Six Authors in Search of the Revolution!

Today is the anniversary of the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774, and of course a bit of trivia like that brings to mind the towering mountain of American Revolution histories that confronts the curious wanderer - a profusions of such histories that only grows more daunting every publishing season. 2011 saw fourteen such histories lumber down the conveyor belt from major houses, with who knows how many more specialized monographs filling out the weight. Innocent readers - especially those semi-mythical 'common readers' just looking for a good book on the subject - must inevitably feel overwhelmed.

Must inevitably feel overwhelmed, that is, until they turn to Stevereads, the un-overwhelmer! I (needless to say?) have read almost every book ever written on the unprecedented revolution Boston devised, spearheaded, and then graciously shared with the rest of the colonies, and I'm happy to help clarify the field a bit. Doing more than 'a bit' will require several entries, but we can at least make a start with six American Revolution volumes and how they each sniff around that first assembly of the Continental Congress. We'll kick things off chronologically and then jump all the hell around:

The History of the American Revolution by David Ramsay

Ramsay was one of America's first prolific publishing historians, and he was collecting original documents about the Revolution while the guns were still firing. His account was first definitively published in 1789 (as usual in that benighted era, pirated versions cropped up too), and in 1990 Lester Cohen made a very good edition of that original two-volume work, including a warm, affectionate Introduction to Ramsay, his work, and his world that perhaps goes a little too far in the direction of forgiving congeniality. Cohen stresses the humanitarian side of Ramsay (who was, to be fair, an amiable man), noting how outspoken he was against the evils of slavery. But Ramsay was a Southerner to his bones, and his own writings on the subject of slavery don't exactly brim with reformer's zeal:

The peasantry of few countries enjoy as much of the comforts of life, as the slaves, who belong to good masters ... There is frequently more happiness in kitchens than parlours, and life is often more pleasantly enjoyed by the slave, than his master.

Fortunately, in the stately sprawl of his history, there's far more to draw the reader's attention (sometimes too close attention - Ramsay has been several times castigated for plagiarism), including our author's summary of that first congress:

Of the whole number of deputies, which formed the Continental Congress of 1774, one half were lawyers. Gentlemen of that profession had acquired the confidence of the inhabitants by their exertions in the common cause. The previous measures in the respective provinces had been planned and carried into effect, more by lawyers than by any other order of men. Professionally taught the rights of the people, they were among the foremost to decry every attack made on their liberties. Bred in the habits of public speaking, they made a distinguished figure in the meetings of the people, and were particularly able to explain to them the tendency of the late acts of parliament. Exerting their abilities and influence in the cause of their country, they were rewarded with its confidence.

This is pious and well-intentioned, certainly, and we may never know the full extent to which Ramsay was aware of the 'viral' and scandalous jokes circulating at the time about that surfeit of lawyers.

Angel in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick

Bobrick's tangled and intellectual 1997 book on the subject likewise ponders the make-up of those early Congresses, and he finds himself at odds with John Adams himself, who at the time was pessimistic about the caliber of men America could field to handle this great crisis. For his part, Bobrick sees giants (and he generously quotes the wonderful Esther Forbes, whom we've praised here before:

Although outstanding figures may occasionally emerge in response to a historical crisis, those who arose to lead the Revolution surpassed all that might have been hoped for or have since been seen. Surely this is so in the aggregate: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Wythe, George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and the Lee family of Virginia; Samuel and John Adams and John Hancock of Massachusetts; Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; John Jay, James Duane, and Gouverneur Morris of New York; John Rutledge and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina; and more, with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others beginning to step forth into the light. Generally speaking, they were men of wealth or professional distinction, socially staid, not likely to be rebels, and belonged to an intellectual elite. About a third were lawyers, and most held university degrees. They were "gentlemen" in the old-fashioned sense of the word, which, wrote Esther Forbes, "implied lace ruffles, clean hands, and a knowledge of Latin and Greek."

