I have some reservations about this book. 1) Its main new primary sources are the several hundred autobiographies that were written in the first decades of the new republic and which Appleby has read. I would suggest that these autobiographies have their own systematic bias. They represent the literate side of the United States, as opposed to the 30%-50% of American whites (and the overwhelming majority of slaves) who were either illiterate, had strictly limited literacy or had little contact with the world of print. Similarly these autobiographies privilege the middle class over the others, the story of the successful entrepreneur over the stories of the unsuccessful or only partially successful. It also privileges the religious over the non-religious. Given the fact that the early United States was an overwhelmingly rural country and that it only had a poor and parochial intelligentsia, it is not surprising that evangelical propaganda had a disproportionately large influence in American publishing. There was a market for accounts in which the subjects feared for their very souls and who wrestled with the demons of the world. There was much less of a market for people who had no qualms with sleeping with their fiancées and who thought Methodists should mind their own business. Yet at the turn of the century one-third of New England women conceived their first child outside of marriage, and the rate was probably higher elsewhere. At one point Appleby notes how little interest or affection her autobiographers showed for Andrew Jackson. Yet considering that Jackson was only three men to win a plurality of the vote for the presidency three times (Cleveland and FDR are the other two) this points out an important bias in her selection.

2) Appleby has a talent for interesting setpieces, such as the rise of duelling as a symbol for the political passions of the Jeffersonian era, or the dialectic of refinement and plainness while obscure biblical names went out of fashion, or the culture of drink or alcoholism. Yet her account of Americans considering their revolutionary tradition misses something. There is a discussion of the triumph of Jefferson and the failure of the Federalists, an account of party strife, and the limits of Northern Emancipation. Yet there is a certain passion missing about the meaning of democracy and liberty here. This is book which concentrates more on the successful entrepreneur than the unsuccessful working man. It discusses race and gender, but it does not really elucidate the dialectic between slave and citizen, and men and women that are crucial to understanding why such potent ideologies arose and their effect.

3) In order to appreciate this book's limits one should compare her work with other recent works of scholarship. One should contrast her appreciative account of Jeffersonian democracy with the subtle, ironical and methodically documented accounts of Alan Taylor which shows the limited gains by Maine farmers, or the political limits of the enemies of Mr. William Cooper. In contrast to her somewhat upbeat account of the industrialization and commercialization of the United States, one should look more closely at Christopher Clark's painstaking narrative of the rise of rural Capitalism in Western Massachusetts. One should contrast her brief comments on love and sexuality, with Nancy Cott's startling demonstration of the fragility of marriage. In contrast to her use of autobiographies one should look at Mechal Sobel's recent work which suggests the rise of a new personality in the United States, more individualistic, less communal. (The discredited concept of bourgeois revolution vindicated by psychoanalysis? We shall see.) And Appleby's account of the triumph of evangelicalism appears a bit complacent, a bit boosterish in its enthusiasm for the winning side in contrast to the recent work of Jon Butler and Christine Heyrman. In conclusion, one might say this book reminds one of Tocqueville. This is not meant as a compliment, since one reason for Tocqueville's abiding popularity and the almost total absence of serious criticism of him is that he provides a complex picture of modern society and its disconents in which questions of liberty and justice are ultimately irrelevant. When such questions arise they are not values in their own right, but problems which must be ably managed by the wise elite Tocqueville is part of. Of course Appleby cares very much about liberty and democracy. What is not so clear is whether she has thought through them enough.

The book is heavily anecdotal, based on her reading of some 200 autobiographies written during the period. She covers topics such as enterprise, careers, distinctions, intimate relations and reform, but the theme is the new national identities that emerged, one Northern and the other Southern, during the period. Three primary forces that shaped the Northern identity, economic enterprise, political participation and religious revival, also caused a reaction in the South that no less shaped it, but it ways that left it bewildered, defensive and conservative. Readers not already thoroughly conversant with the period will miss any discussion of the emergence of party politics, though she notes the personal vilification and "unchecked vituperation of public controversies" that resulted from the proliferation of new voices and new publications. The elements behind the rise of Jacksonian radical politics is absent, as is any treatment of the economic factors that encouraged the enterprise and careers she celebrates.
More troubling is her misreading of the religious situation during the period. She notes "the religious revivalists successfully challenged the religious hegemony of the Anglican and Congregational churches," but that hegemony was regional, not national to begin with, and neither the Congregational church, challenged at home by Unitarians and in the western territories by Presbyterians, nor the Anglican church, still attempting to recover from its moribund situation following the war, carried the weight she implies. Moreover, the Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists had been ceded the field; the proselytizing zeal of the Quakers had long passed, the Dutch and German Reformed churches had never been anything by regional, more concerned with language and culture than with creed and salvation. Apart from the wonderfully vivid accounts of the Cane Ridge revival, I read much of the record of revivals as activities or campaigns that were generated by ministers in established churches attempting to attract new members to church rolls depleted by western migration, rather than an unprecedented religious fervor that swept the country. She does note that women were the vast majority of those affected by the revival and reform movements and credits the Second Great Awakening with bringing blacks, free and slave, into the Protestant church, but neglects any discussion of the significant impact of the African Methodist Episcopal church, for example, in building black communities and opportunity. My conclusion: interesting and stimulating, but unreliable in its interpretation of the major forces of the period.

Appleby provides an excellent survey of the culture of the "first" generation of Americans and what influenced and shaped their interpretation of the American revolution that laid the groundwork for our governance and society today. Appleby notes that the first generation of Americans had to grapple with a yet unformed political and economic structure and much of their thinking and actions completed the formation of our national institutions and culture.

Many themes run through the work. First, Jefferson's election in 1801 was critical because it marked the beginning of the expansion of democracy and participatory politics to the masses and reaffirmed the predominance of state and local control over politics. Literacy and the wide consumption of newspapers and books, social and physical mobility,inventiveness, the embryo of industrialization, the proliferation of religious denominations, the blurring of social distinctions, and the formation of political and social organizations are just a few of the many themes she touches upon. These cultural tides, and others, broadened and made more inclusive participation in the structuring of economic, political, and religious decision making in both formal institutions and informal channels of influence.

Appleby also illuminates the growing isolation of the South from the rest of the country because of its rationalization of slavery -- an institution that was anathema to the ideals (if not the reality) of the nation's founding and ran counter to the democratization and upward mobility experienced by the rest of the nation. In hindsight we see the cultural beginnings of the schism between North and South -- here in cultural terms -- that explains how our nation could bring itself to such violent conflict in the Civil War years later.

These are just a few of the themes in Appleby's work -- and does it little justice. It would take me 20 pages of run-on sentences to describe many of the thought provoking elements in this book. So in short, I highly recommend it for those interested in the nation's founding.