Union

April 6, 2020
Journalist Woodard (American Nations) chronicles the history of attempts to define America’s national identity in this ambitious and accessible narrative. Identifying two competing visions of U.S. nationhood that emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Woodard profiles U.S. Navy secretary and historian George Bancroft (1800–1891), who saw national character through the lens of a series of propositions—a belief in personal freedom, equality before the law, republican governance—and pro-slavery novelist and politician William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), who advocated Anglo-Saxon ethnic and racial chauvinism. During the Civil War, Bancroft’s vision won a grand victory, but Simms’s ethnonationalism, according to Woodard, has continued to be a persistent component of the country’s public life, embodied by the Ku Klux Klan, the social Darwinist–inspired scholarship of Frederick Jackson Turner and Woodrow Wilson, and the “expanding churches of illiberalism” galvanized by the election of Donald Trump. Woodard oversells his argument by treating pride in the nation’s constitutional legacy as historically discrete from pride in America’s cultural heritage, but he marshals a wealth of information into a fluid narrative that manages to make abstract intellectual concepts tangible. This enlightening and character-driven account will resonate with progressive history buffs.

April 15, 2020
A veteran foreign correspondent highlights the essential regional makeup of the U.S. through several historical personages who used their sectional differences to attempt to weld a national character. How did a sense of a shared nationhood coalesce through so many sectional differences? First, Woodard, a state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald, delineates the mission of New England elite George Bancroft. Educated at Harvard and abroad in Germany, he was a failed teacher who supported himself in his wife's family business before embarking on his great life's scheme to write a history of the U.S. in terms of God's plan for the unfolding of its triumphant mission of "popular sovereignty, equal justice, and a free economy." While creating his decidedly blinkered American national myth--he utterly ignored Native and African Americans--his New England bias was criticized by Southerners. One of them was Charleston, South Carolina, native William Gilmore Simms, who serves as Woodard's second model regional character. Simms was a wildly popular hack novelist of Southern fiction in which the masters were benevolent and the slaves so happy with their condition that they declined freedom. Dallying in politics, he went on to support some of the most die-hard secessionist and anti-Reconstructionist leaders. The third of the author's primary characters is Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and joined the abolitionist movement of William Lloyd Garrison, then published his enormously popular autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. Woodard manages to bring all of his disparate biographical threads together in a coherent narrative, using as his apotheosis the life of Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born writer of his own Anglo Saxon-centered History of the American People and proponent of D.W. Griffith's white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915); Wilson became president despite his racism. One glaring omission is the lack of at least one strong female presence; otherwise, the scholarship is sound. Sturdy American history.

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Starred review from June 1, 2020

The theme of Woodard's (American Nations; American Character) writing is that in order for one to understand the national history of the United States, one must account for the regional differences in the country as well as the way those regions have related to each other and the nation as a whole. Woodward picks up this theme in this latest work by tracing the lives and careers of five Americans: William Simms, George Bancroft, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Turner. Each of his subjects was an historian, and the book describes how American history came to be understood and written. Woodard explains how the promises of the United States, freedom and equality, have been reserved primarily for white men throughout most of our history. The book tells the sad story of how Northern military victory in the Civil War turned into Southern cultural victory when Reconstruction was abandoned, culminating in the election of the unabashed racist, Woodrow Wilson. Overall, Woodward effectively shows how the country struggled to create a national myth, and an international image of unity. VERDICT Woodard is a gifted historiographer, and this excellent work will be appreciated by anyone interested in American history and how it came to be written.--Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, FL

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2020
Many think the U.S. is more divided now than ever before, but the political and social divide has been part of American history since before the Revolutionary War. The 13 original colonies were each forged with different cultures, values, and economies, making the task of unifying them under a single national identity problematic, at best. Woodard (American Character, 2016) examines the history of the daunting task of knitting a nation together. He shows the complexity of the process by delving into the background of a number of the people involved, revealing how different and often incompatible their viewpoints were. In sometimes abundant detail, he lays out the compromises made while crafting the original Constitution and how the issues unresolved by that document (such as slavery and the separation of church and state) continued to fester over the years, making Civil War essentially inevitable. Sadly, many of those incompatibilities continue to bedevil the country after almost 250 years. Union is detailed and unflashy, and it contains many valuable historical lessons modern readers will find useful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)