Burstein, Andrew

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Columbia University, A.B.A., 1974; University of Michigan, M.A., 1975; University of Virginia, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES: Office—University of Tulsa, 600 S. College, Tulsa, OK 74104. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, assistant professor of history; University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, Mary Frances Barnard Chair in Nineteenth-Century American History, 2000–. Has appeared on Ken Burns's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television special Thomas Jefferson, and on cable channel programs, including C-SPAN's "American Presidents" series. Historical consultant for films.

MEMBER: American Antiquarian Society.

WRITINGS:

The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 1995.

Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image, Hill and Wang (New York, NY), 1999.

America's Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

Letters from the Head and Heart: Writings of Thomas Jefferson, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor, with Nancy Isenberg) Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.

Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including the Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Early American Literature.

SIDELIGHTS: Historian Andrew Burstein's The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist is a study of a president who carefully guarded his privacy. Choice reviewer M.L. Dolan said Burstein's book "elucidates the enigma of Jefferson's personality, character, and private life more fully and successfully than any previous study." Mortimer Sellers wrote in Washington Post Book World that Burstein's "main contribution … lies in his revelation of the extent to which passion ruled the man's life."

Jefferson left his account books, gardening notes, recipes, and architectural drawings, along with some eighteen thousand letters that he wrote and received from family and friends between 1783 and 1826, and a scrapbook of quotations that he collected while in college. In the latter, Burstein found many references to Laurence Sterne, advocate of the "principle that thought without feeling is as useless as feeling without reason." Randolph B. Campbell wrote in Mississippi Quarterly that Burstein finds Jefferson's admiration of Sterne "an important early indication that the Virginian found a world ruled by reason insufficient and sought to develop sentiment and imagination as well. The interpretation should immediately get the attention of readers accustomed to thinking of Jefferson as essentially a rationalist intellectual, as a man whose head usually controlled his heart."

In The Inner Jefferson, Burstein explores Jefferson's personal relationships, offering information about his friendship with Parisian Maria Cosway. He shows that Jefferson's family was the center of his life, and that after his wife and youngest daughter died, he was extremely close to his surviving daughter, Martha, who was named for her mother. "Has Burstein managed to unlock the Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson?," asked Herbert Sloan in Insight on the News. "Is he right to argue that 'the man most renowned in American history for the pursuit of happiness could not pursue happiness without feeling stress?'" Sloan concluded that "while Burstein may not have the last word, his is as good a portrait as we are likely to have for some time to come."

Burstein's second book, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image, was published in 1999. History contributor Frank A. Cassell wrote that in Sentimental Democracy "Burstein makes an important contribution to the literature of national character by detailing the powerful interplay of intellect and emotion in the formative years of the republic. He shows that the deepest well-springs of American nationality arose from people's feelings and aspirations, not from cold logic."

Burstein's sources for Sentimental Democracy included newspapers, books, letters, government records, speeches, and sermons. In the book, he documents the changes in the national character following the Revolution as influenced by geographic expansion, population increases, and industrialization, which resulted in a more masculine form of sentimentality. He notes that by the 1830s, the qualities of compassion, benevolence, and generosity were associated more with women. Booklist reviewer Bryce Christensen noted that with westward expansion, frontiersmen like Andrew Jackson "brought a more reckless and boisterous emotionalism into the national culture."

Times Literary Supplement contributor Andrew Stark called Sentimental Democracy "an accomplished work of history…. But the book is also blind, not only in the sense that it makes little attempt to theorize about the meaning of 'sympathy,' 'sentimentality,' and other concepts Burstein locates at the core of Revolutionary political discourse, but insofar as it fails to see the road in front of it." Stark argued that the term "virtuous," used to describe male prowess during Revolutionary times, "has long since mutated into an adjective for female reticence." The word "vicious," once used to describe the moral weakness of humans, today "more readily conjures up the threatening feral qualities of an animal."

In America's Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence, Burstein painted a portrait of the decades leading up to a landmark date, July 4, 1826, the half-century anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While he gave some idea of the life and times of the common person, he particularly treated such famous personages as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Layfayette, Ethan Allen Brown, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. He drew on personal journals, newspapers, and other popular literature. Booklist critic Vernon Ford described the work as an "excellent work for viewing a period in U.S. history," a view seconded by Robert Saunderson of School Library Journal, who called the work an "engaging historical analysis." Recommending this history highly, Library Journal reviewer Thomas J. Schaeper predicted that America's Jubilee would appeal to a "wide general readership."

