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    Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
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    Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
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    Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
    Ebook645 pages12 hours

    Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

    By David S. Reynolds

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A New York Times Notable Book

    “Far more than just a political story or, for that matter, a story of Andrew Jackson, Reynolds’s book shines a bright light on the cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic currents buffeting the nation. . . . Reynolds is a thoughtful historian and Waking Giant is as engaging and insightful a narrative of this critical interregnum as any written in years.”—New York Times Book Review

    A brilliant, definitive history of America’s vibrant and tumultuous rise during the Jacksonian era, from the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Walt Whitman’s America

    America experienced unprecedented growth and turmoil in the years between 1815 and 1848. It was an age when Andrew Jackson redefined the presidency and James K. Polk expanded the nation's territory. Historian and literary critic David S. Reynolds captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. He brings to life the reformers, abolitionists, and temperance advocates who struggled to correct America's worst social ills, and he reveals the shocking phenomena that marked the age: violent mobs, P. T. Barnum's freaks, all-seeing mesmerists, polygamous prophets, and rabble-rousing feminists. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Waking Giant is a brilliant chronicle of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061971440
    Author

    David S. Reynolds

    David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include John Brown, Abolitionist, winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award; Walt Whitman's America, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Beneath the American Renaissance, winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He lives in Old Westbury, New York.

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    Reviews for Waking Giant

    3.5/5

    31 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Reynolds examines the chaotic constantly changing years between 1815 to 1848. It’s a bunch of stories wrapped up in one. It’s a fun political story of Andrew Jackson, the first everyman’s president. It seems he was the first president to actually campaign for the job, and the populace loved him. Reynold’s also writes about the cultural, social, intellectual and artistic currents running through the nation. Many different things were happening all at once. President James Monroe observed that a growing network of canals and turnpikes and the development of the steamboat were helping stitch a country together, even as other Americans, saw the division of the Union unless it were bound together by something like the Erie Canal. Countless utopian movements popped up across the country, along with movements to help the poor, heal the sick and assist the deaf, even as Native Americans were forcibly marched to their deaths along the Trail of Tears and plans were being made to ship free blacks off to Africa, or elsewhere. It’s got a little bit of everything, and it’s a fun read.
    • 4/5
      A look at the United States between 1820, roughly, and 1848, this book convinced me of the continuity of many aspects of American society, from negative campaign tactics to experimentation with cults and alternatives to the standard family. There are startling facts here and there, but the book examines the stew that was America during the Jacksonian era, everything from the painting of Washington Allston to the origins of phrases like "manifest destiny" and even "O.K."
    • 5/5
      This book, published in 2008, is a sheer joy to read for anyone as attracted to antebellum US history as I am. It has chapters which tell in nicely chronological manner the political history of the years from 1815 to 1848. Then there is an excellent chapter discussing the religious events of the time including an incisive account of some of the strange religious happenings, including the rise of Mormonism, one of the few religious beginnings of the time which is still with us today. I found less absorbing the discussion of Emerson, but he has never excited my interest. The discussions of Cooper, Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne are however full of interest and even the thorough examination of Americah painting during the time is good reading. As is the account of the still unenlightened state of medicine. All in all, this book is a refreshing and literate view of the years involved. I thouroughly enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      Concise examination of the political, social, economic, religious and cultural issues of the Jacksonian Era.
    • 5/5
      This was a very fair account of this time period.