The Representative Americans: The Romantics

Like the preceeding books in The Representative Americans series, The Romantics makes history human by putting tissue on the skeletal framework of names and dates. Risjord uses a biographical approach to make the past more concrete and vivid, to recover a heritage that today's reader can feel and experience. The Romantics treats people whose principal contributions fell in the first half of the nineteenth century, though several of those studied lived into the Civil War era and beyond. While certain individuals may be unfamiliar to readers_the slaves Prince and Fed, Free Frank, a black farmer of Kentucky and Illinois, and the 'Lowell Girls,' Lucy Lacom and Sarah Bagley_the majority of the figures studied in The Romantics are well known. Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams carry the political story at the beginning of the era; John C. Fremont bears that burden at the end of the time period. The heart of the volume introduces some of the leading literary and cultural figures of the age_Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne_as well as some of the voices of reform_Horace Mann, Frances Wright, Catharine Beecher, and Theodore and Angelina Grimke Weld. Tying it all together is the prevailing spirit of American Romanticism.

Like the preceeding books in The Representative Americans series, The Romantics makes history human by putting tissue on the skeletal framework of names and dates. It treats people whose principal contributions fell in the first half of the nineteenth century. And while certain individuals may be unfamiliar to readers-the slaves Prince and Fed; Free Frank, a black farmer of Kentucky and Illinois; and the _Lowell Girls,_ Lucy Lacom and Sarah Bagley-the majority of the figures studied are well-known, such as Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann, and Catharine Beecher. Tying it all together is the prevailing spirit of American Romanticism.

F. N. Boney

An outstanding book by an outstanding scholar. Professor Risjord continues to produce sound scholarship in clear, muscular prose, useful to the educated layman as well as the experienced scholar. These " Representative Americans" volumes are especially appropriate for college classes where readers know the bare bones but not the nuances and ironies and complications of their nation's history. "The Romantics" hits the high spots—a few political leaders and a good many more intellectual leaders and mavericks—but it also examines unknown, ordinary folk, who are as "representative" as the big shots in their own way. Indeed, the adventures of free blacks, slaves, factory girls, and mountain men dramatically remind the reader that history includes everyone. Above all, Risjord pictures flesh and blood men and women. The famous are given their official due in a lively fashion and also shown to be all too human with their full share of foibles. The obscure are skillfully drawn from the shadows and granted their full humanity too. Overall, this is a fine book, wide-ranging but easy to follow, enlightening, even academic, but also downright entertaining..

Norman K. Risjord is emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he taught for over three decades. He is the author of Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800 and Jefferson's America, 1760-1815. He is general editor of the American Profiles series for Madison House.