Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to Tides of History, add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

Hi Patrick. Hi, Leah.

Guess why we're here today.

Is it because we're taking a vacation from the Middle Ages and moving a little bit forward in history to something that most people only remember from history courses they took in school?

Okay, I used to own my thunder a little bit, but basically yes. That's why we're here. Who are we talking to?

So today we're talking to Professor Richard White of Stanford University and we're talking about the American Civil War Reconstruction and the Guild of the Dage.

Now I know we have a bunch of smarty pants who listen to the show, but for the peasants like me, can you give me a refresher on what's happening in America at that time?

Okay, well so this is a fascinating period of history and it's one that doesn't get talked about very much. It usually gets glossed straight over.

What we have is beginning with the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history and one that still reverberates today was followed by Reconstruction, which was the process by which the South was brought back into the United States with a whole bunch of long term implications for the treatment of African Americans for how political power functioned in the South

and for the relationship between the various parts of the country. This was really important at the same time we have Westward expansion, we have the building of the Transcontinental Railroads, we have mass immigration from Europe, we have a we have mass industrialization taking place, the kind of the full rise of industrial capitalism across the country.

It is there was a lot happening. There was a very great deal happening and all of it was happening amid the greatest political corruption the United States had ever seen or whatever see.

I know when I'm searching like the gaps in my brain from American history, there's a huge kind of black hole between the Civil War and then the turn of the century 1900s. I feel like there's clear, like I remember the stuff that happened around the 60s, maybe very getting into the 1870s.

I know what happened in the early 1900s, but there's a huge gap. Why why can't I remember anything that happened?

That's because it's not a story that Americans want to focus on over much as part of their history. This is Reconstruction was a failure. Reconstruction did not do what it was supposed to do and Reconstruction went down the way it did because of very specific series of failures within the American political system and the American party system.

This was a time of massive corruption and we tend to think of corruption as something that is not good in governance.

It was a time of effectively genocide committed against Native Americans, mass seizures of land, expropriation of serious labor unrest of declining living standards for a lot of people. This is not a happy period of time.

If you want to tell the story of America as one where things get better over time, where the Civil War was a valiant conflict fought to free the slaves and after that, things got good.

The Guilded Age Reconstruction, this is when we get the explicit imposition of Jim Crow laws. It's not like there is a steady upward swing where things get better. If that's the story of America that you're interested in telling, this period is really awkward and inconvenient for you.

I think it gets glossed over.

Why are we talking to Richard White about these things now? How does it relate to the tides that we know?

Because I think the book that he wrote on this period, the Republic for which it stands, I think is one of the best and most relevant history books I've read in a very long time.

I think the echoes of our own times in a whole bunch of different ways are too obvious to miss.

...