American Republics

A Continental History of the United States 1783-1850

De: Alan Taylor

Narrado por: Graham Winton

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.

In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: The United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period, the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense.

Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.

©2021 Alan Taylor (P)2021 Recorded Books Inc.

Excellent overview of the years that formed our nation

This is an excellent overview of the years that formed our nation. It is, at times, painful to listen to the pain and carnage we inflicted to those consider lesser humans. This deep understanding of what we did as a nation should be required reading to all.

Good to learn

Lots of info that’s good to learn about what history was really like. Depressing to learn how people were treated!

Depressing history...

This is a long, sad story of personal ambition and ruthless land grabs. We owe the Native Americans more than we can ever repay.

wideranging

In this book Taylor stretches beyond the usual narrative to give the reader a sense that more was happening than is usually reported in short history books. For instance, Taylor points out that John Sutter was more than the owner of Sutter's Mill: a rapacious slave owner among other things. This book also shows that racism became more virulent, and divisive, after 1800. The slave owning guilt of Jefferson and Washington had morphed into an unrepentant way of life for slave owners. And Taylor reports on the growing divide between slave owning and abolition as some of the South's wrath only enraged northerners who had previously been on the fence. Taylor made it clear, to me at least, that this was not an era which modern Americans should be proud of.

A Portrait, not a political history

This book has a variable range of ratings. What I think is the cause is that this (as the title says), is a Continental history. Mr. Taylor has given us a portrait of America from revolution to the eve of the civil war. This is an important distinction as it reflects more about the humans living on the continent and less on the so called “philosophical debates” which was sophistry explaining our “peculiar” history. This is a corrective of how we truly acted and not how we wished it had been.
My quibble has to do with a bit of repetitiveness in some chapters that an editor should have caught. It was worth the time considering Taylor’s arguments and is recommended.