This book about Thomas Paine is one of several dozen US History books purchased for 5th grade classroom libraries. Discovered on a list of “Notable Titles” suggested by the National Council on Social Studies, it details the life of Thomas Paine and makes connections across time to Abraham Lincoln and Eugene Debs. It even finds a way to make a link Common Sense with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Better yet, it has footnotes, which are vital to Social Studies teachers asking students to answer one of the most important questions in History – “How do you know?”
But there’s a very important history lesson in this book – and it really doesn’t have much to do with Thomas Paine himself. It provides examples of how historians can take quotes and short excerpts from primary sources out of context to provide a point.
The author uses a quote from a 1776 letter of John Adams to his wife Abigail to show how Paine’s writing was admired by leaders of the Revolution.
“I could not have written any thing in so manly and striking a style.”
That certainly sounds like a compliment.
The author took the care to put this quote alongside compliments from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abigail Adams herself. Most readers would assume that John Adams thought as highly of Thomas Paine as these other Revolutionary luminaries.
But readers who take the one extra step and search out the complete copy of John’s letter to Abigail, (which only takes a few clicks at the Founders Archive), something else appears.
Adams is telling his Abigail that although Paine’s support of Independence is “generally approved”, his ideas on a new government from an independent United States are “not much applauded”. Sure, Adams thinks that Paine can write in a manly style – but he also has “very inadequate ideas”. Primary source documents are the hard currency of historical scholarship, but this author is cashing in on just one one phrase taken completely out of context.
The primary document lesson found in a just a dozen words of this book can be very important. We need to be aware that quoted primary source documents can always be used this way. Of course we don’t have the time to check every quote we see, but simply being aware of this dynamic between sources and conclusions makes us better readers of history.
To take this story one more step – we have to fast forward 29 years from 1776. This is what John Adams was writing about Thomas Paine in 1805.
That’s not very nice is it?