Waking Giant is a brilliant, definitive history of America's vibrant
and tumultuous rise during the Jacksonian era from David S. Reynolds,
the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Walt Whitman's America. Casting
fresh light on Andrew Jackson, who redefined the presidency, along with
John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk, who expanded the nation's territory
and strengthened its position internationally, Reynolds captures the
turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over
slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization.