The Jacksonian Promise

The Jacksonian Promise

Author: Daniel Feller

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 1995-11-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780801851681

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In Jacksonian Promise historian Daniel Feller offers a fresh look at the United States in the tumultuous Age of Jackson. Viewing the era through the eyes of people who lived in it, Feller's account captures the optimism and energy that filled America after the War of 1812. His emphasis on Americans' confidence in the future and faith in improvement challenges historians who depict the Jacksonian temperament in terms of anxiety and foreboding. Jacksonian Promise opens with the Jubilee anniversary of Independence in 1826, when Americans celebrated their national birthright of liberty and opportunity. Blessed with abundant resources and what they held to be the best government on earth, citizens believed they could accomplish nearly anything. They felt it in their power to remake themselves, their country, and the world. Feller traces the influence of this enterprising spirit across a broad range of Jacksonian activity. Experiment and innovation flourished as Americans built canals and factories, founded unions and utopias, staged religious revivals and moral crusades, and campaigned to eradicate social ills and to purify law and politics. Yet despite their common source, competing programs of progress soon clashed with each other. As citizens organized to pursue their hopes for America's future, divisions arose among that pointed ultimately toward civil war.


American Politics

American Politics

Author: Samuel P. Huntington

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780674030213

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Huntington examines the persistent gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. He shows how Americans have always been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority, but how these ideals have been frustrated through institutions and hierarchies needed to govern a democracy.


American Lion

American Lion

Author: Jon Meacham

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2009-04-30

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0812973461

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The definitive biography of a larger-than-life president who defied norms, divided a nation, and changed Washington forever Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency. Beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, Andrew Jackson was an orphan who fought his way to the pinnacle of power, bending the nation to his will in the cause of democracy. Jackson’s election in 1828 ushered in a new and lasting era in which the people, not distant elites, were the guiding force in American politics. Democracy made its stand in the Jackson years, and he gave voice to the hopes and the fears of a restless, changing nation facing challenging times at home and threats abroad. To tell the saga of Jackson’s presidency, acclaimed author Jon Meacham goes inside the Jackson White House. Drawing on newly discovered family letters and papers, he details the human drama–the family, the women, and the inner circle of advisers– that shaped Jackson’s private world through years of storm and victory. One of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents, Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will– or face his formidable wrath. The greatest of the presidents who have followed Jackson in the White House–from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to FDR to Truman–have found inspiration in his example, and virtue in his vision. Jackson was the most contradictory of men. The architect of the removal of Indians from their native lands, he was warmly sentimental and risked everything to give more power to ordinary citizens. He was, in short, a lot like his country: alternately kind and vicious, brilliant and blind; and a man who fought a lifelong war to keep the republic safe–no matter what it took.


Internal Improvement

Internal Improvement

Author: John Lauritz Larson

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2002-11-25

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0807875643

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When the people of British North America threw off their colonial bonds, they sought more than freedom from bad government: most of the founding generation also desired the freedom to create and enjoy good, popular, responsive government. This book traces the central issue on which early Americans pinned their hopes for positive government action--internal improvement. The nation's early republican governments undertook a wide range of internal improvement projects meant to assure Americans' security, prosperity, and enlightenment--from the building of roads, canals, and bridges to the establishment of universities and libraries. But competitive struggles eventually undermined the interstate and interregional cooperation required, and the public soured on the internal improvement movement. Jacksonian politicians seized this opportunity to promote a more libertarian political philosophy in place of activist, positive republicanism. By the 1850s, the United States had turned toward a laissez-faire system of policy that, ironically, guaranteed more freedom for capitalists and entrepreneurs than ever envisioned in the founders' revolutionary republicanism.


