| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. By Mark A. Lause. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ix, 240 pp. Cloth, $42.00, ISBN 0-252-02980-1. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-252-07230-8.)

Mark A. Lause's extensively researched book aims to refocus interpretations of mid-nineteenth century American radicalism. His chief subject is the National Reform Association (NRA), the movement built during the mid-1840s by George Henry Evans and others to campaign for land reform as a solution to social inequality and the burdens faced by an expanding working class. Taking issue with accounts that emphasize National Reform's irrelevance to labor politics, or its affinities with nativism, Lause traces the movement's radical heritage and legacies, and the multifarious connections its leading members had with the major reform issues of the antebellum period. Above all, he suggests the significance of radical land reform agitation to the crucial realignments of American politics that set the stage for the Civil War. National Reformers were deeply involved in the emergence of the Free Soil movement and in the Democrats' divisions over slavery. Subsequently, some of its ideas and leading figures would assist at the birth of the Republican party even though the nra had by then ceased to function. "Young America" (a title of the movement's chief journal and of some local organizations) produced a confident, radical critique of existing institutions that helped transform American politics and society.

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