Table of Contents:
  • Introduction / Joel H. Silbey
  • General themes.
  • The political world of the antebellum presidents / Joel H. Silbey
  • The expansionist impulse in antebellum America / Michael A. Morrison
  • The rise of sectional tensions; parties, slavery and abolitionism / Nicole Etcheson
  • The antebellum presidents and foreign policy / Jay Sexton
  • The presidents.
  • Martin Van Buren as party leader and at Jackson's right hand / M. Philip Lucas
  • Van Buren and the economic collapse of the 1830s / Jonathan M. Atkins
  • "Tippecanoe and Tyler too": William Henry Harrison and the rise of popular politics / William G. Shade
  • President John Tyler, Henry Clay and the Whig Party / Edward Crapol
  • James K. Polk and the Democratic Party / M.J. Heale
  • Polk in office: domestic politics and policies / Paul Bergeron
  • Polk as a war president / John Pinhiero
  • Polk as a southern sectionalist / Michael Todd Landis
  • Zachary Taylor in office: Clay, the Whig Party, and the sectional crisis / Michael J. Birkner
  • Millard Fillmore, Whig politician and leader of his party / Damon Eubank
  • President Fillmore and the taming of sectionalism / Elizabeth Varon
  • Franklin Pierce, democratic partisan / Yonatan Eyal
  • Franklin Pierce, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the political transformation of the mid-1850s / John F. Kim, Jr
  • James Buchanan: the early political life of the old public functionary / Jean H. Baker
  • James Buchanan, the slavocracy and the disruption of the Democratic Party / James Huston
  • James Buchanan and the secession crisis / John Ashworth.