Boston minister John Eliot and nine other men established the first historical society in the United States, now known as the Massachusetts Historical Society, in the late eighteenth century. Eliot acknowledged the existence of other learned organizations in Boston, not least the Academy of Arts and Sciences, but argued the new society would be different. Rather than encompassing all arts and sciences, the new Historical Society would “pursue one particular subject.” He and the other founders intended to “confine our attention to this business of collecting things which will illustrate the history of our country.” Other historical society founders throughout the nation used similar terms to describe their intention to collect, gather, preserve, protect, save, snatch, or, more poetically, “rescue from oblivion” all manner of historical materials.1

The Massachusetts society founders considered its establishment a progressive action—and one desperately needed. The new nation deserved preservation of its historical materials. At the time, no other learned societies took history as a primary or even secondary object. The older, Philadelphia-based American Philosophical Society did not actively pursue historical collecting for another quarter century. National, state, and local governments maintained collections of materials, but for legal purposes rather than historical. Unfortunately, government records were ill organized and ill kept. Many public officials, historians, and collectors mingled personal and government materials in their collections. Historical Society founder Rev. Jeremy Belknap, credited as the major force behind the organization’s existence, obtained a number of New Hampshire records while writing a history of the then-colony—and never returned them. Few libraries and academic institutions gathered and preserved historical matter.2

Members of the Massachusetts Historical Society toiled alone for its first decade, but within sixty years the number of active historical societies increased exponentially. States and territories from Maine to Louisiana and Georgia to Minnesota boasted historical societies, as did several cities and counties. Historical organizations served as a mark of civilization and allowed founders to affirm particular views and interests—although many societies failed or endured long periods of dormancy. The society officers and memberships drew almost exclusively from the ranks of wealthy, professional, Protestant men of European descent. Their activities emphasized history in the image of their shared lives and experiences. Their female equivalents had influence on societies’ collecting, but this did not translate into active accumulation of things documenting women’s lives and labors. Officers overlooked the histories of laboring classes and racial and ethnic minorities.

Collecting and preserving historical materials mattered on multiple levels, including affirming importance and ensuring inclusion within the broader historical record. Active efforts to preserve the histories of specific places and peoples generated concerns among others who saw their accomplishments and those of their ancestors diminished or rewritten, or their presences overlooked. Many people vested in ideas of progress and innovation valued historical materials as a means of measuring how much generations improved on one another. Amid competition within and between states, historical documents fueled claims for achievement.

Rescued from Oblivion uses close examination of historical societies to explore historical cultures and consciousness in the early United States. Eliot’s description of the new society’s mission identified core concepts which characterized historical cultures over the succeeding generations: “this business of collecting things which will illustrate the history of our country.” Founders and members had to organize and establish operational procedures. Officers decided what to collect. They did so in service to ideas of national history, but their rhetoric exceeded their reach.

With respect to organizational culture, founders’ decisions persist in many historical institutions to this day. The men who established historical societies followed existing organization practices: elected officers, held regular meetings, published volumes, and kept records. The earliest societies were voluntary entities reliant on members. They took the form of gentlemen’s clubs pursuing goals with public benefits. Successful applications for state charters recreated the societies as quasi-public organizations. The two identities coexisted uneasily, particularly with respect to fiscal matters as most historical societies endured precarious finances and relied to varying degree on government support. State charters laid the groundwork for the bulk of early societies to organize around geopolitical identities: cities, counties, states. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, these close relations furthered development of a “Western” model of historical societies wherein some societies organized as effective arms of state governments and received regular financial assistance.

The process of reconciling society officers’ differences over what to collect contributed to the emergence of primary sources as building blocks of history. At first, officers described collection objectives in terms of content: desired facts and information. Inherently subjective, content-based collecting allowed imposition of conscious and unconscious biases. Preservation processes thus facilitated minimization of materials reflecting the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities, laborers, and women. Officers gradually shifted collecting objectives to circumstances of creation and use, for example, valuing items as historical because they had a connection to a particular place, person, or time.

Preserving historical materials involved balancing complementary and competing activities. Historical societies embraced collecting, organizing, preserving, and educating alongside entertaining and promoting social interaction. The organizations and members shared a common vision and sought to preserve history in their image: the Anglo-American world of the professional elites. Although historical societies embraced national rhetoric, officers built their collections through local action, with a focus on local and regional information. From the first, officers pursued preservation through publication as a means of preserving documents and information. Publication efforts, although laborious and expensive, reaffirmed collecting interests and served as an additional means of outreach to potential donors and supporters. Several officers endorsed rhetorical appeals to the general public, but society publications focused on the interests of the members. Disagreements about what to publish were resolved in favor of miscellaneous publications instead of themed, geographical, or chronological arrangements, undercutting societies’ ability to engage broader support for their publications.

