I have selected President Andrew Jackson as my topic for a research paper that will satisfy the requirements of my Capstone project, and have elected to title it “Jackson: An Uncommon, Common Man.” President Jackson was a fascinating man, a sparsely educated man who was nevertheless admitted to the bar after being a “reader of law” for two years (just like another President that would follow less than two score years later.) Jackson has been called the first “modern President” in that unlike his predecessors he did not defer to Congress on policy matters, but rather saw himself as a champion of the people (people, in that day, meaning land-owning white males, although that was not Jackson’s fault) who stood against cronyism and elitists
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Professor Parsons is the coauthor and editor of another book, that one about the American home front during World War II. Professor Parson’s work on Jackson was widely praised by critics, even earning a positive review from one of the most influential political strategists in the nation, Karl Rove.
Thirdly, author Robert V. Remini’s Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (Norton Essays in American History) will be invaluable in providing material to chronicle one of President Jackson’s most controversial actions, the veto of the Charter of the Second Bank of the United States. This veto led directly to his reelection challenge for his second term and was one of the seminal issues of his presidency.
My fourth print source will be Jon Meachum’s Pulitzer Prize winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, a New York Times bestseller in 2008. Meachum’s credentials are impressive: a Fellow of the National Society of Historians, a regular on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, a contributing author to several respected publications, and the former editor of Newsweek. It is unlikely I will find a better source on Jackson than this, unless Mary Todd Lincoln can arrange an interview in some way. …show more content…
Brands, author of well-received biographies of President Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin. Obviously an accomplished biographer is also a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. Such a definitive source is not easily dismissed.
My sixth and final print source is from author Frank Freidel, whose Presidents of the United States of America may not have the longest section on President Jackson, but I’m hopeful that even though it is light reading, it will possibly provide some nugget that my other sources have missed. If nothing else, it will provide me with a copy of the portrait of Jackson kept in the White House, so that I can have Old Hickory looking down on me as I attempt to do justice to interpreting his when’s, why’s, and
Professor Parsons is the coauthor and editor of another book, that one about the American home front during World War II. Professor Parson’s work on Jackson was widely praised by critics, even earning a positive review from one of the most influential political strategists in the nation, Karl Rove.
Thirdly, author Robert V. Remini’s Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (Norton Essays in American History) will be invaluable in providing material to chronicle one of President Jackson’s most controversial actions, the veto of the Charter of the Second Bank of the United States. This veto led directly to his reelection challenge for his second term and was one of the seminal issues of his presidency.
My fourth print source will be Jon Meachum’s Pulitzer Prize winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, a New York Times bestseller in 2008. Meachum’s credentials are impressive: a Fellow of the National Society of Historians, a regular on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, a contributing author to several respected publications, and the former editor of Newsweek. It is unlikely I will find a better source on Jackson than this, unless Mary Todd Lincoln can arrange an interview in some way. …show more content…
Brands, author of well-received biographies of President Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin. Obviously an accomplished biographer is also a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. Such a definitive source is not easily dismissed.
My sixth and final print source is from author Frank Freidel, whose Presidents of the United States of America may not have the longest section on President Jackson, but I’m hopeful that even though it is light reading, it will possibly provide some nugget that my other sources have missed. If nothing else, it will provide me with a copy of the portrait of Jackson kept in the White House, so that I can have Old Hickory looking down on me as I attempt to do justice to interpreting his when’s, why’s, and