Howe covers the thirty-three years from the Battle of New Orleans to the settlement that followed the war with Mexico, and puts the spread of cheap print, the postal system, canals, railroads and finally the telegraph at the centre of everything else that changed. Faster communication built mass parties, evangelical revivals, reform campaigns and national commercial networks at once. He treats the idea of a market revolution imposed on self-sufficient farmers with open scepticism, arguing that ordinary people wanted access to markets and that growth ran steadily from 1820 onward. The book opens on a continent shared by the United States, Mexico and independent Native nations, and keeps that frame while following Indian removal, territorial conquest and a hardening defence of slavery. Democracy among white men was largely settled; the serious fights concerned who counted as a person with rights. Howe judges that the Whig programme of schooling, industry and federal capacity described where the country was actually going.