America was born in an age of political revolution throughout the Atlantic world, a period when the very definition of 'nation' was transforming. This episode's guests, Benjamin E. Park, traces how Americans imagined novel forms of nationality during the country's first five decades within the context of European discussions taking place at the same time. Focusing on three case studies - Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina - Park examines the developing practices of nationalism in three specific contexts. He argues for a more elastic connection between nationalism and the nation-state by demonstrating that ideas concerning political and cultural allegiance to a federal body developed in different ways and at different rates throughout the nation. American Nationalisms explores how ideas of nationality permeated political disputes, religious revivals, patriotic festivals, slavery debates, and even literature.

Benjamin E. Park received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University. He also spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. His scholarship focuses on the religious, political, and cultural history of America between the Revolution and Civil War, often within an Atlantic context.

Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration.

Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people," however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets. He made his name as a lawyer, businessman, and official along the Carolina and Tennessee frontiers, at times ejecting white squatters from native lands and returning slaves to native planters in the name of federal authority and international law. On the other hand, he waged total war on the Cherokees and Creeks who terrorized western settlements and raged at the national statesmen who refused to "avenge the blood" of innocent colonists. During the long war in the south and west from 1811 to 1818 he brushed aside legal restraints on holy genocide and mass retaliation, presenting himself as the only man who would protect white families from hostile empires, "heathen" warriors, and rebellious slaves.

He became a towering hero to those who saw the United States as uniquely lawful and victimized. And he used that legend to beat back a range of political, economic, and moral alternatives for the republican future.

This episode's guest is J.M. Opal who reinterprets Andrew Jackson, this grim and principled man, whose version of American nationhood continues to shape American democracy.

J.M. Opal is Associate Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author of Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England and the editor of Common Sense and Other Writings by Thomas Paine. His most recent book is Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation.

Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris—a hothouse of intellectual ferment. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America. Harriet Hemings followed a different path. Born into slavery, she would eventfully escape it—apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself. Leaving Monticello behind, she boarded a coach and set off for a decidedly uncertain future. 

To share the stories of these women is Catherine Kerrison.

Catherine Kerrison is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in Colonial and Revolutionary America and women's and gender history. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South, won the Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society. Her most recent book is Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America.

Typically, historians have treated the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 as two separate wars of independence. No Founding Father could divine that the Revolutionary Period of 1763 to 1783 had concluded only one part, the first phase of their ordeal. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 at the end of the Revolutionary War halted overt combat but had achieved only partial political autonomy from Britain. By not guaranteeing American economic independence and agency, Britain continued to deny American sovereignty.



Despite persistent attempts by the British to control American trade waters, the United States asserted the doctrine of neutral rights and developed the world’s second largest merchant fleet as it absorbed the French Caribbean trade. American ships carrying trade increased five-fold between 1790 and 1800, its tonnage nearly doubling again between 1800 and 1812, ultimately making the United States the world’s largest independent maritime power.

To chart this epic fifty-year conflict is Willard Sterne Randall.

After a successful seventeen-year career as a journalist, Willard Sterne Randall pursued graduate study at Princeton University, where he received a Master of Arts in History. He taught American history at John Cabot University in Rome and at the University of Vermont and Champlain College, where he was the Distinguished Scholar in History and is a Professor Emeritus. He is the author of several books, including Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor, Alexander Hamilton: A Life, and most recently, Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution.

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery’s most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas.

According to my guest, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their “vast southern empire” was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy—not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

To unpack this fascinating relationship between slavery and American foreign policy is Matthew Karp.

Matthew Karp is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton University faculty in 2013. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. This Vast Southern Empire received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, the James Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Karp is now at work on a book about the emergence of anti-slavery mass politics in the United States and in particular the radical vision of the Republican Party in the 1850s. You can him follow on Twitter @karpmj.

When Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made was published in 1974, the study of American slavery would change forever. Written by Eugene D. Genovese, an often controversial figure, the book would become as controversial as its author. Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through culture, music, and religion. Not merely passive victims, the slaves in this account actively engaged with the paternalism of slaveholding culture in ways that supported their self-respect and aspirations for freedom, even as that engagement limited the prospects for truly revolutionary politics among the enslaved. spRoll, Jordan, Roll covers a vast range of subjects, from slave weddings and funerals, to the language, food, clothing, and labor of slaves, and places particular emphasis on religion as both a major battleground for psychological control and a paradoxical source of spiritual strength. Winning the 1975 Bancroft Prize, Roll, Jordan, Roll has since become an indispensable but contentious text for studying American slavery.

Talking with me about Roll, Jordan, Roll and its complex legacy is Joshua D. Rothman.

Joshua Rothman is the History Department Chair at the University of Alabama and is the Co-Director of Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from North American Slavery. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia and is the author of Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson and Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861. He is currently at work on a book about the managing partners of Franklin and Armfield, the most significant domestic slave trading firm in American history.

According to Proverbs 13:20, "You are the company you keep," but if you looked at the friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, you could not find men so different. Jefferson was a political radical and envisioned himself as a champion of democracy, he was an aristocrat and a planter, he was a Southerner and a slaveowner. Adams, on the other hand, came from New England's rising middling classes, and while he was a revolutionary, he was a much more conservative thinker, and at his core was a political skeptic and a pessimist about human nature.

But in the crucible of revolution, an unlikely friendship was born and continued to blossom while the pair were in France together. But ultimately, their profound differences would lead to a fundamental crisis, in their friendship and in the nation writ large, as they became the figureheads of two entirely new forces, the first American political parties. It was a bitter breach, lasting through the presidential administrations of both men, and beyond.

But as the early 19th century came into focus and the Age of Jackson began to dawn, these two men were nudged into reconciliation.

To explain this fascinating tale of friendship, division, and resolution is Gordon S. Wood.

Dr. Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University. He was the recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution and  The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. His other works include Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, Revolutionary Characters, The Purpose of the Past, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, and The Idea of America. His most recent work is Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and is published by Penguin Press. Friends Divided also available as an audiobook with Audible.

The last major American battle in the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans (December 14, 1814 - January 18, 1815) has been considered by some historians to be the birth of the Age of Jackson. The American forces included militia fighters, frontiersmen, slaves, Native Americans, and even pirates, led by future president Andrew Jackson. The British forces they faced were roughly 14,450 in number, an army three times the size of the American forces (just 4,732). Yet, despite the odds, Jackson's forces prevailed and won the day. The victory turned Jackson into a national icon and helped set him on a course to the White House.

But why did the United States and the British clash in the first place? How did the Battle of New Orleans come to be fought, and why did it matter so much? Who were these men, and how did they become involved? How did Jackson's army win despite the size of the British army? After the battle, how did Jackson become a popular figure? And what does it mean for Americans today?

To help me answer these questions, I have enlisted Joseph F. Stoltz III.

Joseph F. Stoltz III is a historian at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon where he oversees the library’s digital humanities initiatives. He received his Ph.D. in History from Texas Christian University and previously was the Rowan Post-doctoral fellow in the Department of History at the United States Military Academy. His first book is A Bloodless Victory: the Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).

It has been claimed that the Age of Jackson, the age in which democracy supposedly expanded to greater heights, is really the age of slavery and white supremacy. White racism in the early 19th century reached new depths and, with the presidency of Andrew Jackson, found new ways to manifest itself. By the time Jackson reached the White House, the United States' enslaved population had reached nearly 2 million.

But slavery alone did not define this period, as anti-slavery forces formed and mobilized in bold new ways as well. This era coincided with the formation of state and national anti-slavery societies, the publication of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, large-scale slave uprisings, and the expansion of abolitionist efforts to awaken the nation's moral conscience. But beyond these means and movements, slaves in their every day lives continued to resist and rebel, demanding their freedom and their equal place in American society.

Manisha Sinha joins me to help examine these complex issues and unpack this rich period.

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. Her most recent book, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) has won numerous awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Best Book Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the James A. Rawley Award for the Best Book on Secession and the Sectional Crisis, and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians.

This podcast takes its name from the term popularized by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1945). While early Mormonism and the Second Great Awakening may have gotten me into American Religious History, it was Schlesinger's Age of Jackson that got me bit by the Jacksonian bug.

Despite the picture of Andrew Jackson on its cover and the evocative title, The Age of Jackson is less a biography of Andrew Jackson and more study of democracy's expansion in early 19th century America. In fact, when Schlesinger does reference Jackson, he is typically viewed through others, coming across as a mythical being and a larger than life figure. Key to Schlesinger's thesis is Jacksonian white-male suffrage, in which he sees the origins of modern-day American egalitarianism. As one can imagine, casting Jacksonian Democracy has an egalitarian force is where the bulk of the criticism of The Age of Jackson comes from today. The weakness of The Age of Jackson is most glaring in its silences, as it does not mention Indian removal at all and only references slavery in passing. Because of these problematic features, the book has not aged well for many. Many find its thesis unconvincing, if not counterfactual, such as Daniel Walker Howe. Yet The Age of Jackson is not without its modern-day fans and champions, like Sean Wilentz.

But what about the man behind the book? Who was Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and how did he come to write The Age of Jackson? What is The Age of Jackson about and what insights can we glean from it? Does it have any value for us today?

To help with this first historiographical reflection, I have asked Richard Aldous to join me on the podcast.

Richard Aldous is a professor of history at Bard College,where he holds the Eugene Meyer Chair. He is the author and editor of eleven books, including the first biography of Schlesinger, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian. Aldous’s writing appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, and The American Interest, where he is a contributing editor.