The Republic for Which It Stands

This union of an iconoclastic historian and an icon-making series has produced a surprising, ultimately fulfilling match of author and age. In four decades of intensely creative work, Richard White helped recast Western, American Indian, environmental, and imperial history, particularly in two transformative 1991 works, 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. After subsequent forays into family history, White wielded a new muckraking writing style against myths of business efficiency and creative destruction in his 2011 Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. As White gleefully shattered myths, the venerable Oxford History of the United States series struggled to fashion meaningful myths about the post–Civil War United States. While all such volumes face obstacles, this one seemed particularly ill-fated. The preceding chronological volume, James M. McPherson's immortal Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) loomed large, as did Eric Foner's masterful Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Meanwhile, the latter nineteenth century drifted forward into a combined Gilded Age and Progressive Era or backward into long histories of reform

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