Repeating History Archive

Repeating History, Episode 5 – Dr. Robert Parkinson, Professor of History

by Joel Stockton

October 29, 2024

On this episode of “Repeating History” host Robert Searing of the Onondaga Historical Association is joined by Dr. Robert Parkinson, Professor of History at Binghamton University. Parkinson’s research interests are in early American history, especially the American Revolution. His first book, The Common Cause: Creating Nation and Race in the American Revolution explores how questions of race collided with pressing issues of nation building at the Founding. His current book project, The Heart of American Darkness, is a microhistory about how the grisly murder of nine Indians on a tributary of the Ohio River in 1774 exerted a surprisingly powerful influence in the political and rhetorical life of the early American republic.

The conversation centers around issues of race, violence, and conspiracy and how these issues were used as tools by the American revolutionary leaders like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson working with newspaper publishers to forge a national consensus and the union of 13 disparate colonies. When viewed through this lens, the context of the Declaration of Independence and the timing of the colonists’ decision to break away from Great Britain is seen in a fascinating new light. It also solidifies the foundational nature of racism in American political life. The rhetoric of the revolutionary era regarding a fear of slave revolts and the spectre of violence perpetrated by Native Americans, “merciless savages,” as Jefferson referred to them in the Declaration, persists 250 years later.