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Book Review
| Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy. By David Quigley. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xvi, 238 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8090-8514-3.)
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| Historians such as James C. Mohr have long encouraged scholars to explore the politics, society, and culture of northern locales during Reconstruction. Still, the field has not become crowded. There is room for new approaches, new definitions, surprising nuances that we might add to older perceptions of political alliances; and there is room in the larger drama of the Reconstruction era for fresh data on the African American experience. Now, David Quigley, who has previously coedited, with David N. Gellman, a book of historical sources entitled Jim Crow New York (2003), publishes his first book. It is both concise and ambitious. |
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Not everything in Quigley's book is new. His work follows that of Phyllis F. Field, William Gillette, George Selden Henry, Sven Beckert, Richard F. Bensel, John G. Sproat, Forrest G. Wood, Jean H. Baker, Eric Foner, Michael Vorenberg, David Blight, William Seraile, and Heather Cox Richardson. Collectively, in their studies, as in Quigley's book, we learn about the quixotic patterns of Radical Republican reluctance to follow the logical course of emancipation, namely, citizenship rights for African American men. We glean something about Tammany politics, the Samuel Tilden–led reform agenda, the rise to power of the Democratic party in New York, and the stamina of a public culture of white supremacy exhibited by New York's "best men," by many of its influential editors, by the Irish and German immigrant groups, and by the labor unions. |
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