- Providence and the Invention of American History by Sarah Koenig
In Providence and the Invention of American History, Sarah Koenig sets out to demonstrate “how an unlikely tale about a missionary helped to shape popular and academic understandings of history” (p. 8). As a historical figure, Marcus Whitman is a deeply familiar one. For American historians and for those interested in the history of the American West, the “Whitman story” has loomed large; even those aspects under deepest dispute have proven difficult to dislodge. Koenig sets for herself a profoundly ambitious task: to revisit the histories written about Whitman while resisting the temptation to weigh in on their veracity. In this, she succeeds admirably. Koenig offers readers an innovative examination of the stories that have circulated about Whitman since the years immediately following his death in 1847 to the current day to show how changing iterations of the Whitman story both reflected and drove the norms of academic and popular history in ways that continue to reverberate today.
Koenig traces the Whitman story from its initial telling in 1848, at a time when Whitman’s failures as a missionary and his death at the hands of people he had purportedly come to “save” hardly set him up as a candidate to “someday be honored as a national hero” (p. 17).
Yet shortly after his death, Whitman’s story underwent radical and lasting revision. It is the fact of these failures, Koenig shows, which made such reinvention necessary: “The collapse of the Whitman Mission demanded that the proponents of missions find ways to relocate God’s providential guidance” (p. 19). Koenig identifies Henry Spalding, a Whitman mission contemporary, as “the most prominent early disseminator” of the Whitman Saved Oregon story and a key practitioner of providential history (p. 53). This mode of historical storytelling worked to interpret the past to locate “the work of God or of another unseen force in history” (p. 49).
In Spalding’s telling, through a daring journey to Washington, D.C. to secure protections for Oregon emigrants, Whitman had essentially rescued the Pacific Northwest from becoming a British province. Whitman’s aim, as Spalding would have it, was simply to “claim Oregon for Christ”(p. 40). By enabling an influx of Protestant settlers, the mission, and Whitman’s role in it (both ordained by God), could be seen “as a success for nationalism if not for evangelism” (p. 49). For Koenig, the important takeaway is less that Whitman became a “patriotichero” than that of the staying power of providential history and the way it would shape professional and popular history in the century ahead.
Koenig explores historical writing about Whitman emerging in the 1870s and 1880s and beyond that sometimes identify conflicting conventions of historical writing and research. In this context as Pacific Northwesterners struggled to create a regional identity, the region [End Page 48] also made its “first efforts toward historical professionalization” (p. 14). The Whitman story emerged as vital to both. Crafting Whitman as a pioneer, regional historians agreed that he could be seen as an archetypal western figure but disagreed about whether to cast him as a providential or secular one. Moreso, the two emergent schools of thought differed in important ways over methodology. “Pioneersecularists” insisted that history must be free of religious bias and questioned the use of eyewitness accounts, strongly preferring the use of documentary evidence in interpreting the past. This new set of professional standards threatened to undermine providentialists’ authority and to sow the first serious seeds of doubt around the Whitman story.
Although the Whitman story shaped by the providentialists’ orientation showed remarkable resiliency, at the turn of the century other historians began to debunk the story as a work of fiction rather than of historical fact. At the dawn of the new century, academic history was taking new steps toward professionalization with a focus on primary sources and, relatedly, toward objectivity “as the fundamental norm” (p. 171). This, coupled with the profession’s increasing secularization, prompted a re-examination of the Whitman narrative. Indeed, these...