December 15, 2023: Boston Tea Party Studying: The Shoemaker

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 250thanniversary of one of the most significant events in Colonial America, the Boston Tea Party. So thisweek I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that important moment, leadingup to a special weekend tribute to some of the many BostonStudiers from whomI’ve learned a great deal!]

[NB. Ioriginally wrote this post for my 2012 Beach Reads series, but I still highlyrecommend Young’s book as a key part of Boston Tea Party collective memory.]

Why youshould read about a shoemaker on the beach this summer [BEN: or this December,with summer on your mind!].

For thoseof us who are interested in writing works of AmericanStudies scholarship thatwill be engaging for a broad public audience, it can be particularly difficultto find great models of that style. There are plenty of hugely popular works onAmerican history, but I would argue that most of them—such as DavidMcCullough’s books about theRevolutionary era, or Erik Larson’s The Devilin the White City—are explicitly written as narratives, focusedon telling their interesting and important stories. There’s nothing at allwrong with that, but once an author makes that choice, I would argue that it’svery tough for him or her to also include the kinds of analytical questions andthemes with which AmericanStudies scholarship engages. So when we can find abook that does address such questions while still creating a page-turningnarrative—well, that’s a good AmericanStudies beach read!

Near thetop of that list, for me, is Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory andthe American Revolution (2000). Young’sbook definitely highlights a compelling story, that of Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes, a manwho both took part in the city’s pre-Revolutionary 1770s events (the BostonMassacre, the Boston Tea Party) and later led some of the 1820s efforts tocommemorate those events. Yet while telling the multiple stages of Hewes’story, Young likewise—and just as engagingly, for this reader atleast—highlights and engages with some pretty crucial American questions, ofhistorical and communal memory, of contested commemorations, of the origins ofthe Founding Father narrative and other Revolutionary images, and of howAmerican stories and histories developed in the Early Republic period. Needlessto say, such questions remain pretty salient today, not only with the rise ofour 21st century Tea Party but in a moment when how we remember andtell the stories of our past is so crucially tied to where we go in the future.

But I’mmaking Young’s book sound more appropriate for the classroom than the beach. Solet me be clear—this is a great story, and Young tells it very effectively;when he uses that story to address his AmericanStudies questions, he movesbetween those levels smoothly and successfully, and never loses sight of whatmakes the story engaging and meaningful for a broad American audience. Youngbegins his book by asking “How does an ordinary person win a place inhistory?”, and he not only answers that question (and many others) verythoroughly, but exemplifies a parallel idea: that history can and should bewritten for audiences well beyond those trained in academic historiography. Thoseare key lessons for any public AmericanStudiers, but they also make for a bookthat you’ll be entirely comfortable reading while sunbathing, drink in hand.

Special postthis weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Tea Party takes you’d share?