Shows
WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FMDaniel Gullotta: Witches Are Back. Why?Daniel Gullotta is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Mississippi. He joined WRFH to discuss a recent essay at The Bulwark examining the widening spiritual divide in the United States between women and men.From 11/06/24.
2024-11-0747 min
The Age of Jackson Podcast149 The Tormented Rise of Abolition in Andrew Jackson's America with J.D. DickeyThe 1830s were the most violent time in American history outside of war. Men battled each other in the streets in ethnic and religious conflicts, gangs of party henchmen rioted at the ballot box, and assault and murder were common enough as to seem unremarkable. The president who presided over the era, Andrew Jackson, was himself a duelist and carried lead in his body from previous gunfights. It all made for such a volatile atmosphere that a young Abraham Lincoln said “outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times.”The principal targets of mob violence were...
2022-03-111h 02The Age of Jackson Podcast148 William Hunter, A British Soldier's Son Who Became an Early American with Eugene A. ProcknowIn June 1798, President John Adams signed the now infamous Alien & Sedition Acts to suppress political dissent. Facing imminent personal risks, a gutsy Kentucky newspaper editor ran the first editorial denouncing the law's attempt to stifle the freedom of the press. Almost immediately, government lawyers recommended his arrest and prosecution.That editor was William Hunter, amazingly, the son of a British soldier. During the American Revolution, he accompanied his father on a campaign to fight the American Rebels. Witnessing first-hand the terrors of combat and twice experiencing capture, Hunter wrote the only surviving account written by a child of a British...
2022-03-0451 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast147 John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America with Eric C. SmithJohn Leland (1754-1841) was one of the most influential and entertaining religious figures in early America. As an itinerant revivalist, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to connect with a popular audience, and contributed to the rise of a "democratized" Christianity in America. A tireless activist for the rights of conscience, Leland also waged a decades-long war for disestablishment, first in Virginia and then in New England. Leland advocated for full religious freedom for all-not merely Baptists and Protestants-and reportedly negotiated a deal with James Madison to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Leland developed a reputation for being "...
2022-02-1159 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast146 The Evolution of American Equality with Michael A. BellesilesThe evolution of the battle for true equality in America seen through the men, ideas, and politics behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed at the end of the Civil War. On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America; instead, he’d offered back to them their own hypocrisy. How could the Constitution defend both freedom and slaver...
2022-02-041h 00The Age of Jackson Podcast145 Cronyism in Early America with Patrick NewmanCronyism: Liberty versus Power in America 1607-1849 describes the evolution of political favor seeking in early American history, from the colonial era to the Mexican War. Newman argues that cronyism emerged from the perennial clash between the forces of liberty and power. When the interventionist Federalists, National Republicans, and Whigs controlled the government, special-interest policies—central banking, protective tariffs, businesses subsidies, territorial expansion, and so on—drastically increased. However, after the libertarian Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats assumed the command posts, cronyism only moderately declined before resuming its upward march. “Power,” Lord Acton teaches us, “tends to corrupt,” and slowly but surely t...
2021-12-1755 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast144 The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party with Yonatan EyalThe phrase 'Young America' connoted territorial and commercial expansion in the antebellum United States. During the years leading up to the Civil War, it permeated various parts of the Democratic party, producing new perspectives in the realms of economics, foreign policy, and constitutionalism. Led by figures such as Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and editor John L. O'Sullivan of New York, Young America Democrats gained power during the late 1840s and early 1850s. They challenged a variety of orthodox Jacksonian assumptions, influencing both the nation's foreign policy and its domestic politics. This 2007 book offers an exclusively political history of...
2021-12-101h 13The Age of Jackson Podcast143 The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America with Jordan T. WatkinsIn the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to...
2021-11-191h 11The Age of Jackson Podcast142 Free People of Color in the South with Warren E. Milteer Jr.On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective...
2021-11-121h 02
Political BeatsEpisode 102: Daniel Gullotta / Michael JacksonScot and Jeff discuss Michael Jackson with Daniel Gullotta.
Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by guest Daniel Gullotta. Daniel N. Gullotta is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in American Religious History at Stanford University. He is completing a dissertation on how religious politics influenced the rise of Andrew Jackson and the formation of the Democratic and Whig parties. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Bulwark, The Hill, National Review, The Critic, and many other publications. He is also the host of the Age of J...
2021-10-043h 39
The American IdeaDemocracy and American Prophets with Daniel Gullotta | Contemporary ConversationsIn this episode of The American Idea, Jeff welcomes Daniel Gullotta, Doctoral Candidate in Religious Studies at Stanford University and the host of The Age of Jackson podcast, to the show for a conversation on American prophets. Daniel is a scholar on religion in early American history and is a graduate of Yale University’s Divinity School, in the Master of Arts in Religion program. Their conversation will examine the life and times of three influential American religious leaders from the Early Republic: Joseph Smith, Robert Matthews, and Nat Turner.Host: Jeff SikkengaExecutive Producer: Gr...
2021-09-2939 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast141 Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery with Ken EllingwoodThe history of the fight for free press has never been more vital in our own time, when journalists are targeted as “enemies of the people.” In this brilliant and rigorously researched history, award-winning journalist and author Ken Ellingwood animates the life and times of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. First to Fall illuminates this flawed yet heroic figure who made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for free press rights in a time when the First Amendment offered little protection for those who dared to critique America’s “peculiar institution.”Culminating in Lovejoy’s dramatic clashes with the pro...
2021-09-241h 08The Age of Jackson Podcast140 Constitutionalism in the American Revolution with Gordon S. WoodThe half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism--the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions. The results of these issues produced institutions that have lasted for over two centuries.In this new book, eminent...
2021-09-1057 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast139 Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America with Matthew W. DoughertyThe belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel”—Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE—took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.Some white Protestants, Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people constructed nationalist narratives around the then-popular idea of “Israelite Indians.” Although these were minority viewpoints, they reveal that the story of religion and nationalism in the early United States was more complicated and wide-ran...
2021-08-271h 09The Age of Jackson Podcast138 Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman with Melanie KirkpatrickFor half a century Sarah Josepha Hale was the most influential woman in America. As editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale was the leading cultural arbiter for the growing nation. Women (and many men) turned to her for advice on what to read, what to cook, how to behave, and―most important―what to think. Twenty years before the declaration of women’s rights in Seneca Falls, NY, Sarah Josepha Hale used her powerful pen to promote women’s right to an education, to work, and to manage their own money.There is hardly an aspect of nineteent...
2021-08-2351 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast137 Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America with Kara M. FrenchHow much sex should a person have? With whom? What do we make of people who choose not to have sex at all? As present as these questions are today, they were subjects of intense debate in the early American republic. In this richly textured history, Kara French investigates ideas about, and practices of, sexual restraint to better understand the sexual dimensions of American identity in the antebellum United States. French considers three groups of Americans—Shakers, Catholic priests and nuns, and followers of sexual reformer Sylvester Graham—whose sexual abstinence provoked almost as much social, moral, and political concern as t...
2021-08-131h 00The Age of Jackson Podcast136 C-SPAN's Presidential Historians Survey with Thomas BalcerskiWhen C-SPAN conducted our first Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership in 2000, we worked with a team of nationally recognized historians to establish the survey's framework: Douglas Brinkley, Edna Greene Medford and Richard Norton Smith. They recommended the 10 qualities of presidential leadership and guided us on the survey's organization, execution and analysis of the results. While other advisers have joined for certain years, this core group has remained with us for each subsequent survey. In 2021, our fourth survey, we welcome the addition of Amity Shlaes. Our advisers' research and writing in American history span from the nation's founding to the late 20...
2021-08-071h 07The Age of Jackson Podcast135 The Science of Abolition with Eric HerschthalIn the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines—from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology—to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific eviden...
2021-06-181h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast134 Nativists, Catholics, and Citizen-Soldiers in the Philadelphia 1844 Riots with Zachary M. SchragAmerica is in a state of deep unrest, grappling with xenophobia, racial, and ethnic tension a national scale that feels singular to our time. But it also echoes the earliest anti-immigrant sentiments of the country. In 1844, Philadelphia was set aflame by a group of Protestant ideologues—avowed nativists—who were seeking social and political power rallied by charisma and fear of the immigrant menace.For these men, it was Irish Catholics they claimed would upend morality and murder their neighbors, steal their jobs, and overturn democracy. The nativists burned Catholic churches, chased and beat people through the streets, and...
2021-06-1156 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast133 Joseph Smith for President in the Election of 1844 with Spencer W. McBrideBy the election year of 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers. Nearly half of them lived in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith was not only their religious leader but also the mayor and the commander-in-chief of a militia of some 2,500 men. In less than twenty years, Smith had helped transform the American religious landscape and grown his own political power substantially. Yet the standing of the Mormon people in American society remained unstable. Unable to garner federal protection, and having failed to...
2021-05-281h 02The Age of Jackson Podcast132 American Republics, A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 with Alan TaylorFrom a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The syst...
2021-05-2159 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast131 The War of 1812 in the West with David KirkpatrickThe spring of 1812 found the young American republic on edge. The British Navy was impressing American seamen with impunity at an alarming rate while vicious attacks on frontier settlements by American Indians armed with British weapons had left a trail of fear and outrage. As calls for a military response increased, Kentucky, the first state west of the Appalachians, urged that only by defeating the British could the nation achieve security. The very thought conjured up embellished memories of the American Revolution, and once war was declared, many soldiers believed that the “Spirit of 76” would lead them to victory. But the...
2021-05-141h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast130 Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America with Jonathan Todd HancockThe New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 were the strongest temblors in the North American interior in at least the past five centuries. From the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a broad cast of thinkers struggled to explain these seemingly unprecedented natural phenomena. They summoned a range of traditions of inquiry into the natural world and drew connections among signs of environmental, spiritual, and political disorder on the cusp of the War of 1812. Drawn from extensive archival research, Convulsed States probes their interpretations to offer insights into revivalism, nation remaking, and th...
2021-05-071h 07The Age of Jackson Podcast129 How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America with Joshua D. RothmanSlave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States.In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were...
