Looks like a fun book.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/15/AR2008051503903.html
"From the colonial era to the 1820s -- a period that McDougall
chronicled in a previous book, Freedom Just Around the Corner--
Americans spent much of their time hustling. They were "builders, doers,
go-getters, dreamers" who seized and developed a continent "by hook,
crook, or pocketbook."
When the excitement of the Revolution passed and Americans were forced
to define what their nation stood for, McDougall argues in this new
volume, they deluded themselves. During Andrew Jackson's era, they
strove mightily with each other for political power but costumed their
struggles in virtuous patriotism. Then a technological revolution
brought cotton mills, consumer goods and upward mobility to white
Americans, and elitest revealed their true attitude toward"equality" by
launching a culture war between highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. The
wealthy retreated to theaters to watch Shakespearean actors and look
down on the masses who frequented the circus.
In the 1840s, Americans told themselves they would expand across the
continent peacefully, spreading democracy. Then they perpetrated what
McDougall calls the "fraud of manifest destiny" by violence. . . "
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