Teaching the Way of Improvement Leads Home

I taught The Way of Improvement Leads Home for the first time today.  It was a strange experience.  The students had a hard time reading the text critically and, if they did, they certainly did not feel comfortable talking about their criticisms with the author in the room leading the discussion.

Yet, after some initial awkwardness, I managed to find my groove.  We started with the Introduction.  We discussed the meaning of the American Enlightenment in terms of self-improvement.  We wondered if the idea of self-improvement is a universal idea that defines humanity, or an idea that emerged out of a particular moment in history.  (The book argues the latter). In other words, was there a time in human history when people did not understand their identity in terms of upward mobility or in terms of “making something” of themselves.

When this idea of self-improvement did begin to catch on in eighteenth-century America, the transition from an older way of understanding life defined by land and agriculture did not easily disappear.  Fithian’s story is about a particular moment in time when there was still a great deal of tension between the “way of improvement” and “home.”

We then moved on to chapter one–“A Cohansey Home.”  In this chapter I try to explain the connection that Fithian had to the communities where he was raised–the small towns along the Cohansey River in southern New Jersey.  Only by explaining Fithian’s agricultural childhood and connection to this place can one fully understand the tensions he would later feel between his cosmopolitan ambitions and his local attachments.

Finally, we discussed chapter two: “A Presbyterian Conversion.”  Here I tried to take the students into my historiographical mindset when I wrote the book.  My discussion of the First Great Awakening centers on the revival’s divisiveness and the Presbyterian rejection of such passion-driven, anti-authoritative, and divisive religious behavior in the 1750s and 1760s.  In other words, the line between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution is not as straight as some evangelical Whig historians want to make it.

Anyway, I realized for the first time what several reviewers had already told me.  The Way of Improvement Leads Home is a very undergraduate-friendly and teachable book. 

We continue the discussion on Monday.

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