![]() ![]() What that home actually was, White tells us, developed during the Civil War and in the West. ![]() But in White’s fresh retelling, these periods share something in common: both Reconstruction-era policies and Gilded Age reform initiatives centered on defending and protecting the American home. These two eras have traditionally been strange bedfellows, with Reconstruction treated as the fraught postbellum effort by the North and South to put the union back together again, while the Gilded Age, usually deemed the “fly-over country of American history,” has been a different animal altogether, one of corrupt plutocrats, weak political leaders, and a new industrial age (874). ![]() This is the provocative point of departure for eminent historian Richard White’s sweeping new synthesis of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. ![]()
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