I've had more than a thousand pages of US history in the past month, and I'm getting tired of it. Not that the books I'm reading aren't very good, and not that the subject isn't interesting, but I've had enough. Now I'm reading Middlekauf's The Glorious Cause. He's clear, funny, and detailed, but I miss Wilentz's passion. Wilentz could be funny too, but his humor was mordant; Middlekauf's is airy and light. He seems to think that everyone was getting a little too excited.* Of course, he never says this; it's in his tone. And actually I'm sure he doesn't think it either. In fact, I'm being terribly unfair, and perhaps it's just like what happened when I heard the Brahms Requiem and the Mozart Requiem in one day, in that order: the juxtaposition made Mozart sound like fluff. I hated myself for thinking that, but couldn't help it. Moral of the story: eighteenth century first, then nineteenth century. Never the other way around.

*which is one's suspicion about the American Revolution to start with. Middlekauf's introduction insists that there's no irony in the title. Later on, he admits, "On the surface the Americans' preoccupation with their property … seems petty, demeaning, poor stuff with which to make a revolution." He tries to explain why it wasn't, but... One just has to assume that the ideas of "rights" and "property" were on a seamless continuum — not such a hare-brained notion in the days when small farmers could be economically independent, before the crop-lien system. But still!