John Burgess's "The Middle Period: 1817-1858"

[ScottP]

This month's installment of Powell History Recommends focuses on a resource that has greatly enhanced my understanding of the early nineteenth century in America. Students of "A First History for Adults," Session 1 & 2 have already reached this point in their class on the "Story of America," and witnessed the important shift in American culture that attends the passing of the Revolutionary generation. This period, marked by democratization (as symbolized by Andrew Jackson), a tragic failure to eradicate slavery, and, most unfortunately, a significant rise in economic statism, is not easy to wade through. But John W. Burgess makes it seem uncomplicated in his book "The Middle Period: 1817-1858," (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909).

Burgess's great virtue is that he doesn't settle for the typical dispassionate outlook of historians. The usual, exceedingly boring, approach involves presenting merely a succession of presidents, whose terms in office are treated as the natural, chronological schema for presenting the past. Predictably, when historians use such a barren framework, it contributes virtually nothing to our understanding of the times. Instead, Burgess determines to take the events of this time and present them according to an abstract perspective. His purpose is not merely to relay the facts, but to empower readers to achieve a greater moral understanding of the past. In brief, Burgess believes that the true causes of the civil war must be understood as a key spiritual value for the American soul, that "the South must acknowledge its error as well as its defeat...from the brain and the heart and the manly will, before any real concord in thought and feeling...can be established." (He is writing c.1900) This is a far cry from the typical "scientific" approach that the apostles of Leopold von Ranke (the "Kant of history") would espouse.

Burgess's narrative proceeds along causal lines, from pivotal episode to pivotal episode. As Burgess puts it, "the truthful record, connection, and interpretation of such events is what I call history in the highest sense, as distinguished from chronology, narrative, and romance."

Bravo! Burgess's "Middle Period" should be on the shelf of any adult student of American history.

Scott Powell

Creator, A First History for Adults

Edited August 27, 2006 by ScottP