America at 1750 is the first section of what the author intended to be a three-volume history of American political culture from 1750 to the recent past. The eight chapters published here are complete, but the book as it now stands presents certain problems of omission and scale. How it was originally planned can best be gathered from the following proposal written for the publisher in May 1969:
“Over the next 18 years I propose to write a history in three volumes of the United States centered mainly on politics, from mid-18th century to the recent past. Each volume will run to about 500,000 words and will cover the span of about 75 years.
“What I have in mind is a political history of the American people, but one that is not narrowly construed, since I propose to include whatever is necessary in the way of economic, cultural, and biographical background.
“During the past 20 years and more there has been an extraordinary proliferation of first-rate historical monographs, and several areas of American history, notably the Revolutionary and Federal periods, Jacksonian Democracy, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Progressive Era have been intensively reconsidered. Much important work has also been done in various areas of institutional history relevant to the development of American political culture—notably in economic history, social history, and the development of party systems, the recruitment of leadership, and the like. Thus far, however, no one has attempted a general interpretive synthesis of the findings of the past generation of professional historians that would be accessible not only to students of history at various levels but to the general educated public that reads and makes intellectual use of sophisticated history.
“What I hope to accomplish is a large-scale history that will deviate from the conventional general histories of the past to the extent that a primarily interpretive focus will govern the inclusion of narrative material. Narration will be included not for its own sake but in order to provide background, to pose the essential problems, and to illustrate through the exploration of decisive episodes the meaning of historical events. Special attention will be given to such matters as the role of elites and of leadership, the development of our political practices in a comparative setting, the effect of urbanization on politics, the role of social mobility in American political culture, slavery and the history of the Negro, ethnicity and status in their relationship to political behavior, the history of political ideas and of focal institutions like the political party, and, in the final volume, the development of America as a world power and the emergence of a mass society. I propose to draw upon the central original sources of our history and to supplement this reading with an extensive effort to cull out that which is sound and translatable into broad public terms from the extraordinary mass of significant historical research that has been produced in our time.”
This is an ambitious scheme for any one man to undertake, no matter what his health. Our daughter once called it “Hofstadter’s Monumental History”; my husband laughed and replied, “No, Hofstadter’s Monumental Folly.”
The material in this book was meant primarily to set the scene for what was to follow. Some themes were fully explored in these opening chapters, but others were merely touched on, to be developed in later chapters as they became central to the history of the country.
The model for the kind of historical description which the author had in mind was the first volume of Halevy’s History of the English People in the nineteenth century, England in 1815. He began work, as was his habit, not with the material he planned to cover in the first chapters, but with a subject already familiar to him, in this case religion and the Great Awakening. He wrote chapters VI, VII, and VIII first, and considered them finished. He then went on to what he judged to be the most crucial of the problems of colonial America, white servitude and black slavery. The material on these subjects, which appears here as chapters II, III, and IV, went through several drafts, and for the most part satisfied their author. Chapter V, on the middle class, is in the same substantially complete form.
Chapter I, on population and immigration, was written last, and in some haste. My husband wanted to get on with the chapter he planned on colonial elites, thinking he would return to chapter I.
In August 1970, he stopped work on the colonial elites and began an introduction to all he had written thus far. As the reader will see, this introduction breaks off abruptly; this is the only section which is incomplete, but what there is seemed to me to merit publication. Further, it was my husband’s way of saying that he hoped that if he did not live to write more, what he had written would be published, although what he had written on elites was too fragmentary for publication, and two important sections which he had planned, one on colonial politics, the other on imperial wars, had not even been started.
What follows, then, is for the most part complete in its own terms, though it comprises only a small portion of the entire project as it was first conceived.
Beatrice Kevitt Hofstadter
NOTE: The spelling of quoted
passages has been modernized.