About the book

– PROSE Award in United States History (American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence), 2010
– American Library Association, Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2010.
– Wilson Quarterly Top-Ten Nonfiction Book of the Year, 2010.
Translation: Chinese (forthcoming; Beijing: Han Tang Yang Guang Media).

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW:

* The more America changes, the more it stays the same, according to this engrossing historical survey. Drawing on everything from economic data and mortality statistics to studies of colonial portraiture, University of California–Berkeley sociologist Fischer assesses broad trends across four centuries of American life. His measured but upbeat view of the evolving American experience will disappoint the hell-in-a-handbasket crowd: he finds that Americans have grown more religious and charitable over time, and markedly less violent and nomadic, while remaining roughly unchanged in their propensity toward greed and consumerism. Through it all, he discerns a benignly Tocquevillian trait that he calls “voluntarism,” an individualism softened by unforced solidarity that fulfills itself by freely building communities, be they frontier villages, dissenting churches, egalitarian families, or Internet chat groups. While vast gains in health, wealth, and political freedoms have transformed our lives, they have, he contends, made Americans more voluntaristic and thus “more characteristically ‘American’… insistently independent but still sociable, striving, and sentimental.” Fischer’s lively prose argues these propositions with a wealth of hard evidence and illustrates them with piquant vignettes of people of all eras muddling through. The result is a shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life. (May)

THE WILSON QUARTERLY, Summer 2010, “Pulse of the People,” by Daniel Walker Howe (U.C.L.A.), excerpts:

I [had] advised against the use of the term “American national character” on the grounds that it was misleading, . . . . In any case, it was academically unfashionable. Now, Claude S. Fischer’s Made in America has rehabilitated the expression “American character,” at least for me.. . . .

The book is a sociologist’s take on American social history, a distillation of Fischer’s vast reading. The copious notes, extensive index, and list of works cited take up as much space as the text itself. But Fischer . . . . is not overwhelmed by his ambitious undertaking. He writes not only for his fellow academics but also for the general literate public.. . .

Whether or not the United States is unique, there does seem to be an American character type, and the belief that one can make it however one will—to become rich, popular, healthy, smart— seems a major feature of it. The British students I knew laughingly described their American counterparts: “Americans think death is optional.”

(See full review here.)

BOSTON REVIEW, November/December 2010, “A Question of Character,” by David M. Kennedy (Stanford University), excerpts:

In his brave and ambitious new book, Made in America, Claude S. Fischer energetically pursues that quest [to comprehend the American national character]. Like Tocqueville, he focuses less on formal institutions and laws than on the gossamer tissue of attitudes, values, and beliefs–what Tocqueville referred to as “habits of the heart”– compose what moderns might call the national psyche. Fischer takes a historical approach, yet it is noteworthy that he is not a historian but a sociologist, at the University of California, Berkeley. And his book will take its place in a distinguished scholarly tradition that historians have all but abandoned for nearly half a century.

Claude Fischer, however, dares to ask them [questions about the unifying elements in American diversity], and, as if to challenge his historian colleagues to reenter the discussion of national character, his answers draw on impressively exhaustive reading in the large but disarticulated library of social history that has emerged in the last few decades (the endnotes and bibliography add up to nearly half the pages of Made in America). He concludes not simply that certain traits have persisted among Americans, but that certain processes have long been at work as well. He is principally interested in trends and developments and differences over time—all matters lying squarely within the historian’s province.

Made in America sheds abundant light on the American past and helps us to understand how we arrived at our own historical moment, and who we are today.

(See full review here.)

THE NEW REPUBLIC ONLINE, May 13, 2010: “Past Imperfect,” by Molly Worthen (Yale University), excerpts:

[This] masterful and rewarding book covers three and a half centuries of values, needs, ambitions, and feelings, and debunks a host of common misconceptions about American history. . . .

We do not know our ancestors nearly so well as we thought we did. Fischer’s book is a fine exercise in quiet iconoclasm. His thesis—that over the past three centuries, economic growth and widening perimeters of social inclusion have enabled more people to share a uniquely American collective identity—may sound like heresy to many scholars. In most academic circles, one must avoid phrases like “American mainstream,” “American exceptionalism,” and “grand narrative” at all costs. . . .

Fischer marshals that record into a narrative of growing material wealth and security, expanding opportunity, and the entrenchment of a style of life that he believes shaped “American character” in colonial days, and conclusively defines it now: voluntarism . . .

In an academic climate paralyzed by political correctness and identity politics, Fischer’s narrative is refreshingly universalist and materialist . . .

Made In America is exactly the sort of grand and controversial narrative, exactly the bold test of old assumptions, that is needed to keep the study of American history alive and honest.

(See full review here.)

THE FINANCIAL TIMES, May 24, 2010, by Jonathan Birchall, excerpts:

Everyone likes to generalise about Americans, all 300m of them. But few are likely to be able to do so with the authority of Claude S Fischer, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Made in America, Fischer embarks on a vastly ambitious project: “to sketch how American culture and character changed – or did not change – over the course of the nation’s history”, from the colonial era until now.

That he does so in fewer than 250 pages (there are 200 pages of notes), and in a readable and entertaining way, is a formidable achievement. Fischer narrows his frame of reference by considering the American people’s relationship with five basic aspects of life: physical security, material goods, social groups, public spaces and mental attitude. He concludes that, if anything, prosperity has enabled Americans to become more American ….

(See full review here.)

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION “Page View” (Online), May 19, 2010, by David Glenn, excerpt:

Throughout the book, Fischer warns against gauzy nostalgia. But it’s hard not to hold the book without feeling pangs of regret for the past. One reason is its cover photograph, a 1939 image of a parade in Butte, Montana.

The second reason is the book’s phenomenal scholarly apparatus, which feels like a remnant of a dying age of publishing. Fischer’s text ends on page 246. But then there are 102 pages of endnotes, many of which include long
digressions about topics in historical sociology, including television-viewing, agricultural wages, and suicide. You could give yourself a rich education in American culture by reading these pages alone.

(See full review here.)

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, June 13, 2010: “Old Image, New Portrait,” by Sarah E. Igo (Vanderbilt University), excerpts:

. . . places the concept of national character right in the center of his analysis — indeed, in his title — and proudly claims the mantle of Commager and others in the consensus tradition. Even his argument is reminiscent of Potter’s: “Centuries of material and social expansion enabled more people to become more characteristically ‘American,'” Fischer writes.

What makes Fischer’s task more challenging, however, is that he must contend with the voluminous findings that social historians have produced over the last four decades, often in an effort to dismantle consensus history. Fortunately, he is a master of synthesis, sifting through hundreds of studies of local communities and the lives of ordinary men and women (his footnotes make up a book in themselves) to arrive at what he sees as the defining arcs of American culture from the colonial period to the present. Fischer himself calls this an “outrageously vast and absurdly ambitious goal.” Writing a history like his has a built-in tension, requiring sensitivity to the experiences of disparate Americans but also comfort with broad generalizations.

Fischer filters a mass of material through five themes that span American history: security, goods, groups, public spaces, and “mentality.” That he reaches insightful conclusions about each illustrates the value of the long cultural view. . . .

(See full review here.)

THE TIMES (of London) HIGHER EDUCATION, July 15, 2010, by Allan M. Winkler (Miami University), excerpt:

Made in America is a thoughtful assessment of the patterns of American life over the course of the past several centuries. . . . Made in America has a wealth of important insights and reads well from beginning to end. All in all, it is a lively and intriguing effort to understand the most important elements of American life.

(See full review here.)

