Hofstadter’s books are, however, not just collections of essays in each he advanced a major new thesis about American history. In America at 1750, following an introductory discussion of population and immigration, three chapters examine white and black servitude in the colonies, three others treat religion in the New World, and one comprehensive chapter analyzes “The Middle-Class World.” His mind was that of the essayist, rather than that of the novelist, and all his books, beginning with Social Darwinism in American Thought (1945), are collections of discrete chapters dealing with the same theme rather than connected narratives. In private a superb raconteur and mimic, he avoided in his writings the colorful anecdote, the vivid description.

the shank of history,” Hofstadter was never much interested in story-telling. Willing in theory to concede that “the narrative is. Like Hofstadter’s previous books, America at 1750 is analytical rather than narrative history. Now published as America at 1750: A Social Portrait, these essays offer both a brilliant interpretation of Colonial society on the eve of the Revolution and a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the most gifted and influential of American historians. He had completed only eight chapters of what would have formed the introductory section of the first volume of his trilogy. Eighteen months later he died of leukemia at the age of fifty-four. He estimated that this ambitious undertaking would run to 1,500,000 words and might occupy him for the next eighteen years. Knopf, the prospectus for a three-volume comprehensive history of the United States, extending from 1750 to the present.

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America at 1750 by Richard Hofstadter