Origins and Originality in the New American Nation:
Citation, Authorship, and Impartial Truth in American Historiography, 1784-1850

Eileen Ka-May Cheng
Hanover College

In a survey of historiography on the American Revolution, published in 1912, the historian Sydney George Fisher offered a scathing indictment of his eighteenth and nineteenth-century predecessors. The very title of his paper, "The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution," suggested the general thrust of his critique.  By his account, the revolutionary generation of historians and their early nineteenth-century successors had drastically oversimplified the Revolution.  Blinded by patriotic zeal, these historians glorified their ancestors as uniformly heroic figures.  As they did so, they demonstrated their uncritical standards of scholarship and their lack of impartiality. For Fisher, the methodology used by these historians was both a cause and a symptom of this problem.  He ascribed their one-sided interpretation of the Revolution to their propensity for plagiarism.  Conversely, he believed, their biased perspective prevented them from adopting more systematic and scientific methods of historical writing.  To do so, Fisher argued, would reveal the tenuous basis for their claims.

Ironically for someone attempting to demystify the Revolution, Fisher was engaged in some myth-making of his own.  Namely, he contributed to a myth about the uncritical and unscientific character of historical writing in the early American republic.  Modern scholars have, by and large, accepted Fisher's characterization of historiography in this period.  Like Fisher, they have assumed that early national historians disregarded footnotes and made plagiarism a routine practice.  Yet early national attitudes toward citation were more complex and sophisticated than Fisher and his successors have acknowledged.  Contrary to Fisher's claims, historians in this period developed increasingly rigorous standards for citation and began to stigmatize plagiarism in historical writing.   My paper examines the sources and implications of this trend.  Changing conceptions of authorship contributed to the rise of interest in footnotes. In particular, citation became increasingly important as historians put a new premium on originality and uniqueness as scholarly ideals.  The growing demand for citation also signified a concern with impartiality and a desire to solidify the foundations of historical truth.  In this way, looking at the treatment of citation can illuminate deeper assumptions about the nature of historical knowledge among early national historians, and show how these historians had begun to develop many of the doctrines that scholars ascribe to the modern historical consciousness of the twentieth century.

Paradoxically, this seemingly modern concern with citation was very much the product of its time.  Specifically, the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic aesthetics, the shift to liberal capitalism, and nationalist imperatives all contributed to this transformation.  Thus, by reassessing the theory and practice of citation in early national historiography, this paper seeks at once to revise the conventional narrative of American historiography, and to shed light on the political and social transformations of the early republic.