Isaac, Rhys 1937–

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Isaac, Rhys 1937–

(Rhys L. Isaac, Rhys Llywelyn Isaac)

PERSONAL:

Born November 20, 1937, in Cape Town, South Africa; son of William Edwyn (a botanist) and Frances (a botanist) Isaac; married Colleen Malherbe (a teacher), December 29, 1962; children: Meg, Lyn. Education: University of Cape Town, B.A., 1958; Oxford University, M.A., 1962.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Blairgowrie, Victoria, Australia. Office—La Trobe University, David Myers Building, Ste. E126, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia; fax: 613 9479 1942. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, historian, and educator. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, lecturer, 1963-70; La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia, senior lecturer, 1971-78, reader in history, 1978-99, professor emeritus, 2000—. Johns Hopkins University, visiting professor, 1975; Davis Center for History, Princeton University, visiting professor, 1981-82; College of William and Mary, visiting professor, 2002-06. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, research associate.

MEMBER:

Society of American Historians (fellow), Virginia Baptist Historical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rhodes scholarship, 1958; Douglass Adair Medal for best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly from the Institute of Early American History (Williamsburg, VA) and Claremont Graduate School (Claremont, CA), 1980, for "Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765-1775"; Pulitzer Prize in history and National Historical Society Prize, both 1983, both for The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790.

WRITINGS:

The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1982, reprinted, 1999.

Worlds of Experience: Communities in Colonial Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (Williamsburg, VA), 1987.

Glynn Isaac and the Search for Human Origins in Africa: Inaugural Glynn Isaac Memorial Lecture, 21st April 1993, UCT Press (South Africa), 1995.

Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rhys Isaac's 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, begins with a description of the society that had emerged in Virginia by 1740. Isaac describes this society as one based on "the great cultural metaphor of patriarchy," then uses this portrayal as the background for his book's focus, the transformation that Isaac calls a "double revolution in religious and political thought and feeling." Times Literary Supplement critic Jack Greene noted, however, that Isaac steers away from the political issues involved in "the alleged break-up of the ordered society of the mid-eighteenth century," concentrating instead on the rise of evangelical religion as a cause of societal change in Virginia. According to Isaac, the evangelicals managed to create "a cultural disjunction between the gentry and sections of the lower orders where hitherto there had been a continuum." They accomplished this, the author explains, not through politics or economics, but by renouncing the worldly lifestyles of the dominant class and urging the less powerful segments of society to value communalism over individual wealth and power.

The segments of society distinguished by Isaac fall into three major categories: large tobacco planters, small independent farmers and growers, and slaves. As Edmund S. Morgan, writing in the New York Review of Books explained, Isaac believes that the character of these groups, "as well as the changing character of the society, is to be found in greater or lesser degrees of individualism and communalism." One way in which Isaac measures the character of Virginian society is by examining the architectural plans and remains of the dwellings of the three societal segments. "In these different buildings," Morgan observed, "the author reads a growing individualism among the great planters, expressed in the privacy of separate rooms; a continuing communalism among the small farmers, expressed in the absence of privacy; and a more thoroughgoing communalism among the slaves." Isaac also uses written and graphic accounts of the social and religious practices that were prevalent among the different societal strata as a measure of the character of society. He then attempts to reconstruct the lifestyles, issues, and changes experienced by Virginians in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Isaac's use of drawings, maps, architectural plans, and social artifacts to conceptualize a society—a technique that critics attribute to the influence of anthropology—has drawn both praise and criticism from reviewers. Greene, for instance, hailed The Transformation of Virginia as "one of those rare works of history that is as significant for its methodology as for its substantive findings." Morgan, on the other hand, commented that "it is dangerous to read the signs of [the distribution of power] in architecture and rituals while ignoring the overt expressions of it." The meanings that emerge from such readings, Morgan continued, "must depend heavily on intuitions that derive from what one expects to find. When dealing with words that have an ostensible meaning, the interpreter who thinks there is a different, hidden meaning is at least obliged to offer reasons why he dismisses the ostensible meaning. There is no such control in ‘reading’ horse races or architecture as ‘statements.’"

Greene, as well, noted some flaws in The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. The most serious problem, he asserted, is that "the characterization of Virginia's ‘traditional’ order seems to have been constructed largely for the purpose of providing the author with a stable backdrop against which he could assess the impact of the religious and social developments in which he is primarily interested." As a result, Greene continued, Isaac tends to "underestimate its fluidity and receptivity to change. [And if] Isaac has exaggerated the coherence of the old order, he has probably also given insufficient attention to the continuities between the old order and the new." Even so, Greene considered Isaac's book "the most powerful and sophisticated interpretation [of Virginia's late eighteenth-century history] now available," and he called The Transformation of Virginia "one of the best—and most provocative—books written on colonial Anglo-America over the past decade, … the starting point for all further work on the subject."

In Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, Isaac presents and analyzes in detail the story of Landon Carter, a wealthy landowner in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. Considered one of the twelve richest men in Virginia at the time, Carter was literate and well educated in addition to being well known and influential. Carter kept a voluminous set of diaries from 1752 to 1778, containing primary-source accounts not only of personal and family events, but also of the overall social and political climate of early America. The book is "an extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era," observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Isaac "probes and interprets Carter's journals to reveal the attitudes and values of the Virginia gentry and the collapse of the established social order that attended the Colonies' rebellion against Britain," reported Benjamin Schwarz, writing in the Atlantic Monthly. Throughout the book, Schwarz observed, Isaac "is a sensitive guide to Carter's world, and reading his systematic exploration is the only way for the layman to comprehend the diaries properly." He relates Carter's problems with rebellious slaves, disobedient children, pernicious neighbors, and a political and economic environment that was rapidly changing as the American Revolution surged ahead. Isaac carefully assesses the times in which Carter lived as well as Carter's reactions to them, noting particularly that Carter became a staunch defender of American liberty, rejecting the patriarchal system inherent in the British monarchy even while struggling to retain the patriarchal structure of his own household.

Nation reviewer Ira Berlin observed that "there is no doubt about the importance of Landon Carter's diary as a window on the planter class and Carter himself. It reveals a man who saw himself as a link in the long chain of patriarchy, whose history stretched back to time immemorial. For Carter, as for many members of his class, the patriarchal ideal justified his place in society, rationalized his actions and gave meaning to his life." Carter's patriarchy extended not only to his own children, but to his slaves, and like a stern and demanding father figure, "he offered care and protection in return for deference, obedience, and service, even if they had to be extracted by force," Berlin stated. The reviewer pointed out in particular Isaac's report of Carter's interactions with his personal attendant, and man named Nassaw. Nassaw was a skilled physician, "one of the finest surgeons in colonial Virginia," Berlin noted. However, Nassaw was also an alcoholic, which severely affected his ability to practice his healing arts. Carter took it upon himself to rescue Nassaw from the evils of drink and its attendant vices, threatening, whipping, and abusing the man in an attempt to change his behavior. Nassaw promised to change, but when he did not, Carter treated him even worse, justifying his actions as an attempt to save Nassaw's skills and soul. "Isaac's rendition of the struggle between Carter and Nassaw is nothing short of brilliant, for it demonstrates in close detail the havoc patriarchy wreaked upon its subjects," Berlin remarked.

"Isaac is at the height of his powers in conjuring the poignancy of Carter's situation as it was swept up into escalating political tensions and household strains in the 1760s and 1770s," commented Konstantin Dierks, writing in the Journal of Social History. Isaac "weaves entries from Carter's diary with a splendid biographical narrative," resulting in a "profound and intimate glimpse into one portion of early America," remarked a Publishers Weekly writer. Library Journal contributor Dale Farris called the book "a major contribution to the study of the American Revolution." Isaac's "approach in the book reflects and contributes to historiographical transformations that have shaped the ways that cultural historians approach the past," commented James Sidbury in the Journal of Southern History. The Kirkus Reviews critic found that the book consists of "poignant documents on the collapse of an old world, mixed with learned commentary," and constitutes "an outstanding work of history."

Isaac once told CA: "I have been drawn forward by the thrill of seeking to know and describe in visualizable terms a past world quite different from my own. We live in an age of cinematic image, and I believe that historians must respond to its challenge positively, both by actively engaging in filmmaking (something that I have not yet done) and by writing so as to evoke the kind of visual immediacy that the screen gives. I believe that this is not just a matter of keeping up with a compelling new medium. The kind of capabilities in visual analysis that the varieties and sequences of cinematic images have developed in us all have made necessary a new systematic approach to the records of the past.

"I also believe that there is no such thing as objective reporting. At the very least, statements and presentations tend to challenge or affirm the status quo. As historians learn to reflect on the ways that patterns of roles and actions and the architecture of settings reinforced past systems (in which some ‘had’ and ruled while others ‘had not’ and were ruled), so must they invite reflection on the operation of similar implicit systems in present-day culture.

"My emphasis on the study of action and the settings designed for action, coupled with my attempt to carry on that study in much the way that anthropologists study alien cultures, has led me to call my approach ‘dramaturgic ethnographic history.’ The great strength of such an approach is that it concentrates on actual people—of all ranks and both genders—of the past, and attends to who they thought they were—how they understood themselves. The greatest weakness or danger of such an approach is that fascination with the immediate and visualizable may obscure other, statistically discoverable patterns that were not present to the consciousness of the past people studied but nevertheless controlled their lives in powerful ways. The danger, however, can be overcome—we can both try to recreate past people as they knew themselves and try to understand the ways in which they were caught, as we are, in webs beyond their comprehension."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, July-August, 2004, Benjamin Schwarz, review of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, p. 143.

Business History Review, winter, 1982, review of The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, p. 590.

Journal of Social History, summer, 2006, Konstantin Dierks, review of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, p. 1240.

Journal of Southern History, May, 2006, James Sidbury, "Rhys Isaac and History's Uneasy Kingdom: A Review Essay," p. 429.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2004, review of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, p. 527.

Library Journal, June 15, 2004, Dale Farris, review of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, p. 82.

Nation, November 29, 2004, Ira Berlin, "Masters of Their Universe," review of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, p. 23.

New York Review of Books, January 20, 1983, Edmund S. Morgan, review of The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, p. 38.

Publishers Weekly, May 31, 2004, review of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, p. 61.

Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 1983, Jack Greene, review of The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, p. 177.