The Common Cause by Parkinson.
As further...info:
Reviewed by Anna Leigh Todd (University of Pennsylvania)
Published on H-Early-America (November, 2017)
Commissioned by Joshua J. Jeffers
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=50106
If scores of historians have looked to John Adams’s famous horological metaphor, that “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together,” for evidence of the extraordinary coalescence of Revolutionary fervor, Robert G. Parkinson in
The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution finds greater promise in the second half of the quote. Evoking the act of fashioning implied in the verbiage “were made,” Adams went on to emphasize the manufacture of the clocks, describing their synchronicity as “a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.”[1] In Parkinson’s telling, this mechanism was encapsulated by the rhetoric of the “common cause;” its clockmakers were the printers and newspaper editors who crafted it (p. 5). Faced with the task of making the culturally familiar British foreign, printers and patriots rhetorically linked them to entrenched threats of rebellious slaves, menacing Native Americans, and opportunistic mercenaries--what he terms “proxies”--through the reproduction and dissemination of carefully crafted war stories. For Parkinson, this redirection of patriotic anxiety onto racial and cultural others is at the heart of “the American founding myth,” the foreclosure of the promise of liberty and equality for many Revolutionary participants and the predestination of an American citizenry defined exclusively as free and white (p. 24). This reality has been obscured, he argues, by its very representations. “With the war stories they would tell, refused to tell, or were ineffective in telling,” he writes, “the patriots would bury race deep in the political structure of the new republic” (p. 24).
(snip)
Representation, in fact, constitutes the core of Parkinson’s interpretation in that the common cause both sought political representation and relied on cultural representations to achieve that end. He pays careful attention to the limitations of a term popular among scholars--“propaganda”--which he deftly criticizes for its anachronism and “cultural baggage” (p. 17). Yet Parkinson also variously employs the terms “rhetoric” and “discourse,” collapsing other complex notions within the same process of the linguistic construction of a shared enemy without attending to their nuances and theoretical histories. He makes an interesting claim that the common cause gained legitimacy by selectively reporting on “real” events, but his frequent interchange of a fraught vocabulary leaves one wondering about the relationship between each of these terms and “truth” as well as the role of language in constructing reality. The term that is conspicuously and significantly absent from Parkinson’s theoretical framework, however, is “ideology.” In fact, he firmly rejects Whig ideology as the driving force of the Revolution: “Independence,” he argues, “was not an organic upwelling of patriotic fervor” (P. 262). Rather, in an important twist, Parkinson injects ideology with its own dose of conflict, arguing that the common cause “became as much about fear and outrage as the defense of inalienable rights” (p. 22). This dismissal of ideology with its connotations of the innate and universal serves Parkinson’s emphasis on the contingency of patriotism, its inherent prejudices, and the stakes of the contest over hearts and minds.
In order to trace the consequences of these representations over the course of the Revolution, Parkinson first must address its medium of distribution: the sinews of early American print. The book begins by painstakingly recreating the circulation networks of roughly three dozen newspapers and their publishers, linking them to committees of correspondence, a nascent American postal system, and the shift from an unbiased press to one increasingly dedicated to influencing political opinion. Particularly memorable is Parkinson’s case study of William Bradford’s
Pennsylvania Journal, encompassing subscription records, distribution maps, textual materiality, and the process by which news items were received and recycled. Appendixes offer further data on Bradford’s paper as well as bibliographical information on other circulated titles, proving a welcome resource to readers interested in Revolutionary-era print culture.
Full review is here:
https://networks.h-net.org/node/858...ommon-cause-creating-race-and-nation-american