In most of these accounts, focus among those gentlemen tends to focus on one person more than all the others:

George Washington's War by Robert Leckie

Leckie's fantastic 1992 book is mostly a military history of the Revolution (of which there are quite a few equally excellent volumes), but he frequently takes time out of his tally of battles to paint the broader canvas - and he perforce returns often to that one diminutive central figure:

Yet while conservatives, such as James Duane of New York, Dickinson and Galloway, were attempting to revive the spirit of conciliation with the Crown, Jefferson did not join them. He was drawn, rather, like the Cavaliers of the First Congress, to unite with Yankees such as John Adams. When a petition was received from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety asking Congress to adopt the New England army that had laid siege to British-held Boston, it was Adams who did his utmost - inside and outside Carpenter's Hall - to prevent the nine lower colonies from splitting from the northern four. He arose in Congress to warn of the common danger from the tried-and-true British policy of "Divide and Rule." If New England were to fall, then one by one the others would be enslaved, beginning with New York.

That incendiary voice was a natural-born product of Massachusetts, which had borne the brunt of the king's tyranny longer than any other colony and naturally led the way in undermining and overthrowing that tyranny in every way possible. You wouldn't expect two Southerners to be scrupulously fair about that, and yet:

Rebels and Redcoats by George Scheer and Hugh Rankin

This classic 1957 account of the Revolution is every bit as excellent a read and exhaustive a study today as it was half a century (!) ago, and its authors recount with high drama the unfolding of events after those initial exchanges of gunfire with the British:

Those rebels moved swiftly to gain the advantage in propaganda. The Second Continental Congress would not convene until May 10; the Provinicial Congress of Massachusetts, convening on April 22, decided that news of the hostilities of the nineteenth should be given to the English people as quickly as possible and from the viewpoint of the colonists. Without waiting to consult the general Congress, the Massachusetts body within three days took depositions from scores of participants who avowed that the British troops fired first. These depositions, accompanied by a letter addressed "To the Inhabitants of Great Britain," were directed to Benjamin Franklin, agent for the colony in London, who was requested to "print and disperse" the story.

And in that account, again, a familiar name crops up:

A Leap in the Dark by John Ferling

That name is well known to Ferling, who wrote a masterful biography of John Adams, and in 2003 he came out with this fast-paced, anecdotal history of the entire Revolution - an account that's constantly enlivened by touchstone references back to his favorite Founding Father:

Adams feared that his quest for greatness would be thwarted by his physical limitations. "By my Physical Constitution I am but an ordinary Man," he said, a reference to his unprepossessing physique. He was about five feet seven and overweight. He also was balding, pale, ungainly, and, as one observer noted, "careless of appearances." Other liabilities dogged him as well. His visage was usually grim and stern, his manner gruff and grumbling, and he was often brusquely impatient with those who differed from him.

The 'other' Adams also gets fair mentions by Ferling (although our author has him vapidly diminishing in power and influence quite a bit more rapidly than he in fact did):

Samuel Adams's master stroke at the First Congress had been to discourage intemperate behavior by the Massachusetts delegates. It was John Adams's genius in 1775 to grasp intuitively that it would be counterproductive for the radicals to get too far in front of popular opinion.

In his Introduction to that very good edition of David Ramsay's history, Lester Cohen concludes his comments with a touching tribute:

In preparing Ramsay's History for publication, I had the extraordinary experience of coming full circle. At the beginning of my graduate career in 1966, I was blessed by having Page Smith as my mentor and friend; at the end of my teaching career, there was David Ramsay, whom Page introduced to me, along with his passion for beauty and deceptive simplicity of narrative. I have always identified the two, David Ramsay and Page Smith, no doubt because Page has always exemplified for me the finest spirit of the eighteenth century. If these volumes were mine, rather than Ramsay's, to dedicate, I would dedicate them with admiration and respect to Page Smith.

Anyone who knew Smith would warmly agree with this. From his days as a garrulous Harvard undergraduate to the much-deserved accolades he received as the nation's conscience during the Bicentennial hoopla, Smith was a smart and wonderfully inviting dean of Revolution studies (his own two-volume biography of John Adams might just be the best book ever written on that oft-biographied subject). It seems only fitting that we conclude our brief tour of some good Revolution books with his own:

A New Age Now Begins by Page Smith

He brought this two-volume narrative history out in 1976, and every page of it glows not only with his passion for precise revision but also with his Herodotean dedication to telling stories in the overlay of his researches. His books are unfailingly incredible to read, mainly because he never forgets to let the drama of his events come through, as when he follows the Massachusetts delegation to that first Continental Congress and puts us in their perceptions:

So, some twenty days after they had set out from Boston, the members of the committee arrived in the city where the fate of their province and of America would be decided. There would be, it appeared, about fifty-six delegates, of whom twenty-two were lawyers. The proposals had been made to meet at Carpenters' Hall rather than the State House - in order, the Tories said, to curry favor with the working men of the city, since the hall had recently been built by the subscription of Philadelphia's carpenters who were understandably proud of the handsome structure.

