Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896

Abstract

The sprawling volumes in the long-running Oxford History of the United States series are intended to serve as comprehensive surveys for a general audience, a task at which Richard White's nearly thousand-page chronicle of the postbellum decades admirably succeeds. But the main interest of such syntheses for historians lies in their reconsideration of the master narratives that organize divergent developments at multiple levels into a cohesive account of American society as a whole in a pivotal period, constructing a framework for past scholarship and a platform for future work. The author's previous field-shaping studies of Native American history, Western history, environmental history, and business history make him well-suited to offer an overarching understanding of an era of climactic upheavals in all of these realms: the age of the last Indian wars and the extensive development of the Great Plains, the slaughter of the buffalo and the industrialization of agriculture, unprecedented class warfare, and the ascendance of big business, along with the meteoric career of Reconstruction and the violent restoration of white supremacy in the New South.