In chapters 23 to 25 of The Rise of American Democracy<\/i>, Wilentz continues to provide the somewhat unknown side of American history leading up to the Civil War.\u00a0 Although I sometimes find Wilentz to be a very dense writer, I like his introductions to important events in the United States history that go unspoken in earlier history classes.<\/p>\n

The Dred Scott v. Sanford is an important Supreme Court case that is always mentioned when learning about the Civil War, but Wilentz takes the case into detail, showing how the case inflamed party and geographical lines.\u00a0 While I knew that the Dred Scott case was an important event in the lead-up to the Civil War, I did not know how it called into question the Missouri Compromise or President Buchanan\u2019s role in the case.<\/p>\n

Wilentz\u2019s discussion of John Brown in chapter 24 is another event I did not realize had as large as an impact during this time before reading this chapter.\u00a0 As Kurt talks about in his blog post, this event is not commonly discussed at length while study before the Civil War, although having now read this chapter, I believe that Brown\u2019s raid is a crucial part of American history.\u00a0 John Brown attempted to rally slaves to arm them to fight against slaveholders in Harper\u2019s Ferry.\u00a0 Although unsuccessful and later charged with treason, Brown realized the need for a violent resurrection in order to free the slaves.\u00a0 The violence of Harper\u2019s Ferry shocked the country, sending the South into defensive mode to protect against more abolitionist fights but empowering northern abolitionists who believed he had the right intentions but the wrong way of going about abolitionism.<\/p>\n

Wilentz\u2019s detailed discussion of these two events gave a deeper insight into the time period before the start of the Civil War.\u00a0 I hope that Wilentz continues to write about the surrounding details of important events in United States history as he moves into the Civil War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In chapters 23 to 25 of The Rise of American Democracy, Wilentz continues to provide the somewhat unknown side of American history leading up to the Civil War.\u00a0 Although I sometimes find Wilentz to be a very dense writer, I like his introductions to important events in the United States history that go unspoken in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Untold Stories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}