The half-century between 1820 and 1870 saw the transformation of the United States from a small nation of fewer than ten million people largely hugging the eastern seaboard to a country of nearly forty million stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was crisscrossed with railroads and telegraph lines, neither of which had existed when the period began. The United States had been wrenched apart by slavery and then forcibly reunited by a civil war that cost more casualties than all other American wars combined until Vietnam. With the conquest of the West had come war with Mexico and the wholesale relocation and extirpation of native peoples.

The period also began with a British critic, Sydney Smith, sneering in 1820, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" But by 1870 a diverse and vibrant literary culture had produced writers who are still household names today, such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mark Twain and Henry James had already launched careers that would span the rest of the century. A genteel literary tradition boasted familiar names no longer widely read today, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Women and African American writers like Susan Warner, Sarah Payson Willis Parton ("Fanny Fern"), Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Kirkland, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, once neglected, now command the attention and respect of a growing number of scholars and readers. It is the aim of American History through Literature, 1820–1870 to place the development of this vibrant literary culture in the tumultuous historical transformations of that half century.

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