Summary
The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America.At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences - ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political - divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change - technological, cultural, and political - proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country.In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.
Author Notes
Richard White is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, and "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Mellon Distinguished Scholar Award, among other awards.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This splendid history from White (Railroaded), professor of American history at Stanford, reveals why the 30 years after the Civil War do not readily draw historians to them. These decades are marked by racial violence, bitter labor strikes, political corruption, and abject poverty, and were filled with loutish, mean-spirited men. Measured by intellectual achievement and reformist zeal, the period was also comparatively drab and unproductive. Yet White manages to imbue these ignoble years with the importance that they're due. His account's central focus is public affairs and he foregrounds the West and its native tribes, farmers, workers, and cities; his astute examination of the "Greater Reconstruction of the West" works as a counterpoint to the failures of Southern Reconstruction after 1865. But White covers the whole country, opening with Lincoln and closing with William McKinley's 1896 election as president. He offers a brilliant chapter on the meaning of home, and though the book generally pays greater attention to the on-the-ground facts of the era than on its intellectual or cultural shifts, that's a small matter measured against the book's strengths. White's great achievement is to capture the drabbest, least-redeeming three decades of American history with unimpeachable authority. Illus. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After the Civil War, war-weary Americans were ready to move on. They had banished slavery and longed for peace, but instead they got chaos and change. Consolidation and industrialization upended the work world. The South fought to rob blacks of their hard-won freedoms. Land-hungry citizens moved west, stripping Native Americans of their homelands and herding them into reservations. Stanford historian White (Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 2011) tells this tumultuous story with authority, an eye for detail, and a dash of moral outrage. A noted historian of the West, he covers monetary policy, land use, social history, literature, and biography as he examines America from 1865 to 1896. His theme is home, the place Americans longed for, headed by a man and run by a woman, a refuge for children and center of all that was good. Perceived threats to this vision spawned waves of counter-reaction the murder of blacks in the Reconstruction South, the temperance movement, fear of immigrants, and mistrust of labor unions as industrialization and mechanization leached independence from workers and consolidated power in the hands of business titans. By the end of the era, these forces had created a more complicated world. Contemporary readers will find that this era casts a long shadow over the present.--Gwinn, Mary Ann Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us, by Richard 0. Prum. (Doubleday, $30.) A mild-mannered ornithologist makes an impassioned case for the importance of Darwin's second theory as his most radical and feminist. COMING TO MY SENSES: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters with Cristina Mueller and Bob Carrau. (Clarkson Potter, $27.) The founder of Chez Panisse describes her early days, explaining how a visit to France awakened her interest in excellent food and how she came to embrace the use of organic ingredients. FASTING AND FEASTING: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray, by Adam Federman. (Chelsea Green, $25.) Federman's biography is the first of a cult food writer who became famous with the 1986 publication of her influential book "Honey From a Weed." SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $26.) In her follow-up to the National Book Award-winning novel "Salvage the Bones," Ward tells the story of a Mississippi woman intent on making her fractured family whole again. THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1898, by Richard White. (Oxford, $35.) This sweeping history of the decades after the Civil War decries the spoliations White sees everywhere among Robber Barons and corrupt politicians. THE INTERNATIONALISTS: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The two authors argue for the historic importance of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement usually dismissed by historians as ineffectual and quixotic. In their revisionist view, the pact "reshaped the world map" and "catalyzed the human rights revolution." RESET: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen K. Pao. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) Combining memoir, self-help, tell-all and manifesto, Pao recalls the disillusionment that led her to sue a venture capital firm for gender discrimination. She lost, but showed the hurdles women still face in many fields. THE MISFORTUNE OF MARION PALM, by Emily Culliton. (Knopf, $25.95.) In Culliton's delightful and sneakily feminist debut novel, a Brooklyn mother is on the lam after embezzling thousands of dollars from her daughters' private school. BONES: Brothers, Horses, Cartels, and the Borderland Dream, by Joe Tone. (One World, $28.) A reporter brilliantly recounts the tale of a Texas bricklayer who laundered drug money for his brother, a cartel boss in Mexico, via the horse-racing industry. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
The conclusion of the Civil War through the 1890s marked the transformation of the US from a rural and agrarian society of free laborers to a modern, urban, industrial nation where wages and possessions replaced liberty and individualism. White's rich, sweeping history chronicles the divide between the Radical Republicans (today's Libertarians) and those who saw the need for governmental protection of individual rights. Race and economic status divided the public. While land redistribution in the West provided opportunities for white settlers, it put Native Americans in a compromised position; the lack of such distribution in the South left African Americans in a poor, disadvantaged position. Throughout the US, the home, provided by men's labor and cared for by women, remained the sacred center of the developing American Dream. Due to expansion, urbanization, and industrialization brought about by population growth fueled by immigration between 1865 and the end of the century, the religiously homogeneous white US transformed into a nation of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. White (Stanford) seamlessly incorporates political, economic, social, and legal history to show the birth of the modern US. Throughout, he includes fascinating anecdotes that captivate readers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University
Kirkus Review
A massive history of the striving, riven new nation that emerged from the Civil War, extending to the turn of the century.As an integral piece of Oxford's History of the United States series, this comprehensive volume by distinguished scholar White (American History/Stanford Univ.; Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 2012, etc.), a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, portrays the United States at a significant crossroads. Would Americans embrace the common ideals of the recently deceased president, Abraham Lincoln, which formed a moral foundation for the future, or would the nation descend into political corruption, avaricious corporations, backlash against immigrants, and increasing class conflict? White delineates how both occurred. Lincoln's Republican Party was transformed during these years of Reconstruction, splitting between the Radicals and laissez-faire liberals, essentially divided over how overbearing the federal government would beyet all were committed to larger goals of nationalism, free labor, and contract freedom. While the Radicals were pushing for vigorous federal powers in the protection of freedmen's rights, President Andrew Johnson, and the recalcitrant South, pushed back to maintain "a white man's republic." Meanwhile, the nation was exploding with the innovations of "tinkerers" and mass immigration into the country. The conquest of Native Americans was completed by their acculturation and assimilation, with the reservations governed by religious leaders who knew no more about administration than the military did. As an astute historian of the American West, White offers important scholarship on the "Greater Reconstruction"i.e., conquering the West by bold federal policies like the railway acts and land grant legislation that created new infrastructure and schools and offered free farms for those able to work the land. At the same time, reformers pushed for enormously important social changes. Wage labor, wealth inequality, and immigration created class conflict that erupted in strikes in the late 1880s, while the concept of "home" took on new significance for whites and blacks alike. A highly qualified historian offers a dense, sweeping history of a nation on the move. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Preeminent scholar White (Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford Univ.; The Middle Ground) authors the latest volume in the "History of the United States" series. He begins by examining the idyllic vision of the United States promulgated by the Radical Republicans at the onset of Reconstruction in which the civil rights of all individuals were respected. That dream was supplanted as the populace raced to seize economic opportunity in the West. Vast fortunes were made, often aided by corrupt politicians. As the nation's wealth became concentrated in the hands of the elite, the impoverished saw their opportunities decline and oppression increase. Prosperity proved fleeting for the middle class, as the nation was roiled economically by boom and bust cycles. American Indians fought desperately to cling to their homelands as interlopers abounded, supported by the might of the U.S. military. Immigrants provided essential labor for the expansion westward yet experienced extreme discrimination. In the midst of this chaos, Americans came to forge an optimistic worldview that saw the United States as a unified and diverse country that should share its values beyond its continental borders. VERDICT This seminal work is essential reading on the history of the United States.-John R. Burch, Univ. of -Tennessee at Martin © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
