In the latest installment in the Oxford History of the United States series,
historian Howe, professor emeritus at Oxford University and UCLA (_The Political
Culture of the American Whigs_), stylishly narrates a crucial period in U.S.
history.a time of territorial growth, religious revival, booming industrialization,
a recalibrating of American democracy and the rise of nationalist sentiment.
Smaller but no less important stories run through the account: New York's gradual
emancipation of slaves; the growth of higher education; the rise of the temperance
movement (all classes, even ministers, imbibed heavily, Howe says). Howe also
charts developments in literature, focusing not just on Thoreau and Poe but on such
forgotten writers as William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, who helped create the
romantic image of the Old South, but whose proslavery views eventually brought his
work into disrepute. Howe dodges some of the shibboleths of historical literature,
for example, refusing to describe these decades as representing a market revolution
because a market economy already existed in 18th-century America. Supported by
engaging prose, Howe's achievement will surely be seen as one of the most outstanding
syntheses of U.S. history published this decade.

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