Scan barcode
A review by jordanjones
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner
5.0
This is by far the best and most influential book on a critical period that has been politically interpreted and reinterpreted several times. Foner has the goods. He's done the research and shows how reconstruction showed that a multi-racial America was possible. He also shows how white supremacy not only reasserted itself with black laws and Jim Crow, but how it attempted to re-write the history of reconstruction as a period of utter failure, and a proof of racist theories.
This should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the attempt to get to racial justice in America. It should also be read by anyone who hears, "Slavery wasn't the cause of the Civil War, states' rights was," or some other counter-factual nonsense trying to justify the South's position in the Civil War and mollify people now (150 years later), who still can't come to grips with what America was up to from its inception until the Emancipation Proclamation and from that proclamation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
This should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the attempt to get to racial justice in America. It should also be read by anyone who hears, "Slavery wasn't the cause of the Civil War, states' rights was," or some other counter-factual nonsense trying to justify the South's position in the Civil War and mollify people now (150 years later), who still can't come to grips with what America was up to from its inception until the Emancipation Proclamation and from that proclamation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.