Winner of the Book Prize for New Authors from the National Historical Society

The War of 1812 played a critical role in the emergence of an American "culture of capitalism." In The Republic Reborn Steven Watts offers a brilliant new interpretation of the war and the foundation of liberal America. He explores the sweeping changes that took place in America between 1790 and 1820—the growth of an entrepreneurial economy of competition, the devlopment of a liberal political structure and ideology, and the rise of a bourgeois culture of self-interest and self-control. "Serving as a vehicle for change and offering an outlet for the anxieties of a changing socity," Watts writes, the War of 1812 "ultimately intensified and sanctioned the imperatives of a developing world-view."