2021-04-301h 22The Age of Jackson Podcast128 America's First Civil Rights Movement with Kate MasurThe half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of...
2021-04-231h 06The Age of Jackson Podcast127 John C. Fremont and the Violent Election Of 1856 with John BicknellThe 1856 presidential race was the most violent peacetime election in American history. War between proslavery and antislavery settlers raged in Kansas; a congressman shot an Irish immigrant at a Washington hotel; and another congressman beat a US senator senseless on the floor of the Senate. But amid all the violence, the campaign of the new Republican Party, headed by famed explorer John C. Frémont, offered a ray of hope: a major party dedicated to limiting the spread of slavery. For the first time, women and African Americans actively engaged in a presidential contest, and the candidate’s wife, Jessie Ben...
2021-04-1647 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast126 The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion with Jack N. RakoveToday, Americans believe that the early colonists came to the New World in search of religious liberty. What we often forget is that they wanted religious liberty for themselves, not for those who held other views that they rejected and detested. Yet, by the mid-18th century, the colonists agreed that everyone possessed a sovereign right of conscience. How did this change develop? In Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Rakove tracks the unique course of religious freedom in America.He finds that, as denominations and sects multiplied, Americans became much more tolerant of the free...
2021-04-0958 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast125 The Reverse Underground Railroad Toward Slavery with Richard BellPhiladelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi an...
2021-03-261h 06The Age of Jackson Podcast124 Abraham Lincoln and the Anti-Slavery Constitution with James OakesThe long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States.Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the...
2021-03-1944 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast123 The Disillusionment of America's Founders with Dennis C. RasmussenAmericans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment.As...
2021-03-121h 00The Age of Jackson Podcast123 Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America with Christine Leigh HeyrmanFrom the winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in History, a lost episode rediscovered after almost two hundred years; a thwarted love triangle of heartbreak–two men and a woman of equal ambition–that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America’s Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women’s rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation’s culture and politics.At its center–and the center of a love triangle–Martha Parker, a gifted young New England wo...
2021-03-0553 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast122 John C. Calhoun, American Heretic with Robert ElderJohn C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union—and arguably set the nation on course for civil war.Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as some observers connected the strain of radical politics he...
2021-02-261h 14The Age of Jackson Podcast121 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Brothers who Defied a Nation with Peter CozzensThe first biography of the great Shawnee leader in more than twenty years, and the first to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States. Until the Americans killed Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But award-winning historian Peter Cozzens now shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader--admired by...
2021-02-1956 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast120 Politics and Memory in the American Revolution with Michael D. HattemIn Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as Americ...
2021-02-121h 09The Age of Jackson Podcast119 The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States with Thomas Richards Jr.Most Americans know that the state of Texas was once the Republic of Texas―an independent sovereign state that existed from 1836 until its annexation by the United States in 1846. But few are aware that thousands of Americans, inspired by Texas, tried to establish additional sovereign states outside the borders of the early American republic. In Breakaway Americas, Thomas Richards, Jr., examines six such attempts and the groups that supported them: "patriots" who attempted to overthrow British rule in Canada; post-removal Cherokees in Indian Territory; Mormons first in Illinois and then the Salt Lake Valley; Anglo-American overland immigrants in both Mexican Ca...
2021-02-0556 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast118 The True-Crime Story of Amelia Norman in Old New York with Julie MillerIn Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights.On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the new and luxurious Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him, just...
2021-01-2957 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast117 Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse with Christopher James BlytheThe relationship between early Mormons and the United States was marked by anxiety and hostility, heightened over the course of the nineteenth century by the assassination of Mormon leaders, the Saints' exile from Missouri and Illinois, the military occupation of the Utah territory, and the national crusade against those who practiced plural marriage. Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints looked forward to apocalyptic events that would unseat corrupt governments across the globe, particularly the tyrannical government of the United States. The infamous "White Horse Prophecy" referred to this coming American apocalypse as "a terrible revolutionEL in the land of America, such as has...
2021-01-2256 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast116 George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution with Lindsay M. ChervinskyThe US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet―the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government?On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries―Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph―for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own.Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and co...
2021-01-0856 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast115 Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency with Nathaniel C. GreenDonald Trump’s election has forced the United States to reckon with not only the political power of the presidency, but also how he and his supporters have used the office to advance their shared vision of America: one that is avowedly nationalist and unrepentantly rooted in nativism and white supremacy. It might be easy to attribute this dark vision, and the presidency’s immense power to reflect and reinforce it, to the singular character of one particular president—but to do so, this book tells us, would be to ignore the critical role the American public played in making the pr...
2020-11-201h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast114 The Jefferson Bible with Peter ManseauIn his retirement, Thomas Jefferson edited the New Testament with a penknife and glue, removing all mention of miracles and other supernatural events. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, Jefferson hoped to reconcile Christian tradition with reason by presenting Jesus of Nazareth as a great moral teacher―not a divine one. Peter Manseau tells the story of the Jefferson Bible, exploring how each new generation has reimagined the book in its own image as readers grapple with both the legacy of the man who made it and the place of religion in American life.Completed in 1820 and re...
