Inheriting the Revolution

The First Generation of Americans

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by Joyce Appleby

Harvard University Press

Due/Published August 2001, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0674006631

New in paper (F01)

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.

"Joyce Appleby deals with two themes in this book: the historical experience of the generation after the American Revolution and conflicts within American identity. The result is Whitmanesque, both in its complex but coherent vision and in its elegant expression."--Edward Countryman, New York Times Book Review

In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur published Letters From an American Farmer, in which he famously asked, 'What, then, is the American, this new man?' Americans seeking to define their national character have wrestled with that question ever since, often with dubious results...Now, Joyce Appleby has created a collective portrait of the generation of men and women born in the United States between 1776 and 1800, and on the basis of their lives and values ventures an answer to Crévecoeur's query that is intriguing [and] sophisticated...Anyone curious about how Americans came to understand themselves as a people would do well to read this book."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

   Contents

1. Introduction
2. Responding to a Revolutionary Tradition
3. Enterprise
4. Careers
5. Distinctions
6. Intimate Relations
7. Reform
8. A New National Identity

Notes
Index