Lengthy though it is, this essay must be highly selective. Some fine historical works have been left out, and items cited in footnotes are not necessarily repeated here. With few exceptions, I mention only books, not articles, although many articles appear in the footnotes. Where it seemed possible to do so without creating ambiguity, I have often omitted subtitles and authors’ middle names.
The most influential major interpretations of this era have been those of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945) and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution (1991). Schlesinger considered the distinguishing feature of the period the spread of democracy through class conflict spearheaded by the industrial workers. Sellers argued that market capitalism was an aggressive imposition upon a reluctant population. Schlesinger’s viewpoint has been updated and expanded by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of American Democracy (2005). All three books celebrate the Democratic Party of the time as the agent and defender of democracy against its Whig rival. I disagree with these works, but I have learned from them and admire their authors’ knowledge and skill. For a discussion of Sellers’s book by other historians, see Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America (1996). Valuable general treatments of the period, concise and balanced, are John Mayfield, The New Nation, 1800–1830, rev. ed. (1982); Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (1990); and Daniel Feller, The Jacksonian Promise (1995).
Older general works can retain enduring value in some respects even though dated in others; such include John Bach McMaster, History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (1895); James Schouler, History of the United States, rev. ed., vols. III and IV (1904); Edward Channing, History of the United States, vol. V (1921); and Frederick Jackson Turner, The United States, 1830–1850 (1935). More recent works on this period include Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820–1860 (1975); Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America, rev. ed. (1978); and Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society (1984). Marxist interpretations include William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (1961); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990); and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I (1995).
Antebellum southern history has benefited from works written on a grand scale; three such monumental accomplishments are Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (2004); William Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 2 vols. (1990–2007); and Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).
Diana Muir’s beautifully written Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (2000) emphasizes the industrial revolution. Two other fine books that should also be better known are William Brock, Parties and Political Conscience, 1840–1850 (1979) and Major Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom (1974). Two gems of narrative that reveal much social history are Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (1998) and Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (1994). For connections between religion and politics so important to American history, consult the wide-ranging book by Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars (1999). An excellent college textbook is Pauline Maier et al., Inventing America (2005), vol. I. The chapters on 1815–48 were written by Merrit Roe Smith.
The millennium edition of Historical Statistics of the United States, ed. Susan Carter et al. (2006), became available after I had completed my research; I used the bicentennial edition (1975). Other valuable reference works include William Shade and Ballard Campbell, eds., American Presidential Campaigns and Elections (2003); Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (2001); John Garraty and Mark Carnes, eds., American National Biography (1999)and Mapping America’s Past: A Historical Atlas (1996); Arthur Schlesinger Jr. et al., eds., Running for President: The Candidates and Their Images (1994), History of American Presidential Elections (1985), and History of U.S. Political Parties (1973); Kenneth Martis, Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the U.S. Congress (1989); Donald Bruce Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms, rev. ed. (1978); Frank Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (1910); and John J. Mc-Cusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? (1992).
The University of Kansas Press’s American Presidency Series is excellent. I have used Robert Rutland, The Presidency of James Madison (1990); Noble Cunningham Jr., The Presidency of James Monroe (1996); Mary Hargreaves, The Presidency of John Quincy Adams (1985); Donald Cole, The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1993); Major Wilson, The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (1984); Norma Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (1989); and Paul Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (1987).
Several well-written books bring to life specific years in American history: Edward Skeen, 1816: America Rising (2003); Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee, 1826 (2001); Louis Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (2001); and the most moving of all, Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (1943).
A continental approach is essential for an understanding of the period between 1815 and 1848. To locate the United States in its North American geographical setting, see the wonderful work of D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America; I used vol. II, Continental America, 1800–1867 (1993). Andrew Cayton and Fred Anderson integrate the United States into North American history in The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (2005). Valuable context is also supplied by Lester Langley,The Americas in the Age of Revolution (1996); Alan Taylor, American Colonies (2001); and Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own (1991). I was influenced by the model of Fernan Braudel’s classic, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (1976).
On the Hispanic borderlands that became part of the United States during the period here treated, two books of David Weber are invaluable: The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) and The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846 (1982). See also Donald Chipman,Spanish Texas (1992); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier (2005); and Juan Gomez-Quiñones, Roots of Chicano Politics (1994). Works on the history of Mexico are often useful, such as Michael Meyer and William Sherman, The Course of Mexican History (1990) and Timothy Anna, Forging Mexico (1998). For Hispanic California and its missions, see Kevin Starr, California: A History (2005); Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization (1995); James Sandos, Converting California (2004); and the essays in Ramon Gutierrez and Richard Orsi, eds., Contested Eden (1998).
The literature on the Native American peoples is enormous and includes works of anthropology as well as history. What follows is only a representative sample of works available. For general works, see The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: North America, ed. Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb Washburn (1996); Colin Calloway, One Vast Winter Count (2003); Alice Kehoe, America Before the European Invasions (2002); Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001); Shepard Krech,The Ecological Indian (1999); and Linda Barrington, ed., The Other Side of the Frontier (1998). More specific studies include Gary Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830 (1999); John Ewers, Plains Indian History and Culture (1997); Wilbur Jacobs, The Fatal Confrontation (1996); Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois (1994); Thomas Kavanagh, The Comanches (1996); Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country (2003); L. Leitch Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles (1986); John Sugden, Tecumseh’s Last Stand (1985); R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (1983); and Peter Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (1995).
For the history of the Seminoles, see J. Leitch Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles (1986); James Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (1993); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border (1993); and Kenneth Porter, The Black Seminoles, rev. ed. (1996). Joshua Giddings, The Exiles of Florida (1858) holds up well after many years. On the Florida Wars, see David and Jeanne Heidler, Old Hickory’s War (1996); John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, rev. ed. (1985); Virginia Peters, The Florida Wars(1979); and Francis Paul Prucha, Sword of the Republic (1969).
The concept of a “frontier” as a place of encounter rather than a barrier is explored in Thomas Clark and John Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1795–1830 (1989); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (1991); Gregory Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (1997); Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds., Contact Points (1998); and Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier (2006). On the Great Plains, two books by Elliott West are valuable: The Contested Plains (1998) and The Way to the West (1995). See also Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (2000) and Terry Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (1993).
Canadian-American relations can be examined in Arthur Burt, The United States, Great Britain and British North America (1961); Reginald Stuart, United States Expansionism and British North America (1988); Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America (1967); and Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams (1964). For the diplomatic crises of Van Buren’s administration, see Kenneth Stevens, Border Diplomacy (1989), supplemented with Albert Corey, The Crisis of 1830–1842 in Canadian–American Relations (1941). For the Canadian perspective, I consulted Gerald Craig, Upper Canada, The Formative Years (1963) and Colin Read, The Rising in Western Upper Canada (1982). The
authoritative history of the Canadian-American boundary dispute and its resolution by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty is now Francis Carroll, A Good and Wise Measure (Toronto, 2001). Also see Frederick Merk, Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration(1971); Howard Jones, To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1977); Kenneth Stevens, Border Diplomacy: The Caroline and McLeod Affairs (1989); and Howard Jones and Donald Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-American Relations in the 1840s(1997).
