“There is no place like home,” Dorothy exclaims after a cyclone whisks her and her little dog, Toto, to the bright world of Oz. “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are,” she tells her friend the Scarecrow, “we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful.” Be it ever so gray and dreary—like Dorothy's beloved Kansas prairie in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—the idea of home is a principle, a rallying cry, an ideal; and it's one of the adroit symbols organizing Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands, a sweeping new history of the three teeming decades known as American Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.
“Home Sweet Home”: It's the caption of the Currier and Ives print that comforted Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Home: It's also the “beating heart,” as White puts it, “of an expansive political program.” The idea of home contained all the “gendered and racialized assumptions” of the American republic in the decades after the Civil War. That is, home implied morality, family, and security. If it had a color, it was white; if it had a religion, it was Protestantism.
