), no longer subordinate to theological study.Footnote 12 A professional classicism, with its roots firmly in eighteenth-century German classical study, advocated classical antiquity as “the best model for cultural production and civic virtue.”Footnote 13 Why, then, bother with Assyrians, Persians, or Hellenistic empires? Classical antiquity could thus be “torn from the pageant of universal history and scrutinized, even admired, more exclusively,” apart from the larger context of ancient history.Footnote 14 Although it would take time for this newer vision of antiquity to register outside academic circles, its victory would be near total.
Universal history's significant and long-term influence among Americans came primarily via Rollin between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His panoramic vision encouraged a cross-section of earlier Americans to think broadly across antiquity while also ensuring that religious narratives of ancient history remained very popular. For the first half-century of our story, all seemed united in venerating the work—from the likes of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to Jonathan Edwards and Ezra Stiles;Footnote 15 a cultural consensus was clear even if the apocalyptic vision underlying the work was not universally affirmed. Thereafter, interactions with the work came to vary widely, with challenges as well as promotion flowing from new intellectual currents. The story of Rollin's Ancient History in America is one of changing American thought as reflected in the ways that Americans read and utilized, then challenged, ignored, and iconized, this long-influential work.
CHARLES ROLLIN, ABROAD AND AT HOME
Rollin's Histoire ancienne des égyptiens, des carthaginois, des assyriens, des babyloniens, des mèdes et des perses, des macédoniens, des grecs was translated into English—and many other languages—along with and after its publication in France between 1730 and 1738.Footnote 16 His influence through this work and others was broad and indelible. Another of his works, an internationally influential educational treatise, helped to introduce the term “belles lettres” to English speakers.Footnote 17
Americans quickly latched onto The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians, and Grecians upon its appearance in English.Footnote 18 They imported edition after edition from England for over half a century and then frequently published the work themselves into the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 19 Hardly a decade after its full publication and translation into English, Benjamin Franklin recommended its use in all colonial schools.Footnote 20 The volumes were part of most respectable colonial and early republic libraries.Footnote 21 David Lundberg and Henry F. May's study of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European books in America reveals that Rollin's was one of the top five books (of all genres and types) in early American libraries, with its strongest showing during the 1801–13 period.Footnote 22 Furthermore, a significant number of Americans born in the early nineteenth century appear to have been named after Rollin.Footnote 23
At first glance, Rollin's broad fame in predominantly Protestant North America seems unlikely. A French Catholic and professor of rhetoric, he espoused controversial theological ideas, leading to his removal from a prestigious academic and administrative post at the University of Paris. Later, just as he was publishing his Ancient History he fell in with the Convulsionaries, a group banned for frenzied convulsions accompanying healing miracles at the tomb of the ascetic François de Pâris.Footnote 24 After his forced retirement, Rollin, at the age of fifty-four, began writing prolifically, publishing L'histoire ancienne at the age of sixty-seven. In all, his Oeuvres complètes would swell to thirty volumes.Footnote 25
Rollin did, however, embrace one set of theological ideas that endeared him to many an American Protestant. The Convulsionaries were a radical branch of the Jansenists, a Catholic group which strongly advocated for St Augustine of Hippo's views of God's absolute sovereignty, predestination, grace, original sin, human depravity, and other doctrines dear to Protestants (especially Calvinists). A Jansenist himself, Rollin assumed these Augustinian notions along with a philosophy of history, which he mediated to American readers (almost none of whom owned or had read a single work by Augustine himself), featuring a robust recognition of God's sovereignty alongside a caution in independently analyzing specific historical examples of providence.Footnote 26 Such Augustinian caution regarding God's providence—or Augustinian historical agnosticism—rendered Rollin palatable to Arminian and deist alike, many of whom read him without registering much exception.
Despite his wide influence, Rollin remains largely forgotten today because of how completely his historical approach fell out of favor over the course of the nineteenth century. Along with the shifts in the American conception of antiquity already mentioned, serious methodological misgivings first registering in the 1820s in certain intellectual circles challenged universal history. Beginning in Germany and spreading, often via England and France, to America there was a growing emphasis on history derived from and dependent upon written sources “coeval with the events” rather than the philosophical musings inherent to universal history.Footnote 27 One prominent American thinker influenced by these new transatlantic strands of historical scholarship challenged universal history in general and Rollin in particular. In 1827, Thomas Cooper, the freethinking president of the University of South Carolina, delivered a powerful anonymous challenge to all claims of history before 500 BC—specifically singling out Rollin's work as an “omnivorous farrago.”Footnote 28 Where universal history did persist after the mid-nineteenth century, it assumed a decidedly nationalistic and pietistic evangelical flair utterly foreign to Rollin.
Other significant historiographical shifts were under way which would render Rollin's approach obsolete. In Europe by the 1820s, the academic study of the Greek and Roman worlds was becoming segregated from what was called “oriental studies.”Footnote 29 Any approach which combined the classical and Near Eastern worlds risked being perceived as dilettantism. Such critical division came a bit later to American intellectual circles, but followed very similar patterns. The classical approach dominated American higher education in this time before the great age of Near Eastern archaeology shed new scholarly light on a pre-classical world hitherto known from biblical texts and a few other ancient writings written long after the fact.Footnote 30 The discipline of archaeology was slowly coming together over the first half of the nineteenth century; although excavations and explorations fascinated Americans, their discoveries did not change the narratives of ancient history until archaeology emerged as a consistent discipline, well after the period under discussion here.Footnote 31
At a popular level, the ascendance of classicism was slower. One could, theoretically, read Rollin exclusively for classicist purposes by focusing just on the classical Greek and Roman sections; actual attestations of this, though, are rare, and scarcely attested before the 1820s and 1830s. H. Trevor Colbourn's pithy description of Rollin's volumes during the Revolutionary era as simply “shortcuts to the classics” thus seems anachronistic.Footnote 32 John Quincy Adams did, for example, recommend in 1822 that his son Charles Francis Adams read Rollin's Ancient History with a qualification: “With the Greek and Roman history you cannot make yourself too familiarly acquainted.”Footnote 33 Such classicizing advice stands in contrast to a letter he wrote about a decade earlier to another son, George Washington Adams, in which Assyrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and other ancient peoples were to the fore in a long lesson on ancient and sacred history.Footnote 34 Times had changed, and classicism was becoming more prominent in his circles by the 1820s. The window for reading Rollin for classicist purposes after John Quincy Adams's generation was thus a very narrow one, with major challenges such as Cooper's already arising. Why would classicists even bother with Rollin's behemoth?
