America’s Coming of Age: Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought

Abstract

According to Daniel Walker Howe, the three decades between the end of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican War (1848) witnessed “the transformation of America.”1 Of what did this transformation consist? What drove it? What were its larger implications? These questions lie at the very center of historical writing about the early and middle decades of nineteenth- century America. Howe’s monumental effort goes far in answering them. In the process, he upends several well-known interpretations of the so-called Jacksonian period.