Table of Contents

What Is a Document?
How to Read a Document
Introduction
Note on Sources and Interpretation

Chapter 1: The People Rule, But Who Are the People?
The Founders' Social Vision
Poor White Men's Bid for Equality
Middle- and Upper-Class Women's Bid for Intellectual Equality
The Attack on Slavery

Chapter 2: Creating a Political Order
The Federalists' Political Vision
An Elite Opposition Emerges
A Popular Opposition Emerges
The Clash of Parties
President Jefferson

Chapter 3: Expanding the National Territory
Acquiring the Land
Indians, White Settlers, and the Federal Government
Squatters and the Federal Government
Life in the Western Farm Settlements
Expanding Slavery
Beyond the Mississippi

Chapter 4: The Transformation of the North
Before the Industrial Revolution
Economic Innovators
Religious Innovators
Innovators in Family Life
A New World of Wage Labor
Origins of the American Labor Movement
The Beginnings of Mass Immigration

Chapter 5: Masters and Slaves
The Struggle for Control
The World of the Enslaved
Resistance, Repression, and Rebellion

Chapter 6: Picture Essay: Picturing Families

Chapter 7: The Triumph of Partisan Democracy
Creating a White Male Electorate
Re-creating Party Politics
Party Issues, Party Principles
Politics without Parties

Chapter 8: Race, Reform, and Sectional Conflict
A New Anti-Slavery Movement
The Re-emergence of American Feminism
A Woman's Rights Movement Emerges
Southern Leaders Defend Slavery
Anti-Abolitionism and a New Racial Regime in the North

Epilogue: Becoming a Continental Nation
Refiguring American Nationalism
Anglos and Mexicans in the Conquered Territories
The Sectional Conflict Deepens

Timeline
Further Reading
Websites
Text Credits
Picture Credits
Index

About the Author

Reeve Huston is Associate Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (OUP, 2002), which was the winner of the 2001 Theodore Saloutos Prize of the Agricultural History Society and the New York State Historical Association's 1999 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize.