Publishers Weekly
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When a small group of 17th-century English religious dissenters crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of a place where they could worship God in their own unique fashion, they were following a dream. These early settlers, the Puritans, paved the way for subsequent American dreamers, and, Cullen (Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition) argues, "you'll never really understand what it means to be an American of any creed, color, or gender if you don't try to imagine the shape of that dream." Subsequent versions of the American Dream have pushed to the fore and, in the process, changed the shape of the nation. Cullen particularly focuses on the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence ("the charter of the American Dream"); Abraham Lincoln, with his rise from log cabin to White House and his dream for a unified nation; and Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality. Our contemporary version of the American Dream seems rather debased in Cullen's eyes-built on the cult of Hollywood and its outlandish dreams of overnight fame and fortune. The book desires to be suggestive rather than exhaustive (as the subtitle "short history" suggests), and there are numerous gaps between the chapters where entire half-centuries and important leaders pass without mention. Its straightforward and engaging narrative style ought to appeal to general readers of American history, and its broader exploration of freedom, equality and shared ideals offers a nice dose of depth as well. 8 b&w photos. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus
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Prep school teacher and historian Cullen, who once recast Bruce Springsteen in the mold of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Born in the U.S.A., 1997), now argues that you can't have the American Dream without at least defining it for your own time. The author begins filtering components with the Puritans, whom he frankly anoints as "annoying" progenitors of the Dream, what with their extreme ideas that included the ever-frustrating concept of predestination, their witch-burnings, and their drive to save the souls of Native Americans in order to annihilate them. But still, Cullen proposes, the Puritans did have a dream. From there it's onward and generally upward as Jefferson struggles with what he knows is a contemporary paradox in basing the Declaration of Independence on the intrinsic equality of all men. Readers will further sense the elusiveness of the American Dream even as Lincoln finally hammers the "inalienable" into legislation eight decades after Jefferson penned it and wistfully wonders if "this, too, shall pass" in a speech given almost as if in a dream state. "Among the worst decisions the Supreme Court ever made," Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) socked the Dream right in the eye, but in doing so, Cullen asserts, opened the door for Martin Luther King Jr. and his adherents of all races to rehabilitate it and send it on its way in the '60s. The author takes something of an intermission from the stuff of pure ideas to visit home ownership as the principal material compulsion embodied in the Dream, locating its crowning manifestation in the prefab wonder of Long Island's Levittown. Finally, in dealing with the inevitable frontier complex of American aspiration, Cullen confronts "the Coast," symbolized by California (where the sun sets, etc.), as perhaps the most potentially heartbreaking yet persistently iridescent of the Dream's layers. This is the beckoning impossible-the one that gets Jay Gatsby killed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's rendering. One man's provocative, worthwhile, and stimulating summation.

Library Journal
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The American Dream, argues historian Cullen (The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past), "is neither a reassuring verity nor an empty bromide but rather a complex idea with manifold implications that cut different ways." Cullen combs the riches of American history to analyze the American dream idea: the settling of America by religious dissenters, the creation of the Declaration of Independence, the influence of Benjamin Franklin and the rise of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln as case studies of upward mobility, the contribution of black Americans to the American Dream, the passage of the Homestead Act and the opportunity for home ownership, and the impact of California (and particularly Hollywood) on the American Dream. From these rich slices of American history, Cullen weaves a historical quilt illustrating key components of the idea. Ending with a nine-page bibliographic essay instead of endnotes and written so informally that the author sometimes talks to the reader in the second person ("So you see"), this work combines the author's personal reflections with a cogent interpretation of American social and intellectual history. For public and academic libraries.-Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Cullen explores American history through its ideals and notions that feed goals from which success and happiness are perceived and secured. At different times the American dream has meant different things. At the founding of the nation, Cullen asserts, the Declaration of Independence embodied the American ideal that all men are created equal. Even with the obvious contradiction of slavery, the essence of this dream allowed for the possibility of racial equality, class mobility, and home ownership--all values that at some point have centered the collective American consciousness. Cullen explores the ideas, hopes, and accomplishments of both native-born Americans and immigrants in developing consensus around the ideals. As the dream varies, Cullen tracks its shifts and the complexities that result in our cultural unity of valued ideals. From the initial ideals of the Declaration of Independence, Cullen moves to the expansion and inclusion of the dream through Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality to, finally, home ownership as the commonly accepted notion of the American dream. --Vernon Ford