Becoming America

Winner of the John G. Cawelti Award, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association“We must congratulate Butler for [bringing] under control [a] profusion of scholarship and [making] sense of it in fewer than 250 pages. His book is a tour de force…Compelling and readable.”—Gordon S. Wood, New Republic“Americans today think of the colonial period, if at all, as a time remote from modern America, in which society was unimaginably different from ours. Butler argues persuasively that America during the late colonial period…displayed distinctive traits of modern America, among them vigorous religious pluralism, bewildering ethnic diversity, tremendous inequalities of wealth, and a materialistic society with pervasively commercial values.”—Kirkus ReviewsMultinational, profit-driven, materialistic, power-hungry, religiously plural: America today—and three hundred years ago. Jon Butler’s panoramic view of the mainland American colonies after 1680 transforms our customary picture of pre-Revolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly “modern“ character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto “dark ages”) of the American colonial experience, Butler shows us vast revolutionary changes in a society that, for ninety years before 1776, was already becoming America.

We must congratulate Butler for [bringing] under control [a] profusion of scholarship and [making] sense of it in fewer than 250 pages. His book is a tour de force… Compelling and readable., In a thoughtful, erudite survey of colonial history, Butler traces the formation of many of America’s modern social characteristics in the crucible of pre-Revolutionary society… Americans today think of the colonial period, if at all, as a time remote from modern America, in which society was unimaginably different from ours. Butler argues persuasively that America during the late colonial period (1680–1776) rapidly developed a variegated culture that displayed distinctive traits of modern America, among them vigorous religious pluralism, bewildering ethnic diversity, tremendous inequalities of wealth, and a materialistic society with pervasively commercial values… A sweeping, well-researched analysis of the transformative changes wrought by immigration, war, and cultural change in colonial America., The decades in between the Puritan-dominated 17th century and the market-revolutionizing early 19th century were a formative period, [Butler] suggests, during which a distinctly ‘American’ society—and, as Butler would have it, the first ‘modern’ society—developed… Butler’s original analysis is important reading on 18th-century America; he shows that the colonies were developing distinct ways of spending, building, praying, decorating and politicking even then—a cultural revolution that anticipated the political revolution that was to follow., An engrossing, important book. It promises to provoke and inspire. Jon Butler’s Becoming America is an ambitious examination of Britain’s mainland North American colonies between 1680 and 1770. The scope of the book is really quite broad; it covers nearly a century of development across thirteen widely varying colonies, and considers six formidably large aspects of early American life: migration and settlement, politics, economics, religion, the material world, and the origins of the Revolution. Butler’s book revolves around, and advances, a coherent, critical thesis: that ‘the vast social, economic, political, and cultural changes’ of this period created a distinctively ‘American’ society.’ The surprise of the book is that this society was modern; indeed, as Butler claims, it was the world’s ‘first modern society.’ The world Butler portrays in his often vivid, and always highly readable prose is an America of fantastic diversity, an America of many languages, different customs, and dissenting practices of piety. Butler’s Becoming America is a world of bustling politics and economic revolutions., A terrific book, filled with human interest and the kind of detail that makes abstractions meaningful. A commendable weaving together of themes and materials from political history, social history, and cultural history. Butler offers us a firm foundation for further exploration.

Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Emeritus Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University and Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His books include the Los Angeles Times bestseller Becoming America and the prizewinning Awash in a Sea of Faith and The Huguenots in America. He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians.