Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 - Hardcover

Butler, Jon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674000919 ISBN 13: 9780674000919

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago-and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society-a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a 'new order of the ages' that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly 'modern' character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto 'dark ages') of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us vast revolutionary changes before 1776 among a fantastically diverse assortment of peoples. Here are polyglot populations of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries-a society that, for ninety years before 1776, was already becoming America.

About this title

About the Author

Jon Butler is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, and Professor of Religious Studies, at Yale University.

Reviews

Historians have often argued that the colonies became "Europeanized" in the century before the American Revolution, but in his latest book, Yale historian Butler (Awash in a Sea of Faith) contends that we need to pay close attention to this slice of early American history. The decades in between the Puritan-dominated 17th century and the market-revolutionizing early 19th century were a formative period, he suggests, during which a distinctly "American" societyAand, as Butler would have it, the first "modern" societyAdeveloped. It was a culture "simultaneously aggressive and willful, materialistic as well as idealistic, driven toward authority and mastery." Butler examines the Americanizing process in the realms of politics, economics, religion and material culture. In the first chapter, "Peoples," Butler reminds readers that late colonial society was polyglot and diverseAincluding Germans, French, Scots, Ibo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Catawba and Leni-Lenape. The rest of the book is marked by Butler's characteristic innovation. Regarding politics, for instance, he suggests that Americans were no longer harmoniously self-governing through the town meeting; it was the colony itself, rather than the local microcosm, that was the center of political life. Likewise, distinctly American decorative arts began to develop during these years: after 1680, the relatively simple public buildings of the 17th century were "replaced by far larger, more elaborate facilities." Butler's original analysis is important reading on 18th-century America; he shows that the colonies were developing distinct ways of spending, building, praying, decorating and politicking even thenAa cultural revolution that anticipated the political revolution that was to follow. B&w photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674000919
• ISBN 13: 9780674000919
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336