The Americans: The Colonial Experience was published by Random House in 1958, the first volume of a trilogy that Boorstin would complete over the next fifteen years. The book covers the colonial period from the first settlements through the Revolution, but its organizing principle is not chronology but themes: how the encounter with the American continent transformed European ideas about religion, education, law, medicine, science, and social organization.
Boorstin’s thesis is that America was created not by the application of European theories but by their abandonment. The Puritans came with a theology; the wilderness forced them to become pragmatists. The Quakers came with pacifism; the frontier forced them to negotiate with violence. The Virginia planters came with aristocratic pretensions; the absence of a hereditary class structure forced them to create new forms of social distinction. In each case, the practical demands of colonial life defeated the theoretical assumptions that the colonists brought with them.
The book’s most influential argument is that American anti-intellectualism is not a failure but a feature — a rational response to conditions in which abstract thought was less useful than practical skill, and in which the man who could build a barn was more valuable than the man who could parse a syllogism.
Collecting The Americans: The Colonial Experience
First edition (Random House, New York, 1958): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good/very good: $15–$40
- Signed: $80–$200