CHOICE, October, 2010:

Fischer (Berkeley) plunges headlong into the much-debated issue of the collective character of Americans. Although a sociologist, he shows stunning mastery of a wide range of historical evidence. The book includes comprehensive endnotes, bibliography, and an index that together comprise roughly half the volume. The supporting documentation may prove overwhelming to some readers, but the lively text itself is full of informed examples, analogies, stories, and personal observations that provide additional texture to the analysis. While focusing on a handful of aspects of what it has meant and still means to be American–personal and shared security, materialism and affluence, group life and voluntarism, public space, and shared attitude–Fischer weaves the argument that similarity and diversity need not be mutually exclusive. Scholars in history, the social sciences, and public policy will find much to debate, and even informed laypeople can enjoy the author’s ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Excellent for college and university students as well as an interested general audience. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

THE LIBRARY JOURNAL, May 15, 2010:

In this exhaustively documented volume, Fischer (sociology, Univ. of California, Berkeley; America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone, 1880–1940) asks whether and how the lives of people in the mainstream of American society have changed over the course of time from the Colonial era to the 21st century. Chewing through reams of data (enumerated in 107 pages of works cited and 92 pages of notes), Fischer gauges the state of the American psyche and expounds on the themes of security (safety, economic stability, and health), goods (i.e., consumerism), groups (membership in bourgeois society), public spaces (including political participation), and mentality (self-improvement, religion, education, relationships, etc.) and explores their evolution over time in conventional American society. He credits an ingrained sense of voluntarism in part for maintaining the national character. Fischer’s interpretation leads him to conclude that mainstream American culture and character have changed less than one might have imagined, given the dramatic changes introduced by modernity. VERDICT A thorough work best appreciated by serious readers in sociology and U.S. social history.—Donna L. Davey, New York Univ. Lib.

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, March, 2011, by Wendy Griswold (Northwestern University), excerpt:

Claude Fischer, the eminent Berkeley sociologist who for decades has been setting agendas in urban sociology, inequality, and social history, has the academic street cred to take up Montesquieu’s question [the source of national characters]—everyone knows that Americans have a certain national character—and to try to figure out what it contains and whether it still holds. In Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, Fischer identifies five themes, these being security, goods, groups, public spaces, and mentality, and he shows their distinctive impact upon and expression within American lives. More surprisingly he shows strong evidence of continuities. As he puts it, “The availability and expansion of material security and comfort enabled early American social patterns and culture to expand and solidify, to both delineate and spread an American national character. With growth, more people could participate in that distinctive culture more fully and could become ‘more American’” (pp. 8–9).

To illustrate with a familiar case, Fischer cuts through the debate set off by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000) over whether there has been a decline in Americans’ associational involvements by pointing out that group life for Americans has always been voluntaristic, always involving a covenant (often implicit) between the individual and the group and, thus, the possibility of free exit. In the late 20th century, group boundaries became less formal and membership required less commitment (compare membership in the Masons with membership in the Borders Saturday morning book club), but the essential characteristic of voluntary rather than hereditary membership has not changed since Tocqueville’s day.

One of the fascinating things about Fischer’s argument is how it forces a reconsideration of the causal assumptions rooted in right-wing or left-wing convictions. For example, Fischer shows that during the past century the vast majority of Americans have gained greater personal security, due in large part to federal government programs epitomized by the New Deal (presumably Fischer would see Obamacare as part of this long-term trend). Such increased security has produced nothing like a European welfare-state egalitarianism, however. Instead it has allowed more and more Americans to be more and more American in their approach—that approach being individualistic, competitive, self-scrutinizing, and above all voluntaristic, by which he means that Americans assume that individual efficacy is best achieved through fellowship in groups. There is an echo of Montesquieu here as well. Montesquieu thought that democracies could falter from too much inequality, but also from too extreme equality, which can lead to stagnation. America, so far and contrary to what critics on the left and right believe, has largely avoided succumbing to either extreme.

There seem to be two common ways of doing social history. The first is to state a thesis and draw upon cases and data that support and illustrate it. The second is to plow through volumes of data to induce some patterns that come together into a thesis. The weakness of the first is that thin evidence detracts from its ability to persuade those not already on board; the weakness of the second is that the very thickness and complexity of the amassed evidence qualifies the thesis into oblivion. Very few social historians manage to compile a wealth of evidence toward the support of a clear argument. In fact the best example I can think of is a book called American Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1992), which was written a couple decades ago by … Claude Fischer. America Calling was a brilliant book. Made in America, far broader in its historical scope and its argument, is even better.

THE CLAREMONT REVIEW, Winter 2010, by Wilfred M. McClay (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga), excerpt:

If Fischer has made it permissible once again to speak of national character without the use of scare quotes, then his book will be a very significant achievement in its own right. And this brief review hardly begins to do justice to his thoughtful and imaginative use of American social historians’ “trove of detailed yet evocative studies of ordinary people’s everyday lives in times long ago,” particularly as those studies bear on the meaning of modern American life. This is a scholar who is interested in broad generalizations but who also has a genuine, affectionate interest in understanding the particularities and oddities of the lives he examines, and who renders it all with an engaging sense of modesty and humor. The book is a pleasure to read, and I hope it will have a wide influence. It deserves it.

SOCIOLOGICAL FORUM, June 2011, by John H. Evans (U.C. San Diego), excerpt:

In Made in America, Claude Fischer offers us a well-written monumental work of sociological interpretation. . . . I recommend this well-written sweeping tour of U.S. history to everyone interested in understanding America. This, of course, should be all sociologists who study the United States. The voluntarism Fischer describes really is central to contemporary America, and seeing how it evolved over time in different corners of American life is fascinating.

(See full review here.)

CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY, July 2011, by Peter I. Rose (Smith College), excerpt:

Fischer’s exposition, always evocative, sometimes exasperating . . . is, still, at bottom about the staying power of a spirit that makes the vast majority who
are here, regardless of background, religious faith or political persuasions, feel profoundly American.

(See full review here.)

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY, September 2011, by Amy Richter (Clark University), excerpts:

. . . a sweeping synthetic argument that is grounded in personal stories from the past. . . .(The endnotes and bibliography are as long as the text and serve as a guide to much of the best social history of the last several decades.) . . . . The examples are varied and provocative as he finds evidence of Americans’ voluntaristic mindset not only in the founding of religious congregations, clubs and professional organizations, but also in the celebration of companionate marriages and even the twentieth-century retreat from public life . . . . The juxtapositions as much as the examples provide compelling evidence that Americans have repeatedly sought out social attachments that could be severed by mutual consent. It is difficult not to admire what Fischer has accomplished in Made in America.

(See full review here.)

CHRISTIAN CENTURY, September 20, 2011, by William Vance Trollinger, Jr. (University of Dayton), excerpt:

Despite [these reservations], Made in America is an impressive intellectual achievement, and the book is very much worth reading. One reason it is so impressive is precisely that it is so ambitious. Fischer takes the long view of American history, and in doing so he sees much that those of us who are confined to smaller spaces and shorter time frames do not see.

More than this, he makes remarkable use of the work of social historians (yes, those same historians who adamantly eschew metanarratives), writing that they “have in recent decades mined rich veins of archives, bringing to the surface stories of how Americans of the past really lived.” His 102 pages of endnotes are worth the price of the book.

(See full review here.)

REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, December, 2012, by Elizabeth Fratterigo (Loyola University, Chicago):

Made in America asks important questions of an impressive range of subject matter, and succeeds in prompting us to reconsider what values, attitudes, and beliefs modern Americans share with their predecessors as well as with one another.

(See full review here.)

Not everyone is so positive…..

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY, Winter, 2012, by Richard Pells (University of Texas, Austin), excerpts:

Claude S. Fischer’s Made in America is the sort of book that the majority of historians no longer write. This is not surprising since Fischer is a sociologist, not a historian. Many of his books, however, are, like Made in America, as much examples of social history as they are of academic sociology.
Mostly though, as I read this book, I was reminded of the classic works of historical interpretation and social criticism published during the 1940s and 1950s: Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) and The Age of Reform (1955), Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted (1951), Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), David M. Potter’s People of Plenty (1956), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958), and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956) and White Collar (1951). These books (which those of us who were undergraduates or graduate students in the late 1950s and early 1960s had to read) constituted a golden age in which American historians, sociologists, economists, and political scientists examined—often critically—the nation’s mind and behavior, addressing their works as much to a general audience as to specialists in particular academic disciplines. ….
I wish I could say that Fischer’s book is as original and provocative as those of his postwar predecessors. It is certainly as ambitious. Fischer wants to explain what modern life (defined by industrialization, technology, cities, and wealth) has meant for the average American. ….
…. So Fischer stresses the continuity of what he calls America’s culture and character, its values and assumptions, just as his academic and intellectual forerunners did in the 1950s.
Yet Fischer’s book lacks the edge, the acerbic tone, which characterized the works of Hofstadter, Hartz, Riesman, Whyte, Galbraith, and Mills….. There is a sunniness in Fischer’s appraisal of modern America that was lacking in the more caustic language and arguments of the writers of the 1950s.
Fischer’s book really is an admirable effort to return history—in this case social history—to a consideration of more general themes, to try to uncover the foundations of America’s uniqueness (however livid some of his peers in history departments will become over any scent of American “exceptionalism”). And he is wise enough to acknowledge America’s weaknesses and failures, in the past as well as the present….
I just wish Fischer had approached his subject with a bit more verve and eloquence.

(See full review here.)

… or positive at all….

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES, December, 2010, by Christopher Phelps (University of Nottingham), excerpt:

[T]his work is reminiscent of evocations of American character from the nineteenth century to the early Cold War. Today the claim of a unitary national character will summon scepticism in scholars of American studies, to whom it will seem a throwback to a bygone American order.

(See full review here: DOI:10.1017/S002187581000187)

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JACKET COPY:

Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today?

With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths—such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption—and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years. Skillfully drawing on personal stories of representative Americans, Fischer shows that affluence and social progress have allowed more people to participate fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of “American” —yet at the same time what it means to be an American has retained surprising continuity with much earlier notions of American character.

Firmly in the vein of such classics as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart—yet challenging many of their conclusions—Made in America takes readers beyond the simplicity of headlines and the actions of elites to show us the lives, aspirations, and emotions of ordinary Americans, from the settling of the colonies to the settling of the suburbs.

BLURBS:

“Made in America is a book rich in its findings and judicious in its interpretations. Fischer has uncovered a lot of things that even those of us who have long studied the United States didn’t know, and he has also expertly shown that many of the things we thought we knew are simply wrong. The book will make any reader wiser and more careful in thinking about this strange country in which we live.”

—Robert N. Bellah

“The wants, needs, hopes, and aspirations of generations of Americans-‘all sorts and conditions’ of them-are given careful and circumspect attention in this arresting portrait of a nation ever, it seems, changing, growing. Here is a book that will tell its readers much about how and why a people once struggling to find and define themselves-the very terrain of their country, and too, its values and ideas-became the members of a United States of America whose many variations and sometime contradictions are brought tellingly alive in pages of clear, illuminating, and well-informed prose.”

–Robert Coles

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

1. The Stories We Tell

2. Security

3. Goods

4. Groups

5. Public Spaces

6. Mentality

7. Closing

SPEC’S:

Hardcover: 528 pages (text: 246; notes and references: 282)
E-books: Kindle and Google eBook
Paperback, Fall 2011
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Official publication date: May 1, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0226251438
ISBN-13: 978-0226251431
List Prices: $35; $22 (paper); $12.38 (Kindle)