Early American history in a decolonial framework?

by DonaldFDraper

This may be more of a mind exercise on exploring decolonialism as a means of exploring early American history but also something to think about early American history. Can you look at the Early United States in terms of decolonialism? There is an effort to change towards American culture over British/English (Webster's spelling reforms), and a push toward the cult of republican motherhood. (I don't know enough about early American history to say more).

Is it possible to view Early American History in a Decolonial framework or am I just losing my mind?

hazelnutcream

Yes and no? Certainly plenty of literature examines the sorts of questions you're describing. But I think there's a certain hesistance to frame the history of the United States in the language of decolonization, given the lasting racial and economic implications of colonialism that have been so destructive to other nations.

It strikes me that big, majesterial books on the political and cultural history of the American Revolution have been set as triptichs tracing the transition of the colonies from British provinces to a distinctive political system. Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution is a classic history of the conflict set in three parts: Monarchy, Republicanism, Democracy. These respectively describe the hierarchical society of the colonies within the British Empire, the elite politics of the early Republic, and the radical equalizing that occurred in early nineteenth-century America. Patrick Griffin's book America's Revolution is a more recent book that uses recent turns toward borderlands and Atlantic histories to insert a whole new cast of characters into the narrative. But it too takes a three-part structure that traces the transition in America from British to American modes of understanding politics, sovereignty, and political economy. It describes the thoroughly British nature of the colonies before the war, the conflict itself where Americans acted independently for their own self-interests, and the contests and compromises of sovereignty put at stake in the United States with British rule gone.

You're right in pointing out Republican Motherhood as one of the major ideas that went into the creation of an American nation. One unique book that seems to fit your idea is Kate Haulmann's The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America, which traces how fashion changed over the century as it reflected ideas of politics, political authority, and identity. The British Atlantic distaste for Frenchified style expanded in America during and after the Revolution to include a rejection of all cosmopolitan fashions. She argues that plainer styles indicated self-sufficiency and reflected individuals' willingness to set aside ambitions to contribute to a democratic society. Neo-Grecian, country, and military styles became a popular expression of Republican ideals.

I think more broadly, when historians look at anti-Federalism, they tend toward narratives of American distinctiveness and describe a shift away from the Atlantic world (and the patterns of trade, culture, politics it entailed). Anti-Federalists cast Federalists as neo-Loyalists after all. The central themes of these sorts of books (here I'm thinking of Saul Cornell The Other Founders and Sean Wilentz The Rise of American Democracy) are the Jeffersonian vision of independent farmers as the foundation of the new American political economy, continuing paranoia about oppression expressed in populist events such as the Whiskey Revellion, a focus on westward expansion (rather than the proto-industrailization of the eastern seaboard cities), and the development of Jacksonian democracy.