Ebenezer MacIntosh is one of historian Gary Nash’s Revolutionary War heroes. He was the poor shoemaker who in 1775 led a crowd of workaday Bostonians to riot in protest of England’s tightening control of the colonies. He was the man who single-handedly aroused the city’s working men to level the Stamp Act office, and destroy the house of the hated administrator of the revenue stamp act. This “shoemaker street general,” Nash says, harnessed the resentment that had been building against the King’s restrictive trade policies, a force that English supporters and colonial leaders would come to see they had sorely underestimated. “Here was someone who was not long on the world stage, but who was very important at that particular moment of the war,” says Nash, who in his new book “The Unknown American Revolution” (Viking) introduces the ordinary people’preachers, enslaved Africans, frontier mystics, disgruntled women and aggrieved Indians’whose radical ideas and agendas fired the American Revolution. Nash will talk about these unsung heroes on Thursday, August 25 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. For more than 30 years, the Pacific Palisades resident has been researching and studying the American Revolution from the perspective of the little heroes, not the Founding Fathers who most often dominate the “reigning master narrative.” Those long-forgotten men and women from the middle and lower ranks of America made up most of people of revolutionary America, Nash says. “Without their ideas, dreams, and blood sacrifices, the American Revolution would never have occurred.” Men like Venture Smith, a restive slave brought to the British colonies in the 1740s from West Africa, who through his Paul Bunyan strength and unflagging yearn for liberty, managed to buy freedom for himself and for his family. Women, too, played a pivotal role in the events leading to revolution. They were the engines behind the consumer boycotts of the 1770s. Withdrawing from the Atlantic market meant that the colonies, no longer importing textiles, began to spin cotton, linen and woolen cloth. In 1769, Boston built 400 spinning wheels, and from these wheels came 40,000 skeins of “fine yarn, to make any kind of women’s wear,” Nash writes. A professor, scholar and currently the director of the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, Nash has written and edited more than 20 books on early American history. Although most are scholarly works used for college courses, “Red, White, and Black,”1974 has reached a lay market and is in its fifth edition. He admires the work of superstar biographer David McCullough, whose current book on the American Revolution, “1776” has aroused much interest, not to say brisk sales. Nash points out that his fellow historian’s strength is his style. “McCullough really knows how to read the public. He is good at capturing dramatic moments. “They didn’t tell us in graduate school to be as turgid and impenetrable as possible,” Nash says, laughing. “We were just told to be scholarly.” In “The Unknown American Revolution,” Nash creates a clear and colorful landscape, from the colonial seaboard to Indian country east of the Mississippi and enlivens it with men and women, both brave and boastful. One can immediately understand how uncertain was the commitment of those men who threw their lot with the Americans. Many, many colonists refused to support revolution and fled to England or Canada. Others sat on the fence until the battle came to them, Nash says. “The colonists for the most part were very conservative and afraid that once the genie’the hobgoblin of democracy’was released, this was going to be a different country and they wouldn’t like it.” Those who did fight for America were a rag-tag lot, who suffered the deprivation of weather, food, clothing and heart. “Had Washington not been as stubborn as he was’he never gave up’he couldn’t have put up with the loss of so much support,” Nash says. “And after the war, returning soldiers often had to sell their bounty of 50 acres out West just to get back home. Some of them walked as many as 800 miles, from North Carolina to Massachusetts.” Nash says that while he didn’t start out knowing that he wanted to be a historian, he did grow up in Philadelphia, which is about 10 miles from Valley Forge. “The Revolutionary War sites were always a mystique. As a kid I saw earth fortifications or the log huts where the soldiers lived in 1777-78. And Philadelphia is certainly a history-sod city.” When Nash got to Princeton, he did major in history and after a stint in the Navy, he returned to Princeton as a junior administrator and “developed an appetite for history,” going on to study for his Ph.D. His dissertation became his first book, “Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania 1681-1726.” Despite the dismal statistics on Americans’ historical knowledge, Nash refuses to be pessimistic. “I don’t think that we’re history amnesiacs, rather recovering huge chunks of our history that we’re forgotten. I know that when you put 20 questions on a multiple-choice test, the numbers come out badly. But these tests don’t tell us anything about a student’s knowledge of history; they are not asking the right questions. They’re asking trivial questions.” It’s clear from Nash’s books and his work in developing history curricula in public schools, that the key to making history lively is relevancy. “Jane Pauley told me on her show that her son loved history and went happily along with his father, Gary Trudeau, to all the Civil War sites, while her daughter didn’t like history one bit. So, Jane took her to many of the pioneer women’s sites, and that made the difference.” Nash spends about a quarter of his day on the national History Standards Project, whose goal is to build a bridge between the academic historians and teachers in the trenches. To this end, he sets up institutes for professional development in which he not only teaches, but recruits historians to join him. Recently, a two-week institute for Whittier district high school teachers consisted of a field trip to Civil War sites, while another for Riverside, Los Angeles and Orange Counties third and fourth-grade teachers included an 11-day field trip through California. “I think that interest in history is a high point; look at the success of the History Channel and the Ken Burns’ documentaries,” Nash says. In addition, he cites the high numbers of students in history Ph.D. programs. “When I joined the faculty at UCLA in 1966, there were 65 members in the department, including one woman and one African American man. As the profession has been diversified, all sorts of new questions have come up, and a mountain of scholarly work has followed.” For his part in unearthing more of the minor but pivotal players in early American history, Nash is co-writing a book with Colgate professor Graham Hodges about the triangular relationship among Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, colonel of engineers in the Continental Army, and Agrippa Hull, a free-born black veteran who served under Kosciuszko. Nash says that he aimed in his current book “to capture the revolutionary involvement of all the component parts of some three million wildly diverse people living east of the Mississippi.” His work continues in the ongoing tale of the republic’s founding.
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