Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism before the Civil War

Power Smith does an exceptionally good job of braiding intellectual with political history. The result is a highly sophisticated interpretation of Young Americans? views on nationalism, freedom, race, slavery, expansion, and democracy, as well as a finely grained view of antebellum politics. This book promises to make an original, insightful, and provocative contribution to the vast literature on antebellum American political and intellectual history.

Michael E. Woods, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, author of Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy

In this lively study of political ideas, Mark Power Smith reveals the centrality of the Young America movement to the making and unmaking of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Young America was replete within internal tensions: it was at once internationalist and nationalist; opposed to European imperialism while advocating U.S. territorial conquest; natural law was its intellectual anchor, even as those ideas came to justify rigid forms of racial hierarchy. Power Smith persuasively shows how the internal contradictions within Young America were those of the Union more generally.

Jay Sexton, University of Missouri, author of A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History

A rich work of intellectual and political history . . . Young America is a pleasure to read and makes an incisive contribution to the growing body of work on antebellum Democrats. Journal of the Civil War Era