Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877

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 carries the saga of the American people's continuous self-reinvention across five tumultuous decades. From the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson through the eras of Manifest Destiny, Civil War, and Reconstruction, it is 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--a zesty, irreverent narrative that brazenly reveals our national penchant for pretense.

Author: Walter a. McDougall
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 02/24/2009
Pages: 816
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 8.07h x 5.40w x 1.42d
ISBN: 9780060567538

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 05/28/0009 pg. 35

About the Author
McDougall, Walter a.: -

A professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, Walter A. McDougall is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth and Let the Sea Make a Noise. . . . He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage children.