The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 | Jay Winik

The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 | Jay Winik | Where are the maps?!!!!

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The Great Upheaval...

	The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 Jay Winik Harper, 2007 - 688 pages average customer review:based on 47 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Global Perspective to History

Historian Jay Winik examines one of the tumultuous periods in western civilization. THE GREAT UPHEAVAL: AMERICA AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN WORLD, 1788-1800 is an intriguing historical narrative that almost reads like an epic novel with a cast of characters in world history. Despite what the title says, the United States is one of the focal points in the book, but is juxtaposed with established nations of the late eighteenth century, Russia, France, and the Ottoman Empire who were also experiencing their own major quandaries and transitions.

With the inspiration from colleagues and fellow historians that took six years in the making, Winik has written an enormous book with an immense amount of graphic detail that magnifies the importance of the individuals and topics that a western civilization textbook seldom extensively covers. One of the strengths of the book is that Winik examines American history with a global perspective and with exceptional emphasis on the leaders and their distinct traits of leadership, which was influenced by the Enlightenment; readers will read the significance of philosophers, such as Voltaire, Locke, and Montesquieu during this pivotal era. While America was establishing nationhood and alliance with France, Europe slowly metamorphosed to modernity, but not without yet another long struggle of strife that pitted and challenged Russia and its leader, Catherine the Great, with the long standing Ottoman Empire, and France with a contending revolution against the monarchical rule of King Louis XVI. In addition, Winik recognizes those Founding Fathers who usually appeared in the shadows of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, and places them in the forefront of this narrative, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton and Marquise de Lafayette, and how they greatly contributed to nation-building.

THE GREAT UPHEAVAL is a pure example of how history connects and reconnects events of the past during respective periods. This is a highly recommended book for history aficionados or students studying history who may want to see how American history parallels with European history. One may see it is indeed a collaborative effort that crosses disciplines and geographic borders.

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Where are the maps?!!!!

I would have given this excellently written book five stars if only there would have more maps! There are none of France, so it's impossible to follow visually the armies, Louis' flight, and the many towns, cities, and areas mentioned. Ditto for Russia and it's conflicts with the Ottomans, Poland, and Finland. Very frustrating!

Entertaining

Although a little theatrical in the prelude, it immediately takes off and places you at the center of events in several locations. Well written, well researched but above all it is written like a bestseller novel. It is in total stylistic contrast to Tim Blanning's "The Pursuit of Glory", the European state of affairs taking place at around the same time.

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Attempting more, Winik achieves less

Technology (as we should know by now) is morally neutral, and can be used for good or evil. Take for example, a word processing document template, which can be used to create multiple documents that follow the same outline and format. Winik certainly saved his template of historical narrative from his earlier classic "April 1865" and reused it here, but this time the finished document, attempting more, achieves less.

In the earlier book, Winik artfully used the confines of a very narrow time and place to expand on and at the same time focus broader threads of historical exposition and narrative. I rated that book as a five-star classic in my review (April 1865: The Month That Saved America).

This time, Winik has chosen a much broader range of time--the 1790s--and place--Russia, France, and America. With such a wide-angle lens, Winik attempts to regain focus by devoting each chapter to a different country, resulting alternately in the loss of integration he hopes to achieve and in repetition of ideas and phrases throughout the book.

Like a vacationer who attempts to capture the grandeur of a mountain range by capturing the whole range in a single snapshot, Winik is forced to pull so far back from his subject that the mountain range can be seen only in fuzzy outlines. Better, as he did in April 1865, to focus on a single peak in the great mountain range so that the detail can be traced and generalized to the whole; here, the narrative becomes too general and unfocused, and Winik is unable to tie the narrative together as he hoped.

The flaw is not in the template. Winik showed, that within the right scope with the right ideas behind it, he is a writer capable of producing a classic of historical narrative on this template, and has the ability to do so again in future works. But I found some indicators that Winik overreached his model and perhaps his expertise at this stage in his still-young career as a popular historian:

1. He lifted whole sentences, paragraphs, and pages from April 1865. While they may have applied to both, having read the two books back to back I felt somewhat cheated. The fault of Winik's is not a desire to defraud the user, but as we have already seen the selection of too broad of a scope too close to his original history.

2. Several times in the book, Winik attempts to emphasize the depth or veracity of his narrative with phrasing like "The crux of the matter, and it was the crux" as if an inveterate liar repeating his lie more loudly he may be able to convince the reader of the validity of his points. This is not because Winik's points are false, or counterintuitive, but rather is a side effect of the fact that his narrative template applied to such a broad scope leaves him with nothing but the broadest generalities in his toolkit. So far removed from his primary (and even secondary) sources, Winik must face the skeptical glare of the reader with nothing but his generalizations, and in the isolation of this harsh glare Winik uses this turn of phrase that clanks of the ear like a twice-told lie.

3. Failure to weave the threads back together and explain why it matters that Russia, France, and America went through the 1790s as they did, and how the events of the three countries intertwined. Again, the narrative is in such long focus that the fine-grained detail of the interactions can't be drawn out. Telling the account of this important decade in these three great nations in enough detail to show the interactions would entail many more pages than a popular historical narrative will support; consider, for example, "Citizen", Simon Schama's narrative of the French Revolution--referenced by Winik here--that runs 900+ pages on just one piece of Winik's narrative. A student of the French Revolution would be better served reading that source, and Winik isn't able to compellingly convince me that the reader is better served in "Upheaval."

Again, Winik is not at all a bad writer; he is a writer capable of producing a classic of historical narrative as he did in "April, 1865", and has the ability to do so again in future works. "The Great Upheaval" contains many of his deft turns of phrase, pithy biographical captures of important characters, and his dramatic sense of timing and narrative angles.

If you are new to the decade and the countries involved, and have limited time, Winik's book would be an acceptable starting point. Otherwise, reference the bibliographical notes for the sources Winik used, such as Schama's book on the French Revolution (See my review here: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution).

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America, France and Russia

The thesis of this book is that the world was as almost as tightly wired in 1800 as it is now, hence turmoil hit in America, France and Russia at roughly the same time. The preface states the case sufficiently enough, but the book does not succeed in connecting the events. The book is meandering, over-written, almost self-indulgent in its efforts to support this idea. It reminds me of the joke about the lawyer who argues louder when he has a weaker case.

Reading this book felt like simultanously reading three books covering the same turbulent times in three different countries. Chapters are alternately entitled America, Franc, Russia, etc. If that is not enough of a hop scotch effect, even within the chapters the book has digressions. A meditation on slavery for example, goes back to its ancient history, as does a section on the Ottoman Empire. A good editor (I'm available) could have easily taken this book down by 120-140 pages and greatly improved it.

In fairness, as individual set pieces, these digressions were often informative, but if you are a specialist in any of these periods you will likely find them pedestrian. This is a book that in style and tone is for the general reader, although it is hard to imagine a general reader would be interested in all three story lines.

Still, Winik is a very good narrative story teller and many individual set pieces, such as the Bourbons attempting to escape the mob during the French Revolution, or John Paul Jones' adventures on the high seas, are compelling reading.

It would have been a much stronger book if Winik had chosen to follow one or several characters who actually were on the scene in the revolutions discussed here, such as Thaddesu Kosciusko, the Polish patriot who took part in the Revolutions in America and France and led Polish resistance to a Russian invasion in the 1790s. I suspect the author did not take that course becasue he could not find enough such characters. But their absence disproves his thesis.

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