Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
What America Started
By Gordon S. Wood
The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800
by Jay Winik
HarperCollins, 659 pp., $29.95
American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic
by Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf, 283 pp., $26.95
Living as we do in this postmodern age, we have become increasingly interested in the origins of our predecessor, the modern world. Consequently, we have recently had a spate of historians writing on the beginnings of 'modernity,' that catch-all word for modern society, political institutions, technology, and much else. Although some, like Paul Johnson in The Birth of the Modern,[1] think the birth occurred several decades into the nineteenth century, most scholars, like Gertrude Himmelfarb in The Roads to Modernity,[2] want to date the origins of modern Western society in the late eighteenth century, in the period of the late Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. This is certainly true of the two historians under review.
Review, 4351 words
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