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What Hath God Wrought
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WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT - SPOTLIGHT - INTRODUCTION - SPOILER THREAD
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The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent. Howe's panoramic narrative portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically lowered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innovations prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America's economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. In his story, the author weaves together political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history. He examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party, but contends that John Quincy Adams and other Whigs--advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African-Americans--were the true prophets of America's future. He reveals the power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights and other reform movements, politics, education, and literature. Howe's story of American expansion culminates in the bitterly controversial but brilliantly executed war waged against Mexico to gain California and Texas for the United States.
Winner of the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize
Finalist, 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
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"What Daniel Walker Howe hath wrought is a wonderfully mind-opening interpretation of America on the cusp of modernity and might."--George F. Will, National Review Online
"What Hath God Wrought is the dazzling culmination of the author's lifetime of distinguished scholarship.... The sustained quality of Howe's prose makes it even harder to put down a volume whose sheer weight makes it hard to pick up.... What Hath God Wrought lays powerful claim to being the best work ever written on this period of the American past."--Richard Carwardine, The Journal of Southern History
"Howe knows his era as well as any historian living, and he generously instructs his readers with detailed expertise and crisp generalizations."--John Lauritz Larson, The Journal of American History
"What Hath God Wrought is a feat worth applauding no matter what omissions will occur to every specialist in any facet of early national America."--Scott E. Casper, Reviews in American History
"Howe is a skillful storyteller who knows how to choose relevant anecdotes and revealing quotations. Both general readers and professional historians can benefit from the book. It can be read with pleasure from cover to cover."--Thomas Tandy Lewis, Magill's Literary Annual
"One of the best lessons offered by Howe's book comes in his refusal to view the period of 1815 to 1848 in anything other than its own terms. He never reduces the early part of the book to an analysis of how developments succeeded or failed the hopes of the 'founders.' Nor does he ever treat political and social developments as though they launched the United States on a high road to the Civil War.... Precisely because of this clear-eyed vision of the antebellum period, Civil War historians will want to take a fresh look back at howe's picture of the United States in a constant state of change."--Sarah J. Purcell, Civil War Book Review
"I like to have a heavy tome to calm me down at the end of the day. This is almost as big as a pathology book, but really well written."--Robin Cook
"A comprehensive, richly detailed, and elegantly written account of the republic between the War of 1812 and the American victory in Mexico a generation later...a masterpiece."--The Atlantic
"How's Pulitzer Prize-winning addition to the mulitvolume Oxford History of the United States is excellent in many ways, not least in the full attention it gives to the religious dynamics of American history in this period.... a very satisfying read."--The Christian Century
"Exemplary addition to the Oxford History of the United States... He is a genuine rarity...extraordinary."--Washington Post Book World
"One of the most outstanding syntheses of U.S. history published this decade."--Publishers Weekley starred review
"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."--The New Yorker
"This extraordinary contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series is a great accomplishment by one of the United States' most distinguished historians.... It is, in short, everything a work of historical scholarship should be."--Foreign Affairs
"The book is a sweeping and monumental achievement that no student of American history should let go unread. Attentive to historiography yet writing accessible and engaging prose, Howe has produced the perfect introduction or reintroduction to an enormously important period in American national development."--American Heritage
"The best book on Jackson today."--Gordon Wood, Salt Lake Deseret Morning News
"Howe's book is the most comprehensive and persuasive modern account of America in what we might prefer hereafter to call the Age of Clay. It should be the standard work on the subject for many years to come."--American Nineteenth Century History
"Comprehensive and detailed... an excellent narrative history."--The California Territorial Quarterly
"There is simply too much of value in Howe's book to be even listed in the longest of reviews. The serious student of American history will want to read this book...This is a book worthy of a master of American history." --History News Network
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(last edited Oct 21, 2012 07:51PM)
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928 pages; 47 halftones, 23 maps; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4;
ISBN13: 978-0-19-507894-7
ISBN10: 0-19-507894-2
Paperback
ISBN13: 9780195392432
ISBN10: 0195392434
Paperback, 928 pages
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Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Political Culture of the American Whigs and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Los Angeles.
