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• W4382053764 abstract "Reviewed by: The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America by Louis P. Masur Michael S. Green (bio) Louis P. Masur, The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, xvii + 366 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. The longtime CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid used to lament the difficulty of “trying to be profound for two minutes every day,” and his friend, author Theodore H. White, likened his daily radio commentaries to “doing needlepoint on a matchbox.”1 In essence, that is the kind of difficult legerdemain that Louis Masur pulls off in The Sum of Our Dreams: being brief, sometimes profound, often interesting, and avoiding as many pitfalls or pratfalls as possible. Not that the goal here is to quibble with Masur. It is one thing for him to have written the short, readable book about American history to which the general reader can turn with pleasure and the scholar can read without too much wincing. It is another thing to consider his overall thesis. His title comes from an early presidential campaign speech by Barack Obama, who declared, “America is the sum of our dreams.”2 Masur discusses the American Dream, and the history of that concept, making clear that it is part of his argument but not the overarching part of it. Perhaps this book might be described as assessing the American Dreams in their infinite variety. The Sum of Our Dreams is the latest in a line of works designed to explain American history relatively succinctly—the one-volume account, readable and not too long if not quite concise, by one author, with one distinct point of view. Befitting their audience, some textbook authors have accomplished this in substantially more space—Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty, with its focus on the concept of freedom while also providing the detail expected of a text, or the less thematically driven Alan Brinkley’s American History or John Garraty’s The American Nation, now under the writership of Mark Carnes.3 Recently, Jill Lepore wrote a full-length American history that seemed to try to mirror Foner’s decision to emphasize a particular idea, but avoiding the omnipresent, omnipotent narrative almost always found in a textbook. These volumes all emanated from history departments in the Ivy League—all of the authors but Lepore, who is at Harvard, spent significant portions of their careers at Columbia University. This may suggest a distinctly elitist tone to the [End Page 8] idea that only from what the satirist Tom Lehrer called “ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls” can we have the ultimate word on the American past. Obviously, they have not had the ultimate word or even controlled the textbook or single-volume American history market, as two earlier examples of such texts demonstrated. Southern historian George Tindall of the University of North Carolina went solo for a popular textbook in 1984; in 1956, diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey, based at Stanford, published The American Pageant, which had a distinct focus on punchy writing and a strong emphasis on political and diplomatic history. As they aged, these authors brought in co-authors, and now their texts are far different from their original conception, so much so that their names no longer appear on these totally reimagined volumes. Joseph Conlin, then of California State University, Chico, essayed a textbook on his own, and seems to be the exception to the general rule. This reflects two key points about textbook publishing. One is that these books understandably aim at the widest audience possible, and too restrictive an approach will limit sales. Another, related to the first, is that it behooves both author and publisher not to tack too far in any particular ideological or methodological direction: the readers, and the educators assigning the book they will read, may want something from the text other than a brief narrative or driving viewpoint. Finally, with the proliferation of textbooks has come a proliferation of textbook co-authors, including some mentioned already (Garraty shared authorship with Carnes in his later years; Brinkley first co-wrote his text as the successor to his adviser and..." @default.
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• W4382053764 date "2023-03-01" @default.
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• W4382053764 title "The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America by Louis P. Masur (review)" @default.
• W4382053764 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2023.a900716" @default.
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