From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, The birthday of a new world is at hand,” America was unique in world history. A nation suffused with the spirit of explorers, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas, it was the world’s first truly cosmopolitan civilization.
In Beyond the Revolution, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann tells the story of America’s greatest thinkers and creators, from Paine and Jefferson to Melville and William James, showing how they built upon and battled one another’s ideas in the critical years between 1776 and 1900. An unprecedented work of intellectual history by a master historian, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our national culture.
This lively work makes a case not often advanced these days: that the United States owes much to thinking men and women from the days of the Puritans until after the Civil War. Goetzmann, winner of the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman prizes for Explorations and Empires, robustly challenges those who scorn the role of thinkers and contend that the nation was built only by "doers." He provides a history of lines of thought owing much to Europe but rooted firmly in native ground. Although he tries to knit together his story with a theme of growing American cosmopolitanism and openness to new knowledge, what gives coherence to Goetzmann's survey is the seriousness with which he treats every figure. John Winthrop, James Madison, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass: they and countless others, many scarcely known (including scientists, often omitted from studies of American thought) tread these pages. The result is an authoritative, readable survey of what from others' pens has proved heavy going. Unfortunately, despite his subtitle Goetzmann fails to cover the Pragmatists, arguably the nation's most distinctive thinkers. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved