Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, Howe’s 900-page book traced westward expansion under Manifest Destiny, the rise of Andrew Jackson and modern political parties, and the deepening national debate over slavery. Against the prevailing scholarly view that industrialization uprooted traditional communities, Howe argued that the era’s technological advances served as a force for democracy and moral progress.

Daniel Walker Howe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose “What Hath God Wrought” became a landmark account of American life from the end of the War of 1812 to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, died on Dec. 25 at age 88, according to a spokesman for the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a professor emeritus. Additional details were not immediately available.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, Howe’s 900-page book covered 1815 to 1848. It traced the steady westward expansion of the young country under the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the rise of Andrew Jackson and modern political parties, the overturning of the elite order that had controlled the presidency since George Washington, and the deepening debate over slavery that would lead to armed conflict.

The book was part of Oxford University Press’ ambitious and decades-long series on American history, which also produced Pulitzer-winning works including David M. Kennedy’s “Freedom from Fear,” on the Great Depression and World War II, and James M. McPherson’s Civil War epic “The Battle Cry of Freedom.”

Technology and moral progress

The book’s title was taken from the biblical phrase used for the first telegraph message, sent in 1844. Howe found that innovation served less as a destroyer of old ties than as a force for democracy — an argument he arrived at in direct contrast with the work of his own mentor.

Howe had studied under Charles Sellers at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, but formed a different view of the country’s past. Sellers’ “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846” contended that advances in technology uprooted rural communities and livelihoods and portrayed Jackson as an opposing force who stood, in vain, for working people against the industrial powers. Oxford editor C. Vann Woodward, the prize-winning Southern historian, had asked Sellers to contribute to the American history series but turned down the resulting book because he found it too negative; Oxford released it as a separate volume in 1991.

Howe dedicated “What Hath God Wrought” to John Quincy Adams — Jackson’s bitter rival in presidential elections and his opposite in personal background.

“Before I wrote this book I had never really grasped how often improvements in material terms fostered improvements in moral terms,” Howe told the National Review in 2007. “The people who encouraged economic diversification and development in many cases also supported more humane laws, wider access to education, a halt to the expansion of slavery, even, sometimes, greater equality for women.”

Historian Jill Lepore, reviewing the book for The New Yorker in 2007, called it “a heroic attempt at synthesizing a century and a half of historical writing.”

A career across three universities

Born in Ogden, Utah, and raised in Denver, Howe said he developed a love of history at age 6, when his father told him about “Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to fight the Romans,” as he recalled to The Harvard Crimson in 2009. He majored in history and literature at Harvard University and received his doctorate in history from Berkeley in 1966.

He began his teaching career at Yale University in 1966, then taught at UCLA from 1973 to 1993 and at Oxford University from 1993 to 2002.

His other books included “The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy 1805-1861,” “The Political Culture of the American Whigs,” and “Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.”

Howe married Sandra Fay Shumway in 1961. He is survived by three children: Christopher, Rebecca, and Stephen.

“Later still, perhaps that greatness might be seen in the extent to which the dreams of the 1848 feminists and abolitionists have at length been realized,” Howe wrote in “What Hath God Wrought.” “History works on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive directions but imperfectly.”