What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1850 by Daniel Walker HoweMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I would probably rate three stars the print edition. Narrator John Lescault is so monotone and rushed (I actually checked my app to make sure it wasn't sped up) that the textbook-like material lost any liveliness it had. Still, the subject matter is intensely interesting in appreciation the evolution of the United States. Historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, the transition out of the age of the Founding Fathers covering these presidencies:
James Madison (1809-1817)
James Monroe (1817-1825)
John Quincy Adams (1825-1829)
Andrew Jackson (1829-1837)
Martin Van Buren (1837-1841)
William Henry Harrison (1841)
John Tyler (1841-1845)
James K. Polk (1845-1849)
Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)
This was an era of revolutionary improvements in transportation (Jackson rode a horse into his populist and militarist reign of Indian Removal and left on a train) and communications (telegraph and daily newspapers) that accelerated the extension of the American empire. That acceleration is largely detailed in the merciless militarist imperialism of expansionist Polk who did more than Jefferson to extend the States. He examines the era's politics in an era when party politics evolved from reactionary organizations such as anti-Freemasons founding the Anti-Masonic Party in thw wake of assassinations and supposed conspiracies and the violent, nativist Know-Nothings and the factional Whig promoters of the American System. During this time there was a power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights, and other reform movements. This is the era that led to -- relentlessly -- the Civil War and was thus the defined antebellum era between its idealistic founding and berfore its bloody maturity.
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