Overview

From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War--a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era's political and cultural meaning for today's America. Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the Civil War, and--even more actively--in shaping Reconstruction and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. Foner makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment. He shows us that the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were retaliation for the progress made by blacks soon after the war. He refutes lingering misconceptions about Reconstruction, including the attribution of its ills to corrupt African American politicians and carpetbaggers, and connects it to the movements for civil rights and racial justice.

Full Product Details

9798200220106

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his BA and PhD. He has written a number of books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America, including Forever Free and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. His Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and remains the standard history of the period. In 2006, Eric received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. J. D. Jackson is a theater professor, aspiring stage director, and award-winning audiobook narrator. He is a classically trained actor, and his television and film credits include roles on House, ER, Law & Order, Hack, Sherrybaby, Diary of a City Priest, and Lucky Number Slevin. He is the recipient of more than a dozen Earphones Awards for narration and an Odyssey Honor for G. Neri's Ghetto Cowboy, and he was also named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of the Year for 2012 and 2013. An adjunct professor at Los Angeles Southwest College, he has an MFA in theater from Temple University.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available