Podcast appearances and mentions of Richard D Brown

How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice?  A conversation with Richard D. Brown, author of Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War.  We talk about religious liberty,  Ephraim Wheeler, the rights (or lack of rights) of women, and also about Richard Brown's first book Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts:  The Committees of Correspondence and the Towns 1772-1774,  and about the September issue of the New England Quarterly,  which will focus on the influence of Bernard Bailyn.  

Today 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 Mormonism.Pearsall expertly opens up broader questions about monogamy's emergence as the only marital option, tracing the impact of colonial events on property, theology, feminism, imperialism, and the regulation of sexuality. She shows that heterosexual monogamy was never the only model of marriage in North America.-Sarah M. S. Pearsall is a University Senior Lecturer in the History of Early America and the Atlantic World at Cambridge University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University and has held teaching positions at St. Andrews University, Northwestern University, and Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century and Polygamy: An Early American History.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Many 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 America's founders were not deists; that they did not create a “godless” Constitution; that even Jefferson and Madison did not want a high wall separating church and state; that most founders believed the government should encourage Christianity; and that they embraced a robust understanding of religious liberty for biblical and theological reasons. In addition, Hall explains why and how the founders' views are absolutely relevant today.Did America Have a Christian Founding? is a compelling, utterly convincing closing argument in the debate about the role of faith in the nation's founding, making it clear that Christian thought was crucial to the nation's founding—and demonstrating that this benefits all of us, whatever our faith (or lack thereof).-Mark David Hall is the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. He is also an associated faculty member at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and senior fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books on religion and politics in America and is a nationally recognized expert on religious freedom. He writes for the online publications Law & Liberty and Intercollegiate Studies Review and has appeared regularly on a number of radio shows, including Jerry Newcomb's Truth in Action, Tim Wildman's Today's Issues, and the Janet Mefferd Show. You can follow him on Twitter, @MDH_GFU.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

The 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 Jacksonian Democracy, and helped create the sectional divide that would lead to the Civil War. Although it stands as one of the turning points of American history, few Americans today have heard of the Panic of 1819, with the result that we continue to ignore its lessons—and repeat its mistakes.-Andrew H. Browning was educated at Princeton University and the University of Virginia. He has taught history in Washington, DC, Honolulu and Portland, OR, and he has been a Virginia Governor's Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar. His first book is The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression, which was recently nominated for the Cundill History Prize. His next book about the political education of early America's political class, Schools for Statesmen, will be released next year.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Mania 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 inequality, gender conformity, and racial injustice. Provocative and long overdue, this is the story of those who tried to point the way toward an impossible "American Dream": men and women who momentarily captured the imagination of a nation always searching for salvation.-Adam Morris is a writer and literary translator who lives in California. He is a recipient of the Susan Sontag Foundation Prize in literary translation, a Northern California Book Award in prose translation, and a Ph.D. in literature from Stanford University. His first book is American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. You can follow him on Twitter @adamjaymorris.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

The 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 into one universally understood argument about the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of defining their own identity, understanding Mexicans, and interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It was also, Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity, in turn, reshaped the anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if dominated by Catholics.Missionaries of Republicanism provides a critical new perspective on Manifest Destiny, American republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in the nineteenth century.-John C. Pinheiro is an Associate Professor of History at Aquinas College in Michigan and Consulting Editor for the James K. Polk presidency at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. His publications include Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War, and numerous articles in academic journals and books. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife, Cassandra, and daughter, Lucia.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

In 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 Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well. During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation's growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation's founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America's transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.-Matthew J. Clavin, Professor of History at the University of Houston, is the author of Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers, Toussaint Louverture and the Civil War: the Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, and The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community. Professor Clavin writes and teaches in the areas of American and Atlantic history, with a focus on the history of race, slavery, and abolition. He received his Ph.D. at American University in 2005 and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

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 America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000) publish with Knopf.Upon publication Arming America received rave reviews from some of the academy's most respected figures and the only early negative reviews were from conservative or libertarian voices. Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture would go on to win the Bancroft Prize, the highest honor for historians of American history. But criticism continued to mount, and more and more scholars began to investigate the claims being made by Bellesiles and the numbers he offered. As criticism increased and charges of scholarly misconduct were made, Emory University conducted an internal inquiry into Bellesiles's integrity, appointing an independent investigative committee composed of three leading academic historians from outside Emory. The investigation agreed with his critics that Arming America had serious problems within its thesis, and called into question both its quality and veracity.In 2002, the trustees of Columbia University rescinded Arming America‘s Bancroft Prize. Alfred A. Knopf did not renew Bellesiles' contract, and the National Endowment for the Humanities withdrew its name from a fellowship that the Newberry Library had granted Bellesiles. Bellesiles issued a statement on October 25, 2002, announcing the resignation of his professorship at Emory by year's end because of the university's hostile environment. In 2003, Bellesiles released a second edition of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture with Soft Skull Press and a response booklet to his critics, Weighed in an Even Balance. To this day, while regretting having written the book, Bellesiles stands by Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.-Michael A. Bellesiles is a historian and has taught at Emory University, Central Connecticut State University, and Trinity College. Bellesiles received his BA from the University of California–Santa Cruz in 1975 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in 1986. He is the author of numerous books, including Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, 1877: America's Year of Living Violently, and A People's History of the U.S. Military: Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

