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Also by Heather Cox Richardson:

Democracy Awakening, October 2023
Hardcover / e-Book
Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections, June 2020
Trade Size / e-Book
How the South Won the Civil War, April 2020
Hardcover / e-Book
To Make Men Free, October 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Eyewitness at Wounded Knee, September 2011
Trade Size
West from Appomattox, May 2008
Trade Size / e-Book

To Make Men Free
Heather Cox Richardson

A History of the Republican Party

Basic Books
October 2014
On Sale: September 23, 2014
416 pages
ISBN: 0465024319
EAN: 9780465024315
Kindle: B00L4FSSZY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History

When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation.

In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles.

Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once America's greatest political hope -- and, time and time again, has proved its greatest disappointment.

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