The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it (1948) - Richard Hofstadter

Written by Richard Hofstadter
Read by Kaleo Griffith
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
Release date: 04-24-18
Publisher: Random House Audio

Christopher Lasch - foreword

The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a “kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics,” Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.

Topics covered:
Introduction
The founding fathers, an age of realism
Thomas Jefferson, the aristocrat as democrat
Andrew Jackson & the rise of liberal capitalism
John C. Calhoun, the Marx of the master class
Abraham Lincoln & the self-made myth
Wendell Phillips, the patrician as agitator
The spoilsmen, an age of cynicism
William Jennings Bryan, the democrat as revivalist
Theodore Roosevelt, the conservative as progressive
Woodrow Wilson, the conservative as liberal
Herbert Hoover & the crisis of American individualism
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician as opportunist