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The Americans #1
The Americans, Vol. 1: The Colonial Experience
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
In this brilliantly original book, written for the general reader, the American past becomes richly meaningful to the present.
In this brilliantly original book, written for the general reader, the American past becomes richly meaningful to the present.
434 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
About the author
Daniel J. Boorstin
154 books351 followersDaniel Joseph Boorstin was a historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987.
He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 15. He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution.
His The Americans The Democratic Experience received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history.
Within the discipline of social theory, Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is an early description of aspects of American life that were later termed hyperreality and postmodernity. In The Image, Boorstin describes shifts in American culture—mainly due to advertising—where the reproduction or simulation of an event becomes more important or "real" than the event itself. He goes on to coin the term pseudo-event which describes events or activities that serve little to no purpose other than to be reproduced through advertisements or other forms of publicity. The idea of pseudo-events closely mirrors work later done by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. The work is still often used as a text in American sociology courses.
When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, the nomination was supported by the Authors League of America but opposed by the American Library Association because Boorstin "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate.
Boorstin died in 2004 in Washington, D.C.
He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 15. He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution.
His The Americans The Democratic Experience received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history.
Within the discipline of social theory, Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is an early description of aspects of American life that were later termed hyperreality and postmodernity. In The Image, Boorstin describes shifts in American culture—mainly due to advertising—where the reproduction or simulation of an event becomes more important or "real" than the event itself. He goes on to coin the term pseudo-event which describes events or activities that serve little to no purpose other than to be reproduced through advertisements or other forms of publicity. The idea of pseudo-events closely mirrors work later done by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. The work is still often used as a text in American sociology courses.
When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, the nomination was supported by the Authors League of America but opposed by the American Library Association because Boorstin "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate.
Boorstin died in 2004 in Washington, D.C.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
October 2, 2015
This is a remarkable book about colonial life in America, presented in a fashion quite unlike most history books provide. Boorstin looks at various aspects of life - religion, literacy and literature, the press, the military - and examines them in turn, and paints a picture of life in the colonies as reflected in the activities of the colonists. It is an excellent way into the beginnings of American history, from a fresh and innovative perspective.
May 9, 2011
What a difference just one book can make in your knowledge and understanding of something. This one definitely did it for me and American history. Funny thing is this was just the first of three books in The Americans trilogy written by Daniel J. Boorstin. On that note, what a difference an author can make! Boorstin reminds me of Carl Sagan in that he tended to romanticize his subject matter, subject matter considered tedious to most people, and to break it down in a way that most could appreciate. Click for Boorstin's credentials.
Prior to reading this book, I knew bits and pieces of American history, but now I feel I have a very solid, fundamental understanding of America’s beginnings. Boorstin did a great job at giving a ground level view that encompassed everything from the first major colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia and what influenced their distinct development and personality to the ways and degrees in which the colonials were vested in (or rather casual about) law, medicine, science, literature, warfare, etc. More than anything, Boorstin describes the overall frame of mind during these times – a frame of mind that was heavily influenced by the unending freedom, space and natural resources of America along with the benefits of the European roots. Colonial America wasn’t too keen on dogmas, philosophical ideals, and the worshipping of those “specialists” such as the English clergy, philosophers, and other European “experts”. They didn’t count on laboratory experiments or theorizing to understand their new world, but counted on day-to-day experience. Although they would make record of such experiences as sighting unfamiliar plants and animals, they'd leave it to the Europeans to muster over this information how they saw fit. They were jacks-of-all-trades. They were great implementers. They were literate, but not literary. Interestingly, as a group they spoke better English than the English themselves, primarily due to the way in which the colonial classes intermingled as well as their supposed desire to remain credible sounding to their mother England. They were also, it’s important to recognize, very crude in ways (as any new beginner can be) as exemplified by the behavior of their militiamen.
It's important to note that this book reads somewhat like an essay due to it's sharp focus, but seems to fan out mid way due to its engaging quality. Also important to note is that this book gives virtually no time to the discussion of slavery and only brief mention of Native American influences such as warfare and agriculture. It is admittedly focused on the landowners and other free colonials and their comparison to and evolvement away from their counterparts in England.
Last of all, Boorstin seems to have been a great fan of America and its history and may seem to give too much credit to the colonial Americans and not enough to their European forefathers. However, if you look closely you’ll see that he was more than aware of Europe’s influence on early America; he just chose to focus on the idyllic, romantic uniqueness of what America incidentally was which I feel is a legitimate perspective as long as the reader keeps in mind that this perspective is not all inclusive of American History. I consider this book an invaluable resource for those interested in American history!
Prior to reading this book, I knew bits and pieces of American history, but now I feel I have a very solid, fundamental understanding of America’s beginnings. Boorstin did a great job at giving a ground level view that encompassed everything from the first major colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia and what influenced their distinct development and personality to the ways and degrees in which the colonials were vested in (or rather casual about) law, medicine, science, literature, warfare, etc. More than anything, Boorstin describes the overall frame of mind during these times – a frame of mind that was heavily influenced by the unending freedom, space and natural resources of America along with the benefits of the European roots. Colonial America wasn’t too keen on dogmas, philosophical ideals, and the worshipping of those “specialists” such as the English clergy, philosophers, and other European “experts”. They didn’t count on laboratory experiments or theorizing to understand their new world, but counted on day-to-day experience. Although they would make record of such experiences as sighting unfamiliar plants and animals, they'd leave it to the Europeans to muster over this information how they saw fit. They were jacks-of-all-trades. They were great implementers. They were literate, but not literary. Interestingly, as a group they spoke better English than the English themselves, primarily due to the way in which the colonial classes intermingled as well as their supposed desire to remain credible sounding to their mother England. They were also, it’s important to recognize, very crude in ways (as any new beginner can be) as exemplified by the behavior of their militiamen.
It's important to note that this book reads somewhat like an essay due to it's sharp focus, but seems to fan out mid way due to its engaging quality. Also important to note is that this book gives virtually no time to the discussion of slavery and only brief mention of Native American influences such as warfare and agriculture. It is admittedly focused on the landowners and other free colonials and their comparison to and evolvement away from their counterparts in England.
Last of all, Boorstin seems to have been a great fan of America and its history and may seem to give too much credit to the colonial Americans and not enough to their European forefathers. However, if you look closely you’ll see that he was more than aware of Europe’s influence on early America; he just chose to focus on the idyllic, romantic uniqueness of what America incidentally was which I feel is a legitimate perspective as long as the reader keeps in mind that this perspective is not all inclusive of American History. I consider this book an invaluable resource for those interested in American history!
June 19, 2021
A serious book for the student of American history, providing interesting views on how our colonial experience formed the nation. Boorstin is way smarter than the average bear but he assembles his arguments so clearly even I could follow. He divides the book into four major ideas. The first is on how the colonist’s visions of life in the new world came to be realized or not.
The Puritans established their community with very strict rules according to their orthodoxy. They didn’t want or accept anyone who wasn’t part of their religious beliefs. But their experiences in America forced them to make compromises and eventually come to the idea that toleration was required. They also understood that government requires good, moral people to hold positions and that power must be restricted and limited. We are certainly learning the importance of these principles today:
The Quakers also established their communities with rules according to their beliefs. But unlike the Puritans, the Quakers could not or would not adjust their vision to the realities of life in the New World. This became especially critical as settlers clashed with the Native Americans and suffered in the process.
The attraction of the colonies to the European hoi polloi:
The second major theme deals with education and knowledge. Boorstin makes clear there were no great philosophers in America. The experience of the real world was the laboratory for freedom. The legal and medical professions are also discussed along with scientific discovery.
Sadly, modern America with it’s tech monopolies no longer believes in the power of truth to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Earlier in our history, there was a higher opinion of people than exists today:
Ben Franklin would not be happy with the state of public discourse today…or the lack of it:
Medicine in America does not advance the practice but profits from the lack of European techniques:
And in Franklin’s Philadelphia people were handing about a pointed epigram of “The Advantages of having two Phisicians”,
One prompt Phisician like a sculler plies,
And all his Art, and skill applies;
But two Phisicians, like a pair of Oars,
Convey you soonest to the Stygian Shores.
The practice of medicine was amazingly stratified. At the top, doctors of medicine did not work with their hands.
The third major section deals with language and the power of the printed word.
One of the benefits of not having a European education is a mind open to new discovery. Ben Franklin is a great example. After Franklin spent so much time in Europe, his discoveries declined because he “knew how things were supposed to work” rather than wondering how something works…like electricity:
The last major theme deals with war and diplomacy. I grew up in the north where ‘Indian Summer” was a warm and happy experience. Boorstin reveals the origin of the term was not so idyllic:
Women had to fend off attacks, just as the men did. In either case, the population knew they were the “first responders” in today’s language.
The idea of the American backwoods marksman was well used:
The natural right to keep and bear arms is a result of experience.
There was only one area that I wish Boorstin had covered in more detail. That is what the impact of slavery was on colonial America. He covers it only in the case of what impact it had on land use and skills needed by the plantation owners. Overall 5 Stars
The Puritans established their community with very strict rules according to their orthodoxy. They didn’t want or accept anyone who wasn’t part of their religious beliefs. But their experiences in America forced them to make compromises and eventually come to the idea that toleration was required. They also understood that government requires good, moral people to hold positions and that power must be restricted and limited. We are certainly learning the importance of these principles today:
The Quakers also established their communities with rules according to their beliefs. But unlike the Puritans, the Quakers could not or would not adjust their vision to the realities of life in the New World. This became especially critical as settlers clashed with the Native Americans and suffered in the process.
The attraction of the colonies to the European hoi polloi:
The second major theme deals with education and knowledge. Boorstin makes clear there were no great philosophers in America. The experience of the real world was the laboratory for freedom. The legal and medical professions are also discussed along with scientific discovery.
Sadly, modern America with it’s tech monopolies no longer believes in the power of truth to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Earlier in our history, there was a higher opinion of people than exists today:
Ben Franklin would not be happy with the state of public discourse today…or the lack of it:
Medicine in America does not advance the practice but profits from the lack of European techniques:
And in Franklin’s Philadelphia people were handing about a pointed epigram of “The Advantages of having two Phisicians”,
One prompt Phisician like a sculler plies,
And all his Art, and skill applies;
But two Phisicians, like a pair of Oars,
Convey you soonest to the Stygian Shores.
The practice of medicine was amazingly stratified. At the top, doctors of medicine did not work with their hands.
The third major section deals with language and the power of the printed word.
One of the benefits of not having a European education is a mind open to new discovery. Ben Franklin is a great example. After Franklin spent so much time in Europe, his discoveries declined because he “knew how things were supposed to work” rather than wondering how something works…like electricity:
The last major theme deals with war and diplomacy. I grew up in the north where ‘Indian Summer” was a warm and happy experience. Boorstin reveals the origin of the term was not so idyllic:
Women had to fend off attacks, just as the men did. In either case, the population knew they were the “first responders” in today’s language.
The idea of the American backwoods marksman was well used:
The natural right to keep and bear arms is a result of experience.
There was only one area that I wish Boorstin had covered in more detail. That is what the impact of slavery was on colonial America. He covers it only in the case of what impact it had on land use and skills needed by the plantation owners. Overall 5 Stars
December 9, 2012
This book is the first of a trilogy by Daniel Boorstin. The book takes the reader through an in-depth analysis of life in pre-revolutionary America. Compared to more recent history books, this one is a bit dry, but nevertheless very interesting, and comprehensive in scope. The book shows how a large chunk of English culture was planted into the American psyche. But the huge area of the country, the relative sparseness of settlements, the isolation caused by difficulties in transportation, the constant threats of Indian, French, and Spanish attacks, led to some very important differences. Colonial Americans had a stronger sense of equality, provincialism, and practical "know-how" than people in England. Their sense of equality demanded that militia elect their own leaders! Despite their isolation, Colonial Americans spoke a purer form of English language, and linguistically their speech was much more homogeneous across the entire country, than neighboring cities in England.
Four colonies are examined in detail; Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia. The charters of these colonies were quite different, and their varied geographies contributed to big differences in psychology, politics, and attitudes, especially towards religion. Colonials read a lot, especially newspapers. The press was censored by state governments, but more people read newspapers than in any other country of the time. In some of the colonies, church and state were very closely tied.
There are plenty of fascinating analyses of all facets of life in Colonial America. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in early history of the country.
Four colonies are examined in detail; Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia. The charters of these colonies were quite different, and their varied geographies contributed to big differences in psychology, politics, and attitudes, especially towards religion. Colonials read a lot, especially newspapers. The press was censored by state governments, but more people read newspapers than in any other country of the time. In some of the colonies, church and state were very closely tied.
There are plenty of fascinating analyses of all facets of life in Colonial America. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in early history of the country.
August 10, 2022
The Americans of the United States have done much to change the world in the two and a half centuries since the country was founded. And the eminent historian Daniel Boorstin, in his three-volume study The Americans (1958-74), performed a valuable service in depicting the continuity of certain pre-eminent national and cultural characteristics among the American people – characteristics that any ordinary American, living in the time when these books were published, could have observed from the presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower to that of Gerald R. Ford. The first volume of The Americans, with the subtitle The Colonial Experience, shows how that process of identity formation, American-style, can be traced all the way back to the nation’s colonial founding.
Boorstin’s own life is as fascinating as the histories he wrote. On his way to becoming a University of Chicago historian, and the 12th Librarian of the U.S. Congress, he was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. After a brief, pre-World War II membership in the Communist Party, he moved toward more conservative views, willingly testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding former party comrades. He was also among the historians of the mid-20th-century “consensus school” who emphasized American unity and downplayed cultural and social divisions within U.S. society. Such views might have found wider acceptance in the “I Like Ike” days of 1958, when Volume 1 of The Americans was published, than in the more turbulent years of 1967 and 1974 when the second and third volumes of the work reached the reading public.
The reader of a book with a title like The Americans and a subtitle like The Colonial Experience might typically expect a linear history that starts with Roanoke Island, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay, and proceeds steadily forward until it ends with various Signers fixing their signatures to the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776 – but that is not how The Colonial Experience, or any of the three volumes of Boorstin’s The Americans, works.
Rather, this book calls to mind works like Andrew Malcolm’s The Canadians (1985), John Hooper’s The Spaniards (1986), Marion Kaplan’s The Portuguese: The Land and Its People (1992), or Patrick Oster’s The Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People (2002). Such works invoke history, to be sure, but their primary purpose is to provide insight regarding the national character of a people. Boorstin’s The Americans works in much the same way.
The reader of The Americans: The Colonial Experience will perceive very quickly that Boorstin sees a focus on the practical rather than the theoretical as being a core trait of the American character – and that he feels that the demands and pressures of colonial life fostered in colonial Americans this pragmatic mindset that remains central to the thinking of contemporary Americans.
When writing about the New England colonies, for example, Boorstin argues that “[W]hat really distinguished them in their day was that they were less interested in theology itself, than in the application of theology to everyday life, and especially to society. From the 17th-century point of view, their interest in theology was practical” (p. 5), and adds shortly afterward that “If, indeed, the Puritans were theology-minded, what they argued about was institutions” (p. 6). The focus on practical application of ideas to the life of a society, on the formation of sound social institutions, all sounds very American.
And it is clear that Boorstin is looking ahead toward the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when he writes that the Puritans of New England faced three key problems of social organization: “The first was how to select leaders and representatives” (p. 29); “Their second concern was with the proper limits of political power” (p. 30); and “The Puritan’s third major problem was, what made for a feasible federal organization? How should power be distributed between local and central organs?” (p. 32) John Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay could just as well have been paging James Madison in Philadelphia.
Boorstin reviews various models of colonial organization – religious reformism in Puritan New England, rigid adherence to moral principles in Quaker Pennsylvania, humanitarian philanthropy in Georgia – and finds all of them lacking, precisely because the founders’ idealism rendered them unable to cope with specific realities of the colonial situation. In Virginia, by contrast, where the hope was to establish a profitable colony that would recreate in the New World the social model of the English gentry, Boorstin sees a healthy focus on the practical: “Here we see no grandiose scheme, no attempt to rule by an idea, but an earthy effort to transplant institutions….Squire Westerns and Horace Walpoles underwent an Atlantic sea-change which made them into Edmund Pendletons, Thomas Jeffersons, and George Washingtons. What made them American was not what they sought but what they accomplished” (pp. 97-98).
Boorstin then looks at various fields of colonial American life – education, law, medicine, science, language, culture, the media, diplomacy, defense policy – always with an eye on how the new American model in the colonies diverged from the British paradigm of the mother country. With regard to the legal profession, for instance, Boorstin points out how the frontier circumstances of the American colonies meant that there was a relative lack of formal legal training for lawyers in colonial America – no Inns of Court or anything like that. Accordingly, emphasis in the colonies, for budding American lawyers, was placed on the knowledge that one could gather through apprenticeship – “reading law” with an established lawyer – and on establishing a record of good moral character. One of the results was that
Out of a distrust of lawyers grew a widening respect for law. The American Revolution could be framed in legal language because that language spoke for the literate community. The great issues of American politics through the Civil War in the 19th century and the New Deal in the 20th would be cast in legal language – the sacred test of “constitutionality” – precisely because Americans saw the revered legal framework as the skeleton on which the community had grown. (p. 206)
One can see this characteristically American dichotomy every time one sees or hears an American who moves seamlessly from complaining about lawyers with one breath, to looking at a proposed new piece of federal legislation in the next, and arguing passionately about whether or not it is Constitutional.
I particularly enjoyed Boorstin’s reflections on how the development of the English language spoken in the United States of America came to be so different from the British English spoken in the mother country:
Our insistent spelling-pronunciation shows itself in our habit of preserving the full value of syllables. In long words like secretary, explanatory, laboratory, and cemetery, we preserve the full value of all, including the next-to-last syllable, while the English almost always drop that syllable and say ‘secret’ry,’ ‘explanat’ry,’ ‘laborat’ry,’ and ‘cemet’ry.’ These are only a few examples of the American insistence on giving every spelled syllable its fully pronounced due. (p. 285)
Professor Henry Higgins, the arrogant linguist from the musical play and film My Fair Lady, can joke if he likes about how "the Americans haven’t spoken [the English language] in years"; but I think most observers, on either side of the pond, would agree that American English has proven to be a powerful instrument for expression that is both direct and eloquent, both terse and profound, in fields from literature (e.g., Hemingway) to politics (e.g., Lincoln).
