Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

compact nature, a triumph in condensing so much social history in such an efficient and breezy read. This brevity and precision made the work accessible to the general public and undergraduate students alike. The book’s sequel, however, revels in its excess of information and analysis, resulting in its six hundred pages of text and another two hundred pages of endnotes. This not only pushes the work beyond what can typically be assigned in the classroom but also makes it difficult to glean the more important lessons that are subtly embedded within the work. It is more difficult for the reader to find the primary points when surrounded by so much material. One of his generation’s best historians of antiquarians, Gross has grown closer to antiquarianism himself. Yet these are issues often inherent in classic texts when cultivated over an entire career. Transcendentalists and Their World is a landmark work in social history that will serve as a resource for all historians of nineteenth-century America and scholarly model for generations to come.