This book steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually conprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic.

The North American transcontinental railway companies of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the US economy. Their dependence on public largesse drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, remaking the landscape of the American West. They opened new worlds of work and ways of life. Their discriminatory rates sparked opposition and a new anti-monopoly politics. With originality, range and authority, Richard White shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America and presents a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America.
At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive.
These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country.
In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.

"It's your misfortune and none of my own," the line from a song, sets the tone for this sweeping account of the West from the early European incursions to the present. White, a leader in the "new history of the West" movement, builds upon Patricia N. Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest ( LJ 9/1/87) to provide a far-reaching explanation of the creation of a region rather than just the vanishing of the frontier. Drawing upon ethnic, environmental, urban, labor, and women's history as well as traditional sources, White gives fresh perspective to the West. His book is well written and contains useful graphics, though a major disappointment is the lack of footnotes. Nonetheless, this is a significant contribution to the understanding not only of how the West was won but also of how much of it was lost. This will appeal to history buffs and scholars and is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-Daniel Liestman, Seattle Pacific Univ.