The Age of Jackson Podcast

By Daniel Gullotta

What's The Age of Jackson Podcast about?

A Podcast on Antebellum America (ca.1812 - ca.1845) hosted by Daniel N. Gullotta and sponsored by Andrew Jackson's Hermitage.

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The Age of Jackson Podcast episodes:

03.11.2022
149 The Tormented Rise of Abolition in Andrew Jackson's America with J.D. Dickey
The 1830s were the most violent time in American history outside of war. Men battled each other in the streets in ethnic and religious conflicts, gangs of party henchmen rioted at the ballot box, and assault and murder were common...
03.04.2022
148 William Hunter, A British Soldier's Son Who Became an Early American with Eugene A. Procknow
In June 1798, President John Adams signed the now infamous Alien & Sedition Acts to suppress political dissent. Facing imminent personal risks, a gutsy Kentucky newspaper editor ran the first editorial denouncing the law's attempt to stifle the freedom of...
02.11.2022
147 John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America with Eric C. Smith
John Leland (1754-1841) was one of the most influential and entertaining religious figures in early America. As an itinerant revivalist, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to connect with a popular audience, and contributed to the rise of a "democratized" Christianity...
02.04.2022
146 The Evolution of American Equality with Michael A. Bellesiles
The evolution of the battle for true equality in America seen through the men, ideas, and politics behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed at the end of the Civil War. On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in...
12.17.2021
145 Cronyism in Early America with Patrick Newman
Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in America 1607-1849 describes the evolution of political favor seeking in early American history, from the colonial era to the Mexican War. Newman argues that cronyism emerged from the perennial clash between the forces of liberty...
12.10.2021
144 The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party with Yonatan Eyal
The phrase 'Young America' connoted territorial and commercial expansion in the antebellum United States. During the years leading up to the Civil War, it permeated various parts of the Democratic party, producing new perspectives in the realms of economics, foreign...
11.19.2021
143 The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America with Jordan T. Watkins
In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical...
11.12.2021
142 Free People of Color in the South with Warren E. Milteer Jr.
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene...
09.24.2021
141 Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery with Ken Ellingwood
The history of the fight for free press has never been more vital in our own time, when journalists are targeted as “enemies of the people.” In this brilliant and rigorously researched history, award-winning journalist and author Ken Ellingwood animates...
09.10.2021
140 Constitutionalism in the American Revolution with Gordon S. Wood
The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history,...
08.27.2021
139 Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America with Matthew W. Dougherty
The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel”—Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE—took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found,...
08.23.2021
138 Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman with Melanie Kirkpatrick
For half a century Sarah Josepha Hale was the most influential woman in America. As editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale was the leading cultural arbiter for the growing nation. Women (and many men) turned to her for advice on...
08.13.2021
137 Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America with Kara M. French
How much sex should a person have? With whom? What do we make of people who choose not to have sex at all? As present as these questions are today, they were subjects of intense debate in the early American...
08.07.2021
136 C-SPAN's Presidential Historians Survey with Thomas Balcerski
When C-SPAN conducted our first Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership in 2000, we worked with a team of nationally recognized historians to establish the survey's framework: Douglas Brinkley, Edna Greene Medford and Richard Norton Smith. They recommended the 10 qualities...
06.18.2021
135 The Science of Abolition with Eric Herschthal
In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition shows how Black...
06.11.2021
134 Nativists, Catholics, and Citizen-Soldiers in the Philadelphia 1844 Riots with Zachary M. Schrag
America is in a state of deep unrest, grappling with xenophobia, racial, and ethnic tension a national scale that feels singular to our time. But it also echoes the earliest anti-immigrant sentiments of the country. In 1844, Philadelphia was...
05.28.2021
133 Joseph Smith for President in the Election of 1844 with Spencer W. McBride
By the election year of 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers. Nearly half of them lived in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois,...
05.21.2021
132 American Republics, A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 with Alan Taylor
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching...
05.14.2021
131 The War of 1812 in the West with David Kirkpatrick
The spring of 1812 found the young American republic on edge. The British Navy was impressing American seamen with impunity at an alarming rate while vicious attacks on frontier settlements by American Indians armed with British weapons had left a...
05.07.2021
130 Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America with Jonathan Todd Hancock
The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 were the strongest temblors in the North American interior in at least the past five centuries. From the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico,...
04.30.2021
129 How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America with Joshua D. Rothman
Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and...
04.23.2021
128 America's First Civil Rights Movement with Kate Masur
The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify...
04.16.2021
127 John C. Fremont and the Violent Election Of 1856 with John Bicknell
The 1856 presidential race was the most violent peacetime election in American history. War between proslavery and antislavery settlers raged in Kansas; a congressman shot an Irish immigrant at a Washington hotel; and another congressman beat a US senator senseless...
04.09.2021
126 The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion with Jack N. Rakove
Today, Americans believe that the early colonists came to the New World in search of religious liberty. What we often forget is that they wanted religious liberty for themselves, not for those who held other views that they rejected and...
03.26.2021
125 The Reverse Underground Railroad Toward Slavery with Richard Bell
Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met...
03.19.2021
124 Abraham Lincoln and the Anti-Slavery Constitution with James Oakes
The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and...
03.12.2021
123 The Disillusionment of America's Founders with Dennis C. Rasmussen
Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by...
03.05.2021
123 Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America with Christine Leigh Heyrman
From the winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in History, a lost episode rediscovered after almost two hundred years; a thwarted love triangle of heartbreak–two men and a woman of equal ambition–that exploded in scandal and...
02.26.2021
122 John C. Calhoun, American Heretic with Robert Elder
John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for...
02.19.2021
121 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Brothers who Defied a Nation with Peter Cozzens
The first biography of the great Shawnee leader in more than twenty years, and the first to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States. Until...
02.12.2021
120 Politics and Memory in the American Revolution with Michael D. Hattem
In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of...
02.05.2021
119 The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States with Thomas Richards Jr.
Most Americans know that the state of Texas was once the Republic of Texas―an independent sovereign state that existed from 1836 until its annexation by the United States in 1846. But few are aware that thousands of Americans, inspired by...
01.29.2021
118 The True-Crime Story of Amelia Norman in Old New York with Julie Miller
In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for...
01.22.2021
117 Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse with Christopher James Blythe
The relationship between early Mormons and the United States was marked by anxiety and hostility, heightened over the course of the nineteenth century by the assassination of Mormon leaders, the Saints' exile from Missouri and Illinois, the military occupation of...
01.08.2021
116 George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution with Lindsay M. Chervinsky
The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet―the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government?On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his...
11.20.2020
115 Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency with Nathaniel C. Green
Donald Trump’s election has forced the United States to reckon with not only the political power of the presidency, but also how he and his supporters have used the office to advance their shared vision of America: one that is...
11.06.2020
114 The Jefferson Bible with Peter Manseau
In his retirement, Thomas Jefferson edited the New Testament with a penknife and glue, removing all mention of miracles and other supernatural events. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, Jefferson hoped to reconcile Christian tradition with reason by presenting...
10.30.2020
113 The Whigs' America with Joseph W. Pearson
[Warning: There was some corruption of the audio file and some parts of the interview are missing].Passionate political disagreement is as old as the American Republic, and the antebellum era -- the thirty years before the Civil War -- was...
10.23.2020
112 Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy with Michael E. Woods
As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new...
10.16.2020
111 America’s First Abolition Movement with Paul J. Polgar
Paul Polgar recovers the racially inclusive vision of America's first abolition movement. In showcasing the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and their African American allies during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras, he unearths...
08.28.2020
110 Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 with Kyle B. Roberts
At first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? More than you might think, says Kyle B....
08.21.2020
109 The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation with Richard J. Ellis
Usually remembered for its slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” the election of 1840 is also the first presidential election of which it might be truly said, “Itâ€™s the Economy, Stupid.” Tackling a contest best known for log cabins, cider barrels,...
08.14.2020
108 The Life of John Tyler, the President Without a Party with Christopher J. Leahy
Historians have long viewed President John Tyler as one of the nation’s least effective heads of state. In President without a Party―the first full-scale biography of Tyler in more than fifty years and the first new academic study of him...
08.07.2020
107 The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic with Joshua R. Greenberg
Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number...
07.31.2020
106 Merrill D. Peterson's The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1988) with James Bradley (History of History 20)
Enormously powerful, intensely ambitious, the very personifications of their respective regions--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun represented the foremost statemen of their age. In the decades preceding the Civil War, they dominated American congressional politics as no other...
07.24.2020
105 Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America with William K. Bolt
Before the Civil War, the American people did not have to worry about a federal tax collector coming to their door. The reason why was the tariff, taxing foreign goods and imports on arrival in the United States. Tariff Wars...
07.17.2020
104 Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic with James S. Kabala
Americans of the Early Republic devoted close attention to the question of what should be the proper relationship between church and state. This issue engaged participants from all religions, denominations and party affiliations. Kabala examines this debate across six decades...
07.10.2020
103 White Women as Slave Owners in the American South with Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that...
06.26.2020
102 European Nationalist Movements and the Creation of the Confederacy with Ann L. Tucker
From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast...
05.29.2020
101 Christine Stansell's City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986) with Anne Twitty (History of History 19)
Before the Civil War, a new idea of womanhood took shape in America in general and in the Northeast in particular. Women of the propertied classes assumed the mantle of moral guardians of their families and the nation. Laboring women,...

