First volume in a trilogy; the second of which is the author's The Americans: the national experience; and the third of which is his The Americans: the democratic experience.

This book reinterprets American experience in the formative first half of our history. Emphatically rejecting the notion that America was merely a "second chance" for Europe, that the Revolution was a recapitulation and a preview of European Revolutions, Dr. Boorstin finds in the new and unforeseen conditions of early American life the roots of a distinctive civilization. The grand vision of democracy, for example, emerges, not as the inspired product of venerated Founding Fathers, but as the result of a multitude of fascinating and heretofore little-noticed circumstances. Once you have read the story, you will never again see American in quite the same way.

adult Follett Library Book Co.