| Previews | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Previews | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

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J. M. Opal explores the emergence of "emulation" as a cultural ideal in postrevolu-tionary America by studying academies—secondary schools that spread across the rural North from the 1780s to the 1820s. Academies offered country youth a much higher level of education than did common schools. They also promised to "excite" students by fostering competition between them and rewarding individual accomplishments. Their new approach to motivating students aroused opposition from many parents, who were anxious that their children, once excited, might forgo family and neighborhood duties. They worried, in short, about the social effects of individualism. The conflict over academies and emulation suggests that the roots of a new American individualism lay less in economic change than in the moral and cultural transformation that followed the Revolution.

Most accounts of legal history describe progress toward an increasingly perfect separation of church and state, underestimating the persistent influence of religion on American law. . . .

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