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Charles Sellers The Market Revolution Summary

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Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. The Market Revolution attempts to look at the United States in its most critical period. Beginning after the United States’ victory in the War of 1812, the focus shifts to how the United States will undergo rapid change with a new generation of Americans taking part in an emerging free market economy. The Market Revolution is written by Charles Sellers, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Sellers is an American history professor who has done extensive research of the nineteenth century United States. This century saw the transformation of the United States from an agrarian republic into an industrialized entrepreneurial power. Facing an identity crisis with the emergence of the free market as well as politics between the Federalists and Jeffersonian republicans is the beginning of Sellers’ thesis. With a focus on how the free market is responsible for this transformation, Sellers focuses on the family structure of the American society from subsistent farms …show more content…

Bringing a new viewpoint on the nineteenth century allows a reader to see through the position of eternal class struggle. With new perspective, Sellers interprets his sources well to support his thesis through the use of topics that fit the spectrum of left wing ideology. The book remains an important source in nineteenth century, but the reader must be prepared to endure the repetition of Marxist terminology. The Market Revolution shows the transformation of the United States during the nineteenth century through a Marxist lens where capitalism was seen as the cause of abandonment on the foundations of previous society relating to subsistent farmers and the family structure. History is written as fact, but Sellers uses his personal ideals to show the fledging republic’s free market obsession in a new

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