Enjoy The Idea Of America: Reflections On The Birth Of The United States Authored By Gordon S. Wood Contained In Copy

Revolutionary/Colonial America Historian Gordon Wood's "The Idea of America" is a collection of his essays, lectures, and articles about the ideas of the American Revolution and how those ideas played and still play a significant role in the shaping of the United States, both formally and ideologically, both past and present.
The articles are very well argued and presented, and Wood does a excellent job backing up his assertions about the importance of the American Revolution,

Some of the essays were a bit drier than others, but the vast majority I enjoyed, Wood's perspective on how important the Revolution may be challenged by other historians, some of which I know and converse with regularly, but his presentation here in this collection makes it easy to see just how great an impact the period really had on us as a Nation.
Overall, a very good read and excellent addition to the collection, The Idea of America is a compendium of essays that reflects historian Grant Wood's life's work to understand American history, particularly the ideologies that motivated American history at the country's inception.
The beauty of the work is Wood's ability to trace paths that the United States followed and diverged from at its birth, Wood writes eloquently, for example, of how the United States was founded as a republican monarch, where virtuous bigpropertied farmers like the American Founders would rule the country, with the intention that they keep the best interests of the people in their minds when doing so.
This was what disinterested government was to look like, they thought, and what many of the Federalists thought needed to be in place because if it were not, then the United States would fall prey to special interest groups.
So they argued.

It should be noted that "special interest" did not have the same meaning at all it does now, "Special interest" during the eighteenth century really meant the interests of the people, thought to be selfish by many of the Founders, and the suspicion of which constituted a suspicion of democracy, especially as the American Founders thought that democracy could quickly turn into little groups and organized communities pushing for their rights.
As American institutions evolved, and the politicians who were supposed to be servants of the American Republic became more beholden to corporate interestsinterests which the republicanism of the eighteenth century was designed to fend off but which the laws of the nineteenth century increasedthe American people lost more control to these corporate interests, which more and more turned charters and their respective statutes for public utilities into species of private property, statutes that could not be reigned in by law.
See, e. g. , the Supreme Court Dartmouth College case, which reinterpreted Article, Sectionof the U, S. Constitution as meaning that contracts held by corporations were immune from forfeiture,

I should be candid in telling you that this line of history I have just traced is not explicitly endorsed by Wood himself, but it can nevertheless be discerned from Wood's disparate collection of essays, beginning with "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" and ending with "A History of Rights in Early America.
" Unfortunately, in Wood's "Conclusion," he endorses a picture of the United States as a country which was eager to be a shining example of freedom and Enlightenment to other countries, but, what with theth century Cold War, which became ever more interventionist in world affairs.
Wood acknowledges that the Truman Doctrinewas so much Orwellian doublespeak, designed to protect "free peoples" from "armed minorities," where "free peoples" were authoritarian regimes and "armed minorities" were the revolutionaries fighting for their freedom.
Wood sees much of our involvement during the Cold War and in the Middle East as wellintentioned but ultimately a bit naive, Not for Wood to decide, really, or me or you, for that matter, but history, In this work, Wood offers us a collection of his essays throughout the previous half of a century, Like all of his work, it is thought provoking and rich, Wood is not a historian one casually reads: a playing child, a television on in the background does not work when reading him explaining, by way of a perfectly good excuse, why this took me so long to finish! Instead, you need a peaceful enough environment to let his words sink in.
In this way, one truly can learn the truth about our complicated Revolution, Wood treats his expertise in Revolutionary history like a scientist treats his or her work: without bias and with logic and evidence, He has no agenda to put forth other than what the evidence says, Political extremists on both the right and the left will find no comfort in Wood but such opinions arent academic anyway, motivated instead by ideology, With Wood, the rest of us, those who care about what our history really was and what it really means, are well served by him, The Role Of Ideas In The Making Of The United States

With his erudition, evenhandedness, and thoughtfulness, Gordon Wood is among the best of American historians.
Wood's most recent book, "The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States"collects eleven essays written and revisited over a period of nearlyyears.
Wood's lengthy introductory essay and a concluding essay, "The American Revolutionary Tradition, or Why America Wants to Spread Democracy around the World", frame and give focus to this collection of Wood's writing about the American Revolution and its continued significance.


