The 1828 presidential election, which was contested by Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, has long been viewed as a watershed moment in American political history. For historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Jackson's victory symbolized the ascendancy of Jacksonian frontier values over the privileged eastern urban elitism that Adams embodied. Arthur Schlesinger modified Turner's view, seeing Jackson as a symbol of working-class Americans in their struggle against the business community. Although the Turner-Schlesinger triumphalist viewpoint has come under attack by any number of historians and political scientists, the pivotal nature of the election of 1828 has never been challenged. In this new volume in the Pivotal Moments in American History series, Lynn Parsons will show that Jackson's victory was indeed critical and defining in a number of ways. It foreshadowed the ethnic alliances and regional loyalties that would be established for at least the next quarter of a century and signaled the emergence of two reasonably defined political ideologies that would dominate the national landscape at least until the eve of the Civil War. It also marked the emergence of mass political parties and was another milepost in the decline of deferential politics in America. From then on, an elite educational or social background, fluency in other languages, and possession of an introspective rather than an activist mindset would be qualities held in suspicion by the electorate. Yet as Parsons shows, the outcome of the election was hardly foreordained, and the book traces the course of the election, revealing how at certain moments it could easily have gone another way.