The Rise of American Civilization was published in two volumes by Macmillan in 1927, written by Charles Beard and his wife Mary Ritter Beard, and it was an immediate bestseller — a genuinely popular work of serious history that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became the standard narrative of American development for a generation.
The Beards’ thesis, consistent with Charles’s earlier work, was that American civilization was shaped primarily by economic forces: the conflict between agrarian and commercial interests in the colonial period, the triumph of industrial capitalism in the Civil War (which they famously described as “the Second American Revolution”), and the consolidation of corporate power in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The book treated political history as a surface phenomenon beneath which economic interests operated as the true determinants of national direction.
What made the book extraordinary was not its thesis — economic determinism was a standard Progressive position — but its literary quality. The Beards wrote with a sweep and vigor that made their history readable as narrative, and their portraits of individual Americans (Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, the robber barons) were vivid enough to compete with biography. The book was simultaneously a work of scholarship and a work of literature, and its success demonstrated that serious history could reach a mass audience.
Collecting The Rise of American Civilization
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1927): Two volumes, blue cloth. The two-volume set is the preferred format.
Market values:
- First edition, two-volume set with dust jackets: $100–$300
- Without jackets: $25–$60
- Later one-volume editions: $10–$25