Quodlibet: Containing Some Annals Thereof ...

Quodlibet is a wickedly funny satirical novel from the age of Jackson, told by Solomon Secondthoughts, a schoolmaster looking back over two decades of his town's transformation. The borough of Quodlibet "contains some annals thereof" - meaning the whole chaotic mishmash of American democratic life in the 1830s. When the Patriotic Copperplate Bank arrives (a satirical jab at the Second Bank of the United States and Jackson's Bank War), the town erupts. Judge Flam and Nicodemus Handy champion the institution; Grant the tanner resists it as an affront to old Democratic virtues. But what really animates Kennedy's portrait is the broader absurdity: how political parties mutate, how memory fades, how every generation believes it invented democracy. The humor is sharp, the observations about American self-congratulation are ruthless, and the whole thing reads like a 19th-century校正 of every breathless claim about "the will of the people." For readers who love satirical literature or early American politics played as comedy.