65 pages • 2 hours read
Pauline MaierAmerican Scripture
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The English Origins of the American Revolution
Most of the action in American Scripture takes place during a period of transition in the American colonies’ public discourse, which culminated in the Second Continental Congress proclaiming Independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776. The American War for Independence was unprecedented: No colony had ever separated itself from its parent country and established a republican form of government nearly from scratch, yet this is what the majority of the 13 colonies’ delegates set out to do. Before the conflict began, American colonists were proud of being British subjects because they enjoyed the same rights as the people in the Mother Country; and they thought their country’s system of government was the best in the world. It was a shock, therefore, when Parliament and King George began to tax colonists—who had no representation in Parliament—to replenish funds depleted by the Seven Years’ War. The colonists felt their rights were under attack, but they knew this wasn’t the first time British subjects had to defend their rights.
There was regular discord in England for hundreds of years, and most conflicts involved either the royal line of succession or the country’s established religion—or sometimes both at once. The Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) somewhat settled both issues: King James II fled England after his policies and his Catholicism motivated a group of powerful men to request the King’s Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, take James’s place. William and James’s daughter, Mary Stuart, jointly took the throne and in 1689 signed Parliament’s final draft of the Declaration of Rights—a precursor to the US Bill of Rights, establishing the rights of the public and a legal means by which the people could end a monarch’s reign if those rights were violated. During the Georgian period, which began in 1714, a different situation raised the issue of the people’s rights in North America. American colonists protested new taxes imposed on them by Parliamentary representatives they hadn’t elected. The unrest was most pronounced in Massachusetts, where battles between colonists and British troops intensified.
The action in American Scripture begins with two Massachusetts delegates heading to the Second Continental Congress; they fled their colony just before the battles in Lexington and Concord started the war in earnest. The Congress, despite British attacks, couldn’t agree on Independence because many delegates and their constituents still wished for reconciliation with Great Britain—they still cherished their British heritage, which included the Declaration of Rights. When Congress reached consensus on Independence over one year later, the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, primarily Thomas Jefferson, used the Declaration of Rights as a model.
Methodological Context: Building a Historical Narrative With a Purpose
The professional historian researches primary sources, consults other historians’ studies, and pieces together a coherent theory based on the research; however, every historian has a different method of presenting their findings. Pauline Maier is a revisionist historian—part of a group of historians who, in the late 20th century, were developing new methodologies and rejecting those that no longer seemed relevant to their cultural and political contexts. As a history professor and researcher, Maier believed in teaching students and readers about the complex history of the American Revolution through narrative, often working to correct what she saw as misleading framing in the conventional story of US history taught in primary and secondary schools. Her original motivation to write about the Declaration of Independence was to produce a short textbook for advanced high school and college-level students, but what she wrote instead was a complicated story about why the Declaration was politically necessary, what the drafting process was like, and how the document became a sacred American text. Maier’s purpose in American Scripture (1997) is to educate readers through narrative and to clear away the veil of myth that prevents Americans from seeing the Declaration clearly.
Maier narrates the collective process of the many people who contributed to the cause of Independence and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence through adaptation and debate. She also shows how political and social changes influenced the stories Americans told about the Declaration, which led to adaptations of ideas in the Declaration to support debates about equal rights. She singles out Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. as political leaders who successfully reframed the Declaration as an ongoing challenge—a promise of equality that new generations must work to fulfill. Maier uses literary devices like flashbacks, foreshadowing, repetition, and irony to heighten the drama in her narrative, just as a teacher uses different media to make lessons more interesting and understandable. The way Maier’s story concludes depends on her readers’ response to the moral: Don’t let Declaration historiography become the document’s entire legacy. She encourages her intended audience, American readers, to keep the Declaration alive by adapting and debating its ideas, thus continuing the story beyond the last page of American Scripture. In this way, Maier fulfills the purpose of her narrative history: to teach American readers that history stays vital when they think and talk about it critically.
