Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories and Emotional Loss in Early America

Untangling the private feelings, ambitions, and fears of early Americans through their personal writings from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Modern readers of history and biography unite around a seemingly straightforward question: What did it feel like to live in the past? In Longing for Connection, historian Andrew Burstein attempts to answer this question with a vigorous, nuanced emotional history of the United States from its founding to the Civil War.

Through an examination of the let...