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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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• 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

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Publishers Weekly Review

An esteemed historian of early America, Appleby (UCLA) has written a social history of "the first generation of Americans"Änot those who fought the American Revolution but, as her title indicates, those who inherited it, who had to figure out just what their parents' bold declarations of liberty looked like on the ground. Appleby's lens is wide: she investigates religion, business, family life and politics, examining this generation's struggles with slavery, their musings on the proper role of women and their participation in evangelical revivals. One of the more innovative discussions comes in the chapter "Careers," in which Appleby argues that those who came of age after the revolution often earned their daily bread doing tasks their parents could not have imagined. Many continued to farm, of course, but others headed to cities to run businesses, teach school, preach sermons, build buildings, publish books. Indeed, Appleby notes that in the Revolutionary era, the term "career" "denote[d] a horse-racing course"; it was only after 1800 that it was used to describe the trajectory of a person's vocation. Appleby strains to pay attention to the South, but her book betrays a certain Northern biasÄher focus on the development of capitalism and the incursion of the market better describe the industrializing North than the slaveholding South, which, in historian Eugene Genovese's phrase, was in the market, but not of it. But that is a small quibble with a wonderful book, which freshly conveys the energy and creativity unleashed in a generation forging a new national identity. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Appleby's creative synthesis of the post-Revolutionary generation is a delightful book that will enrich virtually everyone who reads it. Drawing chiefly on autobiographies, she ranges far and wide over the generation that came of age in the 1790s and was active in the early republic until the 1830s. What a varied lot these Americans were! Appleby provides a good introduction to the major themes of the early republic, surveying such topics as the response to the Revolutionary tradition, interpersonal relations, careers, reform, distinctions of class and status, and the question of national identity. Her engaging style draws the reader into the lives of people who appear to be largely autonomous individuals, by and large successful in life. In doing so, Appleby focuses on that generation's social and intellectual construction of reality. In the process she develops an argument for the origins of modern American exceptionalism. This is an entertaining as well as enlightening account of a democratic and optimistic society searching for its future. All levels. J. Andrew; Franklin and Marshall College

Booklist Review

The first generation of Americans born after the Revolution faced the formidable task of actually implementing the ideals articulated by the architects of the American Revolution. Though a tremendous amount of historical research has been devoted to analyzing the motives and the actions of the revolutionary participants, little attention has been paid to ordinary citizens born between 1776 and 1800. This underappreciated group of Americans was responsible for transforming a divergent group of colonies into a cohesive national unit with a distinct political, social, economic, and cultural landscape. Culling information from a multitude of primary and secondary sources, including memoirs, autobiographies, manuscript collections, government documents, letters, and established histories, Appleby interweaves the individual experiences and sensibilities of thousands of American men and women into the collective story of the evolution of a new republic. A scholarly examination of the implications of independence in post-revolutionary America. --Margaret Flanagan

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Joyce Oldham Appleby was born in Omaha, Nebraska on April 9, 1929. She graduated from Stanford University in 1950. She worked for the Restaurant Reporter, a trade magazine based in Beverly Hills, and later as a stringer for The Star-News, a local South Pasadena newspaper. She received a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. She taught at San Diego State University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She retired from there in 2001.

She wrote several books during her lifetime including Economic Thought and Ideology in 17th Century England, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, and Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination. She died from complications of pneumonia on December 23, 2016 at the age of 87.

(Bowker Author Biography)