Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting on its implications for intellectual history.

So unlike the difficult years of the 1970s when social history was all-conquering, intellectual history has entered the new millennium with a respectable sense of possibilities and accomplishments. Old hands mingle with younger practitioners, all of them released from the sensation of being under siege from those who question the importance of ideas and especially the ideas voiced by so-called “elites.” Departments of history may be more likely to appoint someone who does cultural history, but this is less of a disadvantage than it may seem given our agility at claiming multiple identities.

All is not gain, for some branches of intellectual history have migrated elsewhere. Few departments of philosophy may teach the history of their discipline, but departments of government or political science are actively engaged with “political thought” and the enduring topics of liberty, democracy, the rule of law, participation, and the making of the modern state. Political thought's close cousin, constitutional history, has passed into the hands of faculty in schools of law.Footnote ¹ No one will be surprised if I include the history of Christian theology in this list, a subject of great interest within divinity schools, a handful of colleges or universities that retain strong religious affiliations, and, less commonly, departments of religion.

On the other hand, a lively and productive rapprochement is occurring with literary studies. Circa 1990, it seemed that literary historians had abandoned “history” as we construe it (causation, intentionality . . .) in keeping with the tenets of deconstruction and other kinds of “theory.” Within early modern European and early American studies, however, interchange has resumed or persisted, if we foreground writers such as John Milton and John Cotton, always of interest to both literary and intellectual historians. On the side of literary studies, a helpful step has been the broadening of what counts as a literary text; another, an attentiveness to the “sociology of texts,” to borrow a phrase from the bibliographer–historian D. F. McKenzie—that is, the mutations and mediations that direct us to circumstances outside the strict realm of the literary.Footnote ² But perhaps the most productive step has been to reinsert “the political” into the making and reading of texts, a process abetted by the threads of patronage, censorship, self-censorship, and life histories that wind their way through so many texts of the Tudor–Stuart period.

Hence the commonplace recently voiced by a young literary critic, that “important aspects of historical change are most clearly visible through textual production,” an argument supported by a careful reading of Thomas Sternhold's metrical translation of nineteen psalms (London, 1549), reimagined as an instrument of “evangelical” Protestants hoping to persuade the boy king Edward VI to practice godly, Scripture-centered leadership.Footnote ³ I single out Beth Quitslund's excellent book because it demonstrates how close readings of the nuances of Sternhold's translations can situate a text within the politics of the English Reformation and make that politics more visible. Matthew P. Brown's The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England is exemplary for another reason: its demonstration of how the material features of manuals of devotion shaped a mode of reading. Here, a literary historian joins hands with historians of Puritanism.Footnote ⁴

One certainty about an uncertain future is that our partners will come and go. Who can foresee the currents of renewal and reappraisal that such partnerships will provide? One development that bodes well for the future is the transnational or “global” turn in historical studies. It is old news that ideas migrate and that regional or national definitions of intellectual life can shortchange the ever-ongoing processes of exchange and appropriation, but, to cite a single example, the vitality of the transnational turn is being demonstrated in studies of natural history in the context of imperialism, cross-racial encounters, and the refashioning of knowledge in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “Atlantic world.”Footnote ⁵ Granted, arguments for the distinctively American contours of a program or motif will persist, as, for good reason, will case studies of particular communities. At their best, these document the intimacies of debate, personal biography, and social context that impinge on ideas and the politics with which they are invested. Hence the enduring value of Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1979), Daniel Walker Howe's The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (1970), and Charles Capper's close-grained description of Margaret Fuller's part in the Transcendentalist movement—as it happens, each written by historians alert to broader contexts, as Capper is to Romanticism as an international movement. We can be optimistic for another reason: the inexhaustible possibilities for reappraisal and rediscovery. Our teaching is mired in half-truths that specialists find painful to behold, but our scholarship is another matter. The recovery of “conservative” thought in twentieth-century America and especially its religious dimensions; the reclaiming of the “Christian Enlightenment”: the possibilities, not yet fully acted upon, to reconsider mid-nineteenth-century manifestations of Victorianism (usually, in the American context, masked by other terms)—such critical inspections will persist if not redouble in the near future.

