The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

This was, hands down, one of the worst books I've ever read. I can't believe it made the Oxford History of the United States series. Richard White uses this book to soapbox his personal, subjective feelings and beliefs on the post-Civil War United States. The author uses this book as a vehicle to attack anything Christian and white male. This is how he does it: He makes what he claims is a factual, historic statement (generally involving white oppression or violence), then backs it up with a little-known vignette typically involving an obscure character or situation. These statements were almost always about how whites and Christians were oppressing blacks, Native Americans, women, etc. I won't say that the vignettes were false, but rather that they usually were anomalies that represented the exception rather than the rule. He also makes assertions with no basis in fact. For example, White contends that the US Army was inept and incompetent at fighting the Indians. As an Army officer and student of military history, I can say without reservation that this statement was unequivocally wrong.After reading McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" and Howe's "What Hath God Wrought", I was extremely disappointed with this book. This book is nothing more than a collection of Richard White's anti-Christian and anti-white male rants. This is not a history book. Oxford should be ashamed to include this in their History of the United States series. There is nothing redeeming about this book.

Not up to par with the other excellent books in the Oxford History of the US series and, frankly, so bad that I’ve returned it to Amazon after laboring through 200 pages. The book is all over the place. The lenses through which the author wishes to explain periods, his themes, are awkward. There’s no structure to the book, chronological or otherwise. It bounces through relatively unimportant themes without delving into the more well known important ones. In 200 hundred pages of reading and already up to a discussion of Grant, there was little discussion of what went on with Johnson that was meaningful and chapters four on his odd concept of "home" and chapter five on "gilded liberals" were a waste of 80 pages and a couple hours. It’s astonishing how bad this book is given that the others in this series are all award winners. I’ve only quit reading three or four books in my life and I’m accustomed to dense non-fiction and can suffer through even books that have a different viewpoint than mine if I can learn from them. I have no ideological issues with the book. It’s simply a poorly written and extremely poorly edited book, structurally, grammatically and typographically. I cannot believe this is part of the Oxford History of the US series. It was almost two years overdue and I think it took 10 years to write and I suspect they were in too deep to go in a different direction, too invested with White. Do not waste your money and try Foner’s Reconstruction or maybe West From Appomattox by Richardson instead, which is what I will now do.

First the bad news: The book is excruciatingly long;. In the range of 1,000 pages. More than once I found myself checking the percentage of the pages that I had been through, wondering if there was an end to the book. But this is a saga of a lot of years--50 or so, during which many vital things were happening to the country and its people. I am sure a strong editor could have cut out some of the detail, but I don't know what, and I doubt it would have had much effect on the length of the book. Finally, the tale is filled with the names of men, women, many of whom i had never encountered before, or only cursorily done so. And of political parties, the names of which changed far more often than I was willing to follow. Which made a lot of the reading much like the average person's struggle (including mine) with a Russian novel--it's real hard to keep up with a story when names are a blur.Now the good news. First, for me, is that it is well, very well, written. Even when the story had temporarily bogged down in more detail than anyone but a dedicated historian would be interested in, it was still worth reading., as the well-turned phrase, or clever parenthetical observation, more than compensated for the time and effort of the reading. Second, although I should know American History, having received good grades on the subject in classes at grade and high school, and my undergraduate years at college, I quickly found that what little I remembered was but a thin veneer of very general knowledge. By the time I finished I felt that I had substantially better grasp of the period than ever before.And the last bit of news, probably not good. Let me start by admitting that I am what we call today a conservative, perhaps even a very mild libertarian. deeply suspicious of government "nudging" me, and even more so of its forcing me, to do something I would prefer not to do; but aware that without government regulation "free competition": can quickly become becomes a race to the bottom. So when I saw that White was a history professor at Stanford, my guard was up--you know how history professors, particularly at Stanford, are. But when I was reading, I didn't feel that he was heavily biased. Of course, every human will see past events in a different way. And on occasion I wondered whether his summations were of the historic facts, or a current view of those facts, designed to get me thinking that things had always been as a Stanford professor now sees them. I don't now feel that White is deliberately skewing the historical record. Rather, I think that his current predilections may well skew his view of the past. But that would be true of any historian, and White seemed, to me, to play well within the lines.Overall, I think this book is an outstanding first look at a fascinating era for those, such as I, who would like to be a little better informed, but have neither the time nor the inclination to review each footnote source. At the other extreme, I certainly don't have the background or the knowledge to question White's version of what was going one back then, as, apparently, do some of the other reviewers. Certainly if one expects to develop some definitive understanding of the period, further analysis would be critical. But for the objectives of one such as II vaguely curious about a most important era, I cannot imagine a better start.

It has taken me this long to read this 700+page book: you request reviews far too soon! Recently there have been several critics who have compared America's Gilded Age with the benighted state of the UK in the 2010s, and there are indeed points of similarity such as the unashamed greed of the plutocracy. This was one reason why I ordered the book. Richard White has attained deserved fame as a historian of the American West, and the book paints a vivid picture of settlers continually pressing on the frontier, mostly to the detriment of the original inhabitants of the Continent. I was rather surprised to find vital statistics displayed and discussed which convincingly illustrated that living and working conditions, health status, expectation of life etc. were generally worse in the USA, including the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, than in Europe and the UK during the same period - I thought that it was the other way around. It is a well-written book, although its title seems to me opaque, unfortunately

The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White is a very good book addressing the history of the United States between the end of the Civil War and the election of President McKinley. It is a well-written, detailed and informative work which details how the ideals and aspirations of creating a new America out of the ashes of conflict faltered.While the book does have a basic chronological structure, the narrative itself is more driven by the examination of themes and topics such as social conditions, the economy, politics, Reconstruction etc (as with other works in the wider series).Overall, a very good book.

Very detailed and interesting study, I've rated it down solely because my interest is more in political history and this book definitely veers down a social and economic path. Either way a good read for anyone wanting to understand US society in the latter part of the 19th century

Very well documented and researched, very informative.

White's book easily lives up to the very high standards set by previous volumes in the "Oxford History of the United States "; and these are high standards indeed. If you don't believe me, check out the shelf full of Pulitzers this series has earned (not to mention the Parkman Prizes and the Bancrofts). This book will remain a standard work for a very long time.