Inheriting The Revolution – The First Generation of Americans - Hardcover

Appleby, Joyce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674002369 ISBN 13: 9780674002364

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Born after the Revolution, the first generation of Americans inherited a truly new world - and, with it, the task of working out terms of independence. Anyone who started a business, marketed a new invention, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication was helping to fashion the world's first liberal society. These are the people we encounter in this book, a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and the free enterprise into contested realities. Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs an autobiographies, the author tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. They also had to grapple with the new distinction of free and slave labour, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the warm passions of religious awakening; the explosion of small business opportunities for young people eager to break out of their parents' colonial cocoon. Few in the nation escaped the transforming intrusiveness of these changes. Working these experiences into a vivid picture of American cultural renovation, the author accounts how the first generation established its own culture, its own nation, its own identity. The passage of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel; this book shows how, in the early 19th century, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.

About this title

Review

The result is an empirically grounded yet extraordinarily dynamic foray into the multivalent experience of America's first nation-builders...Appleby has nonetheless written a brilliant page-turner, filled with insights, and truly a feast of period detail for general history readers...Appleby has successfully taken on one of the most difficult tasks for early American historians: discovering the origins of American national identity in the welter of social and cultural forces shaping the new republic, while mindful of the civil calamity between North and South lying ahead.--Dee E. Andrews "The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography "

About the Author

Joyce Appleby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England which was awarded the 1979 Berkshire book prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674002369
• ISBN 13: 9780674002364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336