In many ways, I regard this as my best recording of a chapter from “The American Yawp” yet.  I have deleted nothing from the text edited by its editors, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright.  I have added passages of my own where I think additions were needed to clarify what the original authors were trying to say.

Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a French immigrant to American wrote this classic essay, “What, Then, is this New Man, the American?” in 1782, as American Independence from Britain loomed.  Was he correct in his descriptions of Americans then?  Do his descriptions accurately describe Americans today?  How was he wrong then, if he was, and how do his descriptions fail to characterize Americans today, if indeed they do?

Join me, Dr. Rick Reiman, for my reading of the chapter on British North America, Chapter 3 to be precise, from The American Yawp, the celebrated Open Source textbook on the history of the United States and the lands that would become the American Nation.

n this brief overview, we preview the other podcasts in this episode, which define the ideas of liberalism, nationalism and romanticism, and we preview their role as triggers of two very different kinds of revolution in the nineteenth century to come.

n this brief overview, we preview the other podcasts in this episode, which define the ideas of liberalism, nationalism and romanticism, and we preview their role as triggers of two very different kinds of revolution in the nineteenth century to come.