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I think one of the most interesting things I took from Jill Lepore’s People Power was the point on democracy’s transformation from “unutterably bad to unassailably good” in the minds of Americans and people around the world. I took two things from this, as a historian it hit home the lesson of contextualizing sources in the proper time period because Jefferson and Jackson were fighting against traditional norms and their plans to expand democracy to “everyone” had no historical precedent. From our society and the values we’ve been given I think many people would say, oh yes, that’s normal, everyone wants democracy. But what Jefferson did and Jackson did were not the same. Imagine if you will, someone today arguing for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in America. What would your response to that be? What would the people’s response to that be? While I’ll leave the debate concerning the causes of democracy’s eventual triumph to Mr. Webster and his colleagues, I think triumph itself, given the challenges it faced, shows how strange this time period in America was and sheds a different light on the men and women who helped push the limits of democracy that we should take into account when reading primary sources written by these men and women. The second point was that I found Noah Webster fascinating. While I take issue with some of his points, I believe honest men can arise in equal measure from the aristocracy and his so called “knaves and fools,” his points on democracy becoming an “unquestionable truth” ring more true today than they did then. On a personal level, I feel that quest to improve the American government has stalled a bit in our present age because of an unwillingness to question and probe its faults because we have been bound by tradition of our democracy. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Tomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, it’s that sometimes breaking tradition can lead to something better.