The Americans: The National Experience was published by Random House in 1965, the second volume of the trilogy. The book covers the period from the American Revolution through the Civil War — the decades in which the United States ceased to be a collection of former colonies and became a nation with its own distinctive institutions, culture, and self-understanding.
Boorstin’s approach is, as in the first volume, thematic rather than chronological. He examines how the American character — pragmatic, mobile, inventive, commercially minded — produced innovations that had no parallel in European experience: the booster (the self-appointed civic promoter who sold his town’s future to investors and settlers), the corporation (an institutional form that Americans developed far beyond its European origins), the newspaper (which in America became a democratic medium rather than an elite one), the hotel (which Americans invented as a public institution, open to all who could pay), and the lecture circuit (which brought information and entertainment to communities that had no universities or theaters).
The book’s most provocative argument is that the American Civil War was not primarily about slavery (though slavery was its proximate cause) but about the collision between two versions of the American experiment — one based on mobility, commerce, and innovation, the other based on hierarchy, agriculture, and tradition.
Collecting The Americans: The National Experience
First edition (Random House, New York, 1965): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20