| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael D. Clark. The American Discovery of Tradition, 1865–1942. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 268. $44.95.

As intellectual historians continue to examine historical consciousness in post-Civil War U.S. culture, Michael D. Clark's book provides a high standard of erudition, eloquence, and complexity regarding the surprising staying power of the past within American modernity. The study opens by distinguishing tradition from its allied concepts. "Antimodernism," T. J. Jackson Lears's term for the fin de siècle reflex against bourgeois reason and refinement, is both broader than tradition and more concerned with reclaiming intense authentic experience than with calibrating the present with preestablished beliefs and processes; heritage, far more than tradition, involves a therapeutic effort to recreate the past in celebration and confirmation of a certain individual or group identity; and custom transmits workaday types of behavior or practice. Tradition, by sociologist Edward A. Ross's definition, is a "way of thinking or believing." Tradition, for Clark, turns on a psychology, a state of mind open to enriching life with active appreciation of the past.

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