A season of youth: The American Revolution and the historical imagination

"Michael Kammen is an historian of culture, and his expertise goes much wider than the politics, the diplomatics, the economics, and even the sociologies that preoccupy the ordinary historian. In particular, he knows far more than he has any right to know about the literature that had grown in the revolutionary garden plot through more than two hundred years, and he is an acute analyst of the ways in which that literature reflects changing public attitudes and moralities . . .\n"The result is an exhilarating discussion of the ambiguous relationships between traitor and patriot, revolutionary and loyalist, innovator and conservative, romantic natural goodness and a rational skepticism about the damned human race. His book is a thoughtful and informed and stimulating study. " —WALLACE STEGNER\nWhat has the American Revolution meant to Americans during the two centuries since it began? In his new book, the distinguished historian Michael Kammen, author of the Pulitzer Price-winning People of Paradox, once again dispels the mists of cultural misunderstanding and national self-deception as he reveals to us how this, the most central event in out past, has been seen by those in the mainstream of our culture as well as by dissenting social critics. The result (as the advance praise above and on the back of the jacket attests) is a fresh and unprecedented contribution to American historical writing and to American self-knowledge.\nTo answer his crucial question about the meaning of the American Revolution, Professor Kammen has examined popular histories and biographies; contemporary orations, newspaper articles, and broadsides; historical novels from James Fenimore Cooper's to Gore Vidal's Burr; theatrical productions from William Dunlap's André to the recent musical 1776; historical poetry from the nostalgic nationalism of Oliver Wendell Holmes to the informed cynicism of Ezra Pound's "John Adams Cantos"; the treatment of historical themes by painters as diverse in style and intuition as the meticulously accurate John Trumbull (whose work is popularly misread as inspirational) to the irreverent Larry Rivers. What emerges is a strikingly original interpretation of the American revolution as a national rite of passage—a "season of youth" to all subsequent generations—and a brilliantly sustained meditation on the fragile nature and role of tradition in American life.