What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

Sellers’s energetic, brilliant, and strident book may not have reached readers outside the academy-perhaps Woodward anticipated this-but among scholars it enjoyed a huge influence, not least because “The Market Revolution” was published just after many of the nation’s best historians had written essays sounding urgent calls for synthesis in American historical writing. “Establishing capitalist hegemony over economy, politics, and culture, the market revolution created ourselves and most of the world we know,” Sellers wrote. (Oxford did publish Sellers’s book, in 1991, just not as part of the series.) Sellers, a historian at Berkeley, claimed that the greatest transformation of the first half of the nineteenth century-indeed, the defining event in American and even in world history-was no mere transformation but a revolution, from an agrarian to a capitalist society.

Vann Woodward, and it is Sellers against whom Howe argues, if with a kind of gentlemanly diffidence. This would not be worth mentioning except that the book that was initially commissioned to cover this period, Charles Sellers’s “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,” was rejected by the series editor, the late, distinguished historian C. Howe’s book is the most recent installment in the prestigious Oxford History of the United States.

“What Hath God Wrought” is both a capacious narrative of a tumultuous era in American history and a heroic attempt at synthesizing a century and a half of historical writing about Jacksonian democracy, antebellum reform, and American expansion. Between 18, the United States chased its Manifest Destiny all the way to the Pacific battled Mexico built thousands of miles of canals, railroads, and telegraph lines embraced universal white-male suffrage and popular democracy forced Indians from the South and carried slavery to the West awaited the millennium, reformed its manners, created a middle class, launched women’s rights, and founded its own literature. Daniel Walker Howe’s ambitious new book, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” (Oxford $35), chronicles every development that Thoreau despised, many that he admired, and a great deal about which the man in Walden’s woods cared not one whit.

What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe