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What Hath God Wrought
- The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848
- Narrated by: Patrick Cullen
- Length: 32 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's summary
Pulitzer Prize, History, 2008
In this addition to the esteemed Oxford History of the United States series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the Battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era of revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated America's expansion and prompted the rise of mass political parties.
He examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party but contends that John Quincy Adams and other advocates of public education, economic integration, and the rights of blacks, women, and Indians were the true prophets of America's future.
Howe's panoramic narrative - weaving together social, economic, and cultural history with political and military events - culminates in the controversial but brilliantly executed war against Mexico that gained California and Texas for America.
Please note: The individual volumes of the series have not been published in historical order. What Hath God Wrought is number V in The Oxford History of the United States.
Critic reviews
"He is a genuine rarity: an English intellectual who not merely writes about the United States but actually understands it." ( Washington Post)
"A stunning synthesis....it is a rare thing to encounter a book so magisterial and judicious and also so compelling." ( Chicago Tribune)
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers
- By: Brion McClanahan Ph. D.
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Here to rescue the reputations of our Founding Fathers from the plague of modern political correctness is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers. Author and Professor Brion McClanahan shows how patriots like Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton laid the foundations of American civil liberty and had a better understanding of the problems facing us today than our current Congress.
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Highly Recommended
- By Colleen H. on 08-13-09
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History
- By: Thomas E. Woods Jr.
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything, well, almost everything, you know about American history is wrong because most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academic historians who treat their biases as fact. But fear not; Professor Thomas Woods refutes the popular myths in The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
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Highly recommended! Not for the faint of heart!
- By RAC on 12-12-05
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The Real Lincoln
- A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
- By: Thomas J. Dilorenzo
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Most Americans consider Abraham Lincoln to be the greatest president in history. His legend as the Great Emancipator has grown to mythic proportions as hundreds of books, a national holiday, and a monument in Washington, D.C., extol his heroism and martyrdom. But what if most everything you knew about Lincoln were false? What if, instead of an American hero who sought to free the slaves, Lincoln were in fact a calculating politician who waged the bloodiest war in American history in order to build an empire that rivaled Great Britain's?
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OpEd Disguised as History
- By John McDowell on 10-30-18
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A Short History of the United States
- By: Robert V. Remini
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Abridged
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In addition, Remini explains the reasons for the nation's unique and enduring strengths, its artistic and cultural accomplishments, its genius in developing new products to sell to the world, and its abiding commitment to individual freedoms.
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Very thorough, easy listen, heavy on US Presidents
- By Craig on 01-02-09
By: Robert V. Remini
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The Birth of Modern Politics
- Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828
- By: Lynn Hudson Parson
- Narrated by: Milton Bagby
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political resume were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life.
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a very good popular history book
- By D. Littman on 01-29-10
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Victorious Century
- The United Kingdom, 1800-1906
- By: David Cannadine
- Narrated by: Kris Dyer
- Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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To live in 19th-century Britain was to experience an astonishing series of changes, of a kind for which there was simply no precedent. There were revolutions in transport, communication and work; cities grew vast; and scientific ideas made the intellectual landscape unrecognisable. This was an exhilarating time but also a horrifying one. In his new book, David Cannadine has created a bold, fascinating new interpretation of the British 19th century in all its energy and dynamism, darkness and vice.
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Blandly toeing the line between macro and micro
- By Max Shafer-landau on 10-17-17
By: David Cannadine
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Inhuman Bondage
- The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
- By: David Brion Davis
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.
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Very Useful Contribution
- By Biggar Thomas on 06-14-08
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The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.
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Changed the Way I Think
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The Impending Crisis
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A Slog for Sure
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Helps the dots of history to today.
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If you need to sleep...
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Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing 30 years of scholarship, Gordon S. Wood's Pulitzer Prize–winning book analyzes the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society with feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided between the nobility and "the Herd."
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Changed the Way I Think
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A staple
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This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
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one of the best audiobooks I've read recently
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Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History. In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer’s legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer’s historical caricature, revealing a volatile, contradictory, intense person - capable yet insecure, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (he was court-martialed twice in six years).
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Custer and his times
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Encounters at the Heart of the World
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Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were, for centuries, at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science.
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Just okay
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Washington's Crossing
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This New York Times best seller is a thrilling account of one of the most pivotal moments in United States history. Six months after the Declaration of Independence, America was nearly defeated. Then on Christmas night, George Washington led his men across the Delaware River to destroy the Hessians at Trenton. A week later Americans held off a counterattack, and in a brilliant tactical move, Washington crept behind the British army to win another victory. The momentum had reversed.
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Particularly Good Military History
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American Revolutions
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- Unabridged
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The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell.
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Best book on the American Revolution that I have read
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The Middle Ground
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An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations—stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut.
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A great book, not for beginners
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By: Richard White
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An Empire on the Edge
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- By: Nick Bunker
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- Unabridged
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The story of the American Revolution told from the unique perspective of British Parliament and the streets of London, rather than that of the Colonies. Here, Nick Bunker explores and illuminates the dramatic chain of events that led to the outbreak of the war-revealing a tale of muddle, mistakes, and misunderstandings by men in London that led to the Boston tea party and then to the decision to send redcoats into action against the minutemen.
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Hard to put down
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By: Nick Bunker
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The Race Beat
- The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
- By: Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff
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Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen - first black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.
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A fascinating inside look at history
- By Ron on 09-22-09
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The Gulf
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- Unabridged
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When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.
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Decolonize gulf history
- By Jesse Carr on 05-02-18
By: Jack E. Davis
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Whirlwind
- The American Revolution and the War That Won It
- By: John Ferling
- Narrated by: Bo Foxworth
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid a great collection of scholarship and narrative history on the Revolutionary War and the American struggle for independence, there is a gaping hole; one that John Ferling’s latest book, Whirlwind, will fill. Books chronicling the Revolution have largely ranged from multivolume tomes that appeal to scholars and the most serious general readers to microhistories that necessarily gloss over swaths of Independence-era history with only cursory treatment.
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A must read for Americans
- By Conner on 12-16-23
By: John Ferling
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Sweet Taste of Liberty
- A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
- By: W. Caleb McDaniel
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.
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insightful and educational
- By Mark W. on 06-29-20
What listeners say about What Hath God Wrought
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Ary Shalizi
- 04-12-11
Fantastic content, faulty narration
This book provides a comprehensive overview of US history from the end of the War of 1812 to just after the admission of California to the Union. The ebb and flow of politics provides the main narrative framework for the book, into which Howe weaves detailed discussions of the competing social, economic, religious and technological forces that slowly transformed the coastal states of the founders into a continent-spanning empire riven by internal disputes that would erupt in the Civil War and reverberate for more than a century after. Howe makes the entire era come alive by drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, from census data to the writings contemporary diarists and newspaper accounts, and incorporating many engaging quotes.
This would be a perfect listen for an avid student of American history, since it covers a frequently overlooked period (overlooked, I would add, for reasons which Howe discusses at length towards the end of the book) were it not for the truly horrible quality of the recording. The narrator is overall quite good, but the editing is probably among the worst I have ever encountered. There are noticeable jumps in audio quality and speed throughout, sometimes even within the same sentence. These imperfections are substantial enough that at times I found myself listening more to the atrocious mixing than the actual content, which was a shame.
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62 people found this helpful
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Overall
- GARY G STRIEKER
- 05-14-09
bad editing
Good book, good narrator, but the editing was horrible... leaving no pauses where they should be, running all the sentences together unnaturally. A tedious chore to listen to..almost as if the editors were trying to make the book as short as possible by crunching the sentences together as closely as they could. Never had the problem before with any other book -- I hope I never run into it again.
