the48er

U.S. History to 1877

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe

The latest installment of the Oxford History of the United States explores the Age of Jackson (a.k.a. the Market Revolution), courtesy of an Oxford and UCLA American history prof emeritus. Howe's big, sweeping overview of an expansionist and deeply transformative period in U.S. history is a pleasure to read for its elegantly direct prose, soundness of structure and lucidity of argument. After 850 pages he concludes,

In 1848, it seemed that the greatness of the American people had been shown by their extensive recent conquests across the continent. Later, that greatness could seem affirmed by the preservation of the Union, industrial might, commercial influence, scientific research, and victories over global enemies. Later still, perhaps that greatness might be seen in the extent to which the dreams of 1848 feminists and abolitionists have at length been realized. History works on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive its directions but imperfectly. Like the people of 1848, we look both with awe and uncertainty at what God hath wrought in the United States of America.

What Hath God Wrought ... pub'd September 29, 2007 by Oxford University Press, USA

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign by Edward J. Larson

The election of 1800 established many of the basic realities of subsequent American national politics. Two political parties emerged: one tending toward cultural conservatism and authoritarianism, the other toward a more liberal republicanism. New England's political inclinations differed sharply from those of the South. The campaign was a crassly commercial pander-fest by the standards of the day; it was dirty and inflammatory even by our own standards. A Pepperdine law prof and winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize (for his Summer for the Gods) tells the story engrossingly, tracing not only the development of now familiar political practices, but also of an election in many respects entirely unlike those of today. The months-long voting process -- for which only about 10 percent of the population was enfranchised -- ended in a tie between Jefferson and his vice-presidential "running mate," Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives settled it in Jefferson's favor, and it took a Constitutional amendment to ensure that there could be no such outcome in the future.

Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD.

A Magnificent Catastrophe ... published September 18, 2007 by Free Press

Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America
by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Despite the fact that 2007 marks the 500th anniversary of America's naming, the namesake's near-anonymity had somehow persisted -- prior to this widely praised bio. Vespucci is vividly revealed as a self- promoting hustler in an often gruesomely violent 15th-century Florence. He was in many ways a prototypical Age of Discovery explorer -- some attributes of which are counterintuitive. Says Fernández-Armesto,

At every stage of his life, every shift in his trajectory, every moment of self- reinvention, he was in flight from poverty and failure. That, I think, was the background of most late medieval adventurers who abandoned the Mediterranean for the Atlantic. To leave a calm and familiar sea for oceans of uncertain hazards, ambition may be enough to draw you, but desperation will surely drive you. Not until his life was almost over did Vespucci achieve security and something like the fame and honor his father had schooled him to crave. That fame has remained precarious, the honor spattered with suspicions and reproaches. In retrospect, his life seems a series of wrong choices.

Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD and mp3 CD.

Amerigo ... published August 7, 2007 by Random House

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea
by Richard Kluger

In 1802 America's populace was essentially hemmed between the Atlantic and the Appalachians, from Maine to the border with Spanish Florida. Looking west, the nation ended at the Mississippi River. Over the next 46 years, however, the country would acquire from European and Mexican governments claims to most everything west to the Pacific -- and Florida. Further acquisitions would follow. Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his Ashes to Ashes, provides an epic account of Manifest Destiny writ large, beginning -- literally -- with "The Spaniards came first." Kluger writes novels as well as nonfiction, and he's given to literary flourishes: sometimes to advantage, other times not. But overall the book works well, and that's no small matter. American exceptionalism remains at the core of myriad problems for billions of non-Americans, as well as for America itself. One might think it's a subject that merits revisiting often.

Seizing Destiny ... published August 7, 2007 by Knopf

Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life by Kingsley M. Bray

Arguably the most iconic of Native Americans, Crazy Horse has proved as elusive a figure for would-be biographers as he once was for the American soldiers against whom he fought. Among those who've previously issued less-than-authoritative bios are Larry McMurtry, Stephen Ambrose and Mari Sandoz. So it's interesting that Kingsley, a British medical books merchant, has in some critics' estimations succeeded where well-established American writers have failed. Bray draws heavily on archival records, augmenting his solid scholarship by mining early 20th-century interviews with those who'd been Crazy Horse's contemporaries 50 years earlier, as well as pertinent contributions from 21st-century Lakota commentators. The author makes a point of keeping his subject within the context of his Lakota culture, and of portraying the warrior as a quiet, thoughtful, pious man, deeply concerned about his people's welfare.

