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The Shaping of America: A People's History of the Young Republic
The Shaping of America A People's History of the Young Republic Author:Page Smith In telling the story of the first half-century of the Republic, Smith includes Shays Whiskey Rebellions and looks into the conditions of women and slaves, as well as the "lower orders"; and he integrates these concerns into a complete historical panorama. Organizing the period from 1776 to 1826 around an American "schizophrenia&qu... more »ot; represented by two different views of people and government: on the one hand, the Classical-Christian view, represented by the Federalists, of the sinfulness and limitations of humanity; on the other, the Secular-Democratic belief, held by the Democratic-Republicans, in the perfectibility and genuine equality of mortals. The first view is realized in the Constitution, and is spelled out in the Federalist Papers, while the second inspired the Declaration and later became the ideology atop an essentially Classical-Christian policy. The election of the 1800's defeat of the Federalists is the turning-point in the account, really marking a watershed between the two views. Using the occasion to break his narrative with chapters on cities and the countryside, the family, religion, medicine, art, education, the west and the south, before resuming with the Presidency of Jefferson. Arguing that the period was one of growing rationalization in religion and more, he describes "our schizophrenia: we were to become the most powerful capitalist industrial power in the world under the banner of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy." The opposition here, then, is basically the familiar one between Jefferson and Adams-Hamilton, and Smith's preference is clearly for the latter pair. But even if his division is overly schematic, he manages to incorporate all the major events of the first half-century, from Independence to Andrew Jackson, with a social-historian's eye for the everyday, and that makes this a very valuable contribution to our historical self-understanding.« less