I like Mark Summers' work. He has a way with words that other historians need to emulate more. When was the last time you've read (about a suspected overthrow of the U.S. government during Reconstruction): "When putsch came to shove . . . " The only major criticism that I have is that Summers doesn't spend enough time in the 1870s. He gets stuck on the 1865-1868 period, when, from my reading, the 1870-1876 period was just as full of conspiratorial rhetoric.



All in all, it's a good book, mostly easy to read, with great explication of America's paranoid style in the Reconstruction era.