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America experienced unprecedented expansion and turmoil in the years between 1815 and 1848. In Waking Giant, Bancroft Prize-winning historian and literary critic David S. Reynolds illuminates the period's exciting political story as well as the fascinating social and cultural movements that influenced it. He casts 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.

Waking Giant captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. Reynolds reveals unknown dimensions of the Second Great Awakening with its sects, cults, and self-styled prophets. He brings to life the reformers, abolitionists, and temperance advocates who struggled to correct America's worst social ills. He uncovers the political roots of some of America's greatest authors and artists, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe to Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, and he reveals the shocking phenomena that marked the age: bloody duels and violent mobs, P. T. Barnum's freaks and all-seeing mesmerists, polygamous prophets and wealthy prostitutes, table-lifting spiritualists and rabble-rousing feminists. All were crucial to the political and social ferment that led to the Civil War.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Waking Giant is a brilliant chronicle of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise.

Average Customer Rating:

Thorough, readable history of the United States between 1815 and 1848

Customer Rating:

David S. Reynolds provides a broad survey of the United States of America between 1815 and 1848, commonly referred to as the "Age of Jackson". After reaffirming its independence from England in the War of 1812, the United States emerged as a world power brimming with a cast of first-generation American politicians, soldiers, scientists, writers and artists. No hagiography, this book explores both triumphs and failures, both accomplishments and limitations of scores of both American legends and lesser-known significant figures. In the beginning and end of the book, Reynolds covers the Presidential administrations of James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and James Polk; he closes with the 1849 inauguration of Zachary Taylor. With the demise of the Federalists, the Democrat Monroe enjoyed the "Era Of Good Feelings", but national politics soon disintegrated into bitter partisanship between the Democrats and Whigs. Such enmity existed that Congress refused to provide appropriations for the 1840's White House, making President John Tyler pay his own heating bill. Modern parallels abound: Reynolds describes Senators "in the odd position of opposing the war (with Mexico) for political reasons while voting to fund it so as not to appear unpatriotic." A key cultural flashpoint is the amplifying clash between abolitionists and slave-owners that would soon thereafter erupt into the Civil War. Another theme involves the young nation's embrace or rejection of mother country England through disparate arenas like political science, literature or theater. In the middle chapters, Reynolds also explores religion, medicine, scientific inventions, fine art, entertainment and fads of the era. The text is occasionally repetitive, often retelling events from earlier in the book instead of simply alluding to them and moving to new information. Further editing might have yielded a more cohesive volume. Reynolds previously wrote a biography of Walt Whitman and, though usually apt, his inclusion of Whitman's observations in almost every chapter grows tiresome. Reynolds includes a 30-page index and 17 pages of sources and additional recommended reading. The book also includes over 40 black and white illustrations. Detailed but not exhaustive, this volume is informative yet still highly readable. This would probably make an excellent gift for a social studies teacher or casual American history buff.

A Cultural History Of The Age Of Jackson

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There have been made fine books on the era between the War of 1812 and the Civil War that was dominated by Andrew Jackson. From the Pulitzer Prize winning "The Age of Jackson" by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1945) to Robert Remini's three volume biography of Jackson (1977, 1981, 1984), the field have been dominant with political histories. Mr. Reynolds takes a different approach with politics taking a backseat to the cultural times of America. The literary, spiritual, theaterical, etc. are all covered in this history of how Americans lived. The political aspect is covered in a basic approach of an introduction while the celebrities, quacks, writers, and preachers take center stage. The writing is lively and interesting.

Decent Overview

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David Reynolds, whose "Beneath the American Renaissance" gave us a cultural tour of antebellum America, now gives us a wider look at the Jacksonian era. While his book provides a decent overview for the casual reader, it lacks much of a new argument for the dedicated student of the period. The introduction offers the potentially interesting, although hardly groundbreaking thesis, that the Jacksonian era was one of the most culturally rich in American history, and that much of this richness can be found along the margins, among the promoters of fads, the crank preachers, the utopians, and the radical reformers. In the book, however, Reynolds shies away from exploring this line of thinking too fully. Instead we get a largely traditional history of the period, even in its assessment of Jacksonian Democracy as a largely unproblematic democratic movement. His chapters on politics contain little or no new information or interpretation. Reynolds is not, by training, a historian, but rather a literary scholar. So it should come as no surprise that the strongest chapter in the book, not to mention the longest, is the one which deals with the literary and artistic accomplishments of the period. Glossing over some of his more complex arguments from "Beneath the American Renaissance" Reynolds gives us a good, concise, and informative, view of the works of the major literary figures of this period, and how they fit into the politics of the day. Overall, this is a good book for someone who knows little about the period, but a well informed reader would do better with works such as Sean Wilentz "Rise of American Democracy" or David Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought!"