Recommended Resources
The Age of Jackson
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, orig. 1970.
Wilson, Douglas L. Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
White, G. Edward. The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815–1835. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Stuart, Reginald C. United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775–1871. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Reynolds, David S. Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Jaffa, Henry V. A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
Guelzo, Allen C. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.
Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Horton, James Oliver. Free People of Color. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Newmyer, R. Kent. John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
De Leon, Arnoldo. Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans in Western America, 1848–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
McWillliams, John P., Jr. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Perdue, Theda, and Ada E. Deer. The Cherokees. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.
Sinha, Manisha. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010.
Labbe, Dolores Egger. The Louisiana Purchase and Its Aftermath. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998.
Huston, James L. The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Krannawitter, Thomas L. Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University, 1990.
Bly, Antonio. “Crossing the Lake of Fire: Slave Resistance in the Middle Passage, 1720–1842.” Journal of Negro History 83 (1998): 178–86.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.