Columbia Rising

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648 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 13 halftones, 4 maps, 7 graphs, 24 tables, appends., notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-0973-7
Published: August 2013
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-3887-7
Published: August 2013
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-8042-0
Published: August 2013

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Awards & distinctions

2010 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History, New York Academy of History

2011 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

2010 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize, New York State Historical Association

2010 Best Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

In Columbia Rising, Bancroft Prize-winning historian John L. Brooke explores the struggle within the young American nation over the extension of social and political rights after the Revolution. By closely examining the formation and interplay of political structures and civil institutions in the upper Hudson Valley, Brooke traces the debates over who should fall within and outside of the legally protected category of citizen. The story of Martin Van Buren threads the narrative, since his views profoundly influenced American understandings of consent and civil society and led to the birth of the American party system. Brooke's analysis of the revolutionary settlement as a dynamic and unstable compromise over the balance of power offers a window onto a local struggle that mirrored the nationwide effort to define American citizenship.

About the Author

John L. Brooke is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. He has won the Bancroft Prize for The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.
For more information about John L. Brooke, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"In remarkable detail, Brooke mines the archives to balance his portrait between the perspectives of the wealthy landowners . . . and the disenfranchised. . . . Will be valuable to students of history and political theory and others interested in America's early days."--Library Journal

"This grand work peels back the layers of the troubled and very long 'Revolutionary settlement' in New York's Columbia County. . . . Brooke has made the opaque brilliant and, in the process, highlighted useful interpretive frameworks for scholars of early America. . . . Essential."--Choice

"An important contribution to our ongoing effort to understand nation-building at the turn of the eighteenth century. It offers crucial lessons for the present as well."--American Historical Review

"Brooke’s magisterial command of the lives of a host of characters, some obscure and others not so obscure, makes for compelling reading."--William and Mary Quarterly

"Inspiring . . . . Brooke’s book will hopefully provide a framework for future scholars to test as they seek to understand the process by which Americans moved from the crisis of Revolution to the establishment of a relatively stable political system."--Common-Place

"A welcome contribution to the cultural history of the early American republic."--Essays In History