E-Books →Longing for Connection Entangled Memories and Emotional Loss in Early America (PDF)

Modern readers of history and biography unite around a seemingly straightforward question: What did it feel like to live in the past? In Longing for Connection, historian Andrew Burstein attempts to answer this question with a vigorous, nuanced emotional history of the United States from its founding to the Civil War.
With an examination of the letters, diaries, and other personal texts of the time, along with popular poetry and novels, Burstein shows us how early Americans expressed deep emotions through shared metaphors and borrowed verse in their longing for meaning and connection. He reveals how literate, educated Americans―both well-known and relatively obscure―expressed their feelings to each other and made attempts at humor, navigating an anxious world in which connection across spaces was difficult to capture.
In studying the power of poetry and literature as expressions of inner life, Burstein conveys the tastes of early Americans and illustrates how emotions worked to fashion myths of epic heroes, such as the martyr Nathan Hale, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. He studies the public's fears of ocean travel, their racial blind spots, and their remarkable facility for political satire.
Transcending the historical facts he recovers, Burstein questions why we seek a connection to the past and its emotions in the first place. America, he argues, is still shapedby a persistent belief that the past is reachable and that its lessons remain intact: this isa major obstacle inefforts to understand our national history. Burstein showsthat modern readers exhibit a similar capacity for rationalization and that dire longing for connection across time and space as their forebears did.