The consistent emphasis, throughout The Americans: The Colonial Experience, is on how U.S. society, from its colonial antecedents forward, focused on innovation rather than tradition, the practical rather than the ideal, the functional rather than the ornamental. I look forward to seeing how Boorstin continues to apply the arguments of this first volume of The Americans in Volume 2, The Democratic Experience, and Volume 3, The National Experience.
Boorstin’s own life is as fascinating as the histories he wrote. On his way to becoming a University of Chicago historian, and the 12th Librarian of the U.S. Congress, he was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. After a brief, pre-World War II membership in the Communist Party, he moved toward more conservative views, willingly testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding former party comrades. He was also among the historians of the mid-20th-century “consensus school” who emphasized American unity and downplayed cultural and social divisions within U.S. society. Such views might have found wider acceptance in the “I Like Ike” days of 1958, when Volume 1 of The Americans was published, than in the more turbulent years of 1967 and 1974 when the second and third volumes of the work reached the reading public.
The reader of a book with a title like The Americans and a subtitle like The Colonial Experience might typically expect a linear history that starts with Roanoke Island, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay, and proceeds steadily forward until it ends with various Signers fixing their signatures to the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776 – but that is not how The Colonial Experience, or any of the three volumes of Boorstin’s The Americans, works.
Rather, this book calls to mind works like Andrew Malcolm’s The Canadians (1985), John Hooper’s The Spaniards (1986), Marion Kaplan’s The Portuguese: The Land and Its People (1992), or Patrick Oster’s The Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People (2002). Such works invoke history, to be sure, but their primary purpose is to provide insight regarding the national character of a people. Boorstin’s The Americans works in much the same way.
The reader of The Americans: The Colonial Experience will perceive very quickly that Boorstin sees a focus on the practical rather than the theoretical as being a core trait of the American character – and that he feels that the demands and pressures of colonial life fostered in colonial Americans this pragmatic mindset that remains central to the thinking of contemporary Americans.
When writing about the New England colonies, for example, Boorstin argues that “[W]hat really distinguished them in their day was that they were less interested in theology itself, than in the application of theology to everyday life, and especially to society. From the 17th-century point of view, their interest in theology was practical” (p. 5), and adds shortly afterward that “If, indeed, the Puritans were theology-minded, what they argued about was institutions” (p. 6). The focus on practical application of ideas to the life of a society, on the formation of sound social institutions, all sounds very American.
And it is clear that Boorstin is looking ahead toward the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when he writes that the Puritans of New England faced three key problems of social organization: “The first was how to select leaders and representatives” (p. 29); “Their second concern was with the proper limits of political power” (p. 30); and “The Puritan’s third major problem was, what made for a feasible federal organization? How should power be distributed between local and central organs?” (p. 32) John Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay could just as well have been paging James Madison in Philadelphia.
Boorstin reviews various models of colonial organization – religious reformism in Puritan New England, rigid adherence to moral principles in Quaker Pennsylvania, humanitarian philanthropy in Georgia – and finds all of them lacking, precisely because the founders’ idealism rendered them unable to cope with specific realities of the colonial situation. In Virginia, by contrast, where the hope was to establish a profitable colony that would recreate in the New World the social model of the English gentry, Boorstin sees a healthy focus on the practical: “Here we see no grandiose scheme, no attempt to rule by an idea, but an earthy effort to transplant institutions….Squire Westerns and Horace Walpoles underwent an Atlantic sea-change which made them into Edmund Pendletons, Thomas Jeffersons, and George Washingtons. What made them American was not what they sought but what they accomplished” (pp. 97-98).
Boorstin then looks at various fields of colonial American life – education, law, medicine, science, language, culture, the media, diplomacy, defense policy – always with an eye on how the new American model in the colonies diverged from the British paradigm of the mother country. With regard to the legal profession, for instance, Boorstin points out how the frontier circumstances of the American colonies meant that there was a relative lack of formal legal training for lawyers in colonial America – no Inns of Court or anything like that. Accordingly, emphasis in the colonies, for budding American lawyers, was placed on the knowledge that one could gather through apprenticeship – “reading law” with an established lawyer – and on establishing a record of good moral character. One of the results was that
Out of a distrust of lawyers grew a widening respect for law. The American Revolution could be framed in legal language because that language spoke for the literate community. The great issues of American politics through the Civil War in the 19th century and the New Deal in the 20th would be cast in legal language – the sacred test of “constitutionality” – precisely because Americans saw the revered legal framework as the skeleton on which the community had grown. (p. 206)
One can see this characteristically American dichotomy every time one sees or hears an American who moves seamlessly from complaining about lawyers with one breath, to looking at a proposed new piece of federal legislation in the next, and arguing passionately about whether or not it is Constitutional.
I particularly enjoyed Boorstin’s reflections on how the development of the English language spoken in the United States of America came to be so different from the British English spoken in the mother country:
Our insistent spelling-pronunciation shows itself in our habit of preserving the full value of syllables. In long words like secretary, explanatory, laboratory, and cemetery, we preserve the full value of all, including the next-to-last syllable, while the English almost always drop that syllable and say ‘secret’ry,’ ‘explanat’ry,’ ‘laborat’ry,’ and ‘cemet’ry.’ These are only a few examples of the American insistence on giving every spelled syllable its fully pronounced due. (p. 285)
Professor Henry Higgins, the arrogant linguist from the musical play and film My Fair Lady, can joke if he likes about how "the Americans haven’t spoken [the English language] in years"; but I think most observers, on either side of the pond, would agree that American English has proven to be a powerful instrument for expression that is both direct and eloquent, both terse and profound, in fields from literature (e.g., Hemingway) to politics (e.g., Lincoln).
The consistent emphasis, throughout The Americans: The Colonial Experience, is on how U.S. society, from its colonial antecedents forward, focused on innovation rather than tradition, the practical rather than the ideal, the functional rather than the ornamental. I look forward to seeing how Boorstin continues to apply the arguments of this first volume of The Americans in Volume 2, The Democratic Experience, and Volume 3, The National Experience.
October 19, 2019
Heralded as "the winner of the Bancroft Prize," this doesn't speak well for the Bancroft Prize. I cannot remember reading a nonfiction account of any chapter of American history which consists of more didactic dribble, more tripe, more utter garbage than Daniel Boorstin's "The Americans, Vol. 1: The Colonial Experience."
I feel more ignorant of our nation's history having read this. Nearly every chapter begins with wide sweeping hyperbole regarding some facet of American Colonial life -much of it untrue. Boorstin's treatment of race and gender are . . .nonexistent. In one chapter entitled "How the Puritans resisted the temptation of Utopia," he writes:
"Perhaps because their basic theoretical questions had been settled, the Puritans were able to concentrate on human and practical problems." As you can imagine, he speaks of the Puritans with glowing reviews. He refers to Native Americans as "savages." You get the picture.
My advice to the reader considering picking up this tome is "Run!"
I feel more ignorant of our nation's history having read this. Nearly every chapter begins with wide sweeping hyperbole regarding some facet of American Colonial life -much of it untrue. Boorstin's treatment of race and gender are . . .nonexistent. In one chapter entitled "How the Puritans resisted the temptation of Utopia," he writes:
"Perhaps because their basic theoretical questions had been settled, the Puritans were able to concentrate on human and practical problems." As you can imagine, he speaks of the Puritans with glowing reviews. He refers to Native Americans as "savages." You get the picture.
My advice to the reader considering picking up this tome is "Run!"
July 2, 2023
A sweeping history, mostly intellectual, of the American colonial period. The strongest material comes in the first four chapters, examining the experience in New England, Quaker Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia. Boostin has a profound distrust of idealism and utopian projects; writing the period of the "liberal consensus" in American politics (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon), he tilts stronlgy towards pragmatic approaches to problem solving. He minimizes the presence of slavery in Virginia, coming close to serving as an apologist for the Virginia Dynasty of the founding fathers, but synthesizes an immense amount of colonial history. The last half of the book, on print culture, science, and other large topics has been largely superceded by more detailed research, but still very much worth reading.
March 21, 2017
Boorstin's book is like going to a reenactment without having to leave your house. In this beautifully written work, he lays out the facts of colonial life as the average colonial would have understood it, and then draws out important conclusions about how those facts impacted the greater scheme of things. Most of the American identity was not created in the books of Enlightenment philosophes but in the pragmatic necessity of living in a wilderness far removed from civilization. It reminded me a great deal of Michael Oakeshott's idea that ideology is created by idealizing how things are done, rather than creating a working theory ex nihilo and then imposing it upon people.
I have pages of notes on this book; I could review the interesting differences between the hardline but pragmatic Puritans and the supposedly doctrine free but very doctrinaire Quakers, how Georgia was supposed to be built upon silk (?!), the particularly interesting blend of aristocracy and commercial spirit that created Virginia's upper class and our first breed of presidents, the details of the literate but not literary people who lived in colonial America, and the militia spirit that was so irksome of anyone trying to lead them into battle. But the one theme keeps rising up among all topics: pragmatism. Lacking the "knowing" upper classes of Europe, and not even really wanting them, Americans take to reading, science, geography, law, and religion by doing and reading practical guides rather than theoretical works. Governors become doctors, planters must have a basic understanding of legal principles (hence the rise of Blackstone), every man had to be able to defend his homestead against whatever might come out of the wilderness…they were jacks of all trades, masters of none but competent in all.
To the important question of any history book: why does this matter today? We obviously do not live in the wilderness of colonial America; our advanced economy could not function without a high degree of specialization. What worked for America in 1700 obviously is not the answer for the year 2017…or is it? No, we don't want country doctors instead of trained surgeons, and in court it helps to have a competent lawyer rather than pleading for oneself, but we have lost some important traits with this specialization, perhaps most importantly a sense of egalitarianism. That's not the same as equality of wealth; rather, I mean the sense that any man is competent and deserves respect for that very reason. We now have our own "knowing class" that is just as self-perpetuating as that of old time Europe.
Tradition and modernization are always in competition but never pulling exactly opposite of one another. Our way forward must remember, cherish, and preserve the values of our ancestors to keep the benefits they bestowed upon us, while fitting them into a world of new technology and specialization. Some of the old will have to go, but if we toss too much, we'll surely come to regret it. If nothing else, it is important to understand how the colonials understood their world in order to understand the documents they have passed on to us that impact ours.
I have pages of notes on this book; I could review the interesting differences between the hardline but pragmatic Puritans and the supposedly doctrine free but very doctrinaire Quakers, how Georgia was supposed to be built upon silk (?!), the particularly interesting blend of aristocracy and commercial spirit that created Virginia's upper class and our first breed of presidents, the details of the literate but not literary people who lived in colonial America, and the militia spirit that was so irksome of anyone trying to lead them into battle. But the one theme keeps rising up among all topics: pragmatism. Lacking the "knowing" upper classes of Europe, and not even really wanting them, Americans take to reading, science, geography, law, and religion by doing and reading practical guides rather than theoretical works. Governors become doctors, planters must have a basic understanding of legal principles (hence the rise of Blackstone), every man had to be able to defend his homestead against whatever might come out of the wilderness…they were jacks of all trades, masters of none but competent in all.
To the important question of any history book: why does this matter today? We obviously do not live in the wilderness of colonial America; our advanced economy could not function without a high degree of specialization. What worked for America in 1700 obviously is not the answer for the year 2017…or is it? No, we don't want country doctors instead of trained surgeons, and in court it helps to have a competent lawyer rather than pleading for oneself, but we have lost some important traits with this specialization, perhaps most importantly a sense of egalitarianism. That's not the same as equality of wealth; rather, I mean the sense that any man is competent and deserves respect for that very reason. We now have our own "knowing class" that is just as self-perpetuating as that of old time Europe.
Tradition and modernization are always in competition but never pulling exactly opposite of one another. Our way forward must remember, cherish, and preserve the values of our ancestors to keep the benefits they bestowed upon us, while fitting them into a world of new technology and specialization. Some of the old will have to go, but if we toss too much, we'll surely come to regret it. If nothing else, it is important to understand how the colonials understood their world in order to understand the documents they have passed on to us that impact ours.
July 28, 2016
I can add nothing that hasn't been already noted in other reviews. This a tour de force by Brother Boorstin that brings reality to those days so long ago when America was clearly a magnificent experiment. Our geography, our settlers, our national background is so entirely different from Western Europe that one wonders how it ever got off the ground except through HARD work, commitment, and the hope for better things to come. Well worth the read . . .
February 25, 2019
The American Colonies survived and thrived due to pragmatism. Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004), Librarian of Congress, was a great 20th Century historian who popularized intellectual history. “The Colonial Experience” is the first in his America Trilogy about American intellectual history; (he won the Bancroft History Prize for this first volume and the Pulitzer for his third volume in this series.) Boorstin also wrote about world intellectual history in his Knowledge Trilogy. (The Discovers; The Creators; and The Seekers.) I have read all six books in these twin trilogies.
In “The Colonial Experience,” Boorstin presents four themes relating to the role of pragmatism in America. (Boorstin is not quite as free as I am in using the word “pragmatism.”) Nonetheless, I restate his themes in my own words to be more succinct, direct and less academic.
Theme I. UTOPIAS DO NOT WORK.
The colonies were “a disproving ground for utopias." The grandiose dreams of the Old World were “wrecked and transformed by the American reality.” Boorstin cites four separate colonial experiences of the 17th Century: Puritans of Massachusetts; Quakers of Pennsylvania; criminals and debtors of Georgia; and planters of Virginia to illustrate his belief that success or failure of the colonies depended on the degree to which they adopted pragmatism rather than adhering to abstract ideologies.
Americans accepted only self-evident ideas that proved themselves in experience. American facts destroyed European theories. In Europe, rulers and priests controlled knowledge, but American culture was uncongenial to credentials of the special class. Americans did not believe the notion that every institution needed a grand foundation of systematic thought; nor that successful government had to be supported by political theory; nor that religion had to be supported by subtle theology. Questions were to be settled in the arena of experience and the marketplace. As examples, Boorstin cites how doctors, lawyers, ministers, farmers focused on being general practitioners and flexible to new what worked for new challenges.
Theme III. PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE IS DIFFUSED TO THE PUBLIC.
Books ceased to be the property of a literary class. Americans published practical knowledge in a wide variety of printed matter: newspapers; pamphlets; broadsides; almanacs; primers; sermons; tracts; practical guidebooks; dictionaries; and Biblical commentaries. This vast variety allowed Americans to develop a standardized American English, spoken by people spread over 3 million miles.
Theme IV. HOMESTEADERS OUTFIGHT PROFESSIONAL SOLIDERS.
In America, war was a task for armed citizens. Just as everybody in America was somewhat literate but none was greatly literary, everybody was a bit of a soldier but not completely so. In Europe, rulers were reluctant to put the means of revolt into the hands of their subjects, but in America the requirements for self-defense and food gathering had put firearms in the hands of nearly everyone. Because of the poor communications, the vast terrain, and the ways of Indian fighting, war could seldom be a centrally directed operation; instead it was a mass of scattered encounters by small groups and individuals acting on their own.
Professional soldiers killed in distant lands and for reasons not understood, whereas the colonial American defended his home and refused to serve as a pawn in a monarch’s grand strategy. Americans did not think of men marching off to battle, but of a man standing beside his neighbors to fend off the enemy attacking his village.
Boorstin provides a scholarly yet readable intellectual history of colonial America and presents evidence about the benefits of pragmatism in successful governance. He continues this theme in subsequent volumes in the Americans Trilogy. Pragmatism is part of American cultural DNA. Having a consistent, systematic philosophy may be appealing to some on an abstract intellectual level, but Boorstin had his doubts that there is one grand unifying theory governing human experience. If it exists at all, we will stumble into by trial and error (as Boorstin will continue to explain in coming volumes.)
I have read and reviewed all three books in Boorstin’s American Trilogy:
Volume 1: The Colonial Experience
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
(Pragmatism and pursuit of self-interest form successful colonies from the wilderness to the American Revolution.) Winner of the Bancroft Prize for History;
Volume 2: The National Experience
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
(Pragmatism and pursuit of self-interest form a nation from the American Revolutionary War from to the Civil War.) Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize for History;
Volume 3: The Democratic Experience
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
(Pragmatism and self-interest form a Democratic Superpower from the Civil War to the publication of the book in 1974.) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History.
In “The Colonial Experience,” Boorstin presents four themes relating to the role of pragmatism in America. (Boorstin is not quite as free as I am in using the word “pragmatism.”) Nonetheless, I restate his themes in my own words to be more succinct, direct and less academic.
Theme I. UTOPIAS DO NOT WORK.
The colonies were “a disproving ground for utopias." The grandiose dreams of the Old World were “wrecked and transformed by the American reality.” Boorstin cites four separate colonial experiences of the 17th Century: Puritans of Massachusetts; Quakers of Pennsylvania; criminals and debtors of Georgia; and planters of Virginia to illustrate his belief that success or failure of the colonies depended on the degree to which they adopted pragmatism rather than adhering to abstract ideologies.
a) Massachusetts (Success). Pragmatic religion works. Despite the rhetoric (“We shall be as a City upon a Hill”), Puritans of Massachusetts were not utopians, rather they applied practical theology to everyday life. These community builders were stirred by sermons and town meetings to mark boundaries, fight for land titles, enforce laws, and fight Indians. Calvinistic pessimism about the nature of humans discouraged utopian daydreams, so the Puritans concentrated on practical problems: 1) selecting leaders; 2) limiting political power; and 3) devising a feasible federal organization.Theme II. EXPERIENCE BEATS “TRUTH.”
b) Pennsylvania Quakers (Unsuccessful). Utopianism fails. Quakers don’t believe in creeds; they made a dogma of the absence of dogma. The lack of creed deprived the Quaker of the theological security which had enabled the Puritan to adapt Calvinism to American life. Quakers were nice people who believed in: equality; informality; simplicity; and tolerance, but they were undone by pacifism, a preoccupation with the purity of their own souls, and a rigidity of belief. Compromise with the world is a must. Instead Quakers turned away from the community and inward to themselves. “Neither the martyr nor the doctrinaire could flourish on American soil.”
c) Georgia (Unsuccessful). Philanthropic idealism fails as a governing philosophy. The idea seemed brilliant: take the England’s poor, ship them to Georgia, give them a plot of land and teach them to make silk. Georgia’s trustees, from the comfort of London, made detailed and rigid plans too far in advance and too far from the scene of the experiment. Georgians lacked the spontaneity and experimental spirit which were “the real spiritual wealth of America." " Philanthropists, like martyrs, missionaries, and apostles of the Good, are dogmatists who have never been noted for their experimental spirit; they are 'philanthropists' precisely because they know what is good and how to accomplish it."
d) Virginia (Successful). Transplantation worked. Unlike other colonies, Virginia sought to replicate England’s virtue rather than to escape its vice. Virginia became an aristocracy of enterprising planters who developed the habit of command and took their political duties seriously and ruled Virginia like a large plantation. Virginia was not founded by religious refugees seeking a passionate new Zion or City of Brotherly Love, but Virginians emphasized strengthening the fabric of society by ancient and durable thread of religion which emphasized institutions rather than doctrines.
Americans accepted only self-evident ideas that proved themselves in experience. American facts destroyed European theories. In Europe, rulers and priests controlled knowledge, but American culture was uncongenial to credentials of the special class. Americans did not believe the notion that every institution needed a grand foundation of systematic thought; nor that successful government had to be supported by political theory; nor that religion had to be supported by subtle theology. Questions were to be settled in the arena of experience and the marketplace. As examples, Boorstin cites how doctors, lawyers, ministers, farmers focused on being general practitioners and flexible to new what worked for new challenges.
Theme III. PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE IS DIFFUSED TO THE PUBLIC.
Books ceased to be the property of a literary class. Americans published practical knowledge in a wide variety of printed matter: newspapers; pamphlets; broadsides; almanacs; primers; sermons; tracts; practical guidebooks; dictionaries; and Biblical commentaries. This vast variety allowed Americans to develop a standardized American English, spoken by people spread over 3 million miles.
Theme IV. HOMESTEADERS OUTFIGHT PROFESSIONAL SOLIDERS.
In America, war was a task for armed citizens. Just as everybody in America was somewhat literate but none was greatly literary, everybody was a bit of a soldier but not completely so. In Europe, rulers were reluctant to put the means of revolt into the hands of their subjects, but in America the requirements for self-defense and food gathering had put firearms in the hands of nearly everyone. Because of the poor communications, the vast terrain, and the ways of Indian fighting, war could seldom be a centrally directed operation; instead it was a mass of scattered encounters by small groups and individuals acting on their own.
Professional soldiers killed in distant lands and for reasons not understood, whereas the colonial American defended his home and refused to serve as a pawn in a monarch’s grand strategy. Americans did not think of men marching off to battle, but of a man standing beside his neighbors to fend off the enemy attacking his village.
Boorstin provides a scholarly yet readable intellectual history of colonial America and presents evidence about the benefits of pragmatism in successful governance. He continues this theme in subsequent volumes in the Americans Trilogy. Pragmatism is part of American cultural DNA. Having a consistent, systematic philosophy may be appealing to some on an abstract intellectual level, but Boorstin had his doubts that there is one grand unifying theory governing human experience. If it exists at all, we will stumble into by trial and error (as Boorstin will continue to explain in coming volumes.)
I have read and reviewed all three books in Boorstin’s American Trilogy:
Volume 1: The Colonial Experience
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
(Pragmatism and pursuit of self-interest form successful colonies from the wilderness to the American Revolution.) Winner of the Bancroft Prize for History;
Volume 2: The National Experience
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
(Pragmatism and pursuit of self-interest form a nation from the American Revolutionary War from to the Civil War.) Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize for History;
Volume 3: The Democratic Experience
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
(Pragmatism and self-interest form a Democratic Superpower from the Civil War to the publication of the book in 1974.) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History.
August 16, 2017
This book is rather dry and, I believe, was intended to be a text book. I waded through and parts were rather interesting. The author explains why the conditions unique to the United States shaped who and what the U.S. Is today.
January 30, 2016
Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans delivers a cultural history of the American colonies, beginning first with profiles on the disparate groups that settled on the eastern seaboard (Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers), and then following the growth of American religion, law, and education in the new world. Though appearing weighty, being five hundred pages or so, the expanse flies by in a multitude of comparatively short chapters, divided (appropriately enough) into thirteen sections. This is an inbetween America, neither raw nor finished. For students of American history, this is deftly written, and gives a feel for how truly distinct the settling populations were, both in their origins and in their evolution. While the Pennsylvania Quakers and New England Puritans set out to create utopias on a fresh plain, for instance, Virginia’s settlers knew perfectly well that the utopian mark already existed in England, and their intention was to re-create its social institutions. Despite the wide variety of these cultures, constant resettlement from one area to another in the pursue of fresh land ensured a mix of experience, and prevented rabid clannishness. Despite being mostly agrarian, agriculture would be the nascent American civilization’s weak point: flush with land, no one had any interest in putting a great deal of imagination or work into improving their lot. Once tobacco or cotton had drained the soil, they could simply move on. Otherwise, the abounding energy and optimism of the Americas, so distant from the institutions of Europe, allowed for enthusiastic questioning that led to early triumphs in technological and scientific innovation. For Americans interested in the lives of the founders, this provides an enormous amount of storied context.
January 5, 2016
The Colonial Experience provides interesting perspectives on the period. Boorstin posits that the challenges of frontier life and physical distance from Europe created a unique incubator for a new society. His topical approach deals with political/religious institutions, intellectual development, the impact of language and the press, and briefly with the early roots of foreign policy.
Boorstin's work is clearly well researched. Although his writing style feels a bit stiff and formulaic at times, it is largely effective. His patriotism is also quite apparent. When discussing Native Amercan relations it can border on something stronger than patriotism, although in most other instances his biases are less problematic.
The high points are nuanced comparisons between the new and old worlds. In one example, colonial scientific pursuits are shown to lack rigor - new world scientists are largely seen as indiscriminate data gathers and tinkerers - whereas Europeans are presented as more apt to draw unified conclusions from data sets collected by colonials. However, the new world's freer attitudes allowed for intuitive leaps, such as Franklin's experiments with electricity, that were precluded by theoretical dogma across the pond.
Ultimately the text is worth reading. It is interesting and, for the most part, thoughtful. It is not an introduction to American history. It assumes familiarity with the major events and people - look elsewhere if you want a factual primer.
Boorstin's work is clearly well researched. Although his writing style feels a bit stiff and formulaic at times, it is largely effective. His patriotism is also quite apparent. When discussing Native Amercan relations it can border on something stronger than patriotism, although in most other instances his biases are less problematic.
The high points are nuanced comparisons between the new and old worlds. In one example, colonial scientific pursuits are shown to lack rigor - new world scientists are largely seen as indiscriminate data gathers and tinkerers - whereas Europeans are presented as more apt to draw unified conclusions from data sets collected by colonials. However, the new world's freer attitudes allowed for intuitive leaps, such as Franklin's experiments with electricity, that were precluded by theoretical dogma across the pond.
Ultimately the text is worth reading. It is interesting and, for the most part, thoughtful. It is not an introduction to American history. It assumes familiarity with the major events and people - look elsewhere if you want a factual primer.
March 27, 2017
While I have never had a huge passion for history, I do find it interesting occasionally. When I saw this volume on sale as an e-book and was trying to find a new genre to read, I decided to pick it up.
Although I feel like I have a broad knowledge of American history over this time period, this book went into more detail and I learned a lot that I didn't already know. The author looks across various aspects of life and the time period and discusses what was going on at the time, covering topics such as religion, politics, and literature.
While it was a little dry, it was much more interesting than reading a textbook and there were many things I didn't know. It illustrates more clearly than anything I had read previously about the way early Americans imitated English culture and how social classes didn't develop to the degree they had in England because of how large the continent was, difficulty in travel, and how distantly spaced the settlements became. I look forward to reading more about history in the future.
Although I feel like I have a broad knowledge of American history over this time period, this book went into more detail and I learned a lot that I didn't already know. The author looks across various aspects of life and the time period and discusses what was going on at the time, covering topics such as religion, politics, and literature.
While it was a little dry, it was much more interesting than reading a textbook and there were many things I didn't know. It illustrates more clearly than anything I had read previously about the way early Americans imitated English culture and how social classes didn't develop to the degree they had in England because of how large the continent was, difficulty in travel, and how distantly spaced the settlements became. I look forward to reading more about history in the future.
July 27, 2016
Fascination in depth history of the colonies, newspapers, book printing ties with England, politics, the Quakers and Puritans. This is the 1st of 3 books.
