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582), but he mostly emphasizes that Americans shared the same fundamental objectives and only differed over details like the legitimacy of government intervention in the economy and the relative priority of agriculture and urban development. Howe occasionally admits that some Americans had mixed feelings about the economic changes of their times, and acknowledges that Whigs and Democrats were divided by “rival visions of the national destiny” (p.
With isolated exceptions like the Dorr War and the early labor movement, he finds no serious struggle over white male democracy in antebellum America, or any meaningful debate over economic power triggered by a so-called “Market Revolution.” In his telling, the rights of white men and the benefits of economic development were widely accepted on all sides. But with the exception of Jackson's victory over nullification, Howe can find little to praise or even defend about “Jacksonian Democracy.” For him, Indian Removal and the defense of slavery were the core objectives of Jackson's movement, and “white supremacy, resolute and explicit, constituted an essential component of what contemporaries called ‘the Democracy’-that is, the Democratic Party” (p. The political contests of post-1815 America are hard to ignore, of course, and Howe gives full attention to the misnamed “Era of Good Feelings,” to Jackson's path to the White House, to the raging policy battles of his administration, to the rise of political parties, and to the struggle for continental expansion. In a striking departure from earlier retellings of this oft-told story, he explicitly rejects the polarizing figure of Andrew Jackson, as well as his followers' supposed struggle for democracy, as the dominant forces of the age. Morse's resonant telegraph message, Howe's title points beyond technology to religion, particularly to the soaring reform aspirations inspired by the Second Great Awakening. Daniel Walker Howe won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for history for this intricately detailed and sonorously written account of the dramatic changes that swept antebellum America, spurred by the era's remarkable developments in transportation and communication.
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