Volume 5, Number 7 · November 11, 1965
Provincial History
By John Higham
The Americans: The National Experience
by Daniel J. Boorstin
Random House, 517 pp., $8.95
About twenty years ago, Daniel Boorstin, then a young man in his early thirties, started upon a major appraisal of American civilization. Already an accomplished historical essayist, he had written two incisive studies, the first on Blackstone's legal philosophy, the second on Jeffersonian liberalism, both of them exercises in disenchantment. They had introduced a lively critic of ideas who was obviously primed for further assaults on the pieties of progressive scholarship. Since that time Boorstin has persevered exuberantly in the destructive work, in the course of which he and other young scholars have left few of the customary signposts to the American past intact. But behind his darting forays in lectures and essays—it is only now becoming fully apparent—a deeper purpose was going steadily forward: to put American history together again in a new design. Of a projected trilogy, the first volume, entitled The Americans: The Colonial Experience, came out in 1958. While introducing the basic themes, it was something of a hodgepodge (made especially so by the fragmentation of colonial life itself), and one could scarcely guess where the story would turn next or how it would come out. Now the second volume, treating the period from the Revolution to the Civil War, is before us, and it brings the whole ambitious enterprise into clearer view.
Review, 1600 words
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