Travels Toward Modernity in Post-Revolutionary America

Abstract

If our goal is to capture a sense of connectedness between post-revolutionary encounters with modernity and those of later times, Lewis Perry writes, could not tell a traditional story, and we would have to experiment with language and form in order to show our recognition of the fragmentation of public experience and the illogical flow of private consciousness (p. 269). In Boats Against the Current, Perry has taken this experimental approach. The traditional scholarly historical narrative (mixing precise chronological development with explicit topical coverage) is missing. Instead, we find twentythree seemingly disjointed essays, most very short but some lengthy, on a diversity of topics, decades, and issues. In the end, it becomes clear that Perry's fragmented mode of presentation is a good match for his material and his messages. Perry begins the volume with Alexis de Tocqueville's address to his European contemporaries in Democracy in America (1835) on the direction that America was taking Europe: Carried away by a rapid current, we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the bank, while the stream whirls us backward-facing toward the abyss. Ahead, Tocqueville added, lay the prospect of a world where nothing any longer seems either forbidden or permitted, honest or dishonorable, true or false. Toward the end of his book, Perry repeats Tocqueville's observation and couples it with a fragment from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 lectures: Nothing solid is secure; everything tilts and rocks. For Perry, Tocqueville and Emerson captured the essential dilemmas of modern living as they became somewhat discernible during the postRevolutionary decades-the sense that old verities were ebbing without clear replacements, causing everyday life to seem to tilt and rock. In the traditional historical narrative, one expects the author to define modernization precisely and fully at the onset. Perry delays definitional issues until his twentieth and twenty-first chapters, providing in the interval