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Review
| Shapers of the Great Debate on Jacksonian Democracy: A Biographical Dictionary, by Paul E. Doutrich. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004. 360 pages. $75.00, cloth.
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| Shapers of the Great Debate on Jacksonian Democracy: A Biographical Dictionary is a collection of short biographies on various major and minor figures from the first half of the 19th Century. This work is the third recent installment of Greenwood Press's Shapers of the Great American Debates series. The book is divided into three different thematic sections, each contains six different biographies. The first section is titled the Democrats; it includes biographies on Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John C. Calhoun, James Polk, Thomas Hart Benton, and Sam Houston. The book's next section is devoted to the Whigs. It contains the biographies of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Nicholas Biddle. The book's final section contains the biographies of writers and reformers: William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Finney, James Fenimore Cooper, and the Grimke sisters. An appendix of brief biographies for figures like David Crockett, Washington Irving, Horace Mann, Henry David Thoreau, and Roger Taney is also included. |
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Through these biographies, students can learn the ideas, beliefs, and struggles, of many prominent early 19th Century Americans. The book provides students with insights into the election of 1824's "corrupt bargain," and its role in the development of American political parties. It also covers the development of sectionalism, abolitionism, the Second Bank of the United States, and westward expansion. The book's arrangement is advantageous to learners because it allows students to see the issues of the past through biographies of different individuals. This lets students see how one issue affected several different individuals. This format provides the students with diverse perspectives and a more in depth picture of each issue, than most textbooks usually provide. |
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This publication would be a useful resource for students in a high school history classroom. The book is relatively easy to read. It should be within the reading ability of high school students. Readings from this book could be used effectively as source material for classroom debates, for example, over the election of 1824, the annexation of Texas, the rechartering the Second Bank of the United States, and many other issues. It would also be effective as source material for classroom discussions, writing assignments and some graphic organizational activities and as a classroom or teacher's reference book. Shapers of the Great Debate on Jacksonian Democracy: A Biographical Dictionary is, thus, a useful tool for high school teachers who desire to provide their students with additional source material, insights, and perspectives not commonly available to them in textbooks. |
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| Patrick County High School, Stuart, Virginia |
Jonathan Turchek |
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