Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism » (New Edition)

William H. Goetzmann is Jack S. Blanton, Sr. Professor in History and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He taught American Intellectual History for fifty years at Yale and the University of Texas. His Explorations and Empire won both the Pulitzer Prize and Francis Parkman Award. He lives in Austin, Texas.

A magisterial chronicle of America’s intellectual history by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

Publishers Weekly

This lively work makes a case not often advanced these days: that the United States owes much to thinking men and women from the days of the Puritans until after the Civil War. Goetzmann, winner of the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman prizes for Explorations and Empires, robustly challenges those who scorn the role of thinkers and contend that the nation was built only by "doers." He provides a history of lines of thought owing much to Europe but rooted firmly in native ground. Although he tries to knit together his story with a theme of growing American cosmopolitanism and openness to new knowledge, what gives coherence to Goetzmann's survey is the seriousness with which he treats every figure. John Winthrop, James Madison, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass: they and countless others, many scarcely known (including scientists, often omitted from studies of American thought) tread these pages. The result is an authoritative, readable survey of what from others' pens has proved heavy going. Unfortunately, despite his subtitle Goetzmann fails to cover the Pragmatists, arguably the nation's most distinctive thinkers. (Mar.)

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Introduction

Bk. I World History Is American History

1 Tom Paine's Vision 3

2 The Complex Road to an Independent Civilization 9

3 A New Government and a New Culture 33

Bk. II The Greater Enlightenment Forms the National Consciousness

4 The Scottish Enlightenment and the Minds of Early America 53

5 Nationalism and the Varieties of Capitalistic Experience 71

6 Reform, New Religions, and Nativism 95

7 The Diffusion of Education 113

8 The Writer and the Republic 133

Bk. III Information Creates the Romantic Consciousness

9 Americans Join the Second Great Age of Discovery 165

10 I Am "Part or Parcel of God": The Romantic Search for the Self 185

11 The Romantic Writer as Cosmopolitan Seer 209

Bk. IV The Symbolic Union: Consciousness Outruns Nationality

12 The Wild Jacksonian Age 245

13 The Imperial Mind: The West and the Future as Reality 265

14 The South and the Past as Reality 289

15 The Black Man as Intellectual 315

16 The Women's War 337

17 Utopian Ideas 355

18 Battle Hymns: Abolition and/or Union 371

19 Centennial Vistas, 1876: Toward the Twentieth Century 385

Author's Note on Bibliography 401

Bibliography 403

Acknowledgments 437

Index 439