Burstein's The Passions of Andrew Jackson attempts to shed light on one of the most complicated presidents in U.S. history. From his humble origins, which was in stark contrast to those who were elected before him, to his overbearing personality, which frequently erupted into violence, he claimed to be a man of the people while simultaneously exercising brutal control over Native Americans and African Americans alike. He was the first of a new generation of leaders, one whose policies and leadership undeniably shaped the expansion of the young country. Writing in Booklist, Jay Freeman called the book "a solid work of historical inquiry," yet a writer for Kirkus Reviews, despite summarizing the book as "nicely written and generally well-considered," noted that Burstein treats Jackson harshly in passages about his early frontier heroism, or lack thereof, and his paranoia, sexual appetites, and staunch belief in slavery.

Burstein returned to Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. In this work, he attempts to divine the leader's unspoken beliefs from the evidence he left behind in his final, post-presidential years, when he was beset by financial difficulties and declining health. Among these beliefs, Burstein claims, are that the president did not believe in God in a traditional sense, although he considered Jesus a philosopher and the Bible a historical document. He also believed agrarian life was more evolved than urban life, that his political rivals were weak-willed and passive, and that African Americans were inferior to whites. A writer for Kirkus Reviews called the book "most illuminating," and a reviewer for Publishers Weekly called it a "splendid book [that] shows old Jefferson standing at the precipice, taking stock and perhaps judging himself more harshly than any God might."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Burstein, Andrew, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 1999, Bryce Christensen, review of Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image, p. 1510; December 15, 2000, Vernon Ford, review of America's Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence, p. 782; January 1, 2003, Jay Freeman, review of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, p. 838.

Choice, April, 1996, M.L. Dolan, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 1377.

Historian, winter, 1997, Robert McColley, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 422.

History, summer, 1999, Frank A. Cassell, review of Sentimental Democracy, p. 155.

Insight on the News, November 27, 1995, Herbert Sloan, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 25.

Journal of American History, December, 1996, Norman Risjord, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 980.

Journal of Southern History, February, 1997, Philip Greven, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 153.

Journal of the Early Republic, winter, 1997, Jack N. Rakove, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 677.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1999, review of Sentimental Democracy, p. 343; November 15, 2002, review of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, p. 1667; December 15, 2004, review of Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, p. 1175.

Library Journal, November 15, 1995, Thomas J. Schaeper, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 82; April 15, 1999, Thomas J. Schaeper, review of Sentimental Democracy, p. 116; January, 2001, Thomas J. Schaeper, review of America's Jubilee, p. 129; January, 2003, Charles L. Lumpkins, review of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, p. 130.

Mississippi Quarterly, winter, 1996, Randolph B. Campbell, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 215.

New York Review of Books, October 7, 1999, Gordon S. Wood, "The American Love Boat," p. 40.

Publishers Weekly, March 8, 1999, review of Sentimental Democracy, p. 53; December 2, 2002, review of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, p. 41; December 13, 2004, review of Jefferson's Secrets, p. 53.

Reviews in American History, September, 1996, Robert E. Shalhope, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 401; January 8, 2001, review of America's Jubilee, p. 60.

School Library Journal, June, 2001, Robert Saunderson, review of America's Jubilee, p. 186.

Southern Cultures, summer, 2006, Kristofer Ray, review of Jefferson's Secrets, p. 92.

Thomas Jefferson Law Review, spring, 1996, Robert A. Poulsen, review of The Inner Jefferson, pp. 117-120.

Times Literary Supplement, August 20, 1999, Andrew Stark, "Now Feel the Pain," p. 6.

U.S. News & World Report, May 24, 1999, Wray Herbert, "Emotional America" (interview), p. 63.

Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, summer, 1996, Garrett Ward Sheldon, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 405.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1997, James Morton Smith, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 356.

Washington Post Book World, December, 1995, Mortimer Sellers, "The Sage of Sensibility," p. 1.

William and Mary Quarterly, April, 1999, Paul Bourke, review of The Inner Jefferson, p. 459.

Wilson Quarterly, spring, 2005, Christopher Hitchens, review of Jefferson's Secrets, p. 107.