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The Howe of History
By Interview
November 30, 2007 12:00 P.M.
Few books are more authoritative that the volumes in the Oxford History of the United States–a series that includes masterpieces such as The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff (on the American Revolution) and Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson (on the Civil War).
The latest entry is just out: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe. He recently took a few questions from National Review Online’s John J. Miller.
JOHN J. MILLER: Why did you choose the text of Samuel F. B. Morse’s first telegraphic message as the title for your book?
DANIEL WALKER HOWE: The quotation “What Hath God Wrought” works well for me in three ways. In the first place it calls attention to the dramatic technological changes characteristic of the years between 1815 and 1848, revolutionizing communication and transportation. In the second place, this quotation from the Bible (Numbers 23:23) illustrates the importance of religion in the history of the period. And in the third place, it calls attention to the idea that in rising to transcontinental power, the United States was fulfilling a divine providential destiny, a self-image that America shared with ancient Israel, to which the phrase originally applied.
MILLER: Was the invention of the telegraph in 1844 more significant than the spread of the Internet today?
HOWE: The electric telegraph probably lowered the costs of business transactions even more than did the Internet, and it certainly seemed to contemporaries an even more dramatic innovation. For thousands of years messages had been limited by the speed with which messengers could travel and the distance eyes could see signals like flags or smoke. Neither Alexander the Great nor Benjamin Franklin (America’s first postmaster-general) knew anything faster than a galloping horse. With the electric telegraph, instant long-distance communication became possible for the first time. Commercial application of Morse’s invention followed quickly. American farmers and planters — and most Americans then earned their living through agriculture — increasingly produced food and fibre for far-off markets. Their merchants and bankers welcomed the chance to get news of distant prices and credit. The newly invented railroads used the telegraph to schedule trains so they wouldn’t collide on the single tracks of the time. The electric telegraph solved commercial problems and at the same time had huge political consequences. Along with improvements in printing, it facilitated an enormous growth of newspapers, which in turn facilitated the development of mass political parties. To sum up, then, the telegraph had many of the same effects in the 19th century that the Internet is having today: to speed up and enable commerce, to decouple communication from travel, to foster globalization, and to encourage democratic participation. The tsar of Russia worried about the democratic implications of the telegraph, just as the rulers of China worry now about the Internet.
MILLER: You write about the period from 1815 to 1848. How was the America of 1848 different from the America of 1815?
HOWE: The America of 1815 was what we would call a third-world country. Most people lived on isolated farmsteads; their lives revolved around the weather and the hours of daylight. Many people grew their own food; many wives made their own family’s clothes. Only people who lived near navigable waterways could easily market their crops. Improvements in transportation such as the Erie Canal, the steamboat, and the railroad wrought enormous transformations by 1848. Americans were more and more integrated into a global economy. Revolutionary innovations in communication expanded the printed media, with consequences as varied as the rise of the novel in literature and the rise of mass politics and nationwide political parties. Together, the improvements in transportation and communication liberated people from the tyranny of distance. That is, they liberated people from isolation — economic, intellectual, and political. Meanwhile America was extending its territory westward until it stretched from sea to sea, creating a transcontinental empire that these improvements in transportation and communication could integrate. The America of 1848 was significantly more like the America of today. Like all conscientious historians, I seek to be faithful to representing the past, with its many differences from the present. Still, my book shows how the present came to be.
MILLER: Religion is important in politics today. How does it compare with the period treated in your book?
HOWE: The political salience of religion is nothing new. To take a clear example, Evangelical Protestants have formed an important voting block within the Republican party ever since the party first appeared in 1854. What’s more, the predecessor of today’s Republicans, the Whig party of Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and the young Abraham Lincoln, also counted Evangelical Christians among its strongest supporters. On the other hand, in the 19th century, Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Only in recent years have Evangelicals and Catholics been able to make common cause on behalf of certain issues of social morality. Of course, in the period I treat religion was important in many other ways as well. For example, most colleges had been founded to propagate a particular version of Christianity, and took that mission seriously. Religion provided a key incentive to scientific investigation, since virtually all scientists believed that the universe manifested intelligent design. Finally, most of the social reform causes characteristic of the period, notably the movement to abolish slavery, were primarily religious in motivation.
MILLER: Why did you dedicate the book to John Quincy Adams? Why not Martin Van Buren?
HOWE: Adams was a man of principle and vision; Van Buren was a skillful political manipulator. Neither enjoyed success as president. Van Buren seems the more likable, for he had a genial, ingratiating manner. But Adams possessed by far the more profound sense of American national destiny. Adams’s well conceived programs proved politically unrealizable, in large part because Van Buren so cleverly mobilized opposition to them. Van Buren, once he became president, would have liked to sit back and enjoy the office as his reward for a lifetime of scheming. But instead he confronted economic hard times, for which he had no solution. Both presidents served but one term. Adams, however, went on to a distinguished post-presidential career in the House of Representatives, defending the free speech of unpopular minorities, the rights of women, and mobilizing public opinion against slavery. Van Buren, even when he embraced the cause of “free soil” (restricting the extension of slavery) in 1848, did so essentially to preserve the political machine he had built up, not because he really cared about the slavery issue. He soon returned to the pro-slavery Democratic party and remained in it for the rest of his life, opposing Lincoln in 1860.
MILLER: When you started writing this book, you were already an expert on the period. What’s the most interesting thing you learned during your research–something you didn’t know or fully appreciate beforehand?
HOWE: Before I wrote this book I had never really grasped how often improvements in material terms fostered improvements in moral terms. The people who encouraged economic diversification and development in many cases also supported more humane laws, wider access to education, a halt to the expansion of slavery, even, sometimes, greater equality for women. The two heroes of my story, John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, both illustrate this. The economic development that they wanted to promote empowered the average person in all kinds of ways. It brought wider vocational choices and opportunities for personal independence. In today’s third world, improvements in living standards should similarly encourage democracy and respect for human rights. Adams and Lincoln both valued capitalism as a moral as well as material benefit, and they were right to do so. This is the most important thing I learned from the experience of writing the book.
MILLER: In the final chapter, you mention the period’s “dark side” and cite “the waging of an aggressive war against Mexico.” Didn’t that war actually have a tremendous upside — i.e., the acquisition of Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, etc.?
HOWE: Practically every historian who has studied the origins of the war with Mexico has concluded that President Polk’s military invasion of the disputed area between the Rio Grande and the Nueces was legally unwarranted (that goes even for Justin Smith, the historian most sympathetic to Polk). Waging aggressive war is wrong. The United States could probably have acquired much of the same territory by more peaceful negotiations. Still, you are right that victory in the war brought enormous benefits to the United States. Arguably it also benefitted the world as a whole (for example, by enabling the United States to frustrate the designs of Imperial Japan in the 1940s). God moves in mysterious ways, and He is perfectly capable of bringing good out of evil.
MILLER: Do today’s students learn enough history in high school? Do they know enough history when they graduate from college?
HOWE: Schools have been downgrading history for a long time. First it was subordinated to “social studies.” More recently, it has suffered from the priority accorded reading and math, now that they are the only two subjects tested for the purposes of evaluating the schools. In reality, of course, the study of history could do a great deal to improve reading comprehension. Colleges could do a better job imparting a general knowledge of history to undergraduates. At research universities, faculty members are often reluctant to teach the survey courses that nurture an informed citizenry; instead, they want to teach their latest research article. Compounding the problem is the movement to substitute courses in “world civilization” for the customary “western civilization.” Unfortunately, the faculty members are seldom qualfied to teach such a diverse curriculum, and the students end up with an undigested hodge-podge. Until courses in world civilization can be better organized, I think undergraduates are better served by taking western civ. If world civ is to be taught, then it should take two years to cover it, since one year is barely enough for what needs to be taught about western civ.
© National Review Online 2012. All Rights Reserved.
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Daniel Walker Howe
Pulitzer Prize winning historian, professor has loved history since childhood
By Mark J. Chiusano, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
The opening scene of Daniel Walker Howe ’59’s Pulitzer Prize winning history, “What Hath God Wrought,” artistically depicts the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, which pitted British regulars against a heterogeneous American force. The “Americans” hailed from Louisiana, Haiti, Kentucky, encompassing crack Irish-American units, freed slaves, and wary Native Americans. Orders were translated into Spanish, French, and Choctaw.
