I have been reading The Republic for Which It Stands, Richard White’s new synthesis of the three decades after the Civil War, and it is—as anyone could have predicted—magnificent. This period has always defied a kind of holistic, multi-regional narrative, one that adequately encompasses Reconstruction in the South, imperial conquest in the West, and industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The sheer scale and scope of the period, the arrogant vastness of its canvas, has paradoxically forced historians to use figures of consolidation and stabilization to try to get a hold of its elusive unity. It is an age of Read more