Between 18, the United States chased its Manifest Destiny all the way to the Pacific battled Mexico built thousands of miles of canals, railroads, and telegraph lines embraced universal white-male suffrage and popular democracy forced Indians from the South and carried slavery to the West awaited the millennium, reformed its manners, created a middle class, launched women’s rights, and founded its own literature. She writes, in part:ĭaniel Walker Howe’s ambitious new book, “ What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” (Oxford $35), chronicles every development that Thoreau despised, many that he admired, and a great deal about which the man in Walden’s woods cared not one whit. Jill Lepore, Harvard, has an interesting new review in the New Yorker.
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