West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War

A sweeping story of how Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners together created modern America in the years from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt.

The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War.  Instead, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners gradually hammered out a national identity that united three regions into a country that could become a world power. Ultimately, the story of Reconstruction is about how a middle class formed in America and how its members defined what the nation would stand for, both at home and abroad, for the next century and beyond.

A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book stretches the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction. Historian Heather Cox Richardson ties the North and West into the post–Civil War story that usually focuses narrowly on the South, encompassing the significant people and events of this profoundly important era.

By weaving together the experiences of real individuals—from a plantation mistress, a Native American warrior, and a labor organizer to Andrew Carnegie, Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, and Sitting Bull—who lived during the decades following the Civil War and who left records in their own words, Richardson tells a story about the creation of modern America.

• How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
• Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
• To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party
• A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (The Penguin History of the United States)
• The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901
• Reconstruction Updated Edition: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
• Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre
• A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
• The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
• In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 (Valley of the Shadow Project)