The 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 Civil War.An authoritative contribution to the history of the United States' violent path toward building a continental empire, this ambitious and well-researched book deepens our understanding of the seizure of Indigenous lands, including the use of treaties to create the appearance of Native consent to dispossession. Ostler also documents the resilience of Native people, showing how they survived genocide by creating alliances, defending their towns, and rebuilding their communities.-Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon and the author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills and The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. His latest work is Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. You can follow him on Twitter @jeff__ostler.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

President 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 this political turning point in US history in almost fifty years, The Bank War and the Partisan Press advances a new interpretation by focusing on the funding and dissemination of the party press.Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of preexisting political institutions—and even created new ones—to enrich themselves and further their careers. The bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office. Campbell's work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the bank's charter to a multisided, nationwide sensation that sorted the US public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states—in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.-Stephen W. Campbell is a lecturer in the History Department at Cal Poly Pomona. He is the author of The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America. You can follow him on Twitter, @Historian_Steve.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

John 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 Europe, Washington DC, and their family home south of Boston--they maintained a close bond through extensive letter writing, debating history, political philosophy, and partisan maneuvering.The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality is an urgent problem; the father-and-son presidents grasped the perilous psychology of politics and forecast what future generations would have to contend with: citizens wanting heroes to worship and covetous elites more than willing to mislead. Rejection at the polls, each after one term, does not prove that the presidents Adams had erroneous ideas. Intellectually, they were what we today call "independents," reluctant to commit blindly to an organized political party. No historian has attempted to dissect their intertwined lives as Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein do in these pages, and there is no better time than the present to learn from the American nation's most insightful malcontents.-Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University, and the author of the New York Times bestseller White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and two award-winning books, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr and Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. She is the coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson.Andrew Burstein is the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University, a noted Jefferson scholar, and the author of ten previous books on early American politics and culture. These include The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's Secrets, and Democracy's Muse. He and Nancy Isenberg have coauthored regular pieces for national news outlets.You can follow them on Twitter, @andyandnancy.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Sacred 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 regular Americans – people like Mary Dyer, Marie Barnett and W.D. Mohammed -- who risked their lives or reputations by demanding to practice their faiths freely.Just as the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the rich drama of the civil rights movement, Sacred Liberty: America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom brings to life the remarkable story of how America became one of the few nations in world history that has religious freedom, diversity and high levels of piety at the same time. Finally, Sacred Liberty provides a roadmap for how, in the face of modern threats to religious freedom, this great achievement can be preserved.-Steven Waldman is the national bestselling author of Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty and the co-founder of Beliefnet, the award-winning multifaith website. He is now co-founder and President of Report for America, a national service program that places talented journalists into local newsrooms. His writings have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, National Review, Christianity Today, The Atlantic, First Things, The Washington Monthly, Slate, The New Republic, ​and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Amy Cunningham.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

In 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 policy of "popular sovereignty," Democrats left slavery's expansion to white men's democratic decision-making. They also promised white men local democracy and individual autonomy regarding temperance, religion, and nativism. Translating white men's household mastery into political power over all women and Americans of color, Democrats united white men nationwide and made democracy a conservative assertion of white manhood.Democrats thereby turned traditional Jacksonian principles—grassroots democracy, liberal individualism, and anti-statism—into staples of conservatism. As Lynn's book shows, this movement sent conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy can be called upon to legitimize inequality and hierarchy, a uniquely American conservatism that endures in our republic today.-Joshua A. Lynn is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University. His research focuses on the intersection of political culture with constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Lynn is also a historian of American conservatism. He previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his Ph.D. in History. His first book is Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism and he is currently working on his second book, “The Black Douglass and the White Douglas: Embodying Race, Manhood, and Democracy in Civil War America.”---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Just 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, but rather a part of a larger phenomenon of anti-Catholic propaganda, riots, and nativist politics. The secrecy of convents stood as an oblique justification for suspicion of Catholics and the campaigns against them, which were intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and, in particular, the role of women in the Republic. At a time when the term "female virtue" pervaded popular rhetoric, the image of the veiled nun represented a threat to the established American ideal of womanhood. Unable to marry, she was instead a captive of a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a white slave, and a foolish virgin. In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers--male and female--forged this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns, and women more broadly, in America.-Cassandra L. Yacovazzi is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. Her work focuses on 19th and 20th-century American women's history and the intersection of gender, religion, and popular culture. She is the author of Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America. You can follow her on Twitter @CassandraYacova.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

