Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans - Hardcover

Appleby, Joyce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674002369 ISBN 13: 9780674002364

Publisher: Belknap 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 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, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Appleby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

An esteemed historian of early America, Appleby (UCLA) has written a social history of "the first generation of Americans"Anot 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 biasAher 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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/pdf/APPINH_excerpt.pdf

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674002369
• ISBN 13: 9780674002364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322