Joyce Appleby is emerita professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently the co-director of the History News Service, and is past president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

This fine book showcases Joyce Appleby's trademark blend of ambitious arguments, meticulous scholarship, and sound judgment. Addressing controversial and important topics ranging from the shaping of popular memory and the uses of scholarship to the proper historical understanding of early American culture, capitalism, and postmodernism, these essays will delight and enlighten Appleby's many admirers and earn her plenty of new ones.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Without Resolution: The Jeffersonian Tension in American NationalismChapter 2: A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early AmericaChapter 3: The American Heritage: The Heirs and the DisinheritedChapter 4: Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond ExceptionalismChapter 5: The Enlightenment Project in a Postmodernist AgeChapter 6: One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving beyond the Linguistic: A Response to David HarlanChapter 7: The Power of HistoryChapter 8: Presidents, Congress, and Courts: Partisan Passions in MotionChapter 9: The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians

Joyce Appleby is emerita professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently the co-director of the History News Service, and is past president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

This fine book showcases Joyce Appleby's trademark blend of ambitious arguments, meticulous scholarship, and sound judgment. Addressing controversial and important topics ranging from the shaping of popular memory and the uses of scholarship to the proper historical understanding of early American culture, capitalism, and postmodernism, these essays will delight and enlighten Appleby's many admirers and earn her plenty of new ones.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Without Resolution: The Jeffersonian Tension in American NationalismChapter 2: A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early AmericaChapter 3: The American Heritage: The Heirs and the DisinheritedChapter 4: Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond ExceptionalismChapter 5: The Enlightenment Project in a Postmodernist AgeChapter 6: One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving beyond the Linguistic: A Response to David HarlanChapter 7: The Power of HistoryChapter 8: Presidents, Congress, and Courts: Partisan Passions in MotionChapter 9: The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians