To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian

In To America, Stephen E. Ambrose, one of the country's most influential historians, reflects on his long career as an American historian and explains what an historian's job is all about. He celebrates America's spirit, which has carried us so far. He confronts its failures and struggles. As always in his much acclaimed work, Ambrose brings alive the men and women, famous and not, who have peopled our history and made the United States a model for the world. Taking a few swings at today's political correctness, as well as his own early biases, Ambrose grapples with the country's historic sins of racism, its neglect and ill treatment of Native Americans, and its tragic errors (such as the war in Vietnam, which he ardently opposed on campus, where he was a professor). He reflects on some of the country's early founders who were progressive thinkers while living a contradiction as slaveholders, great men such as Washington and Jefferson. He contemplates the genius of Andrew Jackson's defeat of a vastly superior British force with a ragtag army in the War of 1812. He describes the grueling journey that Lewis and Clark made to open up the country, and the building of the railroad that joined it and produced great riches for a few barons. Ambrose explains the misunderstood presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, records the country's assumption of world power under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, and extols its heroic victory of World War II. He writes about women's rights and civil rights and immigration, founding museums, and nation-building. He contrasts the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout, Ambrose celebrates the unflappable American spirit. To America is an instant classic for all those interested in history, patriotism, and the love of writing.

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Title of ebook: To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian
ISBN: 9780743249423
parent-ISBN: 9780743202756
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 11-2002
Released online for download: 11-11-2002
Author of eBook: Ambrose, Stephen E.

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To America

Personal Reflections of an Historian

Chapter Five

Grant and Reconstruction

Ulysses S. Grant was the most popular American of the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. According to historian Geoffrey Perret he was even more popular than Abraham Lincoln. As no one held a plebiscite during the century, it cannot be proved. And what about Jefferson? Jackson? Or, my wife insists, Mark Twain?

To the people of the nineteenth century, Grant was the only Union general who beat Robert E. Lee, so he was the Man Who Won the War. But after being at or near the top to his contemporaries, Grant in the twentieth century fell precipitously. He became "Butcher Grant." To the nineteenth-century mind, he was the President who tried to bring about reconciliation with the South, but by the twentieth century his presidency was so disgraced by scandal that Americans ranked him at the absolute bottom of all the Presidents, behind even Andrew Johnson.

The cause of such extraordinary shifts in opinion was certainly not anything Grant did, or did not do. His record is his r ... read full excerpt from: To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian ebook

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