Pulitzer Prize winner Walter A. McDougall has written an exciting new multifaceted synthesis of American history between 1829 and 1877 called “Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era” (HarperCollins, 816 pages, $34.95). The author takes his title from Walt Whitman, whom he frequently quotes to advantage (“Sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy,” from

“Leaves of Grass”). It is easy to see why Mr. McDougall likes Whitman, since he shares that poet’s admiration for America’s vigorous and varied democracy. His writing style seems to owe something to Whitman, too, particularly his love of lists. Mr. McDougall’s description of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith provides a good example: “He was simultaneously an eminent Jacksonian, a scion of the Yankee exodus, a creature and critic of the Second Great Awakening, a Romantic reformer, a charismatic utopian, a mystic nationalist, and a hustler in the manner of Barnum.”

Mr. McDougall writes vividly, often in a breezy, colloquial style. When he disagrees with an interpretation he admonishes the reader: “Forget it,” he writes. “Don’t bet on it.” But don’t be fooled by this style; Mr. McDougall’s history is not dumbed down. Though he makes profitable use of a vast array of writing by other historians, he not only synthesizes them but displays frequent originality in his own presentations. He is not in the least intimidated by current intellectual fashions or political correctness. He is more critical of Andrew Jackson for destroying the national bank of his day than for his role in expelling the Indians from east of the Mississippi, since Mr. McDougall considers blame for that great wrong to be widely shared. He is surprisingly critical of even that most exalted of heroes, Lincoln, whom he accuses of alienating Virginia by a premature call for troops to suppress South Carolina’s rebellion. The analogy he draws between Reconstruction after the Civil War and the current American occupation of Iraq is startling and illuminating, even if, in the final analysis, not entirely persuasive.

Although political history is the strong skeleton of his account, Mr. McDougall fleshes it out with social, economic, and intellectual history. His descriptions of the important consequences of public literacy and numeracy in facilitating the industrial revolution are excellent. He accords the German immigrants the importance they deserve and seldom receive from historians. His treatment of the military history of the Civil War imparts new interest even to a subject one thought was familiar. And his wise assessment of the two major political parties of Jackson’s day, the Democrats and the Whigs, deserves to be quoted at length:

Who were the conservatives and who were the liberals in this second party system? If one adopts twentieth-century definitions it might appear that the libertarian Democrats were the conservatives and the statist Whigs the liberals. But in the parlance of nineteenth-century Britain, where the labels originated, the reverse would be true. In regard to slavery, free-soil Whigs would appear the liberals and the Democrats supporters of a racist status quo. But in regard to workers’ rights as understood later in the century, neither party was “progressive.” In regard to ethnic and religious tolerance the Democrats would appear the liberals, since they embraced Catholics and immigrants. But in regard to education and social reform the reverse would be true. The only way to get a grip on the growing divide among Americans in the mid-nineteenth century is to purge our contemporary notion of the political spectrum and try instead to imagine the ambivalent anxieties of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in the telegraph office.

Mr. McDougall’s book is not really a narrative, still less an argument for an academic thesis, but rather a panoramic description. If a single theme characterizes the pattern he lays before us, it is “pretense.” Over and over again, he finds Americans guilty of pretense, pretending, and pretension. The pretense of hucksters like P.T. Barnum and the minstrel-show producer “Daddy” Rice he treats with indulgent condescension. The pretentiousness of the genteel he despises. Worst of all is nationalist pretense, such as the self-deluding claims of America’s “Manifest Destiny,” in which imperialist expansion by force of arms was cloaked as the voluntary extension of democracy by peaceful pioneers.

Mr. McDougall’s value judgments are too deeply personal, too quirky, to please all readers. He dislikes Emerson, Thoreau, and the other literary Transcendentalists, finding their celebration of the self another form of pretension. Many students of the American past, however, find inspiration in the Transcendentalists’ self-reliance and willingness to question authority — as well as pleasure in their beautiful prose. Mr. McDougall does not generally like reformers, even when he acknowledges the justice of their cause, as in the case of those who strived to abolish slavery. He finds them too self-righteous. Yet, of course, many non-abolitionists, including some of the people he likes such as New York’s first archbishop, John Hughes, were self-righteous too. Those of us who find history endlessly fascinating usually like to argue about it, as I have just been doing with Mr. McDougall. For its occasional misjudgments, the scope and skill of his book make him a worthy interlocutor.

Mr. Howe, Rhodes professor of American History emeritus at Oxford and professor emeritus at UCLA, is the author of “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for history earlier this week, among other books. He has recently been named American Historian Laureate by the New-York Historical Society.