Critical Book Review #1

In the book “A Magnificent Catastrophe” the author, Edward J. Larson, writes about all of the little details that has occurred in the First Presidential Campaign in the 1800s. He begins his book with how the two parties, the Republicans (Jefferson) and Federalists (Adams), were going to compete in who will govern the United States now that it is a free country and no longer under Britain’s rule. Although they had at first been friends they soon became enemies because of how they believed the government should be. Jefferson believed that the government should be a populist government that trusted popular rule. While Adams believed that America should have a strong government and that al
Larson covered all of the little details and even inserted people such as Adams’ thoughts from his journal. The author accomplished in explaining why the election of the 1800s was so important and how it shows that today’s elections are very similar to the election of the 1800s. For example, how the president believed in one thing the vice president believed in something completely different. That is similar to today because the president and vice president are sometimes in different parties. Larson covers the election of the 1800s in a historical view as he only inputs the facts and the background details that contributed to the election of the 1800s. The author has covered how the election of the 1800s came up and how the start of the two different political parties had come up and how different their beliefs were. Larson has accomplished in describing how the election of the 1800s were in his book providing details about the important events that has happened at the time. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy history and are interested in it, but not to someone who has no interest in the matter. If someone was doing a project on the election of the 1800s this book would be the first to come to mind because it did teach me a lot of things that I would not have learned in a classroom because there is only so much information that my teachers can cover about the topic in such a short amount of time. This book