RaveThe NationThroughout American history, [Richardson] contends, the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation’s future, and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out—how, in other words, we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump ... Richardson shows how the rise of movement conservatism, as personified by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign, came to embody this vision of an oligarchic America. The new oligarchy’s triumph—one that combined economic domination with racial inequality—lay in a political alliance between the South and the West, Richardson argues, and in the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and finally Trump. Her interpretive scheme is simple yet also compelling and clear. The title of the book, of course, is not meant literally, but Richardson does show that while the South lost the Civil War, it eventually, in many respects, won the peace ... According to Richardson, the unending struggle between American democracy and oligarchy began with the birth of the nation ... By offering an account of the forces of both democratic progress and oligarchic reaction, Richardson provides historical detail to Corey Robin’s argument in The Reactionary Mind , which traced the antidemocratic origins of American conservatism while offering insight into the democratic forces that resisted it.
David W. Blight
RaveTimes Literary Supplement\"Blight... has written a deeply sympathetic biography of this extraordinary African American leader that brings to life his magnificent oratory ... Blight does not shy away from the more unsavoury details of Douglass’s private life ... The abolition movement does not get its due in Blight’s book, but that perhaps is the nature of biography ... Gaining access to recently discovered sources in the private collection of Walter and Linda Evans, to whom the book is dedicated, Blight is the first Douglass biographer to do justice to his long and eventful life. Writing about Douglass in the context of some of the most significant upheavals in nineteenth- century American history is a daunting task. David Blight is not only equal to that task, but has accomplished it with unmatched skill.\
Fred Kaplan
PanThe Washington Post[Kaplan] deploys the views of abolitionists and Adams selectively, mainly to highlight Lincoln’s shortcomings and his allegedly unchanging conservatism on slavery and race ... Kaplan with typical overstatement concludes that Lincoln saw slavery and abolition as equally evil ... Kaplan’s understanding of the interracial abolitionist movement is outdated, quaint and erroneous, which undermines his attempt to set it up as a foil to Lincoln.