Even when confined within Cooper's truncated historical view, the historical emphases of universal history and classicism differed significantly. To illustrate briefly, Alexander the Great and the so-called Hellenistic successor kingdoms (Ptolemaic, Seleucid, etc.) occupy nearly one-half of Rollin's voluminous Ancient History. Cyrus the Great of Persia commands well over a hundred pages in most editions, more than any other figure except Alexander. Neither Alexander nor Cyrus, though, factor in any of the major monographs on Classics/classicism in early America referenced at the outset of this study, even though Cyrus of Persia in particular loomed large in the American imagination, as we will see. Rollin put Cyrus and Alexander and his successors in a privileged place partly for theological reasons—both played key roles in biblical eschatology. The Persian Empire actually frames the entire account of Greece in Books Eight and Nine. Structurally and thematically, classical Greece plays a decidedly subordinate role, as it always would in universal history.Footnote 35
Nineteenth-century Hellenocentrism put classical Greece at the very center of the ancient world. Greece was given a significant boost in England and America once ancient Athens became widely hailed as the birthplace of democracy, c.1830.Footnote 36 Such an emphasis on democracy overshadowed previous ancient and nonclassical civilizations. Speaking of a British intellectual context, but generally applicable to an American one as well, Ian MacGregor Morris argues that Hellenocentric nineteenth-century writers ignored eighteenth-century writers (like Rollin) so effectively that not even students of historiography today give them much thought.Footnote 37 Morris protests the neglect of Rollin and others by modern(ist) scholars: “In judging the historical scholarship of the eighteenth century by the academic standards of the twenty-first, we are committing an act of gross anachronism and precluding the possibility of learning from it.”Footnote 38
By the 1820s and 1830s, another shift was discernible, contributing to the decrease in Rollin's readership. From the establishment of the American republic, Rollin's work appealed specifically to Americans who were anxious to maintain a “virtuous republic.” He provided seemingly endless moral examples connecting individuals corporately to the health, safety, and destruction of polities across time and space. When anxieties about national virtue and a virtuous republic began to relax in the 1820s and 1830s, and many in the next generation found their meaning instead in personal “evangelical piety and nationalism,”Footnote 39 a major incentive to read Rollin was lost even among those most likely to appreciate his theological underpinnings. Thus, attacked by critical thinkers, irrelevant to classicists, and increasingly useless to evangelicals, the volumes most often simply sat staidly in bookcases by mid-century.
While recent American historiography has by and large ignored Rollin, it has occasionally resurrected him briefly, if only to bury him. Henry Steele Commager once laconically qualified his passing reference to Rollin as “immensely popular” with “a popularity now so hard to understand.”Footnote 40 In their introductory historiographical text, Peter Gay, Gerald Cavanaugh, and Victor Wexler actually devote a full chapter to Rollin. In it they simply denounce, with noteworthy zeal, the work which would have been unknown to their later twentieth-century American audience: “naïve and superstitious,” “childlike, almost animistic” in its “effusive sentimentality,” “designed to excite [his readers] into a frenzied acceptance of Biblical prophecies” and consisting of “sententious rhetoric and crude didacticisms” that “often degenerate into simple vulgarity.”Footnote 41 Such anachronistic dismissals raise the question of how the likes of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams once swore by the work.
UNIVERSAL HISTORY BETWEEN “ST AUSTIN” AND AMERICA
Universal History was well established on American shores at the time Rollin's volumes arrived. Nearly a century earlier, America's first poet and significant author, Anne Bradstreet, had written a universal-history poem, itself inspired by a best-selling universal history by Sir Walter Raleigh. Bradstreet could rightly be called America's first universal historian as well as poet. Bradstreet's longest poem (by far), “The Four Monarchies,” begins “when time was young, and world in infancy” (line 5), before moving on to cover the major ancient empires individually.Footnote 42 Her relative coverage of ancient polities is telling. Of the poem's 3,572 lines, 616 (17 percent) are devoted to Assyria/Babylon, 977 (27 percent) to Persia, 1,824 (51 percent) to Alexander the Great and the “Hellenistic” successor kingdoms, and only 137 (3.8 percent) to Rome. Classical Greece (Athens) appears, but only as the antagonist to Persian monarchs; the Roman republic and empire do not appear at all, the poem ending with the period of Roman kings, prior to the Roman republic.
Such relative emphasis in an ancient-history poem would not have struck her contemporaries as peculiar, excepting the particularly short shrift given to Rome at the end, which Bradstreet owes to a fire which destroyed her papers before she could finish it (line 3566). Otherwise, Bradstreet was simply working within historical frameworks of universal history which would have been shared by all of her Puritan and other contemporaries. Widely read historical works in America from Bradstreet's day into the nineteenth century assumed universal history as the metanarrative of human history.
The roots of universal history reach back to late antiquity.Footnote 43 Eusebius of Caesarea (290–339) developed some of its basic methods by working to place biblical material into secular or pagan context. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and his student Paulus Orosius (c.375–418) became the real architects of the influential genre. Conceptually, universal history often assumed an organizational scheme of six ages of the world, corresponding to the six days of creation. Proposed by Augustine,Footnote 44 the “six-ages” model was followed, with some variation, by many medieval and early modern writers.Footnote 45 Sir Walter Raleigh's Historie of the World, the first universal history read in America (and Bradstreet's favorite historical work) and “the most popular of all histories by an Englishman in seventeenth-century America”Footnote 46 assumed the six-ages chronology.Footnote 47 Rollin explicitly embraced it as well, as he explains in The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres: “A table must in like manner be given, containing the six ages which divide and comprehend all the sacred history … the six ages are fixed points to which all the rest [of “profane” history] refers.”Footnote 48 Sacred and profane history worked together in universal history, with the six ages providing the scaffolding.
Within these “six ages,” the “Four Monarchies” model determined what to emphasize among the pageant of ancient empires and kingdoms. As recorded in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a colossal statue in four different sections, each composed of a different metal. Daniel interprets the dream—the four sections of the statue represent a succession of world monarchies which would ultimately give way to an eternal kingdom. “One of the fixed points of medieval consciousness,”Footnote 49 the four-monarchies model continued to inform both Catholic and Protestant historical thought into the modern era.Footnote 50 The prevalence of the four-monarchies model in the later eighteenth century is suggested by Voltaire's explicit and frustrated dismissal of it on the grounds that it forced every trivial occurrence into a relationship with the Jewish nation.Footnote 51
The image of Nebuchadnezzar functioned in colonial American discussion as a point of historical reference: “God forbid that ever this Description should be applicable to the British Empire,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1770, referencing the Fourth Monarchy, symbolized by mixed metal and clay.Footnote 52 Speculation on and comparisons with the image continued into the new republic—“our present confederacy is not unlike the monster of Nebuchadnezzar,” one wrote to John Adams in 1789.Footnote 53
Rollin explicitly notes that the four-monarchies model determined his entire work: “The prophecies of Daniel, which designate the succession of the four great empires, and which for that reason have an essential and necessary relation to the subject matter of this work, which is no other than the history of those very empires.”Footnote 54 The four monarchies, for him, united “as we have seen in the course of this history, all that is splendid, grand, formidable and powerful.”Footnote 55 Throughout, he refers to the four great empires which governed the world successively—“that of the Babylonians, of the Persians and Medes, of the Greeks [i.e. Alexander and successors]; and lastly, that of the Romans.”Footnote 56
Early Americans generally assumed with Rollin that the four monarchies formed the very framework of ancient history. Tobias Lear, for example, structured his senior address at Harvard's commencement (15 September 1782) around the four monarchies—“viz. the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, & the Roman,” using them specifically as a way to reflect on “the rising Greatness of America.”Footnote 57 In a work drawing heavily on Rollin, clergyman and author Samuel Whelpley simply equated the study of antiquity with the “four great monarchies.”Footnote 58 In another work, Whelpley would claim that the “great line of history,” by which he meant the four great empires, “would scarcely strike into Greece until the era of Alexander.”Footnote 59 Such references could be multiplied many times over in American discussion, attesting to the firm hold of universal history in general and the four-monarchies image in particular.
From its inception, universal history strove to be global in scope, and the early modern period witnessed a renewed desire for an all-encompassing approach. The great twentieth-century classicist Arnaldo Momigliano connects this desire to the Reformation, which “created a new interest in biblical history.”Footnote 60 Many at this time and beyond would emphasize that “knowledge of history is particularly necessary in the church” in order to understand prophecy.Footnote 61 Joseph Scaliger, famous early modern chronologer, likewise advised “to always have in view as far as possible the order of all times.”Footnote 62
Constructing a solid historical chronology of sacred and profane history working together was fundamental. Scaliger devoted rigorous research to composing a “grand system of universal time” for such a chronology.Footnote 63 The Irish bishop James Ussher painstakingly worked through thorny chronological problems using the best tools then available, becoming the standard reference for the English-speaking world (and well beyond) for nearly two centuries. Ussher is largely dismissed today (for setting the time of creation right around 6:00 p.m., Saturday 22 October 4004 BC), but Nicholas Popper notes that Ussher's work represented a “masterful interweaving of Scripture, ancient histories, and astronomical information” which “would ultimately provide an authoritative chronology that brought to heel the scholarly community's frantic chronological debate.”Footnote 64 Ussher's chronology served as the basis for universal history thereafter, and his influence in America came in part through Rollin, who explicitly and often invokes Ussher's chronologies.Footnote 65 Hester Chapone, author of a popular late eighteenth-century advice book for ladies published in England and America, would, in the late eighteenth century, advocate reading Rollin's Ancient History through twice as a way to help “fix the ancient Chronology deep in your mind,” none other than Ussher's universal chronology.Footnote 66 Also included in many English-language bibles, Ussher's chronology would leave a strong impression until its general demise in learned Christian circles between the 1830s and 1860s.Footnote 67
Universal histories assumed God's hand, but the influential Augustinian strand encouraged caution and even agnosticism in identifying “the hidden judgments of Divine Providence”Footnote 68 in secular (or “profane”) history.Footnote 69 God's sovereignty need not be invoked at every turn—it was usually assumed and implicit. Although the introductory section of Rollin's Ancient History uses explicit language of providence, the actual body of his work was much more Augustinian. When he narrates “profane” historical accounts which overlap with scriptural accounts he can be eloquent in affirming God's providence; but when he is addressing specifically “profane” history without such overlap, he is often silent, even for hundreds of pages, about God's providence. He is content to see God working in secret. The work begins,
Nothing gives history a greater superiority to many other branches of literature, than to see in a manner imprinted, in almost every page of it, the precious footsteps and shining proofs of a great truth, viz. that God disposes all events as supreme Lord and Sovereign; that he alone determines the fate of kings and the duration of empires; and that he, [for reasons inscrutable to all but himself,] transfers the government of kingdoms from one nation to another.Footnote 70
And it ends,
While all things are in motion and fluctuate upon earth; whilst states and empires pass away with incredible rapidity, and the human race, vainly employed with these outward appearances, are also drawn in by the same torrent, almost without perceiving it; there passes, in secret, an order and disposition of things unknown and invisible, which however determines our fate to all eternity.Footnote 71
Thus he can say of one ancient figure, “I do not know that we discover in history any thing more great and accomplished than what we are told of Timoleon,” who, as Plutarch notes, “was fully persuaded, that all human events are guided and disposed by the secret decrees of divine providence.” Rollin exudes, “What a treasure, what a happiness for the state, is such a minister!”Footnote 72 And later, “the Almighty presides … over all events … but he conceals the operations of his wisdom, and the wonders of his providence beneath the veil of natural causes and ordinary events.”Footnote 73
Since universal history necessarily went beyond the people of God (Jewish or Christian), it invariably evaluated the virtues of pagan people. Again, “St Austin” was Rollin's guide,Footnote 74 in the way he affirmed a type of relative virtue. In discussing the ancient Scythians, for example, Rollin gushes on their impressively simple life, among the highest of virtues, in his view; he then adds that if they had known God and the Redeemer, “without which the most exalted virtues are of no value and ineffectual, they would have been a perfect people”;Footnote 75 and, later, discussing Zaleucus, an early Greek lawgiver living in Italy, he notes, “This is carrying morality to as great a perfection as could be expected from heathens.”Footnote 76
READING ROLLIN IN AMERICA
It would likely be impossible to exceed the importance that John Adams once assigned to Rollin in America. In September of 1807, Adams was speculating to Benjamin Rush on where George Washington had learned his political art of “Disinterest” or “Disinterestedness.” “I have Sometimes amused myself with inquiring where Washington got his system,” Adams writes. Where did Washington learn to profess “attachment to private Life, fondness for Agricultural Employments and rural Amusements” while carrying out a very public life? One obvious choice might be Cincinnatus, yet Adams does not so much as mention this well-known classical Roman in his long letter. Instead, after dismissing the idea that Washington had carried out serious historical analysis (“you know that our beloved Washington was but very Superficially read in History of any Age Nation or Country”), he proposes that Washington's—as well as America's—whole “System of Politicks and Ambition” was simply borrowed from Dejoces, an ancient king of the Medes! Adams even cited Rollin chapter and verse:
Rollins [sic] ancient History you know is generally diffused throughout this country … From Rollins I Suspect, Washington drew his Wisdom, in a great measure. In the third Chapter of the third book, i.e. in the Second Volume page forty three, in the History of the Kingdom of the Medes, there are in the Character of Dejoces, Several Strokes, which are very curious, as they resemble the Politicks of So many of our Countrymen … Tell me, has not our American System of Politicks and Ambition been copied from this very passage? If not from whence did it come? Read the Chapter in Rollin. Washington was more sincere than Dejoces: but I am persuaded he had read this description of him.Footnote 77
More prosaically (and actually defensibly), glimpses of Americans reading Rollin's Ancient History present a rich historical picture. The work was read informally, as by an anonymous shopkeeper in Windsor, CT who read it during a lull in her work in 1784.Footnote 78 It was also read formally, as when sophomores at Ezra Stile's Yale were required to read all its volumes,Footnote 79 or when a third of the Harvard class of 1837 “checked out at least one volume of Rollin's history and usually more than one (typically volumes one through three), making it the most popular singular work” checked out that year.Footnote 80 Eleven-year-old Julia Cowles read it along with her classmates at Litchfield Academy in Connecticut in 1797 and journaled what she was reading in it each day.Footnote 81 In 1760, Hannah Callender Sansom gathered frequently with friends in the evening to read the work,Footnote 82 and early nineteenth-century novelist Catharine M. Sedgwick recalls that she read it when she was somewhere between ten and twelve years old.Footnote 83 As a student at the University of Virginia in 1826, Edgar Allan Poe fueled his personal interest in the ancient Near East via its early volumes.Footnote 84 A few years later, likely 1833, a young Abraham Lincoln read the work alongside Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a “‘sacred history’ to set alongside Gibbon's secular one.”Footnote 85
Americans found here a plethora of answers to ongoing questions, not all equally palatable. One could find, for example, defense of monarchy,Footnote 86 denunciation of revolution,Footnote 87 acceptance of revolution,Footnote 88 affirmation of the true end of all government,Footnote 89 a defense of a mixed constitution,Footnote 90 a damning mirror for princes,Footnote 91 a powerful defense of liberty and freedom,Footnote 92 a promotion of small republican leagues,Footnote 93 endless denunciations of luxury,Footnote 94 and much more.
As with all universal histories, examples came from across the ancient landscape. Rollin put forth a broad vision of how ancients learned and borrowed from each other. As “prehistoricists” Americans were not searching for roots of their tradition, nor attempting to demonstrate that their “Western” world was itself a product of the ancient world.Footnote 95 Rollin's narrative often cast Greece as the recipient of others’ innovation rather than the other way around as was common in a classicist framework. In his telling, the Greeks themselves had borrowed freely, and in foundational ways, from Egyptians,Footnote 96 Phoenicians,Footnote 97 “Indian sages” and others.Footnote 98 Knowing well the claims of ancient Greek texts, Rollin countered that “as much as the Grecians desired to be esteemed the authors and inventors of all arts and sciences, they could never absolutely deny the Babylonians the honour of having laid the foundations of astronomy.”Footnote 99
Many Americans followed him, not yet casting fifth-century Greece (Athens particularly) as the font of all ancient creativity. “Besides, the Grecians, in the heroic age, were advanced beyond this intuitive knowledge of the sanctity of matrimony, by their acquaintance with the institutions of the Egyptians,” one frequent correspondent of John Adams wrote in 1809,Footnote 100 echoing directly Rollin's claims of the source of Greek “politeness.” John Adams likewise leaned on Rollin when he wrote to Thomas Boylston in 1823, claiming that the Greeks and Romans borrowed their mythology from Egyptians and others.Footnote 101 When Benjamin Rush noted that Julia Rush (“my dear Mrs. Rush”) was reading on the Egyptians, she likewise assumed this framework.Footnote 102
Americans, particularly between the late 1770s and the 1820s, were veritably obsessed with lessons and models of national virtue, and Rollin's work was a trove of precious examples. Readers during this time routinely read him to find these lessons. The rise and fall of empires were “the central problem of eighteenth century historical thought,”Footnote 103 and so it is hardly surprising that Americans read Rollin specifically to draw lessons, negative and positive, from ancient empires. “It highly concerns us,” he wrote, “to know, by what means those empires were founded; the steps by which they rose to that exalted pitch of grandeur which we so much admire; what it was that constituted their true glory and felicity, and what were the causes of their declension and fall.”Footnote 104 Earlier Americans’ reading was as (what J. G. A. Pocock describes as) “country” republicansFootnote 105 who sought “above all to protect republican values from the corrosion of time.”Footnote 106 The young John Madison informed his famous uncle that he was enthusiastically reading Rollin's “most masterly” work because “Nothing in my opinion can be more beneficial to young minds, than to know from whence government took its rise; the variou<s> causes by which the most flourishing kingdom<s> and empirs [sic] ware raised and destroyed; and the principles by which those governments are to be preserved.”Footnote 107 He continues, describing the importance of learning about the “genius, laws, and custom” of “diferent nations” and of “all the kingdoms, and empirs of the then known world” so that we can see how good or bad qualities “contributed to the grandeur or decay of those states over which they presided.” Such sentiments about the cycle of empires are as commonplace as connections to Rollin and universal history are clear. In 1813, John Quincy Adams wrote his son George Washington Adams a set of letters giving a passionate and extended overview of universal history.Footnote 108 He then notes the empires of antiquity—“the Assyrians, Babylonian and Egyptian Empires, Tyre and Sidon, Thenicia [sic], Carthage”—whose rise and fall instruct in this important cycle.Footnote 109 These were examples and lessons first learned when a very young John Quincy (“Johnny”) himself read Rollin at his mother Abigail's insistence.Footnote 110
Above all other human factors, Rollin noted luxury as the major cause of decline. At times, it seems that his entire work is simply a moral lesson in avoiding it. “Luxury and magnificence” were the ruin of all empires. The “fatal effects of luxury” can be traced across all states, Rollin warns: “The most judicious historians, the most learned philosophers, and the profoundest politicians, all lay it down as a certain, indisputable maxim, that wherever luxury prevails, it never fails to destroy the most flourishing states and kingdoms; and the experience of all ages, and all nations, does but too clearly demonstrate the truth of this maxim.”Footnote 111 Rollin provides plenty of positive and negative examples to push readers toward collective virtue, singling out “love of poverty,” “contempt of riches,” “simplicity in buildings.”Footnote 112 He heaps strong praise on ancient epochs when “men understood how to unite great simplicity with the highest degree of human grandeur,” and lauds the “simplicity and sincerity peculiar to the genius of those ancient times, and extremely remote from the pride and vanity of our own.”Footnote 113 The austerity of the Scythians rendered them as perfect a people as humanly possible without knowing God, as noted above.Footnote 114 Rollin is likewise consistently cynical about that classical gem Periclean Athens, and he derides its “superfluous buildings, and vain decorations.” Citing Plato, he contends that such extravagance “corrupted the purity and simplicity of [the Athenian's] ancient manners.”Footnote 115
The refrain against luxury was heard so often in the early American republic that it hardly needs illustrative examples, but one nonclassical example can illustrate the general point. Ebenezer Hazard denounced Boston in 1780 in a letter to Jeremy Belknap, invoking the ancient city-state of Tyre in the Levant. “Boston exceeds even Tyre,” for “not only are her merchants princes,” but even her tavern-keepers are growing rich, and “there can be no surer sign of decay of morals in a large city than the tavern-keepers growing rich.”Footnote 116 Belknap earlier had requested a copy of Rollin in order to “chew the cud” over one winter.Footnote 117 He found support in Rollin's denunciation of Tyre, which city Rollin roundly criticizes because of a “traffic whose only motive is avarice, and whose fruits are pleasures, vanity, and the corruption of morals.”Footnote 118
Rollin put particularly strong emphasis on the Persian Empire, and Americans followed him. Several factors account for its prominent place. Persia was a global empire, and the Greeks were a collection of small polities and former colonies. Contemporary parallels were obvious—the tumult of the 1770s and thereafter stirred up interest in these. Rollin himself had been eloquent about Persia because it was one of the four monarchies and (perhaps more practically) because of the wealth of material in ancient sources. In most classical texts (as in the eyes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classicists), the Persian Empire was the antithesis of Greece, Athens in particular—Persian hugeness, opulence, and extravagance played foil to Greek smallness, practicality, and virtuous poverty. But for Rollin and his earlier American audience, the picture was far more nuanced. Rollin, in fact, praises the Persian government at great length for promoting “the publick good” and “common benefit of the nation.”Footnote 119 At its foundations the Persian Empire's “manners and behaviours” gave an example of “how to unite great simplicity with the highest degree of human grandeur.”Footnote 120
For Americans, such descriptions of the Persian Empire could simultaneously rebuke the British Empire, which had moved on from its vigorous national bloom of youth, and serve as a model for their own young polity. Abigail Adams presents a complex and dynamic picture of the Persian Empire as she encourages her son to feel an “abhorrence, of Domination and Power.”Footnote 121 She praises “the poor, but hardy Persians” under Cyrus who were able to conquer “the Assyrian empire” (sic). She then goes on to explain the cycle: in time corrupted by luxury, the later “extensive, and opulent empire of Persia” fell to Alexander the Great, and then the “Macedonian empire when enervated by the Luxury of Asia was compelld to receive the yoke of the victorious Romans. Yet even this mistress of the World, as she is proudly stiled, in her turn, defaced her glory, tarnished her victories, and became a prey to Luxury, ambition, faction, pride, Revenge, and avarice.” Drawing direct modern analogy to the early Persian Empire, she encourages her son never to forget how “The History of your own country, and the late Revolution are striking and recent Instances of the mighty things achieved by a Brave inlightened [sic] and hardy people, determined to be free, the very yeomanry of which, in many instances, have shown themselves superiour to corruption, as Britain well knows.” Both the praise and the warning are as clear as her historical picture of the Persian Empire is nuanced.Footnote 122
The Persian conqueror Cyrus was specifically associated with the young and hardy Persian Empire. Rollin praised Cyrus at great length, dedicating to him what amounts to well over a hundred pages in most editions of Ancient History. Neither Bradstreet nor Raleigh had focused specifically on Cyrus, but for Rollin, Cyrus was the epitome of a ruler—“Cyrus may justly be considered as the wisest conqueror, and the most accomplished prince, mentioned in profane history,” a “shepherd” who “did all for the happiness of his people” as “the guardian of the commonwealth and to be king; to be for the people, and to be their sovereign.” “It must be confessed, that such a prince is one of the most precious and valuable gifts that Heaven can make to mortal men.”Footnote 123 Such effusive praise does not come from the pages of the Old Testament, where details on Cyrus himself are sparse; and he is never praised there as a virtuous or wise model ruler in his own right, per se, but rather as the Lord's anointed, the Lord's tool. Often, it is his might that is emphasized, as he ruled over “all the kingdoms of the earth,”Footnote 124 hardly a model for a leader or would-be leader of the new and modest American republic, and incongruous with what Abigail Adams praised about Persia. For Rollin, though, Cyrus loomed large, in part because of his place in the four-monarchies scheme.