2020-11-0643 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast113 The Whigs' America with Joseph W. Pearson[Warning: There was some corruption of the audio file and some parts of the interview are missing].Passionate political disagreement is as old as the American Republic, and the antebellum era -- the thirty years before the Civil War -- was as rife with partisan discord as any in our history. From 1834 to 1856, the Whigs battled their opponents, the Jacksonian Democrats, for offices, prestige, and power. The partisan expression of America's rising middle class, the Whigs boasted such famous members as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and William Henry Seward, and the party supported tariffs, banks, internal improvements, moral reform...
2020-10-3049 min
The Rogue HistorianThe Age of Andrew Jackson with Daniel GullottaDaniel Gullotta is Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and the host of the Age of Jackson podcast - he and I discuss podcasting, the public, and Antebellum politics (with a little of the election of 2020 mixed in). Enjoy!
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2020-10-2500 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast112 Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy with Michael E. WoodsAs the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been...
2020-10-231h 13The Age of Jackson Podcast111 America’s First Abolition Movement with Paul J. PolgarPaul Polgar recovers the racially inclusive vision of America's first abolition movement. In showcasing the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and their African American allies during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras, he unearths this coalition's comprehensive agenda for black freedom and equality. By guarding and expanding the rights of people of African descent and demonstrating that black Americans could become virtuous citizens of the new Republic, these activists, whom Polgar names "first movement abolitionists," sought to end white prejudice and eliminate racial inequality. Beginning in the 1820s, however, colonization threatened to eclipse this...
2020-10-161h 15The Age of Jackson Podcast110 Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 with Kyle B. RobertsAt first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? More than you might think, says Kyle B. Roberts, who argues that religion must be considered alongside immigration, commerce, and real estate scarcity as one of the forces that shaped the New York City we know today. In Evangelical Gotham, Roberts explores the role of the urban evangelical community in the development of New York between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As developers prepared...
2020-08-2857 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast109 The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation with Richard J. EllisUsually remembered for its slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” the election of 1840 is also the first presidential election of which it might be truly said, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” Tackling a contest best known for log cabins, cider barrels, and catchy songs, this timely volume reveals that the election of 1840 might be better understood as a case study of how profoundly the economy shapes the presidential vote.Richard J. Ellis, a veteran scholar of presidential politics, suggests that the election pitting the Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren against Whig William Henry Harrison should also be remembered as the first pre...
2020-08-211h 30The Age of Jackson Podcast108 The Life of John Tyler, the President Without a Party with Christopher J. LeahyHistorians have long viewed President John Tyler as one of the nation’s least effective heads of state. In President without a Party―the first full-scale biography of Tyler in more than fifty years and the first new academic study of him in eight decades―Christopher J. Leahy explores the life of the tenth chief executive of the United States.Born in the Virginia Tidewater into an elite family sympathetic to the ideals of the American Revolution, Tyler, like his father, worked as an attorney before entering politics. Leahy uses a wealth of primary source materials to chart T...
2020-08-141h 28The Age of Jackson Podcast107 The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic with Joshua R. GreenbergBefore Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters...
2020-08-071h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast106 Merrill D. Peterson's The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1988) with James Bradley (History of History 20)Enormously powerful, intensely ambitious, the very personifications of their respective regions--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun represented the foremost statemen of their age. In the decades preceding the Civil War, they dominated American congressional politics as no other figures have. Now Merrill D. Peterson, one of our most gifted historians, brilliantly re-creates the lives and times of these great men in this monumental collective biography.Arriving on the national scene at the onset of the War of 1812 and departing political life during the ordeal of the Union in 1850-52, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun opened--and closed--a new...
2020-07-311h 06The Age of Jackson Podcast105 Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America with William K. BoltBefore the Civil War, the American people did not have to worry about a federal tax collector coming to their door. The reason why was the tariff, taxing foreign goods and imports on arrival in the United States. Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America attempts to show why the tariff was an important part of the national narrative in the antebellum period. The debates in Congress over the tariff were acrimonious, with pitched arguments between politicians, interest groups, newspapers, and a broader electorate.The spreading of democracy caused by the tariff evoked bitter sectional controversy among...
2020-07-241h 04The Age of Jackson Podcast104 Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic with James S. KabalaAmericans of the Early Republic devoted close attention to the question of what should be the proper relationship between church and state. This issue engaged participants from all religions, denominations and party affiliations. Kabala examines this debate across six decades and shows that an understanding of this period is not possible without appreciating the key role religion played in the formation of the nation.-James S. Kabala received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University. He is an adjunct professor at Rhode Island College and Community College of Rhode Island.
2020-07-171h 04The Age of Jackson Podcast103 White Women as Slave Owners in the American South with Stephanie E. Jones-RogersBridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and...
2020-07-101h 10The Age of Jackson Podcast102 European Nationalist Movements and the Creation of the Confederacy with Ann L. TuckerFrom the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations, Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize...
