Tom's Reviews > West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War

West from Appomattox preceded Dr. Richardson's How the South Won the Civil War, but it certainly informs her principal scholarship. Dr. Richardson reviews the country from 1865 to 1901, and details how the slavery history of the South spread to the West and developed into the American Exceptionalism and individualism that masks or hides our racism past.
For me, the non-historian interested in where we came from, and where we headed, her views are enlightening. Here she talks about what's in the soup:

"Paradoxically, American individualists came to depend on government support while denying it to others. This process was not as simple as today’s politicians would have us think, with small-government Republicans fighting against big-government Democrats who wanted to create a welfare state.
"In fact, in the mid-1800s, it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who stood for big government and Democrats who insisted on government limitations. Instead, the process was a complicated story in which sectional animosities, racial tensions, industrialization, women’s activism, and westward expansion cut across party lines to create both a new definition of what it meant to be an American and a new vision of the government’s role in the lives of its citizens."

Will an understanding of the past help us in our quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all members of our Republic? Time will tell, and some of us might run out of time.