Yet historical collecting and publishing were rife with differences of opinion over what to preserve and how, not just between officers of any given organization, but among different organizations and the people who were and were not in elite circles. Historical society founders understood the nation in relation to the local. They embraced bipartisanship and extended membership to Federalists, Republicans, and Whigs, the better to draw on governmental support regardless of political party—yet in turn they consciously minimized documentation of slavery. Print culture offered opportunities for challenges to historical society authority. The expansion of printing during the Early Republic encouraged contributions from historical society members who opted to publish external works amid the rise of popular histories. Likewise, print offered opportunities for members of disadvantaged groups to rewrite history to include themselves and their peoples, albeit contingent on sufficient monetary support. Other venues for historical activity included public commemorations, expeditions, and performances.

The historical society founders organized around local (city, county) and state identities that they described in nested, relational terms, whereby officers pursued narrower and broader ambitions simultaneously. Most societies endorsed documenting national history but did not contribute to popular history initiatives. Officers restricted their spheres of action to within learned, scholarly circles, apart from a few notable exceptions. Early historical society activities were largely secular. Officers gathered religious materials primarily documenting churches and denominations within the public sphere. This contributed to the establishment of separate religious historical societies, particularly around the midcentury.

Historical collecting and preservation activities reflected and affirmed identities and connections. Through attention to the past, participants emphasized the importance of particular places, peoples, and activities. Inclusion mattered, deciding which people, places, and events were important, what warranted remembrance and, the other side of the coin, what should be forgotten. Participants put the past to the service of the present to justify land claims and control. Society officers, members, and other historically minded individuals collectively documented a multiplicity of Americas for their descendants to contemplate and preserve.

Chapter 1 surveys the establishment, organization, successes, and failures of early historical societies. Eliot, Belknap, and other founders created the Massachusetts Historical Society in response to chaotic, piecemeal preservation of historical materials. They established a separate, specialized society in the face of a general lack of action on the part of governments, learned institutions, and the public. Historical societies relied on the efforts of middling-upper-class professional men not inside the top echelons of politics and business. With few exceptions the societies struggled to attract monetary support and as a consequence relied heavily on government assistance.

The second chapter showcases the complex relationships between historical societies and governments. Most early historical societies organized around geopolitical identities: cities, counties, and states. In the process, they reflected and contributed to nested identities wherein individuals understood larger identities (state, nation) in relation to smaller (city, county, state). The proliferation of geographical societies reflected dissatisfaction with existing organizations and tensions between locales. Historical society officers assumed proactive roles with respect to protecting government records in government hands. They petitioned local, state, and national governments to obtain copies of European archival documents, organize and publish colonial records, and erect fireproof buildings.

Chapter 3 highlights how the problem of defining what to collect contributed to the shift toward primary sources as the building blocks of history. At first historical society officers described their collecting interests in terms of information, in particular about the public world members shared. Yet the problem of describing this in sufficient detail to prompt contributions, combined with differences among members, led to alternative methods of valuation. By midcentury, many described collecting interests in terms of circumstances of creation alongside or instead of topical information. Historical society officers also re-assessed the place of natural history within their collections, given the rise of separate natural history societies, exhibiting interest predominantly in gathering textual materials. Exceptions for non-textual items were few, most notably Native American artifacts. Ironically, several members chastised society leaderships for focusing heavily on the past and ignoring opportunities to preserve contemporary documents.

Historical societies pursued publication as a means of preserving documents and information, but their actions in this regard undercut and overlooked opportunities to appeal to broader publics. Chapter 4 demonstrates how historical societies’ publication committees emphasized publication as preservation rather than as an opportunity for popular appeal. The publication committees repeatedly ignored chronological or topical organization in publications, despite criticism from reviews and from historical society officers.

Chapter 5 explores the divide between historical societies and popular history. Several historical societies held lectures open to people able to afford admission fees. Likewise, officers organized public commemorations of historic events, with distinct differences between those who watched processions through the streets, attended the actual ceremonies held in churches or government buildings, or celebrated at the festive banquets afterward. The Connecticut Historical Society proved a notable exception, as its varied collection attracted a diverse clientele of visitors ranging from well-heeled businessmen to mothers with young children to laborers, suggesting early historical societies’ unrealized potential with respect to class and gender.

Finally, chapter 6 examines what historical societies did not collect and what tactics women and disadvantaged populations used to challenge or subvert historical organization authority. Mini case studies of two notable donations highlight ways women of wealth and station, female equivalents to the male membership, ensured acceptance of items documenting women’s lives and labors. African Americans and Native Americans faced higher bars to inclusion. Despite occasional inclusive rhetoric, society leaderships largely excluded documentation of slavery and enslaved peoples through chronological and geographical distancing. Officers expended far more attention on Native American peoples but stressed documentation through European American accounts and affirmation of Native nations as dying or vanishing peoples. Discussions of the discovery of America overlooked Native American claims in favor of European, and Spanish in favor of Scandinavian.

A growing cohort of women, African American, and Native American historians challenged historical society preferences through the power of the press by the mid-nineteenth century. Historical society members and historians dissatisfied with the secular bent of most historical societies also challenged the status quo. They preserved and disseminated alternative narratives and documents through publications and established new historical societies to collect and preserve the histories of particular religious denominations, races, and ethnicities over the second half of the nineteenth century. Attempts to preserve particular histories thus contributed to the preservation, in varying degrees, of other histories.