Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories and Emotional Loss in Early America

Historian Burstein (Jefferson’s Secrets) offers an incisive exploration of the emotional landscape of early America, from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War. Drawing on letters and diaries of 18th- and 19th-century Americans—mostly written between a select “cross-generational” set of famous figures who communicated with each other over time, including writers, artists, and politicians from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln—Burstein investigates how they recorded what they “felt” about themselves and their compatriots. Tracking “apprehensions, yearnings, laughter, [and] vainglory,” he finds that early Americans often turned to British writers to find words to express themselves: Alexander Pope’s poetry was a long-reigning favorite, as was William Shakespeare, whom Americans “regarded... as elemental, almost as a form of consciousness,” according to Burstein. Analyzing books—including Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, “a digressive, American-inflected Don Quixote”—as well as the pages of satirical magazines like Democrat-leaning Salmagundi—run by Washington Irving, his brother William, and James Kirke Paulding—and Joseph Dennie’s staunchly Federalist Port-Folio, Burstein charts the nascent growth of “American exceptionalism and rugged individualism” through an amalgamation of swirling emotions like “martyrdom, betrayal, rationalization, cultural conceit, and unfulfilled longing.” Commanding an impressively vast array of literature, Burstein’s account is sophisticated and layered. It’s a rewarding deep dive into the inner lives of early Americans. (Apr.)