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William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
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William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic |
Author: Alan Taylor
Published: 1996-08-27 |
List price: $18.00
Our price: $12.24
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As of: December 01st, 2008 05:04:44 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Great American historical book!
A wonderful combination of primary and secondary source historical material, this book is fundamental for any early American historian or the average historical reader. Alan Taylor's performance is phenomenal as he relates the story of William Cooper and his experiences on the post-colonial American frontier in an exciting, yet accurate and scholarly manner. This book is also greatly recommended as a university text for any American history professor interested in giving his/her students a view of post-colonial American history from an eyewitness perspective in the form of William Cooper. Overall, a great book that comes highly recommended for anyone interested in early American frontier history.
 Politics Prestige in America's Infancy
"William Cooper's Town" certainly deserved recognition with the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. It is an intriguing look at the development of a frontier community in the earliest days of the republic. The story of parvenu William Cooper's rise and eventual decline from political and social prominence in Upstate New York is well-told with keen insight into the fractiousness of early U.S. politics.
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br /James Fenimore Cooper's first great success in the literary world was a fictionalized account of his father's life. While there are many valuable histories of early American life, Taylor's book is particularly fascinating due to the parallel between William Cooper's life story and his son's novel, "The Pioneers." "William Cooper's Town" is a unique combination of political history, social analysis and biography linked to a study on James Fenimore Cooper's literary effort to vindicate his father's struggle for wealth, social prominence and prestige.
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br /Taylor's book is an interesting new twist on the old story of a rising man on America's frontier. I recommend it highly. It is well worth your reading time.
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Excellent Read, A Bit Over-Focused on "Gentility"
This book has been well-reviewed and well-praised by several other people. It is a great book, well-deserving of its Pulitzer. The author is able to write prose well, and so distinguishes himself from many other historians. Conceptually, he has pulled together a wide range of strands that make up the history of the era, including the literary, economic, political, and social, and woven these strands into fascinating and engaging patterns. His research is solid, and his footnotes useful. Given the other reviews, here I will only try to add a perspective I found lacking in reading those other reviews.
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br /I walk away from this book thinking it fell just a jot short of what it could have accomplished, mainly because the author seeks a unifying theme in William Cooper's search for "gentility". If the book were to be about gentility, I'd like a bit more perspective on the age and more comparisions to others. It is difficult to write a book on such a theme while focusing on a single family. I do not think this is a work on gentility, nor is it grounded by others' work on the subject. There is still a book to be written here, and "William Cooper's Town" is going to be useful groundwork for that history.
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br /If the book is about Cooper, as it seems to want to be, I believe tying virtually every chapter to a single theme oversimplifies an obviously complex man, and results in many of the other insightful thoughts about the man and his age being underemphasized. The continual focus on gentility, by the end, seems too forced. Perhaps some of Jane Austen's characters can be overwhelming motivated by their need to demonstrate gentility, but Austen still enriches the world of such people with foils, and reminds us periodically that they are as much charicatures as characters. While William Cooper's son may have turned him into a bit of a charicature, the historian need not (and clearly this historian did not want to).
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br /None of these comments should dissaude anyone from picking up this book - it is a wonderful work that will be influential for years to come, and it is written with a great sense of the subjects' humanity.
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Fascinating
What a pleasure, what a joy to read this book. It's rare that history rises to such a wonderful pitch -- anecdote, analysis, historial context all wrapped up in one fine package.
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br /I stumbled onto this book while perusing library shelves while my daughter picked out some kid books for herself. Since it won a Pulitzer, I thought I'd take a look. And I was treated to an amazing amalgam of history, economics, politics, and literary analysis. I love books that explore myths and then separate the fact from fiction, and I can't think of any that have done it in a more entertaining way.
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br /If you like history, you'll love the sweep of about 50 years on America's early frontier. If you like politics, you'll love to learn about early New York political machines. If you like economics, you'll learn all about how trading economies were built almost from scratch in the States. And if you like name-dropping, there's everyone from Alexander Hamilton to Aaron Burr to Thomas Jefferson to James Fenimore Cooper.
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Magisterial?
That's a pretty pretentious word to use and Taylor's book does begin to plod at some points but I think this is a fascinating account of early American pioneers. Taylor looks at William Cooper, the father of the author James Fennimore Cooper and his founding of a town in the wilderness of western NEw York just after the Revolution. In tracing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the Cooper family and Cooperstown, he gives us a great account of early American politics and life. Taylor reminds us that the edge of the Northeast was once a wild and unsettled frontier. he also shows us that the frontier, far from being some sort of idyllic outpost, was intimately connected, economically and politically, with the rest of the nation. At the same time he gives us an important social and political look at the post Revolutionary US where a man like William Cooper, a humble workman from NEw Jersey was able to work his way into becoming one of the most well respected land speculators in the country. Taylor wraps up the book with a look at the legacy of the Cooper family and how James Fennimore Cooper became a major influence on how Americans viewed the frontier. Overall a great book and worth the time and effort to read it
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