But this inventory must also take note of a less felicitous aspect of our times: the difficulties many of us experience in attaching our work to a larger story. What I mean by this may best be indicated by returning to the intellectual historians of c.1935 to 1970, the likes of Merle Curti, Ralph Henry Gabriel, Henry F. May, Richard Hofstadter, C. Vann Woodward, and Sydney Ahlstrom. A decade ago, charged with writing a preface and an additional chapter for a new edition of Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, originally published in 1972, I realized that Ahlstrom had been superbly confident that he was telling a national story centered on the making of the nation (the Revolution, but especially the Civil War) and the movements for social justice (anti-slavery, the critiques of capitalism) that culminated in Progressivism and the New Deal.Footnote ⁶

Underlying this narration lay an implicit script, the beneficial effects of modernizing or modernity, understood as including but not limited to the secularization of politics, a confidence in expertise and universities as the home of this expertise, and the expectation that differences of race, religion, and class were giving way to more universal norms and identities. The historians I have mentioned (and others such as Perry Miller could be added to this list) equated the coming of modernity with a maturing of American culture, a process captured in the title of May's The End of American Innocence (1964), in the essays by Woodward assembled in The Burden of Southern History (1960), in Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955), with its storyline of the waning of Protestant moralism as we reach the New Deal, and in the juxtaposition of William James, Thorstein Veblen, and T. S. Eliot with Jonathan Edwards in Miller's Jonathan Edwards (1949). It was as though the raw democracy epitomized by Andrew Jackson, the unrestrained capitalism of the Gilded Age, and the excesses of antebellum revivalism were finally giving way to something much more substantial: serious engagement with the limitations of capitalism, a version of Christianity that encompassed sin or the tragic while distancing itself from bourgeois complacency, a nationalism shaped by the “realism” of international responsibilities, and in Pragmatism a social philosophy ideally suited to the workings of the liberal state. According to these historians and their colleagues in English and American studies, our great writers marched to the same beat. Here, the central text was F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) and its theme of democratic possibilities leavened by what Matthiessen referred to as “tragedy.” An American Renaaissance counts as a piece of intellectual history, as—despite severe differences with Matthiessen—does its principal predecessor, Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30). To these men and their postwar allies we owe a great deal—for instance, the recognition of Abraham Lincoln as a serious figure in our intellectual and religious history and, of more importance, the possibility of constructing a critical narrative of “democratic thought.” To them we also owe a cosmopolitan openness to European influences or legacies free from the “cultural humility” Randolph Bourne had lamented.

But as the critical reaction that set in during the 1970s reminded us, much was missing from their work. Rather than reiterate the outcry that arose among a younger generation of literary and cultural historians about “canon” and a Cold War cultural politics of “consensus,” my disappointment concerns the script of an ever-advancing modernity and its potential for flattening the past. This possibility is sadly evident in Miller's indifference to the role of the Bible in Edwards's theological project and, as I will point out in a moment, in some aspects of Ahlstrom's Religious History. At their best, May, Hofstadter, and Gabriel made room for outsiders, as Hofstadter did by puzzling over the place of John C. Calhoun in The American Political Tradition (1948), and Gabriel by making room for Melville in The Course of American Democratic Thought. With Ahlstrom, the record is mixed. Amazingly comprehensive by any reckoning, the Religious History alludes to an alternative to the modernizing script, the “Fundamentalist” insurgency of c.1910–20 and its dramatic center, the Scopes trial of 1925. Following in the footsteps of H. Richard Niebuhr and others, however, Ahlstrom represented this movement as the religion of the left-behind, the rural southerners and their ilk who were not participating in the modern project. According to the logic of this analysis, the Fundamentalist insurgency was short-lived.

But as he was bringing the History to a close in the late 1960s, the ground was shifting beneath him in ways that revealed the limitations of this logic. The liberal state was in disarray, unable to incorporate or suppress insurgencies from left and right, even as the disciplinary strategies pertaining to work, gender, race, and sex that accompanied modernity were being overwhelmed by Dionysian versions of race, gender, and sexuality. From the vantage of 2003, moreover, I could discern that Ahlstrom had missed several of the “signs of the times” (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Carlyle) that, in hindsight, signaled the dramatic reworking of Protestantism and Catholicism in the final decades of the century. The founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, the persistent appeal of the dispensationalist Scofield Reference Bible, the Supreme Court decisions that applied the religious provisions of the First Amendment to the states and set in motion the unwinding of a de facto Protestant “establishment,” and, perhaps most strikingly, the emergence of Pentecostalism—these events are never mentioned or, in the case of Pentecostalism, barely touched upon. Although reports of the decline of the Protestant “mainstream” were already available, Ahlstrom could not have foreseen how rapidly that decline would unfold or, conversely, the pace with which other groups that historically were outsiders to the modernizing project would expand, most notably the Southern Baptist Convention and the many versions of Pentecostalism.

