I begin with the second of two chronological book-ends. In 1833, Rufus Choate delivered an address in Salem, Massachusetts advocating “The Importance of Illustrating New-England History by a Series of Romances like the Waverley Novels.” Fiction commemorating events and scenery in colonial history prior to 1783 would be valuable “as helps to history, as contributions to history, as real and authoritative documents of history,” to embody and

Choate singled out “the Puritan character” as particularly worth the attention of an American Waverley romancer. At the same moment, just down the road in Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne was publishing his first historical stories. “Provincial Tales” and “Seven Tales of my Native Land” appeared individually in The Token, Salem Gazette, and Atlantic Souvenir. Dazzled by the contemporary colossus of Walter Scott, Choate was unable to see that alternative models for transatlantic historical fiction already existed, and that they encompassed a geographical imagination much broader than New England.

Back in the 1680s an immigrant from the Netherlands settled in Albany County and anglicized his name to Knickerbacker. A century later one of his descendants was named after George Washington; as a young writer he adopted his ancestor's persona in A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809). The stylistic antecedents of Washington Irving's irascible Dutch antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker were Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, melded into a unique blend of whimsy and satire, political barbs tempered by indulgent digression. This voice bespoke a whole attitude to the past in a land dedicated to the future. Knickerbocker's annunciation of absence figured his country's lack of antiquity (“Left his lodgings sometime since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman…”); his abandoned manuscript was America's first transatlantic fictional history. The pedantic persona glances back at Puritan historian Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which inscribed New England's providential progress through the biographies of its governors and clergy. Knickerbocker's History is similarly patriotic, but with an explosive edge of skepticism about its own enterprise: a spoof founding narrative that established “history” as a subset of fiction in American comic writing. Irving's penchant for bilingual puns compounds Rabelaisian bawdry and seventeenth-century Dutch colonial ways with nineteenth-century American progressivism. Knickerbocker's epic ambitions for his history culminate in a mock-Gibbonian penultimate chapter “Containing reflections on the decline and fall of empires, with the final extinction of the Dutch Dynasty,” in which the historian's melodramatic valediction precipitates global chaos:

A piece of provincial hubris and authorial self-inflation, this is pure comedy. The subsequent sentence, though, sounds a patriotic warning familiar in American writing in the first decade of the nineteenth century (a decade that culminated in a second outright Anglo-American war): “Let then the potentates of Europe, beware how they meddle with our beloved country.”