Americans, likewise, held in high regard this emperor, who was “so illustrious in the eyes of Mr. Rollin.”Footnote 125 In addition to the brief glimpses they could see in Scripture and the great detail they learned from Rollin, they also avidly read Xenophon's Cyropaedia, the story of Cyrus’ education.Footnote 126 This work is well attested in eighteenth-century book collections, and reading the work in Greek was even required for admission to Princeton and Columbia in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 127 Cyrus was associated with Aaron Burr, who took on the nickname “Cyrus,” and with George Washington. One famous speech by early republic statesman Robert Goodloe Harper identified Cyrus directly with Washington for wise rulership.Footnote 128 In a letter, written in 1800, to William Smith Shaw, Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody describes a sermon which
recalled to the mind those virtuous deeds which justly denominated Washington a great Man, the best character that ever graced the annals of time … Like Cyrus raised up by Providence, possessing a constellation of virtues, peculiarly suited to the exigencies of a Nation struggling for birth, which by divine direction, shed there benign influences upon our highly favoured, happy Land.Footnote 129
Such panegyric was informed directly by Rollin's work. Another praised Cyrus in Rollinesque Augustinian terms: “tho a Heathen would do honour to the best things of later ages … Happy is the Prince indowed with such excellent talents, and blessed with a disposition to exert them for the good of his subjects.”Footnote 130 One frequent correspondent of John Adams describes Cyrus’ religious importance, invoking the four-monarchies scheme indirectly: “Of the destruction of Babylon and the birth of Cyrus, considering how much the evidence of a system of Religion is depending on that event and that character.”Footnote 131 Early nineteenth-century American novelist Catharine M. Sedgwick specifically recollects only Cyrus from her avid childhood reading of Rollin: “I was not more than twelve years old—I think I was ten—when, during one winter, I read Rollin's Ancient History … I crept under my desk … and read, and munched and forgot myself in Cyrus's greatness!”Footnote 132 Cyrus was a pivotal and model figure in Rollin's telling, and his place in early America testifies to the continued resonance of a universal-history vision.
Rollin's history was also read by Americans for personal improvement. Fairly typical is John Adams's remark on how the study of history informs morals. In a diary description of Rollin's historical method, John Adams remarked that through Rollin's “excellent reflections on every remarkable event that occurs in history he informs his reader of the true source of every action and instructs them in the method of forming themselves upon the models of virtue to be met with in History.”Footnote 133 In 1811, the American Lady's Preceptor proclaimed a similar message:
It has been observed by a very judicious writer, that Rollin's Ancient History is a treasure to young people, though the number of volumes may alarm them. The author is one of the most excellent preceptors, that the world ever saw. It was his ambition to unite the scholar and the christian; and accordingly, by every incident, he labours to promote religious improvement. Under the pen of this most christian writer, adds the respectable commentator, every baser metal is purified from its alloy, every sounding action is divested of its bombast, and traced to its real source. Splendor has no dignity, if unassociated with virtue; and ambition is painted as a fury that destroys. This author deserves universal veneration.Footnote 134
It was such a desire for moral improvement that kept seventeen-year-old diarist Rachel Van Dyke in pursuit of Rollin's Ancient History in 1810–1811 amidst the frustration of constantly finding it checked out of the library.Footnote 135 While admonishing herself for reading a novelFootnote 136 when she could be reading “a more substantive work,”Footnote 137 she regrets at one point checking out Sir Walter Scott's Marmion when her “reading moments now ought to be devoted to History.Footnote 138 Even if Rollin's “dry history” would likely put her to sleep, she is confident it will “improve” her.Footnote 139
While serious engagement with Rollin is hard to come by after the 1840s, the work reappears after mid-century as an icon in popular moralistic tales. In 1860, Rollin's Ancient History found itself as the plot center of a boy's morality book not so subtly entitled Dick Duncan: The Story of a Boy Who Loved Mischief and How He Was Cured of His Evil Habit.Footnote 140 One of the widely read “Glen Morris” stories, it aimed to “sow the seed of pure, noble, manly character in the mind of our great nation's childhood.”Footnote 141 Literally, having Rollin read aloud to him while convalescing drives the naughtiness out of the book's titular mischief-monger: “Thus did better feelings and purposes spring up in Richard's [i.e. Dick Duncan's] heart.”Footnote 142 The triumphant moment arrives with the most tangible proof that the boy has been “cured” of his evil habits—a group of good boys “found Richard sitting on the step of a piazza, busy with his own copy of Rollin.”Footnote 143 No hint of cycles of empires or republican virtues here—simply a straightforward pietistic tale of individual moral improvement via volumes of Rollin's Ancient History.