Ahlstrom, May, and Gabriel could match their understanding of the past with their understanding of the present. They were not bystanders and certainly not the left-behind; in their eyes the story they were telling was the story. Yet in some deep sense their liberal Protestantism or, for those who were not formally Protestant, the categories of maturity and innocence—made it impossible for them to understand why ecstatic encounters with the Holy Spirit and biblical narratives of the end times could outlast the modern project or why the modern state would prove so alienating to many in this country. Politically, they were innocent themselves in failing to anticipate the anarchic violence that “realism” sanctioned in Vietnam. Culturally, their version of modernity was being outflanked and subverted by aspects of “modernism.” Ahlstrom and company were moderns but not modernists; for them, language remained firmly representational and history writing a means of ordering the connections between past and present.

Despite their weaknesses, these men (and the occasional woman) created the field in which we labor and passed on to us some of their assumptions about how history was done. They assumed that critical engagement with what other historians were saying was a means of getting closer to the “truth” about the past, and they were sure that the documentary record was both a necessary and a sufficient basis of our work, but only if we were scrupulously honest about what that record contained. Their admiration for professional history coexisted with a respect for historians such as Francis Parkman who, in a very real sense, asked the questions that continued to guide their own lines of inquiry. From them we have inherited certain stories about the American past that continue to tax our best efforts at interpretation, a list that includes the “Calvin versus Calvinism” question that fascinated Perry Miller, the “modernity” of Jonathan Edwards that informs much recent work, the place of the Whig program in any larger description of antebellum political and economic thought, and the singularities of intellectual life in the South.

As I write these sentences, I find myself wondering if the likes of May, Curti, and Ahlstrom remain a productive resource. Compared to theirs our projects seem chastened, marked by a hesitation to affirm any larger story. Moreover, in the pages of this journal, as well as elsewhere, intellectual historians seem reluctant to use the once-canonical categories of “the Enlightenment” or “Romanticism” or “Social Darwinism,” restrained from doing so by what we know about the genealogy of these categories and by our feeling that, close up, they give way to particularities that bring us closer to a “lived” description of intellectual life. If this tendency (which I endorse) satisfies us as professional historians, what possibilities does it foreclose if we want to claim a larger significance and a wider audience for our work?

And then there is cultural history.

“I consider myself an intellectual historian, but I'd really like to be doing cultural history.” The other evening in a Harvard seminar, one of the doctoral students described himself in this manner. About the same time, a historian who had recently served on the committee to award the Merle Curti Prize in intellectual and social history remarked in my presence that “ninety percent” of the submissions were in cultural history. These comments touched a nerve, for I myself am a hybrid creature, a sometime intellectual historian who, for thirty years or so, has been writing about “mental worlds,” ritual practices, “story frameworks,” and “lived” religion. This forum provides a moment, therefore, to pose a second question: what is cultural history, and how do its modalities intersect with or differ from intellectual history? As other contributors to this forum are proposing, there may not be much difference between these two fields, and certainly no differences worth fighting about. We get along, we share some of the same strategies. Nonetheless, the student I have quoted was voicing a sentiment that deserves our attention: what is so appealing about cultural history or the “cultural turn” that has enabled it to gain such broad allegiance?

A genealogy is one means of answering this question, although any extensive description of the making of cultural history is beyond the scope of this essay. Fortunately, Philippe Poirrier's Les enjeux de l'histoire culturelle (2004) narrates the French side of this story, its starting point a dissatisfaction with Annales-style economic, geographic and social history and, in particular, the subordinating of “the cultural” to the social that happened both in that tradition and in Marxist-influenced scholarship.Footnote ⁷ The crucial moment of transition came in the late 1970s and the decade of the 1980s. As Poirrier points out, it was then that Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms were translated into French (1980), and that a group of younger historians—notably Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel—turned against any kind of history based on social-science theory.Footnote ⁸ Simultaneously, Chartier and company were disdaining a model of culture that divided it up between “elite” and “popular,” a model deemed inadequate because it presumed a social base to which specific forms of culture were attached. Chartier proposed three ways of reversing this assumption: (1) that the social proceeds from the cultural—for him, the social was constituted by “representations”; (2) that so-called “popular” practices or texts circulated too widely to be employed as evidence of a separate culture “of the people”; and (3) that cultural practices are best understood as a multi-sided process of appropriation or remaking that displaces any neat equivalence between product (e.g. cheap print) and meaning.Footnote ⁹

Some of the readers of this periodical can recall the excitement of reading the essays collected in Natalie Davis's Culture and Society in Early Modern France (1975); Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (translated into English in 1978), although possibly not recognizing that Ginzburg relied on a theory of popular culture (Gramsci's) that most of us would not accept; and Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978). Thereafter, Lynn Hunt published The New Cultural History (1989), a collection of essays by various hands, including Chartier's, and her culturally inflected Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984); the journal Representations was founded (1983); and Edward Said published Orientalism (1978). The cultural turn was upon us.

