From the Bookshelf of History is Not Boring…

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848

Daniel Walker Howe

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

No group discussions for this book yet.

What Members Thought

Jun 10, 2009 Susanna - Censored by GoodReads rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, 19th-century, history, american-history, book-club

Very interesting. Certainly a different take on the time than Sean Wilentz' The Rise of American Democracy. The Presidents can be summed up suchly:

Madison & Monroe: intentionally opaque
Adams: high-minded
Jackson: authoritarian
van Buren: political fixer
Harrison: (fatally) long-winded
Tyler: WiNO (Whig in Name Only)
Polk: suspicious, acquisitive paranoid plotter

Howe is as nasty to Jackson as Wilentz was sweet; President Jackson only comes off well during the Nullification Crisis.

He also devotes a lot ...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Sep 10, 2017 Tim rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, bossism, pulitzer

I put this on my bossism shelf as well as my history shelf because one of the things it describes is the birth of the great democratic political machines in the second party system. The chief engineer of this machine was Martin Van Buren, chief advisor to Andrew Jackson, who had to forge partisan politics out of thin air as the nation was in period without distinct political parties. This machine pops up in many American biographies from Truman, whose critics called him the "Senator from Penderg ...more

Like · see review