Americans: The National Experience.: 002 - Hardcover

Boorstin, Daniel J.

4.22

438 ratings by Goodreads

9780394414539: Americans: The National Experience.: 002

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394414535 ISBN 13: 9780394414539

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1965

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A view of American life and dominant figures from the Revolution to the Civil War

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Review:

"Boorstins achievement is to compel us to see again, ranged in order, the whole mass of attitudes and mechanisms that arise from American difference, and to display his material so abundantly and ingeniously that we see aspects of the nations' past as if for the first time." --Marcus Cunliffe, Book Week

"This is the history of a nation 'beginning again and again, under men's very eyes. I can only repeat that this is a fine book--controversial certainly, but a courageous, learned and most exciting work." --George Dangerfield, The New York Times Book Review

"This exceptionally good book . . . abounds in concrete, entertaining details, and in bright, original ideas about those fascinating people, us." --The New Yorker

From the Publisher:

Simon Schama explains why this is one of his favourites...
"A great resource of America was vagueness" writes Boorstin in the second volume of his profoundly original, beautifully written trilogy, for my money the best general history of the United States ever written. "American uncertainties, products of ignorance and progress were producers of optimism and energy." The artful paradox is typical of Boorstin's ironic illuminations in this glorious account of America between the Revolution and the Civil War. But he is much too good an historian to keep sardonic distance between him and his subject; and the book is animated by the hectic, fidgety energy of a nation's adolescence.

The stories, some of which I remember hearing in Boorstin's lectures at Cambridge in the mid-60s are still astonishingly fresh – Frederick Tudor the "ice king" of Boston who first found a way to keep Massachusetts ice cold enough, long enough to export it to the Caribbean and the East Indies and who made the American revolution all over again by overthrowing the hot pudding with the iced cream.

The book is like a great firework display on the Fourth of July, fizz and bang and leaving a tracer long in the imagination.

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