American Republics, Alan Taylor
American Republics, Alan Taylor
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American Republics
A Continental History of the United States 1783-1850

Author: Alan Taylor

Narrator: Graham Winton

Unabridged: 14 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/18/2021


Synopsis

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.

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.

About Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor is the author of William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for American History and The Internal Enemy, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for American History. Taylor is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael

Taylor’s fascinating book revolves around his recurring argument: that Manifest Destiny was not some providential duty to stretch Protestant Christianity and democracy across the continent but instead stemmed from American insecurity over having their fragile union of states upended by real and perc......more

Goodreads review by Brian

Pretty good book but biased. Every single bad thing described is done by a white person. Totally ignores things like the behavior of the commanches or utah Indians selling their kids into slavery in mexico. The terrorism of Simon Bolivar is glossed over. I don’t mind reading bad things white people......more

A disjointed and uneven look at American secessionist movements that unpersuasively finds white supremacy around every corner. Alan Taylor has won two Pullitzer Prizes for his work on William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper) and his history of slavery in colonial Virginia. He should not win......more

Alan Taylor's American Republics provides a broad overview of America's first seven decades of independence. Taylor covers ground well-trod in recent years: there's nothing quite so fresh or revelatory in his account of antebellum America as in similar works by Daniel Walker Howe, David S. Reynolds......more