Like so many of these historians, Smith is fascinated by John Adams (and considerably aided by the fact that Adams, like all of his descendants, was a habitual and highly voluminous recorder of the events of his own day), so we get his impressions of virtually everything:

Two days after their arrival, the New England delegates met the famous Pennsylvania "Farmer," John Dickinson, who was hardly the picture of the simple husbandman as he arrived "in his Coach and four beautiful Horse." Dickinson was the antithesis of a bold patriot. "Slender as a Reed - pale as ashes," he looked at first sight as though he could not live a month, and, indeed, he gave a rather tedious recital of "his late ill Health and present Gout." As one hypochondriac viewing another, however, Adams was impressed with a certain tough resiliency, "as if the Spring of Life were strong enough to last many Years."

It would be pretty to conclude things here by noting with pleasure that the Spring of Life in Smith's own works was strong enough to last many years, but no: all his marvellous books are out of print, moldering unvisited in library stacks and used bookstore shelves. If you ever see anything by this author on those shelves, do yourself a favor and consume it - it's all popular history done perfectly.

As noted, popular history has always lavished attention on all aspects of the Revolution - each of these six titles deserves an entry of its own, and all six represent the smallest tip of the iceberg of what's seen print in the last two centuries. Maybe come July 4th we'll go over six more - in the meantime, find these! They all still have mighty powers to please!

A Struggle for Power!

Our book today is Theodore Draper's luminous, contentious 1996 volume A Struggle for Power, one of the most interesting, provocative, and clear-headed accounts of the ramp-up to the American Revolution I've ever read. Draper takes the standard narrative of the Revolution - a downtrodden people yearning to breathe free, rebelling against the cruel tyranny of their distant oppressors in order to create a land where everybody was equal - turns it upside-down, strips it of all its historical hindsight, and then substitutes a narrative of his own. His story is far less stirring, but it's also far more interesting and infinitely more recognizable. In his account of that crucial decade from 1765 to 1776, 'tisn't morals, 'tis money that saves - and everybody dances to the sound of the profitable pound. Here we have two powers - one old and great, the other new and vibrant - facing off against each other not over principles but over cold, hard cash and the clout it buys. There are civics lessons here, but they happen without the soft focus of hagiography:

The company was supposed to make more money in the American market, drive out the Dutch competition, and benefit the American consumers.

But there was a flaw in the plan. Tea smuggling was big business. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were havens of merchant smugglers. According to a well-informed Tory view, the British made the mistake of underestimating the smuggling business in America, which "was so universal, that the Smugglers Interest had engrossed so great a Power" it would have required ten British soldiers to protect every chest of tea.

Draper consistently paints a picture that's diametrically distorted from the stars-and-stripes narrative of US history textbooks (and the dim-lit imagination of certain former US presidents). In his view, the matters of contention between the British Empire and the American colonies were never the stuff of opera (or, gulp, musical):

At this moment, the final stage of the prerevolutionary struggle hung in the balance. Yet the real stakes were comparatively minor. The tea duty to which North and his ministers were determined to cling brought in a pittance of 9,790 pounds after 1770, little more than enough to pay for a couple of governors. It was a derisory sum on which to base a policy that at best was sure to annoy the Americans and at worst enrage them. It is clear from what North said that he was fed up with the Americans and wanted to pay them back for their insobordination and insolence.

And he saves his bluntest summing-up for the fiery final pages of his book:

The entire colonial case against British rule had been largely negative - against taxation, against a "standing army," against the importation of tea, against the Coercive Acts. In all the mountain of words against the British from 1765 to 1775, few - if any - have anything to do with changing the political and certainly not the social structure as it had developed under British rule. The Revolution was not fought to bring about democracy or any kind of egalitarianism. Before 1776 very few - if any - Americans expected to bring about a republic. The British gave the colonists a revolutionary program long before the Americans were willing to admit that this was their goal.

