The Age of Jackson Archives

Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War comes “a historical spellbinder” (The Christian Science Monitor) about a trio of political giants in nineteenth-century America—and their battle to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy. […Learn More]

The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy

An incisive account of the tumultuous relationship between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison and of the origins of our wealthy yet highly unequal nation […Learn More]

Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier

In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. […Learn More]

Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution

Unshackling America challenges the persistent fallacy that Americans fought two separate wars of independence. Willard Sterne Randall documents an unremitting fifty-year-long struggle for economic independence from Britain overlapping two armed conflicts linked by an unacknowledged global struggle. Throughout this perilous period, the struggle was all about free trade. […Learn More]

Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution

New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon S. Wood elucidates the debates over the founding documents of the United States.

The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. […Learn More]

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. […Learn More]

Book cover of A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America's Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women's rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation's culture and politics. by Christine Leigh Heyrman

Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America

A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America’s Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women’s rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation’s culture and politics. […Learn More]

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War.

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. […Learn More]

Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery

Written as a narrative history of slavery within the United States, Unrequited Toil details how an institution that seemed to be disappearing at the end of the American Revolution rose to become the most contested and valuable economic interest in the nation by 1850. Calvin Schermerhorn charts changes in the family lives of enslaved Americans, exploring the broader processes of nation-building in the United States, growth and intensification of national and international markets, the institutionalization of chattel slavery, and the growing relevance of race in the politics and society of the republic. […Learn More]

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

By the election year of 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers. Nearly half of them lived in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith was not only their religious leader but also the mayor and the commander-in-chief of a militia of some 2,500 men. In less than twenty years, Smith had helped transform the American religious landscape and grown his own political power substantially. […Learn More]