Go team!

The Adams - Jackson feud lives on. It lives on through the internalization of the partisan politics of that day in the heart of a history writer who conveys an impression of "slaveholding imperialists like Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk" (those are the reviewer's words, not the author's). The vehicle is a new book, What Hath God Wrought.

The reviewer just quoted, perhaps a rabid sports fan, cannot take fandom out of the picture: Adams is "heroic" and "Jackson, meanwhile, subverted the rule of law, ethnically cleansed the South of its Indians, and hobbled the otherwise burgeoning American economy by destroying its federal banking system."

History: all about finding and promoting personal heroes. People in history are fashion accessories that help make that very special statement about you.

If this kind of polemically loaded recounting of history looks familiar, the reviewer takes the trouble to mention his admiration for James M. McPherson and the possibility that this book, What Hath God Wrought, could serve as a prequel for McPherson's polemically loaded Battle Cry of Freedom.