For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s

Ronald P. Formisano

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807872628 ISBN 13: 9780807872628

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2012

Rare Book

Review:

<i>For the People</i> is the most important work in print on the sources and development of the people's unofficial national faith from the Revolution to the Civil War: populism. It is by turns brilliant and arresting. A must read.--Bruce Laurie, University of Massachusetts, Amherst|""The American Revolution established the people's sovereignty as the fundamental principle of the new republic. Yet a direct claim to sovereignty was obscured and blunted by elite political power. Time and again in American history movements have risen to reassert that claim. Deeply grounded in decades of research and writing, Ronald Formisano's <i>For the People</i> presents a foundational synthesis of the first epoch of these populist insurgencies between the Revolution and the Civil War. Reaffirming his long-held position as one of this country's most eminent political historians, Formisano presents a compelling interpretation of how populist movements moved from eighteenth-century modes of violent resistance to nineteenth-century engagement in electoral politics. <i>For the People</i> will be required reading for a generation of historians, political scientists, and students of the American condition.""--John L. Brooke, Ohio State University

About the Author:

Ronald P. Formisano is William T. Bryan Chair of American History at the University of Kentucky. He is author of four books, including Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s.