What's The Age of Jackson Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Age of Jackson Podcast episodes:

149 The Tormented Rise of Abolition in Andrew Jackson's America with J.D. Dickey

148 William Hunter, A British Soldier's Son Who Became an Early American with Eugene A. Procknow

147 John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America with Eric C. Smith

146 The Evolution of American Equality with Michael A. Bellesiles

145 Cronyism in Early America with Patrick Newman

144 The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party with Yonatan Eyal

143 The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America with Jordan T. Watkins

142 Free People of Color in the South with Warren E. Milteer Jr.

141 Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery with Ken Ellingwood

140 Constitutionalism in the American Revolution with Gordon S. Wood

139 Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America with Matthew W. Dougherty

138 Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman with Melanie Kirkpatrick

137 Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America with Kara M. French

136 C-SPAN's Presidential Historians Survey with Thomas Balcerski

135 The Science of Abolition with Eric Herschthal

134 Nativists, Catholics, and Citizen-Soldiers in the Philadelphia 1844 Riots with Zachary M. Schrag

133 Joseph Smith for President in the Election of 1844 with Spencer W. McBride

132 American Republics, A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 with Alan Taylor

131 The War of 1812 in the West with David Kirkpatrick

130 Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America with Jonathan Todd Hancock

129 How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America with Joshua D. Rothman

128 America's First Civil Rights Movement with Kate Masur

127 John C. Fremont and the Violent Election Of 1856 with John Bicknell

126 The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion with Jack N. Rakove

125 The Reverse Underground Railroad Toward Slavery with Richard Bell

124 Abraham Lincoln and the Anti-Slavery Constitution with James Oakes

123 The Disillusionment of America's Founders with Dennis C. Rasmussen

123 Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America with Christine Leigh Heyrman

122 John C. Calhoun, American Heretic with Robert Elder

121 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Brothers who Defied a Nation with Peter Cozzens

120 Politics and Memory in the American Revolution with Michael D. Hattem

119 The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States with Thomas Richards Jr.

118 The True-Crime Story of Amelia Norman in Old New York with Julie Miller

117 Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse with Christopher James Blythe

116 George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution with Lindsay M. Chervinsky

115 Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency with Nathaniel C. Green

114 The Jefferson Bible with Peter Manseau

113 The Whigs' America with Joseph W. Pearson

112 Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy with Michael E. Woods

111 America’s First Abolition Movement with Paul J. Polgar

110 Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 with Kyle B. Roberts

109 The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation with Richard J. Ellis

108 The Life of John Tyler, the President Without a Party with Christopher J. Leahy

107 The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic with Joshua R. Greenberg

106 Merrill D. Peterson's The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1988) with James Bradley (History of History 20)

105 Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America with William K. Bolt

104 Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic with James S. Kabala

103 White Women as Slave Owners in the American South with Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

102 European Nationalist Movements and the Creation of the Confederacy with Ann L. Tucker

101 Christine Stansell's City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986) with Anne Twitty (History of History 19)

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