To Instruct and Improve...To Entertain and Please: American Civic Protests and Pageants, 1765-1784. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

The first of this two-part study examines the demonstrations of protest mounted in America from 1765 to 1776, a period which saw thirteen hitherto diverse colonies unite--first to protest, finally to rebel--against British rule. Until the Declaration of Independence proclaimed George III the enemy of American freedom, the protests mounted by American patriots were intended to strengthen America's place in the British Empire, so it was to Engl and 's laws and political radicals that American patriots looked to validate their own concerns. In 1765, when patriots staged demonstrations to express their opposition to the Stamp Act, they drew upon inherited custom and practice. The form of their protests recalled both American Pope Day Pageants, themselves descended from Engl and 's Guy Fawkes Day, and the English Cider Tax protests of 1763. Virtually no visual records survive for American demonstrations from this period; however, contemporary political cartoons provide information about how a protest may have 'looked' and what it meant. Examples drawn from history can establish the continuity of American practice, while a conceptual framework for an investigation of protests is provided by cultural anthropology and the study of the 'social dramas' enacted during times of disharmony. Part Two looks at the decorations--the transparency paintings and triumphal arches--created for the celebrations of approbation mounted during the Revolution to greet victories in battle and laud France, America's war-time ally. The allegorical and emblematic decorations created during the revolution enabled the fledgling nation to speak to European adversaries, allies and potential allies, in a language they all understood. American leaders also used Revolutionary pageants to raise domestic morale and help moderate the francophobia Americans had inherited from their English ancestors. Exigencies of war and dem and s for republican simplicity meant that the Federal and state governments commissioned very few permanent works of art between 1776 and 1784. This scarcity makes an investigation of the ephemeral art form of pageantry especially significant as one seeks to underst and how the new nation was presented, allegorically and visually, to its allies, its enemies and itself.