Reviews of Books

How did Americans celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of national Independence? To answer that question, Andrew Burstein carries us back to 1826, when the young republic paused to take stock of its Revolutionary heritage. As the subtitle suggests, Burstein's study is the latest addition to the growing body of scholarship on the forming of collective memory in the new nation. Like John Seelye's Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (New York, 1998), America's Jubilee shows us how, in early nineteenth-century America, commemorative rituals laid claims to presumably timeless models of national identity; in fact, however, such models were dependent on the impact of recent events and the varying motives of the commemorators. Whereas Seelye's account takes the long view, tracing the memorializing of Plymouth Rock from the 1760s to the twentieth century, Burstein confines his attention to a single year. He begins with Lafayette's triumphal tour of 1825 and ends with the "providential" deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826. Between these temporal bookends, Burstein focuses on a variety of representative contemporaries as they look backward historically and forward personally. Through these moments of reflection, a rising generation of anxious, prospering sons forged a reassuring though tenuous connection to their heroic revolutionary fathers.	1
Whatever Burstein's method may lose as a result of its singular focus, it more than gains in intellectual and cultural breadth. In unfailingly clear and vivid prose, free of jargon but not of complexity, Burstein brings to life a wide variety of issues and activities engaging Americans in 1826: the federal politics of internal improvements and the literary politics of historical romance (Eliza Foster's 1826 novel Yorktown); midwestern canal fever and the eastern marriage market; Masons and newsmen; the culture of dueling and the culture of mourning; the selling of old cheese in Chillicothe and of new liquor in Nashville. This wide range of reference serves purposes beyond developing narrative and adding regional color. In the particulars of daily life, as in formal anniversary celebrations, Burstein discerns a larger process of cultural self-definition. "History is the politics of memory," he writes, "the enterprise of creating the memories that offer special meaning to the present" (p. 305).	2
A more specific thesis about the Jubilee of 1826 gradually emerges through Burstein's gathering of examples. In a newly federated nation claiming to be one people, but containing a bewildering variety of regions, economies, and social traditions, what values could bind so diverse a citizenry together? The Revolutionary fathers' presumably selfless devotion to "Liberty," Burstein shows us, was the one celebratory value on which all Americans could then agree. How ironically fitting, then, that the president during the Jubilee year, John Quincy Adams, should have been the stubborn, maligned, and increasingly unpopular son of a Founding Father. Beneath all the memorializing, Burstein detects hidden unease: "The hopes of the old Revolutionaries had been realized on one level: evidence of prosperity. But they were being betrayed on other levels: illusions of equality, the tenuousness of political union--that is, disharmony among the states. In the jubilee year, there was no greater pursuit of purity, no greater gift of perfection, than the Revolution as it was being revived in the collective imagination" (p. 288).	. . .