Overview

Before Sigmund Freud made dreams the cornerstone of understanding an individual's inner life, Americans shared their dreams unabashedly with one another through letters, diaries, and casual conversation. In this innovative book, highly regarded historian Andrew Burstein goes back for the first time to discover what we can learn about the lives and emotions of Americans, from colonial times to the beginning of the modern age. Through a thorough study of dreams recorded by iconic figures such as John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, as well as everyday men and women, we glimpse the emotions of earlier generations and understand how those feelings shaped their lives and careers, thus gaining a fuller, multi-dimensional sense of our own past. No one has ever looked at the building blocks of the American identity in this way, and Burstein reveals important clues and landmarks that show the origins of the ideas and values that remain central to who we are today.

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9781137279163

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Reviews

This quirky, episodic 200-year gambol explores the development of the American Dream by unpacking Americans' dreams.... Burstein's elegantly crafted nightstand tome demonstrates that dreams reflect a distinctly... human desire to chart time via stories. --Publishers Weekly An acclaimed historian dives headlong into the dreams of some iconic Americans. - Kirkus reviews Lincoln Dreamt He Died provides a compelling perspective on America's collective psyche. Readers will gain new insight into luminaries including Benjamin Rush, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Jefferson, but will likely gain just as much pleasure from the vividly-drawn and lesser known dreamers: a spurned lover in New Orleans, a Norwegian-born sailor in Manhattan, a Civil War soldier and the young woman he left behind in Ohio. Burstein has given us a first-rate cultural history, 'from the inside out.' --Amy Greenberg, author of A Wicked War Andrew Burstein is one of the most original and readable historians in our midst. --Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College and two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize I don't Know any thing more troublesome than . . . those people who are eternally pestering one with recitals of their dreams, complained Henry Laurens, onetime president of the Continental Congress. Two days later, he anonymously printed his own dream in a newspaper. With a keen eye for such fascination and ambivalence, Andrew Burstein has written a compelling history of unconscious America. For much of our past, Americans slept; dreams filled their hours and shaped their identities. Yet rarely have historians looked at the nation asleep, or at the lingering of dreams in daylight. Burstein, one of our most creative and perceptive scholars and writers, awakens us to the significance of dreams--powerful, peculiar, and elusive--in the lives of such figures as Washington and Lincoln, Thoreau and Twain, and in the broader culture of the young republic. --T.

This quirky, episodic 200-year gambol explores the development of the American Dream by unpacking Americans' dreams.... Burstein's elegantly crafted nightstand tome demonstrates that dreams reflect a distinctly... human desire to chart time via stories. --Publishers Weekly An acclaimed historian dives headlong into the dreams of some iconic Americans. - Kirkus reviews Lincoln Dreamt He Died provides a compelling perspective on America's collective psyche. Readers will gain new insight into luminaries including Benjamin Rush, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Jefferson, but will likely gain just as much pleasure from the vividly-drawn and lesser known dreamers: a spurned lover in New Orleans, a Norwegian-born sailor in Manhattan, a Civil War soldier and the young woman he left behind in Ohio. Burstein has given us a first-rate cultural history, 'from the inside out.' --Amy Greenberg, author of A Wicked War Andrew Burstein is one of the most original and readable historians in our midst. --Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College and two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize I don't know anything more troublesome than . . . those people who are eternally pestering one with recitals of their dreams, complained Henry Laurens, onetime president of the Continental Congress. Two days later, he anonymously printed his own dream in a newspaper. With a keen eye for such fascination and ambivalence, Andrew Burstein has written a compelling history of unconscious America. For much of our past, Americans slept; dreams filled their hours and shaped their identities. Yet rarely have historians looked at the nation asleep, or at the lingering of dreams in daylight. Burstein, one of our most creative and perceptive scholars and writers, awakens us to the significance of dreams--powerful, peculiar, and elusive--in the lives of such figures as Washington and Lincoln, Thoreau and Twain, and in the broader culture of the young republic. --T.J

Author Information

"Andrew Burstein is the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University, and the author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's Secrets, and Madison and Jefferson, among others. Burstein's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he advised Ken Burns's production ""Thomas Jefferson."" He has been featured on C-SPAN's American Presidents Series and Booknotes, as well as numerous NPR programs, including Talk of the Nation and The Diane Rehm Show. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana."

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