• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Support
  • Way of Improvement
  • About John
  • Vita
  • Books
  • Speaking
  • Media Requests

New Review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home

John Fea   |  September 4, 2009 Leave a Comment

Here is a snippet from the latest review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home. This one, which was published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, comes from Marcus Gallo, apparently a graduate student at the University of California-Davis.

John Fea’s well-crafted and readable biography of the diarist Philip Vickers Fithian shows how metropolitan culture from Paris and London tricked down to seemingly isolated rural colonists in the years before the American Revolution. Unfortunately, I could not bring myself to like the book’s principal character. Whereas Fithian’s detractors in the early twentieth century called him an “insufferable prig” (166), I could not shake the sense that he was just a phony, filling his journals with sentiments that he believed an enlightened gentleman of his era would hold. My personal distaste for Fithian aside, his published and unpublished writings demonstrate what Fea calls “the rural Enlightenment.

Filed Under: Way of Improvement

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Patron Access

Way of Improvement blog banner

Episode 51: “The Politics of Tinky Winky”

January 27, 2023 By John Fea

He was Florida’s professor of the year in 2006. Today his courses would be illegal.

January 27, 2023 By John Fea

Zakaria: The nation’s policy on classified documents and “secrecy” is “out-of-control”

January 27, 2023 By John Fea

Teaching John Henry Newman’s “What is a University”

January 27, 2023 By John Fea

What is popular this week at Current?

January 27, 2023 By John Fea

More Blog Posts

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Footer

Contact Forms

General Inquiries
Pitch Us

Search

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide
Subscribe via Email


Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide