| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era. By Mechal Sobel. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xvi, 368 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-04949-1.)

Mechal Sobel has produced the first historical monograph on popular conceptions of selfhood in revolutionary America. The monograph follows upon a pioneering essay collection that Sobel coedited with Ronald Hoffman and Fredrika J. Teute, Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (1997), and it offers a direct counterpoint to a book Sobel opts not to cite, Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (1997). Sobel and Howe are similar insofar as they both cover the long American Revolution spanning the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, but there the similarity ends. Defiantly traditionalist, Howe brought his intellectual history of selfhood to the verge of a supposed democratization of the ideal of self-fashioning beyond canonical white men, so that it might come to embrace at least women and blacks with intellectual credentials. 1

Sobel corrects the teleological bent of this narrative by broadening the notion of "selfhood" beyond the confines of liberal individualism. Selfhood in Sobel's view is only secondarily an ideology of individual autonomy, and primarily a mechanism for "alterity"—for constructing oppositional identities. Consequently, selfhood is not an ideological possession restricted to privileged white men, but a cultural process fundamental to the identity work performed by all people, whether female or male, black or white. . . .

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