Our Cultural Legacy
Jensen, Merrill
Our Cultural Legacy T H E CULTURAL LIFE OF THE NEW NATION, 1776-1830, by Russel B. Nye. New American Nation Series. Harper. 324 pp. $5. Reviewed by Merrill Jensen THE New American Nation...
...It was being shattered too by the inexorable shift in the direction of a society that was soon to be dominated by industry...
...The style is lucid throughout, which is no mean achievement considering the elusiveness of some of the subject matter...
...No period is more in need of some pattern of organization than the years between the Declaration of Independence and 1830...
...One of the great problems faced by the cultural and social historians is the development of a pattern of organization...
...In doing so they tend to avoid two areas in which Americans have concentrated much of their efforts and about which they have done some of their most serious and significant thinking...
...An America which was hemmed in between the Appalachians and the Atlantic in 1776, and which faced eastward to Europe, had turned about and was ready to leap to the Pacific by 1830...
...Reviewed by Merrill Jensen THE New American Nation series, unlike the old one, includes volumes on such topics as cultural history...
...Russel B. Nye defines cultural history to "mean chiefly the development of ideas and institutions," but he admits that "in the last analysis much of it simply defies exposition...
...Nye is aware of these changes and of the ideas they produced but he has chosen instead to deal with other facets of the history of the period...
...The Americas of George III and Andrew Jackson were two different worlds...
...The book is based largely on monographic literature rather than on the original research of the author, but the survey is a good one and it will be useful to students of the period, whatever their particular interests...
...Parrington was one notable exception, and whatever the defects of his work, he did offer an intelligible framework for the study of American ideas in action...
...Between 1776 and 1830 an old and sophisticated generation of men died off and their places were taken by men of lesser stature in every way except as practitioners of the art "of politics...
...Some Americans faced westward eagerly, but others were reluctant, for the westward movement of people and the creation of new states were shattering the hold of the old seacoast planter-mercantile aristocracy on American life and politics...
...Aside from chapters on "The Foundations of American Thought," "The Roots of an American Faith," "The Structure of a New Society," and "Emerging Patterns of Social Life," which outline general changes, he has not offered an organizational framework...
...For the most part they reject the conventional framework of political or economic history...
...Cultural historians have not as yet offered a substitute framework and all too often they have dealt with figures who are peripheral to the mainstream of American life, or have presented an off-focus picture of central men and ideas...
...The chapters on religion are particularly good, and he does as well as anyone can with such an intangible as the "roots" of an American faith...
...Most of the chapters are essentially topical ones on science, education, religion, architecture, and the like...
Vol. 25 • October 1961 • No. 10
