Historian Daniel Walker Howe, "who sought to dethrone Andrew Jackson as the defining figure of his era of American history, arguing instead for the central importance of technological advances and the rise of journalism and a women's rights movement, among other turning points in the country's early life," died on December 25, the New York Times reported. He was 88.
Howe was best known for his book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007), which won the Pulitzer Prize in history. The book was his first attempt to write for a nonspecialist audience. He had already retired into emeritus status at the two universities where he taught--the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Oxford.
The title phrase, taken from the Old Testament, was used by Samuel F.B. Morse as the first official message sent by telegraph. The Times noted that Howe argued that this invention, part of a "communications revolution," brought about a more dramatic change in society than even the Internet has.
The book ended with the chapter "A Vision of the Future," about the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 on the rights of women. "I wanted to highlight that which had first surprised me, but then convinced me--the principle that material improvement in society fostered moral improvement," he said in an interview with the National Book Critics Circle.
"The book had sought to upend consensus in several respects," the Times wrote. "Esteemed historians of the period--particularly Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Charles Sellers and Sean Wilentz--had considered it 'the Age of Jackson,' crediting the president with embodying America's democratic spirit."
Howe, by contrast, saw the country's ills stemming from many of Jackson's policies, including his expulsion of Native Americans from their ancestral lands in violation of treaty guarantees, a precedent for "geographical expansion and white supremacy that would be invoked in years to come by advocates of America's imperial 'manifest destiny,' " Howe observed. He also emphasized that Jackson, a slave trader as a younger man, had continued to support slavery.
Howe contended that the U.S. "would head toward greater equality among the races and the sexes, along with a more activist federal government, leading him to characterize the Whigs, which held the White House through much of the 1840s and into the 1850s, as 'the party of America's future,' " the Times noted, adding that "years after What Hath God Wrought was published, many on the left described it as an unexpected guide to modern America, drawing praise from the writers and political commentators Ta-Nehisi Coates and John Ganz as well as Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts."
"It discusses how Andrew Jackson built the Democratic Party in 1828 as a Christian nationalist anti-elitist party--if that sounds familiar to people--and then how the Whigs came to contest him and ultimately won in the 1840 election," Auchincloss told the Times last year. "And I find that template to be informative for the political era we're living in now."