Boats Against the Current: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860

By Lewis Perry

Book Overview

As editor of the Journal of American History, author of a number of books on nineteenth-century America, and professor of history at Vanderbilt University, Lewis Perry has been a leading historian of United States intellectual life for more than two decades. Now, in this highly original look at American culture in the decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, he paints a vivid portrait of our tumultuous society as it veered toward modernity.
Boats Against the Current provides a fascinating account of how American culture emerged from the sheltered, elitist world of the eighteenth century into the dynamic, turbulent civilization that reached full bloom after the Civil War. The antebellum years were times of flux and change, years of a society rushing into the western wilds, muscular and ambitious, yet haunted by uncertainty about its future and its past. Perry begins with a fresh look at Andrew Jackson--who personally linked the revolutionary period to the era that bears his name--vividly recreating a time when Americans, feeling their ties to the past disintegrating, fostered a new fascination with history. Then Perry introduces us to the observations of such articulate foreign travelers as Alexis de Tocqueville and Fredrika Bremer. He deftly weaves together these writers' perspectives to provide a fascinating look at our emergent nation. Here, too, are the women of the cities and frontier, the peddlers, preachers, and showmen, along with such writers as Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, and Parker. Perry brings these personalities and writings together to show us how early nineteenth century America saw itself, in both its promise and its fears.
Gracefully written and filled with fresh insights, Boats Against the Current offers a brilliant portrait of a society in the midst of change, expansion, and reflection about its own future and past. Written by one of our leading intellectual historians, it makes a major contribution to our understanding of the emergence of modern American culture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195060911
• ISBN13: 9780195060911
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The Real American Revolution

In "BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity 1820 to 1860," Lewis Perry's thoughtful and engaging cultural history, we encounter the oligarchic post-colonial culture swamped by the ideas and cultural practices of a newly expressive citizenry. Busily creating and enacting the idea of democracy in word and deed, the unfettered multitude, according to Lewis launched America into the modernist current well ahead of the rest of the West. He shows how with the frame of traditional colonial society cracking apart, a new performative space opened up, and was filled with a chaos of new subjectivities. Perry convincingly describes this era as a time when new ideas met with new audiences, a time when evangelists like Charles Finney, Lyceum lecturers including visionaries like Emerson, abolitionists such as Garrison, circuit ridingMethodist ministers, mountebanks such as the Twain's fictionalized "King" and the "Duke," beggars and Yankee peddlers, co-created with the people a new kind of democratic theater in a new national imaginarium. Perry shows how the contentiousness between rival groups as to what constituted American culture, a contest which has continued throughout American history, began in this era. For instance in the expanding urban of New York "b-hoys" (antecendents of "b-boys?") invaded the new Astor Place theater (which catered to a newly self-conscious upper-class) and shouting the name of their hero, American Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest, pelted a high-toned English actor with rotten vegetables in a gesture of cultural defiance. The conflict ended the next day when the police shot and killed 15 of the rioters. His main thesis is that in this creation of the new popular culture, the beginnings of "modernism" are visible. Modernism is a slippery term, of course, which he readily admits, but does go to some length to define what he means by it, noting how different disciplines employ different definitions. He notes for instance that most historians draw the line according to economic acitivity positing the beginning of modernism in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and defending this view by citing how the war sped up the process of the consolidation of capital and the centralization of the industrial economy of the United States. But an economic basis for judging the onset of modernism, he argues, is not sufficient. He suggests that in the performative culture of this era, in the radical individualism of this post-revolutionary era, the new subjectivity of modernism was also evident. Free to clothe themselves in new ideas, to invent new livelihoods (evangelist, abolitionist, missionary, democratic politician, etc.) or to move between occupations as necessary (lawyer, doctor, farmer) Americans, during this time when boundaries between professions and careers were not as well policed as they later became, were subject to the same anxieties and radical discontinuities we experience now.