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Daniel Walker Howe

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Daniel Walker Howe (Author)

496 ratings

Part of: Oxford History of the United States (13 books)

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The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent.

A panoramic narrative, What Hath God Wrought portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically lowered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innovations prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America's economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. In his story, the author weaves together political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history. Howe examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party, but contends that John Quincy Adams and other Whigs--advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African-Americans--were the true prophets of America's future. In addition, Howe reveals the power of religion to shape
many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights and other reform movements, politics, education, and literature. Howe's story of American expansion culminates in the bitterly controversial but brilliantly executed war waged against Mexico to gain California and Texas for the United States.

Winner of the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize

Finalist, 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

The Oxford History of the United States
The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book." Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.

ISBN-10

9780195392432
ISBN-13

978-0195392432
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

September 23, 2009
Language

English
Dimensions

9.2 x 2 x 6.1 inches
Print length

928 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"What Daniel Walker Howe hath wrought is a wonderfully mind-opening interpretation of America on the cusp of modernity and might."--George F. Will, National Review Online

"What Hath God Wrought is the dazzling culmination of the author's lifetime of distinguished scholarship.... The sustained quality of Howe's prose makes it even harder to put down a volume whose sheer weight makes it hard to pick up.... What Hath God Wrought lays powerful claim to being the best work ever written on this period of the American past."--Richard Carwardine, The Journal of Southern History

"Howe knows his era as well as any historian living, and he generously instructs his readers with detailed expertise and crisp generalizations."--John Lauritz Larson, The Journal of American History

"What Hath God Wrought is a feat worth applauding no matter what omissions will occur to every specialist in any facet of early national America."--Scott E. Casper, Reviews in American History

"Howe is a skillful storyteller who knows how to choose relevant anecdotes and revealing quotations. Both general readers and professional historians can benefit from the book. It can be read with pleasure from cover to cover."--Thomas Tandy Lewis, Magill's Literary Annual

"One of the best lessons offered by Howe's book comes in his refusal to view the period of 1815 to 1848 in anything other than its own terms. He never reduces the early part of the book to an analysis of how developments succeeded or failed the hopes of the 'founders.' Nor does he ever treat political and social developments as though they launched the United States on a high road to the Civil War.... Precisely because of this clear-eyed vision of the antebellum period, Civil War historians will want to take a fresh look back at howe's picture of the United States in a constant state of change."--Sarah J. Purcell, Civil War Book Review

"I like to have a heavy tome to calm me down at the end of the day. This is almost as big as a pathology book, but really well written."--Robin Cook

"A comprehensive, richly detailed, and elegantly written account of the republic between the War of 1812 and the American victory in Mexico a generation later...a masterpiece."--The Atlantic

"How's Pulitzer Prize-winning addition to the mulitvolume Oxford History of the United States is excellent in many ways, not least in the full attention it gives to the religious dynamics of American history in this period.... a very satisfying read."--The Christian Century

"Exemplary addition to the Oxford History of the United States... He is a genuine rarity...extraordinary."--Washington Post Book World

"One of the most outstanding syntheses of U.S. history published this decade."--Publishers Weekley starred review

"What Hath God Wrought is both a capacious narrative of a tumultuous era in American history and a heroic attempt at synthesizing a century and a half of historical writing about Jacksonian democracy, antebellum reform, and American expansion."--The New Yorker

"This extraordinary contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series is a great accomplishment by one of the United States' most distinguished historians.... It is, in short, everything a work of historical scholarship should be."--Foreign Affairs

"The book is a sweeping and monumental achievement that no student of American history should let go unread. Attentive to historiography yet writing accessible and engaging prose, Howe has produced the perfect introduction or reintroduction to an enormously important period in American national development."--American Heritage

"The best book on Jackson today."--Gordon Wood, Salt Lake Deseret Morning News

"Howe's book is the most comprehensive and persuasive modern account of America in what we might prefer hereafter to call the Age of Clay. It should be the standard work on the subject for many years to come."--American Nineteenth Century History

"Comprehensive and detailed... an excellent narrative history."--The California Territorial Quarterly

"There is simply too much of value in Howe's book to be even listed in the longest of reviews. The serious student of American history will want to read this book...This is a book worthy of a master of American history." --History News Network

About the Author

Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Political Culture of the American Whigs and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Los Angeles.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0195392434
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (September 23, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 928 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780195392432
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195392432
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.94 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.2 x 2 x 6.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #102,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18 in United States History (Books)

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Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize, and the Silver Medal of the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of The Political Culture of the American Whigs and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Mark D. Dietz

What history looks like, all grown up

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 27, 2022

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American History

For the past few months I’ve been reading American history books focusing on two great series: Penguin and Oxford American History.

When I was finished with my first brush at higher learning I had a degree in history with no real understanding of historiography. I understood, because it was one of the contentions of my few looks at philosophy, that at no point in history can we ever have perfect knowledge. And so I knew that my understanding was by no means perfect, that the history I had read would change, that the same was true of science, and, even of art and aesthetics.

Art and aesthetics changed very loudly, and many people were sure that this was an indication that art and aesthetics were not true to good learning, that they did not conform to the promise, once you learn something it will remain forever true. They were wrong.

