Jackson Historiography What is the central question about Jackson and his presidency?

1
Jackson HistoriographyWhat is the central
question about Jackson and his presidency?
2
Frederick Jackson Turner

• Late 19th Century
• The Frontier in American History
• Jacksons rise is the rise of the west
• His appeal is a challenge to the eastern
  establishment

3
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

• Early-Mid 20th C Progressive
• The Age of Jackson
• Jackson empowered underclasses in their struggle
  against eastern capitalist oppressers
• Restrain the power of the business community
• Jackson is a liberal economic reformer promoting
  economic opportunity for previously
  underrepresented people

4
Richard Hofstadter

• Neocon - Mid 20th C
• The American Political Tradition
• Jackson favored NEW capitalists entrepreneurs,
  not eastern elite
• Rising elite vs. Entrenched elite
• Removed restraints to (their) econ opp
• Jackson is a conservative

5
Marvin Meyer

• Mid 20th C Ideological
• The Jacksonian Persuasion
• Neocons are wrong
• AJ was wary of industrial growth and hoped for a
  return to agricultural society
• Jackson was a Jeffersonian

6
New Left

• Edward Presson, Michael Rogin, Alexander Saxton
• AJ perpetuated a stratified society
• His election brought about a new revolution to
  re-establish white control of continent
• Blacks? Indians? Women? You
  call that democracy?

7
Who wrote it?

• The legacy of Jackson is his unending
  contribution to the vitality of our democracy.
• Jackson represented equality vs. privilege,
  liberty against domination, honest work vs.
  exploit, natural dignity vs. fictitious
  superiority, patriotic conservatism against alien
  innovation, progress vs. dead precedent.
• (virtue vs the new economic changes)
• The leading books on the Jacksonian period,
  written by respected historians (The Age of
  Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger The Jacksonian
  Persuasion by Marvin Meyers), do not mention
  Jackson's Indian policy, but there is much talk
  in them of tariffs, banking, political parties,
  political rhetoric. If you look through high
  school textbooks and elementary school textbooks
  in American history you will find Jackson the
  frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the
  people-not Jackson the slaveholder, land
  speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers,
  exterminator of Indians.

8
YOU (feel free to add a picture of yourself in
front of books beside your evaluation/interpretati
on of Jackson)