August 18, 2018
As I make my way through The St. Bonaventure 39, it took me a bit of the summer to get through this work on the colonial experience. It's a dense work and Daniel Boorstin loves to use exact quotes from writings from the colonial period which, in all honesty, takes me some time to work through since we don't speak or write that way. (Would it be so terrible for authors of colonial history to write those passages almost as translations and have the exact passage in the footnotes for those who want to examine it more closely for themselves?)
I do find Boorstin's treatment of Native Americans somewhat problematic. He seems to always portray them as war-like, people who thrust constant destruction and fear on the colonial settlers. While I am sure that "Indian attacks" were a real concern, the work lacks nuance or perspective in that realm. It also seems to gloss over the slave labor that built the southern colonies. This, no doubt, is in part because the work was published in 1958. When we know better, we do better. Or at least that's my hope.
Still, there is plenty to think about and plenty to learn from his very extensive work on how the people of colonial America came to shape America -- from religion to literacy to the military.
I did learn that one of the problems of having Quaker values inserted into the political life of Pennsylvania was the strong belief by Quakers against taking an oath. That doesn't sound like a big deal to me, but in setting up rules and government and particularly in court cases, taking an oath is really important. Too bad. Because their ideals of inclusivity are sorely needed in today's America.
It was interesting to learn that Georgia was set up not through investors (who only care about a return on their investment) but by benefactors who cared more what they did. Virginia was impossible to navigate and so localism reigned.
What was more interesting was the later parts of the book showing how the experience of people in American were fundamentally different than the establishment in England and elsewhere in Europe. England, for instance, had a preference for formal education, working from a prescribed set of tried and true methods. Americans preferred experience. You learned by doing.
And you learned how to do a lot. By necessity. Anyone could be a doctor or a lawyer or really whatever he wanted. Because there were few if any established means of regulating professions. And the spread out nature of the population meant people had to be jacks of all trades.
"The man who could not be a little bit of everything was not qualified to be an American."
I also loved this line from Boorstin about Americans who "saw more because he knew much less of what he was supposed to see." Can't we all be a little more like that?
He goes into spelling and the absence of a literary class because there was no central city of American culture. He argues that the universality of language in the colonies meant no more class divisions based on accent. (As in England.) I'm not 100 percent sold on this, although this may be more of a modern invention. Don't we have preconceived notions of people with southern accents, Boston accents, New York City or New Jersey accents?
But overall, the daily realities kept Americans from creating a class system among white, European settlers. (I am adding the emphasis on white settlers. Boorstin does not. Certainly there is a class and caste system when adding in race and ethnicity and, at various times, religion.)
There was no overarching introduction or closing chapter to sum up his thesis. Just lots of research and information. I'm actually glad I read this now rather than as a young adult preparing for college. Because while at St. Bonaventure, I learned more critical thinking. I learned that historians even come at their material with a point of view, a frame of mind. That doesn't make it "bad" or "wrong" but it does allow room for me to take what is written, process the information, but understand that interpretations aren't facts.
I do find Boorstin's treatment of Native Americans somewhat problematic. He seems to always portray them as war-like, people who thrust constant destruction and fear on the colonial settlers. While I am sure that "Indian attacks" were a real concern, the work lacks nuance or perspective in that realm. It also seems to gloss over the slave labor that built the southern colonies. This, no doubt, is in part because the work was published in 1958. When we know better, we do better. Or at least that's my hope.
Still, there is plenty to think about and plenty to learn from his very extensive work on how the people of colonial America came to shape America -- from religion to literacy to the military.
I did learn that one of the problems of having Quaker values inserted into the political life of Pennsylvania was the strong belief by Quakers against taking an oath. That doesn't sound like a big deal to me, but in setting up rules and government and particularly in court cases, taking an oath is really important. Too bad. Because their ideals of inclusivity are sorely needed in today's America.
It was interesting to learn that Georgia was set up not through investors (who only care about a return on their investment) but by benefactors who cared more what they did. Virginia was impossible to navigate and so localism reigned.
What was more interesting was the later parts of the book showing how the experience of people in American were fundamentally different than the establishment in England and elsewhere in Europe. England, for instance, had a preference for formal education, working from a prescribed set of tried and true methods. Americans preferred experience. You learned by doing.
And you learned how to do a lot. By necessity. Anyone could be a doctor or a lawyer or really whatever he wanted. Because there were few if any established means of regulating professions. And the spread out nature of the population meant people had to be jacks of all trades.
"The man who could not be a little bit of everything was not qualified to be an American."
I also loved this line from Boorstin about Americans who "saw more because he knew much less of what he was supposed to see." Can't we all be a little more like that?
He goes into spelling and the absence of a literary class because there was no central city of American culture. He argues that the universality of language in the colonies meant no more class divisions based on accent. (As in England.) I'm not 100 percent sold on this, although this may be more of a modern invention. Don't we have preconceived notions of people with southern accents, Boston accents, New York City or New Jersey accents?
But overall, the daily realities kept Americans from creating a class system among white, European settlers. (I am adding the emphasis on white settlers. Boorstin does not. Certainly there is a class and caste system when adding in race and ethnicity and, at various times, religion.)
There was no overarching introduction or closing chapter to sum up his thesis. Just lots of research and information. I'm actually glad I read this now rather than as a young adult preparing for college. Because while at St. Bonaventure, I learned more critical thinking. I learned that historians even come at their material with a point of view, a frame of mind. That doesn't make it "bad" or "wrong" but it does allow room for me to take what is written, process the information, but understand that interpretations aren't facts.
January 14, 2018
Highlights for me included:
-Puritans in New England "were less interested in theology itself, then in the application of theology to everyday life, and especially to society. ...The Puritans in the wilderness away from Old World centers of learning, far from great university libraries, threatened daily by the thousand and one hardships and perils of a savage America-were poorly situated for elaborating a theology or disputing its fine points."
The Puritans were more focused on survival and living their beliefs than debating and developing them.
-The Quakers of Pennsylvania. I know some basic stereotypes about the Quakers and found these chapters very enlightening. "The two flaws fatal to the influence of this remarkable people on American culture were, first, an urge toward martyrdom, and a preoccupation with the purity of their own souls; and, second, a rigidity in all their beliefs. ...Neither the martyr nor the doctrinaire could flourish on American soil"
-The establishment of the colony of Georgia . I guess I never knew anything about the establishment of Georgia as a colony. This was all new to me. "Georgia, alone of the the continental American colonies, was sponsored by men who promised to make no profit from the undertaking. The rare example of a vast enterprise with a thoroughly altruistic motive became the subject of much poetry and self-congratulation."
The endeavor failed spectacularly. Basically, don't make strict, specific plans very far away from the location where these strict plans are to be carried out. Georgia just wasn't suited to the grandiose plans of its founders.
-The chapters on the development of American nature study and science were interesting.
-I found the chapters on language, dialect/accents, spelling and books in Colonial America to be the most interesting in the book.
"New Englanders and Southerners then spoke with something like what we now call a 'Southern accent.' Southern pronunciation today is thus in many respects a survival of the older ways and the 'English' characteristics of later New England speech are apparently innovations."
"The same 18th-century travelers who noted the lack of dialects were impressed also by the proper and grammatical English spoken by Americans of all classes. ...Some went so far as to say that the colonists 'in general speak better English than the English do."
"Emphasis on 'rules' of proper speaking and writing profoundly influenced the whole American attitude toward pronunciation. It explains what is still perhaps the most important distinction between English and American pronunciation, the American tendency toward 'spelling-pronunciation.' Very early, Americans began trying to discover how a word 'ought' to be pronounced by seeing how it was spelled. This seemed to provide a ready standard of pronunciation in a land without a cultural capital or ruling intellectual aristocracy."
-And my favorite quote from the book:
Speaking of James Logan who owned one of the three largest personal libraries in the early colonies, "Yet he doted on his books and expected them to be the entertainment of his advancing years." This is very much how I feel about my books and why I don't stress about having a lot of unread books on my shelves. I expect them to be the entertainment of my advancing years.
-Puritans in New England "were less interested in theology itself, then in the application of theology to everyday life, and especially to society. ...The Puritans in the wilderness away from Old World centers of learning, far from great university libraries, threatened daily by the thousand and one hardships and perils of a savage America-were poorly situated for elaborating a theology or disputing its fine points."
The Puritans were more focused on survival and living their beliefs than debating and developing them.
-The Quakers of Pennsylvania. I know some basic stereotypes about the Quakers and found these chapters very enlightening. "The two flaws fatal to the influence of this remarkable people on American culture were, first, an urge toward martyrdom, and a preoccupation with the purity of their own souls; and, second, a rigidity in all their beliefs. ...Neither the martyr nor the doctrinaire could flourish on American soil"
-The establishment of the colony of Georgia . I guess I never knew anything about the establishment of Georgia as a colony. This was all new to me. "Georgia, alone of the the continental American colonies, was sponsored by men who promised to make no profit from the undertaking. The rare example of a vast enterprise with a thoroughly altruistic motive became the subject of much poetry and self-congratulation."
The endeavor failed spectacularly. Basically, don't make strict, specific plans very far away from the location where these strict plans are to be carried out. Georgia just wasn't suited to the grandiose plans of its founders.
