Pen to Paper with Peter Mancall

Writing a volume for the Oxford History of the United States is an exercise in both synthesis and ambition. The series has long set the standard for American historical writing, and to join it is to enter a multigenerational conversation about how the story of the nation’s past should be told. In the interview that follows, Peter Mancall reflects on writing for that tradition, the historians, and reading habits that have inspired and shaped his thinking.

1. You’ve spent decades studying early American history. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?

I became an early American historian during graduate school, lured into the field at first by Bernard Bailyn, who became my advisor. I had not studied this period as an undergraduate, but it sparked my interest almost immediately when I got to my PhD program. I found an arena to investigate the issues that drove me to become a historian—the chance to explore the lives of lesser-known people whose actions shaped North America.

2. Your book opens the Oxford History of the United States—a series known for reshaping historical understanding. What does it mean to you to set this foundation for the entire narrative arc of early American history?

The OHUS has a long and well-deserved reputation as a source of sparkling narratives about the American past. As a historian who had moved towards writing narrative, which I have previously done in three books that focused on what an individual’s life could tell us about a crucial topic, I could not resist the chance to write a narrative history that stretched across a continent—and beyond. Having now finished this book, I am in awe of those who wrote these earlier volumes. Each is a work of great scholarship, but just as important, compelling style. The art of history, as others have said more elegantly than I can, lies in the telling of the story as much as the contents. It is daunting to think that my book will be the first in a chronological sequence that tells a history of the nation over several thousand pages. But I hope that my emphasis on contingency and agency, the concepts that drive my approach to writing about the past, set the stage for the many unexpected and unpredictable turns told in the luminous books that follow mine.

3. The OHUS series aims to integrate narrative storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This obviously requires both a scholar’s discipline and a storyteller’s instinct. How has your approach to writing evolved over the course of your career?

I began to write narrative about 25 years ago for a book about the younger Richard Hakluyt, who, among other things, was an avid promoter of the English colonization of North America. While writing that book, which appeared in 2007, I became increasingly interested in questions central to writing narrative, especially trying to develop characters and scenes to move the story forward. That led me to two tragic figures—the explorer Henry Hudson, not during the years of his glory but instead on his last voyage when he could not escape a world he had created; and Thomas Morton, a lawyer exiled three times from early New England. In these works, I hope I have shown readers how individuals wrestle with the hands they must play, sometimes with cards they have dealt to themselves.

4. Many readers associate early American history with the English colonies, but your work ranges far beyond that. Which non-English actors—Indigenous, African, or European—do you think readers will be most surprised to encounter?

Since historians of early America have long been integrating non-English actors into our stories about the colonial era, I am not sure that readers will necessarily be surprised to find Indigenous, African, and European figures jostling in the pages of my book. They may be more surprised by my insistence that we need to tell the stories of everyone who lived in this era, which means a great deal of attention in this volume to Indigenous peoples, who outnumbered everyone else across the centuries I cover in the book. The smaller stories I tell reveal depth and complexity and, I hope, bring to life a narrative that needs to trace the arc of the story from the so-called 30,000-foot perspective. I hope I have succeeded in telling that large history through the accumulation of many intimate moments.

5. If readers take away one big idea from Contested Continent that reframes how they think about American history, what do you hope it will be—and why is that idea particularly relevant now?

I think that those who have looked at early American history have been shaped by three overarching explanations for what happened. The first emerged at the time: Europeans took control over the Americas because this was what the Christian God dictated. The second came later and became associated with scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner: the history of North America, and especially that of the United States, witnessed a clash of civilizations and cultures, with Europeans and Euro-Americans emerging on top because of the advantages they allegedly possessed. The third, the dominant narrative in recent years, emphasizes that European conquest was largely the result of the spread of infectious diseases, part of what the historian Alfred Crosby labeled “the Columbian Exchange.” Each of these narratives presumed European success in the Americas. But as I hope I reveal in Contested Continent, there was no certainty that Europeans would prevail in the contest for the Western Hemisphere. I end my book with a series of events from 1675 to 1680 to suggest that tumult, not stability, defined the American experience, and that it had for centuries.

6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in Contested Continent?

I hope that my book will be looked at with other wonderful, long-form versions of early American history. I hope that my book is read alongside Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years, a brilliant narrative focused on the experience of people in eastern North America from the time of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the era of rebellion in the 1670s. My geographic and chronological framing is different from Bailyn’s. For example, my story starts much earlier than his. But when he wrote that book near the end of his storied career, I saw it as reflecting his uncertainty about the fate of our society. My book, too, reflects ambivalence about the future and tries to explain the causes for what some would see as our current predicament, namely the dangers that humans pose to our planet and too frequently to each other.

7. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or pleasure?

I find inspiration in what many people refer to as creative non-fiction, especially stories focused on individuals or specific moments. The writers who embody this approach for me are people like Jonathan Harr, especially in A Civil Action, and Patrick Radden Keefe in Empire of Pain. Harr once gave me great advice about how to start a book, which I took to heart and have shared with many others over the years. I also turn to great works of fiction that get at issues about human motivation and character. While writing Contested Continent, I looked again at Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—not for their plots but instead for how each, in relatively short works, was able to summon complex portraits of characters in vividly drawn scenes. Even on a large canvas, the small scenes matter.

Featured image by Debby Hudson via Unsplash