A View from Abroad

What does it mean to be an American? As America forged a new nation in the 1770s and 1780s, this critical question occupied people's minds. Not surprisingly, early forms of American identity were brought into relief by focusing on what was not American. Jeanne E. Abrams's latest work focuses on how John Adams and Abigail Adams grappled with this issue when they were in Great Britain and Europe during the 1770s and 1780s carrying out diplomatic duties. In this detailed account of the couple's time abroad, Abrams clearly and convincingly highlights their preoccupation with not only American identity but also America's future. Similar observations were recorded by the young John Quincy Adams and his sister, Nabby, as well as other American visitors and expatriates. A work focusing exclusively on this aspect of the couple's life journey together is long overdue. While scholars of revolutionary America, the early republic, and American diplomacy and foreign relations will not find much surprising in this book, the value of Abrams's work is that it allows us to see vividly the Adamses as well as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, among others, in an exclusively European context. Their sojourns in Great Britain and Europe are not mere sideshows that become overshadowed by critical events of the time at home: the war itself, postrevolutionary rebellion, the Constitutional Convention, and the first stirring of national government. Rather, we can see each of these important founders adrift at sea together, trying to imagine and reimagine national and cultural realignments in a complicated and alien environment, all while grappling with what their own country's existence meant to each other as Americans, but also to the Atlantic world

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