The diverse internationalism of such a scene must have particularly piqued the interest of Howe, Harvard graduate and Professor Emeritus of both Oxford and UCLA, who once dreamed of ancient overseas battles as a young boy growing up in Denver.
“I got interested in history when I was about six years old and my father sat me on his lap and told me about Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to fight the Romans,” Howe said. “I thought this was the most fascinating stuff imaginable.”
Coming from Denver to Harvard was, in those days, still vaguely unusual: Denver was remote and provincial, far from the colorful melting pots of 19th century New Orleans, or ancient Rome. His storytelling father, a newspaperman, died when Howe was eight years old, widowing his mother and making money scarce. It was only a National Scholarship from Harvard that allowed Howe to afford an Ivy League education.
Recalling his early days of transition between Denver and Harvard, Howe interrupts himself to say, “By the way, in those days transportation meant the train,” he said, “It was a night between Denver and Chicago and then another between Chicago and South Station where the train came in early in the morning. So this is a different world.”
It was a different world, a slower world, one that is closer perhaps to the world that Howe wrote about in “What Hath God Wrought” than to the modern era.
The book covers the period between 1815 and 1848. Its popularity is remarkable because, as Susan Ferber, acquisitions editor for the Oxford History of the United States series, wrote in an email to The Crimson, “It’s not an obvious period for many, since it doesn’t cover the American Revolution or Civil War or World War II. Instead,” she said, “it brings together a great many events, such as the War of 1812, technology and communications, party politics, literature and art, and the rise of many different religious groups.” These broad topics, far from the realm of traditional history, reflect Howe’s desire to write for the general public—to tell a story rather than speak in generalizations. “I hoped to make history as interesting for other people as I’ve always found it to be,” Howe said.
Such storytelling and history reflects Howe’s days at Harvard, where he was a History and Literature concentrator: good preparation for his later career as a history professor, as he would later find out: “When I was teaching at UCLA, I became aware that the UCLA history department had a lot of people in it who’d been to Harvard, but the surprising part was how many of us had concentrated in Hist and Lit,” Howe said.
Though he had never published work that deviated so far from traditional academic norms, Howe had always cherished a sort of Hist and Lit version of history—in lecture courses at UCLA, Howe was known to relive his Harvard Glee Club days by personally demonstrating hymns, when appropriate.
Even the day of perhaps his greatest academic achievement—the day when the 2008 Pulitzer prizes were announced—Howe continued his fascination with historical storytelling. As though he were writing a story—as if he wanted the climax to come at the very end—he wrote in a note to his wife: “Meet me at 6 in the St. Alban’s parking lot.”
“P.S. I won the Pulitzer.”
—Staff writer Mark J. Chiusano can be reached at chiusano@fas.harvard.
If I may, I would like to suggest an article in the October 29, 2007 edition of The New Yorker magazine, written by Jill Lapore. I find it a good review of the book because it contrasts the opposing hermeneutics on the period between Daniel Walker Howe and Charles Sellers, Howe's former professor and author of the book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. Interestingly, Sellers' book was originally commissioned for this period's volume of The Oxford History of the United States, but it was ultimately set aside in favor of Howe's book.Sellers is the chief proponent of understanding the period as "The Market Revolution." Howe rejects this hermeneutic in his introductory material, favoring, instead, the idea of "The Communication Revolution."
Lapore provides an effective summary of the "pros" and "cons" of each viewpoint. I found it fascinating that she cast two prominent men of that age, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as metaphors for the views of Sellers and Howe, respectively. I think you will find this device, and Lapore's contrast of the two competing books, to be an aid to discernment as we move through the current selection.
The link for the article can be found here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...
Sellers' book on the same period is:
by Charles Grier Sellers (no photo)
I'm just very happy I was able to secure a digital edition of this book. It's a great read so far ... but very heavy.Tom
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The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (other topics)What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848 (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Charles Grier Sellers (other topics)Daniel Walker Howe (other topics)
THIS IS ALSO A SPOILER THREAD.