Friday Reflection: First-Person Historical
Amy Stallings on Interpreting History from a Character's Point of View
Listen First
If you haven’t yet listened to Wednesday’s episode, this reflection will make more sense after hearing the conversation with Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley as presented by historian–interpreter Amy Stallings.
Throughlines
This conversation unfolds in two registers that constantly illuminate one another: the seventeenth-century world of Virginia as experienced by Lady Frances Berkeley, and the modern craft of historical interpretation practiced by Amy Stallings. The episode begins in voice—quite literally—with Lady Frances Berkeley speaking as a woman embedded in the political crises of 1676–1677, when Bacon’s Rebellion shook the colony and threatened the authority of her husband, Governor William Berkeley.
From the outset, Lady Frances appears not as an ornamental governor’s wife but as a politically alert observer of colonial instability. She describes factionalism, fear, rumor, and uncertainty, offering a ground-level perspective on rebellion and governance that is rarely preserved in official documents. The experience of insecurity—personal, political, and social—runs throughout her account, reminding listeners that the rebellion was not merely an ideological clash but a lived crisis that touched households, marriages, and reputations.
As the conversation shifts to Amy Stallings speaking in her own scholarly voice, the episode opens outward. Stallings explains how such first-person interpretations are built: not from imaginative invention, but from careful immersion in letters, court records, and contemporary descriptions. Her work insists that historical understanding can be bodily and experiential as well as textual—that movement, clothing, gesture, and space shape how people thought and acted in the past.
The dialogue between the two voices becomes the episode’s central throughline. Lady Frances’s words raise questions about women’s political agency in early Virginia, while Stallings reflects on how historians can responsibly recover and present such agency without flattening it into modern categories. Performance here is not spectacle but method: a way of testing historical claims against the constraints of evidence and plausibility.
As the conversation progresses, themes of loyalty, authority, and survival recur. Lady Frances speaks from within a world where allegiance to crown and colony carried real danger, while Stallings highlights how such loyalties were negotiated rather than assumed. The episode closes by returning to the present, asking what is gained—and what risks are run—when historians step into the voices of the past. The result is a meditation on historical empathy, disciplined imagination, and the fragile bridge between evidence and understanding.
Questions for Reflection & Discussion
What does Lady Frances Berkeley’s perspective add to our understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion that official political narratives might omit?
How does hearing a historical voice in the first person change your sense of credibility, intimacy, or authority?
In what ways did women in seventeenth-century Virginia exercise political agency, even when excluded from formal power?
What are the methodological risks of first-person historical interpretation, and how does Amy Stallings attempt to manage them?
How does material culture—clothing, movement, space—shape political behavior and social hierarchy in the early modern world?
Can historical performance be a form of argument? If so, what kind of argument does it make?
How does this episode complicate simple moral narratives about rebellion, authority, and loyalty in colonial America?
What distinctions should historians maintain between empathy, identification, and projection when engaging the past?
How might this method of historical interpretation be useful—or problematic—in classroom settings?
What responsibilities do historians have when giving voice to people whose words survive only partially or indirectly?
For Further Investigation
Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley (1634–ca. 1695), Encyclopedia Virginia
Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (LSU Press, 2010)
James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2003)
James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012)