The age was cynical, but White’s book, allowing for a lapse or two, is not. It is also laced with an irony that sometimes focuses and sometimes plays lightly off White’s outrage at the spoliation he finds almost everywhere he looks. Like that book, this one, the latest installment in the multivolume Oxford History of the United States, is handsomely written and dense in detail. White, who teaches at Stanford, is one of the nation’s most gifted historians, the author of several important studies of the American West, including a scathing exposé of the giant post-Civil War transcontinental railroads. “The Republic for Which It Stands: During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896,” is a capacious and forceful book with a dull title.
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