The American Future: A History

All too often historians focus on one era or one theme to the exclusion of much else. While such focus is fine for readers bent on feeding a special interest or with time to read widely and build their personal world view with accumulated bricks of knowledge, we are well served by those writers who manage to compass a longer, broader view of the world's ways. Simon Schama has served up a masterly history of the American experience in his latest book. Threading vignettes of the past, many of them obscure, he has created a vivid tapestry of beads and beans and bangles and bones that deliver the reader to a much deeper level of understanding of where we are today and where we may be headed. The linguistic tension between his title and subtitle are fully realized: The American Future/A history. Indeed. Schama explores contradictions in our Founding Fathers' words and deeds, the twin forces of humanism and irrational faith that undergird the American experience, the drive toward frontier pioneering and urban enculturation, the forces of vicious racism and hopeful universalism and much more. I highly recommend this volume to any reader interested in gaining a truer perspective on the United States and would happily commend it to school boards as a replacement for the tired sort of histories so often used as texts. This one is superb.

The DVD version of Simon Schama's overview of the American present is a splendid visual panorama. This book provides the added depth that puts meat on Schama's arguments and opinions. Schama uses individual biographies to highlight a historical period or American issue that he considers illustrative of our character as a nation. As an immigrant from England who has now spent more than half of his live as a resident of America, Schama's voice is unique and not always flattering. Some of what he uncovers about the American psyche is clearly discomforting but it never seems unfair. His views on the American Civil War and its continuing resonance today is particularly moving. His examination of the immigrant experience in our history seems cogent and true. How a society treats its weakest and most vulnerable members is one strong indication of its efficacy. Our history in that regard has been less than sterling: occasional compassion accompanied by periods of neglect and outright antipathy has been the norm. But Schama is always hopeful. Although it is obvious that he loves America, Schama holds it to account as he pleads for its deeds to match its loftiest words. And those words are indeed lofty as Schama's portrayal of Jefferson reveals. This is an excellent book with an unique viewpoint that will reward careful and open-minded reading.

Upon skimming over this book for the first time I was not very enthused about sitting down and reading it in detail. The author, Simon Schama, organized "The American Future" in a unique manner. Upon giving this book a thorough read, however, I began to understand the brilliance of the author's approach. Schama packs an absolute ton of information and thoughts into each chapter, yet the book reads very easily. I like the author's style of writing, as it flows incredibly well and he is able to weave a lot of material into something that is easy to understand. I will not go into a blow-by-blow account of the contents of the book since so many other reviewers have done a fine job of that already. The one aspect of "The American Future" I want to focus on is its injection of the stories of remarkable people who generally do not necessarily get a lot of "glory" in other books of this type. For example, Schama wisely refers to Fannie Lou Hamer on many occasions in the book. He sets the scene of Fannie Lou's life and times so well that it was almost as if I were there, taking in the sights and sounds of the 1960s. There are many other people and eras in which Schama does the same thing. People may agree or disagree with some of the editorializing of the author, but the fact remains that the reader will definitely learn a great deal about key moments and people in the history of America. It will also make the reader think about where we go from here, given what we can learn from the past.

The American Future: A History is a delightful bundle of narratives that seem to underscore Schama's thesis that Europe should not give up on America; that for every "bad' (racist, imperial, anti-immigrant) America there is a "good" (liberal, anti-racist, anti-imperial, and pro-immigrant) America--and that the good and the bad sometimes reside in the same person. Take the Meiggs family for example. Montgomery Meiggs managed the Civil War and many have claimed made a Union victory possible; his descendant teaches a course on `Why presidents go to war when they don't have to'; and one of his other ancestors, White Path, ended up betraying the Cherokees. Or take Harriett Beecher Stowe's father--a fervent abolitionist and an equally fervent anti-Catholic whose "Boston sermon against the Catholic invasion of the West was duly followed by the burning of an Ursuline convent in that city." But somehow or another, Americans because the institutions the Founders (imperfect men all) created have such faith in the American peoples, the Americans are able to get up and move on and, what is more, to reinvent themselves. This, Schama suggests is indeed a land of opportunity by which he means a place of boundless energy. A place where people can, through good times and bad, recover the better angels of their history; and so create their own future. A place in which a transplanted agnostic English Jew like himself can be made to feel at home even in a mega-church where the seats were marked SAVED. A place where an Obama candidacy (the book was written before the election) to the highest office in the land was as possible as a Muslim Congressman taking the oath of office on Jefferson's Quran. As possible as Jews being able to vote and hold office; in short to be citizens and Jews all at the same time in the newborn American republic at a time when this was simply not possible in Europe. This, Schama says, is surely not the sort of place Europeans or the rest of the world for that matter should give up on. Simon Schama (who has lived more than half his life here) certainly has not. I strongly recommend this book for the history you won't often get (the history of momentous events is told most often through the eyes of "secondary" characters like the Meiggs family; Major Powell; Grace Abbott; others like them) and for the writing that flows easily from theme to theme without bothering too much with chronology. It is in short a history that reads like a good novel. Did I mention I recommend it?

Simon Schama is a very intelligent, articulate, charismatic sort of man. He has this amazing ability to make history, and even current events, come alive in a way that really surpasses all others. I first saw him doing this in A History of Britain - The Complete Collection, where he brought British history to life for me in a way I'd never really experienced before. Now he does the same with the seminal 2008 Presidental Election. Though it was less than a year ago, in may ways a lifetime seems to have gone by. Heck, this time last year it was still Hillary v Obama, and McCain waiting in the wings, smirking. We'd not even heard of Sarah Palin yet, lucky us. Schama tells us the story of the election and the events leading up to it, giving us a full picture of the history that lead to the present and will take us into the future. True, you might not care all that much about the origins of West Point, but you get invaluable background to our current reality. I've often said that the only way to understand the present world is to know the past, and by doing so, you can better know the future. A book like this will help.