Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Originally published in 1997 and now back in print, Making the American Self by Daniel Walker Howe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought, charts the genesis and fascinating trajectory of a central idea in American history.

One of the most precious liberties Americans have always cherished is the ability to make something of themselves--to choose not only an occupation but an identity. Examining works by Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others, Howe investigates how Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries engaged in the process of self-construction, self-improvement, and the pursuit of happiness. He explores as well how Americans understood individual identity in relation to the larger body
politic, and argues that the conscious construction of the autonomous self was in fact essential to American democracy--that it both shaped and was in turn shaped by American democratic institutions. The thinkers described in this book, Howe writes, believed that, to the extent individuals
exercised self-control, they were making free institutions--liberal, republican, and democratic--possible. And as the scope of American democracy widened so too did the practice of self-construction, moving beyond the preserve of elite white males to potentially all Americans. Howe concludes that
the time has come to ground our democracy once again in habits of personal responsibility, civility, and self-discipline esteemed by some of America's most important thinkers.

Erudite, beautifully written, and more pertinent than ever as we enter a new era of individual and governmental responsibility, Making the American Self illuminates an impulse at the very heart of the American experience.


Author: Daniel Walker Howe
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/22/2009
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780195387896

About the Author

Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of What Hath God Wrought (OUP 2007), which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, The Unitarian Conscience, and The Political Culture of the American Whigs. He lives in Los Angeles.

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