AMERICAN VISIONS | Kirkus Reviews

A journey through the early-19th-century cultural and political visions that “shaped the volatile new nation.”

Distinguished historian Ayers, a winner of the Bancroft and Lincoln prizes and recipient of a National Humanities Medal, looks to “evoke the nation’s highest ideals of equality and mutual respect in the face of the nation’s failings.” He draws on an extensive array of journalists, orators, composers, novelists, naturalists, painters, entertainers, poets, sculptors, and composers who, in different ways, addressed the moral and political tensions attendant to social justice. The history unfolds in chronological segments, with each chapter ranging across themes and the visionaries who embraced them. In a typical chapter, Ayers explores immigration, the California Gold Rush, women’s rights, spiritualism, polygenesis, American literature, and the Greek Slave, a famous statue by Hiram Powers. Included in the chapter are biographical sketches of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Louis Agassiz, Susan Fennimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Margaret Fuller, among others. The book includes not only people familiar to us from general histories of the period—e.g., Henry David Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, Andrew Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Andrew Jackson, Dorothea Dix, John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed)—but also historical figures that may be unfamiliar to general readers, including Black abolitionist and writer Maria Stewart, who “urged her fellow Black Americans to prepare for God’s deliverance”; “self-taught portrait painter” George Catlin; Native American novelist Yellow Bird; and popular writer Lydia Marie Francis, author of The Frugal Housewife, a highly influential book that went through 33 editions. While Ayers’ inquisitive meandering makes for pleasurable reading, his claim that “key elements of national life crystallized” during these decades, a claim that would have connected his historical sketches, is largely undeveloped. Clear throughout, though, is his impassioned commitment to racial, gender, and religious tolerance.

A richly illustrative defense of the role of ideas in the crafting of America’s national character.