Includes bibliographical references (p. 403-436) and index.
Contents:
pt. 1. World history is American history. -- Tom Paine's vision -- The complex road to an independent civilization -- A new government and a new culture -- pt. 2. The greater enlightenment forms the national consciousness. -- The Scottish enlightenment and the minds of early America -- Nationalism and the varieties of capitalistic experience -- Reform, new religions, and nativism -- The diffusion of education -- The writer and the republic -- pt. 3. Information creates the romantic consciousness. -- Americans join the second great age of discovery -- I am "part or parcel of God" : the romantic search for the self -- The romantic writer as cosmopolitan seer -- pt. 4. The symbolic union : consciousness outruns nationality. -- The wild Jacksonian age -- The imperial mind : the west and the future as reality -- The south and the past as reality -- The Black man as intellectual -- The women's war -- Utopian ideas -- Battle hymns : aboliton and/or union -- Centennial vistas, 1876 : toward the twentieth century.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.