This is bracing stuff, and A Struggle for Power is rich with it. This isn't to say more traditional narratives of this same story don't have their merits - they certainly do, and my shelves would be the poorer without them. But Draper's kind of invigoration is a large part of why I read much history in the first place - because the past never stays the same. In the hands of researchers with powerful insights (and pithy prose), the past changes its reflections according to the lights shone upon it. Really good literary journalism can do the same thing for literature, but for me, the process is always more exciting when it comes to the historical texts, periods, and people that fascinate me so much.

So was there any disinterested heroism in the American Revolution? Were there even any such thing as patriots and martyrs to the cause of freedom? Draper would cast a jaundiced eye on the very notions, and thanks to books like this, those old readings will never be quite safe again.

Braddock's March!

Our book today is Braddock’s March by Thomas Crocker, and despite the author’s fondest high hopes, the title is likely to be an utter mystery to most Americans. Those who received a meat-and-potatoes Catholic school education might perhaps know the name Braddock and hazily recall that it signifies pre-Revolution America, but even those few nun-tormented souls will be hard-pressed to put any details to the memory – only the few lucky ones who somehow latched onto a great history aficionado, somebody who can really make history come alive (Thom Daly of our own Open Letters comes to mind, especially in his latest piece), will have been made aware of how charged Braddock’s March – and the resulting Battle of the Monongahela – really was.

It started in late February of 1755 when British Major General Edward Braddock and his two regiments (about 2000 men when half of them weren’t sick) arrived in the New World and met straightway with the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie - “two imperiums of colonial power thrown together by fate,” as Crocker aptly put it – to assess the best ways to disrupt the military operations of the French in America. Braddock’s orders were to strike overland in the direction of the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne and capture it, and toward this end he assembled on his general staff a military ‘family’ he hoped could get this job done (among this ‘family’ was the ambitious young ‘captain’ Robert Orme, whose image rather mysteriously fills this book’s cover, despite the fact that the book’s nominal subject didn’t end up liking Orme all that much).

Crocker does an excellent job at telling this story, this is mainly due to the fact that despite his formidable reading on the time period, he somehow never lost sight of what telling history is all about. “But,” he tells us, “the first word on a key to help unlock the mystery of the Braddock campaign: it is a profoundly human story.”

That story is rife with bragging and doomed heroism, rife with double-crosses and double-dealings, and of course it has a tragic ending for Braddock himself, the hard-drinking hard-swearing blustery-yet-capable martinet in charge of what Crocker calls “one of the most important military engagements in the American colonial period.”

It was important, and it was big news – it’s refreshing that Crocker never loses sight of this. Nothing like the size or official capacity of Braddock’s two regiments of trained, drilled, experienced soldiers had ever been seen in the American colonies, and those colonies reacted with suitable awe and an entirely American nerve, as Crocker insightfully points out:

Just as Braddock arrived with orders and an agenda on how to deal with the American colonies, he would have been naïve to think that individual Americans did not have their own agendas for dealing with him. What is remarkable about the Americans’ reaction to the arrival of the expedition is now they viewed it as a grand opportunity to improve their own prospects for advancement.

One of these scheming Americans was George Washington, who’d seen his prospects of military glory - or much of a military career at all – evaporate after the debacle of Great Plains and Fort Necessity (recounted in all its debacle-ness here), and for a few months that summer of 1755, Braddock, Washington, et al pursued an agenda of typically British grandiosity, as Crocker summarizes:

Their aim was to oust the French, win over hostile Indians, and claim a continent. The British troops who made the march were the finest that England had ever sent to America in force. Their route of march slashed like a scar across the center of the American colonies. They blazed a road where only wilderness had existed. They hauled dozens of cannon across mountains that are formidable even now. They faced an enemy whom they did not know. And they were all but wiped out in one of the most humiliating defeats British arms was ever to suffer.

