In this beautifully written history of America's formative period, a
preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation
confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly
constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally
divided union of states contending still with European empires and other
independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples
sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers
through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The
system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its
vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and
children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites
favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing
a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and
organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of
Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of
the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its
conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided,
with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense.
Taylor's elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible
miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth
to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the
high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and
Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national
expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys
the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the
immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico
City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota.
Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the
continuities between our own social and political divisions and the
events of this formative period.
