I recall sitting, as a graduate student, on the marble floor of Harvard's Widener Library, transfixed by John Fiske's account of the capture of Benedict Arnold. Adams managed to hold readers through nine volumes on the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison by his urbane style, his sense of irony and, above all, his sense of personal involvement in events long gone - a sense shared by the 20th-century historian Samuel Eliot Morison. They wrote continuous narratives, slowly unfolding the drama of American history, which for Bancroft manifested nothing less than the progressive realization of God's plans for the improvement of mankind. A multivolume American history is an admirable venture rarely undertaken these days, and so invites comparisons with the great narrative histories of the 19th century, such as those written by George Bancroft and Henry Adams, men who set a high standard for style and craftsmanship. ''The Vineyard of Liberty'' stops short of modern times, but it is only the first in a projected three-volume history, ''The American Experiment,'' which will Samuel Adams.'' no doubt cover the segregation issue, the New Deal and the atom bomb. This period saw the emergence of national political parties, a still-astounding growth in industry and prosperity, a multiplication of the territorial size of the United States and the onset of Civil War.
It is, after all, on what one might call the classical period of American history, those years between the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation when famous men (Jefferson, Webster, Calhoun, Jackson, Lincoln) participated in events recalled, however dimly, as unquestionably important - the embargo, the Missouri Compromise, the Bank War, nullification. The Republic might even be in some danger, as the Founding Fathers would have put it, when schoolchildren caught in the turmoil of integration have no sense of how the nation came to that pass, are not entirely sure who Franklin Roosevelt was, and even think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as one young man told me) are ''restaurants in Boston.''įor those who would make up for lost time, James MacGregor Burns's ''The Vineyard of Liberty'' has much to offer. Reasons for the widespread inattention to the past are debatable, but its reality is not.
THE time may have come for an American history book written for people who have never paid much attention to history but who have become embarrassed by their ignorance. THE VINEYARD OF LIBERTY The American Experiment.
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