The Bold and Magnificent Dream
About this book
The Cattons, popular-historian father & academic-historian son, offer "a combination of narrative & interpretive essay" on early America that seeks "not to break new ground but to impose our own thoughts & order upon conventional historical material." The book's building blocks are the European background of settlement, colonial growth, the revolution, the adoption of the Constitution, the emergence of political parties & the War of 1812. The authors are familiar with much of the pertinent & recent historical literature. Their facts are consistently accurate & their evaluation of the individual historical components of their story are sensible. But their broad interpretive overlay is little more than a rehash of the old patriotic, Whiggish account of the inexorable development of America as a land of democracy & material opportunity (except for blacks & Indians) & of Americans as an individualistic & hard-working people. Intrinsic to this genre is retrospective history, & the authors see in the early 18th-century colonial societies the seeds of everything from Lexington & Concord to the rise of industry. But, to their credit, the Cattons are willing to confront facts that do not strictly conform to the traditional outlines of the American dream story. They note, for example, that England practiced religious toleration before the colonies & that most indentured servants never achieved material success. Consequently, the book has the major virtue of textbook reliability (& the concomitant flaw of textbook staleness) couched, for everyday history buffs, in dramatic, colloquial prose.--Kirkus (edited)