| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Constructing American Lives: Biography & Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Scott E. Casper. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiv, 439 pp. Cloth, $49.95, isbn 0-8078-2462-3. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-8078-4765-8.)

The title page of this engaging volume shows the embossed and gilded cover of a mass-produced Portrait and Biographical Album from the 1880s. It is an apt image for Scott E. Casper's own book, which ranges widely over the cultural terrain covered by the label "biography" in nineteenth-century America. The albums issued county by county in the wake of the 1876 centennial were actually produced by national firms such as Chapman Brothers, but they went a long way toward democratizing biography by localizing it. In the remarkable formulation of an Arkansas volume, they treated "the most illustrious families of the state—all worthy citizens from the upper, middle, and lower classes." Casper displays the same inclusivity. He gathers an astounding collection of writers, publishers, and readers, an array so broad that it ends up exploding the very category of "biography" with which Constructing American Lives begins. . . .

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