List of Maps
Editor's Introduction
Introduction
Part I: Reconstructing the Nation
Prologue: Mourning Lincoln
Chapter One: In the Wake of War
Chapter Two: Radical Reconstruction
Chapter Three: The Greater Reconstruction
Chapter Four: Home
Chapter Five: Gilded Liberals
Chapter Six: Triumph of Wage Labor
Chapter Seven: Panic
Chapter Eight: Beginning a Second Century
Part II: The Quest for Prosperity
Chapter Nine: Years of Violence
Chapter Ten: The Party of Prosperity
Chapter Eleven: People in Motion
Chapter Twelve: Liberal Orthodoxy and Radical Opinions
Chapter Thirteen: Dying for Progress
Chapter Fourteen: The Great Upheaval
Chapter Fifteen: Reform
Chapter Sixteen: Westward the Course of Reform
Chapter Seventeen: The Center Fails to Hold
Chapter Eighteen: The Poetry of a Pound of Steel
Part III: The Crisis Arrives
Chapter Nineteen: The Other Half
Chapter Twenty: Dystopian and Utopian America
Chapter Twenty-one: The Great Depression
Chapter Twenty-two: Things Fall Apart
Chapter Twenty-three: An Era Ends
Conclusion
Bibliographic Essay
Index
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.
"Fearless and peerless, Richard White leads us through a
transformed and fragmented nation in turmoil, haunted by the slain
Abraham Lincoln, where visions of freedom and equality were rapidly
vanishing. In the rural South, in the urban North, and out West,
from the terribly destitute to the stupendously wealthy, White
brings together stories that historians have long told separately,
untangling the anger and blame that grew so deeply entrenched in
the Gilded
Age. How did all this happen? Richard White explains everything."
-- Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln
"Richard White has given us a brilliantly imagined narrative of
astonishing breadth, thickly peopled with figures from familiar
political lions to Lizzie Borden, Dorothy and Toto, that brings to
vivid life one of the most challenging periods of American history.
His is a twisting, often violent and above all ironic story of a
nation finding its way from a time of both tragedy and optimism to
one of prodigious wealth and colossal energy, of deepening
divisions
of class, blood, and ideas, of new meanings of everything from
government to geographical space, and of a shaken, tempered faith
in the century ahead. This is a masterful performance." -- Elliott
West,
author of The Last Indian War
"Richard White offers a remarkable new synthesis of the decades
following the Civil War, showing the myriad ways in which a period
about which most modern Americans know too little in fact laid the
foundations for the nation we know today. This book will change the
ways we think not just about the past, but about the present as
well." -- William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago
and the Great West
"The Republic for Which It Stands illuminates every key aspect of
the industrializing, expanding nation in the final third of the
nineteenth century: racial, ecological, legal, political, economic,
and cultural. In lucid, witty, and often dramatic prose, Richard
White makes sense of them all in a way that powerfully echoes the
inequalities and environmental degradation of our own day. Yet he
also captures the mighty appeal of the developing capitalist
economy that was becoming the envy of the world. This is the best
book on the Gilded Age that has ever been written." -- Michael
Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace,
1914-1918
"This is a marvelous achievement of narrative history by a great
historian. Written with immense learning, wit, indignation,
fearless judgments, and imagination, the book will stand up for a
long time as a new vision of two eras with reputation problems.
White masterfully weaves the metaphor of the 'vanished twin'
through the book and persuasively makes 'home' a central theme
binding all Americans of every class or race: as dream, as reality,
as racial and
gendered place, and as politics. This is not your grandaddy's
Gilded Age, although corruption - lots of it - oozes from the
story. It is powerful and readable history that exudes all the
'hallmarks of
modernity' we have claimed and soberingly invokes our own grave
political moment. What 'vanished' is nothing less than the meaning
of Union victory and the world the first Republican party struggled
to achieve. White is our Mark Twain with archival authority and
footnotes." -- David W. Blight, Yale University
"The Oxford History of the United States continues to surpass
expectations with this latest contribution. For many Americans,
Reconstruction is still remembered as a period of racial anarchy,
political failure, and the humiliation of the defeated South. This
volume presents detailed knowledge of what actually happened in the
South between 1865 and 1876 and the years that followed. It is
sometimes an inspiring but more often deeply shocking story
that
reveals a nation at its best and worst, when newly freed slaves and
idealists, both black and white, struggled to preserve the rights
Union armies had won on the battlefield and that Republican members
of
Congress affirmed in the years after the Civil War." -- Frank J.
Williams, President of The Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library
and Association
"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. White seamlessly
incorporates political,
economic, social, and legal history to show the birth of the modern
US. Throughout, he includes fascinating anecdotes that captivate
readers. Highly recommended." -- Choice
"The Republic for Which It Stands is a remarkably fresh and
innovative way of looking at the Reconstruction and Gilded Age by
an academic with unmatched academic credentials. No matter how much
you have read on the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, The
Republic for Which It Stands has a lot to offer you. The Republic
for Which It Stands should be a required part of any American
history syllabus in all universities." -- The
Washington Book Review
"Stanford professor Richard White's The Republic for Which It
Stands, a sweeping history of the United States from 1865 to 1896
that just published last month. It's 941 pages but beautifully
written and a gripping narrative of a tumultuous era. (White was
one of my favorite professors at Stanford. I took two of his
classes.)" -- Washington Post
"There is almost nothing about the era that White fails to treat
with intelligence and style Richard White has related a decisive
part of its history with stamina and skill." -- The New York Times
Book Review
"White's masterful book offers a treasure trove of information
about a pivotal time in American history, crafted with a compelling
combination of well-written recreations of events and careful
analysis based on the latest historical research. The Republic for
Which It Stands is the best available guide to the period." --
BookPage
"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." -- Booklist
"The Republic for Which It Stands is a thorough examination of late
19th-century America. White tracks the building of a nation and the
growth of its industrial and economic power with an eye toward
those left behind by the changes - a welcome focus at a moment when
those being left behind by the equivalent changes of our time have
just helped spark profound political upheaval by electing President
Trump. And even when his analysis tends toward the
negative, progressive view of American history, his detail
nevertheless enlightens the reader." -- The National Review
"In this monumental yet highly readable book, Mr. White has given
us a panorama of an age that in many ways seems like our own. The
volcanic turmoil of the late 19th century did much to shape the
world that we live in today, with its creative and destructive
cycles of industry, its quickening technological change, its
extremes of wealth and poverty, its struggle to impose fairness in
the jungle of the marketplace, its tug of war between freedom and
regulation
in the public interest. 'The Republic for Which It Stands' is, in
no small part, the story of how we came to be who we are." -- The
Wall Street Journal
"(White) is one of the outstanding historians of his generation. It
is difficult to think of many others who can match the range,
depth, originality and influence of his writings, which include a
prize-winning account of the construction of the transcontinental
railroads, an environmental history of the Columbia River Valley, a
general history of the American West, and even a memoir of his
mother's life as an emigrant from Ireland." -- Times Literary
Supplement"
"In his impressive new book The Republic for Which It Stands, the
latest volume in the ongoing 'Oxford History of the United States,'
White links the Gilded Age with Reconstruction-the two 'gestated
together,' he writes-and, in so doing, casts both in a different
light while raising new questions about a nation born in the
cauldron of civil war." -- The Nation
Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American
Historians
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