Why did I love this book?
The O.G. of works on Andrew Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger’s book not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but went a long way towards rehabilitating Jackson’s legacy in the eyes of Americans. Although the historical analysis is dated now—not surprising for a book written in the 1940s—Schlesinger’s prose is beautiful, nearly poetic at times. So long as you take the assumptions about race, gender, and ethnicity in the context in which it was written, it’s a great read. I finished it wishing that historians still wrote with prose like this, albeit with different conclusions.
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"The outgrowth of a series of lectures entitled 'A reinterpretation of Jacksonian democracy' delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in the fall of 1941."--Acknowledgements.