Horatio Alger's 1873 novel Bound to Rise: Or, Harry Walton's Motto gives Rollin a similar function.Footnote 144 A poor young Harry Walton, newly moved to town, learned of a library two miles from home, and decided, although he had already worked a long day, to walk to the library, which was open well into the evening. Driven by a desire to get ahead in life, the new boy proves his worth to a local notable, a “Dr. Townley,” by a single act. At the library, Harry “selected the first volume of Rollin's Universal history,” (“a book better known to our fathers than the present generation,” Alger adds), and Dr Townley takes notice. An immediate bond forms between the two which culminates in Harry's “rags-to-riches” story, his choice of Rollin a straightforward symbol of his personal potential, sterling moral character, and intelligence.Footnote 145 Such tales as these fit nicely into what Dorothy Ross, Nathan Hatch, and others have traced as a general trend away from earlier anxiety over maintaining a virtuous republic and toward a less lofty “evangelical piety.”Footnote 146
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF ROLLIN'S AMERICA
In 1759, William Robertson, recent author of History of Scotland, wrote to David Hume, requesting a new historical topic to pursue. Hume suggested that Robertson write on ancient history in order to counteract the influence of Rollin's history. The success of Rollin, Hume wrote, “might encourage you, nor need you be in the least intimidated by his merit. That author has no other merit but a certain facility and sweetness of narration, but has loaded his work with fifty puerilities.”Footnote 147
Such challenges came rather later to America. The first printed criticism of Rollin came apparently in a broad challenge published in 1827, in the American Quarterly Review, a journal which appealed to “the serious cultured reader” and “thoughtful segment of the population which passed its time in reading learned discourses.”Footnote 148 The article critiques both the methodology and the assumptions behind universal history, and Rollin in particular.Footnote 149 Its seemingly innocuous title, “Origin of the Homeric Poems,” belies its real topic. Although, like many articles in this journal, it was published anonymously, evidence points to the polymath Thomas Cooper, then president of the University of South Carolina, and, according to Thomas Jefferson, “the greatest man in America in the powers of mind and acquired information; and that without a single exception.”Footnote 150 This was no minor figure addressing America's “serious cultured reader.”
The article itself has an intriguing backstory. Seventeen years before the publication of the anonymous article, Cooper wrote a letter to Jefferson laying out a course of educational preparation for college.Footnote 151 In the letter, Cooper advised that the student should read, among other things, “ancient history at his leisure hours, and be examined thereon, Plutarch's Lives, Rollin (though an old woman who retails gravely fabulas aniles, et quicquid Græcia mendax audit in historiâ:[Footnote 152]) Gillie's and Mitford's Ancient Greece, Hooke's Roman History, and Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman empire.” Here, in tune with transatlantic historiographical tendencies toward archivally based texts and away from more philosophical history, Cooper registers distrust of the Greek sources which Rollin used as well as Rollin's uncritical use of them, but he recommends the book anyway. A decade later, and three years before the publication of the anonymous article in the American Quarterly Review, Cooper's criticism was untempered. Again writing to Jefferson, he reveals he has been secretly working on a manuscript which he tentatively entitled “Observations on antient history.”Footnote 153 Cooper anticipated that many would have serious problems with his claims, “which I must not venture in the press while I live,” since it contained “a series of bold truths.”
It is virtually certain that the anonymous article in the 1827 American Quarterly Review is this secret work Cooper mentioned in 1824, or a significant portion of it. That he wrote the anonymous piece in the American Quarterly Review is definite, for he later refers to the article in a book he published just before his death, and simply names himself as the author.Footnote 154 In the article in the American Quarterly Review, Cooper reviewed the state of American knowledge of the ancient world in his time. He concludes, “There is no evidence, but traditionary, of any fact whatever of profane history, anterior to 600 years before the Christian era. We are strongly tempted to stop at 500.” He continues,
We do not mean to contend that all ancient history, previous to the period we have assigned, is false. Much of it is in itself intrinsically probable, and may have been true, as to the outline and general features: but it may have been false too. What we contend for is, that there is no evidence of the truth of it reasonably sufficient to make any such fact, anterior to 600 years before Christ, the basis of any argument or conclusion; and, therefore, be it true or false, it is worthless and useless.Footnote 155
Such proclamations and denunciations deprived the universal historian of much material, with its beginning three and a half millennia earlier than Cooper's cut-off point and its uncritical methodology. Cooper's was a perfectly understandable stance for a religious skeptic at this time.Footnote 156 He continues with such statements as “Hence, we know at present absolutely nothing of Egyptian history in ancient times.” There is “nothing credible as to Egyptian, Chaldean, or Phoenician history.” He goes on to dismiss outright, among others, all Persian, Assyrian, Babylonian, early Roman and early Greek history.Footnote 157 Cooper's dismissals were aimed at Rollin's history (which he singles out as an “omnivorous farrago”) as much as at larger questions about the historicity of the Old Testament which were being raised in his transatlantic intellectual circles.
The challenge was clear enough in such circles, but Rollin had a few more decades of influence left at a more popular level. As late as 1837–8, the work was still being hailed in an educational journal as “the most complete, and at the same time, the most interesting compendium of Ancient History,” and “as a genuine and entertaining abstract of the representations, made by original historians of antiquity, [Rollin's] work has not hitherto been excelled.”Footnote 158 Serious engagement with the work seems to disappear thereafter, as scattered fragments from the 1840s onward reveal. An 1846 ladies’ advice book gave a qualified endorsement of Rollin, almost a concession. The Young Lady's Companion, and Token of Affection: In a Series of Letters by Margaret Coxe, notes, “Of the modern writers of ancient history … the young reader will find that Rollin has, in one respect, the decided superiority; we mean in his practice of intermixing useful reflections on events and characters. But we strongly recommend the perusal of such portions of original ancient historians as a judicious reader would select.”Footnote 159 The recommendation of Rollin here is rather more qualified than earlier endorsements even while the reviewer shows affinity with the more philosophical approaches to history (“useful reflections”) which were standard in universal history, and Rollin no longer seems to stand on his own, as before.
