| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ed White. The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2005. Pp. xix, 236. $22.95.
In recent years, historians of the American revolutionary era have largely lost interest in the concept of republican ideology that once captivated them. Its preoccupation with elite ideas and its essential indifference to social conflict became an embarrassment and, ultimately, a bore. But in the very years that historians grew disenchanted with ideological interpretation, scholars of early American literature embraced it. The limitations that made it stultifying and sterile for historians made it seductive for students of letters. The understanding of the American Revolution as, at bottom, a linguistic or discursive enterprise offered men and women whose training was in literature an invaluable assurance. They could safely set social issues aside. They could turn their talents to the revolution as text.	1
Ed White spurns the opening his colleagues have found irresistible. Rejecting the wedding of literary and historical interpretation that he calls the republican megasynthesis, he sets forth a synthesis all his own. It is a synthesis as bracing as it is brilliant, as ornery as it is original. It should change the way we think of early America.	2
White's book takes its title from Raymond Williams's classic, The Country and the City (1973). But White inverts the paradox that informed Williams's work. Williams wondered why English writers clung so tenaciously to rural ideas and ideals so long after their country became urban and industrial. White asks why early American writing was so profoundly urban in a culture so overwhelmingly agrarian.	. . .

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