The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Dec 21, 2011 - Political Science - 560 pages
The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.
 

Contents

The Aristocrat as Democrat
23
Andrew Jackson and the Rise
57
The Marx of the Master Class
87
Abraham Lincoln and the SelfMade Myth
119
The Patrician as Agitator
175
An Age of Cynicism
211
The Conservative as Liberal
307
Herbert Hoover and the Crisis
367
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
457
Index
493
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About the author (2011)

Born in 1916, Richard Hofstadter was one of the leading American historians and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. His works include The Age of ReformAnti-intellectualism in American LifeSocial Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915The American Political Tradition, and others. He died in 1970.

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