| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America. By John Fea. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 269 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4109-9.)

Philip Vickers Fithian, whose diary provides an oft-cited source on what other late colonial Americans were up to, finally gets some attention of his own. And what emerges from John Fea's biography—the first published of Fithian—is a life whose usefulness to historians goes far beyond Fithian's observations of tidewater Virginia and backcountry Pennsylvania. Fithian's journey showcases how abstract dualities created or heightened by the Enlightenment—between faith and reason, self-control and passion, cosmopolitanism and localism—were experienced by at least one young man.

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