Telling No Tales

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, by Sean Wilentz (Norton, 1,044 pp., $35)

Sean Wilentz is a scourge of sentimentality in American historical writing, a refuter of pieties, both those in the triumphalist vein of David McCullough and those of Rainbow Coalition history, the kind that concentrates on everything other than triumphant political figures. How interesting, then, to find Wilentz himself playing the sentimentalist in his new book The Rise of American Democracy. Rise is written in the conviction that there was once a Golden Age in American historical writing, that it is now, alas, no more, and that Wilentz alone can redeem his craft by showing how political history ought to be written.