George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution (1951) is an enduring classic. The important political implications of this revolution are demonstrated in John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement (2001). Also see Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers (1949); Nathan Miller, The Enterprise of a Free People: Economic Development in New York During the Canal Period (1962); Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads (1966); Maurice Baxter, The Steamboat Monopoly (1972); Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (1981); Karl Raitz, ed., The National Road (1996); James Dilts, The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore & Ohio (1993); and John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (2000).
A fascinating book on the Erie Canal is Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River (1996). Also see Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience (1998); Steven Siry, DeWitt Clinton and the American Political Economy (1990); Ronald Shaw, Canals for a Nation (1990); and Carter Goodrich, ed., Canals and American Economic Development (1961). Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Part (New York, 1939) is a classic. The lives of the workers who dug North American canals are described in Peter Way, Common Labour (1993).
On the communications revolution and its political and economic implications, Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) is a broader study than its title might suggest. Also valuable are Allan Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information (1973); Richard Kielbowicz, News in the Mail (1989); Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (1992); Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry(1996); and Donald Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall (2004). On literacy and its consequences, see William Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (1989); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power (1989); and Dan Headrick, When Information Came of Age (2000). The cultural implications of mail are explored in David Henkin, The Postal Age (2006). For newspapers, see William Huntzicker, The Popular Press (1999); Bernard Weisberger, The American Newspaperman (1961); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital (1996); Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley (2006); and Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (1981). A fine study of the mechanization of paper-making, so important to the expansion of print, is Judith McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine (1987). For interaction between the communications revolution and religion see Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World (2004); Wayne Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America(2003); Leonard Sweet, ed.,Communication and Change in American Religious History (1993); David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction (1981); and David Paul Nord, Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America (1984) and Faith in Reading (2004).
The best places to learn about Morse and his telegraph are: Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (2004), chap. 5; Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (2003); David Hochfelder, “Taming the Lightning: American Telegraphy as a Revolutionary Technology” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University,
1999); Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (1994); James Carey, Communication as Culture (1989), chap. 8; Richard R. John, Spreading the News (1995); and Jill Lepore, A is for American (2002), chap. 6. A lucid popular account is Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (1998). Also helpful are Lewis Coe, The Telegraph (1993); George Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (1992); Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind(1982), chap. 1; Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (1981), chaps. 4–6; and Robert Thompson, Wiring a Continent (1947). For the effects of telegraphy on accurate timekeeping, see Ian Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-century Timekeeping in America(2000). An excellent work on Morse as a painter is Paul Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (1989).
Partly because of the communications revolution, nineteenth-century history throughout the Western world concerned public opinion as never before. Readers with a taste for German social theory can explore this subject through Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. by Thomas Burger (1989; first pub. in German in 1962).
Some of the finest political history written about this period consists of state and local studies that transcend their seemingly narrow focus. Of broad interest are Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (1961); Ronald Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827–1861 (1971) and The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts, 1790s–1840s (1983); Gerald Leonard, The Invention of Party Politics in Jacksonian Illinois (2002); Marc Kruman,Parties and Politics in North Carolina (1983); Donald Ratcliffe, The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio (2000); Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (1978); and Harry Watson,Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: Cumberland County, North Carolina (1981).
Other insightful works on political ideas and behavior include Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (1960); Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics (1979); Michael Heale, The Presidential Quest, 1787–1852 (1982); Richard P. McCormick, The Presidential Game (1982); Robert Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Religion and American Politics, ed. Mark Noll (1990); Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (1991); Michael Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development (1992); David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion (1993); and Mark Neely, American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (2005). David Currie, The Constitution in Congress: Democrats and Whigs, 1829–1861 (2005) is quirky but interesting.
Robert Remini’s three-volume biography of Jackson is laudatory and thorough: Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (1977); Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (1981); Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (1984). There is still much useful material in James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (1861). Two studies of Old Hickory’s personality are James C. Curtis, Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication(1976) and Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (2003). For delightful anecdotes, read Marquis James, Andrew Jackson (1937). Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay on Jackson appears in The American Political Tradition (1948).
Samuel Flagg Bemis’s two-volume biography of John Quincy Adams is an enduring masterpiece: John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949); John Quincy Adams and the Union (1956). Other treatments include Paul Nagel,John Quincy Adams (1997); Lynn Parsons, John Quincy Adams (1998); and Leonard
Richards’s negative assessment of Congressman John Quincy Adams (1986). Robert Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (1991) is thorough and workmanlike; more sympathetic are Maurice Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (1995) and Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (1957). Biographies of Daniel Webster include those by Robert Remini (1997) and Irving Bartlett (1978), as well as Maurice Baxter, One and Inseparable (1984). See also Merrill Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1987). Charles Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 3 vols. (1944–51) has become dated. John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union (1988) is sound. See also Gerald M. Capers, John C. Calhoun: Opportunist (1960) and Irving Bartlett, John C. Calhoun (1993).
The young Abraham Lincoln figures in the history of these years as state legislator and member of Congress. Of the vast literature on him, the books most useful to me were Richard Carwardine, Lincoln (2003); Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President (1999); David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (1995); Gabor Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978); and Reinhard Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (1960).
Valuable biographies of other leading political figures include Charles Sellers, James K. Polk, 2 vols. (1957–66); Glyndon Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (1967); Ralph Ketcham, James Madison (1971); Harry Ammon, James Monroe (1971); Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (1979); John Niven, Martin Van Buren and the Romantic Age of American Politics (1983); Donald Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (1984); John Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny, Winfield Scott(1997); and Allan Peskin, Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms (2003). Imaginative and readable collections of short biographies of people from varied walks of life include Joyce Appleby, ed., Recollections of the Early Republic (1997); Jill Lepore, A is for American (2002); Michael Morrison, ed., The Human Tradition in Antebellum America (2000), and Norman Risjord, Representative Americans: The Romantics (2001).
The standard account of the War of 1812 is Donald Hickey, The War of 1812 (1989); also very helpful are Robert Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812 (1997); J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War (1983); John K. Mahon, The War of 1812 (1972); and Anthony Pitch, The Burning of Washington (1998). David and Jeanne Heidler, The War of 1812 (2002) is a handy textbook. For the impact of the war on domestic politics, see Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn (1987); James Banner, To the Hartford Convention(1970); and Linda Kerber, Federalists in Dissent (1970). On Jackson’s great victory, see Robert Remini, The Battle of New Orleans (1999); Robin Reilly, The British at the Gates (1974); Frank Owsley Jr., The Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands(1981); and Wilburt Brown, The Amphibious Campaign for West Florida and Louisiana (1969). For what Americans made of it, see John William Ward, Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age (1955).
For the wars with the Barbary pirates, see A.B.C. Whipple, To the Shores of Tripoli (1991); Robert Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (1995); Paul Baepler, ed., White Slaves, African Masters: Barbary Captivity Narratives (1993); John B. Wolf, The Barbary Coast (1979); and Frederick Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror (2006).
Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (2006) provides an excellent overview of its subject. Paul Conkin, “The American Economy in 1815,” in his Prophets of Progress (1980), supplies a succinct starting point. Also helpful are the varied essays in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America (2006). For the family farming economy, see Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism
(1990); Winifred Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy (1992); David Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (1995); Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution (2000); Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (2000); Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley (2002); and David R. Meyer, Roots of American Industrialization (2003). Despite the author’s preoccupation with unhelpful Marxist terminology, there is much helpful information in Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (1992). Rural white America in the early nineteenth century is evoked in Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (1988); Jane Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside (1993); and Priscilla Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove (2000). For the roles of husbands and wives, see Nancy Osterud, Bonds of Community (1991); Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America (2000); Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (2002); and Catherine Kelly, In the New England Fashion (1999).
There are many fine studies of individual rural communities in preindustrial America. Examples include John Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Mass. (1990); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986); and Randolph Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut Valley of Vermont (1987). The importance of religious communities for American political thought is argued aggressively by Barry Shain, The Myth of American Individualism (1994).
On the origins of consumer culture, see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America (1992); John Crowley, The Invention of Comfort (2001); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution (2004); and Scott Martin, ed., Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America (2005). On economic integration and convergence, see Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (1999).
For perspectives on Americans as a seafaring people, see Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen (1994); Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea (2005); Mark Kurlansky, Cod (1997); and Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront (2004). On whaling, see Lance Davis, Robert Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan (1997).
On the fur trade as an economic undertaking, see David Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West (1979) and David Dary, The Santa Fe Trail (2000). For its contribution to geographical knowledge, William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire (1978) andNew Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (1986); and John Logan Allen, ed. North American Exploration, vol. III, A Continent Comprehended (1997). For the excitement of the mountain men, read Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri (1947) or Dale Morgan, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953).
The great historian David Brion Davis has examined the philosophy and practice of slavery and antislavery on a worldwide scale. See his The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), Slavery and Human Progress (1984), and Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (2003). For more on slavery’s international context, see Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (1969); Duncan Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (1975); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (1988); and Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997).
Life in slavery has been the subject of some of the most powerful and profound American historical writing. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (1956) created the modern understanding of the subject. Besides Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll cited
above, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977); John Boles, Black Southerners (1983); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside (1984); Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (1993); Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (1997); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998) and Generations of Captivity (2003); Deborah White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? rev. ed. (1999); and Marie Schwartz, Born in Bondage (2000). Claudia Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South (1976) disagrees with Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities (1964), but now historians tend to synthesize them. For autonomy among the slaves, see Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, eds., The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves(1991); Larry Hudson Jr., To Have and to Hold (1997); and John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (1999).
The lives and mindset of the slaveholders are portrayed in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005); Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery (1999); James Oakes, The Ruling Race (1982) and Slavery and Freedom(1990); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (1982); John Boles, The South Through Time (1995); William Scarborough, Masters of the Big House (2003); and Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters (2005). The intertwined lives of both masters and slaves are treated in a beautiful case study, Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place (2005).
That holding workers in slavery profited their masters does not seem particularly surprising, but it required massive efforts by economic historians to prove it. Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, The Economics of Slavery (1964) showed that slaves earned a competitive rate of return for their owners. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross (1974) made slavery seem so economically modern and efficient that critics charged they also made the system seem benign; see Paul David et al., Reckoning with Slavery (1976). A more widely accepted demonstration of the profitability of slavery has been Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract (1989), which is supported by three supplementary volumes of Evidence and Methods (1992). For the consequences of the masters’ pursuit of profit, see William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days (1996). For a judicious historiography, see Mark Smith, Debating Slavery (1998).
The massive domestic commerce in slaves, local as well as interregional, is described in Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back (2005). The scope and horror of the interstate slave trade is portrayed in Daniel Johnson and Rex Campbell, Black Migration in America(1981); Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves (1989); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul (2000); and Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce (2003). For issues of constitutional law, see David Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power (2006). Roger Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause (2003) and Adam Rothman, Slave Country (2005) treat the expansion of slavery into the Gulf states.
Slave uprisings have attracted a considerable literature. Douglas Egerton, Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries (2002) is a collection of thoughtful essays. The most reliable accounts of the Vesey conspiracy are in Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, rev. ed. (2004) and John Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt (1983). Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad (1987) is the best treatment of its subject. For Nat Turner, see Kenneth Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (2003); Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment (1999); and Stephen Oates, The Fires of Jubilee (1975). On the incendiary pamphleteer David Walker, see Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren (1997).
Not all African Americans lived in slavery; on the free black people, see Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community (1988); Leslie Harris,
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1868 (2003); Donald Wright, African Americans in the Early Republic (1993); Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1982); James Horton, Free People of Color (1993); James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty (1997); and Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox (2004).
The harshest judgment on Madison’s presidency was rendered by Henry Adams in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison (1891), the most favorable by Irving Brant in James Madison: Commander in Chief (1961). Judicious assessments are offered by George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism (1965); Drew McCoy, The Last of the Fathers (1989); and Garry Wills, James Madison (2002). See also Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans (1965) and Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (1978).
George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (1952) is the classic account of that period. See also Shaw Livermore, The Twilight of Federalism (1962); Murray Rothbard, The Panic of 1819 (1962); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (1969); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (1998); Ralph Ketcham, Presidents Above Party (1984); Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy (2001); and Stephen Skowronkek, The Politics Presidents Make (1993), which is particularly good on Monroe.
Dexter Perkins, History of the Monroe Doctrine (1963); Ernest Nay, The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (1965); Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams (1964); and Donald Dozer, ed., The Monroe Doctrine (1976) treat the most famous principle in American diplomacy.
Trans-Appalachian white migration into the Old Southwest is treated in Thomas Abernathy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee (1932); Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (1968); Malcolm Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier (1978); Daniel Feller, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics (1984); John Otto, Southern Frontiers (1989); Joan Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (1991); Harvey Jackson, Rivers of History (1995); Daniel Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier (1997); and Samuel Hyde Jr., ed., Plain Folk of the Old South Revisited (1997). Two well-written books lament the passing of the frontier in Kentucky: Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost (1996) and Craig Friend, Along the Maysville Road (2005).
The development of an economy based on slave-grown cotton is analyzed in Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (1978); Roger Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery (1989); and David Carlton and Peter Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World (2003). The classic account of the importance of cotton to the American economy is Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States (1961).
The industrial revolution sparked by cotton textiles marked a turning point in the history of the world. See David Jeremy, The Transatlantic Industrial Revolution (1981); Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order (1983); Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism (1983); Barbara Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry (1984); Walter Licht, Industrializing America (1995); and Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth (2003). For copious illustrations, see Brooke Hindle and Steven Labar, Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790–1860 (1991). New England’s innovative role is the subject of Robert Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite (1987); Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (1991); and Naomi Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (1994). For the evolution of the corporation,
see Kenneth Lipartito and David Sicilia, eds., Constructing Corporate America (2004). Two fascinating community studies are Anthony Wallace, Rockdale (1978) and Thomas Dublin, Lowell (1992). Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic (2003) analyzes both consumers and producers. On the cultural impact of the industrial revolution, see David Nye, America as Second Creation (2003).
The Old Northwest commands a growing historical literature; see James Simeone, Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois (2000); James Davis, Frontier Illinois (1998); Donald Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic (1998); Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest (1996); Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier (1996); Susan Gray, The Yankee West (1996); Andrew Cayton, Frontier Indiana (1996) and Frontier Republic: Ohio (1986); Andrew Cayton and Peter Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation (1990); and Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business (1968). However, Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Rise of the New West (1906) and Richard Powers’s Planting Corn Belt Culture (1953) are still very useful.
Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath (2007) is a profound study; I used the 1994 Yale dissertation that preceded it. See also Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy (1953); William Cooper, Liberty and Slavery (1983); and Richard H. Brown’s seminal article, “The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 65 (1966): 55–72.
The social and cultural importance of the Second Great Awakening has prompted a large body of writing. Modern interpretations include Mark Noll, America’s God (2002); Edith Blumhover and Randall Balmer, eds., Modern Christian Revivals (1993); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990); Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989); Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism (1978); William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (1978); Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers (1968); and Perry Miller’s unfinished classic, The Life of the Mind in America (1965). Much scholarship focuses on upstate New York: Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District (1950); Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1978); Mary Ryan,Cradle of the Middle Class (1981); Curtis Johnson, Islands of Holiness (1989); and David Hackett, The Rude Hand of Innovation (1991). For the South, see Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross (1997); John Quist, Restless Visionaries (1998); Randy Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks (1994); and Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (1977). General works of much value for this period include Jon Butler et al., Religion in American Life (2003); Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America (2004); and Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (2004).
To see how religious disestablishment paved the way for the Awakening, consult William McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1680–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (1971), 2 vols. The personalities of the evangelists can be viewed in Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney (1996); Joseph Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (1981); Charles White, The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer (1986); and Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (1994). The Beecher family has a rich historiography; on their role in the Awakening, see Marie Caskey, Chariot of Fire (1977); Vincent Harding, A Certain Magnificence (1991); and James Fraser, Pedagogue for God’s Kingdom (1985).
Works on particular kinds of Protestantism include David Hempton, Methodism (New Haven, 2005); Russell Richey, Early American Methodism (1991); John Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and Popular Christianity (1998); Gregory Willis,Democratic Religion: Church Discipline in the Baptist South (1997); Thomas Hamm,
The Transformation of American Quakerism (1988); Larry Ingle, Quakers in Conflict (1986); David Harrell Jr., Quest for a Christian America: The Disciples of Christ (1966); and Richard Hughes and Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America (1988).
For American Catholics, see Jay Dolan, Catholic Revivalism (1978); Ann Taves, The Household of Faith (1986); Charles Morris, American Catholic (1997); and Jay Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism (2002). For controversies within the Catholic Church, see Patrick Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates (1987) and Dale Light, Rome and the New Republic (1996). For a view of Catholic relations with the Protestant majority, see Lawrence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986), 48–79. Catholic attitudes toward slavery are explained (along with much else) in John McGreevy’s excellent Catholicism and American Freedom (2003); see also Thomas Bakenkotter, Concise History of the Catholic Church, rev. ed. (2004), 294–302.
The active role of women in the Awakening and its philanthropy has rightly received attention from historians. See Marilyn Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America (1999); Catherine Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (1998); Nancy Hardesty, Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (1991); Carolyn Lawes, Women and Reform in a New England Community (2000); Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change (1984); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 2nd ed. (1997); and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City (1971). On the place of the Awakening in working-class history, see Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America (1995) and Teresa Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (1992).
The Awakening occupied a prominent place in the lives of many African Americans, both free and enslaved. See Albert Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones (1995) and Slave Religion (1978); Gary Nash, Forging Freedom (1988); Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On (1979); John Boles, ed., Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord (1988); and Carol George, Segregated Sabbaths (1973).
For the intellectual dimension of the Awakening, see Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers (1985); Brooks Holifield, Theology in America (2003); Richard Steele, “Gracious Affection” and “True Virtue” (1994); Mark Noll, ed., God and Mammon(2002); Paul Conkin, The Uneasy Center (1995); Kenneth Startup, The Root of All Evil (1997); and Leo Hirrell’s misnamed Children of Wrath (1998). Examples of the various practical consequences of the Awakening can be found in Richard Carwardine,Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993); Lori Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (1990); and Benjamin Thomas, Theodore Dwight Weld (1950). Kathleen D. McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society(2003) treats social reform movements as well as organized charities.
The interlocking network of reforms in this period derived much of their impetus from religious origins, but secular changes like the communications revolution affected them too. See Ronald Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (1978); Steven Mintz,Moralists and Modernizers (1995); and Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women (2002). On the temperance movement, see W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic (1979); Ian Tyrell, Sobering Up (1979); and Mark Lender and James Martin,Drinking in America (1987). John Rumbarger, Profits, Power, and Prohibition (1989) argues that temperance was imposed on workers by their employers. The international dimension of the interrelated reforms needs more study, but see, for example, Mark Noll et al.,Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies (New York, 1994); Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in
the Early Nineteenth Century (1959); and, of course, the works of David Brion Davis already mentioned.
P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement (1961) remains useful, but historians have taken renewed interest in the enterprise. See, for example, Katherine Harris, African and American Values: Liberia and West Africa (1985); James Wesley Smith,Sojourners in Search of Freedom (1987); Amos Beyan, The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State (1991); Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad (1999); and Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution (2005).
Masonry and Antimasonry should be studied in conjunction. Steven Bullock treats the former well in Revolutionary Brotherhood (1996). Paul Goodman takes a more negative view of Antimasonry in Towards a Christian Republic (1988) than does William Vaughan, The Anti-Masonic Party in the United States (1983).
The seminal treatment of millennialism in American history is H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (1937); the literature that has grown up around it is enormous. The writings of James H. Moorhead provide a sound guide to postmillennialism, although they emphasize the period after 1848: American Apocalypse (1978) and World Without End (1999). The period before 1815 is treated in Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic (1985) and Susan Juster, Doomsayers (2003). For postmillennialism in the period covered by this book, see Jonathan Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness (2001) and J. F. Maclear, “The Republic and the Millennium,” in The Religion of the Republic, ed. Elwyn Smith (1971). For premillennialism and the Millerites in particular, see Ruth Doan,The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (1987); Gary Land, ed., Adventism in America (1986); and Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler, eds., The Disappointed (1987). Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium (1986) usefully links millennialism and utopianism.
Amidst a very large literature on utopian communities, especially helpful are Robert Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience, 2 vols. (2003–4); Donald Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (1997); Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (1995); Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative (1991); and Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (1993). On Owen and his followers, see J. F. C. Harrison,Robert Owen and the Owenites (1969) and Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias (1970). Edward Deming Andrews, The People Called Shakers (1963) retains interest, but the authoritative work is now Stephen Stein, The Shaker Experience in America(1992). Sterling Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (2004) actually records successes as well as failures. On gender issues in utopian communities, see also Louis Kern, An Ordered Love (1981); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments (1981); Carol Kolmerten, Women in Utopia (1990); and Suzanne Thurman, O Sisters, Ain’t You Happy? (2002).
The comments of foreign travelers to the United States are discussed in C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (1991). For Lafayette’s tour, see Anne Loveland, Emblem of Liberty (1971). Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds (1996) is a superb study, also very helpful on Tocqueville. George Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938) is a classic; see also James Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1980) and Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (2006). R. K. Webb,Harriet Martineau, Radical Victorian (1960) is acute but patronizing; more sympathetic are the biographies by Valerie Pinchanick (1980) and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (1992) and Daniel Feller’s introduction to Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel(2000). Also see Celia Eckhardt, Fanny Wright (1984).
Historical literature on Mormonism is gigantic and sometimes polemical. Insightful presentations of the Mormon religion by outsiders include Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (1957); Jan Shipps, Mormonism (1985); and Paul Conkin, American Originals (1997), 162–225. The projected multivolume history by Dale Morgan was cut short by his death; what little we have appears in Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism, ed. John Phillip Walker (1986). Quite a few fine historians are Latter-day Saints, and some of them write about Mormon history; see, for example, Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience (1979); Klaus Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (1981); Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (1993); and Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Additional biographies of Joseph Smith, each with its own viewpoint, include Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, rev. ed. (1973); Robert Remini, Joseph Smith (2002); and Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (2004). Mormon and gentile historians collaborate in an anthology, The New Mormon History, ed. D. Michael Quinn (1992). On the cultural matrix of early Mormonism, see D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View(1987); John Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire (1994); and Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth (1997). Stephen LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (1987) is judicious. The Mormon trek to Utah is portrayed in Leonard Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (1985); Klaus Hansen, Quest for Empire (1967); and Marvin Hill, Quest for Refuge (1989).
There are several excellent accounts of Jackson’s presidency: Glyndon Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era (1959); Richard Latner, The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1979); and, best of all, Donald Cole, Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1993). For the Eaton Affair, see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (2000); John Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair (2000); and Kirsten Wood, “Gender and Power in the Eaton Affair,” JER 17 (1997): 237–75.
On the history of the “Civilized Tribes,” see William McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986); Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change (1992); Michael Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (1982); and Mary Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks (1961). Three perspectives on the legal aspects are Tim Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal (2002); Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land (2005); and Lindsay Robertson, Conquest by Law (2005). For Jackson’s program of Indian Removal and its effects, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail (1993); Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian(1975); and Grant Foreman’s classic, Indian Removal (1932). A useful textbook with edited documents is Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, Cherokee Removal, 2nd ed. (2005). Annie Abel, History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi River (1908) still has valuable information. On the shaping of federal Indian policy, see Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1975) and Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (1973). Jackson’s policies are defended in Francis Paul Prucha, SJ, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (1984), I, 179–242; and Robert Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson (1988), 45–82; their arguments are rebutted in Donald Cole, The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1993), 109–19. In his final statement Remini concedes much to Jackson’s critics but reminds the reader that blame for the treatment of the Indians was widely shared: Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). For white opposition to Removal, see John Andrew, From Revivals to Removal (1992); John G. West, The Politics of Revelation and Reason (1996); and Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates(2005).
On suffrage and election procedures, see Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage, 1760–1860 (1960); James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention (1973); Ronald Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture (1983); and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (2000). Politics was strongly influenced by the mechanisms of voting and getting out the vote; see Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2000) and Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2004).
Most of the historical writing on the “Bank War” between Jackson and Biddle dates from the period 1945 to 1975. Besides Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson cited above, see Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (1967); Jean Alexander Wilburn,Biddle’s Bank: The Crucial Years (1967); Thomas Govan, Nicholas Biddle (1959); Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (1957); Walter Buckingham Smith, Economic Aspects of the Second Bank of the United States(1953); and Fritz Redlich, The Molding of American Banking (1947). More recent are two books by Robert Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780–1850 (2002) and The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia (2005). Ralph Catterall, The Second Bank of the United States (1902), full of information, remains indispensable. For the influential Democratic banking firm of Corcoran & Riggs, see Henry Cohen, Business and Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War (1971).
William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (1965), a model historical monograph, should now be used in conjunction with the same author’s The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (1990). For the impact of the crisis on contemporary politics, see Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk (1987). Much of the best scholarship on nullification is in article form. There is a brilliant assessment in Donald Ratcliffe, “The Nullification Crisis, Southern Discontents, and the American Political Process,” American Nineteeth-Century History 1 (2000): 1–30. Also see Kenneth Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” JAH 65 (1978): 5–33; Lacy K. Ford, “Inventing the Concurrent Majority,” Journal of Southern History 60 (1994): 19–58; Richard Latner, “The Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion,” ibid. 43 (1977): 19–38; and Merrill Peterson, Olive Branch and Sword (1982). For nullification in the broader context of southern sectionalism, see John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation (1979); Don Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (1995); and Peter Knupfer, The Union as It Is (1991).
The best book on the violence that plagued Jacksonian America is David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861 (1998), though it does not make pleasant reading. Also valuable are Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, rev. ed. (1964); Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (1970); Dickson Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (1979); Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (1996); and Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (1987).
For the history of schools and education, see Lawrence Cremin, American Education, The National Experience (1980); Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic (1983); Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (1980); Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States (1981); Anne Boylan, Sunday School (1988); James McLachlan, American Boarding Schools (1970), 35–48; Theodore Sizer, The Age of the Academies (1964); Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann (1972); Thomas Webber, Deep like the Rivers: Education in the
Slave Quarter Community (1978); and Janet Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (1991).
On colleges and universities, see John Whitehead, The Separation of College and State (1973); Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (1932); Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women(1985); Mark Noll, Princeton and the Republic (1989); D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience (1972); and, on Harvard, Daniel Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, rev. ed. (1988).
The importance of the Bible to Americans in this period is attested in Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, The Bible in America (1982); Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible (1999); James T. Johnson, ed., The Bible in American Law, Politics, and Rhetoric (1985); and Peter Wosh, Spreading the Word (1994).
The idea that the relationship between science and religion has been one of continual “warfare” has been effectively demolished; see David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., God and Nature (1986) and John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion (1991). To capture the spirit of American science in this period, consult Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (1978); Leonard Wilson, ed., Benjamin Silliman and His Circle (1979); Chandos Brown, Benjamin Silliman (1989); Margaret Welch,The Book of Nature (1998); John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (1984); Theodore Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (1977); Albert Moyer, Joseph Henry (1997); and Hugh Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science (1994). A number of classic works on the relation between science and religion retain their usefulness, including Charles Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (1951); John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (1959); and A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray(1959).
