A political history of how the fledgling American republic developed into a democratic state offers insight into how historical beliefs about democracy compromised democratic progress and identifies the roles of key contributors.

Focusing on the working class, Sean Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that took place during the early industrialization of New York City.

Sean Wilentz, one of America's leading historians of the nineteenth century, recounts the fiery career of this larger-than-life figure, a man whose high ideals were matched in equal measure by his failures and moral blind spots, a man who ...

Driving straight to the heart of the most contentious issue in American history, Sean Wilentz argues controversially that, far from concealing a crime against humanity, the U.S. Constitution limited slavery’s legitimacy—a limitation ...

Written by distinguished historians with the force of a novel, this book reconstructs the web of religious ecstacy, greed, and seduction within the cult of the Prophet Matthias in New York in 1834 and captures the heated atmosphere of the ...

Since its publication in 1984, Chants Democratic has endured as a classic narrative on labor and the rise of American democracy.

A political history of how the fledgling American republic developed into a democratic state offers insight into how historical beliefs about democracy compromised democratic progress and identifies the roles of key contributors.

Sean Wilentz discovered Bob Dylan’s music as a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village. Now, almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan.

With these two insights Sean Wilentz offers a crystal-clear portrait of American history, told through politicians and egalitarians including Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and W. E. B. Du Bois—a portrait that runs counter to current ...

In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz, one of our nation's leading historians, accounts for how a conservative movement once deemed marginal managed to seize power and hold it, and describes the momentous consequences that followed.