One mid-nineteenth-century Calvinist who explicitly shared Rollin's providentialist outlook nonetheless came to fault him for an increasingly obsolete methodology. In an otherwise affirming introduction to an American edition of 1854, James Bell acknowledged that Rollin had “little critical acumen,” sometimes lacked an ability to distinguish “between improbability and versimilitude,” and was “often very credulous.”Footnote 160 Even a sympathetic providentialist now shared the new critical textual spirit—Rollin had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
We have already seen how Rollin's work served as little more than a pietistic self-improvement icon by 1860. There is no evidence to suggest that he was still being read in schools by mid-century. The opening epigraph from Uncle Tom's Cabin suggests that the book was a relic by mid-century, even if “solemn and respectable” in glass-doored bookcases. Recall that in the 1873 Horatio Alger story, Rollin was “better known to our fathers” than to the current generation—a clear indication that his work was an artifact at the popular level. At the dawn of the twentieth century, one author, while discussing Edward Gibbon, asks derisively of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “Do scholars read him?” Acknowledging that people still buy Gibbon, the author counters that people still buy “edition after edition of Rollin's Universal History!” “The set looks well on the shelves,” but anyone who actually reads it is “hard pressed to kill time.”Footnote 161
At the very time that Rollin's work was fading, external references to the title itself change suggestively. For the full century after its initial publication in English in the early 1730s, the work was always given shorthand as “Ancient History.” Beginning in the 1840s, however, and continuing into the late nineteenth century, the work became increasingly referred to, in America in particular, as “Rollin's Universal History,” a title no publisher gave the work and no print source ever referred to before.Footnote 162 This could distinguish what Rollin did in his work from the emphasis of a book such as Atlas of the Geography and History of the Ancient World by John King Lord,Footnote 163 beloved long-term Classics professor at Dartmouth, beginning in 1869. The latter claims to be about the “ancient world,” but actually only covers Greece and Rome, and only from the Persian War onward. There is nothing in Lord's book from before the fifth century BC here; “ancient world” had been essentialized to Greece and Rome, a significant semantic shift no doubt owing much to the now regnant binary Greco-Roman classical paradigm. In the introduction, Lord claims that he is giving crucial background for the student of “ancient history.” The “Peoples of the Ancient World” apparently do not include Assyrians or Babylonians, and Egyptians only appear from the first century BC onward, in their relations with Rome. Thomas Cooper would have approved of this new definition of “ancient history.”
Universal history, though, did not die out completely with Rollin's work; it simply took on a new form with continued appeal to pious evangelicals. The most successful nineteenth-century author of this new strand of universal history, evangelical Emma Willard, one of the top three best-selling textbook authors of that century, presents a clear example.Footnote 164 Willard's Universal History in Perspective, published first in 1835, was reprinted and republished into the early 1880s.Footnote 165 Willard begins with a rousing defense of universal history: “Universal history, as a science, is great in itself, great in its consequences on human conduct and happiness; and, at this moment, particularly important to the citizens of our republic.”Footnote 166 Like Rollin, Willard began with Ussher's creation, and worked through the deluge and dispersal of peoples, then through the ancient empires and beyond. Unlike Rollin, Willard did all this mercifully in a single volume. Willard's universal history was essentially a teleological tale ending with the American republic, the fulfillment of God's plan in history. Her history aimed, above all, to encourage evangelical “filiopietistic patriotism” which was on the rise in some quarters over the course of the century.Footnote 167 As Nina Baym notes, Willard's “universal history text essayed the millennial task of demonstrating that the American Republic was nothing less than the beginning of the fulfillment of a divine plan for world peace.”Footnote 168 To the extent that Americans were still reading universal historyFootnote 169—Willard herself emphasized American over ancient history in schools—they ultimately desired to hear a tale ending with America as “a beacon-light amidst the dark waves of oppression, in which the weakness and wickedness of mankind have, for so many ages, involved the nations of the earth.”Footnote 170 Augustinian Rollin was not much help there.
CONCLUSION
Over a formative century, Rollin's broad influence in America was unprecedented and likely unreplicable.Footnote 171 His animating vision of universal history assumed a unifying principle to history and time. Even those who ultimately did not share his providentialist assumptions nonetheless conceived of antiquity in terms derived from his vision. Amidst the ideological shifts and changes in his readership, the religious underpinnings of his work kept a broad and inclusive ancient past alive in the American imagination. Analyzing Rollin and his reception reveals the ongoing significance of religious assumptions of ancient historiography well into the nineteenth century.
Americans were not always trained to think of antiquity as simply Greece and Rome, just as they were not always constrained by a twentieth-century narrative of Western civilization, itself now largely disregarded in a return to more global approaches. Their thinking on antiquity, as with all thinking about the past, was and is constantly in flux. It bears remembering, though, that ours is not the first generation of Americans whose imaginations ranged so broadly across time and space.
Nothing here suggests that classicism had anything less than a major influence on American thought and life in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The recovery of this fact has prompted much fruitful scholarship on early American life. The early American “Lamp of Experience,” however, was fueled as well by an extremely detailed universal history structured on a prophecy from the Book of Daniel. The treatment (or lack thereof) of Rollin over the past century and a half might itself provide a cautionary tale of the potential teleology in the very critical methods and assumptions that doomed his work.
Current situations have a way of jogging historical memory. Recent trends within historiography just might make the story of Rollin in America a pertinent one. In 2010, David Christian, a foremost promoter of “big history,” predicted the return of universal history “in fifty years’ time.” Noting that “Universal History has vanished so completely that few historians even notice its absence,” Christian cites various signs of the return of this ancient tradition in a new form “that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods.”Footnote 172 If Christian is correct, and there is good evidence eight years on to suggest he might well be, the story of Rollin in America becomes, in some respects, a strangely pertinent one. As historians today debate the basic contours of a curriculum—“big history,” “deep history,” world history, global history?—and as best-selling popular historical works cover the globe over multiple millennia, it bears remembering that current trends toward a universal approach represent, at least in some basic ways, a return to past historical models.Footnote 173
The universal-history project was once sustained by a narrative that assumed a common cosmology. For those who project a return to universal history, the big question remains, can we, no longer “under the umbrella of sacred erudition,”Footnote 174 agree upon a structuring framework for a universal history which will capture the minds of a cross-section of society, or at least students in history classrooms? The answer to that remains to be seen.
