Genius Fan

Suddenly I’m interested in the Indians, the native Americans. How did that happen, when I’ve never been interested in them before? Why are we interested in anything? Why this topic and not that? I’m not at all interested in football or cars and I’m not particularly interested in technology or pop culture. But I am interested in history…you know that by now: Eighteenth century history, and that came about because of Benjamin Franklin^*. He was my ‘gateway drug’, you might say. This is how it happened: I was 53 years of age when I read Walter Isaacson Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. It was random. I’d never been particularly interested in history. But he’s such a fascinating person that you can’t fail but follow his story. After that I started looking for great stories centred around people: Dennis Rasmussen’s tale of the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith got me interested in Scottish history and the Enlightenment; Leo Damrosch’s lectures about the Enlightenment and self-identity got me interested in James Boswell; Boswell’s description of an encounter in 1773 with Flora MacDonald got me interested in the Jacobites. And on it goes.

A few weeks ago I started to warm up to a new topic of interest, American Indians. They’ve featured in the various reading I’ve done about the American colonies, the British and French, and the pre-revolutionary years, and of course, I grew up on cowboy and indian movies…but I’ve just never paid any attention to them. Then I discovered Fred Anderson’s book The War That Made America about the politics and conflict between the British, French and American Indians over control of eastern continental America. I’d been looking for a general reader’s ‘way in’ to that episode. In Britain we call it the French and Indian War (1754-63). It’s the American part of a wider ‘world war’ we know as the Seven Years War, which saw conflict in America, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, West Africa, India and the Philippines. In his book Anderson quickly gets into the Iroquois Confederacy, a group of native American tribes comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca…and suddenly I’m interested in American Indians. (Of course, this is only part of the history of native peoples on the American continent.) I’ve said it before, it’s all to do with context, connections and relevance. I’m interested to see where this goes. In the same way, I’ve never read any books solely about the Indian Mughal empire, exploration of the Pacific, China, Japan etc. It’s all there to discover.

^*And my interest in Benjamin Franklin, how did that come about? I was visiting the Hellfire Caves in West Wycombe in 2014 and was captivated by the Franklin anecdote on an exhibit label describing his advice about choosing a mistress.

Notes
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson (2003)
The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought, Dennis Rasmussen (2017)
The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self, Leo Damrosch (2013)
To The Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour, (ed) Ronald Black (2011)
The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War, Freed Anderson (2006)