Books by Sean Wilentz

"Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book."--David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. In this essential reconsideration of the creation and legacy of our nation's founding document, Sean Wilentz reveals the tortured compromises that led the Founders to abide slavery without legitimizing it, a deliberate ambiguity that fractured the nation seventy years later. Contesting the Southern proslavery version of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass pointed to the framers' refusal to validate what they called "property in man." No Property in Man has opened a fresh debate about the political and legal struggles over slavery that began during the Revolution and concluded with the Civil War. It drives straight to the heart of the single most contentious issue in all of American history. "Revealing and passionately argued... [Wilentz] insists that because the framers did not sanction slavery as a matter of principle, the antislavery legacy of the Constitution has been...'misconstrued' for over 200 years."--Khalil Gibran Muhammad, New York Times "Wilentz's careful and insightful analysis helps us understand how Americans who hated slavery, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, could come to see the Constitution as an ally in their struggle."--Eric Foner

The past thirty-five years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the right dominated American politics and government from 1974 to 2008. 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. Vivid, authoritative, and illuminating from start to finish, The Age of Reagan is a groundbreaking chronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon.

The towering figure who remade American politics-the champion of the ordinary citizen and the scourge of entrenched privilege"It is rare that historians manage both Wilentz's deep interpretation and lively narrative." - Publishers Weekly The Founding Fathers espoused a republican government, but they were distrustful of the common people, having designed a constitutional system that would temper popular passions. But as the revolutionary generation passed from the scene in the 1820s, a new movement, based on the principle of broader democracy, gathered force and united behind Andrew Jackson, the charismatic general who had defeated the British at New Orleans and who embodied the hopes of ordinary Americans. Raising his voice against the artificial inequalities fostered by birth, station, monied power, and political privilege, Jackson brought American politics into a new age. 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 is remembered for the accomplishments of his eight years in office and for the bitter enemies he made. It was in Jackson's time that the great conflicts of American politics-urban versus rural, federal versus state, free versus slave-crystallized, and Jackson was not shy about taking a vigorous stand. It was under Jackson that modern American politics began, and his legacy continues to inform our debates to the present day.

I bogen her placerer forfatteren Bob Dylan og hans værk centralt i USA's moderne historie. Udgangspunktet er det venstreorienterede musikmiljø i New York under den store depression og 2. Verdenskrig, og Woodie Guthries, Pete Seegers og folkemusikkens indflydelse på den unge Dylan. Så følger mødet med Allen Ginsberg og beatgenerationen, de store koncerter i 1960’erne og 70’erne og indspilningerne af alle de kendteste albums, ikke mindst 'Blonde on Blonde'. Dylans senere optagethed af 1920’ernes sorte bluesmusik og særligt Blind Willie McTell fører frem til hans kristne periode, der igen trækker linjer tilbage til den amerikanske borgerkrig og de mange religiøse retninger og vækkelser. Bogen fortæller undervejs om The Never Ending Tour, Dylans bøger, malerier og film og slutter med de seneste indspilninger bl.a. 'Modern Times', 'The Bootleg Series' og 'Together Through Life'.