New York | Daniel Walker Howe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose “What Hath God Wrought” became a widely acclaimed chronicle of the vast technological and social changes in the US in the first half of the 19th century, has died at age 88.
Walker died on Dec 25, according to a spokesman for the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a professor emeritus. Additional details were not immediately available.
Awarded the Pulitzer in 2008, “What Hath God Wrought” was part of the Oxford University Press' ambitious and decades-long series on American history, with other works including such Pulitzer winners as David M Kennedy's book on the Great Depression and World War II, “Freedom from Fear,” and James M McPherson's Civil War epic “The Battle Cry of Freedom”.
Howe's 900-page book covered 1815-1848, from the end of the War of 1812 to the dawn of organised feminism in the US — the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
Howe traced the steady expansion west of a young country abiding by the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”. He documented the rise of Andrew Jackson and modern political parties, the overturning of the elite order that had controlled the presidency since George Washington, and the ongoing debate over slavery that would lead to armed conflict.
The country was facing changes familiar to 21st century Americans. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the US became more industrialised, more entwined and more divided.
Information was travelling faster; the title “What Hath God Wrought” was taken from the biblical phrase used for the first telegraph message, sent in 1844.
Newspapers and books were proliferating thanks to cheaper printing and to more efficient mail service, and the infrastructure was being modernised through roads, bridges, canals and other public works projects.
At the same time, the more technology advanced, the more resistance arose in the South, where leading politicians opposed the new projects — "internal improvements” — for fear they would undermine slavery.
“Internal improvements could be opposed for reasons that had nothing to do with their economic effects. There were those who felt their stake in the status quo threatened by any innovation, especially intervention sponsored by the federal government,” Howe wrote.
