His inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1990 was devoted to “Henry David Thoreau on the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” The present volume opens with an 1838 quotation from the English abolitionist and utopian, economic and social thinker, Harriet Martineau, 1 dedicated to the memory of John Quincy Adams-the abolitionist and New England Whig who served as Secretary of State under James Monroe, one term as President and was defeated by Andrew Jackson in the subsequent election of 1828. He published The Political Culture of the American Whigs in 1979 and The Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln in 1997. His prior books are indicative of the focus in the present volume, which basically functions to revise long habitual conceptions of the Jacksonian era. American historian Daniel Walker Howe is emeritus Professor of History at both UCLA and Oxford.
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