The book functions both as a history and as a meditation on writing history, The major theme of the book is that the American Revolution is "the most important event in American history, bar none", The Revolution legally created the United States, and infused into it "all our highest aspirations and noblest values", including our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutional government, and the dignity of ordinary people.
The Revolution also created for Americans their perceived mission to "lead the world toward liberty and democracy, " Wood's essays develop this theme in a variety of contexts,

The second theme of the book involves the role of ideas in the American Revolution and, more broadly, in history, In the earlyth Century, historians of the progressive school discounted the importance of ideas and argued that the Revolution had an economic base, The progressives thought that the leaders of the Revolutionary Era acted from motives of economic selfinterest with their professed ideals a thin epiphenomenon, The most famous work of the progressive school was Charles Beard's "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States", In thes, Bernard Bailyn wrote his stillfamous study "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" which took issue with the progressives and made a strong case that the Revolution was based on the Founders' understanding and adoption of liberal British thought.


Wood tries to take a nuanced position between the progressives and the writers he terms the idealists, He acknowledges that passion and necessity are ordinarily much large sources of human conduct than are ideas, Yet, he sees ideas as of critical importance in that they occur within the context of life and passion and help shape them, Wood endeavors to explore ideas and their significance in a way that supports rather than contradicts the insights of the progressive school, Wood tries to give the progressives more credit than they currently receive, but his account to me is still ideadriven,

A third theme of the book involves the question of "presentism" in historical writing the tendency to explore historical questions solely by focusing on contemporary preoccupations.
Presentism results in polemics and in historical misinterpretation, Wood argues, It ignores the complexity of the past and changes in human thought over time, Wood makes an effort to understand the Revolutionary Era and its participants on their own terms without forcing them into a mold created by current questions, Wood tries to show how people in the Eighteenth Century viewed issues differently than people today view issues, He undertakes the difficult task of explaining the Founders and the Revolution in terms of the culture of their day which is not necessarily the same as early Twentyfirst century culture.
Wood also tries to the extent possible to avoid taking sides as, for example, between Federalists such as Hamilton and democrats such as Jefferson and to understand and explain each position within its historical context.


The essays are dense, richly textured, and formidably documented, The three essays in Partof the book, titled "The American Revolution", consider the relationship between ideas and economics in the Revolutionary era and thus continue the exploration of the progressiveidealist schools of thought that Wood describes in his introductory essay.
The second essay considers the influence of classical Roman thought on the Founders, The third essay, titled "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" is both a historical and a philosophical discussion of the nature of conspiracy theories and of the reasons for the appeal of such theories in theth Century.
Wood offers insight into the continued contemporary appeal of various types of conspiracy theories of events,

The second part of the book consists of four essays on "The Making of the Constitution and American Democracy", These essays focus on the role of disinterestedness in the generation of the Founders, Wood argues that the Founders were indeed exceptional in our history in their commitment to a disinterested politics, Wood's essays explain the Founders' understanding of disinterestedness, He suggests that the Founders outlived their own vision in other words, the Founders' vision of disinterested politics was soon dashed even in their own lifetimes, The essays compare British ideas of constitutionalism with those developed in the fledgling and rapidly democratizing United States, The final essay in this part offers a comparison of the thought of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Wood admires both Paine and Jefferson and finds they share much in common in their belief that "at bottom, every single individual, men and women, black and white, had a common moral or social sense that tied him or her to other individuals.
"

The four essays in the third part of the book, "The Early Republic", begin with a consideration of monarchy, its continued appeal to some of the Founders, and its relationship to American constitutionalism in the figure of the president.
The Federalists in the early days of the United States were accused by their democratic opponents of having monarchical tendencies, Wood explores the extent to which this accusation may have been justified, In an essay titled "Illusions of Power in the Awkward Age of Federalism", Wood discusses how both Federalists and their democratic opponents considerably misjudged contemporary developments that in hindsight appear obvious.
Wood tries to show how Federalist thought as represented by Hamilton was anachronistic in its own time but has received something of a resurgence in contemporary America.
Wood's essay on "The American Enlightenment" is probably the finest work in this collection as a result of its insight in understanding the source and continuing vitality of American ideals.
The final essay "A History of Rights in Early America" is a scholarly account of the development of the judiciary and the doctrine of judicial review, which creates an often tense relationship between the courts and the political branches of government.


In his concluding essay, Wood reiterates even more strongly than he does in his introductory essay the "ideological" character of the American Revolution, He argues that ideas are important in understanding the United States, In partial opposition to pragmatic, practical views of the Revolution and of American thinking, Wood maintains that "the American Revolution was as ideological as any revolution in modern Western history, and as a consequence, we Americans have been as ideologicalminded as any people in Western culture".
Wood argues that Revolutionary ideals continue to challenge Americans in our present difficult times,

Wood's learned book has helped me think about the American Revolution and American history, It is also helped me think about the complex nature of historical understanding,

Robin Friedman.