2020-06-2652 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast101 Christine Stansell's City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986) with Anne Twitty (History of History 19)Before the Civil War, a new idea of womanhood took shape in America in general and in the Northeast in particular. Women of the propertied classes assumed the mantle of moral guardians of their families and the nation. Laboring women, by contrast, continued to suffer from the oppressions of sex and class. In fact, their very existence troubled their more prosperous sisters, for the impoverished female worker violated dearly held genteel precepts of 'woman's nature' and 'woman's place.' City of Women delves into the misfortunes that New York City's laboring women suffered and the problems that resulted. Looking at...
2020-05-291h 18The Age of Jackson Podcast100 Andrew Jackson and His Papers with Daniel FellerAndrew Jackson was of one of the most critical and controversial figures in American history. The dominant actor on the American scene in the half-century between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Jackson lent his name first to a political movement, then to an era, and finally to democracy itself. As the Hero of New Orleans, he became a symbol of American nationalism. As a frontiersman and military commander, he spearheaded the westward expansion of the nation and the subjugation of its native peoples. As the first westerner and first man of humble origins to reach the White House, he stood...
2020-05-221h 45The Age of Jackson Podcast099 The Battle of New Orleans and the Rebirth of America with William C. DavisFrom master historian William C. Davis, the definitive story of the Battle of New Orleans, the fight that decided the ultimate fate not only of the War of 1812 but the future course of the fledgling American republicIt was a battle that could not be won. Outnumbered farmers, merchants, backwoodsmen, smugglers, slaves, and Choctaw Indians, many of them unarmed, were up against the cream of the British army, professional soldiers who had defeated the great Napoleon and set Washington, D.C., ablaze. At stake was nothing less than the future of the vast American heartland, from the Gulf...
2020-05-151h 03The Age of Jackson Podcast098 Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era with Jonathan GienappA stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our Constitution? Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in unce...
2020-05-081h 21The Age of Jackson PodcastCOVID-19, Book Recommendations, Fashion Advice, and Ask Us Anything with Craig Bruce Smith
2020-03-201h 05The Age of Jackson Podcast097 The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King with Thomas J. BalcerskiThe friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791-1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786-1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither marry? Might they have been gay? Or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day "bromance"? In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas J. Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. He traces the parallels in the men's personal and professional lives before elected office, including their failed romantic...
2020-03-131h 20The Age of Jackson Podcast096 The Mormon Kingdom of Nauvoo with Benjamin E. ParkCompared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, treated as fringe cultists at best or marginalized as polygamists unworthy of serious examination at worst. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, the historian Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, and in the process demonstrates that the Mormons are, in fact, essential to understanding American history writ large. Drawing on newly available sources from the LDS Church―sources that had been kept unseen in Church archives for 150 years―Park recreates one of the most dramatic episodes of the 19th century frontier. Founded in Western Illi...
2020-02-281h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast095 Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor using Indian-Killing for Political Gain with Barbara Alice MannPresident by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain pulls back the curtain of "expansionism," revealing how Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor massacred Indians to "open" land to slavery and oligarchic fortunes.President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain examines the way in which presidential hopefuls through the first half of the nineteenth century parlayed militarily mounted land grabs into "Indian-hating" political capital to attain the highest office in the United States. The text zeroes in on three eras of U.S. "expansionism" as it led to the massacre of Indians to "open" land to African slavery...
2020-02-211h 02The Age of Jackson Podcast094 The Influence of European Separatists on Southern Secession with Niels EichhornIn Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War, Niels Eichhorn examines the language of slavery, a component he considers central to revolutionary struggles, especially those fought by European separatists in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tracing the European uprisings of 1830 and 1848 and the American Civil War in 1861, Eichhorn shows that separatism, broadly defined as a group’s desire for self-determination manifested in the form of a breakaway state, was a widespread phenomenon during this period and that the secessionist aims of the Confederacy in the United States were by no means unique. By an...
2020-02-141h 12The Age of Jackson Podcast093 Thomas Jefferson's Education and the Founding of the University of Virginia with Alan TaylorFrom a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education.By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never...
2020-02-071h 13The Age of Jackson Podcast092 Polygamy in Early American History with Sarah M. S. PearsallToday we tend to think of polygamy as an unnatural marital arrangement characteristic of fringe sects or uncivilized peoples. Historian Sarah Pearsall shows us that polygamy’s surprising history encompasses numerous colonies, indigenous communities, and segments of the American nation. Polygamy—as well as the fight against it—illuminates many touchstones of American history: the Pueblo Revolt and other uprisings against the Spanish; Catholic missions in New France; New England settlements and King Philip’s War; the entrenchment of African slavery in the Chesapeake; the Atlantic Enlightenment; the American Revolution; missions and settlement in the West; and the rise of Mormonis...
2020-01-3156 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast091 Jefferson Davis and the Pro-Bonaparte Democrats with Jeffrey ZvengrowskiIn this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics, Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites. Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style warfare with large conscripted armies...
2020-01-241h 00The Age of Jackson Podcast090 Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) with Phillip W. MagnessTime on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) is a book by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Asserting that slavery was an economically viable institution that had some benefits for African Americans, the book was reprinted in 1995 at its twentieth anniversary. First published a decade after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the book contradicted contemporary assessments of the effects of slavery on African Americans in the American South before the Civil War. It attracted widespread attention in the media and generated heated controversy and criticism for its methodology and conclusions.-Phillip...
