Throes of Democracy

A “provocative and richly detailed” history of 19th-century America from the age of Jackson to the abandonment of Reconstruction ( Kirkus , starred review). From its shocking curtain-raiser—the conflagration that consumed Lower Manhattan in 1835—to the climactic centennial year of 1876, when Americans staged a corrupt, deadlocked presidential campaign (fought out in Florida), Walter A. McDougall’s Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 throws off sparks like a flywheel. This