What do you think?
Rate this book
America at 1750: A Social Portrait
Demonstrates how the colonies developed into the first nation created under the influences of nationalism, modern capitalism and Protestantism.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
18 people are currently reading
416 people want to read
About the author
Richard Hofstadter
80 books294 followersRichard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illuminate contemporary history.
His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.
As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it.”
In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late 19th century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified with William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, however, disagree with this interpretation.
His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.
As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it.”
In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late 19th century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified with William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, however, disagree with this interpretation.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 9, 2018
Throughout my reading life I have often dived into and been impressed with the book of Douglas R. Hofstadter. When reading about that Hofstadter it is often pointed out that he is different from this historian Hofstadter. So, I decided, why not read the "other" Hofstadter? I am glad I did. This brisk, accessible American history explores the pre-Revolutionary War American Colonial Era and the foundations laid there not only for that War but for much of what makes America unique. I find it really breaks along three fault lines:
1) Institutionalized Servitude
2) Middle Class socioeconomics and,
3) Evangelism.
"Institutionalized Servitude" includes not only slavery, but indentured servants and gradations between. Endemic during this era it seems to me this bred into the nation nativisit (anti-immigrant; Benjamin Franklin decrying German immigration) and even racist beliefs that still surface today.
The Middle Class is perhaps the least explored of the three, but is an important pillar to the American cult of personality as well as a a further key differentiation to the Old World and especially England, those broadening a gulf that opened the door to rebellion.
Evangelism around charismatic preachers in a mesh of post-Puritan sects added a curious and even hypocritical blend of openness. (Since no denomination was national, denominational pluralism supported an acceptance of contrasting [religious] ideas if implicitly only Xtian ones.) However, this division fostered regionalist tumult and a broad adherence to xenophobic fundamentalism supporting the shared belief, among other things, that Providence lights the way for America and a susceptibility to demagogue led revivalism.
1) Institutionalized Servitude
2) Middle Class socioeconomics and,
3) Evangelism.
"Institutionalized Servitude" includes not only slavery, but indentured servants and gradations between. Endemic during this era it seems to me this bred into the nation nativisit (anti-immigrant; Benjamin Franklin decrying German immigration) and even racist beliefs that still surface today.
The Middle Class is perhaps the least explored of the three, but is an important pillar to the American cult of personality as well as a a further key differentiation to the Old World and especially England, those broadening a gulf that opened the door to rebellion.
Evangelism around charismatic preachers in a mesh of post-Puritan sects added a curious and even hypocritical blend of openness. (Since no denomination was national, denominational pluralism supported an acceptance of contrasting [religious] ideas if implicitly only Xtian ones.) However, this division fostered regionalist tumult and a broad adherence to xenophobic fundamentalism supporting the shared belief, among other things, that Providence lights the way for America and a susceptibility to demagogue led revivalism.
November 8, 2020
This was the last of Richard Hofstadter's books. It was not completed at the time of his death. However, Alfred A. Knopf decided it was well worth publishing what chapters had been written. Some excellent insights are here, but some topics are omitted - perhaps to have been included in the final work. The rivalry between European imperial powers - Spain, France, and England - and their attempts to gain hegemony over Indigenous Americans and the fur trade is one of the missing topics. Relations between colonial Americans and indigenous nations, in general, are missing as well. If you want a far more complete history see Colin Calloway's book.
December 10, 2016
Everybody gets a 5 because these are my favorite books. "The laws put labor at a disadvantage, but the market was on labors side, and the market was stronger." Completely original interpretation of America. Scholarly analysis unimpeded by "conventional wisdom".
January 4, 2021
A Portrait for Today
Hofstadter was a social and political historian well respected by his peers, and who wrote in a style the non-historian (albeit serious) reader could follow and enjoy. In the late 1960s, Hofstadter embarked upon what was intended to be political history of America from 1750 to the present. (His present.) On the drawing board, three-volumes, one million plus words. Hofstadter contracted leukemia and died while working on the first book, America at 1750, but he left the book near enough to completion for it to be reworked and published, although some of the sections should obviously have been expanded and would have been, had he lived.
