Boats Against the Current: American Culture between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860 - Softcover

The chief interest of Boats Against the Current . . . lies . . . in its experimentation with a presentational structure that is faithful to the vision of a history without teleology but that does not lose its own bearings. -- Lawrence Buell * Journal of American History * Boats against the Current, with its often subtle and original insights, earns a high place in the grand tradition of American studies. In resurrecting and refashioning this genre for our times, Perry breathes renewed life into American intellectual history, for which undertaking scholars should be highly grateful. -- Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of The Shaping of Southern Culture * William and Mary Quarterly * A remarkable book. Boats against the Current encompasses two overlapping periods in American history, addresses several deep and complex themes, and examines such diverse luminaries of the nineteenth century as Jackson, Emerson, Tocqueville, and Thoreau. Because of this panoramic scope, Perry's work should appeal to a broad audience. -- Peter Field * Tennesse Historical Quarterly * Solid in its research, engaging in its tone, generous in its sympathies, vibrant in its yearning to communicate a spirit of curiosity about our antecedents-and to make them relevant. -- Stephen J. Whitfield * New England Quarterly * Boats Against the Current must be placed alongside Vernon Parrington's The Romantic Revolution in America, R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam, and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee as one of the most innovative general explorations of antebellum American culture. Indeed, reading Boats Against the Current is like peeling an onion and discovering in the process that the layers are the core-an experience which matches that of many of the antebellum Americans that Perry treats. -- Lawrence J. Friedman * Reviews in American History * Perry has written an erudite, suggestive, and powerful book in the grand Tocquevillian tradition of American Studies. He has done for the road what Leo Marx did for the machine: taken a social fact and transformed it into a profound historical metaphor. -- Charles Capper * American Historical Review *

Boats Against the Current provides a fascinating account of how American culture emerged from the sheltered, elitist world of the eighteenth century into the dynamic, turbulent civilization that reached full bloom after the Civil War. The antebellum years were times of flux and change, years of a society rushing into the western wilds, muscular and ambitious, yet haunted by uncertainty about its future and its past. Renowned scholar Lewis Perry begins his study with a fresh look at Andrew Jackson-vividly recreating a time when Americans, feeling their ties to the past disintegrating, fostered a new fascination with history. Then Perry introduces us to the observations of such articulate foreign travelers as Alexis de Tocqueville and Fredrika Bremer. He deftly weaves together these writers' perspectives to provide a fascinating look at our emergent nation. Here, too, are the women of the cities and frontier, the peddlers, preachers, and showmen, along with such writers as Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, and Parker. Perry brings these personalities and writings together to show us how early nineteenth century America saw itself, in both its promise and its fears. Now available for the first time in paperback, Boats Against the Current offers a brilliant portrait of a society in the midst of change, expansion, and reflection about its own future and past. Written by one of our leading intellectual historians, it makes a major contribution to our understanding of the emergence of modern American culture.