Among its motifs, assumptions, and strategies were the following—admittedly, an inventory linked to my own predilections and encounters and therefore insufficient.

1. 1 Borrowing from studies of early modern popular culture: an interest in the interplay of “high” and “low” and how ordinary people received and acted upon stories or representations. Many cultural historians are moved by the argument recently expressed by Diarmid MacCulloch at the beginning of his magisterial description of the Reformation: a history that, once upon a time, was centered on a “handful of significant males” must include “the movements of popular feeling, [and] the slowly changing lifestyles of ordinary people.”Footnote ¹⁰ Consequently, cultural historians work with an array of media that has expanded to encompass the visual and the cheapest forms of “cheap print.” In doing so, they have reworked the meaning of literacy: once considered an artifact of quantifiable social history (that is, a skill that can be measured), it has become an open-ended process of deciphering “signs” of several kinds.

2. 2 Borrowing from “the history of the book”: an awareness of the mediations that all texts undergo and the politics that drives these mediations; the practices of censorship and self-censorship (shorn of a Whiggish narrative of the rise of authorial freedom); printing-office practices, as these affect the materiality of a book; “para-texts” and how they shape the act of reading; the meaning of “author” and its connections with intellectual property; and the mutations that occur as texts are reworked by any and all of the parties involved in the process of transmission. From the standpoint of book history, every practice that enters into book-making and book-using is richly historical. As well, book history underscores the uncertain authority of the texts on which we depend. For example, anyone wanting to cite John Foxe's Book of Martyrs or elicit Foxe's own voice has to decide which version of the book to employ, for its contents were altered a number of times in response to political currents in the England of Elizabeth I. Book history recasts the meaning of knowledge by questioning the markers of authority we take for granted.Footnote ¹¹ Because the field is attentive to the circulation of information and the conduct of debates, it also abets an engagement with the concepts of “public sphere” and “public opinion.”Footnote ¹²

3. 3 Borrowing from cultural anthropology: a description of culture as practice or “culture in motion,” and an alertness to symbols, meaning, and collective “representations,” supplemented in some versions of cultural history with a focus on narrative or “discursive” structure as a form of action, i.e. narrative as an intensified form of representation that shapes real-world politics. One benefit of these possibilities is to shrink or possibly abolish the distance between thought and action; another, to make more visible the complexities of meaning clustered around most social practices. Cultural historians revel in the play of meaning.

4. 4 Drawing again on popular-culture studies but also on feminist and postcolonial theory: recasting politics as a struggle against certain representations (say, of race and gender). Cultural historians ask who controls the realms of meaning and seek out situations in which those who are “beneath” or outside practice resistance or subversion. Hence the attention not only to race and gender but, in the American context in particular, to “encounters” or “borderlands” where stability gives way to a politics of meaning played out in close quarters. And hence the vogue of Michael de Certeau's scenario of guerrilla-like skirmishes within a dominant cultural system.Footnote ¹³

No wonder cultural history is flourishing. It embodies an appealing politics, an understanding of knowledge or knowing as provisional and unfinished (thereby mirroring the texts on which cultural historians depend), an alertness to practice, and, in its self-estimation, a powerful awareness of the social, albeit the social as discerned through culture (“identity”) or through the categories of race, gender, the body, and the material book.

Wondering, as I wrote these words, if cultural history is informed by a script other than the story of innocence giving way to experience, I turned to A New Literary History of America (2009), a thousand-page collection of very brief essays on texts, events, and themes of all sorts, the majority of them dating from the post-Civil War period and, of the total number, half relating to the twentieth century. The master theme as described by the book's two editors, Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, is America as “made up,” an America of the “imagination.” Accordingly, the story is one of endless, ever-ongoing inventiveness and improvisation: “No tradition has ever ruled; no form has ever been fixed; American history, literary, social, political, religious, cultural, and technological, has been a matter of what one could make of it.”Footnote ¹⁴ In effect, Marcus and Sollors are voicing a postmodernist take on Imagination as canonized within high Romanticism. That they must deny the past any stability or presence is in keeping with a Promethean Romanticism that liberated the artist from all constraints. A delusion at the time this argument was made, its twenty-first century reiteration implies that the cultural historian is released from any hierarchies of critical judgment. Every improvisation, everything that is imagined, has exactly the same status. Any national story vanishes, although “America” and “American” remain astonishingly valorized. If there is nothing more to culture and cultural criticism than improvisation, then knowledge cannot be cumulative, and argument—over sources, over the adequacy of this or that interpretation—is pointless. Pointless happens to be my personal response to the assertion that (to choose one of the terms in play) religion in the United States has never been shaped by “tradition,” as inept a statement as it is possible to make.

A New Literary History may be too contrived to serve as a stand-in for cultural history as a whole. Yet the distance is not very great between its script and the focus on “perception, appropriation, and dialogue,” together with “negotiation” and “experience,” that a European historian has recently identified as key features of the cultural turn in religious history—noting, in the course of this inventory, that institutions (churches) and theology disappear.Footnote ¹⁵ He might have noted another aspect of the cultural turn in religious history, the postulate that representations possess an imperializing authority. This indeed was the penchant of high Romanticism, with its capacity to ignore the friction stemming from the irremediably social aspects of the world or, at the other end of the spectrum, from moral principles. When Frances Dolan tells us in Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture, a study of “representations” of Catholicism in Tudor–Stuart England, that “the specter of Catholicism was the animating and organizing obsession of early modern English print culture,” so much so that “debates” about it “constituted almost every political crisis,”Footnote ¹⁶ the response of most historians should be, wait a minute . . . too much is being made of a literary trope and too little either of social relationships, some of which were largely spared this obsession—Catholics and Catholic sympathizers were routinely part of governments and local institutions—and of change over time.

To bring home the trade-offs that occur when we pass from intellectual to cultural history, I find it instructive to compare cultural perspectives on the Antinomian controversy (1636–8) in New England with those of intellectual historians interested in the history of theology. Excited by the subversive possibilities within a cultural system, the culturalists fasten on Anne Hutchinson. And because, in the propaganda issued by the winners of the controversy, Hutchinson became associated with Mary Dyer's “monster birth” and her own aborted foetus (if that is the correct term for what it actually was), space is opened up to explicate tropes of both female body and monster,Footnote ¹⁷ to describe the controversy as an early example of the rhetorical strategies of heresiography, and to transform it into a demonstration of the transgressive possibilities of speech as speech, without attending to what was spoken. The debates between John Cotton and his colleagues, hitherto the means of discerning what the fuss was about, subside into the background if mentioned at all. Fortunately, those debates had been carefully studied in scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, and historians of doctrine, with occasional aid from others, have continued to analyze them. But as I can testify from reviewing dozens of syllabi in early American history and American religious history, the “Examination of Anne Hutchinson” has effaced the writings of any of the ministers who participated in the controversy as it mutates into a demonstration of diversity or resistance, both of them implicitly valorized as preferable to any common culture or traditions of intellectual discourse.

Meanwhile, intellectual historians continue to do their own thing, armed with the rough wisdom that some people are more given to writing and reading than others, just as some people are more given to farming or fixing cars. On the whole, we are interested in the people who write and read, be it long ago or recently. According to our rough wisdom, we tacitly acknowledge that the political import of our work as historians is not to arouse the masses but to expose the complexities of a text or set of ideas, to the end of enriching the practice of intellectual life among ourselves and those who will follow. Sometimes we can indicate the social and political consequences of ideas, as Colin Kidd does in demonstrating that the Enlightenment attack on theories of monogenesis helped create nineteenth-century theories of racial difference.Footnote ¹⁸ Glancing ahead at the stream of time or as we listen to argument, we may quietly indicate that some ideas are good and others less so. According to our rough wisdom, we can valorize within certain limits, doing so as members of an informal community of people who debate with one another and rely on sources that must be critically appraised, a task that is never fully accomplished.

