The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White

Real change - technological, cultural, and political - proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. The 'dangerous' classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences - ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political - divided society. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. Independent producers had become wage earners.

Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. 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.Īt 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 Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation.

The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White