That defeat waits at the end of Braddock’s March – he was killed and his men were routed, driven to ignominious retreat, the whole campaign brought to a summary and pathetic ending on what Crocker calls “the day America grew up.” But there’s one final delight in this book full of delights: Crocker gives us quick thumbnail glimpses of the lives of all his principal characters after the pivotal events covered by his book – and it turns out he’s quite good at thumbnail sketches too:

Commodore Augustus Keppel (1725-1786). Keppel rose to become an admiral and had a highly distinguished career. However, in 1778, he led the Channel Fleet in an indecisive battle with the French off Ushant, Brittany, allowing the French fleet to slip off to America and to challenge British forces fighting the Americans in the Revolution. Keppel was court-martialed as a result of this action, but he alleged that his second-in-command, Sir Hugh Palliser, gave him inadequate support. Keppel was acquitted, but not before the resulting squabble divided the Navy. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has several portraits of Keppel at various stages of his life, including one that features his flagship Centurion in the background. Keppel died in 1786 without issue. However, his collateral family has given us Camilla Parker Bowles, the duchess of Cornwall and the present day wife of Prince Charles.

Naturally, Crocker a bit overstates both the military and the political significance of Braddock’s March – even novices will be able to spot the more egregious locations of his overreaching, and my bet is their reaction will be the same as mine: instant forgiveness, in the face of the enormous conviction and overriding narrative energy of the book as a whole. Braddock’s March is history written exactly as history should be: meticulous in terms of facts, impassioned and argumentative in terms of interpretation, and masterful in terms of presentation. A baker’s dozen iconic American figures – from Daniel Boone to Benjamin Franklin – make spirited appearances in these pages, and the portraits of Braddock and Washington will stick with you for a long time. Don’t miss this book.

The Americans!

Our book today is the mammoth The Americans, written by the great American historian Daniel Boorstin in three volumes over the course of years, from 1958 to 1973, and that 'great' doesn't come easy: Boorstin could be intolerably smug, and he was as often wrong as right about, well, virtually everything he ever thought or spoke about. And it's hard to skirt the specters of hypocrisy when talking about him, since he railed his whole life against the American drift of shallow reductivism, but he himself was one of the best popularizers of the 20th century. He worked blazingly fast - reading, writing, drawing connections, almost instinctively coming up with the perfect way into any subject, no matter how abstruse, the perfect path not for himself but for others to follow. He was a born teacher, and in more than forty years as a public intellectual, he scarcely ever wrote a boring line.

He had his saws, and when he got to sawing, he didn't always pay close attention to the quality of the wood under his blade. He virtually single-handedly invented the vocabulary with which to describe - and condemn - what we now know as celebrity culture, but he was sometimes (especially in later life) overly casual about equating those who've stepped into celebrity with those who've devoted their lives to seeking it. I guarantee he'd have misunderstood President Obama for a solid seven or eight months before he stopped talking and started paying attention. Naturally, there was this same tendency when it came to President Kennedy, whom Boorstin, tottering quickly across Cambridge Common one beautiful autumn afternoon, once dismissed as "hair, teeth, and tonic-water" (the feeling was mutual: Kennedy once referred to him, in one grunt, as "smart; weak").

But he's gone now, and his works are left behind, and none of them even remotely approach The Americans for offhand genius, eye-opening new perspectives, and utterly memorable insights. Boorstin read everything and remembered a disenheartening amount of it all, and reading The Americans is like sharing a series of evenings with him as the two of you review the entire course of American history, with him frequently wandering off-topic and chasing down every digression he finds fascinating - and like all great teachers, he could convey fascination in a virtually one-to-one ratio. The Americans is a three-volume page-turner.

Volume One is The Colonial Experience, and it excavates the mindframes and collective experiences of a nation that was becoming all kinds of things it couldn't foresee. Indeed, it was that uncertain future - the way the new country warped, elevated, and sometimes perverted the aims and identities of all those who came here - that he singled out as his theme:

America began as a sobering experience. The colonies were a disproving ground for utopias. In the following chapters we will illustrate how dreams made in Europe - the dreams of the zionist, the perfectionist, the philanthropist, and the transplanter - were dissipated or transformed by the American reality. A new civilization was being born less out of plans and purposes than out of the unsettlement which the New World brought to the ways of the Old.

