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Description of  Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism before the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)

0813948533 pdf The Young Americans were a nationalist movement within the Democratic Party made up of writers and politicians associated with the New York periodical, the Democratic Review. In this revealing book, Mark Power Smith explores the ways in whichin dialogue with its criticsthe movement forged contrasting visions of American nationalism in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Frustrated, fifty years after independence, by Britains political and cultural influence on the United States, the Young Americans drew on a wide variety of intellectual authoritiesin the fields of literature, political science, phrenology and international lawto tie popular sovereignty for white men to the universalist idea of natural rights. The movement supported a noxious program of foreign interventionism, racial segregation, and cultural nationalism. What united these policies was a new view of national allegiance: one that saw democracy and free trade not as political privileges but as natural rights for white men. Read more