Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, dead at 88

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NEW YORK (AP) — 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 U.S. 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 organized feminism in the U.S. — 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 U.S. became more industrialized, more entwined and more divided. Information was traveling 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 modernized 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.

A publisher’s backup book

Reviewing the book for The New Yorker in 2007, historian Jill Lepore praised it as “a heroic attempt at synthesizing a century and a half of historical writing.” She also noted that “What God Hath Wrought” was not the first choice for Oxford editor C. Vann Woodward, the prize-winning Southern historian.

“What God Hath Wrought” was, in part, a response to another acclaimed work: Charles Sellers’ landmark “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.” Woodward had asked Sellers to contribute to the Oxford series but turned down “The Market Revolution” because he found it too negative. Released by Oxford as a separate volume in 1991, Sellers’ book contended that advances in technology uprooted rural communities and livelihoods and portrayed Jackson as an opposing force who stood — in vain — for working people against the industrial powers.

Howe had studied under Sellers at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, but he formed a different view of the country’s past. He found that innovation served less as a destroyer of old ties than as a force for democracy. He dedicated “What God Hath Wrought” to the patrician John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s bitter rival in presidential elections and his opposite in personal background.

“Before I wrote this book I had never really grasped how often improvements in material terms fostered improvements in moral terms,” Howe told the National Review in 2007. “The people who encouraged economic diversification and development in many cases also supported more humane laws, wider access to education, a halt to the expansion of slavery, even, sometimes, greater equality for women.”

Howe’s other books included “The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy 1805-1861,” “The Political Culture of the American Whigs” and “Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.” He taught at several schools, starting with Yale University in 1966 and continuing at UCLA from 1973-93 and Oxford University from 1993-2002. He married Sandra Fay Shumway in 1961 and had three children: Christopher, Rebecca and Stephen.

A fascination with the past

Born in Ogden, Utah, and raised in Denver, he recalled loving history since age 6 when his father told him about “Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to fight the Romans,” as he told The Harvard Crimson in 2009. He majored in history and literature at Harvard University and received his doctorate in history from Berkeley in 1966.

Howe has said that being asked to write “What Hath God Wrought” appealed to him for the chance to write for general readers, and not just historians. His intention was to craft an old-fashioned narrative while drawing upon more recent scholarship on social movements, presenting the country’s history as an ongoing debate over whether success was defined by military and economic power or by moral achievements.

“In 1848, it seemed that the greatness of the American people had been shown in their extensive recent conquest across the continent. Later, that greatness could seem affirmed by the preservation of the Union, industrial might, commercial influence, scientific research, and victories over global enemies,” he wrote.

“Later still, perhaps that greatness might be seen in the extent to which the dreams of the 1848 feminists and abolitionists have at length been realized. History works on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive directions but imperfectly.”