American 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. Americans' faith sometimes inspired awakenings and the search for an equitable society, but at other times it justified violence and inequality. Students will come away from American History, Volume 1: 1492-1877 better prepared to grapple with the challenges presented by the history of America's founding, the problem of slavery, and our nation's political tradition.-Thomas S. Kidd is the Distinguished Professor of History, James Vardaman Endowed Professor of History and Associate Director, Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author of many books, including Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, George Whitefield: America's Spiritual Founding Father, American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, Baptists in America: A History with Barry Hankins, and Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father. You can follow him on Twitter @ThomasSKidd.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

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 father was a Presbyterian minister. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, he received his master's and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. He joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in 1975. He was named provost, the university's second highest-ranking position, in 1996; a Presbyterian, he was the first Protestant to ever serve in that position at Notre Dame. Dr. Hatch became Wake Forest University's 13th president on July 1, 2005. He is the author of The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England and The Democratization of American Christianity, and co-edited The Search for Christian America, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, and The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History.-Michael J. Altman received his Ph.D. in American Religious Cultures from Emory University. His areas of interest are American religious history, colonialism, theory and method in the study of religion, and Asian religions in American culture. Trained in the field of American religious cultures, he is interested in the ways religion is constructed through difference, conflict, and contact. Dr. Altman is the author of Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893. For his next book-length project, Dr. Altman is researching the use of American history in the formation of evangelical Protestant identities and communities.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, Alice Burton, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Reflecting 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 compared to the purity of modern science. A renewal of faith led Abigail's great-grandson Brooks, a Gilded Age critic of capitalism, to prophesy two world wars. Globetrotters who chronicled their religious journeys extensively, the Adamses ultimately developed a cosmopolitan Christianity that blended discovery and criticism, faith and doubt. Drawing from their rich archive, Sara Georgini, series editor for The Papers of John Adams, demonstrates how pivotal Christianity--as the different generations understood it--was in shaping the family's decisions, great and small. Spanning three centuries of faith from Puritan New England to the Jazz Age, Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family tells a new story of American religion, as the Adams family lived it.-Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history from Boston University. She is series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Her first book is Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Vagrants. 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 Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic. -Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan is an instructor of Public History and Coordinator of the Internship Program at Rutgers University. She is a public historian, a scholar of early American social history, and former archivist researching and writing about poverty, slavery, mobility, crime, and punishment in the early American republic, as well as public historical and commemorative representations of these subjects. She is currently at work on projects relating to subsistence crime in early America, the Arch Street Prison, and public historical interpretations of poverty, class, and labor. She is the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Troublesome 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 illuminates how criminal punishment and reform intersected with larger social issues of the time, including questions of race, class, and gender, and reveals how women prisoners actively influenced their situation despite class disparities. Hayden's focus on recovering the individual experiences of women in the criminal justice system across the state of Pennsylvania marks a significant shift from studies that focus on the structure and leadership of penal institutions and reform organizations in urban centers.Troublesome Women advances our understanding of female crime and punishment in the antebellum period and challenges preconceived notions of nineteenth-century womanhood. Scholars of women's history and the history of crime and punishment, as well as those interested in Pennsylvania history, will benefit greatly from Hayden's thorough and fascinating research.-Erica Rhodes Hayden is Associate Professor of History at Trevecca Nazarene University. Originally from Pennsylvania, she completed her Ph.D. in history at Vanderbilt University in 2013. Her research interests focus on nineteenth-century American social history, specifically reform movements, women's history, and the history of crime and punishment. She is the author of Troublesome Women: Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania and the co-editor of Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggles, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons with Theresa R. Jach.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

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 spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world.Paul E. Johnson, professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a Ph.D. in 1975. He taught at Princeton University, Yale University, University of Utah, and the University of South Carolina. He is the author of A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, and coauthor, with Sean Wilentz, of The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina, and Onancock, Virginia.-Chris Babits is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the university's Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Fellows. His work examines the intersection of religion, psychology, gender, and sexuality in the modern United States. Chris' dissertation, "To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States," is an ambitious work on the nation's history of sexual orientation and gender identity therapies. You can follow him on Twitter @chris_babits.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

While 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 White House. We watch as she exercises truly extraordinary power as First Lady: quietly manipulating elected officials, shaping foreign policy, and directing a campaign in support of America's expansionist war against Mexico. And we meet many of the enslaved men and women whose difficult labor made Sarah's political success possible.Lady First also shines a light on Sarah's many layers and contradictions. While her marriage to James was one of equals, she firmly opposed the feminist movement's demands for what she perceived to be far-reaching equality. She banned dancing and hard liquor from the White House, but did more entertaining than any of her predecessors. During the Civil War, she operated on behalf of the Confederacy even though she claimed to be neutral. And in the late nineteenth-century, she became a celebrity among female Christian temperance reformers, while she struggled to redeem her husband's tarnished political legacy.Sarah Polk's life spanned nearly the entirety of the 19th-century. But her own legacy, which profoundly transformed the South, continues to endure. Comprehensive, nuanced, and brimming with invaluable insight, Lady First is a revelation of our eleventh First Lady's complex but essential part in American feminism.-Amy S. Greenberg is the George Winfree Professor of History and Women's Studies at Penn State University. A leading scholar of the history of nineteenth-century America, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. Her previous books include A Wicked War and Manifest Manhood.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Since 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 in Washington throughout the antebellum era. He describes how they involved themselves at every stage of the making of tariff policy, from setting the congressional agenda, through the writing of legislation in committee, to the final vote. Considering policymaking as a process, Peart focuses on the importance of rules and timing, the critical roles played by individual lawmakers and lobbyists, and the high degree of uncertainty that characterized this formative period in American political development.The debate about tariff policy, Peart explains, is an unbroken thread that runs throughout the pre–Civil War era, connecting disparate individuals and events and shaping the development of the United States in myriad ways. Duties levied on imports provided the federal government with the major part of its revenue from the ratification of the Constitution to the close of the nineteenth century. More controversially, they also offered protection to domestic producers against foreign competition, at the expense of increased costs for consumers and the risk of retaliation from international trade partners. Ultimately, this book uses the tariff issue to illustrate the critical role that lobbying played within the antebellum policymaking process.-Daniel Peart is a senior lecturer in American history at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Era of Experimentation: American Political Practices in the Early Republic and the coeditor of Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. His most recent work is Lobbyists and the Making of US Tariff Policy, 1816-1861.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

In 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 de Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America. Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund's dynamic engagement in American political and social life and brings to light many of Grund's reflections previously published only in German. Mattes shows how Grund's work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States.-Armin Mattes earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia, working with Peter Onuf on the origins of American democracy and nationhood. Dr. Mattes then spent the 2012-2013 academic year as the Gilder Lehrman Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, where he completed his first book, Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: the Transatlantic Context of the Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, 1775-1840, which was published by University of Virginia Press in 2015. His newly translated and annotated edition of Francis J. Grund's Aristocracy in America was published in Spring 2018 on the Kinder Institute's Studies in Constitutional Democracy monograph series with University of Missouri Press, and immigrant is also currently at work on a book project that explores the transformation of the meaning and practice of political patronage in America from 1750 to 1850. Dr. Mattes has taught at the University of Virginia and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), and he served as a Kinder Institute Research Fellow in History from 2014-2017.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

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 would ultimately lead to civil war. In recounting the experience of Madison and several of his legatees who witnessed the violent test of whether his republic could endure, McCoy dramatizes the actual working out in human lives of critical cultural and political issues. The Last of the Fathers: James Madison & The Republican Legacy was the winner of two major awards: the Dunning Prize by the American Historical Association and the New England Historical Association Book Prize.Dr. Drew R. McCoy received an A.B. from Cornell University in 1971, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1973 and 1976, respectively. He has been at Clark since 1990. A specialist in American political and intellectual history, Professor McCoy teaches courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in early American history, with emphasis on the period from the Revolution through the Civil War. Before coming to Clark he taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University. His current project, which is biographical, focusing on the early life of Abraham Lincoln in relation to the transformative developments of the early nineteenth century. He is the author of The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America and The Last of the Fathers: James Madison & The Republican Legacy.-Dr. Aaron N. Coleman is Associate Professor of History and the History Department Chair at the University of the Cumberlands. He is interested in Anglo-American constitutional and ideological development of the 17th and 18th Centuries, especially the era of the American Founding. Dr. Coleman also specializes in contemporary leadership theory and application. He has published two books both dealing with the conception and political debates over federalism. He is currently working on two projects, one a short biography of Thomas Burke and another on the competing languages of Nationalism and State Sovereignty in 18th and 19th Century United States. Dr. Coleman is a die-hard Elvis fan and spends his free time listening to Elvis or reading Lord of the Rings. He is the author of The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765–1800 and the co-editor of Debating Federalism: From the Founding to Today with Christopher S. Leskiw. You can follow him on Twitter, @Big_Liberty.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Despite 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 create an alliance between the United States and the French republic despite ire from the U.S. Federalist party. As he climbed the political ranks, Monroe's achievements began to add up: he played a significant role in the Louisiana Purchase, helped lead the fight against Great Britain in the War of 1812, oversaw the acquisition of Florida from Spain, and created the Monroe Doctrine to protect the Americas from the influence of European monarchies.Focusing exclusively on America's fifth president and his complete commitment to republicanism, this book offers new interpretations of James Monroe as a patriot who dedicated his life to what he believed was perhaps the most important cause in human history.-Brook Poston is associate professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University. He received his Ph.D. in History from Texas Christian University and is the author of James Monroe: A Republican Champion. ---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