2020-01-171h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast089 America's Revolutionary Mind with C. Bradley ThompsonAmerica's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It is the first major reinterpretation of the American Revolution since the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic. The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in...
2019-12-201h 22The Age of Jackson Podcast088 George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution with David HeadIn the war’s waning days, the American Revolution neared collapse when Washington’s senior officers were rumored to approach the edge of mutiny.After the British surrender at Yorktown, the American Revolution blazed on, and as peace was negotiated in Europe, grave problems surfaced at home. The government was broke and paid its debts with loans from France. Political rivalry among the states paralyzed Congress. The army’s officers, encamped near Newburgh, New York, and restless without an enemy to fight, brooded over a civilian population indifferent to their sacrifices.The result was the Newburgh Conspi...
2019-12-131h 05The Age of Jackson Podcast087 The Influence of Christianity at the Founding and in the Early Republic with Mark David HallMany Americans have been taught a distorted, inaccurate account of our nation’s founding, one that claims that the founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and that the country’s founding political ideas developed without reference to Christianity. In this revelatory, rigorously argued new book, Mark David Hall thoroughly debunks that modern myth and shows instead that the founders’ political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions.Drawing from hundreds of personal letters, public proclamations, early state constitutions and laws, and other original documents, Professor Hall makes the airtight case that Americ...
2019-12-061h 16The Age of Jackson Podcast086 The Panic of 1819, The First Great Depression with Andrew H. BrowningThe Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression tells the story of the first nationwide economic collapse to strike the United States. Much more than a banking crisis or real estate bubble, the Panic was the culmination of an economic wave that rolled through the United States, forming before the War of 1812, cresting with the land and cotton boom of 1818, and crashing just as the nation confronted the crisis over slavery in Missouri.The Panic introduced Americans to the new phenomenon of boom and bust, changed the country's attitudes towards wealth and poverty, spurred the political movement that became...
2019-11-291h 15The Age of Jackson Podcast085 Antebellum American Messiahs with Adam MorrisMania surrounding messianic prophets has defined the national consciousness since the American Revolution. From Civil War veteran and virulent anticapitalist Cyrus Teed, to the dapper and overlooked civil rights pioneer Father Divine, to even the megalomaniacal Jim Jones, these figures have routinely been dismissed as dangerous and hysterical outliers.After years of studying these emblematic figures, Adam Morris demonstrates that messiahs are not just a classic trope of our national culture; their visions are essential for understanding American history. As Morris demonstrates, these charismatic, if flawed, would-be prophets sought to expose and ameliorate deep social ills-such as income...
2019-11-011h 20The Age of Jackson Podcast084 A Religious History of the Mexican-American War with John C. PinheiroThe term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which Manifest Destiny and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.Pinheiro begins with the social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political sentiment...
2019-10-181h 26The Age of Jackson Podcast083 The Battle of Negro Fort with Matthew J. ClavinIn the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Am...
2019-10-111h 05The Age of Jackson Podcast082 'Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000)' Reloaded with Michael A. BellesilesIn 1996 Emory University’s Michael A. Bellesiles, published an article in the Journal of American History: “The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865.” His provocative argument was that there were nowhere near as many guns in early America as people had previously assumed and that American gun culture was born in the lead up to the Civil War. To prove his thesis, Bellesiles pointed to low counts of guns in probate records, gun censuses, militia muster records, and homicide accounts. While his article caused some debate, it received wide praise and eventfully served as the basis for Arming...
2019-08-221h 27The Age of Jackson Podcast081 Michael A. Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000) with Joyce Lee Malcolm (History of History 17)In 1996 Emory University's Michael A. Bellesiles, published an article in the Journal of American History: "The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865." His provocative argument was that there were nowhere near as many guns in early America as people had previously assumed and that American gun culture was born in the lead up to the Civil War. To prove his thesis, Bellesiles pointed to low counts of guns in probate records, gun censuses, militia muster records, and homicide accounts. While his article caused some debate, it received wide praise and eventfully served as the basis for Arming...
2019-08-161h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast080 Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas with Jeffrey OstlerThe first part of a sweeping two-volume history of the devastation brought to bear on Indian nations by U.S. expansion.In this book, the first part of a sweeping two-volume history, Jeffrey Ostler investigates how American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and the federally sanctioned use of force to remove or slaughter Indians in the way of U.S. expansion. He charts the losses that Indians suffered from relentless violence and upheaval and the attendant effects of disease, deprivation, and exposure. This volume centers on the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the...
2019-08-021h 22The Age of Jackson Podcast079 The Bank War and the Partisan Press with Stephen W. CampbellPresident Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most consequential political struggles in the early nineteenth century. A fight over the bank’s reauthorization, the Bank War, provoked fundamental disagreements over the role of money in politics, competing constitutional interpretations, equal opportunity in the face of a state-sanctioned monopoly, and the importance of financial regulation—all of which cemented emerging differences between Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. As Stephen W. Campbell argues here, both sides in the Bank War engaged interregional communications networks funded by public and private money. The first reappraisal of thi...
2019-06-281h 20The Age of Jackson Podcast078 The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality with Nancy Isenberg & Andrew BursteinJohn and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth-tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results; and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. When John Adams succeeded George Washington as President, his son had already followed him into public service and was stationed in Europe as a diplomat. Though they spent many years apart--and as their careers spanned...
2019-06-211h 44The Age of Jackson Podcast077 The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the Early Republic with Steven WaldmanSacred Liberty: America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom offers a dramatic, sweeping survey of how America built a unique model of religious freedom, perhaps the nation’s “greatest invention.” Steven Waldman, the bestselling author of Founding Faith, shows how early ideas about religious liberty were tested and refined amidst the brutal persecution of Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, African slaves, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. American leaders drove religious freedom forward--figures like James Madison, George Washington, the World War II presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower) and even George W. Bush. But the biggest heroes were the regu...
2019-06-071h 05The Age of Jackson Podcast076 Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism with Joshua A. LynnIn Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism, Joshua Lynn reveals how the national Democratic Party rebranded majoritarian democracy and liberal individualism as conservative means for white men in the South and North to preserve their mastery on the eve of the Civil War.Responding to fears of African American and female political agency, Democrats in the late 1840s and 1850s reinvented themselves as "conservatives" and repurposed Jacksonian Democracy as a tool for local majorities of white men to police racial and gender boundaries by democratically withholding rights. With the po...
2019-05-311h 01The Age of Jackson Podcast075 The Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America with Cassandra L. YacovazziJust five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's shocking exposé of convent life, had already sold more than 20,000 copies. The book detailed gothic-style horror stories of licentious priests and abusive mothers superior, tortured nuns and novices, and infanticide. By the time the book was revealed to be a fiction and the author, Maria Monk, an imposter, it had already become one of the nineteenth century's best-selling books. In antebellum America only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, outsold it.The success of Monk's book was no fluke, b...
2019-05-241h 00The Age of Jackson Podcast074 The Age of Jackson within American History with Thomas S. KiddAmerican History, Volume 1: 1492-1877 surveys the broad sweep of American history from the first Native American societies to the end of the Reconstruction period, following the Civil War. Drawing on a deep range of research and years of classroom teaching experience, Thomas S. Kidd offers students an engaging overview of the first half of American history. The volume features illuminating stories of people from well-known presidents and generals, to lesser-known men and women who struggled under slavery and other forms of oppression to make their place in American life. The role of Christianity in America is central in this book...
2019-05-1745 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast073 Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity with Michael J. Altman (History of History 16)In this prize-winning book Nathan O. Hatch offers a provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, arguing that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.Nathan O. Hatch grew up in Columbia, S.C., where his fath...
2019-05-031h 02The Age of Jackson Podcast072 The Religious Lives of the Adams Family with Sara GeorginiReflecting on his past, President John Adams mused that it was religion that had shaped his family's fortunes and young America's future. For the nineteenth century's first family, the Adamses of Massachusetts, the history of how they lived religion was dynamic and well-documented. Christianity supplied the language that Abigail used to interpret husband John's political setbacks. Scripture armed their son John Quincy to act as father, statesman, and antislavery advocate. Unitarianism gave Abigail's Victorian grandson, Charles Francis, the religious confidence to persevere in political battles on the Civil War homefront. By contrast, his son Henry found religion hollow and repellent...
2019-04-261h 16The Age of Jackson Podcast071 Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic with Kristin O'Brassill-KulfanVagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and...
2019-04-191h 07The Age of Jackson Podcast070 Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania with Erica Rhodes HaydenTroublesome Women: Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania traces the lived experiences of women lawbreakers in the state of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860 through the records of more than six thousand criminal court cases. By following these women from the perpetration of their crimes through the state’s efforts to punish and reform them, Erica Rhodes Hayden places them at the center of their own stories.Women constituted a small percentage of those tried in courtrooms and sentenced to prison terms during the nineteenth century, yet their experiences offer valuable insight into the era’s criminal justice system. Hayden illumi...
2019-04-051h 09The Age of Jackson Podcast069 Paul E. Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium with Chris Babits (History of History 15)A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's...
2019-03-2949 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast068 The World of First Lady Sarah Polk with Amy S. GreenbergWhile the Woman's Rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman in Washington, D.C. Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, in her riveting biography, Amy S. Greenberg brings Sarah's story into vivid focus. We see Sarah as the daughter of a frontiersman who raised her to discuss politics and business with men; we see the savvy and charm she brandished in order to help her brilliant but unlikeable husband, James K. Polk, ascend to the...
2019-03-221h 17The Age of Jackson Podcast067 Lobbyists and the Making of US Tariff Policy with Daniel PeartSince the 2008 global economic crisis, historians have embraced the challenge of making visible the invisible hand of the market. This renewed interest in the politics of political economy makes it all the more timely to remind ourselves that debates over free trade and protection were just as controversial in the early United States as they have once again become, and that lobbying, then as now, played an important part in Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people, for the people." In Lobbyists and the Making of US Tariff Policy, 1816-1861, Daniel Peart reveals how active lobbyists were...
