In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published "Letters From an American Farmer," in which he famously asked, "What, then, is the American, this new man?" Americans seeking to define their national character have wrestled with that question ever since, often with dubious results. At the least, they have tended to ransack the past for evidence of those characteristics that anticipate what they currently admire about themselves, thus underestimating the complexity and ambiguity of their ancestors' identity and flattening their own understanding of American history. Knowing that the Civil War ended in the destruction of slavery, for example, latter-day Americans have often assumed that Yankee attributes of egalitarianism and industriousness defined the "true" character of the nation as a whole and have ignored the fact that prewar Northerners happily profited from the slave system and shared without any particular qualms the racist opinions of their Southern contemporaries.
The Best Nonfiction Of 2000
The Best Books of 2000
To read the past in such an essentially teleological and self-serving way is bad enough, but it also tends to sustain the fallacy of "exceptionalism"--the notion that American history serves the United States' special destiny as a beacon to lesser nations. Now Joyce Appleby, a professor of history at UCLA, has created a collective portrait of the generation of men and women born in the United States between 1776 and 1800, and on the basis of their lives and values ventures an answer to Crevecoeur's query that is intriguing, sophisticated and anything but exceptionalist. Anyone curious about how Americans came to understand themselves as a people would do well to read this book.
INSIDE 'VARIETY'
The Story of the Bible
of Show Business (1905-1987)
By Peter Besas
Ars Millenii: 566 pp., $39
Variety, the legendary show business trade paper, brought out the ardor in her employees. For those who worked there, it was never merely a job; it was a mission to which they devoted their lives. There was no need for time clocks or time sheets at the Variety office. Reporters were happily on call 24 hours a day, skulking about the nightspots and entertainment palaces of Broadway, trolling for news. Employees talked about little else than their paper. In later years, when it was being buffeted by financial pressures, they would ask one another tremulously, "Is there life after Variety?"
As a 30-year Variety veteran who ran the paper's Madrid office before being unceremoniously dumped by new bloodless corporate ownership, Peter Besas remains so ardent that he has written an exhaustive, frequently fascinating and unflaggingly loving history of the paper and its plethora of colorful denizens. For him, Variety is a living, breathing organism rather than a metaphor. He says at the outset that he prefers anecdote to amplitude, description to diagnosis, and as "Inside Variety" "cruises through the near-century of the paper's existence," that is pretty much what you get ... until the homey little paper gets trampled under the jackboots of modern business and Besas begins to wax nostalgic for simpler, better times. In this he is a true son of Variety, which kept its eye fixed on the week's box office receipts or the latest show business news. Yet for all its professions of unpretentiousness, Variety was not only a perfect chronicler of the ascendant entertainment culture but one of the enduring symbols of that culture, and the paper's shifting ethos wound up uncannily reflecting the changing role of entertainment in 20th-century America.
INTO THE WEST
The Story of Its People
By Walter Nugent
Alfred A. Knopf: 500 pp., $35
nto the West" tells the grand story of the peopling of the great expanse of the continent that extends from the 98th meridian to the Pacific (including Alaska and Hawaii). Walter Nugent, professor of history at Notre Dame, has written a big, sprawling story about a big, sprawling place. He has an especially good eye for the exemplary anecdote. The personal detail breathes life into statistical material, the past tracings of birth, death, marriage and migration patterns. In notable ways, his account departs from earlier versions of "How the West Was Won." The traditional triumphant narrative claimed the West as the premier site of white Anglo-Saxon accomplishment. But Nugent makes it clear that the American West has always included "people more diverse in race or class than those of the other great regions of the United States." The result of these patterns is that in a great arc, from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific, the Southwest is in the process of turning "majority minority." That is already true of New Mexico, and soon it will be the case in California, Texas and Arizona. "Into the West" should be essential reading for all Americans who want to put these recent events into historical perspective.
JANET, MY MOTHER, AND ME
A Memoir of Growing Up
With Janet Flanner
and Natalia Danesi Murray
By William Murray
Simon & Schuster: 318 pp., $24