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40 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Chris
- 02-20-09
comprehensive history
I am a casual history fan and I've always had trouble keeping track of the Taylor's and the Tyler's in the first half of the 19th century. This book is comprehensive, well-read and detailed, sometimes to the point where it can be hard to follow, especially if you listen while commuting. There are many themes, and he jumps back and forth between them. I found myself backing up several times to make sense of things, but it was not too much of a chore. As the author says in the conclusion, he is telling a story, not asserting a thesis--this type of history I think is the most fun to listen to. I never found it tiresome, and that is a lot to say about a book this long. The other reviewer is correct, there were a lot of changes in the recording, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. While this is unusual in audiobooks, I did not find it very distracting.
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39 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Ed
- 02-13-09
An interesting book with some issues
While I am enjoying this book, there are some issues. There is a LOT more about religion than I thought. From the description, I thought it was going to be about technology and politics. I'm a casual reader of history. It seems that this book is written for someone with a more than casual love of history. Be prepared to ocasionally pause this book and do a Google search for terms that the author assumes the reader is familiar with. While this book is read well, it doesn't seem to be edited well. I can imagine that it takes days if not weeks to record these books. In other books, you can tell when they have stopped and started recording by the suttle changes in pitch or tone. Usually this happens at the end of pages, chapters, or parts. In this book, it happens mid-sentence. A lot. While it doesn't make the book unlistenable, it is annoying.
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39 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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- Peter B.
- 03-13-14
Great book, HORRID PRODUCTION
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
The book's content is excellent, and it had to be to keep me interested, given the terrible production. Looking back, I wish I'd read it instead of listening to it since the production is so poor.
What did you like best about this story?
Often when we read about US history we jump from the Revolution to the Civil War, maybe with a nod to the War of 1812. But this book explains how understanding the period it covers is vital to understanding the maturation of the country and the events, particularly the Civil War, that followed.
Would you be willing to try another one of Patrick Cullen’s performances?
The reader's voice is excellent, and assuming the infuriating problems in the production aren't his fault, I'd listen to him again.
Did What Hath God Wrought inspire you to do anything?
Yes: to scream at my mp3 player and to curse Audible for the terrible production that ruined a great book. Does anyone at Audible read these reviews? Many others have commented on this problem, how do you dare to continue offering this? Obviously the original recording was corrupted somehow and then apparently patched together. Sometimes a different reader fills in for a sentence or two, or even for just a part of a sentence. Often the reader speeds up, sometimes his reading speed is fine (suggesting that it wasn't his fault, but the production's). Apart from speed, at times his cadence is all over the place so there's no pause between sentences, forcing the listener to divert attention from the book while reconstructing the sentences in one's head.
Any additional comments?
Audible, someone on your staff should listen to this production. Not just for a minute or two, but for hours, since some parts are fine, which makes the bad sections (which are most of the book) all the worse. Do you really want to put your name on this terrible production? I realize it would be expensive to produce a new reading, but if don't want to spring for that can't you at least re-mix this somehow? Perhaps slow the reader down in the passages where he sounds like he can't wait to finish? If you won't do that, at least give a warning up front that the production is bad. I wish I'd read more of the reviews that described this problem; that was my mistake, but you should warn your customers. I've listened to hundreds of audio books and this is by far the worst production I've ever heard.
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26 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Steve
- 08-31-09
Well worth listening to.
I am a political conservative who likes honest, even critical history. If you are partial toward historians that are apologists for and who white wash past mistakes and wrongs, I would not recommend this book.
Though in many ways the American experiment may be exceptional, America's history of conquest, expropriation and displacement of natives, of chattel slavery, etc., is in no way exceptional nor remarkable. It is the history of the world.
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21 people found this helpful
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- David I. Williams
- 05-11-13
Great Comprehensive Look at the Period
The phrase “What Hath God Wrought” was the first message sent long distance over the telegraph. This was in some ways the beginning of the communications age. This book covers the period from 1815 to 1848. Many viewed the War of 1812 as the second American Revolution. In the aftermath of that war the American nation began to grow quickly. By the end of the period another war would be fought. This one with Mexico. That war would complete what we today call the Continental United States.
