What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe

Drexler, Guilty of Making Peace (1991); Wallace Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker (1997); Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1990); and Matt Meier and Feliciano Ribera, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans (1993). On the election of 1848, see Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West (1997); Joseph Rayback, Free Soil: the Election of 1848 (1971); Frederick Blue, The Free Soilers (1973); and Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2007).
    Interest in the first year of the California Gold Rush flourishes. Recent, well-written works include Rodman Paul and Elliott West, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, rev. ed.(2001); H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold (2001); Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (2000); Susan Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000); Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold (1997), Paula Mitchell Marks, Precious Dust (1994); and Joanne Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (1990).
    Conventional historiography treats the Irish immigrants of 1845–54 as helpless victims of oppression, premodern in their worldview. See Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants (1972; first pub. 1941) and Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger (1962); a version of this interpretation can be found in Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles (1985). Revisionist and other recent historians emphasize the resolution and resourcefulness of the migrants and the foundation they laid for the economic success of their descendants. See, for example, Donald Akenson, The Irish Diaspora (1996); Cormac O’Grada, The Great Irish Famine (1995); George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History (1996); David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration (1984); and P. J. Drudy, ed., The Irish in America (1985). For reactions to the Irish immigrants, see Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic (1986). For illustrations, see Michael Coffey and Terry Golway, The Irish in America (1997). Nativism badly needs an up-to-date historical treatment. Until then, the principal account will remain Ray Billington, The Protestant Crusade (1938, rpt. 1964). New treatment should take account of the new Catholic history and reconceive the subject as Protestant-Catholic interaction. Nancy Schultz, Fire and Roses (2000) is a well-written narrative of the burning of the Charlestown convent in 1834. Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (2002) includes a sophisticated discussion of the rise of political nativism.
    The definitive account of the women’s rights convention of 1848, if such a thing were possible, would be Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls (2004). For the context of the convention, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998) and Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (2005). Biographies of Elizabeth Cady Stanton include Lois Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1980) and Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right (1984). Ann Gordon has edited Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997). For the larger picture, see Ellen DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998). The international dimension of the women’s rights movement is emphasized in Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999) and Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement (2000).

1. Quoted in Samuel Prime, The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York, 1875), 494.
     
     

2. “The Magnetic Telegraph,” Ladies’ Repository 10 (1850): 61–62; quoted in James Moorhead, American Apocalypse (New Haven, 1978), 6.
     
     

3. Jeffrey Pasley has compiled a list, Printers, Editors, and Publishers of Political Journals Elected to the U.S. Congress, 1789–1861, found at