Beyond the Revolution : a history of American thought from Paine to pragmatism / William H. Goetzmann.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 403-436) and index.

Bk. I. World History Is American History -- 1. Tom Paine's Vision -- 2. The Complex Road to an Independent Civilization -- 3. A New Government and a New Culture -- Bk. II. The Greater Enlightenment Forms the National Consciousness -- 4. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Minds of Early America -- 5. Nationalism and the Varieties of Capitalistic Experience -- 6. Reform, New Religions, and Nativism -- 7. The Diffusion of Education -- 8. The Writer and the Republic -- Bk. III. Information Creates the Romantic Consciousness -- 9. Americans Join the Second Great Age of Discovery -- 10. I Am "Part or Parcel of God": The Romantic Search for the Self -- 11. The Romantic Writer as Cosmopolitan Seer -- Bk. IV. The Symbolic Union: Consciousness Outruns Nationality -- 12. The Wild Jacksonian Age -- 13. The Imperial Mind: The West and the Future as Reality -- 14. The South and the Past as Reality -- 15. The Black Man as Intellectual -- 16. The Women's War -- 17. Utopian Ideas -- 18. Battle Hymns: Abolition and/or Union -- 19. Centennial Vistas, 1876: Toward the Twentieth Century.

"From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, "The Birthday of a new world is at hand," Americans always had a sense of their unique place in the world. Theirs was the first truly worldly civilization - a nation suffused with the spirit of explorers and frontiersmen, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas jostling together to create a new world." "Beyond the Revolution is a panoramic, all-inclusive chronicle of American intellectual history. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann tells the story of America's greatest thinkers and creators, from Paine and Jefferson to Melville and William James, showing how they built upon and battled one another's ideas in the critical years between 1776 and 1900. A chronological retelling of the greatest achievements of American intellectual history, Beyond the Revolution argues that America represents an entirely new kind of civilization. Powered by new ideas about science, literature, and politics at home and abroad, America evolved from a rowdy experiment to the most cosmopolitan of civilizations." "An unprecedented work of intellectual history by a master historian, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our national culture."--BOOK JACKET.