New York — Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian “What did God do?” He died at the age of 88. It became a widely acclaimed account of the enormous technological and social changes in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Walker died on December 25, according to a spokesman for the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a professor emeritus. No additional details were immediately available.
What Hath God Wought won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and was part of Oxford University Press’s ambitious, decades-long series on American history, with other works including Pulitzer Prize winners such as David M. Kennedy’s book on the Great Depression and World War II. “Freedom from fear” and James M. McPherson The Civil War epic “Battle Cry for Freedom.”
Howe’s 900-page book covers the period from 1815 to 1848, from the end of the War of 1812 to the dawn of the organized women’s movement in the United States—the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Howe traces the steady expansion westward of a young nation committed to the principle of “manifest destiny.” He documented the rise of Andrew Jackson and modern political parties, the overthrow of the elite system that had controlled the presidency since George Washington, and the controversy over slavery that would lead to armed conflict.
The country was facing changes familiar to Americans in the 21st century. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the United States became more industrialized, more networked, and more divided. Information was traveling faster. The title “What God Has Done” is taken from the biblical phrase used in the first telegraph message, sent in 1844. Newspapers and books proliferated thanks to cheap printing and more efficient postal services, and infrastructure was modernized through roads, bridges, canals, and other public works projects.
At the same time, as technology advanced, greater resistance arose in the South, where leading politicians opposed new projects—“internal improvements”—fearing they would undermine slavery.
“Internal improvements could be opposed for reasons unrelated to their economic effects,” Howe wrote, “and there were those who felt that their share in the status quo was threatened by any innovation, especially federally sponsored intervention.”
Reviewing the book for The New Yorker in 2007, historian Jill Lepore praised it as “a heroic attempt to synthesize a century and a half of historical writing.” She also noted that What God Did was not the first choice of Oxford editor C. Van Woodward, award-winning southern historian.
What God Did was in part a response to another highly acclaimed work: Charles Sellers’s popular The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. Woodward asked Sellers to contribute to the Oxford Series but he rejected “Market Revolution” because he found it too negative. Sellers’ book, which Oxford issued as a separate volume in 1991, asserted that technological advances were uprooting rural communities and livelihoods and portrayed Jackson as an oppositional force that sided – in vain – with workers against industrial powers.
Howe studied under Sellers at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, but formed a different view of the country’s past. He found that innovation was less a destroyer of old bonds than a force for democracy. He dedicated “What God Has Done” to the noble John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s archrival in the presidential election and his opposite in personal background.
“Before I wrote this book, I didn’t really realize how improvements in physical terms fostered improvements in moral terms,” Howe told National Review in 2007. “People who encouraged economic diversification and development in many cases also supported more humane laws, expanded access to education, halting the expansion of slavery, and even, on occasion, greater equality for women.”
Howe’s other books included The United Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy 1805-1861, The Political Culture of the American Whig, and The Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. He taught at several schools, beginning at Yale University in 1966 and continuing at UCLA from 1973 to 1993 and Oxford University from 1993 to 2002. He married Sandra Faye Shumway in 1961 and they had three children: Christopher, Rebecca, and Stephen.
Born in Ogden, Utah, and raised in Denver, he remembers loving history since he was 6 years old when his father told him about “Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to fight the Romans,” he told the Harvard Crimson in 2009. He majored in history and literature at Harvard and earned a doctorate in history from Berkeley in 1966.
Howe said that being asked to write “What God Made” appealed to him to give him the opportunity to write for general readers, not just historians. He intended to craft an old-fashioned narrative while drawing on recent scholarship on social movements, and to present the country’s history as an ongoing debate about whether success is determined by military and economic strength or by moral achievement.
“In 1848,” he wrote, “the greatness of the American people seemed to have been demonstrated by their extensive conquests throughout the continent. Later, this greatness would be confirmed by the preservation of the Union, industrial power, commercial influence, scientific research, and victories over universal enemies.”
“In retrospect, perhaps that greatness can be seen in the extent to which the dreams of feminists and abolitionists were realized in 1848. History operates on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive trends but only imperfectly.”