Liberty Chronicles

We should not fool ourselves into thinking democracy was some benevolent aristocrat’s generous gift. Nor should we believe democracy was something average people heroically fought for and won. The truth is, ballots have never translated to real political power and influence—they never have. The near-universal patterns in these democratizing state legislatures and constitutional conventions were political pragmatism and opportunism.

“The Votes and Speeches of Martin Van Buren” 

Kohl, Lawrence. The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989.

Meyers, Marvin. The Jacksonian Persuasion. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1957.

Pessen, Edward. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics. Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press. 1969.

Music by Kai Engel

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Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of economic history at Northwestern University. He has a PhD from Yale, he has taught and studied all over the world, and has supervised many dozens of doctoral students in pursuit of the past. He joins us today to talk about his latest book, A Culture of Growth, and the creeping revolution that enriched the world.

Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, Princeton University Press. 2017.

Mokyr, Joel. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2009.

Prof. Mokyr’s biography & CV

Music by Kai Engel

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We have to remember that American democracy was not something won courageously over time so much as it was a long, drawn out process of corrupt bargaining between politicians and the voting public, Conspiracy- and coalition-building between current voters and potential voters, and Nasty, Nasty Deals.

George Kremer to Andrew Jackson, 8 March 1825

Andrew Jackson to Henry Lee, 7 October 1825

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, 20 April 1820

Hammond, Bray. Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1957.

Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Chicago: Open Court. 1996.

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What if I told you that Christmas—the holiday we know and love so well—was a capitalist Conspiracy to indoctrinate the working class into bourgeois culture and values? At one end of the Conspiracy was the very real circle of New York City antiquarians and aristocrats trying to snuff out earlier forms of the holiday, replacing these folk practices with the distinctly quiet, calm, peaceful, productive, contemplative, bourgeois form of the holiday we know today. At the other end stands their greatest creation—the defrocked bishop Santa Claus and his apparently vast, never-ceasing workshops fed by partially enslaved elf labor.

Clement Clarke Moore, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823)

Pintard, Letters, Vol. II: 1821-1827; Vol. II: 1828-1831

Clark, Christopher. Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. 2006.

Penne Restad, Christmas in America: A History, Oxford University Press. 1996.

Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday, Vintage. 1997.

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Between 1815 and 1845, the world changed more dramatically than in any other previous 30-year period. Humanity began to break the food trap which had kept hundreds of generations barely producing enough to feed the living, keeping almost nothing to provide for the future.

“Rip Van Winkle” on WikiSource

Feller, Daniel. “The Market Revolution Ate My Homework”

Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press. 1991.

Stokes & Conway, eds. The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. 1996.

Martin, Scott. Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.

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Kevin Gutzman is a New York Times best-selling author and professor of history at Western Connecticut State University. He has a PhD from the University of Virginia and much of his research has focused on precisely that state. Three of his books—Virginia’s American Revolution, James Madison and the Making of America, and Thomas Jefferson: Revolutionary—flesh out what Gutzman takes to be a radical, revolutionary time and place in American history. We would be remiss if we did not try to understand the world from above just as we try to understand it from below.

Kevin Gutzman’s personal website

His Amazon author’s page

Carroll, Francis. A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2001.

Errington, Jane. The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 1987.

Risjord, Norman. The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson. New York: Columbia University Press. 1965.

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“Anarchiad, a New England Poem” (1786-7)

“The Design of Anarchy: ‘The Anarchiad,’ 1786-1787” by J. K. Van Dover, Early American Literature 24, No. 3 (1989): 237-247.

Banning, Lance. The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1978.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, Vols. 1-3. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1958 (Original Printing: 1927).

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Benjamin Lay was a fearless firework of “isms.” Part Quaker, part philosopher, part sailor, abolitionist, and commoner, Lay was also “The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist.” Joining us this week is Marcus Rediker, one of the most important living historians and Lay’s most recent biographer.

Marcus Rediker’s website

His Amazon author’s page

Benjamin Lay, All Slave-Keepers…Apostates

James Nayler, The Lamb’s War

Thomas Trion, A Way To Health, Long Life, and Happiness

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Few concepts or examples in history have a total sample size of exactly one. With history-making resolve, the slaves in Haiti seized their freedom, which revolutionary Paris only begrudgingly recognized. When the planters, the British, the Spanish, and finally Napoleon himself tried to re-enslave them, they simply refused and resolved themselves to fight to the death for the liberties they’d won.

James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. 1989.

Scott, Julius Sheppard. “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” (PhD Dissertation): Duke University. 1986.

West, Martin, and Wilkins (eds.). From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2009.

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 Who are the actual revolutionists?—the radicals or extremists who end up overpowering the moderates and installing the new regime?

Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, Revised Edition. Vintage. 1965.

Klooster, Wim. Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History. New York: New York University Press. 2009.

Palmer, R.R. The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, Volume One: The Struggle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1959.

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