Session Abstract
This panel, with three papers and one chair/commentator, engages questions relating to individuals’ and societies’ construction of historical narratives and historical understanding, addressing what the Program Committee co-chairs have called “the narrative, causal, and meaning-making frameworks of human storytelling” [Perspectives (Jan. 2012), 31]. The three papers address this theme in varied chronologies and geographies within the early modern Atlantic world.
Mitch Kachun, an African Americanist, will draw upon his current book project on Crispus Attucks in American memory. Attucks was a man of mixed race who was first to die in the 1770 Boston Massacre, a key event leading to the American Revolution. He has subsequently become an important symbol of African American citizenship, patriotism, and heroism. While we know little about Attucks’s life that can be verified in primary sources, conflicting stories have emerged regarding his life, worldview, and symbolic significance. Kachun will assess Attucks’s place in American memory by unpacking the dominant Attucks narratives, evaluating the most relevant sources, and tracing how Attucks’s story has been adapted by different constituencies in different time periods.
Alida Metcalf and Eve Duffy, scholars of colonial Brazil and early modern Germany, respectively, will discuss their collaborative analysis of the 16th century account by Hans Staden, a German sailor who wrote of his shipwreck and captivity among the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil. Their work addresses sources, movement, cultural contact, and the shaping of Staden’s narrative and its reception, while also illustrating the benefits of scholarly collaboration across fields to effectively reconstruct and assess the significance of Staden's tale.
Erika Kuijpers, a social historian of the Low Countries, examines recurrent elements in the tales of heroism that emerged in the Dutch Republic after the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648), a war that started as a civil war and developed into a devastating war between the Habsburg regime and the newly founded Republic. Her paper analyzes the shared characteristics of these heroic narratives and how their content, meaning, and generic structure changed during the transmission from the communicative memory of families or local communities to cultural memory embodied in history books and other media that circulated more widely and served a broader audience.
Aaron Fogleman, a specialist in colonial America and the Atlantic world, will chair and comment.
The panel’s focus on the construction of historical narratives in different contexts within the early modern Atlantic world addresses the program committee’s desire for sessions including scholars from varied subfields engaging related questions as they apply to multiple chronologies and geographies. The panel also addresses the conference theme by exploring “the ways that the shapes and forms of those stories themselves affect how we understand and communicate the past” (ibid.). This panel will interest scholars of the early modern Atlantic world; the shaping of personal and collective memories; the formation of national narratives and identities; the conceptualization of citizenship and belonging; and the construction of heroic narratives.