A panoramic history of the United States ranges from the 1815 Battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War and chronicles the dramatic changes that took place in America during the period, interweaving political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history to address such issues as women's rights, religion, slavery and abolition, education, literature, and more.

What does it mean to be an American, and how have individual Americans consciously endeavored to create their own identity? "Self-improvement," "self-culture," "self-made man," to "make something of oneself"--all are terms that were used from colonial to Victorian times. The particular language that framed the quest has fallen out of fashion, but it was a powerful cultural imperative for hundreds of years. The quest, in all its "post" guises, continues. Daniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy. The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests--for elites and artisans, blacks and women--seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights.

Product Description: [MP3CD audiobook format in Vinyl case.] [Read by Patrick Cullen] Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History Winner of the 2008 American History Book Prize In this addition to the esteemed Oxford history series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era of revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire...read more

Product Description: [This is Part 2 of a 2-part Audiobook CD Library Edition in Vinyl case.][Part 1 has ISBN: 9781433260193][Read by Patrick Cullen] Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History Winner of the 2008 American History Book Prize In this addition to the esteemed Oxford history series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era of revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire...read more

Product Description: Book by Howe, Daniel Walker