-The chapters on the development of American nature study and science were interesting.
-I found the chapters on language, dialect/accents, spelling and books in Colonial America to be the most interesting in the book.
"New Englanders and Southerners then spoke with something like what we now call a 'Southern accent.' Southern pronunciation today is thus in many respects a survival of the older ways and the 'English' characteristics of later New England speech are apparently innovations."
"The same 18th-century travelers who noted the lack of dialects were impressed also by the proper and grammatical English spoken by Americans of all classes. ...Some went so far as to say that the colonists 'in general speak better English than the English do."
"Emphasis on 'rules' of proper speaking and writing profoundly influenced the whole American attitude toward pronunciation. It explains what is still perhaps the most important distinction between English and American pronunciation, the American tendency toward 'spelling-pronunciation.' Very early, Americans began trying to discover how a word 'ought' to be pronounced by seeing how it was spelled. This seemed to provide a ready standard of pronunciation in a land without a cultural capital or ruling intellectual aristocracy."
-And my favorite quote from the book:
Speaking of James Logan who owned one of the three largest personal libraries in the early colonies, "Yet he doted on his books and expected them to be the entertainment of his advancing years." This is very much how I feel about my books and why I don't stress about having a lot of unread books on my shelves. I expect them to be the entertainment of my advancing years.
March 2, 2022
Written in 1958 by one of America’s great historians (The Discoverers, The Creators, The Seekers), this first-in-a-trilogy is about the captivating history of a change-prone people fresh on the wild frontier.
Boorstin opens with four experiments in social engineering that we call colonies: the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, Quakers of Pennsylvania, philanthropists of Georgia, and the re-creation of an English aristocracy in Virginia. Boorstin writes that the Puritans “were less concerned with perfecting the formulation of [Christian] Truth than with making their society in America embody the Truth they already knew”—an experiment in applied theology. They eventually accepted a compromise between scripture and practicalities to satisfy the governance of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill. William Penn’s Quakers were such fundamentalists they “hardened their orthodoxy into obstinacy” and were finally forced to retreat from governance as practicalities of statecraft were a betrayal of faith as they saw it. The welfare state of Georgia’s philanthropists “set up a docile principality instead of an enterprising colony,” says Boorstin, and thus created a society of entitlement loafers under too many well-intended but utterly untested regulations. The aristocrats of Virginia—from which Washington and Jefferson originated—were so above the daily labor of tobacco farming they had their slaves do it and became plantation philosophers or businessmen involved in legal matters and land speculation as they exhausted one plot of land after another. While religious freedom is said to be their reason for existence, each was an attempt to organize a state-based social system with a purposeful future and a meaningful life, all the while—like all states and their ambitions—trying to hold it together as their innovations tried to throw it apart.
By telling the facts of this adventure in which the protagonists had never seen anything like it—compared to England, an almost uninhabited wilderness—author Boorstin clarifies three things he might not have intended. The actions of those first Americans enunciate: 1) the remarkable lengths to which people will go to create order among too many inherently unstable humans; 2) the clash between meaning (belonging, membership, community) and purpose (ambition, notoriety, the rugged individual) are a permanent contest in every person and the froth of every modern society; 3) the human knack for innovation—technological or social—ensures that no system of order, no meaning, and no purpose can survive in perpetuity. By the time these colonists arrive on the scene, the success of our selfish gene has—through overpopulation of the Agricultural Revolution—become a fact of nature. Population growth is not only unquestionable, it’s desired, until, like what these people ran from in England, they seek again to escape what they created, drawn by another promise further west.
Boorstin shows how the characteristics of each colony—like the practical, blue-collar, jack-of-all-trades Puritans vs. the high-minded and very proper overseers of Virginia—would come together in Philadelphia decades later to collide and compromise on their Constitution. He does a splendid job of showing how and why we Americans have the peculiarities we do. Like DNA, certain behaviors, habits, and casts of mind persist.
Boorstin opens with four experiments in social engineering that we call colonies: the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, Quakers of Pennsylvania, philanthropists of Georgia, and the re-creation of an English aristocracy in Virginia. Boorstin writes that the Puritans “were less concerned with perfecting the formulation of [Christian] Truth than with making their society in America embody the Truth they already knew”—an experiment in applied theology. They eventually accepted a compromise between scripture and practicalities to satisfy the governance of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill. William Penn’s Quakers were such fundamentalists they “hardened their orthodoxy into obstinacy” and were finally forced to retreat from governance as practicalities of statecraft were a betrayal of faith as they saw it. The welfare state of Georgia’s philanthropists “set up a docile principality instead of an enterprising colony,” says Boorstin, and thus created a society of entitlement loafers under too many well-intended but utterly untested regulations. The aristocrats of Virginia—from which Washington and Jefferson originated—were so above the daily labor of tobacco farming they had their slaves do it and became plantation philosophers or businessmen involved in legal matters and land speculation as they exhausted one plot of land after another. While religious freedom is said to be their reason for existence, each was an attempt to organize a state-based social system with a purposeful future and a meaningful life, all the while—like all states and their ambitions—trying to hold it together as their innovations tried to throw it apart.
By telling the facts of this adventure in which the protagonists had never seen anything like it—compared to England, an almost uninhabited wilderness—author Boorstin clarifies three things he might not have intended. The actions of those first Americans enunciate: 1) the remarkable lengths to which people will go to create order among too many inherently unstable humans; 2) the clash between meaning (belonging, membership, community) and purpose (ambition, notoriety, the rugged individual) are a permanent contest in every person and the froth of every modern society; 3) the human knack for innovation—technological or social—ensures that no system of order, no meaning, and no purpose can survive in perpetuity. By the time these colonists arrive on the scene, the success of our selfish gene has—through overpopulation of the Agricultural Revolution—become a fact of nature. Population growth is not only unquestionable, it’s desired, until, like what these people ran from in England, they seek again to escape what they created, drawn by another promise further west.
Boorstin shows how the characteristics of each colony—like the practical, blue-collar, jack-of-all-trades Puritans vs. the high-minded and very proper overseers of Virginia—would come together in Philadelphia decades later to collide and compromise on their Constitution. He does a splendid job of showing how and why we Americans have the peculiarities we do. Like DNA, certain behaviors, habits, and casts of mind persist.
December 11, 2023
This book is divided into four "books", a rather awkward split given the relatively modest size of it. The first book was pretty interesting, presenting a view on why the four English colonies, New England, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia, had differing levels of success in their administration of their territories and economic development. Possibly controversial views but at least well-defined ones so that the reader/learner can easily compare in their further readings.
The rest of the three "books" were pretty simplistic I should say, driven almost by a childish urge to praise American exceptionalism. In book two, he cherry picks number of cases where American law and medicine, which were truly unregulated compared to British practice, but also which were almost totally missing the accumulated wisdom of centuries, were showing greater dexterity and giving practical results. It is largely unexplored why the upregulation and ignorance was a virtue in America but a vice in other parts of the world.
Book three, which deals with the intellectual life of the colonial America, or with the lack of it, can be summarized by one idea: Americans were reaping off the profits of centuries long intellectual accumulation of especially Britain (because they were speaking the same language) without having to put up with the caprices and belittlements of an intellectual class, let alone needing to feed them!
Book four, which is actually containing only one chapter, is about the "military" of the colonial America, or again, about the lack of it. How comes Americans, with their truly unorganized militia and a shadow of an army, were able to beat the greatest military power of the time? The writer indeed admits that it was not won by the Americans, rather it was lost by the British, or more correctly, they just gave it up, may be in order not to risk a Franco-American alignment against themselves. An interesting discussion here is that how the political leaders of America were afraid of a military establishment gaining ground in political matters. The fear was such that, they were disbanding the army when a war was barely over. Then how comes so many ex-soldiers were able to be elected to the highest office? There is explanation. Maaan, Boorstin is unbeatable...
I'm not particularly well-read about the US history but it comes to me that the exceptionalism of America was the result of more luck than deliberate actions of Americans themselves: an exceptionalism which could have been easily defeated in case the European power balance was resulting in different reflexes, in case the territory in question was not that vast and fertile, and in case the indigenous people of America were to have an organized alertness about what was going on.
The rest of the three "books" were pretty simplistic I should say, driven almost by a childish urge to praise American exceptionalism. In book two, he cherry picks number of cases where American law and medicine, which were truly unregulated compared to British practice, but also which were almost totally missing the accumulated wisdom of centuries, were showing greater dexterity and giving practical results. It is largely unexplored why the upregulation and ignorance was a virtue in America but a vice in other parts of the world.
Book three, which deals with the intellectual life of the colonial America, or with the lack of it, can be summarized by one idea: Americans were reaping off the profits of centuries long intellectual accumulation of especially Britain (because they were speaking the same language) without having to put up with the caprices and belittlements of an intellectual class, let alone needing to feed them!
