The Market Revolution

Jacksonian America, 1815-1846

By: Charles Sellers

Narrated by: Joseph M. Clarke

In The Market Revolution, one of America's most distinguished historians, Charles Sellers, offers a major reinterpretation of a pivotal moment in United States history. Based on impeccable scholarship and written with grace and style, this volume provides a sweeping political and social history of the entire period from the diplomacy of John Quincy Adams to the birth of Mormonism under Joseph Smith, from Jackson's slaughter of the Indians in Georgia and Florida to the Depression of 1819, and from the growth of women's rights to the spread of the temperance movement. Equally important, he offers a provocative new way of looking at this crucial period, showing how the boom that followed the War of 1812 ignited a generational conflict over the republic's destiny, a struggle that changed America dramatically.

Sellers stresses throughout that democracy was born in tension with capitalism, not as its natural political expression, and he shows how the massive national resistance to commercial interests ultimately rallied around Andrew Jackson. An unusually comprehensive blend of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural history, this accessible work provides a challenging analysis of this period, with important implications for the study of American history as a whole. It will revolutionize thinking about Jacksonian America.

©1991 Charles Sellers (P)2019 Charles Sellers

Stupendous book, awful narration

This book is, rightfully, a classic. I regret waiting as long as I did to imbibe it. In many ways ahead of it’s time historiographically.

The narration, on the other hand, is atrocious. Mispronunciations of basic words every 30 seconds, and several blips in the recording that appear to excise meaningful amounts of text. Sellers deserves better.

25 hours I won’t get back

I now see why C. Vann Woodward canceled this book inclusion in the Oxford History of the United States. This book is very informative, but it’s so dense that it often gets lost in the weeds and has a difficult time getting back on track. The narration is terrible and includes horrible cuts that are very noticeable and unexplained gaps of nothingness. This is the first time I have ever felt compelled to write a negative review on this app, but this book earned it. Horrible, would not recommend. If you want a good read on the era, I would suggest What Have God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe.