Andrew Burstein's lively and perceptive book not only provides an engaging portrait of a long-forgotten age, delightfully populated with characters worthy of a novel, but it offers an extended reflection on the role of memory and history in American life, allowing readers to assess the dilemmas and anxieties of successive generations through the experiences of those men and women of 1826, "an expectant people," beset like us with the problems of growth, economic change, and social division. "All Americans agreed upon one thing, and, it seemed, one thing only: that homage should be paid to their Revolutionary origins," Burstein writes. "It was that universal devotion which promised to preserve a language of unity and harmony and pure motives in an era of widely divergent tastes and purposes. Behind them lay glory days, ahead lay civil war. For them, as for us, the past was a comfort."
