Jacksonian Democracy and Jacksonian America
| When |
Nov 16, 2011
from 06:00 PM to 07:00 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville |
| Contact Name | GlyptusAnn Grider Jones |
| Contact Phone | 502-852-8811 |
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Using first-hand accounts in Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815-1840, Daniel M. Feller, Ph.D., traces the influence of the American enterprising spirit, contradicting the prevailing historical viewpoint which depicts the Jacksonian temperament in terms of anxiety and foreboding.
In his book, Feller views the Jacksonian Period through the eyes of the people who lived it, capturing the general optimism and energy that filled America after the War of 1812. Feller's emphasis on an American sense of future, faith and improvement challenges the more prevailing viewpoint of historians who depict the Jacksonian temperament in terms of anxiety and foreboding.
Feller traces the influence of this enterprising spirit across a broad range of Jacksonian activity. Experiment and innovation flourished as Americans built canals and factories, founded unions and utopias, staged religious revivals and moral crusades and campaigned to eradicate social ills and to purify law and politics. Yet as citizens organized to pursue their hopes for America's future, divisions arose among that pointed ultimately toward civil war.
The free and public event is scheduled from 6-7 p.m., Nov. 16, at the Chao Auditorium located on the lower level of the University (directions). It is the fourth installment of the McConnell Center's year-long history project, "Remembering America: From Colonization to the Cold War."
About the Lecturer
Feller is a professor of history and editor and director of The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee. His scholarly interests encompass the mid-19th century America as a whole, with special attention to Jacksonian politics and the coming of the Civil War.
He has contributed to numerous historical reference works, including the Oxford Companion to United States History, the Reader's Guide to American History and the Dictionary of American History. His critical essays and review articles have appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and Reviews in American History, among others. Feller has been active in the Association for Documentary Editing, the Southern Historical Association, British American Nineteenth-Century Historians (BrANCH) and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), where he served from 1991 to 2004 as Conference Coordinator for its annual summer meeting. In 2000 he was a Commonwealth Fund Lecturer in American History at University College London. He is currently at work on a biography of Benjamin Tappan, a Jacksonian politician, scientist, social reformer and freethinker. Feller earned his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1981.
About the McConnell Center
The McConnell Center offers this Civic Education Program to the public free of charge. The non-profit, non-partisan program was established to assist Kentucky citizens develop a better understanding of the American Constitution and American history and encourage open and free discussion of perennial concerns that inform contemporary politics.