Thomas Jefferson's Theory of the Super Lion, and a Different Sort of Environmental Racism

Most people would likely be surprised to hear that 18^th century European Americans did not think of Africans, African Americans, or Native Americans as innately inferior.  The concept of innate inferiority was actually a later development, beginning around the time of Jefferson’s presidency in 1800, and brought on partly by the need to justify slavery in a post-Revolutionary age obsessed with independence and equality.    

Prior to this, the imagined inferiority of people of color was considered an environmental problem: because all people had sprung from the same source – i.e., Genesis – people were innately equal.  However, according to Enlightenment thinking and to popular culture, as people spread across the globe, they were deeply and often negatively affected by their environments.  An average European American prior to the Revolution would have considered everything from perceived savagery to dark skin to be a deleterious effect of a harmful, non-European environment. 

Many Europeans worried that Americans would gradually succumb to the environmental pressures that caused Native American savagery; they took the wildness and violence of Western settlement as evidence of this.  Jefferson, always ready to argue for the superiority of everything American, argued that while the African environment certainly had led to inferiority amongst Africans, that Native Americans were not inferior at all.  To claim Native American inferiority would have meant admitting  the inferiority of the American environment.  In his own words, the Native American was “in body and mind the equal of the white man.”  However, rather than leading him to value the existing cultures of the indigenous peoples, this belief led Jefferson and his followers to more fervently engage in the colonial project of proving that Native Americans could be converted to European American ways.  Towards this end, Jefferson studied Native Americans passionately: he spent thirty years studying indigenous languages, although after his presidency, his work on Native American languages was stolen as his library was shipped back to Monticello. 

The inferiority of the American climate was also the subject of much European scientific literature.  The great French naturalist of the Western world, Buffon, influentially wrote that the life forms of the New World were underdeveloped, pointing out that the New World had no lions or elephants because the weak American environment could not support such rigorous life forms.  He apparently didn’t see the irony that these animals lived in Africa but not Europe.

The only book that Jefferson ever wrote, Notes on the State of Virginia, took Buffon to task.  In charts that are often edited out of current editions, Jefferson weighed American animals against European ones, finding that while the average European bear weighed 153.7 pounds, the American weighed 400; that the American cow weighed 2,500 pounds to the European 763.  Jefferson sent Buffon enormous moose antlers and numerous specimens, forcing Buffon to revise his work.  

Jefferson wasn’t done with Buffon though.  The following quote is straight from the book Empire of Liberty, the second volume of the Oxford History of the United States: “In the mid-1790s on the basis of some fossil remains, probably belonging to a prehistoric sloth, he [Jefferson] concocted the existence of a huge super-lion, three times bigger than the African lion, and presented his imagined beast to the scientific world as the Megalonyx, ‘The Great Claw.’”  It gets even better: when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition to chart the West, he did so expecting that Megalonyx’s and Mammoths were still walking the Western earth, and hoped that specimens of these super creatures would demolish the Old World notions of New World inferiority once and for all.  

Jefferson's Megalonyx presentation to the American Philosophical Society initiated vertebrate paleontology in the United States.  The great prehistoric sloth remains known as the Megalonyx Jeffersonii.

Fantasy Projects: Writing Curricula Based on the Oxford History of the United States

I have many "fantasy projects" - projects that I would love to engage in given sufficient time and resources.  The first would be re-reading the Oxford History of the United States, and using that resource to write tightly but thoroughly contextualized two page essays on major questions in US history.  The Oxford History, although vast in scope and rigorous in scholarship, is also highly readable, extremely thoughtful, greatly respected... and contains essential contextual information for understanding history that is largely unavailable at the secondary school level.  

In a nutshell, I believe I can take twenty pages of rich contextual information from the Oxford History and re-write it in two enticing pages, at a secondary school level, in a way that few other resources have accomplished. 

I imagine it would take me a month to read and take notes on each volume, and another month to write perhaps twenty two page essays that would help students (and teachers) make sense of history.  Since I have the summer ahead of me, I've decided to test this timetable and to see what product I can create.  I've just started reading Empire of Liberty, and believe I'll be able to start publishing some prototype essays here in mid-July.  

Provocative example questions from the post-revolutionary era that Empire covers include: Why could only men with property vote?  Why did so many founding fathers own slaves?  How did the Revolution weaken slavery, and why was it subsequently reborn with a vengeance?  How could the revolutionaries talk of independence while supporting slavery?  The answers to these questions require analyzing historical contexts in which notions of property and liberty differ dramatically from our own.   Students and adults jump to assumptions about these questions all the time, reading their present understandings of these subjects into the past, in a psychological phenomena known as presentism. (I hope to post an essay on the subject of presentism here soon). 

These essays would be able to stand alone, allowing for easy integration into curricula, but would also link together, creating a cohesive whole.  They would offer the rich scholarship of the Oxford History - lots of contextualization, rich descriptions of causality - and translate that richness into a shortened version accessible to sixteen year old students.

(For a samples of how I've made academic research available in secondary school texts, see my posts Contextualizing the Buddhas Life, and Examining Prejudice in Ancient China, which were written for sixth graders.)  

A Different Take on "People's History"

When someone (at least my age group) first hears that I'm a history teacher, their most common response is, "That's great!  Do you teach a people's history"?  I start by saying, "Oh yes!  Have you also read Zinn?"  But if they really want to chat about it, I give a longer and more critical answer: "I'm deeply committed to helping students understand oppression.  But honestly, I don't use Zinn.  His painting of history is too black and white, and I'm trying to help my students understand complexity.  My take on "people's history" is not Zinn's.  I don't demonize the powerful or romanticize the people like he does.  I help students think about context, which I think is critical for understanding power, in a way that he fails to do.  To me a true peoples history involves helping students understand why all people have thought, felt, and acted as they have, and Howard Zinn doesn't serve this purpose". 

Michael Kazin, a historian of populism and a leftist, writes that Zinn is "bad history... Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable... pitting 99% of the people against a conspiratorial elite of 1% - a premise better suited to a conspiracy mongers website than to a work of scholarship".  A harsh indictment, but the truth is, I agree with Kazin.  I would probably only use Zinn in the same way I use some bad textbooks: I would ask students to compare his version of an event to a more contextualized, less ideologically driven version, ask them to determine which sources are more trustworthy and why, and perhaps have them rewrite some passages.   

Zinn, in seeking to highlight oppression, created a history of good and bad which, in its radical oversimplification and misrepresentation, failed to actually help people understand why oppression existed and how it functioned.  Zinn can tell our students that oppression happened, and that resistance also happened.  But he can't help our students understand what we're trying to help them understand: why and how did historical events occur, including oppression and resistance?  What historical contexts allowed for harmful ethics to evolve?  Where did oppressive ideas come from, and why have they made sense, not only to elites, but to the people as well?  

Zinn's history also homogenizes social groups.  We know from educational psychology that multicultural education for young children leads them to develop stereotypic thinking if the stories they read homogenize groups of people, even if that homogenization is designed to highlight cultural beauty.  Social groups - be they slave owners or abolitionists - need to be portrayed in their complexity not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but for psychological and societal health.  We aren't helping students become good citizens who can meaningfully navigate and contribute to society if they learn to homogenize republicans and democrats, the rich and the poor, or any other group. The stark contrast of good and bad in Zinn is not only bad history, it leads to bad historical thinking, and perhaps even enforces the stereotypic thinking that we're trying to diminish in our students.  

A true peoples history requires rich and realistic portrayals of social heterogeneity rather than homogenization.  It also requires contextualization and providing students with the historical thinking skills to analyze context.  Contextualization is dual: there is the contextualization of the moment - what is happening directly around people that shapes their thoughts and actions - and the deeper contextualization that involves delving into historical causality: what historical contexts have shaped the societies and cultures that produce individuals?  This is the work of historians, but Zinn doesn't provide such work. 

Peter Seixas, a renowned scholar of historical thinking, writes that "Ironically, during the same period of time that Zinn's book went through five printings, academic historiography was undergoing a major shift in North America, to include diverse subaltern populations: women, workers, and ethnic and national minorities".  Academically respected historians today do not write the consensus, nation building history of the 1950's that Zinn heroically and passionately fought to debunk: as Daniel Rodgers writes in his profound Age of Fracture, which documents the radical intellectual shifts during the last quarter of the 20th century, they're more likely to be caught in "the long shadow of Michel Foucault".  (As am I...)

Historians of the United States today routinely write stunning histories of labor.  They write about how historical forces shape sexuality and gender roles.  We have recently seen a revolution on the history of emotion, and of the body.  Since the invasion of Iraq, historians have completely re-evaluated their notions of empire and have reframed the history of the US as one of empire building: this is not the far-leftist work of Hardt and Negri so popular seven years ago, but the trend of scholars at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard.  (See Julian Go's Patterns of Empire; Charles Maier's Among Empires, and the stunning book Comanche Empire, which details the workings of a Native American empire so different from Western empires that until now scholars have had trouble even recognizing it as such).  

As a teacher of history, I am also a student of history.  I am a student of understanding the people - all of them, through a deep analysis of the historical contexts that shaped them.  This is my understanding of a true peoples history, and as a teacher, my task is to provide students with the skills and the content that will allow them to thoughtfully consider the people in their many manifestations.