For important episodes in the history of medicine, see Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (1962; with a new afterword, 1987) and Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History (1997). Martin Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering (1985) and Thomas Dormandy, Worst of Evils (2006) treat anesthesia; and Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002), anatomy. On obstetrics, see Deborah McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine (1998) and Amelie Kass, Midwifery and Medicine in Boston (2002). Marie Jenkins Schwartz,Birthing a Slave (2006) is broader than its title might suggest. For more comprehensive accounts, see John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science (1993); James Cassedy, Medicine in America (1991) and American Medicine and Statistical Thinking (1984); John S. Haller, American Medicine in Transition (1981); William Rothstein, American Medical Schools and the Practice of Medicine (1987); and G. B. Rushman et al., A Short History of Anaesthesia (1996). For the life of the country doctor, see Steven Stowe,Doctoring the South (2004); and for hospitals, Charles Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers (1987). The struggle between orthodox medicine and various alternatives is described in Joseph Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession (1968); Jayme Sokolow, Eros and Modernization (1983); and Stephen Nissenbaum, Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (1980). On African American folk medicine, see Sharla Fett, Working Cures (2002).
On the debates over slavery, see Stephen Haynes, Noah’s Curse (2002) and Drew Faust, A Sacred Circle (1977) and Southern Stories(1992). For the relationship of southern evangelical religion to slavery, see Anne Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order (1980); John Daly, When Slavery was Called Freedom (2002); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005).
On the Panics of 1837 and 1839, see Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (1969); John McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance (1972); Herbert Sloan, Principle and Interest (1995); William Shade, Banks or No Banks (1972); Edwin Dodd, American Business
Corporations until 1860 (1954); and Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States (1961). More recent scholarship is presented in Peter Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837,” Journal of Economic History 62(2002): 457–88.
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman (Cambridge, Eng., 1996–2000), vol. II: The Long Nineteenth Century is an authoritative and up-to-date collection of essays. Other useful anthologies are Paul Gilje, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic (1997); Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer, eds., American Economic Development in Historical Perspective (1994); and Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman, eds., Long-term Factors in American Economic Growth (1986). Stephen Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation (2002) is much broader than its title might suggest. On the growth of manufacturing, see Otto Mayr and Robert Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (1981); Thomas Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early American Industrialization (1981); Cynthia Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk (1986); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (1997); Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998); Colleen Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (1994); Peter Temin, Engines of Enterprise (2000); and, for its impact on American values, John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine (1976). Technical but rewarding are Robert Gallman and John Wallis, eds., American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War (1992) and Mary Rose, Firms, Networks, and Business Values: The British and American Cotton Industries Since 1750 (2000).
For the history of labor, both organized and otherwise, see Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class (1960); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (1984); Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1976); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (1976); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers (1989); Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993); Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis (1990); and Howard Rock, Paul Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., American Artisans (1995). On the unskilled, see Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals (1993). On working-class racism, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (1999) and Anthony Gronowicz, Race and Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (1998).
Labor radicalism is treated in Paul Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity (1980), chap. 9; Jamie Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience (1999); Jonathan Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety (2002); and Mark Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (2005).
On women wage-workers, see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: Lowell, Massachusetts, 2nd ed. (1993) and Philip Foner’s anthology, The Factory Girls (1977). For women as independent artisans, see Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades (1997). An aspect of labor often ignored is women’s housework; see Jeane Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (1990) and Faye Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1983).
Industrial slave labor is covered in Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1970); Ronald Lewis, Coal, Iron, and Slaves (1979); and Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy(1981).
For America’s largest city, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999). Particular aspects of urban life are illuminated in
Tyler Anbinder, Five Points (2001); Amy Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth Century (1998); Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (1997); Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences (1996); Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros (1992); Christine Stansell, City of Women (1986); and J. F. Richardson, The New York Police (1970).
The Whigs and Democrats of the second party system are examined in Robert Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959) and The Election of Andrew Jackson (1963); Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System(1966); Joel Silbey and Samuel McSeveney, eds., Voters, Parties, and Elections (1972); Daniel Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979); Jean Baker, Affairs of Party (1983); John Ashworth, ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’ (1983); Joel Silbey, The Partisan Imperative (1985); Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship (1985); Lawrence Kohl, The Politics of Individualism (1989); John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America (1998); and Daniel Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” JER 10 (1990): 185–61. Michael Holt’s monumental study, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (1999), emphasizing state politics and electoral strategy, is invaluable.
Good legal history is necessarily technical, and much of it is relatively inaccessible to laypersons. I have benefited from the following: William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (1996); William Nelson,Americanization of the Common Law, 2nd ed. (1994); Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993); Hendrick Hartog, Public Property and Private Power (1983); Laura Scalia, America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, 1820–1850 (1999); P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (1979); Peter Karsten, Heart Versus Head: Judge-Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America(1997); Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law(1977); Leonard Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (1957); and Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (1923).
The momentous decisions of the Marshall Court are explained in Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001); Mark Killinbeck, M’Culloch v. Maryland (2006); Saul Cornell, The Other Founders (1999); Charles Hobson, The Great Chief Justice (1996); Edward White, The Marshall Court and Cultural Change (1988); Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1985); and David Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court (1985). For the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney, see Stanley Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (1971) and Austin Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court (2005).
The law of slavery is analyzed in Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law (1996); Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Law (1997); Jenny Wahl, The Bondsman’s Burden (1998); Timothy Huebner, The Southern Judicial Tradition (1999); Ariela Gross,Double Character: Slavery and Mastery (2000); and Mark Tushnet, Slave Law in the American South (2003).
The politics of slavery have been treated in Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (1971); Duncan Macleod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution (1974); William Cooper Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery (1978); Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (1993); Anthony Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (1997); Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic (2001); Leonard Richards, The Slave Power (2001); and Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006).
On the anti-rent movement, see Charles McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics (2001); Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (2000); and David Maldwyn Ellis,Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region (1946).
Too many historians have accepted the Democratic Party’s characterization of William Henry Harrison as a nonentity and his election as an example of the triumph of hoopla over reason. This view is presented in Robert Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign(1957); for a corrective, see Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (1999). On the conflict between Tyler and Clay, besides William Brock, Parties and Political Conscience, already cited, see Dan Monroe, The Republican Vision of John Tyler(2003) and George Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party (1936).
Treatments of Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island reflect a variety of perspectives. They include Arthur Mowry, The Dorr War (1901); Peter Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island (1963), 218–94; Marvin Gettleman, The Dorr Rebellion (1973); and George Dennison, The Dorr War (1976).
