American Revolutions: Boston and Alfred F. Young

Reeve Huston

American Revolutions is the theme of the 2004 OAH meeting. Sessions explore the wide vari ety of revolutions in American life, including several on the Revolution itself, and others on radical and revolutionary movements from abolitionism through civil rights, black power, and the queer movement, and on dramatic transformations in such diverse areas of American life as religion, print culture, law, art, and sexuality.

Among these sessions is one assessing the work of Alfred F. Young. Young has been an influential writer on the American Revolution, and has played a critical role in transforming our understanding of American history through his pioneering work in the new social history.

He has also done pathbreaking work in two emerging fields that will be featured at the OAH program: public history, which will be evaluated in a State of the Field session; and public memory, the focus of a conference within a conference at this year’s meeting.

The setting of this year’s meeting is especially apt to honor Young, since for the last several decades his research has centered on Boston. Young has played a major role in shaping the city’s public history landscape through lectures, workshops, consulting, and publications—most recently through his “eight propositions” for reconstructing the interpretation of the Freedom Trail, published in the spring 2003 issue of The Public Historian. Young questioned whether the many, albeit ill-coordinated, sites of the trail do justice to the “popular” side of the Revolution.

The session on Young’s work will be held in one of the most important sites of revolutionary Boston, the Old State House, where a portrait hangs of George Robert Twelves Hewes, the subject of Young’s 1999 book, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1999).

As a newly minted Ph.D. in 1958, Alfred Young bucked historical conventions, which gave a central place to high politics, political biography, and elite intellectual history. In The Democratic Republicans of New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), Young studied the political movements and aspirations of the “meaner sort” of the Revolutionary era, placing them within a broader class analysis of politics. With more rigor than any previous work, The Democratic Republicans substantiated Carl Becker’s proposition that the American Revolution began as a struggle for “home rule” but became a conflict over “who should rule at home.”

In its focus on the popular classes, on social conflict, and on the Revolution as the occasion for unleashing popular politics, Young anticipated many of the themes and interpretations that distinguish studies of the Revolution over the next two decades.

Young then embarked on an ambitious study of Boston artisans during the Revolutionary era. In a pathbreaking article, he traced Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes’s participation in the Revolution and explored the ways in which the conflict changed Hewes’s political and social consciousness. Young also traced how later Americans remembered and commemorated Hewes’s participation in the Revolution.

In other articles and lectures, Young explored the transmission of English popular rituals and traditions to the colonies and their mobilization during the Revolution, the transformations of artisans’ consciousness and politics, and the impact of popular politics on the drafting of the Constitution.

Young also examined women’s participation in and politicization by the Revolution. Next year, Knopf will publish Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier, the story of a Massachusetts woman who fought in the revolutionary army disguised as a man. Young will follow that with his long-awaited volume on the people of Boston in the Revolution.

Young’s greatest influence may be as a mentor, collaborator, and network-builder among younger historians. In two widely read collections of essays, he showcased the innovative work of younger scholars. The American Revolution (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976) brought together a virtual “Who’s Who” of young historians who would soon transform Americans’ understanding of the Revolutionary era. Edmund Morgan hailed the collection as “the most important book yet produced by historians of the New Left.” Beyond the American Revolution (DeKalb, Ill. : Northern Illinois University Press, 1993) brought together essays which explored the long-term impact of the Revolution.

The first pioneered, and the second helped consolidate a new vision of the Revolution as a panoply of linked conflicts in which a wide variety of social groups—gentlemen, educated white women, slaves, apprentices, family farmers, evangelicals—fought for (or against) national independence and, in the process, transformed the fundamental relationships and beliefs governing American society.

Always an antielitist, Young has devoted considerable energy to bringing the new social history to public audiences. During the bicentennial of the Revolution, he traveled the country, presenting a slideshow lecture on artisans in the Revolution to union members and other lay audiences. With the American Social History Project, he collaborated on a video about George Robert Twelves Hewes’s experience of the Revolution and served as a consulting editor on the Project’s alternative American History textbook, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (New York : Pantheon Books, 1989). And with Terry Fife, he created a permanent exhibit on the Revolution at the Chicago Historical Society which juxtaposed Revolutionary texts with artifacts from white artisans and farmers, women of various races and classes, slaves, and American Indians. The pairings served to raise questions about how ordinary people understood and participated in the Revolution, how their participation changed their consciousness, and whether the Revolution lived up to its promises for non-elites.

This year’s OAH meeting will feature sessions on several pathbreaking and influential historians of the United States: John Higham, Benjamin Quarles, Herbert Aptheker, and August Meier. Alfred F. Young is among them because he has influenced so many important developments in how historians make sense of American history, because he has contributed so much to the public’s understanding of the American past, and because he has contributed mightily to the welfare of the OAH. The organization recognized Young’s distinguished service to the profession with a special award in 2000, and this year it will honor him with a critical assessment of his scholarly work.

Reeve Huston teaches history at the University of Arizona and is cochair of the 2004 OAH Program Committee.