Coda

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.

Israel Potter; or, Hither and Thither History

The present is social: this is the central claim of Chapter 5, the book’s final chapter, which reads Herman Melville’s novel Israel Potter (1855). Formally peculiar, the novel’s erratic telling of history thus mirrors Israel’s wanderings. Both are, as the narrator says at one point of Israel, “repeatedly and rapidly …planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again, hither and thither.” My reading proceeds by way of an exploration of the novel’s varying uses of narrative prolepsis, its movement away from a foreshadowing that knows that is certain, and toward one that doesn’t, but that hopes. Alongside its critique of nationalist posturing, Israel Potter imagines the conditions for a kind of hopefulness, which it glimpses in forms of sociality that reside in an unspecified, perhaps even queer, “as yet.” In doing so, it anticipates the possibility of a renovated and renewed social world.

Frederick Douglass’s Historical Turn

Chapter 4 tracks Frederick Douglass’s developing historical-temporal consciousness and his adoption of a presentist view of history that rhymes with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical presentism. In tandem with his embrace of political abolitionism, Douglass in his speeches and writings of the 1850s, began a sweeping philosophical engagement with the relations between past, present, and future and became what I will call abolitionism’s future historian—the historian of an abolitionist past that had not yet come to pass. Examining a series of recurring images—in My Bondage and My Freedom, The Heroic Slave, and most notably, in his remarkable 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision—of Douglass gazing into the future, I argue for the centrality of a newly acquired present-oriented perspective as the animating feature of Douglass’s mature pre-Civil War politics and his vision of the possibilities of social and historical transformation.

Unhistorical Fictions: Sedgwick and Neal

Chapter 2 attends two early works that, I argue, resist rather than participate in the formation of the historical romance tradition in antebellum U.S. literature and, in doing so, offer an implied critique of historicist assumptions and procedures. John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) each experiments with writing (and experiencing) history through the present tense. Deploying anachronism as both narrative method and trope, Hope Leslie’s narrative of colonial New England disrupts the unidirectional course of time, challenging fundamental conceptions of the form and shape of history that are as prevalent today as in Sedgwick’s time. In Seventy-Six, Neal strives to render an account of history that neither refers nor means, but that simply is. Impossibly, Neal seeks to evacuate the narrative of temporality, to circumvent the inherent tendency of narrative to shape and bestow coherence upon experience—a coherence that inevitably distorts the particular tang of now.

Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian

Chapter 1 analyzes the self-consciousness—and uncanny postmodernity—of Washington Irving in the various works attributed to his historian alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker, particularly A History of New York and “Rip Van Winkle.” I argue that Irving’s Knickerbocker writings inaugurated an under-recognized tradition of antebellum writing devoted less to the creation of a coherent national past than to theorizing “history” itself. Irving’s A History of New York (1809) forms a kind of practical illustration of the dismantling of history writing in our own time. Irving’s metahistorical discourse, I claim, cannot be adequately accounted for by conventional historicist contextualization, by confining his works to a particular moment in time, much less one that has been superseded by or that is irretrievably distant and distinct from the critical present. Working in tandem with A History of New York’s disquisition on the mutability of historical knowledge is the experience of history “Rip Van Winkle” offers to its readers. A story of temporal dislocation, “Rip Van Winkle” exploits and critiques Rip’s—and the reader’s—desire to settle upon an orienting present and locate that present within a chronological sequence (before, during, and after the war).

Introduction

The Ever-Present Now: Time, History, and Antebellum American Writing begins with Garrison’s experience of the present moment’s dire intensity, because for him and a number of his contemporaries, that experience exemplifies an attitude and stance toward history and one’s own place in it that is the central focus of this book. The introduction establishes the Romantic concern with “the living present” as an ethico-political imperative through readings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s well-known poem “A Psalm of Life” and William Lloyd Garrison’s little-known 1857 speech “The Living Present and the Dead Past.” The introduction argues that in their devotion to the present, Longfellow and Garrison give expression to a historical disposition at odds both with modern historiographical injunctions against “presentism” and with political moderation.

Emerson’s Strong Present Tense

Chapter 3 considers this question: why, when Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks of history, does he so often think of the present? Emerson’s various rejections of the past seem to suggest that he had no real interest in history, despite the fact that a persistent engagement with the value and meaning of history provides a certain continuity to his career from beginning to end. This chapter argues that Emerson’s subordination of the past to the present is anything but unhistorical. I read Emerson’s major essays of the 1840s in relation to his antislavery addresses of the 1850s. His ruminations on history, philosophical and political, reveal that he was already an immediatist well before he was an abolitionist. For Emerson, as for immediatist abolitionists, the dynamic, fluid nature of the present moment is that which gives rise to historical consciousness and what makes history and (historical) experience possible in the first place.