One of the things about the new Oxford and Penguin series is that they are written in a way that is conscious of change in our understanding of history, and the writers know that at some point even those new revelations they have served up may be set aside due to newer revelations, but they also recognize somethings that we should be more conscious of.

1. If our new understanding is extreme, it’s far more likely to be unseated in the future.

2. The rules of historiography favor continuities from recent history and imperfect mixtures of the new and old. They favor a kind of floating question mark which says that most ages are far less certain than their loudest voices make them out to be.

3. Complexity is NOT a problem to be overcome by the historian; complexity is the nature of history.

These two series are structured on this new understanding of history. A new historiography. Where the old historiography had said that generalizations are written in stone, and the subsequent historiography, which was not very proud of itself, said that generalizations are never valid, the historiography of today says, all history is and must be suspect, but continuities exist, the accumulation of thought and study is complex, but highly valuable, and each attempt to summarize our understanding, if done well and carefully, is a signpost along the path for a new generation to pick up, correct, and move forward.

It is in this conception of history that the flagship histories (Penguin and Oxford) of the American years are written. This is my fourth or fifth from the two series. I’m a little over half way through this volume. It focuses, of course, on the generally overlooked years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. And it is good in the way these two series are always good.

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Nelson H. Wu

LIVING, BREATHING HISTORY

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 5, 2010

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Daniel Walker Howe states that his goal as a historian is to examine both "the many private decisions made by innumerable common people in the search for a better future, and the conscious decisions of the leaders in the course of making public policy." With that approach, Howe delivers one of the best entries in the Oxford History of the United States. Covering the years from 1815 to 1848, or the end of the War of 1812 to the tumultuous year of political, social and cultural revolutions in Europe and at home, "What Hath God Wrought" presents an urgent story filled with the usual historical suspects and surprising appearances by numerous unknowns, little-knowns and forgotten players. Unlike many of the other entries in the series, which tend toward the overly dignified, Howe has a lively authorial voice. He doesn't hesitate to pick a fight with the historical mainstream, shows a biting wit and wicked sense of humor, occasionally goes on indulgent but greatly amusing tangents, and frequently draws telling parallels to modern-day events.

Right from the introduction, Howe sets the tone by refusing to buy into the standard notion that 1815 to 1848 marked the rise and age of "Jacksonian Democracy." He also rejects the idea of President Andrew Jackson as some kind of champion of the common people. Indeed, Howe's overall characterization of Jackson is of a man concerned only with his own authority and someone who did not hesitate to stretch the limits of executive power to maintain that authority. When detailing one of many instances where Jackson simply dismissed dissenting civil servants and replaced them with his own cronies, Howe draws a telling comparison by jumping out of the narrative and about 100 years ahead in time, stating, "No parallel episode would occur again until 1973, when President Nixon fired two attorneys general in order to find one who would obey his order."

Rather than concentrating on Jackson's role in shaping the first half of the 1800s, Howe posits that the main influences on the era were the dramatic advances in communications technology and transportation, which would directly or indirectly affect women's rights, the religious revival of the 1800s, and the sudden burst of creativity in American letters. (Some of the most absorbing chapters in the otherwise chronolocially organized book are centered around these themes.) And if Jackson isn't the star of "What Hath God Wrought," that role certainly belongs to John Quincy Adams. Even after his one-term presidency ends, Adams keeps making appearances in the narrative in the least expected of places as a champion of the women's movement, abolition, federal government, and national improvement. Howe argues, convincingly, that Adams more than anyone else defined the issues that will shape America for decades to follow.

Howe views the Democratic presidents of the period -- and he counts among them the Whig-in-name-only John Tyler -- in a far less favorable light. He all but dismisses the tenth President of the United States. "It would be easy to demonize Tyler as a sinister frustrater of the popular will, wrecker of the Whig Party's only clear mandate, and the president who prostituted the Constitution," Howe writes with obvious scorn. "But the historian's duty is to understand, not simply condemn."

And then in the very next sentence, in one of his most biting one-liners, Howe grants that, "in his own mind, John Tyler exemplified high principles."

Howe himself never compromises his vision or interpretation of historical events. He doesn't pander to political correctness and isn't afraid to be blunt, especially when talking about Manifest Destiny and the unfortunate roles played by American Indians and Mexicans in the expansion of U.S. territory. "Imperialism is a more accurate and fruitful category for understanding the relations between the United States and the Native Americans than the metaphor of paternalism," Howe claims. Later, when summarizing some of the atrocities committed against non-whites who stood in the way of the race to the Pacific, he adds, "Today Americans deplore the expropriation and expulsion of racial minorities, a practice now called 'ethnic cleansing.'"

To be sure, "What Hath God Wrought" has a few -- but only a very few -- flaws. Howe sometimes sticks in one detail too many. At one point, when writing about the young women working in the 1830s in the Lowell mills in Massachusetts, Howe somehow manages to give a shout-out to his mother, who lived in Yorkshire, England, in the 1930s. (This has to be the literary equivalent to the baseball player waving at the TV camera and mouthing, "Hey, mom!")

Howe also indulges at times in playing the "what if" game, which, to be sure, makes for fun reading -- but doesn't belong in what will presumably become a canonical work in our body of history books. Among other things, Howe wonders what would have happened if Henry Clay had won the 1844 election. Later, Howe, assuming the role of English teacher and board of education member, tries to revive Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's reputation: "[O]ne suspects his poetry could still serve its original purpose of inspiring the young, if once again it were taught in schools." (Howe dons the hat of literary critic again when he asserts that "The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature.")

Lastly, Howe has a habit of interpreting events from a very modern perspective. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that and, it could be argued, that should be one of the historian's principal objectives. But at times it does seem as if Howe has an agenda he'd like to advance regardless of whether or not it advances the work's narrative proper. When describing President Polk's actions against Mexico, Howe makes it absolutely clear that Polk manufactured this war of aggression against a largely innocent Mexico and seems intent on drawing a comparison with recent events. He chooses to concentrate on the Battle of Molino del Rey, which was fought mostly because the U.S. believed the Mexicans had stored large amounts of weapons there. Howe devotes an unusual number of words to setting up the scene -- just for the sake of a great punchline. After suffering heavy casualties, the U.S. entered the town, but "Molino contained no weapons of mass destruction." Howe's very choice of words -- dripping with sarcasm and winking at the reader -- may or may not inappropriately link the Mexican-American War with President Bush's war on terror over a hundred years later.

Howe is an accomplished historian and writer, and the reader can only assume he made a decision to frame the section on the Mexican-American War in very modern terms. And Howe did so probably to make the reader think about history as a living, breathing thing that still walks among us, shapes our lives, and affects our future. And that, finally, is what the best history books do.

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D_S

Fantastic look at America's complex society and political culture

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 15, 2020

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Great, comprehensive look at American society and politics in the Antebellum era. The importance of religion was especially striking. Even atheists and agnostics should recognise the valuable role it played in history, because Howe shows that American Protestantism inspired more progressive movements than anything else in the country. JQ Adams, Charles Finney, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others all shine as American luminaries.

The Jacksonian Democrats can more easily be painted as villains due to their hardline anti-Native and pro-slavery policies, which Howe documents extensively. But even they enshrined principles that are now taken seen as cornerstones of American culture- acceptance of immigrants, support for democracy abroad, supporting the rugged individual over an elite. Despite being less in favour of internal improvements and infrastructure than the Federalists + Whigs, the Democrats also supported the concept of modernisation.

Gabriel Stein

Excellent history of a sometimes neglected period

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 6, 2021

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History is over the United States frequently tend to rush through the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. This is perhaps not surprising, but as this excellent book shows, the period 1815 to 1848 it’s fascinating in itself. In addition, it provides a vital background to the conflagration that eventually erupted in 1861.

Lulu B

Good, but not great...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 1, 2016

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I really wish I could give this a higher rating but in all good conscience I cannot, and here's why...

This volume of the Oxford History of the United States sits between two of the greatest books of American history ever published - Gordon S Wood's' Empire of Liberty' and James McPherson's 'Battlecry of Freedom' - the former one of the most masterful surveys of the early republic and the second the greatest single volume on the civil war. Howe's book should be a beautifully constructed bridge between them, instead it is an idiosyncratic, meandering trail which goes way off course and only comes back to the point after exhausting the reader with detour and unnecessary anecdote.

I have two main issues with the book: the first is the author's bizarre attachment to one of the most inconsequential presidents in US history - John Quincey Adams - and his persistent attempts to shoehorn in Quncey's views or words, or even those of his descendants, when they are not merely unneeded but distracting from the central narrative. The second issue is the author's style. He follows the frustrating trend among some modern historians of attempting to impose modern value judgements and commentary rather than drawing a contemporary picture of a vanished world. In doing this he distorts the motives and impugns the policy of successive presidents and secretaries of state with whom he disagrees. He also intersperses the central narrative with diversions on cultural and social themes that he uses to pass judgement on individual characters and at times whole people.

All this is a great shame because Howe is clearly a good historian, he just falls short of greatness by making the book too much about him and what he thinks about this period in American history rather than letting it and its inhabitants speak for themselves. When I'm reading a history book I don't want to know what the historian thinks,* I want to be able to immerse myself in another world, to understand their conflicts and disagreements as they themselves understood them, not have them interpreted for me by the author through the prism of his own prejudices and views. It's all a bit sophomoric.

* - Edward Gibbon could get away with this; very few others!

6 people found this helpful

Mr Gordon Davidson

Fabulous

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 24, 2014

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Another excellent book in the Oxford History of the United States series. I really can't fault it.

Sometimes reading epically large history books can become a rather onerous task but this book is beautifully written and does a such good job of moving around the various spheres of society (politics, the military, religion, women's rights, science etc) that it never becomes boring.

The author has also done a good job of giving the book a proper ending which can be tricky when writing about a period of time rather than a particular subject.

Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

Jane Fieldsend

Informative and useful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 17, 2013

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Doing a history degree, I made fantastic use of this book. It was informative yet captivating - I would recommend to those with an interest in American history.

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