New Book on Early America Details Nation’s Multicultural Past
Contact: Liam Riordan, (207) 581-1913; George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO, Maine — With so many iconic pre-Revolutionary War events — the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the first skirmish between “Redcoats” and the colonial militia — happening in New England, early America historian and UMaine history Professor Liam Riordan understands why people may associate a predominantly English presence with the early American persona.
He maintains, however, that the association is a misperception.
A more accurate representation of early American social reality can be found among the diverse religious, racial, and ethnic populations of the mid-Atlantic region, whose relationships with one another changed dramatically during the American Revolution and in the post-war early national era, Riordan says. He makes his case in his recently published book Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic, published by University of Pennsylvania Press.
Riordan looks at the lives of the people who settled, not in New England, but in the Delaware River Valley surrounding Philadelphia, buttressing his argument with evidence that includes tax, church, and census records as well as newspapers, personal papers, music, folk art, clothing and architecture.
“We think of early America, at least in the popular mind, as a place with a lot of Puritans. New England has long symbolized everything that’s early American, and that’s really a misrepresentation,” Riordan says. “By looking at the mid-Atlantic, one of the obvious things we see is its enormous diversity of human settlement; the different cultural groups were critical to the social experience, and public and political life of people there.”
Riordan explains this multicultural society by focusing on people in three specific towns, each with different key groups: African Americans in New Castle, Del. evolving from a slave society into a free society; bilingual Germans recruited by founding father William Penn to populate his Pennsylvania colony; and Quakers in Burlington, N.J., whose unorthodox religious practices and pacifist lifestyle contrasted starkly with the patriotic spirit of the day.
“I try to look at how all of those groups contributed to, experienced and were changed by the American Revolution, and I look at it over six decades, from 1770 to 1830,” Riordan says. “It was a very dynamic and exciting period, but also filled with conflict.”
In Pennsylvania, the heart of the Delaware Valley, the revolution was a controversial event that pushed the colonial elite out of power as new groups moved in to claim authority, something that didn’t happen to the same degree in Massachusetts or Virginia, Riordan says.
“Local people’s exploration of how one retains ethnic distinctiveness — a cultural sense of self — while still sharing in a broader public culture was perhaps the most pressing political question of the post-war era,” he says. In New England, with strong English traditions, such questions about diversity were less urgent, he adds.
Social issues in slave societies like Virginia or South Carolina “were so dominated by a black-white dualism that American pluralism and diversity was not as front and center as it was in the mid-Atlantic,” Riordan says. “I think that’s part of why we haven’t understood the prominence of these kinds of issues — because so much of our understanding of early American history is dominated by either a view of Massachusetts as America or Virginia as America.”
Riordan’s sensitive assessment of cultural diversity uncovers cultural tensions in the Revolutionary Delaware Valley that are surprisingly familiar to contemporary cultural issues.
Benjamin Franklin, for instance, complained in newspaper articles that Pennsylvania’s German immigrants could not fit into colonial society and that they would “Germanize us instead of us Anglicizing them.”
Franklin offers “a wonderful example of both change and continuity in America’s multicultural experience,” Riordan says. “You change some of the words around a little bit and he could sound like a spokesman for anti-Latino immigration to California today. Yet, his core argument that Germans were not white and had a different ‘complexion’ from Anglo-Americans strikes us a bizarre. Studying early American cultural diversity can help us to recognize that the United States as a multicultural society has very deep roots.”
American multiculturalism is not solely a phenomenon born from the Civil Rights Movement and Asian and Latin American immigration in the ’60s and ’70s, says Riordan.
“In today’s world — driven so much by new technology, the latest fad, and a preoccupation about what will happen tomorrow — it is essential to reflect on where we’ve come from and the kinds of events and social groups that created American society during the Revolutionary era. This engagement is critical to sustain a healthy democratic society,” Riordan says.
Riordan’s book is available through Amazon.com and at select booksellers.