Heimert

More than anything else, this week's set of readings made me want to go out and buy a copy of poor Alan Heimert's book. It seems to me that since Heimert's book--which was published by Harvard University Press, and which is not typically known for publishing horrible works of scholarship--attracted such vociferous objections, that it is probably worth examining further.

While Morgan and Mead obviously found flaws in the text, it does appear to me that they were entirely too harsh toward Heimert and his work.  As Stout stated in his review, "we must ask whether in fact Heimert wrote the book the critics reviewed. If Heimert's study is simply an extension of Miller, then the problems with the book become insurmountable because, as the critics demonstrate, there is no clear and consistent link between revivalism and republicanism at the level of ideas. But if the book is viewed in a different context altogether-if Heimert was not seeking to establish direct intellectual links between religious thought and political rebellion- then the entire effort needs to be revaluated."[1]

McLoughlin, in his review of the book, appears to agree with Stout, directly quoting Heimert, who stated that "the uprising of the 1770's was not so much a result of reasoned thought as an emotional outburst similar to a religious revival." [2] Piecing together part of Heimert's argument from quotes and statements made my other historians, it does appear, at least in this quote, that Heimert is arguing for an understanding of the origins of the revolution that goes beyond just a tracing of the history of ideas from the Great Awakening (or lack thereof) to the Revolution. Furthermore, it appears that as history and the other humanities have embraced the "literary turn," that subsequent historians (such as Stout) have found Heimert's method of "going beyond the text" to have more merit than Morgan and Mead saw.

Finally, more recently scholars appear to see the vitriol of Morgan, Mead, and others to be the result of Heimert upsetting the applecart by challenging the dominant paradigm that understood the American Revolution as resulting from "liberal" religionist thought, and not from the minds of evangelicals, as Heimert argued in his text.[3]

Of course, Morgan and Mead wrote their objections before the linguistic turn had made seriously headway in the philosophy of history.  Morgan, at least, seeks "empirical" evidence, much like the scientist does. Should historians today seek empirical evidence in their quest to understand the past?  Morgan also notes that "The world he offers us has been constructed by reading beyond the lines of what men said..."  Post-modern thought typically asserts that all knowledge is constructed.  Which view of historical epistemology provides better answers to understanding the past?


[1] Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, The William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 1977): 522-3.
[2] Wiliam G. McLoughlin, “The American Revolution as a Religious Revival: 'The Millennium in One Country'”, The New England Quarterly 40, no. 1 (March 1967): 100.
[3] Jeff Waddington, “Religion and the American Mind,” The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University (blog), April 17, 2007, accessed September 11, 2013, http://jonathanedwardscenter.blogspot.com/2007/04/religion-and-american-mind.html.
[4] Edmund S. Morgan “Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Present (book”, The William and Mary Quarterly (July 1967): 459.