UPC: 9780190053765 | Oxford History of the United States: The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age 1865-1896 (Paperback)

UPC lookup results for: 9780190053765 | Oxford History of the United States: The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age 1865-1896 (Paperback)

During Reconstruction Northerners attempted to remake the United States in their own image. They would make incarnate the new world Republicans imagined at the end of the Civil War. That new world seemed possible because the Republican Party controlled the Union in 1865 as fully as any political party would ever control the country. Reconstruction would produce a nation built around free labor with a homogenous citizenry whose rights would be guaranteed by a newly empowered federal government. Black as well as white citizens would inhabit a largely Protestant country of independent producers. They never realized that dream. The government s attempts to implement this vision confronted significant obstacles. Southern whites successfully resisted and Indians resisted with far less success. Freedpeople both grasped the opportunities that the Republican vision offered them and attempted to articulate their own version of republican America. The United States became a nation of immigrants Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant. New technologies transformed the economy as Americans significantly shifted into wage workers instead of independent producers. Capitalism produced the very rich and the very poor. The Gilded Age thrived where Reconstruction failed the template of American modernity. The era was full of paradoxes. Notoriously corrupt it also formed a seedbed of reform. It spawned racial religious and social conflicts as deep as the country had seen to date but a newly diverse nation emerged. The newest volume in the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series The Republic for Which It Stands offers a magisterial account of the Gilded Age s real legacy that lies buried beneath its capitalists of legend and its corrupt politicians. –Provided by publisher. 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.