The Americans: The Colonial Experience. Daniel 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. The Colonists used books for practical purposes. American circumstances required speech rather than books. They wanted education to be practical. The Puritans developed "plain" speaking and writing.

The author distinguishes between New England's concerns for "applied theology" and for problems of government and Virginia's desire to re-create their native England in the South.

Sample ideas from the book:

Gov. Wm. Bradford: "...they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor..... If they looked behind them there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world." "...the dreams of the Zionist, the perfectionist, the philanthropist...were dissipated or transformed by the American reality." "The new civilization was born less out of plans and purposes than out of the unsettlement which the New World brought to the ways of the old." "Puritan New England was a noble experiment in applied theology." "Here at last men could devote their full energy to applying Christianity....." "They were, first and foremost, community-builders."

"A dissension which in England would have created a new sect within Puritanism, simply produced another colony in New England." "The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay thus foreshadowed the circumstances which, throughout American history, were to give peculiar prominence to the spoken, as contrasted with the printed, word." "In contrast to the involved 'metaphysical' style of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, the Puritans developed a manner which came to be known, in their own words, as the 'plain' style...greater attention to persuasion and the practical consequences." "While the metaphysical preacher depended for effect on intricate literary conceits, the Puritan minister used homely examples."

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. The Virginians, unlike the Puritans, admired English society and tried to duplicate it in the South. Rev. Hugh Jones: "They [Americans] are more inclinable to read men by business and conversation, than to dive into books, and are for the most part only desirous of learning what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest and best method."

Quote: "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."

Quote: "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."

Quote: "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."