From the Publisher
"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.
The New York Times -
Michael Kazin
Like Mark Twain, a rare 19th-century figure whom he admires, McDougall mocks "in suitably palatable fashion" the myth that Americans were a decent people eager to share the blessings of democracy. Because he writes exceedingly well, this makes for a history that is bracing to read, even if one questions its premises and conclusions.
The Washington Post -
Heather Cox Richardson
Rather than a definitive history, Throes of Democracy is a rollicking trip through historical events aimed at waking readers to America's past self-deceptions and prodding them to be more self-critical today. But even if McDougall's history is deliberately provocative, it is not anti-American. The relish with which he launches his characters into the turbulent waters of the 19th century can only reflect a genuine appreciation for them, despite the muck in which they paddled. People like mountain men Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith mounting a disastrous trapping expedition up the Missouri River, huckster P. T. Barnum using swampland to secure a loan, Joseph Smith digging a peculiarly American religion out of a hill, and Walt Whitman defining the nation in myth-making poetry are rendered with an affectionate, if critical, pen.
Publishers Weekly
The subtitle's overextended claim that the Civil War era started in 1829 sets the tone for this hulking second volume (after Freedom Just Around the Corner) of Pulitzer-winner McDougall's projected multivolume history of the U.S. The author tries both to deflate national pride and celebrate national progress in the era in which the nation spread across the continent, shattered in a war and came back together. He does so in an opinionated, breezy narrative that focuses on individuals-lesser known as well as famous, writers and thinkers as well as political and military leaders. But McDougall's history is basically a traditional one about party conflicts, the westward course of empire, war, the Transcendentalists, frontier tensions, railroads, slavery, religious tensions and robber barons. You'd never know that a huge body of history on the real lives of 19th-century Americans had been produced in recent decades. Not many women appear, or Indians, slaves and freedmen, or working people, many of whom helped make the young democracy vital and tumultuous. McDougall's strength lies in deflating cherished reputations, like de Tocqueville's, and restoring others', like pastor and intellectual Orestes Brownson's. A pleasing romp through a critical period in the nation's history, it sticks to the tried and true. 19 maps. (Mar. 11)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal
McDougall (history, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 ), Pulitzer Prize winner for The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Program , presents the second volume of his planned trilogy of "new American history," from the election of Andrew Jackson through Reconstruction. He reiterates the theme of Americans as "hustlers," a term that has both negative and positive connotations. McDougall asserts that citizens of this country are masters of rhetorical self-reinvention in political, economic, social, and spiritual spheres. Beginning by defining New York City's rise as representative of American determination, he expands from there to offer various instances of American ingenuity and drive, citing some atypical examples from history such as the rise of mass entertainment through the entrepreneurial spirit of early comedians and traveling circuses. He also addresses the core signifiers such as Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and the postbellum mythologizing of the country as a nation purged of sin, as it headed forward with optimism and capitalist vigor. McDougall's primary and secondary research is exhaustive, with endnotes providing additional entertaining background. Highly recommended for academic and many public libraries.-Gayla Koerting, Univ. of South Dakota, Vermillion
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A broad-ranging portrait of America in a time of torment, continuing Pulitzer Prize winner McDougall's (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828, 2004, etc.) projected trilogy. The author extends the Civil War era to the first serious rumblings of secession and regional rivalry, closing it with the end of Reconstruction. His narrative opens, fittingly enough, with a massive fire that swept through New York just before Christmas in 1835, when "lower Manhattan ceased to exist." The conflagration had the unintended effect of consolidating city government power and improving water supply and firefighting services, while also making the scramble for housing for less-privileged New Yorkers all that more Darwinian. The effect of that scramble, in turn, was murderous rioting on the part of Irish gangs that targeted African-Americans when not targeting one another-ethnic violence that foreshadowed the larger bloodletting to come. Liking what they heard of these Five Points riots, Protestant Bostonians set about ransacking convents, while in Philadelphia "anti-abolitionists went on rampages in black neighborhoods." Out on the Great Plains, American dragoons were setting about fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes for the first time, again setting the tone for the decades to come. To such seemingly isolated events, McDougall applies themes that speak to dissent and division. He notes, for instance, that "American Protestantism in the Romantic era was characterized by loud disputations over fine points of theology, raucous revivals in country and town, and bewildering sectarianism," which puts him to wondering how it was that European visitorssuch as Tocqueville and Trollope could have considered the United States to be conformist in character. Speaking to that character, McDougall ventures that in the Civil War era something of the nation's essential nature came through: progressive yet conservative, pious yet sanguinary. Provocative and richly detailed-a welcome contribution to popular history.
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