Book four, which is actually containing only one chapter, is about the "military" of the colonial America, or again, about the lack of it. How comes Americans, with their truly unorganized militia and a shadow of an army, were able to beat the greatest military power of the time? The writer indeed admits that it was not won by the Americans, rather it was lost by the British, or more correctly, they just gave it up, may be in order not to risk a Franco-American alignment against themselves. An interesting discussion here is that how the political leaders of America were afraid of a military establishment gaining ground in political matters. The fear was such that, they were disbanding the army when a war was barely over. Then how comes so many ex-soldiers were able to be elected to the highest office? There is explanation. Maaan, Boorstin is unbeatable...
I'm not particularly well-read about the US history but it comes to me that the exceptionalism of America was the result of more luck than deliberate actions of Americans themselves: an exceptionalism which could have been easily defeated in case the European power balance was resulting in different reflexes, in case the territory in question was not that vast and fertile, and in case the indigenous people of America were to have an organized alertness about what was going on.
March 6, 2022
The fault lies not in the book, but in ourselves. So myself thought as I struggled through the essays on language, grammar, and vocabulary. The first part of the book with an emphasis on the founding of four colonies and the role the variety of religious experience played was quite fascinating in a traditional historical way. As the book spun off into other essays it became a bit hit or miss from the perspective of my interest. Still, the information is valuable to any history buff even if he might not have chosen to read a stand-alone essay on the subject.
The fault that may not lie with the reader is the author's tendency to repeat his repetitiveness. There were points where the start of one essay repeated the end of the previous essay verbatim and times when one page seemed like the previous save for a slight change of verbiage.
Still, this is a book well worth reading for the history enjoyer. It goes fairly deep into 50 plus subjects that are often related but in a short enough format that even the least interesting subject can be finished with only the mildest of pain. Don't go in expecting a light read, however. It is aimed at educating first and foremost those with a deepish interest in history.
The fault that may not lie with the reader is the author's tendency to repeat his repetitiveness. There were points where the start of one essay repeated the end of the previous essay verbatim and times when one page seemed like the previous save for a slight change of verbiage.
Still, this is a book well worth reading for the history enjoyer. It goes fairly deep into 50 plus subjects that are often related but in a short enough format that even the least interesting subject can be finished with only the mildest of pain. Don't go in expecting a light read, however. It is aimed at educating first and foremost those with a deepish interest in history.
April 24, 2023
Historical writing about the English colonies of North America mimics a central dilemma of early American life: What unites all these disparate peoples and stories? Boorstin primarily accomplishes this by taking a cultural approach informed by certain anticipations of tendencies he finds in Americans. These tendencies include a practical over theoretical cast of mind, a lack of specialization in professions, relative equality of conditions and manners, and localism in one's loyalties.
In the process of placing these ideas in order across the story, a good number of the colonies are left out. Boorstin tends to focus on Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia along with a lengthy and interesting treatment of proprietary utopianism in Georgia. I think most of Boorstin's theses and his general approach are contestable, but he accomplishes an admirable feat of storytelling that incorporates a goodly number of interesting facts. Where else might we learn of Georgia silk farming, militia mustering, the rise of the printing business, Virginia electioneering, personal library keeping, and the practicing of law and medicine in colonial America all in one fairly compact volume?
In the process of placing these ideas in order across the story, a good number of the colonies are left out. Boorstin tends to focus on Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia along with a lengthy and interesting treatment of proprietary utopianism in Georgia. I think most of Boorstin's theses and his general approach are contestable, but he accomplishes an admirable feat of storytelling that incorporates a goodly number of interesting facts. Where else might we learn of Georgia silk farming, militia mustering, the rise of the printing business, Virginia electioneering, personal library keeping, and the practicing of law and medicine in colonial America all in one fairly compact volume?
September 4, 2023
This is not a ‘Who, What, When’ history, but rather a 50,000 foot fly over of major cultural themes in the American Colonial period: Religion, Education, Law, Medicine, Science, Literature, and Warfare.
Written in 1958 by a 25 year History professor, the writing style is often a little dry but Boorstin includes enough insightful comments to maintain interest . (For instance, I was surprised to read that the founding settlers of Georgia tried to cultivate silk for Merry Ole England, but planted the wrong type of mulberry tree !)
The best section IMO was the one discussing warfare. Boorstin ties the necessity of widespread gun ownership for defense against Indians to the misguided & unreliable reliance on militias, to Washington’s troubles with them during the the Revolutionary War, and finally to the development of American foreign policy principles which still exist today.
Unfortunately, this book is pretty much designed for the “American Colonial History Period Nerd’ and not suitable for the casual history reader so go for it at your peril. (However, it’s not a bad late night sleep aid)
Written in 1958 by a 25 year History professor, the writing style is often a little dry but Boorstin includes enough insightful comments to maintain interest . (For instance, I was surprised to read that the founding settlers of Georgia tried to cultivate silk for Merry Ole England, but planted the wrong type of mulberry tree !)
The best section IMO was the one discussing warfare. Boorstin ties the necessity of widespread gun ownership for defense against Indians to the misguided & unreliable reliance on militias, to Washington’s troubles with them during the the Revolutionary War, and finally to the development of American foreign policy principles which still exist today.
Unfortunately, this book is pretty much designed for the “American Colonial History Period Nerd’ and not suitable for the casual history reader so go for it at your peril. (However, it’s not a bad late night sleep aid)
August 26, 2017
You will most likely learn something new from this comprehensive and occasionally lively collection of essays on the life in the 13 original colonies. Even though some chapters are, strangely, mostly speculation not supported by too many facts, there is plenty of fascinating material in the book to make it worth investing time into. It is apparent, of course, that the book was written before it became good practice to cover our country's history not just from the point of view of the colonizers, but also from the point of view of those who had been displaced. Nor is the institution of slavery covered at any length all. (There are plenty of other resources, of course, focusing on the dark underside of the American conquest.) Still, if you want to know how the colonials lived, what they read, where they studied and prayed, what were their diseases and the cures, how they were governed -- many of your questions will be answered.
April 21, 2018
A social and cultural comparison of Puritan (Mass), Quaker (Penn), Tidewater (Va), and Southern (Geog) states, an exploration of American self-reliance, an assessment of early education institutions, a discussion of how colonial doctors and scientists thrived (and didn't), a terrific appraisal of the unique English that took root in this new world, the origins of the free (and not so free) press, and so much damn more. This is the impressive level of detail you'd expect from Boorstin. There are times when it is drier than the desert floor, and a bit dated (this was written in the late 1950s, after all), and I'm not sure if I'll tackle the next volume, but this strikes me as an indispensable history for pre-colonial American history.
February 7, 2018
I decided to pick up "The Colonial Experience" after reading "The Genius of American Politics", which I really enjoyed. This is the first volume of Boorstin's social history of the American people, and while it can occasionally become tedious in its fascination with the trivial, there are also illuminating discussions on the notion of "self-evidence", and how Americans benefited from a lack of professionals in areas such as law and the ministry allowing ample opportunities for improvisation and adaptation to a "new world". The picture Boorstin paints of colonial America is of a society relatively unburdened by the excesses of cumbersome distinctions and systems of thought.
Shelved as 'bailed'
August 2, 2021The first thing I noticed was that this book was written in 1958!!! Hmm...I wonder what kind of biases, prejudices, and "fake news" this book might possibly contain. I guess I'll never find out because I couldn't get into it. It claims to be written for the general population, but I guess the general population knows more of the back stories than I do. Or at least back in 1958 they did. For me to read this book I would have to Google pretty much everything. I'm familiar with terms like "Pilgrims, Puritans, and Quakers" but do I know the difference between a Pilgrim and a Puritan? Not really. I've heard of Zion and Utopia but can I say off the top of my head what they are? Nope.
April 11, 2022
Daniel Boorstin was a serious historian and this is a serious history of the colonial era. Students of American history will like this book, as I did; general readers probably not so much. The beginning parts of the book - studies of the colonial experience in Massachusetts Bay, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia -are exceptionally well done. The middle chapters, studies of various aspects of colonial culture, go a bit too deep in the weeds to make the point. The book ends with a flourish, an interesting discussion of colonial warfare and diplomacy. I'm glad I read this book; it will find a place in my library. However, I think it is more useful as a reference work than a work to be reread in its entirety.
December 9, 2023
It took me five months to finish this book with breaks to read other “want to read”s on my list. Boorstin’s first book of a trilogy focuses on the colonists of our country: their religion, their views of education, science, the law, medicine and the military. The colonies were disparate in how they were established and governed and what they believed. Yet somehow they came together to agree to leave the British empire. Whenever I read a nonfiction work on the history of our country I am mortified by how much I don’t know. My other fear is that his books may not be on too many reading lists these days. No pictures and lots of pages.
July 25, 2023
History as it should be written without the pomposity and unnecessary minutiae of the typical modern historians. Super collection of great examples of important themes (and their original causes) that run throughout American history continuing to today. He sides with the settlers regarding the Indian wars which probably won’t fly today. And doesn’t have an in-depth treatment of slavery. But the cliche is right - don’t let the imaginary perfect cause us to miss the very rewarding good.
April 11, 2021
A fascinating look at our early days as a country and community. So many elements shaped our American Ethos: a desire to be literature, to educate people, to heal people and provide medicine; a wide and vast space that shaped our beliefs of who we are and what we wanted to do. Vast in scope, this text reviews the context of America's early days.
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