Crazy Horse ... published October 30, 2006 by University of Oklahoma Press

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides

An editor at Outside magazine and the highly acclaimed author of 2001's Ghost Soldiers offers a crisp, lyrical, critically lauded history of the consequences of Manifest Destiny in what is now the American Southwest, where hero and villain were often the same person. That's especially so of the book's central figure, Kit Carson. The author told an interviewer at his former publication,

He went everywhere, knew everybody, and was something of a gentleman. But he's most known for the brutal war on the Navajos. Kit Carson's name has become shorthand for "white domination" among tribes. He's lately started to eclipse Custer as the bad guy in Indian America. But he was much more complicated than Custer. And his relationship to Native Americans was more varied. I don't let Carson off the hook morally, but I don't think comparisons to Hitler are fair, either. ... The real villain is his boss, General James Carleton, who came up with the scorched-earth policy of moving the Navajo.

*Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD

Blood and Thunder ... published October 3, 2006 by DoubleDay

Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution by Mark Puls

Samuel Adams was once viewed as the father of the American Revolution, but for a variety of not very good reasons, he's slipped into an obscurity now relieved mainly by beer commercials. With this slim but enlightening popular biography, Puls, a veteran journalist and co-author of the acclaimed Uncommon Valor, contributes to the restoration of Adams to his rightful place. Says the author,

In the prewar struggle, Adams emerged as the leading patriot strategist as well as the most influential political writer on the continent. His hand was behind nearly every major protest over royal authority in America. It was Adams who, at a Boston town meeting in 1764, made the first call for the colonies to unite in opposition to British taxes, which led to the Stamp Act Congress a year later. He was the first leader to claim that Parliament had no legal authority in America. He pioneered strategies of civil disobedience such as boycotts, and united colonial legislatures with a circular letter stating colonial rights.

Samuel Adams ... published October 3, 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan

Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution,
And the Birth of Modern Nations by Craig Nelson

The author's a good storyteller, and there's no richer subject than Thomas Paine: arguably both the greatest and most overlooked Founder. Eric Foner's Tom Paine and Revolutionary America may still be the gold standard regarding Paine, but there's something special about the fact that Nelson set out to evoke his subject stylistically as well as narratively -- and succeeded. He notes that while Paine

was a founder of both the USA and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase "United States of America" and the author of the three biggest bestsellers of the 18th C., he is known today by the educated public almost solely through biographies for children. At the same time, since he wholeheartedly followed a motto that life should be "a daring adventure, or nothing," his personal drama and historic achievements have inspired a never-ending chain of advocates, apostles and cultists. ¶ Over the ensuing centuries, Paine would become the most controversial figure of the American Revolutionary era, a black sheep founding father who inspired worship, shunning and vituperation in remarkably equal measure.

Thomas Paine ... published September 21, 2006 by Viking Adult

Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann

For generations, Southern apologists saw to it that America's understanding of its post-Civil War Reconstruction went something like this: After the federal troops went home, indefatigable Southerners "redeemed" their homeland from the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and dissolute freedmen who'd ruined it. So we've been told for generations; the 50-year effort to untell that Big Lie herein gets a healthy boost.

To an extent, what Lemann (and historians such as Garrett Epps and Eric Foner) is (are) saying is that the Civil War didn't end until 1876, and it wasn't the North that won: the Slave Power in many ways prevailed. Lemann shows that heavily armed and diabolically and relentlessly violent white Southern males made extensive use of murder and various other kinds of terrorism effectively to nullify both the spirit and in many cases the letter of the constitutional amendments passed at the end of the War.

*Also available on Audio CD

Redemption ... published September 5, 2006 by Farrar Straus Giroux

In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery,
And the Making of a Nation by Francois Furstenberg

Immediately after the American Revolution, George Washington and company were still viewed as mere mortals; the Declaration and Constitution, mainly as formalities. In a scholarly first effort by a young but impressively credentialed U-Montreal history prof, we see the mechanics by which the former were deified and the latter scripturalized. Furstenberg draws heavily on "civic texts": newspapers, almanacs, schoolbooks, and various examples of popular culture. With these he shows that people such as Parson Weems, Noah Webster, Matthew Carey and Caleb Bingham may be the true "Founding Fathers," since it was they (and not Washington, et. al.) who promulgated the idea of one unified nation. Unfortunately, slavery was an integral part of the American nationalism they helped sell, a disease that took deep root in the American psyche, still haunting us today.

WPR featured Furstenberg on the Fourth of July -- the same day he published this item in the NY Times.

*Also available on Audio CD and mp3 CD

In the Name of the Father ... published June 22, 2006 by Penguin Press HC

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick

The bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of Sea of Glory and In the Heart of the Sea now charts the course of the Pilgrims -- from their 1620 Plymouth landing through King Phillip's War (1675-76). Philbrick's is a vivid and fascinating look at an often overlooked period of U.S. history that turns out to be troublingly like our own. While the tale of the Pilgrims usually starts on a ship bound for Plymouth Rock and ends with Thanksgiving dinner, Philbrick's book is fascinating for its additional exploration of the ensuing half-century of wary but creative co-existence between Pilgrims and Native Americans. He shows that the precedent-setting but unusually multifaceted war that ended the long truce killed 5,000 people (three-fourths of them Indian) of a total population of 70,000. Many of the Indians who survived, we learn, were sent into Caribbean slavery.

*Also available on Audio CD, either unabridged and in abridgment

Mayflower ... published May 9, 2006 by Viking

Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom by Robert C. Williams

New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley was one of mid-19th century America's most influential reformers and opinion shapers. Though Greeley's often been caricatured as little more than an eccentric loose cannon, this first full biography in almost 50 years restores some well-deserved dignity and stature to a giant of American history. Known in his own era as "Uncle Horace" (à la "Uncle Walter"), Greeley raised the bar for journalism in antebellum America by keeping his Tribune relatively free of the salacious schlock favored by many journals of the day and filling it instead with sound reporting and intelligent features. His own writing, often on behalf of abolitionism or worker's rights, was superb. Says Williams, a retired history prof, "[H]e could make the language sing for ordinary Americans, writing a colloquial prose they could easily understand. And the audience for his written words was enormous and attentive."

Horace Greeley ... published May 1, 2006 by NYU Press

The House: The History of the House of Representatives
by Robert V. Remini

A distinguished University of Illinois-Chicago emeritus, award-winning history writer, and now official historian of the U.S. House delivers a lively chronicle of that chamber from its inception to the present that's a joy to read. Along the way, Remini treats his readers to a fine blend of judicious scholarship and well-crafted prose. He covers the House's titans (Henry Clay, Sam Rayburn, et. al.) but also its ne'er-do-wells. Though the current House reeks with DeLay and Co.'s corruption, that crew looks pretty tame next to the like of Dan Sickles, who shot his wife's lover dead in La Fayette Square or Henry A. Wise, at whose insistence a duel that would otherwise have ended harmlessly instead escalated to the point of claiming Maine Rep. Jonathan Cilley's life. The historical photos and assorted other graphics in this volume are excellent, and there's a full complement of helpful and interesting appendices.

The House ... published April 25, 2006 by Collins

The War That Made America:
A Short History of the French and Indian War by Fred Anderson

Congrats to the author for turning an 18th-century war about which most Americans knew nothing into a large and thriving 21st-century sub-industry. In 2000 he published his massive Crucible of War to wide critical acclaim and notable commercial success. Now comes his concise but fully wrought companion book to a major PBS miniseries (available soon on DVD). Says Anderson of the French and Indian War,

Winston Churchill described it as "the first world war." It overthrew what had been stable balances of power in both Europe and North America and helped to foster a secessionist rebellion in Britain's North American colonies. That the man who triggered the war by trying to project British power into the heart of the continent should have gone on to lead an American revolutionary army and then to serve as the first president of the United States is surely one of the greater ironies in a national history that abounds in them.

