Powerful Historiography of a developing America

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If history is a matter of recapturing lost voices, Du Bois does so splendidly in Black Reconstruction. It is somewhat of a tome: this is not summer beach reading. Instead, Du Bois systematically reveals Reconstruction as a critical period of economic and legal development in American history. Themes touched on are black rights, the fledgling American worker's movement, the rise of the corporation, and the corrupt nature of Southern AND Northern American politics vis a vis wealthy white landowners.
If you are interested in a Marxist interpretation of 19th century American history, the general history of Reconstruction itself, or the history of the Civil War, this is a must-read. If you are even remotely curious about the history of civil rights in America, this is a must-read. If you are interested in American history whatsoever, you will not regret reading this book. By all rights, it should be a part of every high school curriculum.

Black Reconstruction is a landmark text

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This book is incredibly well-researched, strongly argued, and exceptionally well-written. DuBois is someone whom I have always greatly respected, and it was a pleasure to read another of his incredible texts.

Hard Read - Educational

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This book is written like a text book on history. It is not for the faint of hear. I guess that would make sense. This is a serious read and makes you think. I learn a lot about reconstruction from the black prospective.

The Crucible of Civil Rights

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Du Bois took a revolutionary new look at Reconstruction in the 1930's, providing a fresh view that went largely ignored until recent books by Foner and Litwack resuscitated this overlooked period in American history. Du Bois summons up his great intellectual bearing to illustrate that from being the unmitigated failure that Reconstruction has long been portrayed as, it was the crucible of civil rights legislation, a time when there was very definitely hope that America would redefine itself along more egalitarian lines. While the book deals predominately with the black man's point of view, Du Bois offers a principled Marxist view of labor relations at the time, and how the leading Radical Republicans tried to come to terms with the new industrial society that was emerging in America.

Du Bois was a very compelling writer, he cuts through the layers of history to reveal the soul of the persons most greatly affected by Reconstruction. He charts the troubled waters of the Civil War, and the Presidential attempts at Reconstruction which followed the Union victories in the South. He provides a candid view of Lincoln, who struggled with his own prejudices, but eventually came to accept the black man because of the pivotal role he played in the war. Ironically, Du Bois noted a black did not become a man until he showed he could hold a gun in battle.

Du Bois felt Lincoln really did alter his views during the course of the war, no longer favoring the colonist view held by many that blacks should be repatriated to Africa. However, Du Bois felt that Lincoln lacked the convictions to really push forward Reconstruction, that his principal concern remained in reclaiming the Southern states in the Union.

The mighty task of Reconstruction was left up to the Radical Republicans in Congress and the "Black" legislatures that emerges in the South during this time. Du Bois refutes the Dunning-Bowers view that blacks were incapable of forming governments, by providing a chapter on "The Black Proletariat in South Carolina." Here, he shows that blacks fully recognized the enormity of this most propitious moment, but that they ran up against a set of state and federal courts, which refused to hold up their decisions. While blacks were now members of state legislatures and of the US Congress, they did not take over the South, as is often described. Even in South Carolina, where blacks outnumbered whites, blacks were only temporarily able to seize control of the legislature, and force a new state constitution.

This is the book that forms the basis for Foner's excellent book, Reconstruction. Du Bois was the first to realize that Reconstruction was more than just an epilog to the Civil War, but the beginning of the long road to freedom, which took nearly 100 years in the making for blacks in America.

An Essential Work on the Reconstruction Era

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Given the way race relations have unfolded since the book was written, WEB DuBois' tome is THE essential work on the most pivotal and one of the most grossly underrated periods of American history.

Since it is told from the vantage point of a Black American, it stands as one of the essential missing voices in an otherwise neatly politicized and racially sanitized periods of American history and areas of American historical scholarship.

DuBois, writing with an impressive flair, is not bashful about giving credit where it is due, whether to noble and humane slave owners or to the vastly underrated and seldom reported contributions of Negroes during this period. This emphasis alone is a display of courage unlikely to be found except in very rare instances in other books on this subject.

Despite its flair, the book is still dense with details that only a first rate historian could uncover and organize so well. And although the book has been criticized for being too much of a Marxist economic analysis, it is nevertheless accurate, has the full ring of truth and remains relatively non-polemical. And for one partial to non-Marxist economic analyses, I find rather strangely that DuBois' Marxist analysis seems the appropriate tool uniquely suited for analyzing the circumstances of this particular era of American history.

In short, the book is not just another oblique harangue against the American system of racism as it was practiced during the reconstruction era--or as it has been practiced during any era for that matter.

Along side Eric Froner's book, "Reconstruction," this is another tour de force. For essential reading on one of the most important periods in American history, one is unlikely to find in print a better book on this subject. Amen.