Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy

Rating:
Summary: A great work
Review: Dr. Quigley launches his first work as if he were a veteran. Second Founding relays insight into the reconstruction of this country that is often overlooked and most times forgotten. However, the decisions made in the decade following the Civil War still maintain a powerful presence to this day. Quigley offers some very original insight into the events of New York City and how they ran parallel with and often shaped and formed the political events of the rest of the country. After reading this book, no one can question the reality of New York's leadership in national politics then and now. This book reads as smooth as a novel with the depth of a textbook. A must read!

Rating:
Summary: Reconstruction and the City
Review: I'd read Quigley & Gellman's JIM CROW NEW YORK and liked it. This book builds off of the last sections of that book and tells the New York side of the civil war and reconstruction. Quigley does a good job explaining the city's ugly racial history by looking at the years after the draft riots. I really liked the chapter on election day in 1870 and the way federal troops were deployed. The final section on Grant's tomb makes you think about how reconstyruction continued, or maybe continues.

Rating:
Summary: Too Narrow a Focus
Review: The problem with this book is that reading it is rather like watching a baseball game through a crack in the ballpark's fence. What you see is fairly clear, but you realize that you're missing a lot of the action that takes place outside the available field of vision. Just for one example, there are at least four pages devoted to Samuel Tilden's positions during the 1876 presidential campaign but barely a word about the campaign views of his successful opponent, Rutherford Hayes, or of the Republican party. Did the latter's stands offer a meaningful alternative regarding the issues raised by the Democrats? What impact did the results of Hayes's victory have on the "democracy that emerged at Reconstruction's end", to use a phrase from the Preface? Of the three elements of the book's subtitle, the book offers a great deal about "New York City" but little of the broader context of "Reconstruction" and "American Democracy".