Sentimental Democracy:
The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image
by Andrew Burstein
Published by Hill and Wang/
Farrar Straus & Giroux
0-8090-8535-6; $28.00US; Apr. 99
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For more than two centuries, Americans have used words of
sentiment and sympathy, passion and power to
explain their country's unique democratic mission. Here the
Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein examines the
emotional dynamic and the metaphorically rich language which
Americans developed to express their guiding
principle: that the New World would improve upon the Old.
"Feeling," he argues, was a political and cultural
phenomenon, and in the impassioned rhetoric of
"feeling" we can locate the sources of American
patriotism.
Using newspapers and magazines, private letters and public
speeches, diaries and books, Burstein shows how
the eighteenth-century "culture of sensibility"
encouraged early Americans to make a heartfelt commitment
to the Enlightenment's optimism about a global society; it would
succeed, they believed, as much by sublime
feeling as by intellectual achievement and political liberty. As
Americans grew more united and self-confident,
this once pacifistic ideal acquired teeth; the noble Washington
and humane Jefferson yielded to the boisterous
Jackson, and the language of gentle feeling was succeeded by the
force of Manifest Destiny. Yet Americans
never stopped celebrating their philanthropic intentions and--as
they believed--their innate impulse to do good.
Sentimental Democracy gives us a lively dual portrait of the
American psyche and the American dream--telling
us as much about ourselves as about our morally passionate
ancestors.
Author
Andrew Burstein, born in 1952, graduated from Columbia College
and received his M.A. in Asian Studies from
the University of Michigan, after which he spent a number of
years as a consultant to U.S. firms trading in the
Far East. Returning to academic life, he obtained his Ph.D. from
the University of Virginia in 1994; since then,
he has taught U.S. history at the University of Virginia, Mount
Holyoke, and the University of Northern Iowa.
He is the author of The Inner Jefferson (1995).
May 30, 2001