2019-03-151h 13The Age of Jackson Podcast066 Francis J. Grund's Aristocracy in America with Armin MattesIn Jacksonian America, as Grund exposes, the wealthy inhabitants of northern cities and the plantation South may have been willing to accept their poorer neighbors as political and legal peers, but rarely as social equals. In this important work, he thus sheds light on the nature of the struggle between “aristocracy” and “democracy” that loomed so large in early republican Americans’ minds.Francis J. Grund, a German immigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including this fictional, satiric travel memoir in response to Alexis...
2019-03-0851 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast065 Drew R. McCoy's The Last of the Fathers with Aaron N. Coleman (History of History 14)James Madison survived longer than any other member of the most remarkable generation of political leaders in American history. Born in the middle of the eighteenth century as a subject of King George II, the Father of the United States Constitution lived until 1836, when he died a citizen of Andrew Jackson's republic. For over forty years he played a pivotal role in the creation and defense of a new political order. He lived long enough to see even that Revolutionary world transformed, and the system of government he had nurtured threatened by the disruptive forces of a new era that...
2019-03-011h 12The Age of Jackson Podcast064 James Monroe, A Republican Champion with Brook PostonDespite serving his country for 50 years and being among the most qualified men to hold the office of president, James Monroe is an oft-forgotten Founding Father. In this book, Brook Poston reveals how Monroe attempted to craft a legacy for himself as a champion of American republicanism.Monroe’s dedication to the vision of a modern republic built on liberty began when he joined the American Revolution. His devotion to the cause further developed under his apprenticeship to Thomas Jefferson. These experiences spurred him to support the virtues of republicanism during the French Revolution, when he tried to cr...
2019-02-251h 07The Age of Jackson Podcast063 Mesmerism in the Early United States with Emily OgdenFrom the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years.Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s sp...
2019-02-1545 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast062 Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster with H.W. BrandsIn the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another...
2019-02-0858 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast061 Founding First Ladies and Slaves with Marie Jenkins SchwartzBehind every great man stands a great woman. And behind that great woman stands a slave. Or so it was in the households of the Founding Fathers from Virginia, where slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era, from Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier to the nation’s capital. American icons like Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, and Dolley Madison were all slaveholders. And as Marie Jenkins Schwartz uncovers in Ties That Bound, these women, as the day-to-day managers of their households, dealt with the realities of a slaveholding culture directly and continually, even in the most intimate of...
2019-02-011h 05The Age of Jackson Podcast059 Henry Clay, The Man Who Would Be President with James C. KlotterCharismatic, charming, and one of the best orators of his era, Henry Clay seemed to have it all. He offered a comprehensive plan of change for America, and he directed national affairs as Speaker of the House, as Secretary of State to John Quincy Adams--the man he put in office--and as acknowledged leader of the Whig party. As the broker of the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay fought to keep a young nation united when westward expansion and slavery threatened to tear it apart. Yet, despite his talent and achievements, Henry Clay never became president. Three times...
2019-01-1849 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast058 Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson with Mark R. CheathemAfter the "corrupt bargain" that awarded John Quincy Adams the presidency in 1825, American politics underwent a fundamental shift from deference to participation. This changing tide eventually propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House—twice. But the presidential race that best demonstrated the extent of the changes was that of Martin Van Buren and war hero William Henry Harrison in 1840. Harrison’s campaign was famously marked by sloganeering and spirited rallies.In The Coming of Democracy, Mark R. Cheathem examines the evolution of presidential campaigning from 1824 to 1840. Addressing the roots of early republic cultural politics—from campaign biographies to songs...
2019-01-1157 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast030 How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic with Sharon Ann MurphyPieces of paper that claimed to be good for two dollars upon redemption at a distant bank. Foreign coins that fluctuated in value from town to town. Stock certificates issued by turnpike or canal companies—worth something... or perhaps nothing. IOUs from farmers or tradesmen, passed around by people who could not know the person who first issued them. Money and banking in antebellum America offered a glaring example of free-market capitalism run amok—unregulated, exuberant, and heading pell-mell toward the next "panic" of burst bubbles and hard times.In Other People’s Money, Sharon Ann Murphy explains how ban...
2018-07-061h 12The Age of Jackson Podcast015 Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought [2007] with Miles Smith IV (History of History 4)The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent.A panoramic narrative, What Hath God Wrought portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph...
2018-04-1640 minThe Age of Jackson Podcast002 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson [1945] with Richard Aldous (History of History 1)This podcast takes its name from the term popularized by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1945). While early Mormonism and the Second Great Awakening may have gotten me into American Religious History, it was Schlesinger's Age of Jackson that got me bit by the Jacksonian bug.Despite the picture of Andrew Jackson on its cover and the evocative title, The Age of Jackson is less a biography of Andrew Jackson and more study of democracy's expansion in early 19th century America. In fact, when Schlesinger does reference Jackson, he is typically viewed through others, co...
2018-01-2657 min