Schlesinger’s Syllabus (February/March 1998 | Volume: 49, Issue: 1)

Schlesinger’s Syllabus

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Authors: Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

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February/March 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 1

 

WHEN DRAKE MCFEELY OF W. W. NORTON proposed an updated and enlarged edition of my book The Disuniting of America , he thought it might be a good idea to add an all-American reading list. What are the dozen or so books, he wondered, that everyone should know in order to have a sense of the American experience? McFeely, as the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Ulysses S.

 

WHEN DRAKE MCFEELY OF W. W. NORTON proposed an updated and enlarged edition of my book The Disuniting of America , he thought it might be a good idea to add an all-American reading list. What are the dozen or so books, he wondered, that everyone should know in order to have a sense of the American experience? McFeely, as the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass, has a special interest in American history; and as the son of another eminent historian, I appreciated both the value and the challenge of his invitation.

A dozen books? A hundred—or a thousand—books would not do the job. All countries are hard to understand, and despite its brief history, the United States of America is harder to understand than most, because of its size in dreams, because of its obstreperousness, and because of its heterogeneity. Still, for all this, the United States has an unmistakable national identity. Here, in chronological order, are books that have described, defined, and enriched America’s sense of itself. I am dismayed at all the significant works so brief a list must leave out, but I do think that these particular choices illuminate in a major way what Ralph Ellison called “the mystery of American identity”: how we Americans are at once many and one.

The Federalist

(1787–88) originated as an explanation and defense of the American Constitution. It survives as a brilliant exposition of the first principles of democratic government. Written mostly by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison , the eighty-five Federalist papers were published between October 1787 and May 1788 in New York City newspapers, were reprinted throughout the thirteen states, and were read avidly during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution—and have been read avidly ever since. Can one imagine any newspaper today, even the august New York Times , running a series of such length and weight (except when blackmailed into doing so by the Unabomber)?

Writings

Thomas Jefferson (Library of America, 1984). Jefferson embodied much of American versatility within himself. He was an architect, an educator, an inventor, a paleontologist, an oenophile, a fiddler, an astute diplomat, a crafty politician, and a luminous prophet of liberty in words that light the human way through the centuries. President John F. Kennedy once called a dinner of Nobel Prize winners the most extraordinary collection of human knowledge ever