So early in the pandemic I was looking for something to give some structure to my days, and something to talk to my parents about other than pandemic stress, and I missed our Civil War reading group, so I called my dad and asked if he wanted to start a series of buddy reads, starting with Reconstruction as a topic.

I chose this book from a list of books on Reconstruction, and while I agree that it was about the U.S. in the period after the Civil War, and the way the concept of the U.S. was changing during that time, I was a little disappointed with how little time was spent on capital R Reconstruction of the South. The book did give a lot of interesting context to what else was going on in America at they time -- what shaped the forces that perhaps caused Reconstruction to go the way that it did -- however I did feel that the subtitle (The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War) gives a misleading impression. I wouldn't recommend this as the first book you read on Reconstruction, but I would certainly recommend it as the second or the third.

There is a lot of context to give. I think I appreciated most the information on the settling of the West post-Civil War, on Deadwood and Black cowboys and the beginning of the National Park system. As always, with any good history book, this left me with a list of topics I want to learn more about -- the towns settled, owned, and governed by Black people after the war, the ways the once united abolition and women's suffrage movements were split apart, the history of Chinese immigration and exclusion in the west.

An ambitious and valuable work. ( )

The author describes the political developments of Victorian America developing the thesis that the political concepts and conflicts of today were formed then. On the one hand were the individualists personified by the cowboy, on the other "special interests" who insist that the playing field is not even. Gathering government support by associating individualist middle America with a need, has allowed that segment of the population to gather more government support than the special interests who are viewed as getting too much. ( )