Reconstruction

If most Americans are like me, Reconstruction is vaguely remembered from high school history classes as a time when corrupt and incompetent Carpetbaggers and Scalawags reigned while the South struggled to recover from the devastation of the Civil War. Historians have rescued Reconstruction from this neglect and misunderstanding, revealing it as a second American revolution – but one that failed. It was a time of stunning progress in the rights of Black Americans, a reconceptualization of the role of government in society, and staggering violence to preserve white supremacy. Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Eric Foner’s book is the Bible for this… show more.

This is a riveting account of the achievements of Reconstruction, driven by newly freed people ambitious for a more egalitarian society, and the violent counterrevolution that extinguished it. Foner’s meticulous documentation of this national tragedy upends the myth that I and millions of other students learned: that Reconstruction resulted in corruption and misgovernment in the South, and the old, white-planter order had to be re-imposed. Reconstruction is a model of rethinking and replacing a longstanding, self-serving justification for the resolution of a pivotal national crisis with an evidence-based explanation.