Award-winning historian also knows his Dylan

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“I know few people who seem to know everybody and seem to have a charm and interest that allows them to have an enormous circle of friends. Sean is one of those people,” says Greil Marcus, a leading music critic and co-editor of “The Rose & The Briar.”

“The Rise of American Democracy,” which includes blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth, took 10 years to write and even longer to conceive. Emphasizing that his book is not a “great man” story, Wilentz regards political history as far more than leaders making speeches and signing bills, but of everyday people fighting, and sometimes winning.

Wilentz writes of how this country transformed from an old-world aristocracy to a democracy, however imperfect, with workers, women and minorities increasingly claiming rights for themselves.

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“This is political history for the 21st century,” says historian Eric Foner, whose “Reconstruction” won the Bancroft in 1989. “He integrates a lot of levels of society into a unifying theme. He gives you a clear point of view, not just a bunch of facts thrown together. His book should become — at least for a while, because nothing is permanent in history — the standard interpretation for the long era he writes about.”

“The Rise of American Democracy” begins with the aftermath of the American Revolution, when the very word “democracy” implied mob rule. At the time, only white men of property could vote and slavery was a peripheral issue discussed, then deferred, with the founders hoping it would die a natural death.

But over the next century, the country would change in revolutionary ways. Andrew Jackson, the son of a backcountry farmer, would become president. Enfranchisement spread to men without property. Labor unions formed, women began asserting themselves and slavery emerged as the country’s unavoidable breaking point, the direct instigator of the Civil War.

Presidents from Jackson to Abraham Lincoln are part of the story, but the real actors, Wilentz writes, are names far less known: Frances Wright, a British radical who advocated abolition and free love; Denmark Vesey, a free black hanged for allegedly encouraging insurrection among South Carolina slaves; Thomas Dorr, who led a working-class rebellion in Rhode Island so powerful that state officials declared martial law.

“The most common misperception among general readers is that America was somehow born democratic, or that democracy was an inevitable byproduct of the revolution,” Wilentz says. “But once you realize it required a long, uneven struggle to expand the definition of popular government, then democracy looks a lot less simple.”

Like history itself, democracy remains an ongoing argument. Wilentz’s book ends with the Civil War, but in real life the story continues. He notes that rights have expanded radically over the past 140 years, from blacks and women getting to vote, to government programs that offer economic and legal support.

He also points out the setbacks, like the Southern backlash against Reconstruction that led to a long era of legal segregation. As a liberal, he worries now about increased economic inequality and increased presidential power, citing President Bush’s authorization of warrantless government wiretaps.

“So long as the executive is eager to accumulate more power, and the Congress is willing, for the most part, to go along, checks and balances break down,” Wilentz says.

“But the Constitution had proven remarkably resilient over the past 220 years. There isn’t much that’s gone wrong with the country’s institutions that a good election can’t cure. Or a few good elections. So I have a kind of willful optimism.”

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