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Article: The Reconstruction Presidents.(Review)
- Article from:
- Presidential Studies Quarterly
- Article date:
- March 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Center for the Study of the Presidency. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Reconstruction Presidents. By Brooks D. Simpson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. xi + 276 pp. $35.00 cloth.
Whereas the preponderance of historians' recent work on Reconstruction concentrates on grassroots struggles within the South to effect emancipation and racial equality, Brooks Simpson focuses unashamedly on the presidential administrations of Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and Hayes. The obvious justification is that "presidents, national politics, and policy matter" (p. ix), a fact that modern historians have sometimes forgotten but southern freed people knew very well. Simpson's slender monograph is an exhaustively researched, persuasively ...