What does our rough wisdom tell us about cultural history? To return again to my own inclinations, no single answer will do. Many of us are comfortable with cultural history and acknowledge a double identity, perhaps because we are drawn to the “movements of popular feeling” evoked by Diarmid MacCulloch, to “cheap print” of the kind that Alexandra Walsham exploited in Providence in Early Modern England (1996), or to “practice” as a bridge between ideas and action. Alternatively, we may feel a sense of strain, as I do when I read some recent work on the Antinomian controversy. And if A New Literary History of America is any indication, we may have an obligation to push back against some of the claims being made on behalf of the cultural turn. One means of doing so would be for an Americanist to reconstruct the making of cultural history and the arguments and assumptions, possibly half-hidden, that accompanied its development. Poirrier's Les enjeux de l'histoire culturelle is exemplary in this regard, as are some of the essays in the Dictionnaire d'histoire culturelle de la France contemporaine. A project of this kind would permit a more reasoned assessment of where the two fields agree and differ and abet critical engagement.

From my vantage, what both fields need is something the social historians of c.1970 failed to give us: a robust understanding of “the social” as it impinges on ideas, representations, narrative, and social practice in the past. I am far from being alone in this regard, although I am not aware of programmatic statements to this end.Footnote ¹⁹ Anyone of my generation is haunted by the disasters that can ensue—for example, the attempts some decades ago to represent early Methodism as an instrument of class control, to associate early modern millenarianism with psychosocial factors, and to derive the Progressive movement from status discontent.Footnote ²⁰ The lesson we learned from these failures was to distrust the models articulated within the social sciences, or at least the repertory of models of c.1960. Aware of those failures as they have impinged on studies of Puritanism, I looked elsewhere in A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (2011) for assumptions that would enable me to incorporate the “social” into a history of legal, political, and religious reform framed around the argument that the colonists accomplished a program of near-revolutionary change that was thwarted in Civil War England.

In making this argument, I set myself two tasks. The first was to reconstruct the relationship between rhetoric and the social experience of authority among the colonists.Footnote ²¹ Like virtually everyone in the England of their day, they accepted the argument that authority was good for the commonwealth, an authority invested in specific people and institutions, from kings and parliaments to fathers and ordained ministers. Yet in the social world of the colonists and those who lived in Stuart England, authority was doubly and triply mediated, its force deflected by alternative values and the multiple loyalties of local officials. Out of everyday experience (and “custom” rooted in such experience) arose, therefore, an alternative version of authority predicated on widespread participation and “consent,” a version of politics reinforced among the colonists because of how Charles I and the leaders of the Church of England were acting. Mediations rooted in everyday social relationships tamed the rhetoric, yet an inconsistent rhetoric also abetted some of those mediations.

The social ethics of the colonists, or how they imagined a good society, also played a large role in my narrative; for me, the social encompassed the moral imaginary. Here, the challenge was to avoid the trap set by the social historians of early New England, a storyline of “declension” as values inevitably give way to the reckless pursuit of land and other material assets. One means of rebutting this story was to demonstrate the workings of “equity” (a key value) in all-important situations like the distribution of land. Another was to foreground religious ritual and, in particular, the sacrament of baptism, to demonstrate the complex meaning of “legacy” to families obsessed with incorporating the young into an enduring community. Separately from these two lines of argument, I attempted to open up the meaning of “liberty” and “arbitrary,” two master words in the political rhetoric of the colonists, by linking them with the categories of “saint,” the “Antichrist,” and “popery.” “Real, imagined, or merely a convenient means of criticizing certain policies of the Crown and Church, the rhetoric of anti-popery the colonists transported from England shared important motifs with apocalypticism. Both condemned abusive, unconstrained authority, both extolled Christian liberty, and both implied that church and commonwealth were better off in the hands of the saints who adhered to Scripture.” Was the doorway to the political thought of the colonists not through the humanists described in Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) but through studies of apocalypticism? Surely the latter, if we are to understand why young Roger Williams, newly arrived in Massachusetts, labeled Charles I the Antichrist and why John Cotton's lecture-day commentary on the Book of Revelation is perhaps the most important “political” text of the 1630s.Footnote ²²

The rough wisdom of intellectual historians continues to serve me well. Contrary to one mode of cultural history, I felt no imperative to construct the story of early New England as a narrative of resistance from beneath. Chronology plays a major role in A Reforming People and the future beckons—that is, the making of the American republic. Argument with other historians is woven into the endnotes. On the other hand, my attentiveness to popular rhetoric is more in keeping with cultural history, as is my strong interest in experience and the mediations that frame social practice. Some of what I most admire about intellectual history is missing, in particular the interplay of biography, reception history, and engagement with the intricacies of ideas. It may be that, as most of us learn by writing, compromises of this kind are inescapable. But I would not want to see intellectual historians compromising their confidence in reasoned debate and historical scholarship as cumulative inquiry. The generation of May, Curti, and Ahlstrom would expect nothing less.