The best sections, on indentured servitude and slavery make clear these were in no way comparable. White indentureds were recognized under the law as human beings, black slaves were chattel, and from this, all else flowed. Servitude for whites was most often voluntary, a way of paying for passage to the New World. Some servitudes were as short as two years, seldom were they longer than seven and the servant got a stipend at the end, to get him or her started on their dream.
Slavery varied from one region to another as well as over time. If a slave could have chosen where he or she was to be enslaved, and did he know what Hofstadter knew, two near-impossibilities, said slave would have chosen to get as far north as he could. (Slavery was legal in the North, in 1750.) Even before northern slavery was abolished, and as awful as slavery was in the American South, our slave, in 1750, would have chosen the worst of the southern colonies, South Carolina, over the hell of the Caribbean sugar islands.
The Religious Awakening was peopled by some colorful characters, most prominently George Wakefield. He was the Billy Sunday or Billy Graham of his day, a strong-lunged orator and the subject of one of Ben Franklin’s best know scientific observations.
The Awakening was a response to the lassitude infecting the established churches and was carried forward on the legs and lungs of men who were less expert than they imagined or would admit. They aroused the pitchfork crowd to tear down the establishment without having any clear idea of what to put in its place.
(Whitefield, it should be noted and for all his piety, was a slaveholder who, at a time when the colony of Georgia was debating whether or not to allow slavery, came out fully in favor of the Peculiar Institution. He needed slaves to run his enterprises, which included an orphanage.)
For anyone interested in understanding the epic events of the last half of the eighteenth century in North America, the French and Indian War, The Revolution, the Federalist Period, this book is highly recommended. Have to know where you’ve been to understand where you’re going.
Hofstadter was a social and political historian well respected by his peers, and who wrote in a style the non-historian (albeit serious) reader could follow and enjoy. In the late 1960s, Hofstadter embarked upon what was intended to be political history of America from 1750 to the present. (His present.) On the drawing board, three-volumes, one million plus words. Hofstadter contracted leukemia and died while working on the first book, America at 1750, but he left the book near enough to completion for it to be reworked and published, although some of the sections should obviously have been expanded and would have been, had he lived.
The best sections, on indentured servitude and slavery make clear these were in no way comparable. White indentureds were recognized under the law as human beings, black slaves were chattel, and from this, all else flowed. Servitude for whites was most often voluntary, a way of paying for passage to the New World. Some servitudes were as short as two years, seldom were they longer than seven and the servant got a stipend at the end, to get him or her started on their dream.
Slavery varied from one region to another as well as over time. If a slave could have chosen where he or she was to be enslaved, and did he know what Hofstadter knew, two near-impossibilities, said slave would have chosen to get as far north as he could. (Slavery was legal in the North, in 1750.) Even before northern slavery was abolished, and as awful as slavery was in the American South, our slave, in 1750, would have chosen the worst of the southern colonies, South Carolina, over the hell of the Caribbean sugar islands.
The Religious Awakening was peopled by some colorful characters, most prominently George Wakefield. He was the Billy Sunday or Billy Graham of his day, a strong-lunged orator and the subject of one of Ben Franklin’s best know scientific observations.
The Awakening was a response to the lassitude infecting the established churches and was carried forward on the legs and lungs of men who were less expert than they imagined or would admit. They aroused the pitchfork crowd to tear down the establishment without having any clear idea of what to put in its place.
(Whitefield, it should be noted and for all his piety, was a slaveholder who, at a time when the colony of Georgia was debating whether or not to allow slavery, came out fully in favor of the Peculiar Institution. He needed slaves to run his enterprises, which included an orphanage.)
For anyone interested in understanding the epic events of the last half of the eighteenth century in North America, the French and Indian War, The Revolution, the Federalist Period, this book is highly recommended. Have to know where you’ve been to understand where you’re going.
January 10, 2015
This is one of the list of books which I like.
June 27, 2019
Nice snapshot of what made Americans tick in the run-up to the Revolution. So sad that Hofstadter died after completing this, the first of three planned volumes.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews