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UsedGood. Hardcover; stated first edition; fading and shelf wear to exterior; fading to pages; in good condition with clean text, firm binding. Dust jacket show s fading, scuffing, and edge tears.
Add this copy of The United States of America: a History to cart. $13.50, fair condition, Sold by Quirky Used Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Albuquerque, NM, UNITED STATES, published 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf.
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Fair. No DJ. Second edition, revised. Faded, scuffed and scratched red cloth covered boards. Dented corner tips. Worn and dented spine ends. Significant underlining and marginalia. Firm binding. 783 pages plus index.
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"What does it mean to be an American?," asks Henry Bamford Parkes. To answer that question, he takes us to the beginning of European exploration and discovery. he describes aspirations and motivations of the first settlers and how their experience in a new land molded and shaped their character and cultural assumptions. Parkes tells us that the civilization of America, due to this experience, developed unique traits. But the practical and action-oriented culture of America, while part of its great strength, also has brought dangerous liabilities. Intellectually, Americans have often been timid and derivative in their theory. This has led their intellectuals to try to understand their own nation and culture through the European linear model (left-right) and seek solutions to American dilemmas in either big business capitalism or big government socialism. Parkes shows, however, that the highest values and most distinctively and positively American traits come from what he calls "the agrarian tradition," which is explained by neither Marxism or capitalism. Democracy was in large part a result of abundant, cheap land, which reconciled economic freedom with equality of opportunity in 18th and early 19th century. Parkes explores the history of agrarian thought and attitudes from first discovery and settlement, through colonial times and the American Revolution, Jacksonian democracy and the Civil War, through industrialization and into the 20th century. He describes the conflict and contradiction in the American mind between the values of industrial capitalism and those of agrarianism in the early Republic, and how by the 20th century, American idealism lost touch with much of agrarianism, adopting much of the thinking and practice of European upper-class liberalism. Parkes frankly tells us that the agrarian economy of the past is gone. But he warns that the only way for America to maintain its unique character, trascend its contradictions, and live out its highest ideals wiil be to rediscover its agrarian tradition and apply it to industrial society in the 20th century. Parkes' message may seem anachronistic to some. But the new and vaunted ideology of the global economy and information age has failed to resolve the ideological wars initiated in the industrial age between labor and capital. Culture wars still bitterly divide Americans. The American land remains, permanent; and as other American agrarians, like Wendell Berry, have admonished it is this land-based tradition that holds the key to cultural unity and survival.
