Joyce Appleby

Biography

Joyce Appleby, a distinguished historian and prolific author who argued that ideas about capitalism and liberty were fundamental in shaping the identity of early Americans, died on December 23, 2016 at her home in Taos, N.M. from complications of pneumonia. She was 87.

A former journalist who began her Ph.D. training at 32, while caring for three children, Dr. Appleby rose to the top ranks of the discipline, serving as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.  She wrote several books, contributed to others and edited several more; she was 84 when her final book, “Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination,” was published.

She was also a scholar of Thomas Jefferson and wrote a brief biography of him, published in 2003.

Dr. Appleby was part of a generation of historians who examined the ideologies and beliefs that animated the American Revolution. These scholars took seriously the ideas of the founding generation, unlike Progressive Era historians like Charles A. Beard, who had dismissed revolutionary ideas as rhetorical cover for the founders’ economic interests. But the scholars were not united in their interpretation.

Following a path laid by Caroline Robbins, historians like Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood emphasized civic republicanism — a set of beliefs that focused on the threat of power to liberty and the need to put the common good above personal self-interest. They traced the Americans’ revolutionary beliefs to the so-called radical Whigs of 17th-century England, thinkers like Algernon Sidney and James Harrington, who feared a slide toward despotism.

“The classical republican convictions that Bailyn ascribed to America’s founders drew on a vocabulary of political pathology to predict tyranny, chaos, usurpations and conspiracies,” Dr. Appleby said in a 2012 lecture. “Locke was turned into an eccentric figure, the center now being held by an inherited way of interpreting events harking back to Renaissance fears about power lusts.  Classical republicanism involved several propositions: that change generally brought degeneration, or worse, and that history pointed to the instability of all political orders. Civic virtue, where leaders put the common good above their own interests, formed the only bulwark against decay.”

In books like “Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s” (1984) and “Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination” (1992), Dr. Appleby challenged this view.  She argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for. John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence — or even more — than the radical Whigs on founders like Thomas Jefferson. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy.  “For me, liberalism had entered American consciousness as a potent brew blended from 17th-century entrepreneurial attitudes and the Enlightenment’s endorsement of liberty and reason,” she said in the lecture. “Because nature had endowed human beings with the capacity to think for themselves and act on their own behalf, representative government seemed the perfect fit for them.  Rather than classical republicanism’s fixation on social traumas, liberalism was optimistic, moving forward with the rational, self-improving individual who was endowed with natural rights to be exercised in a widened ambit of freedom.”  Or, as she put it in a 2007 essay on the intellectual underpinnings of American democracy: “Fear moved aside to make room for hope.”

The debate between liberalism and republicanism, especially active in the 1970s, eventually subsided. A new generation of social historians analyzed the concerns of marginalized groups — workers, women, free and enslaved African-Americans, and Native Americans, among others. Later still, a new cohort of scholars, influenced by postmodernism and cultural studies, looked at how human consciousness is shaped by language.

Dr. Appleby did not reject postmodernism and multiculturalism out of hand but feared that they had taken history too far toward relativism. In “Telling the Truth About History” (1994), she and the historians Lynn Hunt and Margaret C. Jacob waded into the “culture wars” over what should be emphasized in museums and textbooks.  They agreed that claims of the “absolute character” of scientific truth, and the supposed triumph of Enlightenment reason, needed to be challenged. But they argued that some thinkers had gone too far in arguing that there can be no historical truth at all — only opinion, ideology or myth.  The notion of truth, they argued, makes science itself — and the self-criticism necessary for democratic society — possible. They turned to American 19th-century thinkers like John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce to argue for “pragmatic realism,” for history that is both aware of philosophy but also grounded in empirical data.

Joyce Oldham was born on April 9, 1929, in Omaha, the youngest of three. Her father, Junius G. Oldham, a World War I veteran and a salesman for the United States Gypsum Corporation, came from a Democratic family; his father had been a friend of William Jennings Bryan. Her mother, the former Edith G. Cash, a homemaker, was the daughter of a Republican land speculator.

After graduating from Stanford, in 1950, Joyce won a contest to work in the advertising department at Mademoiselle magazine, in New York. The publishing executive Harold W. McGraw Jr. offered her a job, but she felt compelled to return to California to get married, as her friends were doing.

She worked for a time at Restaurant Reporter, a trade magazine based in Beverly Hills, laying out pages, delivering copy and sending out subscription notices. After her first child was born and the family moved, she was the South Pasadena stringer for The Star-News, a local newspaper, but concluded that she “didn’t have the brassy spirit to be a reporter.”

She eventually enrolled in a Ph.D. program at what is now the Claremont Graduate University — because it was close by — and set about studying the impact of American nation-building on French and English politics early in the French Revolution. “It was a topic I could handle from Escondido, Calif., after two weeks of document-gathering in the East,” she recalled.

She began teaching in 1967 at San Diego State University and later moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught until her retirement in 2001. Her book “Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans,” published that year, looked at memoirs and autobiographies to reveal how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society.

Her first marriage, to the art historian Mark Lansburgh Jr., ended in divorce. Her second husband, Andrew Bell Appleby, a scholar of British social history, died in 1980. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sons, Mark Lansburgh and Frank Bell Appleby, and four grandchildren.

Later in her career, Dr. Appleby returned to the study of capitalism, the topic of her first book, “Economic Thought and Ideology in 17th Century England” (1978) and of her penultimate book, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism” (2010).

In a 2001 essay in The Journal of the Early Republic, she argued that capitalism, “viewed as a cultural, rather than an economic, phenomenon,” was like “an invisible social engineer,” adding: “Because it affected access to both wealth and power, its success provoked the outrage of successive groups of moralists, aesthetes and traditionalists. We do not need to take sides in these battles to do justice to their histories.”
—Excerpt from New York Times Obituary for Joyce Appleby, January 2, 2017

Joyce Appleby Honored at 2019 Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting