The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846

Charles Sellers

May 1994 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

In The Market Revolution, one of America's most distinguished historians offers a major reinterpretation of a pivotal moment in United States history. Based on impeccable scholarship and written with grace and style, this volume provides a sweeping political and social history of the entire period from the diplomacy of John Quincy Adams to the birth of Mormonism under Joseph Smith, from Jackson's slaughter of the Indians in Georgia and Florida to the Depression of 1819, and from the growth of women's rights to the spread of the temperance movement. Equally important, he offers a provocative new way of looking at this crucial period, showing how the boom that followed the War of 1812 ignited a generational conflict over the republic's destiny, a struggle that changed America dramatically. Sellers stresses throughout that democracy was born in tension with capitalism, not as its natural political expression, and he shows how the massive national resistance to commercial interests ultimately rallied around Andrew Jackson. An unusually comprehensive blend of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural history, this accessible work provides a challenging analysis of this period, with important implications for the study of American history as a whole. It will revolutionize thinking about Jacksonian America.

Ratings and reviews

This is an older book, but has a good thesis that is now mainstream. It's miscategorised as a business book.

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About the author

Charles Sellers is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His two-volume biography of President James Polk won a Bancroft Prize in 1967.