James McPherson: Writes children's history book
Something else they don’t tell you in school is that life can be a lot like a textbook. It’s a slog mostly, and it’s tough to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s the Warren G. Harding administration. Currently, the teaching of the past for people in the middle school years relies heavily on the use of terms like “Shays’ Rebellion” and “checks and balances,” terms you memorize and explain. It’s history as checklist — which is what makes James M. McPherson’s “Into the West” seem so brilliantly serene, with slow considerations of an era of American history that is as important as it is overlooked.
Reconstruction is usually a blip on the screen of young people’s history classes, a quick stop in the race from the Civil War to World War I. But in the non-semester-based world, Reconstruction is a hotbed of historical scholarship. Industrial America was in its infancy, and the West was being won, as well as lost, mined and marketed, by the railroads, the interstates of their day. Racism continued to pull the United States apart at the seams while the war-modernized Northern economy began pushing the country west — and pushing an idea of the West that still shows up in car commercials.
“As a boy I watched dozens of western movies starring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, which were filled with myths,” writes McPherson, the Pulitzer-winning author. “When I grew up and became a historian, it was surprising to learn the realities of the West, which I have tried to present to you in this book.”
The realities are about development and politics, starting with the Homestead Act, one of Lincoln’s most far-reaching legislative measures....
Read entire article at Robert Sullivan in the NYT in a review of James McPherson's From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier
Reconstruction is usually a blip on the screen of young people’s history classes, a quick stop in the race from the Civil War to World War I. But in the non-semester-based world, Reconstruction is a hotbed of historical scholarship. Industrial America was in its infancy, and the West was being won, as well as lost, mined and marketed, by the railroads, the interstates of their day. Racism continued to pull the United States apart at the seams while the war-modernized Northern economy began pushing the country west — and pushing an idea of the West that still shows up in car commercials.
“As a boy I watched dozens of western movies starring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, which were filled with myths,” writes McPherson, the Pulitzer-winning author. “When I grew up and became a historian, it was surprising to learn the realities of the West, which I have tried to present to you in this book.”
The realities are about development and politics, starting with the Homestead Act, one of Lincoln’s most far-reaching legislative measures....