Inheriting the Revolution

The First Generation of Americans

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects American History American Studies History

by Joyce Appleby

Harvard University Press

Due/Published April 2000, 320 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674002369

Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Appleby tells many intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. These new Americans also grappled with the distinction of free and slave labor, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the 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 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 an 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.