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Michael F. Holt, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 491–493, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486245
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It is impossible in a review of this length adequately to summarize, let alone properly assess (that is, dissent where dissent is warranted), Sean Wilentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy. The book has many strengths. It is based on a prodigious amount of secondary literature as well as primary sources. Its prose is clear and often eloquent. Its scope, both chronologically and topically, is strikingly ambitious. Many of its interpretations are fresh and stunningly astute. Best of all, Wilentz makes a forceful case for “the importance of political events and leaders in democracy's rise” and thus, of political history itself (p. xx). Yet it is also an uneven book. Its first two parts are far more compelling than its third.
“Democracy,” writes Wilentz, “appears when some large number of previously excluded, ordinary persons … secure the power not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government, as officeholders and as citizens free to assemble and criticize those in office” (p. xix). Its rise was “highly contested, not a given, and developed piecemeal, by fits and starts, at the state and local as well as the national level” (p. xxi). This political definition is clear enough, and it suggests the breadth of Wilentz's agenda. But in the meat of the book, the definition and coverage broaden even further to include any movement that challenged hierarchy of any kind. Thus, to give but a few examples, for Wilentz the Second Great Awakening, abolitionism, westward expansion, the Amistad affair, and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) all contributed to democracy's rise.
