Reconstruction and the American West: An Interview with Heather Cox Richardson

September/October 2007 Historically Speaking 25 Reconstruction and the American West: An Interview with Heather Cox Richardson Conducted by Randall J. Stephens HK4THER COX RICHARDSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has reconceived the Reconstruction era in West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2007). A reviewerin the Adantic Monthly heralded her interpretation of Reconstruction as "a national—rather than strictly Southern—-phenomenon that unitedthe North, South, and West, andcreatedthe creed of middle-class individualism that woulddefine the 20th century. " TheAmerican West was shapedby both Reconstruction andAmerica's newpostwareconomic vision. Rangingfrom Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, Richardson reveals the emergence of a modern America in which a new middle class helpeddefine the nation's ideals and outlook. Historically Speaking associate editor Randall Stephens spoke with Richardson about her work in August 2007. Randall Stephens: Your interest in this topic came in part from your students' questions about the Reconstruction era. How did teaching inform your writing? Heather Cox Richardson: For me, writing and teaching are parts of the same process. The give and take of the classroom enables me to test out new ideas with the hardest possible audience, skeptical undergraduates. At the same time, I find that undergraduates tend to look at issues differendy than I do, and their questions often open up whole new ways of looking at a problem I thought I knew. Many things came together to prompt me to begin the research for Westfrom Appomattox , but one critical piece was a student 's question in my Frontier and the American West class at MIT about why the cowboy has come to represent America when, as I had explained , there were cowboy types in many countries. I gave the standard answer about how the individualist cowboy was an antidote to the increasingly impersonal industrialization of the late 19th century. The student thought about it for a minute, and then, in that wonderful MIT way, said: "I'll have to think about it, but that sounds like a description, not an explanation." I decided he was right. Stephens: You profile a number of individuals who lived through the late 19th century. How did you select your subjects? Richardson: I wanted to use characters in the book to combat the general sense that this period is one dominated by large forces diat are too impersonal for a non-specialist to grapple with. Real people lived through this era and they made decisions that were sometimes disgusting and sometimes heroic and mosdy quotidian, but which ended up leading both to what we generally consider good outcomes— women's suffrage and child labor laws, for example —and to truly appalling ones, like the systematic lynching of African Americans and the war in the A lithograph commemorating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870. Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZC4 Library of -2399]. Philippines. I wanted to emphasize that events don't simply happen; people just like us make them happen . The characters I set out to work with originally were not always the ones that ended up in the book. At first, I searched for characters simply by looking into the lives of people I wanted to know more about, people like the black politician W. Beverly Nash, for example, for whom I've always had a sneaking fondness. Then I made a list—after writing to colleagues for their opinions—of which people from this era every modern-day American should know. With these leads, I began researching various characters, but quickly realized that their presence in the book had to provide threads of continuity as well as personal voices across the decades of the book. That narrowed the field of possible candidates, since they had either to live through the entire period or die a significant death. Ultimately, I ended up with characters who seemed to me to contribute articulate perspectives on the period and who, with luck, would pique readers' interest in the era. Stephens: West from Appomattox is a truly national history. Did you encounter challenges writing a book that ranges so far over space and time? Richardson: This book damn near...