Glorious Victory

Glorious Victory

Author: Donald R. Hickey

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1421417057

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The story of the battle that saved New Orleans, made Andrew Jackson a hero for the ages, and shaped the American public memory of the war. Whether or not the United States “won” the war of 1812, two engagements that occurred toward the end of the conflict had an enormous influence on the development of American identity: the successful defenses of the cities of Baltimore and New Orleans. Both engagements bolstered national confidence and spoke to the élan of citizen soldiers and their militia officers. The Battle of New Orleans—perhaps because it punctuated the war, lent itself to frontier mythology, and involved the larger-than-life figure of Andrew Jackson—became especially important in popular memory. In Glorious Victory, leading War of 1812 scholar Donald R. Hickey recounts the New Orleans campaign and Jackson’s key role in the battle. Drawing on a lifetime of research, Hickey tells the story of America’s “forgotten conflict.” He explains why the fragile young republic chose to challenge Great Britain, then a global power with a formidable navy. He also recounts the early campaigns of the war—William Hull’s ignominious surrender at Detroit in 1812; Oliver H. Perry’s remarkable victory on Lake Erie; and the demoralizing British raids in the Chesapeake that culminated in the burning of Washington. Tracing Jackson’s emergence as a leader in Tennessee and his extraordinary success as a military commander in the field, Hickey finds in Jackson a bundle of contradictions: an enemy of privilege who belonged to Tennessee’s ruling elite, a slaveholder who welcomed free blacks into his army, an Indian-hater who adopted a native orphan, and a general who lectured his superiors and sometimes ignored their orders while simultaneously demanding unquestioning obedience from his men. Aimed at students and the general public, Glorious Victory will reward readers with a clear understanding of Andrew Jackson’s role in the War of 1812 and his iconic place in the postwar era.


Come Along with Me

Come Along with Me

Author: Shirley Jackson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-02-26

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1101616059

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A haunting and psychologically driven collection from Shirley Jackson that includes her best-known story "The Lottery" At last, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" enters Penguin Classics, sixty-five years after it shocked America audiences and elicited the most responses of any piece in New Yorker history. In her gothic visions of small-town America, Jackson, the author of such masterworks as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, turns an ordinary world into a supernatural nightmare. This eclectic collection goes beyond her horror writing, revealing the full spectrum of her literary genius. In addition to Come Along with Me, Jackson's unfinished novel about the quirky inner life of a lonely widow, it features sixteen short stories and three lectures she delivered during her last years. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.


U.S. History

U.S. History

Author: P. Scott Corbett

Publisher:

Published: 2024-09-10

Total Pages: 1886

ISBN-13:

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U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.


The Market Revolution

The Market Revolution

Author: Charles Sellers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1994-05-19

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0199762422

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In The Market Revolution, one of America's most distinguished historians offers a major reinterpretation of a pivotal moment in United States history. Based on impeccable scholarship and written with grace and style, this volume provides a sweeping political and social history of the entire period from the diplomacy of John Quincy Adams to the birth of Mormonism under Joseph Smith, from Jackson's slaughter of the Indians in Georgia and Florida to the Depression of 1819, and from the growth of women's rights to the spread of the temperance movement. Equally important, he offers a provocative new way of looking at this crucial period, showing how the boom that followed the War of 1812 ignited a generational conflict over the republic's destiny, a struggle that changed America dramatically. Sellers stresses throughout that democracy was born in tension with capitalism, not as its natural political expression, and he shows how the massive national resistance to commercial interests ultimately rallied around Andrew Jackson. An unusually comprehensive blend of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural history, this accessible work provides a challenging analysis of this period, with important implications for the study of American history as a whole. It will revolutionize thinking about Jacksonian America.


Liberty and Union

Liberty and Union

Author: David Herbert Donald

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1504034031

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The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s penetrating analysis of the crisis of democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. In Liberty and Union, David Herbert Donald persuasively examines one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. With the same wit, eloquence, and willingness to question received wisdom that define his acclaimed biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner, Donald suggests that it was the commonalities between North and South—and not their differences—that led to the earth-shattering conflict that was the Civil War and defined the chaotic years that followed. Exploring the political, social, and economic impact of the war, emancipation, Reconstruction, and westward expansion, Donald combines history and philosophy, offering a bold and thought-provoking analysis that goes far in explaining the nation we live in today. Riveting, illuminating, and provocative, Liberty and Union sheds a brilliant light on a half-century of US history and addresses a perennial problem of democratic societies all over the world: how to reconcile majority rule and minority rights.