Boorstin was trained as a lawyer - he always referred to himself as an 'interloper' historian, a passionate amateur. But his summaries, even when you didn't agree with them, could cause that signature intake of breath that always accompanies watching a first-rate analyst at work. Just listen to this, never before said so pithily:

The virtues, like the vices, of any age bear its peculiar flavor. The swashbuckling grandeur of the projects of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake expressed the aspirations and daring of Elizabethan England. The clarity, simplicity, and doggedness of the purposes of William Bradford and John Winthrop were that special combination of grand end and commonplace means which characterized the England of Oliver Cromwell. Similarly the altruism of the founders of the Georgia colony of 1732 was a touchstone of the limited aspiration of the England of that day.

And here he is on the smallpox epidemic that gripped New England in 1721, and the heroic efforts of a few brave men and women who advocated the new process of inoculation to turn it around:

In March 1722, after the worst of the epidemic was over, [Cotton] Mather pointed out to the Secretary of the Royal Society in London that of the nearly 300 inoculated in Boston only five or six had died (and perhaps these had already been naturally infected before their inoculation), while of the more than 5000 who caught the disease naturally, nearly 900 had died. This meant that there was about nine times as much chance of death if one caught the smallpox in the ordinary course of infection as compared with the danger from inoculation. The fact that about half the population of Boston had contracted smallpox during the epidemic showed that from the point of view of the community as a whole the risk of inoculation was very much worth taking.

1965's volume of The Americans was The National Experience, charting the new nation as it grew and continued to morph into one identity after another. Boorstin points out that this morphing happened very fast and veined out along rapidly expanding railway lines, which were built - literally and figuratively - on a radically different philosophy than that which had governed the Old World:

By building rapidly and flimsily, Americans refused hostages to the future. They affirmed their faith that, in America, everything would change - including, of course, the techniques of railroad building. For them, railroads were by no means "a final improvement in the means of locomotion." The British confidence in the future, and in its resemblance to the present, made it hard for Britishers even to imagine obsolescence. But belief in obsolescence became an article of American faith.

And naturally, for a man who could manage to find a smile in even the worst of times, Boorstin's books are shot through with humor - he's always willing to linger a bit on a funny story, and the course of American history gives him plenty to choose from. Like, for instance, the sorry saga of the massive George Washington statue commissioned from Horatio Greenough in 1832. Greenough was, like all sculptors since Pygmalion, a thorough-going scoundrel, and in addition to bilking the government whenever he could, he intentionally produced something he knew would cause his commissioners to hit the roof. In this case, it was a statue of a seated Washington that had two problems: first, it was so big and so massive it cracked the floor of the Capitol rotunda when it was placed their ... and second, Greenough's Washington was practically goddam naked, sitting there in a vaguely Roman half-toga with his entire torso bare. You can just hear Boorstin chuckling over the sanctimonious outcry this display produced, like the New Yorker who wrote, "Washington was too prudent, and careful of his health, to expose himself thus in a climate so uncertain as ours," and he duly reports Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous cry, "Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world."



The third volume of The Americans, The Democratic Experience, came out in 1973 and won Boorstin the Pulitzer Prize, and it's the first volume in the book that allows its author to talk directly about the multi-faceted affects modern technology has on society. Boorstin was fascinated by this, which is a little saddening to those who knew him: this was one Librarian of Congress whose thoughts on the Internet (and especially collective experiments like Wikipedia) we would very much like to have known)(history is replete with such bad timing; Erasmus, more than any human being who ever lived, would have loved email). He was sensitive to the nuances of technology in ways few writers were at the time:

By the time the fifty-millionth telephone was ceremoniously placed on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's desk, it was unusual for any American family to be out of reach of the telephone. The business of government was conducted by phone. The United States possessed more than half the telephones in the world, and by 1972 nearly a half-billion telephone conversations were being carried on in the United States each day. Still, the telephone was only a convenience, permitting Americans to do more casually and with less effort what they had already been doing before. People found it easier to get their message to other individuals whom they wanted to reach.

Television was a revolution, or more precisely, a cataclysm. For nobody "wanted" television, and it would create its own market as it transformed everyday life. It extended simultaneous experience, created anonymous audiences even vaster and more universal than those of radio ...

The Americans goes on endlessly like this, page after page of captivating reading, the very best that so-called 'popular' history can be. It's an inquiry in the finest sense of the word, a long, rambling, extremely intelligent meditation on the nature of the American nation, and it should be required reading for everybody from the President on down. A nice sturdy Library of America volume wouldn't be a bad idea, either.