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

NEW YORK– Daniel Walker Howe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose “What Hath God Wrought” became a widely acclaimed chronicle of the vast technological and social changes occurring in the United States in the first half of the 19th century, has died at the age of 88.

Walker died Dec. 25, according to a spokesperson for the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was professor emeritus. Additional details were not immediately available.

Winning the Pulitzer in 2008, “What Hath God Wrought” was part of Oxford University Press’s ambitious, decades-long series on American history, along with other works, including Pulitzer winners, like 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 covers the period 1815-1848, from the end of the War of 1812 to the dawn of organized feminism in the United States – the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Howe traced the steady westward expansion of a young country abiding by the doctrine of “manifest destiny.” He documented the rise of Andrew Jackson and modern political parties, the overthrow 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 before the Civil War, the United States became more industrialized, more closely knit, and more divided. Information traveled faster; the title “What God Has Done” is taken from the biblical phrase used for the first telegraph message, sent in 1844. Newspapers and books proliferated thanks to cheaper printing and more efficient postal service, and infrastructure was modernized with roads, bridges, canals, and other public works projects.

At the same time, as technology advanced, resistance arose in the South, where prominent political leaders opposed new projects—“internal improvements”—for fear that they would undermine slavery.

“Internal improvements could be opposed for reasons that had nothing to do with their economic effects. Some felt that their interest in the status quo was threatened by any innovation, especially by federally sponsored intervention,” Howe wrote.

In a review of 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. Vann Woodward, an award-winning historian of the South.

“What God Hath Wrought” was, in part, a response to another acclaimed work: Charles Sellers’ seminal work “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. Published by Oxford in a separate volume in 1991, Sellers’ book argued that technological advances had uprooted rural communities and their livelihoods and portrayed Jackson as an opposing force that defended – in vain – workers against industrial powers.

Howe had studied with Sellers at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, but he had a different view of the country’s past. He found that innovation served less to destroy old ties than to strengthen democracy. He dedicated “What God Has Done” to the patrician John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s bitter presidential rival and his personal opposite.

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

Howe’s other books included “The Unity 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 at Yale University in 1966, then at UCLA from 1973 to 1993 and at Oxford University from 1993 to 2002. He married Sandra Fay Shumway in 1961 and had three children: Christopher, Rebecca and Stephen.

Born in Ogden, Utah, and raised in Denver, he remembers 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 said being asked to write “What Hath God Wrought” appealed to him for the chance to write for the general public, not just historians. His intention was to craft an old-fashioned narrative while drawing on more recent studies of social movements, presenting the country’s history as an ongoing debate over whether success was defined by military and economic might or by moral achievement.

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

“Later still, this greatness could perhaps be seen in the extent to which the dreams of the feminists and abolitionists of 1848 were finally realized. History operates on a long time scale, and at any moment we can perceive directions only imperfectly.”