For the role of women in electoral politics in this period, see Elizabeth Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (1998); Robert Dinkin, Before Equal Suffrage (1995); and Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840,” JER 17 (1997): 277–315. Sarah Josepha Hale and women’s magazines are discussed in William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (1961) and Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors (1995). For the role of petitioning in the development of women’s political consciousness, and John Quincy Adams’s defense of it, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship (2003). The complicated but exciting story of the Gag Rule and its repeal is told in William Lee Miller,Arguing About Slavery (1995) and William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay (1990), 287–352.
Of the many works on William Ellery Channing, especially recommended are Madeleine Hooke Rice, Federal Street Pastor (1961) and Jack Mendelssohn, Channing (1971). For his context, see a fine anthology, Sydney Ahlstrom and Jonathan Carey, eds., An American Reformation (1985); as well as David Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists (1985); Anne Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America (2001); Conrad Wright, ed., A Stream of Light (1975); Conrad Edick Wright, ed., American Unitarianism, 1805–1865 (1989); and Daniel Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, rev. ed. (1988).
Writings about the Transcendentalists are voluminous and mostly by literary scholars rather than historians; I mention here only a few that have most influenced me. Barbara Packer gives a superb general account: “The Transcendentalists,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. II, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (1995). Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from Revolution Through Renaissance (1986) is indispensable; Francis Otto Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941), an enduring classic. Perry Miller’s great anthology The Transcendentalists (1950) should now be supplemented with that of Joel Myerson, Transcendentalism (2001). Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Transient and Permanent (1999) is an outstanding essay collection. For the Transcendentalists as social rebels, see Anne Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement (1981); Albert von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns (1998); and Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (1994). For their complex attitude toward the market revolution, see Richard Teichgraeber, Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom (1995).
Robert Richardson Jr. has written two excellent intellectual biographies: Henry Thoreau (1986) and Emerson (1995). See also Lawrence Buell, Emerson (2003); Mary Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence (1989); and Peter Field, Ralph Waldo Emerson (2002). Charles
Capper’s two-volume biography Margaret Fuller (1992 and 2007) is detailed and fascinating; for more on Fuller’s relationship to feminism, see Tiffany Wayne, Woman Thinking (2005). So far we have only the first volume of the giant two-volume biography of Theodore Parker: Dean Grodzins, American Heretic (2002). Norman Risjord, Representative Americans: The Romantics (2001) interprets the American Renaissance broadly.
The perfectibility of human nature was a central tenet of the American Renaissance. Self-improvement projects are illustrated in Daniel Howe, Making the American Self (1997) and Angela Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2005). For black people’s self-improvement, see Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005) and Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies(2002). On educating the most severely handicapped, see Ernest Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman (2001) and Elisabeth Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest (2001). For Dorothea Dix’s campaign to reform the treatment of the insane, see David Gollaher, Voice for the Mad (1995) and Thomas Brown, Dorothea Dix (1998). Stephen Rice, Minding the Machine (2004) interprets the ethos of self-improvement as a strategem to sustain the authority of the middle class against the working class.
Works on the American literary Renaissance are too numerous to do more than suggest some of its ramifications. William Charvat’s Literary Publishing in America (1959) and The Profession of Authorship in America (1968) defined their subjects. More recent treatments of literary culture include Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985); Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (1984); David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (New York, 1995); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital (1996); Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003); Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People (1993); and Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense (2005). The rise of the novel is discussed in Nina Baym,Novels, Readers, and Reviewers (1984); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (1987); David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (1988); and Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 2nd ed. (2004). For the connection between literature and social reform, see, for example, Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985) and Carolyn Karcher’s biography of Maria Child, First Woman in the Republic (1998).
On the theater in the young republic, see John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility (1990); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988); Susan Porter, With an Air Debonair (1991); and Nigel Cliff, The Shakespeare Riots (2007). Minstrel shows have a substantial bibliography of their own; see Ken Emerson, Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (1998); Robert Toll, Blacking Up (1974); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993); and William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (1999).
The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (1998) contains judicious essays on this period. For the music of the slaves, see, in addition to works on black culture cited earlier, Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 2nd ed. (1983) and Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (1977). Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery (2005) includes recordings. The hymns of white Christians are discussed in Henry Wilder Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody (1940) and Peter Benes, ed., New England Music: The Public Sphere (1998).
The abolitionists are heroes to most Americans nowadays, and an extremely large body of writing pays tribute to them; what follows is a highly selective sample of it. An excellent
overview is James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors, rev. ed. (1997). See also Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists (2001); Lawrence Friedman, Gregarious Saints (1982); and Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File (1986). Two essay collections are Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest (2006) and Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered (1979). Simon Schama, Rough Crossings (2006) and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (2006) put antislavery into its international context. The best biography of Garrison is Henry Mayer, All on Fire (1998); for Weld, see Robert Abzug, Passionate Liberator (1980). Frederick Blue, No Taint of Compromise (2005) and Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison (2005) celebrate the political abolitionists. The growing militancy of the abolitionists is treated in Merton Dillon, Slavery Attacked (1990) and Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism (2004). Three historians argue about the relationship between abolitionism and capitalism in the difficult but rewarding volume entitled The Antislavery Debate, ed. Thomas Bender (1992).
On the schism within the abolition movement, see Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (1969); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (1971); and John McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion (1984). For women’s resistance to the schism, see Julie Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism (1998).
Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969) remains useful. Particular aspects of black antislavery are covered in John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men (2002) and John Ernest, Liberation Historiography (2004). Bruce Dain’s book on race theory, A Hideous Monster of the Mind (2002), sheds light on African American abolitionism. A large body of writing on Frederick Douglass includes Nathan Huggins, Slave and Citizen (1980); William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (1991); and Waldo Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984). Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth (1996) is judicious.
For abolitionist feminism, see Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina, rev. ed. (2004); Blanche Hersh, The Slavery of Sex (1978); Jean Yellin, Women and Sisters (1989); Jean Yellin and John Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood (1994); Nancy Hardesty, Women Called to Witness, 2nd ed. (1999); Anna Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women (2000); and Kathryn Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery Movement (2000). Michael Pierson connects the subject to party politics in Free Hearts and Free Homes (2003). For the transatlantic dimension, see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery (1992), 121–53, and Kathryn Sklar and James B. Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery (2007).
On efforts to aid escaping slaves, see Thomas Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws (1974); Stanley Harrold, The Abolitonists and the South (1995); David Blight, ed., Passages to Freedom (2004); and Fergus Bordewich, Bound for Canaan (2005).
There are many books on the Texan Revolution; what follows is a highly selective list emphasizing recent works. The authoritative military history is now Stephen Hardin, Texian Iliad (1994). For other aspects, see Gregg Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas (1999); James Crisp, “Race, Revolution, and the Texas Republic,” in The Texas Military Experience, ed. Joseph Dawson (1995), 32–48; Paul Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience (1992); Sam Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions (1990); Andreas Reichstein, Rise of the Lone Star, trans. Jeanne Willson (1989); Margaret Henson, Juan Davis Bradburn (1982); and Paul Hogan, The Texas Republic (1969). The Alamo has of course attracted particular attention: see Randy Roberts and James Olson, A Line in the Sand (2001); William C. Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo (1998); Timothy Matovina, The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives (1995). Lelia
Roeckell, “British Interests in Texas, 1825–1846” (D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1993) is the most thorough treatment of its subject; for background, see also David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (1991). The expulsion of the Indian tribes by Anglo settlers is the theme of Gary Anderson, The Conquest of Texas (2005).
Historical treatments of American imperialism in the 1840s range from celebratory to sternly critical. See William Weeks, Building the Continental Empire (1996); Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design (1985); Shomer Zwelling, Expansion and Imperialism (1970); Frederick Merk, The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism (1966); William Goetzman, When the Eagle Screamed (1966); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (1981); Sam Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire(1997); Robert F. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld (2002); and Linda Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau (2001). Concise biographies of the leading expansionist are Thomas Leonard, James K. Polk(2001); Sam Haynes, James K. Polk, 3rd ed. (2006); and John Seigenthaler, James K. Polk (2003). Edward Crapol, John Tyler, the Accidental President (2006) emphasizes his role as an expansionist.
A vivid account of the process of Texas annexation is in William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay (1990), 353–452. David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation (1973) is detailed and solid. Frederick Merk, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (1972), like everything by that meticulous historian, is still valuable. For a narrative, see Richard Winders, Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas (2002). Joel Silbey, Storm over Texas (2004), treats annexation’s impact on U.S. party politics.
The greatest historian of the Oregon controversy was Frederick Merk; see especially his Manifest Destiny and Mission (1963), The Oregon Question (1967), and Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (1971). Also valuable are Bradford Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. I (1993) and David Dykstra, The Shifting Balance of Power: American-British Diplomacy in North America (1999). For the settlers, see Julie Jeffrey, Converting the West (1991); Michael Golay, The Tide of Empire (2003); and David Dary, The Oregon Trail (2004). On the British side, see John S. Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor (1957) and Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America (1967).
The causes of the war between the United States and Mexico are treated in Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation; Perkins, Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. I (all cited above); and Gene Brack, Mexico Views Manifest Destiny (1975). Polk’s statesmanship is defended in Justin Smith’s classic The War with Mexico (1919), vol. I, and by Seymour Connor and Odie Faulk, North America Divided (1971). Norman Graebner offers a judicious assessment of causality in “The Mexican War,” Pacific Historical Review 49 (1980): 405–26. Scott Silverstone, a political scientist, analyzes how Polk provoked a war, then framed the issue so Congress would vote for it: Divided Union: The Politics of War in the Early American Republic(2004).
The U.S.Mexican War has not attracted as much attention as so momentous a conflict deserves from either historians or the American public, but see Charles Dufour, The Mexican War (1968); Odie Faulk and Joseph Stout, eds., The Mexican War (1973); K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War (1974); John Weems, To Conquer a Peace (1974); and John Eisenhower, So Far from God (1989). For contemporary illustrations, see Martha Sandweis et al., Eyewitness to War (1989) and Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, The U.S.-Mexican War (1998). On the army, see Richard Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army (1997); James McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny (1992); Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The
Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865 (1968); and Richard Uviller and William Merkel, The Militia and the Right to Arms (2002). For the seamy side, see Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair (2002). On the navy, see John Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire (1985). On the sanpatricios, see Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword (1989) and Peter F. Stevens, The Rogue’s March (1999). A superb reference work is Donald Frazier, ed., The United States and Mexico at War (1998).
Attitudes of the U.S. public toward the war are treated in Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas (1985); John Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent (1973); Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002); and Joel Silbey, The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841–1852 (1967). Works in English illuminating the Mexican perspective on the war include Ramon Alcarez et al., The Other Side, trans. Albert Ramsey(1850); Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora (1968); William DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852 (1997); Ruth Olivera and Liliane Crété, Life in Mexico Under Santa Anna (1991); and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “War and Peace with the United States,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, ed. Michael Meyer and William Beezley (New York, 2000). Readers with a command of Spanish can benefit from Laura Herrera Serna, ed., México en guerra, 1846–1848 (1997).
For the war in California, see Neal Harlow, California Conquered (1982); Andrew Rolle, John Charles Frémont (1991); Tom Chafin, The Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (2002); Dale Walker, Bear Flag Rising (1999); and Alan Rosenus, General M. G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (1995). On the war in New Mexico, see Stephen Hyslop, Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest (2002); Howard Lamar, The Far Southwest (1966); Dwight Clarke, Stephen Watts Kearny (1961); David Lavender, Bent’s Fort (1954); and Norma Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion (1996). James Crutchfield, Tragedy at Taos (1995) covers the uprising from the U.S. point of view. Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder(2006), a novel-like history of Kit Carson and the Navajo, includes a vivid account of the U.S. conquest of the Southwest.
On Nicholas Trist and the treaty of peace, see Robert Drexler, Guilty of Making Peace (1991); Wallace Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker (1997); Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1990); and Matt Meier and Feliciano Ribera, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans (1993). On the election of 1848, see Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West (1997); Joseph Rayback, Free Soil: the Election of 1848 (1971); Frederick Blue, The Free Soilers (1973); and Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2007).
Interest in the first year of the California Gold Rush flourishes. Recent, well-written works include Rodman Paul and Elliott West, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, rev. ed. (2001); H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold (2001); Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (2000); Susan Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000); Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold (1997), Paula Mitchell Marks, Precious Dust (1994); and Joanne Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (1990).
Conventional historiography treats the Irish immigrants of 1845–54 as helpless victims of oppression, premodern in their worldview. See Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants (1972; first pub. 1941) and Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger (1962); a version of this interpretation can be found in Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles (1985). Revisionist and other recent historians emphasize the resolution and resourcefulness of the migrants
and the foundation they laid for the economic success of their descendants. See, for example, Donald Akenson, The Irish Diaspora (1996); Cormac O’Grada, The Great Irish Famine (1995); George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History(1996); David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration (1984); and P. J. Drudy, ed., The Irish in America (1985). For reactions to the Irish immigrants, see Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic (1986). For illustrations, see Michael Coffey and Terry Golway, The Irish in America (1997). Nativism badly needs an up-to-date historical treatment. Until then, the principal account will remain Ray Billington, The Protestant Crusade (1938, rpt. 1964). New treatment should take account of the new Catholic history and reconceive the subject as Protestant-Catholic interaction. Nancy Schultz, Fire and Roses (2000) is a well-written narrative of the burning of the Charlestown convent in 1834. Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (2002) includes a sophisticated discussion of the rise of political nativism.
The definitive account of the women’s rights convention of 1848, if such a thing were possible, would be Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls (2004). For the context of the convention, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America(1998) and Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (2005). Biographies of Elizabeth Cady Stanton include Lois Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1980) and Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right (1984). Ann Gordon has edited Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997). For the larger picture, see Ellen DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998). The international dimension of the women’s rights movement is emphasized in Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999) and Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement (2000).