Symbol, struggle, and sensibility
Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution
By Alfred F. Young
New York University, 419 pp., illustrated, paperback, $22
To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord
By Sandra Harbert Petrulionis
Cornell University, 233 pp., illustrated, $29.95
Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England
By Ann M. Little
University of Pennsylvania, 262 pp., illustrated, $45
This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains
By Christopher Johnson
University of New Hampshire, 313 pp., illustrated, $25.95
The site of the Liberty Tree, a rallying place for patriot resisters in the years leading up to the American Revolution, is at the corner of what are now Washington and Essex streets in downtown Boston. And while there's an antique bas-relief on the Registry of Motor Vehicles building at the corner, and a bronze replica of it in the small plaza across the street, the site itself does not appear on National Park Service maps of Boston's Freedom Trail.
But for Alfred F. Young, professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University, the Liberty Tree is "the major symbol" of the Revolution -- even if it eventually gave way to the eagle as the national symbol.
In the title piece in his provocative collection of essays, "Liberty Tree," Young explores its role as the site of protest activities and as revolutionary symbol -- and its subsequent disappearance from "the dominant public memory of the Revolution."
The area around the Boston tree (there were at least a dozen others, mainly in New England) became a kind of "Liberty Hall," writes Young, "where white male Bostonians without regard to property" -- the "better sort," the "middling sort," and the "lower sort" -- "could take part in public life," even replacing the official town meeting, in which there was a property qualification for voting.
But in time, Young writes, "Bostonians did forget" their Liberty Tree, and its memory was not preserved "in a city whose Brahmin elite fostered a willful forgetting of the radical side of the Revolution." In histories of the city, he notes, "illustrators either reduced the great elm to a small tree with only a few passers-by or put the tree on a landscape totally devoid of people -- the ultimate conservative erasure of the 'mob' of the Revolution."
Young explores that theme further in an essay in which -- as "an attentive outsider" and "occasional insider" -- he offers "propositions" for redirecting the Freedom Trail itself to reflect "the 'popular' side of the Revolution" by addressing the roles of artisans and tradesmen, ordinary women, and African-Americans.
Reflecting a broadened interpretation of the Revolution, Young writes that "the issue is no longer whether to include ordinary people in public presentations of history, but how to include them."
In "To Set This World Right," historian Sandra Harbert Petrulionis notes that when Henry David Thoreau set out on a highly principled but very criminal mission in the early morning of Dec. 3, 1859, he could have called on any number of his neighbors to take his place.
It was the morning after John Brown was hanged for his role in the failed Harpers Ferry raid, and Thoreau was undertaking to transport Francis Meriam, one of the conspirators, to the South Acton railroad station, where he would board a train, eventually escaping into Canada.
Petrulionis, editor of several Thoreau studies, writes that she has sought to "[frame] the evolution of Thoreau's antislavery ideology as part of his community's activism" dating back to the early 1830s. By the time of John Brown's raid, she writes, there was "a confederation of neighbors [who had] fomented a radical consciousness."
Women's experiences -- particularly those of the women taken captive during Indian raids -- have a major place in the study of warfare in Colonial New England, where the front lines could be as close as the edge of a settler's cornfield. In "Abraham in Arms," Ann M. Little, a historian at Colorado State University, explores the issue of gender as it involved both women and men .
Little notes that "the authority" of the male colonists was based on their sex, as well as their religion and ethnicity. But Algonquian and Iroquois warriors "threatened the safety of [settlers' households] and mocked [their] pretensions to dominate New England: 'you dare not fight, you are all one like women ,' they taunted in battle."
Somewhat startlingly, Little also identifies "cultural cross-dressing" as an issue, noting that Indians dressing in English clothing might be an indication that they had killed the clothing's owners, and that throughout the period, "the stripping and reclothing of both male and female captives was central to Indian adoption rituals."
New Hampshire's White Mountains were among the earliest areas of true wilderness to be penetrated and explored by American settlers -- and to engage their artistic sensibilities.
In "This Grand and Magnificent Place," Christopher Johnson notes that before there was an interest in preserving the wilderness, it was a region to be conquered and tamed, and its Abenaki people with it.
Along with a fine narrative account of the region's history, Johnson discusses the paintings of Thomas Cole, which "not only captured the visual beauty of the region but also created a new perspective toward the wilderness," paintings that "were pivotal" in creating "a heritage of respect for and love of the American wilderness."
Michael Kenney writes periodically on books of local and regional interest. 
