Grand Old Party; A History of the Republicans
New York: Random House, 2003. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. xv, [3], 597, [9] pages. Frontis Illustration. Illustrations. Notes. Suggestions for Further Reading. Index. Lewis Ludlow Gould (born September 21, 1939) is an American historian and author. He is Eugene C. Barker Centennial Professor Emeritus in American History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a specialist on 20th century American political history, the history of the Republican Party, and presidential administrations since 1896. He pioneered the scholarly study of presidential spouses. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1966, Gould taught history at the University of Texas at Austin until his retirement in 1998. Gould has written and edited numerous articles and books on politics and the American presidency. Gould in 1982 developed the nation's first course on presidential spouses. Among his books: Lady Bird Johnson: Our Environmental First Lady, Helen Taft: Our Musical First Lady and Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Creating the Modern First Lady. Presidential Studies Quarterly stated in 2011: "Gould, the preeminent political historian of the Progressive Era, contributes new, original research and a provocative reinterpretation in Four Hats in the Ring, which is based on insights from his 40 years of research into the period." The Journal of American History stated regarding the President Taft book: "The result is a balanced, fair assessment of the twenty-seventh president that will prove to be particularly valuable to those studying the early twentieth century. ....[It] will prove to be the first volume that scholars who want to learn more about Taft will consult for years to come." The Republican Party, also known as the GOP (Grand Old Party), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the then-dominant Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics ever since. The party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of slavery into the western territories of Kansas and Nebraska. It supported classical liberalism and economic reform while opposing the expansion of slavery into the free territories. The party initially had a very limited presence in the South, but was successful in the North. By 1858, it had enlisted most former Whigs and former Free Soilers to form majorities in nearly every northern state. White Southerners became alarmed at the threat to the slave trade. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, the Southern states seceded from the United States. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, the Republican Party led the fight to defeat the Confederate States in the American Civil War, preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. Afterward, the party largely dominated the national political scene until the Great Depression in the 1930s, when it lost its congressional majorities and the Democrats' New Deal programs proved popular. Dwight D. Eisenhower's election was a rare break in between Democratic presidents and he presided over a period of increased economic prosperity after World War II. His former vice president Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972 with what he touted as his silent majority. The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan realigned national politics, bringing together advocates of free-market economics, social conservatives, and Cold War foreign policy hawks under the Republican banner. Since 2009, the party has shifted towards populism. Derived from a Kirkus review: Gould writes that some early members favored an anti-immigrant, nativist stance; others, more liberal, pressed for a coherent antislavery platform. Gaining national prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the party was tested, following the Civil War, by episodes of ineptitude and corruption. If soft on big business, Gould demonstrates, Republicanism from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was eminently moderate, and dominantly urban and suburban, fielding solidly middle-of-the-road candidates such as Wendell Wilkie and Nelson Rockefeller. Enter the rise of Cold War conservatism, led by the likes of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, on whose heels came Ronald Reagan and his hard-right cohort. The subsequent realignment of the party essentially pushed out moderates. Whence the current leadership, at turns antifederalist and imperialist, isolationist and unilateralist—all characteristics of a GOP past, present, and presumably future. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Republican Party, Grand Old Party, Reconstruction, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Civil Rights, Grover Cleveland, Elections, Gilded Age, Ulysses Grant, GOP
ISBN: 0375507418
[Book #76238]
Price: $42.50