From the Publisher
Born after the Revolution, the first generation of Americans inherited a truly new world--and, with it, the task of working out the 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 Inheriting the Revolution, a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities.
Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby 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 labor, 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, Appleby crafts an extraordinary--and deeply affecting--account of 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 nineteenth century, thevery idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
-
Fred Anderson
[It] must also command the respect of all scholars who seek to understand the origins of American culture and identity.
New York Times Book Review
-
Edward Countryman
Appleby deals with two themes...: the historical experience of the generation after the American Revolution and conflicts within American identity.
Publishers Weekly
An esteemed historian of early America, Appleby (UCLA) has written a social history of "the first generation of Americans"--not those who fought the American Revolution but, as her title indicates, those who inherited it, who had to figure out just what their parents' bold declarations of liberty looked like on the ground. Appleby's lens is wide: she investigates religion, business, family life and politics, examining this generation's struggles with slavery, their musings on the proper role of women and their participation in evangelical revivals. One of the more innovative discussions comes in the chapter "Careers," in which Appleby argues that those who came of age after the revolution often earned their daily bread doing tasks their parents could not have imagined. Many continued to farm, of course, but others headed to cities to run businesses, teach school, preach sermons, build buildings, publish books. Indeed, Appleby notes that in the Revolutionary era, the term "career" "denote[d] a horse-racing course"; it was only after 1800 that it was used to describe the trajectory of a person's vocation. Appleby strains to pay attention to the South, but her book betrays a certain Northern bias--her focus on the development of capitalism and the incursion of the market better describe the industrializing North than the slaveholding South, which, in historian Eugene Genovese's phrase, was in the market, but not of it. But that is a small quibble with a wonderful book, which freshly conveys the energy and creativity unleashed in a generation forging a new national identity. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
KLIATT
The generation of Americans that came of age between 1790 and 1830 inherited a brand-new country and could, to an extent, create and shape it as they went along. How they did this is the focus of this sophisticated study. The reader needs a strong background in the history of 18th-century Americans to follow the thematic presentation in this text. Chapter headings such as "Enterprise," "Careers," and "Reform" indicate the author's groupings. Appleby offers some fascinating material on the growing split between the North and the South, on the growing application of Jeffersonian ideals in the daily life of the citizen, and on the growing mobility and flexibility of the lower and middle classes, but the reader must often supply his or her own framework for the author's tapestry. This is a valuable text for enrichment at the advanced placement level. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 2000, Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap, 322p. illus. notes. index., $16.00. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: Patricia A. Moore; Brookline, MA , November 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 6)
The New York Times Book Review -
Edward Countryman
Whitmanesque, both in its complex but coherent
vision and in its elegant expression . . . does not
reduce its subjects to mere bearers of ascribed
categories. . . . Appleby writes about a contradictory,
difficult inheritance that was worth having.
Kirkus Reviews
A treasure-trove of information about the early Republic, recreating an era that mixed cultural and emotional chaos with unprecedented opportunities at all levels of society. Appleby (history/UCLA) paints the early 19th century as a time of tumultuous expansion of individualism, economic growth, and political engagement. The "first generation," born in the decades immediately following the revolution, applied their parents' idealistic challenges to authority to the reinvention of politics, commerce, and intimate relationships. Although Appleby's purpose is to examine social contexts rather than anomalous individuals, the materials she uses vividly evoke the lived experience of real people. Drawn from hundreds of diaries, letters, memoirs, and records of the obscure as well as the famous, her panorama comprises men and women, African-Americans and Europeans, and rich, middle-class, and poor Americans. Appleby dramatizes daily life in a brand-new nation in which dueling was an accepted form of political discourse, counterfeit currency was nearly as valuable as genuine, and young men and women sallied forth to adventures and careers their forebears could not have imagined. In the South, slavery promoted the concentration of wealth and a rigid caste system; in the more progressive North, new avenues to prosperity opened up with technological innovations and the aspirations that motivated them. Revolutionary ideals of cultural egalitarianism helped to spread the desire for literacy and "refinement" throughout the population, creating new opportunities for work in the business of culture. But entrepreneurial enterprise valued flexibility and originality attheexpense of familial loyalty and continuity with the past, fraying the relationships that had sustained earlier generations. Throughout the nation, the post-revolution generation reinvented the notions of religion, family, and destiny, forging an ideology that celebrated individual autonomy and elevated self-improvement stories to the status of myth. Appleby presents the explosion of possibilities at the beginning of the 19th century in sparkling, jargon-free prose and vibrant detail, producing an indispensable guide to a fascinating, turbulent time. (Illustrations.)
loading...