Most people have probably never heard of John O'Sullivan, who launched a magazine called Democratic Review in 1837 with money provided by the Democratic Party, or of the "Young America" movement the magazine spearheaded. But one of the phrases that emerged from Sullivan's writing--"Manifest Destiny"--has entered the American lexicon, although in a much more limited form than its author intended. When O'Sullivan wrote in 1838, "It is manifest that the reaction now apparent over the whole length and breadth of the land is a great national movement that must go on," he had in mind not merely the expansion of political boundaries but a broad cultural dissemination of democratic principles that encompassed literature and other arts. Edward L. Widmer's effective combination of history and literary criticism sheds much-needed light on an intellectual movement that captured many sons and grandsons of the American Revolution, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman (and, although he would always maintain a critical distance, Herman Melville). Young America vividly depicts the United States in the tumultuous years between the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, an era in which politics was America's popular culture.
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