Americans Colonial Experience Boorstin

The Americans: The Colonial Experience
Daniel J. Boorstin
New York: Vintage Books, 1958.

Why read it? The seeds of American culture were sown in the Colonial period. Their effects can be recognized today. Distinguishes between the New England concerns with government and Virginia’s attempt to create a reproduction of their native English society.

Whatever Europeans wanted to do in America was transformed by experience with American reality. The colonists essentially built communities. The Puritans grappled with fundamental American problems: selecting leaders, limiting political power and the struggle for control between the local and the central governments.

Franklin made it clear that the only way to have peace with the Indians was to defeat them.

The Virginians, unlike the puritans, admired English society and tried to duplicate it in the South. Americans read people rather than books and wanted to learn only what was absolutely necessary as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Best sentences:
“Not the litterateur but the journalist, not the essayist but the writer of how-to-do-it manuals, not the ‘artist’ but the publicist is the characteristic American man of letters.”

“Especially in the smaller libraries, or in the collections of two dozen titles or less…one often found medical texts to help the planter or his wife treat the plantation sick…. Numerous handbooks on agriculture, building, horses, hunting, or fishing were not for the hobbyist…[but] essential tools to…enable the Virginian to etch in more minute detail his reproduction of English country life.”

“But everyone knows from his personal experience that the purchase of a book is sometimes a substitute for the reading of it; we would all be flattered to think that the contents of our libraries had got into our heads.”