Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877
4.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
"And then there came a day of fire!" From its shocking curtain-raiser—the conflagration that consumed Lower Manhattan in 1835—to the climactic centennial year of 1876, when Americans staged a corrupt, deadlocked presidential campaign (fought out in Florida), Walter A. McDougall's Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 throws off sparks like a flywheel. This eagerly awaited sequel to Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 carries the saga of the American people's continuous self-reinvention from the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson through the eras of Manifest Destiny, Civil War, and Reconstruction, America's first failed crusade to put "freedom on the march" through regime change and nation building.
But Throes of Democracy is much more than a political history. Here, for the first time, is the American epic as lived by Germans and Irish, Catholics and Jews, as well as people of British Protestant and African American stock; an epic defined as much by folks in Wisconsin, Kansas, and Texas as by those in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia; an epic in which Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, showman P. T. Barnum, and circus clown Dan Rice figure as prominently as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry Ward Beecher; an epic in which railroad management and land speculation prove as gripping as Indian wars. Walter A. McDougall's zesty, irreverent narrative says something new, shrewd, ironic, or funny about almost everything as it reveals our national penchant for pretense—a predilection that explains both the periodic throes of democracy and the perennial resilience of the United States.
Walter A. McDougall
A professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, Walter A. McDougall is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth and Let the Sea Make a Noise. . . . He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage children.
Related to Throes of Democracy
Related ebooks
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSalmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Worlds of William Penn Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs -The Election that Changed the Country Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRoosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJohn Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, from Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Coming of the New Deal: The Age of Roosevelt, 1933–1935 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51812: War and the Passions of Patriotism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Forge of Empires: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, 1861-1871 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Definitive FDR: Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1882–1940) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1940–1945) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUp from Conservatism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
United States History For You
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Library Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The White Album: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: An Edgar Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twelve Years a Slave (Illustrated) (Two Pence books) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Throes of Democracy
2 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5McDougall is a great writer, researcher and analyst. He is by far my favority American Historian.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5McDougall traces several themes through his history of America from 1829-1877 (a follow-up volume to his preceding book “Freedom Just Around the Corner” which covered 1585-1828). These include:1.Americans have embraced a civic religion, which is “all the more powerful for being unspoken, unwritten, and for the most part unacknowledged.” This civic faith stands above sectarian creeds and also guarantees their free exercise.2.Americans are hustlers, in the sense of finding a way around any law or authority that stands in the way of their pursuits of happiness (generally defined as amassing assets).3.Self-interest is cloaked in self-deception, spin, hokum, and manipulation.4.Business and government corruption have been rampant, audacious, pervasive and continuous.5.Violence and hatred toward those with less power have been as characteristic of our past as have goodness and generosity.6.Americans believe [however] that they are “priests in a church of democracy,” that their nation is an Eden in the making, that achievement is an indication of righteousness, and that their corruption is forgivable so long as it results in progress.This version of American history is unlike others you have read; the facts are the same, and yet the conceptual lenses through which McDougall analyzes them totally alters the American diorama. He seasons his stories with state profiles interspersed in the text and dozens of history factoids that are fun to learn: why are Michiganders wolverines and Wisconsinites Badgers? Whence came the expression “give someone the Dickens?” How did log cabins come to personify goodness and authenticity?Even in a book of over 750 pages there are omissions – necessarily – for coverage of this vast of a historical period. But decisions about what to include and what to eliminate also necessarily structure perceptions about truth, since each scaffolding of facts creates a distinctive architecture. What is omitted remains invisible.For example, McDougall (unlike any historian I can think of) defends both George McClellan and Andrew Johnson. In so doing, however, he omits certain behaviors of theirs that might contravene his kinder and gentler pictures of these oft-maligned fellows. Likewise, he paints fairly objectionable behavior with rosy colors: for instance, the fate of blacks in the Reconstruction Era: not as bad as it could have been…My criticism reflects, of course, my own prejudices, interests, and socioeconomic background. If you understand that McDougall’s history, like any, is “sedimented knowledge” – contingent on this one historian’s interpretations, you can enjoy his narrative as a fun and interesting tale about our past and some of the more colorful actors from it. Each additional history we read enriches our understanding of the tapestry of events that led to the present state of affairs. I recommend this book as an enlightening addition to our national story.