The Shaping of America
KOHN, HANS
The Shaping of America The Americans: The Colonial Experience. By Daniel J. Boorstin. Random House. 434 pp. $6.00 Reviewed by Hans Kohn Professor of history, CCNY; author, "American...
...Many Europeans envisioned the North American settlements as a fulfillment of European dreams...
...By background and training, the author is well qualified for this original and fascinating undertaking...
...they had a character all their own...
...American possibilities were not the same as European impossibilities...
...He is not a historian in the narrow, traditional sense: religion, science, law, language, customs and ideas occupy as central a place in his research and presentation as do diplomacy and warfare...
...Readers will look forward to the two subsequent volumes which will carry the story to the present...
...Boorstin believes that the American character and way of life were shaped in the colonial period...
...The real spiritual wealth of America did not grow out of the principles and convictions which the immigrants brought with them, but out of the spontaneity and the experimental spirit opened up by the possibilities of the new world...
...The colonies were a disproving ground for utopias...
...In little more than 350 pages, and in a language unencumbered by sociological and psychological jargon, Boorstin presents a vivid and memorable picture of the "American way of life," pointing up its singularity and its roots in the American experience...
...What made the immigrants American was not what they sought but what they accomplished...
...Born in Georgia, raised in Oklahoma, a student at Harvard and Yale, and now a professor in Chicago, he knows the U. S. from within...
...But Boorstin points out that "America began as a sobering experience...
...In his analysis of the colonial experience Boorstin branches out into many fields...
...Throughout his interpretation, Boorstin stresses the contrasts between the culture of Europe and that of the United States...
...Dreams made in Europe were transformed by the American reality...
...In many ways which come to life in Boorstin's highly readable study, the learned men lost their monopolies in the new world...
...This discrepancy between the vision and the reality is brilliantly illustrated by a penetrating analysis of the experience in Massachusetts Bay, in Pennsylvania, in Georgia and in Virginia...
...But he also was a student at Balliol College in Oxford and passed the bar examination in Massachusetts as well as at the Inner Temple in London...
...What America demanded was an open mind...
...But no one can deny that The Americans is a major work, an original contribution in a field which in the last 60 years has abounded in great research and scholarship, a book equally stimulating for the historian and for the general reader...
...In America what seemed to be needed was not so much a new variant of European schools of philosophy as a philosophy of the unexpected...
...Not the least rewarding among them is the new approach of the settlers to warfare and diplomacy...
...All the different aspects are well integrated into a unified reinterpretation of the roots and character of American civilization...
...It trusted experience more than learning...
...Boorstin's point of view is provocative and controversial...
...The new civilization was not a realization of purposes brought over from Europe, but an unsettlement of the ways of the old world...
...author, "American Nationalism" THIS VOLUME, the first of a projected three-volume reinterpretation of American history, covers the period from the first English settlements on American soil to the War of Independence...
...Even to dream fruitfully of the life here, it was necessary to compound the English dream with the American experience...
...So many of the questions which Americans ask about themselves and which trouble the foreign observer are answered here...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 63
