Can anyone recommend a good book on reconstruction?

[cynatnite]

I watched a documentary on the period not long ago. Now, I want to learn more. :)

[leveymg]

1. The classic is Eric Foner's

RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, 1863-1877

Here's a good intro:

http://www.kevincmurphy.com/foner.html
Eric Foner


Beloved by undergraduates and reviled by right-wing ideologues, Columbia University's Eric Foner is arguably the world's foremost authority on the tumultuous period of American Reconstruction (1865-1877). Taking a page from W.E.B. Du Bois's often overlooked 1935 work Black Reconstruction, Foner's work definitively overthrew the racist apologia and Redeemer discontent of the Dunning School, which had argued for decades that Reconstruction was a cataclysmic morass of misgovernment, corruption, and ineptitude visited upon the defeated South by a vengeful cabal of Northern politicians. Instead, Foner placed newly freed Africans-Americans at the center of the post-Civil War story and, in so doing, illustrated the brief moments of political and social possibility available for Southern blacks before the racial and economic discrimination of Jim Crow was enthroned throughout the "New South."

Contrary to the radical anti-American bogeyman conjured up by David Horowitz and other such fringe-right freak shows, Foner's writing is animated by a deep and abiding passion for America's promise, a passion made all the more potent because it is tempered by an honest and critical appraisal of the times our nation has fallen short of our founding ideals. Those who criticize his work as being "unAmerican" haven't been reading his books very closely (Moreover, people who "hate" America as much as the straw men academics of right-wing nightmares generally don't spend their lives studying American history with as much care and attention to detail as has Foner.) In a sense, Foner's approach to the past and to the discipline of history share some similarities with the "prophetic pragmatic" project of Cornel West: "To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it."

In sum, whether it be scrutinizing the revolutionary milieu of Tom Paine in Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, describing the harrowing economic plight of freedmen and freedwomen in Reconstruction, or surveying the history of America's most cherished concept in The Story of American Freedom, Foner has illuminated the contours of our shared past with honesty and integrity.

Full Disclosure: I have taken a number of courses with Eric Foner during my graduate work at Columbia, and have found him to be very friendly, personable, humble, and humane - everything one could ask for in both a professor and a public historian. And he's even a Lord of the Rings fan, which goes far in my book.

[cynatnite]

2. That sounds great!

It's now on order!

Thanks!

[pretzel4gore]

3. it's a wonderful story!

the goddam wankers were on the run for awhile folowing appomattox - and there were guys like ben butler and govenor ames who established black voting rights and so on...i can't recall the book i read but what came through was the improvement which also accrued to the white working people when blacks had actual political power (which they were not to gain again until the 1980!)
racism was worse then many people today realize (though the recontruction era showed such promise) ...i wonder how much in actual treasure racism has cost the usa?
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/sundowntowns.php

[RoyGBiv]

4. I'd also suggest ...

Foner is indeed the standard ... He's a bit dry in my opinion, but that's just my opinion.

I will also suggest _Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory_ by David Blight. This is a different angle on Reconstruction, but deals with the same era. As the title suggests, it deals with the process of reunion and shows how a "memory" of the war was created throughout this period that became usefull in politics, utlimately leading to the end of Reconstruction without needed, significant reforms and then house this moved us into the 20th century.

For a view of Reconstruction from the freedman's point of view, start with _Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery_ by Leon Litwack.

And, if you want to get a good, exhaustive review of one of America's first terrorist organizations, the initial form of which developed during this era, and how it related to the process of Reconstruction, read _White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction_ by Allen Trelease.

[YankeyMCC]

5. Second recomendation for "Race and Reunion"

[RoyGBiv]

7. Thanks ...

Glad to know someone else around these parts has read it.

Did you catch the genius on the thread about historians, Blight among them, criticizing the decision of ABC to show the P2911 thing say that, "as a history PhD" s/he did not know "a lot of people who realy like there work" <sic> and that they (Nicholas Salvatore, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., et al) were not "well respected"?

I was almost shocked speechless at such an absurd suggestion.

[Sequoia]

6. In the NYT Sunday Book Review

REDEMPTION
The Last Battle of the Civil War.

Ten years after Appomattox, Northern support for the newly enfranchised ex-slaves and their white allies had faded. Recalcitrant Southern whites, whose Ku Klux Klan night-riding had been aggressively repressed by the federal government in the early 1870’s, regrouped under the political aegis of the Democratic Party. By mid-decade, most of the Reconstruction state governments had fallen at the ballot box to the forces of white supremacy, the self-proclaimed “redeemers.”

Mississippi, with a large black voting majority, resisted longer than other states, but redemption finally came there too, in 1875, sealed by a new frenzy of paramilitary carnage and intimidation. Two years later, after a disputed national election, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes finally won the White House by agreeing to remove from the South the last of the federal troops who had upheld Reconstruction at the points of their bayonets. The troubled effort to build a Southern interracial democracy out of the ashes of the Civil War was over.

The story of Reconstruction’s demise in Mississippi is familiar to historians, and Nicholas Lemann, in “Redemption,” retells it in all its terrible gore. His account squares with recent scholarship, which has challenged both the traditional “Birth of a Nation” view (of Reconstruction as a tragic era of black plunder and white degradation) and the skeptical scholarship of the 1960’s and after that questioned the reformers’ commitment. Lemann, the dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia and the author of “The Promised Land,” among other books, affirms Reconstruction as a noble, thwarted experiment, the nation’s “unfinished revolution,” in the words of the era’s current leading historian, Eric Foner. This book strives to burn that academic re-evaluation into the minds of nonacademic readers.

<snip>



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/books/review/Wilentz.t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin

I might have to read it myself.

[reichstag911]

8. You have to go with Foner;...

...he is widely considered the expert on the period, and he's extremely prolific (see http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/103-0801854-9690256?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=eric+foner ). (And contrary to what I've seen in some places on the web, he is not the uncle of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal {see avatar at left}; he was, in fact, the first husband of their mother.)