For the People is the most important work in print on the sources and development of the people's unofficial national faith from the Revolution to the Civil War: populism. It is by turns brilliant and arresting. A must read.—Bruce Laurie, University of Massachusetts, Amherst



The American Revolution established the people's sovereignty as the fundamental principle of the new republic. Yet a direct claim to sovereignty was obscured and blunted by elite political power. Time and again in American history movements have risen to reassert that claim. Deeply grounded in decades of research and writing, Ronald Formisano's For the People presents a foundational synthesis of the first epoch of these populist insurgencies between the Revolution and the Civil War. Reaffirming his long-held position as one of this country's most eminent political historians, Formisano presents a compelling interpretation of how populist movements moved from eighteenth-century modes of violent resistance to nineteenth-century engagement in electoral politics. For the People will be required reading for a generation of historians, political scientists, and students of the American condition.—John L. Brooke, Ohio State University