Description: As Lynn's book shows, this movement sent conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy can be called upon to legitimize inequality and hierarchy, a uniquely American conservatism that endures in our republic today.
Review Quotes: Joshua Lynn is one of those rare historians who can take an old subject and make it new by discovering unusual documents and crisp new insights. Preserving the White Man's Republic is timely, beautifully written, and original; antebellum Democrats fashioned a white nationalism that propelled the process of disunion and left a lasting legacy of racism inextricably linked to conservatism. Lynn does a sparkling kind of political history--about ideas--that the field dearly needs.--David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom