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The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. By Charles Sellers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. viii + 502 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-19-503889-4.)
Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. By Harry L. Watson. (New York: Noonday, 1990. xii + 274 pp. Paper, $9.95, ISBN 0-374-52196-4.)
Over the last half century, since Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Jackson (1953) anointed Old Hickory as the spiritual and ideological godfather of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, modern historians have returned obsessively to this tumultuous era of American history. Attempts at synthesis have gone through several overlapping cycles. Schlesinger's ideological analysis of the Jacksonians and Whigs receded before political science and its notion of party systems, which in turn blended into ethnocultural studies of party affiliation, which more recently have given way once again to ideological analysis. Yet this circular historiographical path has followed an upward spiral. Two recent overviews, Charles Seller's The Market Revolution and Harry L. Watson's Liberty and Power, combine the best in much recent scholarship to produce works that are sophisticated, lucid, and well argued. These splendid books, to their credit, also raise problematic interpretive questions.
The Market Revolution is simply the best synthesis now available on Jacksonian America, and it constitutes the crowning achievement of Professor Seller's long and distinguished career. Surveying a vast array of scholarship in political, social, cultural, and economic history, the author integrates it in support of a central thesis: the rapid development of the marketplace, rooted in a population and commercial boom in the late 1700s, dominated and radically transformed American life in the three decades after the War of 1812. This capitalist social and economic system emerged from a sustained, escalating confrontation between...