Louis Leonard Tucker

[Note: Since I work there, I probably shouldn't be "reviewing" a book about the Society. But since it covers a period long before I came, I feel alright in commenting on it as a work. Consider this full disclosure.]

Every venerable organization should have a bicentennial history, and Louis Leonard Tucker's The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791-1991 (The Society, 1995) fills this niche ably for the MHS. Tucker provides a broad narrative survey of the first two centuries of the Society's existence, drawing on the published Proceedings and the vast unpublished organizational archives (as well as various outside books, articles, and manuscript collections). He chronicles the Society through good times and bad, recounting the changes and continuities which characterize the life of any longstanding institution.

Through biographical sketches of the principal leaders and staff members who have served the MHS over the course of its first centuries, plus anecdotes (some very humorous), and reports of organizational and financial activities, Tucker offers a (mostly) unvarnished examination of the Society's inner workings and public outreach. As an introduction to the subject, no better entry point has been published.

Useful appendices to the text list all members of the MHS from 1791 through 1991, as well as those who served in leadership and major staff capacities. This section of the book I use regularly, but until now I had not sat down and read the narrative chapters. These were worth the wait, and offered much new perspective about those who came before.

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Jeremy Belknap's may not be a household name (at least not in most households). But his role in American history is an important one, and his role in the formation of the Massachusetts Historical Society is a very important one. Former MHS director Louis Leonard Tucker's Clio's Consort: Jeremy Belknap and the Founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1990) offers not only a useful biographical sketch of Belknap, but also a close examination of his values as a historian and an in-depth treatment of the beginnings of the MHS and Belknap's preeminent role in the establishment of the Society in 1791 (as the first historical society in the Americas).

Tucker succinctly captures Belknap's historical mentality, his view that "history must not only be based upon the most authoritative primary sources but also be factually accurate, as consistent with truth as was humanly possible" (xii). Trained as a minister, Belknap's true love, or as he called it, his "hobby horse" (an overt nod to Sterne), was American history. He published a three-volume history of New Hampshire hailed by 20th-century critics for its uncharacteristic nature as a "modernist," "secular," "objective" history when such things were even less common than they are today. His highest phrase of praise for others was "accurate and indefatigable," adjectives which he certainly sought to cultivate in his own writings and efforts.

Concerned with the loss of contemporary historical materials and conscious of the need for an institution to house, preserve and publish such things, Belknap and several friends in Boston organized the Massachusetts Historical Society from the ground up in the early 1790s, basing the institution around a broad collecting policy that included the acquisition of books, manuscripts, pamphlets, broadsides, &c. that would be useful for scholars then and in the future. Belknap also envisioned a vibrant publications program to make manuscript collections more widely available in printed form, plus a facility to allow scholars free and open access to the Society's holdings; these two traditions continue at the MHS today.

When you work at a place with such a long-standing record of service, it's important, I think, to periodically go back and delve into the roots of the organization - if for no other reason than to remind yourself of the original mission and the folks who got things off the ground. Belknap does deserve more recognition than he gets, and Tucker's book is a good step in the right direction.

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