From 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 spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson's circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.-Emily Ogden is the author of Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. She has written for Critical Inquiry, The New York Times, American Literature, J19, Lapham's Quarterly Online, Early American Literature, and Public Books. Her columns at 3 Quarks Daily appear every eighth Monday. The Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and other granting organizations have supported her work. You can follow her on Twitter, @ENOgden.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

In 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 for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal, and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart.Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.-H. W. Brands was born in Portland, Oregon, where he lived until he went to California for college. He attended Stanford University and studied history and mathematics. For nine years he taught mathematics and history in high school and community college. Meanwhile, he resumed his formal education, earning graduate degrees in mathematics and history, concluding with a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1987 he joined the history faculty at Texas A&M University, where he taught for seventeen years. In 2005 he returned to the University of Texas, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History. He has written twenty-five books, coauthored or edited five others, and published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. His most recent book is Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Behind 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 spaces.Unlike other histories that treat the stories of the First Ladies' slaves as separate from the lives of their mistresses, Ties That Bound closely examines the relationships that developed between the First Ladies and their slaves. For elite women and their families, slaves were more than an agricultural workforce; slavery was an entire domestic way of life that reflected and reinforced their status. In many cases slaves were more constant companions to the white women of the household than were their husbands and sons, who often traveled or were at war. By looking closely at the complicated intimacy these women shared, Schwartz is able to reveal how they negotiated their roles, illuminating much about the lives of slaves themselves, as well as class, race, and gender in early America.By detailing the prevalence and prominence of slaves in the daily lives of women who helped shape the country, Schwartz makes it clear that it is impossible to honestly tell the stories of these women while ignoring their slaves. She asks us to consider anew the embedded power of slavery in the very earliest conception of American politics, society, and everyday domestic routines.-Marie Jenkins Schwartz is professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South, and Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

Charismatic, 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 he received Electoral College votes, twice more he sought his party's nomination, yet each time he was defeated. Alongside fellow senatorial greats Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, Clay was in the mix almost every moment from 1824 to 1848. Given his prominence, perhaps the years should be termed not the Jacksonian Era but rather the Age of Clay. James C. Klotter uses new research and offers a more focused, nuanced explanation of Clay's programs and politics in order to answer to the question of why the man they called "The Great Rejected" never won the presidency but did win the accolades of history. Klotter's fresh outlook reveals that the best monument to Henry Clay is the fact that the United States remains one country, one nation, one example of a successful democracy, still working, still changing, still reflecting his spirit. The appeal of Henry Clay and his emphasis on compromise still resonate in a society seeking less partisanship and more efforts at conciliation.––-James C. Klotter is Professor of History at Georgetown College and State Historian of Kentucky. The prize-winning author, coauthor, or editor of some eighteen books, he was the executive director of the Kentucky Historical Society for many years.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows that despite its founding statement that “all men are created equal,” the early Republic struggled with every form of social inequality. While people paid homage to the ideal of equal rights, this ideal came up against entrenched social and political practices and beliefs. Brown illustrates how the ideal was tested in struggles over race and ethnicity, religious freedom, gender and social class, voting rights, and citizenship. He shows how high principles fared in criminal trials and divorce cases when minorities, women, and people from different social classes faced judgment. This book offers a much-needed exploration of the ways revolutionary political ideas penetrated popular thinking and everyday practice.Richard D. Brown is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. His previous books include Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865; The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in Early America, 1650-1870; and the coauthored microhistory The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America. His most recent work is Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices