Reviews for Foundations of colonial America

The average rating for Foundations of colonial America based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-20 00:00:00 Osman Black A very helpful interpretation of the period. Not particularly easy to read, though. The Republic Reborn belongs to the vignette-and-quotation-stew school of intellectual history. Watts tells some some really effective stories, but they are loosely organized. For a lot of students, though, this is a very important book. Watts argues that elite Jeffersonian republicans after the "revolution" of 1800 gradually became liberals. They did not turn their back on republicanism; they merely accommodated republican ideals to liberal capitalism as the country developed economically. Instead of seeing republican and liberal ideology as opposites, in other words, Watts sees liberalism as an outgrowth of American republicanism. It emerged as Americans grappled with the implications of individual and collective ambition in the modern economy. Watts also believes, though, that commerce placed enormous strain on republican ideology and on republicans' sense of self. Here, despite implicitly putting the market revolution a good 10 years earlier (at least), Watts sounds a lot like the market-revolution historians of the Jacksonian era. He is much more pessimistic about liberal capitalism than is Joyce Appleby, with whom he otherwise has much in common. He believes the liberal economy and the bourgeois values it required took a terrible psychological toll on such figures as Charles Brockden Brown, John Quincy Adams, and John C. Calhoun. But unlike scholars like Charles Sellers, Watts does not fancy that there was any sort of early nineteenth century insurgency against capitalism. On the contrary, several factors made the enthusiastic liberalization of American life possible in spite of the psychic pressure it created. Evangelical religion was one; it delineated legitimate and illegitimate ways to fulfill individual desire in a world where the individual was becoming the keystone of society. Various forms of nationalism were another; they suggested a way to find coherence in modern life. But most important, according to Watts, was war -- both in experience and in the collective imagination. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the threat of war with France and Britain spurred nationalistic projects of internal improvement; leaders like Albert Gallatin deliberately encouraged a national domestic market as a way to secure the independence of the republic. And when war actually broke out in 1812, it provided "ambitious Jeffersonian individuals" with a way to reintegrate their divided selves and discern a way forward in the modern world. In violent self-assertion, even in death, on behalf of the republic, they found "a sort of primal, genuine experience that would overwhelm the materialistic, duplicitous masks of social intercourse in a liberal society" (214).

Review # 2 was written on 2017-12-30 00:00:00 Steve Karnya I am not a big fan of American history, I was simply reading it for a class. That being said, for a textbook, this book was a quick and easy read.