Reconstruction: Home

This text seeks to show the story of the Reconstruction through the words of the people who lived through it. The author presents original documents from the era which record the feelings, ideas, frustrations and aspirations of the newly-freed black people of the South.

This new volume deals with two momentous and interrelated events inAmerican history: the American Civil War and Reconstruction and offers students a collection of essential documentary sources for these periods. Provides students with over 60 documents on the American CivilWar and Reconstruction Includes presidential addresses, official reports, songs,poems, and a variety of eyewitness testimony concerning significant events ranging from 1833-1879 Contains an informative introduction focused on the kinds of materials available and how historians use them Each chapter ends with questions designed to help students engage with the material and to highlight key issues of historical debate

A succinct, up-to-date overview of the history of slavery thatplaces American slavery in comparative perspective. Provides students with more than 70 primary documents on thehistory of slavery in America Includes extensive excerpts from slave narratives, interviewswith former slaves, and letters by African Americans that documentthe experience of bondage Comprehensive headnotes introduce each selection A Visual History chapter provides images to supplement thewritten documents Includes an extensive bibliography and bibliographic essay

The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. Eric Foner's compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre-Civil War mass meetings of African-American "colored citizens" and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.

Through the letters and testimony of freed slaves, this work tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War era. Former slaves, free blacks and their contemporaries recount the elation accompanying the reunion of brothers and sisters separated for half a lifetime and the anguished realization that time lost could never be made up. There is also the satisfaction of legitimizing a marriage once denied by law and the unspeakable sadness of discovering that a long-lost spouse had remarried, the pride of establishing an independent household and the shame of not being able to protect it.

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.