American Heritage History of the Confident Years: 1866-1914

Somewhat informative but disappointing read

Not being very familiar with post-war America and the Gilded Age, I was looking forward to reading a general history encompassing the political, social, and economic aspects of that era. This book was not it.

To be fair, the author absolutely knows his subject matter. However, he also writes with an assumption that the reader, too, knows quite a bit of this timeframe (which I, and I’m sure many others, do not). He will drop names of individuals or events with no real explanation as to who or what they are, believing the reader already knows them, or can inference them from the rest of his writings (which sometimes one can, oft times one cannot). As for the overall subject matter, this book is almost exclusively a political history of the era, focusing on the leaders of the major political parties of the time, followed somewhat by economics. It is not a social history. Anyone looking to read about the post-war struggles of former slaves, Jim Crow laws, Native American conflicts, women’s suffrage, child-labor, or just what life was generally like in the late 19th century for average Americans will not find it here.

Another aspect I found maddening (and this may have been due to the e-version of the book) is that there are absolutely no footnotes or bibliography. The author makes liberal use of quotations with no citations, and conclusions from sources that are not referenced. Furthermore, the author is not shy about throwing in his personal opinions, many of which are borderline judgmental, about people or events with little explanation as to why he’s making his conclusions or just what his opinions are based on. Examples: he calls Grover Cleveland’s wife “the most gracious and accomplished hostess since Dolley Madison.” By whose standards…the author’s? Late 19th century high society’s? In Chapter 6, he labels Cleveland “the very embodiment of decency in government,” then spends the next paragraph extolling his physical and moral attributes. But the author doesn’t make it clear if these are his own opinions or that of Cleveland’s contemporaries, and he makes no explanation as to the reasons why these opinions developed, regardless of whose they were. He describes various people as “unreasoning”, “slow-witted”, “biased”, etc with the same lack of information as to where these descriptions are coming from. And finally, what I found particularly irritating was the author’s near-obsession with making disparaging comments about persons’ physical attributes, mostly those that were overweight. His descriptions of people being “rotund”, “corpulent”, “ponderous”, “300-lb”, “elephantine”, are liberally thrown about the book which added nothing to the narrative and had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter the author was writing about when he made those remarks. They simply come across as petty.

The above criticisms aside, for what this book is, it is an adequate introduction to the political history of the era. But for those looking for a more in-depth and overall history of America in the late 19th/early 20th centuries free of unnecessary and unsubstantiated comments by the author, it’d be best to look elsewhere.