Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism

Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism

by William H. Goetzmann
Basic Books, 456 pp., $35

E pluribus unum. The phrase has long defined our nation's political sensibility, but it's equally apt for defining our nation's intellectual sensibility if you go by William Goetzmann's impressive new historical analysis of early American thought. The venerable University of Texas American studies and history professor argues that as the young republic was absorbing emigres from many lands into a single nation unlike any on the global stage, it was also admitting to its shores all "the world's ideas, inventions, and varieties of consciousness," synthesizing and syncretizing them into a civilization designed to accommodate all peoples, all experiences, in a universal whole. What Goetzmann does is no less than describe those varied philosophical, political, literary, and religious movements at play in the country's heady, turbulent first century, weaving together in a scant 450 pages everything from Scottish Common Sense philosophy to the Second Great Age of Discovery, Transcendentalism, capitalism, abolitionism, manifest destiny, romanticism, utopian communities, African-American intellectuals, women's rights, and more.

This is Cinerama scholarship, as sweeping and expansive as the nation itself – indeed, the book covers so much ground that it threatens to overwhelm. Goetzmann, though, is a sure and steady guide who knows the territory as only a scholar with five decades of deep study can (check out that bibliography of 700-plus reference works!), and just when you might feel lost, he zooms in on an individual, giving a brief biography with the kind of detail that makes history personal and compelling. These are among the book's juiciest sections, with Goetzmann giving play to his wit and proving himself an insightful literary critic on Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Cooper. And his compact yet rich appreciations cover both the historically prominent (Frederick Douglass, Andrew Jackson) and the half-forgotten (sister spiritualists turned socialists Victoria and Tennessee Claflin and Jane McManus Storm, a distaff version of Aaron Burr who played a provocative role in Texas' early days).

Goetzmann's eye, however, is always on the big picture, always returning to an overview of the United States and its development, and that panoramic breadth is where the value of Beyond the Revolution lies. It provides a fresh awareness of the diverse minds who all sought to follow through on this country's promise of, as he puts it, "cosmotopian republicanism." Out of the many, one dream that we still pursue

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Goetzmann will give a reading at BookPeople on Thursday, April 16, at 7pm.