In conversation with Susan-Mary Grant (Newcastle University), RAI Junior Research Fellow Mark Power Smith will discuss his new book, Young America.

Young America explores how political ideas underpinned Americans’ sense of national belonging in the period before the Civil War. It focuses on the Young America movement: a faction within the Democratic Party which sought to challenge the global hegemony of European powers through the territorial expansion and intellectual development of the United States, but ultimately destabilized American politics before the Civil War.