This study examines the meteoric career of a vigorous intellectual movement rising out of the Age of Jackson. As Americans argued over their destiny in the decades preceding the Civil War, an out-spoken new generation of "ultrademocratic" writers entered the fray, staking out positions on politics, literature, art, and any other territory they could annex. They called themselves Young America - and they proclaimed a "Manifest Destiny" to push back frontiers in every category of achievement.

Their swagger found a natural home in New York City, already bursting at the seams and ready to take on the world.

Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City is without question the most complete examination of this captivating and original movement. It also provides the first published biography of its leader, John O'Sullivan, one of America's great rhetoricians. Edward L. Widmer enriches his unique volume by offering a new theory of Manifest Destiny as part of a broader movement of intellectual expansion in nineteenth-century America.