This period is rich in American history. The nation grew in size, but also in many other areas. Religion flourished in many new and differing ways. An American culture began to grow in the areas of science, literature, and the arts. The tasks of governing a Republic of vast proportions was a novel concept and continued to perplex many leaders. This period saw the end of the Federalist party with the government becoming a one party system with the Republican party in control during the Monroe years. After that the Republican party split itself in two as the followers of Andrew Jackson created the Democrat party and the opponents of Jackson creating the Whig party. Some of the greatest orators and politicians of 19th century America lived and served in this time. It was the period of Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and John Quincy Adams. Towards the end of the period new leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas began to rise.
Slavery was the elephant in the room that could no longer be ignored. As abolitionist societies began to grow in the North the Southern planter class become more and more adamant about protecting slavery. This conflict would continue to pull at the fabric of the nation until, a dozen years after the final period of this book, it would tear the nation in two.
These are only a few of the areas covered by Daniel Walker Howe in this outstanding volume in the Oxford History of the United States. Even a seasoned reader of history is bound to discover some new gems in these pages. Howe’s prose is never wooded and the subject is made very accessible. With magnificent books like these it is a shame that so few Americans read history. This is a great place to begin the study of a crucial time in our nation’s history.
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18 people found this helpful
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- Scott
- 03-30-09
Long, in depth, illuminating
This period of history always gets the short stick. We go from revolution to civil war to WWI and 20th cetury without a pause into the largest technological, business, political, religous and social changes which enabled our 21st century ethics around the role of government, equal rights, the use of technology which seems so natural to us was quite different in 1812, but much closer to our current world in 1850. The discussion of women's rights, the revolutions of 1848, the great awakening, the war against Mexico, the development of the Whig's, and the anti-slavery movement are particualry engaging. Central is the change from the world of the horse to the technology of the railroad, telegraph, newspaper and strong federal government, complete with the central bank. This period of change rivals the change we feel has ocurred in the 20th century. Enjoy a great book.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 02-27-15
History is not just for those who live in the past
I did not realize how interesting or nuanced American history was during this period of time. The author tells the history while never boring, but at times the players got more complex than any science book because the categories don't always neatly fit into today's way of thinking about things. There just too many good stories to be told and he tells them. The author gives the political top down story, but never forgetting the bottom up approach and looking at the individuals who make up the whole.
The country was not a monolithic beast able to only hold one thought in its mind at a time. Even when we did wrong (slavery, Native American removal and extermination, women discrimination, wars of expansion, and so on), there were large undercurrents who spoke up against it.
The real dichotomy throughout the book is the value of the individual as weighed against the good of the society as a whole. The characters and the stories being told never ceased to awe the listener. The author also really gave large sections on the history of religion at the time and why it was so important for the development of the country at that time. The Millennialism Movement was widely believed and contributed to the belief of American Exceptionalism and even helps pave the way for Abraham Lincoln. My only regret with the book, is he didn't take me all the way up to 1860.
I would definitely recommend this book. The more we understand where we came from the more we can understand where we are going. There is a reason why some politicians want to end Advanced Placement History from high schools and not let students read books like this one. History does not always tell our story such that we are always exceptional, always in the right, or that we have a manifest destiny. History is much more nuanced (and interesting) than cable news, talk radio or some blogs would have you believe.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Roger
- 04-30-09
Thorough and in-depth analysis
When writing a period survey, it is extremely difficult to be both comprehensive and cohesive. This book, however, succeeds marvelously at both. Howe has incorporated the breadth and inclusiveness of a period survey with in-depth critical analysis, and the result is a compelling story. Howe disclaims an attempt to present a thesis, yet he does identify several themes in his analysis, such as what he calls the revolutions in communications and transportation. He does a wonderful job maintaining his themes throughout the book, explaining how various events and trends influenced and were influenced by the themes. He also explains how many of these trends influenced the periods following 1815-1848, especially the lead-up to the Civil War, and continuing into the present.
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9 people found this helpful