The Last Great Battle of the West”

This book was not reviewed by the AHR upon its original publication and its review now is part of the journal’s reckoning with racist aspects of its work and influence. In the aftermath of the unprecedented mass mobilization for racial justice in the summer of 2020, an emerging national dialogue moved corporations, media outlets, nonprofit organizations, and public institutions to consider their responsibility in perpetuating inequality. The AHA was no exception, announcing in early 2021 its intention to “reckon with the Association’s role in the dissemination and legitimation of racist historical scholarship that has had a deep and lasting influence on public culture.”2 The damage caused by the AHA—and the discipline writ large—in advancing racist ideas and practices is perhaps most evident in the historiography of Reconstruction, which promoted segregation, violence, and racial exploitation across generations. From the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 to the dawn of the “Second Reconstruction” in the 1960s, historians supported the political and popular consensus view of the decade after the Civil War as the low point in US history, when ignorant freedpeople and their Republican allies in Congress championed a misguided, wasteful, and corrupt federal intervention in the southern states. “The freedmen were not, and in the nature of the case could not for generations be, on the same social, moral, and intellectual plane with the whites,” leading historian William Archibald Dunning wrote in 1907, “and this fact was recognized by constituting them a separate class in the civil order.”3 The implications were clear: Black people were unfit to participate in American democracy. The disenfranchisement, entrenched poverty, and unchecked white supremacist terrorism that came with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 had restored the natural order of things.

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