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

New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Julie Franken (Author Photograph). xviii, [2], 904, [4] pages. Maps. Illustrations. Footnotes. Bibliographic Essay. Index. DJ rear flap has an edge crease. Signed by the author on the title page. This is part of the Oxford History of the United States. Daniel Walker Howe (born January 10, 1937) is an American historian who specializes in the early national period of U.S. history, with a particular interest in its intellectual and religious dimensions. He was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England (from 1992 to 2002 then Emeritus) and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought (2007), his most famous book. He was president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Historical Society. Howe earned his Bachelor of Arts at Harvard University in 1959, magna cum laude in American history and literature, and his Ph.D. in history at University of California, Berkeley in 1966. Howe's connection with Oxford University began when he matriculated at Magdalen College to read modern history in 1960, receiving his M.A. in 1965. Howe has taught at UCLA (1973-92), where he chaired the history department, and Oxford (1992-2002). In 1989- 1990 Howe was Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford and a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. In 1992 he became a permanent member of the Oxford history faculty and a fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford until his retirement in 2002. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. The book provides an intellectual, religious, social, and political history of the United States at the time when the Founding Fathers of the United States were handing the leadership of the nation to a new generation. Howe demonstrates that Americans during this period considered their country an example of democracy for the rest of the world. He argues that the most important forces that made U.S. democracy meaningful during this period were (1) the growth of the market economy, (2) the awakened vigor of democratically organized Protestant churches and other voluntary associations, (3) the emergence of mass political parties. The impact of these three factors was magnified by developments in communications (mails, newspaper, books, and telegraph) and transportation (trains, steamboats, canals, and roads). The book's title comes from both the Bible and Samuel Morse's first telegraph message. Howe details the horrors involved in slavery, the removal of Native Americans, and the war against Mexico. Some of the major individuals and groups of the period were Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, James Monroe, DeWitt Clinton, Thomas Hart Benton, James Polk, Democratic Party, Whigs, abolitionists, evangelical Protestant sects, Joseph Smith and slaveholders. In 2008, What Hath God Wrought also won the American History Book Prize. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Historian Howe, professor emeritus at Oxford University and UCLA, stylishly narrates a crucial period in U.S. history-a time of territorial growth, religious revival, booming industrialization, a recalibrating of American democracy and the rise of nationalist sentiment. Smaller but no less important stories run through the account: New York's gradual emancipation of slaves; the growth of higher education; the rise of the temperance movement. Howe also charts developments in literature, focusing not just on Thoreau and Poe but on such forgotten writers as William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, who "helped create the romantic image of the Old South," but whose proslavery views eventually brought his work into disrepute. Supported by engaging prose, Howe's achievement will surely be seen as one of the most outstanding syntheses of U.S. history published this decade.