*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD

The War That Made America ... first published December 1, 2005 by Viking

The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz

The Founding Fathers were not big fans of democracy, agreeing with such thinkers as Cicero and Montesquieu that mixed government (combining elements of delegated autocracy and meritocracy with democracy) was best. Wilentz traces the decline of mixed government and the rise of democracy from the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson to those of Abraham Lincoln. With almost 800 pages (nearly 1,000 in paperback) of dense text and nearly 150 more of notes, this one's a major doorstop, but the basic questions Wilentz sets out to answer demand no less: Who were the people and what were the forces that transformed America from a mixed-government republic in 1800 to a nation strongly biased toward democracy alone six decades later (and, of course, today)? Garry Wills explores many related issues (while focusing on Jefferson's and Madison's administrations) in his characteristically virtuoso Henry Adams and The Making of America.

The Rise of American Democracy ... first published October 24, 2005 by W. W. Norton

Henry Adams and the Making of America by Garry Wills

Garry Wills' reconsideration of Henry Adams and the "making of America" during the Jefferson and Madison administrations is as superb as anything he's done. As is the case with virtually all of his work, this volume offers direct yet elegantly crafted prose, meticulous research, and startlingly original and consequential ideas. As the title suggests, Wills (author of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winner Lincoln at Gettysburg) simultaneously develops two themes: that Adams' work (and especially his nine-volume History of the United States [1801 to 1817] ) constitutes some of the finest, most important -- and most egregiously undervalued -- American historical scholarship to be found anywhere; and that the America we "know" was to a great extent created during the Jeffersonians' 16 years in office. It's a brilliant duality that essentially teams Adams and Wills, who in combination provide the reader with a panoramic but detailed look at how America got to be America.

Henry Adams and the Making of America ... pub'd Sept. 14, 2005 by Houghton Mifflin

Andrew Jackson by H.W. Brands

A Texas A&M history prof and author of some 20 major books provides a solid personal biography of Andrew Jackson. Brands' The First American helped revive interest in Ben Franklin, and one hopes this volume does something similar for Jackson. For while the author does a fine job of animating Jackson's life for the reader, he generally leaves to others the job of thoroughly exploring that life's legacies to America.

Some have faulted Brands for what they see as his kid-glove treatment of the most personally violent man ever elected president -- and one who vigorously prosecuted genocidal policies against Native Americans. Another underexplored element of Jackson's significance is the second American Revolution that he led and that replaced the Founders' mixed-government republic with a nation ostensibly (if certainly not in practice) committed to democracy alone. Brands addresses "Jacksonian democracy" throughout, but the scope of his work limits the extent to which he can develop the idea. Despite his omissions, though, Brands succeeds in reminding us of some primordial American roots that we forget at our own -- and the world's -- peril.

*Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD.

Andrew Jackson ... published October 5, 2005 by Doubleday

1491 by Charles C. Mann

An accurate picture of the Americas before European arrival had been unavailable for centuries, buried under an accumulation of time and histories written by those with insufficient information on their subjects. But Charles Mann, who cheerfully claims descent from "the first white person hanged in North America," presents voluminous evidence that before Columbus, the Western Hemisphere was

a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed. Now, though, it is returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look.

Having clearly "looked" at the latest research with commendable tenacity and thoroughness, Mann uses well-crafted, pleasant-to-read prose to take the reader on an expertly guided romp up and down the continents and across dozens of millennia, via a work that's lavishly illustrated and scrupulously sourced.

*Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD.

1491 ... first published August 9, 2005 by Knopf

Revolutionary Mothers by Carol Berkin

America's Revolutionary War was a civil war that lasted considerably longer and often created circumstances more brutal and chaotic -- especially for women -- than those of the Civil War. Carol Berkin does a fine job of dispelling cozy illusions about nature of the Revolution and of stripping away the two centuries of airbrushing that have obscured the vital roles that women played in the nation's founding.

She shows that in addition to the interests of revolutionaries and loyalists, those of neutrals, Indians, and black slaves were also at stake -- and often at odds. Homelessness was pervasive, basic commodities were scarce and expensive, and violence was everywhere. Wrote a British officer on Staten Island, "[T]he fresh meat our men have got here has made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished." Nevertheless, most women endured, overcame, and in the process expanded popular notions of what women could do and be.

Revolutionary Mothers ... first published February 1, 2005 by Knopf