Testaments to the unique character of ''The Useful Arts'' and ''The Fine Arts'' follow, with Joseph Hopkinson, in an address to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, viewing taste as a matter of degree ''always capable of much improvement.'' The concluding section projects aspects and incidents of ''Order and Disorder,'' from abused social mobility (Hugh Henry Brackenridge) to Gabriel's insurrection (documented but little discussed) to Charles Jared Ingersoll's tacit repudiation of his Tory heritage: 'here there is no populace, no peasantry, only people.' America had come to new terms with itself, and this documentary history achieves independent stature by focusing on the difficult process. Janson condemns, Jefferson defends, and a particularly interesting airing of ''The Problem of Luxury'' emerges from the debate over Boston's innocuous Sans Souci Club.

The question arose, could the American environment sustain a civilization? were brutality and vulgarity inevitable? Englishman Charles W. But the alliance between the Enlightenment and American Protestantism disintegrated and the task of maintaining moral and civic virtue felt to evangelical sects and voluntary societies, represented here by their prime movers. For the commencement exercises he recited The Rising Glory of America, a. Under ''The Promise of America,'' John Adams' rational idealism is complemented by Samuel Hopkins' millenarian pragmatism (''there will be a fulness and plenty of all the necessaries and conveniences of life''). Hugh Henry Brackenridge, American author of the first novel portraying.

At first, it seemed, America would realize the ideals of the Enlightenment and constitute a new classical republic, an elite-emulating ''homogeneous community of calculated austerity infused with reason and civic virtue'' by 1820, republicanism had taken an unexpected turn, expressing individual materialism, ''bumptious nationalism and the defiant abandonment of Europe.'' Such is the thesis of this newest volume in the American Culture Series, closely and cogently argued and considerably amplified in the introduction not surprisingly, the selections substantiate the argument.

The rising glory of america