Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans

Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans

by Joyce Appleby
Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans

Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans

by Joyce Appleby

Paperback

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674006638
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 09/15/2001
Series: Belknap Press Series
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

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

Table of 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

What People are Saying About This

Jan Lewis

Joyce Appleby perfectly captures the world created by the sons and daughters of the American Revolution. Enterprising and energetic, mad about money and seemingly constantly on the move, deeply pious and convinced of their own capacity to shape their own destinies, they took their Revolutionary legacy and made it into the world that we still inhabit, if with a little less optimism and a better sense of its contradictions.
Jan Lewis, author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia

Mary Kelley

Joyce Appleby's dazzling narrative takes us into the lives of the Americans who inherited the Revolution. With Appleby we glimpse the men and women--black and white, immigrant and old stock--who invented the distinctive social and cultural forms that we ourselves have inherited. We see ourselves anew in the originating impulses of participatory politics, in the rise of capitalist culture, in the shifting relation between the personal and the civic, and in the myriad ways in which we struggle to fulfill the promise of America. Reading Inheriting the Revolution we reckon with the America we are still making.
Mary Kelley, author of Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America

Peter S. Onuf

Joyce Appleby's influential argument for the democratic transformation of post-revolutionary America takes on new power and persuasiveness in her engaging biographical portrait of The First Generation. Artfully weaving personal narratives and sophisticated analyses into an evocative account of a new people's coming of age, Appleby sets the agenda for a new generation of scholarship. While never losing sight of the conflicts and contradictions that jeopardized the nation's future prospects, she brilliantly captures the dynamism and energy of her extraordinary cohort.
Peter S. Onuf, author of Jeffersonian Legacies

Daniel W. Howe

A highly original book, written very engagingly, by an author with a gift for apt phrases. The autobiographies include many fascinating accounts of little known people. Appleby's book will take an important place in the ongoing debates about its period. Inheriting the Revolution reflects the enthusiasm, maturity, common sense, and wisdom of its author.
Daniel W. Howe, author of Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Harvard)

Jon Butler

Pungent, vivid narrative, magisterial sweep, and imaginative explorations fuel Appleby's compelling account of the early republic's improbable, extraordinary birth--a masterful achievement by one of our most distinguished historians.
Jon Butler, author of Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Harvard)

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